By The River

German life and culture is often the subject of stereotypes in America. I got a huge laugh Thursday night from my cousin, Florian Penkwitt, and his friends when I said the popular perception of a German beer garden is of fat men and burly waitresses in Bavarian lederhosen swilling huge mugs of beer. There was plenty of beer being swilled at the Amadeus beer garden where we were, but Germans as a whole are a lot slimmer than Americans and dress pretty much like we do.

And here are some other thoughts:

--German drivers stop for pedestrians, by and large. I had drivers stop and wave me across the street when I didn't proceed immediately out onto the crosswalk, which can get you killed in America. German pedestrians rarely jaywalk. They'll stand and wait patiently for the light to change even if no car is in sight. The real risk to pedestrians is bicycles. Bicycles share the sidewalks with pedestrians, and often have a marked bike path that American pedestrians invade at their peril.

--Restaurants in Germany don't rip you off when it comes to wine. It was quite easy in Berlin to get a half-liter carafe of good wine for 6 or 7 Euros, or about $7-8. Waitresses inevitably ask you if you want water to go with it. You can be arrested for d.u.i. in Germany with a blood alcohol count of 0.5. In Pennsylvania, it's 0.8.

--Most public toilets charge between 0.30 and 0.55 Euros for the privilege. Even McDonald's Restaurants, the haven for free toilets in the U.S., do this. German toilet paper is definitely of the character-building variety. You can also use it to sand down that old table you've been meaning to refinish.

--Germany seems to have more slim, fine-featured, classically beautiful women than just about any place I've been. Kein Wunder, as they say, that so many American soldiers stationed here get themselves a Fraulein. You can't bring home the beer, but you can bring home the babe.

--My wife will probably kill me for that last observation.

Posted by David at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Germans couldn't stop talking about the beautiful May weather they had last week. Winter here was long and hard, with record amounts of snow. This is not a warm country in the best of times--few homes have or need air conditioning for the summer, and "shorts day" is a meaningful phrase. After concluding my lecture tour, I spent the weekend visiting my relatives in the impossibly beautiful Tauberland/Hohenlöhe region of Baden-Württemburg. Rolling hills, forests, vineyards, and manicured farm fields cut by narrow and winding paved roads make this a step back in time. I shot the photo above near the tiny village of Lindlein.

Many Germans in this region have given up farming, stymied by the low prices and end to price supports brought about by globalization. My Freudenberger relatives in the village of Lindlein have thrown in the towel and now rent out their fields. So do the Dummlers in Elpersheim, the village where my grandfather was born in 1901. Only Walther Kilian, my cousin in Oberndorf, still actively farms. He raises hogs in an indoor system and farms 40 hectares of wheat, corn, oats, and rapeseed. Walther, like many German farmers, has a second job, in his case working for the local water system. Another thing I noticed since my last visit in 2003 is the number of windmills that have risen in the region. The state government here partners with farmers on these projects. Walther considered it, but decided he is too old (58) for it to have time to pay off. Renate, his wife, doesn't really like to see them on the horizon, a common sentiment.

My ulterior motive for the visits was to copy old family photographs. I brought along my laptop and a very small but effective Canon scanner and found a treasure trove that was both moving and disturbing. I always knew my grandfather's brothers and cousins, the ones who stayed in Germany, were drafted into the German Army during World War II like most men their age. But to see old black-and-white photos of them in uniform was jarring. In conversations with family members, it was clear they have moved on from the terrible losses of the war that Hitler started, but still think about them everyday. They are just below the surface.

Heading back to America where I can have pancakes for breakfast instead of cold cuts--a German standard that is great for a few days. I enjoyed the food, especially the spätzle noodles with beef stroganoff that my aunt in Lindlein prepared. And I'll miss that great, great German beer. Nothing like it in the world.

Posted by David at 05:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are two kinds of cities in Germany: those which were bombed heavily during World War II and those which weren't. Stuttgart is one of the former, bombed more than 50 times. Nearly every historical building in the central city was damaged if not destroyed. The city created a mountain, Birkenkopf, out of the rubble of the destroyed buildings. You can follow a path to the top, where, like in Planet of the Apes, pieces of historic buildings lie out for the passerby to contemplate. The view from the top is spectacular, but the rubble forces you to contemplate how a beautiful city was destroyed to avenge the unleashing of demons by Nazi Germany.

