New York – Berlin: A Tale of Two Unequal Cities

Here’s a link to my latest blog post on NPRBerlin.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/nprberlinblog/2012/05/01/151701077/new-york-and-berlin-a-tale-of-two-unequal-cities

It’s about the vast differences between the two cities when it comes to handicap access to public transportation.

New Story on The World: Germans and Bike Helmets

I’ve always wondered about the lack of bike helmets in Germany — or in many other European countries for that matter. But in Germany it seemed especially odd to me since the country has tons of rules for everything else.

Here’s a piece on Germans and bike helmets that ran on The World on April 23: http://www.theworld.org/2012/04/bicycle-helmet-germany/

Here’s what traffic in downtown Berlin looks like sometimes:

The First Berlin Seder

It was very pleasant and quite different. Held in the Kulturbrauerei — a fairly massive and complicated complex near the Eberswalder Ubahn station:

Startseite

Seder was hosted by Keren of Keren’s Kitchen — it was a Veggie Seder/Israeli inspired and the languages in the room were mainly English and Hebrew.

When this happens it always makes me feel badly about hating Hebrew School and not paying attention.

Main course was peppers stuffed with rice (the Sephardim eat that on Pesach — a tradition I’ve adopted!), creamy scalloped potatoes and salmon. Yummm. No chicken and matzoh ball soup here — though there was a veggie broth with some kind of matzoh balls, though they were a bit different than what I’m used to.

 

 

 

Tonight it’s back to tradition at the Juedische Gemeinde Center on the Fasanenstrasse.

FYI — I desperately need some matzohs. The ones I brought from the States are stale, to say the least, though they are edible if you toast them. Toasting Matzoh is an art, though, because the pieces are so thin, they easily burn. Any folks in Berlin with an extra box of Matzoh they’d be willing to sell me until I can get to a store on Tuesday — give a holler. You’ll be doing a mitzvah!

Hag Sameach – Happy Passover

Tonight is the first night of Passover. It falls right in line this year with Easter. Here in Germany today is Karfreitag and of course everything is closed as it will be on Monday — Oster Montag. That’s what you get for having no separation between church and State.

I’m going to two very different seders here. Tonight is a more “alternative” one at the Kulturbrauerei in Prenzlauer Berg, which has become ultra trendy. It’s being put on by Keren’s Kitchen  http://kerenskitchen.com/  a vegetarian, ergo kosher, catering service.

Tomorrow it’s Passover at the Jewish Community — a seder put on by the egalitarian Oranienburger Strasse synagogue. I rather like this congregation though the rabbi, Gesa Ederberg, is not for everyone. She’s a convert to Judaism, which rubs some people the wrong way, though it’s not supposed to. I suspect this seder will be more like the ones I know from my childhood.

For any of you who are not familiar with the Jewish holiday of Passover — the story is pretty well layed out in Charlton Heston’s Ten Commandments movie. Like many Jewish holidays, it centers around a group of people who are trying to wipe out the Jews. The Jews have few resources — in this story they are slaves in Egypt — but they manage to triumph (thanks to Moses). And of course eating is a big part of the holiday, as it is with most Jewish holidays, sans, of course, Yom Kippour.

Anyway…Happy Passover — or Easter — or Spring (for the heathens among us)

Germany’s view of US Healthcare – Part Two

So they put the audio up: http://www.theworld.org/2012/03/germany-health-care/

And for you tech savvy folks, it’s also up on Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/theworld/why-germans-dont-have-a

This was one of the most important stories I’ve done in a fairly long career in journalism. It’s been pretty well received so far — it was played by 716 people on Soundcloud.

Let me know what you think!

Germany’s view of the U.S. healthcare debate

I did a piece for The World on the above topic. Here’s the print version: http://www.theworld.org/2012/03/germany-health-care/

They don’t have the audio up yet. I’ll post it when it’s there.

For those of you in Portland — listen in at 3:00 pm on 91.5 FM and let me know what you think.

Sorry it’s been ages since I’ve posted to this blog. Things have been busy.

A few thoughts on Christian Wulff

The former president of Germany is off the front page and will likely stay there until something new comes up about his finances. Yesterday one of the local papers ran a picture with a caption about his family moving back to their home in Lower Saxony.

There was a lot of fuss here over the last months about what the president did — or allegedly did — with regards to his finances, loans from friends, peddling of influence. I have no idea what is true or not and state investigators are looking into it. If what he did was illegal, he should be prosecuted, just like anyone else. But it did seem to me that there was a  lot of fuss made for what I suspect many politicians (and a lot of journalists) do all the time — take advantage of their position. It was especially interesting since the president in Germany is a very ceremonial role — a lot like the vice president in the United States.

One of the best editorials I’ve read about this whole thing ran last Thursday in the Berliner Zeitung. It was the day the memorial service for the 10 people killed by neo-Nazis was held. Eight of them had Turkish backgrounds, one Greek and one was a policewoman. Wulff was instrumental in getting the service organized. He was to have spoken at the ceremony, but resigned before it took place. For German readers here’s a link to the whole story:

http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/meinung/leitartikel-zur-gedenkfeier-all-den-vielen-opfern-des-rechtsextremismus,10808020,11696392.html

The key, for me, is the editorial’s final graph. It was written by Arno Widmann (no relation):  “Wir haben ein schlechtes Gedächtnis. Wir sind gut im Wegschauen, und wir haben eine große Routine darin, uns am nächsten Tag mit dem nächsten Thema zu beschäftigen. Aber vielleicht sähe es in unserem Land auch besser aus, wenn der investigative Journalismus sich mit eben der Energie und dem Elan auf die zahlreichen ungeklärten rechtsradikalen Übergriffe stürzen würde, wie er es gerade so bravourös tat, um die kleinen legalen und womöglich illegalen, jedenfalls meist ein wenig schmuddeligen Pfennigfuchsereien des Bundespräsidenten Christian Wulff aufzudecken.”

It basically says: Germans have a guilty conscience and are good at looking away. We’ve developed a strong routine about moving on to the next topic with the next day. But maybe it would look better in our country if investigative journalism would devote as much energy and effort to the numerous unsolved radical right assaults as it did to  bravely uncover the tiny legal and possibly illegal petty deeds of President Christian Wulff.

Well said. Be nice if the “investigative machines” moved on to the radical right, but I don’t think that will happen. The presidential “discussion” has now moved onto whether it’s okay or not for Joachim Gauck, the likely next president, to move into the Bellevue presidential palace with a girlfriend and not a wife. He’s been dating a journalist for more than a decade, but they aren’t legally married. Maybe she can get the discussion to move in a different direction?

The individual versus the group

Here’s a story I just posted on NPRBerlin’s blog! Hope things are well.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/nprberlinblog/

An interesting afternoon…

I went to the Jeanette Wolff senior center, one of Jewish old age homes in Berlin on Wednesday, to speak with the mother of a friend of mine.

Inge Borg Marcus will be 90 on Feb. 4.

This is not her apartment — I forgot my camera (aargh) — but it is pretty typical of what one looks like.

I originally went to speak with her because she is a long time member of the city’s Jewish community I wanted to get an historical view about the community’s many political and financial problems.

But we ended talking a lot about her childhood and the Nazi years.

Inge is one of those people many American Jews can’t understand. She was born in Berlin and  went to school here. She  was kicked out of school on Nov. 10, 1938 after the Kristallnacht Pogrom put her father, like thousands of Jewish men, under arrest. She left Berlin for England in April of 1939.

Her parents never got out. They were murdered in Auschwitz.

Yet after the war she reconnected in Paris with a teenage flame. They got married, had their first child there.

And in 1950, they moved back to Berlin.

Many people I know — including several family members — cannot understand that. My Uncle Al, in fact, bitterly complained to my mother when I made my first work trip to Germany in 1987, with the intention of staying one year. I remained for nearly nine.

“It’s not nice that a Jewish girl lives in Germany.”

My mother didn’t defend me. She didn’t like the idea either. Never mind that none of Uncle Al’s four grandchildren married someone Jewish.

Germany was different.

So when I brought this up to Inge, she nodded her head and said she understood all the criticisms.

“But you have to know they weren’t all bad,” she said, referring to non-Jewish Germans. Inge said she was the only Jewish student at her high school, but was not picked on. She also said their neighbors in the building where they lived were very nice to them.

Inge’s parents were able to live in their apartment until they were deported in 1941. Most other Jews were herded out of their apartments into ghetto-areas where Jews were kept.

“If someone in the apartment building had complained that they didn’t want to live near Jews, my parents would have been out of there like that” she said as she snapped her still quite nimble fingers.

She said they returned to Germany because her husband wanted to see what remained there . They also wanted to make claims for their property and needed to file reparations claims.

And Inge told herself if she returned to Germany, she would do all she could to help rebuild the Jewish community.

And that she did.

Though this is a file photo, it represents what Inge does on a regular basis — She speaks to young Germans about her experiences as a 16-year old     German girl in 1938 in Nazi Deutschland. She talks about being lucky to be able to get to England, but the horribleness of having to leave her parents behind.

   And about the importance of building up the Jewish community in Berlin after the war. I’m very grateful Inge and others did this. I’m not sure I would have been able to do the same.

Need some help

I’m working on a story that has to do with the obsession Germans often have for rules. I’m looking for some examples of rules that are either

1. really obscure

2. funny

3. seem to be very illogical

As an example: You can take your dog into many restaurants here and into some cafes but you can’t take your dog into a cafe that is also a bakery.

I really don’t get this one and no one so far has been able to explain it to me. I think it might have something to do with a bakery having a production facility on the premises. But a restaurant is also producing food.

Anyway…if some of you could help me out with examples, I’d be grateful.

Schoenes Wochenende. It’s finally supposed to be sunny here, but of course Pauline has an INDOOR soccer tournament this weekend. Which just goes to show you that you can still be a soccer mom without a car. Go Hertha 03 Zehlendorf!