Tag Archives: Germany

A liberal snowflake encounters a moth’s nest

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I’m used to having a couple of holes in my clothes. It comes with the territory of being one of those people who occasionally leaves the house with a dress on inside-out and whose bag contains a decade-worth of receipts and a half-melted Mars bar. 

And it’s fine, really. I’ve got this far. The sub-group of perfectly put together individuals is already large enough.

But there came a time, a few weeks ago, when the number of holes in my clothes was becoming disproportionate.

“What’s going on?” I asked LSH, waving my green woollen cardigan, brown knitted dress and – tragically – a brand new sweater from Uniqlo before his sleepy yet not indifferent eyes.

His fate was similar.

“I wore this coat tending goats in Norway,” he said sadly. “I’ll never be able to replace it.”

We filled black bin bags to the brim and – not knowing where else to go with them; it did not seem right to transfer a potential infestation to the Red Cross clothing bank – popped them into the Restmüll container.

I ransacked Rosmann’s anti-moth section, buying bundles of lavender, rings of cedarwood – and only in case of emergency – sticky paper.

We emptied our wardrobes and used our weak-powered, spluttering OK brand vacuum cleaner to remove every last speck of dust.

Attribution: Wikipedia Creative Commons, Agrius convolvuli (Greece) More info: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

“It’s the honesty I appreciate,” LSH says of the Hoover. “It’s just OK. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more.”

I found four lifeless caterpillars, which I removed using a plastic shot glass and a business card from someone at the World Bank.

Our life returned to something resembling normal. With the range of our outfits diminished, what remained in our wardrobes had more room to breathe.

We became accustomed to the smell of lavender and cedarwood in our bedroom.

Still, often, more often than we liked, we spotted moths. They loitered on the bathroom wall, and on the kitchen ceiling. Their shadows haunted us.

Research had taught us that they weren’t the enemy. It was the larvae – invisible to the naked eye – that had the insatiable appetite. They only ate organic – wool and cotton were their favorite.

But the presence of these matriarchal moths was a cause of concern. They flew about with authority, mocking us as we chased them with the plastic shot glasses; their confidence was of the ripe and reproductive kind. Thankfully, an outrageously opportunistic real estate agent had recently written asking if we would like to sell our apartment. He had enclosed a high-quality business card in the envelope. It was ideal for catching moths. We became better hunters.

We removed them – humanely of course – one by one.

“Just tip them over the balcony,” I told LSH. “They’ll be alright, they can fly.”

I bought more bundles of lavender. The waft of cedarwood became more intense.

Time passed. The pandemic raged on. We spent our evenings watching the French version of possibly the worst television program ever made, The Circle.

“We need to talk,” LSH said one day.

We had already agreed that the bureaucracy of a divorce in this country would be too much to handle. Besides, we had been getting on just fine. And he was the one who had suggested we watch Le Cercle.

“It’s about the vacuum cleaner.”

He took my hand compassionately and like a woman condemned, I followed him to the living room.

He picked up the small, red OK hoover. “I’ve found the source.”

Inside the dust bucket, beyond the fluff from our socks, the crumbs of our dinners, the remnants of our dead skin, the Hoover brimmed with life. A mass of white eggs, a smattering of tiny caterpillars, an occasional fully formed moth.

I squeezed his hand tightly and for several days, we did nothing. The word moth did not even pass our lips. We were, I can see now, in shock. We were not OK.

During our ordeal, in a period otherwise marked by inertia, we got a new Hoover. LSH spent ages researching and in the end we opted for a not-particularly-cheap Philips model. Its power is inordinate. Vacuuming is a joy we argue over and emptying the dust bucket a near-religious ritual. Sometimes, especially when you are in your thirties, it’s OK not to be OK.

Yesterday was a national holiday in Germany. “Christi Himmelfaht” marks the ascension of Christ into heaven, 40 days after his surprise resurrection.

Inspired by the painful events that led to this glorious flight, I decided to sacrifice myself to the cause of dealing with the moth nest in our vacuum cleaner.

As liberal snowflake vegetarians, we do not enjoy killing though we are also complete hypocrites because we do eat pesto.

LSH thought Restmüll was the answer.

“I can’t,” I said. “That’s an awful death.” I had just been reading about the ecological advantages of moths in The Guardian.