Some of the historic buildings were rebuilt, and rebuilt well, but you can always tell. They look a little too perfect. The empty spaces in Stuttgart were filled in with 1950s-1960s Modernist buildings from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, and Le Corbusier, according to Frommer's Germany 2006. But I had guessed the parentage just from looking at them. The downtown reminded me in some ways of the state office complex in Albany, N.Y., where an historic 19th century neighborhood was torn down and replaced by office highrises and a state library that still look futuristic.

With not much of a past to display, Stuttgart focuses on the present, especially on the arts. The new art museum, opened in a glass cube a year ago, contains one of the world's premier collections of the paintings of German Surrealist Expressionist Otto Dix. Dix's paintings in the 1920s foreshadowed the end of the troubled Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. Mangled German veterans of World War I beg for crumbs from rich parasites. Then in "The Triumph of Death" (1934), he foretells the destruction of Germany in World War II, showing a skeletal king wielding a scythe that is about to cut down, soldier, mother, baby, old man, and young lovers alike. Dix was one of the painters labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis.

Last night was the last in my lecture series and probably the best. About 12 people attended, and of those maybe half were recruited by my cousin, Florian Penkwitt. I talked about the Centralia mine fire and the upcoming midterm elections in America. The questions came thick and fast.

Florian invited me to come out for beers with him and his friends afterward. We walked to a nearby beer garden and settled in for some more conversation. Turned out that not everyone there was German. One guy was from Spain, another from Hungary, but they were studying in Germany. Tabea Kilian, another cousin, came along, too. The Spanish guy was carrying a box that Kai, Florian's friend, said contained "religious relics." Actually, they were 350 euros worth of World Cup tickets, ordered a year ago. Germany becomes more obsessed by the day with the upcoming quadrennial world soccer finals, which will be played here this summer. He held them like they were the bones of saints. A woman from another table came over and asked to see and hold them as well.

After two glorious beers and a burger, I said my goodbyes and walked back to my hotel. Tomorrow I head up into the pastoral German countryside where my grandfather was born.

Posted by David at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Look at this photo of young Germans riding bicycles in Heidelberg and tell me what you DON'T see. Give up? Not a single one is wearing a bicycle helmet. This is no aberration. Until I arrived in Stuttgart, where the culture is clearly different, I saw almost no one in Germany wearing a bicycle helmet. Not in Freiburg, or Eisenach, or Berlin, or Heidelberg. Many Germans ride bicycles, especially in urban areas, and they just let the wind blow through their hair.

Asking around, I was told that most people won't even consider wearing one. They didn't as a child and they're still here. Why should they now? Rainer Czarnecki, my cousin in Frankfurt, said helmets are considered "uncool" among kids--as they would have been when I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s. For us, it would have been a ticket to permanent dorkdom.

I explained to several Germans that in America, one is considered to be irresponsible if he or she fails to wear a bicycle helmet, and that some states have laws requiring children to wear them. What about head injuries? Answer that, Mr. German Devil-May-Care (not you, Rainer). Nah, still not interested. I did feel guilty when Rainer's children headed out the door the next morning wearing their bike helmets for the ride to school. Of course, he also told me that some kids are known to peddle out of sight of their parents and then ditch the helmet.

It's different in Stuttgart, where I see many bike riders wearing helmets. Tabea Kilian, my cousin who lives here, said the city is considered to be a dangerous place to bike. Perhaps that's why bikers here make the sensible choice to wear a helmet. Still, it brought back good memories of childhood seeing so many people riding without an uncomfortable plastic appendage on their heads.

Many things about Germany evoke an earlier time that we Americans often regret having lost. Cities have thriving downtowns with big department stores and small shops both. Bookstores are practically on every corner. Real bakeries--not the supermarket kind--are everywhere. A public university education is still free, although the government is trying to change that. The shocking proposed tuitition? About $750 a year.

There are reasons some of these things still exist here, including some that would make a free marketeer run screaming from the room. But you can't argue that they don't enhance the quality of life.

