Anna Steegmann 2 Worlds

A Loss Beyond Words

2011-09-04T06:21:00.001-07:00

In the air, on my way from Berlin to New York I finish Monika Maron’s “Ach Glueck” somewhere above Newfoundland. The sparse and forlorn prose, the author’s questions about happiness in old age and the role of fate in our lives, speak to me. Like the protagonist, I am on a transatlantic flight headed into a new scary life, a future much different from how I envisioned it months ago. Maron’s protagonist is leaving behind her husband in Berlin. My husband died and left me behind.
I take out my note book to add to my bloated to-do list. English words appear on the paper. I am surprised. After more than five weeks reading, speaking and writing German, my brain has switched over to English. I wasn’t aware of it. I take it as a good sign.
On April 4 I brought Roman to the emergency room of Mount Sinai Hospital. Language was my refuge for the twenty- three terrifying days that followed. I woke up after a few hours of restless sleep and sat down at my computer. I wrote friends asking for help and prayers. I gave updates following his twelve-and-a-half hours of brain surgery. I told them about the diagnosis of Schwannoma and my relief at finding out that it was a benign tumor. I wrote about the complications and setbacks, his optimism and his plans for the future. He was looking forward to Christmas in Goerlitz, Easter in Vienna, and summer in Venice. He promised to take me for a ride on the Siberian Railroad once he retired.
On Wednesday, April 27th I wrote the final message: Roman died this afternoon.
I wrote the obituary for his memorial service for I could not bear the idea of a stranger delivering the final words of farewell. Then the English language failed me. I was struck speechless. I could barely write. When I scribbled down a few paragraphs into my journal, it was in German. I have resided in a place without written language ever since.
Living in a new land, the land of the grieving, I live with tears, pain, despair, but also gratitude and love. I cannot shape these emotions into words, sentences and paragraphs. They are too raw and too unruly for words. Roman was my husband, my best friend, my life companion for twenty-five years. A loss beyond words.
It has been four months since Roman left this world. He lives in my heart, in the cells of my body, and in my memories. He lives on in the hearts and memories of his friends, his family, his students and colleagues. He visits me in my dreams, takes me in his arms and comforts me.
The English language is the second language for both of us. We spoke to each other in English, we argued with each other and expressed our love for each other in English. A language made precious because he told me several times each day that he loved me.
I hope to make him proud by going on living and writing.

SNOWY GEMÜTLICHKEIT

2011-01-13T06:12:00.001-08:00

The second snowstorm of this winter has arrived. A priceless stillness has fallen over New York. The city that never sleeps usually moves to a fast-paced soundtrack of honking horns, wailing sirens, and rumbling subways. Music blasts from windows and stores; vendors shout to attract customers. Street preachers pontificate to their impromptu flocks. People talk and argue louder and faster than any place I’ve ever visited.
Not this day. Not outside my window. St. Nicholas Avenue and St. Nicholas Park are blanketed with snow; the parked cars are buried under mountains of it. No one walks, no one shouts in the street. Except for the occasional sanitation department snowplow, the street is sparsely trafficked. The pristine white, the serenity, the brilliance of the winter sun, the unique winter light are a miracle to me --- not the weather emergency it is for the rest of the city. I can sit at my desk and devote a full day to my novel, look up and out once in a while to take in the serene city.

“So gemütlich,” I think.

There is no word in the English language that accurately captures the meaning of “Gemüt” (mind, soul, disposition, heart) or “gemütlich” (comfortable, smug, and cozy).
The term originally meant soulful (voller Gemüt.) In the beginning of the 18th century “Gemütlichkeit” appeared in the writings of the Moravians in the sense of “Herzlichkeit” (cordiality, heartiness, warmth). In the Biedermeier period, “Gemütlichkeit” gained the new meaning of comfort or comfortableness and became a fashionable concept. At times “Gemütlichkeit” appeared related to nationalism and Teutonic mania and took on the negative connotation of laziness. The writer F. T. Vischer coined the derogatory untranslatable term "Vettermichelsgemütlichkeit" (cousin kraut‘s coziness?).

A word does not only carry linguistic and etymological meaning, it carries cultural as well as emotional meaning. In contrast to the common and valued emotional restraint, “Gemütlichkeit” is an acceptable way of expressing emotions in German culture. It’s a way of making oneself and others feel at home, to let down one’s guard and experience intimacy. My own etymology, origin and meaning of the word “Gemütlichkeit” stems from the Germany of the 60s. I was invited for “Kaffee und Kuchen” (coffee and cake) by my neighbor, Frau Stanke. Sitting across from her on the kitchen bench, I watched her set the table with ritualistic accuracy and care for her ten year old visitor with the linen tablecloth (picked up earlier in the day from the Heissmangel pressing service), the gold trimmed Sunday china, a platter of poppy seed cake, a cup of Muckefuck (ersatz coffee) for me and the cup of Jacobs Krönung for herself. She squeezed her massive body into the narrow space on the bench and slid closer to me. Then came the precious invitation in her charming Silesian accent:

“Lass es uns gemütlich machen.” Let's get comfortable.

Leitkultur?

2010-11-17T14:23:00.001-08:00

Xenophobia and growing hostility towards immigrants are on the rise in Europe. “British work for British workers,” they shout. “Send the Romas back home,” they insist. Failed immigration is making headlines everywhere. The German chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed that in Germany the multicultural society has failed.
The situation of immigrants in Germany is a hot topic here in New York also. The German Consulate hosted an Immigration and Integration Issues conference. We watched the documentary “The Yilmaz Clan” about three generations of a Turkish family living in Berlin. It was followed by a panel discussion “The Turkish German Minority in the European Context” and a seminar on Economic and Human Rights Factors. Jürgen Habermas’ article “Leadership and Leitkultur” appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times. The reaction in Germany to Thilo Sarrazin’s book “Germany does away with itself” was documented in two articles in the New York Times. The last one, on November 13th, took up an entire page. I was shocked to find out that more than one third of Germans agree with Sarrazin’s belief that Germany is becoming more stupid as a result of Muslim immigrants. He seems to express what a lot of Germans are thinking.
I am aware of the heated headscarf debate which has been going on for years. Many of my left-leaning friends fear a Turkish parallel society. They tell me that third generation Turks do not speak German properly. Their graduation rates from high school are lower than those of Germans and their incarceration are rates higher.
This concerns me also. What are the reasons? Certainly Muslim immigrants are not of lesser intelligence (a false biological conclusion Sarrazin draws). If Muslim children are doing poorly in Germans schools, could it be the fault of the German school system? Are discrimination and prejudice to blame for higher unemployment among Muslim immigrants? Higher education in Germany seems to be for children of the upper class whose parents have attended college, not for children of working class or immigrant families. In Germany a quarter of the population attends college, less than in the United States.
I am worried that Europe is becoming more provincial. I see nationalist movements on the rise and politicians acting as if European civilization is under threat. There is a European Union, but no European passport. If the Turkish community in Germany today is more religious and more conservative than the first wave of Turkish immigrants could this result from German policies towards integration? The social and economic status of immigrants is an indicator for integration. The discussion is too often about us and them. How much of us do they have to become? It seems that the only well integrated Muslim is an ex-Muslim.
I left Germany in 1980. Today, it is a much more interesting country, not only because of reunification, but because of immigration. Germany has better food, even better fast food (the Döner kebab was an instant hit). There are plenty of writers, artists, taxi drivers, soccer players, and teachers who have a “migration background” as immigrants are labeled in Germany. All of them enrich the German cultural landscape.
Maybe we should start to speak of trans-culturalism instead of multiculturalism. Immigrants who have a foot in two countries, who travel with two passports, are always a hybrid of two cultures. For some this is a painful experience. The Chicano rapper Jae-P sings about being “Ni de aqui, ne de alla” (Neither from here, nor there).Others enjoy their hyphenated existence. Mexican American Gloria Anzaldua writes about her in-between identity. She’s not crossing a bridge from one culture to another, but is staying on the bridge instead.
Finding myself on that same bridge, I’d like to help in making the bridge passable to others. I believe I can do so by writing my own narrative and helping others do the same.

German Reunification--My Personal Gain

2010-10-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

“Wende”, turning point, is what Germans call the time that led to reunification of the two Germanys. Twenty years ago, protests and demonstrations —a peaceful revolution—ended the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) regime in the German Democratic Republic. The first free elections of the People's Parliament took place in March 1990. They paved the way to a parliamentary democracy and German reunification.

The New York Times reflected on the 20th anniversary with the article “For Some Germans, Unity Is Still a Work in Progress.” NPR,Deutsche Welle TV,and the BBC World News took an in-depth look at how Germany has been growing together. Germans, in their typical “the glass is half empty” attitude, focused on flaws, imperfections, and disappointments.

There’s disparity: the unemployment rate is higher in the East and the salaries are lower. But Germany today is without a doubt a great place to live. Germans have freedom of speech; they are well off or well taken care of with universal healthcare from cradle to grave. They retire at an early age and have plenty of vacation time.

German reunification has brought me many rewards. Throughout the early nineties, I had the opportunity to work with teachers and social-workers in the former GDR. This gave me insight into the East Germans’ state of mind. The world they knew stopped to exist; their careers were obliterated. Some felt anxious and overwhelmed. Others bemoaned the loss of security. The windows of bookstores displayed plenty of self-help books.

For the first time in history, a capitalist and a socialist economy suddenly became one. Many East Germans embraced the new freedom and the previously unthinkable opportunities that came with it. The West Germans, often lacking empathy, complained about the steep price of unification: $1.7 trillion. The country seemed split into "Ossis" and "Wessis." Alienation and misunderstandings ruled.

Maybe I understand East Germans better than the West Germans. When I moved to New York my cultural and social security blanket vanished. Feeling off balance, I had to fend for myself in an alien land. It took years before I felt I belonged. Thirty years later, as both an American and a German citizen, I still have trouble understanding the behavior and thoughts of my fellow Americans.

I benefit from personal post-unification perks: travelling to Weimar, Dresden, Leipzig, the Baltic coast, and the lakes of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. As a resident of the Federal Republic of Germany who had no relatives in the East, I was not able to visit these places before. I was only entitled to spend 24 Hours in East Berlin. Driving from my hometown to Berlin and through the GDR transit zone, I could never drive off the roads, explore the villages and towns along the way or have a picnic in the forest. I would have been arrested. The border crossings were an ordeal. The x-ray machines at Bahnhof Friedrichstraße where West Berliners crossed over to the East could have been invented by George Orwell.

Another reunification benefit: spending time with my Berlin friends in their Brandenburg forest datsha (Many former West Berliners now have vacation homes in the East.) Developing new friendships with Kathrin from Leipzig, Dagmar from Görlitz, and Anetta and Petra who grew up in East Berlin.

At the top of my list is: falling in love with Görlitz (a gem of town on the Polish border) where I bought a charming apartment in 2004 at a ridiculously low sum. I now have a German “Personalausweis” (ID) that states that I am a resident of Görlitz. I spend time there every year. With each stay, my love for the town and its people deepens. Many other Germans are turned off by the dialect spoken in Saxony. It took some time to get used to, but as a resident of the state, a Saxon and “Ossi” by choice, it is music to my ears.

As Germany was reunified I was reunited with people and places in the East kept at a distance from me in the past.

Our Mother Tongue and its Influence

2010-09-09T06:13:00.000-07:00

I often ask myself if and how our first language influences our way of thinking. My German self is more serious, deeper, gloomier and more complicated than my American self. I am a different person speaking and writing in English— simpler, lighter, and funnier. Perhaps that is why I have become a published writer in the English language first.
Our mother tongue forces us to think a certain way, to be precise about certain information, to pay attention to aspects of our experience that is not required by speakers of other languages. In English, a teacher can be either male or female; in German, the gender is clear: I am either taught by my “Lehrer” or “Lehrerin.” In English I need to spell out if I meet or met my husband, if I will meet him, or I am meeting him. Other languages do not force us to specify in this manner; in Chinese, the same verb form stands for past, present, and future.
When the English language borrows words from the German, as in leitmotiv, schadenfreude, wunderkind, weltschmerz and realpolitik, is it difficult for the native English speaker to understand the concepts behind those foreign terms? Two psychologists, Lisa Irmen and Astrid Köhncke conducted experiments to find out if the grammatical use of gender influences our notions about the objects. To Germans, the bridge, “die Brücke,” is female: They attribute qualities like beautiful, elegant and slender to it. For the Spanish, the bridge, “el puente” is male. The Spanish think of typical male attributes as huge, strong and solid. Do Spanish and German architects therefore design different types of bridges? I wonder why the moon is male and the sun is female in German, while it is the opposite in French. Having grown up near the Rhine river, “Vater Rhein”, the river is always male to me as is the forest, the mountain and the ocean. The meadow, color, crowd and revolution on the other hand is always female. The child, “das Kind,” is an “it” in German as is the girl, “das Mädchen.” Does this reflect the belief that they are not yet sexual beings?
If the habits of our mother tongue impact our thoughts, perceptions and experiences in the world what happens to the English-speaking people who do not assign a gender to their nouns? Linguists argue about the validity of linguistic relativity, the fact that different languages give us a different picture of the world. David Sedaris’ contributed the funniest comment to this debate in his story “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” the hilarious account of his struggle with learning the French language. It is assigned reading in all of my writing classes and often the text my CCNY students—most of them immigrants or the children of immigrants—enjoy the most.
“… I managed to mispronounce IBM and assigned the wrong gender to both the floor waxer and the typewriter. The teacher’s reaction led me to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France…. I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to a Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when sex implied?”

Civic Duty

2010-05-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

I was eager to take part in an “important civic responsibility and opportunity to participate in the American judicial system.” It was my first time to be called for jury duty. What I knew about the American jury system, I learned from movies like “Twelve Angry Men” and “Judgment at Nuremberg.”
The eligible citizens, a mix of Manhattanites of all ages, races, and ethnicities, gathered in the jury’s room on the 11th floor of the Manhattan Court House. They were dressed in Wall Street, hip-hop, Madison Avenue Prada, ethnic African, and work out attire.
To most, their contribution to democracy seemed an inconvenient burden. They slept through the instructional film, tapped furiously on their blackberries and laptop computers, and negotiated real estate deals over the phone. Some hid out in the TV and PC rooms. Free Wi-Fi tranquilized the majority of them. I brought along a thick novel and spent the morning reading and waiting. A panel of sixty people was called after three hours, but I wasn’t one of them.
“This is the golden age of Manhattan trials,” a court employee said. “Crime is so low that we have very little to do for you.” How reassuring. At 3:30 PM, another panel of jurors was called. At first, I didn't react when my name was called. Even after thirty years in New York, mispronouncing my name ÄNNA STIEKMÄHN, made me feel they're looking for someone else. “Good luck,” the court employee said. “Remember, you are the one standing between civilization and anarchy.”
We were invited into the judge's court room. A criminal case, I thought, I hope it's not murder. Horrid images of Truman Capote’s “In cold blood” ran through my mind. The judge introduced the defendant, a middle-aged white man, accused of selling cocaine to an undercover policeman. He explained the reasons one might not be able to serve as a juror, i.e. being a Jehovah's Witness who are not allowed to sit in judgment of others. He invited potential jurors who might be excused from the case to speak to him individually. Once outside again, a long line of people formed with issues that might prevent them from serving as jurors.
By 11:30 AM the following day everyone had a chance to speak to the judge. So far, the experience had nothing of the tension and excitement portrayed in Hollywood movies. Twelve jurors and two alternates were selected. My name was called first; I was in shock. Those chosen sat in the jury box, the rest on the benches reserved for the public during the trial. We filled out a questioneer, and then had to read our answers out loud. Again, I was first. Soon we found out where each juror lived and who they lived with. Each disclosed their profession, their highest level of education, their partners’ profession and if they had family members in law enforcement.
Amongst us was an oncologist from the Upper West Side, a retired subway employee, a young girl who worked for Banana Republic, a plumber from Washington Heights, a fashion designer, a pianist and a CEO married to a medical doctor. We were a highly educated group; most of us had master’s degrees. The college educated read the New York Times; the high school graduates preferred the Daily News.
“Would you have trouble judging someone?” the judge asked. In my previous life as a social worker, I was trained not to judge people. “Would you draw conclusions about the defendant’s character knowing that he has a criminal record?” the lawyer asked. “How do you feel about the police, undercover police in particular? The young black man, who worked at Footlocker and lived in East Harlem with his mother, had strong feelings about undercover police officers. One of them had thrown him against the wall in this building and patted him down without identifying himself.
Most of us stated that we’d be able to judge the defendant impartially. “Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” the potential jurors said.
“How do you feel about someone selling drugs?” the lawyer for the defendant asked me. I had hoped that someone else would answer before me to no avail. I have smoked marijuana and tried Ecstasy. Some of my friends and family members have used drugs. I worked as a drug prevention counselor and saw the devastation caused by crack cocaine firsthand. But I had no time to think about an answer. “Using drugs is a mistake. Selling drugs is a mistake,” I said sounding as eloquent as a fourth grader. “Hopefully people will learn from their mistakes.”
We sat outside for another forty minutes. I remembered how the defendant scrutinized all of us in the jury box. His fate lay in our hands. Was I ready for this responsibility? I no longer felt excited about jury duty. I felt ill at ease, anxious about judging another human being. I thought about the unjust Rockefeller laws that might send the defendant to jail for a long time for a small amount of cocaine. The defendant with his pockmarked face looked frightened and dejected. He reminded me of my younger brother at his worst, in the thralls of alcoholism and mental illness. Would those feelings influence me? Could I be impartial? What gave me the right to judge somebody?
Finally, the list of acceptable jurors was called. I felt great relief that I wasn’t one of them. It would be six years before I was going to be asked to serve as a juror for New York State again, four before the Federal Court could summon me for duty. Enough time to come to terms with judging a fellow human being.
I felt lighter, going down the elevator. I didn’t have to become a Jehovah’s Witness to evade my civic duty after all.

DIsgruntled Germans

2010-04-24T00:59:00.000-07:00

I have spent time in Berlin, Leipzig, Görlitz, and my hometown of Moers these past three months. There is plenty I enjoy about Germany and the Germans: Pflaumenmus, Weizenbier, ecological awareness, the time they take to cultivate friendships, and the outdoor pubs where no one sits alone frantically pounding laptop keys, blackberries or i-phones. There is plenty I find annoying: stupid TV shows like "Wetten, dass...?," washing machines with 90 minute cycles, prejudiced attitudes toward Muslim citizens (as evident by the headscarf debate), and the obsessive complaining.
In my opinion, the Germans have no reason to complain. They enjoy a high standard of living and an unparalleled social safety net. People the world over would trade places with them anytime.
There’s one issue in particular that makes me feel that Germans live in a different universe: their attitude concerning reunification. Many Germans don’t seem to appreciate the gift of freedom, the bloodless revolution and coming together of a nation that’s been separated by barbed wire and “The Wall.” Shockingly, according to a recent survey by the Opinion Research Center Emnid, twenty-four percent of West Germans and twenty-three percent of East Germans wish, at times, to have the wall back. Sixteen percent even think it’s the best thing that could happen to the country. Eighty percent of the citizens in the East and seventy-two percent of the citizens in the West can imagine living in a socialist state like the former GDR as long as there is “work, security, and solidarity.” Freedom as the most important political goal is named by twenty-eight percent of the East Germans and forty-two percent of West Germans.
Who are these people who feel this way? Are they all born after 1970 into relative wealth? Do they all live far away from the wall and Berlin? Have they never known Berliners who suffered because their families were separated by the wall or former GDR residents who spent years in jail for expressing their opinion or trying to leave the country?
I have friends who have spent time in an East German jail or who were lucky to escape in the trunk of a car with the help of a paid escape agent. I have friends in Berlin, who from one day to the next, were unable to see their grandmother or other relatives in the East. They could no longer play in Treptow Park with their childhood friends. I remember the dramatic stories of people trying to escape from East Germany in the newspapers and the evening news. Doing research for my book I have immersed myself in the events of the early sixties for the past two months. The tragic stories of the divided Germany are fresh in my mind.

