A Brief Digression on Language

“Schön tag noch fur sie” the lady at the bake shop said as I paid for my croissant. I have put quite a lot of time into learning more German since finding out that I had received the grant. Deutsche im Auto studerien - learning in my car while making endless traverses across the Los Angeles basin. I don’t know enough yet to be able to converse, but I can get by, and more and more bits jump out at me.

So - “A beautiful day yet/still for you,” the lady said. Oh! “Have a nice day.” German is very structured, very precise. If you see a word written you will know exactly how to pronounce it in standard German, and you pronounce every letter (if you count diphthongs as a single letter). Not like French were the pronunciation is also quite specific but you ignore about half the letters written (but according to rules). And English? Enough drought thought through though. The “f” in “if” versus “of”, but then add another “f” for “off”. And my current favorite to say out loud: Going - Doing - Boing!

German is also very specific in sentence structure, which is quite difficult to learn, especially because English cuts all those corners so nicely. “Have a nice day.” Can’t say that in German (or in French I think, must ask). You can have a piece of cake, but how can you have a day? It’s a reflexive, “have (for) yourself a nice day,” but most reflexives are not directly expressed in spoken English, except maybe in the South? “You’all have yourselves a nice day, now.”

So the imprecision in English structure makes it very easy to construct ways to say things, but difficult to make sense of why things sound the way they do. In German you’ll always know how something sounds, but the rules to construct phrases are difficult to grasp.

To, from, of: there are about 5 times as many ways to make these connections in German, depending on the what and how the “to, from or of “applies, all of which don’t apply in English, were dropped. The = die, der, das, den, dem - these all circle around each other in a mad dance depending on gender (3!), object, subject. I know, Russian has even more of this, for example. In French, Spanish, Italian there is at least some broad convention about how to tell masculine from feminine nouns, but not so in German apparently. Everyone tells me, you just have to know. Someday, vielleicht.

Indian Music in Berlin

No doubt many of you reading this will want to know about the Indian music scene in Berlin. I have now had an opportunity to check this out firsthand. I was fortunate to be invited to perform at the Indian Embassy, which is now the most frequent venue for Indian music programs in Berlin. I was even more fortunate to be referred by tabla maestro Pandit Sankha Chatterjee to one of his protégés in Berlin, Soumitra Paul. He is an excellent player and accompanist and a very nice person with a lovely family. About the program itself I’ll say only that it wasn’t too bad for a Wednesday night after having not practiced enough post-travel. Mostly I was inspired to get my practice back in order.

While the intentions of the cultural program division of the embassy are probably laudable, the effect of offering numerous free concerts has had perhaps unintended consequences. The payment is very low, but many musicians who want the opportunity and aren’t expecting to get paid much anyway (such as me) are willing to play there anyway. As a result, no one else can book a program and draw enough of an audience to provide properly for a top grade artist. If you want to hear any of the many fine artists who tour in Europe, you have to travel from Berlin to somewhere else in Germany to hear them.

I had heard mention that there was to be another Indian music concert at the Museum on Saturday night, sponsored by the Embassy, featuring L. Subramanium, who is of course a very well-known artist. But there was no notice or poster at the Embassy, and no announcement at Embassy music events, including mine. There were no notices at the Museum, even though the event was supposed to be in conjunction with the Rabindranath Tagore exhibit there. I arrived in time for the 8:00 pm start time I had been told, but the program time had been changed and it had started at7:00. Enough said.

Performing for the Indian Embassy did bring me into direct contact with the German banking system, and its distinct character. Bank accounts are not easy to open - I had to tell them I planned to stay for a year. Credit cards are very little used. They are not accepted in most restaurants or stores unless they intend to cater to foreign or tourist trade (and are therefore more expensive). No one uses written checks at all - if you have or get one no one at the bank will know what to do with it. What’s used where I would expect a Visa card to be usable is a debit card with an electronic chip in it. What’s quite different is that you use electronic access to your account in place of where I might expect to use a check. I give someone my account number and a bank number and they go to their bank or online and transfer money directly. The check is never in the mail. People mostly use cash, and because the one and two euro denominations are coins, you can very quickly end up with $10-$15 in your pocket. Not like at home where I never carry any change longer than it takes to dump it into the ashtray of my car.

In Charlottenburg

The "urban" view from my bedroom

One week living in town - I will throw together a mix of observations. I have never before lived for an extended period in a truly urban environment, where you can walk to all the various shops and facilities in the neighborhood. Being able to walk out my door first thing in the morning and have 3 or 4 places to buy a fresh croissant to bring back for my coffee within 3 minutes walk is outstanding! I had better be careful of how many croissants I may eat while I’m here. A good market is one minute away, the organic bakery, vegetables and cheese are 5 minutes. It’s 10 minutes to the Italian store, a small warehouse-style market where literally EVRYTHING is imported from Italy, all the canned and packaged goods, but also vegetables, cheese, salumi, etc. If I want to make eggplant parmesan with an actual Italian eggplant I can do that.

