The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

I was up until 4:30 editing one, ten minute segment of the interviews for my project. Scott got home around 1:00 or so, but he is blessed with the ability to sleep while someone else is up and about in the room.

Today we went to see the Eisenman Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The memorial was built after 17 years of debate. The pamphlet for the museum includes a resolution passed in 1999 endorsing the museum. Among the resolutions was this:

With the memorial we intend to
• Honor the murdered victims,
• Keep alive the memory of these inconceivable events in German history
• Admonish all future generations never again to violate human rights, to defend the democratic constitutional state at all times, to secure equality before the law for all people and to resist all forms of dictatorship and regimes based on violence.

No mention is made of the fact that Germans were the perpetrators. A very passive voice is used to acknowledge that something bad happened in Germany. ...
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The joy that is the end of the quarter.

I am in agony trying to finish my project. I have attempted to edit three or so hours of interviews and at this rate I’ll be finished by February and have yet to write an actual page of my paper. Ahh!

Socialists in Germany

Yesterday Charles took us on a very long tour of the socialist resistors to the Nazis. The history as it has been written in the west has gone to great lengths to minimize the role the socialists played in combating Hitler. If it wasn’t for German socialists, there would have been no resistance to Nazism worth mentioning. It was politically expedient after the war to demonize all socialism in an effort to combat a very real Soviet threat. But we shouldn’t equate every socialist with Stalinist communism any more than we should equate every conservative with fascists.

The Reichstag and the German flag

Wenzel somehow orchestrated a private tour of the Reichstag for our class. This was really amazing. They have re-built the place, renovating it with a neat glass cupola, and amazing Earth friendly design (geo-thermal and solar heating and cooling). However, they have kept many of the remnants from the Nazi era and cold war years. When the place was occupied by allied soldiers (mostly Russian) they littered the walls with graffiti and many instances of this were preserved.

The Reichstag is a public art space and several permanent installations are on exhibit. All are symbolic. There was one which was basically a corridor made of small file boxes. Each box had the name of a duly elected German politician. Naturally, we all tried to find Hitler’s name. His was the only one which had gone missing. ...


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Sachsenhausen again (3x)

I went to Sachsenhausen Saturday on my professor’s recommendation. We had been to this dreary concentration camp as a class some weeks before, but I had missed a really important building that is relevant to my project. (I was dying to get home to Janet, and given the choice between a concentration camp and Janet, I choose Janet every time.) The T-Building at Sachsenhausen was the administrative center of the entire German concentration camp system. So, I headed out there yesterday only to find that, in true German bureaucratic fashion, it closed 1/2 hour before the rest of the museum/memorial. So, I had to go back on Sunday.

Sachsenhausen is about a two hour round trip when you include the dreadful walk from the train station to the camp, following in the steps of the damned. I did get there and took some pictures, but the museum portion consisted entirely of German information cards and had no English audio component (as did the rest of the museum). ...
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Da bus

Went on a tour of the subways today. It was interesting. You ride them every day and yet don’t know a thing about them.

Reagan’s interested me because he explained how the divide between East and West Berlin is in part preserved by the different transportation systems. 15 years after the wall came down, West Berlin is still much more dependent on the bus and the car, whereas the East relies on the Tram (both sides use the S- and U-Bahn’s though. I once heard someone say that mass transportation will never be ubiquitous in the U.S. because people love the independence of their cars too much. Maybe busses offer this to a lesser extent. Don’t know.

The Hajj

Yesterday, Ulf Heinsohn took us on a tour of Turkish Berlin. Very fascinating. One of the highlights was a trip to a Mosque. The Mosque is situated on a historic cemetery for Turks, who have a long history in Berlin, although the vast majority arrived in Berlin after the war to help reconstruct it. While were in the Mosque, Ulf, who is a tad opinionated got into an argument with the Muslims. ...

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You are the dancing queen. . .

I was going to postpone writing this journal entry until later, but I could resist no longer. Someone has to explain German pop music to me, because I don't get it. American pop music is terrible, no doubt, but in most major cities you can find at least one station that ocasionally plays decent music. Although I'm jaded because of KEXP (years later, I still want to write KCMU). O.k., maybe you can't find good music in most American cities either. You've got your golden oldies and soft rock, your classic rock, young country, old country, "urban" (by the way, just who are they kidding with this category? In Germany this category is called "black music" which might not be PC, but it doesn't mince words).

I wander. . .I'm in a cafe which has free wireless access, and it's only just 2 blocks from my apt. Perfect! Well, it's close. Considering I'm paying up to 3 euros an hour to use the internet elsewhere, I'll settle for just about anything. I also found a laundromat that has a good cafe. Nice ambience, good food, all you can drink coffee (a rarity in Germany). The problem with both these places is that they, like EVERY OTHER *&^%ing place in Germany plays nothing but 80's music. American 80's music. Occasionally they might throw in a tune from the 70's or 60's. What's weird about this is that there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to their playlists. If it comes from the 80's, it must be good!

I'll need to return to this subject because it merits further attention.

