But Paul and Johannes didn’t really begin their evening until midnight, when I once again hopped onto the handlebars of Johannes’s bike and allowed myself to be spirited through backstreets of neighborhoods I didn’t recognize (our old haunts in Kreuzberg and Mitte, they explained, were now full of yuppies). We first downed several giant bottles of Beck’s, “served” at a chichi members-only establishment whose gimmick was that it had vending machines instead of staff. I’ll just drink away my jet lag, I thought helpfully to myself, as we then moved on to a tiny, encouragingly dingier club, where Paul shoved yet more Beck’s into my mitts and we listened to a band called Die Schlümpfe (The Smurfs, because of course) sing a blistering cover of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”
And it was at that precise moment, hearing that song—which my erstwhile boyfriend had once played some seventy thousand times during a month-long cross-country road trip (“Let’s just bring ten CDs and get to know them really well!”)—that my evening swerved from euphoric-drunk, to drunk-drunk, and directly on to very-sad-drunk. I spent the rest of the wee hours chain-smoking Paul’s cigarettes and crying to Marlene, Johannes’s empathetic and messy-haired girlfriend. Silver lining: after eight years barely speaking a Wort of Deutsch, I managed an entire conversation, about difficult and wrenching emotions—and I learned an important new vocabulary addition: Liebeskummer. Loosely translated it means “heartbreak,” but literally it means “love grief.” “How long will it be until I feel better?” I asked her. “A month? Two? Five? Never?”
She just shook her head before looking at the time and declaring that since it was almost four in the morning, they’d better start their night in earnest. The legendary techno club Tresor was about to close its doors for good, and they wanted to make sure they arrived during peak hours. I demurred and took Paul’s keys so that I could stare mournfully into space on the night bus and then crash on their couch to grieve my love in peace. “I don’t understand why you’re paying all that money to stay with a host family!” Johannes said before I left the next morning. “You could have just stayed with us.”
“For a month?” I asked. “I don’t want to impose.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “I’m insulted that you didn’t want to.”
That’s the thing about Germans. You don’t talk to them for eight years, and then you go out to drinks, and they spend the whole time ignoring you while they argue with someone else about football—but then they nonchalantly invite you to freeload for weeks on end.
The next afternoon, I dragged my backpack down to the district of Schöneberg, where my new host family lived: Frau Blodau and her two grown daughters. Rather than not-impose on my old friends, I wanted a do-over of the Herrmann family shit-show I’d created in 1995. I was a grown-up now. I knew enough German to know what the fuck was going on in the house. I was ready to keep track of my keys, to stay off the landline, to take my shoes off at the door and then put on a different pair of identical shoes that weren’t allowed out of the house. My showers would be so short they wouldn’t even exist. I would be home for lunch, Mittagessen (and, why the fuck not, Abendessen later on, too), ready to immerse and converse. Bring’s jetzt!
I was buzzed up into a spacious, high-ceilinged flat, with innumerable mysterious locked rooms off the Flur, or foyer, that is the centerpiece of every German apartment. “Welcome, hello!” gushed Frau Blodau, my new landlady … in English. I greeted her back in the most accent-perfect German I could, following my own rules for establishing the relationship in the learned language and hoping she’d get the hint. She led me into the kitchen and invited me to sit down with her. “I just drink a little wine,” she explained—in English. It was 9:00 A.M. It turned out that she was partaking of the hair of the dog, thanks to her monumental Kater, which literally means tomcat but actually means hangover.
“Oh,” I said, “were you celebrating?”
“In a way,” she said. “It was my best friend’s funeral. She committed suicide this week.”
Oh boy.
“Did you sign up for full board?” she asked.
“Ja,” I answered. “Und ich freue mich sehr darauf.”
“You look forward to it, yes, good,” she continued in German-syntax English. “But normally we’re not eating together. Petra is many nights at her boyfriend, and Elise is forever at the work.” She pointed me to some sad packaged bread and a few abused-looking jars of preserves, and the coffee machine (Gott sei Dank!), and then showed me to my bedroom, which was furnished top to bottom in what I recognized as the very cheapest versions of everything IKEA makes.
“The bed is in order, yes?” she asked, as I plopped down onto what had to be a two-inch futon.
“Ja, klar!” I said. I was going to be Frau Blodau’s Kelly, by Gott, and no dead friends, English, sad breakfasts, dearth of all other meals, or dubious sleeping arrangements would stop me.
After waking up at four the next morning and passing the time until my pitiful solo breakfast doing sun salutations in my room (a NEW ME! habit which lasted precisely the duration of my jet lag), I hopped on the U-Bahn and rode to the genteel district of Wilmersdorf to begin my reeducation. I’d be attending group class in the morning and then have two hours with a private tutor in the afternoon. “Ach, Wilmersdorf,” Marlene had scoffed about the language school’s location. “You’ll learn lots of important bourgeois words like Sahnetorte.”
