Not an Englishman in New York, but a legal alien nonetheless

So, after five months of hanging out on the other side of the world, I figured it was time for an "impressions" survey. Not really sure where to start; there are a number of semi-connected ideas banging around in my head that I'm just too lazy to organize into any kind of premeditated structure, so I think I'll just start typing and see what makes its way out and what gets lost in the mad rush to escape the narrow confines of my brain. ;)

Living as opposed to visiting...
...has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. To be sure, I'd lived in Germany for six years before, but it was as a child: and needless to say, your perspective as such is much more limited. Excepting the excellent efforts of our parents to take us out to explore Europe, a kid's normal daily encounters are usually Home, Schoolbus, Neighborhood Kids, and the Half-Mile Radius Around Your House. Although we did benefit greatly from our parents' determination to see as much as possible of the area and surrounding countries, and to integrate themselves as much as two foreigners could into the culture -- Dad was stationed at Ramstein Air Force Base, but we lived off-base, in a village, and our friends consisted of equal parts Germans and Americans -- a person's recollections 14 years later of their life from age seven to twelve is bound to be a little hazy. Of course we were deeply imprinted with the basic feel and smell of German language and culture; that's the age when humans are still growing, and their surroundings become as much absorbed into their cells and subconscious as does the food they eat and the parenting they receive. Right now, church bells are calling outside from the distant Innenstadt below, and the stately, deep, arrhythmic "bong" is setting off answering rings from one of the inner chambers of my heart (maybe it's the left ventricle). It was this slow steeping in Germanness -- the absorption of the warm, dark brown language and the smell of Lebkuchen at a Weihnachtsmarkt, the high view of treetops from the wall of a castle ruin, the dim memory of a cozy Gasthaus that served Jaegerschnitzel (my favorite) and the comforting aroma of my dad's beer -- that drew me inexhorably to German Studies much later at the university. (Huh, funny, maybe that's why I love the smell of good beer on men. I have, probably certifiably, the best dad anyone could possibly wish for; and so my associations with beer are not only happy, but also somehow connected to the conviction that beer is How a Man Should Smell.)

Anyway, studying German at the university opened up a whole array of complicated currents (politics, culture, history, literature, and other various Zeitgeists) that had been swirling around us unnoticed as we played with our friends or stopped at a roadside stand for a Bratwurst. Kids just kind of accept their surroundings without too much consideration: sure, there was the field behind my friend's house where we weren't allowed to play, because authorities couldn't be sure if they'd ever really cleared out the landmines from WWII; and yeah, there were some cities where the ground was noticeably higher in some spots due to newer structures having been built on top of rubble, also from the war. But that was a background detail: real, but (to a child) long ago and irrelevant. What was realer to me was the fact that this particular cathedral was -- whoa! -- a thousand years old! I would wonder who had wandered down this nave before me. Or take for granted that the look and feel of some of the older villages as something from a fairytale, the surrounding forests cool and green and probably populated by witches in gingerbread houses or Tolkeinish folk. I loved Germany. But we were imaginative kids, and my impressions of it were thoroughly mixed with the whimsical world of childhood.

When you grow up a little, though, and start to study mindsets and literature, you gain, needless to say, a much more enriched perspective. I still think of Germany as the place of gingerbread, forests, and far-off church bells. But now I also think of the land of the Romantics and the Englightenment; before that, a medieval world just as full of discovery and struggle as the 21st century; religious conflict; an only recently politically unified country -- Germany became an actual nation only in 1871! -- from what was before a collection of highly factional principalities, each with their own dialect and culture and interests.

The struggle to define a national identity continues today: am I Bavarian first, German second? Or the other way around? What about my neighbor, whose parents are Turkish? She wears a headscarf and speaks Turkish to her family, but she was born and raised here; is she really "a German"? See, in the States, we're used to this: most of us are decendants of some immigrant wave or another, some more historically distant than others. But until recently, your average German was a part of the very soil he tilled. There isn't really a direct or even adequate English translation for the word Heimat: it's more than just "home". It means the land of your roots, of all your family, probably since the Middle Ages or before. Bert goes back to the Erzgebirge, and that's where he belongs. This is not to say he isn't a well-traveled and broad-minded individual; he is indeed. But being the vagabond I and all of my family are and have been, it took me a little while to realize that the Erzgebirge isn't just the place his family happened to buy a house a couple generations ago (like many of us gypsy Americans); no, in fact, you could almost call it his ancestral home. Bert will call himself a Saxon before he identifies himself with the more general term "German."

Which leads of course into all the other complications of a German identity. What about the reunification in 1990? Germans were just starting to figure out who they might be as a nation before a moustachioed maniac came to power and took it way too far. Immediately afterward, the young country was divided into a communist Eastern half and a capitalist Western half -- both of whom weren't even independent states themselves, occupied as they were by, respectively, the Russians and (eventually exclusively) the Americans. What's it like, to have a foreign air base next to your village? Foreign soldiers walking down your street in their uniforms, loudly speaking their own language and complaining that your doorhandles are handles instead of knobs? Or worse, on the other side, not to be allowed to leave your own half of the country, or even listen to radio broadcasts from the other half? Then suddenly, after forty years -- two generations -- the two halves try to fit themselves back together again. Try to turn that into a sense of national identity. To say nothing of the difficulty of coming to terms with a piece of the past that most of the younger generation would prefer to pretend had never happened, and yet it's there in front of their faces every way they turn. How do you answer for the crimes of your grandparents? Should you? How can we learn from the past if we don't remember it, study it, look it in the eye; but what if doing so comes with an almost crushing sense of blame which you feel you haven't personally earned? For sixty years, Germans have been practically allergic to any hint of nationalistic pride. One simply does not play or sing the national anthem, except maybe at the Olympics. Until last summer, no one flew the flag out their window, the way we Americans do at seemingly every opportunity -- at home, at school, in the workplace, in our back windshields. And yet... since the World Cup was held in Germany last summer 2006, there has been a shy attempt to maybe not stash all the "Go Krauts!" paraphernalia away again. Sometimes someone will wear a red-black-and-gold sock, or even more daringly, have not put away the flag hanging off their apartment balcony. I like this. It seems a much healthier balance. And maybe it's just the Germanistik student in me, but as I said before, I love Germany. The large black stain in the middle of the 20th century is indeed glaring and horrible; but there is so much more to the country than just that, and I personally believe it's high time we allow a nation to redeem itself and be a nation again. Go, Krauts. :)

All righty, well, to return to the heading of this little chunk, let me just reiterate that these are all things you can't get just by visiting a place. After all this study, it's wonderful to actually get to come and live it for once. To not view a people and country from the distance of a classroom or through the pages of great, but static, literature; instead, to once again sit in a cozy Gasthaus, and this time, smell more than just the beer. It seems like every weekend, I'm sitting around another table with someone new and discussing philosophy and history; exploring a new town; making dinner in someone's kitchen and arguing about comparative school systems or the future of higher education; world politics; American politics; cultural idiosyncrasies; unemployment; the chasm between East and West; dealing with the past; the list is endless. I think I had kind of intended this blog to be a record of such conversations and impressions, but perhaps I haven't been as conscientious as I meant to be. This entry alone has taken over an hour and a half, and there is still so much to say... sometimes the most I can do is a hasty listing of all the things we've done and seen, just to record them for the indistinct Future when I do have a chance to imbue it with the better retrospection that such experiences deserve. Ah well, my coffee's waiting, and there are lessons to be planned... auf Wiedersehen, for now. :)