I googled: How to remove a moth’s nest humanely.

Nothing.

I put the vacuum cleaner in a black bin bag and put on a pair of disposable gloves we’d bought at the beginning of the pandemic.

I walked self-consciously to the park. It was raining, which I had hoped would make things easier. But the joggers were out in force. Germans are hardy people.

I made my way through a clearing in the bushes and took a deep breath. I opened the bag. For the first time, I examined the life inside carefully. I hoped that no one was watching me. I did not know how to explain.

I clicked open the dust bucket and tipped the contents onto a bed of moss.

On the way home, I walked to the bins in the communal courtyard and discarded of the rest of the Hoover in Restmüll. A better person would have brought it to the recycling center but the sticker on the bin said that the rubbish inside would be burnt to power homes across the city. There is only so much virtuousness possible in one day.

I returned to the apartment, shaken but satisfied.

“They are risen,” I told LSH.

From elephant caretaker to private security guard

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This story was first published here.

We meet in a café down the road from where the Berlin wall once stood. Olaf Schwarz is just as I remember him from our one encounter in 2014. Small, bespectacled and in his mid-sixties, he wears a silver chain around his neck and speaks so softly that I have to lean right into him to hear. He orders a beer.

I’d reached out to him because five years ago, on a bus ride to an event at which we were both volunteering, he’d mentioned that he used to work for East Germany’s state circus. He’d taken care of the elephants.

Olaf Schwarz with elephants

Olaf Schwarz taking care of elephants in the GDR in 1986 Photo: Olaf Schwarz

It’s the kind of fact that sticks and it came back to me as I was contemplating the economic impact of German reunification. I was on the search for somebody who could capture the experience of East Germans whose socialist world crumbled almost as abruptly as the Berlin wall did. Olaf Schwarz, I thought, could be my man.

On November 9th, 1989, when Germans rushed to tear down the wall that had shackled them for so long, two radically different ideologies came face-to-face for the first time in 28 years. On the western side was a nation with a thriving free-market economy that had experienced a ‘Wirtschaftswunder,’ or economic miracle. On the east was the Communist-run German Democratic Republic: a centrally-planned economy in tatters.

The GDR circus was one of many East German institutions that floundered and ultimately collapsed following reunification. Olaf Schwarz worked there between 1981 and 1987.

“It wasn’t hard to get a job in the GDR,” he says. “The circus was always looking for people.”

In many ways, it’s no surprise that he ended up there. In the years before, he’d spent most of his time hitchhiking, sleeping outdoors and avoiding the authorities. He first got a taste for it at the age of 12, when he and four friends set off on an ill-fated quest to hitchhike to the western city of Duisburg, because they’d seen a picture of it in their geography textbook. They stood on the side of the Autobahn and told the drivers who stopped for them that they were on their way to their grandmother’s funeral. Eventually, after a search warrant was put out, one of the drivers smelt a rat and the police caught up with them. Olaf Schwarz’s appetite for adventure was born.

Olaf Schwarz hitchhiking

Olaf Schwarz hitchhiking to Bulgaria in 1975

Unlike regular citizens, whose movements were heavily monitored and restricted, employees of the circus were allowed to travel freely. Their performances took them to West Germany, Austria and even Japan. The GDR authorities trusted them not to defect during their international performances.  Were they right to?

“When I went to Austria in 1983, it did occur to me not to come back,” Schwarz says. But the conditions and hierarchies he’d observed at Western circuses put him off.

“The relationship between individuals of higher and lower rank was terrible,” he says, adding that the conditions at the GDR circus, where everyone and not just the boss had access to hot showers and a kitchen, “couldn’t have been better.”

Another distinguishing feature of the East German circus was that the children in the troupe got an official state education from accredited instructors who would accompany them on their travels. Childcare was provided too, and Olaf Schwarz fell in love with one of the Kindergarten teachers. In 1987, when she began to suffer health problems and was no longer able to travel, he quit the circus so they could stay together.

He got a job at an animal welfare organization, which was on a mission to control the wild cat population. “My job was to drive to wherever the traps had been set up and pick up the cats,” he says. A few months into his new post, one such journey brought him close to a pathologist’s clinic. It was to be a turning point in his life.

He got talking to a staff member, who invited him in to see a corpse. He gazed at it impassively. As a child he’d spent a lot of time observing operations at a slaughterhouse. Death didn’t faze him.