“I already know that word,” I’d said. (I’d never actually heard it before, given that cream cakes hadn’t been a regular offering at the Loftschloss, but I figured it out through context.)
Wilmersdorf did appear stately when I arrived after a train ride that was, to the second—as the school promised in my registration materials—exactly seven minutes long. There weren’t going to be any beers served through holes in a wall (or Automaten-Bars, for that matter), here among the nineteenth-century apartment buildings and mellow corner bakeries. I took my place in line to register for my first day of classes and tried not to be proud when I was placed in Oberstufe, the most advanced level of German they taught, given that I myself would be entrusted to teach beginning German some thirteen months in the future.
At the school, located in one of the nineteenth-century apartment buildings, which had been renovated into a hodgepodge of classrooms and a small café, I tiptoed through a dizzying maze of courtyards and hallways until I found the Oberstufe classroom, where about ten adults were conversing in rapid-fire German, each with an accent and set of understandable grammatical errors that gave away not only his or her background, but also, in short order, his or her reason for plopping down 150 euros a week for German class. Katja, from Serbia, was about to enter graduate school at the FU and needed to pass the good old TestDaF in order to secure funding. Being a Slav, she would always use the genitive case when discussing plurals of objects larger than four in number, but never use it when constructing a possessive. Mu-Yuan was a nineteen-year-old from a tiny, provincial village in mainland China, who matter-of-factly informed the class that she had been permanently disowned by her family for marrying a forty-five-year-old German. She was upping her already-excellent fluency so that she could work as an office manager and spend less time cleaning up after the forty-five-year-old’s kids, some of whom were older than she was.
Hsu was a Taiwanese guy who normally lived in Paris, a graduate student in translation, and a stellar product of the old-school Asian system of language-learning, which involves a lot of grammar work and almost no conversation. It took him about ten minutes to get out a sentence, but that sentence was always perfect. Goran was another Serb, a pompous medical student on vacation who “collected” languages as “hobbies,” as he put it, pompously. Zoë was from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, sent to improve her German by the wealthy family for whom she worked as an au pair. She spoke perfectly already, but put all her empha-SES on the wrong sylla-BLES. And then there were three other Americans: first, John, a retiree who had just moved to Berlin with his boyfriend. His German-language skills seemed based entirely on repeated viewings of Wagner’s Ring cycle, and he brought the word Nibelungen into more conversations than you’d think was relevant. Finally, there were two undergraduates on a study-abroad program. My fellow Landsleute didn’t have to identify themselves as such; I recognized the same flat vowels, forced umlauts, softened rs, and misplaced verbs that plagued my own conversations and gave me away. Wie lange bist du hier? (“How long have you been here?” or, literally, “How long are you here?”) Für zwei Monate. (“For two months,” a construction Germans do not use. They just say “two months,” or sometimes “since two months.”) As the class settled down, I plunked myself between the two Serbs.
“Du siehst genau wie eine Porzellanpuppe aus!”
(“You look just like a porcelain doll!”)
This was the teacher’s way of acknowledging me as a new student, before she handed out one of the most brutal grammar worksheets I’d ever seen. We were to decline compound-adjectival phrases cold:
“I saw a three-weeks-overdue, out-in-the-rain-left-until-it-got-soggy library book.”
“I should have gone to the cinema with my didn’t-attend-school-so-he-doesn’t-know-how-to-read cousin from Hamburg.”
After school let out for the day, the undergrads and I reverted to our native ways to learn more about each other.
“Hey!” I said. “Does either of you want to come with me on a sort of nostalgia tour through whatever’s left of dirty Kreuzberg?”
My hopes were particularly high for Declan, a lanky twenty-three-year-old senior, also from Oregon (a plus), who had the same haircut as Richard Ashcroft from the band the Verve (a double-plus).
“I’d love to!” he said. “Only thing is, I’m straight-edge and I don’t drink.”
His friend Callista could pencil in some free time in approximately two and a half weeks, but until then she was way too busy with her studies. Studies? In Berlin? Teetotaling? IN BERLIN? Motherfuck. The Serbs were no better—the one only hung out at her lesbian commune, and I couldn’t risk asking the other to do anything social, because he would immediately assume I was sexually interested in him, and I could just tell he would absolutely relish rejecting me. (I was not sexually interested in him in the least, because he was a pompous asshole.) Mu-Yuan was always busy with her vile-sounding forty-five-year-old husband, and I was too impatient to try to have a full conversation with Hsu. Johannes and Paul, meanwhile, my alleged Berlin crew, had founded some sort of legitimate computer business in their living room a few years back; they now had legitimate offices, employees, and clients and were, as Johannes put it, eh immer bei der Arbeit, which is the German expression my new host mom had translated literally to mean “always at work.”
