By Madeline and Luci

Around the Spinnerei, where we took the tour with Brad, is where the Bandhaus is located. An area of regrowth and new development, the factories that dominated the district of Lindenau (also called Plagwitz) closed, and the area was devoid of activity until new economic development enlivened the area. Artists, innovators, and creative folks of all calibers have come into the community created by the Spinnerei and have spread in and around the area to influence places like the Bandhaus Leipzig.

Madeline: I will admit, I was nervous before we went to the doom metal show. I had listened to the band on Spotify beforehand and they sounded kind of scary, I was wondering whether I had made a mistake. Once we got there however, my sentiments changed. The crowd looked quintessentially punk; most were equipped with piercings of all sorts, tattoos galore, attire was primarily black with denim jackets adorned with patches of various metal bands to show their commitment to the scene, and men with long hair perfect for head-banging. They were all so beautiful. Once the first group, Calliophis, started to play– I was in love. They were intoxicating.

Luci: I agree. I had come only to see Leechfeast, the band I’d listened to all semester while studying and had discovered eerie transcontinental connections with. However, I was entirely impressed with Calliophis. They were heavy and controlled, and had beautiful harmony. Also, that one time they just said “I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate…Jesus Christ” was funny. Standing right next to the speakers with the bass making my lungs shake until I coughed, being around familiar kinds of people who had antifascist and activist leanings (not only on their patches), was refreshing for my soul. Also, I met more people who like Chelsea Wolfe. Maybe she’s too popular to like anymore…(J/K).
I hadn’t been to a good show in a while, and it reinvigorated my desire to produce music again, so that’s on my mind as I think about what to do when I get home.

Madeline: Luci knows the guitarist from the band Leechfeast, Jaka, and has connections with the lead singer, also named Jaka. We hung out with them, sitting on the concrete drinking a beer in front of the tour van before their set. They asked us questions about what we were doing in Leipzig, our other excursions in Europe, where we were from in the states, and what we planned to do after school. They were all from Slovenia. Jaka the guitarist told us he had a lot of family who immigrated to the U.S. In his family, anything they would call “amazing” or “great” is associated with the U.S. This struck Luci and I as bittersweet. We know things in the U.S. aren’t always peaches and cream, but it is projected as a great, rich land of possibilities to many countries around the world– although it does not live up to that image. Jaka then went on to tell us about his time touring in Detroit; he and a buddy were walking through the city and were shocked at how quickly a nice part of town they walked through became desolate and devoid of basic necessities less than two blocks farther away! Luci and I informed him that unfortunately that happens a lot in the U.S.

Luci: Yeah, dude. The United States is broken in so many ways, it is totally mind-boggling and infuriating. We don’t even have health care or, like, clean water in some places. End-stage decadent capitalism for the win?

Madeline: Cut to Leechfeast performing. It was amazing! Jaka the guitarist was impressive with his skills on guitar, and simultaneously the computer/keyboard station that was set up. Jaka the lead singer was incredible, with a screaming vocal range that was brutal combined with a more classical– almost chamber music-esque– singing voice that added a welcomed strangeness to the heavy soundscape. The bassist, Jurl, was so cool too. The performance was intoxicating, you were sucked in like a crazy intense meditation. It went by much too quickly!

Luci: Yo, you have hit on a really important point for me. That feeling of trance or meditation is one of the things I love most about doom metal, especially when it’s live. There are no mosh pits, there are no people showing off or proving their clout. It’s just a bunch of music lovers who have an intense connection with the droning…yeah, meditative…feeling of the music. “Shoegaze” is an offshoot genre of doom metal, and new doom is definitely pushing the boundaries of experimental genre-bending (like…what even is doom metal and what isn’t it?) with the addition of visual components like video compilations and soundscapes using prefabricated computer tracks. It’s pretty rad. I’m into it.

I thought our walk back to the apartment from the Bandhaus Leipzig was really fun, too. We were checking out graffiti, chatting about life and Germany, and then we had to decide whether to wait for a bus that might have taken 30 minutes to arrive. I’m glad we chose to walk, past the Baumwoll-Spinnerei and the canals, and groups of people out late just chilling on the sidewalks. It was nice. I’m so glad you went, Madeline. I look forward to calling you up when there is a great show in town at home and having some more fun experiences!

Madeline: I’m so down!

• 

On our last day in Berlin, we went to Dai An Asia for some delicious Vietnamese food. It is located in Friedrichstrasse, next to Theodore-Wolff Park, down the street from Check-point Charlie.

It was a small and intimate shop. The kitchen was really small for the three to four people cooking in it, but they seemed to make it work. The seating area was also very small, and we didn’t see anyone sitting down and eating there. It must be a place where most people carry out and eat their food in the park like we did.

These are the foods that we ordered:

Tom Yam Kai is a spicy and hot soup. Tom refers to the boiling process, Yam refers to a spicy and sour salad, modern version popular with mushrooms. James got this dish.

Gebratene Nudeln (fried noodles)-This is cooked in a wok at a high temperature and involves a sauce of honey, soy sauce, lime juice, groundnut oil, and oyster sauce. The duck or chicken is breaded and cooked skin down in oil. Madeline got the dish with chicken and Elizabeth got the dish with duck.

Currently, there are about 20,000 Vietnamese citizens living in Berlin. Between 1981-2007, about 42,000 individuals renounced their Vietnamese citizenship and took up German nationality. East Germany invited (what were then North) Vietnamese young people to attend study and training programs as early as 1950, but despite this history, there was harassment and violence towards Vietnamese asylum-seekers post-reunification. In 1994, 85 investigations were opened against police officers harassing the Vietnamese community; only 5 were punished.

