Parenting in the Shadows of Atrocity

Pictures from a few hours ago:

We're in the mountains. The sky is preternaturally blue. Maybe I'm in Colorado.

An airplane approaches, too low. It breaks into two pieces. There's no fire, smoke, or explosion. The fuselage just snaps in two, breaking right behind the wings. It goes down instantly, silently.

In the dream, everyone knows it's September 12. Oddly, I'm the only one who immediately realizes that this isn't just a technical malfunction.

I wake up. Sometimes, commemoration doesn't involve flag pins or pious moments of silence. Sometimes, it's neurotic and lonely and feels as real as the rubble of history.

********

We haven't yet told our kids about the 9/11 attacks. Each year, we keep the news off the TV and radio so that the Bear won't pick up on the story. I realize he needs to hear about it from us before he hears about it from other kids; I know that time is running out on our policy of avoidance. He was not quite two in 2001. It was easy to shield him, then, and he was too young to ask why my eyes were so red-rimmed.

Now, as he approaches his ninth birthday, he's a very sensitive kid - so much so that he asks me to turn off NPR if a report about the Iraq War comes on. He understands that war is not a game, that it's about death and destruction. I've never discouraged him from gun-play because it's never really come up; he's scared of guns, plain and simple.

He's familiar with the word "terrorist." He knows about the shoe bomber. We fly regularly and he hates taking off his shoes for security. I explained that a bad guy tried to sneak a bomb onto a plane in his shoes, and that it won't happen now because the TSA is watching for it. I believe this is true. Something else will happen, but it won't be a shoe bomb.

It's much easier to provide reassurances about those attacks that never happened.

How do I explain falling buildings? How do I make sense of the kind of zealotry that guides a plane into a skyscraper? How do I assure him that we can still get on a plane without fear?

I'm not looking for advice. Legions of child psychologists dished out tips on managing our children's fears after 9/11. None of it struck me as very helpful. These are questions without an answer, and I know it.

Maybe I'm overprotective. I think it's more complicated than that.

********

I'm a historian. I don't understand how people can be "history buffs." History is not a hobby. History is a chronicle of atrocity, disaster, and horror. Every once in a while the archives give you a glimpse of love or heroism or honor. Mostly, it's war, plague, oppression, and one child in five dying as an infant.

I am as thin-skinned as my Bear. I cried the first time I saw Night and Fog - not discreet, dignified tears, but big gulping sobs. My doctoral adviser was sitting right next to me. I was afraid she'd conclude that if I lost it while watching a documentary on the Holocaust, I wasn't tough enough to study German history professionally. Instead, she kindly told me: There would be something wrong with you if this left you untouched. Once I'd calmed down, I realized she was right.

It's possible to be that thin-skinned and still stare down history without blinking. I want that for my children. I don't want them to become impervious.

Given that my kids are half German, they'll have to live with the legacy of the Holocaust. From me, their American mother, they inherit the legacy of slavery and the persecution of American Indians. We've talked about this things in age-appropriate ways. The Bear knows about slavery, Martin Luther King, and Huckleberry Finn. He knows Germany had a very bad ruler who was mean to the Jews and started a huge war when his Oma was a little girl. There's time enough for the harsh details when he's old enough put them into context: A great-grandfather who made his peace with the Nazis. A great-grandmother who was killed in an air raid while his Oma was buried alive. The deportations and the death camps.

Is it ever possible, really, to put such stories into context? Or do we just learn to hold ourselves at an ostensibly safe distance?

********

I also don't want my children to be ruled by fear, which is surely what will happen if they're exposed young to all the world's dangers. We have become a nation of cowards that specializes in saber-rattling. We are "governed" by chickenhawks who think invading Iraq worked out so well, we might as well take on Iran and Russia next. I don't want to raise my sons with the sort of false bravado that becomes a defense against otherwise unmanageable fears.

The same people who peddle fear promise to deliver us from it. Vote for them, and they'll snuff out the evildoers all around the globe. Give them power, and we'll be freed of the stuff of our nightmares.

I don't want that freedom, bought with the blood of innocents. I want a leader who will say yes, there is evil in the world, and I can't make all your bad dreams go away. I want to hear that even when the world bristles with real threats, we can be brave without being belligerent.

I want to be told that it's our job to be the grown-ups.

About Those Supposedly Anal-Retentive Germans ...

I'm back in my verdant garden, and I'm loving it. But goshdarnit, I do miss Berlin - warts, dog poop, and all.

Berlin contradicts lots of stereotypes about Germans. While there are pockets of stodginess, most of the city's younger inhabitants (and by younger, I mean under age 60!) appreciate nonconformity and human variety. Berlin has an openly gay mayor and it's just no big deal. You see punks and anarchists and eager young politicians and artists and students and little old ladies with ridiculous small dogs. You see lots of red, orange, and purple hair. (Call me sentimental, but I just dyed my hair red today; while I'm not quite Nicole Kidman, it looks pretty great.)

The city also puts to rest the idea that Germans are anal-retentively obsessive about cleanliness. Sure, in the south and in most villages, everything is shiny and well-groomed. I've seen people actually rake the gravel in front of their houses into neat, straight lines just to maintain order.

But when you arrive in Berlin, you're liable to slip and fall in a pile of dog shit within your first 48 hours. (This happened to my own dear mom once.) I can't say I love this trait of Berliners, who own some 150,000 dogs according to one estimate. According to my personal estimate, I'd say about 1 turd in 100 gets picked up.

Like any big city, Berlin also has human denizens who regard the world as their potty. Our subway station smelled particularly vile this summer. Apparently someone is trying to reassert order and sanitation on this one count (and I'm all for it), because this lovely sign was posted just outside the station:

Photo by me, Sungold. The sign says "entryway under video surveillance."

What I adore about this sign is that it's not homemade. Someone is mass producing these beauties.

Threat Level: Tiger Orange

I'm back in Ohio after an almost uneventful trip. Almost, because we had a minor adventure in Tegel Airport, before we ever left Berlin.

Tegel is set up as a 12-sided shape,(a dodecagon, my mathematician friend tells me). Each gate has its own waiting area. This is only feasible because Tegel is a quaint little airport with just over 20 gates in total. (Berlin has two other airports.)

Each gate has its own security checkpoint because that's what the geometry dictates. Centralization is a national pastime in Germany. Tegel is decentralized only because everything else is a mathematical impossibility.

So we're unloading all of our carry-ons onto the belt, and noticing that the security crew seems half-trained and uncertain, and trying to keep an eye out so neither kids nor laptops disappear - when suddenly the belt stops, and stays stopped, with our last two bags trapped inside the x-ray machine.

