Spring Fever and Wanderlust

May has gone by in a flash. From the very first day of the month, there was always something going on. The first of May meant a huge street demonstration in Kreuzberg, our neighboring barrio. I was told it was going to be big and crazy, and it did not disappoint. It's easy to get the impression walking around Berlin, that it's gotten pretty polished lately. There are posh boutiques and cafes in even the most traditionally modest neighborhoods, even in my neighborhood, Neukölln, which traditionally doesn't have anything you could call a "scene". Rent prices are rising fast. These days you have to look a little harder to rent a room in a shared flat for less than 200 EUR a month (including utilities naturally). Even beer prices are skyrocketing, well above 2.50 EUR for a half liter in some bars and clubs! With these sorts of developments as well as the gentrification of Kreuzberg and the former Eastern districts, it's easy to think Berlin is fast loosing it's poor, punk edge.

The First of May celebrations, however, convinced me that Berlin is still keeping it weird. Berlin's very handsome and openly gay mayor Klaus Wowereit infamously stated that Berlin is "Poor but Sexy". May Day proved him right, my goodness there are a lot of good looking young people in Berlin! Of course, I only took pictures of the weird ones, who were out in full force. As far the part about being poor is concerned, my roommate confirmed that when she told me that she, earning net 1,500 EUR a month, belongs to the highest earning 20% of Berlin's population. That doesn't seem to keep the population down too much though, because at least for the moment, life remains dirt cheap in Berlin.

So, while I did not see the open warfare which I have been told often breaks out on May Day here, I did see a wild group of people, lots of near altercations, and many many many riot police. I was told that there were up to 8,000 police on duty, including a special Anti-Konflikt team. It was strange to see people pushing their baby strollers past the groups of police in full riot gear. As we did not care to see for sure if violence would indeed break out, we did as all nice kids on May Day, and got the heck out of there before nightfall. Here are some pictures of the scene for your enjoyment.

The Scene on Kottbusser Tor. Imagine loud socialist hip-hop in Spanish (the language of left in Europe it seems) to complete the scene.

Lots more people on Oranienstr. Less militant and more curious onlookers.

Aren't they lovely?

Barely managing to stay upright, and looking good doing it.

I nice little line-up, Anti-Konflikt Team on the job.

Now that you've had a taste of down and dirty Berlin on May Day, I'll write about a different sort of German experience. Train travel in Germany is notoriously expensive. A two hour trip which would cost you 4 Euros in Italy, costs 100 Euros in Germany. There's one little exception to this rule, the Schönes Wochenende Ticket, a wonderful ticket for a poor student (or TA) and four of her friends which allows her to travel as much as she wants in Germany on a Saturday or Sunday for only 35 Euros. Split between five that makes for pretty cheap travel. One catch is you've got to use regional trains, which more than double the time your journey takes. No problem for us though, we're in no hurry. On this past occasion, we set out for a little place called Quedlingburg, which is a town so old, not a building in the place stands up straight. Some of the houses were so narrow, people with a more generous modern girth would have a hard time turning around in them. I'll spare you too much more talk about it, and just get to the pictures...





My final adventure this month was also the greatest. When Alex came to visit, I planned a surprise for his birthday: a trip to Italy. I got a good deal on tickets to Pisa (cheaper than a German train), and since that was near the area I'd been farming in a couple years ago, I knew a couple places to go. I decided to revisit Cinque Terre where I had lost my camera on my first Italy trip, and to visit Lucca, a place I'd never been. I got Alex to pack his bags for a 6 day trip to Hamburg, but when I got him there I gave him the tickets and we flew to Italy the next day. It was all very exciting. I think again, the pictures say it best.

Pisa

Lucca

Aren't they just so Italian?

Cinque Terre

Riomaggiore, the town we stayed in on our last night

Coming soon....