“The guy said that if this stuff didn’t bother me, I should go work for the Berlin municipal undertaking service. He said I’d earn double there.”

He took the man’s advice and traded cats for corpses. If the salary he’d been promised as an undertaker was good, the tips he got were even better. It was for this institution that he was working when the Berlin wall came down in 1989 and the socialist regime in which he’d come of age began its final demise.

“Sure, you could have seen it coming,” he says. “If you thought about it logically, it was clear that things couldn’t continue on as they’d been.”

In the beginning, nothing much was said and the staff kept on working as normal. Within weeks however, the old managers, all of whom had been members of the East German Communist Party, had been replaced. For Olaf Scholz though, an even bigger change was to come.

The following year, the East German currency, the Ostmark was replaced by the West German Deutsche Mark. “Overnight, the tips stopped,” he says. There is indignation in his voice. “We got nothing anymore.” I ask him why he thinks this was. “People were too stingy to give away their Western money,” he says simply. Perhaps, I think, they realized its worth.

The GDR undertaking service did not survive long after reunification. There was briefly talk of it remaining a government entity, but the well-established private funeral parlors in west Berlin spoke out in opposition. Once again, it was time for Olaf Schwarz to look for a new job.

Never one to turn down a challenge, he became a security guard for a private US security company in west Berlin. He even got a firearms license as part of his training. His job included patrolling the villas by the Wannsee lake, which to this day are home to some of the city’s wealthiest residents. To a person who had spent almost three decades living in a system that forbade the accumulation, let alone the flaunting of wealth, it must have come as quite a shock.

“It was interesting,” he says. “Some of the villas had swimming pools in their basements. And places to dock their boats.”

He worked in the security business for several years, before once again getting a job at a funeral parlor. He was there all the way up to 2007, when the business folded.

It was then that his first and only prolonged period of unemployment began. It was to last for a decade, until he reached retirement age.

He filled his time taking free courses for people out of work. He learnt how to operate a camera and it was in this capacity that we met in 2014, when we spent a day working together to produce a report about an event at a seniors’ club in Berlin. Today, he continues to shoot videos, which he uploads to his YouTube channel.

One of the greatest pleasures and challenges of storytelling is when the tale you thought you were going to tell morphs into something else. Before our conversation, I thought that Olaf Schwarz might represent a kind of common East German experience. Perhaps, I thought, as he reflected on his time at the circus, he would display a certain kind of Nostalgie, a yearning for the certainties, if not the repression of the GDR regime. Alternatively, I considered, maybe he typified the East German who was quick to embrace the freedoms that capitalism offered. An entrepreneur of sorts who was able to grasp hold of new opportunities.

Both narratives are far too limiting. Like the millions of Germans whose sensibilities were shaped by the cold war, his response to the political and economic events of his time was entirely unique. If I did have to identify a single thread that has run through his life and got him to where he is today, it would be a healthy disregard for authority.

“To be honest, whether it was then, or now, I don’t trust any government,” he says. “I just do my thing.”

 

 

 

 

‘Men are absolutely useless’ says LSH

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We were holidaying in Ahlbeck, a seaside town near the German-Polish border. It was our last night and we were in an Italian restaurant, waiting for the enormous pizza we’d ordered to go.

All of a sudden, a look of panic spread over LSH’s face, and he began tapping his pockets frantically. Then he emptied the contents of his bag on the table.

“I don’t have my wallet,” he said.

“It’s probably in the apartment.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Go back and check,” I suggested. “I’ll wait for the pizza.”

I couldn’t wait to tear into its cheesy, spinachy goodness.

It came moments after LSH had left. The heat from the box radiated through to my fingertips as I crunched through the snow back to the apartment. Giddy with greed, I expected to find LSH sheepishly reunited with his wallet, and ready to crack open a few bottles of the local beer we’d bought in Edeka earlier.

Instead I found him stony-faced.

“It’s gone,” he said.

We turned the apartment inside out, tearing open drawers, accessing nooks and crannies we hadn’t known existed. We even turned the couch upside down, as if we expected the wallet to tumble out with a guilty “alright, you got me!”

“I had it in Edeka,” LSH said later, miserably munching a cold slice of pizza. “I paid with exact change. I must have set it down when I went to pick up the bottles.”

