The Shadow of Fluency

Since I've been home, several people have asked me whether I'm fluent in German now. The answer: I don't know. There's no border to cross, no test to take, no magic moment in which you get your German-speaker membership card and all the Austrians welcome you as a member of the tribe.

Christmas Party at Frauentreff

Because my flights on Saturday were cancelled, I was able to attend the holiday party for workers and clients of Frauentreff, the organization for migrant women where I'm interning this semester.

Jugendzentrum Alte Trafik: A youth / community center where many of Frauentreff's social activities (including the holiday party) take place.

On Multiculturalism

I came home to a large pile of newspaper clippings on my desk. It seems that my grandma cut out every article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for the past few months that had anything to do with Germany or Austria. While skimming through them, I found this op-ed from Leonard Pitts, Jr., comparing the German debate about multiculturalism to the American one. It really crystallizes a lot of the thoughts I've been having about attitudes toward migration in Austria and about my feelings toward American immigration.

One Last Adventure for 2010

The Christmas holidays have been looming in my mind as the most significant sign that my time in Austria is rapidly coming to an end. When I return from Pittsburgh in January, I'll only have three weeks left in the country, and when you've been measuring your time in months, those three weeks are going to fly by. Every reminder that Christmas is approaching has been bittersweet: I'm certainly excited to see my family again, and my friend from Kosovo has assured me that the dorm is pretty lonely and boring over the break, because most Austrians go home, but I also was not willing to come to terms with the fact that when I return, it will be only to tie up loose ends before saying goodbye forever. I've had a lot of very strong, very mixed emotions in the past few weeks as Christmas drew nearer, and it was with sadness that I pulled out my suitcase on Wednesday and started packing.

Christmas in Wien

Winter in Wien would be almost unbearable without Christkindlmärkte. The little wooden stands seemed to sprout up on every sidewalk, Hof, and otherwise empty square inch of space in the city at the end of November. 

Christkindlmarkt am Alten AKH (near the Central College Office)

Social Life

A few weeks ago, we had a midterm discussion as part of the Central College required course, in which we re-evaluated the goals we had formulated for the semester at the beginning of our time in Vienna. I was quite pleased to do this: I've participated in a lot of goal-setting sessions at the beginning of projects, but without a structured space for follow-up and adjustment, the goals become little more than words on a piece of paper that's tossed in the trash at the end of the project with a sigh of "I wish I would have done more on that." It can be easy to lose track of how micro-actions are the stuff of major movements, and that goals are achieved or neglected on the basis of day-to-day decisions.

mi è piaciuta la italia

It's no secret to anyone who's talked to me in the past few months that I am seriously in love with Austria and with my life here. I'm living like a normal student, which was my goal for the semester from the beginning. But that also means I need to remind myself that there's a lot that's special about this semester as well, and that I should take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities as much as the ordinary ones.

Thanksgiving in Wien

I’ve always been the type of person who lives in the moment, and so I’ve never really had much of a problem with homesickness. I did get a little sad, though, when I Skyped my family on Thanksgiving and heard about their holiday plans, and so I was especially glad that Central College organizes a Thanksgiving Party “for us,” in that we the exchange students are the ones who need this feast the most, but also “by us,” in that we’re also responsible for cooking the foods and sharing our tradition with our Austrian guests (our roommates and friends as well as the Central College Abroad professors).

I ♥ My Uni

Universitätshauptgebäude (main building)

Learning German: der Heurige

Heurigen are wine taverns directly on the property of the vineyards whose wine they serve. They exist throughout the Eastern Austrian wine-producing region, and have become a veritable institution since Kaiser Josef II permitted vintners to begin selling their own wines in 1784. Today, there are two types of Heurigen: touristy places reachable by the tour buses full of Germans who come down to sample Austrian wine, and more rustic accommodations that often require a hike up a meandering mountain path that's too steep for the tour buses to travel. On the last day of my Mom's visit, I wanted to show her one of the latter. With a recommendation from Marie, the assistant director of my program, and a printed map from Wiener Linien (Wien's equivalent of the MBTA), we were ready to go.