At first we assume the computer system has frozen up. I figure someone would try rebooting it, but no, the guards have called for outside help. And so we wait.

After maybe ten minutes, there's no sign of any tech geek. Instead, three burly, uniformed police officers appear. This is the first sign that maybe it's not a technical glitch after all.

On the x-ray equipment's screen, it's evident that the offending baggage is the Tiger's Bob the Builder carry-on. Inside it, you can clearly see the outline of the his LeapPad: a couple of batteries, some circuitry, and an irregular loop that connects the stylus to the rest of the toy. Here's how it looks in action, with the stylus cord clearly visible:


Unfortunately, I can't replicate the x-ray view. Just imagine it looks sort of like this, only way more threatening with its innards exposed:


And so we ask: What's the holdup?

"Wir warten auf den Hund." We're waiting for the dog.

Oh dear. They've called in the bomb squad - on account of my son, the Tiger.

As my sister later commented: "We know he can be a terror. But a terrorist?"

The dog eventually appears, frolicking around the equipment with his tongue lolling about. He seems completely unimpressed with the Tiger's foray into international terror. Then again, as any parent knows who's spent hours with a noise-making toy, maybe the LeapPad is the most dangerous item on board. So we unpack it, make it go doodle-doodle-doot, and repack Bob the Builder just as boarding begins.

It's not all that surprising that German airport security is just as paranoid as the American version. They've had over thirty years practice, ever since the Red Army Faction provoked panic in the late 1970s.

The rest of the trip was easy, including re-entry into the U.S., which always makes me nervous. No one confiscated our laptops at the U.S. border; we didn't end up stranded in O'Hare even though oodles of connecting flights were delayed. In Columbus, we managed to fit all ten of our bags into our old Saturn sedan without even having to strap one of the kids to the top. (I did have one carry-on under my feet, though.) To stay awake on the drive home, I ate not one but two Krispy Kreme donuts on the way home - one glazed, one maple frosted. They were divine.

It's great to be back.

In Transition, Again

I probably won't get a chance to post anything substantive for the next couple of days; I'm flying back to Ohio, leaving Berlin behind.

Here's what I'll see when the plane takes off, assuming the fine weather holds. This is the view from the Siegessäule (the reward for climbing up those 285 steps, and then - painfully - back down them). It's also more or less the vista that Barack Obama saw from the ground when he spoke here; he stood at the base of the Siegessäule. The spire is the TV tower that the East German government built to show how high-tech they were. At the end of the street, you can see the Brandenburg Gate.

In Praise of Political Correctness

"Agonised Clowns" - photo by Flickr user tallkev, used under a Creative Commons license.

I don't usually have much use for political correctness. I'd much rather have a free-wheeling discussion. When I teach women's studies, I make that clear on day one, though it usually takes a couple of weeks until the great majority of my new students trust that I mean it. The result is that even Republican supporters of pregnancy crisis centers feel free to speak their minds - and I've developed nice relationships with people whose views are the polar opposite of my own.

But darn it, I hit my limit last night.

I was out at a beer garden with my family, having dinner before my mother-in-law took the night train home. This is something I love about Germany. A beer garden can be a perfectly nice environment for kids. This one, the Johannesgarten, has a slightly ramshackle, dusty playground.

I'm equally delighted by the fact that the Johannesgarten is run by the Johanniskirche - St. John's (Lutheran) Church - in the verdant space next to its sanctuary. Imagine even the United Church of Christ or the Unitarians doing something like this in the U.S.! The idea is to reach people where they live, and so this congregation also hosts puppet shows for kids and other neighborhood activities.

Last night, the Johannesgarten hosted a free variety show, and as always the intent was good. Right away it was clear that the emcee wasn't very funny. That alone would've been fine. I know lots of funny Germans - I don't last long with humorless people - and there's also a growing number of hilarious, talented people in the German comedy scene. Even so, lots of the mainstream, mass-media humor tends to be pretty hokey.

The show took an ugly turn, though, when his sidekick appeared onstage. The emcee introduced him as Blondie. The sidekick was a black man. And his schtick was the most unreconstructed Steppin Fetchit act I'd ever seen.

I don't know what I found more disturbing: That the show's sponsors at the church thought this was okay. Or that at least half of the audience convulsed in giggles at the name Blondie. Or that some unemployed black actor felt compelled to take on this humiliating role.

I wouldn't argue that German society is more racist than American. It's certainly more overtly racist, simply because "political correctness" hasn't pressured people to examine their stereotypes about race (apart from anti-Semitism, which is discussed at length in the schools). People of my mother-in-law's generation (over 70) have loads of unreconstructed racist notions. But then again, a lot of stand-up comedy in the U.S. plays with stereotypes - including racial ones. It's virtually never funny in the U.S. either. A lot of the laughter stems from embarrassment. I'd like to think that was true for part of the Johannisgarten audience as well.

At any rate, for a few moments I found myself yearning for a bracing dose of political correctness. Not just because I was offended and embarrassed - though that was my main beef - but also because there's just no way to be entertained after you've seen the Jim Crow era come alive onstage. Even the quite good Parisian juggler couldn't tickle me. I was just deeply relieved when it was time to get my mother-in-law to her train.

It turns out that it's not so-called political correctness but racism that's the mortal enemy of humor.

Song of the Earth

I don't have much to say for myself tonight because I spent the day trying to finish a translating job and then went on an actual date.

We heard Mahler's Lied von der Erde - Song of the Earth - played by the German Youth Orchestra at the Konzerthaus (which I will always call by its old name, the Schauspielhaus) in the former East Berlin. The orchestra was just a bunch of kids, really, aged 14 to 19. They blew away lots of older, more professional musicians.

Interestingly, in light of how long Germany's top orchestras were male dominated (the Berlin Philharmonic still had only a handful of women 20 years ago), the youth orchestra was predominantly female. I'm curious to see how they'll transform the music landscape over the next 20 years.

I know Mahler isn't everyone's thing. People fall into two categories, I guess: those who adore Mahler and think he expresses the whole range of human experience, and those who think he's just noisy, overblown, and in bad taste. (Well, I guess there's a massive third category, those who don't give a shit about classical music, but they've stopped reading by now.)

I love him partly because music can be heard as pieces for French horns (sometimes small armies of them) accompanied by orchestra, which - as an old horn player - is how I listen to them. I think Mahler manages to capture joyful angst and angst-ful joy. He merges beauty and despair. I didn't just get tears in my eyes; my nose turned a charming shade of blubbery red. Luckily my date knew that about me before he married me.