“We’ll go back first thing tomorrow morning,” I said. “But until then there’s nothing we can do.”

“All my bank cards,” said LSH. “My BVG travel ticket. My Trinity College graduate library pass.”

“It’s expired,” I said gently. “We moved away six years ago.”

“The existing pass is required for renewal,” LSH said tersely.

The romantic, gorge-ful evening we had envisioned was slipping away.

“I just have to sleep it off,” said LSH, and went to bed, leaving me to nurse a flat regional beer.

The next morning the snow sparkled under brilliant sunshine. It has to be in Edkea, I thought, though I was careful to conceal my optimism.

The shop had just opened. A young man sat at the till.

“Good morning,” I said. “We’ve lost a wallet. And we think we left it here, on this very ledge, last night. Could you check to see if you have it?”

He shook his head vigorously. “Nope,” he said. “No wallet here.”

“Go to the department of lost items,” the customer behind us chipped in.

“Oh?” I said. “I didn’t know such a thing existed.”

“It’s in the town hall,” he said.

“This is very odd,” I said as we made our way down a long and narrow yellow-walled corridor, passing glass cases that featured posters outlining the requirements for passport photographs due to come into effect in 2004.

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How LSH and I feel about women everywhere

“It is a sleepy town,” said LSH.

We found a door labeled “Office of found items” We could hear a radio on in the background.

We knocked.

There was no answer.

A young woman swept past us on her way into another room.

“Can I help you?” she asked pleasantly.

“Sure,” I said. “We’d like to declare a missing wallet.”

“You’re in the right place,” she said, sympathetically. “But the office might not open for another few minutes. Why don’t you just take a seat?”

“Thanks,” we said.

We sat down outside the Lost and Found office, and became aware of a male voice coming from it.

We agreed that this time it wasn’t the radio.

“I’ll knock again in a while,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later, the same woman emerged again from her room.

“Still no answer?” she asked.

We shook our heads sadly.

Forty-five minutes later, during which time no one had actually entered the room, we knocked again.

“Come in,” said a gruff voice.

An old, bearded man was sitting at a desk. Judging by his expression, he was not happy to see us.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“My husband has lost his wallet” I said.  “Has it possibly turned up here?”

“No.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. Perhaps we could report it missing?”

The request appeared to pain him.

“I’ll need your ID.”

“It’s in my wallet,” LSH said helplessly.

The man sighed.

“Perhaps I can give you my passport instead?” I suggested.

He agreed, reluctantly.

He typed my details –  painstakingly slowly – into the computer.

I asked if I could provide an e-mail address so he could contact me if the wallet was handed in.

He squinted at the computer.

“There’s no box on this form for an e-mail address,” he said. “There has to be a box.”

“Oh, hmm perhaps you could just take a note of it then?” I asked.

He continued to gaze at the screen.

“Actually, there is a box,” he said. “So you can give it to me after all.”

He printed out a document to confirm that LSH had lost his wallet.

We thanked him profusely and left.

“I’m going to have to cancel everything,” LSH said, crestfallen. “So many phone calls.”

(We hate phone calls.)

On or way back, we passed Edeka again.

“Come on,” I said, suddenly determined. “We’re going back in.”

We passed the young man at the till and made our way up and down the aisles until we found another member of staff: this time, a woman stacking shelves.

“Excuse me,” I said, with a hint of desperation in my voice.

“My husband thinks he left his wallet here last night. Is there any chance it’s been found?”

She smiled.

“What does it look like?”

“It’s black!” LSH blurted out. “Bulging with receipts.. a ton of cards!”

She nodded.

“And look,” LSH said, brandishing our document from the man in the town hall. “We’ve even got an official document declaring it missing!”

She glanced at it, bemused.

“One moment,” she said.

She disappeared to the back of the shop and came back with the wallet.

LSH clapped his hands together in adulation. I called her an angel.

She looked at us with the kind of sympathy reserved for the deranged.

“You’re welcome!” she said and returned to her tins of soup.

As we left the shop, passing by the young man at the till, LSH turned to me and said:

“Katzi, men are absolutely useless.”

“Go on,” I said, happily.

“The tosser at the till, swearing blindly that he didn’t have the wallet. He didn’t even look. Or ask someone!” He paused, then continued, “that old man in the town hall: zero help!”

