The Berlin Jewish Museum: Pictures and Reactions

The building is very carefully designed
to evoke various feelings.  And note the two security
folks in front.  I don't think they had guards
stationed outside the building when I was here
in 2009.

 My sister and her boyfriend visited me in Berlin at the same time as Mrs. Spew.  So, I played tour guide, and we hit many of the major spots in town and also wandered through some neighborhoods.  One must-see is the Jewish Museum, which documents the lives of German Jews before and after the Holocaust.  I had visited during my first trip to Germany (if I remember correctly) but not since.  And much has changed as they did a major renovation.  I don't remember well what it looked like before, and I apparently didn't take that many pictures.  So, it was all fresh to me, and I am pretty sure many of the best infographics were new.  

I am going to put a bunch of pictures below and comment on them, rather than develop a coherent discussion of the entire experience except for the following mega-reactions:

• So much of the run-up to the Holocaust feels way too familiar right now, as many politicians compete to write laws to exclude trans people from society.
• As it is the Jewish museum, I don't mind as much the exclusive focus on the Jewish Holocaust experience, but as we visited the Romani/Santii memorial, the number really isn't six million Jews but eleven million people including Jews, Roma, LGBTQ, disabled people, communists and socialists, and many others.
• Not much on the Holocaust itself--that is somewhere else.  
• I would have loved to see a conversation of what does Never Again mean. 
• In the past, I would go to places like this and be sad.  Now, I am sad and angry.  Angry that Israeli authorities are betraying the lessons learned long ago and doing so much harm because it satisfies some sense of revenge and it distracts people from unseating Netanyahu.
  

Lots of statements by German Jews reacting to
the Holocaust

Changes in # of Jews in Germany

Where the Jews were expelled to

The white figures represent the total Jews pre-Holocaust, the black repesent those who were killed.
Note Bulgaria!  This was one of the biggest surprises during my visit.

I

Row upon row of laws passed
from 1933-1945 to repress
Germany's Jews

The last of the laws--how to hide what they did

One wall had reactions by Jews to Hilter/Nazis
getting into power in 1933

Multiple walls dedicated to
Jewish superstars including Jesus

   

This caught my eye given
the rise of Jewish anti-Zionists. 

I didn't know the connection between Wagner
and anti-semitism---I thought it was that
Nazis loved his music.  Nope, it was that he
was a virulent anti-semite.

Great info graphic showing the breakdown
of Germans and German Jews in the economy.
Now I know why I suck at yard work: Jews are not
farmers.

Marx had some good ideas.

all the towns from which Jews were
expelled.  Makes me think about
Israel doing some expelling then
and now.

They had an exhibit of a German poet who
released his work weekly from his hiding place
in the Netherlands.

  

One thing I didn't see this time that I saw my first time:

Friends Kippa!

Driving into the Past: Dresden, Leipzig, Nuremberg, and Erfut

Mrs. Spew is spending a couple of weeks with me in Europe, so I thought we would wander through the middle of Germany before going to northern Italy.  We wanted to see some castles and some history, and we have gotten a heap of both.

Our first stop was Dresden, which, of course, resonated with me since I read Slaughterhouse Five in high school, which was in the context of the firebombing that utterly destroyed the city and is now seen as something far worse than gratuitous.

 We saw occasional memorials and unrepaired walls here and there, but it was mostly out of sight.  Definitely not out of our minds.  We stayed in the old town area, which is how we maximize the walking and the sightseeing.  We were close to the massive central cathedral, heaps of palaces (now museums), city halls, and the river.  We had some excellent food here including both Spanish and German tapas (best German food I have had, I think, in my three months here).  There was a wonderfully silly, cheesy "experience" where one gets some headphones to listen to the narration of a character from long ago trying to figure out how he died as we get a tour of the remnants of the fortress.  We also went into a pretty amazing art museum that had a great collection of statues including a replica of David and a display of East Germany/communist era art, which tended to focus on American imperialism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We spent our next morning at Schloss Weesenstein, which is between Dresden and the border with Czechia.  It looked v ery small and uncastle-like from the road, but very big and very castle-ish from the inside.  It had some very funky display tendencies including paintings that would then have a figure/mannequin sticking out of it to give the face in the picture a 3-D body.  It was one of the places where the Nazis put (stolen) art to protect it from the bombing with the castle at Nuremberg being another.

