A Silent Spring

A lapse of 15 or so weeks in writing is probably more telling than anything I will think to say here. But in the future, perhaps for J., it may be interesting to know what life was like in this period, for our family living far from home, in a place that has, rather famously by now, handled a pandemic better and suffered less than most other places, certainly than the U.S.

My avoidance of writing was at first a necessity–daycare closed (for us in mid-March), as it did everywhere, then I started a new job, remotely of course, in early April, and Caro and I were left, like many parents, squeezing in work when J. napped, at night, on the weekends. Even if there were pockets of time, it seemed the world's distress was too large a topic for a silly Berlin Dad blog to address. Anyway, what was there left to do that would amount to anything worth writing about?

This sense of the bigness of problems has, certainly, intensified in recent weeks, with the U.S.'s immemorial problem bursting out in protests that everyone here supports and some emulate–but in a more muted way, as if all anyone can do now is refract U.S. culture. Nothing else seems terribly relevant by comparison.

It was clear a few weeks into the shutdown that whatever we had thought our time in Berlin was going to be about–gorging J. on novel playgrounds, soaking up culture, taking cheap train and plane hops around Europe–it was really going to be, for a while anyway, about coronavirus (a word I somehow prefer to the menacing COVID). Yet even that experience has been so much shorter and less onerous than in other places, and the sense so reassuring of the government piloting the crisis with calm, Sully-esque aplomb, that an American living here feels a certain guilt. This is intensified by a feeling–probably classic for expatriates–of lacking solidarity, of avoiding problems (namely, American ones) rather than facing them or trying to participate in their solution.

To make matters worse, we never had it very bad here. Even at the height of the shutdown, to risk sounding very annoying, you could get a delicious takeout cappuccino made by Shoji down the street. Several new restaurants run by enterprising young couples reconfigured themselves for takeout–Otto serving giant jars of goulash, Estelle pizza with Jerusalem artichokes, Mrs. Robinson's larder items like eggs, yogurt, and sourdough. As people who, in this stage of life, almost never go out at night, we actually gained by all these restaurants being open during the day, selling reasonably priced things we could buy from a street-side counter and eat at home with our child.

The hardest daily thing about the relative shutdown was the closure of playgrounds, which along with the Kitas are the lifeblood of child culture here. Our saving grace, as Caro wrote in a lovely piece for Businessweek (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-27/when-playgrounds-close-parents-have-to-get-creative), was a local graveyard-cum-park, where J. watched lilacs and tulips bloom, and learned the word "grave" as we kicked a small soccer ball among sparse stones. These commemorated freethinking 19th century Berliners with a mix of Christian and Jewish surnames, as well as later citizens, a number of whom died in 1944 or 1945, some to Allied bullets, some to Nazi ones as members of the German resistance, others to the gas chambers. Now, a little alarmingly, J. applies the word grave to other objects like manhole covers and stones propped against walls. It was in fact in this oddly cheerful and sylvan cemetery where we celebrated, with a few friends and a green dinosaur cake, J.'s second birthday in late May.

Earlier in spring, we regularly visited a Jugendfarm, a sort of urban, cooperative child-run petting zoo that, being outdoors and housing roosters, goats, and bunnies, couldn't actually close down. The approach to it, at the upper end of the Mauerpark, is lined by several dozen cherry trees that bloomed spectacularly. Our visits, in which we were sometimes joined by one or two other friends and their children–with whom we were effectively co-quarantining–couldn't make up for all the beloved, closed playgrounds, whose inaccessibility J. greeted with a frown as we passed them, repeatedly noting that they were closed. One, with a monkey theme, saw apple and cherry trees flower and drop their buds behind its padlocked gates. The phrase "silent spring" kept running through my mind, a beautiful season with few to admire it.

But none of this constituted acute suffering, and even the mood in the street seemed very different from what we heard from our parents in Massachusetts, or friends in New York and other places. Partly because of people's trust in government, their sense of its preparedness and good sense (and abundant medical resources), people seemed altogether more relaxed here throughout the crisis. Masks appeared, but slowly, and we even saw grandparents babysitting grandkids, conduct most in the U.S. would still consider verboten.

Though I wouldn't describe people's behavior as careless, I don't think it was any better or different than what people in much of the U.S. were doing, and it seemed accompanied by less fear and anxiety. It seemed that the Germans were eating their Kuchen and having it too, getting credit from the world for a textbook-perfect response to the pandemic, yet, on an individual level, behaving about the same as people in much harder-hit countries. Of course, I'm generalizing from a maybe too-specific example of our Brooklyn-like neighborhood, which we never left throughout the quarantine period, except for runs through deserted streets to the river or a park.

The worst of it, for us, has been being cut off from family, a poignant matter when the six months since our Christmas visit make up a quarter of J.'s life. In this time he's gone from tentatively sliding down slides to climbing up them, from walking to zestfully jumping on trampolines and riding a scooter and balance bike, from saying individual words to whole sentences in the past tense (in German, astounding me), singing O Tanenbaum in a Southern accent, even making little plays on words (Budapest, learned from a chidren's book about a poodle's Wanderjahr in Europe, turned into Budapesto, Budapasta, and Budamuesli, his favorite foods). Our parents had all planned trips here, all of them cancelled, and we hope to visit this summer, but the outlook is uncertain.

None of this touches what's most painful in the world now, the George Floyd protests. My new job, which involves the new and unlikely (for me) field of social media, has been an interesting vantage point on it. Working for a very German cultural institution, I've seen a certain thorough German attitude coming up against the protests' justified impatience for change. Unlike many U.S. institutions and some in Europe, this one has said nothing so far on the protests, and has been at least lightly criticized for it. The attitude within, though everyone is hyper-liberal, seems to be that if you're going to say something supportive, you need to actually do something, something substantial that involves a commitment of time and money and effort.

Though it might look like retrenchment from the outside, I have developed a certain respect for this attitude, its carefulness to avoid tokenism or glibness, its earnestness. It recalls, in a small way, the German approach to facing its own worst sins: an approach that, of course, integrated a re-envisioning of how history is taught in schools, reparations payments to Israel, and many other small and large changes in people's thoughts and attitudes. I see these anti-authoritarian attitudes in my workplace (remote as it still is), where using as simple a word as "conducts" to describe what a conductor does prompts debate–because it suggests that the conductor is a boss rather than a collaborator of the orchestra musicians, who govern themselves. I see these attitudes in my boss too, who says she likes to under-control certain processes, leaving "a bit of room for chaos," as to avoid bossing others around, who might then get bossy in the future. German parenting is much this way too, with its antipathy to sleep training, spoon-feeding children, or intervening in playground disputes, arising from a belief that children learn best when they teach themselves.

I don't mean to overpraise Germany or Germans, and actually, feel more of a soft spot for America now than ever. A bar on our street whose owners and many of whose customers are American, which used to seem a little yucky to me, has become a favored spot for a takeout beer at the end of the day. Its friendliness and openness, its charming lack of sophistication, its entirely native-English speaking staff, all feel like a relief.

In the postwar decades, Germans looked to the U.S. as a model, and I think they see its current predicaments (above all, the election of the chief Predicament who preceded and has exacerbated every problem) as one would look on an older sibling, formerly an idol, who has headed in a dissipated direction. The feeling is not antipathy, not quite horror, but a deep, fraternal concern.