Amy & Adam's European Highlights

Without a doubt, one of my favorite things about Dresden, is the Elbe River. The Elbe runs through the city separating the old town from the new. On both sides of the river is a well-maintained path that is greatly enjoyed by runners, bikers, walkers and "bench watchers." Adam took these photos last month when Rose and I were enjoying an equally beautiful day in Prague.

We encountered some pretty awesome German engineering with this DHL package machine. If you aren't home when the DHL delivery person comes, she will leave a slip in your post box which you need to take to this machine. At the machine, you enter the code on your slip that opens a side door, revealing your package miraculously inside! Amazing.

The Sächsische Schweiz (Saxon Switzerland) is a National Park a short 45 minute train ride away. I must stress how amazing I find it that we live in a city and can hop on a train and be in a national park in under an hour! The black sandstone formations which are one of the highlights of the national park, have also been an important natural resource: it was used to build many buildings in Berlin and Dresden. The other draws of the park are miles and miles of great hiking and steep cliffs enjoyed by intrepid climbers (we aren't among them).

I think that it's safe to say that I've never spent a year enjoying the outdoors as much as this year.

Many of you caring and inquisitive folks have asked me what Adam is researching. What is he up to? How does he spend his days? Although I could do my best to tell you that he leaves our apartment early and returns late after looking through lots of moldy paper filled with often very hard to decipher German cursive, I thought an update from him would be best. Thus, he has delivered articulating both what he is researching and why this topic is of interest to him.

So, without further ado, from Adam:

Studying Germany in the year 1945 can seem like studying two different worlds. One such world is crowded with images taken from a conflict that took an enormous toll on the German people. From mid-1944 on, food became scarce, entire families were uprooted and Germany suffered a string of military catastrophes. This is the period of the Dresden fire-bombing. This is where the rape of some countless millions of civilian women and girls took place. This is when roughly 2 million German soldiers died. Staggering. But there is also another world to Germany in 1945, equally devastating. Here, the machinery of the Holocaust continued to function. 7 million forced ‘guest laborers’ in Germany were placed on a starvation diet, so civilians would suffer less. Concentration camps operated almost until the minute of liberation. The Gestapo and its many civilian informants—rounded up ‘traitors’ and routinely sentenced them to death. With maniacal fervor, children were known to pick up abandoned weapons and occupy trenches against overpowering Allied armies with maniacal fervor. Equally staggering. Such divergent historical narratives—of abject victimization on the one hand and of continued criminal perpetration on the other—remain very difficult to reconcile.

It is within this theoretical debate that I position my own dissertation research. I believe that these two different stories of 1945 must find more common ground if they are ever to reach any sort of stable historical consensus.

I’m using the experiences of a small German city just before and after the end of World War II to place the tensions of German suffering into dialogue with the suffering of the often-invisible populations that lived in Germany at the same time. Think German civilians and soldiers on one side, and then forced laborers, POWs, concentration camp inmates on the other. I’m particularly interested in how the relations between these two different groups evolved through the window of Germany’s final defeat. What happened when the carefully-structured racial and political hierarchy of the Third Reich began to collapse? How did the populations in such a community address that new world? Also, I’m curious about whom in particular benefitted—and who suffered—in the construction of this new postwar order.

The town itself that I have selected is called Schwarzenberg, a provincial city in the hills of Saxon Germany, almost on the border with what is now the Czech Republic. This town was under the nominal administration of the Third Reich until German surrender in May 1945. It was never attacked nor was it immediately occupied. In fact, Schwarzenberg was left in a sort of no-man’s-land between American and Russian units for roughly two months after the German capitulation. This makes it a very good area for my interest in how Germans dealt with the fallout from the Second World War; Germans here were largely left to their own devices to make sense of life immediately before and after the war’s formal conclusion.

In this unoccupied pocket, all sorts of people ended up living side by side: lingering German military units, huge numbers of refugees streaming in from the East, freed labor and concentration camp populations and ordinary civilians. Allied military units even made their presence known from time to time. And amidst this, the story goes, groups of ordinary civilians came together to stave off impending catastrophes. These ‘committees’ took over local municipal governments, organized food distribution, maintained security and attempted to quarantine sick populations. They solicited Allied assistance to root out some German military units that held one community hostage. They—and this is fascinating in retrospect—issued a new currency and organized a regional postal system. Even held regional elections to develop a representative assembly!

It couldn’t last, of course, and didn’t. The area ultimately was absorbed in the East Germany. But it’s an intriguing story, and one that has even been the subject of a couple works of fiction by prominent German authors. Better yet, for me at least, it is practically unknown in the English-speaking world.

Not surprisingly, most histories of this ‘Free Republic’ of Schwarzenberg start from the formal end of the war itself. I seek to start the story a little earlier. If I look at the story of Schwarzenberg from the gradual defeat of the Third Reich in the Second World War and then carry it through the first months and years after the German capitulation itself, what details emerge? As is, Schwarzenberg’s history right now is almost exclusively a tale told by Germans about Germans, which tends to favor a ‘Germans as victims’ narrative. Interesting and noteworthy, to be sure. But Schwarzenberg, like practically everywhere in German-controlled Europe, was also part of the highly stratified society organized by the Third Reich. Forced laborers, concentration camps and other markers of the Nazi order were deeply woven into local life. And these populations of so-called ‘inferior peoples’ in Germany didn’t simply disappear with the end of the war.

I’m tracing what did in fact happen to these populations—as best I am able, their records are spotty—and how exactly Schwarzenberg’s tale of being left alone to make threatening problems disappear (epidemics, theft, food supply, etc) might also have been premised upon making certain peoples disappear as well.

To make this sort of case, I’ve been looking at really disparate archival files. Basically anything that can provide a perspective or insight on life in Schwarzenberg at this time is of use to me. I’ve been collecting the personal information of thousands of forced laborers who called Schwarzenberg home at some point in the Second World War. I’ve sifted through correspondence between Schwarzenberg’s municipal administration and regional concentration camps. I’ve been trying to track down information on Schwarzenberg’s Jewish populations. I’ve looked at the process of property redistribution during the Third Reich, and then its redistribution after World War II. I’ve enjoyed the ‘morale reports’ pulled together by Third Reich and Soviet-occupation governments, which attempt to outline the pressing local issues on a month-to-month basis.

I’m even following threads off this story back to Russia and the United States, where the military records from this time and place stand to offer a different perspective of life in the ‘unoccupied zone.’ Soon, I have a trip to the town itself, to collect any and all records I can find there (and they are extensive, this a very popular bit of local lore). In the end, I hope to be able to piece together a history of Schwarzenberg’s 1945 that can tell how a disparate group of people chose to work with each other—and sometimes to work against each other—to negotiate the fallout of the Second World War.

My new laptop is up and running again! Thanks to Adam’s persistence following up with Dell Support in both America and Germany (the communication is surprisingly bad between those them), a very young service repair man with a corduroy jacket, hesitant smile, and shaggy hair made a house call to our apartment yesterday morning. This unnamed surgeon (he only introduced himself as “Dell Support),” spent over an hour taking apart the laptop, laboriously screw by screw, plastic piece by plastic piece, until he reached the mother board. He then removed the mother board, replaced it with the new one he brought, and carefully put it back together again. It was amazing. I’ve never seen a laptop taken apart before nor can I fathom that anyone actually understands how they work in such detail. It was a wonderful reminder of how we all have different gifts. And god, mine don’t lie remotely close to understanding hardware.

I’m also happy to report that I’ve found interesting work at Dresden’s International School (DIS). I am helping the student support coordinator and the school counselor by providing individual college counseling to juniors who are interested in returning to the US for college; assisting the school counselor (who happens to have gone to Lesley U for her masters in expressive therapies) create a wellness/health curriculum for 7-9th graders; and creating a teacher advisory curriculum that integrates the school’s core “International Baccalaureate Learner Profile,” which includes qualities such as “Open-Minded,” “Caring,” and “Reflective” with life skills to provide them with a small guidance curriculum.

