Dominant, prime, tonic...Advent

I've never liked the number five. It's an odd number that looks as if it ought to be even. It is somehow complacent and bumbling, wholesome and healthy. It's the easiest, least interesting interval to sing (it's even called the dominant, for goodness' sake, as if it weren't self-important enough already); the place where you are, briefly, before you get to the end, the tonic chord. It's half of ten and like all halves has a symmetrical quality while also lacking something essential. Five is, I suddenly realise, a prime number, so it ought to be interesting, but I still don't like it. It doesn't have the erratic, intriguing aspect of seven, or the mystical connotations of nine, which is just the opposite of five: it's not a prime number but looks as if it ought to be.

Poor number five. It can't help itself, and all this is really just a roundabout way of saying that I did not enjoy turning 45 a couple of weeks ago. I didn't enjoy turning 40, either, but I grew reconciled to it, even started to enjoy it once I got to 41. But 45 is just....meh. As ages go, it has little to say for itself. There are plenty of role models, but there's no really desirable description. I'll have to invent one, perhaps. But I have to admit that despite my principles and my feminism, I'm a little intimidated. Looking at myself in the mirror, I don't look young any more, but I don't look old either. I scrutinise my laughter lines and my worry lines with the same doubts that most women, married or single, mothers or not, gay or straight, have at this age. Am I attractive? Am I interesting? Do I have anything to offer the world? What does it have to offer me? Where will I be in five years? Will I ever live anywhere for more than a year at a time? Should I have another cup of tea? None of the answers  are looking so great this year, I think (except for the cup of tea). Maybe in a couple of years, when I finally get to a properly odd number, things will feel different. 

Those were my general thoughts, a few weeks ago. But something in me rebelled against worry. Whether I was going to be 45 or 47, it was still my birthday and I wasn't going to ignore it. I like my birthday, usually, and I decided that this year I wanted to do something special, something pretty, something slightly boring yet also - for me - exciting. Something I wouldn't be able to do in England. An Advent Boat Trip – Kaffee und Kuchen included – seemed the perfect cosy solution for a late November birthday. Also, it had an element of 45-ness that I felt to be appropriate. "Enjoy the Havel in all its wintry glory!" the brochure promised. I pictured myself drifting through a beautiful snowy landscape in flickering candle-light while munching on chocolate, and sent out excited invitations, with an alternative offer to meet at a bar, just in case people didn't want to spend money on boat trips. It turned out no-one except Mel and I wanted to go on a boat, and I wondered why. Was it the money? Family commitments? Fear of getting seasick? Fear of - gasp! - leaving Berlin? "Oh, well," I shrugged. "Their loss."

Like every year, my birthday this year fell exactly four weeks before Christmas. But this year, it also fell on a Sunday. While in England this would just mean I didn't have to go to work, this year we are in Germany. This year, Sunday 27th November had a meaning all of its own; it was der erste Advent, as they call it here –– the first (Sunday in) Advent. And while this would be true wherever you were in the world, I had forgotten just what it means in Germany. Unlike in the UK, Christmas here doesn't start in September. Everything has a time and a place, and in the German calendar, der erste Advent has an important subtext: Christmas is nearly here, you numpties – get your act together and go shopping now before it's too late! And suddenly, it was all happening. Christmas markets opened. Carol services took off in a big way. Children ran around crafting lanterns frenetically – oh no, sorry, that was 12th November, St Martin's Day. But it's not just lanterns - knitting, crocheting, pottery, badge-making, weaving, they all start to make unexpected appearances in the least handknitted of places. (Imagine Superdrug with basket-weaving.) And most importantly, crowds flock to florist-and-candle shops, which I think may only exist here, to buy those German winter essentials: Advent wreaths and as many candles as you can fit in your bike basket. 