Doing it Aurally

I like music for the same reason I like sports -- as a form of collectivism and communal experience. There's nothing inherently exciting to me about banging on a piece of metal in a regular fashion, or blowing gusts of wind through a wooden cylinder; I enjoy listening to music for its ability to connect me to (sub)cultures. As I youngster, I was embarrassed about living in a middle-class household in a working-class district, so I got into punk. Maybe I couldn't be a throwaway youth -- someone who has decided to burn out rather than grow up because earning a good living is not really possible -- but I could listen to their music and get angry just the same. I feel as if I can bore my way into the minds of a specific group of people by listening to the music they do. For example, I named my blog last summer "Crack in Chelsea" because I would always listen to a certain Dropkick Murphys song on my way home from work, "as I put on my most bad-ass face and dodge through the crowds at Grand Central Station," as I wrote at the time. I was a New York bad-ass, and bad-ass New Yorkers listen to hard-edged skinhead music. So I did the same.

That's why I knew that my early-2000s American rock collection was not going to cut it in Austria. I tried listening to almost everything in the U-Bahn during my first few weeks here (rap, ska, indie, punk, folk), but it always felt a bit wrong, as if I was disappearing into an American world between my ears and letting Austria pass me by. Interestingly enough, international pop hits like Airplanes seemed to work well, but I can't ignore my American socialization, which tells me that those songs can only be occasional guilty pleasures, long enough for them to serve as a sustainable solution to my dilemma. Since I still wanted to listen to music on the trains, I needed to amp up my German-speaking music collection. Here's some of what I've found so far:

Innsbruck

November 1 (All Saints Day / Alle Heiligen) and November 2 (All Souls Day / Alle Seelen) were university holidays in Austria, so my mom and I took a short trip to Innsbruck, the capital city of the province of Tirol.

"But Your German is So Good!"

Because I'm not taking a German language class here, my learning feels more haphazard. I hear many of the mistakes I make (mostly in terms of gendered articles and their corresponding adjective endings), but I'm sure there are plenty of others that pass by unnoticed. I'm taking more risks linguistically, in terms of guessing the noun forms of verbs I know, for example, which is good, but without instruction, I have no way of making my guesses more educated.

And then, of course, there's my accent. I've gotten everything from Northern Germany, to Sweden, to Switzerland, to France. (Maybe so few people guess it correctly because, even though everyone knows what Americans sound like, it's so rare to hear an American speaking German.) And when I'm tired, I fall into English sound patterns. Sometimes I even end up saying English words instead of German ones, like the night I tried to go out with my floor after three hours of sleep, and ended up talking about "Östria" -- a blend of Österreich (German) and Austria (English).

I know all of this. My grammar mistakes grate at my ears, so I'm sure they bother my Austrian conversation partners even more. But sometimes, I wonder whether this isn't the Harvard perfectionism creeping in again. Language isn't a formula to apply; it's a communication apparatus. Mine might be a little less stable than most, but if it works, that's the most important thing. But is that just laziness and a lack of ambition talking?

Every time I meet someone new, this dilemma crystallizes itself. If the person already knows I'm an American, they'll say, "Oh, you speak such good German!"* But if they don't know I'm a foreigner, immediately after I speak they ask me, "Where are you from?" or "You're not from Austrian, are you?" Should I take the complement and run? Or strive to not be immediately pegged as a foreigner?

*I also don't know to what extent I should believe the complements I receive. I know that Americans are much more free-wheeling with complements than most other countries, but I also feel like the Austrians are judging me from a different standard of "good German" -- basically, I don't need to speak English with you -- than I would like to judge myself. The one complement I actually believed, though, happened when I was in class with the WU students. Part of our small group work was to read a two-sided explanation of the American mindset behind a specific situation. When my Austrian reading partner flipped the page over, I said, "Whoa, dude, I'm only on the first column. I read really slow." And he said, "Oh, I'm sorry, your German was so good, I forgot that you might take longer." He didn't expect me to be incompetent! Of course, I actually was, which proves yet again that I have a lot of work to do.

Going Deep

For the required Central College Abroad course on Thursday, we met with students from the WU (Wirtschaftsuniversität, squint at the last part of that word and you should be able to figure out that it's one of the universities in Vienna) who are taking a course on intercultural communication in preparation for studying abroad in the United States next semester. We had each prepared posters on cultural differences between Austria and America (the normal stuff: Americans are fat, but have lots of social mobility; Austria is not Australia, but has a strong social welfare state; etc.) Then we ate lunch together at the WU cafeteria. The word got out that I went to Harvard (because I met a kid who'll be studying at Bentley University, which is apparently in Waltham, even though I'd never heard of it before), and everyone wanted to see my student ID card. Then, somehow, the other Americans left, but I got roped back into the classroom for another four hours of intercultural communication class, in German this time.

