This article, based on my chance encounter with retired Bavarian police superintendent Otto Oeder and subsequent invitation to the Stammtisch, appeared in the Mindener Tageblatt’s January 13/14, 2024 weekend edition. Captions to photos are in English so you can follow along even if you don’t read German! Leuchtende Berghänge: sattgelbes Eschenlaub, das Hellgelb frühherbstlicher Buchenblätter,… Read more Working through History over Beer
How come some thirty-somethings who never experienced the GDR think of themselves as East Germans? And does one have to have experienced the GDR in order to write about it? Read my essay in SAPIENS magazine
You’ve been reading along—or maybe you just came across this little island in the vast virtual ocean—and now you want to see these places for yourself? Now you can! Find out more. AFTER THE WALL: DISCOVER GERMANY’S HIDDEN HEARTLANDThis special tour [dates TBA] will take you to the Green Belt—the nature preserve that has been… Read more See for yourself!
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
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)
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The next few posts will be about my visits with people in Kella, population plus minus 500. When Germany was divided after WWII, Kella ended up in the 500-meter Schutzstreifen (“protective zone”) right next to the border strip, which meant that its residents had to put up with considerable restrictions on everyday life, imposed by… Read more Visiting
More contemplations from the borderland: Excerpts from Chapter 7 In the Middle Ages, Heimat was a legal term that meant someone had the right to settle, live, and follow their trade in a particular location. The word still has the meaning of home place, or the place a person is from[1]. But most of the… Read more “This is my country”
