Marching Against War: February 27, 2022

Today, a German Protestant church coalition, environmental groups like Greenpeace, and trade unions organized a peace protest against the invasion of Ukraine. In the expectation that 20,000 people would show up, the streets leading into Straße des 17. Juni were blocked with light barricades from the Brandenburg Gate to the Siegessäule. Cycling down the Frankfurter Allee on Friday, I already saw a warning to motorists that the protest would snarl traffic.

I constructed a protest sign at home: 'Nein zum Krieg' in German written in blue lettering (a nod to the colours of the UN, also a colour that both the Ukrainian and Russian flags have in common) on one side, нет войне in blue lettering on the other side (a nod to the slogan that protesters are using in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg).

Potsdamer Platz was quiet as I walked, half an hour early, toward Brandenburg Gate. But the Tiergarten was already busy and the first glimpses of people wearing the yellow and pale blue colours of the Ukrainian flag appeared. When I reached Brandenburg Gate, a stream of people already flowed down the entire length of the street toward the Siegessäule in the early spring sunshine. Tiny white and yellow flowers and a few early green leaflets were sprinkled in the otherwise stark brown brush.

The austere pale façade and army-green tanks of the Soviet War Memorial, erected quickly after World War II as the trees of the park and the buildings surrounding were still largely in ruins, presented an irony that protestors were quick to grasp. A man in his fifties or sixties in what I remember as a battered jacket gamely stood in front of the memorial's fence for a photo-op, for example. He held a sign that said in German, 'Mirror, mirror on the wall,' captioning a caricature of President Vladimir Putin standing in front of a looking glass and seeing Joseph Stalin. A lot of the people at the memorial and in the crowd in general were German, although the Berlin expatriate community was also represented.

Aside from the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag: rainbow-coloured peace flags, European Union flags, and German trade union flags (IG Metall, for example) were also common. SPD flags and Polish flags and German national flags with the German Football Union logo stamped at the bottom also appeared. One man was wrapped in a Syrian flag; two people at least wore the red crosses on a white ground of the Georgian flag. A group of protestors had taken heat isolation foil blankets that were gold on one side and silver in another, in an eye-catching display that caught the eye of photographers, professional and amateur.

Most signs were homemade cardboard signs. They often bore the peace symbol, anti-war slogans, and declarations that 'we stand with Ukraine,' and were often written in English. A few protesters rightly made the point that we in Germany would rather freeze than depend on Russian natural gas for heating, at high humanitarian cost. (Temperatures at night are still below 0°C and I saw my breath vapor in the air when leaving the apartment around noon, but maybe the signs were a little melodramatic.) A few protesters had not heard yet that the European Union and US had already agreed to block access to SWIFT banking; they called for the access to be blocked.

Professional journalists appeared to be sparser on the ground than they had been for presidential candidate Barack Obama's speech at the Siegessäule in 2008. But eventually I saw people with tripods or with analogue cameras slung around their necks purposefully moving through the crowd. Finally a cameraman with the local Radio Berlin Brandenburg state-funded media also briefly set up his bulkier equipment at the street intersection I was standing at, to capture the gold-and-silver foil flags and then the masses of people streaming toward him from Brandenburg Gate.

In two loudspeaker announcements, the organizers passed on police recommendations to wear masks and keep the recommended 1.5 metres of social distancing. After that, face masks appeared fairly consistently. But social distancing became a problem as the mass of people grew denser.

After standing at a street corner for about an hour, I drifted back up toward Brandenburg Gate. Claustrophobia was also setting in; I felt tight in the chest until I found an opening beside two police vans at the Soviet War Memorial. After staying there about 20 further minutes, also hearing musicians playing John Lennon's "Imagine," I moved through the masses of people again. I swam against the tide with another thin line of departing marchers. Then I could exit the crowd again.

People were still streaming toward the protest as I walked toward Potsdamer Platz at 2:13 p.m. (It also turned out that public transit had been overwhelmed.) A policeman was quietly conversing through a car window with a stranded driver, where a barricade had been extended further than planned along the Holocaust memorial. It turned out later that over 100,000 people had marched in total.

A Vague Commentary on the Invasion of Ukraine, Feb. 24 2022

There are years where life runs along its customary paths. 

