Traveling at top speed through Central and Eastern Europe

This blog would have been a great place to write about our trip, had I started it right after the Hamburg post. I didn't write about the Fulbright program (although one of my colleagues did) because I wasn't sure how public I wanted to be about my musings on the German Sozialstaat.

Anyways...meeting up with B on the train worked out just fine, although his pocket got picked in the process and we spent HOURS in the lobby in our place in Prague skype-calling the credit cards to cancel them and get replacements sent to our hotel in Dresden. The fucker got nothing, though - although he tried cash advances on every card. We were less successful with the MA DMV (no surprise there) - apparently the possibility that a MA resident should lose his/her license while out of the country and have to have a replacement in order to rent a car has never occurred to the Provincial Geniuses who run the DMV. (Why would anyone even leave the state? I ask you.)

I never did get my bearings in Prague but we saw the city museum on the first day (Sunday) - interesting but not really research-relevant. Interesting special exhibit on a 1920s furniture designer and architect from the Czech Republic whose name escapes me this moment. Also we saw the monument to Jan Palach and later, the Museum of Communism (REALLY great!). Later we stepped into a brand-new club called Propaganda that is full of leftover artifacts from the period. The next day, Monday, we took Communism tours from two different tour companies - same content, quite different approaches - but lots of parallels with the tour industry in Krakow/Nowa Huta (Poland).

We met a delightful French couple in our hotel and talked with them every day at breakfast. I am glad to report that I am able to be sarcastic in French as well as English. We sort of bonded over our frustration with Stumbledumb, the weekend desk clerk.

On Tuesday, we grabbed the train to Dresden. More to follow.

confidential to JW

Has our electrical power been off? We can't connect to our hard-wired databases over the internet, suggesting that the power was off and the system needs to be reset.

auf wiedersehen, Hamburg!

Tonight is our last night in Hamburg, and tomorrow I board a Prague-bound train, and hope that B finds me when the train stops in Berlin! It will be a fraught 2 hours - because if he's not there, then what???

I'd better grab some hotel info right now. And check the weather - it's supposed to be rainy.

The seminar program has been so intensive and so interesting - yet in ways tangential to what really interests me, which is the question of identity formation. I'm also interested in the economy - but our work on that was tangential as well. The first thing would be to go through the notes and see if I can synthesize our work. Then, I have to figure out what use to make of all this.

Hamburg is potentially very interesting - but due to working on "real" work last night I feel I have no grasp of the city. Some good photos of the port, though - and our farewell dinner was on a converted fireboat in the harbor - really stunning views.

Ooh, B! Later...

"Ich bin ein Berliner"

Ja, Herr Prezident, ICH bin Berlinnerin. Wir sind ALLE Berliner!

So, ok, today after the guided tour of the Reichstag (equivalent of the U.S. Capitol building), I stepped into the Kennedy Museum at the Brandenburg Gate, influenced by the fact that it was close and they probably had a bathroom (yes!) and maybe a cafe (no).

It's the equivalent of about 3 rooms, mostly archival photos but also some artifacts of a lesser sort - a dress shirt, JFK's designer briefcase, handwritten notes, pens. There's quite a lot of material about JFK's 1963 trip to Berlin and how he sort of went off-script vis-a-vis the administration's policy of appeasement of the Soviets, because he was so incredibly appalled by seeing the Berlin Wall. (They took him on a 53-km drive of the wall in Berlin, which was the majority of his eight hours there.)

A side note: Some interesting notes from Jackie directing the addressees not to pay particular bills that she or Jack or others in the family had incurred. There was no context given for this, but my guess is that some stuff was "loaned" (jewelry, say) and other stuff was to be paid for by friends or the campaign rather than the Kennedy family personally.

I am not sure the Berlin Wall thing fits into my research outline but it's pretty interesting that there is all this stuff in Berlin. The museum was not well attended though. Taking photographs was not allowed (lots of copyright-protected iconic photos by famous photojournalists) unfortunately, so I ended up staying longer than I really wanted, to write down photo captions. Then in the bookstore I saw two books about JFK in Berlin, so probably this is well-covered territory. But, no one has yet analyzed the textual materials in this particular exhibit, I'd say. So there is room for some peripheral treatment, by me. Gotta write my field notes while all is fresh. More later.

interpreting the past

I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday afternoon. I toughed out the jet lag by visiting the Topography of Terror installation (the Nazi SS headquarters site, now excavated to show the basement remains), with interpretive panels and a new Documentation Center with facsimiles of photographs and other documentation of the SS atrocities.

This is one way to interpret history - present the evidence and hold the interpretation to a minimum. Even so, what's opaque to the viewer is the selection process - which pieces of evidence were selected? Which were passed over? In a museum setting that judgment is not just a matter of historiography but also a question of aesthetics to some degree: what documents will "read" best for the viewer?

Yesterday I visited the DDR Museum, a documentation of a different sort. The approach taken here is to use the actual material culture (of communism) in display cases, but find ways to make it interactive, through the way the displays are framed and through supplemental activities incorporated in that framing. I am not usually a big fan of the multi-sensory "hands on" approach because I think it often results in "hands on" for its own sake - and that is partly the case in this instance. Also, the frame often (and in this case too) visually and experientially overshadows the artifacts. Materials for this kind of frame are usually cheaply constructed because intended not to be permanent. However, I think the interpretive text panels are very well done.

The message I received: communism was a time of scarcity (that theme is very prominent, due probably to the focus on daily life) imposed by possibly well-meaning but certainly incompetent leaders. Actually, now that I think of it, there's little agency in the text pieces: it's "the Party" or "the GDR" or simply the agentless passive voice.

I'm glad I'm writing this - I wouldn't have caught that absence necessarily otherwise. In textual analysis, absence can be hard to see.

milestones, birthdays, etc.

It's been 6 days since R. died and between that and the dread that I feel when facing a solo trip (especially abroad) I have been in a bit of a funk.

There has been an outpouring of online tributes to R., most of which I (harshly; B says this is about me, and surely he's right) find WAY too self-involved. My grief is private and I don't feel it necessary to share it on my university list-serve. Also NB: 90% of the tributes are written by men. R. had some women students (not many, and all outside the mold of traditional feminine, whatever THAT is) and a lot of women colleagues, and yet women have not found it necessary to proclaim their sorrow online to their colleagues.

We celebrated Mom's 88th birthday today. My brother asked if she ever dreamed she'd live to be 88, and of course she did not, but she mentioned that both her mother and mother's sister died at 88 so clearly she's thought about that. She is as sharp as ever - up on all the news; clearly articulated views; lots of hobbies and activities.

I am melancholy about old age, even middle age. To me, it's roads not taken, friends lost to death, and abilities reduced. Maybe after I lose 30 pounds (my birthday gift to myself this year, starting when I get back from Europe) I will feel differently about the reduction in abilities. Let's hope. I am definitely NOT feeling that surge of middle-aged delight that Carol Gilligan has written books (a whole genre) about.

Sorry. The next post will be more cheerful, I promise you.

feeling blue

The blue haze that hung over us yesterday from the smokey fires in Quebec matched my mood. My advisor (see prior post) died on Sunday afternoon, and I learned the news yesterday morning.

There has been a lot of emailing about our collective shock and grief, but we don't have any information about arrangements. Yesterday I threw myself into ferocious gardening, but today it's raining so I'm at my desk, with too much time to think.

If there is any consolation to be had, it's that R. went out doing what he loved: riding his motorcycle on a cross-country adventure to visit friends. Had he survived the crash, he would not have been satisfied with a life constrained by the effects of his injuries, which were severe.