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.

A Christmas Promenade in Kreuzberg, etc.

It's been a cloudy Christmas Day with gaps of sunlight - even that is a relief after a few rainy and snowy days and nights.

We ate Christmas breakfast: bread rolls with cheese, mezze and Mediterranean dips from yesterday evening, etc. To go with those and the usual chocolate and gingerbread and Spekulatius, we had coffee, and taper candles were lighted on the tabletop. Only brother Gi. was sadly missing, as he is in quarantine in Brandenburg.

As presents there were a Christmas stollen and a book from one of my mother's professors, Greek Christmas cookies from one of my professors, a bag of assorted sweets from a family friend whom my mother met through her former bookshop, malt whisky fudge, more chocolate, and origami papers for T. (Besides I'd bought myself a book from the shop where my aunt S. works, a few weeks ago, and began reading it today. It feels quite self-affirming to be a good gift-giver to one's self.)

Earlier than the usual last-minute timing on December 23rd, the tree has already been selected, bought, and hauled by Ge. and J.  for a few days. J. did the decorating. As we have at least 5 moving boxes full of ornaments from our paternal grandparents as well as our own stores, only a fraction will fit on the tree every year. But the blown-glass balls with trapped bubbles, in marine cobalt blue, pale blue, and green, are obligatory; so are the two strings of fairy lights.

After breakfast and the admiration of presents, the youngest brothers, my mother, and I went for a walk to Kreuzberg.

Snowberries were stippling the darkness, light green buds have appeared on the tips of lilac twigs and in a sprig of yew or hemlock in early preparation for next spring, flocks of birds flew around, and other people had also come out for a Christmas stroll. In the sky, foreboding grey clouds alternated with glimpses of clear blue sky, and pools of pale sunlight occasionally brightened the scenery. The fine branches and ornamenting seed pods of the plane trees were very pretty against the sky, like antique ironwork.

The visibility was so perfect today that not only towers, domes, chimneystacks, and building cranes were sharp regardless of distance, but also the dark ridges of the low Brandenburg hills that ring the city.

I was photographing constantly. Maybe next year I'll have gathered skill and will use the hybrid digital-analogue camera that was my high school graduation present, instead of my smartphone?

Back at home, T. led another intensive session of learning a Christmas song in 4-part harmony, which she introduced this year. She sings alto, Ge. tenor, J. bass, and my mother and I the soprano part. I haven't been a proper soprano since I was a child, but it's getting a little easier. First we rehearsed "In the Bleak Midwinter," then "Prepare the Royal Highway" (which was more familiar to me as an Easter song, when we went to a German Lutheran church in Canada when I was very small). Today we finished struggling through Mozart's "Ave verum corpus" (which we'd forgotten had very grim lyrics until we started rehearsing it) and then breezed through "Angels We Have Heard on High."

In between I brewed a pot of herbal tea, mended the sleeve of a dress as a sort of Christmas present to myself, and it was all very cozy.

In honour of the day I've put on hold the book research (about Berlin from 1900 to 1929) that I've otherwise been madly undertaking as the university holidays set in.

The Ups and Downs of Early December

It was a brooding, November sort of day, but weak sunlight in the afternoon as well as a pale purple sunset were a welcome change of pace from monotonous rainfall.

My Greek class was cancelled, so I went on an unnecessary trip to campus. But I analyzed the bulletin boards before leaving, took an impromptu architectural tour on the way home, and generally enjoyed myself. The ice and snow have of course melted from the streets and sidewalks, and it's a relief that it is safer to cycle again.

Greatly impressed that I'd managed to wake up before 9 a.m., when weirdly I've found myself struggling to wake up before 11 a.m. throughout the past month, I went on a few errands.

At the zero-waste shop I stocked up on pasta, chocolate, dried mint, apples, and vegetables. The Mediterranean cookbook I'm working through has a hispi cabbage and roast hazelnut recipe next, but aside from the cabbage, pumpkin was on the shopping list too for the sake of a pumpkin eggnog recipe.

The pumpkin eggnog was fine. The youngest brothers certainly appeared to appreciate it. But the pumpkin type at the store had more of a watery, squash-like flavour and colour, so I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about the result.

Then I went to an organic food store hoping to find Christmas delicacies, but it didn't have many aside from Christmas punch and tea blends.

Working briefly at a Christmas market selling lanterns two weeks ago has made me re-think the value of money again. A 20€ bill that I'd have earned by sitting at a laptop last April, now represents 1.5 hours of standing while trying to engage with dozens of strangers, remember the sales pitches, keep the booth presentable, process and respond to ongoing coaching from my boss, and gift-wrap the merchandise quickly and accurately.

Anyway, now that my amateur choir's Christmas concert is over, I can devote time and energy to journalistic outings again. But there's also a big Greek homework backlog to reduce; I've done a bit of that this morning.

Besides I'm thinking of recording myself at the piano, as the Christmas concert has nudged me back into regular playing.

The plan to give myself daily Christmas presents, mentioned in the last post, fizzled out a long time ago. But on the whole I feel pretty happy and I think it served its purpose.

I've also put myself on a diet because of recent depressive episodes. More fruits and vegetables, more water, more protein; less sugar and processed food: I figured that these guidelines certainly wouldn't do much harm, and I do feel more awake.

That said, I think the depressive episodes likely come from 'crashing' after a few intense weeks of covering pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protests.

November Hermithood, Mediterranean Cooking, and Books

It's Day 4 of my Christmas project of giving myself one 'intangible' present per day. First day: sleeping in until noon. Second day: not feeling guilty about waking up too late for Greek class. Third day: washing some of the dishes that need to be hand-washed and had piled up. Now I don't really know what to do for the fourth day...

The weather today is atrocious but appropriate for November: grey, few leaves on the trees but admittedly not as bleak as January through March, and now that it's nighttime quite brisk winds and dripping rain.

A glimpse of light is in the news: the ceasefire agreement in the Middle East.

Today I cooked fava beans and zucchini fritters from a Mediterranean cookbook, as I haven't eaten many vegetables lately, and for fruit have focused on apples, oranges, and pears. It was nice to have something fresh again, but it was definitely enough work that I don't consider it a present.

Tomorrow I'll resume cooking recipes from a Christmas book: after a delicious but very boozy glögg (I flambéed it twice but I still felt slightly floaty after drinking only one glass), I'd made a 'Hot Mexican Chocolate' yesterday of dark chocolate melted with cinnamon and whisked up with warm milk. But I thought it would be best to let a day pass before moving on to mulled wine.

Altogether I've had cabin fever these past days. It was a huge relief to get my bicycle back from the shop where it was being repaired, so that I can go out and about more. The impediment to full mobility is that the bicycle has a subtle leak in the front tyre: cycling about an hour today was fine, but the tyre does deflate in a 2-3 day time span and requires pumping up again.

And I'm a little anxious that I'll be somewhere in eastern central Berlin in an exciting protest only to find myself rolling on the wheel rims all of a sudden. I can fix this myself, of course, and didn't want to ask the bicycle shop employees to look at it. Ge. sagely and firmly advises buying a new tyre. I could also try the trick of inflating the tyre under water and seeing where air bubbles appear, then patching it.

Anyway, once I'm outside more regularly, I'll be quite happy not to be stuck with my own circular thought patterns any more!

For my former work team, on another topic, I'm admittedly worried. Only one of us has been asked back to the re-formed company, at least for the foreseeable future; the effect on morale is correspondingly depressing. Of course everyone is a grown, independent person and I shouldn't fuss when they're finding their own paths and survival techniques as we all have to do sooner or later. But... It's especially tough I think for people who have been with the company a very long time and were very dedicated.

In the meantime I'm sorting through National Public Radio's list of the best books of 2022, and seeing which ones have ebooks I can lay my hands on. It's absorbing, and I'm already looking forward to their lists of best music albums and singles, too. But as for the best books of 2023, I'll leave those for next year.

A Snapshot of Garden Life Just Before November

This afternoon I cycled to the allotment gardens again.

The plant life is settling back into the ground as always in late autumn, figments of leaves (green and red and yellow, with pale underbellies like fish) and pink rose petals plucked off the trees and bushes and shrubs and melting into the grass, gravel, and earth, against dark wooden posts and tree trunks, garden sheds and evergreen trees. But instead of the vinegary scent of rotting apples or other whiffs of decay, the air was relatively fresh and I only caught an occasional trace of rose blossoms.

Besides the rose haws and late flowers, orange berries, Virginia creeper leaves, and late red apples that had partly fallen on the grass — tattered and drying late purple asters and the odd hidden nasturtium blossom in flaming colour, were adding life to the scene. A bird flew overhead to a hidden congregation of crows.

2023 was not a great year for grapes due to the better rainfall and scanter sunlight. They were more sour and less flavorful than last year, and began to sag in September; now a lot of them seem to have dropped from the vines instead of enduring, round and sweet, late into winter's frosts as they did last year.

In one of the garden plots, the pumpkins that were hanging from vines like orange lanterns have disappeared; so I think have the beans, and the ginger blossoms are shrivelling after being bright and beautiful for several months. But the dark, long kale is thriving, and the chili peppers planted alongside it in the same raised bed have ripened.

