Wahnsinnige Platzangst!
(Ominous voice-over:
"The year is 2008. The University of Potsdam, most advanced institution of its kind, has advocated a new innovation in course sign-up: The use of pens and paper. Stone tablets and cuneiform are now a thing of the past in this bastion of modernity...")
How do I hate German bureaucracy? Let me count the ways at a rate of one a second, and I might still be at it when they discover the Internet. "Wahnsinn" is my new favorite German word, and the only one that comes close to describing the goings-on this morning during class sign-up in the Institut für Germanistik at Potsdam. A close second is "Platzangst", or "fear of losing your place" (the kind you hold in line). This is a term I have never encountered in any other language, one which strikes me as more fundamentally German than even Currywurst. Coming here bears many of the symptoms of time travel, and I certainly don't mean into the future: disorientation, absence of fundamental technological infrastructure, eerie sense of familiarity yet frustration with how everything is done.
Guess how one registers for German courses at Potsdam? By hand, course by course, by signing your name to a sheet of paper in one small room on the 3rd floor of the Germanistik building. It's open for an entire week, but of course everyone shows up on the first morning, some people as much as two hours before the room opens. You then sign your name to a sheet of paper in the order you arrived (45 minutes before the start, I was the grateful recipient of No. 152), and if you are brave, venture back out through the throng to get a breath of fresh air before it all starts. (Mistake number 1.) If you are wiser and less brave, you will probably stay in the crowd on the third floor, so as not to have to barrel your way through it all again when you fight to reclaim your place in "line". Germans certainly don't share the uncanny ability of the English to form an orderly line through any and every sort of contorted space. If you do succeed in making your way into the registration room, you are reliant on the luck of the draw for whether there are still places available in the classes you want to take. I was relatively lucky, and by virtue of being only number 152 I got into both of the courses I needed to register for. But Mensch! I feel bad for the poor sods who showed up at 10 am. Hope nobody thought that going tomorrow would be a good idea. (I wonder if anyone ever registers on Fridays...)
My course list for the semester looks like this:
Monday
13:15 - 14:45: Fathers and Sons in Literature from the Turn of the 20th Century (Potsdam, Seminar)
Tuesday
10:00 - 12:00: Writers' Epistolary Exchanges around 1800 (Humboldt, Seminar)
13:15 - 14:45: Dramas of the Storm and Stress Period (Potsdam, Lecture)
(maybe) 16:00 - 18:00: Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Humboldt, Lecture, I want to audit this one)
Wednesday
10:00 - 12:00: Laokoon - Theories of Art (Humboldt, Seminar)
12:00 - 14:00: Literature and Literary Life in Weimar and Jena at the End of the 18th Century (Humboldt, Seminar)
(maybe) 14:00 - 16:00: Kant's Pragmatic Anthropology (Humboldt, Seminar, I may try to audit this one if four straight hours of literature don't completely exhaust me)
Thursday
13:00 - 14:45: Musical Settings of Heine from Schubert to Hanns Eisler (Potsdam, Seminar)
All in all, I have at least a three-day weekend, a four-day one if I decide to drop one or the other of the Potsdam courses on Monday and Friday.
In better news, I have a home now! Actually a reconfigured storage room slash hallway in Hákon and Hildur's ap, it definitely comprises the cutest four square meters on the block. The "room" is just big enough for a bed, a bookshelf, and a tiny one-foot-deep dresser, but for six months, it's quite fine. I have actually grown to like small cozy spaces quite a lot, so I'm not at all unhappy. I've put some pictures up on the walls (including a print I found in London of William Smith's world's first geologic map!) and I got the brightest-colored bedsheets I could find in IKEA (red sheets, dark green and lime green duvet cover and pillowcase).
My friend Hákon is a bit of an amateur electrician, and he wired electricity into the room for me, which is a good thing as there are no windows. It's a little funny for now though, as the wires are spliced with the ceiling light in the living room, which is so powerful that if we turn it on, the light turns off in my room, and if I turn on the stronger of my two lamps, a small glow appears on the light in the living room even if it's turned off. Funky stuff.
The complete implosion of the Icelandic economy hardly merits mentioning, so outrageous is it. It makes me furious to think that my entire country may be mired in debt until I'm a grandmother, not to mention all of the students who are being forced to terminate their studies because their savings are suddenly worthless and the apathy of foreign nations who have helped us right along this path and are now leaving us to beg the Russians for a bailout for our broke(n) financial system. When i think about it, which is a lot of the time, I just want to scream.
So I will stop now. It's sunny out, and I am going to go find me some used bookstores and bolster my Reclam collection.
