I cast my vote!

My absentee ballot finally came in the mail yesterday (Wednesday, October 29th), and I went and got it (from hubby's office), came home and allowed my adult son, just off the plane from Indiana, to counsel me on some of the more local votes (and thank you, dear neighbor Susan, for your counseling of him), filled in all the little ovals after hunting over the whole house for a number 2 pencil, and went and mailed it off at the mailbox by the Grunewald train station on my way to Nordic Walking in the woods.

Hooray! I am enfranchised! And my all-important Indiana vote should be there in plenty of time to count. 

Anonyma - my thoughts on the book

I mentioned to my book group a while ago that I wanted to read Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin (in English, A Woman in Berlin I believe). I guess it was only available in hardback in English; anyway, they didn't go for it but I did. And I've been wanting to write about it for a while.

The book is amazing. It's the journal of a 30-year-old German woman who had been traveling around Europe but ended up settling in Berlin in late 1944 or early 1945 to work at a publisher's. The journal starts as she is staying in the apartment of an acquaintance who has fled Berlin; the building where her own old apartment was had been bombed and destroyed, and in this new building she is now part of the Kellergemeinschaft, the community of the basement - where they go whenever bombs start to fall.

She writes the journal in a notebook some of the time but also on scraps of paper when she can, in between bombings and runs to get food and, later, rapes and negotiations and trips to connect across the city.

What I had heard about the book seemed to concentrate on the rapes. It isn't all there is in the book, after I finished the book I even thought it wasn't really the main thing in the book, but now that it's been a while and I'm thinking back, it's really what colors and affects everything. 

Essentially, in the basement community where they huddle to wait out bombs, there are mostly women, because so many men have either fled Berlin or else have gone to war. The women know that the Russians are arriving, and they are quite sure they will be raped. They also know that their own brothers were raping Russian women in Russia. 

Anonyma, the woman telling the story (do you still call her a narrator when it isn't nonfiction? the journaler / journalist . . .? not sure what to call her) is truly amazing, I think. She's steeped in a sense of German-ness, she's completely convinced that the Russians are an inferior and boorish and uncultured people (this is both before they arrive and after they have come and occupied the city), and yet she doesn't finally seem to judge or condemn the Russian soldiers - neither her own rapists, nor the others. In fact, she talks to them, hangs out with them, has pity for some of them, empathy, you name it.

A number of things struck me forcefully about this book. They interconnect but let me try to untangle them and say what they are:

One of the strongest is what I have just said: that Anonyma, our journaler, is so amazingly unjudgmental. She not only doesn't seem to morally condemn the rapists (even while she has, culturally, completely pre-judged them) but she also seems to be, finally, not seriously traumatized by the rapes. Now, I'm really unsure about this, and it might be the literalist in me reading her book, where she kind of glides over a lot of things and reports them obliquely so that I am only realizing pages and pages later what happened earlier, because she didn't spell it out.

But in fact, she does something that took me by surprise as I read about it. Although she socializes with the Russian soldiers and officers (eating, drinking, singing, talking), and really has genuine human contact and interactions with them, she decides that, while after the first instane or two she is not going to physically fight the rapes (in fact, she goes and chooses somebody to be her regular bed partner so that he, or the fact of him, will keep others away), she is in no way going to be physically affected or sexually engaged. So she turns herself into a cold stone.

This means that the whole thing is, physically, horribly painful. Day after day. She's actually in horrible pain. But I guess this choice is how she manages the psychic pain - because she keeps her own self intact and uninvolved in the sexual contact which, after all, she really has no choice about, she keeps her integrity.

I can see I'm being unsuccessful in disentangling the things that struck me. Another one is this: Anonyma, and a lot of the women who surround her, know they are going to be raped, then know about each other that they are being and have been raped, and talk about it, even joke about it, are vulgar about it. They go on with things. This is happening to them, they cannot help it, but they know that it happens (and they knew it would), and there are other things in life as well (friendships, old connections that can be rediscovered by long treks across the ruined city after it seems things have become calmer, skills to use, plans for how to find food, how to manage extreme hunger, how to plan for life after the war, how to plan new businesses . . .  )

And yet there are ways and places in which this relative sanguinity about the rapes breaks down:

- first of all, there are entire families who shoot themselves rather than letting the young daughters in the family be raped (or after the young daughters have been raped)

- then, there are the men who return from the war, who have a very different reaction. Anonyma was keeping this journal originally as an ongoing letter to her old boyfriend/lover/partner. When he finally actually does make it to Berlin and finds her, they have a day or two of togetherness but it seems as though her journals, and the things she says there, and more than that the matter-of-factness and the vulgarity and the jokeyness with which she and the other women around her talk about the rapes, are what finally drives him away again. 

I find it so interesting that Anonyma herself draws a very definite line between what it's like for her to deal with being raped, and what it would be like for a young woman who has never had sexual experiences before. I guess it makes sense but it wasn't immediately obvious to me. She talks about fumbling, bumbling high school experiences, a clumsy awkward kiss somewhere with a teenage boy, and how those memories are something she can look back on (along with her later adult sexual experiences, but she doesn't mention that as much), but that a girl who's never had anything of the sort would, according to her, be so much worse off because she doesn't have her own sense of sexual feelings on her own terms to place against what is happening to her forcibly now.

There is also a sense, not really expressed, but there, that because Anonyma seemingly has no family left there is nobody left to worry about honor and shame and categories of that sort. If she can put this experience in a box and move on, then there is no-one else who is going to look at it as something else (except, of course, the boyfriend who returns from the war and then can't stand it - can't stand to know what she has gone through - and leaves again). 

But finally, what really surprised me in this book was Anonyma's clear sense, as I mentioned before, of German cultural superiority. She is really truly confident about this. And this is a woman who is generally broad-minded - who, as I said, is apparently so broad-minded that she truly has empathy for the Russian soldiers who are raping her and all the women around her, and she truly equates their actions with those of the German soldiers who had been in Russia (and the equation is made explicit by one of the Russian soldiers who had had to watch awful things being done to his sister). 

She says things like "Jetzt sind wir kein Volk mehr, wir sind nur noch Bevölkerung, sind wohl noch vorhanden, stellen aber nichts mehr dar." Roughly, "Now we're not a people anymore, we're just a population, we're still here, but we don't represent anything anymore." Represent anything!? What does that even mean? I guess in my world I have no concept of the people of a country representing anything to begin with, but for her this is basic. Later she says, about German soldiers returning defeated from the Russian front (I guess), "Die Männer waren unrasiert und abgezehrt, hatten einen elenden Hundeblick. Mir war, als sähen sie gar nicht deutsch aus." So, "The men were unshaven and haggard (I had to look that one up), they had a miserable hangdog look. It seemed to me as though they didn't even look German anymore." There it is again: it's not about whether they're human or not, they are definitely still human (she then says they look like the Russian prisoners she used to see), but they have come down a serious step because they don't look *German*.

There are more things like this. Later on, she writes, about the Russians, that "Thievishness is deep in them." and talks about how when she herself was traveling in Russia, people stole happily and all the time. And she talks about how amazing it must have been for the Russian soldiers to see in what self-assured "culture" the Germans had lived. I was just so struck by her sense of herself and her nationality, because I had already otherwise before been struck with this woman's unbelievable equanimity and seeming generosity of spirit, her evenhandedness.

I have to say, after I finished the book I was walking around Berlin wondering whether this is how Germans, or many of them, still think. I do know, and have known for a long time, that as an American so much of what I say, do, eat, wear, etcetera seems barbaric to Germans. But the way this woman put it seems to have brought home to me much more strongly the sense of people having been brought up to know: we do things a certain way. We are civilized, we are cultured, there is one right way to do most things and we do it that way, and boy do we feel sorry for all the rest of the world! (And boy, must they all wish they were us.)

Now, things may have changed completely since 1945 and of course in so many ways they have. But what she expresses about her own thoughts matches well enough with what I've heard people say that I can imagine they still think in similar ways.

Anyway, I thought this book was amazing. It was amazingly well written under duress (hubby is reading it now and finding it difficult to believe it could really have been written so well under those conditions), it uncovers all kinds of questions and ideas about how people act and react under extreme conditions, and to me it really was thought-provoking about how men and women differ in their reactions to rape (and maybe that can be generalizable to how people react to violence depending on whether it happened to them or to someone close to them but not themselves). 

Hope you have a chance to read this book too. Tell me what you think. 

relationship between men and women

jokes

different responses by different families (honor etc.; virgins etc.)

German arrogance

time change after all

turns out my computer was right and I was wrong: the time did change in Berlin last night! Who knew? There was nothing about it in the papers or anywhere like that . . . I could swear I even discussed the time change with several people last week and NOBODY said it was now.

p.s. re planning meals

This week's resolution, by the way, is to plan my meals out a little further ahead. I tend to go to the store, see a bunch of foods that look promising and/or look for ones I've heard or thought about at a  meeting or elsewhere, and then buy a bunch of things that are good for me to eat.

But then there they all are and they're going bad or they have to be processed so I either have to throw them out or I have to eat them all at once and then I've eaten way too much or I haven't eaten any of them or I have to spend a huge amount of time processing them, and then there's still too much.

So this week, I said out loud in the meeting and I wrote it down for the leader and I put it in practice when I got home, I'm planning meals. I wrote down on one page of my notebook a lot of different foods I'd like to eat and buy and cook and all; on another page I wrote down what days and meals there are to be dealt with (we were going to be going out a lot), and then I made a little calendar grid and started planning meals for different times.

Didn't get the whole week planned and gridded out but it did help, did get me making more different things, including even some things to share with the family (hooray!), and buying less all at a time, and even making some things in smaller quantities. I'm trying to use the existence of the lists and the grids to assuage my anxiety that if I don't buy whatever it is right now, I'll forget to ever buy it.

Humbled

Last time I posted re Weight Watchers, I think, I was on this trajectory where I was losing a kilo a day for a few days in a row. I was already worrying about how I would explain the 7-kilo weight loss after a week.

Well, it didn't happen that way, and in fact it's been up and down. I'm slowly, slowly lowering my weight, with some upward bumps. I've done a few things differently. 

I've tried just eating what my family's eating, when we go out. That was interesting. 

I've tried using the German weight watcher system where certain foods you can eat as much as you need or want to be satisfied in a meal, with a flat point rate for those. That's actually doing me well. (Can you say that?) I think I end up eating better, and mostly, I crave less in the way of in-between snacks.

As always, if I get my sleep I do so much better re not needing snacks.

Of course, if I ever get back to writing or editing in a serious way I'm going to have to deal with the problem there that I find is almost impossible not to want to be chewing on something while I'm trying to write or edit. 

I do find it interesting that there is still so much more to learn. And, I guess a little more understandably, there are still so many ways in which I can work on changing habits. This is year 5 of the great Weight Watcher go-round. Year 1 I just lost weight every week, for a total of 80 pounds. Year 2 I just treaded water basically but ended up about 10 or so pounds heavier by the end of the year, maybe it was 20. (Clarification: Felix is reading over my shoulder and points out this could be misread: I was 10 or 20 pounds heavier than at the end of year 1.) And so on like that. In year 3 I read new books, learned some new things. Towards the end of year 3 I set a new goal, in year 4 I met it and was redefined as a success for having lost and kept off 75 pounds, rather than as a failure for not having lost 90 pounds. In year 5 I started trying to keep a journal that was going to help in many ways. And of course, in year 5, knowing full well that I had knocked myself out to establish routines that worked for me, I came to Berlin, to knock all my routines sideways.

Wish me luck! This morning I weighed 81.7 (I think) kilos with nothing on. When I start weighing 82 kilos or less at the meeting, with my clothes AND shoes on and post-breakfast and post-jog, then I don't have to pay for the meetings. In Bloomington I hadn't been paying in a while.

Gospel Choir in disarray

OK, so the choir I did join, just for a weekend: I'm glad I did it, but it was wild.

First of all, it was truly on the other side of town. But of course, first of all, everything is, and besides, the trains are great. So I read.

I got there and found it, trusty map in hand (going straight from a boat trip for our whole institute, families and staff and all), and made my way inside a forbidding-looking large double wooden door with bars on the windows at the far bubble end of a round cul-de-sac (not like a cul-de-sac in the States with countryside all around - somehow here they fit cul-de-sacs into the middle of nonstop streets and buildings and playgrounds and stores and more streets and people, people, people, bikes, kids). Found a lovely far-from-forbidding inner courtyard there, with a woman standing in the large arched (I think) entryway to the courtyard looking at signs, and asked if she was there for the choir. Long story short, she was, she was early, I was early, but we went in together, found the bathrooms (important: we were going to spend hours upon hours upon hours there), and found our seats together.

Being all proper and playing it safe I Siezed her (pronounced Zeetsed), i.e. used the formal you. And in the gradually filling room around us (filling almost exclusively with women), people were buzzing and talking and mostly using Du (familiar you) but I kept playing it safe. (Later it became clear the choir director was calling us all Du and I asked: people told me, "in choirs you always say "du" to each other.) 

(Aside about that: in my Nordic Walking group on Wednesday (striding through the woods with long poles in our hands) I also asked about it,  because the previous week our leader, who officially/formally would be Frau Doktor somebody-or-other, seemed to have called me both Du and Sie at different times. I asked, and she said "Yes, well, athletes always say "du" to each other". But then she added "But sometimes I slip and say "Sie"." Very confusing. More on this later.)

I don't want (actually, I do want, but I'm restraining myself) to tell all about the choir weekend in gory detail. In a nutshell, there we were, and first we suddenly found out that we were going to be learning choreography, not just songs.

Then we found out that our choir director's choir (she was brought in from Bremerhaven), which was supposed to have come along, which would have made our lives easier (they would know what they were doing, and we would lean on them), wasn't coming after all (their sponsor dropped out).

Then it became abundantly clear that the choir director herself had the flu and was getting sicker and sicker as the weekend progressed. She was going to belt out the main parts of a lot of the songs and we were just supposed to be the backup on the choruses and things. And she was fabulous when she did belt, but she could do it less and less and clearly also had less and less oomph and energy to teach us things, do things with us, help us out.

Then she kept saying, trust us (she had two assistants with her). Trust us. 

Well, we sang twice for people on Sunday, after 3 hours together Friday night and about 10 hours on Saturday. And we never did trust her and we were right not to. It wasn't a complete fiasco because some of the songs were nice, and my family and my neighbors, who came to church on Sunday morning to hear and see us, thought it was just fine from the outside. And mostly, I made a couple of friends, for which I am extremely glad.

However, as a choir, we were very insecure and missed an awful lot of cues. We altos really had a hard time remembering what we were supposed to sing (we were tempted to sing along with either the sopranos or the poor tenors, who were made up of a couple of young men (who were there sporadically) and maybe 6 or 8 brave women), and we couldn't see or hear the director very well (in the afternoon concert, we could not see or hear her *at all*).

Everyone was annoyed because on the Saturday afternoon we spent a number of hours playing sort of get-to-know-you games, playacting games, things like that. We were in a circle of 50 people or so and spent a few hours doing this, when our director had promised us we would be practicing our individual parts, which we sorely needed. A lot of the others, who unlike me are busy tied-in people in Berlin, were truly irritated because they had put all their busy things aside to do this choir weekend, but we were really, it felt like, just marking time together. (I thought getting-to-know-you games might not be so terrible but it did end up being poorly run, and we spent a couple of hours playing some game where basically 6 or 7 people participated and everybody else watched. Not so good.)

And we felt dissed in many ways - Sunday afternoon we were supposed to be there at 3 to practice, at 3:30 we hadn't started and she threw us out of the church so she could concentrate on something; she never told us what we were about to sing; she never really gave us a clear account of how many times we would sing the various choruses in a row, which seemed to keep changing, so that when we were actually performing on Sunday afternoon, since we altos couldn't see or hear her, we were pretty lost!

However, I went somewhere new, did something different, met very nice people, and so I'm glad of it. I thought since it was so far from where we live I'd never see these people again but in fact I exchanged contact info with three of them (one soprano, one tenor, and my special alto buddy) and on Friday I went for a wonderful long walk with my alto buddy, and we talked German about 1/3 of the time and English the rest, because she doesn't get as many chances to talk English as she'd like (she's an English teacher when she isn't organizing and leading bike tours around Berlin). 

But what a chaotic weekend!

Choirs are the German book group

Since I hit Berlin I've been asking all the people I already knew and all the people I've met whether they are in a book group and whether they know anybody in a book group and whether I can join. Since that is my great source of happiness and connection at home. 

The answer is no. They are not in a book group, they don't know anybody in a book group (OK, untrue, a few people did, but the connections appear to be pretty distant - and one book group has disbanded).

On the other hand, after I signed up for a weekend gospel choir workshop I found out that just about everybody in Germany is in a choir, used to be in a choir, wants to be in a choir, or is about to be in a choir! The dinner I was very late to on Saturday night because of the workshop: everybody there when I got there said they'd been talking about how they envied me and how they missed their days in the choir. The people who aren't in book groups: turns out they're in choirs. The neighborhood newsletters dropped in our mailbox, the info sheets hubby's institute gave us at the beginning . . . full of choirs!

Now, if only I could a. really read music, and/or b. still sing soprano, and/or c. manage to remember alto parts (as opposed to the melody, which I apparently always sang when I was a soprano) so I could sing with the altos, I too could be part of this great German multitude of choirs. Stay tuned!