Oktoberfest: The German Version

There are certain words that come to mind when you think of Oktoberfest: Gemütlich. Feuchtfröhlich. Prost. There are other words, though, equally German, that you do not think of when you think of Oktoberfest: Effizient. Durchgeplant. Anstrengend.

Somehow, even though everyone knows that Germans love to sing cheesy yet awesome Schlager songs (click the links!) and drink beer for hours on end, and everyone knows that Germans are rigid, efficient beings who lead a society best described as "well-managed," I had never really thought about how those stereotypes conflict.

Or rather, how they mix with one another. Because while Oktoberfest might indeed be a sloppy, happy mess of singing, beer drinking, and Dirndl wearing, it is also an exercise in regulated consumption, of finding the perfect balance of Hendl, Brezn, and Wurst that will allow you to keep drinking for an entire day. It is Germany, in both the ways I expected and the ways that surprised me.

Americans Have No Culture

Because it's basically an ERASMUS-Heim, my dorm seems to be built on the principle of cultural exchange in a way that I've never experienced before. Sure, I had plenty of international friends at Harvard. But at Harvard, the specific countries where my friends came from were not that salient to their public identities. We talked about sex in Georgia, transportation in France, educational philosophy in Nepal, etc. whenever it came up, but because we were all trying to fit into the cosmopolitan culture of Harvardland, national identities were not a huge part of our daily reality.

Here, it's altogether different. I've already talked about how this represents the first time many of the students here have gotten the opportunity to meet people from all over the world. And part and parcel of that is a kind of "food and festivals" multiculturalism that seems to be pretty common in the Heim.

Inspiration, Round 3

It's become something of a tradition for me to express my thoughts about my imminent departure in the form of a song lyric I can't get out of my head. This summer is no exception, as I've been haunted by the first lines of a song from, of all things, Pocahontas--the most American of Disney movies. It comes to me as I flip through GRE vocabulary flash cards, as my feet pound the track of my former high school on a run, as I slowly but surely fill my suitcases with clothes, books, and other items I can't bear to leave behind:

What I love most about rivers is
You can't step in the same river twice
The water's always changing, always flowing

I wanted to return to Austria partly because I feel comfortable there. I know that train tickets are much cheaper when you have a VORTEILScard (although it has always been unclear to me why it couldn't just be called a Vorteilskarte), that you have to move it in the grocery store checkout line if you don't want the customers behind you flashing you increasingly dirty looks, that almost anything can be found somewhere along Mariahilferstraße, and that THERE IS NO FUCKING U5 (seriously, oida, what the fuck?).

But you can't step in the same river twice. Austria will have changed in the thirteen months since I've been there, and more importantly, I've changed as well. A lot of times I feel like I'm in a relationship with Austria. Well, we've been on hiatus for over a year now, and now I've decided to try to rekindle things. But there's no way of knowing whether sparks will fly this time as they have in the past. I've met plenty of expats in Austria who absolutely hate the place, and I don't want to become one of them. I have loved Austria, and I want to believe I will love it again. But a part of me--the part of me that doesn't even believe in love--wonders whether that's even possible.

Verabschiedung

Wie fühle ich mich bezüglich meiner Heimreise? Letztes Mal habe ich immer „gemischte Gefühle“ gesagt, obwohl die ehrliche Antwort war, dass ich einen Panikanfall gekriegt habe, jedes Mal ich daran gedacht habe. Diesmal habe ich mich nicht so gefühlt. Vielleicht geht es darum, dass ich das erste Mal unsicher war, ob ich ja mal im Leben zurückkommen würde. Und ich habe es nach knapp 4 Monaten geschafft, was mir gezeigt hat, dass ich ja zu jeder Zeit in Österreich wohnen könnte, wenn das mir mal am wichtigsten wäre. Und deswegen habe ich diesmal keine Panik gehabt. Ich habe einen Absicht in Amerika: Mein Studium fertig zu machen, damit ich als qualifizierte Arbeitskraft nach Österreich kommen dürfte. Ich habe einen Plan und eine Auswahl; ich bin nicht für immer gegen meinen Willen in Amerika exiliert. Und daher fühlte ich mich lockerer.

Dachte ich.

What I Did During Donauinselfest

The line up at the SJ-Bühne, where I spent a good deal of my time

What exactly is Donauinselfest? It's a free three-day music festival on the Donauinsel (as the name suggests, an island in the middle of the Danube) held over the Corpus Christi holiday weekend and one of the major events in town during the year. The Straßenbahn lines run late into the night, the U-Bahn comes more frequently, and it can feel like everyone in the city comes out for the party. Here's what I did:

Inspiration, Round 2

I'm already counting down the days (24 at the moment) until my triumphant return to Europe. Often, as my boots clack against the Harvard Square cobblestones on my way to class, lines from this song -- a half-remembered anthem of my parents' youth -- start running through my head. A fitting epigraph to a period of expectancy:

Well she was an American girl, raised on promises.
She couldn't help thinking that there was a little more to life somewhere else. 

In just a few weeks, I'll again be in pursuit of whatever it is I think I'm missing.

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: