Berlin Postcard

Saturday, October 3, was Reunification Day, the anniversary of the formal reuniting of East and West Germany in l990. Here in Berlin the big event was a weekend-long outdoor spectacle involving Die Riesen, giant marionettes created by the French street theatre company Royale de Luxe. Some two million people turned out to watch a huge little-girl giant and an even more enormous grown-up-man giant dressed as a deep-sea diver wandering in search of each other in various neighborhoods. It was meant as a 'maerchen" or fairy-tale, although no one seemed to know the story of the little girl and the deep-sea diver. Something about separation and reunion, anyway. Since it was a beautiful warm blue-sky day (one of the few! it rains a lot here) my husband and I set out to find them. We walked and walked through the Tiergarten and stood in a huge crowd on Unter den Linden but the promised giants didn't appear and eventually we had to leave. (Two bits of local anthropology you'd never see in New York: at the street fair stretching along Unter den Linden you could buy many kinds of alcoholic beverages, including schnapps, and just stand about pleasantly drinking; the great lawn in the Tiergarten, along which the crowds walked, was littered with the bicycles people had used to get there. Unlocked bicycles.)

My German teacher, Ursula, whom we ran into later, said the problem was that the little girl giant was kaputt. Sehr traurig! But late that night we saw the two giants at the Brandenburg Gate, sleeping. The little girl giant was sleeping on the big man giant's lap. You could hear them breathing very quietly. It was strangely moving.

In other news, Garrison Keillor reads my poems much better than I do:

"What I Understood"

"Two Cats"

"Amor Fati"

You can find these and more in my new book of poems, The Mind-Body Problem, recently published by Random House. I'll be quiet now.

Comments (10)

1. Dear Ms. Pollitt,

   I myself once wrote a little doggerel about the mind-body problem. It was in the late 1990s, back when I was a graduate student writing about the hundred-year-old "Monismus" movement. Correspondingly, the poem resolves the mind-body problem in a monist manner.

   Oh, by the way: It's in German. It's clunky, but please remember that German is my second language. Share it with your teacher if you like.

   Glaubensbekenntnis eines Materialisten

   Vom Anfang bis zum Ende, wohin ich auch mag gehen, bin ich nichts als die Umstände die mich unumgänglich umstehen.

   Vom Gehirn, das denken kann, bis zum sogenannten Herzen, das da leidet oder sich vergnügt, bin ich nichts als das mir Gegebene, und nicht dasjenige das angeblich darüber verfügt.

   Posted by JakobFabian at 10/10/2009 @ 4:10pm

2. a absolutely awful poem. German is my first language and my BA is in German literature.

   Posted by emile duBois at 10/11/2009 @ 6:40pm

3. sorry Jake.

   Posted by emile duBois at 10/11/2009 @ 6:42pm

4. "It was meant as a "maerchen" or fairy-tale"

   Maerchen. Nouns in German are always capitalized.

   Posted by freiheit1 at 10/11/2009 @ 9:12pm

5. Posted by emile duBois at 10/11/2009 @ 6:40pm

   Oh? What's German for "statutory rape"?

   Posted by Mask at 10/12/2009 @ 07:31am

6. Ich hab noch einenKoffer in Berlin...

   Posted by emile duBois at 10/12/2009 @ 11:28am

7. I haven't read Pollitt's poetry, which I am in any event not qualified to judge, but her word pictures are charming and intriguing. Her prose pirouettes. Swiss cities, btw, have been experimenting with free public bikes for decades.

   But how do giant marionettes work? Were those puppets stacked away for the night near the Brandenburg gate, or were they performing as two sleepers? Breathing might be simulated via small swiveling fans.

   Posted by Pirovano at 10/12/2009 @ 12:53pm

8. I'm not offended, "Emile DuBois." (Geschmackssache ist eben Geschmackssache, und außerdem habe ich nie behauptet, ein großer Dichter zu sein.)

   It didn't help that I messed up the stanzas. (As you know, you have to hit the "return" key twice to begin text on a new line in these threads.) Each stanza was supposed to have five lines. But however you display the poem, it doesn't scan very well. Nor does it exactly rhyme. (Na ja.)

   My poems in English aren't any better, so I'll spare you the displeasure and won't print any.

   "Mask," if you're looking for "statutory rape" in German, I advise you to look it up at "LEO.org." This is a very handy online German-English dictionary. I would guess "Vergewaltigung im Sinne des Strafgesetzbuchs." But LEO may provide a snappier translation.

   Posted by JakobFabian at 10/12/2009 @ 10:12pm

9. Posted by emile duBois at 10/11/2009 @ 6:40pm

   Oh? What's German for "statutory rape"?

   Posted by Mask at 10/12/2009 @ 07:31am

   Mask, I got your humor in that one if no one else did. :-)

   Posted by ginza00 at 10/13/2009 @ 1:17pm

10. Posted by ginza00 at 10/13/2009 @ 1:17pm

    emile/Johannes will now put you on Ignore for DARING to re-post what I said since he put me on Ignore years ago for now showing him the proper respect.

    Sorry about that....heheh

    Posted by Mask at 10/14/2009 @ 09:37am