Tour Day 3

Today is a travel day on the bus, we are driving from Dresden to Munchen. Rather than by nationality, the seating pattern was established by degree of gregariousness. The shy kids are up front, the loud kids are in the back, with the exception of Andrey, who is so shy that he made himself a private corner by the window in the back row, behind a couple of suits hanging on a clothing rack bar across the seats. I started a group Tagebuch, or day journal, for people to express their thoughts and reflections on this journey, so this got passed around the bus. I will include quotes from now on.

Yesterday morning, we visited the national porcelain collection at the Saxon castle, and Katya gave a guided tour on its history and artistic ideas. She is an expert porcelain scholar who works at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Her enthusiasm was catching, and she opened my eyes to the business side of the porcelain trade, as well as the meanings embedded in the shapes, colors, and figures represented in the objects. As Abi wrote, “From the stories of attempted espionage of the valued secrets of “white gold” to the symbolic meaning of the figure pieces depicting love via birdcages, (and to the Comedia del’Arte clown figures with goats!), it was the first time I understood the wonder of porcelain beyond kitsch! Brava Katya!”

Porcelain has an interesting history as a technology. After the Germans were able to reverse engineer its production and crack the production monopoly held for hundreds of years by the Chinese and Japanese, the artists who knew the secret became well-kept prisoners, unable to travel or interact with foreigners. For the first twenty years, they imitated Asian forms, like vases and sake pitchers, before beginning to develop a new German style of animal and flower figures. But the secret leaked, and before long, porcelain was being produced around Europe, just in time for the development of cups and saucers for people to enjoy newly available beverages in the late 1700s, coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. Since these developments made these beverages affordable, a new type of public space emerged: the café. Today cafés remain a distinctive feature of every European city, proliferating along main streets and public squares.

In the afternoon, we took a short bus ride to the mountain town of Glashutte, to visit the watchmaking factory of the same name. Founded in 1845, the company makes watches entirely by hand, which is an incredible thing to witness. Three hundred craftspeople sit hunched over tables in room after room, polishing tiny screws and assembling intricate parts through microscopes. They are hired through an apprenticeship program where about half are hired after being trained for three years. Each watch takes more than 400 hours to produce, and the entire factory output is about 7,000 per year. Needless to say, they are extremely expensive luxury items, starting at 5,000 Euro, up to 120,000 Euro. We were told that they serve a large Arab clientele. One buys them for show, rather than punctuality, because they lose one to ten seconds per day.

After the tour, we were served coffee in Meissen porcelain cups, and given a presentation by Glashutte’s CEO, Herr Muller. He started out by asking us, “What is luxury?”, and leading a contemplative discussion. He was so enthusiastic and engaging that he inspired a barrage of questions for over an hour. As Olga commented, “The visit to the watch factory was so interesting, and I never thought that anybody could be so proud of his own business, more than he was. We could feel this and it was great.” He told us about their corporate philosophy, which was all about maintaining the original vision of producing a high quality product completely in-house, using traditional methods. Existing in a world where change is the only constant, he said, there is value in being a constant thing. I thought there were interesting contradictions: producing hand-crafted goods, yet in a factory, and using out-dated technologies, yet meeting a modern demand. These reminded me of Germany, which is a place with a long history, and yet a young nation.

Yesterday’s last stop was to a spot of unexpected beauty, the “Saxon Switzerland”. We gaped at the pastoral views from steep limestone cliffs as the sun went down. After we got back to Dresden, Abi and I went to the theatre. She is a playwright and director, and so had scoped out a local production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. It was a rock-n-roll production of the comedy, with characters dressed in 70’s punk, which we enjoyed.

Today we woke up to snow and are passing through frosted coutryside. Although Friedrich, or Fritz, as we call him, has the job of keeping everyone together and is most often heard saying “Wir mussen punktlich sein!”, or “Please be on time!”, he is also one of the gang, joining in a snowball fight a reststop. As Ed wrote: “My highlights from the bus ride to Munchen were the baroque opera house (and especially the mean lady who tried to confiscate our cameras), the pineapple, and a feeling like a kid at the Sachsische Schweize. Lin told me Fritz’ Chinese name, which I promised to keep secret. That he even has one by now made me laugh.”

