An der Spur Einsteins

It was a particularly warm Saturday in February (10°C = 50°F) so we decided to make a day trip within Baden-Württenberg. Baden-Württenberg is the state where we live and Deutsche Bahn, the national railway, encourages such trips by offering the Baden-Württenberg ticket: for 29€ ($40) five people can travel to any city in B-W and use that city's local transportation (S-Bahn, U-Bahn, and busses) for one entire day. Even though there were only two of us, it was still a deal, and we decided to visit Ulm.

Why Ulm? For one thing, it has the second-largest Münster (cathedral) in Germany (after Köln) and, for another, it's the birthplace of Einstein. Physicist-son Andrew is on a mission to collect relevant photos of European physicists this year, so we decided to contribute.

Of course, with any great deal, there's a hitch: the B-W ticket limits you to Nahverkehr (regional trains with frequent stops) rather than the high-speed, luxury ICs or ICEs. So we adopted the strategy of commuters everywhere (stuck paperbacks in our backpacks) and arrived in Ulm, some 122 km (76 mi.) away, a scant 90 mins. after stepping through our apartment door.

To American eyes the German rail system, both long-distance and local, is ein Wunder. Germans expect (and get) frequent, punctual-to-the-minute service. I remember standing on the Bahnsteig (platform) during rush hour when it was announced that the S-Bahn would be five minutes late. Even though they're fifteen minutes apart during rush hour, the crowd responded with a huge groan of disappointment. I can easily imagine a similar announcement made at Lincoln's train station about Amtrak's Zephyr would result in cheers of approval!

Just a few steps from the Bahnhof  (Bahnhofstraße 20, actually) is this memorial to the house in which Einstein was born. It gives his birthdate, Mar. 14, 1879, on which he zur Welt kam (came to the world). This phrase, evidently, isn't poetic as I've heard my colleagues use it to describe their children's birth.

Naturally we had to discuss the setup of the picture before taking it and, to our surprise, another group of Einstein devotees, parents and young-adult son, offered, in fluent English to take a picture of the two of us. We hear so little English spoken here that we were a bit taken aback. We quickly learned that the father was an engineering professor on sabbatical from Chile at Universität Karlsruhe, also in B-W. His Ph.D. is from UC Berkeley and they have an older son pursuing his Ph.D. in geology at UC Santa Barbara (to which Andrew was recently accepted). We mentioned we were interested in visiting Karlsruhe and expressed gratitude for their invitation to visit them when we did.

Here are some other spots where we "found Einstein."

India's tribute

Community College

Breakfast till 11 pm!

Of course, the Gothic Münster is the architectural star. Begun in 1377 and completed in 1890, it defied the odds (80% of Ulm's Altstadt, the old city surrounded by a medieval wall, was destroyed in WWII) and remained intact.

Because it has the world's highest church tower, it's visible all over the city. We had only one day in Ulm and passed up the 4€ "invitation" to ascend its 768 steps but would like to return to do so. Even though it was warm outside, the Münster was so cold inside we could see our breath!

Here are a few other Sehenswürdigkeiten (tourist attractions).

 Ornate Rathaus with astronomical clock

Ulm's own "Leaning Tower of Pisa"

Medieval wall on the Danube

Late in the day the afternoon light cast the church in a warm glow.

While Ulm isn't in every tourist book, it's a lovely city, rich with history. If you have a chance, visit it. Es lohnt sich.

Kaffeestunde with a Schnaps chaser

We bought some homemade Birnenschnaps (pear schnapps) at a Kirchengemeinde Herbstfest (church community fall festival) a month ago. It has a very gentle soothing effect when I've had just about as much Deutsch as I can process. Our skills are improving, but a little knowledge (and reasonably good diction skills) can be a dangerous thing.  When I get in over my head in German conversation, I smile and nod a lot.