And my God, was I glad I stayed.

Frauentreff, or in English, Meeting Women

Central College Abroad gives us the opportunity to complete an internship during our time in Vienna. Brie, another girl with the program, and I are both working at Frauentreff, a non-profit organization for foreign-born women in an immigrant neighborhood. Frauentreff has German language coruses, beginning literary courses, and advising for women in multiple languages (Turkish, Spanish, and three West African languages -- Ewe, Twi, and Hausa -- I had never heard of before). This is mostly advice and help with everyday life (How do I register my daughter for school? Could you translate this form and help me fill it out?) and small bureaucratic matters that present minor annoyances to cultural insiders but major roadblocks / sources of confusion for immigrants with little knowledge of the system and weak language skills. It's a bit ad-hoc, but nonetheless important. Unfortunately, there's not really much for us to do, so I don't know how long this internship is going to last, but I've enjoyed simply watching the work of the center so far.

Today, Brie and I went to a beginning literacy course. Because all of the women were from small villages in Turkey, they had never had the opportunity to go to school, and since studies show that it's easier for a person to learn to read in their native language, the class was conducted in Turkish. The women were working off of a paper with a bunch of very simple, "What is your name?" questions, and then various answers. First, the women attempted to read the paper through. A phonics lesson then followed, as the women had to attempt to figure out how to write each of the names of the people on the paper. Finally, the women had to attempt to write their own name using phonics. It was fascinating, because even though Brie and I could read the words on the paper, we didn't know what they meant -- the exact opposite of the women in the class, who understood the words but couldn't read them. By the end, though, both groups understood that "ismin ne?" means "What is your name?"

At the end of the lesson, the teacher told Brie and me that we could gladly stay and drink tea with the women. We accepted, and suddenly, the women were pulling out huge containers of food and pouring heaping amounts of a dish that looked and tasted like Italian wedding soup without the soup on plates for us. A large, circular piece of flatbread (very similar to naan) formed the basis of the meal, and then there were various topping options, from joghurt (Greek style, but don't tell Turkish people that) to thick cherry filling to cucumbers and parsley.

Brie and I didn't have a language in common with these women, because even though they've been in Austria for two to five years, they spoke very little German. They understood us when we said "Bitte" (please), "Danke" (thank you), "Entschuldigung" (excuse me), and "Auf Wiedersehen" (goodbye") -- what you can learn in any tourist book -- but when I tried to ask them "Wie heißt das auf Türkisch?" (What is that called in Turkish?), I got a mix of blank looks, "Türkisch, ja" (meaning that Turkish was the only word they understood), and "nicht verstehen" (don't understood). But that didn't really matter, because if you want to be my friend, all you have to do is feed me. The women were incredibly nice, and told the director of Frauentreff, a Turkish-born woman who has lived in Germany and Austria for 20 years, that they wished we could talk to one another better. I think they don't have a lot of opportunities to interact with Austrian / non-Turkish people. The director says that because they can find everything they need in their neighborhood (just like back in their villages in Turkey), they rarely venture out.

By the end of the meal (and with some help from the director), we had learned the Turkish words for sugar, bread, tea, thank you, spoon, and bowl. One of the women even asked us how to say goodbye in English. There was only one lingering question: Was that supposed to be lunch, or does "drinking tee" really mean "drink tea and eat until you burst?" I'll have to Google Translate that question and ask the women at "tea time" next Friday.

Geeking Out

Every semester, students on the Central College Abroad blog (where, if you so desire, you can read a cleaned-up / de-radicalized version of these posts) make some sort of joke about forgetting the "study" portion of study abroad. When you’re a sociology student, though, the boundaries between your everyday world and your academic world often blur. When I go to a lame party, I "put on an ethnographic gaze," and analyse the social interactions going on around me. I can’t take a walk or ride a bus without noticing the ways in which social structures and social relationships have left marks on the physical environment of the neighborhoods I’m passing. At the same time, my academic work often involves talking to people. I get to ask them about lives, about how they see the world, and about how the world sees them – the kind of deep conversations that are increasingly rare in a society dominated by superficial interactions.

