The Perils of Trying to Do Too Much

Last Wednesday I had a job interview. It went I thought fairly well, I happily demolished a slice of cherry streusel cake at a café while we talked, and it sounded like the interviewer planned to get in touch around Tuesday this week. But he also said — as far as I understood it — that it would be ideal if I got in touch, and save him and his hiring colleague some time. So I did, in the early afternoon this Wednesday, rather worried if I'd misunderstood and would come across as pushy. He said that he was eating lunch but would get back to me at the end of it. He has eaten an incredibly long lunch.

Then on Sunday I followed the Berlin half-marathon. It was enjoyable but, as I covered over 6 km in about 2 hours, so tiring the day after that on Monday I wasn't good for much.

Nonetheless I had a check-up at the dentist's on Monday; the surgeon was out, and it wasn't clear if everything was OK or not. In one and a half weeks, the next appointment should reveal all.

Since the course of Ibuprofen to handle any pain and swelling related to my dental surgery ran out, I've been having intense dreams (but also sleeping more soundly). All my life I've almost never had nightmares, so waking up after dreaming that I'd fallen off the side of a ship and was about to hit the water was a little alarming. A few hours afterward, of course I wondered if I was dreaming in metaphors and felt that something was off in my life, or if this was purely physiological.

So altogether I'm nervous if everything's OK, medically speaking.

Regarding the choir, I finally sent a frank email to two of the organizers when they asked why I hadn't been showing up regularly and if I was OK.

First of all I mentioned that the job search and trying to apply to university were still in progress and that my life is a bit of a mess.

Secondly I mentioned my worries about the summer concert: that singing an Israeli song that wasn't explicitly about peace, and not singing an Arabic-language song alongside it for example, was depressing me a lot.

We quickly came to an agreement that it would just be explained at the concert that we weren't singing the song for political reasons, and that the song had been planned for the programme far longer than 6 months (which I hadn't known before).

So I no longer worry as much that I'm going to become a cheerleader for famine and 30,000+ deaths, and that resolved some of my choir- and Weltschmerz-related woes. (Although I still feel that the public stances of the Berlin city government, the Green Party, the way the RBB evening news is reporting the conflict, and for example the Free University are kind of pushing me into a corner: if I claim any Jewish heritage whatsoever, I have to position myself as a victim of anti-Semites — who are supposedly always immigrants of Germany 'of course' because evidently Germany's Vergangenheitsbewältigung has been suddenly completed — and stand together with Netanyahu policy. It's not an identity I long for, and to me it couldn't be further from the multicultural, inter religious/inter-creed, and rational ideals that my Mendelssohn ancestors held. And I know it's not logical because it's really not my fault, but that as well as the discomfort I feel also about the lot of civilians on both sides in the Middle East, is still eating away at me.)

Either way, the energy required for the choir in general is still really costing me, also literally.

The whole of the weekend after this one, I've agreed to attend the bi-annual rehearsal retreat at a cost of over 70€. An organizer had offered to reduce my costs given my unemployment, but paradoxically they were also disappointed that I didn't choose the more expensive overnight stay option. That retreat will prevent me from relaxing and/or going on revitalizing journalistic excursions for those 2 days. The day after that weekend, there will be the important Kant event.

Turning up weekly to the regular choir rehearsal, instead of skipping it, is also adding pressure.

At the same time, I'm still volunteering and I enjoy seeing the people there when I go.

But I flaked twice when I was invited to join an iftar there, during Ramadan. I did send an excuse each time, and the second iftar clashed with the choir rehearsal time, but it still felt rude and I still feel uncomfortable about it.

Besides, living in a neighbourhood with Muslim families, I'd been longing to be invited to an iftar for years because it seemed nice, and I'd been delighted when it finally happened.

On Tuesday I spent much of the day baking a cake, in a haze of exhaustion; on Wednesday I brought it along as a post-Eid-al-Fitr treat.

Anyway, today I decided to celebrate the end of the 2 week sports ban by finally picking up a training regimen again that I'd abandoned a while ago, namely fulfilling fitness requirements for firefighter work.

The original regimen that inspired me to make the effort is on a piece of paper that has disappeared into the chaos on my desk. But from what I recall it requires running with a weight, push-ups, and sit-ups — in a certain quantity performed within a certain time.

And for 12 minutes I did running and walking intervals in a local park. Full of people, pets, a duck diving for food, pigeons and a timid young rabbit, aromatic pale purple lilacs, and green leaves, it was a relaxing setting.

Leipzig Book Fair, Part III: Founder Time or Kaiser Time?

Back to Leipzig!

***

St. Thomas's Church.
The big Bach statue was on this side of the building.

***

Visiting the Thomaskirche was an odd experience.

I knew that extended family members had lived in Leipzig and undoubtedly entered the building some 200 years ago. Also, of course, Bach had worked there for years. It is also a tourist magnet, attested to by incongruous orange table umbrellas in the rear, but I was the only tourist there.

It was as if a grey network of shadows of past people and events were traced over the building itself, or I were treading over a lot of invisible footsteps.

I tried to read a tombstone beside the church by standing at just the right angle, but the inscription was best suited to be read either when it wasn't raining or if one took a pencil rubbing of it. 

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's statue
a stone's throw from the St. Thomas Church

Near the church, lawns with the statue of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and, downslope, an old memorial to Bach were pretty. Taken with the aged trees and the Gründerzeit apartment buildings, the not overly broad roads, the atmosphere was like what I imagine it must have been around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was unsurprising to read (after returning to Berlin) that a lot of imperial-era buildings in Leipzig had been spared from aerial raids during World War II.