Dear family, friends, blog readers, I've been ruminating on lots of ideas for upcoming posts, but because I've had such an exciting and action packed month, I haven't yet managed to pound them out yet. I have decided that in these next couple days my main goal will be to get writing. As an insurance to make sure I stay true to my big ideas, I am making my declaration public. Also, I don't want you all to give up on checking in for lack of new material. Recently I have realized that this blog has ended up being the main product of my time here. I had lots of photographic and cinematic ideas, but technological and cultural challenges have made that road a little difficult at the moment. I am not disappointed though, because this space has given me ample opportunity for expression. And in my last month plus here, I hope to fill it with some of the ideas and thoughts that have been banging around my head all year. I hope to also have enough material for a German "Americana" blog exhibition, in which I will post pictures of all things Germans consider to be American, decked out in stars and striped packaging. I've cringed, laughed, wanted to cry, and even been occasionally pleased by the things represented under our flag. So cross your fingers for me that I will get this all together. The good news is, I've always been good under deadlines!

Lost in Transportation

It was my goal to write two posts a month, and here I am on the last day of April taking the last chance I've got to stick to my goal. So, the month in review: I got a job teaching extra classes for big money (at least as far as this humble Fulbrighter is concerned), I've got a new class schedule because the seniors have graduated already, and every day is filled with small moments which astonish me. But of course that seems par for the course. At school I encounter a thousand small consequences of the way mass media influences people. It's so easy to see in kids, who are still open enough to accept challenges to what they think about something. It's harder somewhat to gauge the influence of parents and friends, but the media influences stand out pretty clearly. Particularly upsetting is to realize how our movies, music, and media portray such a racist image of African Americans. Today I was explaining how offensive the word "bitch" is, and how using sexualized words like bitch, whore, slut, etc. to criticize other women is very harmful, and that women are particularly guilty of doing this to one other. One girl innocently said, "black men use those words all the time." This struck me as proof of how, once a film, song, or text leave our borders, it takes on an air of basic truth that it might not have so directly within our borders. Americans know on some level, that when they see images of an angry black young man from the projects, that he is a product of his environment. They are more likely to have an idea of the range of social conditions that have caused him to become this way. They may also have real life experience which put the images into context. Of course, I believe constant exposure to the same stereotyped images of black people must have a damaging effect on the minds of all Americans. This effect is more subtle and difficult to quantify however, than the effects I see on young people here. Here, these images represent truth, they are taken to represent the people they portray.

Sometimes this leads to misunderstandings so big, they are even funny. For example, they see our somewhat sexy, party movies, and they think we are a sexually open or even libertine culture. This is so far from the truth that it is flat out comical. We are a nation where people get worked up into a frenzy about the smallest whiff of something sexual, something having to do with the human body itself, where when an artistic photograph of young Miley Cirus, queen of teen purity, shows a hint of her back, suggesting that under her covering she is naked, it is enough to provoke the outright wrath of mothers everywhere. I thought about that photograph a bit, and realized that it is not about what it shows, in fact it shows nothing which in itself is provocative, it is the reminder of what lies unseen that riles our puritan morals. It is the same reason that Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen was so provocative: provocation by omission, by leaving it up to the minds of the viewers he creates a space more provocative than any he could have put on stage. Anyway, I'm getting off track. So my point there was, American storytelling when it crosses borders is taken as a report of fact.

When I told Viktoriya that in the images of angry black men calling women bitch all the time, is not an actual portrayal of black men in general, she was sincerely surprised, telling me that that's what she's always seen. I told her that I grew up in a very white town, and I had heard many men (and women of course, which was my original point) who talk to women that way. I told her it had absolutely nothing to do with race, and everything to do with upbringing, socio-economic conditions, and education. Of course in our country minorities are underprivileged at a consistently higher rate than the Caucasian majority, which can lead to the impression that black people are naturally inclined to be a certain way. I told her though, that this is a false impression, although an understandable one given the images she's been exposed to. It had never occurred to her, and she had never been told that these images might be misleading. Just as easily as she had accepted that idea from the media that black people were a certain way, she assimilated the new information that this was not true, that these images are misleading and make for entertainment, not documentation.

It might have been possible that her understanding could just have been a one case thing, but my experience is that it is the rule, not the exception. Boys here worship their thug life rap idols, putting their image on a pedestal and seeing it in the face of every black person they come across. These images are so strong, and as they leave our shores, they gain strength, becoming unquestionable fact. I wonder whether this is a new problem, thanks to globalization. I am hard pressed to say, as this global world is really the only one I've ever known.

