Tübingen Tübingen Tübingen!

First things first: clarification on my thoughts about the term “Obrigkeitshörig:” I don’t believe and didn’t mean to imply that this term/concept explains National Socialism by itself. My Zivi put it best, and I requote him here: “Yes, you cant understand the coming-up of the Nazis without it BUT this is a result of German politics before WWII and goes much further than just we Germans are regularly Obrigkeitshörig.” I’m in full agreement with him, and feel bad that I may have implied that “Germans are regularly Obrigkeitshörig, therefore, National Socialism and WWII.” Because that’s, quite simply, untrue.

Instead, what I found most interesting about this chat with my teacher (who, for clarification, is a teacher of the German language, not a student/professor/researcher of German history/culture/lit) was that I had not heard the term before as a student of Germanistik, and wanted to replicate what he had said/how I dissected the term.

Secondly, I essentially need to update on both my last days on Bonn and my first days in Tübingen – Thursday the 3^rd of March I moved to Tübingen, a small town south of Stuttgart, where I will take another Sprachkurs (language course) during the month of March, and where I will (finally!!) actually attend university from April 11-July 23.

I’m going to steal an idea from the amazing Chris Hughes and update you on the last few weeks in bullet points. And use lots of bold so you can skip around and read about what you want. And leave “Bermerkungen” for another post. So user-friendly, no?

Also, I promise there will not be any further posts with a rundown of what I did everyday – but I think the first days in a new place are always amusing and interesting.

Last days in Bonn

· Decently uneventful but fun

· Hit a few more museums (I really enjoyed the art museum)

· Some dinners, bar hopping, the usual

· On Wednesday, the last full day I would be in Bonn, I finally went and walked along the river, which was beautiful and made me sort of sad that I was leaving Bonn, as I’d just started to like and get used to the city, meet people outside of my way-too-small class, and appreciate my lovely room in the dorm! But, onto Tübingen…

Thursday, 3. March 2011, aka, I’M FINALLY IN TÜBINGEN!

· Wake up really early

· Drag my shit to the Bahnhof

· Receive help from lots of friendly Germans with my massive suitcase

· Get on a train

· Get on another train in Stuttgart

· Get picked up at the platform at the trainstation in Tübingen by Thomas, the coordinator for WashU-Tübingen study abroad, and Christy, a WashU PhD student who is living here and writing her dissertation. It was awesome and I totally felt like a 6 year old kid getting picked up after school.

· Go to my dorm

· Haul stuff up to the fourth floor

· Go over some paperwork with Thomas, he and Christy peace

· Start to unpack

· Realize my room is filthy

· Go to the supermarket and buy food and cleaning supplies (please be impressed mom??)

· Clean my shelves and Schrank

· Unpack

· Head to the Altstadt with Christy

· Wander around

· Get dinner at a great Italian place

· Meet up with Christy’s roommate Aaron, a graduate student (from Ohio!) who has been living in Germany for two years already

· Hit a bar

· Hit another bar

· Hit an Irish pub

· Realize this is wonderfully different from my first night in Bonn

· Catch a bus home at like 1:30 – the bus system here runs late on weekends!

· Go to bed so, so, so happy to finally be in Tübingen

Anddd break from the bullet points to update you on two things:

Room/living situation: Turns out I am once again living out away from the city – slight sadness there. But, I’m in a dorm that is one of maybe 15 in this area, so tons of students are also up here, and the bus stop is a 55 second walk away. The University building where most of my classes will be is apprx 9min away by bus, and the Altstadt is 11min away. So really no big deal. My room, location aside, is great, and by that I mean really big with a desk (which I don’t have in my room in St. Louis!).

I am in an apartment-style dorm, with 6 single rooms. There is a shared kitchen/common area, and from that space branch off two separate areas, each with three rooms and a bathroom. And we have a balcony. So cool. But filthy…not that I’ve really worked on that.

I’ve met three of the roomies so far, all real Germans!! Ellie, Anna, and Mauritz. Evidently it’s totally normal for guys and girls to live together in student, university-sponsored housing. I’m going to roll with it. The other two Mitbewohner (roommates) are supposedly going to show up at some point during the semester: one more German guy, and one Greek guy (I think).

Major win that I’m living with four real Germans. And Ellie and Anna have promised to speak only German with me. Their German is crazy rapid and I love it.

The Altstadt: Translates as “old city,” aka, where all the fun happens. Three thoughts on the Altstadt right now: 1. It’s GORGEOUS. Totally picturesque little German town. I’ve been here a week and still get overwhelmed by how beautiful it is and how different it is from anywhere I’ve ever lived. 2. It’s confusing as all hell; see the finding church story below. After a week I’m only just beginning to get a feel for it. 3. It’s going to get me in very good shape – very steep hills, lots of up and down, etc. Overall, I’m already a very big fan of the Altstadt.

Friday, 4. March 2011, aka, the extremely frustrating day

· Wake up late

· Realize most of the places I want to go are already closed, because it’s a Friday, and I’m in Germany

· Go to the place where I’ll get a code that allows me to use the internet in my room – it’s supposed to be open till 4

· Learn that the secretary leaves at noon, because it’s a Friday, and I’m in Germany

· Wander around the Altstadt

· Decide to buy a phone

· Go to the phone store and sign some forms (no idea what they say, but I’m taking comfort in the fact that the store doesn’t have my credit card number. Yay for having to pay cash everywhere?)

· Buy another Schnitzler book (“Reigen,” it’s a play, Wikipedia it…the premise is pretty funny) because I’m facing an internet-less weekend

Saturday, 5. March 2011, aka a moderately successful day

· Hit the Bahnhof for some passport photos which I will need to enroll in my Sprachkurs Monday

· Wander around looking for a Catholic church

· Finally realize that one I’d seen yesterday is Catholic, but confusingly has the word “Evangelisch” in the name.

· Find an Apotheke

· Successfully converse with a pharmacist about the slight cold I’ve got

· Leave with what he tells me is just the right medicine

· Buy a lamp for my room! Because it’s actually very poorly lit, and I anticipate doing lots of schoolwork/reading/writing papers/being studious…

· Go home

· Hear doorbell ring – people! Excitement!

· Answer…and it’s our “Umwelttutor” (environment-tutor) and he was coming to basically make sure we keep the place clean. Which we absolutely don’t.

· Practice my listening-to-rapid-German skills as he tells me we’ll have to pay for a professional cleaning service if we don’t get it together

· Clean the sinks in our bathroom (and ignore the kitchen)

· Make rice for dinner. Delicious (not really).

Sunday, 6. March 2011, aka the day I get really lost and almost miss church

· Get really lost an almost miss church

· Go home after making it to church at the last minute

· Nap.

· Finally do some reading

· Finish “Reigen” (hat’s three of Schnitzler’s works down, 6 to go!)

· Make pasta for dinner (more delicious than yesterday’s rice)

Monday, 7. March 2011, aka the day I realize how much I despise rules and bureaucracy

· Wake up at 8 am. So ready for this day.

· Visit the Hausmeister (house-master…not really sure what the US equivalent is. Not an RA, not a student, but a real adult person who deals with all the dorms)

· Explain in broken German that our shower doesn’t drain

· Learn how to fill out a maintenance request form

· Walk to the internet-code-giving place – takes a good 35 minutes, but it’s all downhill and a gorgeous day

· Learn from the secretary that I absolutely, 100% cannot have a code until I’ve matriculated at the Uni

· Ask for a temporary code, show her some paperwork that Thomas said would help, give her Thomas’s number

· Get slight frustrated when nothing

· Get extremely frustrated when I learn that even after I matriculate, it takes 3-4 days for all the paperwork to go through to this particular office, and then they send you your code via post (what the hell. A few days later someone in my Sprachkurs said “With all this bureaucracy I think I understand Kafka a lot better now” haha)

· Go to Thomas’s office

· Explain the internet situation (thinking he will pick up the phone and say “Let’s see what I can do”)

· Get frustrated all over again when he says “oh, that’s really unfortunate. Well, just try to check your email frequently at the library as that’s how I’ll be staying in touch with you.”