—It's cheeky to say this as I'm not a specialist in this time. But 'Gründerzeit' or 'Founders' Age' seems to me like a misleadingly respectable term for the epoch after the Franco-Prussian War. Overseas I think it marked the apex of German colonialism, including the genocide of Hereros in Namibia. I'd argue that foundations for 20th century wars and repression were laid as well, and the Franco-Prussian War wasn't nice either. Whereas 'Kaiserzeit' captures more ambiguity, in my view. You can picture Wilhelm I trotting around Berlin on a horse as a delighted public goes on, or picture bloody imperial politics; and both are true.—

I also admired the massy pink magnolia blossoms on the tree in the Thomashaus yard, adjoining the church.

The old memorial pillar for Bach

It was a good day to pass Bach's statue beside the church. One or two days earlier he'd had his 339th birthday, and flowers were still standing at its base.

An antiques(?) shop in Leipzig's inner city

It was around 8 a.m. and the church bells of the neighbourhood underscored it. I'd determined to begin returning then to Leipzig's Hauptbahnhof and travelling to the trade fair grounds.

A GDR architect's attempt to mingle old and new...

After wiggling through an alley and up another street or two, leaving the historical city centre behind me, I emerged out into a large open space. A turn-of-the-century Deutsche Bank building stood at a street corner. An intriguing park with a green slope and the pale white statue at its top (which I was too exhausted to try to walk up to) was to the left. But I wasn't in the right line to reach the Hauptbahnhof.

The City-Hochhaus skyscraper with the 'mdr' logo was close by, and it was showing me the different logo on its eastern face. So I reorientated myself.

Near Leipzig's Ring-Café.
Exhibit A of the gloomy lighting conditions
on this particular morning
(I'd thought this photo wouldn't turn out at all)

Fortunately a tram station exists handily near the Ring Café, opposite.

(I'd thought that Berlin had been 'special' in getting fancy classical-inspired architecture of Frankfurter Allee during the first decade of Soviet occupation, but clearly Leipzig had received it too. The Café was impressive even if, again, no one was going in or out at this hour; so the grand scale of the architecture was underused.)

I was delighted to see that its announcement board spelled out 'Leipziger Messe' as its destination: this would spare me a longer walk to the Hauptbahnhof. While I waited for the tram, I saw the stately towers of the Neues Rathaus.

I'm not sure how watertight my rights to take the tram without buying an additional ticket were. But morally I was going to buy a ticket to the Book Fair later anyway, the possession of which would entitle me to using Leipzig's local transit.

Entering the tram now felt premature as the Fair would only open at 10 a.m.... But once the right tram arrived and I was inside, rain began to pelt the windows: it felt rather clever not to roam outside. The rain also dispelled, along with my weariness, the idea of walking 6 km to the trade fairgrounds. After leaving the Hauptbahnhof station behind us, we went on and on and on along the Delitzscher Straße ....

I was wearing an FPP safety mask. Whenever I did so in Leipzig I had the impression that one or two people in my train or tram compartment had a strong reaction to it... It was a relief when another passenger hopped on board the tram wearing a mask, as if to show it's not that weird.

(I'd just seen the mask as a minor precaution for travelling long distances in enclosed spaces in cold-and-flu season. The choir I sing in still requests weekly testing for Covid and I had no intention of infecting any elderly ladies with a respiratory illness. So I didn't think much of wearing a mask. But in the end it was an opportunity to learn that attitudes in Leipzig seem less nonchalant than in Berlin.)

Man Proposes, Tooth Disposes, and Kant's Philosophy

For the past three days a dentist's visit has distracted me from writing about the journey to Leipzig, and also sown chaos into my schedule of journalistic expeditions and other outings.

I went into it quite innocently. Then came out, after a surgery, with a long list of rules for the next 24 hours/2 weeks, 4 prescriptions (1 homeopathic), and a face that was OK at first and then by evening began to swell.

A hiring manager phoned me on Wednesday. Wallowing in an audiobook and self-pity for my chipmunk face, I'd been hoping that the practicalities of life would postpone to next week and was not very phone-ready. But in the end it hopefully wasn't too awkward.— I pleaded for a postponement of an interview to next week.

On Wednesday evening, one of my stitches unravelled and fell out.

Reluctantly, after seeking advice from the internet, I went to the dentist's office at noon the next day, knowing I was being a pain in the neck because it was the last day before a 4-day weekend.

But after waiting longer than usual, and looking over journalistic notes while I waited, the surgeon saw me.

She was surprisingly pleased with the healing— as I told the family afterward, my mouth looked a bit like Hieronymus Bosch to me, but clearly the landscape looked quite tidy to her — and my care of the stitches. She and her assistant gave things a clean and rinse, but didn't need to put a stitch back in.

As mentioned, my face has been chipmunky. Although the walk and the wait in the reception had done me some good, the first thing the surgeon advised when I said 'Ich sehe wie ein Eichhörnchen aus' was 'Kühlen, kühlen, kühlen!' ('Chill.') (We have four cold compresses in the freezer, and I'd already been using them intermittently. So that advice was easy to follow.)

Either way, I returned home quite cheerful. It's also good that I was able to go into Easter with peace of mind.

Before the visit, I had been thinking of the early cosmetic surgery during World War I that I'd researched a while ago. Maybe the weirdest thing was how soft and inflamed the skin inside my mouth felt, as if it were not skin at all but just flesh, and how it felt like I had a cotton wad between my cheek and my gums. But I have the safety net of modern antibiotics.

