November

My grandmother always said she liked November for the way the sky lightened when trees dropped their leaves, a compensation for shortening days. The effect was especially strong in the open Connecticut countryside where she lived. She didn't repeat herself much, and held sentimentality in horror, but related this observation to me several times, even suggesting it was something I could remember after she was gone. This is the first November since she died before Christmas last year, and I find myself remembering it.

The trees in our neighborhood held onto most of their leaves, yellow with the occasional red, until a few days ago. I noticed the change while jumping with J. on an in-ground trampoline in the playground behind Gethsemane Kirche. Even the loud, dissonant clangs of the church bells (which J. sometimes imitates at noon and six, and 10:30 on Sundays, saying "bong, bong" with an open mouth and nodding head) seem a bit louder without the muffling of leaves. And the skies of Berlin seem a bit more open, expanses of grey that can be strangely grand and uplifting (rather like those in the paintings of Phillips Koninck).

To celebrate the season, last Thursday our Kita paid tribute to St. Martin, the patron saint of gemütlichkeit, as far as I can tell, in whose name Kitas across Germany march at twilight carrying lanterns and singing songs, winding up at Spielplätze where they roast dough on a stick to create, after an endless wait, a primitive caveman bread called Stockbrot (stick bread). I fulfilled the role of the American rube, failing to heed a fellow Kita parent's advice to make it "lang und dünn" (instead of long and thin, I went for a kind of fat brioche shape, which kept slipping and getting almost incinerated), endlessly turning my Stock while others were already enjoying their Brot, and finally handing it off to a capable German so I could drink a beer. Our friend who made the dough said the whole point of the ritual is to take so long that people are forced to talk to each other. I think it also proves what Tacitus said, which is that Germans are happiest in primitive surroundings, sitting on dirt around a fire in the cold. As for J., the ritual made a huge impression, and he went to sleep muttering "Stock...Brot...Papa...Feuer...," clearly retaining the image of his father stooped by the fire in a Sisyphean attempt to turn dough into bread.

My grandmother didn't live long enough to see us move to Berlin, but I am sure she would be surprised to find me, or any relative of hers, living in the capital of a country she and my grandfather, a naval officer in World War II, were more or less committed never to visiting. Even my parents preserve some of this prejudice, though I think the objection (especially on the part of my Greek-American mother, who visited last month and tried her best to like it) is only partly about history, partly about Germany's historically weak PR as a travel destination–something young people obsessed with Berlin would find hard to imagine–which is in turn, of course, about history.

Last Saturday, November 9, was not just the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but a round-numbered anniversary, the 30th: a cause for Berlin to organize hundreds of events, some of which happened conveniently across the street from us, at the Gethsemane Kirche. A temporary exhibition told the story, in admirably painstaking German detail, of the church's role as a center of resistance and unofficial organ of information in the GDR. It made churches seem like rather cool places in East Germany, their pulpits filled by quietly radical, shaggy-haired preachers who let punk bands give concerts in the basement.

When the Wall came down, I was in fifth grade, old enough to know Gorbachev's birthmark from the television news, young and American enough not to get why the news really mattered. I remember a classmate, Marta, bringing a chunk of broken concrete, small enough to fit in a backpack, to show-and-tell and feeling cynical when she said it was a piece of the actual Berlin Wall that a relative of hers had brought back. It looked like any ordinary piece of construction-site detritus.

We had no big plans for November 9 until my wife's friend Jan, a madcap Berlin character who puts more energy into having fun than most teenagers (when I first met him, he put on a fireworks show for us in Tempelhof Field), suggested we wear 1980s apparel and meet him on a bridge in upper Prenzlauer Berg. We were to join his group, the West Germans, as they crossed the bridge to reunite with their East German peers at 9pm, the hour when a toast to reunification has been drunk at that spot for the past 30 years by the Bürgermeisters of Mitte and Pankow, the districts connected by the bridge. I did not realize until reading about it later that the bridge, on Bornholmer Strasse, was the first place where the Wall was breached.

Jan's group was easy to pick out from the surrounding crowd, which was mostly German and sedate, by its portable turntable and thrown-together vintage outfits. East and West reunited as planned, people danced in the cold, drinking directly from bottles of Sekt and beer, and a few, those old enough to remember, made speeches recalling the day in 1989. The most incongruous, solemn speech reminded us that November 9 was also the day of Kristallnacht, in 1938, and a recent attack on an East German synagogue proved that Germany, despite all its atonement and remembrance, cannot afford to be complacent. (November 9 is also, as I learned from my history-major brother-in-law, and later my German teacher, the day of the Beer Hall Putsch and just about every other really important German historical event since 1848.)

Jan told us that some on the farther, Antifa left think November 9, with its awful pogrom associations, should not be celebrated at all, even if it does mark the end of the Iron Curtain, the spread of democracy–an accomplishment that looks more provisional now than it did thirty years ago. A surreal aspect of the party was how much time we spent, while bobbing to Björk and whatever else the amateur DJ played, seriously discussing problems in the former East Germany, whose story of disenfranchisement and reactionary politics sounds strikingly Trumpian. These were among my Berlin-iest moments yet, drinking beer outside in the cold on a windy bridge that we biked to, trying to be festive while also not losing sight of the serious, sad history underlying the celebration. It felt like a taste of what being German is actually like, the way that even "fun" needs to be offset with an asterisk. Things were simpler for my grandparents.