After church a couple Sundays ago we went to the Kaffeestunde (coffee hour) and I sat down with an older fellow—balding with an enormous mustache—and put together my little German sentence, "Wir sind Amerikaner und wir freuen uns über jede Möglichkeit unser Deutsch zu verbessern..." He welcomed me charmingly and expressed his delight at meeting an American who tries to speak German and next thing I knew he was telling me (in rapid fire German) about the FBI in Pocatello, Idaho, his experience working with the KGB (could he really have said this??!!??) in St. Petersburg and something about his field being Psychology, so he could tell I was really intelligent. Before long he had launched into some deal about a young woman who was attracted to Goethe (or maybe it was Schiller), but she was afraid of his powerful intellect. (All his subject matter was delivered with an abundance of "jazz hands," as though that might improve my understanding.) Then, thinking that Scripture might provide us with some common ground, he proceeded to express his opinion regarding the false translation (from the Greek into German) of Christ giving St. Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven and the word nicht (not) when it should really be nie (never). Taking my nod as a sign of approval, he shifted into high gear, and launched into a thorough clarification of the death of Rasputin—which, by coincidence, I had just read about online a day or two beforehand—so I was not completely lost, but I couldn't recall any of the vocabulary that had to do with weaponry. I suggested that after the poison, stabbing and gunshot wounds, Rasputin had been thrown into the river and had died of hypothermia (what do I know...this was just what the online story said), but my Gesprächspartner said, no, "Er war getrunken," so we talked about the false friend anti-cognate problem—getrunken doesn't mean "drunk," it means "drowned." Then he quickly returned to the subject of Russians who had been assassinated, and he told me all about Trotsky in Mexico. I think.

In retrospect, I was able to process some of this very one-sided conversation.  I might have fared a little better if my eyes could've confirmed what I thought I was hearing—unfortunately, this gentleman wears his walrus-mustache like some kind of lip camouflage. He gave me his Visitenkarte (business card) and asked for mine—people are always doing this.

I'm sure there's a printshop near the Marktplatz. On the way home I'll buy another bottle of Schnaps.

Apfelmännchen

Andrew sent me a link to Benoit Mandelbrot's obituary in the NY Times. Mandelbrot connected art to mathematics in a way no one had done before by discovering fractals, self-similar pictures that "look the same" when blown-up to a larger scale. This is just one of many examples of recursion, an idea that both mathematicians and computer scientists share and communally love. (Here's a written summary of the term and a visual one.) His most famous fractal, the Mandelbrot Set, attained immortality through its presence on thousands of T-shirts.

That same day I discovered that my office-mate had posted an obituary from a leading German newspaper. While it expressed the same warmth toward this iconoclastic genius as did the NY Times article, there were distinct cultural differences. One was simply the name for his most famous creation. The Germans call it Apfelmännchen or Little-Apple-Man.

This was not the first time I had been charmed by picturesque language used by Germans. In 2001 we visited Berlin and saw the remains of a bombed-out church, the Gedächtniskirche (Remembrance Church),which still stands as a reminder of the horrors of war. Berliners call it "the hollow tooth."

Apfelmännchen. Little-Apple-Man. Schön.

Der Zug

Son, Andrew, also has a blog about his Fulbright year in Austria. Since Andrew is an experienced blogger and his Dad a newbie, I thought I'd seek a cross-generational critique. It was quick in coming and succinct: "Dad, your blog sucks!" A request for further explication yielded a suggestion to publish more frequently so here, Gentle Reader, is an attempt to reduce the SQ (Suckiness Quotient).

Before we left the USA, I had bought Zug (train) tickets from Deutsche Bahn, the excellent German national railway, online. They had a special online Sparpreis (discounted price—marketing, of course) of 29€ (the euro was then about $1.19, its lowest point in the last year) per person from the Frankfurt Airport to the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof (main train station). This seemed like a deal for this 75-minute, 120-mile train trip, so I quickly paid with my U.S. Visa card and printed out the online boarding pass.

We had a lot of luggage and I imagined that, in the worst case, the customs authorities might want to open some of it to check for contraband articles so I allotted four hours between our projected flight arrival and our train departure. The flight arrived a bit early and we breezed through customs (nothing was opened) so we had plenty of time on the train platform to plan how to get all of our bags onto the train during its brief stop.

Public transportation in Germany is a marvel to behold. In general, trains arrive on time (to the minute!)  and depart on time. I timed a few trains prior to ours and discovered we had about three minutes to get our eight bags (and ourselves) on the train. We had opted for reservations (an additional 5 €—without one, seats are first-come first-served) and, hence, knew our seat and car numbers. With typical excellent planning, Deutsche Bahn provided this graphic display on the platform (right-click to open in a new tab full-sized and then left-click to enlarge). Each line shows a train which stops at the airport and the arrangement of cars, complete with car numbers. The letters A–G on the graphic correspond to marked positions on the platform so I carefully moved all eight bags to the precise spot where our car would stop, confident that I could get them all onboard in the allotted three minutes and that we could then find our seats.

The overhead display showed the number of minutes before our train would arrive and even provided another graphic which confirmed the order of first- and second-class cars. Two minutes before arrival an announcement came over the loudspeaker. It seemed to us that this wasn't the deutlich (articulate) German we had heard at the Frankfurt Airport but rather an actual slice of the local dialect, Schwäbisch, of which we understood little. I ran down to the overhead display and it appeared that the order of first- and second-class cars had reversed! Sure enough, our car, which was supposed to be near the beginning of the train, was now near the end but I didn't know exactly where it was nor did I have enough time to schlepp all eight bags. So, we just got on the nearest car (which turned out to be first-class) and, in several trips, carried our bags through the long train until we reached the second-class section of the train. We never did reach the car with our reservations and simply asked the conductor (who by that time was checking tickets) if we could exhaustedly plop down into the first two empty second-class seats that we found, which we hoped were not reserved. He checked his list of reserved seats and gave us his Genehmigung (permission), which we gratefully accepted. We arrived at the Bahnhof, took a taxi to the Pädagogische Hochschule, got the key to our apartment, and settled in. All in all, a minor setback in a long but ultimately successful day of travel.

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Verkehrsmittel

Living without a car is both crippling and liberating. We do a lot of walking and are delighted to live so close to the bus lines and the S-Bahn (light rail)—which is literally 3 minutes away from our door. Taking public transit does require some advance planning, which is not my strong suit. We were very pleased not only to find bicycles in the cellar of our apartment, but also to find a bike repair shop nearby.

It was interesting to arrange to have them tuned-up, since we know almost none of the necessary vocabulary to discuss what might need to be done. But the folks at the neighborhood bike shop have been very friendly and patient with us. When the work was completed we had the seat-heights adjusted; it was amusing (?) to be assisted by a 10-year-old boy (the owner's son?) who was trying to get me to push my bike pedal all the way to the bottom of the stroke and balance with my heel on the pedal so they could see the angle of the bend of my knee...well, of course, I don't know the word for 'heel' or 'pedal' or 'stroke' and he kept yelling a little louder, thinking maybe that might help my comprehension. Eventually, they let me leave, although I'm sure they think my seat should be higher.

I got my courage up and agreed to bike to church this morning. We visited Zur Heiligsten Dreieinigkeit (Holy Three-Oneness) on the Marktplatz in the center of town. (A wonderful organ and organist—their fine cantor sang the psalm and the Hallelujah verse). Ludwigsburg is criss-crossed with bike paths, clearly marked, and we have a bike-route map, but still made some poor choices as far as hills are concerned. I ended up walking the bike uphill to church for the last 3 blocks or so.

Bicyclists share paths with pedestrians and it's just polite to let walkers (moms and dads with kids and dogs) know you're coming. Thanks, Bill, for installing the Klingel on my Fahrrad!

Anfang

I am on sabbatical with wife Hannah Jo at the Pädagogische Hochschule Ludwigsburg, Germany, for the academic year 2010–2011. This is our second sabbatical in Germany as we visited PHL in 2001–2002 as well with our two boys, then 10 and 13, who are now college students and on their own.

The trip and preparations deserve an entry of their own. Suffice it to say that there were a few "bumps" but we made it. Here's a picture of Hannah Jo with a year's worth of luggage in the Frankfurt Airport. HJ's is marked with a "T" and Bill's with an "X".

We're staying in the PHL's Guest Apartment until March, when another guest arrives. It's a lovely 3-bedroom Wohnung in a 3-apartment building in a wooded, secluded area on the northernmost tip of the campus, adjacent to Favorite Park, Ludwigsburg's largest park, the middle of the trio below.

We still have many things to do before we've fully moved in and hope that you'll become a "Follower" of our deutsches Abenteuer by clicking on the "Follow" button at the top right.