Tag Archives: by Katharine Starke

Germany, America, and Intertwined Crises: An Interview with Professor Sabine von Mering

Interview,

When I sat down in downtown Wellesley’s Peet’s Coffee and Tea to interview Sabine von Mering, a professor at Brandeis University, I was incredibly nervous. This was our first meeting and I, over-thinker that I am, had managed to persuade myself that everything would go terribly. The worst scenarios flashed through my mind; I was convinced that I would stumble through the questions I had prepared and make a complete fool of myself. To my relief, none of that came to pass. Von Mering, who completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Germany before moving to the United States to obtain her Ph.D., was very friendly and easy to talk to.

Having lived in both Germany and the United States, she offers a unique perspective towards, and understanding of, the differences between the two countries. Germany, which since reunification has become more and more important in a variety of areas, fascinates many American students. It seems as if every week there’s a new article in The New York Times or The Economist discussing the political or economic importance of Germany. But as von Mering points out this is a somewhat limited view of the country; the vibrant German cultural scene, both historically and in the present, “appeals to students studying art, music, and theater.”

Of particular interest to von Mering, however, is Germany’s position in the world as a leader of green technology and environmental protection. I myself am no expert on climate change and the issues surrounding it but von Mering, who encouraged me to do more research on the topic, peppered our discussion with film and book recommendations. My “things to watch” list now has everything from Flow, a short 10-minute film by Germany’s Umweltbundesamt (the country’s main environmental protection agency), to Michael Moore’s most recent documentary, 2015’s Where To Invade Next. It may not be a traditional beach read, but Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, another recommendation, will likely be my first book of the summer. Her current research, which centers on climate change and how German/European and American attitudes and perspectives towards it differ, is something she’s clearly passionate about.

When we spoke about the current European refugee von Mering said something that has stuck with me. We cannot separate environmental crisis from human crisis. The European Union’s Schengen Agreement is, as she said, now dead, and things have the potential to get far worse; as the central regions of the world heat up due to climate change, the number of refugees pouring into Europe and the US will get larger and larger. Her comments left me to dwell on one question— If countries do not deal with the climate/refugee crisis now, what will they do in the future when it is far too late?

S = Katharine Starke

vM = Prof. Sabine von Mering

S: First thing, I really appreciate this and would like to thank you for being here… Since it’s been in the news recently I’d like to ask you about American students and German. Since there’s been so much talk about the German economy still being strong compared to other places and the country being in the news so much, have you noticed more people being interested in learning German and learning about Germany?

vM: Yes, definitely. Germany as a place, for example, that has shouldered the startup costs of the Green Revolution, the renewable energy revolution, engineering… there are students who are interested in politics who see Germany as an interesting place, not only because of its economic power but also because of its role in Europe and its role in possible shaping European politics… Students who are interested in economics see that Germany has a very successful history of supporting small businesses, something very different from the corporate model here in the United States. You have thousands of world-class tiny companies in Germany that are competing at the highest level, and they’re family-owned, they have been for decades, and their model is very different than what we here would consider success. They basically narrow in on a small niche and say “We’re going to make the best screwdrivers or pencils in the world.” It’s interesting to students who are going into business, and since so many students are broke by the time they graduate they are interested in going into business! But it’s not just about business; Germany also appeals to students studying art, music, and theater because it is a vibrant cultural place. Museum curators, film people… many of them come to Germany.

S: I’d like to ask you about what said about renewable energy… One criticism I’ve heard, and I’d be interested to hear your opinion of it, is that especially after Fukushima and the closing of the nuclear power plants, is that countries are simply going to be importing energy from countries with lower safety standards. Do you think that’s happening?

vM: Well first of all, I don’t think anyone other than Germany has decided to shut down their nuclear reactors. Not even France did. And the decision in Germany to shut down the reactors was made by the Red-Green coalition, long before Angela Merkel came around. Angela Merkel actually then campaigned with the slogan “Exit from the exit,” so she didn’t actually want to shut down the reactors. When she did shut them down after Fukushima it was a very spontaneous and badly-understood decision that was, you know… she’s a physicist, she knows what nuclear energy is about, and she decided that it was too risky to extend the lives of these old reactors. Germany is selling electricity to France. It’s not true that we need nuclear power. Nuclear power is excessively expensive… it’s interesting to me, by the way, that Americans… I don’t know what the physics textbooks say in high school but American students love nuclear energy. There’s no understanding of the danger of nuclear energy in this country.