The day before my birthday, on Saturday morning, we joined everyone else at the market in Zehlendorf, where little tents were full of jolly people selling local vegetables (huge baskets of glossy, exotic looking cabbages, kale, brussels sprouts, parsnips and kohlrabis, and even Teltow turnips!), local meat, bread, cheese and wine. The air was icy and tall Germans in their woollen coats breathed clouds of steam, laughing and chattering at the onset of proper winter and more importantly, Christmas. We took the plunge and launched ourselves into the shop at the end of the street which sold Advent wreaths, jostled and pushed by crowds buying pungent-smelling greenery and silver Santas on a stick. Everywhere we went, people wished us "Froher Erster Advent!" I hadn't realised it was quite such a festive occasion, and it was lovely. But then my heart sank. This was why no-one else had signed up to come on my birthday boat trip the next day. They were too busy lighting candles, eating Stollen and decorating their house with holly, or alternatively, taking advantage of the shops being open on a Sunday for a change.

Or so I thought....

Before...

We arrived in Potsdam the following day to glorious, frosty sunshine. We had breakfast in a cafe, wandered round the park at Sanssouci and eventually meandered down to the Lange Bruecke, where all the boats go from. I collected the tickets. Full of excitement, I jumped up and down: "That must be our boat there!" And so it was. But then..."What's that coach doing there?" And more anxiously, "What's that big lift thing on the coach for?"

"I think it's for our fellow passengers," said Mel, neutrally. We looked at each other. Then we looked at our fellow passengers. An enormous group of them was gathered by the boat. They were mostly wearing beige. They were complaining to each other about various things. The tiniest, oldest ones – at least the women – were wearing their bright Sunday-best going-out scarves and hats. Several of them were in wheelchairs. Suddenly, 45 seemed extremely young. "There's a young family over there," Mel pointed out encouragingly. "They're here with their aged parents," I pointed out in return. 

"I don't think there's anyone else our age here on their own," Mel speculated. "Maybe this is why no-one else wanted to come."

That was it. I'd finally done it. I had carried being boring too far! I was too old to be cool! No-one would ever want to come to my birthday again! My life was over! I nearly turned back.

But it was too late. The doors were opening. The crew was ushering us on to the boat. A huge, sparkly Christmas tree stood in the centre of the foyer, and tinsel lined the long, mirrored cabin that was decked out with baubles and plastic holly, each white-clothed table with its festive napkins, plates of Stollen and coffee cups ready to be filled. Last Christmas was playing on the tannoy system. Elderly people rushed to get to the best spots as if they were on the bus. We moved slowly up the cabin. Elderly men pushed their chairs aggressively outwards, so that we could not get past. Eventually, we found our table and sat down. We were at the front, but right beside us, an argument was ensuing. Parents were ordering their middle-aged children to move so that they could get a better view. "And leave a place for Hilde, she's in the toilet but she's going to sit with me." The middle-aged children rose as one and decamped to a separate table. We looked at the elderly people beside us, all of them absolutely intent on having an excellent time. They smiled at us in a conspiratorial manner. 

And after

 And we began to laugh.

"I don't want to go home," I told Mel. "I'm enjoying myself far too much."

So we sat and listened to Wham!, Slade and German Schlager Christmas hits, while the harassed waiter did the rounds with his flasks of coffee and the boat moved slowly off down the Havel River out towards the lakes that surround Potsdam. The sun shone, and the low windows allowed us to sail right alongside the ducks and swans that accompanied the boat. People waved from the riverbank. Soon the coffee was exhausted, as was the waiter, and our fellow passengers abandoned their cake and began to order wine. We gazed out at the landscape, which really was wintry and beautiful. We ate all our cake. As the sun sank lower in the sky, we came into the Wannsee, out towards Sacrow, and I ran upstairs to go out on the deck. To my surprise, I found myself completely alone. The freezing air chilled my skin, but the sun warmed it. I stood absolutely alone on the deck of a ship, in the middle of the vast expanse of water that is Wannsee, and looked up to the blue sky where flocks of birds were passing over. The woods to either side were bright in the setting sun. Suddenly I didn't mind being 45. Suddenly I didn't care about my age at all. I didn't want to be anywhere but exactly where I was.