Leafy tree species are, of course, losing leaves at different rates. One species is almost entirely bare; but the spiry thin cottonwoods are largely green, for example. The amply leaved oaks beside the gardens, with their high-arched autumnal warren of shadows and tree trunks and rain-wettened asphalt path beneath, suggested a Thoreau-era New England in early autumn, even if (almost?) all of their acorns seem to have been shed already.

Other people worked, went for walks or bicycle trips, or met with friends, in the garden enclosures and the paths; but they were lost amongst the shrubbery. The brooding grey sky exuded the same heavy, sound-dampening feeling as the sky after snowfall.

Passages of poetry (that I've probably quoted before in this blog) recurred to memory.

Keats:

The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Byron, where my 'sea' was instead the wind in the trees and the distant roar of cars:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
⁠By the deep Sea, and Music in its roar

I came home with three red apples more or less the size of walnuts, more like Christmas tree decorations than like edible fruit in appearance.

Scylla and Charybdis, and Studies

For the second weekend in a row, I've been practicing amateur journalism skills by going to protests about the Israel-Hamas war. It's been challenging to keep my own feelings in check, also as in Germany this war has brought up longstanding stereotypes about Middle Eastern neighbours that I personally find deeply offensive and unfair. The German press coverage also makes my amateur journalism far more uncomfortable: pro-Palestinian protestors have no empirical reason to trust me; as a result, I have not conducted any interviews or photographed many people's faces. But I figure that having more opinions about the war is not going to help anyone, so it's not hurting anyone if I shut up about mine; and at least I personally feel quite safe at the protests. So I just vent freely to my siblings and my mother, and attempt to be outwardly neutral.

What's going much better is the next university semester. While I still haven't received a final response to whether I am accepted for full-time study or not, I like the Plan B that I've implemented: i.e. another semester of guest-auditing modern Greek. This year, the fellow students are native German speakers who don't insist on speaking Greek 100% of the time. So, regardless of how class compositions may look in future semesters, it gives me a chance to wholly follow what's being taught and discussed, and to steadily acquire enough knowledge to handle Greek-language classrooms in future.

That said, a fellow student has a Palestinian parent, and she hasn't been showing up to classes in the last week. I didn't fully understand what was discussed, but it sounds like she's distressed by the university's public stance on the war. As she's the only fully enrolled student in the Greek programme for our year, this means that missing classes will really be a disadvantage to her university career, although our professor is flexible and sympathetic.

As for the weather, the transition to fall has been abrupt, and 'suddenly' there have been a lot of gloomy days. The Tiergarten had dramatic yellow foliage yesterday, interspersed with rust red from the chestnuts or horse chestnuts, and temperatures have dipped near the freezing point repeatedly. Last night the switch from daylight saving time happened. While I felt remarkably early-birdy for waking up at around 8:15 a.m. this Sunday morning, I figure that soon I'll backslide.

On my schedule today are three protests, plus hanging out with my family. Potentially at a restaurant, to celebrate my sister's well-deserved acquisition of a Bachelor's degree, after fulfilling the last formal requirements.

An Early Autumn Outing at a Forested Riverside

The last few posts are not cheerful. I've realized retrospectively that there are a few more things that have made me uneasy lately (the cooling of the construction industry that my youngest brother is in, flights of military jets over my neighbourhood, ...) that I forgot to mention...

But, on the bright side: the smaller company I used to work for before it was bought in 2021 is likely going to be reestablished. It's impossible to feel truly happy if one always has this consciousness that, even if I myself escaped our Employer Overseas by quitting, a lot of my friends are still metaphorically straining under the whip and yoke of the workplace every single day while I frolic. It's also difficult to feel truly happy if suddenly they're all unemployed and thrown upon the mercies of Berlin employers (good and bad). But now that a new set of opportunities is arising, the constant ache and grief of the past few months is healing rapidly.

***

At around noon I met with two former colleagues and godfather M. to traipse around the walking and hiking paths near the Nikolassee and the Havel, at the western edge of Berlin.

On the way, acorns were firing like little bullets from beneath my bicycle wheels, patterned with their graceful curving leaves in the forest floor once I was walking in the forest itself. Elm or beech leaves, and maple leaves, in yellows and reds, were also spreading and peaking on the ground. Brown squelched horse chestnut hulls carpeted some of the bicycle paths, their shining dark brown fruits spilled here and there, or crushed to green powder underneath car tires.