“Yes,” I said. “I can certainly see where you’re coming from.” But then, for the sake of diplomacy I said, “Not all men though. You, for example, are alright.”

“Katzi,” he said.  “I’m the one who lost my wallet!”

“True,” I said. “And I’m the one who got it back.”

We crunched through the snow back to the apartment, singing the praises of women everywhere.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Westalgie in the qi gong changing room

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There were three of us, in various states of undress. I was the youngest. Hardly surprising, given that we were getting ready for qi gong, the slowest form of exercise imaginable.

“You’re not from here?” one of the women said.

“No,” I said, “I’m Irish.”

She wasn’t German either, though she sounded it, having moved here from Greece as a young child. Her name gave it away though: Althea*.

The other woman was from Bavaria. Her name was Heike*.

“Some friends of mine were moving to Berlin,” she said. “So I went with them on a whim, planning to stay for a few months. That was 50 years ago.”

We chuckled.

“But oh, how West Berlin has changed,” said Althea, who came here long before the wall came down.

“Oh yes,” said Heike. “It used to be quite something.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“West Berlin used to sparkle,” she said. “It was a very special place.”

Althea nodded enthusiastically. “Yes,” she said. “It positively glowed.”

Everyone knew each other, they told me. Walled off and with a constant perceived threat of Russian invasion, it was an unconventional type of person who chose to come to West Berlin.

“It was full of pacifists,” Heike said, referring to the young men who came to West Berlin specifically to avoid conscription. A quirk of the city’s division was that the West was technically under the rule of the Allied occupiers, allowing residents to legally bypass the draft that applied elsewhere.

There was a schizophrenic aspect to the city too. It wasn’t just conscientious objectors smoking cigarettes while they mused about changing the world.

Wealth mattered. And flaunting it was a conscious choice.

No building typified it more than KaDeWe on Kudamm. These days, it looks like a regular fancy department store.

But back then, it was an icon of capitalism and the freedom many asso

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KaDeWe – source: Wikipedia Creative Commons

ciated with it.

“There used to be a cafe nearby,” said Heike. “You couldn’t go there without meeting someone you knew. There was this one wealthy man who would pay for everyone …  they were good times.”

The concept of Ostalgie – nostalgia for the former East Germany – is in common parlance in German.

It evokes the sense of a simpler time, far from the Ellenbogengesellschaft (literally ‘elbow society’) of today, characterized by citizens nudging each other in the race to get to the top.

(Before you get too warm and fuzzy, it’s worth remembering that it was also a time of totalitarianism, operated by a network of tyrannical officials and served by tens of thousands of informers masquerading as friends and lovers.)

But the idea of Westalgie – the yearning for the walled-off West – was new to me. Proof it existed could be found in the qi gong changing room in Schöneberg.

*names have been changed

Why I’m a tree hugger and you should be too

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When Frau B looks out of her fourth-floor bedroom window, she sees two tall trees. On the left is a spruce. Its mass of deep-green needles presents a burst of colour all-year-round.treehuga

But she’s more interested in the maple tree beside it. Each September, she watches its leaves turn from vibrant green to grimy brown and yellow. A few weeks later, the wind snatches them away, leaving a stark tangle of branches for Frau B to observe during the winter months.

At the age of 97, even she is a whipper-snapper compared to a tree.

When I told her the other day that scientists in Norway had discovered a 9,500-year-old spruce, she sighed.

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a tree community in Volkspark Humboldthain

“Mich nimmt der liebe Gott auch nicht,” she said, meaning ‘God won’t take me either.’

It’s something she says quite often, usually with a smile. This time, it conjured up an image of a long line at the gates of heaven. When Frau B eventually gets to the top, she is rejected alongside a Norwegian spruce. Together, they lament the curse of their longevity.

In the past few weeks, my relationship to trees has morphed from passive appreciation to zealous awe. Peter Wohlleben, the author of The Hidden Life of Trees is mostly responsible.

The book was an impulse-buy, having met my three criteria for spontaneous literary purchases: an inviting title, a pretty cover and the promise that I would be a slightly different person after reading it.

My transformation has become especially apparent to LSB, who now finds himself at the receiving end of a barrage of excited outbursts:

“Do you know that trees use fungal networks to communicate?”