I am volunteering with those projects, but they have also offered me some paid work—serving as a proctor of the 12th grade’s IB exams in May! While it will be quite exciting to make some Euros, the process of ensuring I get paid is arduous. First, the DIS office manager informed me that I need my tax ID number. I, of course, don’t have such a thing and needed to figure out where to get it.

When we registered in the city hall last week (which you must do anytime you live in Germany), we stuck gold and had one of the kindest, most patient civil servants. She informed us that Dresden can’t provide me with my tax card as I need to get it from the city that issued my visa (Tuebingen). She provided us with the phone number to call. (Clearly, that wasn’t going to help me out very much since one can’t assume that governmental workers speak English. And, although Adam could have called during a break while in the archive, I sensed his hesitancy with this stressful task).

THANKFULLY, my wonderful and highly competent German friend Rose came to my rescue and called the appropriate town office for me and convinced them to send my tax card—not to the address we live at and provided on the registration form—but another address. (As you may recall, we have a strange living situation where we haven’t been given permission to use the mail box of the man we are subletting from). Thus, when my tax card successfully arrives in the mail, we will have made it over another bureaucratic hurdle.

In other news, I have taken ownership of “The Stare.” I can’t remember if I’ve already commented on this particular aspect of German culture, but Germans stare. Interestingly, the childhood curiosity and interest of looking at others in the eyes for a few seconds (or longer)!, which we have snuffed out in American culture, is commonplace here. Although it took me seven months to become accustomed to this habit, I have now adopted it. The scenario here goes like this: I walk down the street, look at almost every person I pass—directly in the eyes—for a couple of seconds while they do the exact same in return. On a very rare occasion I’ll smile or say “hallo” but I’ve also adopted the local customs which are just to stare with a deadpan expression and remain silent.

We’ve observed a real difference among Germans private and public personas. In public, Germans are extremely quiet and keep to themselves. While it is common to greet people in a shop or people you are interacting with, in general, Germans are not a talkative bunch in public. Unquestionably, this is why I find it relatively easy to live here without speaking much German beyond the very, very basics. I’m sure that if I lived in a more outgoing, gregarious culture like, say Italy, I would feel much more pressure and interest to learn the language.

Which brings me to…I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t made much progress with learning German since taking the intro class last Fall. My comprehension in understanding basic conversation is certainly much improved, but my speaking, reading and writing is dreadful. While I’m definitely not proud of this fact, the essential reason I haven’t made better effort is simply that I lack motivation. I struggle with finding ways the German language could be useful to me back in the States, and thus fill my days doing other things. I should say that I do have the strong motivation to learn Spanish, beginning this summer. I plan on holding myself accountable to this plan. For the amount Adam and I admire people who can master multiple languages, it would serve me well to identify among the multi-linguals.

OK, I’ll be highly impressed if anyone finishes my stream of conscious text. (Sorry, no visuals in this posting). I’m sitting at our beloved hostel café a short four minute walk from our apartment. Adam is spending long days at the archive in Chemnitz. My next post will include an update from him.

With love from Dresden,
Amy

Prague
During Amanda’s visit, we celebrated our ten year anniversary! My host brother Zdenda helped us to realize this important milestone and we celebrated with a shot of apricot schnapps at a “Czech(s)-i-can”--a mostly Czech but with some Mexican influences--restaurant.

Zdenda & Marina; Marina & her brother; me & Amanda & Zdenda:

My host brother Zdenda and his girlfriend Marina picked us up from the train station and took us on my first driving tour of Prague. I should note that both Zdenda and Marina hate walking. A huge bonus of having the Zdenda-Marina Prague highlights tour, however, was that they showed us some spectacular Prague viewpoints that I hadn’t seen before. I also owe Zdenda and Marina photo credits for some of these great group photos.

St Vitus:

The following day, Zdenda and Marina drove us to Karlstein Castle, a hunting lodge of the beloved King Charles IV who named most of the city after him (Charles Bridge, Charles University)…Despite the cold and rainy weather, we enjoyed the small hike up to the castle and toured the interior. To my great delight, this time while touring the castle I could understand everything as the tour was in English! Zdenda reminded me that he used to translate for me when we went to castle tours in 1999. While he did a great job, he also confided that he isn’t particularly interested in these sorts of details. The interior of Karlstein is stripped of most of its original furnishings with funny stories about how King Charles’ bed was taken by an Austrian king and is now in Vienna.