· Slowly start to realize that the concept of “pulling strings” doesn’t exist here. This is the point where I realize I DESPISE rules and regulations. Really what is the point.

· Go to the Deutsch-Kompakt Sprachkurs registration

· Wait for like 40 minutes, as there are only 3 people checking us in

· Hear English all around me (joy)

· Finally get to check in!

· Fill out lot’s of paperwork

· Ask the girl how I can matriculate today because “It’s killing me not to have internet!” (that I say in English)

· Learn that basically, I can’t. Because I need a residence permit first (that’s why I’d just filled out all that paperwork). And that won’t be back from that particular office until Thursday. Which is why we won’t matriculate until Friday. Again, I’m desperate for someone to say “But let’s see what we can do for you.” Instead, they are very fond of saying “It just can’t be done.” (Das geht überhaupt nicht.)

· Go to the library.

· Learn that they won’t let me in until I’ve matriculated either. (Will someone please break one rule for me!??!) To anyone still reading this…please be impressed that I haven’t burst into tears yet.

· Give up on the internet thing for a bit

· Go buy some handsoap for the bathroom

· Buy some Döner for lunch. Delicious.

· Make one last attempt to find internet at an internet café that the Deutsch-Kompakt people told me about

· Learn that that was a bad tip – no internet still.

· Try the city library for internet

· Learn they’re closed on Monday

· Give up

· Go home

· Nap

· Clean some more – major vacuuming and mopping

· Finish unpacking and 100% move in, aka, the suitcases are empty and stowed under my bed!

· Ellie the super-nice roommate lets me use her computer to email mi madre

· Dinner. Rice again (but I’ve purchased some soy sauce. Win.)

Tuesday, 8 März 2011, aka, the day I make some friends

· Wake up, get ready, go to Deutsch Kompakt!

· Take a really boring written test

· Take a slightly less boring mündliche (spoken) test

· Hit up the Altstadt with the two Americans and one Ecuadorian I’ve just met

· Get ice cream!

· Walk up to the castle!

· Spend the whole time chatting auf Deutsch! (Major win and I’m so impressed with these guys that we spent like 2 hours auf Deutsch when we soooo easily could’ve done English)

· Go back to Deutsch Kompakt

· Visit the Mensa (inexpensive student cafeteria)

· Munch on some food and meet some more people: a Slovenian guy, two Brazilian girls, another American girl, and a guy from Taiwan who speaks freakishly good English

· Take a tour of the city with our tutor

· Learn where the post office is (very important)

· Learn where we can purchase a month-long-valid bus ticket (even more important). It’s slightly frustrating that the semester ticket won’t be valid until April, when the semester starts, but again, I’m rolling with it. And dishing out the Euros.

· Visit a bar with the Deutsch Kompakt program

· Tell a Korean gal that “it depends” when she asks another American and me if it’s normal to start drinking at 3 in the afternoon

· Spend the next few hours chatting with the super-nice Slovenian guy who speaks great German, and an Israeli-German guy who speaks like 5 languages

· Go to dinner with Thomas and Christy

· Chat chat chat

· Go home

· Fall in bed EXHAUSTED from the first real day in Germany that I’ve been speaking non-stop auf Deutsch with people I really want to get to know

Wednesday, 9 March 2011, aka, the first day of Unterricht (lessons) for Deutsch-Kompakt

· Wake up, running late as usual

· Get on the bus 10 minutes before class is supposed to start

· Don’t miss anything since we don’t start on time

· Do some getting to know each other – the class is quite small, like 12 people

· Pause (break) – head to the “Clubhaus” where students meet/hang out

· Sit outside in the sun and chat

· Unterricht part 2 – boring and overly simple grammar review. Yuck.

· 90 minute Pause – hit up the city library to use the internet

· Check my email

· Become frustrated all over again that I can’t do this in my own room

· Tutorium – not really Unterricht, but we’re in a classroom doing German-related things; it’s led by a current student at the Uni

· Listened to and discussed a German song

· Run into a girl from class in the city

· Trek out to some random store away from the Altstadt in search of clothes hangers

· Find clothes hangers! And buy other random things like Tupperware and a coffee mug

· Meet another Mitbewohnerin (roommate) when I get home, Anna – she’s super nice and offers me dinner, which I can’t accept as it’s Aschermittwoch (Ash Wednesday).