 Leipzig was the least spectacular place.  Still some pretty sights, big cathedrals including one where J.S. Bach is buried (but we couldn't find the actual site within the place).

 

Speaking of which, Nuremberg is pretty spectacular.  On the way in, we stopped by the Zeppelin grounds where the Nazis had huge rallies.  The structures don't look the same, in part because the American troops blew up the giant swastika on the platform, and partly because other parts of the superstructure were falling apart, so they got demolished.  It was strange to be standing exactly where Hitler stood way back when. We then drove into Nuremberg, where google maps led us astray a bit.  We managed to get to our hotel and then walked around, yes, the older part of town.  

 

A very pretty river runs through the city.  We went up to the hill to the Imperial castle that overlooks the town.  We spent most of our time there, looking at the gardens and going through the museum.  It had lots of medieval armor/arms displays and much discussion of how imperial rule worked.  The emperor didn't stay put, but would visit castles around the empire to network, to show that his authority was everywhere, to rule on local disputes, etc.  The big tower had at the top pictures on each side, showing what that view looked like before the war, at the end of the war, and then after the rubble was picked up.  Nuremberg got hit very hard by allied bombing--because of its symbolic importance as well as being a transportation hub and industrial center.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then to put all this into context, on our way out, we stopped by the Nuremberg Trial Memorial/Museum.  there was a whole lot of history packed into  a relatively small space.  Surprisingly, nearly all of the text was in German despite the tribunal being an English/French/Russian affair, and a sharp contrast to the rally grounds displays.  So, we had to listen to the audio guide read the English translation of the displays.  It slowed us down a bit, and we had to skip some stuff.  But a fascinating experience and a nice bookend to the rally grounds.  

 

Then it was on to Erfurt, a smaller city that avoided being bombed.  I asked my wife which of the places we visited had the highest burgermeister/meisterburger quotient, and Erfurt edged out the others.  A really beautiful town with a funky covered bridge with shops, a very large citadel, and more ice cream stores per linear meter than pretty much anywhere else. 

Why they have a bread dude statue? 
I have no idea.

Random observations along the way

• I guess the whole thing of densely populated areas is that the areas in between are empty?  So much of the roads in between these places had nothing but farms, windmills, and solar panels. 
  
• Autobahn!  Superfast but lots of places with strict limits--keeps you awake.  The roads are so well constructed that it is easy to go uber-fast without feeling it--our rental car is also pretty smooth.  So, yeah, I have generally been driving at speeds that I would never approach in North America... while still getting passed by much, much faster cars.
• 
  Strange parking processes.  In a mall in Leipzig, the parking machine spit out a yellow token, not a ticket.  So, when I returned to the car, I had to put the token into a normal payment machine, which I had expected to spit out a ticket. Nope, it spit out another token.  But it worked.  In another
  parking structure, it takes a picture of your license plate, so on your way to your car, you enter your license plate number into the machine and it spits out a ticket to let you out of the lot?  
• Speaking of driving, I learned how to drive a manual in high school, shortly after passing my driving test.  My mother's Datsun 310 only had four gears plus reverse.  I did learn the funkiness of how to get some sticks into reverse when I was a parking attendant in high school--yes, they hired a 16 year old!  Anyhow, after leaving home, my manual car experiences have been far apart and few, like when I landed in Brussels to drive to the Arnhem bridge (it was not too far for me, but my next stop was as jet lag hit me hard) about fourteen years ago.  So, this rental SUV has got six gears, which means I sometimes put into third rather than fifth or fourth rather than sixth.  Oops.  Oh, and my first gear skilz (the hardest gear) are not so great.  So, a few clumsy starts at stop lights.  Unlike the hard time I had figuring out how to get into reverse at the forementioned Brussels airport, I quickly realized the trick with this car was pushing down on the stick to get it into reverse.
• Lunches on the road didn't always work out.  We kept finding restaurants near our routes to be closed--on the way out of Dresden/Schloss and in Bamberg in between Nurenberg and Erfurt.  We ultimately just waited to eat in Leipzig. In Bamberg, we settled for a Turkish doner cart in the parking lot of a grocery store, and, as all of my Turkish doner experiences have been in Germany this year, it was super tasty.
• I don't remember the trams being this fast in Berlin.  In Erfurt and in some of the other places, they are fast and jeez, they are close to the sidewalks.
  

