Marriage advice

chocolates we made, with out-of-season strawberries

In my role as a Frau (wife), I was recently asked for some general marriage advice. Granted, Dear Husband and I have only got 6.5 years of experience in that area--a whole order of magnitude less than my grandparents--but I agreed to share the short essay below. I post it here in honor of Valentine's Day, which DH and I will be celebrating "Eastern Orthodox"-style this weekend. (Before we got married and while we were still living in separate states, we used to wait until Spring Break to celebrate, rather as Eastern Orthodox Christmas and Easter fall a little later than their counterparts in the Western Christian church.)

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Dear Husband and I are high school sweethearts. My friends used to ask how it was that I knew Dear Husband and I were in love and right for each other. Unfortunately, the surest measure I knew then or now of the quality of a relationship is time. If you are still together next year after all the good and the bad, and the year after that, and the year after that—then you have a successful relationship. Of course you should treat each other well, but we have all seen seemingly happy partnerships fall apart. Marriage requires more stick-to-it-tive-ness than Americans are used to exercising, and I hope if/when the two of you ever find the glue between you getting thin, you will turn to your friends for a nudge back together, like the pieces of a plate or bowl you superglue back together after dropping in the sink, because although you could afford a nicer set of dishes, you are used to and still like the one you already have.

One of our coping strategies is that we refer to each other as “partners in life, for life.” That means that we have committed to help each other out with mundane things like household chores, to ensure that each of us can achieve the things we want for our careers and our family. As a church musician, DH is particularly busy during the months of November-December (Christmas season) and April (Easter), so I make sure he gets a meal between rehearsals and mastermind our holiday plans so he doesn’t have to. He does the same for me during the stressful parts of the semester. Because we (usually) manage the little things well, we are individually poised to accomplish big things better. So we joke that although he works several part-time jobs without benefits, DH is my “sugar-daddy” putting me through medical and graduate school; but I’ll return the favor: once I make a physician’s salary, I’m his retirement plan!

A less romantic but more useful measure of the quality of a long-term relationship than time is…your ability to assemble furniture together. This life skill is particularly tested after buying a house, as you finally have the space and an excuse to splurge on a nice set of shelves from IKEA. You know, the kind that look the same from both sides and come with one of those crooked little wrenches and picture instructions without any words? Are you still speaking to each other an hour later? DH and I think we set a record for the 3.5 hours necessary to put together the large, wheeled island in our kitchen from a set of instructions that possessed merely a superficial  resemblance to English. The key to getting through some difficulties in your marriage is to recognize when it is the other person's fault and when it is not. If you two can unite against a common enemy (such as a furniture assembly guide in Engrish), then you really have a strong relationship!

Which brings me to my final point: laughter really is the best medicine. Laugh with each other at each other. Pick your battles, walk away from the unnecessary ones, and use humor to diffuse tense situations—for instance, by talking to bad drivers in a syrupy, sing-song-y voice as if they were stupid puppies: “Did you just cut me off? Yes you did! Yes, you did! Don’t f*** with me today, buddy, I’m on my way home from my in-laws’.”* Read to each other: on picnics, on long car trips, in bed before falling asleep at night. That way, no matter else you do individually, you will always have one thing in common as a conversation-starter. Bonus points for reading something so funny that you have to stop because you’re gasping for air from laughing so hard.


I love being married, and I love being married to Dear Husband. We wish you the same happiness—and intelligible furniture assembly directions.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

So, that's what I know about marriage. In honor of the holiday, I would love to hear your stories and advice as well. Don't worry if you're "late" responding--remember, we're not celebrating until Saturday!

*--I actually have about the best in-laws in the country; I used this as a figure of speech for comedic effect only.

The Menu, please!