“Woah! You will NOT believe this! Trees can detect the saliva of insects and use THAT knowledge to send out chemicals to attract their predators!”

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tree bark in Volkspark Humboldthain

“Okay, I promise this is the last one: did you know that parent trees deprive their children of LIGHT in order to keep their growth rate steady?”

“…I know, I know: I’m sorry but I just have to tell you this: trees of the same species INFORM each other about impending environmental threats!”

At first, he listened politely, nodding occasionally as he scrolled through his phone. But as the days turned to weeks and my enthusiasm failed to wane, he advised me gently that I was putting the “bore”into arboreal.

It hasn’t stopped me though.

What I find so extraordinary about trees is in fact quite unremarkable: they’re just like us.

They have memories, which they can pass on. Communication happens via a sophisticated electric network forged over millions of years. The sick are nursed and the tendency is to protect one’s own.

Eventually though, like you, me and Frau B, they breathe their last and descend into the ground. There they turn to humus and enable new life, once again, to begin.

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a sick tree is propped up by its neighbour in Volkspark Humboldthain

The German town that dedicates an entire festival to asparagus

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Before I moved to Germany, asparagus never played more than a supporting role on my dinner plate.

I regarded it as a bog-standard vegetable: average-tasting in a soup and appropriately assigned to side-dish status.

I soon realised this kind of indifference would turn me into a pariah here.

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My relationship to asparagus has developed since I moved to Germany.

The German language has a term to describe the period when asparagus is in season: Spargelzeit.  It’s generally between mid-April and mid-June.

In Berlin, Beelitzer Spargel is celebrated as the most exquisite – and comes with the price tag to match.

Beelitz is a 30-minute train ride south of Berlin and home to around 12,000 people. Its official website defines it as a Spargelstadt – an asparagus town.

Every year, it devotes a festival to the asparagus and crowns a local woman Asparagus Queen. This year, in an attempt to complete our integration into German culture, LSB and I decided to attend the event.

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Bavaria’s most attractive all-women band (or so I’ve been told)

From Beelitz train station, you can catch the Spargel shuttle bus to the town center. LSB and I decided to walk. It wasn’t far and the streets were well sign-posted with arrows on every other lamppost directing you to the Spargelfest.

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Costumed asparagus and Asparagus Queen greet festival-goers

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The 2016 Spargel Queen

We arrived in time for the 11 am performance of a Bavarian band called The Midnight Ladies. They advertised themselves as Bavaria’s “most attractive all-women band” – a title I was not in a position to judge but that seemed plausible, given how dashing they looked in their glamorous traditional garb.

Milling around the town were two giant asparagus: one green, one white. The costumed vegetables flanked the Asparagus Queen as she shook the hands and kissed the babies of stall-holders and visitors alike.

The highlight of the performances was undoubtedly the dance of the Spargelfrauen (or Asparagus women). The group of a dozen women have been performing at the asparagus festival for 20 years and it certainly shows in their choreography.

At 2 o’clock, it was time for the asparagus parade. LSB and I had an enviable spot right next to the stage, where two anchors from a local TV station provided a running commentary on the floats.

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Members of the Asparagus Women dance troupe perform at the festival

Asparagus farmers drove through the crowds in their tractors, handing out baskets of the vegetables to lucky onlookers (myself included). Any local organisation you can imagine, from volunteer firefighters to a children’s rope-skipping group took part. Even an historical society marched through, with members proudly pulling two replica medieval cannon-shooters through the town.

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Costumed asparagus receives assistance getting in the door.

It went on for an hour. Tragically, I could only capture five minutes on film.

I did however manage to snap a rather comic moment earlier on, when one of the costumed asparagus had to be escorted to the bathroom and an assistant recruited to get his head through the door.

After the parade, LSB and I went for lunch. We dined on a classic: white asparagus, served with butter and potatoes on the side.

The festival concluded with a tearful expression of thanks from the mayor and the Asparagus Queen. The former told the crowd he had already confirmed the visiting acts for Spargelfest 2017.

Never again will I consider asparagus as anything but the main act.

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Beelitz town

Remember all those headlines about Merkel making a refugee girl cry?

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Last July, the world’s media directed its wrath towards Angela Merkel after an 11-year-old refugee girl burst into tears at a government-sponsored event in the northern city of Rostock.

