Small Things

A couple of days ago, I met Daniel, a friend who had worked as a German correspondent in Washington, D.C. for five years until he moved back to Berlin in 2007. We talked about the big picture, of course. Politics (why Hillary Clinton didn’t even come close to becoming the first female President of the United States, while nobody in Germany even seems to take notice that Chancellor Angela Merkel is a woman), economics (the dollar gaining ground again against the euro), bilateral relations (likely to improve in any era after George W. Bush).

But when it came to our personal experiences with life abroad, we found that for both of us, it was most of all the small things which made us realize the degree of integration into – or resistance against – our new environment.

During his first year in the US, Daniel said, whenever he flew back to Germany for a couple of days, he used to go to the drugstore and buy lots of small things. Soap, body lotion, toothpaste. Familiar smells, trusted effects he longed for in the outland. And I remembered that one of the most important boxes to come out of the moving van two years ago was the box with all the soap bars and hair shampoos we had bought at Rossmann’s , our beloved German drugstore, before we left Berlin.


Nowadays, Daniel buys small things in his favorite American drugstore chain whenever he goes back to the States. Things he misses since he left DC.

After our second summer in Germany, I will still bring a lot of stuff back to P. Shirts, shoes, stuff like that. Fashion is one thing I will always prefer the European way, I guess. (Food is another. No way to bring much, though...)

But soap? Or shampoo? Seems like I got used to the brands I bought in the US for the last couple of months after our supplies from Germany had been finished.

There are other small things of everyday life in New Jersey, I find, that I got agreeably used to. That one can get cash, for example, at the cash register of most stores or supermarkets. In Germany, you have to find an ATM of your bank or an associated one to get cash – which can mean quite a trip, depending on where you are. Or that one can go out to a club, a bar, or any other place without smelling like an ashtray afterwards – although there is a legal-political war being fought in Germany right now about banishing smokers from all gastronomy and other public places, too.

On the other hand, I was so relieved because I didn’t have to worry about letting the boys run around naked on the beaches, or in the back yard, when it was hot outside. I also enjoyed being able to buy a decent bottle of wine while shopping at the grocer’s or at your average supermarket.

Some little things that can make – or ruin – your day in an instant, you find in both countries, of course. Friendly car guys who help you out quickly when you left the lights on, and won’t even hear of any payment for such a “small” favor. Or barbers who can give a three-year-old a horrible haircut in no time, and charge you an outrageous price on top of that.

Now, we are almost on our way back to the country that meanwhile has promoted us from “non resident aliens” to “resident aliens”. Looking forward to some small things like the fact that you can do shopping on Sundays.


And then there are, of course, the friends and neighbors one has been missing and is very much looking forward to seeing again. But that would be talking about the really big things…

Summer in Germany: Dresden

Architecture from five centuries

The skyline of "Elbflorenz"





The Frauenkirche



View of the river Elbe from the "Blue Miracle Bridge"



A bar in Dresden Neustadt


Dresden's first skyscraper



Snack bar in Dresden Neustadt


Socialist architecture: Kulturpalast



Robotron: The GDR's one and only computer chip industry



Deutsches Hygiene-Museum: "A universal museum of man"






The state and university library (SLUB)



Dresden Main Station, redesigned by Norman Foster

Views From East of Berlin

Mr. Trojna is electrician. He’s Polish, but has been living and working in Berlin for more than twenty years. He is known as an outstanding craftsman in builders’ circles, and he’s been making good money, especially since the renovation of thousands of historic buildings in East Berlin started after the wall had come down in 1989.

One of his sons is studying to become an economic engineer. He is going to Shanghai in October, for an internship with a company that pays him 3000 euros per month. 3000 euros for an intern, plus two flights to Germany during his two-months stay. Mr. Trojna finds that hard to believe.

He had planned to go back to Poland after retiring, Mr. Trojna says. Now it turns out that he’d rather stay in Berlin. Not only because of the children who grew up in Germany and don’t feel that strongly about a country they only know from summer vacations. The children might end up in China, anyway; who knows these days.