Dear Reader, I have started writing my dissertation. No, really, I mean it. You may recall that in a post last October, I revealed that the assertion "I'm writing my dissertation now" is sometimes a socially acceptable platitude for explaining why a graduate student still hasn't graduated. But earlier this month, while traveling to the medical library at another university to photograph yet more books for the chapter I am writing, I realized that my motto needs to be "READ LESS, WRITE MORE." (Yes, it must necessarily be written in all caps, like an internet troll posting the same four words over and over again in the message board of my internal narration.) Now, I knew while I was in Germany that there were some published sources I could get in the United States, so it was not a surprise or change of plans that took me there. Actually, I have been trying to conduct a survey of old German textbooks and cookbooks for about 3 years now, so I was excited that over the winter break I could finally devote time to finding out what turn-of-the-last-century physicians could actually do to treat illness in the pre-anti-biotics age, verses what the alternative practitioners were offering, verses what home remedies were recommended. More on that in a later post.

ANYway, while on that trip I decided to sit down and just start writing the thing already. After all, eating an elephant begins with the first bite. So I expanded the chapter outline from one of my many grant proposals into three whole pages of text. I was 1% done! More importantly, it felt really good to have gotten "over the hump," as if I had finally acquired enough activation energy to start the reaction of writing. You see, I had been planning to wait until I had read "everything" and had a bird's eye view of my sources to draw out an argument. But that sort of wait-and-see methodology risks becoming procrastination while reading "just one more book," because I know that I prefer the passivity reading to the activity writing. So I feel good about exercising some discipline to write about things as I encounter them and have about 20 pages now.

From reading colleagues' work, I know that first dissertation chapters tend to run on the long side (60+ pages), as the author figures out what he or she is arguing. As my undergraduate thesis adviser told me, "You can't edit what you haven't written yet." So some of the pages I have written will probably be condensed down into paragraphs, or even sentences, as I distill my notes into a concise argument in 30 or 40 pages. I can't help but feel a little miffed, however, that the effort that went into all those pages will likely go unnoticed, and I am tempted to workshop a long version of my first chapter, just so that someone read all this stuff that I've been writing!

Here is where you come in, Dear Reader. I assume most of my ramblings are not interesting to you until I figure out what it is that I am arguing, but the following snippet of text will at least give you an idea of the shape of the project. While in a punny mood one evening, I realized that--if I didn't over do it--I might be able to present my dissertation using the metaphor of multi-course meal. At the end of the Acknowledgments section I lay out what amounts to a menu of what will be served in the pages to come:

In keeping with the theme of food and foodways, one could describe this dissertation as an eight-course meal, with each section or chapter representing a different course. The Acknowledgements are like the soup course: “to stimulate the stomach, not weigh it down.”* The Introduction to my theory of the “telescopic body” is meant “to flatter the gums,” as Henriette Davidis thought appetizers should. I will build my case in the succeeding chapters. With Chapter One, the starter, we have reached the main courses. Davidis suggested a light meat such as steamed poultry, or fish; I will review the by-now familiar history of the development of the New Knowledge of Nutrition in the first three decades of the twentieth century and offer a novel case study on the rations for the sick in Dresden during World War I. According to Davidis-Holle, the entree should be the most complicated dish and the highlight of the meal; Chapter Two will attempt to close the reception loop from producers of scientific information about the healthiest way to preapare vegetables to uses of that same information, namely housewives and the canning industry. By convention the next course consisted of either a roast with compote or a warm pudding: comfort food for a chapter that takes place at home. Chapter Three explores foodways in the ordinary kitchens in both city and countryside. Chapter Four returns to the topic of eating for health/food for the sick (Krankenkost), an apt parallel for the course of light vegetables without meat. The seventh, dessert, course concludes the meal; whereas a middle-class German Hausfrau might have served a torte or ice cream, I will summarize my argument and indicate what changed between 1900 and 1933/5 and what remained the same. The Epilogue looks at the concept of the Volkskörper and its fate up to the present; those who are sated may skip this course, as one may pass on the cheese, fruits, and sweets at the end of long and filling banquet. Finally, to give the reader a “taste” of early-twentieth-century Germany, I have opened each chapter with a representative selection of recipes. Guten Appetit!


