End of Term Essays, Exams, etc.

It's less than a month before the end of the university semester, so the 3,000-word essays that I will need to write before October are beginning to be discussed in my classes and two exams are looming. Besides I am in the middle of a rewrite of a Spanish language essay.

I can't say I look forward to these academic milestones with great excitement. I am hoping to wrap them up neatly at the very beginning and at the very end of the summer holidays, so that university and leisure don't blur into each other in a psychologically dysfunctional soup leaving me exhausted, cranky and dull-witted next year.

That said, one of the essays will compare a neoclassical Spanish play with one of Molière's plays, and I'm excited about that since Molière is indulgent, fun reading to me.

But what I'd actually wanted to do during the summer is to forget university and work instead, since both Detrumpification and trying to offset Berlin's budget cuts are looking like increasingly expensive endeavours. Lately I've been economizing on mealtimes at university because I'd like to spend my weekly money ration on fixing problems, and I'd rather remain financially independent as long as possible. Today's splurge was donating to the Christopher Street Day parade.

Besides, I wouldn't mind having a steady income so that I can go off of my financial diet after 26 months of (mostly uninterrupted) unemployment. New books, sheet music, museum outings, new clothes, CDs, travel, magazines, sessions at the bouldering gym, concerts, etc. — it would be nice to splurge again, or at least enter stores and feel like I can theoretically buy things again.

Returning to the Christopher Street Day parade, the local evening news broadcast reported a few weeks ago that American companies that co-sponsor the parade have been pulling back this year due to political pressures at home. On the one hand I guess it's nice to know that American companies were supporting LGBTQ+ rights in Germany. On the other hand it's depressing that the companies let themselves be intimidated by a spiritual lightweight like the 47th president.

I watched Barack Obama's recent interview with a historian in Connecticut, in a YouTube video, and more or less agree with what he said: for wealthy and influential Americans who have been reaching out to him for advice about how to deal with various pressures from the current presidential administration, his message is that no one's forcing them to make Nelson Mandela sacrifices like sitting in prison for 28 years. (On another note, my armchair assessment is that Obama still seems seriously burned out and should probably not be spending so much time thinking and talking about his country's morally bankrupt regime until he feels better.)

To give credit to my last and deeply unlamented employer, despite their shortcomings, however, they're not shy about celebrating Pride Month on a certain social media job website.

Anyway, returning to the idea of a summer job, I've applied to do monkey work for an edition of Hannah Arendt's collected works, and I'm quite excited about it. Sending the application is something I'd probably do anyway, but I also like feeling that my father would have been intrigued and delighted by the opportunity and by my giving it a try. My more rational side admits that a 41-hour-per-month job that therefore stretches out to 10 hours per week will probably be quite a drain on time and energy that I need for my homework. That said, I've been calculating the cost and preparing to pay up, and there's little more one can do.

But I think that just sending one application to one job is not enough. I might look into working with pre-schoolers, since I like that curious, squawking, exploring age very much but am not sure if I have talent dealing with them. It's too long ago since I was an overbearing older sister to a kindergartner. So a practicum or mini-job should do.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Six

New Denver's claim to fame so far is, sadly, that it was one of many sites far away from the Pacific coast where thousands of Japanese-Canadians were interned, as supposed enemies of war, starting in 1941.

Entrance of the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre,
New Denver, Canada. September 2024.

The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre was set up in the 1990s, encompassing three original houses that were built in the 1940s to hold the displaced Canadians, and a community centre. A garden with maple trees and cedar shrubs, ferns, a flowing dry gravel stream, and other features, designed by a former internee, runs amongst the houses and to the street's edge.

The Hastings Park Exhibition Grounds in Vancouver,
where Japanese Canadian internees were held.
There even seem to be bunk beds in the bleacher seats.
As a Berliner, the view reminds me disquietingly of the asylum seeker accommodations
at the former Tegel Airport.