Posted by David at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I arrived in Stuttgart today and was met at my hotel by Bernd and Barbara Penkwitt, parents of my cousin, Meike Penkwitt in Freiburg. I've known Bernd and Barbara for years and always enjoy seeing them, even though my limited German makes it difficult for us to carry on a full conversation. We get along with smiles and gestures and much good will.

Barbara is my mother's cousin, though much younger. Technically, I am her "first cousin once removed," but just "cousin" will do. Her father, Hermann Kilian, was the brother of my grandfather, John Kilian. Hermann was just a boy when my grandfather and two of his other brothers left Germany in 1924. The family was separated by the Nazi era and World War II, and not really reunited until around 1961. My aunt Joan, married to an Army doctor, took advantage of living in Stuttgart to seek out her father's surviving German family. I completed the job in the late 1980s, compiling a chronicle of of names, dates, and places that spoke of war, death, and survival. One of my grandfather's brothers and five or six of his cousins died on the German side in World War II.

At dinner last night, we were joined by Bernd and Barbara's son, Florian, Florian's buddy Kai, and my second cousin (again to be technical) Tabea Kilian. All three are young and speak excellent English. Things got cracking and we had a great time over beers discussing Florian's two months of bumming around Morocco, Tabea's trip to Wisconsin last summer with her 75-year-old grandfather, and Kai's relation to the American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein and his various experiences talking to Floridians about George W. Bush.

They don't call it the language barrier for nothing. Most Germans learn English and a second foreign language in school. Unlike us, they have a ready ability to practice their English in everyday life, which is the key to retention of a foreign language. I tell Germans that it is entirely possible for an American to go through his entire long life without ever encountering a foreign language speaker. I took German every year from the seventh through 12th grades and again in college, yet I struggle now with even basic conversations. I had worked with language tapes for several months before coming over here, but nothing stuck.

I wish it was otherwise. I know I am missing mountains of family history from the war years and other years because of my inability to converse easily in German. They would happily tell me if only I was able to listen.

Posted by David at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was last in Heidelberg 31 years ago, right after I finished my four years at Hope College and was wondering how to begin my planned career in journalism. I needed three more credit hours to graduate, the result of an unfortunate encounter with a statistics class while spending night after night working on the college newspaper. Hope offered a three-week May Term course in England that would put me over the top. After three weeks in England, I still had some time, and decided to go to Germany for a long weekend.

To certain young Americans of that period, especially those who studied German in high school, Heidelberg resonated as an impossibly romantic place. One imagined students still dueling with swords in the street (I had done well in a fencing course in college and felt myself fully prepared). There is a large university here and has been for hundreds of years. There was even a student jail, last used in 1914. Mark Twain spent several happy months in Heidelberg getting over writer's block and penning "A Tramp Abroad" about his travels through Germany. Erica Jong used Heidelberg scenes in her famous novel, "Fear of Flying," although that came out shortly after my visit.

I had forgotten how truly beautiful this city is. Heidelberg belongs on a short list with Paris, San Francisco, and a few other places as one of the more beautiful cities in the world. It sits snug in a tight valley of the Neckar River, flanked on either side by forested mountains. Yesterday, I strolled the "Philosopher's Walk" on the other side of the river, gazing back upon the city, its castle, and the leafy trees. This was one of the first really warm days of spring here. Students were everywhere, lazing in the sun and necking on the Neckar.

And of course, I ran into someone I knew. Or rather, who knew someone I knew. I was in a shop in Heidelberg completing a purchase and mentioned Pennsylvania to the store clerk. A woman standing nearby, an American, asked where in Pennsylvania? Harrisburg, I said. Oh, she said, my brother lives in Mechanicsburg. It turned out she was from Mount Carmel, Pa., just down the road from Centralia, was a Bucknell University graduate and the daughter of Joe Swatski, the former superintendent of Shamokin Area School District. I knew Joe well when I was a reporter at The News-Item in Shamokin. Another woman in the store chimed in that she lived in New Castle, Pa. Much more of this and Heidelberg will be a campaign stop for the candidates for governor of Pennsylvania.