S: They do kind of teach us that it’s the greatest thing ever.

vM: Yeah! Who is behind that? I’m really interested in that because it strikes me as so odd given that, for example, here in Massachusetts we have several nuclear power plants in our vicinity that are super old, that are leaking, that are constantly having to shut down because of failures in the safety systems and yet everybody has this idea that somehow nuclear energy is perfectly safe. It is not! I mean, the only countries that are investing in nuclear energy right now are China and North Korea. And China… it is a dictatorship! There’s no public discussion about it there.

S: They are subsidies to build solar panels in Germany, yes?

vM: It’s complicated… I honestly don’t know the exact situation right now because what the Merkel government has done is they’ve kept changing what they initially said the project was. I think there still are some subsidies, but they’ve been wound down quite a bit.

S: To switch focus a bit, let’s talk about the EU. How do you feel about the future of the EU? Do you think it’s going to survive the refugee crisis?

vM: (laughs) Well that’s a big question. Clearly the European Union Project was a peace project as well as an economic project. It started out as an economic project but it always was also meant to preserve the peace on the continent after decades of tensions and war, and I think that the mistakes that were made include growing too fast, and expanding too wide, and taking in countries like Greece and Portugal who were actually not quite ready to compete inside the free market… taking on the Euro probably too soon… so in a way there was an optimism that guided the process that probably should have been curbed a little bit. At the same time, if you look at the European Union, the states… yes, they are incredibly disordered and when they have come to make a decision they usually come out fighting and it usually ends up being a bad compromise, but if you look at the EU… well, just look at the Republican Party in the United States. That’s one party in one country and they can’t get their act together? And now you think of 28 countries with different cultures, different economic systems, different languages, different histories, getting together on a regular basis to try to fight it out with each other? That is a huge accomplishment, and if we look at the ties that actually tie the European Union together, everything from pens to paper to baking stuff… whatever it is, it’s regulated on the same basis throughout all European countries, so you can’t sell a pastry baked with twice as much sugar or charge so much more for an item than another country, so there’s really a lot of regulation that is very beneficial for people but no one has been good at explaining it, so people just see the money going to the central government and the negative aspects… I mean the fact that you can sue at the European Court and have a law changed… that’s a huge accomplishment. We can’t even get that done in this country from state-to-state! If you have health insurance in one state you can’t use it in another… it’s ridiculous! Americans are very critical of the European Union, but I think that underlying that there’s a lot of jealousy. There’s the whole “you can’t tell my state what to do…”

S: Like states’ rights?

vM: Yes! States’ rights! And I think it does make this country weaker. (Laughs) I didn’t answer your question though… the truth is nobody knows what will happen with the EU. The Schengen Agreement right now is dead because of the refugee situation and with climate change we will have more refugees coming, there is no question about that. And that will put more pressure on the same countries because they are coming from the south, and eventually you could see the European Union fortressing itself off. You could see England get out… I doubt it, I think they will stay in, but you could see Russia asserting itself again against the European Union, which could have two possible effects, it could bring the EU together or it could tear it apart. I hope that people keep in mind the achievements and I hope that the strong ties that exist will hold when other forces are against it.

The Continuing Missteps of Bernie Sanders

Letter to the editor,

To the Editor:

In the article “Early Missteps Seen as a Drag on Bernie Sander’s Campaign” (April 3) Patrick Healy and Yamiche Alcindor discuss how Senator Sanders’s lack of campaigning in 2015 has hindered his success in early Democratic primaries. However, his missteps have not been limited only to the early part of his campaign. Sanders has won seventeen states thus far, the majority of which hold caucuses and not primary elections. Caucuses tend to favor candidates with extremely enthusiastic supporters, something Sanders has in droves. His campaign has thus been able to exploit the caucus system to their benefit. However, with only two Democratic caucuses remaining, the question remains whether or not this strategy of relying on the devoted base will work in states which use primary elections to assign electoral delegates.

Caucuses, one of the systems used during presidential primaries to select candidates, ought to be abandoned. Caucuses are the original system of American voting, a holdover from the days when land-owning white men, many of whom did not have professions, were the only Americans with the right to vote. Today the caucus system continues to discourage participation from working-class voters. Caucuses take hours, and a participant needs to be present the whole time. A low-wage worker, someone who works multiple jobs, or a parent without access to childcare can easily spend a few minutes casting a ballot at a local polling station. However many of them cannot afford to clear their schedules and devote a whole day to caucusing.