During the separation of Germany, East Germany faced a shortage of laborers in the country due to its citizens having fled to the West. To solve this problem, the country invited laborers from socialist and communist countries allied with the Soviets to fill the void—a move that corresponded, at least superficially, with West German “guest worker” programs. In terms of publicly stated goals, the program was intended to build solidarity between these countries and the DDR. (It was for this reason that, as mentioned above, Vietnam was included in the number of the countries that the DDR worked with.) Individuals’ stays in the country were initially limited to three years, and the conditions that the Gastarbeiter worked in were notably worse than those of their counterparts in the West.

Following the fall of the Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany, the temporary workers in East Germany faced discrimination and premature discrimination. About 75% of the guest workers left East Germany after Reunification. Those who stayed, including a number of the Vietnamese guest workers, were not considered legal immigrants—despite the entirely regularized processes by which they had originally arrived. Many became street vendors to survive. This population was eventually granted residency and began opening small businesses. Germany and Vietnam have been working on figuring out what to do with the former guest workers since Reunification, with individual people caught in the middle of negotiations. Despite the long roads that these immigrants have had, many of them have built a life for themselves as community members, running Vietnamese restaurants and other businesses throughout Germany.

By: Madeline Knight, Elizabeth Messenger, and James Brockenborough

By: Madeline Knight and Elizabeth Messenger

• 

We discovered the Zionskirche church by mistake after Elizabeth took us off of the tram at the wrong stop.

In the 1830s onward, Berlin experienced great growth as a result of the industrial revolution and the number of workers that moved to Berlin. This church originally emerged from the St. Elisabethkirche’s parish; as the area that it served grew, the parish had to buy a hall to provide church services. This hall became Zionskapelle or “Zion Chapelle” which eventually became Zionskirche in 1864.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a minister to the parish of Zion in November of 1931, the start of the Nazi period. Bonhoeffer was aware of his church’s failure in facing the injustices and social conditions, the depression and Nazi’s ethnic discrimination, of the time. Bonhoeffer left Zionskirche before the Kirchenkampf (“Church Struggle”) broke out in 1933 over the state’s claim to control the church. Bonhoeffer was strictly anti-Nazi, and wrote the following in April 1933: “the church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any social structure, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” Unfortunately, he was isolated in this regard.

During World War II, a firebomb destroyed the roof and caused extensive damage to much of the building, damage that can still be seen today by visitors. The church was re-consecrated in 1953 and work began to restore the church. However, due to the anti-church attitude of the GDR government, restoration work was hampered, the structure continued to deteriorate, and services increasingly took place behind closed doors.

The Zionskirche was a center of the civic reform movement that lead to the end of the GDR. The church is also the site of the Umwelt-Bibliothek. This library contained books and magazines over environmental and human rights topics that were prohibited by the government. Raids that the Stasi committed in the church sparked public interest. The raids lead to the groups that worked in the church gaining popularity among other citizens of the GDR and the Western media. Because of this, the dissidents were given a platform to bring about the end of the regime.

Today the church remains active in the community. They do a lot of weddings and community events, and their kindergarten has a long wait list. The neighborhood is a traditionally working-class neighborhood, but due to gentrification it is becoming increasingly harder for those families and that socioeconomic class to live there. The church is doing their best to ease the struggles of their parishioners while also being self-critical, so as to not make the same mistakes from their past.

Our impression of the historical church was that it seemed to function as a “small-seeming” community within a rapidly growing context, and that it remains underfunded due to its location in a working class neighborhood and the gentrification that’s affecting the city of Berlin as a whole. The church has been structurally repaired so that it may continue to play an important role. However, the more superficial restoration projects like the paint, artwork, and some of the flooring have taken a backseat so that the church can serve its parishioners. The church did look run down, but money isn’t everything and its appearance can serve as a reminder to those that enter it that the building has a long and complicated history.  

Madeline Knight

I get it: because of the title, you probably don’t want to read this, since you’ll become depressed. Yes, the Palace of Tears was a depressing place filled with family members and friends sobbing as they were forced to return to either East or West Berlin, but what I learned from my trip to the Palace of Tears provided me with a different view on the division of Berlin.

The Palace of Tears was a nickname given to the Friedrichstraße train station because during the division of Berlin, when the wall was up, it straddled the division of the city and became the checkpoint for those traveling between the divided city.

Next to Friedrichstraße is the Palace of Tears museum, which I went to today.

In the exhibit, there is a video of a former worker at Friedrichstraße talking about the demolition of the station that came as a result of the fall of the wall. He was happy that this was occurring and felt that it was a historic moment but ultimately he had no job anymore. Before the wall came down, he had a sense of job security and never had to worry in that regard. This was an interesting side of the story that we usually don’t hear. The master narrative concerning the fall of the Berlin wall is that all Germans were joyous and capitalism had finally won out.

Another piece of the exhibit that I found interesting explains how some West Berliners sent parcels to East Berliners with food items and consumer goods that weren’t available “over there”. According to the exhibit, the parcels were a source of great joy for the East Berlin recipients, so much so that they usually wanted to send something back. This seems almost incorrect because we met a Mizzou professor, Olaf Schmidt, who had grown up in East Berlin. He told us that he used to mess with the tourists and West Berliners who would look over the wall. He and his friends would beg the onlookers for bread and other basic necessities as a joke to keep up the belief that East Germans are much worse off than the West.