Intermittently I have been quite cranky. Part of the reason is also the 2-week prohibition on sports, so in fact the somewhat anxious walk to the dentist's to see about the stitch was liberating and fun because I was so happy to be outdoors again.

But I'm also cranky because of the bland food I've been having because it's mushy enough to eat without damaging my stitches. I've had to do a lot more cooking and food preparation than usual, and sometimes it wasn't clear if I was getting enough calories.

Oats steeped in yoghurt and milk, yoghurt with mashed banana, mashed banana on its own... porridge... soup made from bouillon powder with a crushed salty cracker... soup made from bouillon powder with guar gum powder I thought I'd never be able to use... fried eggs... boiled eggs.. and finally, yesterday, chocolate pudding. — (An electronic information form that I was given to read before the surgery had advised against milk or milk products for I think 48 hours, which cast me into some despair. Afterward I found a paper online that suggested that this is a fairly Germany-specific, scientifically unfounded canard that might be left over from times when tuberculosis was a big risk; this may explain why the dentists and my take-home guideline sheet didn't mention it.) — Cookies dunked in tea. Lentils and rice I didn't cook long enough, so the rice may have compromised the stitch that fell out. The chicken soup with salty crackers was my favourite meal until today, except for the lingering aftertaste of monosodium glutamate.

Then, today, we had a lunch of boiled potatoes (with butter and nutmeg and pepper) and spinach, with applesauce and optionally fried eggs. And I truly enjoyed that.

The question was also, what to do during the 12 hours per day where I can't do much of anything? On Wednesday I researched historical train accidents because of a story I'd wanted to cover, but it felt ghoulish sifting through the ashes of someone else's misery and obviously the activity wasn't a cheer-upper. Reading magazines and newspapers was more purposeful, and I finished a year-old copy of Exberliner.

My new morning and evening routines that bookend my days include swallowing an amoxicillin tablet of such impressive dimensions that, in pill terms, 'watermelon' comes to mind. I was going to skip the ibuprofen after the first dose because I wasn't in pain. But then the surgeon told me that it was good to take it twice per day just because it would also reduce the swelling, and I was sold. Then there's an antiseptic I need to apply to the stitches 3x per day.

Either way, of course I'm very grateful for the amoxicillin, because of the aforementioned recency of widespread availability of antibiotics in human history. But I'm not sad to see that half the prescription is already finished.

On April 2nd I'll have a check-up.

***

This afternoon I tried to prepare for journalistically interesting events in April and May.

It turns out that in late April there will be a very formal event for Immanuel Kant's 300th birthday. (Which has a few awkward geopolitical connotations: he lived in Kaliningrad, but we're not on speaking terms with Russia's government...) I invited myself there, also because I felt my father urging me to take the chance.

But when I received the confirmation email that I may go, I freaked out:

I have not read more than two pages of Kant's works in my life, as far as I remember.

I'd never finish the Critique of Pure Reason in time; reading the timeliest secondary literature by then seems hopeless too.

So I imagined myself sitting at the fancy venue, in my usual plebeian rags, asking my seat neighbour to explain everything to me with puppets and song, like a dumbed-down Sesame Street episode ... While a Kant expert sits at home sulking into their scholarly publications, because they weren't able to secure their rightful seat before the venue hit capacity.

Fortunately we have Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy in the family library.

Russell won't posthumously help me figure out what to wear to the event, admittedly, but the assistance with Kant's thoughts is already plenty.

[Kant's] General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) [...] sets forth a possible origin of the solar system. [...] In parts it is purely fanciful, for instance in the doctrine that all planets are inhabited, and that the most distant planets have the best inhabitants—a view to be praised for its terrestrial modesty, but not supported by any scientific grounds.

Leipzig Book Fair, Part II: A Walk in the City

Leipzig, after centuries of history as a trading city, became the second-largest city of the German Democratic Republic after Berlin. After 1989, it seems to have rapidly developed in a less piously Communist direction. So when I set off from the main train station to walk around, there was a jumble of Baroque buildings, medieval edifices like the Thomaskirche, grand 19th century buildings and public monuments that carried over stylistically into the early 1900s, GDR buildings, and post-1990s capitalist glitz.

One of the first large buildings that I spotted after leaving a half-hidden western portal of the Hauptbahnhof (1902-1916) was an apartment tower with the logo of the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk broadcaster. It's not an unknown brand, but for some reason mdr reminded me of the French internet acronym for mort de rire. So the City-Hochhaus tower was engraved in my brain, and that was just as well, as it would turn out later.

I had considered planning out a walking route in Leipzig, but in the end briefly looked at a map that had a scale of 1:25,000 or 1:50,000 and only sketched-in names for the largest streets — back in Berlin. I did put the map, which my mother had bought for her pilgrimage route through Brandenburg, in my purse. And as long as I could access the WiFi of the Hauptbahnhof and other public access points I'd be able to look at Google Maps if needed.

Instead I just 'winged it,' and ate the kumquat from my travel provisions before setting off and using the methodology of spotting church spires or older buildings, memorizing how to get there, going off to see them, and then retracing my steps back to where I'd started.

Leipzig's Hauptbahnhof later in the day,
when the grey drizzle had disappeared
and people seemed more disposed to be on the streets

It surprised me how quiet the city was around 7:15 a.m. It wasn't unpleasant, however. First I walked down the Tröndlinring and admired (not for the last time) the well-marked bicycle routes in Leipzig. Vaguely I felt that the city centre must be toward the mdr building, behind a façade of shopping centre. But instead the north seemed more attractive, and soon I'd spotted a church spire that looked post-Baroque (the Michaeliskirche) and walked down the Nordstraße toward it.