But Mr. Trojna himself has got used to Berlin and to German ways. The standard of living. The way of life, the way business is done. “We kind of don’t speak the same language any more”, he says of his friends and relatives in Poland. So he and his wife might spend their retirement here, after all.

Anna is a student. She’s Ukrainian, and she’s just about to finish her studies of biotechnology. When she came from Kiev as an au pair seven years ago, she hardly spoke any German. Now, she speaks it fluently, has learned English, too, and is about to start working for a Russian professor at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin.

Anna is married to a German student of economics, Florian, who is doing his Ph.D. in England after graduating from one of Berlin’s universities. With the help of his parents, they just bought a small flat in Berlin. But Florian dreams of a life on the other side of the Atlantic. He wants to work at the IMF or the World Bank, and that’s where he’s staying as an intern right now.

Anna just came back from a visit in Washington a few days ago. She kind of liked it, but she’s a bit disappointed, too. Somehow, she had thought the US capital would be more impressive, “maybe I expected too much”, she says. She couldn’t quite imagine living there.

But then, she’s ready to be pragmatic about moving if her husband won’t find the job of his dreams in Berlin.

Mr. Trojna tells us of a similar experience. America, the superpower that had defeated the Soviet Union, did not live up to his expectations. “The power supply system in that country – ridiculous. The state of the infrastructure – alarming.” He shakes his head. No country for an electrician from Germany.

But then, after moving to Berlin, he drove back to his hometown in Poland whenever it was possible during the first few years. Because Germany seemed such an alien place.

I look at our boys. They grow up in New Jersey now, and they will know Germany mainly from summer vacations, especially the little one. Their parents are planning to come back to Berlin in ten to fifteen years. To spend our retirement in our country, where we were born.

But then, it’s only been two years since we moved to the US.

Summer in Switzerland: Lake Lucerne

Lucerne's Culture and Convention Center (KKL), designed by French architect Jean Nouvel

Paddlesteamers on the Lake Lucerne (Vierwaldstättersee)

View of Mount Pilatus

Lucerne's Lion Monument

Traffic Jams and Tattoos with Dirndls: Impressions from Zurich

The age of the automobil as an individual means of transportation is over. Says cultural theorist Paul Virilio. Because of the oil price, global warming, etc. Some cities, Zurich among them, were already trying to banish cars from their downtown areas, step by step, by taking away lanes and parking spaces.

If only that concept worked! The first impression we got when we entered Zurich by car was: chaos, total traffic jam, aggressive speeding whenever a short piece of free lane opened, desperate fights for every free parking lot.

It took us more than half an hour to go the few hundred yards from the main train station to our hotel late on a Saturday night. Erratic traffic lights, pedestrians crossing streets in hordes without even watching out for cars, drivers almost knocking them over after they hadn’t succeeded to conquer the crossing at the fourth time the light turned green…

Didn’t seem like people were much impressed by the efforts of the city council – if the extremely short phases of green and long phases of red at the crossings were part of the plan to frustrate drivers out of town. And, no, this was not just the clueless tourists’ fault.

Most cars that were hopelessly stuck and dragged along in the metal avalanche had Zurich license plates. Streetcars were half empty. And later, from my hotel window (when our car was sitting in a public garage for $61 a night), I saw cars circling around the block forever to take a chance at the maybe five legal parking spaces within that particular square mile.

So the traffic policy didn’t provide us with a working example of Swiss efficiency. Social rituals in a beer garden did, though. In that self-service beer garden right on the bank of the Limmat where it meets the Zurich lake, people didn’t order one beer, and than maybe another one later. They went for the crates instead.

Many younger people – some of them in flip-flops and very old, cut-off jeans, some in suits and ties – met in large groups, then sent one or two for the drinks. They came back with at least two crates of beer, putting them down right next to their clique’s table and propping their feet up on them in a proprietary gesture. Then passing around and downing one bottle after the other. In an astonishing speed. Very efficient. And very impressive even for a German from Cologne. Where they say it is the waiters’ pride to always serve you a new glass of beer even before you finished the old one.