 Tomorrow, we drive back to Berlin, drop off the rental car, and get on a plane to Venice.  We will have about five days in Italy split between Venice and Milan.  I have never been to either place, and Mrs. Spew last visited ... before Iran-Contra.  She has been keeping me from getting gelato since it supposed to be pretty good where we are going.  

Auf wiedersehn!

 

Bamberg and the Humboldts

 No, not a rock band, but my past few days of hanging out with super-smart folks and the folks who fund them and me.  The Humboldt Foundation held a meeting for awardees, which involved lots of Franconian food (oh my), several amazing lectures, and meeting these folks.  It is held in Bamberg where the spirit of Humboldt apparently lives.  Let me explain.

Despite Humboldt being a dead rich guy, the foundation is not what he created with his will, but by the German government to foster engagement with foreign scientists after World War II.  It funds, among other things, foreign scholars to spend time in Germany working with German scholars.  This foundation is why I am spending three months in Berlin this year and three months next year. The range of scholarship that is funded is pretty breathtaking, as our meeting includes philosophers and classisists (classics scholars, whatever they are called) and physicists and engineers and material scientists and folks in between.  I have been to such a multidisciplinary event although it did remind me of a conference in 1990ish where Dave and I served as rapporteurs but that was mostly physicists and nuclear engineers and the like.  

The program here involved opening presentations about Bamberg and Humboldt, lectures on optical networks, philosophical rationality, climate change, and the human genome and mutation (now the X-men are on my mind).  We also had small group organized by discipline-ish.  My group of 20 covered the humanities and social sciences.  And we had some excellent meals that exemplified the food of this region (heavy, really heavy).  

I was my first real European rail trip since my college days (except for some trips between Amsterdam and the Hague), and, yowza, are the rails smooth here.  Great tank country.  Anyhow, I got here a bit early on the first day so I walked around the town.  Bamberg is, well, really old and mostly undamaged.  It was founded around 1070 as the home to Holy Roman emperor types, and it was not bombed in World War II, which makes for a really amazing old city.  It is famous for a specific kind of beer: smokey!

The first evening started with a bit of history about Humboldt.  He was one of two sons of a rich family, and he really, really wanted to explore and engage in some serious botany and other scientific investigations.  Which he did once his mother died.  He documented heaps of nature in Latin America and in Europe.  His scientific interests were all over the place, so naming this foundation after him makes a great deal of sense. Alex said once: "Knowledge and insight are the joy and entitlement of humankind."  Indeed.

The first section of the first morning was by Polina Bayvel of University College London on optical networks.  She did an excellent job of talking to folks who were a range of sharp hard physicists and curious social scientists--she made the optics of fiber and of the cloud and the internet most clear.  The history of philosophy and religion prof lost me.  

In the afternoon, our roundtable was partly aimed at introductions so that maybe folks might find some people to work with down the road. The person at the table closest to me was... a former colleague.  Vincent Pouloit, who was hired at McG in my sixth year or so there, is also here.  That was a fun surprise as neither of us knew we are Humboldting this year until we read the program for the event. The group talked a bit about a variety of issues affecting contemporary social science including AI in the classroom.