Although Senator Sanders often speaks of his desire to improve conditions for blue-collar workers, he has focused on campaigning to Millennials worried about college costs and retirees worried about their pensions and Social Security. Sanders’s rallies provide soundbites for the Internet generation, but he’s neglected the kind of small-time, face-to-face campaigning that tends to be popular with working-to-middle-class voters. These people often cannot participate in caucuses, but they vote. Unless Sanders’s campaign strategy changes, many of those votes won’t go to him.

The Art of Ida

Film review,

Ida is a visually stunning work of art. The 2013 Polish film (and winner of the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) about a young novice nun who discovers her family’s painful history is noticeably static, with much less dialogue than one might expect in a 21st-century film. At the beginning of the film the titular young heroine is referred to as Anna, but when she goes to meet her aunt before taking her vows she discovers that she was born Ida Lebenstein, a Jewish child who was saved due to her extremely young age and ability to pass as an ethnic Pole when her family was killed by their Christian neighbors.

Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski, the film’s cinematographers, and Paweł Pawlikowski, its director, clearly know their art; nearly every frame echoes back to another film, photograph, or painting. That doesn’t mean, however, that the creators of Ida suffer from a lack of originality or ingenuity. The cinematography here is full of references and homages, not shot-for-shot recreations—and this, one could argue, requires a truer and deeper understanding of the source material than a remake would. These visual echoes give the film a haunting emotional character. As viewers we can’t help but engage with the film. Even if we can’t remember exactly what the artistic references are, we’ve seen them before; there’s something uncanny and slightly discomforting about many of the film’s scenes, a sense that everything is familiar and yet not quite the same.

Many of the interior shots, filmed with a fixed camera, evoke Dutch genre and architectural paintings of the 17th century. When Ida is eavesdropping on her aunt threatening Feliks Skiba, the man who killed Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son, we don’t see everything that is happening, as a significant portion of the screen is filled by the doorframe and wall. It gives us the sense that Ida is seeing something she is not really meant to see and gives the shot a voyeuristic quality similar to what we find in Johannes Vermeer’s The Love Letter. In that painting a seated woman, holding a letter, looks up at her maidservant, who seems to be teasing her about its contents. In The Love Letter the viewer sees what is happening through a doorway; in fact, the viewer is looking out of what seems to be a closet or storage room, which adds to the aforementioned voyeuristic quality. Something similar happens in Ida. In one shot Wanda, framed by the doorway, sits and speaks to someone just out of frame. Here the viewer and Ida have the same perspective; they are observers, not participants. Neither understands yet why Wanda is being so harsh with the Skibas, as Feliks’ actions during the war have not yet been revealed. Both can see that Wanda is in pain, but neither has yet learned about her son.

Wanda

Left: still from Ida Right: "The Love Letter," Johannes Vermeer
Above: Film still from Ida
Below: “The Love Letter,” Johannes Vermeer, 1666

When Ida is speaking to the Mother Superior in the convent, the figures take up less than half of the frame. The remainder of the shot is taken up by a bookcase, whitewashed walls, and a short set of stairs leading to the doorway. Sunlight streaming through the window dwarfs the seated women. It looks like a painting by the 17th-century Dutch painter Emanuel de Witte, who was known for painting women in interior spaces. Many of his paintings have very little action; the visual interest and beauty of his paintings come from depicting light, shadow, texture, and space. We can see Żal and Lenczewski using the same concepts in the film. Viewers accustomed to color films might find black and white dull and uninteresting. Instead of being overwhelmed and distracted by color in Ida, however, the viewer notices seemingly minor details like the reflection in a window, flecks of paint peeling off a neglected wall, and the differences in the way light diffracts through glass, shines off metal, and dully glows off wood. It’s the polar opposite of the explosions and dramatic special effects we might see in, say, a Michael Bay movie.

image16

Above: Film still from Ida Below: "A Woman Peeling Apples," Pieter de Hooch
Above: Film still from Ida
Below: “A Woman Peeling Apples,” Pieter de Hooch, 1663

But why would a Polish cinematographer incorporate Dutch painting into his film? On the surface it seems nonsensical. Maybe, however, we should look at it as yet another example in the film of the pulls between East and West, communist and capitalist, that have defined so much of Poland’s recent past. Pawlikowski, Żal, and Lenczewski incorporate other references to this tension in Ida, most of which have an artistic bent. Wanda listens to music by Mozart, not the Soviet Union’s beloved Tchaikovsky. Government-approved music plays on the car radio, but the young people in the hotel play jazz. The Poland of Ida may politically lean towards the Soviet Union and the communist East, but its cultural heart seems to be pulling towards the West.