There are countless heart wrenching pictures and stories. People jumping from their third and fourth floor apartments, some of whom were saved by a fire department’s rescue net, others, not so fortunate who died. An engineer crawling through the sewers to freedom. Two young men arriving naked without any belongings in West Berlin. They swam to freedom. Newlyweds from the West walking up to the barbed wire to show themselves to their parents in the East who couldn’t attend the wedding. The wife's mother shouted across the barbed wire “Celebrate, but don't forget us.”
There’s one story in particular that haunts me. On August 17, 1962 two young men tried to jump over the wall. One made it into the west unharmed; the other, 18- year-old Peter Fechner, was hit by bullets in his back. Seriously wounded, he fell back to the eastern side of the wall. There he lay for 80 minutes without anyone coming to his assistance. West Berliners stood and watched in shock, unable to come to his rescue. Peter Fechner died a long, tortuous death. “Help me, please help me,” he shouted while the East Berlin Vopos let him bleed to death.

A stable job and a decent salary, health insurance, social welfare, and social security mean nothing if I don’t have freedom. The freedom of speech, the freedom to practice my beliefs, the freedom to live my life the way I want to.
The answers a quarter of Germans gave to the Emnid Institute make me feel ashamed of my fellow citizens. Is this dissatisfaction the result of the belief that unification has had a negative impact on social welfare? That life was better before unification?
Perhaps I have lived too long in the US, a country that has given refuge to millions of people persecuted in their homelands for their religion, political beliefs, or their ethnicity. I can live without security and wealth, but could never do without freedom.

The Leipzig Book Fair

2010-03-25T07:08:00.001-07:00

Leipzig has always been important for the printed word. The first newspaper in the world was printed here in 1650. Publishing and printing has been Leipzig’s most important trade for centuries; every second Leipziger was employed in it until WWII. When Leipzig became a Soviet zone at the end of the war, 360,000 businesses and most of the publishing houses fled to the west. The city continued to have an important book fair during GDR times, but here was no freedom of the written word. Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain—the Monday night marches that resulted in the peaceful revolution and the fall of the wall started here-- the city is once again an important laboratory for literature. The Frankfurt Book Fair is commercially more important. Berlin has more publishing houses, but for the sheer exuberance around books and reading, nothing beats the Leipzig Book Fair.

The fair lasted four days (March 18 to 21) and drew 150,000 visitors, 30% younger than twenty. There were 2,100 exhibitors from 39 countries. Events took place from 8:00 AM to well after midnight.Ulrich Blumenbach won the translation prize for David Foster Wallace’s “Infinitive Jest,” Ulrich Raulff won the prize for Non-Fiction/Essay for his book “Kreis ohne Meister,” a biography of the poet Stefan Georges. Georg Klein won the fiction prize for “Roman unserer Kindheit.” The Hungarian author György Dalos won the Prize for European Understanding for his books “Der Vorhang geht auf” (The Curtain Lifts) about the end of dictatorships in Eastern Europe.

The Leipzig Book Fair is pivotal for small independent publishers, especially those from Eastern Europe. Many Eastern European publishers can only afford to attend one international fair and most choose Leipzig. I enjoyed the exposure to literature from Bosnia-Herzegowina, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. Many of the writers have not been published in the West. The translations were often financed by German foundations.

My first impression of the fair was visual and auditory overkill. Publishers staged a dramatic struggle for readers. They presented titles with the most commercial potential. VIPs were surrounded by autograph hunters. There were countless readings, discussion groups, book signing, mini-concerts by music stars, and garish manga-graphics. Visitors walked around with gigantic shopping bags to collect free gifts, buttons, stickers, pens, brochures, book samples, and audio books.

But then I discovered another Leipzig Bok Fair: the fair for writers and readers. With more than 1500 writers and 2000 readings and events, the fair is the largest reading festival in the world. Readings took place at 350 venues, in hair salons, cinemas, the cemetery, the opera, and the aquarium. My personal highlights were Balkan Night (music and readings) and the event at the Polish Institute where a collective of translators (Germany is worldwide the most important country for translators) spoke about translating the Ukrainian author Otar Dovzhenko, and the award ceremony of the Kurt-Wolff Foundation. Leif Greinus and Sebastian Wolter, two young publishers who started Voland & Quist Verlag in Dresden won the prize for most promising publishers. They specialize in authors from the spoken word scene. Klaus Wagenbach won the main prize for lifetime achievement. The event took place at the Connewitzer Velagsbuchhandlung, an independent bookstore and publisher. The upper floor of the bookstore was bursting at the seams. Voland & Quist introduced one of their authors, the talented poet Nora Grominger. I had seen her at City College New York a few months ago when the Creative Writing department invited her to present her work.

Wagenbach prides himself that he publishes books readers should read, not just books readers want to read. He spoke about his career and read from his forthcoming memoir. He started his publishing house after he’d been fired from Fischer Verlag and moved his business to Berlin in ‘64 when, because of the erection of the Berlin Wall, everyone else was leaving Berlin. He wanted to create an East-West Berlin press for he believes that Germans have a common history and language and that literature could be our bridge. He published the East German dissident Wolf Biermann—the manuscript was smuggled into West Berlin in installments. The GDR government retaliated by blocking all licensing of East German writers for him.

He is known as a courageous, courage-inspiring exemplary publisher who introduced Germans to the work of Alberto Moravia, Boris Vian, Natalia Ginzburg and Alan Bennett.

I listened enraptured to him and Nora Grominger sitting on a sofa made of books. After the event, I met Mama Hinke, the mother of Peter Hinke and owner of the bookstore. She had prepared a scrumptious buffet and had made all the Schnittchen herself. This too is love for literature in Leipzig, I said to myself, pleased that I had made the journey.

Homecoming

2010-02-25T12:21:00.000-08:00

I had a pleasant return to Berlin. The Berlinale celebrated its 60th birthday. I had collaborated on the script and was one of the main protagonists of “New York Memories” shown in the Berlinale’s Panorama section. Despite the rigorous selection, the film was one of 50 selected from a pool of 3,000. Next to Cannes, the Berlinale is the most important European film festival. This year 300,000 tickets were sold.
“New York Memories” is the latest documentary by Rosa von Praunheim. Twenty years after filming “Überleben in New York (Survival in New York)” Rosa returns to determine what happened to New York and his former protagonists. “Survival,” a documentary about three German women in New York was his commercially most successful film. Rosa and the producers hoped to repeat this success.
Of the three protagonists, Uli no longer lives in New York; she has moved to California. Claudia and Anna are doing well. Eva, the lead from his film “Transgender Menace,” has survived. New material is interwoven with clips from his old films depicting the wild 70s sex parties, gay pride demonstrations and eccentric superstars like Andy Warhol. Rosa recalls the tragic 80s, the bitter fight against Aids, and the transsexual uprising in the 90s. Giuliani has cleaned up the city. Rosa muses that the city has become richer and duller. He questions what happened and to all the artists and homeless people.
I remember my first Berlinale in1975, the stars, the exhilaration of discovering new films and filmmakers. We stood in line for tickets in the freezing cold; the films sold out fast. We partied all night. The Berlinale provided a welcome respite from the long dreary Berlin winter. Woody Allen won a prize for outstanding artistic contribution for “Love and Death.” This time I did not have to stand in the cold; I did not have to pay for my ticket. I got treated to drinks and Häppchen at the ARD parties (the alliance of German Public TV) and watched Eva Mattes, an actress I greatly admire, devour Eisbein next to me at lunch. She liked the film. “I could have continued to watch these people’s lives for another couple of hours,” she said. I found my name and picture in the program, sat anxiously in the cinema at the opening and felt embarrassed watching myself on the enormous screen. The audience responded with enthusiastic applause.
This was my first experience writing for the screen and I learned a lot. I did research, interviewed the protagonists, found interesting characters and locations. I tried to write visually; to keep a good pace and to interweave the individual stories in a way that would create a unified whole.
The final film is very different from the original script. Thirty-five hours of footage were edited down to 84 minutes. Lorenz Haarmann, the cameraman, told me that for documentaries, on average, 20 hours are shot for each hour of film. In terms of writing a novel, that means writing 200 pages to end up with 10.
Rosa discovered new protagonists —the multitalented, quirky and vivacious Pohl sisters— and cut out others. The film was funded by two public television stations, a situation many US filmmakers can only dream off. The producers had a huge impact. Certain scenes and characters were considered lackluster. They had to go. This might be similar to an editor telling an author to cut or rearrange chapters, to develop the characters more.
The final showing at the Colisseum on Schönhauser Allee was the best. Rosa asked us all on stage after the screening. The audience was fired up. They had a lot of comments and questions. Many remembered “Survival” and were fascinated by all the twists and turns of our lives. We were running half an hour over time. The people outside were getting impatient. I took the microphone. “We’ll do a sequel in twenty years,” I said. Rosa who is going to be in his 80s 20 years from now turned to me and said: “You’ll direct it.”
He might be right. Having been accepted to the Maysles Institute’s Filmmakers Collaborative, I will begin documentary film training in September.

Collaborative work, accolades, and drinks at the Hotel Savoy are pleasant. Now I’m back to working ALONE at my desk, away from the hustle and bustle of New York and Berlin. Here in Görlitz, I started work started on a novel. It’s my first day and so far I have written 1,500 words. By the end of April, I will be back in Harlem, hopefully with the first hundred pages in my suitcase. I pray I won’t have to throw out 90 of them.

Bipolar Predicament

2010-02-14T07:49:00.000-08:00

In Germany for two weeks now, I dream in English at night and find myself walking the sunlit streets of New York, in a crowd of people of all races. In New York, the Germany of my youth often invades my dreams. It might be the melancholy landscape of the lower Rhine with its gray and rainy skies or Berlin’s Prussian architecture, its Häuser und Hinterhäuser, backhouses and backyards.
I’m never just in one place; I‘m constantly comparing. New Yorkers are nice to strangers. They engage them in conversation; they are polite; they show genuine interest. Germans rarely speak to strangers. It appears acceptable to be rude, or to sit next to one another on the bus or in a cafe without exchanging a word or a smile. I am always living in two places simultaneously, with two languages in my brain. My way of looking at the world gets me into trouble on both sides of the Atlantic.
When Germans attack the US for its position on Israel, the National Rifle Association, its use of military power and its lack of ecological awareness, I become a staunch supporter of the US and the Americans. I point out all that’s right and fair in the US: a leader in civil rights, more opportunities for immigrants and more diversity in the workplace and the academic world. In Germany, I long for the optimism, the straightforward friendliness of the American people.
When in New York, just as my peers in Germany, I complain about American ignorance and narrow-mindedness, the pro-life activists and the religious fanatics. I long for more Tiefgang, (depth), friends I can argue with without the risk of offending them or losing a friendship. I deplore gas guzzling SUV’s, especially the pompous Hummer. I complain that the US is technologically behind Europe. Why is it that when we’re too hot in winter, we open the window or turn on the AC? Why don't we have individual thermostats in our apartments like most of the developed world? Why do we Americans waste our precious resources?
I had hoped that this rift, which I so often perceive as insurmountable, would heal over time. But it has never left me. Maybe I need to embrace it like a permanent companion, without whom life would not be worth living. When I was younger, I enjoyed nothing more than this “in-between state.” At ten, in a bus filled with children from the Ruhr Valley traveling to a Bavarian summer camp to escape the pollution at home, all my troubles disappeared. I was happy as long as I was on the move; no longer at home and not yet at the final destination.
Recently I came across the work of André Aciman a writer and professor of literature at the City University of New York. Aciman was born in Egypt. His family were Jews of Turkish and Italian origin who settled in Alexandria in 1905. Aciman experienced double migration. He moved with his family to Italy at the age of fifteen and then to New York at nineteen. I found comfort in his book “False Papers, Essays on Exile and Memory” (2000). In his essay Pensione Eolo, he writes:
“The true site of nostalgia is therefore not a land, or two lands, but the loop and interminable traffic between these two lands. It is the traffic between places, and not the places themselves, that eventually become the home, the spiritual home, the capital.”
On the train to Berlin, I pass through my former home state. Nordrhein-Westphalia has turned into a snowy winter wonderland. I have left my mother and my hometown but have not yet arrived. Zwischen den Stühlen sitzen, having fallen off both stools and experiencing the world from the gap, being in the middle might just be my place of belonging. My capital.

Embracing Change

2010-01-19T16:53:00.000-08:00

“New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities,” E.B. White wrote in 1949.
New York is the greatest city I've ever lived in. It is constantly changing, evolving. Neighborhoods are transformed at a fascinating speed, ethnic and racial groups replace one another, and places of worship house several different congregations in their lifetime.
In the past thirty years that I've lived here, the city has changed at an unbelievable pace. Thousands of new immigrants from all over the world have arrived and foreign-born New Yorkers now make up 36% of the population—an all-time high. New York benefits from these newcomers, their courage, energy, cultures, and cuisine.
The city has both gained and lost. Many of my favorite places are gone: the small off-Broadway theaters and art cinemas, the sing-along bars, Zito’s Bakery, Café Europa, and the Village Gate. Times Square has been cleaned up and Broadway Disneyfied. Our parks and waterfront have never looked better and the city has never been safer.
I have become the victim of ever-changing New York twice. In 1988, I had to leave TriBeCa when I didn't have the money to buy the loft I was living in. I lived in SoHo for the following five years and had to leave when the landlord sold the building. Losing my residences was traumatic. Looking back, I don't feel bitter. Had I not been forced to move, I would have never experienced living in the West Village or Harlem. I might not have moved on with my life.
Some of my friends in Berlin, as well as some New Yorkers, still live in the same apartments they first rented as college students. They will never move because their rents are so low. When I return to Berlin and visit my old stomping grounds (I lived there from 1975 to 1980), many of the same restaurants and clubs I knew then still exist. At the Slumberland, a late-night dive on Winterfeldplatz, I found a former roommate (a member of my Wohngemeinschaft) leaning against the bar as had been his habit thirty-five years ago.
Living in one room with my partner for eight years stifled my creativity. In the West Village, we paid less than $1300 a month rent, which many of our friends considered a steal. I did not feel so lucky. I was tired of not having my own desk, tired of not having any privacy, and most of all, I was tired of living like a college student. Growing up, growing older, is about change. Forced to move, we move out of our comfort zone. Moving to Harlem has been a blessing. Once I had my own desk, my love for writing returned. I discovered City College across from Saint Nicholas Park and ended up studying creative writing there. A few years later I left my work as a school social worker to become a full-time writer.
Harlem has changed a lot since I moved there in February 1999. In the 70s, Harlem became a blighted neighborhood devastated by drugs, crime and arson, “a penal colony of poverty, drained of population, services, and hope” (Adam Sternbergh, New York Magazine 12/11/09). Thirty percent of the population, most of the middle class, had left. The new Harlemites, like me, often moved into abandoned or rehabilitated buildings. We did not displace the existing population. With the influx of new middle-class residents and their money, drugstores, supermarkets and a variety of new businesses arrived in Harlem. Harlem residents benefit from this development. They lost too. African-Americans are no longer the majority in Greater Harlem, but Harlem is on its way to become a truly integrated neighborhood.
Many of my peers bemoan the loss of the “Old New York”; they miss the gritty streets, the wild sex clubs, the hustlers on the Christopher Street Piers, and raunchy Times Square. They wish themselves back to the seventies, where they believe everything was better. They complain that New York has become too expensive, that lawyers and stockbrokers have replaced poets and filmmakers.
But young people from small towns from across the US and from the world over still flock to New York. Unable to afford the East Village and Williamsburg, they move to Bedford-Stuyvesant or the South Bronx. They share a flat with several roommates; they struggle to make ends meet, but they would not be anywhere else for the world. No one said it as eloquently as E.B. White (Here is New York). His words still ring true today.
“And whether it is… a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer…”

European Morosity

2010-01-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

“Americans are so friendly. They talk to you, they smile at you,” Gaby said. It was her third day in New York. Like me she grew up in Moers, a small town on the lower Rhine. Geneva, Switzerland, is her adopted home. “Swiss people, like the Germans are not friendly to strangers. They always seem in a foul mood,” she added.
I’ve also noticed this difference between Europeans and Americans and still remember my astonishment upon my arrival in New York. White Americans physically resembled the Germans, but seemed a different species altogether. They did not walk with slumped shoulders; they did not drag their feet. They walked with a bounce in their step and held their heads high. They smiled at you. They were optimistic. I did not understand why they weren’t affected by history. Where was their Vergangenheitsbewältigung? How did they cope with the past? Why weren’t they burdened by guilt for what they had done to the Native Americans and the Blacks? Why weren’t they mourning their losses in the Vietnam War? Half of the world hated them, but they didn’t care. Unlike the Germans, they didn’t believe in guilt-ridden soul-searching.
Recently Dominique Moïsi’s book The Geopolitics of Emotion deepened my understanding of the differences between Americans and Europeans. Moïsi is the founder of the French Institute of International Affairs and a visiting professor at Harvard University. In his book, he examines the emotions that drive cultural differences and cause the divisions in the post-9/11 world. He shows how fear, humiliation, and hope are reshaping the world. For him both the U. S. and Europe are ruled by fears of the “other.” Both continents fear the loss of their national identity.
In contrast Muslims and Arabs are ruled by humiliation. They feel excluded from the economic benefits of globalization. Historical grievances and conflicts at home extend to the countries they emigrate to. This feeling of humiliation is evolving into a culture of hatred. In another part of the world China and India --with their economic might and focus on a prosperous future-- have created a culture of hope. Moïsi believes that “Chindia” will in the future come to dominate the world and that the U.S.A., with its huge debt and crumbling infrastructure, will no longer be a major player. According to Moïsi, Europe--stuck in the past and resembling a museum--won’t be able to move forward.
He sees more collective hope in the United States than in Europe and cites the election of Obama as an example. He observes that West Europeans experience more collective fear despite little real suffering. What my visitor from Geneva described as the foul mood of her fellow citizens, Moïsi calls the morosity of the continent.
His ideas are a thought-provoking and resonate with many of my own experiences. He is considered a leading authority on international affairs and I highly recommend his book:
Dominique Moïsi: The Geopolitics of Emotion, Doubleday
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-52376-9 (0-385-52376-9)

Generational Divide

2009-12-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

New Yorkers are divided by class, race, and ethnicity. Teaching English Composition to a multiethnic and multiracial group of students, most of them foreign-born, I was struck by the sharp generational divide.
In class we examined ads for Amnesty International. One showed two African refugee girls, possibly child soldiers, holding machine guns. They were looking straight into the camera with solemn eyes. Below the photograph there was blue sky and the words “imagine” and “nothing to kill or die for.” I worried that my students might not know Amnesty International, John Lennon’s famous song or John Lennon. I wanted to play the song for them, but—technologically stuck in the last century— I owned the record, not the CD. I couldn’t figure out how to download the song to my computer or how to create an MP 3 file.
My students, 17 to 20 years old, knew nothing of Amnesty International and its mission, but they were touched by the photo and in favor of protecting the dignity and rights of all people. None of them had heard the John Lennon song before; three or four knew who John Lennon was. “That Beatle with the funny glasses,” one student said. “He lived near Central Park and was murdered by a deranged fan,” another said.
We discussed the role that images play in our lives. My students — mostly computer science and engineering majors — didn't mind being visually bombarded all the time. They didn’t think it was wrong that more Americans get their news from TV than from newspapers. They thought it was awesome that they could take a photo with their iPhone and instantly send it to their cousins in Ghana, the Philippines, or Korea. One boy made fun of his mother who still writes real letters to her sister in Colombia.
“Maybe your mother’s sister does not own a computer,” I said.
“My mother is forty-five,” José said. “Too old to figure out e-mail.”
I tried to defend his mother; I tried to make a case for handwriting. “A handwritten letter is so much more personal,” I said.
My students didn’t think so.
“Do you want to get a love letter or condolence letter by e-mail?” I asked. “Sure,” they said. “That’s the best way of sending anything.”
Declining book sales and folding newspapers worry me. “Will computer screens replace books as our dominant way of reading?” I asked.
“No one will read books any longer,” Pram said. “We’ll all have a Kindle or one of those devices.”
“It's better for the environment. Think of how many trees we save,” Nicola said.
“Books will become extinct like dinosaurs in no time,” Mamandou added.
I felt as if a soccer ball had hit my stomach. “How soon?” I asked.
“Ten years,” someone in the back of the room shouted.
“No way, I’ll give it six,” Mamandou said.
The class nodded in agreement. Ten years was too long of a time. It was so much more convenient to read on a computer screen. They didn't need libraries. They didn’t need books. They had the Internet! I was shocked and saddened. I love books. I love to touch them, smell them, turn their pages, and feel their weight in my hands. Opening a book for the first time is as exciting as falling for a new lover.
I left class and walked down the stairs of Shepard Hall with slumped shoulders. They are the future, I thought. Did that make me, at 55, a proud member of the international family of book lovers, an endangered species? I tried to picture the literary events and readings I attended recently. My students were wrong. People still loved literature! I thought about my favorite place in Manhattan, the Center for Fiction (formally the Mercantile Library) that holds the largest fiction collection in the entire United States. Every time I walk into the Midtown mansion, I am greeted by beautiful old wooden file cabinets. I love to pull out the handwritten index cards and hunt for a book. The place smells like a library.
I had met younger people, readers and writers there, didn't I?
I concentrated hard to re-create the last reading in my mind’s eye. A famous writer and not too many people in the audience. Half the chairs were empty. The average visitor, like me, was middle-aged and female.
What if my students are right?

