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Interview with Barbara and Steve Hall - Part 2
An American Family in Germany
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The Tea Group outing... with fuel for the bread oven. Photo courtesy the Hall family. |
In Part One of this interview, Barbara and Steve talk about their difficulties in finding a place to live, the Compost Police, and other surprises. In this installment, the Halls discuss their German skills and how they coped (or not) with living in a small German community and in a foreign culture. Barbara had to deal with the “trailing spouse” syndrome.
Interview - Part 2
GW&M: What kinds of tactics did you develop to help cope with culture shock?
Barbara Hall: I cried and screamed a lot. And threatened divorce at least twice a day.
Steve Hall: What about the Tea Group?
Barbara: Well, it was only once a week. But if I hadn’t had that Tea Group I might well have gone mad! The Tea Group was started by a German lady whose husband worked for IBM. He had been in the US for three years and she was miserable. When she returned to Germany she decided to seek out foreigners to help them cope with living in Germany. It developed into this huge group that met once a week. It was a woman’s group. You talked about things, got questions answered, traded things (English-language magazines were hot). The group was made up of about ten German and forty foreign women when I belonged. We went on field trips, shopping trips, out to lunch, and generally had a ball. I went every week and really looked forward to it.
Steve: My most difficult coping problem was dealing with the family! It broke my heart that they, and especially Barbara, weren’t living up to my dream of conquering Europe! So I coped by working hard, riding my bicycle, and generally withdrawing.
GW&M: I saw a picture on your Web site showing Barbara walking with some other women behind a German woman pushing a load of sticks. Did that have anything to do with the Tea Group?
Barbara: That’s right! The Tea Group arranged an outing that was hosted by an old German woman. She permitted 10 of us to join her in her home to learn how to bake the old fashioned way. She provided pre-measured flour, eggs from her chickens and milk from her cows. In her kitchen, we mixed the ingredients for Zwiebelkuchen (onion cake) and several other German farmhouse breads. Then she led us across town to the community Backhaus. (See photo above.) That’s the picture you saw. The Backhaus is available for rent by the public. It has a brick oven. You fill it with twigs and light it. After the fire dies down, the embers are swept out. By then, the oven is hot and your breads are placed in it for baking. Mmmmm! That was a great day!
Steve: Toward the end of our two-year stay, we were tired of traveling and looking for excitement. I came up with a great birthday present for Barbara.
Barbara: Ohhh. My little Fiat Brecetta! A 48-hour toy. Steve showed up at the front door at 7:30 a.m. with this great sports car. He rented it for two days. It was a little cold at the end of May (summer lasts from June 15 to July 20 in Stuttgart), but I bundled up and drove around with the top down anyway. That was wonderful! It even got me to let Steve buy himself a Miata when we returned to New Jersey.
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Barbara’s two-day birthday present: a rented sports car. Photo courtesy the Hall family. |
GW&M: Barbara, you mentioned in one of your newsletters some of the difficulties you had in learning the German language. How did that finally work out for both of you? Did anyone know German before arrival?
Barbara: None of us knew any German before we got there. I took lessons for about a year. Maria, my German teacher, came to the house once or twice a week for two-hour lessons. You’d think I would have been fluent after that! But, I didn’t keep to the schedule. Any excuse to cancel. Basically, I wasn’t motivated to learn. She kept wanting to perfect my pronunciation and explain the fine points of grammar. I just wanted to know the German word for pears! I got really infuriated when she pulled out a map of Germany and started teaching me geography! By the time we left I could food shop without any problem, order meals in a restaurant, and understand simple directions.
Steve: Not learning German is my biggest regret. I took a total of ten hours of private lessons. After we’d been there a year, Barbara went back to the States with the boys in the summer while I stayed in Germany to work. That’s when I took the opportunity to have some lessons. It helped a lot, but I didn’t want to invest the time when the family came back. Of course, mine is a somewhat special situation because everyone spoke English at work (even though it was a German company). So I wasn’t really forced to learn the way many expats are.
Barbara: The boys had German class every day at school. Between the four of us we could cope quite well in German. But we never got the hang of understanding German TV.
Steve: I could almost read the newspaper, if you count the Bild in the “newspaper” category [grin]. A girl at work saw me reading it one day and she chastised me for ruining my German by reading such trash!
GW&M: Steve, I noticed you mentioned your interest in clocks, and I enjoyed the piece about the Biedermeieruhren [Biedermeier clocks]. Can you tell me more about your German experiences with clocks?
Steve: I collect and restore antique clocks. I expected to find a lot of them in Germany, and I did! But it took a long time to find ones that I could afford. At first I thought that the prices were just way higher than for equivalent clocks in the US. But eventually I decided that I was simply looking in the wrong places. It could be that my value structure changed, but I think clocks in antique stores in the US have equivalent prices to antique stores in Europe. When I started frequenting the flea markets I finally found pieces that were affordable. I bought fifteen or twenty in total.
My favorite place to shop was in Strasbourg (in France, near the German border), on the street. They have an open-air flea market with mostly antiques every Wednesday and Saturday. Another great place is Metz, also in France. Their flea market is held twice a month (schedule varies). It’s indoors and huge. The local markets around Stuttgart are frequent, but have slim pickings.
I also started collecting stamps with clock themes. I found stamps at nearly every flea market and it was fun picking through the bins. I think stamp collecting is much more common in Europe than in the US. This is evident in the fact that there are two monthly stamp magazines in Germany found on every large newsstand. In the States there are a couple of monthlies, but you have to go to a stamp store (or subscribe) to find them.
In the next installment the Halls talk about business, driving on the Autobahn, and a dog’s life in Germany.
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ON THE WEB
- Nufringen.de - Information about “die Gemeinde Nufringen im Kreis Böblingen.” In German only.
- Steve and Barbara’s Life in Germany - Online slide show with photos concerning the family’s two-year stay in Germany. Part of the Halls’ Americans in Germany website.
- See more related links in Part 1 of this interview.
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