One of my daylilies from mid-July - it doesn't quite capture the spirit of the Lied von der Erde, but it'll have to do.

Ballsy Denglish Speakers

From I Can Has Cheezburger? (department of desserts).

One source of amusement when you're living in a foreign-to-you language is the endless mistakes you make. I'm sure my husband could regale you with some of my linguistic bloopers, but the humor would probably get lost in translation.

If you speak the globally dominant language, though, you're treated to the natives' adventures with English - here in Berlin, it's Denglish, an alarming blend of Deutsch and English. I had one of those precious moments today.

We were at a memorial for the Berlin Wall that has sort of preserved a small stretch of it, soberly trying to explain to the kids why this broken-down chunk of reinforced concrete mattered so much. In the midst of all this earnestness, the kids spotted an ice cream truck. And so I said sure, why not have a scoop?

Well, it turns out that "a scoop" was nowhere on the menu. You could order chocolate or lemon or Fanta or dino-cola (which made me go WTF? but not enough to try it). Regardless, it came in the form of either a Kugel or a Ball. Or so the sign said. My darling smart-ass husband asked the proprietor, an apparent Berlin native on the far side of sixty, what the difference was, since Kugel and Ball mean pretty much the same thing. They both refer to things spherical.

Just as sober as we'd been with the kids, the ice cream man informed us that a Kugel was, well, a Kugel - the usual German word for a scoop.

And Ball was English - no, American English! - for the same thing.

I was so tickled, it really didn't matter that the ice cream was mediocre or that we were slurping it next to the old death strip.

Beer, Bratwurst, and Bullshit

Via an email from alert reader Kevin K. (who's got a great post on LaRouche supporters posing as PUMAs), I just got wind of a rumor that free beer and bratwurst were available at Obama's Berlin speech last Thursday to entice a larger crowd to show up.

It's total bullshit.

As I reported right after Obama's appearance, there was lots of beer available. There were half-meter long bratwursts for sale, too - I recall this because even though I loathe sausage, a friend of mine was almost hungry enough to buy one. They looked too nasty, and he decided to go hungry instead.

But the point is, they were for sale. No one was offering free food or drink to lure unsuspecting Germans to the event. And let me say I have a keen nose for free comestibles, since I was usually broke in college and grad school.

People need to use their pea-brains! The sheer cost would have been ridiculous. And just assume for a moment - thinking along with the conspiracists - that a candidate wanted to use beer as a lure. You'd then expect to see posters or other advertisements getting the word out in advance. I arrived in Berlin a week earlier than Obama, I've been out and about by bike, subway, and bus, and I can testify: There was no such publicity. The German press didn't make any mention of freebies either - not before the speech, and not afterward. (And yes, I'm highly fluent in German.)

So who's pushing these rumors? The first hits on Google led me to pro-Hillary sites, including this gem from the Hillary Clinton Forum:

Now we know why Obama had such a large crowd. Free Beer, Pizzas, Bratwurst, and two favorite rock bands. All for free. Obama supposedly help share the cost.

Yes, the bands played for free (from the audience perspective). It's possible that the campaign payed for them. It's possible that they volunteered; there's enough grass-roots Obama love here in Germany that this is conceivable. While I'm sure some of the younger audience members would've known the bands, I didn't recognize their names. Everyone around me thought the music was too loud. We weren't there for the free concert.

A blog called Pagan Power is also pushing the rumor. It too seems to subscribe to Hillary revanchism and sports a big PUMA logo. (Since I left a very civil comment there, debunking the rumor, I'd like to refer anyone who followed me back from there to my comments policy at the top of the right column. Feel free to say hello - nicely.)

I'm sure that this rumor is mostly demon spawn of the wingnuts or other Republican ratfuckers. (Update 7/30/08: Two people already asked me offline about the apparent hypocrisy/hilarity of me breaking my own civility rule right after I invoked it for visitors. But ratfucking is actually a technical term. It's what Nixon's minions called their efforts to gum up the Democrats' campaign machinery. It goes back to Donald Segretti and the Young Republicans that came out of USC - including Karl Rove.)

But gosh, you'd think my fellow Democrats would have better things to do. Like rallying around the effort to defeat McCain in November. Because if he wins and we spend the next 100 years in Iraq, you can be sure none of us will be getting any freebies.

(I rarely have a chance to debunk actual breaking news/rumors, since I'm too lazy, too busy with kids and work, and too much a historian at heart anyway. So it's sort of fun to use my perch in Berlin to play journalist.)

Wildlife in the City

What to do when the city starts to stink in the summer heat, as Berlin with its century-old sewers tends to do: Head for the park. What not to do: Make a beeline for the smelliest part in town.

Of course, that's just what we did today. We biked to the Jungfernheide, a big wooded park in the northwest of the city, to visit the wild pigs - Wildschweine - which are so strange and fascinating that we do this every time we're in Berlin.


The ground is bare dirt because they spend most of their time snuffling around in it or - when they want to prettify themselves - bathing in it.


They stop snuffling only when visitors offer to feed them - which, luckily for them, seems to be a pretty constant gig. This pig is showing off her talent at standing on her trotters while my husband feeds her raw spaghetti, their snack of choice.


The adults are not beauties. They have improbably adorable babies, though. We saw about a half-dozen nearly newborn piglets ("Frischlinge") but they were running so fast, my camera didn't stand a chance. (There actually shouldn't be any newborns so late in the year, but these Wildschweine seem to be quite overcrowded in their quarters. Either they're no longer closely managed due to Berlin's financial woes, or someone decided that surplus pigs could be sold to local restaurants at an easy profit.)


Here's what the Frischlinge look like when they're several months old and ready to start competing (mostly unsuccessfully) for their share of spaghetti. Their markings are so cool; I don't know of any other critters that have lengthwise stripes.


On the long bike ride home, we saw a group of five bunnies who were obviously being fed by humans, because they were about two yards from the bike path, yet they didn't flee. No, they weren't as unusual as the Wildschweine - but at least they smelled blessedly neutral.

All photos by me, Sungold. The Wildschweine don't like to hold still and the park is deeply shaded, so although I took dozens of photos, even the best are a bit blurry.

Obama Postgame

I had a pretty good vantage point for Obama's big Berlin speech yesterday. It wasn't - as Salon's Joan Walsh opines - "political brilliance." Nor was it - as Time claims - "a soaring address that invoked echoes of the famous speeches in this city in which John F. Kennedy made common cause with Berliners against communist oppression in 1963 and Ronald Reagan called nearly 20 years ago to tear down the Berlin Wall."