"The year is 2008. The University of Potsdam, most advanced institution of its kind, has advocated a new innovation in course sign-up: The use of pens and paper. Stone tablets and cuneiform are now a thing of the past in this bastion of modernity...")
How do I hate German bureaucracy? Let me count the ways at a rate of one a second, and I might still be at it when they discover the Internet. "Wahnsinn" is my new favorite German word, and the only one that comes close to describing the goings-on this morning during class sign-up in the Institut für Germanistik at Potsdam. A close second is "Platzangst", or "fear of losing your place" (the kind you hold in line). This is a term I have never encountered in any other language, one which strikes me as more fundamentally German than even Currywurst. Coming here bears many of the symptoms of time travel, and I certainly don't mean into the future: disorientation, absence of fundamental technological infrastructure, eerie sense of familiarity yet frustration with how everything is done.
Guess how one registers for German courses at Potsdam? By hand, course by course, by signing your name to a sheet of paper in one small room on the 3rd floor of the Germanistik building. It's open for an entire week, but of course everyone shows up on the first morning, some people as much as two hours before the room opens. You then sign your name to a sheet of paper in the order you arrived (45 minutes before the start, I was the grateful recipient of No. 152), and if you are brave, venture back out through the throng to get a breath of fresh air before it all starts. (Mistake number 1.) If you are wiser and less brave, you will probably stay in the crowd on the third floor, so as not to have to barrel your way through it all again when you fight to reclaim your place in "line". Germans certainly don't share the uncanny ability of the English to form an orderly line through any and every sort of contorted space. If you do succeed in making your way into the registration room, you are reliant on the luck of the draw for whether there are still places available in the classes you want to take. I was relatively lucky, and by virtue of being only number 152 I got into both of the courses I needed to register for. But Mensch! I feel bad for the poor sods who showed up at 10 am. Hope nobody thought that going tomorrow would be a good idea. (I wonder if anyone ever registers on Fridays...)
My course list for the semester looks like this:
Monday
13:15 - 14:45: Fathers and Sons in Literature from the Turn of the 20th Century (Potsdam, Seminar)
Tuesday
10:00 - 12:00: Writers' Epistolary Exchanges around 1800 (Humboldt, Seminar)
13:15 - 14:45: Dramas of the Storm and Stress Period (Potsdam, Lecture)
(maybe) 16:00 - 18:00: Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Humboldt, Lecture, I want to audit this one)
Wednesday
10:00 - 12:00: Laokoon - Theories of Art (Humboldt, Seminar)
12:00 - 14:00: Literature and Literary Life in Weimar and Jena at the End of the 18th Century (Humboldt, Seminar)
(maybe) 14:00 - 16:00: Kant's Pragmatic Anthropology (Humboldt, Seminar, I may try to audit this one if four straight hours of literature don't completely exhaust me)
Thursday
13:00 - 14:45: Musical Settings of Heine from Schubert to Hanns Eisler (Potsdam, Seminar)
All in all, I have at least a three-day weekend, a four-day one if I decide to drop one or the other of the Potsdam courses on Monday and Friday.
In better news, I have a home now! Actually a reconfigured storage room slash hallway in Hákon and Hildur's ap, it definitely comprises the cutest four square meters on the block. The "room" is just big enough for a bed, a bookshelf, and a tiny one-foot-deep dresser, but for six months, it's quite fine. I have actually grown to like small cozy spaces quite a lot, so I'm not at all unhappy. I've put some pictures up on the walls (including a print I found in London of William Smith's world's first geologic map!) and I got the brightest-colored bedsheets I could find in IKEA (red sheets, dark green and lime green duvet cover and pillowcase).
My friend Hákon is a bit of an amateur electrician, and he wired electricity into the room for me, which is a good thing as there are no windows. It's a little funny for now though, as the wires are spliced with the ceiling light in the living room, which is so powerful that if we turn it on, the light turns off in my room, and if I turn on the stronger of my two lamps, a small glow appears on the light in the living room even if it's turned off. Funky stuff.
The complete implosion of the Icelandic economy hardly merits mentioning, so outrageous is it. It makes me furious to think that my entire country may be mired in debt until I'm a grandmother, not to mention all of the students who are being forced to terminate their studies because their savings are suddenly worthless and the apathy of foreign nations who have helped us right along this path and are now leaving us to beg the Russians for a bailout for our broke(n) financial system. When i think about it, which is a lot of the time, I just want to scream.
So I will stop now. It's sunny out, and I am going to go find me some used bookstores and bolster my Reclam collection.