Summer in Germany: The Palatinate

Bad Bergzabern

Burg Landeck




Views from Burg Landeck

Borderland: Between Germany and France

Weißenburg - Wissembourg

A Master of His Universe

When J. drives his Volkswagen Touareg through the vineyards and sees his empire beyond, stretching from the mountains of the Pfälzerwald out into the valley of the Rhine, he loves to listen to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. Can't be loud enough.

Looking down at row after row of Riesling, Weißburgunder, Dornfelder grapes. Perfectly planted, perfectly cut they stand, like an army of extremely well trained soldiers. Growing on one of the country’s best soils for vineyards, at the flank of the hills rolling out to the Southwest for an optimum of sun.


Not a monoculture, mind, as there are lots of shrubs, small trees, and meadows, surrounding the vineyards. A good vintner knows that the best wine needs an intact ecosystem, needs birds and insects and plants to provide for the perfect environment that no chemicals or genetic engineering could ever replace.

J. is a vintner with the best theoretical and practical education one can get. And he is one of the most successful vintners of this small town in the southwestern corner of Germany, right on the French border. He is not the type for understatement, even if he is nothing like a nouveau riche kind of guy. Short grey curls, designer stubble. Checkered shirt with short sleeves, hanging loosely over his shorts, nothing fancy. Socks in sandals, even.

While J. points out the different grapes and explains his “philosophy” of wine making, his wife serves at their vineyard's Strausswirtschaft, as the typical local mix between a wine bar and a restaurant is called. Her smile seems a little tight at times.

In the kitchen, J.’s mother reigns. She has been cooking her famous Bratwurst and Bratkartoffeln (roast potatoes) here for almost half a century. A lot of habitués come here for her cooking exclusively. The meat she serves is from pigs that are slaughtered by a butcher in her yard, right under her critical eye.

But he is the aspiring young vintner who transformed the small family vineyard into a cleverly managed business, who refined his vintner's expertise as well as his marketing after he had taken over from his father a couple of decades back.

The winery’s buildings are beautifully renovated, the heavy oak portal opens four days a week to restaurant guests and wine customers, many of them from the upscale region of Karlsruhe across the river Rhine. In J.’s huge cellar, wooden barrels stand next to stainless steel tanks, tradition and high tech mingle in these cool, quiet halls.

J. has three sons. The eldest is already studying viticulture, so the succession is assured. During the last two centuries, a lot of young people left the Palatinate, as the land, split too often among too many offspring, in many cases hardly delivered enough to provide for one family. Many of these younger siblings that couldn’t be provided for, tried to make their own way overseas, and settled in Pennsylvania or other parts of the US.

Today, many wine growers send their children to California – to study different methods and traditions of viticulture in the Napa Valley and other famous wine regions. But it is clear that J. would never consider leaving his home region for good. America? Not for him, and it is clear that he almost feels sorry for us for having to live there, as he sees it.

His pride and his interest are focused on his product, on his peers. He and maybe a handful of other outstanding vintners have brought prosperity to their village that had seen less fortunate times before. He is successful in his world, and what lies behind that world’s limits? – He couldn’t care less.

"All creatures drink joy At the breasts of nature", goes Schiller's text that Beethoven chose for his Ninth symphony, and: "Kisses gave she us, and wine"...


J. may never get as rich as some deftly calculating start-up entrepreneur who sells out to financially potent investors at a certain point. He may never become a cosmopolitan with a refined understanding of or taste for different cultures. But maybe this is a price worth paying for an imperturbable self-confidence?

Joy, beautiful spark of gods...

Summer in Germany: The Rheinland

City on the Rhine I: Cologne

Köln Hauptbahnhof: the central train station

Cologne Cathedral and the Ludwig Museum

river promenade

"Südkai": My favourite lounge

Lukas Podolski´s new apartment will be right here: Kranhäuser in Cologne


City on the Rhine II: Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf´s skyline


Mannesmann tower

The new harbour


Waterside promenade

Heroes here and there

Most certainly, this was and is not intended to be a journal on soccer. But I have to write about soccer at least once more. Simply because I bumped into two very different kinds of heroes on your side and on this side of the Atlantic lately.

Here, it is a tiny soccer player who definitely ascended to heroic status last Wednesday. His name is Philipp Lahm, and his last name ironically means "lame", although he is an amazingly fast runner. He is the most likeable hero one could ever imagine. He is probably also the most typical modern (West) German kind of hero I can imagine.

