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July 26, 2007

By the number of maps and city guides I've started seeing everywhere, and the slightly more embarrassing fact that I recently tried to keep a cell phone conversation I was having with my mother in a café private by speaking in Spanish, only to realize that I was in the middle of a Spanish tour group, it looks like tourism season in Berlin is well underway. The past couple of weekends have seen me become something of a tourist as well, first by traveling to Munich the weekend before last, and then by having two non-German-speaking friends from Harvard come visit this past Saturday and Sunday.

It's interesting because I feel like I thrust myself into the rhythm of the city almost as soon as I got here: a week in, I was already living in an apartment with German-speaking roommates and working at a German firm. So withdrawing a little bit helped me to think more critically about what Germany really is and how I fit in here.

My first realization, brought on by the trip to Munich, was that the very idea of “ Germany ” is extremely difficult to define. Any history class will tell you so, but nothing can really compare to slowly leaving gritty Berlin, riding six hours by train through the countryside, and arriving in Bavaria, where, according to the family friends I stayed with, lederhosen and dirndl dresses are permanently in fashion.

But no matter how much Munich and Berlin can seem like opposite ends of the spectrum of German cities—mountainous and flat, traditional and unconventional, devoutly Catholic and half-heartedly Protestant—the next weekend, which saw me host two American friends, proved that Berlin itself is too complicated and expansive to fit into any such generalizations (I suspect the same is true for Munich). It's a sprawling city, not only measured by its geographic size (8 times that of Paris), but also in terms of the remarkable diversity of people and places and things within it. When I heard that the bike tour we were going to take was four hours long, I expected we'd see everything; perhaps a bit predictably, I was surprised at how much we missed.

It's that kind of depth that makes me excited just to live here, but my job has gotten more engaging over the past few weeks as well. I'm starting in right now on capturing, logging, and editing more than 200 hours of footage dealing with the anti-Iraq War movement in the U.S. Given that it will take me 200 hours just to see it one time through, it's probably a project that will last the rest of my internship, but I have no objections. It's good, interesting work, and I've never done anything like it before. And that's been, in many ways, the refrain of the summer: never been to Berlin before, never spoken German outside of class before, never worked in film before. It's remarkable not only how well everything has come together, but also how, when you live in a world of never-befores, each new experience becomes easier and less strange than the last, and you begin to actually seek out what's unfamiliar and unknown.