The internees at "The Orchard" had likely been summoned to large halls in, or near, the towns or cities where they lived, with a few suitcases. They were forced to leave homes, businesses, and cars behind; these belongings were 'held on their behalf' and — more often than not — sold, without their consent, for bargain prices. (While the Holocaust went further, the profiteering of a fellow citizens in Canada from racist prejudice against a minority group does feel shamefully similar to expropriation of Jewish Germans' possessions in Nazi Germany.)

After being held, the Japanese-Canadians were shipped off into remote inland villages. The first winter in New Denver was freezing, and the Memorial Centre doesn't leave much to the imagination about conditions: a tan-colored tent like the ones in which many women and children were left to sleep is set up in the museum, with a small oil-fueled heater and a blanket, as a black-and-white photo shows the real 1940s tents steeped in snow.

It was only in the following winter in the 1940s that the cabins were finished. The houses that survive in the memorial centre have thin cedar shingle walls. Tar paper seemed to do most of the remaining work of insulation and waterproofing. Outhouses with washrooms were a later addition. Over time, the houses were customized and improved, but they don't look much more winter-proof.

To make things worse, families were sometimes separated again after the original deportation. Over 1,000 Japanese Canadians were sent to Ontario to work. Women were sent off to work as domestic servants; a sign in the Centre suggests that the women's wages were garnished to pay for their family members' internment. Men were sent to Ontario as well, as labourers to build highways, farmers or foresters.

A few men, at least from other British Columbia camps, were kept in the province but sent to fight forest fires: at the entrance to the museum garden, a section of tree trunk that was found again much later by a logging company shows the names of Japanese-Canadian firefighters from Lemon Creek Camp, engraved into the wood during a mission in 1945.

In the modern day, the houses in the Centre are furnished roughly as they might have been like in the 1940s: beds in rooms that are barely large enough to hold anything else, a few wooden shelves sticking out from the walls, and modest piles of adult and children's clothing, as well as comforts like handheld paper fans. A radio in the entrance, perhaps, and a dining/entrance/kitchen area with a dense throng of waste pail, old-fashioned iron stove on four legs, broom, pots, and cooking ingredients. Then one or two rooms that hold Japanese-Canadian nostalgia: cosmetics and newspapers with Japanese writing, a large rectangular tin labelled "Japanese Crackers." A few of the artifacts are post-war, as the camp was fully dissolved later, in 1957.

Table in one of the cabins at Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre.

Despite the stressful conditions, the exhibits record a sense of community: the community hall amongst the family houses is a literal example, and the building still hosts a Buddhist shrine and a bath house. Photos also capture annual celebrations like a Christmas concert. In the Centre's gardens, a vegetable patch or two shows the gardening skills of many Japanese Canadians who had been farmers in British Columbia before the war, and later grew crops like broad beans in the internment camp. 

At the end of the war, the government — far from recognizing its injustice — told Japanese-Canadians that they were no longer wanted in British Columbia. One or two exceptions were made, but most former internees were ordered to Japan or to Eastern Canada. I was wondering if this banishment was ordered because their Canadian neighbours were ashamed, didn't want to give back the possessions that they had stolen, or still genuinely feared a Japanese invasion, were too steeped in racist stereotypes, or felt resentful of Japan's military actions during the War. Regardless of motivation, the order was revoked in 1949, but I am guessing a lot of damage had been done by then.

A plaque signed The Village of New Denver at the entrance of the Memorial Centre now says, "It is a humbling reminder of the courage of the Japanese Canadians interned during World War II and their contributions to the social and cultural character of the area."

The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre is not the only site in New Denver that commemorates the detention of Japanese Canadians. A few private homes in the village are left over from the internment camp and can be identified based on their shape and size, although internment camps were generally bulldozed after the war. Besides a garden was laid out at the water's edge.

I seem to remember the Kohan Reflection Garden was, like the Centre, co-funded by Japanese Canadians. From its shoreline we admired the flights of two remote-controlled model float airplanes over Slocan Lake, the swishing waters on the pebbled lakeside, the wood-shingled red and black tea house, a gardener's work, and the trees and bushes (rhododendrons, hydrangeas, bamboo, ...) and ornamental stone lanterns and bridge of the garden itself.