The girl, whose family had fled from Lebanon, was outlining her situation to the chancellor. Smiling nervously and in perfect command of the German language, she explained what it was like to live in constant fear of deportation. Tentatively, she told Merkel she too had dreams.

Merkel listened, nodded and promptly committed PR suicide: she told the truth.

“Politics is hard,” she said. “And you’re an incredibly likeable person.. but there are thousands more living in camps in Lebanon.. we can’t take everyone in.”

Moments later, the girl had begun to cry.

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It was glorious headline fodder.

“Merkel makes refugee girl cry,”wrote the mass-circulation Bild. “Angela Merkel is ice cold,” other news outlets announced.“Merkel reduced girl to tears,” said Britain’s Daily Mail.

Merkel’s attempt to comfort the weeping refugee girl by patting her even gave way to the ironic and scathing hashtag, #Merkelstreichelt (Merkel strokes).

Oh, how things have changed.

Eight months after the encounter with 11-year-old Reem, Angela Merkel’s stance towards refugees is now widely considered the gold standard in moral leadership, setting her apart from all other world leaders. Those who support her open-door policy consider her a beacon of hope in an otherwise depraved world. Those who oppose it at least acknowledge the political sacrifice she is making in order to stick to her convictions.

The image of the ice-cold chancellor has been all but erased.

It’s worth pointing out that last July’s exchange took place against a backdrop of headlines about Germany’s tough-line approach to negotiations for a third Greek bailout.

Now even in this regard the narrative has flipped, as Merkel leads calls for more solidarity with countries like Greece that find themselves on the frontline of the refugee crisis.

Merkel’s encounter with Reem, the girl from Lebanon, was notable in two respects.

First, it was a departure from her usual careful media strategy, which is to say as little quotable as possible. The German chancellor is known to make hard work for journalists who have to sift through long sentences of little concrete substance in search of a suitable sound bite.

More than anything though, the intervening months have proven that when Angela Merkel “made a girl cry” last year, the media hung her for being artless, not heartless.

Baking cookies with refugees

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This is a follow-up to an earlier post about refugees in Germany

It was an afternoon full of surprises. For one, the Syrian teenagers loved baking Christmas biscuits. One of the boys carved the name ‘DIANA’ into his piece of dough and nodded shyly when I asked if it was the name of his girlfriend.

I met a Serbian man and his two young daughters, who looked angelic in matching owl hats. They’ve been here for six months and already the little girls speak perfect German.

When they arrived, they were entitled to free lessons. That policy has since changed to reflect the government’s intention to fast-track the applications of people with little hope of being granted asylum. Anyone from the Balkans is no longer considered worth the investment.

The father, ambitious, highly educated and fluent in English, fitted the description of ‘economic migrant.’ In Serbia, he worked as a salesman, overseeing two shopping centers. One of his ventures was into Lebanese honey, which he assured me, was the best in the world. “Even better than Manuka,” he said. He told me that no matter how hard he worked in Serbia, it remained a struggle to make ends meet. “It was different in the former Yugoslavia,” he said. “We had prosperity then. Now we can’t afford anything. And our passport is useless.”

As a fellow economic migrant, it made me sad to reflect that the accident of my birthplace entitled me, but not him, to seek a better future here.

But pragmatism, I think has to win out. There are 800 asylum-seekers arriving in Berlin every day. School gym halls are now being used to accommodate them. On the radio yesterday a mother described her son’s disappointment at finding out that his football training had been cancelled because the sports hall was now home to Syrian refugees.

The war in Syria has so dominated the conversation about refugees that it’s easy to forget the people coming from everywhere else.

As I was making to leave with another female volunteer, two young men motioned over to us. They gave off a macho, yet needy vibe, asking in a conspiratorial tone whether we used ‘Whatsapp.’ I was evasive in my answer but relented and gave them my number when they asked for it directly.

The men come from Gambia. One of them has been sending me unsolicited messages. He has been transparent, and – frankly – inappropriate in his pursuit of contact, refusing to accept that I have no romantic interest in him.

But I don’t regret giving him my number. His messages have been enlightening. It is depressing how desperate he is to attach himself to a woman from the EU. His messages are manipulative – describing his sadness at not hearing from me, demanding again and again to ‘meet me at the TV turm’ despite my clear assertion that this is not on the cards.