And really, I still don't.

Sacrow Church

...and wine with the Polish Ambassador

Winter's coming..oh no, it's here already...

It has been hard to write over the past few weeks. Most people will have noticed a general shift in the world as of 8 November, and the elections in America have led to strange times here in Berlin too. The beginning of winter has something to do with it (I haven't yet worked out whether Berliners actually do undergo a personality change when the temperature drops beneath about 5 degrees Celsius, or whether they just take a bloody-minded delight in the fact that they have an EXCUSE to be miserable) but the news from the US was met with a different kind of paralysis, as people found themselves unable to find a way of thinking about what is happening, or might happen, or has happened. Obama visited a couple of weeks back (memorable chiefly for the entire city centre being shut off, helicopters over our house day and night, and a strange picture of the President drinking coffee from a polystyrene cup on his own at the Brandenburger Tor). The visit was the occasion of melancholy. The Berliners, thanks to their history, set great store by American Presidents ("Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" "Ich bin ein Berliner", etc). But the absurdity of the new incumbent defeats even Berliner rationalism. Instead, they were having to say goodbye to someone who, despite drone attacks and the general military "business as usual" of the US, still seemed to stand for a kind of uncertainty, even relativism that characterises our democracies. And in view of the absolutism that Trump supporters seek – the deathly certainty that characterises all kinds of extremism – I find myself almost longing for a return to the uncertainty and moral struggles that most politicians bring to their role. It brings a new edge to the Chinese saying, "May you live in unexciting times". Boring! That's what we want things to be, or at least when the alternative is violence, hatred and racism. 

So while on the one hand, I have been preoccupied by this whole question of what a nation is and the even more vexed question of identity (a word that I think is pretty much empty of meaning), I have also continued in my pursuit of those boring things that make life worthwhile. Such as, at the moment: twinkly Christmas markets, a sunset boat trip with octogenarians, visiting the Authorities in Zehlendorf, eating marzipan and drinking coffee, and, on a slightly less ordinary note, drinking wine with the Polish Ambassador. Which, now I come to think of it, is not entirely irrelevant to the political situation.

Waiting for ambassadors

Three weeks ago – the day after the US election results, in fact – I sang in a concert given for Polish Independence Day, the anniversary of Poland's founding as an independent nation after the First World War. Why? Well, I wasn't really sure. I had been drafted in as an extra to sing in the neuer chor berlin (ncb, New Choir of Berlin), and I was so grateful to be singing at all, that I hadn't asked why we were singing a mass in language none of us understood for reasons nobody mentioned. In the slightly hazy state that I have been in since arriving here in August, I assumed it was just an ordinary concert and we just happened to be singing a Polish mass by a modern composer. But I began to wonder at the last-but-one rehearsal, when we were joined at the church by a very young orchestra of Polish men and women, conducted by a famous Polish conductor, in the presence of a suave, fluent, grey-haired gentleman whose function appeared to be (a) to tell us how nice we were to invite them over, and (b) to tell us when to sit down, when to stand up, when to clap, how to sit and generally, how not to disgrace ourselves in an ambassadorial context. His immense politeness, air of distinction and excellent German awed us, and we instantly obeyed.  But I still didn't know why we were there at all.

We were in a different world, somewhere between German, English, Latin and Polish. We had spent hours practising the pronunciation of the Polish parts of the mass, and despite the practising, still didn't know what all of the words meant. In fact I hardly knew what any of them meant. But once the orchestra tuned up, started to play, and our words fell into place with the music, I also, to my surprise, fell in love with these words that I didn't understand. I didn't care why we were there. It didn't seem to matter. The deep smoky voice of the alto who was singing the Psalm convinced me I did understand it, somehow; or that at least I could be enchanted by it without understanding it. 

In a world of Donald Trumps and Nigel Farages, it's easy to forget that what is foreign and strange can be completely enchanting. Maybe strangeness is even a condition of enchantment. I can still visit Poland, but I can't visit the Middle East any more; I can't visit Iraq and Syria, that I fell in love with via Agatha Christie novels. (Agatha Christie travelled to them by train, almost as easily as getting the Eurostar to Paris, worked there for years with her archaeologist husband, became enchanted by the East.) Our opportunity to be enchanted by what we know nothing about is being gradually closed down, it seems, and if we aren't enchanted, how will we learn to understand?

My enchantment with the strange Polish words and the history they referred to may have been the reason why the day of the concert itself turned out to be a kind of magical adventure. Even Berlin looked different. On the day, I emerged, still sleepy, from the U Bahn at Theodor-Heuss-Platz and found myself at the edge of an enormous unfamiliar roundabout in bright winter sunlight. Cars and lorries rushed around the central island, while people placidly did their Saturday shopping on the streets around it. The buildings, the roundabout, the blue sky all looked huge. It was an entirely different part of Berlin – Masurenallee, the end of Kantstrasse, a long, long boulevard that starts, or finishes, with the high-end shops and leisurely, wealthy shoppers around Bahnhof Zoo, passes through Berlin's Chinatown and on past the peeling paint of the student cafes, the Kant Kino and increasingly seedy shops that line the road near Wilmersdorfer Strasse, right out to the place where Berlin starts to meet the outside world – to the city ring road that passes Tegel Airport, to the massive, white granite Trade Fair Centre Berlin, the Radio Tower, and my destination, the Haus des Rundfunks – Berlin's first, and grandest, radio studio. 

outside

inside

The Haus des Rundfunks has acquired satellites and extensions since it was completed in 1931, of course, and huge modern buildings surround it. But the Haus itself is the flamboyant frontispiece, standing with its pure proportions and Art Deco splendour right on the edge of the Allee, its length glittering down the long curve of the street into the distance. The inside is even more impressive. Once in the foyer, you look up past gallery upon gallery up to the ceiling where skylights let in a yellow Art Deco kind of light and a bronze sculpture twists and points up to an ambitious future. The Polish conductor was on his mobile in the middle of the foyer. I hurried down mirror-lined hallways to the basement room where we were assembling. Then we followed our grey-haired Polish manager up to the concert room, where a young boy was assembling flags: the Polish flag, the German flag and the EU flag. He was having some trouble getting them the right way around.

The soloists, some cheery, some sober and glamourous, took their places for the dress rehearsal. One of the sections was done like a pop song, with bongos in the background, and an incredible key change towards the end. The bass, who had left the stage after his solo, began to dance behind the conductor's back, like John Travolta, and we all had to stifle giggles. All too soon, though, the rehearsal was at an end. We returned to the room below, hanging about, practising our breathing, eating satsumas and drinking tea, while watching the Polish orchestra polish off a huge meal of dumplings and chicken. Then, finally, as we were all starting to fall asleep, it was six o'clock. Time to go upstairs. "Remember," our manager admonished, "Stay in exactly the same lines as you did before. Stand up when the conductor comes in. Sit down when the conductor gives the sign. There will be a Polish reading. Do not stand up before it is over. Watch the conductor..." The usual first-night nerves spread through us all, as we stood in the corridor, waiting for our cue to go in.

Although it was gone six, people were still mingling in the foyer, arriving in state to be greeted officially by the Polish Ambassador. Men in stiff white collars and elegant suits, accompanied by their wives (not, apparently, the other way around) queued outside the concert hall, awaiting their turn. Then, some of the wives decided they were going to go to the toilet one final time. We watched spellbound. Diplomatic restraint was one thing. This was a whole other kind of communication. This was a bold, brash statement of importance, a signal that these women were to be noticed. A woman in blue kitten heels, a blue, tight-fitting little dress and a tiny blue hat swayed past, casting her eyes up coquettishly at the men as she did so. Another woman in gold thigh-high boots with four-inch heels, a skin-tight beige dress that reached to just under her knickers and an enormous gold and white hat above a gold-powdered face, stood eyeing us from beyond her husband's shoulder. A very small woman with feathers in her hat, high heels, bright gold hair and quantities of blue eyeshadow marched efficiently past to the loos. But now it was nearly half-past six and we could not concentrate on these wonders. We were nearly half an hour late, and like all musicians, we just wanted to start singing.

Finally the nod came. We filed in, in silence and sat down to applause. Then the orchestra, the conductor and the soloists, along with a middle-aged lady in a green dress. We stood, sat, stood, sat again, waited, keyed up, on edge. But instead of the conductor, another man walked up to the podium. The Polish Ambassador was going to give a speech. My stomach knotted. I was nervous already. What if I fell asleep? What if I had a panic attack? The speech seemed to go on for ever, in Polish, then in German. Most of it, I couldn't understand, due to the acoustics of the hall. But some parts of it did stand out. He was talking about nationalism. What made the Polish nation great. Unity, independence, bravery, solidarnosc. So far, so good. But then...family, religion, identity...and I began to feel worried.

Why celebrate nationhood? Can it be done at all? In recent years, the Polish National Day that we were about to celebrate has been marked by right-wing violence, homophobia, hatred of foreigners. The word "nation" or even the concept of it seems to act like a kind of catalyst for anger and hatred, not just in the past (the comfortably distant 1930s, for example), but right now, in 2016. Ironically, in the hall we were standing in, the 1930s were not so distant. The Haus des Rundfunks was taken over by the Nazis after 1933 - radio was a key part of their propaganda. Its beautiful Weimar Republic lines and internationalism of design were distorted by the most extreme form of nationalism. Yet in Poland, nationalism is something usually seen as opposite to this - as having survived after the country itself was nearly crushed so many times by invaders. Does this make their nationalism better?

I thought about my part-German family with their dislike of Polish immigrants. The place we come from – the place my grandfather came from – is now Poland. And the conductor, the members of the orchestra, the composer, all bore more than a passing resemblance to members of my family. I recognised myself in them, at least physically, and suddenly the language did not seem as foreign. What if, I speculated, we are not only part-German, but actually part-Polish? What would that say about my family? What would that say about what it means to be British? And anyway, where is the music? What have these words about Nationhood got to do with it?

But the music, of course, was the key. Like all good music, it's a contradiction and an answer at the same time. The words are partly a celebration of Poland. The last chorus commemorates the first Christian baptism of a Polish king 1050 years ago, in 966 AD, and refers to the King who is crowned by divine right. God Himself places the crown on his head. The drama of the music tells of the amazement of this act. But the music also tells a different story. The words may be taken from a Polish national poet who died in the sixteenth century, but the music is of now, the 21st century, and the mixture of styles, of jazz and pop, Romantic and Baroque, its disconcerting way with tonality, the gentleness of the Kyrie placed against the triumphalism of the finale, is a reminder that life is very much more complicated, mixed up and exciting, than any nationalism has room for. The psalm that lies at the heart of the Mass (Psalm 104) reads in English, "How manifold are your works, O Lord. The earth is full of your creatures; if you take away their breath, they perish and return to their dust."

The Earth and its creatures. Dealing with them requires something other than nationalism. It requires humility and enchantment. Two things that are in short supply right now. But the beauty of the music went some way to provide them, just a little. And perhaps the excitement and pleasure of the people drinking wine at the post-concert reception - an international, chaotic, buzzing crowd of diplomats, their wives, their wives' hats, musicians, children and guests - just goes to show that nationalism is only the tiniest part of any story. We hope.

http://www.clicmusique.com/gabriel-kaczmarek-msza-1050-tarasiuk-andrzejewska-raczkiewicz-bieganski-chau-p-97370.html

Stairwell, Haus des Rundfunks