Because of that, I don’t feel so much tension between the desire to do well academically here and the desire to fully immerse myself in the study abroad experience. I chose classes that would enrich my understanding of Austrian culture by providing historical and theoretical background on just the topics that fascinate me. And because academics are an important and exciting part of my time here, I wanted to provide a brief introduction to my classes, all of which are taught in German at the University of Vienna unless otherwise noted. Details after the jump.

Penetrating Ethnic Communities

(I love it when Austrians try to speak English.) That's the given English translation of a seminar I’m taking, which basically throws 25 people in a room for three hours to informally discuss contemporary immigration to Austria. Today was the first course meeting, and it was one of the most fascinating experiences of my time in Austria. 

We first spoke in small groups about our perceptions of immigration / migrants / foreigners in Austria, and what types of contact we had with them. The strongest cultural difference I noticed came when we were trying to formulate a definition of assimilation / integration. No one mentioned naturalization as a marker of integration, so I asked directly, “Would you consider naturalization part of the process of integration? Do you have to be an Austrian citizen to be 'successfully' assimilated?” “No,” my groupmates said. “You can only become a citizen once you’re assimilated.” And that, I think, is a very different formulation of the national community. Austrian citizenship is like a prize that you get once you’ve already become Austrian, a visible marker of an internal transition. “The Austrians” are integrated, because the un-integrated are not permitted to become Austrians.

All the Small Things

Sometimes I feel like it's cheating to go to Europe for an "intercultural experience." Austrian and American cultures really aren't that different -- on the surface. We consume the same products and lifestyles (thanks global capitalism!), think on the individual level, believe in progress (we're Westerners, after all), and have a strict concept of time. It takes time to recognize cultural differences between Austria and America, because they're hidden below the surface of this hegemonic Western consumption-oriented cultural facade. That's why I'm here for five months, instead of two weeks. And during my first week of classes, some of these small differences made themselves clear.

Vokabelheft

I’ve been keeping a running list of vocabulary words -- German words that I heard for the first time, but was able to figure out through context clues; German words I read or heard without any comprehension whatsoever (thankfully, this is rarer than the first type); and English words, whose German equivalents I desperately sought during conversation, only to come up empty, leading me to either gesticulate frantically or describe around it using other words. (Dropping in English is always an option, but one I try to avoid when I’m not with other Americans. It seems kind of rude to me. But maybe that’s just a projection of some internalized “you should speak my language” Americanness, and Europeans don’t actually feel that way.)

My Vokabelheft (vocabulary-notebook), as I call it, reads like a running commentary of my time here. When I’m diligent about writing down new words, I don’t need a proper journal.

Lange Nacht der Museen

As sad as I was to leave Schwäbisch Hall and all of the friends I had made there, I was ready to live in a city again. Even amidst the stress of dragging multiple oversized suitcases through half of Vienna, when I first stepped onto the streets last Thursday, tasted the cold city air, and tried to avoid getting trampled by the rush of people streaming out of the U-Bahn station, I knew I had made the right decision. I like to tell myself that I could live anywhere the revolution takes me, but I’m a city girl at heart.

auf der Wiesn

When I was still deciding whether or not to study abroad this semester, one of my friends told me, "The highs are going to be high, and the lows are going to be low." And during a day trip to Munich with the Goethe-Institut, I experienced it all: confusion, jubilation, frustration, contentment. It was a culture-shock roller coaster, and I was happy to be on it.

(I was also happy to be on this roller coaster, at Oktoberfest.)

Photo Journal of Schwäbisch Hall

I'm notorious for never taking pictures of my friends. I normally say it's because I would rather live my life than document it. But the real reason is that stopping for a photograph never fails to dampen my spirit. When I feel happy, loved, surrounded by friends, I don't want to think about our eventual separation, about the time when we'll need photographs to remember our joy. "You will never experience this moment again," a photograph says. "Time pushes ever forward, and all soon all you'll have will be pixels."

This was especially true of my time at the Goethe-Institut. I had such wonderful experiences and made such fantastic friends in my three and a half weeks in Schwäbisch Hall. The rapidly increasing date was enough of a reminder that our time together was limited; I couldn't bear to bring a camera into the picture as well.

Thankfully, the Goethe-Institut staff took plenty of pictures this month, and we received them on a CD-ROM at the closing ceremony today. Some of my favorite memories after the jump.

Imagining the Other, or Anti-Fascism without Fascists

During a walk on the outskirts of town last Thursday, I found a series of bridge underpasses. Each one was heavily graffitied, and each one seemed to "belong" to a youth subculture. There were the antifascist skinheads: "Punks raus!" (Punks, get out!) and "Fuck the Nazis!" There were the hip-hoppers: "Nigga 4ever" and "Hip-Hop" (OK, this one was kind of obvious). And, across a creek from the others, was a small tunnel for the fascists / neo-Nazis: "Fuck antifa!" (Fuck antifascists!). It, and a small "White Pride" sticker on a trashbin near my dorm, was the only sign of actual right-wing extremism I've seen during my three weeks in rural Germany, and it was a pretty weak one at that. It's anti-fascist graffiti that covers the walls, bridges, and tunnels of Schwäbisch Hall.

Fascism isn't an opinion; it's a crime.

Ban the NPD now

I actually don't know how to translate this, but the general idea is that we need a positive movement, not neo-Nazism.

The abundance of anti-Nazi graffiti, of course, could stem from a small troupe of anti-fascist skinheads. For them, it's not about fighting Nazis in Schwäbisch Hall; it's about fighting Nazis through "participation" in the European anti-racist skinhead movement. 

Much more prominent is Schwäbisch Hall's Freundschafttag (Friendship Day), an annual street festival celebrating multiculturalism, that took place yesterday on the main plaza.

A warm welcome to Friendship Day!

It was started 25 years ago, when people from different parts of the world began arriving in Schwäbisch Hall and the NPD started making some ruckus. There was at least one sign of the festival's political origin:

Banner on the church wall says: "Social justice instead of Sarrazin! Racism solves no problems."

For the most part, though, this was a day of "fun, food, and festivals" multiculturalism, which makes "celebrating diversity" a consumer choice rather than a call to reorder social power relations. Because of its anti-fascist history, Freundschaftstag is also a way of defining the self in opposition to the Other. Because we are not neo-Nazis, the festival indicates, we are not racist, either. If only it worked like that.

With that said, this type of multiculturalism does include FUN and FOOD. So it can't be all bad. And I had an enjoyable afternoon hanging out with various people from the Goethe. What began as a gathering of four on the main church steps became a circle of fifteen young people enjoying the sunshine; conversing in German, French, English, and Spanish/Portuguese/Italian (they're interchangeable here); and cheering for three other Goethe students and professional musicians who performed at festival's conclusion.

View of the festival from the church steps

Lebanese man grinding chickpeas to make falafel.

Homemade falafel. Yum!

Brazilian drummers

Goethe students performing: Sean (American viola player), Keiko (Japanese violinist), and Amy (American opera singer)

The Times When This Seems Impossible

The Goethe-Institut has a Tandem-Programm, in which they pair Goethe students who want to practice German with local residents who want to practice other languages. Today, I met my Tandem-Partner for the first time. He's 20, is originally from Russia but has lived in Germany for 8 years, just took his Abitur, and is going to Stuttgart in the beginning of October to study economics.

For the first half of the time, we spoke English while walking through the main park in Schwäbisch Hall. He told me about why it's so hard for immigrants to succeed in the German education system (which I knew), how bureaucratic Germany is (which I didn't know), how he loves to rap in Russian and how rap is modern poetry (I totally agree with him there!), how 9-11 was an inside job (maybe, but probably not), and how Germany is going to flounder because women want careers instead of babies (definitely not).

Then, about the time we decided to go to a bar (typical), we switched to German, and talked about how expensive higher education is in the US. In Germany, the government actually gives you money for school, and you only have to pay half of it back. But he's doing a program where he alternates studying semesters in Stuttgart with working semesters in Munich, gets 1100 Euros per month, and doesn't have to pay anything back. He thought I was crazy when I explained that I'm paying $20000 for each semester at Harvard.

We also commiserated about how boring Schwäbisch Hall is, and how we'd much rather be in big cities, where there are clubs/bars to go, different types of people to meet, and public transit that works at night (sorry, Boston!). I told him, though, that it was nice to be learning German in Schwäbisch Hall, because people were patient enough to speak German with me. He said, though, that was just because they can't speak English, and that when he worked at McDonald's, he was the only person who could talk to the foreign tourists because no one else at the restaurant spoke English.

