Archive for the ‘Germany’ Category
What’s wrong with Germany?
That’s the question I often get asked by my relatives and other locals who are puzzled by my peregrinations (left 28 years ago) and nationality changes (two). After all, it’s not a bad country. It has more than its fair share of culture; of great writers, composers, artists, photographers. It’s clean, people are reasonable, landscapes [...]
Filed under: 1980s, Childhood, Germany, Music, Youth | Closed
Tags: German language, German music, schlager, Yiddish
Bettina
Another small memorial to a person with an unknown fate. Bettina was my my best friend when I was in my early teens. Early puberty not an easy time for most people; in my case it had turned me into a highly combustible package of shyness, insecurity, defiance and yearning. She picked me; I didn’t [...]
Filed under: 1980s, Friendship, Germany, Youth | Closed
Tags: adolescence, friendship, hippies, mental illness, pot, punk, school, women
Family, lost and found
You might have noticed at this point that my family was more of the “unhappy in its own way” kind. Helmed by parents whose own parents had never shown them much affection, which meant they never learned how dispense it themselves, my family was an archipelago of six individuals with few bonds. We were four [...]
Filed under: 2000s, Childhood, Germany, Third Reich, World War II, Youth | Closed
Tags: Brighton Beach, family, friendship, isolation, loss, mortality, sadness, sisters, unhappiness
The pleasure of menial jobs
I’ve had many jobs in my life. Some paid $3 an hour and some paid $250 an hour. Some had me scrubbing the toilets that were the bathroom of choice for the local homeless and some had me give talks in front of CEOs. If money was not an issue, if the only stipulation was [...]
Filed under: Berlin, Clothes, Germany, London, Work, Youth | Closed
Tags: career, factory, jobs, menial, self esteem, work
Gloomy Sundays
When I was a teenager, I got shipped off to Berlin once a year. Those couple of weeks were by far the happiest times in my young life. Theoretically I was supposed to babysit my two young cousins but practically I would spend many days roaming the city entirely unsupervised. This might strike observers as [...]
Filed under: 1980s, Berlin, Childhood, Germany, Photographers, Youth | Closed
Tags: 1980s, adolescence, Berlin, freedom, Michael Schmidt, nothingness, Sundays
Into the very opposite direction
Dropping out of high school was surprisingly easy. One day, instead of going to school, I went to the local job center to look for an apprenticeship for tailoring. They sent me to a clothes factory a few villages over to take an aptitude test. I had to follow a few drawn curlicues on a [...]
Filed under: Books, Childhood, Clothes, Germany, Thomas Bernhard, Youth | Closed
Tags: adolescence, apprenticeship, Der Keller, factory, job center, literature, quitting high school, relief, Salzburg, Scherzhauserfeldsiedlung, school, The Basement, the opposite direction, Thomas Bernhard
Life on the coma ward
I spent many hours of my life in the waiting area of a coma ward. Even though visiting hours were supposed to start at 4pm, they often got delayed. Some medical crisis, patient needing to be cleaned, new admission meant the lone little group of visitors were forced to stare at the blank walls or [...]
Filed under: Coma, Germany, Mother | Closed
Tags: coma, Germany, Glasgow Coma Scale, Glasgow Coma Score, intensive care, mortality, vigil
The dead in your backyard
I grew up in a very pretty village in one of the more picturesque parts of (then) rural Germany. It did have a small factory, but the overall vibe was agricultural. The farmer a couple of streets down would sell you a liter of fresh raw milk for one Mark, and our house was surrounded [...]
Filed under: Childhood, Germany, History, Third Reich, World War II | Closed
Tags: Baader Meinhof, cemetery, childhood, concentration camp, forced labor, Germany, Harald Isermeyer, Hitlers Hinterhof, hometown, mortality, Nike missile base, Rote Armee Fraktion, Third Reich
It is with profound joy
While we’re on Klemperer, I’d like to add a digression on the birth announcement of my mother, which appeared in January 1943. It read something like “With the most profound joy we would like to announce the birth of our daughter Brünnhilde. May she give birth to many courageous warriors. Munich, The Brown House.” The [...]
Filed under: Books, Germany, History, Linguistics, Mother, Third Reich, Victor Klemperer, World War II, Writers | Closed
Tags: 1943, birth announcements, Das Braune Haus, death announcements, family announcements, Lingua Tertii Imperii, LTI, Martin Bormann, my grandfather, my mother, The Brown House, Victor Klemperer
The pursuit of happiness
A few years ago I read all of Victor Klemperer’s Diaries – from 1933 to 1959. I read them in the subway on the way to work, at a time when I felt overwhelmed and miserable. I figured it would be therapeutic to read about the daily life of someone who had it so much [...]
Filed under: Books, Germany, History, Third Reich, Victor Klemperer, World War II, Writers | Closed
Tags: bombing of Dresden, Dölzschen, diaries, Eva Klemperer, Hadwig Klemperer, happiness, miserableness, Muschel, persecution of Jews, Q train, stoicism, Third Reich, Victor Klemperer
The final loosening
Walter Serner’s Letzte Lockerung (hard to translate: last loosening? final loosening?) was one of the guidebooks of my teenage years. It billed itself as a guide to conmanship, and contains several hundred themed aphorisms and directives on how to live life with a certain kind of haute grifter style. It is imbued with a 1920s [...]
Filed under: 1980s, Books, Childhood, Germany, History, Third Reich, Walter Serner, World War II, Writers | Closed
Tags: aphorisms, cool, detachment, Dorothea Herz, Dorothea Serner, guide to living, Letzte Lockerung, mortality, murder, Walter Serner, World War I
What is style?
Jean Genet There are many definitions of what style is. I’d like to add mine. Style is a response to injury – it’s a way of dealing with pain. Those that are truly stylish, and not merely fashionable or well turned out, are often those who grew up deprived of love or attention, who had [...]
Filed under: 1980s, Books, Childhood, Fashion designers, Germany, Mother, Writers, Youth | Closed
Tags: 1970s, adolescence, childhood, clothes, Jean Genet, my mother, Pain, style, Vivienne Westwood
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