*--Davidis-Holle, Das Praktische Kochbuch (1901), 740.

Ein deutschsprachiges Weihnachten

DH and I, with "the gang" (our Bible study group), after

decorating the house and Christmas tree

"A German-language Christmas," reads the title of this blog post. Now that I am back in the United States, it's easy to see that Christmas here is a lot like Christmas over there. You are probably aware that many of our cherished traditions have their roots in that Teutonic nation: decorated fir trees, braided Christmas bread, "Silent Night." For my Christmas Eve entry this year, here is a medley of Christmas celebrations from various places in Europe, ending in Deutschland:

The best of European Christmas:
http://www.viennaforbeginners.com/

This blog carries lovely photographs of Vienna, accompanied by nostalgic or quirky verse. (My favorite references US Poet Laureate Billy Collins.) Although I have spent only three days there, it makes me impatient to go back this summer!

The worst: In the Netherlands, Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) arrives on 5 December on a large ship, then transfers to a white horse. He is accompanied by Zwarte Piet (Black Peter), "a Moor," an actor in blackface.
Once a slave to Saint Nicholas, the many Peters (yes, he's been cloned) now each have a particular job to do: while one wraps presents, another bakes cookies; while one navigates, another still plays the fool to rouse the crowd while they wait for the Big Man. The Netherlands used be a great sea-faring nation, which included trade not just in spices but in people, too.

Fun fact to know and tell: when DH and I were in Chicago recently to attend the Lyric Opera and visit a few museums, we saw the 50 national Christmas trees in the Museum of Science and Industry. Each was decorated by members of a local heritage group to represent Christmas in Kenya, Egypt, Belize, Russia, Japan, and Scotland. Although the trees were spread out, it was easy to see that neighboring countries share some traditions, like the parades of children re-creating Mary and Joseph's search for room at an inn in Central and Latin America, or the emphasis on Epiphany in Eastern Orthodox countries like Greece and Ukraine. One fun fact we learned is that in Hungary, finding a spider web in the house on Christmas Day brings good luck. DH has been teasing me about (not) cleaning the house, just in case!

It's Academic: Joe Perry, UIUC History PhD, Christmas in Germany: a cultural history
Finally, I share with you a brief summary of a first book, just published by someone who graduated from my department a few years ago. In Christmas in Germany: a cultural history, Joe Perry reconstructs two hundred years' worth of holiday rituals and celebrations, from the Christmas tree (der Weihnachtsbaum) to Father Christmas (der Weihnachtsmann) to "the Christmas spirit" (die Weihnachtsstimmung), in order to explore how these seemingly timeless and universal traditions were constructed in the early 1800s as a reaction to the tumultuous Napoleonic Era. Like many Europeans whose lives and countries had been rearranged by the ambitious Emperor of France, Germans turned inward toward the private sphere and created the modern Western ideal of (bourgeois) family life. Perry shows how Germans developed a national emotional culture around the combination of Western Christianity and pagan festivals; however, this common culture still allowed for differences in class, confession (Catholic vs. Protestant, Jews), and politics. Ancient faith in the birth of God's son combined with modern consumerism (Kauflust--the desire to buy) and medieval pagan emphasis on light during the darkest time of the year--strands we still find in our American Christmases. Moreover, Perry argues that "This book moves beyond public/private dichotomies to argue that Christmas, supposedly a private family celebration, was and is Germany's national holiday" (7). It is the private, "feminine" side of national belonging, which historians have tended to ascribe to the more obvious, masculine militarism of public German nationalism. For the last 200 years, it has been one thing most Germans had in common, as whomever claimed to speak for "the nation" (Social Democrats, National Socialists, Cold War liberals, Communists) tried to shape how private individuals did or did not celebrate it. Perry also tries to write the history of German Christmas "from below," showing how some Germans pushed back against the contemporary narrative of what Christmas was supposed to be. In other words, the "war on Christmas" began as soon as it was invented as we know it.

However you do (or do not) celebrate Christmas, I wish you Happy Holidays and a Joyous New Year!

Experimental Cooking, I

I have been wondering how to include you, Dear Reader, in my dissertation research, now that I am home from Germany and spending my days either reading secondary literature--most of it probably uninteresting to you--or doing close reads of primary sources. That may be interesting to you, but only once I have figured out what I think it means in terms of my broader argument about ideas on food and bodies in early-twentieth-century Saxony. Both of my advisers have given me the green light on my dissertation outline, so while you wait for me to fill it in with case studies, here are some gustatory illustrations.

At the moment I am organizing and reading through the photographs I took back in September 2010 at the Dortmund Kochbuch Museum of the most famous cookbook in Germany, the Praktisches Kochbuch. Henriette Davidis (1801-1876) published the first edition of this practical cookbook in 1844; after her death the publisher contracted with a series of editors to continue capitalizing on her famous name. You can still purchase editions on amazon.de; the most recent edition came out last year (2010). What made Davidis's cookbook so famous in an otherwise glutted market of literature for middle-class housewives and daughters was that she wrote for beginners, describing how to prepare even basic kitchen staples like pickles, noodle dough, or flavored butters. Moreover, rather than merely "borrowing" recipes she tested the ones that she published. Later editors retained her name and often the format, but they also updated the recipes to reflect changing tastes, ingredients, and technologies (i.e. gas and electric stoves, refrigerators).

I have heard that one should not try out new recipes for parties or when company comes over for dinner, but that hasn't stopped me--or many of the users of the cookbooks from the early 1900s that I have been reading! I have attended two potlucks in the last week, and for each I tried out a recipe from the Davidis line of cookbooks. What made these recipes particularly challenging was not the translation from German to English or from grams into cups but rather the fact that they were written in the middle of World War I, when due to the incompetency of the various levels of government and the English blockade, many foodstuffs (like pork, beef, milk, wheat, potatoes, eggs, sugar, and coffee) became scarce for many Germans. Workers living in cities usually had it worse than the middle class, who could afford to buy on the black market (Schwarzmarkt), and the farmers, who simply refused to sell what they produced at the government-determined prices. I tried to find a balance between the historical frugality these recipes embody and the fact that I still wanted the results to taste good! Below are two recipes translated more or less literally from Luise Holle's Praktisches Kriegskochbuch (1916), with my comments in brackets.

Christmas Cake [Weihnachtskuchen]
Stir 50 g lard or artificial fat [1/4 cup unsalted stick margarine] until soft, add 100 g fine sugar [1/2 cup] 1 egg yolk and 2 teaspoons of beaten egg powder [Eiersparpulver], a pinch of salt, 50 g diced citron [1/3 cup], 40 g raisins [1/4 cup], 30 g coarsely chopped nuts [1/4 cup chopped walnuts] and 300 g flour [2.5 cups] mixed with 1 packet of baking powder [??] to that and then fold in the stiff peaks of the egg white. Fill a long, prepared [greased] loaf pan with all but 5 teaspoons full of the batter, which one reserves. On the dough spread 3 spoons of breadcrumbs [omitted], then 30 g raisins [1/4 cup--actually, the rest of the bag of golden California raisins] and 30 g of grated nuts [>1/4 cup chopped walnuts] mixed with 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder, and pour the rest of the batter on top. The cake must bake 1 hour at moderate [gleichmässige] heat [on the advice of an older woman at church I settled on 325 F for 25 minutes].

