Germany East: Leipzig

Editor's note: Having researched and written a series of posts for our up-coming trip to San Francisco, and having already purchased tickets for my next trip to Germany (late May/early June), I figure I had better finish up with the posts from the previous trip. This is the penultimate entry I had planned, and I've taken advantage of the end of Spring Break to put the finishing touches on them both for you. The other one will appear on Wednesday.

German National Library

I spent the last two weeks of my January research trip in Leipzig, at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library). This private institution is in the southeastern corner of the city and abuts the Alte Messegelände (Old Trade Show Grounds). The German National Library celebrated its centenary last year, and its magnificent building will be 100 years old in 2016. It still amazes me that Germans continued to do things like build libraries during World War I. Back then it was called the Deutsche Bücherei.

The first morning in Leipzig I woke up to a fresh blanket of snow:

Iconic double Ms at the eastern entrance

For a variety of reasons I chose not to live in the same Haus I did back in May 2011, so I was happy to discover a small Pension just a 10-minute walk away. The Messegelände is 100 years old this year, and the buildings that aren't being torn down for being too old (or ugly--quite a few date to the Communist period) are being re-purposed. A number of Christian associations have purchased Building 14 and use it for worship, a school, a community center, and to house some missionaries. The first-floor cafe and third-floor hostel (Cafe/Pension 14) are run by a Christian businessman a little older than I am. He remembers when only the party elite were allowed to come to events at the Messegelände.

Herr Stiehl and I had a lot of opportunities to talk, since I was the only one at breakfast. Most tenants at the hostel are factory workers and feed themselves from the primitive guest kitchen upstairs. I wanted to start the day with a hefty breakfast that I could stretch into a second meal, so I paid extra for a spread like the one in the photo. It included tea, orange juice, two rolls, meat, cheese, jam, jogurt, muesli, several fresh fruits, and sometimes a soft-boiled egg. I slipped a sandwich and piece of fruit into my bag for later. For my other meals I used the large discount grocery store in Building 11 next door.


Among other anniversaries being celebrated, last year was the 300^th birthday of Frederick the Great of Prussia, and this year Richard Wagner would have been 200. Even though he is most associated with Bayreuth in nearby Bayern (Bavaria), Wagner is a native Sachsen (Saxon). He was born on 22 May 1813 in Leipzig and lived here for two years, until his stepfather moved the family to Dresden. Leipzig is making a big deal about it, having concerts and exhibitions and the like. I didn't catch any of those, but one Saturday night I did go to the famous Gewandhaus to hear what I assume was the final performance of the semester of the student orchestra. They were pretty good--and played "the can-can" as an encore, complete with students in local skirts and knee-high socks doing a silly dance.

Finally, 2013 is 200 years since the Battle of Nations, the decisive battle between Napoleon Bonaparte and the combined armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden, fought on the flat land just south of Leipzig. (Saxony fought with the French. Oops.) It was the largest battle in Europe before World War I and marked the decisive end of Napoleon's European campaign. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of that momentous event, in 1913 Emperor Wilhelm III dedicated the Völkerschlachtdenkmal. (The next time French soldiers would cross the Rhine River int Germany was toward the end of WWI.) This monstrosity of a monument turns 100 later this year, and there are celebrations planned for October. 

Sunrise at the Monument to the Battle of Nations

Who else is celebrating a big anniversary this year? Tell us in the comments!

Friends and Food

Two of my favorite things are friends and food. This post brings those two together. Recently two friends provided me with some good food. One had been to the nearby Amish settlements and brought me back some (sugar-free) apple butter. My family rarely bought apple butter, but it always reminds me of childhood. It was very thoughtful of T.A. to think of me that way. The other friend had discovered No-Knead Bread and has already provided us two loaves.

He says,

Do you have a good cast iron enameled Dutch oven? That's the key piece of equipment. I hear you can use a ceramic or earthenware container as well, as long as 
1) You preheat it to 450 F for 30 minutes before you drop the dough in and
2) CRITICAL: you have a tight lid that keeps the moisture in.

The opening photo brings these two gifts together.

The No-Knead Bread has a firm crust and a moist interior. It looks very rustic when it comes out of the oven, but the most wonderful thing about it is its versatility, going well with gooseberry jelly, honey, or peanut butter & nutella. It also turns out to be an excellent supplement to a traditional Saxon dish I cooked up last week for some other friends of ours.

Leipziger Allerlei is a spring dish that pairs crayfish with fresh young vegetables like asparagus, cauliflower, kohlrabi, morels, carrots, and peas. At the farmers market I substituted turnips instead of kohlrabi and oyster mushrooms instead of morels. Even though I found crayfish at the grocery store, in the end I decided I didn't want to pick them all myself and went with crab claws. The packaging company had very considerately scored the claws at strategic places, so it was pretty easy to pull out the meat.