When he spoke German, though, I was hanging on for dear life. He had a small Russian accent, but the main problem was that he spoke so much faster than anyone I've ever heard speaking German: teachers, actors, news reporters, etc. Real-life language -- the language Germans speak to each other -- clearly, is not the same language that you hear on the radio or in the TV. I could barely keep afloat, and was mainly just trying to predict when I would need to say something, or could say something, before being washed over by the flood of language. But despite it all, I never lost track of the conversation! I'll take a small victory when it comes. And I'm thankful for the opportunity to practice language in such a setting before I go to Vienna.

A lazy Saturday

For lunch, my roommate Li Hon and I decided to get the Döner Kebaps we've both been craving all week. We went to Arslan's Kebap, right across the street from the Goethe-Institut. Originally Turkish, Döner is a German takeaway staple. It's lamb meat, onions, lettuce, red cabbage (see the German influence? Food culture is so fascinating), and white sauce on a thick, toasted pita. And it tastes so good!

Döner Kebap

Because it was such a nice day (first shorts day since I've arrived: 70 F and sunny), we brought homework with us and went to Schwäbisch Hall's outdoor beer garten, on a park right on the river.

Li Hon with her Döner in the Biergarten

My homework was to read the weekend edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a well-known paper out of Munich, and use the reading strategies we've been talking about in class. Unlike my previous German classes, where it seemed like the goal was to work towards the day when you would be fluent, this class is all about strategies to survive in German culture RIGHT NOW. Concretely, that means reminding us of elementary school reading strategies like making a list of questions we hope the text will answer, recreating an outline of the text, and using context clues to figure out the meaning of new words.

As my teacher loves to say, we're the equivalent of German ten-year-olds in terms of vocabulary, and we need to accept that we're going to read and speak like ten-year-olds, because we can't go around the world with a dictionary in hand. Being told that I need to accept my limited conversational capacity, and work within it, rather than trying to use a dictionary to speak with the same high-falutin' style I do in English, was a little hard to hear. But I think it makes a lot of sense. And I love that I can just read German blog posts and newspaper articles without taking lots of time leafing through a dictionary. Reading the newspaper today was also an interesting look into German culture: immigrant incorporation (always a controversial subject), small rural beers making a comeback -- especially among young urbanites -- a la PBR, and the growing tendency to bury people in the forest instead of in a cemetery.

Locally brewed beer and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The perfect way to spend an afternoon.

False Cognates

If you've ever learned a new language, false cognates -- words that sound similar in two languages but mean different things -- can be tricky. I still sometimes get tripped up by stay / stehen (stand) and map / die Mappe (pencil case), and I remember how one of the first year English students at the Austrian school in 2008 answered the question, "Where did you go?" with "me." (Wer is German for who).

Another false cognate, one that I experienced richly last night, is foosball / Fußball. Fußball in German is just regular soccer; what we know as foosball is Tischfußball (table-soccer). At the Goethe-Institut party last night, about 50 teachers, staff, and students met in basement bar for beer, multilingual conversation, and, of course, Tischfußball. (Yes, the Institut has a bar. This is Germany, after all.)

I've never been very good at foosball, but I spent quite a few nights in high school playing the game in a friend's basement, so I thought I had some grasp of it. But Tischfußball, even though it uses the same apparatus, has more in common with Fußball itself than with the American arcade game. While my preferred "strategy" has always been to fire off a big spin of the lever when the ball gets in my vicinity, the Germans I was playing with and against employed lateral passes, sent the ball back to the goalie for a clearing kick, and paid close attention to field position. I'd never seen anything like it before. Instead of leisurely holding the handles while sipping my beer, I found myself bent over the table, in intense concentration, trying to match my opponent's centering passes with my own tackles and blocks. After embarrassing myself a few times, I was even able to pull out a win against Kathi, another Central College Abroad student, and Umut, a Turkish student in my class. (Okay, so my partner was a native German and the best player of the night. I scored one of our goals!)

Just Like Harvard

Last night was the first Goethe-Institut Stammtisch. Culturally, it used to be common in Germany for men to meet regularly at a specific bar to drink and socialize. They even had a regular table: a stem-table or Stammtisch. I've been told that only old men (and foreign students, apparently) do this nowadays, but I still had a ton of fun getting to know other young students at the Goethe better.

