A Note on Judaism in Germany

This was supposed to be the intro to a discussion about my bike trip to Worms and Speyer (two cities with very interesting Jewish histories) last weekend. As usual, I rambled on a bit too much, so I'll turn my discussion of that trip into another post.

I've mentioned the fact that I'm Jewish to most of the people I've met in Germany, and here's the thing: it's made me much more uncomfortable than I thought it would. Germans are, as I've said, very conscious of the Holocaust, to the point where the mere mention of Judaism will cause most Germans to snap to attention. It's easy to see the dozens of questions swirling around in their head, but they don't ask any, and even if you start talking about the religion, there are never any follow-up questions. 

(Example: during one of my first weekends in Germany, I was watching a soccer game in my apartment with about 15 of my flatmates' friends. At one point, one of the guys started talking about the US/Israel relationship with me, and when I prefaced my comment with "I'm Jewish, so…" the entire room fell silent. I spoke uninterrupted for about 30 seconds, and when I stopped, everyone sat pensively for a minute then started talking about soccer again. That was the end of the Israel talk.)

What makes this so frustrating is the fact that most of these people, by their own admission, have never met a Jew before. Now, I've popped plenty of Jew cherries before, but in every one of those situations the other person has been curious, probing and just a tad uninformed. Take my CS host in Strasbourg, for instance: Outside of Paris, Strasbourg has one of the largest Jewish populations in France. But despite seeing Jews walking around all the time, my host had never actually had a conversation with a Jew before. When I told him I wanted to check out the synagogue in town, he started rattling off questions—and not just silly, "do you celebrate Christmas?" type stuff, but insightful things about God, dating and everything in between. He even used my presence as an opportunity to strike up a conversation with a black-hatter on the street—something he had clearly wanted to do for a long time. Now, that being said, this guy wasn't extremely high on Judaism in general: he's a self-proclaimed atheist, and he saw (and probably still sees) Orthodox Jews as ultra-religious crackpots. But the point is that he asked. He engaged. Ignorance is a virtual non-issue as long as it's tempered with a healthy sense of curiosity.

But in Germany, you simply don't get that kind of engagement. Of course, this is not something unique to Judaism. In the month and a half that I've been in Germany so far, not once have I had a conversation about religion with a German (I've had several with other Americans). So it could very well be that I've come up against a simple cultural difference—Germans don't talk religion. But what makes it so much more painful is the fact that Germans are curious. They want to ask questions. But the ingrained mores of a self-conscious society seem to be getting in the way. Perhaps I'll find a way to get them to open up, but for now I'm stuck feeling mildly uncomfortable as people quietly stare at me when I say I'm Jewish.

One other note: Merkel's reaction to the Cologne court banning circumcision is quintessentially German. Forget the misguided claims of anti-circumcision activists. Forget the infringements on individual liberty. Hell, forget the Muslims. We just don't want to look bad for mistreating the Jews again. Sorry for the cynicism, but this does seem to be the state of German dialogue on Judaism (and race/religion in general) at this point. The general population seems to be pretty misinformed, and while the exceedingly politically correct atmosphere does keep minority groups' rights intact (the question is not if, but when this ruling gets overturned), it also stifles the possibility for constructive dialogue and allows ignorance to fester under a calm surface.

Couchsurfing in Strasbourg

Note: Since I'm still playing catch-up on important events that have happened in the past couple weeks, things are going to look king of travel-bloggy around here for a while. Hopefully I'll be caught up after this weekend, which means I can talk about things more pertinent to everyday life, such as the fact that I've been working for the last month. But for now, just enjoy the pictures of pretty buildings in Europe.

Strasbourg basically looks like a Disney movie.

Strasbourg Cathedral is wildly impressive.

The cathedral also has a giant, overwhelmingly informative clock inside. This is just the 24-hour clock part of it, but it also tells you the position of the planets and the phase of the moon. 

I'm not saying that there's any place where it's really appropriate to be playing the fife and lyre these days, but if such a place existed, it would probably be Strasbourg.

