Category Archives: Germany

Germany

1945

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It wasn’t the size or the scale or the beauty of the view, the changing leaves, the sun peeking out behind the grey clouds. It wasn’t the stones placed on memorials or the signs explaining what we were meant to remember. It was, rather, the order, the organization, the efficiency and thought that had gone into creating an industrial process that, as intended, exterminated thousands of souls.

Souls that were exterminated because they were no longer thought of as souls, as individuals, as humans.

In an industrial process devoid of humanity to enable the process to function.

In a place that was beautiful, with forest growing on the mountaintop, with sunlight streaming through trees, where the wind must have been extraordinary when it came.

And what got me, too, was the way that nature could entirely take over if we let it. The soil had regenerated from the burned remains of buildings overloaded beyond expectations. The trees had grown tall inside what had once been structures meant to contain, to suppress, to separate. The paths were almost overgrown, almost hard to distinguish from the leaves strewn across the ground.

It was autumn in the beech forest. Autumn in Buchenwald.

If we let it, nature could obliterate the remains of what we were there to remember. Nature thrives despite of humanity, against humanity, and here we have fought nature back to remember. Letting this place become, once more, simply a beautiful place would mean that we risk forgetting, risk allowing the lessons of the past go unlearned.

And so the paths were almost hidden. Almost, but not quite. Intentionally the paths were designed and intentionally they remained.

It is not enough to remember; rather, there is a responsibility to act. And this means putting up the markers, placing the stones, taming the trees. This means being there, being at Buchenwald, and acknowledging the lives taken and ended there. This means continuing to tell the stories, to say the names, to walk where thousands walked, and to share the experience so as to keep it as present as we can into the future.

Because it is not enough to say that we remember.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. – Elie Wiesel

Germany

Herbst/Fall/Autumn

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There has been more than a little space between blog posts recently, and it’s not for lack of what to say. Rather, it’s due to time spent being in the world where, I am grateful to say, I have found myself in good company and laughing.

Playing, I said.
Living, came the response.

And in this moment, quite so.

Where I pause, however, is when I stop to consider the gulf between my small corner of the sky and the big, wide world around me. That’s when it’s hard to laugh, hard to remain positive, hard to stomach what I read in the news with my students every day. We’ve had beautiful sunshine lately and that affects my mood, too. Fall can be a quiet, contemplative time but lately it hasn’t been. It has been lively and full and it’s easy to get swept away in that. I need to remind myself to take stock, to take a step back. I am so lucky to be here.

A year ago we started watching this tree as the leaves changed, as the days grew colder and the nights crisper. We watch nature because we are at home in it, because it’s beautiful, because it quite literally soothes the soul. And we spend as much time out in nature as we can because we know that pleasant temperatures don’t last forever.

Lately I’ve been laughing a lot, despite what’s in the news and what we expect for winter in Europe. I cannot change the world’s geopolitics but can put into the world what I believe should be part of it. To this end, I’ve been laughing with someone who reminds me to slow down, to take it easy, to take time away in order to be present with what is there.

Here now in autumn, leaves change. Colours change. The way that we approach one another during times that many of us, to varying degrees, find profoundly unsettling, can also change. We can choose to be a little kinder, a little more open, a little more honest. We can look for reasons to laugh, to play, to live.

And in the world that I believe should be, we stand up together and support one another because that creates “us” and when there’s just “us” rather than “us and them”, that creates peace. We all laugh, after all, and peace means finding commonalities and making them count.

So I’ve been out in nature and laughing. And I hope this post, and my wish for the world, inspire you to get out there, as well.

Germany

Yoga auf Deutsch

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I’ve been living in Germany for slightly over a year and it seems like my language skills are slowly improving. A friend asked recently how long I’ve been learning German (about a year and a half) and complemented my fluidity when speaking, which I think was a generous remark. It certainly doesn’t feel fluid and I often only catch the grammar mistakes after I’ve made them, assuming I catch them at all. But I am starting to get a sense for the language and I can make more meaning out of what I read and hear without knowing all of the words, which suggests a gradual improvement.

One thing I’ve been trying to do is hear as much German as possible, for example, on the radio, in films or TV shows, and eavesdropping closely when the opportunity arises. It is for this reason that I started following a German yoga instructor on YouTube. I’ve done YouTube yoga for well over ten years and it seemed like a natural progression in language learning. The idea is immersion, after all.

It helps that I am intimately familiar with yoga after years of practice and it helps that Sanskrit is used for many postures. It helps that yoga sequences are deliberately repetitive and that all yoga teachers talk (slowly and calmly) about breath, stillness, movement, and stretching. They use imperative language, which is not always obvious in daily life, and speak as explicitly as possible without simplifying, which is otherwise hard to find. I hadn’t realized all of this when I first began looking for yoga videos in German and perhaps it wouldn’t have taken me so long if I had.

Brand new when I began practicing yoga auf Deutsch were some anatomy words and the German translations for names of postures that I’m used to hearing in English. These are the things one doesn’t typically learn out of textbooks, but also the things that make the difference between living in German (when I try to do that) and learning German. And if experience is the best teacher and language learning requires repetition, yoga is a beautiful way to practice.

A benefit I did not expect is that doing yoga in German requires me to focus in a way that a yoga class in English does not. I’ve done plenty of yoga sequences with my mind accidentally elsewhere the whole time, breathing automatically rather than intentionally following the breath. After such a practice, the body feels better but the mind remains in a whirl. But when the instruction is in German, my whole attention is on listening because I cannot passively absorb language the way I do in English. As a result, I am more engaged when practicing and recognize immediately when my mind has wandered because I lose track of the sequence and literally cannot continue. At the conclusion of practice, my body and mind are very much aligned.

Naturally, there are things that I miss in these videos, perhaps elements of philosophy that go beyond my current vocabulary. But the benefits, both for language learning and for yoga practice itself, are far greater than that, and far greater than I anticipated. The biggest reminder here, I think, is that it is always worth trying something new because you really never know what you’re going to find.

You live a new life for every language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once. – Czech proverb