Sometimes the language of his messages changes, with sentences apparently copy and pasted from lyrics or inspirational quotes.

I don’t particularly pity him, as I was annoyed that his badgering continued after I asked him to stop.

But I do wonder what he left behind in Gambia and whether being married to an EU citizen really would be the utopia he imagines.

Frau B takes on “the modern condition”

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“Nice haircut, Frau B!”

She pats the sides of  her head, self-conscious and pleased. “Like it? You’re the only one who bothers to notice.”

There’s a knock on the door. A young woman, slight and dark-haired, sporting a pale green uniform, walks in.

“Julia!” says Frau B. “Now you can finally meet Katechen, my little Iren.”

Julia and I greet each other.

“Julia comes from Spain,” says Frau B. “Don’t you?”

“Yes, ” says Julia and hands us both a cup of coffee.

“She speaks very good German,” Frau B says after she’s left. “She came here because there were no jobs at home. Just like you did!”

Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00134 / CC-BY-SA via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00134 / CC-BY-SA via Wikipedia Creative Commons

We talk about mass unemployment and the effect it has on the political landscape of Europe. Frau B was a child when Germany was in its deepest ever financial crisis.

“1929 and 1930 were the worst years,” she says. Even my father was unemployed for nine months. People said that if he had no work, it meant there really was none.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a precision mechanic. He was very good with his hands.”

“Something you inherited!”

“I sure did. I got his feet too. He had tiny feet, for a man.”

Screen grab from Daily Telegraph article of 27 January 2012

Screen grab from Daily Telegraph article of 27 January 2012

She takes a sip of coffee and continues:

“Hitler would never have come to power were it not for unemployment. See, he re-built the army and got people back to work.”

I tell her about Ireland’s Republican party, Sinn Féín, and how they’re currently enjoying a rise in popularity.

We agree that mass unemployment and disillusionment add to the allure of extremism.

Sometime later, when we are done talking about politics, Frau B mentions her grandmother who was born in 1838.

As a child, Frau B would spend long afternoons reading the Bible in her grandmother’s rural home. But it is a detail related to her Oma’s appearance rather than any biblical verse, which has stuck most in Frau B’s mind.

“My grandmother used to be bothered by a few little hairs, which sprouted above her lips. She’d tear at them with her hands until they came out,” she says.

Now Frau B notices a few hairs growing above her lips. “It comes with age,” she says. “I pluck at them when I can’t get to sleep.”

“Some people believe vanity is unique to the modern condition,” says Frau B. “It’s really not.”

As I observe Frau B rearranging her hair-do, and think about the events which led up to the horrors of World War II, I feel both comfort and unease at how relatively small our 70-year age-gap really is.

Want to win the World Cup? Try “Konzentration”

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I meant to post this yesterday but didn’t get around to it, sorry! The story begins at the Brandenburg Gate 24 hours ago:

As I write the German football team are dancing on a stage at the Brandenburg Gate. Before their “Sieger Flieger” landed, the plane took a spin over the fan-zone, where half a million people clad in red, black and gold were waiting to welcome their heroes home.

I have no idea how half a million people have nowhere else to be on a weekday morning. But this is Berlin; they’re probably in the creative industry or have called in sick.

As I watch Berlin explode with festivities, I’m reminded of the cliché that when Germans do party, they tend to party hard.

And, come to think of it, identifying the right time to party has been key to this team’s success.

Throughout Germany’s stellar World Cup campaign, coach Joachim Löw has refused to celebrate prematurely.  Instead, he remained adamant that each team Germany faced had the potential to end their championship dream. He was right too; after his side’s spectacular 4-0 defeat of Portugal, Germany could only muster a 2-2 draw against Ghana.

And after their epic 7-1 win over Brazil, which broke social media as well as footballing records, he remained determined in his caution.

Löw’s measured style may be seen as a tactic to keep his team level-headed before the final. But it was matched, if not exceeded by Merkel’s  endearingly understated response.

Appearing at a press conference the day after her country’s  7-1 defeat of Brazil, she said: “I agree with the global opinion that it was a very good match … I think it almost merits the description ‘historic.’”

She went on to wish the team “strength and concentration for the task at hand.”

Strength and concentration, seasoned with some good old-fashioned caution,  is the German recipe for Weltmeisterschaft success. What’s yours?