Then it was time to cook up a batch of crab butter. I decided to go to all that trouble because one of the things that stood out to me from my research with old cookbooks is the effort housewives used to expend preparing all the little things in the kitchen that we can take for granted in an era of prepackaged condiments. Just open your refrigerator and look on the door: all those pickles, mustards, relishes, butters, mayonnaises, salad dressings, and vinegars were once homemade. So, I gave crab butter a try.

Reserving the meat, I threw the shells into melted butter. The instructions called for breaking the shells with a mortar and pestle and later straining the mixture with a hair sieve. I don't have one of those and settled for mashing them up a bit with the potato masher. Then I popped the pot into the fridge to cool. Oops. Having forgotten to strain it at all, and not wanting to reheat the mixture because dinner guests were coming in one hour and it wouldn't cool in time, I ended up picking the broken claws all over again--this time for butter instead of meat!

Then it was time to chop the vegetables. The original recipe from 1901 says each one is to be boiled separately in salted water (and the carrots in beef broth), but my stove only has four burners, and since I learned to cook after the vitamin revolution (in the 1920s), I steam vegetables to prevent the loss of their nutrients. (I'm actually writing a chapter on this concept, hopefully the second one I draft this summer, right after the one on rationing I'm working on now.) To be more economical about it, I put each of my steamer baskets in a large soup pot and filled them from bottom to top with denser vegetables (carrots or turnips) to softer ones (mushrooms, snow peas, asparagus). By the way, did you notice the carrot on the left of the bunch in the photo above? While I was peeling it I could think of nothing else except that I was skinning an anencephalic baby. Thank you, medical school, for messing with my head.

Finally, finally, it was time to make the crab meatballs. Because meatballs were last year's It-Food--they succeeded cupcakes--I assume someone out there knows how to make little cannonballs out of meat that isn't ground beef, but as yet the skill eludes me. I had dutifully left out some bread heels overnight to represent day-old bread from a cooking culture before plastic bags and twist ties. Almost too late I remembered I was supposed to soak them in milk (to soften them!), which I did, for a few minutes. Then I squeezed them out and tore them into pieces to mix them with some of the crab butter and two egg yolks (maybe 1 too many?). But the little lumps I pressed in my hands didn't stay together very well, even with the addition of some commercial bread crumbs, so I never even got around to using the egg whites I had beaten. Still, J.G.D., J.D., and N.D. had arrived, so I forged on, dropping the crab balls into the boiling broth leftover from making the butter--where they promptly disintegrated.

As you can see from the photo, we improvised, serving our "all manner of vegetables" with a ring of crab, salvaged from the broth with a slotted spoon, instead of with crab balls. In the background are a tossed green salad, courtesy of our guests, and--in the upper right--a wedge of Gouda and the rest of one of those loaves of No-Knead Bread. It was a delightful, light, spring meal. Friends and food: a great combination, indeed.

Where I worked, Part II (Leipzig und Berlin)

This is the second of two posts about the places at which I conducted my research while in Germany. Apologies for the delay in publication; teaching, reading my notes, and putting the finishing touches on a book manuscript have been taking up my time.

First: Saxony's second city. I went to Leipzig in order to work in the rich collection of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (Germany National Library). The two houses in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main collect everything published in German since just before WWI. The big old building with beautiful mosaics in the lobby and pretty stained-glass windows in the cafeteria (left) dates from the same time, so many of the city tour buses pause in the circle drive for the tourists to snap a few photographs. When eating outside on the steps I often felt like part of the attraction. I liked working in the large main reading room, with its dark wood floor, walls, and desks. The desks each had a classic green-glass hooded lamp, which when glowing in the evenings lent the appropriate mood for doing research in early-twentieth-century ladies journals.

My hair was still short in May!

Small dome in Haus 1

Door handle to Haus 1

Speaking of mood, the characters of the two houses of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin are very different. Haus 1 opened with great fanfare in early 1914, and its domed main reading room is supposed to have been quite an impressive sight. Unfortunately, the cuppola was damaged during WWII air raids, and it was finally dismantled in the 1970s. Haus 1 lies on the famous boulevard Unter den Linden, just a few blocks east of the Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate), and it ended up in East Berlin. There it suffered the architectural outrage (to read about it now) of having a couple of ugly book towers erected to hold the collections. The building is currently being cleaned and renovated inside and out, and a new glass cube main reading room will open early next year. On Die lange Nachte der Bibliotheken (Long night at the libraries) we were allowed a glimpsed at the as-yet unfinished reading room. Even though the entire place is essentially a construction site, I rather preferred the older style and even the noise to the visually interesting but strictly quiet Haus 2 on Potsdamer Platz. Plus, Haus 1 was closer once I moved to Prenzlauer Berg in July. With the division of the capital city, the library was also divided, and a newer, more modern building constructed in West Berlin in the 1960s contains the more recent collections. It is an architectural marvel of white and concrete and glass, of shapes and lights and uneven, open balconies. The open hours of Haus 2 were shorter than at Haus 1, so I was only here twice: once, to photograph a book that exists in single-copy in the Handwriting Collection; and once on Die lange Nacht der Bibliotheken to hear a radio drama set in a library. If you ever get lost in a library late at night--well, sometimes you don't want to be found...

