Berlin: The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

When I was in Europe the first times, I did not try to read cities, because I did not have the idea of a comprehensible or readable city. I looked at particular monuments, public buildings, public spaces, and I formed impressions, but I did not expect them to add up to anything or to result from some kind of intention. This time, as I noticed the different atmospheres of different cities, their personalities, I became fascinated with the language of public spaces and with the odd kinds of 300 year intentions or 1000 year intentions that shape those spaces.

The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is an intervention in a complex of buildings and squares celebrating the cultural and political history of Germany. It was placed there after that complex was reactivated, made effective and relevant again, when the wall dividing the city was removed. The history of its construction is summarized in this Wikipedia article.

A German-language piece describing "warning memorials" says that they are to carry memory across generations. When one encounters the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, from the main street next to it,  there is very little to describe it and nothing about how to use it. It looks like badly designed picnic tables and benches, at the shallow ends, and people try to sit on them, to cluster around them, to play with them, but they are unfriendly to this use. Nobody says not to use them that way, but they don't work very well. And deeper into the monument, the tables become pillars in rows, getting taller as the visitor walks into a depression in ground. Children attempt to play tag, but it doesn't quite work. The space is dank like a basement; you can only see this one row and column, and the ways are narrow enough that you wouldn't want to run around. You might hurt yourself. The deep part becomes more frightening as it gets dark. One wants to ask, as a visitor, "What do I do with this thing?" It is 4.7 acres, too big to ignore, obviously important, and it resists any attempt at summary or storytelling. 

Comparing this memorial to the sculptures in Friedrichstraße of children being deported: realistic sculptures of a suitcase, a violin case, warm clothing - that all says something about the different power of different sculptural media. Now, the Friedrichstraße memorial will win people's hearts, stir their imaginations, confront them with a reality about which they must form an opinion. In the long term, over generations, people may come to resist this effort to take charge of their emotions. But the warning memorial puts visitors into a space that feels wrong, and then more wrong, and then frightening and inhuman. If visitors, of any age, can dismiss that as an alien landscape, a curiosity, that is one way it communicates across generations. If visitors find it oddly familiar, like what is happening to them at work, at school, in their private family life, then that is another way it communicates. It refuses to let the visitor be finished with it by having an appropriate feeling and moving on.

When I look for parallels, Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial comes to mind: also, an experienced monument in which  what matters is what one does with it, as a visitor; also, a descent into depths and then an ascent to the light; also, a warning about what we gradually get ourselves into. But it is somehow easier, more narrative: it is natural to leave memorials, to do rubbings. There is nothing natural to do with the memorial in Berlin, and that is how it communicates across generations.

 

Doing Sociology with Ghosts

Home now - thinking back over all those train stations and subway stations full of people (and about the SHOCK of a two day  train strike), I want to ask a question dangerously close to nonsense: what do all the Minnesota counterparts of those people have in mind - that is, all the people who would be in train stations and subway stations and regional train centers, if we had (more than 2 or 3) such things? How many hundreds of thousands of intentions get redirected or strangled in their bassinets, for lack of civilized, affordable public transportation? Some projects can be transferred to cars, or to electronic media, surely. But most of them just don't go anywhere. And so, one has the mystery of ghostly frustration, of all those aborted travel plans, all those millions of missed connections, failed homecomings, cancelled reunions. I can't believe that the explanation of people's lives is just: they work with what is possible for them. To some extent, they also suffer from what isn't possible. They keep lowering their expectations. And somehow, out of all that, the character, the typical attitude, of a people emerges. And that is partly what one encounters as the mood of a city, the rhythm of a city. 

The problem is that good political thinking has to take account of all those ghosts. We can't just work to improve what we have. The ghosts of what  we could be are really just everywhere. And I don't see any way to know that except to move around, to smell different air.

The Brain Drain and The Brain Drip

I left this in Münster two weeks ago and came home to Minneapolis, to this:

No patriotism can combat three full months more of fall, and an early spring. Until Europe begins persecuting academics, Germany and Austria are safe from the siren song of Minneapolis. We won't be doing Viking raids on the universities. 

And yet: many of my conversations with scholars young and old made clear  how often local advantages appear: Austrian writers need help from people with specialized English editing skills; the public discourse in Minnesota needs an accurate, up-to-date European perspective. The philological emphasis on history of ideas corrects the American impulse to pretend that philosophy was invented yesterday. And always, particular scholars in the midst of big projects need to meet, because publication is slow, lives are short, and projects converge. 

So, the most qualified person to fill in for an undergraduate survey of 19th Century philosophy at Gustavus in St. Peter happens to live in Münster,  in circumstances that make travel difficult. A fine adviser on initiating dialogue with Muslim youth about ISIS is doing good work in Vienna, work about which Minneapolis folks (faced with similar problems) know nothing. 

The solution is surely not to move mammals and enrich the airlines. The citizens of Münster should continue to enjoy their foggy fall, and Minnesotans should should maintain their conditioning and their illusions (it's pretty, in it's own special way) as the deep cold comes ever closer. But something should be done, soon, technically and institutionally, to let the intellectual marketplace do its work  to some limited extent. 

There are magic times: 1 to 3 pm in Minnesota is 8 to 10 in Germany and Austria. A seminar or a reading group at those times can be trans-Atlantic, if the technology can be made to really work, not just sort-of work. That's a problem for experimenters. 

The bigger problems are institutional: how to embed visiting people as  raisins in the overall course muffin -- and pay the raisins. How do university departments and institutes get out of the habit of spending $2,000 for tired speaker rather than $200 for a rested speaker, ten times?

As usual, the problem is ethical as much as it is technical or social. Higher education has produced a lot of under-used minds, and the world needs that energy, that insight. Institutions far and wide have to look beyond their immediate needs (what can we get by with) and take responsibility for the intellectual health of the world. To those administrators who want to solve just simpler problems, I'd suggest that such problems are, quite simply, beneath their dignity.

This language thing

So, a while ago, my apartment-mate had a supper and asked me to help pull out the table. Now, the thing's sticking out, and I want to suggest to her that we push it back together. I don't know quite what the English idiom is for that, and lots of funny German occurs to me, meaning roughly "squish it back to how it was," "reestablish its prior dimensions," "make it not stick out so much." All of those funny utterances, suitably translated, would solve the problem -- and, to a considerable extent, language just is about solving problems. I think if it were taught that way, it would save a lot of misery and get more people talking: generally, with even a rudimentary vocabulary and uncertain grammar, you can get must things done that you want to do if you just wing it and if you are willing to look slightly stupid.

There is, of course, more to language than that. A favourite book from a couple of years ago was The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a picture of language as an elaborate dance, an achievement of culture, a way that the people who care about doing things right recognise each other. That is, of course, also part of the story. Foreigners caught in another language world are caught between the two models: they have to solve problems or they never find the bathroom, get what they want to eat, and they also have to gradually figure out what the beauty of the thing is and move along with it. That's tricky, especially in Austria, because there are so many foreigners, and so much odd language around. The problem solving aspect threatens to dominate. Also, English forms keep popping up as normative, as the way that new words and expressions are being formed. 

Re-search as re-hearing

From a city garden near Karlsplatz in Vienna.

Re-search

I return to Vienna with this odd mission, to help some people interested in issues of sustainability and food security with their teaching and research by producing non-research video that explores issues around food. I am being essentially invited to meddle.

I had no idea about research when I first came here; I just collected impressions and had thoughts about them. I am not much more advanced now, except I am better about writing things down and keeping photos and videos and in general keeping records, since I now know that important things may seem trivial at first glance and also that thoughts get lost. 

My method, for the bulk of the relevant activity here, is to go to a rural area and do a cluster of interviews with people who are guided by ideas in their farming, food preparation, and food distribution activities. This work reminds me of every real kind of research I have ever done. It is always the same: one hears very similar stories, very similar rationales for actions, over and over again, and it seems important to notice both what keeps coming up and what small differences show up. 

Here’s one example: mostly, people justify their preference for local produce in very contemporary terms. It’s safer, it supports the local economy, the quality and freshness are superior. Occasionally, one hears also about how farms have always been pretty self-sufficient, how that has always been an ideal, and about how the countryside kept the cities alive during the war, about the importance of maintaining a local capacity for producing food. Sometimes, one also hears, in this very prosperous country, the worry, familiar to us in the US, that social security will go bankrupt and that old people will be dependent on their gardens and their gardening skills. 

One thinks initially about coming to understand how new ideas about sustainability and food security have taken root in rural areas. One hears a lot that sounds very contemporary. However, it may be that the key to the success of these ideas is partly that they are not new at all, that they connect to very long-term concerns in Austria. 

How Ideas Travel

Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther partly as a warning about the dangers of extreme feeling, such as the romantics cultivated. There was allegedly a wave of suicides copycatting the suicides in Werther: Goethe was not a good warner, but he was an awfully good depicter. Maria Theresa got worried and, just to be safe, banned Goethe entire. This shows up in Wikipedia as a partial explanation of why there is a hundred-some year hole in Austrian literary production. 

People find such meddling funny, partly because they don’t think much about the power of ideas. One of my heroes, Cordwainer Smith, pictures the ideal government as having two important jobs: preventing the export of religion and preventing the export of news. He was a China expert and knew something about what ideas do when they get loose. 

Anybody who thinks and writes is morally bound to know something about how ideas travel, for the same reason that anybody who shoots a weapon is morally bound to know something about who might be standing in the line of fire. We have examples in front of us of how fast ideas propagate: Facebook, the economics and aesthetics of Apple, the connected world. All of these revolutions were accomplished so fast and so thoroughly that most people cannot imagine what it was like before the revolution. That’s how idea-revolutions work; they wipe out the history of their predecessors, make the earlier thoughts unthinkable, except by antiquarians. 

So, I have come here to Austria to see what is happening with ideas about food. Knowledgable people all over the world are worried; the current food-ideas lend overwhelming support to patterns of shipping, consumption, toxification, and land-use that have frightening consequences, projected a few decades into the future. Lots of people would like to see food ideas change. So, intellectuals make gambits: they put ideas out - regional food, slow food, respect for animals, food security. Some of these get taken up, here and there, in advertising, in policy, in the operating rules of idealistic farm and retail businesses. 

One doesn’t need interviews like mine - long, rambling conversations with farmers and gardeners and merchants - to study these idea-gambits: they are well defined in various literatures. Interviews are useful for seeing what happens to ideas as they enter the minds of individual people, as they become part of how people make meaning of their lives through conversation and sometimes conversion. Do the ideas fit with other stuff?  Do they get domesticated, or do they remain on the fringes of people’s lives? (How often do food decisions really reflect a concern about buying local products: once a week or once a day?)  Do they combine with apparently unrelated ideas? (Does ‘eating organic’ come to be seen as a species of ‘conspicuous consumption?’ ) Are they linking up with powerful ways of thinking that are already central to people’s motivations? (Does the idea of food security combine with old memories from the war, about the time when the country fed the cities while the rebuilding was happening?)

Ideas are like viruses. They mutate in minds, in small ways. We have a terrible fear that certain viruses will become airborne. Many people have the hope, that organic agriculture will become airborne. Whether out of fear or out of hope, it seems awfully important to study with a microscope what happens to ideas in the culture media of minds and communities — what happens, that is, in the mind of a third generation baker in Bad Zell and around the Stammtisch in Gasthof Ahorner at Sankt Thomas am Blasenstein. 

Watching Edible City with Austrian Students

Last night, I saw a documentary called Edible City, http://www.ediblecitythemovie.com, about efforts in Oakland, California and other places to establish community gardens on unused land. It began with the hard truths about fossil fuel use, about the future of the middle class way of life, with its foundation in cheap food and an international food market system. I saw the film at WUK in Vienna, counter-culture centre with performance spaces, theatres, a school, and workshops - a nicely repurposed old building that attracts idealistic kids. I had gone there to meet a student who was returning to his grandparents’ farm. He fed me new grapes and herbs from a basket. The people were so familiar: from meetings in South Minneapolis, many trips to new farms, CSAs, hopeful new city gardens. 

When I left the movie, during the testimonial time — “we tried this, and it really worked, but it’s harder than you think,” — I was hungry, and not much was open that would be fast, so I stopped at a wurst stand by the subway. Wurst stands are cheap fast food, tastier than we have, but clearly part of the Other System. It was natural to stop. I was getting mildly squirrelly from not having eaten.  The stop set up the opposition in my mind: “The Truth” versus “What’s Natural.”

I also thought: why am I doing interviews the way I do? Here was a little documentary with nice graphics to present the underlying economics, which a bright pig could grasp, and pleasant people endorsing sensible solutions. What more is there to do, besides remaking  Edible City a thousand times, just to repeat the food message, and also to apply the same template to species extinction, nuclear power, the loss of rural population, air pollution. One could do a whole film festival of documentaries that present the truth; after those are all made, what need is there to do anything different? It can be a nice hobby to keep doing interviews, but where is the need? 

I think some of the guests on my television show come on the show wanting to contribute their own version of “Edible City” to the world, to blow the trumpet once more for truth. And what I am trying to do both allows that and thwarts it, or re-directs it. Messages work best when they are pithy; my interviews go about an hour. Also, I ask for the personal story first, the origins story. And then, I don’t usually edit, so the point people want to make is not lifted up out of the conversation. It coexists with everything else. From one standpoint, what I make is just: bad documentaries, examples horrible for video classes, exercises in self-indulgence at the other extreme from the discipline of documentary production (in company with, I might note,  Frederick Wiseman and David Susskind). 

So, what is the point? When the truth and what is natural diverge, as they usually do, there are several possible responses, all aimed at producing a new natural state — beloved carrot and celery stands by the subway entrances. These include: new laws (stricter wurst regulation), a change in public opinion and attitude (big posters to celebrate the carrot), and, hardest of all, a redirection of the whole cultural life, away from scarcity, from haste, from stress, from emphasis on the future — so that a person coming out of a film at 9 wouldn’t feel rushed to get home, wouldn’t be concerned to eat the cheapest thing available, wouldn’t rush through his meal barely tasting the food. Such a person might find it natural to stop at a little veggie restaurant, chat with the waiter, sample the new dishes. Most plausible solutions to the problem sketched in Edible City are some combination of these three: laws and public relations in concert leading to changes in the cultural landscape.

This does work. For better and worse, it does work. Vienna doesn’t have a big pigeon problem, that I’ve seen anyhow, maybe because some combination of pigeon control and the pr campaign “Doves are really just flying rats” has changed their place in the city. It is no longer cool to sit in the park and feed the pigeons. So one can imagine one’s role as a public intellectual: beginning a process of ethical and scientific consciousness-raising leading to intelligent social engineering — something very appropriate for the city of Franz Joseph. Most ethical leadership seems to fit this formula. It’s not a bad formula.

So far as I can see, it’s the formula that everybody we get to hate also used. Think: “Birds are evil” in China; think “Protocol of the Elders of Zion.” That should at least give us pause.

My concern is with two matters. First, I am concerned to find the roots of motives, before they get amalgamated into ideologies and movements, to see what the first expressions are. Also, I am concerned to show the exercise of a muscle, the action of saying, “Why am I doing what I am doing? Where did that come from?” (In some body work, you have to show people what is required to move just one muscle, by itself.) I agree that change is important, that Edible City to some extent tells the truth, but I want change to have such deep roots that it can stand against the formidable resources of those who are basically users of humanity, or corporate robots with very simple programming.

Also, when I was a kid, I learned a lot about food and agriculture, by osmosis from university extension brochures, conversations between enlightened and unenlightened farmers, and very colourful health studies books detailing the four basic food groups.  What ties all the stuff I learned together is that it was, on contemporary standards, all wrong, and inhumane, and unsustainable. And the combination of brochures and classes for farmers and health texts brought about just the revolution that landed us in this mess. I don’t want to be part of the next wave of taken-for-granted stupidity.

Education for Democracy

I have run into some odd ideas of what "education for democracy" might mean during my time here. That makes me think. It can't be just one movement, one example. Democracy is complex, and, most important, it contains tensions as an idea, and it generates tensions, whenever anyone tries to put it into practice. 