I decided to forgo the historical accuracy of using some kind of powdered egg substitute in favor of one actual egg. Perhaps for this reason, my dough was rather dry--and that was with only half the recommended flour (according to a couple of online measurement conversion sites). However, I am proud of the fact that I beat the egg white into "stiff white peaks" the old-fashioned way.* Plus, it seemed a little silly to use the electric mixer for only a single egg white. Besides the cooking temperature, I also had to guess about the baking powder. Who knows how much and what kind of baking powder was in one packet sold in Germany in 1916? Today they contain 15g, so I went with 1 level tablespoon of my usual double-acting baking powder. However, on account of the dryness, the two halves did not bake together. The result was something more like Christmas Granola Bars than Christmas Cake. (See above.) I think next time I will go ahead and use a whole stick of margarine (or butter) and be even more judicious with the flour. As it is, I ate what we brought home from the party with milk for breakfast. That's an economical way of using leftovers Henriette and Luise surely would have approved of.

"Blarney," in progress: potatoes, 
cabbage, carrots (later: another
layer of potatoes, then onion)

For the second event, I knew the meat dish would be a roast, so I decided to make Falsches Irisches Gericht, which literally translates as "False Irish Dish." This cookbook has a number of foreign dishes--Danish Soup, Belgian Oven Dish with White Chicory, and Gypsy Turnips--so I am not sure why the title for this one is modified by "false." I am pretty sure the turnip recipe is no more authentic, but for some reason Holle felt the need to distance this mixture of potatoes, cabbage, and carrots from the Emerald Isle. Dear Husband suggested I should call this one "Blarney"!

False Irish Dish, or "Blarney" In a cooking pot greased with fat, heat 1/8 liter of water, lay finely chopped white cabbage in layers, raw potatoes cut in slices, and some finely chopped carrots in between. Spread salt and pepper on each layer, cook everything together for 10 minutes and put the dish in a cooker [Garkocher] for 2 hours. Only stir some fat into the dish at the very end, after spreading a few spoonfuls of onion cubes cooked light-brown [in butter].

This recipe reads like how I usually cook: with the exception of the strange precise-ness of the volume of water, no amounts or measurements are specified. I ended up using 3 large skin-on potatoes (or 6 the size of your fist), cut into thin-ish slices; several carrots peeled and halved short-ways (and long-ways if the top half was fatter)--I don't know how many(!); and most of a bag of prepared coleslaw mix to cut down on prep time. I hate to have Reste and would have used the whole bag if I could have fit it all in the glass casserole dish. I simply checked the water when testing the dish for done-ness every 20 minutes. In place of the slow-cooker I put it in the oven at 275 F for an hour. Although the butter-cooked onion smelled absolutely delicious, I had forgotten the salt and pepper, so I thought the result was not very tasty. (The other guests assured me otherwise.) Nevertheless, when re-using the leftovers, I am adding the rest of the shredded cabbage and some Kräutersalz [herb salt] that I brought back with me, so now this quasi-Irish dish will definitely taste German to me.

I anticipate doing more experimental cooking, if only because I like trying new dishes. But I wonder what impact this very subjective experience will have on my dissertation, if any. Does(n't) my project require that I know what common foods looked like, cooked like, tasted like--even digested like? If I don't share that sensory experience with my historical actors, if I merely re-use the words they used, I am afraid that my analysis will merely become a sort of citation analysis: "the description süsssauer [sweet and sour] often appeared in recipes for..." or "pikant [spicy] meant different things to different people...." On the one hand, it is objectively impossible to recreate boiled turnips from 1917 or Sauerbraten from 1933: the varieties of vegetables are more homogeneous now, the soil then was more nutrient-poor, my water is softer. More to the point, my taste history is different as an American in the 21st century than that of a woman of my age and class living in early 20th-century Saxony. For one, I have grown up eating more processed and packaged foods; Davidis couldn't know what Pepsi, Chef Boyardee, Pop Tarts, or pixie sticks taste like. Even though I don't eat/drink any of those things anymore, my expectations for sweet, salty, spicy, and other flavors are surely not the same as those of someone who grew up at a time when the recommended daily intake of salt was 15g[!] (it's currently 2.3g/day). This cultural variety is why Coke, McDonald's, and other globalized food commodities taste different in different parts of the world today. On the other hand, historians have long been in the practice of writing about societies of which they are not a part and cultures they have not experienced. Surely I can still come up with something interesting to say about foodways that are so different from mine, just as men can write about women in history, modern citizens can write about slaves, Americans can write about Germans, and so forth. Some scholars assert only personal experience can make one an expert in a particular category of identity, whereas others argue that being an outsider gives one a better perspective. I suppose with my food projects I am straddling the line a little bit. Come back to read more of my philosophizing about food and bodies, with the remove of an ocean and 100 years...