I wondered why the Japanese Canadians who had been interned didn't just spit in the eye of the oppressor after the war, but instead created beautiful things. Still, I guess they took the wiser path.

Student Elections and the Protest That Went Off on a Tangent

In the weeks since my last post about university, I've been sleep-deprived and overwhelmed, but it's still a far better semester than my last.

The Eurovision Song Contest, a musical flashmob for peace in Middle Eastern politics, an Italian-language lecture about an archaeological site in Italy where many villas have been excavated (no, it's not Pompeii) took up part of my time throughout the month of May.

***

Then in the first week of June I was given a chance to earn money again, as an election helper for my university's student parliament. It was intense, although the earnings were good and we were showered with snacks to feed us through the 6- and 3-hour shifts. Besides it was worthwhile (as I'd hoped when applying for the job) to learn the rigorous procedures, because they are reasonably close I think to elections outside of the ivory tower as well.

It was also a happily bizarre experience. Two fellow students and I were set up in a hallway with large glass façades, doors leading to lecture halls for over 120 people, but barely any foot traffic except for the same librarians and office staff ... opposite a horse skeleton to celebrate the building's second function as home to Veterinary Medicine. I'd thought at first that it was a prehistoric animal, but something felt off (i.e., in retrospect, that prehistoric horses were actually smaller). Instead, it was the skeleton of Prussia's King Frederick II's favourite horse, as I discovered the second day of elections.

For hours I did homework, read a book by Isabel Allende, and chatted with the fellow election helpers. Of course I also helped people to vote, but if we averaged out the daily tally, only about 6 people voted per hour, which left a whole lot of time for lollygagging.

On Day Two, I went over to photograph the horse skeleton. But the glass vitrine and lights made for awkward reflections. Then, an hour or so later, a mildly nervous-looking university staffer turned up with a photographer. He tried a few shots of the horse skeleton with his analogue camera, then profanely pronounced the lighting conditions 'Sch*e.' (It felt validating, as it implied that my technique was not at fault.) He took a few last shots with his smartphone 'to give the client a variety to choose from,' and then left.

It felt again weirdly like I  'mesh' with far more experienced photographers, despite my own lack of experience. I'd suggested removing an election banner that might be in the way of his shots, and it turned out to be exactly what the man had needed.

But in general the vote-counting work was, like the work at the ballot boxes, a mixture of intense activity that alternated with a cosmically nihilist absence of purpose: sometimes as I sat around uselessly, I worried that I wasn't earning the very generous €16+ hour.

*

It's been busy after that as well, but I'm not sure how much to ramble on about it. A university budget cut protest on June 4 turned into a pro-Palestinian protest mixed with a little bit of the original protest, culminating in about 400 people howling at the university president's building for him to come out and show himself, as a serried line of fluorescent-yellow-and-black riot police stood in front of the entrance. The speakers felt inter alia that the university should drop charges against the handful of activists who — a few months ago — had armed themselves with axes etc. and broken into the building...

Regardless of my thoughts about this 'interesting' interpretation of how to help Palestinians, some of the police activity earlier had seemed pretty ridiculous to me. 3 to 5 people had unfurled a Gaza banner from an upper level of a different university building, one of them had a Palestinian scarf swathed around his or her face like a babushka, and someone waved a huge Palestinian flag. (I still figure that if you think your actions are right, you won't hide any part of your face; but either way I didn't feel threatened.) In response, however, a police officer, down on the street where I was, started running a few feet toward the 'scene' and excitedly reporting into his walkie-talkie about 'vermummte Personen auf dem Dach.'

I haven't kept up to date with Berlin's pro-Palestinian protests enough to say so with certainty. But generally it seems to me like Berlin's police's guidelines have shifted, and even things like scarves or flags that have not been ruled unconstitutional by any German court are being considered unwanted at protests. And I think it's a bad development. Public relations and convenience are not enshrined in Germany's basic law, while freedom of speech (even if I would never use it that way) is.