Apart from that, Zurich is the only city I can think of where it was next to impossible to find an open café on a late Sunday morning. (Maybe people were still exhausted from the beer and the traffic on Saturday night.) It is also the only city where I ever saw a young woman wearing a dirndl and braids with army boots, and huge tattoos covering both upper arms. Looking absolutely, stunningly beautiful. Because of her outfit, or in spite of it – I have no idea.

Obama for Kanzler

So, HE was here. About 200,000 people came to the so-called “fan mile” in the heart of Berlin to see Barack Obama. More people than came to any politician’s speech in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland before, if I am to believe the TV commentator. “Obamania” in full bloom, right in the middle of Old Europe.

Usually, the “fan mile” on the Straße des 17. Juni – a name honoring the violently suppressed uprising of East German workers against the GDR’s Soviet-backed regime in June 1953 – is put up to watch the German national soccer team play in a major championship on huge TV screens. Or to watch a Live-8 Concert when Herbert Grönemeyer and Chris de Burgh sing for a good cause.

Granted, some of these 200,000 must have been US expatriates. But the majority were Germans celebrating their somewhat bizzare love affair with Barack Obama. “Obama for Kanzler”, Obama for German Chancellor, one sign sticking out of the crowd read in hopeless Denglisch, this mixture of German (Deutsch) and English that has become so common in this country, transcending decent bakeries, zu Deutsch: Bäckereien, into “Back-Shops”.

There are several reasons why Germans tend to feel so strongly about US elections in general, and US elections with charismatic candidates (Clinton – eh, Bill –, Obama) in particular. First, we think that after watching “Dallas”, “West Wing” and other trailblazing US soaps on TV for decades, we know America and the Americans better than they know themselves. Second, after two terms of George W. Bush, we think that we’d also vote better in US presidential elections than the Americans themselves.

And last but not least, I’m dead sure there is political romanticism in abundance in this country, even if home-bred political personnel like Angela Merkel (the Conservative Chancellor), Kurt Beck (her Social Democrat partner in an uneasy “grand coalition”) or Oskar Lafontaine (the former-Social-Democrat-turned-populist-figurehead-of-the-extreme-left) somewhat fail to inspire such broad-felt romantic encounters right now.

So, why not put one’s heart out to a charming, good-looking, rhetorically gifted young man aspiring to be leader of the US and, yes, of the so-called free world?! Especially as he is not only the first black guy standing a realistic chance to become President of the United States – therefore being the politically most correct candidate, of course –, but reminds people of JFK on top of everything, whom Germans and especially “Berliners” tend to glorify…

Are those 200,000 (and the rest of us, who at least contemplated going, if only we had had a babysitter), then, would-be believers longing to see a new political messiah, as some media spectators had it all figured out? Can Obama – or: Obamania – inspire some new bonding between Americans and Germans, those estranged allies?

To be honest, the rage about Obama at the Siegessäule reminded me more of the hype around baby polar bear Knut in the near-by Berlin zoo two years ago. People found Knut “cute” and went to see him in droves. Now, people find Obama “cool” and come to see him in the Tiergarten park. Which is a synonym for zoo, by the way.

After all, Obama is a phenomenon, inspiring the bright and the young; making more and more people curious, drawing them to the stadiums in tens of thousands. He is a celebrity, huge scale. “Welcome to the show”, one of his many self-declared helpers covered with “Yes, we can!” stickers, called out to people approaching the stage in Berlin.

But should Obama really become the 44th. President of the United States, people will probably react not much different from the way they did when they came to see Knut, the cute fuzzy baby bear, a couple of month after his international media career had started – and found a dirty, bad-tempered adolescent polar bear instead. “This is not the cute white Knut we used to know”, they protested, turned around, and left.

“This is not the cool black Obama we used to know”, Germans might find, should we look at a President Barack Obama in a couple of months. And turn our backs on him, too, sinking back into our good old habit of Politikverdrossenheit.

Not that he’d care much, probably. But don’t count on promotionally effective pictures of cheering crowds in Berlin any more, Obama, once you step down from the Olympus of celebrity and into the flats of realpolitik!