I got that job at the Shamokin News-Item a few months after returning from Heidelberg. I suppose you could say things have come full circle.

Posted by David at 01:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This seemingly typical suburban apartment complex is actually in Berlin and not what it seems. I was taken here during a walking tour this morning of sites in the German capital associated with Hitler and World War II. About where that light standard juts up in the middle of the photo is where, in 1945, the bodies of Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, were burned after they committed suicide with the Russians closing in. Some 50 feet down from that light standard was Hitler's bunker. The East German government twice blew up the remains of the bunker, intent on not having it become a shrine for rightists and fascists from around the world. No sign marks this site today.

In 1945, Hitler's chancellery--a combination residence and office complex--stood where the apartment complex stands now. It was huge, said our guide, stretching the length of "an American football field." This is a couple of blocks from the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate. Not much could look more normal than this.

Posted by David at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've always been intrigued by the former East Germany. Not for its awful government (although they did women's rights well) but for its cities and lands, which were largely off limits to American tourists for so many years.

I have a long free weekend between places where I have to be in Germany, and decided to spend most of it in Berlin, where I am writing this now. But on the way, I stopped at Eisenach, a city in the state of Thuringia. The attraction of Eisenach was Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran Church, found refuge with a local nobleman while he committed the revolutionary act of translating the New Testament from Latin into German. That made it accessible to average people, not just priests and nobility who could read Latin.

When I took the Lutheran confirmation classes as a child, I never forgot the image in the textbook of Luther throwing a bottle of ink at the Devil, who had supposedly appeared in his room one night. Whether or not it really happened, it's a great metaphor. And not just for Lutherans. It's really a perfect metaphor for what journalists do when they do their jobs well. All of us in the profession have thrown ink at the Devil, or wish we had.

Eisenach, like many cities in the former East Germany, looks tired and a bit down at the heels. My friends in Freiburg told how local authorities would spruce up houses along roads that former DDR leader Erich Honecker would travel when he came to visit, but only to the second floor. That's as far up as he could see from his moving automobile. Eisenach is full of history. In addition to the Luther connection, Johann Sebastian Bach was born here. He and Luther, a century or so apart, were choir boys in the same church.

Wartburg Castle sits atop a mountain. I took a city bus to the top, but after it lets you out, it was still 600 feet of steps to the front drawbridge. Having visited the castle, I put in the category of "European Monuments That Look Great from the Outside, But Not So Great Inside." Even Luther's room was a bit of a letdown, much more interesting for what happened there than how it looks. Only one thing is original in the room, a whalebone footrest. Tourists in the 19th century picked apart the desk he used, and tore away the alleged inkspot on the wall. That was gone after about 1901, a guide said.

Still, it was worth it. Acts of revolutionary writing need to be commemorated. And journalists need to throw more ink at more Devils.

Posted by David at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The former Communist state known as East Germany was all bad, wasn't it, a place that would have certainly qualified as one of President George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" states had it still been in existence when he uttered those words in 2002. State repression of dissent, a failed economy, and the Berlin Wall were the hallmarks of what Americans know about East Germany.

Wasn't it?

Yesterday in Freiburg, I had lunch with my cousin, Meike Penkwitt, and her old friend Eva Manske, the director of Carl Schurz House, aka, the German-American Institute. Eva grew up in Leipzig in the former East Germany. Eva was the second East German woman I had met through Meike, the other being Sybille Brinz, who I met at Meike's wedding in 2003. Both told me essentially the same thing: as bad as East Germany was in the political sphere, it was very good for women. Women had true equality with men there, something they have lost in the reunification with West Germany after 1990.

Here's a summary of what Eva and Sybille told me, plus some interpretation of my own: In the former East Germany, daycare for children was readily available. Women were strongly encouraged by state policy to work and pursue professions. Everyone's talents were needed to build the communist state. Women were encouraged to be independent and self-reliant. There was no room for outmoded thinking on the proper role of women in the DDR (as East Germany was known).

