Welcome to our website about life in Leipzig!
Our thoughts naturally turn towards friends and family this time of year. But our minds have been that much more focused on home because of the terrible ice storm that left so many without electricity for so long and destroyed so many of the cherished trees that took generations to cultivate. So we send love and good thoughts in particular to our friends in Norman and Oklahoma City.
We’ve tried to include something for everyone here including a number of linked videos that might be fun for kids. This website uses a blog program so if you’re interested in exploring, you can either go to the first post and page forward, or you can click on one of these topics and go from there: Introducing Leipzig, Knutmania, The Big Move, Discovering Saxony, Other Destinations, School, Work, Apartment Living, Leipzig Music I, Leipzig Music II: Dorky German Pop, Kids’ Recommendations, and Christmas in Leipzig. Or if you’re the kind of person who pages through a magazine from back to front you can just scroll down and then click on “older posts” at the bottom. If you feel like it, please leave a comment–or just send an e-mail. We’d love to hear from you.
P.S. We don’t want to give the false impression that we represent the entire Oklahoma ex-pat community in Leipzig. Our friend OGP put us in touch with his old friends and former Normanites L & P and their two kids, who’ve lived here for years. So think of us as just the Nouveaux Okies (or would that be Nouvelle?) in town.
No doubt about it, Germans do Christmas well. Without the distraction of Thanksgiving this country is in full-throttle Christmas mode by the first week of November. I think the super-charged coziness of German Christmas is in part a compensation for the lack of daylight in the winter months, which can otherwise make a person nearly catatonic.
For the entire month of December a gigantic Christmas market overtakes the entire old city. Our apartment overlooks one spoke of it, which includes the largest and most popular stand for mulled wine and Feuerzangenbowle (a flaming rum drink). That means that by closing time on most nights we are serenaded by a chorus of male voices that are not among Leipzig’s finest.
And here’s N. & M.’s video tour of the Leipzig Christmas market. Note the edgy, low-angle camera work of these avant-garde young filmmakers. (The conventional pan shot at the end was an intervention by the studio, a.k.a. Mom.)
Books were our salvation in the first couple of months of our stay in Germany. I started reading the last Harry Potter book aloud to N. & M. on the way back to Leipzig from France in August and continued reading book after book after book to them until sometime in early November. Everywhere we went they wanted me to bring along whatever book we were in the middle of–especially on our way to and from school. I think those books gave us a shared emotional focus in the midst of all our new challenges. But then gradually the kids went back to reading their own books on their own time and no longer seemed to require my reading services. While that certainly freed up my evenings, I kind of miss those little shared worlds.
I asked N. and M. what book recommendations they would pass on to their friends. Here are a few in their own words.
N.’s tips:
The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud (The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem’s Eye, and Ptolemy’s Gate). For kids and young adults who like comedy, drama, tragedy, and adventure. It’s about good and evil and if something starts good which way it will go. A young boy Nathaniel becomes an apprentice to a magician. Magicians are not good in this book. He summons a demon named Bartimaeus and he meets a girl two years older than him who has resilience to magic and is against the magicians.
Horrible Histories by Terry Deary and other authors. History as gory comedy that boys will love and most girls will put down with a “blah.” Here are some examples of books: Measly Middle Ages, Rotten Romans, Groovy Greeks, Terrible Tudors, and Vicious Vikings. They have recipes, quizzes and mean jokes about teachers.
The Big Book of Boys’ Stuff by Bart King. This is great for boys and awful for girls. It has sections about gross stuff, food for life, stories, jokes, and slang.
M.’s tips:
Pippi Longstocking series by Astrid Lindgren. Pippi is a girl with no parents. Her mother died when she was two years old and her father was blown off-board a ship. Pippi is a strong girl, and the books are very funny.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Lucy finds a wardrobe which leads into a world called Narnia. It is dramatic. I like the characters.
Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Alice goes on adventures. It is fun to read or listen to!
We also entertain ourselves sometimes with YouTube videos. Here are two favorites.
N.’s top video:
“Mean Kitty Song” by Cory “Mr. Safety” Williams. There are also more videos in the series.
M.’s top video:
“The Three Questions” from Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
Leipzig is also quite proud of Die Prinzen (The Princes), its home-grown pop superstars–well, superstars within the German pop galaxy anyway. Almost all the band members were graduates of the Thomas-Choir School in Leipzig during the GDR years. And that choral influence is pretty unmistakable in their music. They first became popular not long after the wall came down, and this is one of their playful early hits, which the kids really enjoy. See the English translation below.
Kissing forbidden (Küssen verboten)
You want to have me because you find me attractive.
I must say I can understand that well.
You give me gifts and clean up for me
And I think I have it good with you.
But there is one thing that I cannot bear
When your moist lips come too close to me.
Refrain:
Kissing forbidden, Kissing forbidden
Kissing forbidden, Strictly forbidden
No one who has ever seen me would have believed it,
Kissing is not allowed around me.
Already in school, when I was seven years old,
There was Jule, totally in love with me,
When I went home, she came chasing after me,
And at recess she wanted still much more.
She thought she could buy me with cheese rolls,
And then her moist lips came after me.
(Refrain)
And last night in a dream, Tobias came to the door,
I saw big moist lips and I could only scream
Ahhh!
(Refrain)
One of our hopes for this year was that we could take advantage of the incredible music tradition in Leipzig and cultivate in our kids a better
appreciation of classical music. Our first several attempts did not go over very well. Although the concert hall of the Gewandhaus orchestra and the Leipzig opera hall are literally around the corner, we thought we’d start out easy with the free or nearly free organ and choral concerts offered in local churches. Of particular note are the weekly concerts of the Thomas-choir, the boy’s choir that Bach once conducted, in the Thomas-church, where Bach was once cantor. Below is a YouTube video of the Thomas-choir singing in the Thomas-church. See if you agree with our children that listening to them is pure torture.
But the kids’ attitudes utterly shifted when we introduced them to the Mozart opera The Magic Flute. We bought tickets for an afternoon family performance and then began preparing by listening to the opera on cd, watching lots of YouTube videos of different scenes, and purchasing a marionette version on dvd. We also entertained ourselves (and possibly our neighbors) by practicing the Queen of the Night aria. Mira in particular made an admirable effort. Here you go in case you’d like to try it at home.
Noah in particular was very interested in how much the production we saw changed the meaning of the story. For those of you who know the opera: the Leipzig production ends with a vindication of the Queen of the Night, as Tamino and Pamina are inducted not into a utopian Enlightenment community but–you guessed it!–a totalitarian dictatorship of reason with clear GDR overtones.
While we love the central location of our apartment in the old city, and we’ve found–to our surprise–that its 800-some square feet really are enough for the four of us, there are some real disadvantages. One is that we’re living through a MAJOR overhaul of all the plumbing in the entire building. The dust, the grime, the dozens of workmen constantly hauling bulky things up and down the stairs, the occasional electric and water outages are all nothing compared to the DRILLING. Since the apartment also doubles as my study and workplace, I am well acquainted with an entire symphony of drills, saws, and sledge hammers. But since I cannot describe that experience in words, only desperate little whimpers, I’ll move on to the second disadvantage. There is no real place for the kids to let loose–no common space in the building, no yard or nearby park. We try to get out as much as possible–in the old town or on excursions–but there are times when the kids literally bounce off the apartment walls, as you see in the following dramatization. (Shhh, don’t tell the Hausmeister you saw them jumping on the couch.)
Since most of my days are spent in front of my computer and my books, either at home or in a library, there really aren’t a lot of entertaining tales to tell about my work. I do have a German academic host whom I did not know in advance and who turned out to be quite a lovely man. I recently gave a lecture in his doctoral colloquium, which I found a gratifying experience. But beyond that I’m left to my own rather unremarkable routine.
B., by comparison, leads a fast-paced life involving an office and regular contact with both students and colleagues. His colleagues, at least those I’ve met, are very interesting and likable people. The American Studies department here hosts two visiting American professors every semester–the Fulbright lecturer (B.’s position) and the Picador professor for a visiting writer. The visiting writer this semester is a novelist and short-story writer named John Haskell. Since we like him very much we’ll venture the following last-minute holiday gift suggestion.
The first observation the kids made about the international school in Leipzig was that it is not McKinley Elementary School and their teachers here are not their beloved teachers from last year. But once we were able to move beyond that indisputable starting point, things have begun to improve. It helped tremendously that the school moved out of its temporary building in October. While its old building was being completely renovated, the school was housed in a grim old GDR building that was smeared with graffiti including some English obscenities of truly monumental size. In order to enter the schoolyard everyday we had to go around or through a group of very committed alcoholics, who kept regular business hours, on task with their beers everyday by at least 8:30 AM. The overgrown playground–if you could call it that–sometimes concealed broken beer bottles and always plenty of cigarette stubs.