No, Obama's speech didn't make history. But after years of tensions with Europe, Obama's appearance was a lovely gesture of friendship and good will. He offered up a laundry list of mostly good-to-excellent foreign policy initiatives and approaches. But the speech wasn't wonky. He wrapped it all up in a warmly welcomed vision of America as an equal, cooperative partner, which constrastly nicely with the global policeman, cowboy, and rogue state that Germans have perceived over the past eight years. You can read the full text of his speech here or here, and you can also view the video. So instead of summarizing it, I'd rather discuss its reception - a point that the media has analyzed rather superficially, possibly because the respectable press had a comfy perch on risers rather than mingling with the sweaty audience.

The crowd itself was remarkably young. I was probably in the upper quintile as far as age went - and I'm younger than Obama himself. The typical audience member was somewhere in their twenties, and German, although it seemed as though every American in Berlin (except for the one dear soul babysitting my kids) had turned out for the show, along with a noticeable smattering of Italians. The Democrats in Berlin were working their butts off to register voters - a smart tactic, given that the expat community tilts liberal anyway, and I doubt many Republicans bothered with the hour-plus wait at the security checkpoints.

Photo from Obama's campaign, aka Flickr user Barack Obama (!), used under a Creative Commons license. This shot must have been taken about two hours before the speech started, or shortly before I got through security. Note the crush of humanity still behind the barricades; by the end of the evening, this whole area was packed.

Oh, and the crowd was huge. The police are estimating upward of 200,000. The Berliner Morgenpost - a paper known for lowballing crowd size - puts it at about 215,000. I was pretty far enough forward, in the middle of the actual plaza where he spoke; I'd hope to get even closer, but we arrived only two hours before the speech. Also, the crowd was much denser than at Grateful Dead shows, where you could dance your way close to the stage. At any rate, I was far enough forward that I couldn't see the long column of bodies filling the boulevard behind me. And I did get a pretty decent view of Obama, albeit one filtered through the dreadlocks of a guy in front of me. Plus, have I mentioned that Germans are really, really tall? So at just over 5'7" I was craning my neck constantly.

Photo of the view down Strasse des 17. Juni by Flickr user helter-skelter, used under a Creative Commons license. Note the big screen on the left. The trees lining the street are part of Berlin's lovely central park, the Tiergarten.

The set-up did look remarkably like the "fan mile" during the World Cup, complete with giant screens for those not lucky to get as close as I did. Oh, and there were even stands hawking beer, both inside and outside the security checkpoint. When's the last time you could buy beer at a political rally? Now, not too many people were actually drinking it. The weather was hot (mid-80s, but hotter due to all the bodies) and the portapotties so vile that I would've preferred dehydration. But the Berliner Kindl did remind me that I definitely wasn't in Ohio anymore.

Photo by me, Sungold. Berliner Kindl is not a very good beer, by German standards.

Another thing that I don't recall ever seeing at a major political rally, including Kerry/Edwards in Dayton in 2004 or Michelle Obama's stop in Athens, Ohio: There were no preliminaries. No introductions apart from his name. Once the security helicopter hovered low as his motorcade arrived, it was all Obama.

Photo by Sungold - you can see the security copter to the left of the Siegessäule.

Obama began with a reference to the Berlin Airlift (which, as I've said more than once before, is politically smart to tap into) but belabored the story much longer than necessary for his live audience. Even a young crowd of Germans is on top of the history. He also relied on clichés and oversimplifications. Do we really still believe that the Soviet tanks were ready to roll westward? I wasn't the only one who criticized this: We were hanging with an old friend who is German, Jewish, and a historian, and she would just as happily have deleted that whole section of the speech. I can only think that both the excess detail and the oversimplification were geared to his audience in the States. Or maybe his speechwriters just missed the mark.

Politically, too, the first section of the speech was somewhat misguided. Obama devoted too much attention to the old Soviet menace. Sure, Berlin's significance comes largely from its Cold War history. But as my husband said afterward, you can't demonize the Soviets at the start of the speech and then credibly ask them for greater cooperation at the end of it. Somewhere in the middle, you'd have to express some grounds for friendship - but that didn't happen.

The problem is, the farther the Cold War recedes into the past, the harder it is for a visiting politician to tap into Berlin's former drama. When Kennedy came here, the city felt besieged, and the Wall was like a fresh laceration running through the city. Without the barbed wire and gun turrets, no politician who visits here can summon up the same tension or significance. That's why Clinton's 1994 speech was not especially memorable - and why it's now virtually impossible to give a "historic speech in Berlin." In fact, despite all the pre-speech analogies between Obama and JFK, this city is probably the one place where the comparison is most doomed.

So, while Obama's repeated references to the Wall and the airlift worked fairly well as metaphors, they were also predictable and went on too long. They weren't able to catapult his speech into the realm of history. For that, he'd have to do something new and different - like he did when he addressed race in America last winter. That was a historic speech.

Photo by Flickr user azrael74, used under a Creative Commons license. Alas, I got no picture of my own because my camera's battery was dying by this point and so zooming was out of the question, never mind the dreadlocks in front of me.

When Obama turned to his vision of American in the world, the crowd warmed up. However, there was one real clunker (as the UK's Guardian notes, too): His call for greater NATO involvement in Afghanistan and in fighting Al Qaeda drew only very muted, polite applause - and quite a few skeptical remarks from the people in my vicinity. Including me. I agree that the Taliban remains a problem, and that we can't just turn our back on it. But what Afghanistan lacks is a functioning civil society and the rule of law. I'm not convinced that continuing to attack Pakistani military bases (oops!) and Afghan wedding parties (double oops!) is going to foster either of those things.

But if Obama's anti-terror rhetoric struck a Berlin crowd as leaden and misguided, that's probably because that snippet of the speech was aimed entirely at his home audience. Lo and behold, MSNBC took the bait with the headline "In Berlin, Obama urges war against terror" and the following lede:

Before the largest crowd of his campaign, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama on Thursday summoned Europeans and Americans together to "defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it" as surely as they conquered communism a generation ago.

In fact, this was a tiny part of the speech. I think Obama sincerely believes we need to act more aggressively in Afghanistan and Pakistan (he said this already during the primary). But I really wish he didn't feel compelled to play the rhetorical game of invoking 9/11 and Al-Qaeda.

The rest of his speech got a truly warm reception. As another longtime German friend of mine said afterward, "I wasn't impressed with the first half, but by the end I was satisfied." And so was I.

Here's what people loved best, judging from the clapping, whoops, and hollers:

Obama's thank-yous to his German hosts drew a big (but sympathetic) laugh when he totally mangled the pronunciation of Chancellor Angela Merkel (evidently no one told him that the E is pronounced like a long A, so it came out "Murkle") and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit (which is admittedly a mouthful even if you know the language).