It was drizzling lightly. There were pleasant bourgeois house façades nearby, and trees that were going to be beautiful in full leaf.

***

In many ways, Leipzig reminded me agreeably of Berlin, although of course the cities aren't the same. I felt the mixture of building epochs was similar, it also felt strikingly liberal though maybe just because leftwing graffiti and posters predominated while I saw no right-wing counterparts, there were also gold 'stumbling stones' in the sidewalks that commemorated people who had lived there but were persecuted during the Nazi era. Dark green street water pumps sometimes resembled, sometimes did not resemble ones that have survived in Berlin.

It looked like Prussian industry had collaborated across the two cities.

To the west of the Hauptbahnhof there are still a few remnants of the imperial railway's freight industry. (But there were strikingly few residential buildings that looked like they came from the Weimar Era to me, so I wondered if the 1920s had also seen a massive underinvestment outside of the capital city.) The gas lanterns with their 'Dreibündelpfeilermasten' (if I recall correctly; at any rate, basically, fluted columns) were also familiar.

And while there are more onion domes in Saxony, and more stepped gables with scalloped edges, I felt that the underlying principle was the same.

***

First, however, there were modern high-rise buildings, none of them understated. One of them, a grandiose Westin hotel with tinkling fountain that looked almost like post-1989 capitalism had compounded a low, boxy foyer building and a few brand names onto a GDR Plattenbau.

A Leipzig hotel, seen through the columns
of another building that reminded me of the giant mushrooms
in an old film adaptation of Jules Verne's
Journey to the Centre of the Earth. 

Another corner of what I thought of as the 'mushroom building'
It houses a Saxon bank.

Besides the Leipzig Zoo was nearby.

An animal smell — like the kind you'd scent at a petting zoo, or a farm — drifted over the white walls. Reliefs of animal footprints were embedded in the sidewalks for blocks around the buildings themselves. At the main entrance, growths of bamboo leaves were partly desiccated in the Leipzig climate and I wondered if it would feel too mundane to grow plants that are native to Saxon forests there instead.

When I passed other entrances on my way back from the church, zoo security staff and at least one other employee were heading in and out of the parts of the complex to which guests weren't permitted. And a raven sat on the wall.

I thought that the elaborate structure with tower of the Congress Hall was a church, and was mildly disappointed when it wasn't, and turned out to be from the turn of the 19th/20th centuries.

It did make me feel smug to realize that my book research about Berlin's architecture has usually made it quite easy (even outside of its borders) to recognize and concentrate on the buildings that have the longest history. While still appreciating more modern historicist buildings as the aesthetically interesting architectural apparitions that they are.

Finally I reached the brick gates that were clearly some of the oldest parts of the zoo.

The gates of the Leipzig Zoo (1899-1900).

Walking along the Parthenstraße was more melancholy. A concrete channel formed boxy banks, and along one side of it, a subdued turquoise river flowed as willows began to sprout bright yellow-green leaves above it.

Monument to an event of the Holocaust,
near the Parthestraße, with the modern riverbed behind it

On a bank, a dark grey monument commemorated the forced gathering in this riverbed of Jewish people, in preparation for deportation to a concentration camp, in 1938.

But a cheery residential building with yellow and red patterns on the pale façade nearby, blue grape hyacinths growing from the strip of grass around its props, young trees that had been planted as a community initiative on the banks of the Parthe as well and that had little signs with messages about who had donated the trees, and the cars passing in the street, pulled you back into the 'now.'

Then I began zigzagging to the city centre. On the way there, it became even clearer how thoroughly mixed the pre-imperial, imperial, GDR, and post-Reunification architecture including current building sites was.

The tower appears to be of the Nikolaikirche,
Given this church's historic importance during German Reunification
and medieval origins, it's a pity I didn't recognize and visit it

Sic transit gloria mundi:
A pre-war building of the Hotel Astoria
and rapid real estate development occurring around it
as daffodils bloom in front.

Leipzig's pedestrian sections of the historic city centre reminded me of Strasbourg's, and had roughly the same mixture of shops. Again it was quiet, though. The elaborate drain covers were also a direct reminder that we were in Leipzig instead.

A Leipzig drain cover.
Inscribed with "Kanalisation der Stadt Leipzig."

It took a long time to see a shop or restaurant that was open, and then it was a bakery that was just receiving a fresh delivery from a truck outside.

A chandelier:
truly 'bang for our buck'

At the Old Stock Exchange, a whitewashed 17th century building that resembled a galleon to me, with its levels and balustrades and its ornamental waterspouts and its gilded decorations, I began to encounter the truly tourist sights.

The old stock exchange (left)
Based on architectural elements & scale,
I'm positive the building behind it postdates the 1880s,
and this old photograph seems to support that estimate.

I admired the white periwinkles that grew in a massy field behind a fence, as I had never seen periwinkles that weren't purple. And I wondered to whom a statue was dedicated, which was facing away from me. I hoped it was Mozart, and instead it was Goethe — my nemesis ever since Faust first crossed my path, that pompous self-admirer. 😠

To the right, I admired the shop windows, which mingled Easter and Christmas displays.

At the Market Square; the Old Town Hall was first built in the Renaissance.
The U-Bahn station is to the left
(not depicted)

It looked like there was more than one relic of colonial times, like this building that reminded me of Berlin's Afrikahaus and whose sculpted heads underneath the balconies seem like an anthropological allusion to artwork like the Moai. The juxtaposition of a Unicef office was interesting.