*--Unfortunately, I paid bodily for my re-creation: 2 days later I had shooting pain in my right shoulder, presumably my deltoid tendon complaining about the stress I put it through whipping that egg white. How did all those housewives did it for all those years??

Germany: now a familiar strange place

Me: Lace curtains: that’s how I know we’re in Europe.

Him: Is that all?

This exchange with Dear Husband took place in Vienna last November, but the curtains in the photo are from my kitchen in Leipzig (May). I compiled the following lists over my months in Germany as a way to remember what at first seemed different to me. In no way do they pretend to be comprehensive. These may not even be the "most important" differences between the two countries. But they are things I noticed in my daily life, and I would be interested to hear your agreements, additions, or corrections in the comments section below.

What you will find in Germany:

What you will not find:

·   stuff you lost: a jacket with house keys in the pocket, presciption sunglasses or a cell phone in the library, a USB stick left in a computer… ·   trust: this means laptops left unattended in the university library, bicycles left leaning against buildings (many places), and the honor system for payment on public transit (with random checks, of course!) ·   good public transportation (due to high population density, economic disincentives to produce gas-guzzling automobiles in the postwar period, and environmental stewardship) ·   bike paths and even bicycle street lights—many have a handle you can hold onto while waiting for the light to change, so you don’t have to get off your bike! ·  certain baked goods: a wide variety of breads and rolls, pastries, “cheese cake” ·   Ausbildung = education. Even the store cashiers and cleaning ladies take courses.

·   water fountains; corrolary: no free water with your restaurant meal; some places will let you ask for tap water ·   trash cans on street corners, at least in Dresden, because eating is something you do when you are someplace, not when you are on your way to someplace. This means I often ended up carrying a banana peel or apple core a couple blocks, until I reached the next busstop. ·   ashtrays at busstops: as if by making it “inconvenient” to throw away their butts, smokers will quit. Yeah, right. They just toss them on the ground. ·   cookies, brownies, and cake: I think it has something to do with the baking powder. Also, in general, Germans prefer less sweet baked goods. Just the sight of your standard American brownie (fudge with chocolate chips, say) would send many Germans into sugar shock. ·   sales tax: sticker price of 99 cents means 99 cents ·   homeschooling. Since the mid-19th c. Germans have had a Schulpflicht: literally translated, the duty to go to school. It was originally conceived as a paternalistic responsibility of the state to care for its future citizens by educating them, but it is a burden for those parents who don’t want the state directing their children’s education.

A last observation that I frequently made is that I look German but—even with my best grammar and vocabulary—as soon as I opened my mouth it became blatantly obvious that "Frau Ehrenberger" was not German. Most people I interacted with were willing to work with my sometimes limited language skills.* Only once did a complete stranger (to me; he was a friend of a friend) make fun of me. She and I were loading my things into her car after a sleepover, and I was unselfconsciously prattering away in German with my broad American accent. “Was?” he asked her in front me. “Was ist das? Ist das Deutsch?” I wanted to say to him, “Hallo! Ich verstehe Sie!” but just mumbled a “Hi.”**

By contrast, a South Korean artist I met outside Dresden (who had good English from having studied in Boulder, CO), noted that she was stared at in her small town outside Munich. She was often the first Asian these people had ever seen. But some neighbors had taken her under their wing and regularly invited her over to drink beer and learn Bayrisch. So even though she didn’t look German, she often impressed shopkeepers by speaking in the local dialect!