On Easter Sunday, while waiting in line to get into St. Vitus Cathedral, Amanda witnessed how bad Europeans are at waiting in line. After what seemed like the 50th person jumped in front of us to “meet with other members of their group” Amanda turned to me and asked: “would Jesus cut?” A priceless comment, this line will be a keeper in our repertoire.

We spent an afternoon touring Prague’s impressive Jewish quarter with a native guide. I haven’t been to these sights since I studied here and really enjoyed seeing them again. There were many Jewish people living in Prague prior to WWII as is evidenced by the four synagogues located quite near each other in the Josefov neighborhood. I found the tour to be a nice combination of celebration of Jewish life, culture, history, and religion with the overarching remembrance of the horror of the holocaust.

Other views of the city from foot. You have no idea how hard it was to get this photo of Amanda on a city street without any other folks:

We celebrated Easter Sunday with my host family with a traditional meal of turkey hen, dumplings and sour kraut. One interesting difference we’ve noted is that Europeans (at least Czechs, Germans and Italians) differentiate between male and female Turkeys. While Turkey farmers and other extremely knowledgeable agricultural types might also make such distinctions in the U.S., when purchasing turkey, I’ve never seen the gender marked. As far as I was concerned, a turkey is a turkey. But both our German friend Rose and now my Czech sister Zuzka intensely translated the different words they have for a male and female turkey and discussed their various virtues.

The big holiday for my Czech family isn’t Easter but the following day. I don’t know the name, but this day apparently has pagan roots and involves women giving eggs to men and children after being lightly beaten on the behind with a stick. In return for being beaten, we are to be granted beauty, vitality and a symbolic virginal rebirth. In preparation for this day, on Sunday, Amanda, Zuzka, Marina and I decorated eggs. Zuzka, the artist, is always full of new ideas. In addition to some ways I’m familiar with (dying the eggs with a dye-vinegar solution and shrinking a plastic wrap to fit) we also melted crayons over candles and applied the melted crayon to the egg with a pin head. Amanda experimented with a vinegar pen, relieving the color from the egg with her extremely patient and deliberate marks. The egg artists at work:

Neighbors coming over to beat women of the house to receive eggs (and candy). Note the sticks with ribbons tied to the end:

BERLIN
We trained to Berlin and were greeted by sunshine and relative warmth. I’d only ever seen Berlin in cold, cloudy conditions—in sun and warmth this city is really damn close to perfect. Our first activity was going to Berlin’s antiquities museum, the Pergamon. Amanda, not prone to hyperbole like me, announced it’s “the best museum ever.” Among many other things, it houses the amazing 2nd Century B.C. Greek Pergamon Altar (my favorite) while Amanda preferred the Babylonian Ishtar Gate.

The following day, we went on an Original Berlin Walks “Discover Berlin” tour. This was a fabulous way to cover most of Berlin’s major monuments and sights in a four hour walking tour with a knowledgeable and entertaining guide. Our guide, Thorben, is a history graduate student at Humbolt University with an American and German parent. He did an impressive job reciting an excessive amount of information, speaking loudly and clearly over construction and traffic, and dealing with our young, American college students from New Jersey who didn’t listen to him and blindly broke all of the ground rules we started with (crossing the street with the red ample man, walking on top of the Jewish monument, etc).
Photos of WWII bullet marks; Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church; our guide with the traditional GDR car, a GDR mural juxtaposed with a photo from a workers uprising; Gendarmenmarkt:

Amanda and I had a fabulous romantic dinner at Hasir, an upscale Turkish restaurant right in the middle of Berlin. We had the entire dinning room to ourselves the first hour; that happens when you eat at 5:00. We split a hot and cold appetizer plate, a lamb dish, and a bottle of red wine. It was a fabulous, and truly memorable evening which has only reinforced my love of Turkish food—probably my favorite cuisine. Amanda’s post-dinner celebration:

There were huge and rather attention-getting advertisements throughout the city. The first one is covering an entire palace facade. In the second ad, I was absorbed into my artwork. Please note the horse on Amanda's beer stein and on the ad:

It was fabulous to see Amanda and explore Prague, Berlin and Dresden. While we also spent three days or so in Dresden, I don’t have many photos of that part of the trip as the weather was exceedingly cold and wet. But, she did get to experience our “Hobbit hole” apartment, see August the Strong’s jewel and valuables collection in the historic Green Vault, and go for two great runs.

Rose flew into Prague by way of Amsterdam, so I took the scenic 2.5-hour train along the Elbe River from Dresden to meet her. We stayed with my host family for three nights, twenty minutes outside of the city center by tram. Rose is a vegetarian; a bit of a stress for Lenka and Zdenek, my host parents. Familiar with the idea that vegetarians exist but not having to cook for them often, Lenka ruminated over what Czech dishes to make. Ultimately, she and Rose decided upon my favorite Czech dish, apricot dumplings, shown below. We spent the rest of our time eating Italian and Thai/Indian food in the city. One appetizer we particularly enjoyed, and have since re-created, was baked goat cheese with honey, freshly ground pepper and rosemary. I’m getting hungry just thinking of it…

Lenka with her tasty apricot dumplings:

We had constantly changing weather, which gave us dramatic skies and increased the photographic appeal of the city. Yes, Prague is a wonderful city to photograph—a place where it is quite difficult to take a bad picture. I still love Prague, and one of my favorite things to do is walk the city by foot from Prague Castle through the Charles Bridge to Old Town Square, exploring side streets along the way. But the city has changed so much since I studied here in 1999, and at this point, Prague is a thoroughly discovered city. It is packed with tourists all the time and is extremely English-language friendly. Unlike some places in Germany, where you can’t assume vendors you interact with will speak English, English is a given for anyone working within the tourist industry in the city. And let me assure you, everyone in the city center is in the tourist industry! The city center is in a constant state of beautification. One of the things that looks strange to me as part of this cleaning up are the bright white sandstone statues they are in the process of replacing or have replaced along the Charles Bridge and on tower gates throughout the city. While these replica efforts reveal more details of the art work, I personally think more about Disney World than ‘original’ old world charm. This is silly, of course, because even the city I was so familiar with nine years ago was far from original. In any event, the gritty, Eastern European urban qualities I marveled at years ago—so different than in the U.S.—are much diminished. I think I need to travel much farther East now to receive the thrill of experiencing vastly different cultures and living conditions. All this being said, I feel so fortunate to have a family in Prague and will always love visiting. It is particularly wonderful to be there with new visitors as the city still holds tremendous charm and wonderment.

In Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral. I'm so happy that the photo of Alphons Mucha's window came out well:

A response to our Government's placement of a missile-defense radar system south of Prague:

We walked up beyond the castle to Petrin Hill to get a great view of the castle and city:

Rose is a much better model than Adam! (She enjoys having her photo taken and hams it up appropriately):

--DRESDEN--
Rose spent the other half of her week with me in Dresden. As Adam and I had only been here for a week or so prior to her visit, it was great for me to have a capable buddy with which to explore. In addition to going to some of Dresden’s fabulous museums, we went to the local Ikea in search of a more comfortable mattress pad for Rose to sleep. Long gone are the days we had an extra bedroom with comfortable conditions for guests!

This was Rose’s first visit to Europe and it was successful in igniting her travel bug. I was delighted to learn that she’s already planning her next trip.

In the Zwinger castle complex. We went a couple of times so these photos reflect Dresden's ever-changing weather. The sandstone cherubs are really something.

Yes, these are two different cherubs with supple, round behinds:

View from the Zwinger in the direction toward Dresden's International School:

These photos all help to give a feel of our neighborhood. Please note the impressive German Democratic Republic (GDR) mural and the photo of the list of things you are not allowed to do in this beer garden. The final photo is our our street: