Excerpts from Alison Dault’s Letters Home from Erlangen, Germany

My long-standing love of German: German has been a part of my life since I was a child. My mother's heritage is primarily German, and she told us about growing up with grandparents who spoke old-country German. Our "O Christmas Tree" was called "O Tannenbaum," and "Silent Night" was "Stille Nacht." My first adult friends in Michigan were a grand old German couple-- he was an industrialist who was retiring to the Black Forest-- who taught me to count in German and gave me a 1950s-era book full of photos of children from the entire world. (Typically me: right then I decided someday I was going to learn to read every single line in that book!) When I started third grade in my new town, I happened to be put in South School, where the principal came in to teach us a little German when we had substitutes.

(Now that I’m here, though, I need to exercise my German to the point where I can have longer conversations with people… or even have the courage to talk to people. This is still hard for me. I am so afraid that I will leave Erlangen without having made any friends.)

Doing my homework: As I prepared to study in Germany, I read as extensively and widely as I could. I read about culture shock. I looked into sociological theories of communication—verbal and nonverbal—and culture shock. I read about Germany: the CIA Factbook; Culture Shock! Germany (with which I already disagree on several points); nonfiction history and guidebooks; my favorite and very funny Vicky Bliss mystery novels set in Germany (which I reread looking for stereotypes). I also read German fairy tales and children’s science fiction and adult novels and short stories. I lingered over an excellent “crimi” [detective novel] starring a German detective of Turkish descent raised by German parents, written by a German author of Turkish descent. (It could turn out to be a fascinating window into Turkish-German relations.) I even listened to the album of German heavy metal group Blind Guardian, which ironically was completely in English and which drew on Tolkien myths. Unfortunately, I did not have much luck with reading German-language sources online (my language skills are still decidedly unsteady) but I was fully informed about the flooding in parts of Germany!

Lingering questions: The questions that interested me most were not in books. How do German family members relate to each other? How do German friends find each other, become friends, and act with each other? What is the relationship between Germans, foreigners, and what we would call ethnic minorities? Since Germany is the European country with the largest number of immigrants, how do Germans feel about that? What are their stereotypes? I did find scholarly studies of immigration and integration in German society, but they offered incomplete answers at best. I also desperately wanted to know how to function in everyday life, because invariably exchange students encounter situations that are simply not covered in German 101.

First impressions of Erlangen: Getting off the train in Erlangen was simply beautiful. It was brightly sunny. Wenda (our Resident Director) was waiting on the platform, gushing welcomes and hugs and kisses. The suitcase fibers sparkled in the sunlight, which was far too bright. There was a little wooden fence around part of the station patio, maybe a foot or so high, and it was almost glowing… That image won’t leave me, nor will the instant love I felt for the cobble-stoned streets, the pastel facades bright in the sun, the people walking and bicycling in brightly-colored clothing. It was like a fairy tale, or maybe a picture of a Mediterranean country on the front of a travel brochure. My mind was totally blank. There wasn’t room for anything but tiredness and joy.

Herd animals! Here I am, three weeks into my German Experience. My group of nine Kalamazoo College students is braving the unknown (to us) wilds of German bureaucracy and education at the University level. We are like the Fellowship of the Ring (but less bleak, of course!). Everything seems a little blurry; my perception of time slows down and speeds up; all in all, I feel very much like someone watching a Discovery Channel documentary. We are being led through the processes of registering—at university, for classes, at the City Office, for public transportation passes—and I am feeling quite like a herd animal at times. I don’t really feel like I know enough language and culture to venture too far off on my own yet. I really want to step outside the safe zone, wander off into the unknown wilds and find out more about what I now get glimpses of in my peripheral vision.

Our orientation class: Kalamazoo students have a special orientation class from September to October, taught by Gudrun, who normally teaches German for incoming international students. The class curriculum is a mix of German language and grammar and culture, which Gudrun says is primarily to help us adjust to Germany. It is an excellent idea, because we don’t have host families—the instant entrée into a society—and most of the German students seem to be at home or on summer vacations at present, so our only opportunities for language practice and interaction so far are in shops. Our German is still fairly creaky, too, for the most part.