Children go to and from school, their parents go to work and eat, we tend our gardens literal and figurative, and we bear the pain and losses that inevitably come along — despite the quotidian comforts of life — as well as we can.

Then someone decides that — no matter how hard life might already be, or no matter how much fragile happiness we have managed to gather in life — that this relatively rational if humble state of being cannot proceed, and starts a war.

It is utterly foolish and contemptible.

A Saturday After the Storms

It's the 'year 1947' in my historical experiment, and I didn't dive in too deeply. It was windy again today, although not as stormy as last night. We had three plain croissants and a pain au chocolat for breakfast, alongside hot cocoa.

Ge. went off to help a friend of the family who needed to supervise the removal of a tree that had fallen over in the storms; a crew of firefighters did the principal work.

In the meantime I wandered around the neighbourhood, first visiting the much-frequented bank, where a polite, possibly eastern European man perhaps in his late twenties held open the door. (While people have mixed feelings about this form of begging for money, in my view it allows people who are begging some feeling of utility — especially as it really is hard for elderly people, women with strollers, and cyclists to manoeuvre in and out of the doors without help.)

A few doors down, there's a florist's that I last visited in December. To my dismay, there were no tables or plants in front of it, the display window had been cleared out, a few bare branch wreaths lay in the dimness behind instead of spring flowers. Instead, there was a big blue placard in the window with a poem entitled "Müde" ('Tired'), which a thin young couple were staring at with awe.

After googling, it sounds like the owner of the florist shop supported the anti-Covid-safety protests, to the ire of a few neighbours. It's a pity because professionally it was a great shop: everyone I've met who worked there loved flowers, and also did a beautiful job binding them, even if yes — once or twice when I went there in long-past years, they've been standoffish. To me their closing also proves the severe psychosocial effects of the pandemic.

A fresh shock awaited at the market square. On early Saturday afternoons of course I expected throngs of people. It was empty except for a strolling couple and the market's wooden trestle tables (stacked at the parking lot beside it). It took me a while to stop double-taking, checking if it really was Saturday, checking if it really was not after 5 p.m. ... until I finally realized that, like other outdoor markets in Berlin on Thursday, it was likely shut down due to the heavy winds.

Snowdrops are blooming in a few garden plots now, gold blossoms emerging on an Oregon grape bush, and the crocuses are emerging in greater number: purple and pale yellow. I sent Gi. a snapshot, which took me a while as I am still inept with the work smartphone.

Besides I went to a French brasserie, with its many shelves of white and red and rosé wine, its bottled fig paste and olives, its canned cassoulet, tinned oysters and sardines, crackers, chocolates and biscuits and caramels and nougat, walnuts, and above all a long counter with hams, sausages, and cheese from the hard to the soft (brie). Its stock is not generically French, but instead celebrates the character of different regions. I bought odds and ends for lunch, to be eaten with our weekly Saturday baguette bread — which, I'd forgotten, we hadn't been able to procure this week. (And after that I shopped in the organic food store for lettuces, potatoes, butter, eggs, lemons, radishes, and shampoo.)

We did end up eating the French odds and ends for lunch. We had radishes and lettuce with vinaigrette for the sake of health, and switched in whole wheat toast for the baguette. The tinned mussels in sunflower oil, flavoured with spices, a fragment of bay leaf and a slice of garlic, were soft and tasted like mild sardines. The pesto crackers were mild too. We enjoyed the green olives with the pits still in them as well as the chocolate with fleur du sel, and lentil chips I had also bought at the organic food store.

I figured that returning British soldiers might have eaten French food in the late 1940s, so didn't worry too much about historical culinary accuracy.

It's still lovely to 'travel' via food in corona-y times. (Although fortunately, signs that the Omicron Variant is peaking and we can return to normal soon, are appearing in greater number.)

Midway through lunch, Ge. returned and brought along roasted chicken with French fries that the family friend had sent us. Erasing the planned dinner menu (boiled potatoes, salad, reheated fish and rice) from our imaginations, we dug in enthusiastically.

After that I read part of the New York Times (international edition) bought from a local 24-hour kiosk — these are cultural institutions, the targets of equal opprobrium and adoration, in Berlin — and the T Magazine that arrived in it. T Magazine's international edition also had a nice tribute to Gail Halvorsen, the American pilot who helped spearhead the chocolate and raisin component of the Berlin Airlift in the 1940s. Other reading: more passages of Gogol's short stories. At the same time I listened to a vinyl record of Mstislav Rostropovich playing Haydn cello concertos, and began listening to Vivaldi's Four Seasons with Henryk Szeryng. No clothes mending this week, but I did tend my houseplants and dust more bookshelves and ornaments; and post-experiment I lit another lavender incense stick for relaxation.