Having crossed the market square and the deep red stone of the U-Bahn station — hurrying more because the shops around the square often bore names of retailers I'd worked on for my previous job, and somewhat undermined my sense of relaxation — I stumbled at last on the Thomaskirche.

Leipzig Book Fair, Part I: The Train Ride There

In the early hours yesterday morning I travelled to Leipzig for the book fair, and I suppose the travel part of it was rather like an ice bath because it was quite unpleasant in bits but on the whole invigorating and healthy.

At around 8:30 p.m. I'd tried to go to sleep, after eating a big dinner. By 11:15 p.m. I may have drifted off a little intermittently, but probably just lay there thinking, also about how maybe I should have eaten earlier. At 3:15 a.m.ish I woke up again and then lay awake until around 4 or 4:15 a.m.

Then I got up, got ready, had more of yesterday's dinner with a slice of whole wheat bread and orange marmalade, and walked off to the train station.

The towers of Wittenberg at 6 a.m. (March 24, 2024)

It was still dark. I didn't know when to expect dawn, but since we'd just had the Spring Equinox and I knew that the fast-breaking for Ramadan was happening after 6 a.m., knew it would come a bit later. One or two shop windows with red furnishings glowed rather luridly. Three food delivery trucks were doing their rounds, then one or two testosterone-fuelled drivers roared their vehicles down the larger streets. In the side streets, birds were trilling from lightless corners, daffodils glowed from their plantings, and the trickling of water through the street gutters was an analogue to the brooks and rivers that have been replaced by modern canalization. The apartment buildings, street signs, and trees were also dripping incessantly after the rain.

In the Leberstraße I also saw vignettes while passing by. A cook had arrived at a restaurant, her coat and purse lain aside on a diners' table; a young man with shaggy hair was sitting in a bar/pub with a hardwood door with geometric patterns in the stained glass, and inside possibly a potted palm or two; a young woman had grabbed a slice of pizza and was eating it in a bright shop that looked more like a to-go place. And in the train station itself, two bakeries were open.

I'd bought the train tickets the day before, but had also written up the information on a piece of paper so that I could save time by knowing which platform to go to, etc.

A school class was waiting for the same train, and going to continue westward almost to the French border. As a second group of parent chaperones reached the platform with their charges and passed by the group beside me, a few of the children squealed happily at the sight of each other.

I was travelling second class, and had lined up at the right letter before the train arrived so I didn't need to walk along the platform to reach past the first class. A few dark grey pigeons were fluttering in the high, iron-riveted ceiling, and a man was startled when one of them dislodged a crumpled piece of paper packaging and sent it tumbling to the rather grubby station floor.

When the train arrived, it wasn't overcrowded. That had in fact been the main attraction of travelling between five and six a.m. We set off soon, and I stood in a doorway and watched the darkness as we set out through Brandenburg. By the time we reached Wittenberg, the sky had already lightened enough that I saw the distinctive landmark towers. But we roared through.

Wittenberg(?) Train Station, c. 6 a.m.

The green of grass conquered the darkness as dawn progressed, then the beige shape of a house or farm building. A clump of deer grazed at a distance. Maybe I'd seen other deer earlier too, but when I tried to see exactly what they were, the light must have just shone off their hind legs and their backs:  they looked like graceful half-arches in the dim. And a wheeled watering frame was sketched through a field, and floods of white sheeting lay over what I assumed were asparagus beds later on. The white blossoms at the hedges did look vaguely bridal, although I've tended to be skeptical of the simile when it appears in books.

Heavy weather with thunderstorms and sleet had been forecast for Saturday, and indeed the sky was a brew once it was no longer midnight blue. Especially after we'd already (I think) crossed into Saxony-Anhalt and the terrain became hilly, vast clouds without any blue gaps stormed from horizon to horizon, grey masses dipping toward the land below. Once, a spout shape reached off the bottom of one like a finger: I wondered if it might be a tornado.

A few clouds were manmade. Industrial chimneys spewed whitish vapour into the air from twinkling masses of buildings, one or two of whom had a white cooling tower. Not Keats's 'dark satanic mills' but 'light satanic mills,' I thought.

While gazing at drearier landscapes of rain-bogged ground and leafless trees and the deceased grasses of yesteryear rising from patches of paler green, I was kind of regretting not taking a book along to entertain me. But then I realized that, due to sleep deprivation, I would not have absorbed much anyway.

By the time we reached Halle an der Saale, which I thought was already Leipzig because it had so many high-rise buildings, it was bright. The rain had been a sprinkling rather than a downpour, and it dried on the windows of the ICE train as we rushed on.

Then, rolling through the suburbs of Leipzig in a long arc, we reached Leipzig's main train station.

A building at Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, to the west. I think it predates the 1920s.
I'm a bit miffed now that I know this building was in use and looking much better 10 years ago...
[2013 photo from Wikimedia user: Link]

On Jobs and Pasta Sauce

Inspired by the rainy weather, I've been indoors all day.

I woke up relatively early and then read romance novels, the nonfiction book x+y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender, and the Canadian contemporary fiction novel Denison Avenue, until the early afternoon. Then first I practiced Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody on the piano (part of the piece, not the whole thing).

Then I felt strong enough to check my email. I needed to send replies about 1. a recommendation letter from my previous employer, and 2. a potential job! Both were done.

The German test was written as planned last week, after 5 gruelling hours in a courtyard edifice amongst the office complexes of Mitte with ~7 other students and two invigilators. So the gears are set in motion to reapply to university early in June, then if all goes well to start studying in October as an official student instead of a guest auditor.

Last Thursday I had an interview for an office job: My impression: the interviewer had no problem with my work experience or skills, or my demeanour.