First of all, he plays defense - so he's totally unoffensive -, but scored the third and decisive goal of the German national team against Turkey this week (message: You don't need to be on the aggressive side to be successful). He is only 5,6 feet tall and looks like the sort of son-in-law any mother would just love to have in the family. Definitely not on the Goliath side. Although Germany's leading news magazine, "Der Spiegel", ascribes a good measure of sex appeal to "EC Hero Lahm"...

On top of everything, his rising fame even outside the soccer fan community - which began at the world championship in 2006 - seems not to have damaged this guy's golden heart in the least. Among other things, the 24-year-old lends his face to a campaign against speeding on Germany's infamous highways, playing with his being small in physique by declaring: "Speeders are SO cool", showing a tiny distance between his thumb and middle finger. And he founded a charity to support underprivileged children in Europe and Africa. "I had a super childhood, I have always been privileged", he said in an interview. "Now I want to give something back."

The other hero is someone I had more difficulties to accept as such, although he clearly seems to be a very amiable person, too. His name is Danny. He is not famous at all. He is a soldier from New Jersey, and he serves in Iraq.

His picture hung right next to my eight year old son's classroom door, framed by US flags. “We Salute... One Of Our Country’s Many Heroes Fighting In Iraq, Army Private 1st Class Daniel Gabryszewski”, said the poster that the second graders had made. Danny wears an overall in camouflage color. The martial outfit somewhat distracts from the fact that he, like Philipp Lahm, is more on the tiny side.

N. and his classmates wrote to Danny regularly, and he answered their questions by mail. He drives some kind of special army truck, and a New Jersey newspaper printed an article about him.

But why should children be indoctrinated like that, was my first thought when I heard about this campaign. Why do they have to glorify a soldier fighting in a war of which the legitimacy is more than questionable in the first place?!

When I told N.'s teacher, Mrs. M., of my concerns, explaining that Germans in general tended to be rather uneasy with the concept of war heroes for historical reasons, she smiled and said: "I think the children really need someone like that." As she had worked miracles with those second graders before, I didn't object any further.

At the end of the school year, the class organized a charity sale for Danny. They designed posters advertising the event, crafted door knob hangers and fridge magnets, and persuaded their Moms to bake cookies for the sale - in spite of almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

From the posters I learned that "their" soldier has his king-of-hearts qualities, too: On top of "fighting against terrorists and for democracy in Iraq", as N. told me in a tone of utter conviction that made me cringe, Danny takes care of stray puppies, and he supports poor children in Iraq with school materials.

That's what the second graders' sale was for: Buying pet food for the puppies, and pencils and markers for the children Danny tries to help. Everybody came: teachers, students, parents, siblings. After less than an hour, each and every item had been sold. And the children counted more than 300 dollars in their cash box.

The most important thing, though, was the whole lot of thought and honest work they invested - and their obvious pride in their common project.

I'm still not totally convinced that it is a good idea to make second graders worship soldiers as heroes - even if I have to admit that it is somewhat easier to stand up and be counted on a successful soccer player's side, than on the side of a soldier fighting in a questionable war.

But I sure learned that working for a hero's good cause is a most inspiring activity for children. And when N. was asked whether he was looking forward to go to Germany for the summer, he said that he sure was, but that there was just one thing he really regretted: That he was going to miss the picnic his classmates were planning in July - for Danny, while the soldier from New Jersey would be on vacation at home.

Soccer sensations

Cologne/Haan, June 25

The first thing that happened after we had made it out of the Cologne airport last Friday was that N. stepped into dog poop. Won't be the last time, I guess.

One tends to forget these things after ten months of absence. Germany has pretty straight laws against leaving dog poop on the sidewalk, but hardly anywhere are they strictly enforced. In Berlin, for example (probably the German dog capital, too), you shouldn't ever walk through the streets with your eyes simply on people, sights, or traffic lights. At least half of one's attention should be focused on scanning the sidewalk for possible turds.

Things soon got better, though. The weather is gorgeous - seems there IS going to be a summer in Europe this year. And yesterday, when I stepped out of the Cologne railway station, the first thing I saw was a guy picking up his dog's smelly legacy from the sidewalk.

