Julia starts 2nd grade, Justin 24th

Nearly two weeks ago I wrote, but did not post, the following:

It was an eventful week, filled with milestones and misadventures and capped by the fairest day Berlin has ever known.

But before we get on to this week, a short note on last week, about which we blogged nothing. Last Saturday was the fiftieth anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall. As a memorial to the day, we walked through Brandenburg Gate from East to West, then walked a short distance (the girls were in no humor for great peripatetic exertion) along the route where the Wall once ran. We even snapped the inevitable American tourist photo of ourselves standing with one foot in the former East, and one foot in the former West, Berlin. It was a special thing to be in Berlin for the occasion and to think how different the city center must once have been. The girls are likely to remember, if they remember anything at all, only that we bought them ice cream.

On Monday Julia started second grade, enlisting as a full-fledged Schülerin at the Spreewald Grundschule, which bills itself as “Theater betont”—i.e. emphasizing theater, which thrills Julia who prides herself in her acting skills and foresees for herself a brilliant career on stage and screen. So far they have mostly acted like ordinary elementary school students—only more so, since elementary school starts here with the first grade, and Julia’s class has a mix of first and second graders. So Julia, who reads three books a week, shares a class with some kids who know about three letters. We may have to agitate for an upgrade. Julia has been a stalwart trooper about going to a German school. Language gap notwithstanding she made a host of instant friends. Lia worried the other day that Julia’s personality might be so forceful that by the end of the year she will have taught thirty German kids English rather than learned German herself. Lia went to pick Julia up from school on Wednesday and found her at the head of a train of girls, linked at the arms, who were marching in rhythm to Julia’s stentorian cadence (in English): “One, two, three, four! Hup, two, three four!,” etc.
[*Note: We have since transferred Julia to the Loechnitz School. More anon.]

Eli was to start at her Kindergarten the same day. But as a result of misunderstanding (on my part) and negligence (also on my part), it turned out that the place we thought they had for her was likely full—and that in any case, the head mistress was on vacation (she being a European and it being August; start of the school year be hanged) and couldn’t be contacted to ask for sure until the twenty-eighth of August. So it was back to the drawing board. For a time it seemed we would have to wait till the first of October and send her to a new Protestant Kindergarten down town. But at the eleventh hour another Kita answered one of the blunderbuss emails I sent out earlier in the week. On Friday Lia, Katharine, and Eli went to see it. And it’s perfect. We’ll sign Eli up on Monday and she’ll start September first.
[*Note: Eli started this week at the Haus der Kinder Kita. More anon.]

Late Thursday evening I had my prospectus colloquium with two of my committee members via Skype. This was a helpful conversation, but basically a formality. My committee had long since endorsed my project and happily sent me across the sea to the archives when the powers that be insisted that we hold a formal colloquium. It is a hoop that all graduate students must jump through, and I have now jumped through it. Only my quondam law school comrades will appreciate the eeriness and incongruity of receiving a note on Skype informing me in pre-formulated words of saccharine exuberance that “Bruce Ackerman wants to stay in touch with you by using Skype!” Anyhow, the upshot of the evening is that I am now, officially, ABD. Now onward with the D.

On Friday evening we had our ward friends Olaf and Antje Wenke over for dinner and, after the girls went to bed, a movie. They’re a great couple. Olaf is the factotum English translator for the ward and has recently filled in for Eli’s primary teacher, who just moved. Antje is the quiet book wonder worker, LJEK’s visit to whom was chronicled in an earlier post. We had a lovely evening together and watched a prodigiously silly movie—I had almost written uncommonly silly, but that would be inaccurate; cinematic idiocy is so ubiquitous that no amount of it is ever truly unique. It was a musical of sorts—a light-hearted and non-minded comedy from the 1950s or ‘60s in which a hundred seconds rarely pass without the eruption of a song. I cannot remember the name. I had read in histories of postwar Germany about the flight of German film from serious content in the decades immediately following Nazism—of the national addiction to airy escapism, to films about sun and fun in Italy, about affluent young people acting like idiots in a kind of eternity. I have now seen such a film.

Saturday was a perfect day—a climatological miracle that descended, of all places, on Berlin. We went on a little Ausflug to Chorin, to visit a venerable Cistercian cloister there and, in theory, to hear an outdoor symphony at their summer music festival. After not many minutes the girls vetoed the concert. But this was just as well. We had a glorious hike from the Bahnhof to the monestary—about two kilometers with Eli riding in the stroller, Katharine astride my or Lia’s shoulders, and Julia striding ever onward, inexorable and indomitable. Julia walked several miles today, in sandals and with a blistered foot, and never uttered a syllable of complaint. A few cautious references, yes, to her injuries and inadequate footwear, lest her heroism go entirely unmissed; but no murmuring at all. After giving up on the concert we climbed around on the ruins of one of the original buildings, where Eli met a dog named Pasqual and, through it, a lovely family from upstate New York, the parents of which teach music history (the husband focusing on J.S., the wife on C.P. Bach) at Cornell. They’re on sabbatical here, and happen to live a couple streets over from us. On the way back to the train station Eli rode on my shoulders and Katharine slept in the stroller. This was a hardy slog, but the sky remained glorious and the breeze sublime. Back in the Dorf, we crashed a village Volksfest where we ate Bratwurst with curry sauce. It was a small—a very small—foretaste of Oktoberfest, but an unforgettable moment of feeling really at home in Germany. We returned home weary and grateful.