Of course, in order to have that Italian eggplant, or anything else, I have to be able to ask for it, in German. The 50 or so lessons of “German in your car” that I did while driving around in Los Angeles in June, July and August have certainly helped, but it’s still quite a linguistic adventure on a daily basis. I can make statements and requests, if I plan a little in advance, and I guess being a musician my pronunciation is good enough, usually to provoke a response that immediately goes beyond my ability to comprehend on the fly. I think of it as “shopping German.” I shamelessly eavesdrop on everyone in the bus or subway and sometimes can catch a little.

Klausenerplatz - more photos later

My “kiez,” my neighborhood, is apparently one of the nicer districts. When I mention my street, Klausenerplatz, or that I’m in Charlottenburg, I tend to get a bit of the raised eyebrow reaction that I associate from Los Angeles with being told that someone lives in Bel Air or Beverly Hills. Berlin covers a very large area, more an assemblage of towns strung together by an (excellent) transit system than a city, people here say. There are lakes and forests. I haven’t explored much of the old Eastern zone, but a trip to Karl-Marx Allee to look at the monumental socialist architecture has been recommended. In the former Western zone what I see mostly, where original buildings are gone and areas have been rebuilt, is typical 1960s architecture, but better than most you see in the US. It has held up over time better, at any rate.

Klausenerplatz park

And there is certainly some strangeness. While taking the U-Bahn (the subway) to the museum the other day, my eye was caught by the name of one of the stops along the line: Onkel Toms Hütte. Yes, there appears to be a district in southwest Berlin called Uncle Toms Cabin. And that’s not all. A google search revealed that there is a 5-star hotel in the university town of Göttingen called Onkel Toms Hütte. I read an article in the New Yorker recently that discussed the influence the book had had in its time and after in America, and that it was even more of a phenomenon in Britain and Europe. It must have made quite an impact in 19th-century Germany!

Berlin 1

It has been just over a week since I arrived in Berlin, so I’ll catch up with a summary and some observations.

August 26, 2011: The flight was quite tolerable considering that I got up at 4:00 (after going to bed at midnight). Watched Thor, more entertaining than I thought it would be, and most of Hanna, which I will now have to see the end of.

The flight was an hour late, so I assumed there was a good chance I would miss my train connection, but the airport runs so smoothly, no waiting or harassment going through passport control, baggage arrives quickly and smoothly, that I still had time to get my BahnCard50 at the train station, get the local train to the Frankfurt Hbf and get on the superfast ICE express to Berlin. What a contrast to arriving in the US, where even citizens are treated with suspicion and delay. Frankfurt Hbf (train station) is great, wonderful old building, a woman walking by eating a giant pretzel for breakfast. I had a “Bismarck Herring” and onion sandwich on a very good little roll and a cappuccino. Ah, to be in Europe!

It’s high summer, warm, humid, from the train window I see people taking their kids to ride bikes in the country, walking dogs along rural lanes. This is one major thing that I have observed on previous trips.  The transition from city to rural country and then wide-open agricultural land is very quick. The cities and towns are surrounded by functional green space. Skies are clear. It’s very attractive. It’s also very hot!

August 28, 2011: Now the weather has returned to ‘normal,’ in the low 70s, a mix of sun, clouds and rain. I’m staying for this week with Lars Koch, the director of the Music Ethnology section of the Berlin State Museum, at his home, an old farmhouse in the small, very charming community of Werder, on an island in a lake southwest of Berlin near Potsdam. This area was not fashionable during the time it was part of East Germany, so it has changed very little. Now it has been discovered and is starting to go more upscale. The island has attracted small shops and businesses like architects, landscape and garden designers, and discreet antique shops.

September 1, 2011: This initial week passes both slowly and quickly. I have taken care of many essentials, such as the formalities of the grant, so that I have quite a stash of Euros for the moment, getting a monthly transit pass, an access pass to the Museum, etc. The transit system is excellent, as I have seen on past visits, and my pass will take me quite far into the surrounding areas. I continue to be impressed by the result of this society’s decision to reject the cancer of urban sprawl. My Museum ID will get me entrance to dozens of museums all over Berlin; I could probably use half the time I have available just working my way through the museums.

I am also encountering the passive entropy of a bureaucratized society that is very set in many ways. I was able to open a bank account, but not deposit any money because the bank wasn’t set up to receive it. The Museum’s database was painstakingly designed to allow for the description or cataloguing of any kind of object that might be found in any of its collections. As a result, the way that any particular object or type of object is listed is obtuse and difficult to work with. So much information about the musical instruments I hope to examine is hinted at, but the links that look like they should be there are not, or are maybe hidden and someone will find them for me later, or… Is information or actual instruments lost literally, as in destroyed during the decades, or just misplaced? I keep replaying the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark in my head, as the crated ark is wheeled into the giant warehouse.

I will move on Sunday into town, into the wonderful flat on loan to me from Amelia Cuni and Walter Durand while they have an artist’s residency in Vienna for two months. I’m looking forward to the chance to get to know the neighborhood. A preliminary observation about Berlin is that there is a very high proportion of elderly people and people with dogs, and elderly people with dogs - on the street, on the train, on the subway, in restaurants and businesses.