On the piano I finished playing three Bach 'Duettos' and made my way through about fourteen pieces in his Goldberg Variations. It was nice nostalgia from the time when I listened to Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations (not sure right now if they were the early or late recordings) at Canadian university, and then played them at home regularly in the 2000s. The variations where the left and right hands cross over each other are still rather difficult for me.

The past week at work was, in a phrase, incredibly challenging and turbulent. But it was really good to go outdoors and not use the computer much today. Sanity levels rising!

A Sedate Workday Amid an Early Spring Storm

It's been a howling sort of day, literally rather than metaphorically, as a storm swept (this time literally) over Germany. There was a constant roaring or whistling in the stovepipe, rain from time to time, and at times rattling of the panes in the windows. In the daylight, road signs vibrated on their stalks, and the broom-like trees were being shaken from trunk to twig-tip. The sky was largely grey.

I found it difficult to sleep past 8 a.m. with all the weather excitement, therefore had bags under the bags under my eyes as usual, in all my video calls.

***

It was a pleasant day on the whole.

Yesterday an HR colleague and the managing director kindly sacrificed one of their time slots to give me advice about something, and it was another one of those times where the managing director was helpfully calm and lent me a bit of inner security.

I had two '1 on 1 meetings' today. My direct manager (someone different) is blunt, but it makes conversations with him reasonably satisfying as long as he doesn't go too far. We had almost an hour-long conversation where we openly but politely disagreed on some things, and agreed on others.

Besides I also had a long conversation with the colleague who co-leads my team, always enjoyable except insofar as she is currently working and being worked too hard.

During lunch, I fried an 'egg in the nest,' tended my plants, dusted part of a bookshelf, played more Bach on the piano, and generally felt quite pleased with developments.

Earlier in the day a teammate and I went over a mySQL query, which was fun too; and then three colleagues joined me to take a look at how we monitor things that go wrong with our client service.

At the end of the day we had two meetings: One was a work-related meeting with over forty guests that began well enough but later made me so anxious at times that I purposely multitasked and checked messages until my breathing was back to its normal steady pace. Then there was another meeting where the teammates and I were just chatting.

(Before the meeting, the news had spread in the company that Google is planning to change its privacy policy on Android appliances, which (it is no great secret) is not likely to be particularly great for the company I work for. And I thought somewhat wistfully that our old days of not working for a stock-listed company were less exciting, in a good way.)

Lastly I did my usual evening data quality checks, spent time going through my notes of the day to make sure that everything I promised people I'd do was done as far as possible, booked an evening for our next team event, answered a few final direct messages, checked my email inboxes, and shut down the computer.

***

Having caught up on a few YouTube videos (one of them a ballet video), Twitter, and the Guardian, I have been working on one of the Open University's free introductory mathematics courses and soon plan to catch up on Duolingo lessons. Besides I want to keep listening to two audiobooks: Jimmy Carter's biography and A Knock on the Door, a report about Canada's residential schools.

Jimmy Carter's biography is also funny to read for me personally as a satire on my current persona in the workplace: tactless and overly honest at maladroit times, courageous in a way that closely resembles stupidity, irritatingly convinced of my own moral high ground, and effective but without appearing to be effective.

The 1940s and the 2020s, and Peace

As the years of World War II have ended in the weekly historical experiment, I've picked the experiment up again in the year 1946.

I didn't research it much, however, and therefore mostly spent the day just distancing myself from post-1940s technology in the form of the personal computer.

After eating a breakfast of croissants with Mama and our youngest brother, Ge. and I went for a walk to the Kreuzberg. It was a bright day with a pale blue spring sky, and other park-goers were also taking advantage of it as a police car slowly cruised past us. While the boxwood bushes have new yellow-green leaves and buds, and rosebushes have a few sprigs, and the sight of lawns with sun splashing on them was a pleasant novelty, the trees are still bare and the night frost lingered on the dead leaves and the ground where the sun didn't reach. In the city panorama that radiates from the top of the memorial — the glinting gold sculpture on the Siegessäule, Potsdamer Platz, church peaks, the TV tower, palatial domes of other religious buildings ... — we saw graduated clusters of apartment buildings that are usually sunk in a haze or shut out of sight by tree leaves. We spoke English, and so did most of the other people standing around the memorial.