Haus 2, Potsdamer Platz

The last place I worked in Berlin was at the Bundesfilmarchiv (Federal Film Archive) at Fehrbellinerplatz in Wilmersdorf. Part of the Platz is surrounded by the rounded “wings” of two Nazi-era buildings. From above I think they are supposed to be eagle-shaped. (The red structure in the photo to the left is the entrance to the U-Bahn.) I worked in the building across the street (right). Although the collection itself is impressive, I was underwhelmed my first day there. Visits are by appointment only and consist of you using the machines in an archivist’s office. However, this was helpful for me, since some of the 1920s hygiene films I looked at came in the mundane formats of VHS or DVD, but others were on film reels, and I had never worked with those before. I went back for a quick half day on my last day of research in Germany. I marked a few films for stills I want for an article I'm thinking of writing, and I watched a few more films. I was interested to note that both an advertisement for canned meat and a public health film on good diet used the idea of a fantasy land of too much food--they date from the post-WWI period, when Germans were finally able to buy and eat food after the long "hunger blockade" by the Allies.

A window onto my world in Leipzig and Berlin

Editor's note: This post records some of the sights and sounds of my life in Germany. In Berlin I discovered a multicultural radio station broadcast just a block from my apartment in Kreuzberg. Right click on the link to open a little musical accompaniment!

One of the things I will remember most about my apartment in Leipzig is the windows; I mentioned them in that post from Leipzig that published itself before I could add any pictures (or edit it! Click here for the cleaned-up version). I found the old wooden-framed ones in my bedroom quaint with their knobs (below left), and the newer ones in the bathroom (below center) and kitchen that you can either tilt or hinge open are stereotypically European in their functionality and simple design (Americans, think: IKEA). I was also tickled by the windows in the big double doors to the apartments, which opened inward behind a fancy metal grill (below right); this is how I paid my landlady early on a Saturday morning, while she was still in her bathrobe.

 

As I mentioned, my bedroom faced the street. I had no internet, no television, no radio—and on weekends no roommate, either. So I would listen to the “street radio.” At home we joke that our cat “watches tv” out the windows. In Leipzig the windows were my radio: while eating breakfast and fixing lunch in the morning, or while reading in the armchair on a Sunday afternoon, I listened to the cars driving over the cobblestones, the bikes rattling by, the sounds from the basketball court in the park, the clanking and rattling of the construction down the street, and the rain.

Here you can see the cat in our old apartment, watching Cat TV Channel 1: it carried the comedy show "Squirrels Go Nuts!" and his favorite soap opera, "Leaves in the Wind." Channel 2, in the bedroom, carried Pedestrian News and Car Chase. At our not-so-new house he can still watch "Squirrels Go Nuts!" from his perch above my desk in the study; the picture window out front shows bicycle derbies and the drama "Men at Work."

In Berlin my room again faces the street, but on the second floor instead of the fifth, and on a major east-west artery instead of an out-of-the-way T-intersection. Because there are no curtains, I have to dress in the bathroom. The other downside of these old windows is that they are binary: either open or closed. There is no "I would like a little fresh air while I sleep" setting. In Leipzig I was able to latch the panes to each other so the wind wouldn't blow them into each other, but I can't do that here. So I have to choose between traffic noise or getting baked by the morning sun. Mostly I leave a window open day and night. Immediately below me is a cafe, so as I sit at the desk the sound of utensils on plates and snatches of conversation waft up to me. Sometimes they even have live jazz music in the evening. 

Because I am closer to the street, the windows are also *my* television. And yesterday, the street was overtaken by a parade as part of the Karneval der Kulturen. Organized every year since 1996 for Pentecost weekend (Pfingstwochende; Monday is a holiday here, too!), the KdK includes a street fair, dance parties, and a Carnival-style parade. In the old women's magazines I've been reading, Pfingsten was to Germans what Memorial Day is to Americans: a family holiday that marked the start of summer and vacation season. In the 1920s there were even Pentecost sales! Fewer Germans are religious anymore, but really, the KdK has nothing to do with tongues of flame or the Holy Spirit. Rather, it's an international festival that takes advantage of the holiday weekend.