The longest, strongest applause came when Obama promised to bring the war to a close:

And despite past differences, this is the moment when the world should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close.

Nearly equal enthusiasm met his call to negotiate with Iran, contain nuclear weapons, and rebuild the Atlantic partnership. He twice invoked the genocide in Darfur and mentioned Zimbabwe's crisis as well - two issues he needs to bring before an American audience as well. His Berlin audience appreciated it; I personally would have liked to hear him say more about our responsibility to Africa.

People also clapped long and hard for Obama's pledge to finally take responsibility for America's emissions:

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya. ... This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations – including my own – will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

Statements like this one - which expressed a healthy humility - aren't necessarily going to win over voters in Colorado or North Dakota or Ohio. And that's why I think Obama wasn't entirely blowing smoke when he started his speech by saying, "Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world." Sure, there was a bit of pandering on terrorism, but the speech was much more geared to rebuilding European-American relations.

Apart from his promise to end the war, this line brought possibly the longest, warmest applause at all:

The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

Sucker that I am, I got a little teary - not just at the sentiment, but at the stark contrast between this rhetoric and Bush's cowboy posturing. I was almost embarrassed - until I saw the tall, blonde, German woman next to me surreptitiously dabbing at her eyes, too. (Then my husband said, "What about the agnostics?" and the spell dissolved into laughter.)

At the end of the speech, that same woman turned to me and said, "If he can manage to half of these things, you Americans ought to bring back the monarchy." We laughed, and she then said, "Seriously, it does such good to hear these things from an American again."

And then we all trudged homeward. The crowd was so thick that getting out took nearly as long as getting in. But there was impromptu entertainment along the way ...

Photo by Sungold.

... until suddenly the crowd thinned and fresh air flooded in and my German historian friend totally upstaged Obama by spilling the news that - at age 42 and after giving up on it - she's pregnant. And after I'd finished jumping up and down and hollering in celebration, my husband and I hopped on our bikes and rode the breeze home under a fuchsia sunset along the banks of the Spree River.

Swedish Kitties in the Lap of History

Yesterday we went to see a children's play featuring two beloved German characters, a curmudgeonly Swedish recluse named Petterson and his cheeky cat, Findus. Here's the plush version of Findus, which my little Tiger persuaded his dad to buy for him:


Though Petterson and Findus are originally Swedish characters, I suspect they're at least as big here in Germany as in their home country. Like Janosch's Little Bear and Little Tiger, they haven't yet found a translator who could capture the quirky humor of the original in English. And so the only video clips I could find online are in German (like this one) or Swedish (which I'll spare you).

In the film clip, Petterson's well-meaning neighbor, Frau Anderson, is trying to convince him he's getting too eccentric and lonely, and needs to adopt a kitten. Findus arrives in a box of "Findus" brand green peas. Whereupon Petterson offers him a cup of coffee.



The "only in Berlin" part of our experience at the Petterson and Findus stage play was the venue: an outdoor theater right next to the Spandau Citadel. No, that's not Spandau Prison where Rudolf Hess was imprisoned for 40 years after World War II as a Nazi war criminal, and which was then demolished so it wouldn't attract neo-Nazi pilgrims. The Spandau Citadel is a historic building in its own right, though - a well-preserved fortress dating back to the Renaissance, now a museum.


It's set in a lush park and surrounded by a moat. Which even has a drawbridge. As you might imagine, the kids loved that - almost as much as the play.

Photos of the Spandau Zitadelle and its drawbridge by Flickr user Gertrud B., used under a Creative Commons license.

Photo of Findus by me, Sungold.

Obama Meets the World Cup

So it's been decided: Barack Obama will give his big Berlin speech not in front of the Brandenburg Gate, nor in front of the Schöneberg City Hall (where JFK spoke, and where I wanted to see Obama). Instead, he'll appear next to the Siegessäule. That's "Victory Column," in English, but no one here - including the resident English-speakers - ever uses the English name.

Photo of the Siegessäule by Flickr user dionc, used under a Creative Commons license.

Originally, the Siegessäule was build as a memorial commemorating Germany's victories in its wars of unifications in the late 1860s through 1871. The cannon on it are reputedly real ones, seized from the French and then gold plated.

Detail of the Siegessäule cannon by Flickr user azrael74, used under a Creative Commons license.

You might know the Siegessäule as the pedestal for the iconic golden angel in the Wim Wenders movie, Wings of Desire.

Photo of the Siegessäule by Flickr user tin.G, used under a Creative Commons license.

But if you live in Berlin, the Siegessäule has more immediate associations. It was the focal point of the Love Parade, a sort of mobile rave, back when the parade was still held in Berlin. Yes, some people still listen to techno here. You can even find some classic, 1970s-style punks if you now where to look.

More importantly, the Siegessäule's obvious phallic symbolism - not just the monument itself, but all those big golden guns affixed to it - made it an obvious mascot for Berlin's gay community. There's even a mazagine for gay men that uses it as its namesake. (Bizarrely, the monuments Wikipedia pages don't mention this - neither in German nor in English!)

I'm not sure if the Obama campaign is wise to the gay connection. I'd like to think they are. But the campaign has sometimes been tone-deaf on issues related to sexual orientation (though I think Obama's heart is basically in the right place). Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, is openly gay, so this city - with its large and vibrant gay community - would actually be a great place to take a gutsier stand on issues such as marriage equality.

The street between the Siegessäule and the Brandenberg Gate (Strasse des 17. Juni) was most recently used as the "fan mile" when the World Cup was held here in 2006. And that's how the press here is billing Obama's stage - as a new "fan mile." There were reportedly about a million people in that space during the last day of the World Cup, when my beloved Jürgen Klinsmann and his upstart team came to enjoy their accolades. I was there too, even though I had scarlet fever (unbeknownst to me at the time). This is how it looked then (with the Brandenburg Gate done up as a stage, viewed from halfway between the Siegessäule and the Gate):


I have a feeling we won't see quite so many American flags on the coming Thursday, although who knows - the Berliners might be less inhibited about that than the (generally very progressive) expat Americans who live here.

And I'm pretty sure we won't see any of these signs because Klinsi is only married to an American, which doesn't quite make him eligible. More's the pity!


Anyway, the World Cup comparison is yet another sign of how Germans view Obama as a star. And while I don't think he'll attract a million fans, I think he could well draw a larger audience here than he's ever pulled in the United States. I guess I'd better plan to get there early - and find a babysitter for the Tiger, who repeatedly tried to get lost in the crowd during the World Cup.

The last two pictures were taken by my husband.

Ich bin (wieder) ein Berliner

Photo of the Brandenburg Gate by Flickr user http2007, used under a Creative Commons license.

Well, I'm not quite a Berliner again - not until I arrive there blurry of eye and brain on Thursday. Today's a travel day. I'll spend five weeks in Berlin with my family, then get back to Ohio in time for the kids' school to start. Since five weeks is too long to just drop all my work, I'll need to prepare a new class or two while I'm there. (Okay - realistically, just one). If I'm lucky I'll get a bit of translating work, too.

In between working and loitering in cafes and biking along the Spree River and trying out every last playground in the city, I hope I'll get to see Barack Obama when he visits Berlin. Yes, I'm still feeling painfully disillusioned. Yes, I know I never should've nurtured those illusions. It reminds me of when you're fifteen and you fool yourself into thinking the really cute boy you like might actually like you back. Except I'm not fifteen anymore.

I'm not done being pissed at him - but I still want to see him in person. And yeah, I know he was in Zanesville and Dayton, so it's silly to have to schlep to another continent in order to see him. I don't care.

But apparently, high-level officials in both Germany and the United States care quite a lot. Last week, Spiegel Online (via Salon's English translation) reported that Obama wants to speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate. That's where Reagan famously challenged Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this Wall. And where I saw Bill Clinton speak back in 1994, days before my wedding, years before any of us had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky or Ken Starr.

The German Chancellery isn't keen on Obama sharing the same venue as past American presidents. Arguing that electioneering would be improper in front of such a weighty symbol, Angela Merkel's office is putting pressure on the Berlin city government to prevent Obama from using the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop. Her coalition partners, the Social Democrats, favor the idea, reports the New York Times. So does Berlin's left-leaning municipal government (again according to Spiegel Online via Salon).

In other words, German politicians are dividing along partisan lines. And no wonder: Der Spiegel reported that the Bush Administration has apparently been putting pressure on Merkel's people. For her part, she's apparently forgiven Bush for that unwanted impromptu neck massage he gave her.

Not that anyone from the Obama campaign has asked me - but I think he should nix the Brandenburg Gate and speak at the Schöneberger Rathaus (city hall). That's where JFK gave the most famous Berlin speech of all - the one where he claimed, "Ich bin ein Berliner."

It all depends on what Obama hopes to accomplish. If this Berlin speech is really just another campaign stop, then sure, the Brandenburg Gate is the symbol that'll resonate back home. It's got that Cold-War cachet. (Maybe we could even rebuild a short stretch of the Wall? And invite Pink Floyd back for another concert?)

If, instead, Obama intends to start rebuilding some of the burned bridges, then the Schöneberger Rathaus would be a highly meaningful site for Berliners, other Germans, and the American expat community. While I haven't been in Germany since last summer, my sense from family and friends is that most Germans adore Obama. They are ready to see him as a sort of human incarnation of the Berlin Airlift - a chance for a new start - but this time, with the United States, not Germany, as the rogue nation that needs to be brought back into the international community.

So Senator Obama, I hope to see you next week, holding forth on a balcony in Schöneberg.

Photo of Rathaus Schöneberg by Flickr user snooker68, used under a Creative Commons license.

Female Desire Week - Klinsi Edition

Since it's been declared female desire week, I'm going to post a few pictures of one of my favorite all-time lust objects. This is not a theoretical post. Nor is it a fitting response to the original question from Laura at the F-Word, who was asking why there are so few images of sexy men on sex-positive sites or porn for women sites. Kittywampus is neither of those things (well, I guess we're sort of ambivalently sex-positive) but we do like us our men. That's not to ignore those like belledame who were asking - rightly - what about lesbian and bi and queer desires. It's just that I'm an unreconstructed hetero gal and so I'm going to post what makes my pulse quicken.

And I might feel goofier about this if purtek hadn't already covered the hockey beat, or if Lynn Gazis-Sax hadn't declared her earlier penchant for Björn Borg, but here's the thing: for sheer perfection of the male form, soccer players leave me weak in the knees. They don't have the overdeveloped upper physique that football or baseball players tend to cultivate; they're not inconveniently tall like many basketball stars. Some do have an unfortunate tendency toward mullets, but that can be easily remedied with some sharp scissors.

I do love the game, too. That's one of the main things I gained from my time in Germany. I love the excitement of it, the aesthetics. I even kind of love how - to paraphrase Clausewitz - soccer is the continuation of war by other means, because it usually gets no uglier than Zinadine Zidane's famous head-butting incident in the final game of the 2006 World Cup. It's a pretty civilized way to carry out national rivalries (apart from the occasional hools). I love how it can bring a million thrilled fans onto the streets. I love how it's okay not to have a winner at the end of the game.

But: I also really, really love those legs. Tremendously powerful, muscled, well-defined legs.


And they are devilishly hard to find on the Internet. Believe me, I spent a chunk of this afternoon searching for photos that show my all-time favorite soccer player, Jürgen Klinsmann (aka Klinsi), from head to foot. I didn't find many but I sure had fun trying.
















Mostly I found some lovely head shots, maybe because he's a coach these days (for the German national team in the 2006 World Cup and now for Bayern München, Germany's strongest league team). I guess once you're a coach, you've landed on the mind side of mind/body dualism? I'm pretty sure he still has spectacular legs, but I can't muster actual recent evidence.

So note the forearms in the next shot, which are pretty hot in their own right. And then scroll down for some video that gives you a fuller picture from his days as an active player.

(AP)

(Reuters)

I've provided photo credits where the original source included them, but many were uncredited at their source. Clicking on the photos will take you to where I found them. Usually I try to be overscrupulous about copyright, but in the service of lust this time I picked up the nicest pictures. If anyone objects, I'll take 'em down.

And finally, for a glimpse of legs and motion and the unrestrained joy that I think makes him not just handsome but sexy (hit mute if you don't think the Europop adds to the atmosphere):

Going Along and Getting Along with the Nazis

Sugar Mag is telling some fascinating stories about her grandmother, who was born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1925, came of age during the Nazi years, and had a brief, doomed engagement to a handsome, wealthy young SS officer. Her stories raise the question of how any of us might respond had we been born into a situation that called for extraordinary courage. In comments, Sugar Mag writes:

My grandmother's parents were not party members but neither did they actively oppose the Nazis, I think they were just trying to get through it.

Based on my own experiences of having married into a German family with a mixed political heritage, I think that this phenomenon – sometimes called “inner emigration” – was widespread indeed. There was a range of accommodation, from simply lying low to joining a party organization in order to fit in or get ahead.

