LGU class takes on the Berlin Challenge

By Carrie Caine
Collegian Staff
April 12, 2006

Eleven students and I, Dr Robert Vogel and his wife, departed on a travel study to Berlin, Germany on March 2, 2006 . The course, Beyond the Wall: Globalization, Education and Tolerance, is part of the Leadership and Global Understanding minor at La Salle. It wrestled with one question: “Are German schools preparing their youth to live in a more tolerant and global world?”

In answering the question, we encountered snow, bratwurst, trains, not enough planes and some sassy Saxons. There were laughs and tears about luggage, much history and a very bad rendition of “American Pie.” Throughout the trip, the same chants resounded through the historic streets and construction sites that riddle both East and West Berlin. I had a chance to record my experiences in a journal.

“Not Without Our Luggage!”

Arriving in Berlin in March is a cold, grimy, frustrating business, particularly when arriving during a blizzard with the airport’s luggage conveyor belt broken. Thus, during our eight-day stay in the capital city of Germany, we were without luggage for most of the time, washing clothes in the sink, drying them out the hotel window and looking for bargain clothes on the streets of Berlin.

It was awful to tool around town without fresh shoes or hair straighteners. It was worse to feel guilty about whining about not having our stuff when we visited sites memorializing the tragic events of Germany’s history, like the Wannsee Conference Center where the Holocaust was planned and the Final Solution written in January 1942 or the Topography of Terror which displays information and photographs about the rise and fall of an oppressive and intolerance Third Reich.

Sophomore Martha Kutteh describes what it was like without her luggage.
“It was really hard not having it, but it brought the group closer together because we were all going through the same thing, and in the end I think it worked out okay,” she said.
I never received my luggage while in Berlin (I got it a month after I checked it in Philadelphia, three weeks after we came back), and all week the no-luggage cloud hung over my head. I couldn’t shake it. “Not without our luggage!” became the rally cry against the dominating forces of Lufthansa’s (the airline) baggage claim department.

While there, we realized that Germany, as a country, has trouble shaking off their emotional baggage issues as well. The country’s history is brief and tumultuous, as it formed just over a century ago and then endured two world wars and economic hardship before dividing under the Iron Curtain and tackling reunification a short time later.

In fact, Berlin’s emotional baggage is on display all over the place, through enormous museums and educational programs to the prolific public arts that symbolize the pain of the past to the running brick line throughout the streets that indicates where the Berlin Wall used to divide the city.

Our luggage trickled into the hotel at a teasingly slow pace. Eventually, everything fell back into our hands in various states of disarray. Our baggage challenges were certainly less complicated than Germany’s but, at least for the week, we had a taste of living with the baggage monkey on our backs.
“Not Without Our Bratwurst!”

There are moments when we make discoveries that turn our previous perceptions upside down. I never thought that I would fall in love with a member of the sausage family. Yet here I sit, in my room at midnight, aching for a good bratwurst.

Bratwurst is made of pork, beef and sometimes veal, but I wasn’t aware of that during my first experience with the German sausage. I would break up my bratwurst experience into three distinct stages. First, there was mockery, as I pre-judged the meat when first I saw it. To be fair, bratwurst is not the most attractive of meat products, and the name is not one that rolls off the tongue. Spying a poster for bratwurst sandwiches for 1.40 euro, I engaged in the “point, laugh, snap picture” form of mockery.

However, I was soon eating my words (pun intended), as hunger overcame my weary traveling soul. This hunger, coupled with a spirit of adventure and curiosity (which I call stage two) led me to the very bratwurst vendor whose poster I had earlier poked fun at. Stage three began with the first bite of my bratwurst, and I term it acceptance. No, no, not acceptance unbridled enthusiasm. The roll was hard on the outside, soft on the inside and the ketchup had a slight hint of zesty flavor. And the bratwurst itself was a German-form-of-fiesta-cause-I-don’t-know-the-word in my mouth.

We found ourselves partaking of bratwurst several other times during the trip. The convenience of vendors on the streets of Berlin served as “fixes” for our bratwurst cravings. We first considered applying the phrase, “Everybody’s German when they eat a bratwurst!” to our culinary crusade. This we found to be not such an appropriate tagline after all. Berlin may be a cosmopolitan city, but Germany is a country still wrestling with issues of identity. There is a large population of immigrants in Germany that ethnic Germans are not making a concerted effort to integrate.

While the Berliners enjoy the diversity of restaurants in their city, they largely ignore the problems resulting from an alienated population. For Germany to truly become a leader in a multicultural world, the German people will have to embrace all the bratwurst eaters of Deutschland as contributing members to the country’s rich cultural identity and will have to work to balance cultural practices with ethical standards.
“Not Without Our Yoga!”

When we went to IBM in Germany to meet with some international business people, we thought we would get a taste of the economic woes in Germany, but we did not expect the debate over culture and globalization that broke out between two of the IBM representatives.

Because our program and our class are so concerned with globalization and culture, we love thinking, talking and arguing about its impact on a culture. The standpoint of businesses like IBM is pretty standard, since such corporations benefit from the free trade that globalization allows, they pretty much love it. However, they do face challenges with labor laws and competition within the European Union.

Daniel Boesel stood in front of us and announced: “Globalization destroys culture,” and the room grew silent and shocked as a math convention does when someone yells that pi is equal to three. Boesel believes that globalization robs the identity of places, using the example of the shortage of good German restaurants in Berlin.

Reviewing the establishments in which we ate and drank illustrates his point: a Vietnamese bar, an Asian restaurant, Italian restaurant, a Spanish bar, a Turkish restaurant and an Irish pub. German fare was limited to the continental breakfast at the hotel, a potato restaurant and street-vendor bratwurst (see right).

Boesel’s colleague, Indra Hadeler, a lawyer for IBM Berlin had another idea:
“I like my yoga and my Thai food. I know plenty of good German restaurants in Berlin. Hadler said, “What’s so wrong with globalization?”

Amitav Ghosh echoed these thoughts in his book Incendiary Circumstances when he quoted Aghas Shahid Ali: “What I say is, why can’t you be happy with the cuisine and the clothes and the music and all these wonderful things? At least here we have been able to make a space where we can all come together because of the good things.”

Berlin was an interesting cultural study in that, though many Berliners enjoy the best of other cultures, few Berliners are welcoming or appreciative of the multicultural immigrants who have settled in the city with their own religions and customs. This contradiction of cosmopolitan world knowledge and diversity against a very German-centered established culture became one of the most intriguing and lasting aspects of our trip. It was embedded in our conversations with politicians, professors, students and ourselves.

Some of our chants perhaps were a failure, and although Christine Sweeney couldn’t unpack her luggage, she unpacked choice words to multiple Lufthansa employees. Despite the potholes on the road to answering our central question, 12 students, a teacher and a wife managed to navigate Berlin with world famous La Salle style. We met the Berlin challenge.

cainec1@lasalle.edu