I figured that Olivia wouldn’t need much time to get used to Kindergarten, and I was right. She is 2 3/4 years old, which is the time one is allowed to start Kindergarten here, as long as there is a spot free. She has been ready for at least six months. She watches her sisters go off to school and asks when she can go. Of course, she corrects any English speaker who dares ask her about school, because as we know, Kindergarten is not school here! Potty training was not yet successful, but apparently that is not a criteria for starting preschool anymore, so we are safe. Off she went on the first day and said “alone” when I asked her whether I should stay. The subsequent days have not been as easy as the first one, but generally, she loves it.

Noah is starting Krippe at 18 months so I can get back to work,  and the process there is somewhat different. The Krippe follows the so-called Berliner Modell (see http://www.liga-kind.de/fruehe/202_beller.php). Basically, it is set up over a span of three weeks, giving the child the chance to feel comfortable in the Krippe and comfortable with being left. I have to bring Noah to the nursery from 10:00 - 10:45 am for the first week, with a bit longer period on the fourth day and an attempt to leave him alone for 15 minutes on the fifth day. The next week the time he is at the Kindergarten is longer and the periods where he is there alone (with me being available in another room or at home) also are gradually increased.

The system seems to work quite well, but it is certainly complicated if one is already working when the child starts. I am assuming most people are not already working, because being at the Krippe from 10 - 10:45 is not really very practical. I have to say that the system appears to work. The Krippe just opened in January and all of the kids who are there now have just gone through the process. Only one still seemed a bit weepy, and she was much younger than the rest. The whole process is probably harder for the parents than it is for the children, but after experiencing it first-hand, I am confident that my baby will do okay.

Having never gone through the process in the US (daycare, etc.), I don’t know how things work there. But this is yet another case where I truly appreciate German efficiency and organization. Let’s hope Noah appreciates it as well and that the process works as it should!

-Sarah

The widely circulated video is of Oettinger painfully stumbling through a speech clearly neither drafted nor rehearsed by him. The point of the speech, recently held in Berlin at a Columbia University hosted event, and Mr Oettinger’s main message as the new EU Energy Commissioner are unfortunately lost, overshadowed instead by Mr Oettinger’s inability to pronounce many of the more “challenging” words such as “justifiable,” “interference,” and “initiative” and making other words such as “does” and “otherwise” unrecognizable. Already known for his rather distinctive way of speaking in German (read here: he has a very heavy Swabian accent), Oettinger managed to “swabianize” English. The well-known Baden-Württemberg tagline, “we can do everything except speak high German” has been refashioned by commentators to, “wir können alles außer Hochdeutsch - und Englisch!” along with the terms “schwänglisch” and “Spätzle-Englisch.” What made this all the more humiliating perhaps is that the YouTube video included footage of Mr Oettinger emphasizing how all Germans, regardless of their profession, must be able to speak and understand English.

The video was indeed cringeworthy for all those who watched as well as laughable. Since my family and I live in the heart of Mr Oettinger’s home turf here in “Schwabenland” or Swabia, everybody has been talking about this video. My circle of English teacher friends and I have been shaking our heads wondering how he could have tried delivering such a speech with such poor preparation; he clearly needs a new language coach! My husband’s colleagues, nearly all German and many Swabian, were mostly horrified. They were ashamed that Oettinger, in his now more prominent and international position, had so poorly represented Germany. Their fear was that everyone else would now be laughing at Germans.

VIDEO: Germany’s new voice in the EU

Last Friday evening, as my husband and I were enjoying a rare evening out by ourselves (ohne Kinder!), a party of ten Swabians were also dining out in the otherwise empty restaurant. (The snow seemed to keep most people at home.) It was impossible not to overhear their discussion. Rather than being outraged by Oettinger’s poor English language skills, they were more upset by the fact that he was being ridiculed at all: “The EU is full of so many translators anyway; that’s what they are there for!” “That American woman on Johannes B Kerner’s show, who criticized Oettinger, spoke such horrible German herself and the Amis, British and French never bother to learn German anyway! Why do they ridicule Oettinger who is at least trying?!” “What was important was not his English, rather what’s in his brain!” Clearly, they were not so pleased that their native son had not only become the butt of many national jokes, but that this had gone international!

I don’t think these people have to worry. Sure, this recent YouTube debacle has been fodder for perpetuating stereotypes of Germans and their accents. (Remember that great Berlitz ad: “Mayday, Mayday! We’re sinking! We’re sinking!” and the German coast guard radio controller answers, “What are you thinking about?”) But while Mr Oettinger absolutely needs to improve his language skills (otherwise we will continue to not understand what his brain is trying to tell us without a transcript!), I don’t think this has been a PR disaster for the rest of Germany.