The most exciting animals in Strasbourg are the giant water rats in the canals (seriously), but since I couldn't get a good picture of one, here's a donkey instead. 

I haven't really gotten into the overwhelmingly positive experience I've had CouchSurfing in Europe so far, but seeing as this is the first weekend that I've taken advantage of the site for vacation purposes, now seems like a good enough time to bring it up. For those of you who aren't aware, CouchSurfing is a site that allows users to send requests to potential hosts all around the world. The hosts are locals who offer a free couch or bed to visitors, and the system is self-perpetuating in a kind of pay-it-forward manner—I can surf in Europe for six months and then, as a nice gesture, host other travelers when I get back to the States.

Since I couldn't move into my apartment until mid-June, I used CouchSurfing as a rich (or, more accurately, poor) man's hostel service—not only did I have places to stay, but I also met some locals in the process, which has allowed me to avoid spending all of my time with other American interns from BASF. For someone traveling alone in Europe, a resource like CouchSurfing is tremendously useful—this weekend I'm going on a solo bike trip around the Rhein-Neckar, but thanks to CouchSurfing I'll have places to sleep and shower in Worms and Speyer when I stay overnight.

Rewind to last weekend: Strasbourg is essentially the French version of Heidelberg—old, beautiful in a stereotypically French way, and touristy as hell. Since Strasbourg is right on the German border (just an hour and a half away by train), I decided to devote an early weekend to this rather straightforward trip. I went out there with another guy (Paul) from my program, and we stayed with a CouchSurfer (Manu) who grew up in France and came to Strasbourg a year ago after his company moved his job from Alexandria.

This is where kids in Strasbourg go to school. For free.

Of course there's an old-timey-looking carousel in the middle of Strasbourg.

Sightseeing-wise, Strasbourg is a genuinely beautiful town, and it's small enough to see in a weekend. The cathedral in the town center is magnificent, and the architecture is strikingly reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast (actually, it would probably be more accurate to say that Beauty and the Beast is reminiscent of Strasbourg). Through some random stroke of dumb luck, this town also happens to be of huge political importance in Europe—the EU Parliament and Human Rights Council are both located on the outskirts of Strasbourg—and it has one of the largest Jewish communities in France (although we didn't end up making it to services on Saturday). Just a few hours into our stay, Paul was already joking that he needed to find a French girl who would be willing to give him a marriage of convenience so he could stay there indefinitely.

The European Union Parliament building. The globe in the center was a gift from the Polish.

You can't really see it all that well, but somebody dropped 30 Agurot into the middle of the EU Parliament globe, which will probably lead scores of tourists to say, "hey, isn't there one of those Jewish things on that coin?" (This is exactly what Paul said when he looked inside the sculpture.)

A semi-sacrilegious photo I took on Saturday. It's the largest synagogue in Strasbourg.

But in my mind much of our trip's success had to do with CouchSurfing. Manu lives in a trendy-yet-semi-Bohemian three-story apartment with a rooftop terrace and a random hammock in the living room. He was very friendly (although, like many of the guys I've met on CouchSurfing, a bit too sex-driven—I think it would be a lot harder to use this site as a girl traveling alone), and he spent a good deal of his time showing us around. On Friday we met up with a friend of his for ice cream, wine and tarte flambée (I have no idea what the English equivalent of this would be other than flatbread pizza. I do know that in German it's called flammkuchen, and it's a traditional Alsatian dish). On Saturday he took us to a picnic and outdoor concert on the Rhein (I'll probably write about this in more detail tomorrow since it really deserves its own discussion) and then brought us back to his place for a party—although because of the French people's general inability to speak English, we ended up being those guys who go upstairs to smoke weed and play guitar, only without the weed. It rained on Sunday, which, on a day when the shops are all closed anyway, essentially meant that the city was dead. Thankfully, we were able to hang out at a café with Manu and another CouchSurfer from Strasbourg, so the day wasn't a total waste. Without a local host, we would have had difficulty replicating any of these experiences, and the trip would have felt very different—much more touristy, much less authentic.

As the world becomes more international, it's only natural that our social spheres will expand to encompass new areas. But what's even more fascinating now is that the internet has allowed us to create networks out of thin air. Sure, it takes a good deal of trust to actually commit to a project like CouchSurfing, and I realize that, despite my love for the site so far, one bad experience is already too many. But the ability to come to a new place and not feel like a total stranger is incredibly important. In fact, this is the way I travel to cities in the US: if I go to New York City alone, I'm not going to stay in some hotel, I'll stay with a friend—why shouldn't I be able to do the same in a place where the only person I "know" is some dude I saw on the internet who lives with pharmacy students and plays a little guitar? Because there's a chance he could rape and kill me, of course. But you get the point.

Berlin: Day 3

An iconically dreary photo of Potsdamer Platz. There's multicolored pipelines running through the entire city, although we were only able to figure out that the blue ones carried water (surprising, I know).

A bicycle makes a huge difference in a place like Berlin.

On the last full day of our Berlin trip, my mom and I decided to rent some bikes in order to see some of the less touristy parts of the city (this is a bit of a misnomer – there are touristy areas all over Berlin, but these ones happened not to be smack dab in the city center), and while I still think we’re a far cry from actually having a great grip on Berlin’s daily life, today was certainly much more enlightening than yesterday.

Berlin is, like much of Europe, very light on the skyscrapers. Most of the city’s neighborhoods have that kind of Brookline/Ramat Gan look with lots of three-to-five-story apartments and restaurants lining the streets. This general appearance makes Potsdamer Platz – the modern center of Berlin – look all the more out of place. Potsdamer Platz basically looks like what you would get if you were to rip out a quarter-block section of mid-town Manhattan and plop it down in the middle of Berlin. The piece de resistance is the Sony Center – a hyper-modern-to-the-point-of-satire movie theater cum business office with some cafes thrown in for good measure – but you can also go see the Blue Man Group, eat at Tony Roma’s or take a picture next to a giant Lego giraffe (yes, there’s a Lego store, too). So if you’re looking for the most American area in Germany, well, this may very well be the place.

I wish I had a better photo of this fountain. It's the goofiest thing ever. Every few seconds it shoots a drop of water from the outer edge of the fountain into a spot about three inches further in. The perfect centerpiece for the Sony Center.

Movie screenings in English: how to tell you're in a not-so-German part of Berlin.

Not quite Toys-R-Us-in-New-York-City level, but still pretty cool.

Of course, before I come down too hard on the lack of personality in Potsdamer Platz, it bears mentioning that this part of Berlin was completely decimated during World War II and left to decay during the Cold War, so the overt modernization of Potsdamer Platz has simply been a consequence of the desire to rebuild a once-thriving square. In fact, walking around outside of Berlin’s main tourist areas (around the Tiergarten and Museum Island) makes you realize how devastating the 20^th Century was on this metropolis. The in-all-other-situations-amusingly-named Topography of Terror gives you a taste of how difficult it was to be a Berliner for the past 80 years. The outdoor museum is situated below ground level on the site of the old Gestapo headquarters, and right in front of a preserved section of the Berlin Wall. The museum’s goal seems to be to definitively show that, from 1933 to 1989, it really, REALLY sucked to live in Berlin. Beyond the obvious horrors of the Nazi and Cold-War regimes, there’s also the fact that the city was completely ruined during World War II – after Germany surrendered every woman between 15 and 65 was conscripted just to clean the rubble. And places like Potsdamer Platz were essentially ignored until the end of the Cold War (there were some other construction projects in the city – the TV Tower was built as a symbol of East Germany’s supremacy), which makes the current appearance of Berlin all the more impressive.