Thus, after what turned out to be a misleadingly exciting first few days, I spent most evenings in Berlin sitting at Frau Blodau’s kitchen table while she drank and cried, nudging the conversation into German by never uttering a word of English no matter what she said or did, and drinking straight from a bottle of Jägermeister I bought at the grocery store, which I used to wash down my Abendessen of fifteen cigarettes, two bags of Erdnussflips, and a chocolate baton. My landlady loved dubbed episodes of Friends, and who was I to begrudge a grieving woman her Central Perk? I never got any potatoes with béchamel sauce, but I did learn that the German for How YOU doin’? is Na … wie GEHT’s denn so? Where was the Berlin I needed, to debauch away the loneliness that threatened to claw me to strips? What a waste of money my new artisanal travel journal was, given that all it contained was a note about a new vocabulary word I learned: Lebensgefährtin, which means “life partner.” It is, I’d scrawled wryly, no doubt distracted by German Monica and Ross in the background, near-identical to the word Lebensgefahr, which means “mortal danger.” Ha ha ha ha ha.
Luckily the unseasonably chilly May had finally given way to a weekend of hot weather, and on cue all of Berlin—which spends its pitch-dark 3:00 P.M. winter afternoons in helpful illustration of the vocabulary word trübselig, which means “cheerless,” but literally translates to “blessed with drear”—had exploded onto the sidewalks and into the parks. There was but one word that stood between me and some desperately needed mirth: Picknick. A German Picknick is different from its gingham-blanketed, letter-k-bereft, Stepford-inflected American counterpart in several ways. First, the provisions. While a well-stocked American basket might contain a stack of ham sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade, Germans (and expatriates in an Oberstufe class) will descend upon a Picknick as if it were a potluck during the apocalypse, with foodstuffs piled higher than the Berlin Wall (most of which requires a real metal knife and fork to consume, which of course they also bring)—and, of course, alcohol, which is consumed legally, openly, and with great Lebensfreude in the out-of-doors.
“You guys!” I declared to the class on a Friday morning so blindingly sunny it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually seen the sun—or felt remotely happy—since I could remember. “We need to have a Picknick tomorrow! Tiergarten park! Everyone come! Bring your friends!”
In the end, only a handful of the class showed up—Mu-Yuan had a full weekend of ironing her husband’s ties, Katja was too busy studying for her language exam, and Goran, thank goodness, had skipped class on the day we planned the outing and didn’t know about it. In the end, it was just Zoë the French Swiss, the Americans, Hsu the grammatically perfect slow talker, and me, feasting on Butterbrot and washing it down with room-temperature champagne. In honor of the warm day, I was wearing a backless cotton halter dress from Anthropologie, in a yellow-and-green floral print that was supposed to evoke 1970s glam but instead made me look like I had a starter case of hepatitis B. Few noticed the sallow tinge to my complexion, however, because everybody was looking at my boobs: the dress had a neckline that plunged halfway down my rib cage. It felt like a bit of a shame to be wasting it on Oberstufe—especially when Hsu so clearly disapproved: “If your skin is so pale and sensitive,” he said in his measured, grammar-translation-method diction, “why do you wear so little clothing?” I took a little pleasure in noting that Herr Perfektes-Deutsch used the phrase so wenig Kleider, a literalism no German would employ in that context, because it evokes a mental picture of someone draping multiple garments all over her and then removing all but a few of them. (A German would technically say so little, but Germans would never say that to begin with, because they think swimsuits are for prudes, for chrissake.) Just as I was about to tell Hsu I had on plenty of SPF 50, he got a text and jumped up.
“I’m going to get my friend from the S-Bahn station,” he said.
Huh, I thought. Hsu has a friend. Must be French or Taiwanese, because otherwise how could they ever have a conversation? To my immense surprise, fifteen minutes later he returned with an actual German dude, who introduced himself as Matthias and explained that he enjoyed meeting international students. Matthias was, we learned, in a band—with a name in nonsense-English, Assimilated Funk. He was twenty-four and in the final semester of an eighteen-month Ausbildung, or professional school, an alternative (or sometimes a supplement) to university that trains Germans for a specific vocation. This is because almost all jobs in Germany require some sort of certification. You shop for shoes in Germany, and the person who gets your size and makes officious recommendations about your foot shape is not some Al Bundy schmoe, but rather a graduate of an official certificate program in footwear retail. Matthias was training in Werbeverkauf, or ad sales. I made the silly mistake of asking what he was going to do when he was finished with his studies, and he looked at me like I didn’t know how words worked and said: “Ich werde Werbekaufmann.” (I’ll work in ad sales.)
“Sorry,” I said. “In my country, the mythos is that philosophy dropouts become multibillionaire CEOs, and people with eighth-grade educations grow real-estate empires.” (Oberstufe was working really well. Apparently all it took to get better at German was, you know, to study German a lot. Phantastisch.)
“I thought everybody in America drove a package truck,” Matthias said.
“A what?”