Contrast that to the non-Communist West German model, where the attitude toward working women bears uncomfortable parallels to the the "Kinder, Kirche, Küche" (children, church, kitchen) model of the Nazi state. There is a widespread belief that women who pursue professions should remain childless. There is even a contemptuous German word, "Rabenmutter," (raven mother), used to refer to a mother who "flies off" to a job and leaves her children in daycare. Daycare in Germany today is expensive and restrictive.

Eva and Meike described a local daycare that requires mothers to spend the first eight weeks at the daycare facility with their child to ease the transition for both. Germany faces a declining birthrate, almost below the replacement level, in part because many women of childbearing age want or need to work, but feel socially pressured not to have children if they do. Don't get me wrong, some German women buy into these attitudes, too (even Eva said there were times in the old DDR when she wished she could be "just a housewife"), but for those who don't, life can be tough.

In France, where Eva actually resides (for my central Pennsylvania readers, France is almost as close to Freiburg as Carlisle is to Harrisburg, and living costs, especially for housing, are lower), the government provides well-run and reasonably-priced state-run daycare.

So arrive at an uncomfortable truth--that East Germany, and communist states in general, were better for women than free-market, capitalist states like West Germany. I've believed for a longtime that we in the West benefited in someways from the Communist East. In my opinion, the existence of Communism acted like a giant vortex, pulling Western nations like the U.S. toward the socialist left on such things as health care and government care for the poor from the 1930s through 1990.

Western capitalists worried greatly about Communism, probably to an unreasonable extent. But because they did, they sought to make Communism less attractive to the working men and women here. In other words, they gave them some of the good things about socialism so they wouldn't be tempted to embrace the bad, i.e., total state control of the economy. I don't think it's only coincidence that since the Berlin Wall fell and most Communist states collapsed in the early 1990s, America has been rapidly shedding those hat-tips to socialism, things like employer-paid health insurance and reasonable income gaps between the rich and working classes enforced by progressive taxation. Free market capitalism is taking its inevitable course. If you can get it, good. If not, too bad for you, loser.

Not that Eva is a victim of "Ostalgia," another German word coinage that means unreasoning nostalgia for the former East Germany. After all, she said, you had to wait 17 years to get an automobile, she recalled, and when it finally arrived, it was a Trabant--the "Trabi" being basicly an ugly metal box with a lawnmower engine. She also described witnessing a police crackdown on well-meaning citizens in Leipzig protesting the industrial pollution that was tolerated in the name of growth of the nation (note to Bush Administration: don't try this at home). But when it came to the status of women, the East Germans got it right.

For the sake of America's future, we need to stop free market capitalism from running rampant. We need to place rules on business to preserve the best of social democracy while not unreasonably impeding the ability of businesses to earn a fair profit.

Posted by David at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I happened to look out the window on my flight to Germany last night and realized we were passing over the Arctic, or at least a very snowy portion of Canada. It was still light, and there was snow everywhere, and some open water. I suppose airplanes fly over the polar ice cap all the time, but I had never seen the ice on any of my previous flights to Europe. It was like returning to winter. Approaching Frankfurt, I looked out the window again. Now it was dark, but the sky was cloudless and the stars were brilliant.

I'm in a cafe in the Frankfurt Airport train station. The clock says 7 a.m., but my body says 1 a.m.

Posted by David at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I leave for Germany tomorrow on a two week vacation. It's not my first trip there. Actually, it will be my fifth or sixth visit. My grandfather emigrated from Germany in 1924, and left a lot of family behind. I'll be traveling to Freiburg, Eisenach, Berlin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and some little farming villages you never heard of. Most of my relatives live in the Hohenlöhe Region on the border of Baden-Württemburg and Bavaria. It is very rural and pastoral, a land of rolling hills and forests and vineyards. There is a house with my mother's family name above the door in the village of Elpersheim. My grandfather was born there in 1901.

I'm also excited about going to Berlin. I was last there in 1990, a year after the Wall fell. Much has changed, especially in the former East Berlin, where I'll be staying. The Berlin Biennale, a major art exhibition, is going on, and I'll be taking the Third Reich walking tour, where they show you the surviving places associated with Hitler's terror. My plan is to blog from the road when I can, perhaps even with a photo or two added to the site. And guess what? In Stuttgart, the beer gardens have just opened for the season. What could be better?

Posted by David at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)