Friday night and Saturday evening, after the library closed, I went to the Straßenfest, which happened to be just north of my apartment, on my route home. Sunday afternoon I also met up with a German graduate student and some of his friends to watch some of the parade. The Umzug began at 12:30pm, but the first float only reached my block at just before 3pm; the last one came by about 9:30pm. Of the nearly 100 groups participating, there was particularly strong representation from Latin American countries and clubs. The floats and costumes were some more, some less professional-looking. There were samba dancers, jugglers, guys on stilts. Probably the funniest moment was when a man wearing one of those costumes that sits on your shoulders--in the shape of an ugly magician with a tattered cloak--"charged" the children on the sidelines, to their horror and delight. Talk about sensory overload!


My first impression was the sheer number of people (1,5 million, according to the media). If you found a place to sit or stand, the people-watching was excellent: couples of various kinds, Teenies in pairs or small packs, fathers carrying children on their shoulders, mothers trying to maneuver strollers. All shapes and colors, every manner of hair style, lots of "ethnic" clothing, many different languages being spoken. But it was hard to go anywhere, especially since I was carrying a big backpack, and I worried about pickpockets. After a while even the most charitable of human beings could turn into a misanthrope, due to the overwhleming proximity of so many people. People bumping into you who are sweaty, and smoking, and drinking beers from around the world.


Of tastes there were many: I ate a Moroccan lamb-duck pita; a Bulgarian sausage; Ghanian vegetable-rice-and-beans; and one night, an American frozen yogurt cone, because it was being touted as something foreign, new, and "a real dairy product" (as opposed to something made from a powder, water, and air).


At the stands one could buy batik dresses, sombreros, jewelry, wooden figurines, absinth--even Berlin Underwear (local, handmade, one-of-a-kind underwear for 15 Euros = $21.50 each). About the only thing missing was knitted socks. I guess someone forgot to invite the German Omas. (Come to think of it, there weren't many in the crowds, either....)

Finally, the sounds: at the street fair there were several stages, but many of the stands played music too. Waiting in line at the Afro Küche (Afro Kitchen) Sunday we heard a Cuban trio playing dance music. Many of the floats either piped music or had small bands or were followed by drum corps. My last (and lasting) memory of the Karnival der Kulturen will probably be the thudding techno beat of the sidewalk party in front of my apartment building. The boom-a-boom-a-boom-a started coming through my window around noon, and I expected it would go on past midnight. As they say about my neighborhood, the nights are long in Kreuzberg. However, the party broke up about 10:30pm, and thereafter came the sounds of the clean-up: the engine of the occasional truck and the clink and clank of the empty glass bottles that enterprising individuals with those little shopping carts hadn't already collected for the Pfand (return money).


Last fall, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the head of her party, Horst Seehofer (CSU), declared, "Multiculturalism is dead." It isn't enough to live side-by-side with one another, they said; we need to support common goals and principles (in German, Leitkultur). But the organizers of the Karnival der Kulturen beg to differ: Germany, and its capital city especially, are living examples of what's wonderful about recognizing our different cultures: the sights, the tastes, the sounds of diversity (spice of life, and all that). And after all, what says "Berlin" more than an enormous, international, outdoor party?

If Rick Steves Showed Outtakes

Like Mr. Steves (and my paternal grandmother), I like to plan trips. I like to see some of the most important sites, get some local flavor, and do so efficiently and cheaply. But things don’t always go as planned. Sometimes things still turn out great, and other times you are just disappointed. There was a little of both in Dear Husband’s (DH) recent trip to visit Bach me here in Leipzig.

  

As if he had just played a concert
at the Mendelssohn Haus

The day he arrived the library where I’m researching was closed for a special occasion, so I was able to meet him in the afternoon without guilt about what I wasn’t getting done work-wise. We had a lovely time at the museum in the house where Felix Mendelssohn Batholdy lived (and died—of a stroke brought on by over-work and exhaustion—eek!). But the first two neighborhood restaurants we tried were closed (despite the signs on their doors indicating they should be open), so we ended up sitting outside and eating at the pub down the street. That day was redeemed.

I was able to arrange for DH to practice on the small grand piano in the seminar room of my apartment building while I was at the library during the week. After two months of his own stuffed-to-the-seams schedule of rehearsals and concerts for Easter and the end of the semester, DH was glad to get the chance to “do his own thing.” We spent the evenings and the weekend together. Saturday we ran errands, did chores, and then explored the permanent exhibit at the Zeitgeschichtliches Museum (Museum of Contemporary History) about life in East Germany. Happily, it was free. Cut to a scene of us enjoying a really delicious meal at a Chinese restaurant just across Lene Voigt Park from my apartment.

