Notes from Germany
Friday, December 27, 2024
I didn’t notice it in Frankfurt, but maybe that was because it was such a sunny day and after the 10 hour flight from Vancouver I was a bit jetlagged. Happy people enjoying the warm rays, walk the river under the watchful eyes of the statue of Karl de Grosse (aka Charlemagne), King of the Franks in the 9th century. Whether it was the weather, jetlag, or the cute little historical towncenter of Römerberg, I didn’t notice it. I walked the cobbled streets, enjoyed a kaffee mokka in a 17th century cafe, and climbed the church tower to get a view of the city.
📸 See all Frankfurt photos on Flickr →
It was the next day, after boarding the Inter-city express (ICE) from Frankfurt station that I started to clue in. The station was in that European style, with the arched metal roof, that I had seen in movies. I finally boarded a train but did not understand the seating situation. People were all over the place, sitting on the floor and stuff. Since it was just a 45 minute trip to Mannheim I stood at the exit doors and watched the landscape roll by through the tinted windows. First it was the smoke stacks of the factories as we left Frankfurt, then farmland, small villages, a low hill, copses of trees. I imagined what it would have been like to cross this land during the war. How would a platoon use those trees as cover? What would it have been like for the people in that old farmhouse to see a tank trundling across the field?
Arriving in Mannheim I had a couple days to myself, walked the streets, around the water tower, ate an Italian salad in a punk cafe and a poutine in the shopping district. Mannheim is an innovative city, a university town, known for the invention of the bicycle and automobile. Popping into a random church I was amazed to discover that it was consecrated to St Francis Xavier, a Jesuit I was well familiar with due to his exploits in Kyushu in the 16th century. Leaving the church I walked along an empty side street, along a low grey building with barred windows. I pulled my thin jacket tighter as the wind-whipped, noticed the clear visibility lines up and down the block, imagining a late night Cold War rendezvous between two trench-coated men with their hats pulled low.
📸 See all Mannheim photos on Flickr →
Once out on the boulevard it was a different scene: students milling about a large palace complex. Mannheim University was founded inside the Mannheim Palace, a massive 17th century baroque schloss that is second only to Versailles. The center building has recently been restored and turned into a museum. I wandered inside, out of the cold, and then later went over to the university store and bought a “Mannheim U” pullover to keep warm.
📸 See inside the Mannheim Schloss photos on Flickr →
I was so tired. My hotel was east of Mannheim station, the very last building before a green lightly forested area. To the south were the train tracks and on the north side was a sanitarium. My blank, tired eyes stared out of my fifth floor window into the abandoned shell of a building across the street as the grey sky turned dark. Night came, but sleep did not. I felt undead. I tossed and turned for two nights, imagining legions of ghosts wandering the city aimlessly, lost generations of the past. Was this place haunted? Or was it I who was haunted?
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Even before we travel to a new country, we carry baggage. People who live outside of Japan have an impression of the country that is about twenty years out of date. When they see it for themselves, and talk to those who live there, they get a sense of actual lived reality and must discard their baggage.
I went to Germany with the intention of throwing away my baggage.
This is my first trip to Mitteleuropa, having only been to the extreme edges of Sintra, Portugal to the far west, and the European side of Istanbul on the far eastern side. My motive for going to Germany was to attend Causal Islands however the country had long been on my bucket list, especially Berlin. Being well known as a haven for hackers and bohemians, I wanted to see if the city still harboured the culture of the black clad punks and the legendary Chaos Computer Club. Or was my impression 20 years out of date and needed to be discarded?
But before I even got to Berlin, I realized I had even older baggage. My perception of Germany had been tainted by countless war stories: books, films, documentaries. Every time I turned my eyes to a street, a building, a patch of land, I viewed it through that prism.
But in Heidelberg, with its old churches and bridge and castle, I gained respite from my overactive imagination. Heidelberg’s deeper history allowed me to escape to a time before the war.
📸 See Heidelberg photos on Flickr →
Then it was on to Berlin where the post-war is etched into the street and depicted on the walls of the buildings. Although I did visit Checkpoint Charlie and saw the location of the Nazi HQ (under which, in an undisclosed location, is supposed to be Hitler’s bunker and tomb), I did not want to dwell on Nazi history here. I did want to visit the Wall.
In 1989, the year the Wall fell, I was about 11 years old. The Canadian nightly news broadcasts showing people swarming the wall, climbing it, smashing it with hammers, tearing it apart, are the earliest memory I have a of a global political event. Thus I had to see it for myself.
But mostly, I was in Berlin to see people, to talk to residents and understand the realities of living in Germany — to discard my baggage.
Outside of the conference I connected with people doing amazing fiscal sponsor work, with orgs helping undocumented immigrants get started in Germany, with “social red-team” critical analysts and artists and musicians and internet activists. I took the trains and trams, checked out the graffiti and architecture, drank hot kaffee on the cold beach at the massive flea market at Mauer Park. I got body-scanned for interplanetary parasites at the legendary hackerspace c-base, home to Chaos Computer Club. In the nice area of town where I stayed the October nights were cold but people were still outside on the patio, bundled up in big parkas drinking tall bottles of cold beer. Smoking, hand tattoos, and bread were everywhere. Down in Kreuzberg I walked the ring and checked out the mosque, making note of the heavy polizei presence patrolling in front of the Bosnian and Turkish restaurants (I didn’t see any cops in my area of town…). I spoke to people who had lived in Berlin for many years, originally attracted by the alternative scene in the city. They were all either permanent residents or citizens. Many related how Germany’s shift to the right, its suppression of Arabic voices especially regarding Palestine (at one point Germany was funding a third of Israel’s weapons, second only to the USA), and austerity politics have changed the city. Berlin is no longer the place of cheap rents and free-flowing arts funding. Gentrification is starting to push out the black-clad anti-establishment types and anarchist intellectuals. People were starting to think about how to get out, but more importantly asking the question: where do we go?
I left Germany with that profound question about the state of the world on my mind. Loaded up with chocolate and Rhine Valley Gewürztraminer, I returned to Canada, my baggage thoroughly discarded.