- Jane

It should not be so surprising, really.  It is difficult to get a good unfiltered view of how voters feel when you live behind a wall of handlers and advisers.  Politicians are still just people and are just as susceptible to wishful thinking as anyone else.  The FDP is on the verge of learning this lesson the hard way.

The FDP, usually called the business friendly party, is firmly rooted in individual rights.  If you are looking for an American equivalent, the libertarian party is the closest fit… though analogies of this kind are always dangerous.   The FDP  (which is the coalition partner for the majority CDU party) has scored serious points with protections of individual rights and personal data from proposed government plans designed to locate all sorts of bad people such as terrorists and hijackers.

But the FDP has really missed the boat on the tax issue.  They pushed very, very hard for tax cuts this year.  Their arguments have been somewhat vague, though.  It is easy to draw the conclusion that they believe in Keynesian economic theories (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics for more on this). But is that really the case?

A scandal just this past month revealed that the tax policies of the FDP may be more “client driven” as some German pundits like to say.  The FDP received €1 million donation from a single donor who is a hotel magnate who has now received a significant tax break for the hotel industry, lowering the standard 19% tax to only 7%.

In times of economic upheaval, the FDP proposes cutting taxes and increasing spending.  It does sound Keynsian… but even the appearance of such bias seemed to be enough to send the FDP down the polls in terms of support.   I would go so far as to say that the many FDP voters were voting out of protest to the CDU rather than embracing the FDP.  The last CDU/SDP government was becoming increasingly unpopular with the exception of Angela Merkel herself. 

Mrs Merkel, at the same time, took a lot of heat from her own CDU party when she refused to get into the mudslinging and negative campaigning that is all so typical of political races around the world. She seemed to be trying to set a higher tone for her vision of Germany.  So it is unfortunate that her position is tarnished by the fortunes of the FDP and their seeming disregard for how their tax policies will affect public services.  The CDU is increasingly seen as devoid of ideas and vision and is merely moving forward on inertia.

The individual states in Germany were unusually vocal about the cutting of tax revenues by the CDU/FDP federal government.  They were against it, even CDU stronghold states were loudly in opposition.  In a modern Germany where reform is now being forced on it from Brussels (as part of EU integration) and the religion of privatization at all costs is a new religion it is public services which suffer most visibly.

Services at public kindergartens are being cutback, including:

• elimination of hot lunches
• elimination of kindergarten supplies such as toothbrushes
• reducing the number of slots available

Additionally:

• Train service in Germany has long been a victim of a lack of investment. 
• Roads are in increasingly bad shape. 

Voters do not like what they see.  Could it be they were trying to send a message to the CDU and SDP by voting for the FDP (and other parties) in such large numbers?   And now that the FDP has blown it’s chances at making real improvements in the basics of society, it too is losing support.

If all of this is true, we’ll probably see another SDP/Green government after the next federal elections.  And if they don’t learn today’s lessons… we’ll just be in for more political ping-pong elections while Germany drifts towards a modern world that lacks proper investment and coordination in the ”uncool” things like infrastructure and education but instead plays up to sexy tax cuts that polls show German voters do not even support… but tax cuts are more flashy on campaign materials.

During a recent visit to San Francisco I got a surprising reminder of how truly widespread and important German culture once was in the United States – before two world wars drastically changed the role it played in America.

My wife and I were standing in a very long line of people, slowly making our way towards the entrance to the California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park. (And we all already had tickets!) As the line flowed at its glacial pace, I noticed a statue of two figures standing on a stone pedestal. I remarked to my wife that it looked like a German or European statue. As we got closer, the bronze figures seemed even more familiar.

Once we were standing right in front of the statue, I was amazed to read the inscription on the reddish stone base: “Goethe. Schiller.” As I gazed up at the large bronze figures of Germany’s two greatest poets and philosophers, I realized why they looked so familiar. This statue seemed to be the same one my wife and I had seen a few years earlier in Weimar, Germany. How the heck did it get here? What was the story behind this larger-than-life symbol of German culture standing in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco? Did any of these people in line, besides my wife and me, even know who Goethe and Schiller were?

I took out my iPhone and snapped a picture of the statue (see photo), thinking I would try to solve this mystery later.

The Goethe-Schiller memorial statue in
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (Dec. 2009).
Photo: Hyde Flippo

Back home, as I researched the matter, it turned out that the statue in San Francisco is indeed an exact copy of the original monument that has stood on the Theaterplatz in Weimar since 1857. Not only that, like the original, the copy was also cast in Germany. In 1899 it was cast from a plaster model of the original at a foundry located between Berlin and Dresden and shipped to San Francisco by boat and rail. (Sculpted by Ernst Rietschel, the original statue was cast in bronze by the Königliche Erzgießerei in Munich.) The San Francisco Goethe-Schiller monument was to be the first of at least four in the United States: Cleveland, Milwaukee and Syracuse, NY each have one. All are exact copies of Rietschel’s original 1857 sculpture. (A fifth Weimar copy now stands in a town near Shanghai, China, but that’s another story.)