· Watch TV with the roomies for a bit (hard to understand auf Deutsch!)

· Head back to the city for a “gemeinsames Abendessen” (dinner together) with the people from Deutsch Kompakt

Thursday, 10 March 2011, aka, they have bars in German dorms!?

· Go to Unterricht, coffee break, go back to Unterricht, lunch break

· Eat at the Mensa (student cafeteria type thing) in the Altstadt instead of the closer one on Wilhelmstraße – it’s much prettier

· Go to Tutorium

· Wander around the city for a few hours with another Deutsch-Kompakt person

· Grab dinner in the Altstadt

· Go home, where the Anna has an Irish friend over who doesn’t speak great (any) German

· Am really amused by hard it is for me to switch back to English after a full day of speaking German

· Watch “Germany’s Next Top Model by Heidi Klum” with Anna and Ellie – soooo funny

· Go to the student bar in the dorm-administrative-building-20-seconds-away-from-us where Anna works

· Continue watching Top Model

· Learn that Ellie loves country music too – WIN!

Friday, 11 March 2011, aka, international evening of fun

· Unterricht, pause, Unterricht, lunch break

· Go to the Bahnhof (train station) and buy my train ticket to Amsterdam!

· Tutorium – we all talk about stereotypes of our respective countries, a pretty fun/funny class

· Go buy shoes (because naturally I didn’t bring shoes that are good for a day walking around on cobblestone streets)

· Receive a compliment on my German from the really nice old woman working at the store – she then says “It’s so nice you speak German so I don’t have to speak English!” Adorable.

· Grocery store (carrots!)

· Home

· Dinner

· Go back to the city at 10pm to meet people from Deutsch Kompakt

· Go to a phenomenally cheap and mildly sketch bar

· End up at a party where people are mostly (only?) speaking Spanish

· Party with the Spanish-speakers

· Catch a bus home at 2:30am

· Run into more Deutsch Kompakt people on the bus home

· Go to the student bar together

· Don’t go to bed until 5am

Pictures from Bonn

Wayyy too much has happened this past few days (for example, I moved to a new city! Tübingen. Finally.) I'm not yet sure how much I want to torture you all with the details of my first days in here so I'll leave the writing for later and let you all enjoy my (honestly quite lacking) photography skills.

Cafe/restaurant/something in the main city square - it was freezing, but we grabbed a few of the handily provided blankets and had our coffee outside!

Asmik and I, the day we went to the botanical gardens.

Awesome view I saw a few times daily when walking from the Innenstadt to the GI. (You can't really see it in this picture, but there is a Schloss way far in the background. Gorgeous.)

Major university building in Bonn, with the massive lawn in front of it. Took this picture from a bench where I was working on some readings.

View out of my dorm window. Super-not-exciting.

View out the window from my classroom at the Goethe Institut - much much prettier!

I am (almost) a real German student

I am currently choosing classes for my upcoming semester in Tübingen, AND for my upcoming fall semester back at WashU. Crazy, right?! Let’s explore the differences between German and American universities…basically, I will be attending the summer semester in Germany – it will start April 11, and end July 23. Why am I still choosing classes though, with only a month and a half before the semester starts? That’s just how it goes in Germany. Also, there is no central system/website for registering for classes. For seminars, you must contact the professor via email to express your interest in taking their class, and for lectures, you basically just show up. Thus far, I’ve emailed 4 professors about seminars. The one I’m most excited about is “Arthur Schnitzler in the Context of the Wiener Moderne” – love Schnitzler, and a major plus is that we’ll be reading shorter works, dramas and novellas. Slightly terrifying is the fact that the professor wants us to read all 9 works before the semester starts! Here goes…

The other classes I’ve emailed about are “Reality in Realism,” “Dorfgeschichten” (Stories from small towns, roughly translated) and “Drama of the Classical Period.” Hello wonderful German literature. I’ve also inquired about taking a Russian class and received and email saying I’m welcome to do so, and I’ve found around five lectures courses in the history department that I think would be both fascinating and really enhance my understanding of German history/culture/lit/etc. But no, I’m not going to take 10 classes – in Germany, you totally just shop around classes the first week or so, and if you decide you don’t want to take a class anymore you just…stop going. No drop deadline!

