My latest love poem to my Berlin, my Germany
Nov 1st, 2007 by Paul Moor
When a day begins with one unexpected pleasant surprise, it has the same effect upon me that William Wordsworth’s rainbow had on him. When two further unexpected surprises bless the day, that rare benison gooses me into at least mental writing – in this event into what involuntarily took form between my ears during a long walk I took this afternoon. Gertrude Stein got it right when she observed (in the caption she wrote for some book’s photograph of her in affectionate converse with her dog) that “Real writers write all the time, everywhere.”
Germany’s radical, even revolutionary “student movement” during the late 1960s totally dumped – forever, let’s hope – the long traditional stiff-necked authoritarian German methods of child-rearing that gave the world, among other calamities, Adolf Hitler and his unprecedentedly murderous Third Reich. At that time, during the 1960s, revolutionary trends among those wonderfully courageous students sometimes swung a bit far in the opposite direction, but one lone book changed German attitudes towards education in a totally benevolent way: Summerhill, by England’s maverick educator A. S. Neill. He’d adopted as his own personal guru Sigmund Freud’s most radical disciple Wilhelm Reich, the title of one of whose books will tell you a good deal about that (quite literally) mad genius: The Function of the Orgasm. Under Reich’s dominant influence, Neill founded in England an unprecedented school for children who’d proven such behavior problems that their parents, finally at their wits’ ends, had literally no place else to send them for schooling that would even touch them with a bargepole. One basic sentence suffices to sum up the sole rule Neill imposed upon his nippers: total – and I do mean total – freedom, as long as that unbridled freedom didn’t violate the rights of others.
One salutary offshoot of those yeasty days here in the 1960s’ Berlin (which fell well within my own first quarter-century sojourn here, from 1956 to 1981) took the form of what became known as the Kinderladen – literally “children shop”: parents sufficiently interested in shielding their kids from those horribly destructive traditional authoritarian methods joined together in groups and simply rented cheap empty storefronts (to use the American term), and in them housed newly created private kindergartens, with carefully selected teachers who shared their views about teaching during those early formative childhood years – in turn an echo of one of Freud’s primary fundamentals of psychoanalysis, which recognises the first six or so formative years of a young human’s life as uniquely important for what that human will then in time develop into.
My apartment building in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf borough has had such a Kinderladen nextdoor since before I moved into it immediately after returning to Berlin twelve years ago. One little boy there attracted my psychologically educated attention the first time I saw him: pallid complexion, dead eyes, withdrawn manner – he immediately evoked my limited experience with that still puzzling psychological phenomenon called autism. From time to time, when my Dachshund boss Maxe walks me, I pause for brief conversations with the two young women in charge of the place, and when I asked one of them about this obviously far from happy little boy, it came as no surprise when she told me: “Er ist Autist.“
Returning with Maxe from our first walk this morning, I saw ahead of us, on the stretch of sidewalk in front of my building and the Kinderladen, those two women’s considerably younger new assistant, whom I’d noticed a few days earlier because of his clearly harmonious relationship with a group of the kids coming back from the spacious playground in the aptly named Volkspark – People’s Park – a short walk away. This morning, as I approached, I could barely believe my eyes to behold that autistic little boy actually smiling – something I’d never before seen him do. That behavior had an obvious reason: that young assistant had taken him – and him alone – out to play with him, on a tricycle on our stretch of sidewalk. That sight so gladdened my heart that I spoke to him and complimented him on his clearly manifest expertise in dealing with all those kids.
The day, which had begun with unseasonably sunny weather, seemed to cry out for me to make the most of one of our last fair days before the temperature will force me to caparison myself with such things as gloves, so since Maxe’s exceptionally attenuated spine (his first X-ray revealed that Maxe – the world’s champion dog by anyone’s genuinely disinterested, truly objective standard, has one more vertebra than nature intended for even a Dachshund to have) precludes his making longer walks than necessary, I set out alone.
Crossing the Bundesallee (the pre-war Kaiserallee) on the overhead footbridge, I first came upon the spacious enclosure where dog-owners have official permission to let their mutts run free, and I paused for a few minutes of fond regret. When Maxe took charge of my life about twelve years ago, I tried taking him there every afternoon to let him wear himself out by trying desperately, on those truncated legs of his, to keep pace with longer-legged dogs, but he soon proved, to the surprise of no one with the least experience of this most headstrong of canine breeds, so anarchic that in order to re-leash him, when time came to go home, I had to enlist one or more strangers to help me corner and overwhelm my recalcitrantly headstrong mutt.
Continuing on my way eastward this morning, I passed another spacious enclosure, this one for young bipeds. Does anyone reading this recall Cat Stevens’ poignant song about modern city life “But Where Do the Children Play?” My beloved Berlin has certainly long since answered that vitally important question – in every neighborhood of this huge city, twenty-five miles across at its widest diameter – once and for all.
At the easternmost end of my walk I came to the building that had once, soon after World War II ended in 1945, housed what every German at that time knew as RIAS, the acronym for Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor – Radio in the American Sector of that era’s four-power city ruled over by the victorious Allies: Britain, France, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and the USA. RIAS (pronounced REE-ahss) became one of the most implacably persistent thorns in the Soviet authorities’ Communist sides, and it remained that until 1989 brought Germany’s reunification and RIAS got absorbed into today’s RBB, Rundfunk (literally circular spark, a term that also includes television) in Berlin and Brandenburg, the federal state that completely surrounds the city-state Berlin.
When Maxe got me home, one of the two ladies in charge of the Kinderladen happened to tarry outside its entrance, and I seized the occasion to zing in a good word for their young new assistant Johannes. I told her that his noticeably excellent wave-length with his young charges, in particular with that little autist, had made it a surprise when he told me he’d studied foreign languages but had no actual specific training as a Kindergärtner. “No,” she said, “he’s only twenty-eight and he’s going this job as his” – here she used an abbreviation new to me, something I recall as Zivi (pronounced Tzee-vee), obviously short for Zivildienst, a catch-all term for various kinds of public service available to all young Germans as an alternative to going into uniform as legally required by my adopted country’s “universal” military service. How wonderfully sensible, I couldn’t help thinking, that such young Germans today (another of them: a newly married young physician I’d first photographed, the son of friends, at the age of less than twenty-four hours, who with his lovely fellow-physician pregnant wife had graced the party given for me a month or so ago to celebrate my naturalization) have available this possibility to serve today’s Germany – my Germany – truly pro bono publico.
And then several hours ago, what should fall into my lap but yet another story, this time actual news, of the kind I especially enjoy distributing for two reasons: it seems to me characteristic, even typical, of the Germany I so sincerely and gratefully love, and because its kind of story about my own today’s Germany so often simply remains unknown abroad. Instead of my even partially summarizing it for you, I’ve instead made it available in its entirety to anyone reading this bloggery who can work up the energy merely to click here.