Luckily, the German-Americans in San Francisco (and there were many of them!) documented the occasion of the 1901 unveiling of the Goethe-Schiller monument and the statue’s history in a book entitled Das Goethe-Schiller Denkmal in San Francisco, California. Written in German by various authors, the book describes how the German-American community (including sugar magnate Claus Spreckels) raised money for the statue and its pedestal with a Mid-Winter Festival and other events over a period of years, beginning in 1894. The final cost was over $10,000, a considerable sum of money for the time.

The unveiling ceremony in Golden Gate Park in August 1901.
Photo from “Das Goethe-Schiller Denkmal in San Francisco, California” (1901)

The grand Goethe-Schiller unveiling on August 11, 1901 in Golden Gate Park was a major event with thousands in attendance. The occasion featured classical music, poetry readings, and speeches by various dignitaries (in German and English). The German-language California Demokrat newspaper published a long account of the grand day (with its “herrliches, echt californisches Wetter”) in its August 12th edition. The German-American celebration ran on into the night with a huge “Festfeier” in the Native Sons’ Hall with colorful flags and banners “in den deutschen und amerikanischen Farben” – and even more speeches!

“Dedicated to the city of San Francisco by the citizens of German descent of California in the year nineteen hundred and one” - Original inscription on the pedestal (Because of a construction fence I could not see if this inscription is still on the memorial today.)

The monument’s original location in 1901 was not where it stands in the park today. Although it was in Golden Gate Park somewhere on the road that rings the Music Concourse, around 1920 the statue was moved. When construction began on the new Academy of Sciences building in 2005, Goethe and Schiller were yet again relocated a short distance to their present spot on the left (west) side of the Academy.

That is where I saw the memorial just over a month ago, and it is difficult to grasp how vastly different things are today. The German-American community of 1901 could not have possibly foreseen the horrible damage that two world wars would do to the way Americans view German culture. Their marvelous cultural monument survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but it couldn’t overcome the double whammy of Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. Although it still stands in Golden Gate Park, few if any of the people who see the Goethe-Schiller memorial statue today give it more than a passing glance, much less understand the monument’s true meaning and history.

- HF

We first took Noah to look for shoes before Christmas when he had just started walking. It had been pretty cold here and even I, the American who doesn’t ever put enough clothes on her kids, thought he might be getting a tad bit cold. But we were sent home from the shoe store. I guess kids have to have been walking for a couple of weeks before anyone is allowed to buy them shoes. Even my German husband was surprised, but around here, we must listen to the experts!

After all the holidays were over (three weeks later), Noah was finally properly walking, so we went again. After listening to a ten-minute mini information session on what to look for when buying shoes (flexible, not too “airy”, not too tall, not velcro) she measured his foot and told us he needed a size 22. That sounded big to me, but again, we trust the expert. For the next 45 minutes, Noah tried on any number of shoes and was subjected to the thumb-pressing, where’s his toe, how wide is it test. He could walk in all of them, but they were all too “airy” around the top of his foot. Hmmm, the saleswoman said, we have nothing else, you must go elsewhere! We were surprised, but acquiesced. We didn’t think to ask for a smaller size.

Ty was still wondering why the heck we were taking so long, and was even more surprised when we said we had to go elswehere. He said, “My mom never had our feet measured! Just pick one and buy it!”. I guess for shoes running at 40 Euros or more, I am more careful….And again, I have suffered through enough lectures on proper Schuhwerk from my mother-in-law.

The next lady had a completely different approach. No standing on the measuring device. No squashing down the foot. And lo and behold, he wasn’t a size 22, he was a 20! Oh dear. Once again, we tried on any number of shoes. Lucky for us, the bargain, reduced, but very good brand shoes were on sale for only €15! And we were told to come back in 6 weeks to see if he had grown out of these already.

When I think back to the purchasing of shoes for my older two, who got their first ones in the US, I remember it going like this.

1. Hmm, so-and-so needs shoes.

2. Let’s go to Payless, or Target, or Kmart, or if we are really feeling posh, to a “real” shoe store.

3. Put feet on the footprints on the carpet of Target’s shoe department.

4. Find a pair of cute, girly shoes (or boyish shoes) that must at least light up or have some character from PBS on them. (Our German shoes for Noah are not really cute, or pretty).

5. Try them on.

6. Buy them.

Hmmm….did my older kids suffer? Are they traumatized by my lazy and cheap shoe purchases? Who knows?

- Sarah