So that’s the situation with classes. Until then, I’m just continuing my German language courses (and should be madly reading Schnitzler…).

And now we’ll return to that convenient division between “what I’ve done/what’s happened” and “Bemerkungen” (remarks on Germany).

What I’ve done:

Thursday: Class. Learned a wonderful new grammar construct that allows for nominalization of Nebensetze (subordinate clauses) via use of the preposition “bei.” (for those of you who speak German…Wenn es regnet, gehen wir nicht draußen OR Bei Regen gehen wir nicht draußen.) Super exciting.

Friday: Class. Then dinner with a bunch of people from the Goethe-Institut, organized by our Zivis. I finally met the girl who lives in the dorm with me – she’s Russian and totally fun. Dinner was at an Irish pub (not sure why the Zivis think that is a good cultural experience for all of us people trying to learn German…) and it was totalllllly wack to hear Irish music sung auf Deutsch. Extremely culturally confusing for me. I sat at a table with Asmik (the Russian girl), two Chilean guys, a French kid, and Swiss kid, and an Italian woman. Guess what language we spoke? ENGLISH! So frustrating…everyone’s English is about 100x better than their German (ok, not true, they’re all just wayyy more confident auf Englisch) so I find myself in Germany, wanting to speak German, but with English all around me. The extreme mix of cultures is wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but less than good for my language development.

After that we went to another bar, and then a club. The club was fun but what was most interesting was the insane amount of broken glass on the floor…and when people knocked bottles over and they broke, no one seemed to care. Not sure if that’s a German/European thing, or if we were just somewhere sketchy. I’ll keep you posted on that one.

Saturday: Very chill day, went into the city to get dinner, fun.

Sunday: Also very chill day in which I went to church (I’m really getting down the Mass auf Deutsch, which is super-cool) and the to the “Haus der Geschichte,” a museum about Germany since 1945. I learned to the joy of being dependant on public transportation when I rushed downstairs to catch the S-bahn and saw it pulling away just as I got into the lobby…the next one wouldn’t come for 30 minutes since it was early Sunday morning! Fail. Missed the 10am mass I wanted to go to, went at noon, missed going to the museum with everyone, and ended up just going alone.

Monday: Class with me and only one other student…! Which is just kind of awkward. The other student is a woman from Saudi Arabia, all of our other classmates are from Libya, and she told our teacher she thinks they got bad news this weekend (as Libya is going the Egyptian route). Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for them?

Tuesday (today!): Before class, Asmik and I went to the Poppelsdorfer Schloss (Palace) and walked around the gardens there…big surprise, it was not that exciting as it’s the middle of winter! But it was nice weather and nice to walk around before class. After class (still just me and one other student…) we grabbed dinner with some people from her class: a French guy, a couple from Romania who lives in Paris, and a Dutch guy. And we spoke…English. So sad. I also experienced my first bout of anti-Americanism, as one guy spent a good 10 minutes at the beginning of our dinner explaining to me all the things he hated about America (unhealthy, fattening food was at the top of the list). These criticisms would have been totally fine to express, of course, except he was being very rude and confrontational with me (sorry pal, I don’t run the FDA). Anyways, he went to smoke about halfway through our meal and came back much friendlier, but it was still interesting to experience.

Bermerkungen! Aka the interesting stuff:

1. A lot of stuff on the internet (tv shows, Pandora internet radio, Cleveland’s country radio station, etc) won’t stream outside the US. I am finding ways around this (hellooo country radio from Texas).

2. I’ve purchased three of my books for the Schnitzler class so far – Germany has these little “Reclam” Bücher (books) that have the TINIEST print ever (how you are supposed to annotate them I have no idea) and yellow covers. They’re super-recognizable and I felt SO legit buying them at a bookstore the other day.

3. After a few people on Friday night asked me if I was married with a worried look at my right-hand ring finger, I realized that not everyone wears wedding/engagement rings on their left hand! (The people I alarmed were Chilean, Russian, and German). I turned naturally to Wikipedia and learned that in Germany and Austria, wedding rings are worn on the right hand, leaving me with a bit of a situation: to switch or not to switch? (I wear this ring every day and it only fits on my ring fingers.) My normal rule is don’t go crazy changing myself in an attempt to blend in because 1. I’ll fail and 2. I’m simply not German and usually don’t feel a need to pretend. However I’m not entirely sure I want people to mistake me for married…or do I? Eitherway, I’ve spent the last 48 hours switching it back and forth, and have settled with leaving it on my right hand. It weirds me out less.

4. In class my very first day (not sure why I’m writing about this only now) we learned that in Germany (or at least according to this one teacher), “Herbst ist Herbst und Winter ist Winter” – “fall is fall and winter is winter.” BUT there is both Frühling (spring) and Vorfrühling (“prespring”) and Summer, lucky season it is, is divided three parts: Frühsommer (early summer), Hochsommer (high summer, which is "extrem heiß"), and Spätsommer (late summer).

5. For clarification, Germans capitalize ALL nouns. (I believe the Grimm brothers are to thank for that one.)

6. Today at dinner, people expressed real disgust over the fact that in the US we let people drive at 16, but alcohol is for those who are 21 and over. (This fact is of course not surprising, but I was struck by how they actually seemed disgusted by it, not just “oh that’s strange/different/you silly Americans.)

7. Twix (the candy) do not taste the same in Germany. (I think the American ones taste better).

8. I’ve learned from talking around with people/our Zivis that my accommodations are actually some of the nicest that people from the GI have had to deal with – although we aren’t terribly close to the city, we’re in a safe place (some people are evidently in areas that are genuinely not nice), the S-bahn gets us where we need to go, our rooms are big and clean compared to other people’s, and we have our own bathrooms. Turns out I have it really good…!

9. People at crosswalks drive me INSANE. Basically, Germans are very respectful of crosswalk signals – even if there are no cars or anything coming and they could cross the street very safely, they wait. When the traffic lights are changing and there is that five second interval before you are going to get the green walk signal…the wait. It drives me up the wall, and the only people I see crossing when they’re not supposed to are very young, kinda punk-looking guys, and people send them very disproving looks. This leads really wonderfully into what I learned in class today (good thing about having two students is you can direct class wayyyy more – when our teacher starts talking about German culture, psyche, or lit, I try to keep that going as long as possible):

10. The term “Obrigkeitsdenken” – let’s dissect (and I promise this will be interesting!). “Obrigkeit” means “authority,” and “Obrigkeitsdenken” can be translated (according to dict.cc) as “subordinate mentality,” which I think is a bit too strong. Better perhaps is “authority-oriented mindset,” as “denken” is to think, or thought/reasoning. My teacher said that “die Deutsche haben ein Obrigkeitsdenken” – “Germans have a subordinate mentality/think on authority” – see how this fits with the crosswalk issue?
Then he throws out a second word: “Obrigkeitshörig,” let’s dissect somemore: “hörig sein” means to be a slave, dependent, or submissive. “Obrigkeitshörig” = submissive to authority. He (teacher) then says “Die Deutsche sind Obrigkeitshörig” and follows that up with “Ohne dies versteht man Nationalsozialismus nicht.” Auf Englisch, “Germans are submissive to authority, without this one cannot understand National Socialism” (Nazism). Interesting, sure, earthshattering, no: what I found particularly fascinating was that I, a third year undergraduate student of Germanistik, German studies, have NEVER hear this term! (The sad alternative is that I am the worst third year undergraduate student of Germanistik ever, but I’m really hoping this isn’t true. Cross your fingers for me.) So. In conclusion this is really making me want to take the lecture course on the fascist years in the 20s/30s/40s, in order that I can compare/analyze the different ways Americans and Germans conceptualize National Socialism and its effects.

I’ve been phenomenally successful with the earrings lately.