Then, of course, the whole country is in soccer euphoria. Flags everywhere. Hanging out of windows, sticking on cars (eight was the highest number of flags I have counted on a single car), even on baby strollers. Hardly a bar, café, or restaurant that hasn't installed huge TV screens to encourage - and profit from - the collective worshipping of the Soccer God.

Right now, N. (my son), his father (my husband), and his grandfather (my father) are watching the semi final match, Germany against Turkey. Three generations, all experts, of course. Cursing, brawling, yelling, lamenting. The German team is playing like a bunch of toddlers in a sandbox. The coach should be fired and sent to Siberia. The Swiss referee is a partial imbecile (pro-Turkish, of course). And now the TV lines from Basel broke down on top of everything. For the second time. Unbelievable. The score is 1:1.

I'm not a big soccer fan. I even used to hate late Saturday afternoons, when every family in West Germany had to go home from whatever activity they were engaged in because Daddy absolutely had to watch the "Sportschau" on TV, showing the games of the national soccer league.

But I have to admit that I am once again moved by the cheerful patriotism that Germans have been exercising at least in the context of international soccer championships for the last two years. It started 2006 with the World Championship in Germany, which our family experienced during our last summer as residents of Berlin. When Jürgen Klinsmann and his men became heroes. When the whole country was happy. And for the first time, the world liked us. Even more important, we finally seemed to like ourselves.

There are more than solid reasons to hate and fear any German nationalism, of course. But two years as immigrant in the US have made it pretty clear to me that without a healthy dose of patriotism, a country's identity and self confidence probably won't be worth much. And a national identity, a certain feeling of belonging somewhere worth belonging, is something one comes to cherish even more when living as - and sometimes feeling like - a Non-Resident Alien in a foreign country.

There! The German team just scored the third goal against Turkey - it's 3:2 now, 30 seconds before the final whistle. Three generations are jumping up and down on my parents' living room sofa. "We are in the final!", beams N., "maybe we will even become the European champions!" Now the TV shows half a million soccer fans, cheering and celebrating in front of the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin.

Honestly, I couldn't care less whether Germany is soccer champion or not. But seeing all these people celebrate their team and their country, makes me feel just happy to be one of them.

Even if that includes people whose "best friend's" dog poop I sometimes cannot completely avoid.

corn

corn, originally uploaded by mrittenhouse.

bakery in lagos traditional food

bakery in lagos traditional food, originally uploaded by mrittenhouse.

Split Peas & Mais

Split Peas & Mais, originally uploaded by More Altitude.

untitled (detail)

untitled (detail), originally uploaded by dbthayer.

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untitled, originally uploaded by dbthayer.

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untitled, originally uploaded by dbthayer.

Wirrarika-(5) Ethanol's effect: Expensive tortillas

Wirrarika-(5) Ethanol's effect: Expensive tortillas, originally uploaded by Nicola Okin Frioli.

Rice grains for sale

Rice grains for sale, originally uploaded by MyLSD.

Food trough

Food trough, originally uploaded by kylehammons.

Sandy

Sandy, originally uploaded by More Altitude.

Filling Up

Filling Up, originally uploaded by More Altitude.

All About Bubbles

There are lots of things one gets used to after living in the United States for more than one year. That everybody asks you how you are, but nobody wants to know. That a “7” in handwriting doesn't come with a dash in the middle. Even this stubborn resistance against the metric system.

What I haven't got used to, though, is the overwhelming presence of economic excess.

At least in this part of the country, where a seven-year-old boy once expertly asked me whether we were paying for our car "on a monthly basis", an automobile with less than six cylinders simply doesn't seem to feel right.

When my neighbor D. was pregnant with her second child, her girlfriends gave her huge gift bags full of expensive clothes at her so-called baby shower. My son, who turned eight this month, got a couple of hundred dollars' worth of birthday presents from his friends (or rather from their parents).

On a larger scale, law firms and enterprises of the financial sector compete for graduates from elite colleges by offering six-figure salaries for their first year on the job. Getting rich and retiring by the age of 35 has become not an unrealistic goal among twenty-somethings at Wall Street.

As we have also learned during the past few months, a lot of people with no financial resources whatsoever were given - and accepted - hazardous mortgages from major banks. Mortgages they could never seriously be expected to pay back.