And then there was the award ceremony.  It was really touching to have every awardee introduced and given a certificate.  I will be most proud to frame it and put it on my office wall.  I felt very outclassed here as some of the folks here are making tremendous contributions to science, but I am, of course, quite proud to be among them.  

Vincent!!!

The meals, other than the heaviness of the food, have been the best part.  The first night our table happened to be me and a sociologist and three super enthusiastic physicists who so much loved talking about their stuff and using their hands like fighter pilots to explain their concepts.  Last night, as it was before the ceremony, there were some friends/guests of the Humbodlt Foundation at the dinner.  So, I sat next to a very inquisitive chemist who asked me about NATO and other stuff, and explained his work--zapping things with lasers including ... coffee!  

The first presentation of the second day was by Tiffany Shaw (a Canadian!) who talked about Predicting Climate Change.  It was a fascinating talk about some of the dynamics of climate change and where the uncertainty is.  Nope, no uncertainty about it being caused by humans and that it is getting worse.  One of the things I had not known is that the temperature change was essentially additive--that the temperatures are rising in a relatively linear fashion but the effect on precipitation is non-linear.  That means it is getting to get much, much wetter.  Oh my.  I asked a question about 2023 since she had it on her final slide but didn't talk about how last year was beyond the predictions or at least at the outer end of the range of predictions.  She suggested this year might actually not be quite as hot as there were some specific dynamics last year that were temporary that pushed things hotter than the general trends. She finished by saying how this was an exciting time to be doing this kind of work, which reminded me of how I left about doing the International Relations of Ethnic Conflict in the 1990s--exciting but scary and depressing.

 

The next presentation was about the genome and mutation.  The first big surprise is that most/all mutation is bad--making it more likely for someone to die.  And, well, that ran against all the years of X-Men and Homo Superior.  Magneto had the wrong idea about mutation?  It turns out that what we think about evolution is wrong--it is not really progressive and more by chance!  That mutations tend to be selected out in a large population (like yeast?!) but may remain in smaller populations like elephants these days or homonids way back when.   This nearly neutral model of evolution has really shook things up even as it has not made it out of the genome scholars and into the popular understanding.  

I didn't stick around for the q&a as I had to get to a pharmacy before it closed.  And then I explored more of Bamberg, going into various museums and super old buildings.

My quest for life-changing strudel continues, alas, without success. It was fine.

 

 

 We have one last dinner, and then tomorrow, I take the train back to Berlin to prepare for my next adventure: skiing in the Alps!  Hopefully, the wifi will be better in Zurs, but, of course, I will need it less as I will be out and about on many slopes and chair lifts!

Once again, I am thinking--better to be lucky than good.  This winter has been amazing--my time in Berlin and Vienna has been fantastic. I can now add my Bamberg adventure.  Just a terrific time, learning a lot, and enjoying the Humboldt Spirit™.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Future of NATO and of Canada-German Relations

 A couple of weeks ago, I went to Berlin for an event organized by Atlantik-Brücke and Atlantik-Brücke-Canada.  These organizations aim at building transatlantic bridges with the latter reminding folks that there is more than one NATO country on this side of the pond.  It is very much an effort to build ties between Canada and Germany.  I was asked to write a paper on the future of NATO, which was to provide some fodder for discussion. It was a hard paper to write as I was to speak about the future from both Canadian and German perspectives.  I basically punted on that second part, suggesting that since the Germans were confused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and how it upset the Ostpolitik 2.0 effort,  this turning point they are calling Zeitenwende, there was no clear German perspective to provide on the various topics I addressed.  Oh, and writing about THE Canadian perspective on the future of stuff was also really challenging since I have always written about the past and have limited my speculation about trends down the road.  That was not part of my training at the Jedi temple.