Someone once said to me that to see or even begin to understand the cinematography of a film you need to watch it over and over again.  However with Ida that approach is completely unnecessary. The cinematography is the main reason to see the film. I would go so far as to say that the cinematography IS the film. There are so many visual references to past works of art in this work, but they won’t be openly acknowledged; the viewer needs to discover them and interact with them personally. Is Ida the right choice for a fun Saturday movie night? I would say no. But it is a work of art in its own right, and is worth watching.

The Magic Flute

Feature article,

I’ve always wanted to see The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) in person instead of just listening to it on disc, given that it premiered on my birthday two hundred and two years earlier. However, before being in Germany I had never gotten the chance to see a live performance. On Christmas Day the Berlin State Opera (Staatsoper Berlin), which has been performing in Charlottenburg’s Schiller Theater for several years while its permanent home on Unter den Linden undergoes extensive renovation, offers a matinee “family performance” of Mozart’s famous 1791 work. As one might expect from an event geared towards families with children, the tickets are relatively cheap. I was willing to exchange what I assumed would be a loud theater full of chattering kids for a reasonable price.

Before walking into the theater I worried about how The Magic Flute would be staged. A recent trend in contemporary opera is for directors and set designers to attempt to “update” the classics, placing them into spaces where they don’t really fit. It’s difficult to merge an 18th-century story with a WWII setting, and the soaring emotions of a 19th-century opera (say, Puccini’s La Bohème or a work by Wagner) don’t quite meld with minimalist, industrial sets. Is it too much to ask that operas be operatic?

In that sense the Staatsoper’s production certainly delivers. The sets are based on the designs for an 1816 production of the opera, only 15 years after it originally premiered in Vienna. They are simply fantastic. Each and every backdrop has been hand-painted to produce a dream world— the banks of the Nile River dotted with palm trees at moonlight, a looming temple complex in the distance, and the swampy endlessness of a mythical forest. The addition of modern electrical lighting allows the sets to be particularly stunning. We can even clearly see the bright sunlight streaming between columns into a dark interior or the hazy, misty effects of a riverside twilight. The most stunning of all is the so-called “Star Dome,” a backdrop of glowing stars, originally designed for the 1816 production. The Queen of the Night, standing on a crescent moon and resting behind a screen of painted clouds, sings of her lost daughter in front of it. The costumes also show the influence of the early 19th century. The women don’t wear the structured and fitted redingotes of the 18th century, but instead flowing Empire gowns. The hero Tamino wears trousers and an overcoat, not the breeches and powdered wig of an earlier generation. The animals that come to listen to the music of the eponymous magic flute are neither mechanical creations nor special effects. The crocodiles, rabbits, horses, and wolves are actors in costume. It’s something unexpected in an era of fantastical special effects but it adds to the atmosphere of the performance, as we get a better sense of what an early audience may have seen on stage.

imgtoolkit.culturebase.org-6imgtoolkit.culturebase.org-2

Not every element is positive, however; The Magic Flute was written in a very different time and place from the society we live in today. It can be a somewhat problematic work, and many viewers find it difficult to separate the beauty of the music from the more discomforting elements of the story. The opera is set in Egypt and features presumably African characters, one of whom, Monostatos, is a central villain. In fact he and Pamina, the white heroine of the story, are the only two characters whose races are specified. The libretto, which contains references to “wicked Moors” and portrays Monostatos as a traitor and attempted rapist, is often edited in the English-speaking world to reflect the differences between 18th– and 21st-century attitudes towards race.

There are of course also many more people of African descent in the United States and England than there are in Germany, and thus more sensitivity and acknowledgment of what may and may not be offensive. The Staatsoper performance was not edited, but perhaps it ought to have been. It may be faithful to original performances but it is difficult not to flinch and be uncomfortable when a man who is clearly of white German descent walks out onto the stage wearing blackface.

When I expressed my shock at seeing blackface in the 21st century people were quick to insist that a white person painting their skin black only has racist implications in former colonies. According to the logic of the people I spoke to, blackface is racist in America because of slavery. It simply can’t be racist if a German does it, as Germany had no slavery. This viewpoint is not at all valid. Involvement in the slave trade may not have been as common as it was in other countries such as Britain or Spain, but many Germans were indeed slave traders. The German economy has been reliant on shipping and international trade for hundreds of years. During the 18th and 19th centuries and the height of European colonialism slavery would have been part of that economy. Germany was also a colonial power in Africa, where colonists openly bought and sold slaves until their defeat in WWI – less than a century ago. Even when some Germans know the history and cultural implications of blackface, it doesn’t bother them. To a German, blackface may be “just makeup,” as some of the people I spoke to suggested. But how can that possibly outweigh what it represents to many other people in the world?