Sunday we went to the morning service at the Thomaskirche, Johann Sebastian Bach’s favorite church.* 

The theme of the hour and a half-long service was baptism. Four children were baptized, and the children who had been baptized the previous three months also came forward to light their baptismal candles in remembrance/renewal of theirs. St. T seems to do a brisk business in “fire insurance,” because there was quite the parade when they read the roll of names! I thought it was very mete that although a pillar blocked our view of the main chancel area where the baptisms took place, we could see a Renaissance painting of Jesus’ own baptism by John. (Later I learned that the pews at St. T used to face each other across the main aisle, so that pillar would have been less of an obstruction.)

After the main service, Holy Communion was celebrated up in the chancel. The much smaller congregation sat in two double rows facing each other—over Bach’s grave! Well, over his reburial vault, any way. He was originally buried in the New Cemetary of St. John Church, which lies outside the Altstadt on the route to my apartment. But when that church was torn down to put up some apartment buildings, they did a search for Bach’s grave (supposedly “six steps from the door of St. John Church”), found remains of an oak coffin of the kind used for important people, a thimble (from his second wife, Anna Magedelena?), and a belt buckle (from the belt used to secure his burial shroud?). These relics were put in a glass container and can now be seen in the Treasure Room of the Bach Museum!

Yours truly with the Diamond Fahrrad (manufactured in Karl-Marx-Stadt!)
on the Augustusplatz, site of effective peaceful protests against the regime in 1989.

Since we had eaten lunch with the St. T congregation, we were then free to go on an excursion I had planned for us outside of the city. Here is where a dirctor would have been handy. During the Museumsnacht I had picked up the first edition of a biannual newspaper Leipzig’s museums have put together and became morbidly curious about the Sanitäts- und Lazarettmuseum, which advertised itself with a photo of an exhibit of a field hospital tent (from the Napoleonic Wars), complete with a soldier who had just had his arm amputated. Blood and guts and gore! And if we could figure out how to get all the way out there (open only 1-5pm Sunday afternoons), it might be fun to picnic when we were done. The first bad sign was that their website gave only meager instructions on how to get there; this was followed quickly by error messages from the public transit website. Using Google Maps and downloaded copies of the tram and bus timetables, however, I had finally been able to piece together a half-hour travel plan of a tram and a bus plus some walking at the end. Although the weather was a tad cool and called for possible showers, we had enough time after the Bach Museum to give it a try.

After a full sprint in front of traffic, we were able to catch the tram. 15 minutes later we got off at the end stop and looked around (as it started to sprinkle) for the bus stop. A kindly old man pointed it out to us just as I realized that we had bought tickets for only one transit zone but would be crossing into another zone. But the bus was rounding the corner, so off we sprinted again. The bus driver waved us on. After a few stops, I thought I should either check the map on the bus or else ask the bus driver to confirm the stop we wanted. I possessed the vocabulary to ask, so I did. To my surprise, he told us we should get off right there and take a certain street and then ask for further directions. So we gathered up our stuff, got off (in the light rain), and set out. Five to ten minutes later without any signs of/for the museum, and having already asked one unknowing couple, I realized I had both the museum’s phone number and my cell phone. No answer (whoops—that was the Schumann Museum!). Still no answer; call back during the week said the answering machine. During the few hours of the week that they were supposed to be open!

We consulted a map I had and determined we should have kept going on the bus after all. Back at the bus stop, it looked like another bus was coming in just 10 minutes, so we hung around, hoping to succeed the second time around. But when I asked this bus driver about the whole two zone-thing, it turned out his route ended soon. He got off the bus to show us the time table for the bus we really wanted and explained repeatedly that we wanted the other bus that came in half an hour, until I finally cut him off (“Thank you, I understand!”). At this point he went on his way, and we decided to bag the excursion, since we would have had only an hour at the museum (IF we had managed to find it), and it was no weather for a picnic anyway. So we ran to catch the bus in the other direction—and the first bus driver was driving! I explained that we had actually wanted to get off at a later stop, and he exclaimed that he was from around there and didn’t know anything about this museum. [!]

It was an unhappy ride back into town, as I had really had my heart set on getting a little dose of medical history and Napoleon. But sometimes plans don’t work. If only some had yelled “Cut!” after I got the wrong answer from the bus driver! “This isn’t working; let’s try you consulting the map instead.” If I had decided to check the map instead of asking the driver, I would have been able to confirm the stop we needed, and we would have at least seen the museum. (I don’t know how dinner would have turned out.) As it was, the rain had stopped by the time we got back home, so we decided to picnic in the large Friedenpark nearby. We decided to have a rest and read on a bench in the pretty little apothecary’s garden. And then it started to rain. When it let up, we decided maybe dinner should be at home after all, but on our way out, we stumbled upon the Duft- und Tastgarten, a smell and touch garden for the seeing-impaired. The Braille signs and the flower beds aren’t in the best of shape, but it was still kind of neat to wander around.

Spiny spines...of death!