Anyway, the howling at the protest sounds entertaining now that it's written down, but I wasn't in the right frame of mind to appreciate it at the time.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Five

It's the Pentecost weekend, which means that Monday is a statutory day off in Berlin, so I want to spend time diving back (in my imagination) into last year's holiday!

***

We entered New Denver just before the shops (specifically, the shops that were still open after the main tourist season) began to close for Friday evening. It is, as a man told us later in our journey, a town that looks like it did during the 1960s.

In fact the 1960s were why Uncle Pu had decided to take us there. My paternal grandfather had been a schoolteacher in that decade, and he was assigned to New Denver and lodged in a house just at the entrance to town, at the corner of 6th Avenue. Uncle Pu pointed it out to us immediately: a beige, weatherboarded two-storey house with a peaked roof, kept in a tidy state that preserved its historic appearance.

We parked on 6th Avenue and wandered down the slope to Slocan Lake. I imagined that tourists would throng through the village in summer months, skiers with drawling leisurely voices who would be heading into the 'back country,' mountain bikers, and the kayakers and canoeists. In one yard, someone was advertising vinyl records for sale; in another, men around middle age or older were sitting in a garden arbour at what looked like a café. Further down the street, there was a pharmacy and an art gallery and further up the street and far beyond it, a forested mountain looked blue in the mist.

I popped into a souvenir shop, which sold (amongst other things) postcards, clothing, balls of yarn, books including a copy of the 2022 bestseller Remarkably Bright Creatures that was also circulating in Berlin — as well as books by Indigenous authors like Richard Wagamese and Eden Robinson, and decorated chopsticks. I ended up getting a card that showed a dark wooden shack with a mountain ash tree in front: it raises funds to preserve the remaining houses from a Second World War-era internment camp. When I paid for the card, the man at the counter was pleased that I'd chosen it; he spoke about the cause with the same respectful gravity that I'd hear from other New Denverites later.

A fabric shop was closed; and the Valley Voice newspaper office had a sign on it saying that the owners had decided to pass the legacy to someone else and were looking for someone interested.

Next I wandered into a back yard from a local museum. The first exhibit, impossible to miss, was a lovingly restored wooden boat, "Lancet," from the early 20th century: it was now sheltered beneath a roof a little way from the sidewalk.

When I turned into the back yard, it was to find a range of forestry and agricultural implements arranged in a semi-circle. Hanging from the rear wall of the house, there were the 'Forest Finds,' everything from oven doors and shovel heads and axe heads through metal ladles to enamel dishes and colanders, some dating back into the Victorian era, that had been found amongst the trees around New Denver.

Nearer the boat, a "Wood shaft bucket" ("used to clear rock from a vertical shaft") whose slats had drawn apart near the bottom and whose iron frames were orange with corrosion, hung from a roof. A black "forge bellows" was hanging above an iron crank. A metal file, and several pincers and shovels displayed beside the bellows could have belonged to a forge, too.

"Forest Finds" around Silvery Slocan Museum, New Denver. September 2024.

It was not hard to picture miners and loggers sitting around campfires or in a woodland cottage, or working, and using these tools, a hundred years ago. I also liked picturing locals or visitors finding these tools embedded in dark, cedar-needle-strewn forest soil decades later, being delighted and confused, and bringing them to an expert who'd tell them what it was and when it had been made.

From there, we walked to another weatherboarded, street corner building that used to house the Bank of Montreal. 'This is,' our uncle told us, 'where I opened a savings account in the Sixties.'

We found out from a signs that it stopped being a bank by the 1970s, when it became the Silvery Slocan Museum.

