Everyday Life in Berlin

Here is Vera on the day she arrived in Berlin. She first walked to the wrong building, whose senior residents told her no young people lived there. Then she made it to my building, but did not know which apartment I had sublet. Fortunately one of my friendly neighbors remembered seeing an Asian woman in the neighborhood and directed her to my place.

Since cleaning up a bit, I've become newly delighted with the apartment. It has been refreshing to commute to "work" every morning at the Bundesarchiv and return home in the dark, filled with the satisfying sensation of having had a most productive day.

I see this statue, which the woman who lives in the apartment carved herself out of sandstone, as representative of her life. Simple, stark, with the frustrations of the scholarly life expressed in chisel marks.


And here is myself, "hard at work," at the kitchen table. Notice the cheery sunflower border on the wall, which Vera surmises to have survived from an earlier tenant.

It has been very mild this winter in Berlin, but this morning I awoke to a beautiful wintry scene: a light dusting of snow covering tree branches. I was tempted to take a snow day, but the Prussian work ethic eventually worked its magic, and I trudged off to the archives for a full day of note-taking.