I probably won’t get out to that museum on this trip after all. Maybe I’ll never see it. I didn’t expect to really learn anything about the history of medicine. I just wanted to be able to say I had gone. At least I speak the language around here. At the end of my 10-month stay in Germany I’ll be visiting Poland for a couple of days, and my vocabulary is limited to a few Czech phrases (hello/goodbye, please/thank you)! I wonder what kinds of failure stories Rick Steves could tell? What does his outtakes file look like? Closed museums? Food poisoning? Surly waiters? Dirty hotel rooms? Lost train tickets?

Do you have a travel outtake to share?

*--J.S. Bach was cantor of the Thomaskirche choir, in charge of musical instruction at the St. Thomas School, and music director of Leipzig’s five city churches: St. Thomas, St. Nikolaus, St. Paul (the University of Leipzig’s church), St. Peter, and the New Church. St. T and St. N were the main churches, and Bach alternated playing/singing/directing the services there. He wrote/chose the music for the others; and the choir boys who could barely carry a tune were relegated to St. Peter’s!

St. T has been lightly renovated since Bach worked there 1723 to 1750. St. N was extensively rennovated in the nineteenth century. The Peterskirche was torn down and rebuilt larger just south of the city walls in 1895. The Neukirche was demolished at some point, and the Communists imploded the Paulinerkirche on May 30, 1968. Despite little warning, some of its treasures were able to be saved; for instance, the small organ has been at the Peterskirche since then. Meanwhile the Peterskirche was badly damaged during WWII and both building and organ are still in the process of being rebuilt.

Dresden by Day, Leipzig by Night

I have been accumulating cultural experiences from the last couple of months, and now I think I have a clever little rhetoric for putting them together. I’ll describe what I saw one sunny day in Dresden and then what I did during the recent Museumsnacht (Museum Night) in Leipzig.

The first weekend in April, on a really beautiful Sunday afternoon, I decided to walk ~45 minutes home from the swim hall where I had done a few laps after church. As I meandered through the Innere Neustadt, I noticed several sandwich boards outside the Dreikönigskirche (Church of the Three Kings). I had heard that the view from their bell tower is the best in the city, so I decided to investigate.

I didn’t get further than the lobby, however, because there some sort of special service was being conducted in the sanctuary. But that was okay, as this evangelisch (Protestant) church is apparently quite active in matters of social justice: there was a exhibit of art from Columbia sponsored by Amnesty International related to the on-going drug war. Apparently, when the country formed in the early 1800s, the landed class demanded a strong central government, while the urban bourgeoisie feared their power and wanted a weaker one. A century later (post-WWII), the resulting relatively weak central government was not able to stop the landowners from mistreating the peasants, who formed paramilitary groups in self-defense. These have since abandoned their Robin-Hood past of sticking up for the common people and are just as guilty of terrorizing the peaceful, law-abiding populace as the cocaine guerillas, who are fighting the (US-backed) military. I found the art pieces about living amid all this violence to be very moving.

After that I asked about the bell tower, which I was able to reach by going around outside. While reading about the history of the church building—destroyed during the 1945 firebombing—the clock struck three, and the bells’ peals drove a flock of teenagers clattering down the steps! I climbed up I-can’t-remember-how-many steps by myself and emerged to a brisk breeze and strong sunshine. Here are just two pictures, one looking south to the Altstadt (where I lived), and one looking north over the Neustadt to Albertstadt and the Main State Archive where I spent most of my waking/working hours.

1—Kunstakademie, 2—Frauenkirche, 3—Kreuzkirche, 4—Kathedrale, 5—Residenzschloss

The second weekend in May (first Saturday) was a Museumsnacht in Leipzig, in which the museums stay open late (some until midnight or 1am) and hold special programs. You buy one ticket (6 Euros for students) and visit as many museums as you want to or can. I had promised the only other North American DAAD student studying in Leipzig that I would call him when I got to town, and we were able to arrange with a friend of his (he’s Canadian, btw, she’s Scottish) to hit up a few of the events. Our evening began at 7:30pm, funnily enough, at the new Book Museum, right next door to the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek where I spend 50% of my time (the other 50% is in my apartment, sleeping). They were opening a beautiful new building, complete with local musicians. Leipzig’s history as a publishing center is only a little younger than its history as a trade city (the printing press had to be invented first!), so a book museum is fitting. In fact, it's the oldest and largest of its kind in the world. We looked at some of their books and heard the end of a tour before deciding to take off for the Edvard Grieg house and museum.