For instance, most young people who were eligible to join the Hitler Youth or League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädel, BdM) did so. My mother-in-law has lots of harsh memories of the later war years, but she did have fun with those girls in the late 1930s. The rest of her family responded ambivalently to this. On the one hand, her bourgeois parents looked down their noses at the coarseness of the Nazis, and so they weren’t thrilled about her BdM membership. On the other hand, her father joined the SA (Sturmabteilung, or brownshirts) as a doctor. He was not a true believer but recognized that joining would enhance his professional position, while staying neutral could hurt it. Apparently he thought this would be a lower-profile move than joining the SS, though his exact motives are impossible to reconstruct. He also personally profited when a colleague was forced to sell out for political reasons. He acted opportunistically rather than ethically.

Now, there’s obviously a big difference between this sort of low-level collaboration and inner emigration. Ethically, it’s the distinction between active and passive collaboration. But to be fair, professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, and judges, came under greater pressure to join the Nazi Party or one of its offshoot organizations than did farmers or manual laborers. Professionals who were Jewish or unfriendly to the regime lost their jobs early on or suffered professionally in other ways. There was a host of repressive mechanisms that fell fart short of the concentration camps, and they cultivated fear among those who weren’t already among those persecuted. Thus, most professionals cut loose their Jewish colleagues (this happened already in the spring of 1933 in law and medicine) and cozied up to the regime just enough to preserve and promote their careers. A substantially small number went on to lead the Nazification of the professions and society. Very few actively resisted - unless they were already being persecuted for political and/or racial reasons.

The other side of my husband’s family illustrates the penalties for not accommodating to the regime. His paternal grandmother was fired from her teaching job because she had a long history of involvement in Catholic politics. Prior to 1933, Germany had a specifically Catholic political party, the Center Party, and she had been an active member. Like most political Catholics, she did not suffer imprisonment but was considered too politically unreliable to hold an influential job. Of course, the Nazis realized that they needed an iron grip on the education system to consolidate their power. The results of this were both political and personal: My husband’s grandmother suffered real financial hardship because she was a widow and needed the income, while her son felt like an outsider at school. In the aggregate, the teaching profession became extremely brown, to such an extent that postwar schools in West Germany often employed large numbers of former Nazis because otherwise there would have been a massive teacher shortage.

Given all the repression, peer pressure, and propaganda, it’s amazing to me that any Germans of that generation grew up with a moral compass. Sugar Mag describes how conflicted her grandmother was when she overheard a conversation that ought to have been reported to the Gestapo (according to her teachers) but would have betrayed family and friends. She made what we would now consider the obvious right choice and protected her loved ones. We can never know how she preserved that nugget of morality in the face of propaganda and massive social pressure.

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the philosopher Hannah Arendt famously wrote of “the banality of evil” – the ordinariness and routine that greased the cogs of the Nazi death machinery. People collaborated, laid low, and sometimes even resisted for reasons that were ordinary or even petty. Bureaucracy and efficiency obviated the need for moral judgments. People just did their duty, and the sum result was monstrous.

But these family stories suggest how the banality of Nazi evil worked on another level, too: If you happened to be born in Germany in the 1920s or 1930s to a supposedly “ethnically German” family, that was just your life. If you grew up surrounded by militarism and anti-Semitism, it was just your girlhood. It was the framework – the lifeworld – in which you played, went to school, fell in love. And when an evil system is that pervasive, normal, and taken for granted, you have to call on extraordinary moral reserves to resist it.

Like most of us, I’d love to think I would have found that moral core in myself, but I’m not sure. Unless we're tested, I’m not sure we’ll ever know. And I hope never to be tested in that way.

By the way, I included the Wikipedia references because they're concise and quite well done, and because they're convenient, but they would not have been allowed on my reading list for my Ph.D. comps. :-)

The Day the Music Burned

I realize there are worse tragedies happening in the world. No one got killed in this one. I'm still really sad about it.

Photo by Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters; I swiped it and hope no one will mind.

Today the Berlin Philharmonic hall suffered a severe fire, which apparently started while welding work was being performed. The International Herald Tribune reported:

Musicians described a frantic evacuation. Sarah Willis, the 2nd horn player, said she had been in the warm-up room when she "smelled something like lunch was burning."

"A few minutes later, someone burst in and said we have to get out now," she said, speaking on her cellphone as she watched smoke billowing from the building. "Double basses were on stage and many valuable violins and cellos were in lockers. The stagehands were allowed to take them out." ...

"It's really sad," she said. "It's the best acoustic in the world. We just don't know what it's going to look like."

She's not exaggerating. I was lucky enough to hear probably a few dozen concerts in this hall when I lived in Berlin. The acoustics are astonishing. Even the "standing room" seats behind the orchestra are fantastic.

For me, this is also personal. The Philharmonie has been almost a character in my life. I met my husband at the Schauspielhaus in East Berlin in 1991, when the Berlin Philharmonic had to relocate during asbestos removal from the Philharmonie. A concert at the Philharmonie was our favorite thing to do on a date, and we almost always scored inexpensive last-minute tickets. I went there with dear friends and relatives when they made the trek from California to visit me in Berlin. I heard Mahler's 7th at the Philharmonie while I was hugely pregnant with the Bear and thought I was going into labor early. Apparently he was signaling enthusiasm or exasperation at all the Sturm und Drang. (He likes Mahler now, for what it's worth.)

I hope the roof can be repaired in a way that preserves the acoustics. I hope it can happen even though the city of Berlin is in the direst of financial straits. And I hope that, while the repairs are being made and the orchestra is again displaced, some other young couple will find each other while waiting for the music to begin.

Sex and the Smart Girl

This is the penalty for clicking on stupid headlines like "SEX BOMB: Smart ladies have worse sex" at Yahoo's new Shine portal for "women's news." (As if men don't care about the sort of sex their female partners have!) I felt compelled to read the silly thing and then debunk it. If your stupidity tolerance is low today, go read a nice thick novel or even the sports pages. You've been warned.

So a German "study" has ostensibly found that smart women are less likely to have an orgasm. Among survey respondents, 62% of those who completed college-entrance requirements reported trouble coming, versus only 38% of those with less education.

Okay, here comes the scalpel. First, Shine's source on this - that bastion of classy British journalism, the Sun - interpreted the findings for us:

Brainy babes find it harder to have an orgasm – because they are too busy thinking, a study claims.

This is why I spent all those years honing my German skills! So I could be thinking about which verbs are regular and irregular and which nouns get declined, instead of coming like a bonobo! No, wait, I learned German for just this moment, so I can read the original crappy study and tell you why the Sun's report is even more crapalicious.