Globalization Tour, Day 1

What happens when ten Americans, ten Russians, and nine Chinese young professionals and scholars board a tour bus for a two-week land cruise through Germany? I will soon find out. Today our assembly of young professionals and scholars set out upon a journey I have dubbed the “Globalization Tour”. We are setting out to learn German history and culture in the name of world peace and prosperity through cultural and knowledge exchange.

What brings us together is the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which has sponsored our research in Germany. In addition to a stipend for living expenses, the Foundation sponsors language training and organizes several networking events, one being this study tour. At night we gratefully raise our beers to our benefactor, “Uncle Alex.” Formed through a process of self-selection and the wisdom of the Foundation, our group is composed of 12 men and 17 women, all under 35, from a variety of fields:

3 lawyers
3 environmental engineers
3 artists
3 city planners
1 architect
3 social scientists
1 public health expert
4 marketing and human resources researchers
1 accountant
1 banker
1 policewoman
3 education researchers
1 bee expert
1 journalist

Last night we met up in Dresden, to kick things off with some sauerbraten and hefeweissen. There was one American table, one Russian table, one Chinese, and one mixed, which included our intrepid tourguide Friedrich, the lone German of the assembly. Gracious, friendly, and infinitely patient, he bears the official title of Baron von Maltzahn. Although aristocracy is not a prominent part of German society, it is a nation formed from many small kingdoms and innumerable titled families.

Today we began exploring Dresden with a presentation from the City Manager, who is also a friend of Jen’s. She showed us a marketing video promoting the city as a traditional center of arts and culture. It is located in the Elbe river valley, which is protected as a U.N. World Heritage Site for its pastoral beauty and Baroque buildings and bridges in the urbanized area. It has had modest population gains since German reunification in 1990, to about half a million people, while nearly all East German cities have been shrinking. A massive rebuilding effort, resulting in the reconstruction or new development about 75% of the central city, has restored it as a tourist destination, and they have about 10 million visitors per year. Abi and I were inspired to try our Baroque manners to fit in at the castle.

Perhaps the largest project was the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche, a church which was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid made famous by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel, “Slaughterhouse 5”. Between 30,000 and 130,000 people were killed, almost entirely women, children, and refugees who had sought shelter because it was not a military target. When I first visited Dresden in 1994, it was a gray, grimy city full of Soviet architecture and grand ruins that looked like the bombs had fallen yesterday. The Frauenkirche was a pile of rubble surrounded by a small village of stone-masons workshops. I was amazed to observe craftspeople sorting bits of the church into piles, and then attempting to assemble them like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Today I saw the result, which was completed in 2005: the rebuilt church includes just 10% of stones from the original, recognizable by their darker color. It was just in time for the city’s 800^th birthday celebration in 2006.

We wound our way through the historic center with a tourguide, shivering and muttering complaints in an unexpectedly cold wind. Most historic buildings and sculptures are magnificently restored, and contrast interestingly with the space-age buildings which remain from Communist times. New investment is evidenced in the homogenous contemporary-style shops and hotels by the train station, and shiny new trams. Even the frescoes documented the changing times – we saw a block-long mural of a proud parade Saxon kings over 200 years by the old opera house, rivaled by a Socialist-realist mural celebrating the rise of the worker on the wall of the GDR Philharmonic.

In the afternoon, we took the train to the nearby town of Meissen to visit the famous porcelain manufacturer of the same name there. The Chinese were the first to discover how to make porcelain, which is prized above regular pottery because of its superior beauty and strength. For several hundred years, they had a monopoly on its production, despite the best efforts of Europeans to buy, steal, or negotiate the secret through diplomacy. Finally, at the direction of a Saxon king, a German chemist spent four years reverse engineering it, and got lucky in 1708. Meissen became the first place outside of Asia where porcelain was manufactured. At the factory, we saw skilled craftspeople working with the clay to form tableware and sculptures, all by hand from start to finish. In the shop, you might find a saucer or egg cup for 50 Euro, but most items were more in the 500-5,000 Euro range, perhaps 40,000 for an entire table setting.