The P-Word Again

Of the eleven students in my German class, five of us are students: me, another girl from Central College Abroad, a 20-year-old Turkish guy who wants to become a translator, and two 24-year-old engineering students, one from India and one from Israel. The others are older adults, many with families, who are here in Germany for work and need to learn German. In fact, we have four doctors in the class (three of whom are Romanian)! I feel so privileged compared to them. Here I am, studying abroad just because I think it would be fun, and because I want the personal satisfaction of being bilingual. I guess what I didn't realize before is that in most of the world, being bilingual (or even tri- or quatralingual) isn't some membership badge to the cosmopolitan elite. It's the best way to survive and provide for your family. My introduction interview partner, for example, is an engineer from Libya with a 10-month-old son. He's been learning German from the ground up for seven months now, and next month he's going to bring his family to Germany because he finally has the language skills to get a job.

I know that (white) Americans get derided all the time for only speaking English. (In fact, that was my original reason for wanting to continue studying German, even though it no longer fits neatly into my academic or career interests.) And maybe the world would be a better place if everyone could speak multiple languages. But I think I would rather work for a world in which learning other languages isn't so painfully necessary, a world in which opportunities for high-paying jobs exist in every language. And then we can worry about all becoming polyglots who get to learn about other cultures.

One other thing: I realize how horrible it is that I needed to go to Germany to interact with recent labor migrants on a personal level when the United States is one of the biggest sites of immigration in the world. I don't have a good explanation for it, except that, for all the I'm-just-here-for-academic-enrichment privilege I bring to the table, I am going through a somewhat similar process to the immigrant students in my class.

It's Definitely the Destination, and Not the Journey

Because the journey fucking sucks. There was a crying baby two rows behind me on the plane, and the person in the seat directly behind me thought it would be fun, apparently, to sleep with their head against the tray table, so I couldn't even recline my seat (without giving them a headache, at least). I started feeling nauseous mid-flight from a mix of allergies acting up and sleep deprivation (many of you know how I get), but was too embarrassed to ask for a barf bag, so I just didn't eat anything -- or open my mouth.

Once I got to the Frankfurt airport, I had three trains to catch to the Goethe Institut in Schwäbisch Hall (a small town in southwest Germany). I was worried about making them, because I had only scheduled myself 12 minutes in between each train. That was the naive American talking. In Germany, everyone takes their luggage off the rack, grabs their bags, and lines up in front of the door 10 minutes before the train reaches the station. Exiting the train takes about two minutes, then another two minutes for new riders to get on. A four-minute stop at each station in total. So that's why German trains run on time. Not some bullshit notion of "national character," just the minimal got-it-togetherness of being prepared to exit when it's time to do so. And, of course, knowing that you have another train to catch in six minutes that won't be running late either.

My roommate here at the Goethe Institut is from Japan. She speaks German at a beginning intermediate level, and very little English, so communication could be a little tricky. Oh well, we can practice German on each other.

This morning I took a placement test at the Goethe Institut in speaking, writing, and listening. I was placed at B.2.3, which I about what I expected. The exam moderator also asked if I was interested in a challenge, and true to overachieving Harvard form, I said yes, so she said she would put me in a higher level class if she has enough students to create one. I won't know my final course until tomorrow morning, the first day of classes.

After my placement test, I took an hour and a half walk around the town. There are parks on each side of the riverbank with pedestrian bridges to connect them, and a small park island as well. The park island seems popular with gutter punks, but also with young families. And I got catcalled twice (by an old man and a fifteen-year-old), so being a woman out in public can suck here, too. I'll be sure to Hollaback (great resource!) if anything nasty goes down.

The town itself, being built on a riverbank, is very hilly. Many streets are only for walkers and bikers, and sometimes, the best way to go between streets is to take a staircase. I haven't figured out, though, which staircases are public, and which just lead to someone's backyard. Hopefully I'll get my bearings before any awkward encounters go down.

With all the hiking and biking trails, the medieval-looking buildings, and the lazy, clean-enough-to-glisten-in-the-sunlight river, Schwäbisch Hall is the type of European town you see in the movies (at least before it gets wrecked). Or maybe that only happens in the movies I watch.