The German report at the "lifestyle website" beQueen asserted no explanation at all, at least as far as I could see after reading through a whole lot of drivel. BeQueen just reported the stats. But in a game of transnational Telephone, the Sun's interpretation got picked up and smeared all over the Web.

Of course, the next problem with the so-called study is the definition of "smart," again as it's been reported. The study didn't ask about some proxy for intelligence such as IQ. It asked about educational attainment. Obviously that has some correlation with smarts, but it's a loose one, especially in Germany, where social class still shapes young people's educational options to a remarkable extent, mostly due to cultural expectations. There are still plenty of bright young working-class women who don't pursue a college-entrance degree because they and their families set their sights lower.

Note, too, that we're not talking about really high levels of education. The survey distinguished only between the equivalent of an American high school diploma with college-prep coursework, and lower levels of attainment. A very solid majority of American women would fall into the "too educated" group for purposes of this study. The poor frigid gals in question are not a bunch of Ph.D.s, though even if they were - I'm at least one data point that suggests there's no negative correlation between excess education and, um, capacity for pleasure.

Another issue is the study's sample. It was plenty large - over 2000 respondents - but that means very little because it's not representative. Because the respondents were women who randomly chose to answer an online questionnaire, we actually have no idea how representative they were of German women as a whole. What if - for some reason - educated women tend to ignore such surveys as drivel unless they're motivated by frustration, say? Gosh, we don't even have a clue whether all of them were actually women!

Nor did the study have any way to obtain meaningful information on the women's male partners. Since people tend to pair up with their educational equals, what if the problem were educated male partners unable to turn off their thoughts or focus on their partners? What if the survey's real message is that educated men make lousy lovers? Of course, there's no evidence for that either, and I don't believe it for a minutes. But it's instructive that the media response to the beQueen survey has pretty well ignored the invisible men.

Then there's the name - beQueen! - which even by the standards of ludicrous German pseudo-Anglicisms is a real prizewinner. "beQueen ist die Online-Community, in der Frauen sich wie Königinnen fühlen können," says Burda, the mega-publisher behind it - "beQueen is the online community where women can feel like queens." That would be dorky even without the pretentious capitalization. I realize it might not seem immediately relevant to the study, but a name that moronic seems geared to drive away smart readers.

On top of all that, the survey is not confirmed by previous research, which is a decidedly mixed bag. According to Christine Whelan, an expert on single women, a Canadian study found results similar to beQueen's. However, a U.S. study found that educated American women are less likely to report coming every time but more likely to report that they come at least sometimes. An Australian study a few years back, which was larger and representative than beQueen in its sampling, found that greater education enhances women's capacity for orgasm.

Surveys like beQueen's pseudo-science is the sort of sexist pap that the media adores because it confirms so many people's prejudices. As Anne Fitzgerald at Yahoo's Shine points out,

it makes for the kind of story that's ripe for spinning into the quick and easy sexist stereotypes that make you angry (or should)--the uptight brain versus the dumbass blonde with her knees behind her ears, the frigid smarty pants versus the ditzy good-time girl, the pervasive idea that a smart, educated woman can't really enjoy sex, or talking about it or thinking about it ...

Fitzgerald notes that good sex thrives on imagination, creativity, and open-mindedness - all qualities that a decent education ought to develop. At the time the Australian study came out, Carol Lloyd at Salon similarly commented:

One obvious explanation is that educated, wealthier women aren't afraid to ask for what they want in bed. They are likely to be more liberal minded, less controlled by their partners, more open to a multiplicity of techniques and toys.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Women may still find power a turn-on in men (and that'd be a topic for a whole 'nother post). But if they have some real power, autonomy, and security in their own lives, won't they be more likely to pursue their own pleasures?

If you read German at all, you can still take the survey though your answers won't be included in the public results anymore.

The neighbors' rhododendron, shot by me - because flowers and sex are never a bad combination, so long as one's not being used as a bribe for the other.

Where the Tiger and Bear Got Their Names

I call my sons the Bear and the Tiger on this blog mostly because I don't want any weirdos invading their privacy. In fact, I try to write mostly about my own reflections on parenting, without a whole lot of identifying detail or anything that would embarrass them later. But those are also their nicknames in real life. They're named after characters in German kids' books by a guy named Janosch. (Just Janosch. That's his whole name.)

The Little Tiger and the Little Bear live in a house on the bank of a river near the woods. The Little Bear is a would-be gourmet who mostly knows how to make bouillon. The Little Tiger is, like any good cat, a bit lazy, but he does like to watch the Bear work. Occasionally the Tiger gathers mushrooms for dinner. They have two constant companions, a tiger-duck and a little green frog called Gunther Kastenfrosch. They both believe in soft, comfy couches.

And they take care of each other, even though the Tiger can't read yet. (He does learn eventually; you can see an online version, in German but with pictures, here.) The Bear has some rudimentary literacy, just enough to get him in trouble. When one day he finds a banana carton labeled "Panama," he gets it in his head that Panama must smell like bananas from top to bottom. That sets them off on a quest for the land of their dreams, but when they ask for directions to Panama, they keep getting told to take the next left turn. After several lefts, they end up - you guessed it - back at their little house between the river and the woods. It's sort of a mild-mannered version of "There's no place like home," minus the witches and tornadoes but with repeated black humor featuring a fox who's "romancing" a goose.

The Bear takes care of the Tiger when he takes sick one day while picking mushrooms. He carries the Tiger home and plies him with his favorite food (well, bouillon), tea, and visitors. He bandages the Tiger from neck to foot, though the Tiger implores him to "leave my back unwrapped" because "I might have to cough." (The picture shows how well that worked.) Finally, the Tiger is carried to the Hospital for Animals by a grand procession of motley woods-dwellers, including an elephant and a vain, flirtatious donkey named Majorca. There, an x-ray reveals the diagnosis: a slipped stripe! The Tiger has an operation ("a little blue dream") and the same caravan of animals schleps him triumphantly home again.

None of this has a whole lot to do with my kids, really. They got the names even before they were born because their dad and I loved the Janosch books. My Bear is a pretty good reader; my Tiger is actually more apt than my Bear to help around the house, though the right verb is more often "help." But like the Little Tiger and the Little Bear, my sons are both intense - both bent on seizing all they can from their young lives. Both are resourceful and quirky. And while they get ferociously on each other's nerves (a topic that deserves a whole 'nother post), like the storybook Bear and Tiger they do adore each other when the day's done and we're all snuggled together on the comfy couch.
All images come from posters at the Little Tiger online shop, which sadly only ships to German addresses.