In any case, there are plenty of other sites to see in Berlin. We biked around to Checkpoint Charlie (touristy), Kreuzberg (international), the Tiergarten (pretty), Schloss Charlottenburg (prettier), the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (under construction), etc. etc. Somehow, the day ended with me feeling like we had both seen very much and very little of the city. Precious though my weekends may be, I think it may very well be worthwhile to come back to Berlin before I leave Germany.

The Tiergarten is a pretty swell place to ride a bike.

We couldn't really figure out why the entrance to the Berlin Zoo has an extremely stereotyped, elephant-laden East Asian theme, but it does look nice.

Berlin is the kind of city where you just happen to stumble across important sites from the Holocaust. This is what's left of the facade of the train station from which Jews were deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt.

Berlin isn't always a blatant tourist trap, but when it is, it puts Germans into military outfits and makes them stand in front of American flags.

The garden behind Schloss Charlottenburg has water, flowers and statues of cherubs. What's not to like?

Not sure if the contrast is quite up to snuff in this picture, but that water is completely green. I know it's just algae, but for some reason these kinds of things give me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

Berlin: Day Two

Iconic Berliner Dom photo, and proof positive that my mother was in Germany.

We stayed at a hotel right by Volkspark Friedrichshain, which provided just a few of many opportunities to look at statues of Greeks.

Like I said, statues of Greeks. And churches.

Obligatory Jewish shot! It's the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Strasse.

After walking around the touristy areas of Berlin for about 10 hours today, I can safely report that this is a pretty cool city, and I don't really need to know all that much about the place to make that observation. Berlin bills itself as a potent mixture of old and new worlds, an image that is reflected almost perfectly by the Reichstag and its totally out of place yet weirdly fitting glass dome, rather questionably by the Chancellor's office and its ultra-modern-facade-but-with-Roman-columns architecture, and all too temporarily by the giant stage currently adorning the western face of the Brandenburger Tor (there was a major party—which I'm pretty sure was the culmination of a gay pride parade—in the Tiergarten today, with the focal point being a live performance from a band comprised of the German equivalents of Meredith Brooks and the flute player from Jethro Tull).

So this happened.

Not really sure what's going on here, but that lady totally has a beard.

 I wish I could say something meaningful about the people in Berlin, but the reality is that the only person we really met today was a rather odd math teacher from New York who likes to spend his summers in Germany. We did pass a lot of dudes in drag (again, gay pride parade, so maybe that's not an everyday thing), a lot of people who were making giant soap bubbles in major tourist centers, a good number of Spanish soccer fans (and about four French fans—the two countries played a Euro Cup game today and Spain won, of course), and one mime.

Mime: the perfect profession for an out-of-work Berliner with three years of Alexander technique experience. 

Seriously, I have no idea what the deal is with the bubbles, but we saw at least three of these bubble-making stations while walking around Berlin Mitte.

From a very superficial perspective, I can say that Berlin has a lot to offer—just look at the pictures, there's some pretty cool stuff here. But one thing I didn't expect to see (and I'm sorry for going in a more somber direction here) was people drinking beers on the Holocaust Memorial.

You see, Germany is not Poland. Everyone in this country is hyper-conscious of Nazism, and German public life is swathed in heavy layers of political correctness. So while it's not entirely surprising to see Polish schoolkids enjoying themselves at a field trip to Auschwitz (not too unlike American kids running around Little Bighorn), I expected Berliners to be much more sensitive about their city's World War II memorials.

The thing is, it's very difficult to be mad at people for using Berlin's Holocaust Memorial as a glorified series of park benches. Without any context, it's hard to tell that the stellae make up anything more than a cute art installation—the signage is intentionally kept to a minimum, and the giant concrete blocks are nondescript enough to leave any uninformed passersby with no knowledge that they are entering a serious site. What's more, I can see the appeal of sitting down amid a forest of concrete after walking through the nearby Tiergarten or, if you're a kid, trying to jump from one giant block to the next—this is the first thing I would have thought of doing had I not known I was entering a Holocaust Memorial beforehand.