Well, I was planning on writing a light-hearted fluffy post tonight, but it seems that there is usually something more pressing on my mind. Tomorrow is May Day. A big deal here in Berlin, it's a favorite time for riots, burning cars and neo-nazis vs. punks. Should be interesting! Maybe May Day will provide me with some lighter material to reflect on. Mmmm.... or maybe not!

American and Abroad

Anti-Americanism. It's strange that I've only been moved to address this topic now, after so many months living here in Berlin. I'm not sure whether I've simply become more sensitive to it recently, after an unpleasant encounter on the street, or whether it really has become more undeniable due to changes in socio-political and economic conditions worldwide. Last week was the annual Fulbright Conference in Berlin, which brought together Fulbrighters from across Germany and Europe together for panel discussions, presentations, and "networking". I met up with a couple Vassar grads, which was very comforting. It's really a pleasure to meet with so many like-minded people, especially when it can be so difficult to find in daily life.

After the party on the last night of the conference we were grabbing curry wurst and fries from the Imbiss (street food/fast food vender) under the Eberswalderstr. U-Bahn. We were in the process of picking up and paying for our food when this tall, hippy-like guy elbows through and orders as though we weren't there. Hearing us speaking English, he pulled the food we'd ordered off the counter and started muttering "I hate Americans, stupid Americans, I hate you. I hate Obama..." and so forth. Jeanette, a Vassar girl, countered his odious ejaculations by ostentatiously saying how happy it made her that when people visit the US they are treated with respect and treated to good American hospitality. Surely, this was the most positive response one could make. I however, was seriously peeved by this jerk's sense of entitlement, and I did not appreciate how he pushed me when I tried to save my friends' victuals. So I pushed him back and told him in his own language to take off. My reaction may not have been so peaceable, but I couldn't just let him push me around. Was my or Jeanette's effort productive? Probably not. Perhaps one of the most surprising things about the incident (other than the fact that he said he hated Obama, who everyone I've encountered in Germany loves, and didn't mention the president everyone loves to hate) was that this sort of encounter is not all that unusual. All the Fulbrighters present had previously experienced similar bile. They weren't even that upset by it. It has become frighteningly commonplace.

In the days since the street encounter the blatant stereotypes I've heard about Americans (that we don't cook and only eat fast food, that we're uninformed and unintelligent, you know the drill) have become harder to ignore. Patricia tells me I just need to let it slide off my back. In some ways I know she's right. As the civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson said at a speech she gave at my school here in Berlin, hate hurts the haters more than the hated. They have to live with it inside them, and hate is corrosive. I can turn my back on them and walk away from their hatred, they carry it wherever they go.

Perhaps this is why it is other manifestations of Anti-Americanism that bother me even more. The other day I talked with a British man about music, saying that I thought it was in modern music that the British and Americans have had their greatest collaborations. He immediately got defensive, disavowing any American influence on British music. Of course this is patently ridiculous. After all, both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones got their start as bands playing covers of American Blues and Rock music. To say their music was not influenced by this is just plain silly. Also, my argument was that the influence goes both ways. Still, the idea that there was any collaboration involved between great modern American and British musicians was abhorrent to this guy. Collaboration and cooperation should be among the highest goals of any two nations in their dealings with each other, and yet, people are utterly turned off by it when you bring it up.

When I talk to people from all over the world who revel in the problems the US is currently facing, declaring gleefully that America is a nation on the decline, their Schadenfreude burns me. They savor the suffering and tribulations of the American people in a way that deeply disheartens me. And somehow, this sort of attitude is acceptable, and even encouraged by the way America is portrayed in the news media. I understand, that what often lies below these feelings is simply resentment of the strength of the American presence worldwide. And yet, people everywhere keep buying our music, our movies, our pop culture, even (regrettably) our fast food. They love our cultural production, and resent it at the same time. Untangling these sorts of complicated love-hate feelings seems nearly impossible sometimes. But as Patricia reminds me, all we can do as individuals is be the examples of that which we hope our nation represents, be accepting, critical, well-informed, and hopeful in the face of great challenges. Of course, I am also acutely aware of the failings of my nation's government, and the ignorance and sometimes arrogance of many of its people. I am aware of how far we have yet to go, how the ideal of working to create "a more perfect union" is threatened by an unjust war, propaganda of fear, and personal political agendas. It is hard to be an American living abroad, but while it presents the greatest personal trials, it also presents the greatest opportunity to smash apart the ignorant and pervasive stereotypes about Americans, so that people can begin to form more complicated, well-rounded and realistic impressions. This is why the sweetest sound to my ears, is to hear someone say, I didn't think Americans were like you.