And the tree canopies were mostly still intact, curving over the sidewalks and streets and forest paths, piled as copiously as the vast and quickly-changing clouds (white or grey) in the sky. Often splashes of sunlight streamed across the paths, often splashes caught in the upper leafy branches. And although a few dead trees seemed to testify to losses from summer droughts, and many twigs and branches had been shaken to the forest floor by gusts of wind, the overall impression was: green.

The weather was so good for boating that the loud sputtering of the many sails was audible from the shore — louder even than a fire-engine-red speedboat — the grey surface was choppy, and foaming white wakes trailed from the sterns.

There was an elaborate set-up of hiking paths, information panels (also at an 1840s stone memorial with the same Gothic nubs you might see on a church spire, that had been refurbished in 1945 and commemorated a legend, overlooking the lake), bus stops, benches, etc. for humans. And black sheeting to help keep frogs from meeting a swift and smashing demise by hopping onto a semi-busy road beside the shore. But not so many other people that one constantly felt accompanied.

A group of swans was putting in a 'pit stop' on a grey sand shore. A raven flew overhead, I think, when we paused on a bench (to eat pastries and rest) overlooking an idyllic riverside copse; it made its echoing clicking calls, while dragonflies hovered over a horizontal tree trunk. And a few crows I especially noticed at the beginning. There must have been a red squirrel or two, but I didn't fully pay attention. There were, relievingly, no frog or mouse corpses glued to the roads as I'd seen elsewhere in and around Berlin. And although a few tree roots looked a bit blackened or even charred, it didn't seem as if there'd been many losses due to lightning strikes over the summer.

And although I felt too much like I needed to conserve energy to speak much with the other hikers, at least I listened to the conversations. It was a lovely outing.

Foreign Affairs and the Lemming Instinct: A Rant

For the past months I've been feeling more and more uneasy about the balance of world politics. I don't know if it's a presentiment or if the world is just surviving as it always does, as contradictorily bad and good.

The sea change in the rhetoric about asylum seekers and migrants, who in my view are caricatured in the Berlin and national German news more and more as a threatening mass. (Quite ignoring the reality that, as two or more speakers at the UN General Assembly mentioned in September, there are more conflicts in the world today than there have ever been since World War II. — The more conflict, the more people fleeing conflict. It's not that people suddenly 'decide' that they want to be refugees. — And that countries around the world, even the poorest, have accepted millions of refugees too; it is not just the European Union and the United States.)

The weird inertia about evacuating people from Afghanistan who are endangered for being women or too 'pro-Western.' Afghanistan being kept in a worsening limbo as countries refuse to work with the "de facto" Taliban government. Apparently refusing because of the Taliban's bizarre policy about women's professional lives and education, which based on General Assembly speeches many other governments in the world seem to see with genuine bewilderment — a policy that also concerns me because it's a huge economic self-own.

The impulse in last week's Bavarian elections to vote extreme right primarily (55% of AfD voters identified this topic as important for them) based on 'concern' about accepting more refugees and migrants. — As if migrants were having the worst effect on quality of life, instead of global inflation due to the War in Ukraine, or climate change-related droughts and other natural disasters, for example. And thereby thrusting young and old, men and women, poor and (well, probably not rich) alike back into the arms of people who will torture, oppress, and kill them. Why not turn into a fascist state at once?

The wielding of eco-friendly home heating legislation in German political discourse as if it were a terrible civil rights oppression. Many countries around the world, affected more badly than Germany by global warming, wish they had as much public money to devote to reducing emissions as Germany does. But also the (in my view) counterintuitive impulse in countries like Germany to produce more and more climate-friendly cars and power plants and heating systems etc. etc. instead of focusing on reducing demand.

The continuing war in Ukraine. The impossibility of shipping its grain to countries who do want it (tons) as opposed to countries who don't want it (Poland, ...).

The downfall of Twitter and the megalomaniacal whims of Elon Musk.

The baffling support amongst American voters for the reelection of the US's 45th president, despite the sleaze that's radiating off of him like a mile-high nuclear fireball.

The peculiar support in business and politics for the United Arab Emirates and especially Saudi Arabia, despite the cloven hoof and horns that peer out whenever one considers the treatment of migrant workers, women, political opponents, people who lived in the path of 'eco-friendly' neo-cities before they were shot to death while protesting, Eritrean migrants crossing the border, and journalists.

And a lot of the unease I felt was already peaking even before Hamas tore down parts of the border wall in Israel and began massacring civilians.