We write in journals about what we experience, and use them as a springboard for class discussion about German culture. We also work on assigned grammar, vocabulary, and current events topics; and we prepare a Referat, an oral report on something about which we are passionate. This is also a place to talk about problems, frustrations, and feelings in general—anything from missed birthdays, to problems coping with the culture, to where and how to return deposit bottles. My frustrations were usually mundane and material, the sort of thing that I wouldn’t be fazed by at home: burned-out light bulbs I wasn’t sure how to handle, hot water outages, appliances that didn’t work, buses that never came, and my pair of dress pants that disappeared after being washed, only to reappear the next week.

Bigger problems: I know I have been experiencing a slow kind of culture shock: so many things look familiar, because I have lived in Europe before, and been to Germany before. The electric cords and plugs, light switches, toilets and radiators and washing machines, as well as the cars and buses and street signs all look familiar. That sometimes makes the juxtaposition of faintly familiar types of things, a totally new place, and a language that’s slowly becoming easier to navigate somehow more subtly unsettling. This is all ok, however, until I hit The Wall, and fall into The Pit.

The Wall and the Pit are my images for the dark moments of cultural adaptation. Sometimes, when I am speaking a foreign language, my brain gets stuck: I can’t reach for language to express myself, although the concepts are clear in my mind. It feels exactly like hitting a wall: a sudden shock, immobility, and a frustrating incapacity to continue my sentence. At that point, I must take a deep breath, stop, back up, and try again. And sometimes, just sometimes, I then fall into the Pit— usually after hitting the Wall several times. I say "falling," because for some reason—frustration, fatigue, confusion, insufficient vocabulary or whatever reason—it feels exactly like I am falling into a deep, dark pit full of frustration… and I leave all my languages and ability to communicate behind. Sometimes it feels like my brain simply switched off, and didn’t want to cooperate in producing any more foreign language. This is certainly a type of culture shock, and is completely frightening. I remember this clearly from my time in France: the only thing to do was excuse myself, run to the bathroom, and either calm down, take a break, and restart… or start crying, and then restart. At the very beginning of both study abroad experiences, there were times when I simply couldn’t think anymore, and just went to bed.

Cultural misunderstandings: They’re inevitable, I suppose, but we had a rather serious one with one of our teachers. We had a misunderstanding in class, and no one knew how to handle it. Should we handle it directly, or ask for help from an intermediary? How direct could we/should we be?

I have learned from this, however. First, always observe! Second, as the firemen say, stop, drop, and roll: when something is confusing or frustrating, first stop; then drop the emotions and try to let go of your own culture for a moment; then try to look at things from the other culture's point of view, and “roll” into their “role.” Basically, do as the cultural misunderstanding diagram in our textbook doesn’t do! Also, people are all at once individual personalities, professional people doing a job, and representatives of a culture. When I want to respond to someone, it is good to consider all three levels… otherwise I can miss things.

(written later) I'm still thinking over the misunderstanding—what happened, and why—and sorting through the different perceptions and versions of the events. One thing is for sure: people across the world are still people, and that means they have their perspectives, faults, foibles, and ... well... can be hard to understand. On top of the personality differences and communication style variances you'd find in any population with a shared culture, here there are intercultural differences too. And teachers and students are people too, with human reactions and bad days, just like everyone else.

My friend Martin: Martin is a German friend I’ve known for a long time. Most of our relationship has been carried out in English, in the form of letters. While I’m here, I’ll actually be able to spend some time with him. I am somehow afraid, though. I don’t know how it will be, to be friends in German. Everyone seems to have a slightly different way of being and expressing themselves in a foreign language. I am afraid that, now that we will be speaking German, I will do something wrong.

Even though I was nervous before his visit, I am really glad to have an old friend here. (Especially since he speaks fluent German and English, and can therefore bail me out in either language.) We still get along really well, and aside from some awkward moments and white empty space in conversations I think his visit went much better than I'd ever expected.

We were both able to talk about some problems we’d been having. He knew most of the time when I wanted advice, and when I didn’t. He needed someone to talk things over with, too. I just sat and listened, and only offered advice at the end. I get the feeling that when you talk about something here, you are often implicitly asking for a solution. And if you do not implement these solutions, people start to get impatient with you. We had a few near misunderstandings, but when we saw the other person looked confused or responded in a way we did not expect (given that we're such good friends), we stopped, backed up, or reinterpreted what had been said.

It was so good to observe a German person I already knew, this time in his native environment. As a result of Martin's visit, I feel better about the German language, more comfortable and at home. I suspect that it's because I was with a friend, that we dealt with deeply emotional and deeply philosophical concepts in the language (although I resorted to English when I couldn't say it in German). It was great to be with someone who regards me as an intelligent, capable, strong person who happens to be in the early stages of learning German. I am so very grateful for Martin’s friendship and help. I have a new confidence, too, I think.