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Now playing: Air - Universal Traveler
via FoxyTunes

Family Vacation - Europe

My family departed Berlin yesterday and should now be in Chicago, preparing to face a long drive north to end their journey. It was really nice to have most of the family here, although Pete's absence was always on our minds. Things have really come to a screeching halt here since the family left. I almost don't know what to do with myself now that I don't have anything to plan or coordinate, now that I'm back to the real world.

Today the weather finally turned beautiful again, temperatures getting up to about 50F and sunny. Of course, the two weeks of the family vacation were not only unseasonably cold, they were in fact the coldest and snowiest since I arrived in September. Miraculously the very day they departed the clouds broke and the temperatures rose. Figures. It'll be up around 60F before the end of the weekend. There is one thing that eases my annoyance at the cheeky weather. Today I went to the Turkish market with my roommate Katja. We accidentally went one stop past Hermannplatz, so we had to go an alternate route to the market, which took us past a junk store with three beautiful dirty old bikes out front. I thought they'd for sure be too expensive, cheap bikes are not easy to come by in these parts. The guy only wanted 25 a piece. So Katja and I snapped up a pair, the men's and women's version of the same model. Mine needed and needs a bit of work, tomorrow we're going to the flea market for a pedal. They seem to be in good shape, great condition, just neglected and old. Really old. They are the 50th anniversary edition of a company established in 1919. So now my roommate and I have a little Pärchen of bikes, or as Patricia might say a casal. I feel like I ought to know more about bike care an maintenance. It will probably come in handy with this old man of a bike. I think that's what I'll refer to it as, Old Man.

So here are a few pictures of the highlights of the Zambon Family Vacation for your enjoyment...


My parents and José visit my 10th graders



Marion takes us on a castle tour


The sights of Berlin....
The Brandenburg Gate


The Berlin Cathedral and the East German TV Tower


The Charles Bridge in Prague


At Sansoussi in Potdam on our last day

Integration or Assimilation

Today's post grew very long, after many days of rumination. Somehow this topic has been tickling my consciousness for a while now, but has only recently come up in clearer terms. I hope it's not too cumbersome, but having rolled around in my head now for so long, I felt it was time to write it down.

Several days ago in class we had a very enlightening conversation. Grit brought up a comment that the Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan recently made about Turkish-Germans. He said flat-out that "assimilation is a crime against humanity. I repeat... assimilation is a crime against humanity." That's right, he said it twice just to make sure you heard him correctly. Grit asked the students how they felt about this comment. Most of the students seemed to find it a little extreme, but emphasized once and again how they could never forget where they came from, their traditions, their culture. They seemed to buy into the idea that accepting the German culture and lifestyle meant that you must forfeit the identity passed on to you by your ancestors. There seemed to be a general consensus that in order to emigrate successfully to another country one must learn to tolerate and live amongst the original inhabitants. In other words, it is necessary to integrate to a certain extent into the host culture. They drew the line however at taking on any of the host culture's other traits. For them to do so would be to betray their traditional culture. With a few exceptions all of these students were born and raised in Germany.

In order to better understand what the argument surrounding assimilation and integration was about, we decided to look up several dictionary definitions of the terms. We put up several definitions we found. For example:

assimilation
noun
1.	the state of being assimilated; people of different backgrounds come to see themselves as part of a larger national family
2.	the social process of absorbing one cultural group into harmony with another
3.	the process of absorbing nutrients into the body after digestion
4.	a linguistic process by which a sound becomes similar to an adjacent sound
5.	the process of assimilating new ideas into an existing cognitive structure [syn: acculturation]
6.	in the theories of Jean Piaget: the application of a general schema to a particular instance

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

in·te·gra·tion (ĭn'tĭ-grā'shən) n.