And why shouldn’t they go for it? Didn’t even some politicians and NGOs actually embrace subprime mortgages as a means to give poor people the chance to own a home, too? Didn’t the whole country get used to living with huge deficits in its federal budget as well as in its trade? And hadn’t everybody lived quite comfortably with spending, on average, more money than he or she actually earns? The national savings rate has been in the negative since 2005. But why bother if one had got used to the value of homes growing at a double-digit rate every year?

Now, Americans watch the mortgage crisis expand and the stock markets crash. Their's, and those of other countries around the world. Concerns grow that a major recession is going to follow suit.

And not only do the wealthy lose money. Middle class people and families with low income stand to lose their homes and investments they rely on for their old age. Cities face bankruptcy because of the real estate market collapsing in whole districts.

Not that there hadn't been warnings in abundance. For someone coming from a part of the world where economies tend to suffer from over-regulation (and where people tend to put their money into savings accounts with ridiculous interest rates, rather than either spending or investing it), it was fascinating to watch the mortgage crisis evolve with the Fed, the government, and other institutions looking the other way. While the financial industry turned ever more creative in "redistributing" risks as if they could make them dissappear.

As a student of American history, I had already marveled at the excesses of the so-called Gilded Age towards the end of the 19th century, when “robber barons” like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan dominated the scene until these early financial heydays ended with the Panic of 1893.

Since then, America has become even more of a “Bubble Economy”, as Eric Janszen, founder of the investment website iTulip, argues in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine. (Janszen, and iTulip, became famous for predicting and commenting on the burst of the dot.com bubble in 2000.)

And no end is in sight, according to Jantzen: He writes that what he calls the FIRE sector – Finance, Insurance and Real-Estate businesses – has successfully replaced the business cycles which had at least been connected to the economy’s fundamental value and health, with a cycle of “shared speculative hallucinations”. Helped by media, governments and legislators, they pick out a certain sector and inflate it with capital, thus creating a perpetuum mobile of rising assets for as long as the hallucination lasts.

To cover their losses after one bubble bursts, the author concludes, financiers will have to create an even bigger new one. And a new bubble might already be well on its way: Janszen predicts alternative energies and infrastructure to be the next target. Not that those sectors didn’t need investment, he writes. But odds were that the lion’s share of the bubble trillions would end up in shares and not in actual new industries or infrastructure.

Janszen doesn’t leave much hope for any “change” of this system from the political side; on the contrary: Following Al Gore and the latest media hype, presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton have already begun to embrace alternative energies as a political key topic, thereby only delivering one more crucial ingredient for FIRE’s success in creating a new bubble.

One might add that financial sector’s powerful grip on the US economy does also result from the simple fact that alongside the bubbles, the sector itself has grown into huge dimensions. FIRE nowadays stands for more than 20 percent of America’s GDP.

Last but not least, the sector has been extremely successful in luring a major part of the country’s intellectual talent into its own system. Take the example of Princeton University: Six out of ten undergraduate students go from this university straight to Wall Street. Needless to say that the best get hired in advance, before they even graduate.

At least right now, it seems hard to imagine a way out of the vicious circle of bubble economy. Or, as Janszen laconically puts it: “Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence.”

Boy Group Revisited

It was my first rock concert in about 15 years. It was the first rock concert I ever listened to sitting on a chair.

Sting is still the hell of a great-looking guy. His voice is still fabulous, as is his yoga-modeled body, effectively shown off in tight black pants and a white sleeveless T-shirt so ragged it looked like an actual leftover from the eighties. And “The Police” reunited still is a band that may not have revolutionized rock music, but plays songs you tend to replay in your head, songs you want to hear over and over again.



“The first boy group in history”, mocked my husband (who came with me anyway). But now the boys are way into their 50s - Sting and Stewart Copeland -, or even 60s - Andy Summers. The idols of my late teenage years, featuring grey hair (Stewart), a paunch (Andy), and a heavily receding hairline (Sting). Matching my own wrinkles and growing demand of hair color products.

This is how I spent at least the first half of the concert in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall Arena. Looking at and marveling at how old we all have become. The huge video screens displaying close-ups of the musicians from different angles, were constant pitiless reminders of that fact. Of course I had known before. But now it was shown. Live on stage.

Was that mixture of nostalgia and self-pity distracting me from the music? Was this the reason why this vibrating, exciting live-concert-feeling simply wouldn’t kick in - although the show was pretty good, the band in high spirits, the songs often jazzed up or otherwise reinterpreted? It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the event and the music; I sang along, still knowing many of the lyrics by heart. But “rocking” in my chair already felt a little awkward. Was it the folding chair that prevented me from jumping up and dancing?