Now the late 19th-century bank building's windows have been recast as vitrines: mini-collections of everything from an engraved musical brass instrument, through a Lydia E. Pinkham bottle, to a spittoon or two, all of which looked like purest Laura Ingalls Wilder — as well as an electric iron from the 1920s, oil lamp from Hong Kong in the 1940s, and a flower-painted, glass-walled butter churn. The selection paid implicit tribute to the variety of nationalities and backgrounds of immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

On the museum's second floor balcony, we spotted antique chairs rocking chairs arranged in the open air, as if ghosts were holding a conversation. I seem to remember that one of the chairs looked as if it had been burned in a fire.

Below the house, I also seem to remember mining carts rested on a pair of train rails, as a sign commemorated the galena ore extraction industry. (One of New Denver's streets is named Galena Avenue.) It looked like a nice museum to visit in the summer season, when the interior is also open.

— What was disconcerting in several places in British Columbia, admittedly, was that while there was a lot of visible history, little to none of it was Indigenous. Of course that speaks for itself: it shows how long ago Indigenous people were already forced from their land. But it would still be more satisfying to know which cultures did exist there and how they lived in the landscape. —

Slocan Lake, September 2024.
The mist between two of the mountains is
the smoke of a forest fire.
The cedar in the foreground is showing signs of drought.

Then we reached the lakeside.

An Edwardian pump house in white weatherboard with green trim stood beside it, underneath trees. Nearby – and this excited me most of all – there was a rectangular brown garbage can with a bear-proof sticker.

It was sad to see, while standing in the gaps between the trees on the New Denver bank, on the other side of the lake how much Valhalla Provincial Park has been injured by forest fires. Swathes of the evergreen forest were black or red, smouldering steaming smoke was seeping from several parts, and the snow fields above were contaminated and grey, long after the fire was first fought back. That said, the weather held the promise of more rain to help relieve the forest.

On the way back up 6th Avenue, I looked at the signs that described the historic origins of the buildings: one was built in 1894 as a mining office, then used by a doctor, before it was used as a mining office again. Another was a newspaper office that was partly rented out to a carpet and furnishing store, until 1904. A former hotel, milliner's, butcher's shop turned general store, ...

Like a bear near a garbage can, but in a much more appetizing way, we also began to think of food. We saw a restaurant, underneath a huge leafy tree that (in my mind at least) had its own unearthly aura and seemed to have a gin fragrance. A few droplets of rain clung onto the outdoor tables, and autumnal wasps were visiting.

We ordered ice cream and brownies from the dessert menu, and began to chat with the family of owners. It's often said that it's a small world: so it's not entirely surprising that despite the fact that we were in a village of around 500 inhabitants in western Canada, two of the family had lived in Berlin, and could chat about Prenzlauer Berg and the Avus highway with us in German.

In the meantime, the mother of the family (a hard worker who turned her hand to a lot of things, so that I was in awe of her throughout) was tending to the plants around the parking lot, while her grandchild toddled behind her wielding a large shovel. And after our meal, they kindly offered us plums that they had picked themselves. It seemed part and parcel of a neighbourly ethos I likely haven't travelled often enough to see anywhere else, and I hoped I showed that I appreciated it.

The owner family also told us about the summer's forest fires. New Denver had been on evacuation alert (or watch?) after three days of 40°C weather. A thunderstorm arrived, and lightning strikes found the forest dry as kindling — 'jeder Blitz ein Treffer' ('each strike was a bull's eye') our host commented dryly. Then a fire had broken out around Silverton, 5 kilometres to the south.

We decided to stay overnight in their inn: a pastel-blue-painted building with stone elements that looks like it might be from the 1970s or earlier, and flowered wallpaper and what I seem to remember as dark wood wainscoting along the inner hallways.

Uncle Pu absolutely wanted a chance to kayak around Slocan Lake, and this was part of his negotiation with the owners. But I was too timid to enjoy the idea of me or anyone I cared for navigating an unfamiliar waterway, and so was secretly relieved when elaborate plans to take to the water didn't work out after all.

Before we thought of turning in for the night, though, there was the remaining afternoon and evening before us. We walked to the Nikkei Memorial Internment Centre on the other side of town, across the rocky Carpenter Creek.