Certainly much of my experience in Germany was filtered through my language skills, what I could or could not understand, what I could or could not express. Being in an English-language environment is my favorite part about being back in the United States. Okay, maybe my second favorite part, after having DH around all the time. And so it seems mete to publish this final missive from/about Germany a year after the above exchange about the foreign-ness of Europe being manifested in its curtains took place. In the title of this post I call Germany "now a familiar strange place," because I feel as if I understand or recognize some of what makes our countries different (hence, "familiar")--but they are still different ("strange"). I hope you have enjoyed reading along; I know I appreciated having a creative outlet for writing and for sharing photographs. Watch this space: over the next months I may post every few weeks with some update on my dissertation research and writing; and definitely stay tuned in June 2012, as I accompany DH on a choir trip to Central Europe. We'll post more stories and photos for you!

*--My German definitely improved, but the variety of topics I encountered sometimes strained my vocabulary. High-school German, for instance, does not provide one with words or phrases for church or Bible study. And my research taught me about medicine, food, and even agriculture but not always what I needed for discussing current American economics or politics, which were popular topics with acquaintances.

**--"What?" "What's that? Is that German?"  "Hello! I understand you!"

On my work, part II

Me in the Elbe River while back in Dresden in July 2011

I had the nagging feeling that half-written posts were waiting to be finished and published--and I was correct! This is the companion to my last post (several weeks ago); a retrospective remains to be illustrated, and that will end my "Germany entries," conceived/written while I was still in Europe.

In the first part of this post, I discussed some of the quirks and annoyances about archival and library research. You may have wondered why I want to go through all the trouble! That's easy: I love research, because I love the thrill of the chase. The slightly ADD part of my psyche relishes when a search for one piece of information leads to another and another and then connects back to something else I already knew. This means I often end up opening multiple browser windows while looking stuff up online, as my thinking branches off in one direction after another. Then I have to work backwards to reconstruct the bits of knowledge I was after, like so many parenthetical comments or tangents in a conversation with myself.

Another thing I like about research is finding sources that referenced each other, or at least the same event. I have plenty of sources, too many probably, so that’s not a problem. And I could say many things from each of them. However, when more than one source mentions the same question or controversy, then it feels like that event really happened and isn’t just a fragment from an archive or a figment of my over-active (or desperate) imagination. Now that I am outlining, I am pulling these inter-textual references together into case studies about various concepts, like food for the sick or the pleasures/dangers of home canning.

I always like finding stories, too, especially about patients or other ordinary people. The last project I worked on while in Dresden was seven copy books of letters written by a nutritional chemist working in or just outside Dresden. The copy books included both personal and business letters, so I could learn about both his work and his family life. Because there are so many letters from this person, who hasn't been written about in English yet, I will probably include him in at least two of the six chapters in my dissertation.

As I transition from researching to reviewing to writing, maybe I will introduce you to this character in a future post. There are joys and frustrations about writing, too, and those will probably be subjects of musings (or rants) as well. Finally, as fun and as frustrating as the privilege and duty of research can be, I honestly want to devote a larger portion of my career as a historian to teaching. I am TAing for the History Department for the first time this semester, and now that I am beginning to settle into a rhythm with that new task and identity, I expect to share some of what I learn about myself as a teacher and about history for non-majors. As you can see from the photograph at the head of this post, I've barely gotten my feet wet in the wide river of the historical profession.

On my work, part I

June 2011 in Haus 1, Staatsbibliothek in Berlin
Laptop + old books + camera = ready to work!

