There is something to be said for being older than, say, fifty: Chances are you remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, which in my case came with a surprise revelation about history. I was in my living room in upstate New York that November 9, 1989, when a friend practically ordered me to turn… Read more History is Real People
For most of her sixteen years as German chancellor, Angela Merkel said little about her East German past. After the surprise of her meteoric political career in the newly reunited country – a woman! An Easterner! – things quieted down for a while. By the time she became chancellor in 2005, the major challenges of integrating… Read more Day of German Unity: Angela Merkel’s East German Past
Last year I wrote about the time “between the years” – that time span between Christmas and New Year’s that can feel like a gap in time, a reprieve from other, more tightly scheduled times of the year. A kind of time that invites reflection and contemplation. Lately I’ve been thinking about another kind of… Read more Fellow Passengers in the Bardo
Just like the Iron Curtain once separated families and friends, today’s politically polarized divisions cut through families and ruin friendships. And they cause just as much pain. Is there anything we can do? Here’s an op-ed I wrote for the Montpelier Times-Argus I grew up in a divided country, and I don’t just mean polarized.… Read more The Walls in Our Heads
There is a German expression to describe the time between Christmas and New Year’s: Zwischen den Jahren, or “between the years.” It’s not that that time span of seven days is between any two years; what matters is the feeling of having a chunk of secret extra time. Time that is safe from work meetings, dentist… Read more A Raven-Black Faith in the Future
Does anyone need a story of encouragement? October 9 holds such a story, one based in the courage that comes from facing fear and overcoming it. October 9, 1989 is the day that “fear switched sides,” which is also the title of a book by Siegbert (Siggi) Schefke, one of the East German dissidents who was… Read more When Fear switched Sides
(Bonus Post in German! Ausschnitte aus Kapitel 18) For English, scroll back to the last two posts. Die Nachtluft hat die Hitze des Tages nicht wirklich aus meinem winzig-gemütlichen Dachzimmer vertrieben, und meine schläfrigen Versuche, einer hungrigen Mücke nachzustellen, waren erfolglos. Aber als die Morgensonne meine schweren Augenlider überlistet, fällt mir wieder ein, was für… Read more Die Vögel am Ende der Welt
As Kai goes on to fill in the picture for me, I realize that what made the resolution for the Green Belt so effective was a chain of developments that sounded almost providential. Kai Frobel himself uses the expression glückliche Fügung, the coming together of auspicious circumstances. What becomes quite clear to me, too, is the… Read more The birds at the end of the world (Part 2)
Why “the end of the world?” you may ask. For the people who lived near it, the border between East and West Germany might as well have been the end of the world. For birds – and for countless other wild creatures – the deadly border was a lifeline in an increasingly inhospitable modern agricultural… Read more The Birds at the End of the World (part 1)
Since the coronavirus started to spread around the world earlier this year there have been countless stories of nature rebounding: bobcats and black bears venturing onto the roadways in Yosemite National Park, Venice canals so clear that schools of fish are visible again; seismologists finding that movements in the earth’s upper crust have slowed down… Read more At home on this earth?