Regardless of whether a cataclysm like a nuclear strike happens or not, justifying my foreboding, Martin Luther King Jr. Day did make me think that I should not whine about all the obstacles to civil rights and political rights today. If he could resist an establishment where policemen were genuinely out to crack his skull, like John Lewis, and much of the political elite that supposedly represented him probably even wanted him dead, and if he could still improve his country under those circumstances — why should I, as a woman who faces little-to-no oppression from my government, give up hope?

It's important to keep trying to live (if one has the privilege of trying it) in a way that shines a beam of light into the tempest.

Stage 2 of Observing Lay-Offs: Anger

Three days after the lay-offs at my former employer, I'm reliving a few of the reasons why I'd resigned from it in the first place.

The first night afterward I had trouble going to sleep, thoughts racing, and then woke up at 5:30 a.m. I listened to an audiobook for a while and then was able to rest again.

The next day, intense irritation and anger on behalf of my family and friends took hold. I didn't find myself squinting whenever I thought of the lay-offs as on the day before, but the impulse to take out my boxing gloves and pads and take a few whacks to relieve my feelings grew.

Fortunately at least I was able to see more of Gi. and T., since their garden leave had begun. Like most other colleagues, they were busy taking care of signing and submitting the firing paperwork to the company; then the paperwork for the federal German job agency (Agentur für Arbeit) began.

I thought back longingly to the relaxing journalistic routine I've established over the past month, including a larger article that I've been working on and that I'm proud about so far. But to be honest I think I'll need to give myself very flexible working hours until Thursday. The laid-off colleagues and friends and family have been organizing what they need for themselves efficiently, and my sage advice based on my own Agentur für Arbeit experiences was limited. So I've considered myself more or less merely on standby to help if needed.

But I've found myself mindlessly snacking throughout the day, tensely strung, and nervous. And now I'm finding myself thinking of getting therapy again, endlessly listing coping mechanisms to myself that might make me feel more balanced and relaxed, and thinking that I'd better cut out the sugar because that will worsen my anxiety and general state of wellbeing. In other words, changing my entire lifestyle to cope.

What's more, I'm sick of asking other people to manage my feelings for me, including my younger brothers who've seen my crankier side again. I'm worried again about not treating people fairly because I'm so stressed, constantly beleaguered by moral qualms and doubts.

And it feels highly inappropriate to ask for help or sympathy, when 1. my own departure from the company was long ago and it was something I'd arranged on my own schedule, and 2. others are worrying about supporting children, arranging visas, etc.

I keep on reflecting that the upper levels of the company are not full of evil people.

Nonetheless, the company took skilled colleagues from all over the world, with a healthy social working culture and a sense of purpose in their work, a highly prestigious client list, and a regular profit. They turned all of these assets into a massively incompetent and ill-conceived blimp of a project that was such a profitless money sink that I at least couldn't really blame them for shutting it down. (But they should have reassigned the employees.) The leaders, in short, were plain stupid and uninformed.

That almost every single colleague has reported that their wellbeing has suffered over the past months or years is also telling.

And I keep on reflecting that I'd resigned from this f***ing company precisely so that I would never have to feel this degree of emotional ill-health again. I sacrificed my financial security, my ability to guarantee my family financial security, and my fear of never proving myself professionally again, to make it happen. I also sacrificed many regular social contacts in the workplace and have therefore often been tremendously lonely since April, to be honest. And yet I'm temporarily back where I was six to eight months ago.

As my father would say, when a piece of technology drove him past the boundaries of his endurance: damn it all to hell.

An Axe Falls at My Former Employer

It's been an interesting day: in the morning I woke up early as the telephone rang, to confirm details of my mother's hotel stay in France. Until the early afternoon I was working on a journalism article.

Then the telephone rang again: my sister, telling me that all of my ex-colleagues who were still at the company I used to work for have been laid off. (Except for a skeleton team of around 10 who will be keeping the lights on until next April.)

My former team, always gossipy, has been chatting heavily for the rest of the afternoon, and so has the family.

And I don't know exactly how to feel about it... Except that I am annoyed that my friends have had their job security ripped away, but relieved for those who wanted to quit the company anyway. Unsure whether to feel relieved on behalf of those who have been suffering work-related mental health problems and now have the option to take a well-paid garden leave before they can find a next job, ... And not very surprised because valuable colleagues had been axed before I'd left, which to me implied a scarcity of resources or prioritization of the wellbeing of the company.

And to be resolved to never put people in the same position that my colleagues have been put in.

It's also unpleasant to know that three of my close relations have been made jobless at the same time. (I'm also not really a fan of the Fast Capitalism that has led to this in the first place.)

Although at least T. will stay in the skeleton team.

Now I'm not sure how to help without intruding, although I'm also curious to see which support systems will grow up amongst the 'current' colleagues.