Doing archival research for one's dissertation--and especially going abroad to do so--is something of a rite of passage for history graduate students. This probably applies to disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and archaeology, too. Once you've condensed your dissertation proposal into the neat package necessary for travel grant applications; jumped through the hoops of visas, international health insurance, and local institutional affiliation; and then actually lived and worked in a foreign country for 6 or 10 or more months, it's like you've entered a special club. "Oh yeah," you can say to the first-year graduate students. "I've already been to [insert comparatively exotic city] to do my research. I'm writing my dissertation now." It's true that getting to live and do research in Paris, Mexico City, Moscow, or Johannesburg is a unique and privileged opportunity. How many of my high school or even college classmates have gotten to do the same? Most American Germanists prefer large and metropolitan Berlin, but even living 7 months in Dresden was a wonderful experience. It's no cultural backwater. I'll be telling stories about it for the rest of my life.

But I'm not writing my dissertation now. Because writing a dissertation is more than merely reading some old documents in archives far away and then coming home and writing about it. For starters, I did very little reading while I was in Germany. On the advice of my advisers, I spent my time there collecting; now that I'm home again sharing the mortgage and grocery bills with Dear Husband, I am finally getting around to reading some of the mountain of data I collected.

But I'm not even supposed to be doing that just yet. My advisers want me to sort through that mountain, looking for sources that stand out for their uniqueness and potential, so that over the course of this semester I can refine my chapter outline. Next semester I'll start writing my dissertation.

Until then, I thought I would share some reflections on the process of doing archival research, day-in and day-out. For one, it is temporally different than the work I had done with primary sources while I was taking graduate classes. Earlier, I would either order something through inter-library loan, or I would go hunting in the stacks at our library. Then I would snatch time between this class and that meeting to read, analyze, and write a paper by the end of the semester. Living abroad to research, researching in the archive or library became an all-day, every-day task (even most Saturdays). It had a very different rhythm.

What I liked least about my work were the physical aspects of it. For instance, at the Staatsbibliothek (State Library) in Berlin, the chairs at the table with the microfiche readers were so high that although I was at eye level with the machine, I had to point my toes for my shoes to even touch the floor. By contrast, at the Hauptstaatsarchiv in Dresden, the chairs were too low for the tables, which made typing for long periods uncomfortable. The reading room there was often cold, so during the winter in Dresden I brought a heavy shawl and used it as a lap blanket. Meanwhile, summer in the un-air-conditioned library in Berlin meant sometimes warm afternoons (although not many) when we had to collectively decide whether to use the drapes to shut out the sun--but also the breeze. And nowhere was I allowed to eat and work at the same time (for obvious reasons, I might add!), so although my mental energy might have been high, if my stomach was cramping, I had to stop working long enough to eat, which sometimes interrupted my rhythm. Other times I had to stop to wash my hands because the old ink/paper/bindings left a dust that irritated my skin after a while. I developed pretty good hand hygiene before eating! On the other hand, while a cleaner activity, looking at microfilm for hours on end often led to a stiff neck (the screen tends to be set too high) and to dead brain cells (the film…never…ends…).

All this work on sources from the past requires a lot of technology, both new and old. As the photo at the head of this entry suggests, I depended heavily on my laptop and digital camera for photographing sources. This was both free and convenient, because those thousands of photographs weigh no more than my laptop. Unfortunately, almost as soon as I got to Berlin, the screen on my laptop died. It had flickering some in Leipzig, but I had hoped to make it back home. No such luck. I was able to find a computer store near my new apartment that was so...convenient: my laptop lived there for an. entire. month. Thankfully, my roommates in Kreuzberg were sweet (if not predisposed to cleanliness), and one lent me an old laptop of his. Unfortunately, it was an Italian laptop set to the German keyboard. That made taking notes in English tricky! (Germans switch Z and Y, for instance.) Then my landlord loaned me the German laptop in the photo above. It was old but fast, and once I figured out how to get it to talk to my camera, I could get back to work. Next time: some fun stories from my research.