She's gone

Janet flew back to Seattle, while I flew back to Berlin. It wasn’t nearly enough time together, but we did have fun. One of the most memorable times we had was when we both went to Café Burger’s Russen Disko night. This is very hard to describe, but I’ll try. Mix Russian folk, klezmer music, rock, punk, ska, hip hop, and electronic dance music, and you have Russian Disco. We danced and danced, even though I was sick (still am). We got home late.

The end is near!

The end is near! I’ll be home in just 19 more days. It’s hard to believe. I want to come home so bad, but my project is nowhere near finished. Some of my classmates have cavalierly let it be known that they’ve drafted 10 or more pages already. Bastards! I would sure like to know what it is that separates them from me. I have never, ever, managed my time in such a way as to prevent a mad dash to complete any project. I’ve done enough research already to write several papers, but that’s not the same thing as writing it. I found myself fantasizing about getting hit by a car, or perhaps knifed by some deranged street person. Then, when John (my prof.) visits me in the hospital and asks if there is anything he can do for me I can ask him he wouldn’t mind if I delivered my paper orally so that I could die in peace, or return to health without this project looming over me.

I have generally liked the class, and wouldn’t trade the experience, but I have felt that my time was wasted on more than one occasion. I will spend the next 2.5 weeks with my head down and not really get to enjoy Berlin as a unique city. It’s now just a place where I sleep and eat, drink coffee and find internet access so I can finish my project.

Optical curiosity shop

Sara brought us to an acquaintance of hers who runs a curiosity shop/museum of optics and projectors, Werner Nekes. He has a warehouse space on the river in Mulheim an der Ruhr, near Oberhausen. He has filled it with 18th and 19th century cameras, optical illusions, and books on optics. He has some zoopraxiscope discs from Edward Muybridge. Apparently, Muybridge had produced them for an exhibition but people didn't know what to do with them and they are now very rare. This guy has written and published several books on the subject (see www.wernernekes.de). He also showed me an encyclopedia from the 1700’s that had a huge section on military maneuvers, fencing, naval ship building, all things martial. Some gorgeous French volumes.

Köln (Cologne)

Janet and I were in Cologne together this weekend. We had a wonderful time, even though we were both fighting losing battles with colds. While we were there, we had hoped to see our friend Randy Jones, also from Seattle. Randy was performing in Wiesbaden, but travel to and from Wiesbaden just wasn’t feasible. As luck would have it, Randy was supposed to be in Cologne for one night. He had sent an email to that effect to Janet. I called him on the night in question and left a message for him on his cell phone (called “handy” in Europe. I don’t approve). Knowing how expensive and unreliable American cell phones are in Germany, I held little hope that a rendezvous would actually happen. Cologne is a big city, I don’t know how big just now, but I imagine that it’s larger than Seattle. So, you can imagine how unlikely it would be to run into Randy at the train station. But that’s exactly what happened. We were walking away from the luggage lockers when we saw Randy walking towards us saying, “There you are, I’ve been looking all over for you.” What are the odds?

Cologne Cathederal

I probably should have mentioned the Cologne Cathedral the other day, because it is phenomenal. When you walk out of the train station, the cathedral is right there, massive, looming over you in its incredible, gothic glory. I gasped when I saw it. The Cologne Cathedral is the epitome of gothic. Twin spires reach to the sky, the face of every wall is grooved with lines that meet somewhere in the clouds. It’s beautiful. We first saw it the night we arrived from Berlin and so didn’t get a chance to look at it more closely.

We came to see our friend Sara who Janet had originally met when she was speaking at an animation conference in Stuttgart. Sara led us to our hotel. She’s picked a number of hotels for us, and each one has been perfect. I wish had her talent. Sara is an artist and animator also, but is now a full time mother and house wife with two children ages 1 and 3. Janet is god mother to the youngest, Lillith. They are both adorable. The older of the two, Justine, calls Lillith her baby, and will contradict her mother on this point.

It was a little sad to spend Thanksgiving away from all our family. At least we had each other for company. We didn’t lack for good food, albeit sans turkey and pumpkin pie. Sara’s husband Lars is a gourmet. I never realized tongue could taste so good!

Karl-Marxallee

Me and Karl Marx.


I was supposed to meet the group for a tour of Karl-Marxallee, originally called Frankfurterallee, then changed to Stalinallee in honor of the man with the dubious distinction of killing more than Hitler. By the way, I don’t equate what Stalin did to what Hitler did. “Relativizing” the Holocaust is not something that I could support. There are significant differences between the two that make Hitler’s apocalyptic mass murder worse than Stalin’s, although Stalin does have the numbers. ...

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Last days of the DDR

Brad and Jason took us on walks that dealt with the disintegration of the DDR. Jason led us on a walk starting at Alexanderplatz and winding up at a church in Prenzlauerberg. The walk followed the course that people took during the November 4th, 1989 protests that originated at Alexanderplatz. The DDR was celebrating the 50th year since the countries founding. Gorbachev was on hand for the festivities. It amazes me that as the country celebrates its founding, it was in the process of dissolving. One of the contributing factors, as I understand it (and this isn’t an area I’ve studied in detail) was the Soviet Union’s own problems and its unwillingness to bolster the DDR artificially. The Soviets made it clear that they would not interfere in East German affairs—at least not the extent they had been. Did Gorbachev and the KGB, or either, know about the impending crisis? ...

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