What struck me, observing this factory, was the irony of a hand-crafted item being reproduced en masse. Each craftsperson is reproducing designs often 100 years old or more. They are very skilled, but much of the value comes from the tradition and history of the brand – people are willing to pay for the cache. As Adel put it, “it’s not real art.” Jessica, who is herself a porcelain artist, was impressed with the quality, “these folks are professionals.” There is also a large porcelain collection on display which includes some figures of Chinese people, as interpreted by 18^th century European artists. They were jolly, with wide smiles and long earlobes. “That’s not real Chinese,” a couple of Chinese colleagues commented.

After the factory tour, about half the group decided to climb up the winding, cobbled Meissen streets to check out the castle which huddles protectively over it. From its ramparts, we looked down upon a frozen ocean of pitched red roofs. We found that silliness transcends language and cultural barriers when we spotted a doorway framed by empty saint-pedestals and got into making dramatic figure compositions.

For me, the day ended with a heated discussion with Larisa, Oleg, and Wyly over Indian food in a German kneipe about global warming, ethical pig farming, and who will be the next guy in our group to shave his head (so far Oleg and Wyly are BBC, or bald by choice). On the way home, Daniela gave a demonstration of East Bolivian carnival dances at the tram stop, and die-hard tourist Constantine took off, guidebook in hand, saying, “I’ve got one more church to see.”

Hanseatic League

March 1

Today I visited Bremen, which makes the third Hanseatic city I’ve seen, after Hamburg and Lübeck. My cousin Marian and her husband Bryan are visiting from California, and this was the first stop on a whirlwind tour of Deutschland. While they had a good dose of typical rainy Hamburg whether yesterday, today the sun shone through the clouds, and it was like a miracle to see colors and blue sky. In Hamburg we have enjoyed a sunny day about once a month since last October. I found myself staring at a large orange table umbrella like a thirsty desert-crosser at an oasis.
The Hanseatic League of cities was a cartel of merchant guilds controlling key ports in Germany and Scandinavia during the middle ages. Member cities ringing the North and Baltic seas formed a trade network moving goods in and out of Europe – and protecting ships from pirates – from the 12th to 16th centuries. They controlled access to international markets via shipping, and they retained their wealth with a minimum of tariffs and imperial taxes. The hanseatic League was an effective cartel until other large-scale global shipping networks arose in the 17- and 1800s. In Germany, these port cities were governed by merchants who grew rich enough to buy their independence from local lords in this period, of which they remain fiercely proud. Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck were the last remaining cities of the Hanseatic League when it collapsed in the late 1800s, and they joined the newly formed German nation as city-states. (Wikipedia has a good article at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League)These cities all retain some shipping activity, and Bremen is still an important port in Germany, but Hamburg has continued to flourish as primarily a port city. It is among the top ten highest-volume ports in the world today. Marian wondered what could possibly be in all those containers, “Maybe we should stop importing so much crap from China.”

So a harbor boat tour is an imperative experience to understand the city. Yesterday we set out on such a “Rundfahrt” through the container ships, scrap metal piles, oil refineries, and stout 1900s brick warehouses that define the harbor. One feels like a feather floating on the water among such towering industrial ships and cranes. We saw a stern-heavy loaded ship being towed upriver by two tugboats. There was a Costco ship being loaded by a crane the size of a skyscraper, slinging 30-foot containers around with grace. The harbor is at once a museum of changes in shipping technology over time, a model of modern efficiency, and a vast construction site building the new infrastructures of tomorrow. Actually, most of the gigantic Hafen City development project is re-using old warehouse sites for millions of square meters of new residential, retail, and office space. It will roughly double the urbanized area within 2 km of the magnificent Rathaus, or City Hall.

Today in Bremen, we found another formidable Rathaus, this one with an arched breezeway lined with citizens basking in the rare winter sunshine. There was also a freshly refurbished gothic cathedral, with unusual blue and red painted columns. We stumbled upon “Böttchersallee”, a narrow, winding alley lined with art shops and sculpture. Walking into its perfectly preserved main square made you forget yourself. “I feel like I’ve traveled back in time,” Marian said.

My visit to Lübeck was last December, and included a tour of the Rathaus. It was the chief city of the Hanseatic league at its zenith in the 14th century. The long shadows cast by the civic pride from that heyday remain today. Each Mayor from the 1300s onward is memorialized with a plaque or a bust – which is quite a feat. There was an intricate wood carving showing the harbor in its early days, and at it peak in the 1600s, buzzing with tall-masted ships, bound together for lack of shore space.