The Ordeal of Being German

2009-11-14T06:28:00.000-08:00

For most of my life being German felt like an ordeal, a full-time job. We dealt with our parents’ and grandparents’ guilt, the heavy load we had inherited. On American TV, my compatriots were Nazis, deranged psychiatrist, or Bavarians in Lederhosen. They were either barking orders or slapping their legs doing the Schuhplatter dance. That certainly didn't help me to feel any better about being German.
The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 was a life-changing event for me and for Germans no matter where they lived. The image of Nazi Germans was suddenly replaced by joyous Germans infecting the world with their good will and spirit. For the first time, I felt great being German and proud to belong to my nation. Overcome, I sat glued to the television with tears of joy streaming down my face. The next day everyone at work hugged me and congratulated me as if I had been responsible for bringing down the wall. Strangers invited me for a drink to celebrate the end of the Cold War. The parents of a Korean child in the school where I worked as a counselor brought me a flower. “We are happy and sad,” the father said. “We hope we are next,” his wife added.
After enthusiasm and celebration reality set in. Two million East Germans left their homes to seek their fortune elsewhere. In many parts of the former GDR, unemployment is in the double digits. East Germans earn 20% less than West Germans. The catch-up might take another twenty years. Germans are no longer surrounded by a cement wall but twenty years later a mental wall still exists. Many West Germans complain that their lives were better before reunification. Some East Germans feel nostalgic about their life in the GDR. The 1.3 trillion euro investment in the former East Germany—more than the entire Marshall plan for former West Germany—has not yielded the desired results.
With the exception of hosting the 2006 World Soccer Cup, Germans have not displayed joy and enthusiasm in large numbers. But now, at the twenty year anniversary of the fall of the wall, we allow ourselves to feel good once again. Here in New York, many events —readings, films and a dance performance —celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Columbia University hosted a conference “Freedom without Walls.” “Words without Borders” organized a reading and panel discussion at Idlewood Bookstore on November 10th to launch their new anthology The Wall in My Head. The book includes writers who witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain and those who grew up in its wake. [Milan Kundera, Peter Schneider, Ryszard Kapuściński, Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin, Péter Esterházy, Andrzej Stasiuk, Muharem Bazdulj, Maxim Trudolubov, Dorota Masłowska, Uwe Tellkamp, Dan Sociu, David Zábranský, Christhard Läpple.]
At Idlewood, Polish writer Dorota Maslowska, German writer Kathrin Aehnlich and Romanian writer Dan Sociu read excerpts and spoke about how they witnessed the events at age six, twelve, and thirty-two. Eliot Borenstein, Chair of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, moderated.
Dan Sociu, a younger poet of the so-called “2000 Generation,” a movement Romanian literary critic called “Miserabilism”, brought down the house with his deadpan humor. Dorota Maslowska (Snow White and Russian Red) spoke about the difference of her generation to older, more established writers. “They want to write pretty literature; we want to rape literature,” she said. Kathrin Aehnlich read a hilarious segment from her latest book Everyone Dies, Even the Paddlefish in which teacher Aunt Edeltraud rules the children in an East German kindergarten with the iron fist of a prison warden.
Kathrin Aehnlich, a Leipzig native, was the only one old enough to not only have witnessed the fall of the wall but also to have actively participated in the Monday night demonstration that she believes prepared the fall of the wall.
The room was jam-packed. The audience asked a lot of questions. Most people stayed and engaged in lively conversation after the event. They polished off the hors d’oeuvres and drank the last drop of wine. The mood was festive. When the bookstore closed many were not ready to go home. I joined a group of German and American journalists and writers, a Dutch restaurant owner and a Canadian real estate agent at the Old Town Bar. There we continued our discussion over greasy bar food and Paulaner Beer.
My advice: have a beer, some mozzarella sticks, or if you prefer a piece of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte. Indulge in being German. Bask in the fact that the fall of the wall was one of the few positive developments in recent world history. Be shameless. Who knows when we'll find such a good reason to party again?

An Evening with Yuri Andrukhovych

2009-10-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

I had other plans for the evening, but when I heard that Yuri Andrukhovych was in town I changed my mind immediately. I had read his literary essays “Disorientation and Locality” and “My Europe” (co-published with the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk) in the German translation and often found myself laughing out loud while reading. I had read his novel, Twelve Rings, which many consider his best work in the German translation. A few years ago Barbara Epler, editor-in-chief of New Directions, asked me to read the book, write a report and make a recommendation if his work might do well in the American market. Despite my enthusiasm and praise, New Directions decided against translation and publication. Yuri Andrukhovych’s work has been published in Poland, Germany, Canada, the United States, Hungary, Finland, Russia, Serbia, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Bulgaria. Unfortunately, he remains largely unknown to the American reader.
Cosponsored by the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University and the Kennan Institute this event was not advertised anywhere. Nevertheless the room on the top floor of the International Studies building with the spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline was packed mostly with native Ukrainian speakers.
Yuri Andrukhovych had forgotten his reading glasses. So he read little and told stories instead, thereby revealing his unique sense of humor and remarkable talent as a raconteur. He spoke about the origins of his poem “Werwolf Sutra.” In 1986 he had a grant to stay in an East German artist residency. In the surrounding forests of Wiepersdorf he found the ruins of a former Soviet army town with its barracks, firing ranges, and outhouses covered with graffiti.
He recounted the background story of his novels Recreations (CIUS Press, 1998), Perverzion (Northwestern University Press, 2005) and The Moscoviad (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2008) and read selected excerpts.
He touched on the problems of translation. “Werwolf Sutra,” for example, had not been translated into English from the Ukrainian original but from the Polish translation. Of the four prestigious international literary awards he won; three were awarded to him in Germany, the other in Poland. Asked why he was so well received in Germany, Yuri Andrukhovych pointed out that Germany stood out in Europe for its knowledge about Ukrainian literature. Highly professional translators are available to translate from Ukrainian into the German language. He noted that Germany historically had always looked East and to the Russians, idealizing a quality they thought they lacked. I thought about my love for Slavic literature and Slavic people (I married a Ukrainian!), my travels to Eastern Europe (my favorite destination) and the first friend I made in New York, Polina from Moscow. When she introduced me to her Russian friends I found them so much more passionate than the Germans. When the Russians were sad, they were desperate; when they were happy, they were ecstatic. In Germany wearing your heart on your sleeve was frowned upon.
At 9:00 PM the organizers of the event urged the audience to leave, but the majority remained. Most mingled, shared their reactions to the reading and lined up to have books signed, to take photos, and to question Yuri Andrukhovych. All the available books were sold immediately.
“It is more important to live than to write,” Andrukhovych stated at one point during the evening and the crowd seemed to take his word for it. It was a great event featuring an inspiring writer. It was a privilege to have met the author of this distinctive literature.
Before coming to New York Yuri Andrukhovych appeared at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. A video of that forum can be accessed at
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1424&fuseaction=topics.event_summary&event_id=550298
He is scheduled to go to Cleveland next. If you get a chance to hear and see him in person, by all means take it.

The European Book Club

2009-10-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

I am a voracious reader. I read everywhere: on the couch, in the bath tub, in bed, on park benches, airplanes, busses, and in the subway. Reading, I shut out the world and immerse myself in the world the author has created for me. Reading is my solitary pleasure. The bond is between the writer and me. I have never allowed anyone in to share my pleasure. It felt as if I’d be letting the world in to watch me making love.
For that reason, I have never participated in a book club. The last time I discussed literature in a large group was more than 30 years ago in high school, more specifically my German Gymnasium. Back then, only one interpretation of a work of fiction was allowed, that of the teacher’s. I sat in class knowing that the teacher was wrong, that there was more than one way of looking at the text, that all interpretations had value. Writers are open-minded; they present the lives and motivations of even the most despicable characters and often do so without judgment. So it was with great trepidation that I attended my first book club meeting.
Fifty percent of all the books in translation published worldwide are translated from English, but only six percent are translated into English. This amounts to 400 foreign fiction books (of which approximately seven are German) per year translated into American English. The European Book Club was launched one year ago by the librarians of the Austrian, Czech, French, German, Italian, and Spanish Cultural Institutes in New York City to expose more Americans to the wonderful literature of their homelands. From the beginning, it was a huge success. The Polish, Romanian, and Norwegian libraries have subsequently joined.
I was prepared. Reading Katherina Hacker’s The Have-Nots had not been a pleasurable solitary experience. In fact, I had to force myself to get through the story of well-to-do thirty-somethings, who like the rest of Germany, seemed to suffer from low-level chronic depression. I had a hard time following the multitude of characters and the simultaneous stories lines. I didn't care for the 9/11 reference, the wealthy protagonists, their pain, angst, and ambiguity. I wondered why Hacker had won the 2006 German Book Prize.
At the Goethe Institute’s new downtown location, twelve women and one man sat in a circle. Unsure how to act, I sat back to observe. Many participants found the novel difficult to read. Some had not finished the book. The group explored the motivation of the characters. The protagonists were one-dimensional and lacking in empathy. Had that been the writer's intention? We discussed the different prose style of American and German writers: great storytelling, entertaining literature as opposed to literature as Bildungsauftrag that made the reader work hard.
In no time I felt totally at ease and plunged into the discussion. We jumped around quite a bit, touched on the role of Holocaust in post World War II German consciousness, German guilt, and Herta Müller winning The Nobel Prize. Should we read her next? We discussed modernism in literature, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce. Maybe Katherina Hacker tried to do something similar? We all agreed that she didn't have the skill of those writers. We shared personal experiences about 9/11, living in Berlin, Poland, in Ceausescu's Romania, and as a Jewish American in 70s Germany.
I was impressed how polite and inclusive the group was. No one cut each other off. We pointed to the weak portions of the book with kindness. I sat there thinking what if I was to discuss this book with my friends in Germany? Would we have trashed the book, used much stronger language? Would we have been so kind?
After the official end of the book club, most stayed and continued the conversation over wine and pâté crackers. A diverse group of people had been brought together by their love for European literature. I was glad I had been part of it. This had been an extremely enjoyable evening. “When is the next meeting?” I asked before walking out the door. “Count me in.”

The Offensive Headscarf

2009-09-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

I am walking down a tree lined Berlin street on a hot August day with my friend Hannelore. A couple is coming toward us. The man is dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, his wife is wearing a headscarf and a black long sleeve dress over her pants. “Don’t you just hate this,” Hannelore says.
“Hate what?” I answer.
“This backwardness, this oppression of women.”
While I ponder her comment, she launches an all out attack against Muslim male chauvinists. “These men, they keep their women locked up at home. They won’t let them leave the house alone. They don’t allow them to work outside the home.”
“Are you sure all Muslim men are that way?” I ask
She doesn’t hear me; she’s worked herself into a rage. I learn that she’s for the ban of headscarves for teachers and all public employees, that she is convinced that women are second class citizens in Muslim society, and that men have no right to impose their “misogynist” patriarchal values on women. “Even Turkey, a secular Islamic nation, bans the headscarf,” she fumes.
I can’t get a word in. “Why is this such an issue for her?” I think. “Why are so many progressive left wing Germans like Hannelore so intolerant?” In the New York subways, I’m exposed to commuters of different religions every day, some wearing chains bearing a crucifix and others the Star of David. Observant Jewish men wear yarmulkes while Orthodox Jewish women don wigs. I see Muslim women in headscarves and Sikhs in their turbans. If Berliners experienced this diversity every day, would Hannelore be more open-minded?
I think of a former colleague, a mathematician from Yemen, who dressed modestly and always covered her head. She didn’t appear oppressed to me. I think of the many Muslim students in my classes at City College. I think of Mawara who came to class in a Persian Gulf niqab, with only a slit for the eyes; none of her classmates found it strange or objectionable. I think of Ziram and her latest essay assignment. She wrote about her parents, liberal Egyptian Muslims, who allowed her all the freedom of an American teenager. Ziram danced, she flirted and dated. She came to her high school prom in a sexy slinky gown. Then she had a religious awakening. She prayed more, dressed modestly, and began wearing a headscarf. Her parents failed to understand. “I prefer to dress like this now,” she wrote. “It protects me from guys and their lewd stares.”
“Isn’t it possible that some women choose to wear headscarves, that they decide for themselves how they want to present themselves in public?” I ask.
“No way,” Hannelore replies.
Another fifteen minutes of heated debate follow. Hannelore paints a gruesome picture of honor killings that have taken place in Germany. She reminds me of the Taliban’s moral police. They don’t allow little girls to attend school. “Not every Muslim forces his wife to stay home or to wear a burqa when she has to leave the house,” I say. “Most want their daughters to become educated.”
She doesn’t hear me. I can’t help feeling that Hannelore’s stance reflects an anti-Islamic sentiment. Progressive Germans would never think of forbidding a Sikh to wear a turban or a Jew a yarmulke. Maybe Hannelore’s attack on the backwardness of Islam is a sign of her own prejudice and intolerance. I recall an interview with Hayrünissa Gül, the wife of Turkey’s president, reported in the news. A journalist questioned her about her fight for the right of Turkish female students to wear headscarves at universities if they so choose. “Isn’t that going backwards?” he had asked, to which she replied:
“The headscarf covers my head, not my brain.”
Copyright © 2009 by Anna Steegmann

Politically Correct Language?

2009-09-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

Having returned from a two months stay in Europe, I recall warring letters to editors and heated debates in the Austrian press. An advertisement campaign by an ice cream company caused a ruckus. “I will mohr! “ (I want moor) the posters said referring to the desert “Mohr im Hemd" (moor in a shirt). Similar to the English Christmas pudding, this mix of chocolate, sugar, egg yolks, almonds, and red wine is cooked in hot water, and then covered with hot chocolate sauce. Cream (the shirt) is squeezed through a pastry bag around the Guglhupf-shaped desert (the moor). How could such a delicious innocent desert cause such a controversy?
The name for this desert, beloved by generations of Austrians, insults members of the Austrian black community. They perceive Mohr as a colonial racist term alluding to African nudity. Blacks in Austria have been fighting for more than a decade to eliminate discriminatory names of foods, streets, and other things. They have succeeded with the Negerbrot(Negro bread), a chocolate with peanuts. Very few Viennese pastry shops still sell it under its original name. They want the street names for Kleine und Grosse Mohrenstrasse (Little and Big Moor Streets) changed. One reader commented in his letter to Der Standard; why not rename the streets Cassius Clay and Barack Obama Street? Another reader suggested the Zigeunerschnitzel be renamed Sinti-und Romaschnitzel.
In Germany the pastry Negerkuss (Negro kiss) was replaced by Schokokuss ten years ago. The classic children’s book Zehn kleine Negerlein (Ten Little Negroes) now comes in a second, politically correct version Zehn kleine Kinderlein (Ten Little Children) although it does not sell as well as the original.
This discussion about inoffensive language took place in the US much earlier. Negroes are now African-Americans, while mongoloid children are children with Downs Syndrome. While this may satisfy some groups, I doubt that it eliminates real discrimination. Do we need to change our existing terminology?
In James Baldwin’s novels, African-Americans are called Negroes or colored people because that was the common name at the time. Shakespeare gave us “The Moor in Venice” and no one takes offence. What do we gain when we rename Negerbier black beer? Often language, literary style suffers. The original terms in the language hold more meaning. Rape is stronger than sexual assault. Negerbier makes a certain time and place come alive. Modern politically correct language is often lifeless and cumbersome. See the German StudentInnen to include females in the plural version of students. In the old usage, ninety-nine female students (Studentinnen) and one male student would have become Studenten (students); in the new, StudentInnen with the capital I in the middle, ninety-nine male students and one female all become female students.
Have we gained anything or is it a mere quibble? Why can’t a beloved desert keep its name? Maybe we should inject a little more humor into the debate and not take ourselves so seriously. The German band Tote Hosen is on to something when they said: Auch lesbische schwarze Behinderte koennen aetzzend sein. “Even disabled black Lesbians can be a pain.”

Continental Divide

2009-07-29T00:39:00.000-07:00

For the third time, I have exchanged the air-conditioned, often windowless classrooms of City College for those of the Palazzo Zenobio in Venice. This somewhat derelict but enchanting building dating back to the 16th Century was once an Armenian
college. My students in New York are 18 to 25 year old children of immigrants. They live in the Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn and Queens. My students in Venice, aged 13 to 75, were mostly natives of their countries and came from Melbourne, Oxford, Hong Kong, Vienna, Cologne and Zurich. They were accomplished professionals, teachers, lawyers, historians, economists and journalists. Both groups shared a passion for writing.

In New York, I teach writing in English; the past two years in Venice, I taught in German. An article in the Guardian about the Summer Academy Venice produced a spike in English speaking students and I found myself in the predicament having to teach creative writing in two languages.

I was worried. The Austrians, Swiss and Germans might be able to follow instruction in English, but they ‘d certainly write in their mother tongue. Would their English be good enough to understand the texts of the English speakers? It takes years to grasp the nuances, Zwischentöne, of a foreign language. Would the English speakers—unable to understand and comment on the German texts—be bored while listening to the Germans read?

I do not recommend a bilingual writing class to anyone unless they are fluent in both languages. Miraculously, the class worked. Most participants produced twenty pages of new material and one short text nearly ready for submission. Unable to understand the language, they listened to the musicality and rhythm of the words. English words found their way into German poems. A 75 year old Jewish man, forced to leave his native Holland in his youth, recalled his German. His wife, a native of Chile, who had lived in England for the past 50 years, suddenly began to write in Spanish again. The English speakers recalled the German words that had found their way into the English language: Zeitgeist, Schadenfreude, Wanderlust. Both groups living in Venice, immersed in the Italian language and culture, allowed Italian words to lighten up their stories. A Swiss-Iranian woman who attended kindergarten in the Italian speaking canton, produced a delightful story about her early childhood beautifully punctuated with Italian words.

