On any monday through thursday, my travel-size alarm clock has been ringing at 7am. While my classes don't begin until 8:30, you might wonder why I would bother getting up at this time. Well, I often like to check my emails -- of course, as I am 6 hours ahead of Eastern standard time here in Berlin, there may have been a few messages I missed out on from the evening before. I hate being ignorant to any sort of information that might help me later.
By 7:50 or so I make my way down the short stretch of Bismarckstrasse in Charlottenburg to the U-Bahn (or subway) stop. I'm guessing from the two times I've ridden by auto in and out of Mitte that it's a relatively similar distance to connecting our home in Westwood to Foxboro Stadium, in terms of distance. However, if I can time it right, I get the switch-off from U-Bahn to S-Bahn, arriving at Friedrichstrasse and walk the rest of the way to the IES center in under half an hour.
I am incredibly impressed with the student to teacher ratio that our program offers. My own small German class has a 3 to 1, and that allows for far more vocal participation. It's a much better practice, but I don't think it goes over the top, because our exercises are not overwhelming. They provide us with practice in grammatical performance and vocabulary building. I have always enjoyed these benefits, but I haven't been able to speak with my professors directly about them in such depth.
To go on with other classes, I enjoyed one engineering/ architecture based course which had a look through powerpoint slides at the historical developments of the metropolitan areas around Berlin, as well as St. Petersburg. With this same class, we had a brief walk around the downtown area of Mitte on Wednesday and had a look at structures and observed the course they had taken as they changed through history. Friedrich Schinkel was an important name to remember of the Prussian era, as he designed the Neue Wache, as well as the Bauhaus. Both of these structures were adapted following their completion due to the political climate here in Berlin.
One other course, called "Soccer, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll" (no joke) focuses in on the happenings of pop-culture around the Berlin underground musical scene. I was handed a paper during my second class which listed off some of the top clubs in the area. Needless to say, I was a little surprised. But I suppose, a lively social life is easy enough to come by for any local Berliner who is around my age.
My late class on tuesdays and thursdays is a sociological course which analyzes the impact of the recycled city on the masses from a comparative perspective, offering views from St. Petersburg and Paris, as well as American cities.
My last course focuses on the question of Identity in contemporary Europe. This course takes more of an anthropological perspective of European cities as they developed, spreading the influences freedom, economy and art throughout their societies. It was with this class that I took a field trip this past friday, biking my way around Potsdam. We did not visit any of the castles or palaces as we viewed earlier in the month, but instead the Dutch and Bohemian communities as well as relics from the past.
If I might pause for a moment, that syllabus-style entry was no more fun to write up than it was to read. I have a few assignments this weekend, for example, implications of Rammstein lyrics on America, and for German, describing the lifestyle of a policeman using prepositions and conjunctions. And now for something completely different...
It's very interesting, the manner in which Germans help each other. They are somewhat passive-aggressive, but when a gleam of light shines upon unification for the nation in free competition, the citizens bond together and cheer. For example, a couple of years ago during the 2006 World Cup, I was told that the Fernsehturm (or TV-Tower) in Alexanderplatz was decorated to look like a soccer-ball. They are not very welcoming at a first glance, which may have earned them the stigma of a cold-shouldered nation. However in reality, as I have said before, all that a person really has to do is ask for assistance, and they will be likely to receive it.
Speaking German doesn't necessarily matter here, either. You may not be able to understand their side conversations as you walk past them, but the younger generations can likely interpret what you would ask of them in English. You may think I have a biased perspective, being a white male. I honestly can't tell you, but what I can say is that the German sense of prejudice at the moment doesn't seem to be as harsh as I have seen in other places, like slums of major cities in America. There are no such locations here, and the unemployed are assisted by the state. It was very interesting, a topic we came upon in my sociology class, which was called the 'filter-effect.' The less wealthy inhabitants of the city move into the buildings which are older and need less maintenance, while the wealthier citizens move to better homes further outside the downtown area, and so forth.
Naturally, each small neighborhood has everything a person would need, including a convenience store, a bakery, and retail markets of all types. Migration within the city does not occur as it might be expected in America, because many people live around the usage of bicycles. I might note that the city was built to move people great distances with rails, rather than roads; thus, the ownership of a car is very clearly a luxury.
I think my courses might facilitate my efforts to dig up the real source of what makes the society here so different from America, and what makes the mind of an individual retain its uniquity. It's not a terrific thing that I'm doing here, viewing an alternative culture a few hundred years in the past. But what I think is remarkable is the fact that I might be able to trace back my own roots, and dig up the dirt and dust of my own origin.
On that note, I made a visit to the Franzozischer Dom as we walked around on Wednesday. This structure was built to commemorate the French Huguenots, or Protestants who migrated to Prussia and were welcomed by King Friedrich Wilhelm. My last name, Marquart, is a German name, but within that category, Marquardt is a huguenot name. I think I am getting closer to realizing where exactly I stand in the face of history.
Either way I think about it, I need to stop paying so much attention to what time it is, I need to enjoy myself in the here and now, and savor the present for all that it is worth. After all, I don't know if I'll be able to come back to Europe again in this lifetime, so every opportunity I see should be a new passage for me.
"Clocks slay time... time is dead so long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does it come to life."
William Faulkner