But we discussed the drawbacks as well: if I study as well as work, I would not be able to answer phones during the entirety of the company's office hours. Also the office is far away from home and from university. Besides she still needed to interview other candidates.

The interviewer said she'd talk the point about full time vs. part time over with her colleagues. And I felt she liked me and would send the rejection letter with mild personal regret instead of joy. So the interview was a confidence-booster.

Then I applied to work as a salesperson in one of three small pottery shops. It would be 15 hours per week, either in Friedrichshain or Prenzlauer Berg or Schöneberg. There's still an email conversation ongoing!

***

As for the organization I mentioned last time, which replied to my application with a 'mail could not be delivered' auto-reply, I'll try to find the letter they sent me after the days of silence and add it to this blog post.

[Edited to add: and I've found it!

vielen Dank für Ihr Interesse am [redacted] und die Zusendung Ihrer Bewerbungsunterlagen.

Vor allem vielen Dank für den persönlichen Besuch in unsrem Hause letzter Woche!

Wir bitten Sie zunächst um Ihr Verständnis dafür, dass das Gewinnungsverfahren länger als vorgesehen gedauert hat.

(i.e. The email expresses thanks for sending an application, and 'for the personal visit in our abode.' Apologies for hiring process taking so long.

[Not quoted]: The company hired a different applicant who met the requirements even better, and the decision had been difficult amongst so many applications.

The email continued saying that I can monitor their website for future jobs:) 

Sofern Sie weiterhin an einer Tätigkeit beim [redacted] interessiert sind, bitten wir Sie sich jederzeit unter [redacted] über unsere aktuellen Ausschreibungen zu informieren.

] 

I was amused but also furious when I first read the email, because the thanks for visiting them seemed highly sarcastic. But one can give the benefit of the doubt.

***

5 other job applications are pending, all of them (if I recall correctly) for longer hours at larger companies or NGOs.

But I have the feeling I should look again at jobs in the small shops in the neighbourhood.

... I also made penne pasta for the family today. I served it with a pot of 'improvised' tomato sauce made of basil-flavoured passata (shop-bought), a yellow onion, oregano and black pepper and cayenne pepper and tarragon and salt, butter and olive oil, capers and caper brine, tinned plum tomatoes, a few red linseeds because we have expired ones in the pantry that I'd like to make vanish, and stale brown bread.

A Trivial Job Search and a Serious Situation in Gaza

I've been looking intensely for work this week, as the regular unemployment money known as 'Arbeitslosengeld I' will stop arriving on March 23rd. Besides I realized that I have applied far under the 2 jobs per week the federal jobs agency asks for.

That said, after researching one job and carefully writing a cover letter and sending off an email, it was returned to me as undelivered mail that had been identified as spam. I tried sending from another address: same result. And I don't think there was any warning in the job posting about not attaching PDFs to email.

Concerned that maybe the company was not receiving any applications due to an oversensitive spam filter, I tried telephoning, but it didn't ring at the other end nor did anyone pick up. So then, as the company was in the neighbourhood, I went there in person.

One of two receptionists at the building, which housed multiple offices, tried to phone the job posting contact, but the lady was out on her lunch break; so instead the receptionist asked me to write down my email address and phone number. So far I have heard nothing back.

Anyway, I thought the whole thing was funny/depressing.

*

Next week I'll write a German test that will hopefully prove my language proficiency for university admissions. But if accepted to study for my Bachelor's again, I'd only be starting in October, so the question is how to set up my health care and other things before then.

One thing I'm thinking of doing is to apply for freelancer status with the Finanzamt, so I can at least accept mini-jobs (which was difficult to do when registered as unemployed, as I'd need to earn under a certain amount or sacrifice my unemployment status, including health care & pension subsidies).

***

Anyway, I haven't known exactly what to write, but I'm still frustrated on a daily basis by the way the Israel-Hamas war is being discussed in Berlin.

It feels very personal right now because for my amateur choir's summer concert, the choir master has put an Israeli song and a song by Mendelssohn on the programme, to show solidarity.

If the Israeli song were about peace, I'd be fine with it, but it's about something to do with the 'wells of deliverance.' And it's more than fine by me if Mendelssohn's music brings comfort and peace to German-Jewish Berliners who are interested in his music. But as an indirect descendant I feel almost physically nauseated that his music seems to be used to pull a veil of respectability over the actions of the current Israeli government in the Gaza Strip, and for example if I had any power I would remove his music from any programme of a Berlin event where political figures like the current Israeli ambassador are attending. And it's a little ironic talking about 'wells of deliverance' when millions of people in the Gaza Strip have been drinking brackish water that has been making some of them sick.

Because I have Israeli friends who I know are not doves and at least one of whom knows people who went missing in October, and because there are genuinely attacks on Jewish and Israeli people and installations in Berlin (and have been long before last October), it feels like all of my anger and frustration have nowhere to go.

I'm angry about the killing on a massive scale, starvation, indirect torture e.g. through women giving birth without anesthesia, and wholesale destruction of homes, in the Gaza Strip. But I'm also angry about what I consider the weirdly lackadaisical approach that the current Israeli cabinet has used to putatively try to recover and safeguard Israelis. Take as an example indiscriminate bombing that resulted in the deaths of hostages. I know that the voting public will not agree with me — and Sadat (in Egypt) and Rabin unfortunately experienced grim consequences of taking the other path —, but I think it's also highly likely that choosing a military route in this conflict is actually far less likely to save Israeli lives than a peace agreement, if you start by counting the deaths of Israeli soldiers since October 7th.

Attending a pro-Israel rally (in a journalistic capacity) I also felt that the German President showed far more care and attention to the hostages' family members who were speaking at the same event, alluding to them by name and pledging them his support, than the Ambassador did. The Ambassador went off on a self-indulgent ramble where inter alia he complained about German political insider baseball like statements by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.

Hopefully all of that won't annoy anyone too much. Either way, it's a relief to get it off my chest.

Spring and the Crankiness of Growing Older

Yesterday I had an incredibly busy day of researching the early 20th century in the local library, walking down a grassy street median and taking photos of the crocuses and squills, then cycling off to Prenzlauer Berg to look into a job opportunity.

It was dry, intermittently sunny, and I also enjoyed the trip to Prenzlauer Berg. It wasn't bombed as heavily during World War II as other parts of the city, so there are unbroken residential apartment building façades from around the 1850s to the 1920s. Besides the remnants of the gigantic Bötzow beer brewery are very impressive, if dipped in 80s/90s style swathes of graffiti along one wall. It was also the evening for day care centres, so children were toddling around hand in hand with parents and endearingly squawking, and it lent life to the otherwise formal and occasionally brooding architecture.

But I was so exhausted this morning that I slept in and decided to skip volunteering today, which I've begun to do again near the Siegessäule also because I badly need a routine and contact with other people again.

At home I've tended to be a bit cranky lately.

I've been constantly losing pieces of the feeling of having two parents over the past six years. After a while I'm just tired of facing new challenge after new challenge, feeling bound to fail because I'm no longer shielded and supported as I used to be. Even small things are symbols, and I no longer want to suffer unresistingly and quietly as they disappear one by one.

In general being the eldest sibling comes with a crushing sense of responsibility. A lot of older relatives have died and it feels as if entire generations can disappear in the wink of an eye. The 'work family' has also disintegrated to a large degree.

So since my dad died I'm clinging to totems to help me cope. I like to wear his sweater or have a few of his things around me.

Besides the feeling of support and (to be honest) having several (unfairly burdened) people standing between me and a few of the truths of adulthood, I miss his quality of listening to me explain the things that scare me, even if they don't seem very logical. Right now it feels likelier that I'm ridiculed for mentioning them.

Anyway, the best escape at present is the exhilaration of observing protests and of ducking into courtyards and alleys to do journalistic or historical research. Then I feel quite strong and free, and like I am sufficient.

A Berlin Vigil for a Russian Dissident

Today the news broke that Alexei Navalny had died in prison, after being secretly transferred to Siberia around the Christmas season.

I was upset about it to a degree that surprised me, because I admire his strength of character but didn't agree with all of his views.

I suppose that part of the shock is also because it is cruel and cowardly to kill someone who's already trapped, like pulling wings off a fly — although in every other sense I wouldn't compare a human being to a fly.

In the evening, having read that two protests took place today and that one was officially ending at 7 p.m., I cycled off to Unter den Linden to take photos if the protest was still ongoing.

I arrived past 7:30 p.m., but just as expected, people were still there.

It was a strong juxtaposition to have the Ukrainian patriotism of yellow-and-blue and a flag with the figure of a soldier printed on it, encircled by the crowd of what (based on the languages spoken) I suspected were largely Russians. They were laying bouquets and red-shelled candles at the homemade memorial that's been decorating the gravel since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

An odd juxtaposition in my view simply because I think it's hard to celebrate the deaths or injuries of Russian soldiers in Ukraine wherever they have been cannon fodder ("What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" as Wilfried Owen once put it). They were not all callous invaders and torturers of civilians.

The police guard was heavy, clustered largely on the side of the street beside the ornate fence of the Russian embassy's yard. A few officers were standing on foot, on the median. They seemed reasonably relaxed; the officer who stood on guard beside me as I walked over in the nick of time and unlocked my bicycle from the security barriers was polite when I asked if it was fine to use a nearby lamp-post instead.

As the crowd thinned, a few women came back from the direction of Brandenburg Gate, carrying heavy armfuls of red roses, bright tulips, pale chrysanthemums and other flowers.

While I was almost in tears at times, I found the mood amongst the crowd, many of whom were conversing amongst each other, not too funereal. Maybe Navalny's early death was more foreseeable to them?

Either way, it seemed to me that a few of the protesters who crouched down, lighted candles, and placed them on the ground, also found comfort in the gesture.

Glimpses of Sunlight, and the Film Festival

It was a sunny day, for once, and massive fluffy clouds were floating across the sky as I cycled off to Charlottenburg to meet my godfather and a friend/former-colleague at a noodle house.

As it was the lunch hour, a few people came in as Japanese pop played in the background. Below boxy wooden lamps, near a courtyard window that showed a storeys-high carpet of ivy draped over early 20th-century or late 19th-century brick back wall, at a wooden table with a little potted plant that almost looked like samphire on it, I read a page or two of Walter Benjamin's Berliner Chronik while waiting for the other two to arrive.

We ordered a bento box, ramen with mushrooms and spinach and snap peas, and rice with tofu, respectively; ginger tea, the ginger shredded into delicate slivers, served in pottery cups with a piece of lime in it and honey on the side; and coffee for the first course.

Then, mochi ice cream (berry and coconut flavours, with a berry sauce on the side, also served on grey pottery) and matcha tiramisu for dessert, as well as more coffees.

Needless to say, we didn't all eat every dish.

It was warm, comforting food, except for the dessert (which was also delicious, however, and comforting in another way), and I enjoyed it very much.

Back at home, uncle Pu came to visit, then T.: we chatted and ate plenty of cookies.

Since then I've been researching the Berlin film festival again. Besides, speaking of films and competitions, I've been watching part of the biopic Rustin, because it was nominated for Screen Actors' Guild awards.

I've also been watching (to brag) a food documentary, where it was pleasing to find out that I can understand Brazilian Portuguese subtitles reasonably well.

Last night I reflected that maybe I have to take the leap and do my amateur reporting always in both English and German... such as it is. By now my impression is that becoming a Canadian foreign correspondent is a pipe dream because it would require ironclad bona fides on my part, networking, and an employer who could afford to pay me; I can't retreat into the comfort zone of English by itself forever.

University, Train Transit, and Journalistic Experiments

For the first time in a while I woke up early enough to attend a Tuesday morning class, and I've felt chipper ever since. It turned out that one of my bicycle tires was flat when I was about to roll it out the door; so instead I took the U-Bahn.

It's been a decade since I regularly went that route. So the time travel was engrossing: the train arrival clocks have changed (now e.g. 4' instead of 4 Min, if I recall correctly), and maybe the voices of the announcers, but the stations look roughly the same and the train wagons themselves are still the same old model. Of course I feel different from the twenty-something I was then, in good ways as well as in being a little less fresh and — for lack of a better word — dewy.

On the trip home I wandered past the fields of the Domäne Dahlem farm with its horses in one pasture and pigs in a smaller enclosure, down the budding lilac bushes of the Schorlemer Allee past the stepped façade of Podbielskiallee station, and down into the Breitenbachplatz station. Then I went by the florist's in the train station where I stepped out and bought grape hyacinths, which are now separated and repotted in my room.

Later I watched a press conference for the Berlin Film Festival, and started setting up an editorial plan. This year I found out too late about the press accreditation deadline, but either way I'd feel more comfortable having a proven track record in reporting on the film festival before asking for accreditation.

To me the most essential question so far is why under 40% of directors who submit films to the festival are women. But I've also been reading background material on former Berlinale director Alfred Bauer.

Right now the big, most urgent topic in Berlin is, of course, this week's strike of a large German rail worker union, the longest strike in the history of the Deutsche Bahn. The S-Bahn and wider regional trains have not been running. This affects me not at all personally as I rarely use them. But it does interest me what corporations like the DB should and can now afford to offer employees who are stricken by inflation and by staffing shortages that intensify their task load.

I read about the union's arguments in Tuesday's taz newspaper, a little, but don't remember the details precisely. Whereas on television today, the Tagesschau coverage seemed more geared toward the perspective of consumers who are affected by the strike — whether private travellers or German businesses who rely on freight transport by rail and who will apparently lose out on $1 billion of revenue —, ignoring the perspective of the strikers.

To me, buying newspapers and reading them cover to cover (unless they infuriate me, like the second issue of Die Welt that I tried to read) is still not the most exciting way to learn more about the German journalism scene. And as the taz costs under 3€, which feels highly inexpensive as opposed e.g. to Die Zeit, it's not like I'm contributing hugely to the economic model. But after doing so off and on over the past year, it does offer a slightly better orientation.

Besides buying the taz, I also finally fetched groceries at the nearest zero-waste shop again: walnuts to serve to guests, chocolate, freeze-dried strawberries to make my morning bowls of yoghurt or oats more interesting, and so on and so forth.

And I've been doing considerable Greek homework for university, as well as a little reading out of paper books and book research.

So altogether I've been feeling quite virtuous.

Ghosts of Yesteryear

The past week has been quiet. After recovering from a stomach upset that was a fairly effective way to lose weight but made it difficult to eat much for a few days, I've mostly been indoors researching the non-fiction book I started last year.

As part of the research I fetched out the silver cutlery that Opa had bought, and that we only use for guests occasionally, as well as a linen tablecloth and napkin, which after ironing I could put together into a table setting according to a turn-of-the-century cookbook. Then I took a handful of photos for my fairly bulging archive for the book itself...

Watching the beginning of the black-and-white silent film Mickey, an American production that was the highest-grossing film of 1918, was more of a 'trip.' After apparent animal cruelty and allusions to corporal punishment were interspersed with the intended comedy and the romantic plot, I figured that sometimes it's better to leave the past in the past.

All four siblings were in Berlin today. So we chatted, sang the songs that we're laboriously learning in four-part harmony together with our mother ("As With Gladness Men of Old" has been the easiest to learn so far, whereas Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus" is still an ordeal), and ate take-out Indian food for dinner. And my godfather came to visit, and a friend of the family!

It's hovering around -1°C and the pavements are wet, but if I were to go outdoors and seek out a little nature again it might be worthwhile despite the month. Yellow flowers that aren't quite like forsythia blossoms have already appeared in the allotment gardens, and clumps of snowdrops have been multiplying in a local park. Not to mention the leftover autumn berries: I thought I spotted deep red barberries, looking orphaned on their leafless twigs, as well as lurking Oregon grapes and the unmissable droplets of white and pink snowberries.

Last week I sent off two job applications. Then I checked to see if the old TestDaF certification I received over 10 years ago can still be verified by the institute where I wrote it. (The institute quickly wrote back; they can't verify it.) Which means that I'll need to do the certification all over again to attend university in November. O tempora, o mores.

I'm also 'doodling' on the piano more regularly. The Bach-Busoni chaconne, the few songs I know for Epiphany, a stray Édith Piaf arrangement ... It adds another dimension to playing the chaconne that I've now read a little about Busoni and seen his grave and learned that he lived in Berlin for a while; I always pictured him working away in a plastered house, wreathed by the ghosts of the Renaissance and Baroque past, in an Italian city like Florence.