A trip to the pharmacy: I visited the Apotheke today, to get decongestant to flush the rest of the stuffiness out of my system. Except the word "decongestant" wasn't in my dictionary or my little phrasebook. Instead, we went for the multimedia style. I established that I didn't know the word for what I wanted, explained (in "Germ-ish") that I have allergies and am taking Claritin, an antihistamine. She pushed a pad of paper and pen into my hands, I wrote it; she smiled, took off towards her mysterious drawers. I said, “wait, wait!! There's more! I take those pills, but now I... [didn't know the word for cough, so I coughed].” She smiled again, grabbed my dictionary, and looked up... "mucus." Here they have anti-mucus stuff, also called... "expectorant"! She gave me a tiny, funny little roll of something that melts in water like Alka-Seltzer yet tastes... kind of like... maybe faintly rosewater-ish with citrus, and some free "suckable" vitamins, flavored orange-mango and pineapple. Yes!! I am officially in the land where medicine does not have to taste nasty!

Adventures in cultural/linguistic navigation: My laptop has a detachable cable. I can buy a cable with a German plug, and, with that, plug my laptop into the wall. However, because we’ve had power outages in Erlangen the last few weeks, I also wanted a surge protector. So I set out with the computer case and a dictionary on a quest to get my computer working. The first few stores I went to didn’t know what I was talking about. They couldn’t understand my broken German, and told me they didn’t know. I showed the American cable and the back of the laptop to the clerk at an electronics department store, and after about five minutes of explanation attempts, he produced a cord… but he had no idea what a surge protector was. I went home pleased with my efforts, but determined to figure out what a surge protector was called in German. A few days later, two friends dragged me into T-Punkt to buy rechargeable phone cards for their cell phones. The man who helped them… was half-German, half-American and spoke English nearly fluently! We quickly explained what we were trying to find, and then he asked his boss. Five minutes later, I had a little piece of paper with “Überspannungsschutzer.” Then I went to an electronics store with the paper and the cord. “In Germany, people don’t usually plug laptop computers into surge protectors,” said the salesman. He didn’t have them in stock, and seemed surprised that I would want to attach one to my computer. “A surge protector, for protection against stormy weather? But we don’t usually have power outages here! You don’t need one, I can’t imagine.” By that time, however, I had gotten better at keeping my good humor, seeing the humor at all, and describing without having exact words. It was a good feeling.

A great new word: I might have found a key German concept…."menschlich Perfekt” — “as perfect as is humanly possible.” No, that's not pessimistic, it's ... it seems to be a German way of expressing an acknowledgment of limitations. This is related to the fact that I haven’t heard people here say, “Of course I will do that;” instead, they usually say, “I will try.” And I like that attitude.

I like it here! I'm frustrated at times. I guess I write more about my frustrations, and my strange ironical, sarcastic sense of humor may not come across well in writing, but I enjoy the challenges of living here. A large part of the pleasure I derive is from being in a different environment. I like the city, I like the buildings and the pretty multicolored and different-sized money and the people who can be very friendly if you let them. I like the small market on Altmarkt Platz and the buses that run often--but often late--and the moody cloudy-sunny-changing Frankish weather that reminds me of Michigan and Vannes. Daily I find things that amuse me, even if they confuse me, too. I find it exciting. I don't find it trying to the point where I want to go home.... ok, I do, but I only say that once or twice a week when I'm frustrated and tired and just having a bad minute/hour/day. I cry about once a week, but... it's because there's so much going on. My emotions go up and down, it's really intense, and I have to let things out. But I LIKE IT HERE.

When you live for a year or two someplace where people speak a different language and have a different lifestyle, it helps you grow and change and become better. It has its horrid days-- your camera might walk off, or some random person might "borrow" your pants for a week and a half, you'll cry and be confused and whatever because it's a different culture and you're learning and it does tend to hurt when you take the learning curve so fast-- but IT'S GREAT! It's like bungee jumping and scuba diving and Christmas and Easter and Summer Solstice and Hanukah and the Chinese New Year and more, all wrapped into one. It's the closest you will ever get to being a character in a book or even switching lives with someone else, because you will come back with a different perspective. Yet, at the same time… more yourself than ever before.

In short, it's an adventure.