Pale yellow and purple crocuses, in long bullet-like buds, were the only spring flowers we saw; snowdrops don't grow everywhere, clearly, and winter aconites don't seem to have appeared yet or to be popular either.

After tending to my houseplants, I played the piano: compositions from the 1930s by someone named William Alward, which our Aunt N. had picked up for her sheet music collection; and the beginning of Isaac Albéniz's "La Vega." Hopefully I can explore more of Aunt N.'s mid-century repertoire next week — Bela Bartók is next. Later, in the evening, I finished the project that I started last year: playing Beethoven's 16th through 32nd piano sonatas all the way through. I like the 32nd (and Beethoven's last) sonata, the 'Halloween' sonata with the gothic beginning and the meditative continuation, and had already listened to a Sviatoslav Richter recording and played much of it before. It is easier to do it justice, understanding what the music is supposed to do, than a few of his other late sonatas. So the project ended on a good note.

(The piano project went into its next stage today: The next challenge is playing all the way through a collection of Bach's works. The Italian Concerto is finished and his Ouverture in the French style is in progress; both of these are pretty familiar, especially as the Concerto was part of my daily rotation in the late 2000s. In honour of Papa's preference, I am trying to lay off the damper pedal while still achieving fairly sonorous notes.)

In the evening I took a look at clothes in our mending pile, and darned a sock that had a hole as big as a walnut. (Speaking of which, it's funny that 'whole' and 'hole' rhyme and are practically antonyms.)

The 9-to-5 at a Manager's Peak Season

Today (well, Wednesday) was a long day...

Knowing that a colleague was under pressure to deliver news about something related to my team, I'd told him that I was available (amongst other time slots) before 10:15 a.m. My calendar has a blocker scheduled for 9 to 10 a.m. every morning named "No Morning Meetings," but I torpedoed my own initiative.

At the time where I closed my laptop for the evening, I wasn't aware yet which time he had chosen. When my smartphone ringtone went off before 9 a.m., I suspected and then was able to confirm that in fact the meeting slot was indeed at 9 a.m. Looking in the video call preview, I saw that I looked more or less like night owls look at 9 a.m., and with 3 minutes to go did a few arm circles to get my blood moving and look more alert. The meeting didn't go too badly; and, despite the close relationship between early morning hours and intellectual underachievement, no glaringly absurd things were said.

After that there was one meeting after another until lunch. For lunch, I opened a parcel that a lovely colleague had sent as a pick-me-up: chocolate, scented bath lozenges, and tea. It was a great and most welcome surprise.

Then I had to go for a corona rapid test; it was quiet there and I was the only pokee. It has still been windy today; January has been cloudy to an above-average degree, but the wind swept aside the blanket so that sun rays could pierce through. It also drove specks of sidewalk dirt into my eyes so that I faintheartedly took shelter in the nook of a building until the fiercest gusts had passed.

After lunch there was also one meeting after another.

Meanwhile, like densely flocked storm clouds, the consciousness loomed that I still need to finish coordinating all of my team's yearly self-reviews, peer reviews and company value criteria into a people-manager's overview. I have finished rating every friend, brother, and uncle in my team from 1 to 5, which felt like vivisecting vulnerable little animals one moment and like ripping my heart out the next moment. On Friday I need to join other team leads for a meeting with someone from the parent company, where we calibrate these scores.

(Calibrate = If one team lead believes that all their geese are swans and give them 5s, that team lead will need to lower the scores to match the dourer conservatism of other team leads, and give everyone's teammates a fairer chance.)

At the same time we're still architecting our projects for the next half year. (Which also gave rise to my 9 a.m. meeting.)

After 6 p.m. I went to my voice coaching elsewhere in Berlin.

A police car passed me when I was near the city centre and joined two other cars. They were reinforcement for a group of officers who were clustered around a man, crouched on the sidewalk, who was hoarsely shouting in Arabic. It's always strange living in the city when, absorbed in the most mundane line of thought, you suddenly brush against the deepest dramas and most poignant troubles of someone else's life.