Inspiration

Today I went to the funeral of my nanny, Berta Haberleitner Dignon. Berta was one of the first people -- and the first Austrian -- I ever met. I know that the nanny relationship can be problematic, and I hope my parents paid Berta well, because she took wonderful care of me for the first eight years of my life while my parents were at work. I went on play-dates with her own grandchildren, and we visited her on holidays even after she had retired from working for us. I'd like to think that some small part of my interest in German comes from that early influence. I have distinct memories of learning my first German words (for doll, girl, etc), and my parents tell me that I first spoke English with an Austrian accent!

At the funeral, our priest shared a letter written by her son that gives some background on Berta's amazing, inspiring life:

Berta Juliana Haberleitner was born in 1922 and grew up in the village of Willendorf, which sits along the Danube River near Vienna, Austria. Her father worked for the Austrian railroad. Berta grew up during the Great Depression, and in the late 1930s Willendorf, along with the rest of Austria was overtaken and occupied by Germany during the build-up to WWII. She actually saw Adolf Hitler when he paraded through the streets of Vienna with the German army. As a teenager, Berta was taken away and forced to spend several months in a Hitler Youth camp in northern Germany. Her two brothers became conscripts in the German military: Fritz into the army and Rudi into the Luftwaffe [air force]. Her brother Fritz was wounded and spent over a year and a half in a Russian prison camp.

Obviously, that's a very positive spin on Austria's involvement in Nazi Germany. The reality, of course, was more complicated and less innocuous. Berta's village was only meters away from Mauthausen, the only concentration camp in Austria, and she told my dad that she remembers watching the trains pass by en route to the camp. She certainly knew something was up, although she claims she didn't realize how bad things actually were in the camps until after the war. I'm not sure if this was due to the fact that Berta was a young teenager at the time, or whether information was really that compartmentalized. Besides, Berta had worries of her own:

She and her family survived WWII and endured many hardships, including the relentless Allied bombings of her country and the invasion of the Russian Army on their vengeful march to Berlin. Because of the extensive damage, the first year after the war was very difficult: rationed food, rationed heat and electricity. She actually was shot at by a farmer when she crawled through his food plot searching for food when there was none. She ate horse meat for over a year. Berta left her family and Austria in 1947, determined to find a better life for herself. She emigrated to Glasgow, Scotland, with a Jewish family and worked as a nanny there. She met my father William Dignon, Sr, who was working for the Scottish Gas Board as a plumber.

Berta told me that she spoke almost no English when she met her future husband. He flirted with a German-English dictionary, looking up his sweet nothings word by painstaking word. One of her friends in Scotland told her that if he was willing to put that much effort into courting her, he was probably a keeper.

They soon married and in 1951 they decided to immigrate to the US and Pittsburgh with their infant son Alan. Mom and Dad ended up having four children ... Although he grew to become a successful engineer in the real estate business, Dad's life was cut short when he died of heart failure at age 54 back in 1979. Once again, Berta, as determined and strong-willed as always, carried on and lived independently for the next 30 years on her own. She died Sunday night at age 88 of complications from congestive heart failure and diabetes. 

In one of her moments of clarity recently, in a conversation with her granddaughter Jessica about the 16-year-old girl who was attempting to sail alone around the world, Jessica commented on how unbelievable it was that anyone would have the courage and guts to attempt such a thing. Berta looked up at her and said, "It's unbelievable the things you can do when you are unafraid." Words that perfectly capture my mother's remarkable story and life.

Berta's story cements for me the notion that human beings are capable of surviving pretty much anything. Berta withstood years of starvation, the destruction of her homeland, the loneliness of transatlantic migration, and the pain of her husband's early death. And through it all, she remained an incredibly loving and compassionate human being.

I was getting more and more nervous about going to Germany/Austria during the course of the past week. But after attending Berta's funeral, I'm not really nervous anymore. Studying abroad in Europe for a few months, with a six-year language background and e-mail and Skype contacts to friends and family back home, is nothing compared to what Berta was doing about the same age.

After I went to Austria for the first time in 2008, Berta told me that she had lived for two years in an apartment next to the Universitätskirche (university church) in Vienna. One of my first stops in Vienna will be to say a prayer in that church -- for Berta, her remarkable life, and for her power of the human spirit.