Before I get into what others said at the conference, what did I write in the paper?  First, I procrastinated, which was fortunate since I would have had to scrap anything I wrote before February 24th.  Russia's invasion of NATO reminded us of what NATO can do quite well, what it can't do, and what it means.  As I oriented the paper around several key questions to invite discussion, I did suggest that the usual NATO question--the existential question--was moot.  Russia's aggression resolves, at least for the near to medium term, the question of whether NATO can or should continue to exist.  In this crisis, NATO has played its traditional and strongest role--deterring aggression against its members.  

I raised the question of how can NATO provide security and stability for non-members since NATO's day job is quite well handled.  The paper then provides two answers to that: enlargement to some and training/arming to others.  The Finland/Sweden membership train sped way past my paper, as I had to turn it in at the beginning of April.  It is a done deal, with Turkish leveraging barely slowing down the process.  The question is whether the Ukraine model can be applied to Moldova, Georgia, and others--can NATO either via multilateral or bilateral channels provide training and arms assistance to make these other neighbors less tasty and less digestible.  I did point out that a key difference between Ukraine 2022 and Iraq 2014, both targets of much military training assistance, is that the former engaged in good civilian control of the military, promoting the most capable officers and not those who were the most handy for domestic political games.  

Another theme in the paper was humility--that NATO and its members should not get too cocky.  That NATO could not survive another Trump administration, that NATO is not really all that well suited to handle China or gray zone attacks, and that as an alliance of democracies, it's not in the best of shape (Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and, yes, the US).  

The day had a number of panels, but, as a good narcissist, I focused on the one I was on, with the opening statement by Sigmar Gabriel, the former Vice Chanellor and Chair of Atlantik-Brücke; and then I spoke along with Jana Puglierin, who heads the European Council on Foreign Relations Berlin; Thomas Silberhorn, a Christian Democrat Bundestag member; and Vice-Admiral (ret) Ron Lloyd.  Jana was quite clear that the actual policies produced by the Zeitenwende may be less than advertised--that the increases in German defense spending are limited, returning back to normal in five years as the government apparently does not want to constrain future governments (more below); that there are already cracks emerging in the consensus produced by Russia's aggression; that the new money will not really advance the German military that much but just catch it up some from the underspending that has caused a readiness crisis; and that Germany needs to re-think its opposition to linking economic and security issues.  Silberhorn argued that the military strategy to non-members needs to be accompanied by an EU strategy, that we need more options fo rnon-members.  He pointed out that this is not the cold war as we will be cooperating, coexisting, and conflicting with China simultaneously.  

The give and take and Q&A were most interesting--lots of frustration with the current German government which set high expectations and seems to have been dashing them on a daily basis since then.  Similarly, Canada created high expectations by talking about a big boost in defence spending which turned out to be $8b over five years and not in any specified way.  So, much similarity between the two countries--promising big but not actually dramatically boosing defense spending.  The big difference has been Canada's willingness to arm Ukraine, whereas German promises have not always met the realities.  Both are hoping for some kind of normalcy soon, but the mood in the room was that the war was going to drag on and that normal is not going to be a thing anytime soon.  

On the bright side, I think the AB-C mission of reinforcing the transatlantic link is in good shape--the relations between Canada and Germany are pretty good.  I was surprised to learn that the EU had not ratified the CETA agreement, and Germany was one of the laggards on this.  This crisis could provide some momentum on that, but it might also distract Euro folks away from Canada as well.  But on most things, Canada and Germany are not too far apart, and Russia's aggression reminds us of what we have in common.  The eastern front is now NATO's priority, so we will see less debate about whether other areas should get more NATO focus (the southern front of refugee prevention, for instance).  I can't imagine the NATO Summit in a few weeks spending much time on anything besides Sweden/Finland membership and the confrontation with Russia. 

Finally, for Canada, Europe remains the land of easy policy decisions.  Tis in Asia, where the hard choices remain.