Before the concert, we had met Robert in a Japanese noodle place at the Trump Taj Mahal’s bombastic casino floor. A bald, jolly little guy in his fifties, eagerly digging in his memory for some traces of the German he had learned in high school. We small talked. He had come to see “The Police”, too, combining the concert with a visit at the casino before he’d have to go “back to business” on Monday. There was a shuttle service, he told us, for the Taj Mahal’s hotel guests to the concert hall and back. Very convenient.

Maybe that’s what is most irritating about going to a rock concert when you are forty- or even fifty-something.

As a teen or twen, one got there in an old VW Beetle with at least six people crammed inside, sleeping bags in the trunk. The event was huge, feelings were intense, anything could happen - or so you hoped. And the music almost made you fly. Until one woke up freezing in a soaking wet sleeping bag the morning after one of those open air concerts.

Two decades later, chances are that a rock concert is something well organized, to be fit into a tight schedule. Somewhere between picking the children up from soccer training on Saturday afternoon and getting back home not too late on Saturday night for the babysitter. No drugs. Furtively glancing at the cell phone display in the middle of “Message In A Bottle”, in case the babysitter is sending out an SOS at this very moment about a toddler who had suddenly fallen sick…

No, neither the boys nor the concert were anything like 15 years ago. What a pity. And what a relief.

happy uncomplicated lives

I met Anny at a wedding reception.

I am not a great fan of receptions, let alone wedding receptions, especially in the US. (I could also write about ten dozen paragraphs about my issues with American weddings, but promised myself I will try to keep my posts shorter).

It’s because I am socially-challenged. Hopeless at small talk. And very-awfully uncomfortable having to make acquaintances that are supposed to last a quarter of an hour.

Anny was an exception.

She was born in France before WWII. Her parents – I assume at least one of them had to be Jewish – emigrated to Argentina, where she spent most of her childhood. Then, in 1947, she moved to the US. “I grew up speaking French and Spanish, that’s why when I speak English, my accent is hard to detect” she said.

Mine is probably easier, but nevertheless she was not able to decipher it (I have no idea why, but it always makes me feel good, when people have problems trying to guess my accent).

Where did you come from? How long ago? What do you do? She was firing questions like from a machine gun and I could see in her shiny, black eyes that she was genuinely interested. I did not have to talk for long. “I know exactly what you are going through” she said after about one minute.

A few hours and many toasts-speeches-hors d'oevres -champagne-and-wine-glasses later, we bumped into each other again. This time it was in a tent where a live band was playing. My daughter who assumed a flower girl duties for the day (do not ask me about a 100 dollar plastic dress she had to done) was dancing with her grandparents. A lot of goofiness and laughter.

“You should be happy that you daughter has such happy and uncomplicated grandparents” Anny told me. “Because she will be able to live a happy and uncomplicated life."

Just as she was saying it, I noticed that the bride parted with her elegant high-heels and was dancing bare feet. One of her elegant braid’s maids donned sneakers and you could barely see a Nike logo from under her long, red satin dress.
Happy, uncomplicated lives. I can't stop thinking about it.

Do I want my daughter to live a happy and uncomplicated life? Or is it more complicated than that?

Happily, it’s probably not upon me to decide.

Happy IVGLDSW Day!

This morning, I got an email from a friend that made my day. She had received it from another friend in Switzerland, and I already passed it on to a friend in Germany. But I'd like to share it with more Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Women out there, and that's why I posted it here without knowing to whom I owe the copyright - except for the quotes, of course...
Wherever you are in the small world, enjoy!

"Today is International Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Woman's Day, so please send this message to someone you think fits this description.

Please do not send it back to me as I have already received it from a Very Good Looking, Darn Smart Woman!

And remember this motto to live by... Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!

To the Girls !!!

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.
(Cora Harvey Armstrong)

Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out. But I can usually shut the bitch up with cookies.
(Unknown)

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
(Helen Hayes - at 73)

Old age ain't no place for sissies.
(Bette Davis)

Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.
(Caryn Leschen)

I'm not going to vacuum 'til Sears makes one you can ride on.
(Roseanne Barr)

Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.
(Maryon Pearson)

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
(Eleanor Roosevelt)

When life hands you lemons, ask for tequila and salt and call me over!!!"