After The Magic Flute ended the children and their parents left the theater, chattering happily about their favorite parts of the performance. As I walked back towards the train station alongside these families I couldn’t help but wonder. If German children are taught that blackface is “no big deal,” how will it affect their views as adults? The history of racism and colonialism is without question a complicated one, and may be difficult for children to comprehend. I understand demands for authenticity in art, and I understand that the role of Monostatos is itself problematic. However, updates are not inherently bad. Electric lighting didn’t exist in 1791, but that doesn’t stop modern opera companies from using it to enhance productions. Perhaps we should apply the same principle to characters and costume.

English Required – German a Plus

Blog Post,

 “Good morning Berlin; you can be so ugly, so dirty and grey.” The song pumped through my headphones as I sat on the bus and tried to stay awake. “Guten morgen Berlin; du kannst so hässlich sein, so dreckig und grau.“ Ten in the morning on a Sunday is a perfectly reasonable time to schedule an appointment, right? On an average Sunday I might agree; getting from Zehlendorf, a district in southwest Berlin, to Friedrichshain, a district in the east, should take no more than an hour. But Germany was in the midst of yet another Deutsche Bahn strike, which left the buses and trams the only available modes of transit. Great. Now that hour-long trip was going to last two.

Seven a.m. in Germany in mid-February is by any definition awful, but I desperately needed to make that appointment. Since September I had been living in a student apartment in Zehlendorf. It was barely in Berlin (I could have easily walked to the next city over) and I had to share a kitchen and bathroom with five other students. However at 230€ a month the rent was unbeatable, and the building was nicely situated amongst the small garden plots dotting the city outskirts. I had no plans to move until my return to the US in August. Of course that would have been far too simple, and directly before the December holiday everyone living in the building received an email; our contracts couldn’t be renewed for the next semester, and we would all have to vacate the building by the end of February. I was terrified. I had barely learned to cook.

So to the Internet I went, specifically to wg-gesucht, a house-hunting website that’s essentially a German Craigslist. I didn’t think that speaking German in Berlin would be a plus at all; I thought that it would simply be an expectation. Oddly enough the opposite is true. Thanks to its reputation as both a party city and startup hotspot Berlin attracts thousands of young EU citizens. The tech startups, since they recruit talent from all over the world, use English as the language of business. That combined with endless groups of partiers from the UK (a London-Berlin round-trip flight can cost just $35) has created a dual society in the city. Germans who work in tourism or are university graduates can move between both groups with ease but average German shop owners or plumbers now can’t communicate with many of their customers. Berlin is now a city where job advertisements for baristas or bartenders read “English required – German a plus.”

I quickly learned that the rental market in Berlin is brutal. I sent out about two hundred inquiries. I received four responses. One was an instant no. The last three were willing to grant me viewings, more or less group interviews with everyone trying to outdo the other applicants. Two of these didn’t pan out. As I rode the bus to the last one the only thing I could think about was the threat of not having anywhere to live in two weeks. I was running out of time. So after two hours of travel and five flights of stairs I arrived at my last appointment feeling desperate. The landlord met me at the door; when I introduced myself in German his face lit up as he chatted rapidly with me, but switched to slow and broken English when speaking with the other applicants. I thought little of his relief at first. He had agreed to rent me a room in the apartment! I finally had a place to live!

Speaking German, as it turned out, is what got me the room and made life in Berlin much easier. When the water meters in the apartment had to be replaced, my new non-German roommates couldn’t communicate with the guy from the water company, but I could. I could understand conversations that happened in cafes and on traincars. I could understand when the man leading tours of a former Stasi center spoke of his own experiences being imprisoned. The Berlin I got to know wasn’t the Berlin of nightclubs and hipsters. I got to experience a different city, where the water guy cracks jokes about socialist plumbing, where the elderly woman selling the best Apfeltaschen around has lived under three different governments. It wasn’t the Berlin of movies and music videos; it was the Berlin of Berliners.

Petersburger Straße - just around the corner from my apartment
Petersburger Straße – just around the corner from my apartment
Karl-Marx-Allee - The big main avenue in East Berlin
Karl-Marx-Allee – The big main avenue in East Berlin (the TV tower is in the background)