Leipzig also has a rich musical history (ever heard of J.S. Bach? what about Felix Mendelssohn? Gustav Mahler? Robert and Clara Schumann??). Norway’s favorite composer attended the conservatory here in the mid-nineteenth century, and he frequently visited throughout his life. In fact, he composed (or at least orchestrated) the Peer Gynt Suite in his fourth-floor apartment of the building that now houses a small museum about him. At 9pm we watched a 20-minute adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt play by a high school theater group from outside Chemnitz, complete with snippets from Grieg’s music. The actresses were very enthusiastic (especially the Mountain King’s minions), and afterwards they served us a dessert called Abandoned Bride (crumbled graham crackers, apple sauce, and quark (kind of like whipped cream)). I hadn’t known the story before, and I learned a little about Grieg (who had a happy marriage to his cousin and who apparently carried a little stone frog in his pocket as a good luck charm before concerts).

Last on our agenda was the little Psychiatry History Museum, because there was supposed to be a reading of creepy storied by a bonfire. On our way, we biked past the Hinrichtungstätte, the Stasi execution site during the DDR that is only open once a year, on Museumsnacht. 64 people were killed, most on what were probably trumped-up charges. The line to get in was out the door, but we were heading for the hip locale of Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse and pizza anyway. After sitting outside and people-watching while enjoying our drinks and munchies, it was time to hop back on our bicycles and look for the bonfire.

We arrived a little after 11pm to find a large fire, people chatting, and one woman holding a small book up to candle lantern and reading in what sounded like a desultory way. But we couldn’t tell for sure, because only the people sitting at the picnic table with her could hear, which was disappointing. She wasn’t projecting her voice at all. After a few minutes of straining we gave up and went inside and upstairs to see the exhibits. This cool little museum is exactly what you would want in a history of psychiatry museum: it devotes significant space to telling individual patients’ stories; it acknowledges psychiatry’s terrible history (such as the T4 massacres of disabled and chronically ill individuals that took place in 1939/40); and a side exhibit challenges the dependence of contemporary psychiatry on the pharmaceutical industry. There was also an exhibition of humanizing portraits of people we think are current psychiatric clients in town. One small room is given over to Daniel Paul Schreber, son of the man who founded the Schrebergarten movement (Germany’s famous little gardening colonies) and famous himself for having written an autobiography of his mental illness that Freud read and turned into a case study on repressed homosexuality. I found out that the park by my apartment is named for Lene Voigt, who in the 1920s was famous for her poetry in Säschisch, the difficult Saxon dialect. Because the Nazis found her style "ugly," she had a hard time publishing in the 1930s; in the early 1940s she was diagnosed with late-onset schizophrenia and institutionalized until her death in 1962. They also tell the life story of a man, also possibly schizophrenic, who was tried, appealed, and eventually hung in 1820-something for murdering his on-again, off-again girlfriend. His was the last public execution in Leipzig.

In front of some technical drawings by a patient during the DDR
whose favorite topic was space and travel.

We hung out by the fire until 1am, when everything was supposed to close down. But the guy in charge of the fire was still feeding it branches, so I guess they let people in until 1am, and then you could stay until the fire died, which was going to be another while. But we three biked home our separate ways. My way was very separate, for I turned too soon and got briefly lost. A big problem for me here is the street names. Have I mentioned that Leipzig has a lot of history? Well, I meant to turn down [insert famous person’s name here]-Strasse, but instead I went down [insert famous person’s name here]-Strasse. Unlike other cities, where a [insert famous person’s name here]-Strasse stands out because it’s different from the streets with ordinary names (like Prager Strasse or Schützenplatz), Leipzig seems to have a lot of them. Many Dresden street signs had plaques explaining for whom the street was named—maybe Leipzig just has more more-famous people streets for me to get confused? It also doesn't help that the streets frequently change names. At any rate, I saw even more of Leipzig by night than I had bargained on!

Live from Leipzig!

I am renting a furnished room in a fifth-floor apartment in a Jugendstil building in the Reudnitz neigborhood of Leipzig. This “young-style” building dates to 1900-something and is currently mixed-use for an alternative health center, a couple artists, and apartments. In the center of the house is a winding dark wood staircase with worn treads and heavy newel posts. The apartment doors have glass panels that open(!) behind fancy metal screens. There is a wide central hallway with (closed) doors—very German. My room is large and on the front of the house; because there is neither a radio nor internet at there, I tend to open a window and listen to the sounds of the street and the basketball court in the park across the way. The windows in my bedroom are original, but those in the kitchen and bathroom are new. I share the kitchen and 1.5 baths with two roommates, also renting rooms from the landlady who owns the building. Because there is so much turnover, the apartment gives the impression of being white and “sterile” (according to my Dresden rommate, who helped me move in). I’ve put up pictures of/by my neice and nephew to personalize my space. Out back is a small Hof (courtyard) with the trash and recylcing recepticles, clotheslines, fish pond, and small patio that’s nice to use if the smokers aren’t. I park my bike out front.

When I visited Leipzig five years ago (June 2006) to do pre-dissertation research, the impression I got was of ugly old DDR-era buildings, construction, and not much “touristy” to do except see Bach’s churches. I have been happily mistaken on all fronts. There is a mix of architecture: despite the WWII bombing and numerous shabby-looking “Communist” structures, there are still some streets (reminding me of Vienna!) with rows of stately old apartment rowhouses, as well newer, modern-looking buildings. However, the Völkerschlacht-Denkmal, a pyrimidal monument dedicated in 1913 to Napoleon’s defeat a century before that at the nearby Battle of the Nations, is still objectively ugly. I have been surprised at how much green space there is here. Dresden has a reputation for its openness and for the wooded expanse of the Dresdner Heide, but Leipzig somehow manages to be both a bigger and a greener city. In addition, the bicycle paths here are far superior to those in Dresden, so I am hoping the weather continues to improve so that I can avoid buying a bus pass and just bike everywhere I need to go.

In addition, the cultural offerings are much broader than my old guide book lets on. When DH comes to visit, we will of course go to Sunday worship at the Thomaskirche (Bach’s main church) and probably also at least one organ concert. We wanted to attend the Mahler Festival, but only really expensive tickets are left, so instead we’ll hit up the Grassi Museum for its ethnographic exhibits, and hopefully the Museum of Contemporary History for an exhibition on life in the DDR. I’m also curious about the coffee museum!

The River Elbe

Loschwitz as Winter Wonderland

Reorganization of the zodiac notwithstanding, I am a water sign (Cancer), and I loved living near the magnificent body of water that is the River Elbe here in Dresden. The first three months I lived on a central, low-lying Platz on the right/northern bank, but in general the terrain is elevated there, with scattered small vineyards along the higher slopes. I couldn't quite see the river from my bedroom window, but just around the bend in the road stood the famous Blaues Wunder ("Blue Wonder"--first suspension bridge in Europe without pylons in the river). The last four months I lived on the left/southern bank, a few minutes' walk from the Marienbrücke, with the Neustadt across the river. One of my favorite memories from this time will definitely be the sight of the beautiful, reconstructed baroque buildings of the Altstadt, seen from a Strassenbahn while crossing one of Dresden's many bridges over the Elbe.

There are currently seven major bridges. In addition to the Blaues Wunder and the Marienbrücke there are the Albertbrücke, the Carolabrücke, the Augustusbrücke, the Flügelwegbrücke, and the Autobahnbrücke. The controversial new bridge is the Waldschlößchenbrücke. The Dresden Elbe Valley had been listed as a World Heritage Site, but when Dresdners voted in a 2005 referendum to build another bridge to relieve traffic congestion, the valley was listed as "Endangered." The city backed away from the plans, but a court ordered that the referendum had to stand, and in 2009 the Dresden Elbe Valley was de-listed as a World Heritage site (only the second time that has ever happened). Many people are upset because the bridge will be modern-looking and quite long (probably one reason why a bridge wasn't built across that stretch of river before). But I can attest that it is necessary, because at the moment there is really only one Strassenbahn line that serves that stretch of city, and when it's late or not running, you don't have many options.


I decided to take a picture of the Elbe at the beginning of each month, as a memento of my time in Dresden. Below is a chain of images of the river, the first three looking toward my first apartment (Oct., Nov., end of Dec.) from the far side of the Blaues Wunder. In the first photo, you can see there was Hochwasser (flooding) when I arrived. I waited to take the November photo until after I had run my errands, and by the time I was ready to walk back across the river, the beautiful morning had clouded over. The early December photo is at the start of this post; we had snow on the ground continuously from the week of Thanksgiving into January. The third photo below I took on moving day the last week of the year.

 

  

The new views are from the near side of the Marienbrücke at the beginning of January (still snow). While I was gone on the East Coast in mid-January, the snow finally melted, as the February photo shows. The March image is unfortunately over-exposed, but the April one hints at the nice blue skies we sometimes had. The bottom image shows my last day, cloudy in Dresden at the end of April.

Of course, the Elbe isn't always beautiful. In 2002 there was terrible flooding. The stereotypical German Stube (hunting-themed pub) down the street from my second apartment had a mark at least waist-high on the wall, showing how high the water was then--and that wasn't exactly close to the river. Here's an image from the river-side amphitheater at Schloss Pillnitz with markings of historical floods; the 2002 deluge is the one off to the right, as high the epic flood of March 31, 1845.


I am in Leipzig now, which has a river (the Weisse Elster), but is somehow not as defined by it as Dresden, "the Florence of the Elbe," perhaps because as the river runs through the city, it is surrounded by parkland (a flood zone?). As it turns out, Leipzig has lots of parks and Schrebergärten (those little garden colonies), so even without direct access to the Weisse Elster, the big-city architecture is broken up by green space. I am finding Leipzig a prettier city than I had originally thought.


Editor's note: This, my farewell post for Dresden, was slightly delayed by the difficulty of having laptop, camera, cable, and internet all in one place at the same time.