As improbable as it may seem to teach writing in a multilingual setting, the results were stunning.

BIlingual Writers Inspire Us

2009-06-11T06:08:00.000-07:00

Once in a while a bilingual writer comes along who puts us all to shame. Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett and Joseph Conrad come to mind. They managed to write forcefully in their second language. Following in their footsteps is the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hermon, the child of a Ukrainian father and a Bosnian-Serbian mother. When war erupted in his homeland in 1992 shortly after he came to the US, he found himself stranded here. This 44 year old journalist from Sarajewo, did not speak English. Three years later he published his first story and his first book (The Question of Bruno) in 2000 in English. He wrote for the New Yorker, The Paris Review, published three more books and won the Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant.”
Aleksandar Hermon gave himself five years to learn English, five years to write and publish his first story in English. He worked as a sandwich assembly-line worker, a bike messenger, as a bookstore clerk and as a door to door magazine subscriptions salesman. “He also read voraciously in English, storing words he didn’t know on note cards, and within three years had achieved his goal.” (Larry Rother: Twice-Told Tales, The New York Times, 5.15.09)
I cleaned the apartments of elderly Jewish ladies, sold nuts from a push cart, worked in the theater, as a Go-Go dancer and a school counselor. I too recorded the words that I didn’t understand, couldn’t remember or pronounce, into a notebook—schedule, issue, vicarious— but it took me more than 20 years to publish my first story in English. I did not become a voracious reader of English books like Aleksandar Hermon. Reading with a dictionary in hand was too much work and no pleasure at all. There was peace in my homeland; the wall had come down, and Germany won the Soccer World Cup. I was not in despair—a good writing motivator according to Hermon.
“I was cut off from my previous life, in despair … I had this horrible, pressing need to write because things were happening. I needed to do it the same way I needed to eat, but I just had no language to write in. I couldn’t do it, and so I thought I should enable myself to do it.” (ibid.)
I lacked the confidence to write in English. The belief that, aside from Beckett and Nabokov, no one could write in a second language, held me back. Then I discovered a new generation of writers: Turkish, Russian and Japanese writers who wrote in German, Dominican and Haitian writers who wrote in English. Some playfully integrated their first and second languages. Their example gave me the courage to try the same. Like Hermon and many other bilingual writers I found a new, welcoming home in the English language. Aleksandar Hermon recently discussed writing in a second language with Junot Díaz and had this to say (my translation):
“Everyone can declare the English language his home and no one can be banned from it…..Everyone can bring his experiences with a foreign language into American English without having to fear being expelled from it.” (Thomas David: Amerika auf dem Weg zur postnationalen Literatur?, Neue Züricher Zeitung, June 8, 2009.)
I am grateful to Aleksandar Hermon for being such a shining example and inspiration for bilingual writers everywhere.

Appalling Multiculturalism?

2009-05-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

I was excited to attend "Macondo: Imaginary and Real" during the recent Pen World Voices Festival. Writers from Holland, Peru, Hungary, and Spain spoke about home and migration. They discussed Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional homeland Macondo and the Austrian refugee camp Macondo. Since 1956 it has provided a home to displaced people from around the globe.

Josep-Maria Terricabras, a Catalan writer and philosophy professor, had spent time at the University of Münster, Germany as had I, but this is where our similarities ended. He found many aspects of the multicultural society, the idea of multiple identities, appalling. He bemoaned the parallel societies of immigrants that have emerged in many European countries.

I wanted him to experience City College where I teach writing. The "Harvard of the Working Class" is a university for the children of the working poor and the children of immigrants. Most of my students were born in a foreign country or their parents were. There are more than one hundred languages spoken on campus. Last semester my students came from Latin America, the Caribbean, Siberia, Tajikistan, Kosovo, Egypt, China, Korea, Poland, Yemen, Nigeria, Senegal, and Mali. After the initial struggle of learning a new language and adapting to a new culture, most regain their balance and come to embrace the city in their own way. This is evident when they write about their New York experiences. They might live in what Europeans call a parallel society--a predominantly Russian or Mexican neighborhood--because their parents chose to be close to their country men and women, near their places of worship, and stores that sell familiar foods. Most likely they hoped to find out about job opportunities, the American school system and customs from people who could understand their language.

I cannot find any fault in this. I, certainly, do not find it appalling. My students are not going to riot and set cars ablaze as did some of the Muslim youth in the suburbs of Paris. They are too busy working, often at full-time jobs, and studying at the same time.

As long as there is upward mobility in our society, a real possibility to improve one's lot, these immigrants will not stay outsiders. We can love the land of our birth and can love our new homeland at the same time. We can juggle two languages, two ways of being in the world, two different traditions and approaches to life, as long as the dominant society allows us in.

For thousand years, most European countries have built walls to keep the Roma people out. The stranger was perceived as a threat. What if we allow these strangers to augment our experiences in the world by teaching us about their culture? Josep-Maria Terricabras delights in a homogenous society with people that speak his language and understand the history of his people. This appeals to me also. I enjoy my visits to Germany; I take pleasure in hearing the German language all around me. However, I find it sad that hardly any of my friends and relatives have made friends with the many foreigners, children of "Gastarbeiter," and recent transplants from war-torn countries who reside in Germany. While they enjoy mingling with the natives in the Dominican Republic or the Canary Islands on vacation, at home they keep their front doors locked. They envy me for my New York circle of friends. “Just like the United Nations,” they say with longing. Then they return home to shut out that sort of diversity.

This is sad, for nothing is worse than suffocating from an insular view of the world.

Looking at 55

2009-05-03T13:39:00.000-07:00

In German double and triple digits are called a Schnapszahl (schnapps number). A Schnapszahl is a lucky number. Barack Obama is the 44th U.S. president. Turning 55 I’m hoping for a lucky year.
Yesterday I found four pennies and two dimes. I interpreted for a German writer at the Pen World Voices festival—something I had never done before. Tomorrow the filming of New York Memories starts. I wrote the script; Rosa von Praunheim will direct. After a hiatus of more than twenty years I will be acting again.
This morning as I sliced bread I almost cut off the top of my left ring finger. For two hours it bled profusely. I’m hoping for Glück im Unglück which is not the same as a blessing in disguise. The Yiddish Massel im Schlamassel comes closer.
I feel lucky that I can still write with my right hand, lucky to sit under a regal London Plane in Bryant Park. The park is a miracle of an urban oasis: Paris-style park chairs, promenades, woody shrubs, bright red triumph tulips surrounded by skyscrapers. A large green lawn where pigeons and sparrows strut with confidence. No need to fly fight over crumbs. The 11, 000 people who use the park on an average spring day leave plenty.
I’m in good company. Goethe’s bust is in front of me; the statue of Gertrude Stein and the Public Library, the most exquisite temple of books, are behind me. I listen to the unique New York soundtrack. The steady hum of car traffic blends harmoniously with birdsong. An occasional siren of an emergency car seems to belong to a futuristic sci-fi movie. The children on the carousel’s horses shriek with delight. I look over to the dark, masculine Bryant Park Hotel with its delicate golden figures and imagine a middle-aged couple from Hanover on the terrace of their room. I imagine how amazed they are by the New York spectacle.
Here in Bryant Park the 19th-century smashes into the 21st. As if Marcel Proust was writing for the Wall Street Journal. I’m opening my notebook. My left finger still throbs with pain, but I move my right hand and start writing. No need to create stories. I just have to find them.
How lucky I am to live in the greatest city in the world.

Coccinella Septempunctata

2009-04-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

Hostile ladybugs
in flashy red and black armor
soldiers in an army
of seven-hundred-twenty thousand
dive-bomb Stuyvesant Town

Impervious to obstacles
potential predators
antennae on alert
they flex their wings
climb up sharp thorns
attack and devour
the hapless aphids

A deserter abandons the troops
grabs a female from behind
rides on top of her
holds her tight

Four to seven weeks to live
five- thousand aphids to kill
they refute the war
ponder their true nature
and copulate for two hours

Coccinella Septempunctata

Feindselige Marienkäfer
in schwarz-roter Rüstung
marschieren
Antennen alarmbereit

Soldaten in einem Bataillon
von siebenhunderttausend
überfallen
den Hauptfriedhof im Sturzflug

Erklimmen scharfe Dornen
todesmutig
attackieren und verschlingen
den Feind

Des Kampfes müde
verlässt ein Deserteur die Truppe
besteigt ein Weibchen
krallt sich an ihr fest

Ein kurzes Leben
vier bis sieben Wochen
ein harter Kampf gegen
unglückselige Blattläuse

Der Ausreißer trotzt dem Krieg
kopuliert ungestüm
erwägt seine wahre Natur
Paaren statt morden?

Crime Against Spring

2009-03-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

Each neighborhood has its perpetrators

The Butcher of Bay Ridge
The Elmhurst Executioner
The Gansevoort Girdler
The Mastermind of the Moshulu Massacre

The victims
Twenty-three hydrangea bushes
Twelve Chinese dogwoods
Seven roses of Sharon

Four sassafras
Three butterfly bushes
Two sycamore maple trees
My favorite magnolia

Winter-weary
We sit next to the Ghandi statue
And bemoan the destruction
Of our sanctuary

(The first poem written after a 25 year hiatus; published in 138journal.com)

Phantom Pains

2009-03-02T05:15:00.000-08:00

It was New Year’s Eve 1964. Our living room, decorated with paper streamers, was buzzing with anticipation. Mother had lit votive candles on the windowsill as a tribute to our brothers and sisters in the Ostzone. Separated from us by a wall, barbed wire, and mine fields, the East Germans were not as free or as fortunate as we West Germans were. We were never to forget their plight. The aroma of Berliner Ballen, special New Year’s Eve doughnuts, permeated the house. Perfectly round, filled with marmalade, fried in fat, and sprinkled with powdered sugar, they were my favorite pastry. On New Year’s Eve, each Berliner had a small object inside. A pig predicted a lucky year; a ring, a wedding; a coin, wealth. If you got the one filled with mustard, your year ahead would be full of bad luck.

Mother removed the pink rollers from her hair, sealed the curls with hairspray, and admired her helmet head in the mirror. She changed into her Sunday dress. Father stayed in his stretched-out blue track suit, the empty pant leg rolled up and fastened to his trousers with a safety pin. His wooden leg leaned in the corner of the living room. We gathered around our kidney-shaped coffee table. I looked at the pickled herring, liverwurst, and Gouda cheese canapés decorated with gherkins and pretzel sticks, but decided to wait for the Berliner Ballen. The more I stared at the minute hand on the grandfather clock, the slower it moved. My brother and I were bouncing on the sofa. We couldn’t wait for midnight to run outside into the freezing cold and watch the sky ablaze with fireworks.

I was hoping that our family would experience Freude, joy, a feeling I mostly knew from books and songs like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, which we had learned in music class. Tickling sensations in my toes made me want to jump up and do my version of a rain dance. But I froze when I caught a glimpse of my father’s contorted face. His bushy eyebrows were furrowed together, creating a deep canyon on his forehead. He let out a piercing scream. The stump of his amputated leg was acting up. I knew what was coming. I had experienced it all too often. Once unleashed, the pain might last for several hours, perhaps the entire night, and turn Father, a huge, strong man, respected and feared by his wife and children, into a sobbing, tortured mass. The phantom pains, without fail, always arrived in time to ruin all our holiday celebrations.

Mother ushered us upstairs to the bedroom; Father grabbed his cane and hobbled to the kitchen. He locked himself inside the kitchen every time the phantom pains attacked. No one was allowed to enter. Sitting alone in the dark, he sang for several hours with a loud, mournful voice that resonated throughout the entire house and prevented us from sleeping. I knew all of Father’s moods, all the songs that mirrored them. I knew his favorite Wanderlieder, his favorite Volkslieder, and his favorite Soldatenlieder. I knew the words to all the melodies.

Heinrich and I sat down on my bed and stared at each other. We were both trembling despite the heavy sweaters we wore to save money on the heating bill. It was only half past ten. Heinrich was pessimistic. “We’re gonna miss all the fireworks.” Not ready to give up hope, I thought of the loving father dwelling above the starry canopy and hummed Ode to Joy. I would hum it over and over until joy would visit our home.

Father was sad over losing the war, sad over losing his leg. I listened to the intensity, the ebb and flow in his wailing. I listened for a possible change in his mood. He started to sing In einem Polenstädtchen, one of my favorites. In the song, German soldiers march into a small Polish town and encounter a captivating maiden who refuses to kiss any of them. Many nights, unable to fall asleep, I had mouthed along with the refrain Aber nein, aber nein sprach sie. Ich küsse nie. I had imagined myself as the irresistible maiden among all the lonely men. Like her, I would not allow anyone to kiss me.

The longing and homesickness in his voice were heartbreaking. I pictured Father among a group of soldiers with their knapsacks, marching and singing in the open air. I pictured the long Russian winter, the battle of Stalingrad, being hit by a grenade. I pulled the heavy down comforter up to my neck to ward off the harsh and biting wind he must have felt. I tried to understand his phantom pains, the agonizing torture he felt. But why did his pains, undoubtedly real, have to return today on New Year’s Eve? Did he want to make us suffer, make us feel as bitter and depressed as he was?

Mother, balancing a plate of Berliner Ballen on her palm, entered our bedroom. “It’s a quarter to twelve. Have a Berliner,” she said and sat down between us. “You have to understand your father. He’s afraid of New Year’s Eve. The fireworks sound like an artillery attack to him.”

I pictured Father among a group of soldiers with their knapsacks, marching and singing in the open air. I pictured the long Russian winter, the battle of Stalingrad, being hit by a grenade.

Life was unfair. I was tired of having to understand Father. I was ten years old. It was New Year’s Eve and I wanted to join the jubilation. Not steal away alone in tears, but follow the rose-strewn path.i The War had ended almost twenty years ago. Heinrich and I had never fought in a war, nor lost a war, but we were being punished as if we had. Ignoring the pastries, we went over to the window and pressed our noses against the glass.

The street was full of people. “Holy cow, did you see that Kometenhagel? Amazing,” Heinrich said. Like a silver serpent, it shot up and opened into a cascade of tiny stars. There were mini explosions everywhere.

“Two more minutes,” Heinrich whispered. The people outside started to shout “Zehn, neun, acht, sieben…” yelling louder and louder as the numbers decreased. A thunderous, deafening blast erupted when everyone set off their fireworks at the same time. There were Roman candles, pinwheels, single rockets, cherry bombs, and my favorite, Chinaböller. Brilliant silver, green, red, and gold flashed in the sky.

Half an hour later, the detonations petered out. Once in a while, a Bengali cylinder flame or Bombette shot up. It had been a great show. Heinrich wiped a tear from his eye. I put my arm around him. Our own New Year’s Eve Family Fun Pack sat unused at the foot of the stairs. We had not fired our shells and mortars.

Outside, our neighbors were locking arms, clinking glasses, and downing shots of liquor. Father’s voice soared above the sporadic flare-ups of fireworks. He sounded strong and confident. “Breslau, Danzig, Königsberg. We’ll take you back!” he shouted. Those towns once belonged to Germany. In school, we had learned that the price for losing the war was surrendering parts of our country to Poland and the Soviet Union. My history teacher didn’t think we would ever get these territories back. Father demanded them back. He launched into a combat song:

Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen

SA marschiert mit ruhig-festem Schritt…

Mother, looking like a frightened little girl, began to tremble. That song always upset her. I liked the melody, so forceful, buoyant, and optimistic. Mother stood up and closed the curtains as if she didn’t want our neighbors to hear Father’s singing. Heinrich sank his teeth into a Berliner while Father sang himself into a rage.

In school, we had learned that the price for losing the war was surrendering parts of our country to Poland and the Soviet Union. My history teacher didn’t think we would ever get these territories back. Father demanded them back.

Free the streets for the brown battalions
Free the streets for the Storm Troopers

The swastika, the hope of millions…ii

Mother sighed: “Why does he have to sing that song all the time?”

“Why are you worried, Mama?” I asked.

“That’s the Horst-Wessel-Lied. It’s illegal to sing that song. Your father could get into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“Like ending up in jail,” she said.

Heinrich was beaming. “Look, look, I got the pig, the lucky pig!” he shouted, displaying the rosy plastic piglet. Hoping for a delicious plum marmalade filling and a lucky charm, I took a big bite of my Berliner. The strange taste made my mouth pucker up. It couldn’t be true. I had gotten the one Berliner filled with mustard. Disgusted, I spit the pieces of dough and mustard into my hand. They looked like baby vomit. Life was unfair. There was no loving father dwelling above the starry canopy. Only my own father who was like my Berliner Ballen—good on the outside, but filled with the bitterness of war on the inside.

i Ode to Joy (An die Freude), lyrics by Friedrich von Schiller

ii Horst-Wessel-Lied, the Nazi Party’s anthem, was part of Germany’s national anthem from 1933 to 1945. A regulation required the right arm to be raised in a “Hitler salute”
when singing the first and fourth verse. In 1945, the Horst-Wessel-Lied was banned. Both the lyrics and the tune remain illegal in Germany to this day.

Text first published in the anthology "Families. The Frontline of Pluralism",Wising Up Press, Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett, Editors, reprinted by guernicamag.com

THE NOVEL

2009-02-08T17:01:00.000-08:00

Small discount shops line Vienna’s busiest streets, the word NOVELS is written in large bold letters above their entrance doors. To their customers, literature is a provision, just like TOBACCO and LIQUOR in the stores to the left and right of the dime-novel shops. It hardly matters that no great literature is offered here. The novel survives because it is life’s companion. This has not been true for plays for example for a long time. The theater summons people still convinced it has something important to say. We no longer believe this gesture’s self-importance. In contrast the novel does not draw attention to itself. It sits on the shelf, together with five hundred others and consents to be undiscovered, unread. For that reason, we always seek it out. (translated from WILHELM GENAZINO, published in ezratranslation.com, Voume2, Number 2)

New York/New York

2009-01-31T07:36:00.001-08:00

I had booked the Hotel Earle because Bob Dylan once slept in room 331. From the moment I first stepped out and into Washington Square Park, I was smitten with New York. It was a Saturday afternoon in late September, a sultry, sun-drenched day so rare in Germany even in midsummer. The sun was hotter and the sky bluer, more radiant than back home. At a time when all German cities turned into graveyards, Washington Square Park was full of manic activity. Blasting radios battled each other for dominance, senior citizens played speed chess with youthful contenders; dope peddlers, fire eaters, and aspiring folk singers all competed for the public’s attention. People of all races and ages danced to Parlament Funkadelic.
In Berlin every thinking person around me was depressed. As I watched the children on the swings shrieking with delight and hyperactive dogs engaged in rough and tumble play, my earnest, sullen self faded away and a new upbeat person emerged. I would never have to feel miserable again, not if I could experience Washington Square Park’s anarchistic exuberance any time I wanted to.
I discovered a bounce in my step and skipped the next ten blocks uptown. I walked upright, no longer with slumped shoulders. I made eye contact. I grinned when someone smiled or complimented me. Life in New York, as in a Mediterranean city, happened in the street. The street mirrored my mood. Since I was in high spirits I encountered only smiling faces. “Hey Babe, wanna come along for the ride to Florida,” a truck driver said. “Another hour unloading and I’m ready for takeoff.” “Great hair cut,” a hip black woman shouted. “Ola Mami,” a Latin-American teenager said smacking his lips.
14th Street was the Mecca of the less well-heeled New Yorkers. People were looking for bargains in the many 99 Cents and discount stores. Men sitting up high on ladders were watching out for thieves and enticing the shoppers to come inside. “Ladies and gentlemen, our prices are the best. Come on inside and see for yourself.” Many people lost their money in games of dice. The children’s clothing stores with their frilly dresses, the smell of Comida Criolla and Cuchifritos, the sounds of Salsa, the mix of English and Spanish, the entire human razzmatazz of 14th Street made me feel intoxicated with life.
At home I had been chided for my hyperactive Zappelphilipp ways. My parents always said: “Don’t walk so fast, don’t talk so fast, don’t wave your arms so much. In New York, everyone walked and talked fast. In New York, I was normal.
It was love at first sight—irrational and fatal. Could one fall head over heels –unsterblich—in love with a city just as much as with a person? Mubarez from Pakistan worked at the reception of the Hotel Earle. On my fourth day in New York he said: “You can become a New Yorker and still be yourself. You belong here. Stay.

A Gift That Fails-- On the Lack of Literary Success

2009-01-08T08:53:00.000-08:00

Translated from Wilhelm Genanzino The Extended Glance (Der gedehnte Blick), München Wien 2004. Find the entire text in DIMENSION2,08

During the early 1950’s William Faulkner recommended a second occupation to all his fellow authors. Faulkner said in an interview that the shoemaker, carpenter, and baker trades were best suited to them, that manual labor was a wise counterpart to the more intellectual writing profession. He was concerned with the economic crisis in the lives of writers. With a stable secondary occupation, they could avoid the risk of not having enough money for food and shelter. In 1932, twenty years before this interview, Faulkner’s European colleague, Robert Musil, was in serious economic trouble, so much so that he felt compelled to go public and ask for help. In I Can’t Go On, he intended to tell the literary world: “I am writing about myself for the first time since I became a writer. The title tells all. It is the bitter truth (…). I believe that apart from the suicidal, few live such precarious lives and I will not be able to evade their hardly enticing company. This is my one and only attempt to resist such a fate.”
Musil did not have to publish his appeal. The Musil Society, an aid organization willing to support him with continuous donations, was established in Berlin. Musil was a widely admired author at the time. The first published volume of Man without Qualities brought him abundant fame and respect, but not enough money. The Rowolth Publishing House pushed for a sequel. Musil gave in and wrote thirty-eight chapters for a second volume published in March of 1933. A few months later, Musil left Germany and returned to Vienna. Another recently formed Musil Society there helped him out regularly although it was never enough. Musil was not able to shake off his dependency. Six years later, when he emigrated to Switzerland he became dependent on the help of strangers there as well. The Geneva priest Lejeune and the Swiss Aid Society for German Scholars contributed to the Musil household for years. It’s an interesting fact that Musil considered his failure to support himself unethical, but failed to take any action. In an interview, he stated: “Not to be famous is natural. Not to have enough readers to survive is shameful.”
The quote is revealing. Musil did not say: “Not to have enough readers is shameful.” He said instead: “Not to have enough readers to survive is shameful.” The social dimension, being able to live from one’s writing, was not Musil’s main theme. He did not consider the social aspect of literary life important enough to deserve its own failure. The best writer’s confidence is disturbed by the fact that writing should even exist as a social problem. These authors’ self-esteem is noble on the inside, but to the outside world it is uncompromising and unmoved. The stronger the inner noble feeling the more adamant is the denial of the external reality. Only raw, ethically irreconcilable isolation survives.
We can find these constructs of literary life today. The German writer Undine Gruenter, recently deceased in Paris who was unsuccessful and uncompromising all her life, made this journal entry on April 28, 1989: “To be sure, if I am badly off, because I have no money, from a social point of view it’s my fault. But I will not change my life because of this. I would rather continue to produce my 150 pages a year. Hopefully I will get better at it all the time.”
To live a common double life is out of the question for these authors. No need to consult Faulkner. Examples of double lives can also be found in German literature. I need only mention the two old prototypes, Joseph von Eichendorf and E.T.A. Hoffmann, lawyers by day and practicing romanticists in their spare time. Let me also cite Kafka, Döblin, and Benn. We cannot imagine them without their civic professions. Musil could have easily followed Faulkner’s suggestion. He had a second profession. Highly qualified and holding a degree in engineering from the Technical University in Brünn, he could have worked as an engineer anytime. But for Musil, writing was an absolute, internal, and all-demanding occupation. His work had to express his integrity and his aesthetic honor.
Honor expresses the desire for originality and purity. Purity is an inconceivable and pathologically malleable notion. Purity always demands a higher absolute purity and so becomes infinite like fame, which knows no boundary either. Because Musil’s contemporaries did not share his notion of honor, they were second-rate pretenders in his eyes. He belittled Joseph Roth, Leon Feuchtwanger and Franz Werfel in public. He ridiculed Thomas Mann as the writer whose pants had the most immaculate crease. No other author set himself apart more and no one paid a higher price for doing so. We might say Musil’s undeserved lack of success stems partly from his mockery and arrogance.

Sturm und Drang

2008-12-07T11:26:00.000-08:00

Adolescence struck like a tornado. My parents, teachers, and most adults became my enemies. They were hypocrites and liars. My school, the Municipal Modern Language Secondary School for the Education of Women, was a prison. The teachers were harsh and punitive wardens. Most had taught during the Nazi era and although officially de-nazified, their fascist teaching methods persevered. Herr Bhode, my history teacher had lived on a large estate near Königsberg “until the Russians confiscated it.” He still advocated the doctrine of the Bund Deutscher Mädchen, Hitler’s youth organization for girls: “A German girl is a pure girl. She does not smoke or paint her face.” He aborted my first foray into make-up with blue eye shadow. “Make-up is for whores. Go to the bathroom and wash your face.”
I was thrilled when after years of pounding Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Hebbel, Herder, Fontane and legions of other dead writers into us, we finally got to read books written in our century. Herr Bhode, a staunch anti-communist, hated Brecht and called him “A traitor who moved to East Germany. Voluntarily! Imagine that.” He despised having to put Mother Courage, a play set during the Thirty Year War, on his lesson plan. The Education Department of our social-democratic state made it a mandatory part of the curriculum. Since Herr Bhode hated Brecht, I liked him right away.
“Girls, what is your interpretation of the funeral scene?” he asked. No one paid attention. It was the last period and the room was hot and stuffy. My class mates were bored. They liked romantic novels without all that bloody fighting. Two girls in front of me were reading the teen magazine Bravo under their desk. My neighbor secretly filed her nails. Some girls had their head down, others were yawning. I was the only one to raise my hand. Herr Bhode cut me down: “Tersteegen, we are not interested in your comments. You don’t have to think in my class.”
The old geezer made my blood boil. I was furious. How dare he forbid me to think? Our history book portrayed the Germans as victims of World War II who were led to disaster by a megalomaniac leader. The German loss of life, the soldier’s loss of limb, the allied bombing and the destruction of cities were described at great length. The losses of other nations and the atrocities committed in the concentration camps were relegated to a few paragraphs and fine print.
Whenever I asked adults how all of this could have happened, they shrugged their shoulders, refused an answer, or insisted that they didn’t know how terrible it had been. Frau Stanke felt that Hitler hadn’t been all that bad. “He built the Autobahn. Everyone had work again. Our Führer restored law and order in the country, and people felt proud to be German again.” I pitied the losses of the other nations, especially the Russians. Discovering Chekhov and Dostojewski made me fall in love with the Russian people.
I followed the Auschwitz trials and the testimonies of the camp survivors in the news. More than 6000 former members of the SS guarded Auschwitz from 1940 to 1945; only twenty-two faced trial. Those accused showed no trace of remorse. The loathsome concentration camp Doctor Mengele lived a privileged life in South America. I looked at pictures of emaciated bodies, rooms full of shoes and handbags. Had they really mixed ashes with fat to make soap from the remains of the Jews? How could I feel anything but shame about belonging to this nation?
We had murdered millions. What role did my father play?

I discovered rebellion and assumed a loud-mouthed belligerent defiant stance. Testy and antagonistic on principle I confronted my father about his participation in the war and his beliefs about Jews, Poles, and all the other “inferior races.”
“What did you do in the war?”
“I was a regular soldier.”
“A regular soldier? How many people did you kill? Did you enjoy doing it?”
“Watch your tone, young lady. We did what we had to do.”
“What about the guards in the camps? They did what they had to do. Would you have done it too?” I howled him down.
My father’s face turned dark red. His Adam’s apple started a little dance, as if he had trouble swallowing. I didn’t care that his blood pressure might rise to a dangerous level. Let him have a stroke right this minute. “What about the camps? Was that all right with you?” My mother ran in from the kitchen, an onion in one hand, a small knife in the other. “Leave your father alone. Don’t aggravate him. He’s not well. Your questions will bring him to an early grave. If he dies, it will be your fault.”
I stormed out of the room and marched up the stairs. I loved the screeching sound of my metal shoe tips hitting the cold hard stone. Hoped it would send goose bumps down my parents’ spine. I pushed the door to my room open and then slammed it shut with a loud wham. Turned the key and barricaded myself inside. My heart raced as if I had just finished a sprint on sport’s day. I would never calm down. Not in a million years. I wanted to hit something, kick the door in or punch a hole in the wall. Instead, I paced in a circle. My riding trophies, all seven of them lined up neatly on my book shelf, caught my eye. They had to go. Bam, bam they flew of the shelf. I loved the noise. The pictures of horses were next. They had graced my bedroom walls for as long as I remembered. A testimony to my childhood plans of owning a horse farm one day.
A horse farm! What a ridiculous idea! I started with my favorite picture. The Arabian stallion, torn to pieces, landed on the floor. The Lipizaners, Dülmen ponies, and the fine Przcwalski were next.The Araappaloosa show horse, the black Friesian with its long mane, the strong Holsteiner, and even the small Hucul from the Carpathian Mountains, they all had to go. I felt strong and powerful as I destroyed them. What would my father, the proud cavalry man think if he could see me now? He had taught me to love horses. I had followed him around on tournament day dressed in proper riding-habit, boots and riding crop, the entire outfit his gift for my ninth birthday. He had been proud to show his daughter off and asked a stranger to take a picture of us. He even let me bet on my favorite horse. None of this mattered anymore. The horses time was up. I did not stop until all hundred and twenty-five pictures were scattered on the floor. I thought about starting a bonfire, of burning down the house, but stopped myself right in time. Instead I stomped over to the chest of drawers, took the Animals album out of its sleeve, placed the 45 on the record player and lowered the needle. “We gotta get out of this place” was the best song ever written. I played it as loud as possible, at least twenty times in a row and sang along at the top of my lungs.

Somewhere baby
Somehow I know it baby
We gotta get out of this place
If it’s the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this place
Girl, there’s a better life for me and you
Believe me baby
I know it baby
You know it too

I could not get out of this place, but I could redecorate. I started by pinning my new heroes on the wall: Che Guevara, Mao, and Bob Dylan. The man was a genius. How did he come up with the brilliant line “If dogs run free, why we don’t?” Above my bed I hung a picture of the cutest couple in the world, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful. Meanwhile my mother shouted from the first floor:
“Turn down that Negro music. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.”
“So what. Have your breakdown already.” I muttered. My mother was a doormat, a piece of furniture. Stuck in the past. She acted as if the war had never ended. I had heard the story of the starving Rapp family a million times. “Living on cabbage for three months, a hard boiled egg divided among four people, a tablespoon of butter a real luxury.” I didn’t care one bit. I didn’t want to hear another word about German suffering. If my parents both ended up in a mental institution, I’d be happy to live with my grandmother. My mother’s parents were the only acceptable ones among my relatives. My father’s family, the first to join the Nazi party in their village, had been staunch supporters until the bitter end, but my mother’s parents never joined. The Nazis were too un-Christian for their taste. My grandfather had always made fun of the little man with the big mustache and listened to enemy radio. The family maintained friendly relationships with their Jewish neighbors. Grandma lit the fire in the synagogue every Saturday until there was no more synagogue.

Looking for role models and help with my unanswered questions, I turned to literature. In the backroom of the public library, high up on the shelf were the books deemed inappropriate for youth. Ms. Waldenburg, the petite middle-aged librarian with enormous horn rimmed glasses that hid kind blue eyes had been my friend since third grade. I harbored the fantasy that she loved me more than any other child who visited her library. There had been rumors that she had no husband and children because her fiancé had died fighting in Belgium. I was sure I was special to her and if she could she would adopt me. What a wonderful life we could have had, sitting together on the couch in the evenings, reading, taking breaks to update each other on the plots, reciting special passages out loud, all the while munching on butter cookies.
“Do your parents know that you are taking out Günter Grass and Hubert Fichte?” She asked.
“We have to read Grass for school.”
She knew that I lied. The books were full of dirty passages I wasn’t supposed to read yet. The Catholic Church had placed them on the list of forbidden books. “You might want to read this one too,” she said with a wink and placed Peter Weiss into my hands. Weiss, a writer outraged by the amnesia that had befallen my parents’ generation, was the answer to all of my prayers.

Judge: Did you see anything of the camp?
Second Witness: Nothing. I was just glad to get out of there.
Judge: Did you see the chimneys at the end of the platform or the smoke and glare?
Second Witness: Yes. I saw the smoke.
Judge: And what did you think?
Second Witness: I thought those must be the bakeries. I had heard they baked bread in there day and night. After all it was a big camp.

I started to question everything. How could there be a God? Why was he unable to prevent such barbaric cruelty? I signed myself out of religion class at school, and then doubted if it had been the right decision. Still I attended the Catholic youth group meetings in the basement of our church. We went there because we were bored and had nothing better to do. It was a chance to hang out, to meet boys and to get away from home. The young chaplain was handsome and cool. As a miner’s son he was one of us. He had invited us to watch Die Brücke. It had been shown on TV before, but my father made us turn it off and I never got to see the end.

Chaplain Paul fumbled with the projector while I surveyed the room. My friend Astrid who had a reputation for being fast played with her hair and shot seductive glances in Reinhold’s direction. I had known Christel, the youngest in the group, since kindergarten. We had played doctor together in her parents’ garage. Cornelia was a straight A student and we all despised her for that. I had a crush on Andreas. With his handsome features, sultry voice, gorgeous brown eyes and dark hair, he was every girls dream. He looked just like a movie star. I helped myself to pretzels and Coca Cola. The coke was warm, but tasted fantastic simply because it was forbidden at home.
Chaplain Paul turned off the light (our favorite part) and said with a somber voice: “This is the first German anti-war film, based on a novel and the true experiences of the writer. It shows what happens when children are educated in the wrong ideas, when they become victims of ideology. You have to watch it so you won’t repeat the sins of your fathers.”
Andreas and Reinhold yawned. They hated educational movies; they hated it when Chaplain Paul used big words. “What’s ideology anyhow?” Andreas asked.
The film took place in a small German town similar to ours populated with children, women, and old people. It was shocking and sad. During the final days of the war seven teenage boys were drafted into the Volkssturm, a small ad-hoc unit pulled together for local defense. They trained for one day, learned to use their weapons, and were sent to the front. Their teacher, afraid for their lives, intervened on their behalf. The boys, not much older than us, had to secure an unimportant bridge, meant to be blown up anyway and defend it against enemy seizure. At first we were proud of how brave they acted. Andreas poked Reinhold in the ribs to show his approval. When their commander, mistaken for a deserter, got executed Christel and Astrid started to cry. On their own now, fiercely patriotic, and elated to be called to duty, the boys continued to fight even as the German troops retreated. American tanks arrived and tried to cross the bridge. We were worried and concerned for the boys. I stopped chomping on the pretzels so no sound would distract us from the action on screen. The American soldiers looked young and handsome. One of them was chewing gum. I liked his uniform. He made fun of the young fighters, called them kindergarteners. Why didn’t the boys surrender? I held my breath. To continue to fight would be a suicidal mission.
Only one of the boys survived. The death of his friends and the death of the German and American soldiers were all in vain. We had tears in our eyes when the epilogue appeared on the screen. ”This took place on April 27, 1945. An insignificant event, it was not mentioned in any military report.”
No one spoke. Nobody went to the bathroom. No one was in the mood for board games.

At home I confronted my father: “Why didn’t you let us watch Die Brücke to the end?”
“You’re not old enough.”
“Not old enough,” I fumed. “I’m old enough to learn about the war.”
“You won’t watch crap like that in my house. Not as long as you live under my roof and I’m putting food on the table.”
“What kind of reasoning is that? Just because you feed me, I don’t have to buy into your lies.”
“Watch your mouth or you’re gonna get it.”
“So what do you want to do? Hit me? Does that make you feel good? Alright then, if it makes you feel superior and strong, go ahead and hit me.”
Shaking on the inside, I managed to act cocky on the outside. I turned my face to my father. He raised his hand and held it up in the air for a few tormenting seconds. We stared each other down. Then his arm collapsed as if it belonged to a rag doll. He couldn’t do it. I had won. I was fifteen years old and more powerful than my own father.
From now on I let him have it. “Why do we have to switch channels whenever a Jewish historian or scientist appeares? “What’s the point of tearing up all the Marxist and Maoist pamphlets I bring home?” He didn’t answer. I stormed out of the room and heard him lament: “I’ve raised a Bolshevik? My God, I’ve raised a Bolshevik!”

My father didn’t have a monopoly on hate. I could stew in hate too. I hated my life. I hated him. I hated his politics and his despair. I hated my mother and her wimpy ways. I hated school, Germany, and the character traits of most Germans. Their desire to regulate every aspect of life. Hated bus drivers, post office clerks, and anyone wearing a uniform who savored their power and found perverse pleasure in treating me as an inferior. I hated old ladies who scolded me when I tried to cross the street on a red light: “My God, these young people today. No respect for rules!” The entire country was plastered with Verboten signs. Playing in the yard verboten! Verboten to touch the flowers! Spitting verboten! Walking on the grass forbidden! Was life itself verboten?

Luckily I found kindred spirits. The TV brought images of San Francisco’s rebellious youth, flowers in their hair, into our living room. College students in Berkeley, Paris and Berlin protested the Vietnam War. They all told their parents off: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” In Germany, longhaired beatniks, despised by adults, participated in many Easter peace marches. The more the adults hated them, the more I longed to be one of them. Marijuana made a lot of young people happy. I was determined to score some.
In Berlin a group of young left-wing college students, seven men and three women started an experiment in radical communal living. The members of Kommune 1 had given up individual possessions to practice for life after the revolution. It was just a matter of time before exclusive love relationships were a thing of the past. The women in the group were beautiful like models, the guys funny looking. Rainer Langhans had a flamboyant mop of curls on top of his head. Fritz Teufel had a full mustache and beard. Everyone wore round wire rimmed glasses. I begged my mother to let me change my frames immediately.
The guys of Kommune 1 were great comedians. I was always hoping to see another of their pranks on the evening news. When US vice president Hubert Humphrey came to visit Germany, several members were accused of planning a bomb attack and were arrested by the secret service. They got off. The police couldn’t prove a thing. Teufel said: ”We had planned to bomb him with eggs and pudding.” My father was outraged: “They all belong in jail. Get rid of them; send them to East Germany.”
Dieter Kunzelmann, the leader and most outrageous member had me crack up every time he made a public statement. The latest was his best: “I don’t work and I don’t study. Why should I care about the Vietnam War when I have trouble reaching orgasm?”

What was an orgasm anyway? How could I find a man like Dieter to teach me all about it?

( published in sic, 2006 and read in KGB Bar NYC, 2007)

Dieter II

2008-11-22T04:46:00.000-08:00

We met in Monday morning’s “Fundamentals of Group Dynamics” class. There was chemistry and mutual attraction from the start. Dieter II was tall and handsome with dark shoulder length brown hair, blue eyes, fine features, and plump lips like a girl. We had been studying with the same professor for three semesters and discovered that we had read the same books, liked the same authors, in social sciences, psychology, and literature. On the last day of class, Dieter II announced that he was moving to Berlin. I sensed that he was too shy to make the first move; it was up to me to seduce him.
As we were leaving class I lurked about him and then managed to stand behind him on the escalator leading down to the first floor.
”Do you feel like continuing our discussion over lunch?” I asked.
“Sure, I’d like that,” he said.
At the bottom of the escalator we turned left to the cafeteria. I stood in front of the counter and could not make up my mind. Did I want the Königsberger Klopse or the noodles? I wasn’t hungry. I had no inclination to discuss Adorno, Horkheimer and the contributions of the Frankfurter Schule to the Studies of the Authoritarian Character. I needed a beer to calm my anxiety. Dieter II made his selection. I picked the noodles, he went for sausage and potato salad, and we both proceeded with our plastic orange trays to the cashier.
In a secluded corner we found a table with a view of the lake. I finished my beer in no time and picked at my food. Watching him eat, I got worried. Didn’t a man’s way of eating point to his skills in bed? Dieter did not taste, smell, or even chew his Würstchen mit Kartoffelsalat. He shoveled the food into his mouth at breakneck speed and then swallowed it. Would he be one of the guys who tore a woman’s clothes off, skipped foreplay and got right down to it? The way he inhaled his sausages, signaled he might climb on top of me for a few missionary minutes culminating in premature ejaculation.
“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen.” Adorno is brilliant, don’t you think?”
“You really can’t say it any better way,” I agreed. “I try to live authentically, but it’s hard in this sea of pretense, among all these phony people.”
“Do you like Frank Zappa?”
“I like a lot of his lyrics. ‘Plastic People’ is one of my favorites.”
Dieter’s eyes sparkled like the decorations on a Christmas tree. He started to recite:

A fine little girl
She waits for me
She’s as plastic
As she can be

I chimed in:

Me see a neon
Moon above
I searched for years
I found no love

We finished together in perfect harmony:

I’m sure that love
Will never be
A product of
Plasticity

We stayed three more hours. Like me Dieter II was fond of Peter Handke .
“The man is a genius. Don’t you think he deserves the Nobel Prize for Short

Letter, Long Farewell?” I asked.

”Of course,” Dieter said. “No one else comes up with lines like ‘This is my second day in

America. I wonder if I’ve already changed.’”

We were made for each other. Soul mates, if such a thing existed. Neither of us felt like leaving, but the Turkish cleaning ladies in their light blue uniforms had started to move around noisily. Some were wiping the tables; others made a concert worthy of modern music with their buckets and mops. It was time to go.
“Let’s go to Pinkus Müller,” I said.
“Your wish is my command,” he answered.
Pinkus Müller was an old establishment dating back to 1816 and the glory days of the University of Münster. Its slogan was “Student life is not complete without Pinkus Müller.” There was a long history of dueling clubs whose members proudly exhibited their facial scars, drinking themselves into a stupor, thereby missing class the next morning. These fraternity members were punished with a few days of incarceration until they had sobered up. Tourists could take a tour of the university with the special detention cells, and admire the walls covered with graffiti and caricatures of evil professors dating back to 1902. There was plenty of evidence of mindless drinking throughout the centuries. On a regular day Dieter II and I would not be caught dead in this pub. Pinkus Müller was for conservative law students, supporters of the bishop, the right to life movement and other idiots. But that day Pinkus Müller felt right. We downed several pints of dark beer. I pulled up all the alcohol infused strawberries from the bottom of the glass and ate them one by one. Dieter II let me have his and fed them to me. He was hungry again and ordered the special Möppkes un Liärberbraut met Schmoräppelkes as Pinkus Müller insisted on regional Westphalian home cooking and would have none of the fancier nouvelle French or German dishes you could find in other restaurants. I watched with concern as he devoured his liverwurst sandwich topped with sautéed apples. Meanwhile I continued to suck dreamily on my strawberries, getting drunker by the minute. Although I was living with Dieter I, I had no inhibitions or guilt about cheating on him. I had only one concern. How could Dieter II perform after all this beer? Would he make love as fast and sloppy as he ate?
“Feel like coming over to my place for a cup of coffee?” He finally asked. I was primed. We walked along the Prinzipalmarkt, past the cages where the devout had speared and beheaded the Anabaptists, the Rathaus where in 1649 after thirty years of war they signed the peace treaty, past the fancy café where I had a part time job as a dish washer, and into Hacklenburg Street, where he shared a flat with a pal from his home town.

We never got to drink the coffee. His roommate retreated to his room as soon as we arrived. Ten minutes later we ended up on Dieter’s single bed. I was in for a pleasant surprise. Despite his greedy eating habits, Dieter II was a slow, delicate and attentive lover. He started by nibbling my neck, then covered me with kisses and very very slowly worked his way downward. I had given up bras in the 11th grade, so when he peeled off my T-shirt, he had no obstruction and started to caress my nipples with his tongue. Unable to contain my excitement any longer, I ripped off my jeans. He took his time, made me ache in anticipation of his next move.
I stayed all night. There was no point in going home. I had missed the last bus and I’d be in trouble with Dieter I whenever I got home. Why leave now? We had sex three times and must have resembled acrobats doing the impossible on a tiny bed. The most exciting moments happened in between the acts of fornication. My first orgasm. Ever. Between the second and third time Dieter got hungry again and fixed himself a Schmalzstulle. I declined a helping of the brown bread spread with goose liver fat, but accepted some of his father’s home made apricot Schnaps. After two hours of uncomfortable sleep, pressed against the wall on his hard single bed, he woke me up with a cup of coffee, the one he had promised me in Pinkus Müller.
“How did you get so good at making love?” I just had to know. Dieter II had suffered from a tight foreskin early in life. This had made erections and penetration painful. Too embarrassed to tell his parents, he waited until he moved to Tübingen for his civil service to undergo the simple procedure that liberated him from his foreskin. In the presurgery years he had become a skillful lover, experimental, adventurous, and unbelievably accomplished in the art of pleasing a woman via oral or manual stimulation. When I mentioned my good luck to my gay friend Halina she commented: “Now you understand what lesbian sex is all about.”

Germans in American and German Films

2008-11-10T07:35:00.000-08:00

The anticipation for the new films from Germany at the Museum of Modern Art was high. A double feature. "On the Line" (Auf der Strecke) is Reto Caffi’s graduate project from Cologne’s Academy of Media Arts. It tells the story of a shy security guard who works for a large Zürich department store. He is infatuated with the bookshop clerk who works in the same store. He spies on her and follows her to the subway. The second film, "The Other Day in Eden" (Gestern in Eden) was written by Jan Speckenbach while he was studying at Berlin’s Film and TV Academy. Speckenbach tells the story of a man who goes to a nudist colony in the former East Germany to manage his recently deceased father’s affairs. At the colony, he starts a sexual relationship with the nurse who was his father's girlfriend.

My friends and I who have lived in New York City for more than 20 years were disappointed by these films described as “stories not about those from the East or those from the West, but just Germans, grappling with life, love, and trust” (Eddie Cockrell). We knew that American film and TV portrays Germans as Nazis, deranged scientists and insane psychiatrists. The Germans in those films never talk. They bark. For a more flattering portrayal of the Krauts there are the occasional Bavarians in lederhosen doing the Schuhplattler dance.

The Germans in the new films from Germany smoke nonstop. They have trouble connecting to other human beings. They throw themselves into raw, animal sex with no foreplay, no romance. No tender words are spoken. The Germans in the new German films are people without a conscience allowing a gang of four to beat up and kill a young man in the subway.

Which version is better? The Germans portrayed by American film or the Germans portrayed by German and Swiss filmmakers?

The Cigarette Box

2008-10-31T05:18:00.000-07:00

Twenty-two seniors are still in limbo. They have not made a decision about life after high school. Most are afraid of move away from Bed-Stuy, East New York, and Brownsville, terrified to leave their neighborhoods. Proud of their “ghetto fabulous” ways they know they’d feel like a fish out of water in a place like Rochester, New York. A few are dieing to get away from home, the constant noise outside their bedroom window, the shoot- outs that rob them of their sleep. The yelling and constant arguing. A rural college in New Hampshire looks like paradise. But no one wants you when you score 650 on the SAT.
I have called Carla in because she is one of them.
“I think I’ll join the Marines. A recruiter came over to my house last Saturday. He
is just waiting to see if I pass English for the year, but once I have my high school diploma, I am in.”
“Carla, what if you have to go to Iraq?”
“Well, I do what I have to do. I am not afraid.”
I look at this tomboyish seventeen- year- old Jamaican girl in front of me. She is still sporting her elegant up hairdo from Friday nights prom.
“I would hate to find your name listed among the war casualties in The New York Times. Carla Rigby, age nineteen, from Brooklyn New York, killed in action.”
Carla is not impressed. I have been her guidance counselor for almost four years. She appreciated the referral to Planned Parenthood I gave her in the 9th grade when she needed to get a pregnancy test without her grandmother finding out. A few times each week she stops by my office to ask for a Band Aid, a feminine pad, calculator or candy when she is in serious need of a sugar fix. Maybe she sees me as just another old person, trying to spoil her fun and tell her how to run her life. Someone too timid to embark on a daring adventure. Besides I have no idea how hard her life is. The four foster children her grandmother has taken in to help make ends meet. Her little brother and his sickle cell anemia, the older brother in Rikers. Carla does not want to be a burden. She wants to pull her own weight.
I am losing this battle. Seventeen- year- olds know everything, have been everywhere, done everything or at least they act that way. It’s time to pull out my last weapon. I walk
over to my desk; push aside the disciplinary reports, cut slips, Kit Kat bar wrappers, and To Do List for my personal life to recover a little cherry wood box. I take the box, carry it like a precious jewel and hand it to Carla.
“I want to show you something.”
“What’s that? An old wooden box?”
“Notice anything special?”
“Looks like someone made it. There’s a rose engraved, and the letters H and S. What is it Ms. S.?”
“H. S. are my father’s initials. This is a cigarette box he made when he was a prisoner of war”.
“What war?”
“A war, a long time ago. You learned about it in 10th grade when Mr. Salerno taught you about the Second World War in Global Studies.”
“What happened to your Dad?”
“He was 17 just like you and felt very patriotic. So he volunteered to join Hitler’s army. Did well in the first year as a gunner. They won a couple of battles on the Western front, occupied Belgium, then France. I am sure he felt invincible. Two years later he found himself fighting in Russia and his luck ran out. His unit was hit by grenades. He was happy to be alive, but he lost his leg.”
“What happened?”
Carla stops fidgeting in her chair and gives me her undivided attention.
“Well in peace time they might have been able to save his leg, but not during the war. There were too many men dead and wounded, too few doctors and medical supplies. They had to amputate his leg and he, nineteen years old, spent the following two years as a prisoner of war.”
Carla is quiet. Her big brown eyes have lost their defiant stance and are filled with concern.
“And that is why, Carla, I cannot support your decision to join the military. Go to a community college, keep up your grades, you might be able to switch to a state college or another four year college. Then when you’ve gotten your degree and you’re a little older and wiser, rethink your idea about signing up with the Marines. You can serve your country in other ways and still make your community proud.”
We are interrupted by the piercing sound of the bell. Carla has to make it up to the seventh floor to her English class.
“Thank you Ms. S. for sharing something from your personal life.”
“Thanks for listening.”

I have three minutes before a group of freshmen is coming in. A lot of “He said - She said”, gossip, backstabbing behavior and the threat of fights. So- and- so said she’ll bring her cousins up here to jump me. Regular stuff. I push the jumble of papers on my desk away and return the box to its place of honor. I close the lid. The sorrow of thousands of young men put to rest again.
MY FIRST PUBLISHED NON-FICTION TEXT, CAMPUS 2.24.2006

Hans in Luck

2008-10-17T05:09:00.000-07:00

My love for German food and the German language returned. Most Thursdays after therapy, I strolled down the three blocks of Sauerkraut Boulevard/ East 86th Street. Yorkville in the early 80s, before the onslaught of PC Richards, Victoria’s Secret, and Footlocker mega stores had the flavor of a German neighborhood. Restaurants, named Heidelberg, Ideal, and Café Geiger, served Jägerschnitzel, Sauerbraten, and excellent draught beer. Elk’s Candy carried the best marzipan this side of the Atlantic. In the evenings, zither and accordion players entertained the crowd. Before I started my long haul back to TriBeCa, I always treated myself to Kaffee,und Kuchen, Germany’s version of High Tea, at Kleine Konditorei. Their rich Black Forest tart, almost as good as my mother’s, never failed to improve my mood.
In Germany, being German was an ordeal, a full time job. Everyday we dealt with our parents and grandparents’ guilt, the heavy load we had inherited. On American TV, my compatriots were Nazis, deranged psychiatrists, or Bavarians in Lederhosen. They were barking orders, or slapping their legs doing the Schuhplattler dance. I was no longer troubled or insulted by it. Here in New York, at Kleine Konditorei, I shamelessly indulged in my Germaness.
Kleine Konditorei, proud of its home cooking and gut bürgerlich ambiance, kept the Teutonic theme under control. No antlers on the wall, no decorative steins, or yodeling over the sound system, just immaculately clean windows and floors, red fabric chairs and sofas, starched white linen tablecloths, and fine china. New York offered a multitude of restaurant experiences, but it did not have a coffee house culture like European cities. Kleine Konditorei, a pitiable substitute for Berlin’s Café Einstein was the next best thing. I could linger for hours in a comfortable upholstered chair over a Kännchen Kaffee without being harassed by the wait staff to place another order every twenty minutes.
Anita, the heavyset Viennese waitress, was polishing the doorknob with a table napkin as I made my way in.
“Schönen guten Tag,” she chirped.
“Danke, ebenso,” I answered.
Ogling the cakes and pies behind the counter, I made my way to my favorite table. From my vantage point, I could scrutinize most of the inside tables as well as the outside street action. Across from me, three old ladies with hairdos resembling corrugated sheet metal, sat with gigantic portions of tort. They spoke a strange mixture of German and English. “Der Mohnkuchen is fantastic. So lecker! Please pass mir die milk und das Sweet & Low.”
I considered the special attributes of German Kaffee und Kuchen. Brewed with less Arabica beans, German coffee was thinner than Italian espresso, but superior to the dishwater that passed for American coffee. Americans never got torts right. Just like their saccharine smiles, their pastries were unbearably sweet. German pastries, like life, were both sweet and tart. As I sank my teeth into the scrumptious piece of Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte, a superb concoction of cherry sauce, flour, cream, eggs, chocolate, and Kirsch brandy, I mocked the accent I heard all around me: “Ziss Kriempuff is fäbuluss.”
As I licked my spoon I thought about my therapist’s question an hour ago: “Have you ever been with an older man?” and how I had rebuffed Vivian Deutsch: “No way. An older guy and me? You won’t see that happen any time soon.” Vivien had been adamant: “You ought to give it a try. Allow yourself to be attracted to a good kind man. A man with the qualities of a good father. It should help you move from romantic love and a fixation on sex, to sustained attachment.”
Maybe she had a point. Even Freud had called romantic love “the overestimation of the romantic object.”
As I surveyed the room, a man with the handsome look of an old-time matinee idol caught my eye. His Basque cap, silver unruly hair sticking out from underneath, and red scarf tied around his neck gave him a bohemian flair. He took cautious measured steps, and then rested on his cane until Anita came to his rescue. She led him to a table set for a large group of people, took his coat and helped him into his seat.
“Who is that?” I asked when she passed by.
“Hans Glück. He’s a writer. Part of the Stammtisch. A group of old Jewish folks who meet here every Thursday. They all speak German.”
“You are kidding?”
“No. They’ve been coming here for the past thirty-five years. No one wants to wait on them. They sit forever and don’t eat much. Terrible tippers.”
I decided to stay and ordered a brandy. As I savored my Asbach, I eavesdropped on the discussion at their table. My ears perked up when I heard them talk about Thomas Bernhard’s latest book. One man with an Austrian accent didn’t like Bernhard: “How can he call Salzburg, his hometown, a terminal disease?” Hans Glück didn’t like my favorite writer either. “Who does he think he is? James Joyce? Unreadable, this relentless, repetitive stuff.”
How could he not like Bernhard? In my canon of western literature, next to Musil and Beckett, Bernhard was the greatest writer of our century. No one else’s writing was so personal and uncompromising. Hans Glück was ignorant. How would he justify his position? I strained to listen. Against my better judgment and annoyance, I fell in love with the way he spoke. Like a bourgeois playboy in the final days of the Habsburg monarchy, his was a pure, upper class, turn-of-the-nineteenth-century German, untainted by any Anglicism. In an instant he transported me to an Arthur Schnitzler novel. Fortified by my third brandy, I asked Anita to introduce me. She did not waste time.
“Liebe Stammtischgäste, you have to meet Anna. She’s from the Rhineland, but she studied in Berlin.”
“Oh Berlin, my heart aches for you,” Hans Glück said.
Now I had a chance to study him close-up. He had bushy, unruly eyebrows, and curious pale blue eyes. His right eye had a mind of its own and made him look almost cross-eyed. The enormous dark circles under his eyes held a lot of sorrow. But his lips were full and sensual. Somewhat melancholic. He must have been a good kisser. As if he had been able to guess my thoughts, he turned to me, took my hand and kissed it gently. “Junges Fraülein, we must get to know each other. I’m quite lonely these days. Come visit me,” he pleaded. Then he rummaged through his pants pocket and produced a business card. Hans Glück, Writer, it said.