I mean, in all reality, if this wasn't a Holocaust Memorial I can't think of a better public place to sit around and have a few beers in Berlin.

Ultimately, it's not really such a bad thing that Berliners aren't entirely somber when they walk by their city's Holocaust Memorial. There's a serious attachment to the past in Germany, and the capital is filled with plenty of not-so-gentle reminders—a plethora of war memorials, still-standing chunks of the old Berlin wall, and more museums (many of which deal with the more troubling aspects of Berlin's past) than you can shake a stick at. So in some sense, it's kind of nice to see Germans taking ownership of a very dark stage of their past by repurposing a guilt-ridden memorial for the most German past-time of all—drinking beer.

Berlin: Day One

I'm going to gloss over the fact that it's been more than a week since my Berlin trip and just post my thoughts on the city now, as if it were happening in real time (go ahead and ignore the fact that the Euro Cup just ended—I'll get back to that on a later date). In fact, there's a lot that I haven't talked about so far, so it's daily updates from here on in. Without further ado:

Riding on the Autobahn…

…is basically all I did today. For some reason my image of the Autobahn has always been this futuristic superhighway with plasma blue roads and lots of tunnels with flashing lights—basically something out of Minority Report. As it turns out, it's pretty much just a road, but you can go as fast as you want in certain parts, which is pretty cool except for the whole car-hitting-motorcycle-at-100-mph thing (happened today, not a pretty sight).

I can still see Tom Cruise jumping from car to car on this road, but it would have to be Mission Impossible Tom Cruise instead.

How did I get there? My mom's in town, which means I need to show her a place with a bit more history than Mannheim, which means taking a trip to Berlin. Of course, rather than splurge on the train ticket, I decided to go with the cheaper option.

Germany has something called Mitfahrgelegenheit, which translates roughly to "ride share" and is basically the equivalent of that section of Craigslist. Basically, you pay a stranger a few Euros to schlep you in their car to wherever it is they happen to be going. It's the cheaper alternative to public transportation, and it's potentially a good way to meet some interesting people. The worst experience I've heard of with Mitfahrgelegenheit is someone getting a ride with a Chinese immigrant who had just gotten his license and drove very slowly—and badly—from Mannheim to Frankfurt. So not too bad.

My ride to Berlin was filled with some interesting people: the driver was a stereotypically uptight German student who was extremely worried about his car—at one point he pulled off the highway to inspect the undercarriage when we hit a bump. I sat up front with him, and there were two girls in the backseat—a 26-year-old metalhead with two asymmetrical nose piercings, and a cute Polish girl who brought 30 shirts and six pairs of shoes for her week stay in Berlin. She was actually pretty inspiring though—she came to Germany with no knowledge of the language and took the same three-month German class that I'm enrolled in. One year later, and she's totally fluent, so there may still be hope for me.

In any case, the ride was pretty enjoyable for the first part—I basically slept and attempted to have conversations with people who didn't speak great English. But when we hit traffic on the road to Berlin, the driver panicked and decided to take a detour around Dresden, which is basically equivalent to hitting traffic on the way into L.A. and saying, "it's okay, I'll just cut around through Anaheim." We left at 1:45 in the afternoon for what was supposed to be a six- or seven-hour drive. We didn't get in to Berlin until 10:00, which wouldn't have been a problem, except for one thing.

Apparently happiness is a road hazard on the Autobahn.

Tonight was Germany v. Greece, Germany's first elimination-round game of the Euro Cup. Berlin has a huge public viewing right in the heart of town by the Brandenburger Tor, and I had hopes of going there and taking awesome pictures of Germans getting really into soccer. Sadly, the game started at 8:45, so I was confined to taking pictures of much lamer public viewings in restaurants during the last few minutes of the game. Kind of a bummer, but if Germany makes it to the final I'll make sure to come back here. And next time, I'll splurge for the train.

Somehow, this is the only photo I possess of a public viewing in Germany. I need to start taking more pictures.