But at the end of October, after three weeks (!) of fall break, the school moved
into its beautifully renovated building in a lovely part of town next to a park. There are a few hitches–an overactive fire alarm and a temperamental elevator, the interior of which B., N., & M. came to know well late one afternoon. But the atmosphere of the place has utterly transformed. If it is still by definition not McKinley, it does have many nice aspects. The kids have small classes with very good, caring teachers (both Americans). And they have great extra-curricular activities. What the kids enjoy perhaps most at the school is their drama club. Right now we’re gearing up for the Christmas play in which N. plays Santa and M. plays an elf.
Here are a couple more school-related pictures. In Germany, the first day of first grade is a very special event, called ‘Einschulungstag,” where the kids receive great cones full of gifts and sweets from their families. On the left is M. on her big day at the old building (note the graffiti in the background). The other picture was taken on the day of the school’s official reopening in its new building. Since the presence of an international school is of great symbolic significance for Leipzig, there 
were lots of dignitaries in attendance. We found this picture of N. with the Minister-President of Saxony (kind of like the state governor) in an on-line newspaper.
Berlin
In late September we traveled up to Berlin for Ben’s Fulbright orientation. I became more than a little nostalgic when in the train I suddenly realized that it was exactly twenty years, almost to the day, since I’d arrived by train to West Berlin for my student Fulbright year. For me nearly every block in Berlin is layered with history, both the earth-shattering events of the last few centuries and my own very personal history at important junctures. I can think of nowhere else that holds such power of place for me.
M & N loved t
he Fulbright conference because of all the other families with kids their age. While B. attended his meetings, we toured the city in a wild pack of ten children and five mothers. I’m not sure why it ended up being only mothers, but the companionship was great and I think I had as much fun as the kids. Still we only got to see the tiniest slice of Berlin during our few days in September. We came back again for a lovely day with Aunt K. and Uncle A., and we’re planning at least two more trips of several days each over the course of the year. But by the end of the year I’m sure we will have still only scratched the surface of my favorite city on earth.
But of course we think fondly of home too, so it was sweet to come across this reminder of Norman in Berlin. On the lawn of the Museum Island there was a massive temporary exhibit of Botero sculptures. Among them we found a copy of our own friendly neighborhood Botero sphinx, which stands outside the FJMA ( OU Art Museum).
Innsbruck
I’d never been to Innsbruck before, but even for me–arguably the least sports-aware person on earth– it held the aura of the glamorous 1976 Winter Olympics and Dorothy Hamill’s to-die-for haircut. While the haircut was a huge disappointment for me personally, our trip to Innsbruck was not. Nor was it for the kids.
Certainly the main attraction was hiking in the mountains. But I had to own up to something that perhaps I’d never been quite frank with my family about before: I’m basically afraid of heights. And it’s worth noting that a “family-friendly” trail for the Austrians is not necessarily “acrophobe-friendly” and may contain precipitous drop-offs on one-side. (Perhaps it has to have lethal drop-offs on both sides for it to qualify as not family-friendly.) So as the kids traipsed ahead with their dad like little
mountain goats I crouched along the trail grasping at vegetation. Fortunately a confident older German couple took us under their wing and hiked along with us. Their presence shamed me into behaving a little less neurotically and I eventually really enjoyed the hike. On our second day of hiking we ended up in less sublime but more “K.-friendly” terrain.
Prague
Prague, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. I’d visited my friend T. there in 1991 and found it eerily beautiful and haunting. Back then it wasn’t hard to imagine it as Kafka’s city. Sixteen years later it’s one of the most touristy European cities I’ve ever visited–comparable perhaps to Venice. It was so crowded on the October weekend we were there that one hardly needed a map–you could just let yourself be borne along from site to site by the rushing river of tourists.
Still there were plenty of memorable sites. From books the kids knew about the legend of the golem and his creator Rabbi Loeb so they were interested in seeing the famous Jewish quarter. But the visit made a sad impression too as they saw the names of more than 77,000 murdered Czech Jews covering every inch of the interior walls of the Pinkasova synagogue. They are aware of the Holocaust but those names made it concrete.
When about a year ago N. and I read E.H. Gombrich’s book for children Little History of the World, N.’s favorite episode was the “defenestration of Prague” of 1618, when Bohemian nobles tossed several imperial governors out the high castle windows. Although they miraculously landed unscathed in a pile of manure, the incident touched off the Thirty Years War. And of course it inspired this attempted reenactment in the Prague Castle in 2007.