Read the rest of the story in : Love After 70, Tosteson, Pelletier, Krivchenia Edit.,
Wising Up Press, Decatur, Georgia 2008

Wilhelm Genazino: The Unpredictability of Words

2008-09-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

On November 6, 1913, Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer: “I don’t keep a diary at all, I wouldn’t know what for; nothing happens to me to stir my inmost self. This is true even when I cry, as I did yesterday in a cinema in Verona. I am capable of enjoying human relationships, but not experiencing them.”
I found six more or less obvious distortions in these five lines. The first (”I don’t keep a diary at all”) is the most obvious. Kafka’s diary is one of the most impressive documents of all time. To unmask his second distortion (“I wouldn’t know what for”) we need to insert a single sentence from this unacknowledged diary: “But the stability I gain from the smallest amount of writing is indisputably wonderful.” The third, (“Nothing happens to me to stir my inmost self”) is so audacious a lie to anyone familiar with Kafka’s biography that there is no need to correct it. The opposite is true. Too much stirred Kafka’s inmost self and he often spoke about this burden. The fourth lie (“This is true even when I cry, as I did yesterday in a cinema in Verona”) is just a progression of the third; crying is a sign of too much emotion. We can easily see the fifth (“I am capable of enjoying human relationships”) and sixth lie (“but not experiencing them”) as the attempt of a melancholic man to pull the wool over our eyes. Kafka recognized long ago that his enormous masochistic energy might allow for much, but it surely wasn’t “enjoying human relationships.”
An explanation might be that Kafka, who found refuge in writing, was not aware of his dishonesty. He shares with many others the inclination to lie – or to be more forgiving, to distort the truth- while successfully relieving his urges. This might explain why Kafka’s distortions have rarely attracted attention.
The difficulty of the writing profession rests in the author’s relationship with his work. There are many fantasized relationships but only one real one. Fantasy is external. The writer sits quietly at his desk and writes. He hopes and prays that this minimal creative effort will help him survive life’s struggles. Of course, the image of serenity at the desk is an illusion. In reality, the author battles several myths at the same time. First of all, he has to invent his job description and his place within it. His occupation is not protected. Anyone so inclined can consider or call himself a writer. Let me remind you of Joseph Conrad. At the age of fifteen, he was convinced he would be a great writer. For the next twenty-three years he struggled with the feeling he might just be playing the part of the gifted writer. Finally, at the age of thirty-eight, he delivered his first novel and proved that all his fantasy had not been in vain. Let me remind you of Egon Krenz, East Germany’s last Communist leader. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, he was asked on TV about his plans for the future. With the most irritating self-assurance, Egon Krenz stated that from then on he would be a writer.
Both anecdotes are more closely related than they seem. By exposing how they view themselves, writers reveal the imaginary core of their profession. Even serious authors get tangled up in fantasies of entitlement. Despite all their professional accomplishments, they don’t arrive at a clear job description, measurable qualifications, absolute authority, or stable experiences.
The second fantasy the writer needs is more intimate and delicate in nature. A book’s basic structure has to be anticipated and imagined before it becomes reality. This creation fantasy must be megalomaniacal; a reduction fantasy can’t produce a great work, unless, as is the case with Robert Walser, this diminution is also the book’s theme. The author feels like a phantom. He knows he’s a dreamer, but he can’t expose himself as such in public.
The writer’s public exposure brings about the third, most dramatic fantasy. The postmodern author knows the public is not eager to welcome his book. His way to examine and engage in life, via literature, has lost credibility in our canon of communication. It was different once. After the Enlightenment, when bourgeois society established itself, the writer’s voice expressed new liberties. We all know that in our postmodern times we need just as much, if not more, enlightenment. But often the best books of today do not find their readers. The individual writer has to historicize his work into a future where subsequent generations might realize how useful he could have been, had he been recognized during his lifetime. This fantasy is necessary because through it (and often only through it), can the depression of futility be averted. Many important books are denied recognition by their contemporaries. Although published, they did not rise to the top in our culture of stupefaction. Yet these authors, despite failing on a personal and artistic level, hold on to the story, as Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote, that the goal of all writers is to produce their own meaningful biography.
At first, these three fantasies mislead the author and thwart his work. He has to use his fantasized self-assurance to banish the phantoms of obstruction to the sidelines. Only then he can press forward to the true core of his work: the unimposing sentences and images he expects of himself. The irony of writing is that nothing is earned without the input of fantasy. Even great writers often speak foolishly about their work; I presume it is because of their complicated entanglement of fantasy and reality. Nobody knows how an interior emotional script becomes an outward bound text. No one knows what writers separate their sentences from. Or should I say: Expel? Solicit? Tell lies? Not knowing the answer, I offer a metaphor: Literature is the attempt to speak with pain. Great writers know the pain that dwells inside, and what this pain tells them. At the same time, they know the language of pain is always a construction. Still they repeatedly consult their pain, attend to it and listen to the call and response of text and pain, until they become its carrier.
I can’t be more specific at this moment. You have guessed by now that I am attempting to rehabilitate Franz Kafka. I spoke of his distortions, not of his dishonesty. Dishonesty alludes to intention and deliberateness, distortion to disposition. It is the disposition of the poet and writer standing guard at the gates of his consciousness. He is the first one unable to grasp how a text with unsettling immediacy emerges from life and in that instant becomes a mystery. Unlike philosophers and psychologists, poets and writers do not know what speaks through them when they experience it. They are not willing to name this voice, if it is a voice. They do not call it Being, Unconscious, Language, Other or Non-Identical. Only in this namelessness, can the unpredictability of words survive to surface from time to time as fabrication.

Translation first published in Absinthe 9, 2008, New European Writing,

Original in: Der gedehnte Blick, München, Wien 2004

PROVISIONS

2008-09-19T06:25:00.000-07:00

When my mother ate an apple, she slowly and systematically ate the entire fruit including its core and left nothing but the stem. When we threw out a half-eaten piece of fruit, she rescued it from the garbage and finished it. When we failed to clean our plates, she took our unfinished pork chops and gnawed the bones clean. She once made the mistake of baking a crumb cake with salt instead of sugar. The taste was revolting and the family refused to eat it. But without blinking an eye, she ate the entire cake.
It was 1964 and all of Germany was on a feeding frenzy. Even our Chancellor Erhard was chubby. The war had ended and food was no longer rationed. People stuffed themselves to make up for the times they had to do without. One room in our basement was set aside as a root cellar. Apples, potatoes, preserved fruits, pickles and sauerkraut in mason jars sat next to several five-pound bags of flour and sugar. We had no sense of security. Another war might break out anytime. “The next war won’t be fought with tanks and horses. It will be a nuclear war and the entire world will go to hell,” my mother said with teary eyes. I wasn’t worried. My hometown had air raid shelters and bunkers left over from the last war. We had food to survive for a few months.
My mother spread a slice of black bread thick with butter and put a piece of Schwartemagen on top. I hated Schwartemagen, a jellied loaf, made from the edible parts of the pig’s head and stuffed into a casing of pig’s intestine. It tasted as horrible as it sounded. I hated butter, but our family had had to do without butter, the best butter, for so long that it was a crime to refuse it. No matter how disgusting it looked or tasted, my brother and I were forced to eat everything.
“Why that face?’ my mother asked. We had just gathered for Abendbrot, our evening meal.
“I’m not hungry,” I lied, then turned to my brother and rolled my eyes. Heinrich was happily loading up on the slimy stuff. He had no problem with Schwartemagen.
“The poor children of India are starving, and you’re not even finishing your Butterbrot,” my mother scolded.
“Send it to India, then,” I mumbled.
She slapped me across the face before I had time to duck. My mother did not put up with my lack of respect. “Ungrateful brat! You’re lucky to have enough to eat. You have no idea what it’s like to go hungry.”
I did know; I was reminded of it every day. I had heard her story of deprivation a thousand times and could recite her litany by heart. When she was my age, her stomach had growled with hunger pangs all the time. The family lived on cabbage for months. Dinner was often Einbrennsuppe, a soup made with a drop of lard, flour, and water. A teaspoon of butter was a real luxury. A hardboiled egg had to be divided among four people. There was no coffee during the war, only Muckefuck, a grain beverage that tasted just as repulsive as it sounded.
For punishment I had to help my mother make preserves. I stared at the mountains of boysenberries, currants, sour cherries and rhubarb on the kitchen table. My mother started on the cherries and her lecture: “In the hard winter of 1942 people traded their jewelry, damask tablecloths, and even their wedding rings for food. I was sixteen, the oldest. They sent me and my aunt on day trips to the Hunsrück, to beg or trade our own wine for food.” I thought I had heard it all before, but this opening made my ears perk up. I had been to the Hunsrück, a small mountain range, and tried to imagine my mother hiking from village to village.
“You mean you went from door to door like Gypsies?”
“Kind of. We knocked on many doors. Most people didn’t even open their door. But when they did, I always tried to peek in.”
“What did you see?” I was curious now.
“Watch that knife. You almost cut yourself.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. Just go on.”
My mother emptied a sieve full of cherries into a gigantic pot by the sink, rinsed her hands, wiped them on her apron and returned to the table. “I saw tables bursting with black bread. I saw pitchers of milk, sausages, ham and pickles. I saw all the foods we had done without. What tormented me most was the smell of bacon and Handkäs.”
I hated that stinky, smelly cheese, her favorite, and could not comprehend why she liked it so much.
“Look at you, your mouth all red from eating too many cherries. Work a little faster or else we’ll be sitting here all night. Start on the currants now.” Cleaning the currents was a struggle. The tiny berries never came off the stem easily. Having to peel off the even tiny black flower remnants was maddening.
“How did the people react? What did they say to you?” I asked.
“They kept on eating, stared at us, and then told us to go home. They weren’t interested in trading a bottle of wine for a piece of bread or sausage. Maybe we would have been luckier if we had fine linens or gold.”
“That’s mean,” I said. “What happened next?”
“I tried not to faint from hunger. I was so excited by the aromas from the kitchen.”
I looked at my mother, her large breasts and wide hips. It was hard to imagine her as a skinny teenager.
“I was so mad, I prayed all the way back to Langenlonsheim ‘Lord please remove my hatred for these people from my heart,’” she said.

Read the rest of the story in H. Tosteson, C. D. Brockett (Edit.) Families: The Frontline of Pluralism, Wising Up Press, 2008

A Visit to Germany

2008-09-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

Once I had my green card, I could travel home again. My mother’s excitement had been building for months. In every letter and every phone call she asked:
“What shall I cook for you and your husband? What do you want to eat the day you arrive?”
“Cook something typically German,” I told her.
She did. The first evening we sat down to a substantial meal of fatty Schweinshaxen, sauerkraut and mashed potatoes.
“Best to have a good foundation, so you won’t get too drunk,” my mother said toasting with Earnest.
“Summ Woll.”
I had tried to teach Earnest a few German phrases, but he was hopeless. While my mother delighted in her new son-in-law, his manly voice, good manners, handsome looks and funny attempts at German, my brother’s face turned sour. Heinrich did not approve of my move to fascist America. The America of Ronald Reagan, the land of Right to Life fanatics and Evangelical Fundamentalists.
“Anna, tell Earnest he’s not the first black man I met,” my mother said.
“Is that so?” Earnest grinned.
“Langenlonsheim was liberated by American soldiers. When the GI’s rolled into our village with their tanks, I was scared of the Black soldiers. I had never seen Black people before. When an old man warned us that Blacks weren’t human like us and that the soldiers might rape us, all the girls ran home. I hid at home, but I shouldn’t have been afraid. They were very friendly. They gave us chocolate and chewing gum.”
I translated the portion about the gum and chocolate.
“Tell your mother her pork knuckles are almost as good as my mother’s.”
My mother watched Earnest struggle with his knife and fork. He did not manage to cut much meat off the bone. She came to his rescue. Holding the meat up with her fingers, she took a big bite. Earnest, relieved, followed her example. She nodded approvingly, “No need to feel shy. It tastes better this way.”
I studied my brother. Heinrich ate mechanically, without pleasure. He drank too fast. After my father’s death, my brother had taken on my father’s mannerisms, patterns of speech and way of bossing my mother around. Sitting in my father’s chair, under the crucifix, he barked at her: “We need more beer here, Mutti” and sounded just like the old man.
After dinner my brother proposed a trip to Vater Rhein, a brewery tavern. “You’ll be able to taste real beer, not that dishwater they sell in the US,” he promised his brother-in-law. It was a cool and cloudy August evening. Germany’s endless grey winters and cold and rainy summers had always depressed me. Now after years of tropical heat and the unbearable humidity of New York summers, I enjoyed the grey skies. I wasn’t gloomy, rather pleasantly melancholic.
On the way to the pub, I savored the scenery. The factories with their gigantic chimneys weren’t as ugly as I remembered. “Hein, do you remember how we played in the coal dumps. Wasn’t it fun to slide down the slag heaps?”
My brother shrugged his shoulders. “I guess.”
“Remember how mother had to waste a pound of butter, how she scrubbed us for hours to make us look like white children again?”
Hein did not share any of my excitement. I turned to Earnest.
“You might be in for a special treat. Twice a week, the blast furnaces of Krupp Steal light up the sky. It’s awesome. Different shades of flaming reds and oranges you’ve never seen before.”
“Can’t wait,” Earnest said.
There was the unpleasant smell from the Chemical plant. Still, after being away for a while, it was rather romantic. Keyed up by the view of the green meadows and the majestic river, I recited my favorite Heinrich Heine poem for my husband.
Mein Liebchen wir saßen beisammen
Traulich im leichten Kahn
Die Nacht war still und wir schwammen
Auf weiter Wasserbahn

“That sounds lovely,” Earnest said. ”Must be a romantic fellow, this Heine.”
“He was a romantic fellow. Born in Düsseldorf on the Rhine, not far from here, “
I said.
“Your homeboy,” Earnest chuckled.
As soon as we stepped into Vater Rhein, all eyes turned to Earnest. I was glad that he had left his bone earrings and bear claw necklace at my mother’s house. He was exotic enough. People in my hometown had no problem staring at strangers. Perhaps the only Black men they knew were Muhammad Ali and Sammy Davis Jr.? We sat down at the barrel-table and waited for the burly waiter in his blue work shirt and apron to bring the first round. He came with a tray full of small glasses of Diebels Alt, the local specialty-- a copper colored, slightly sweet dark beer. Happy to hear him speak in the local dialect, I didn’t mind his gruff manner. Smiling was not common in this part of the world. If you wanted to see smiling people, you went on vacation to the Italian Rivera or the island of Mallorca. I didn’t need to be around smiling faces when I was home, among my people.
My brother spotted a co-worker and shouted across the room. “Manfred, come over. Meet my sister and brother-in-law from New York.” All heads turned in our direction. It was rare for tourists to visit Vater Rhein. I eavesdropped on people’s conversations. The local dialect melted my heart. The view of the Rhine was sensational. Although it was 9:00 p.m., it was still bright outside. How I had missed the long European summer evenings. I watched the barges headed for Rotterdam, Basel, and Cologne. On one barge, a woman was hanging up laundry, on another a terrier looked expectantly at me. The boats’ lovely puttering sound put me into a dreamy state. I remembered the train rides along the Rhine on visits to my grandmother. The castles, fables and the tale of the Loreley Mountain. I had pictured myself as a stowaway heading for Holland, the North Sea, and finally the Atlantic Ocean on my way to America, the country of my dreams. The land of the Little Rascals, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton. A country where having fun was mandatory.
When the waiter set down the slender glasses I snapped out of my reveries. Heinrich and Manfred took two beers each. “The first round is on me,” my brother announced. The waiter took out his pen and noted six beers on Heinrich’s coaster. “Na denn, Prost,” Heinrich said and clinked glasses. Manfred emptied his in one gulp, Hein took two for his. They wasted no time and moved on to the next round. Earnest and I looked at each other. I shrugged my shoulders. “Guess, they have to prove their manhood,” Earnest whispered.
Hein inspected Earnest as if he wasn’t good enough for me. Hein and Manfred stepped up their drinking tempo. The waiter served us in shorter intervals. “Let’s see if the American can hold his beer,” my brother said. I was worried for Earnest. Like most Americans, he wasn’t accustomed to real beer. The waiter noted that they had twelve beers. My brother and his friend were not the only ones getting drunk. Many of the guests at Vater Rhein were working themselves up into a drunken stupor. In the rear, a group of fans celebrated the victory of their soccer team. They made sure the rest of the guests knew about it. “M--S--V, M--S--V, let’s drink to the MSV,” they hooted every time the waiter brought another round. Back by the brewing-kettle, two parties battled each other for dominance. They sang songs praising the beauty of the Rhine. “Why was it so beautiful on the Rhine? Because of the jolly maidens and the thirsty fellows.”
The singing and excessive smoking got on my nerves. I’d just kicked the habit a few weeks earlier and worried about a relapse. “Ask Earnest what his position on Reagan’s foreign policy is,” Heinrich demanded. During high school my brother had fallen into the clutches of the Communist Party. He decided against college and chose the revolutionary path: working among the masses in the factories. He never approved of my choices. We had been arguing about politics all our lives. Now he was ready to start with my husband. I translated the request. Earnest was perplexed.
“I have no idea what Reagan’s politics are.”
“But he’s your president. Aren’t you concerned?” my brother screamed.
My stomach felt queasy.
“Not really. I don’t care about politics,” Earnest said.
How could he be so relaxed under an interrogation like this? He had never experienced the barbs of my brother’s fury.
“What do you care about then?” Hein yelled.
“Interior decorating. Whether I should change my slipcovers from hunter green to midnight blue. Whether that would match my carpet.”
“What did he say?” Heinrich asked.
I didn’t dare to translate, but my brother, despite his proletarian demeanor, was quite well-versed in the English language. He was outraged. “The whole world is going to hell because of your government and you worry about your sofa!”
He had a point. I had been mad at Earnest for not exercising his right to vote. When was the last time he participated in politics? During the Vietnam War?
“You need to pay attention to your president’s position on rearmament. He wants to install more missiles in Europe,” Manfred said as his face turned purple.
”I don’t know anything about that,” Earnest said, without sounding the least bit apologetic.
“Don’t you read the papers?” Heinrich countered.
“Not really. I’m not interested in politics.”
Manfred was beside himself. US ignorance had infiltrated his favorite pub. My brother lit a new cigarette with the butt of the old one. Greedy, he inhaled as he worked himself up for further confrontation. The waiter brought another round of beers. One, two gulps and the small glasses stood empty again. Manfred called the waiter back to the table. The coaster had no more room for notations. The waiter turned it over and used the back to write on.
“I expected more from a Black man,” Hein said, “You are a bad example for your race.”
“How dare you say something like that,” I screamed.
Earnest covered his ears. My voice must have been several octaves too high.
“A black man should be aware of his country’s history. Aware of his people’s struggle,” Hein lectured.
Manfred nodded his approval.
“Well, maybe he is,” I said, hardly believing it myself.
“Does he think with his dick? Does he have a big one?” Manfred asked.
I was stunned. I had experienced bigotry a few times in Earnest’s company. While walking arm in arm in SoHo, a car with a New Jersey license plate had stopped next to us. One of four young men stuck his head out and yelled “Why don’t you let us fuck her, brother” before they sped away. This sort of conduct could be expected in New Jersey or Queens, but not here in my hometown, in the company of my brother and his friend, two revolutionary thinkers.
Earnest had not understood a word. I had been looking forward to this visit. The Rhine, my friends, my mother’s cooking, the Tatort detective series on TV. When Earnest got up to go to the bathroom, the revolutionaries took turns attacking me.
“The US is a fascist country.”
”Reagan is a madman. How can you live in such a country?”
“Voluntarily!”
“Look,” I defended myself, “not all Americans are alike. Some even read the New York Times.”
“But look at the politics of the country.”
“Not everyone supports it. At least none of the people I know.”
My arguments fell on deaf ears. Only one thing mattered. The principle. Reagan’s foreign policy had brought us dangerously close to a war. WAR. Didn’t I know what that meant?” Earnest came back to find me shouting on top of my lungs:
”No, I don’t know what war is. Neither do you. We have never lived through a war.” My brother was a pompous ass. So was Manfred. I was tired of their pontificating. They let me have it.
“You’re a fascist pig, yourself.”
“A degenerated Philistine.”
In our teenage years Heinrich and I argued all the time. At times, we chased each other around the kitchen table shouting obscenities at each other. My helpless mother tried to be the peace- broker: “Stop, you’re going to kill each other one of these days. For Christ’s sake, remember, you’re brother and sister.” He was my brother. But he was a fool who had not learned anything in all these years.
People at neighboring tables stared at us. Heinrich and Manfred chain-smoked. I was tempted to light up myself. Earnest looked helpless as if racking his brains for a way to protect me from their attacks. I was ready to leave it all: Vater Rhein, this town, this state, Germany. I wanted to get on a plane and return to New York. Stay in New York forever and never set foot in this country full of dogmatic idiots ever again.
The waiter stopped by our table. Earnest took two glasses for himself. Manfred and Heinrich moved in on me like two birds fighting over a crumb of bread. Each one tried to outdo the other in attacking me. Manfred tried to justify an attack on the US Air Base in Frankfurt.
“You fools. Two people ended up dead and one wounded. What was the point? Do you really believe you can change people’s minds by using such strategies?” I screamed. They never got a chance to answer. Earnest, a beer glass in each hand emptied them out over my opponents’ heads, in one swift move. The beer ran down my brother’s face and soaked his shirt. Neither Heinrich nor Manfred said a word. A temporary cease.