I encountered one component last night. I went out to eat in a fine part of the city, near the Kirche am Hof, in an area with wide streets, stately buildings on a human scale, and grand public squares, connected by narrow alleys. By the entrance to one such alley, a young woman in a long gown sang through a repertoire of good contemporary songs - the best of the show tunes. She sang for about two hours and filled about four city blocks. I couldn't judge the quality, though she had to have had some serious training. What struck me was just: somebody wanting to sing and begin willing to take over the public space. Of course, anybody who complained or even harassed her could have shut her up. She had no goons to back  her up, just the tradition of people singing in public plus this IS Vienna plus why not?

I thought: if school children - or adults - see this, they have maybe the most important piece of education for democracy. Beyond that, we have to learn to cooperate, to share, to play nice. But point one is: if you want to sing, you can try singing in public, and maybe nobody will stop you.

The Transvaluation of Values

A dove is not a rat. Perhaps it is helpful if people think this way; they might stop feeding pigeons. 

Turning unwelcome beings into rats and snakes is an old propaganda trick, used before in ways that people here want to forget. But the trick is wrong, not just its uses. Shifting perception is serious, and there are occasions when the shift is accurate. That's just why it shouldn't be done - cheaply.

Here's a real dove:

Education for Democracy

Two artefacts  from prisoners: a dog someone made to cheer up a child and chess pieces carved by a man who was later executed. These are part of museum attached to the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. I went there yesterday to speak to the director, Karl Pfeifer. His assistant put me on to a strange story.

Austrian school children are given some mandatory information about the Holocaust, and many are given a concentration camp tour. During some such tours in recent years, students have been disruptive and deprecating, and this has upset the ministries at the highest levels. They have pushed for more investment in Holocaust education, more empathy, more repudiation of neo-Nazi movements, so that such disruptions can't happen again. The name for this kind of action: "education for democracy."

One associate of the Documentation Centre wrote about this phenomenon in a piece titled roughly: "What is Education For? The Holocaust and Right-Wing Extremism in the Schools" (Andreas Peham, in the archive Yearbook from 2010). He asks one of those splendid simple questions on page 45 of this piece, "How can I teach someone who has to obey me to be disobedient?" 

I can't do better than that question. It states the problem of public education here as Alice in Wonderland states the problem of logic, as the parables of Jesus state the problem of love, as Maya Lin's wall states the problem of war. 

Impressions

In a serious conversation yesterday, someone I'd just met asked me for my impression of Vienna, and I blanked. Having an impression should be easy, but it is really the hardest thing, especially when one is fighting the demon of being nice and the demon of having something acceptable to say that will also be understood. So, like with all good questions I haven't answered in my decades of talking, this question kept burping up all day, "What is my impression of Vienna?" I finally found one of maybe a thousand answers in the difficulty I was having with the question: Vienna is a city in dialogue with its cliches. It has so many cliches: the coffeehouse cliche, the city of Mozart cliche, the Catholic cliche, the Hapsburg cliche, the "first victim of the Nazis" cliche, the "Hitler's most enthusiastic helpers" cliche, the city of ultimate open-ness cliche, the melting pot cliche, the rich and politically irrelevant cliche, and maybe also the Disney theme park cliche. All of these have something to them and also some very big things against them, but one thinks of the city by remembering them and also trying to forget them -- just that movement. And one is always tempted to fall away from one and into another, to just go back and forth among them. 

In that way, traveling here is an intense lesson in a certain kind of personal epistemology, one that Wittgenstein, for one, took to heart.  Knowing is sometimes well described as forging what one wants to say, crafting it out of experience. Maybe Thoreau, a couple of chapters into Walden, does something like that, after he gets the rhetoric out of his system and really looks at his pond. But more often, when one is not in a woods but in an old city of many layers, as we mostly are, knowing is noticing what we are tempted to say and how it doesn't quite work, and also how the opposite of what we are tempted to say also doesn't quite work. That's a reasonable summary, I think, of Philosophical Investigations, for which Vienna was the training ground. 

In The Twilight Zone, astronauts are greeted affectionately when they arrive on a new, familiar planet, are escorted to strangely familiar suburban living quarters, then discover, the next morning, that they are a new zoo exhibit. Vienna has a very good zoo, old and yet progressive, well organised. There are enough tourists that one shows up every five minutes or so, almost anyplace. One gets the feeling of being a zoo animal. One begins giving one's own tour, as a running commentary on one's life. That is a strange existential problem just because animals in a zoo are not part of a real eco-system. They exist to be looked at. Historical exhibits, palaces, most monuments are not part of real political life. They are splendid leftovers. So, one finds oneself saying, "My life does SO have a meaning," and then wondering what that's all about. This is one way that philosophy is close and touchable here. The place sets a problem.

The Oddities of Travel in 2014

The bottles of apricot schnapps are pretty, but they wouldn't have trumped the palaces, the white horses, the blue Danube, the monuments of Vienna, as subjects for a photograph in 1972. You didn't waste film, and you brought back the picturesque European stuff. Now, by what would surely seem like magic to the 1972 version of me, my camera takes unlimited numbers of clear photographs, and anything famous has thousands of searchable images on the web. I find myself photographing anything that interests me, as a kind of record of my interest, and emphasising ephemera: posters, graffiti, things in cars, juxtapositions. Casual photography has become, quite recently, a new activity.

Similar, quite recent, changes have changed most of the constraints of travel in 1972:

*I can talk to my friends and family for free, anytime they're awake. In 1972, I never called home. It was too expensive and too intimidating. I got cold just thinking of the electrons passing through that long cable.

*Anything I know the name of, I can find, or find out about. If it's a place, I can get there. If it's a name, I can find the Wikipedia article. If it's an idiom, somebody's done a discussion of it. 

*The Vienna subway is finished and integrated with busses, streetcars and trains. No place within a city of a million people is very far away, and the fares are cheap enough that one just doesn't worry about them. The mapping technology is so good that, even without a constantly working smartphone, I can get where-ever I want to go.

*With a Kindle, I can bring all the books I need, without adding more than the weight of electrons.

*Local media - television and radio - are available streaming for free, in some version. That means that I can learn to understand the spoken language faster and that I can keep up with the minutiae of life in the city for years after I return home.

*I can work from any place I am living. I don't need an office or a desk or an assistant. 

All of this was unthinkable in 1972. I could say something now about how this is a sort of mixed blessing, and it probably is, since most blessings are mixed, but I can't think seriously of a downside to these developments, for my preferred kind of travel. Rick Steves, in his excellent advice to travellers, is concerned to help them get into casual, comfortable relationships with local people and to show them the country beyond the stereotypes. What the new developments mean, for me, is that, on an extended visit, I can go beyond that admirable ideal, can understand enough of where I am to have serious conversations and engage in persistent inquiries -- following up on the hints that are around me about what might be going on. This just wasn't possible before.

Subways are astonishing teaching machines. You learn a route: a number, an end station, and a stop, and you get an instant reward. The system is totally reliable and endlessly repetitive in structure. Every line works the same way. The attachments - busses and trains - work the same way, with small differences. One orients oneself to one system, then expands one's reach to an analogous system as one develops new needs and desires. 

Subways are also meta-teaching machines. They teach about teaching and learning, about what kind of structure should be there: repetitive patterns, systemic analogies, immediate response to obvious needs and desires. You expect of a theory what a good subway map shows, and you learn theories because you want something like a subway map for some part of life.

Here's another teaching machine, a slack line. You get on. You fall off. You see somebody walk across. You try again. You still fall off. You get the hang of it, eventually. From this, you generalise: confidence and trying until you get it right.

This is also a meta-teaching machine, with a much less definite message than the subway system.

So, a city, a culture, teaches you and also teaches you what learning means, and if it does that in enough ways, you are ready to learn the various things you need to learn. 

Getting Over Good Advice

This might be my favourite photo so far. The Hund was a spaniel, very low to the ground, and my preferred translation of the sign is: "If you rob us, the spaniel will watch you intently." This might deter a self-conscious thief. 

When I was here the first time, I got a piece of good/bad advice from the teacher leading the group: "You all have no feel for the language." This was directed at a group of people with varying exposures to German: they'd been exchange students, they'd lived in German-speaking countries, they'd taken classes, including her classes. The point was not at all stupid. When faced with a communications challenge, things occur to you to say. In English, it's ok just to say what occurs to you because its basis is a whole life of hearing English. In Germany, those intuitions have no such basis. One needs to look up the idiom or learn the idiom. There's no short-cut in one's intuitions. 

This is like the advice given to people who have been singing casually when they get serious about singing: you need to relearn how to sing, if you are to do it really well. Otherwise, your bad habits set a limit to how good you can get.

Coming back, I have fallen into a situation in which this advice just does not apply. After almost 40 years of not speaking the language, I simply have to compose complex notes and I don't have time to check every idiom. So, if I am to work at all, I have to rely on what occurs to me. And so the way that this advice is false also shows up. English is in the family of languages in which German also lives, and so one can sometimes be understood in a very annoying way with just English. As one gains information about grammar, vocabulary and so on, it becomes likelier that one will be understood if one just says what it occurs to one to say. One is, however, often clumsy and annoying. 

There is a way of proceeding that consists in finding out how to do things right, and there is a way of proceeding that consists in doing them somewhat wrong but well enough: in the case of language, well enough to be understandable but annoying. The problem for the second approach: to gradually get less annoying. The point about bad habits, across a broad range of activities, is a good point. The point about not taking forever to do what one needs to do is also a good point.

I think these two approaches are quite general educational approaches, across a range of disciplines. People freeze when they have to do what they don't know how to do even when they know something about how to do it. The problem of a teacher is generally not addressing the situation of the totally ignorant but rather addressing the situation of the person with promising but unreliable intuitions. 

My solution thus far to the problem of getting better is Harry Potter in German. I had never read it in English, and find myself compelled to rip through it. I don't know whether the idioms stay with me: ask me when I meet my first troll. 

(Afterword: what I actually find, since this is my book-to-take-along, is that all sorts of situations show Hogwartesque dimensions, especially, the university departments.)

This oddity of language

Sometimes, one has to stop cringing and lead.

Before I came here, I transcribed 20 interviews with Minnesota cultural leaders: poets, historians, journalists, a major arts administrator. You can say about people at this level: "They know the language." On any imaginable standard, they are competent speakers. And yet, when I actually entered their sentences, I sometimes found rules very different from those I had been taught -- or virtual anarchy in areas I'd regarded as rule governed. It struck me that they were speaking quite different languages and that what we encounter in formal grammars is some kind of compromise among the idiolects.

That experience gave me courage when I came to Vienna, where many novices need to speak. One basically invents a language, puts it out there as a gambit, and hopes that it will be accepted well enough to make one, for one's particular purposes, competent. At the same time, one keeps trying to learn new tricks. My main technology for that is the German  Harry Potter. If I encounter a dragon, I'm prepared. So far, while people may have laughed at my emails or even posted them on the office wall, annotated, they have mostly responded to me in ways that got things done.

One other experience though showed me where the unbridgeable gap might lie. I went to a Gasthof for supper; three slavic guys were there, speaking their own language. As I watched, I was transported back to the supper table at my grandmother's on the farm - everybody talking at once, very fast. Both kinds of conversation seemed to me like dances. There wasn't information to  convey. There were familiar interactions to rehearse, roles to re-establish, prejudices to cement, reassurances to be given that everyone had his accustomed place. This level of stuff a foreigner has trouble with, and also, this level of stuff gets pretty easily squeezed out by people with simpler conceptions of language who can't make space for it. Xenophobia may be wrong, but it's not crazy.

I think there is such a thing as a national treasure. When I am on the subway, most people alone are tired, withdrawn, mildly agitated, sometimes angry. Occasionally, two people are talking and it is like a concerto: a very fast, very happy interchange of a thousand hints. One can actually see where Mozart came from. This interchange is the most valuable thing I've seen here.

So far as I can tell, the statuary here conveys several insistent public messages: making out is fun, war is  glamorous and sometimes cute, and somebody much smarter and harder-working than you is doing the thinking: have another cup of coffee. These are messages from another time, from Hapsburg time. They still echo. It is strange to live in a place where there is such a consistent monumental container, with consistent messages. 

The stuff about making out can be sinister: the objects of erotic attention are not always totally enthusiastic, and some of the pursuit statues are right next to the Schönbrunn maze, which would be a  place for all sorts of liberties.  One remembers the literary stories about peasant girls ruined by heartless aristocrats on a spree.

On the positive side, some people in Vienna know how to kiss. They do free demonstrations on the U-bahn. We in Minnesota should get them to make us instructional videos. We are primitive in that activity, at least in public. 

There's one other message, perhaps not intended. There are downsides to being a public figure; one may have to spend eternity holding one's pants up:

Also, if one sits for a bust on a grumpy day, one may spend a long time looking grumpy:

This suitcase is the first piece of named anything I have acquired, a Rick Steves suitcase with straps AND wheels, very likely to fit into overhead bins. I bought it because Steves has posted good travel advice which I studied before I came to Europe.  Advice in quantity, available in advance, is one big difference between traveling in 1972 and traveling now. Steves' suggestions saved me hours of misery and worry. He writes for a somewhat different traveler than I am: richer, less interested in sustained local contact, with less time and broader ambitions (Europe in two weeks). Most of what he says makes great sense. For a 60+ person like me, I'd tweak his advice a bit, mostly changing emphasis. The major problem I face traveling is that new situations bring out my obsessive compulsive tendencies. I have things to be afraid of, things not to lose, and so I recheck and worry and otherwise torture myself too much. So, if I were writing his books, I'd aim them at diminishing obsession:

1. Your best friend is a long lanyard. Keys keep mattering.

2. The pants with pockets that zip make many worries go away, and money belts don't fit well around some people.

3. An international drivers license means you can leave your passport somewhere safe.

4. One needs a small plastic bag for the usable coins and a box in one's room for the unusable coins; otherwise, one loses one's pants and one's dignity at approximately the same moment.

5. Weekly tickets on public transportation and yearly ticket to  museums make one feel approximately like a Hapsburg.

6. One should always have an emergency lunch, a jacket, and some water.

These are small matters. The big matter is: one can plan now for trips in a way one could not easily before: see each step in advance, arrange to meet people, check out the train regulations. For adventurous people, that may not matter much. A night in jail, a night sleeping with goats, emergency evacuation -- these are just other names for fun. But, for some others of us, the belt and suspenders type people, anxiety really does wreck the experience. We take our adventure in carefully measured spoonfuls, or not at all. For us, people like Steves make  travel possible. The suitcase isn't bad either, though the one-directional wheels keep it from rolling sideways, which it sometimes needs to do. 

This is one of two kangaroos in the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna. Kangaroo: an animal that moves by bouncing, also, an animal remarkably out of place here. I think that's a way to begin: I have bounced back more than 40 years, to a city I lived in as a student, interacting now with colleagues who could be my children. And I am interestingly out of place: more hopeful than those around me, and also much messier. More differences will present themselves. 

I have quite a nice enclosure: a room in a sunny apartment in Meidling, two stops from Schönbrunn, in a changing neighbourhood with many immigrants that seems not to have been worn much by the strangers and their ways. 

Across from me is the local version of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship; down the street is the Love-Kino. Neither seems to be getting much business, and neither spills out onto the street. A furniture factory is somehow buried in one of the adjoining buildings; one knows that only by the sign. A strangely diverse mix of activities coexist without taking account of each other.

I have the job: to document, to make public, stories about food, and any other stories that come my way or that I can scare up. I am supported but not salaried, so have just that much autonomy. Unlike the first time, I have some credentials: a television show, a website, a PhD, a history of having done things. This changes my introductions to people, as does also my age and my relative self-assurance.

I'm not sure it's good to keep trips to oneself. The relatives' slideshows had a point. To travel is an advantage, paid for partly by the work of others, and one should make something useful of one's trips, for those who couldn't go this time. That's partly the point of writing this. Also, I am a bad rememberer, a bad record keeper, and the more attempts I make at records, the more likely some reminder will be there when I wonder later, "What was that exactly, that I did back then?" I am being lucky right now, relative to other phases of my own life and relative to the lives of my friends, and that should be acknowledged.