1. 1. The act or process of integrating.
   2. The state of becoming integrated.
2. The bringing of people of different racial or ethnic groups into unrestricted and equal association, as in society or an organization; desegregation.
3. Psychology The organization of the psychological or social traits and tendencies of a personality into a harmonious whole.
4. Mathematics The process of computing an integral; the inverse of differentiation.
5. Electronics The process of placing more than one integrated circuit on a single chip.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Several distinctions strike me immediately. Both words can refer to the union of people from different cultures. Both imply the formation of a harmonious whole. However, integration suggests a sort of separateness, several different circuits that exist in the same place, but which have distinct and separate paths. What is most important about the term assimilation is its implication of understanding, of comprehension. A person assimilates new information when they truly understand it. I also appreciate its implication that people of different backgrounds can share a common identity. Integration is based principally on tolerance, whereas assimilation is based on mutual understanding. Thus for me assimilation is a much more powerful and harmonious concept. Tolerance presupposes a sort of disapproval, which must be overlooked in order to be able to endure someone. This is why I do not see tolerance as the ultimate goal when dealing with diversity.

After hearing my students affirm their loyalty to their ancestral traditions, I told them that for me living according to the traditions of my ancestors is simply not a possibility. Americans in general have many parts which make up their ancestral background. My identity is not dominated by the places my family immigrated from. Rather, it is something much more fluid than my students had ever imagined possible. I explained for example, that when I lived in Mexico, I assimilated to Mexican culture. I had to learn to think and behave according to their cultural norms if I wanted to be part of society there. Mexican culture allowed them to make room for me, and they accepted me both as an American and as a member of their community. I don't want to downplay the challenges of assimilation, but if the host culture and new resident are both willing, it is attainable, and in my opinion desirable.

My students were agape when I told them that after living in Mexico, my identity expanded to include my Mexican cultural assimilation. And yet, at the same time I never felt like I had sacrificed or betrayed my American identity. In fact, after my experience I don't believe it would be possible for me to do so. No one has ever told these kids that they can be more than just one thing, that their national identity can have multiple facets. As I told them of my Mexican experience, I also realized something about my German experience. I will never assimilate here. German culture does not allow foreigners to assimilate. To a certain extent, integration is possible, but without German blood, one has no right to claim German identity. In fact, by mere virtue of the fact that part of my ancestry is German, from their perspective I am less foreign than the students in my class who were born here in Berlin. Those students are condemned to be forever foreigners, born in a country which withholds from them its national identity, many never having set foot in their faraway"homelands".

US Election Mania in Germany

I wrote this little anecdote up for Daniela at the US Embassy. We had coffee the other day along with the other two Fulbright kids who helped with the Building Bridges conference. We started talking about the election and I mentioned how surprised I was to find a lot of interest in the election among my students. She said that that kind of information is really good for them to know, so that they can convince people in Washington to send good speakers to Germany. So I wrote this up for her:

In the course of working as a Fulbright Teaching Assitant in Berlin, I was recently asked by one of the teachers to give one of his classes a brief overview of the election process and and introduction to the candidates. I was concerned that our complicated system might be difficult for them to understand in English, and that the topic would be utterly uninteresting to them in general. The U.S. Election is all over the news here in Germany, its coverage even eclipsing a lot of domestic political issues. However, I never imagined that this interest might have penetrated the consciousness of a class of 11 graders. I was totally shocked by how knowledgeable and interested the students in the class were. The normally somewhat rowdy and talkative class listened attentively as I tried to explain the basics of the electoral system. When I asked them what they knew about the candidates, several students piped up at once naming the top contenders. When I pressed them for more information, some of the students were able to give me very up-to-date details on who the candidates were, what they were saying, and how they were being perceived. Not surprisingly, while their knowledge of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama left me agape, they knew almost nothing about the slew of candidates on the other side of the party line. In Germany, interest even among the youth, in this election is astonishing. You would be hard pressed to find students in an American school that were more knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the election. And my school is by no means elite. On the contrary it is one of the schools in Berlin with an undeserved bad reputation. It is a school in which every one of German's ethnic and religious minorities are well represented. The interest these students have in the direction of American Politics can well be said to represent the feelings of the broadest spectrum of the German population.