First published in universaltable.org/A Foot in Two Countries

Mein Harlem

2008-08-28T10:35:00.000-07:00

Harlem, even at its worst, has always been good to me. The first friend I made in New York after leaving my home in

Germany

lived in Harlem. We met in 1982 at an audition at La Mama. I was excited when Dana Jackson invited me to her house. She lived with her mother in East Harlem, not far from where my favorite writer, James Baldwin, was raised. In my German guidebook Manhattan ended at 96th Street and foreign visitors were warned not to venture beyond because they might not leave Harlem or Washington Heights alive. But I wasn’t afraid of Harlem. I already knew Harlem from James Baldwin’s novels, short stories and essays that I had read in the German translation.

As soon as I emerged from the No. 2 train at the corner of 125^th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, the air was full of danger and menace. The only white person on the street, I held my head high and walked with confidence east for a block, then turned right onto what Baldwin had called “wide, filthy, hostile Fifth Avenue.” I looked for the grocery store’s Jewish proprietor who had given the Baldwin family credit, the shoe repair store’s Negro proprietor, the Buy Black street corner meetings and the Holy Rollers Baldwin had described. I hoped to find the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly where James got his start as a youthful preacher.

Instead I found blocks of abandoned and burnt-out buildings that looked like Germany at the end of World War II. Street vendors aggressively hawked their wares and Black Israelite preachers pontificated to their street flock. One of them, looking extraterrestrial in his shiny silver headband and belt, suddenly spewed hatred in my direction. “Whites are the incarnation of evil. God will wipe out all the Christians and Muslims. Only we are his chosen people.” I hastened my pace. Shady characters lurked in doorways. Young men offered me drugs. A good number of people had collapsed on the pavement, strung out on potent liquor or drugs. I was relieved to finally arrive safely at Dana’s home.

The Jacksons’ residence was fortified like a medieval castle with window gates, burglar bars, slide bolts, deadbolts and impressive looking high-security police locks. Dana explained that they had been broken into plenty of times: from the roof, the backyard, the basement, and through the kitchen window. Once I passed the security barrier, I found three elegantly furnished floors, an entire brownstone just for Dana and her mother. There were bay windows, a graceful parlor, shiny parquet floors, fireplaces and a library with thousands of records and books. Miss Jackson could have started her own radio show with her outstanding R&B collection.

Dana’s mother felt sorry for me, all alone in New York, so far away from my own mother, and adopted me for Thanksgiving, Christmas and many Sunday dinners. On my first visit I stared in disbelief at the abundance of food, the visual and olfactory feast spread out before me. The rich burgundy tablecloth was covered with plates, bowls, terrines and glass candlesticks. There were three plates for each of us, rolled-up linen napkins and a confusing assortment of cutlery. Unsure about what to do with all those knives and forks, I waited for Miss Jackson to start. She wore a chic flower-print dress that clung to her curvaceous body. Her hair was done in the latest Jheri-curl fashion and the bright orange of her lipstick and perfectly manicured nails matched the colors of her dress. So different from my mother who always wore an apron or a housedress, never a stylish dress like Miss Jackson. My mother hated make-up. She had been indoctrinated by Hitler’s youth organization for girls. A German girl is a pure girl. A pure girl doesn’t smoke or paint her face. Only whores do.

“Child, are you hungry?” Miss Jackson asked me. Then she folded her hands neatly in front of her chest. “Dear Lord,” she said, “thank you for all the blessings you have bestowed upon us. And thank you for bringing us this nice visitor from Germany.” Overcome, I turned beet red. I was twenty-six and no one had called me Child in a very long time. At home saying grace was simply going through the motions, mumbling the words without thinking. Miss Jackson made up her own prayer. She spoke like a poet and infused each word with deep emotion. An atheist since forth grade, I was ready to join her flock.

I was taken with Miss Jackson’s grace, hospitality and her amazing culinary talents. She introduced me to new foods: black-eyed peas, mustard greens, okra and best of all sweet potato pie. Her collard greens looked and smelled similar to my mother’s Grünkohl, but tasted so much better. Her smothered pork chops were the best I ever had. I found that black people, like the Germans, devoured pig’s feet, ham hocks and tripe. What we called Saumagen, they called chitlins and maw. Our drinking habits, however, were worlds apart. The Jacksons did not drink beer or wine with dinner. They drank ginger ale with their meals and strange alcoholic concoctions before or after.

Miss Jackson taught me about Black history, about Harlem as “the capital of Black America,” the excitement of the Civil Rights Movement, the riots and the devastation caused by drugs that followed. “The middle class moved to the suburbs and left nothing but poor people behind. Harlem turned into a slum.” A supervisor at AT&T, she purchased her brownstone on East 122^nd Street during that time and was very proud to have made it on her own. Smart women buy low and sell high.

A legendary beauty, Miss Jackson had enjoyed many suitors in her youth, but never married. She had banished Dana’s father, “the sperm donor,” from her life. He drank too much and “was a heap of trouble.” She had a steady boyfriend, but would not let him move in with her. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Hank, the owner of a trucking company, was a perfect gentleman. He took her to fine restaurants, Broadway musicals and weekend trips to Atlantic City. For her birthday, he bought her serious jewelry. He let her pick out his clothes at SYMS and agreed to have the rims of his hats taken in, since he, a native of South Carolina, looked “too country” for her taste. I thought of Miss Jackson as a feminist icon and tried to follow her advice. Don’t let a man treat your ass like a comfort station. My mother, afraid to be on her own, had stayed in a loveless marriage with an irascible husband. She could have learned a thing or two from Miss Jackson’s chutzpa.

Read the rest of the essay in epiphanyzine.com or ep;phany; listen to the podcast of the New York Public Library's reading series Perodically Speaking: Literary Magazine Editors Introduce Emerging Writers from May 13, 2008.

My Super and I

2008-08-09T02:31:00.000-07:00

In February of 1999, I moved to Harlem. Bringing down the garbage for the first time, I met our middle-aged super.

“Hi, I’m Angela. They call me the Clean Nazi. I really appreciate how you separate your garbage. You do a great job tying up your recyclable newspapers and cardboard boxes,” she said.

After my initial shock of witnessing a black woman calling herself a Nazi, I answered: “Hi, my name is Anna. Thanks for the compliment. I’m from Germany. Recycling is a religion in my homeland. You might go to jail if you don’t separate your brown from your green and white glass.”

“My kind of country. Welcome to Harlem. How do you like it so far?”

While I stuffed my laundry into the dryer, we talked. Angela, from Trinidad, didn’t mind White people moving to her Harlem. “We have too many people with poor breeding the way it is now.” Our conversation turned personal. We found out we were the same age.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you menopausal?” she said.

“I stopped menstruating a year ago.”

“A drag, isn’t it?

“I wake up at four every morning and can’t go back to sleep.”

“Do you take hormones?”

“No, I believe in really good quality dark chocolate.”

“You’re my kind of woman.”

On my next trip down to the basement I brought her some of the Novesia Goldnuss Schokolade from my mother’s care package. Angela inspected the green and gold wrapping, the see-through window revealing dark chocolate with gigantic hazelnuts. “Hmm, that looks different,” she said as she ripped the package open. She put the first piece in her mouth and closed her eyes in blissful surrender. I have never had sex with a woman, but Angela looked positively orgasmic. I felt like a voyeur watching the chocolate and hazelnut dance around in her mouth. Finally she opened her eyes.

“Good Lord, this is divine. I’ll throw my Hershey’s away for this. What makes this so good?”

“The right kind of fat. Nothing but cocoa butter. No fillers and additives,” I said.

Angela licked her lips. “How can I make it up to you?”

“No need,” I said, “I just wanted to give you something to take the edge off those menopausal mood swings.”

Then I threw the bright yellow Ikea bags with my freshly laundered clothes over my shoulders and made my way up the stairs.

“Wait a minute,” she stopped me. “Do you have any plans for Saturday night?”

“No, not really.”

“Want to come to my birthday party? We’ll have a male stripper to entertain a crowd of menopausal woman.”

Of course I wanted to go.

(First published in boomerwomenspeak.com)

A Venice Moment

2008-07-23T08:34:00.001-07:00

While taking the grand tour of Venice on the vaporetto Nr.1, a family from Berlin occupies the prime outside viewing seats on the boat’s bow. Besides taking up more than one seat per person with their massive behinds, they store their outsized luggage on the remaining empty seats. In their excitement and enthusiasm, they report loudly on everything they observe. “Die Rialto Bridge. Der Canale Grande. Wie schön!” The family feverously videotapes and photographs the sites. “Almost as nice as our Wannsee,” the father says. “For sure,” his wife answers. An elderly Italian lady, desperate for a place to sit, complains to the sprawled out Germans about their quest for Lebensraum. The tourists shrug their shoulders and point to their luggage. “No place to put,” the father says. He opens his backpack, takes out a package of German chocolate, unwraps it, and offers it to his wife and children. The elderly lady tries again: “Please, put the suitcases inside the boat. I want to sit down.” The Germans ignore her. They enjoy their chocolate and the sights of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. The mother studies her Polyglott Venedig guide book. She lectures the rest of the family about the sights. “This is the former German Handelshof, today the main post office. “ The father nods approvingly. The elderly lady comes back with a handsome official in a light blue short sleeve shirt and navy pants. He’s obviously in charge of this vaporetto. “You must put suitcase to special place, inside boat," he says in broken English. The Germans don’t move. They talk among themselves. The father asks the older daughter to translate. “We don’t trust people. People steal our suitcases.” she says. The Germans keep their eyes on the palazzi in front of them. The father finishes the rest of the chocolate. The mother turns to the father. “We can’t leave our suitcases inside and sit outside. I don’t trust the Italians. They’ll steal our suitcases on our first day.” The daughter films a gondolieri. “He’s so cute,” she says. The handsome man in charge of the vaporetto comes back and forces the Germans to put their suitcases on their laps. The Germans are not happy. They can hardly see anything. They look ridiculous, extremely uncomfortable, stuffed into their narrow seats with their massive suitcases on their laps. The elderly lady sits down triumphantly. She puts on a pair of oversized Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and turns to face the Germans. In flawless English with a slight Chicagoan accent, she says: “Tourists have many rights in Venice, but they don’t have all the rights.”

P.S. I observed this confrontation during my stay in Venice where taught creative writing ( see summeracademyvenice.com.)

ICH BIN EIN NEW YORKER

2008-06-30T00:42:00.000-07:00

TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, I walked out of my old life and into New York.

I was an earnest young German who had just earned a master’s degree in social work from a university in West Berlin and was here on a brief vacation. But from the moment I first stepped out of the Hotel Earle, at Waverly Place and MacDougal Street, and into Washington Square Park, I was smitten with the city.

It was a Saturday afternoon, a time when German cities turn into graveyards. But in the park, blasting radios battled one another for dominance, elderly men played speed chess with youthful contenders, and dope peddlers, fire eaters and aspiring folk singers competed for the public’s attention. Children on the swings shrieked with delight, while hyperactive small dogs engaged in rough-and-tumble play.

I was 25, love-struck and delusional, and I decided to stay. Ignoring all the illegal immigrant’s red flags (no health insurance, no green card, no work, no savings), I cashed in my return ticket.

In New York, my vocabulary was that of a 10-year-old. I could barely read a tabloid like The New York Post. But I was confident that I’d conquer the English language in no time. I decided on a strict immersion regime: no hanging out with Germans, no German books or movies.

Men found my accent mysterious and my errors endearing. “Just continue to talk, go on about anything, even the weather,” one admirer pleaded. I was often the funny foreigner. En route to a dinner date, the zipper of my skirt broke and sent me rushing to Woolworth’s. My question — “Do you carry security needles?” — drew blank stares. “For when you need to hold it together!” I insisted. More blank stares. Finally, I took out my pen and drew two pieces of fabric held together with a safety pin.

But if my 10-year-old’s grasp of English was funny to others, it was often mortifying to me. I was enamored of a handsome sales clerk at the Spring Street Bookstore. Mustering my courage, I stepped up to the counter and asked, “Do you sell Granta?” I had seen the magazine before and remembered the edition devoted to Germany.

“What issue are you looking for?” my heartthrob asked.

Issue? Issue? Unable to understand, I blushed and fled. At home, I scavenged my dictionaries. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language listed nine definitions of “issue.” What was it: a point of debate, or a discharge of pus? Then again, what was pus?

Humor almost completely disappeared from my life. Imagine the anguish of sitting with a group of people, all of them roaring with laughter, while you, the oddball foreigner, struggle to grasp the jokes. I consoled myself with Buster Keaton silents at Film Forum.

Reading, too, deserted me as a source of pleasure. Someone recommended Thomas Pynchon’s novel “The Crying of Lot 49”; flummoxed, I gave up after the opening sentence. In Germany, I had published some poetry and personal essays, but here I stopped writing. Who, other than Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, could compose literature in two languages?

I grew terrified of leaving telephone messages. Words like vegetable, refrigerator and schedule tortured me. And how did Americans manage to press the tip of their tongue behind their front teeth to produce the proper “th” sound?

Children learn their first language naturally, without formal instruction. But what about those of us who must learn a second language at 20, 30 or 60? Today, almost half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home. I don’t know what the percentage was 25 years ago, but I recall that my manicurist, from Uzbekistan, had a master’s degree in sociology; a livery cabdriver had been an engineer in Senegal; the doorman of my friend’s high-rise was an anthropologist from Colombia.

TO make a living, I sold nuts from a pushcart and cleaned houses, mostly for elderly Jewish ladies from Poland, Ukraine and Russia who had lived in the East Village for decades. My favorite was Ms. Rabinowitz, 82 when I met her, from Odessa. Her children lived in large houses in California and New Jersey, but she refused to join them. “You’ll see,” she told me. “Once New York gets into your blood, you won’t be able to leave.”

To ease the pangs I was feeling, I watched the Miners’ Club from Recklinghausen, Miss German America and Bavarian Club Edelweiss in the annual German-American Steuben Parade, which will take place, for the 50th time, on Saturday. When I felt truly homesick, I went to East 86th Street, then the heart of the city’s German community, to visit the Kleine Konditorei restaurant, whose Black Forest torte was almost as good as my mother’s.

The customers, elderly men in Tyrolean hats and ladies with hair resembling corrugated sheet metal, spoke a strange mixture of German and English. “Willkomm, mei ladies,” one would say. “Du lukst wanderfull mit dem neuen hairdo.” “Try the Mohnkuchen,” said another. “So lecker!”

It took five years before I mastered The New York Times, seven years before I started to dream and think in English. By then I felt confident enough to work as a psychotherapist, one profession in which a German accent was no hindrance, and began a three-year training program in Gestalt therapy.

But only after a decade did I feel wholly comfortable speaking English, an achievement I paid for by a gradual loss of fluency in my mother tongue. Now, whenever I spoke German, I had to switch my brain from English to German. “Meine Arbeit ist zu stressful,” I used to say on the phone to my mother, just like the émigrés at the Kleine Konditorei. “Ich brauche unbedingt vacation.”

Published 9.9.2007, The New York Times

TWO LANGUAGES IN MY HEAD

2008-06-22T09:07:00.001-07:00

I feel pure love for the English language, a love not soiled, not conflicting. The language of my childhood is the language of fear, the language of horror. I have been beaten up and humiliated to German words. “You’ll never amount to anything," my father said. "You are a quarter-liter jug and I’m trying to pour a half- liter into you," the teacher said.

English: James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Easy Rider, Woody Allen, Talking Heads.

Deutsch: Heine, Hölderlin, Beethoven, Brecht, Fassbinder, Fußball.

The bluest sky in the world, the New York evening light, the majestic clouds over Provincetown are English. Gray, drizzling skies, the melancholy Lower-Rhine, poplars standing at attention like soldiers are German.

German is the language of the internal -- confined, conscientious, meticulous, encapsulated. Glück (happiness), lifelong friendships and profound conversations are German

English is the language of the external-- superficial, uncomplicated and unreliable. Fun, fleeting acquaintances and small talk are English.

English is the weightless summer dress; German the heavy winter coat.

English is doing; German is being.

The German sailors in the New Yorker subway talk among themselves. "Where do we get off for Central Park?" I secretly listen to their conversations. How beautiful the German sounds. How familiar. Like Christmas cookies and Glühwein (mulled wine). Here in New York, I am allowed to intrude in their conversation. The sailors made a mistake when they got on the express train. "If you don't get out at the next stop, you’ll land in Harlem," I say. The young man from Heidelberg beams. I speak his language.

Rita, a psychiatrist from Berlin, is visiting. We are sitting in the subway. Rita has come alive. She feels enthusiastic, inspired; she raves about New York. The furrowed, old lady opposite us slides nervously back and forth on the bench. She trembles, she is terribly pale. Her eyes are full of fear. She pierces us with her gaze. Suddenly, she gets up, positions herself before us and screams: “Don’t you dare speak that bastard language in my town. Get out! Get out now!”

The German journalist is distraught. He dreads having to return to Germany. He doesn't want to go back into his charming house in Hamburg-Eppendorf. His wife and daughters don't want to go back either. Soon the girls will be sitting in a German class room agian. The fifteen year-old takes the PSAT regardless. No question, she will attend an American university. The father doesn’t know how he’s going to pay for it.

Forced to return to Europe, they miss New York terribly. The New York ease, the small surprises in everyday life, the friendliness without a cause, the humor. Precious New York moments.

The New Yorker subway brought me and a German-Romanian writer together. My friend Liz sat next to Carmen-Francesca Banciu in the subway and started to talk to her. She found out, that Carmen-Francesca is a writer who lives in Berlin. "Then you have to meet my friend Anna. She's from Berlin too. She's a writer too."

Friendships are formed effortlessly in New York. Often they don’t last. But would we have met in Berlin or Bucharest the same way?

Thoughts of an Emerging Writer

2008-06-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

I was thrilled to participate in Periodically Speaking: Literary- Magazine Editors Introduce Emerging Writers at the New York Public Library on May 13, 08 (find the podcast at http://media.nypl.org/periodically_speaking/periodically_speaking_5_13_08.mp3)

Willard Cook, editor of Ep;phany, had invited me. Four years ago, at the Cornelia Street Café, I read a story in public for the first time. I was introduced as an emerging writer then also.

English is not my native tongue. Often, I think I know the meaning of a word when I really don't. Having been called an emerging writer twice I finally looked up the word. I always pictured a diver jumping from a spring board, doing a few twists and somersaults, then emerging from the water and leaving the pool.

How was this connected to writing? The Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines emerge /emerging as 1.come up or out into view, 2. become known, be revealed to, 3. become recognized or prominent, 4. become apparent.

When does a writers stop to be an emerging writer? When she has published a book? When her book sells well? When she gets reviewed? When she gets a good review? When she makes the best seller list? Literary fame is a fickle mistress. German writer Wilhelm Genazino wrote in his essay A gift That Fails. On the Lack of Literary Success (translated by me and published this month with Dimension 2):

What is success? What is failure? Is publication success or is publication followed by silence the beginning of failure? … Isn't literature, not belonging to a society where mere literary success does not matter at all, the biggest failure?....The names Musil, Svevo, Fleißer, and Broch stand for an interdependent pain tumbling down our cultural century with unhurried brutality. Ronald Barthes called writing “spending oneself for nothing.” There is true despair about literature’s afterlife hidden in this phrase’s mundane elegance.

I feel honored to be considered an emerging writer, honored that some editors appreciate my work and my take on life. I am glad that my friends enjoy my stories. It doesn't matter that I do not have an agent, that I have not published a novel, that I will never make the New York Times bestseller list.

Writing is foremost my solitary pleasure. I write to please myself. But I also write to communicate. I reach out to the reader to share my experiences, my thoughts and my delight in storytelling. I hope to enter into a dialogue with the reader. I respectfully disagree with Ronald Barthes.

Writing I'm spending myself for something.