Berlin Wall Falling: Thirty Years Later

I had the chance to go to Berlin when I was doing my Eurailpass tour of Europe in 1987, but it was kind of out of the way and cost more money.  So, I didn't, thinking I could go see the wall some other time.  And then the world changed.  The question is: how much?

People have been reacting online in a couple of ways:

• the fall of the wall and the liberation of Eastern Europe pale in comparison to the rise of China in terms of major shifts in international relations
• the fall of the wall and democratization produced much conflict
• walls are back in fashion.

My basic take is that we tend to observe what we want.  What did we expect on that amazing night thirty years ago?  Would we have expected Russia to be led by trolls seeking to mess with pretty much everything?  Not sure.  Would we have expected most of Eastern Europe to become and remain democratic thirty years later?  Hungary, Serbia, Belarus, and Poland are the exceptions, a growing group that should cause much dismay.  However, there was both more and less ethnic conflict than one might have expected.  When empires fall, ethnic conflict ensues.  Thanks to some interventions and some other dynamics, Yugoslavia largely remained the exception and not the rule.

Would we have expected a reunified Germany to be looked upon as one of the few remaining powerful supporters of the liberal international order?  Remember how nervous some countries were about a reunified Germany.  These days we ask Germany to do more, not less.

Checkpoint Charlie

I have been to Berlin several times to do and to present research.  I tend to go to the same places--Checkpoint Charlie and the East Side Gallery










I do think much has changed and much of it for the better.  Europe is not perfect, but it is far better off being unified than divided.  There may be some holes in the map of European democracy, but most Europeans are living free.  There might be lots of dissatisfaction, but, thus far, opposition to most governments has been peaceful and exercised through the ballot boxes.  We can be disappointed about the backsliding, but we should remember how much progress has been made. 

To say that China's rise is hugely important should not diminish the meaning and relevance of the fall of Communism in Europe, the mostly enthusiastic embrace of democracy, and all that the Europeans have accomplished since 1989.  The irony, of course, is the defeat of the far left in the late 1980s has been replaced by the emergence of the far right abetted by Russia.  Brexit would not have happened had not the Conservatives tried to placate their right flank.  Trump, well, he has more than abetted the far right in the US and around the world.  So, we can be plenty depressed on this day as well. 

I will choose to focus on the upside, that so much changed 30 years ago, most of it for the better.  If we screw up what we inherited, that is on us. 

Berlin Weekend Tourism: Old Stuff, Water Stuff, Scary Stuff

No interviews on weekends, of course, so I had much time to tour Berlin.  Given that this is my third visit here, I had to figure out stuff I had not done before.  The answers: Pergamon Museum, Spree boat ride, Dungeon and walking in between.

Eastside Gallery redux

If there is one must-see when visiting Berlin, it is the Eastside Gallery.  Some authority (Berlin municipal?) decides who gets to put art on the remaining parts of the Berlin Wall on, well, the east side.  The art varies in style and quality and intent, but it is moving and puts much into context.  So, for those who can't get to Berlin, here are some of the wall segments:

Not My First Trip to Berlin

So, what to do when I have done many of the major tourist destinations in town? I left Berlin for the day-after-flying-and-dragging day and headed to Potsdam.  While Potsdam has other attractions, such as a neat Atlas-->




The primary attraction is the park/gardens/palaces of Frederick the Great. He liked his fruits so much he had an orangerie--a building that had much space for hothouses.


It was also unique, in my experience: making visitors wear slippers over their shoes.










Meanwhile, this model gives an idea of how vast this space was with so many palaces.

I got to go inside a working windmill, which was a first for me:

and I really enjoyed this picture of Freddie the Great

 

Twas a beautiful day to walk a lot. 

So far, the beering, the eating, and the touristing go well.  Tomorrow, we will find out if the VPN works so I can watch Game of Thrones the interviews go as well.