Tirana News for ex-Residents

For almost three years the directions we gave to our house started with "go down the Llana and turn left at the first bridge past the blood-feud house." Well, the house is gone, and nothing remains except the bare earth. I don't know how this came about, but the most repeated version is that the occupants have been moved to a secret location. This was the last remaining house on the river.

Albania is now part of the Schengen visa-free zone, and the morning after the vote in Europe these banners appeared all over town. There are a lot of things the government is not very speedy about, but flooding the city with banners is something they can do exceedingly well. This first picture has a little blue arrow at the bottom with the wording Pa Viza Ne Europe; little blue arrows with names of major European cities also appeared on all the downtown street signs: Helsinki, Copenhagen, Lisbon, etc. They hardly ever pointed in the right direction, and they're gone now. All joking aside, this is a huge improvement for Albanian citizens, who no longer have to wait in long lines to get a visa.

This is the big one on the Prime Minister's office.

Rant I

Each month of my little 2011 Daily Planner has a quotation; the one for January is this: “Procrastination is like a credit card: it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.”

I can’t help but to think of our President and Dear Ole Senate Majority Leader – no one told them the Bush tax cuts were going to expire the end of the month! No one told them repealing DADT might take more than a week! No one told them there would be a new Congress sworn in the first part of January! So they had to do the best they could under the circumstances.

Which, since the month isn’t over yet, things may turn out okay, but yet again I’m getting the sinking feeling that lack of planning and lack of will are going to ensure a less-than-stellar result. Sort of like getting assigned a semester paper in September, starting on it the middle of January, and telling your professor it was the best that you could do in a week, and expecting to get a decent grade.

Maybe this is what Will Rogers meant when he said he wasn’t a member of any organized party, he was a Democrat.

Berlin Inspired Musings

There has not been a foreign invasion of the continental United States since the Battle of New Orleans was fought January 8, 1815. At least if you don't count the Mexican-Texan ones, but Texas wasn't a part of the U.S. then. And for 220 years we have had one government. So going to Germany in general and Berlin in particular is quite a contrast. We've been pretty fortunate.

A person born in Berlin on January 6,1920 (my father's birthday) would have been born into a country which had just six months earlier signed the Versailles Peace Treaty formally ending World War I. This treaty, among other things, obliged Germany to pay reparations, give up territory on all sides, and ironically (since the treaty was signed exactly 5 years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria) forced to accept sole responsibility for causing the war.

The Germany of that era was very weak and disorganized, with communists battling Freikorps in several cities, strikes by labor and military, attempted coups by communists and Nazis, and unemployment high. By 1924 inflation was ridiculously high -- million mark notes used for wallpaper and all that. Even so, the Weimar Republic managed to last until January 1933 when Hitler was appointed the 13th and last Weimar Chancellor. Then 12 years of National Socialism, a misnomer if there ever was one. Then the post-war gradual descent into east and west. Only the last 20 years have seen a united, wall-less Germany, but the scars linger. Germany in the summer of 1945 was a mass of rubble, and over the last 65 years much has been rebuilt/restored. After 20 years of reunification there is still a significant difference between east and west Berlin, but the gap is narrowing.

A map of the Berlin wall in the old part of the city. We rented an apartment in old East Berlin, Planckstrasse, about equidistant from the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, and Museum Island, so walking was the locomotion of choice, even with the daytime temperature hovering around freezing. Max Planck was a theoretical physicist and was one of the few who recognized Einstein's theories as belonging in the important category, as opposed to the crackpot category.

Checkpoint Charlie from the old American Sector looking into the Russian Sector. This little guard shack is a reproduction; the original is in a local museum. The Wall was in front of the new buildings.

Looking from the Reichstag toward the Brandenburg Gate. The double row of bricks going straight down the street marks the location of the Wall. The Tiergarten is on the right, and the new American Embassy is next to the Gate, right by the Gate. Thanks to Fox News manufacturing/reporting/leaking a supposed terrorist threat, the Reichstag was closed and I didn't get to go inside. Top of the list for my next trip.

Bebelplatz from Unter den Linden. (All of you German speakers will be interested to know that according to the Michelin guide, the street was named for the lime trees which grew along it. Wonder how that made it by the editor. Or how the lime trees made it through the winter.)

Anyway, this was Opernplatz before the end of WWII, no doubt because the opera forms one side of the square. (Opera on the east, Humboldt University building on the west, St. Hedwig's Cathedral in the rear left corner behind the opera -- not in the picture). The main campus buildings of Humbolt University are across Unter den Linder from the square. Einstein taught there for 20 years before leaving Berlin for the U. S. in 1933. Bebelplatz is a fairly normal European square, but my interest in it was because it was the site of the book burning orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels, and held here in 1933. Some 20,000 books written by Jews, Communists, and others not liked by the Nazis were burned. Many of the books came from the library at Humbolt.

Fahrenheit 451

The memorial for the book burning -- empty shelves, supposedly enough to hold 20,000 volumes. "In the middle of this square on May 10, 1933, National Socialist students burned the works of hundreds of free-lance writers, journalists, philosphers, and scientists." Also at the memorial, the words of Heinrich Heine: "Where they burn books, they will also burn humans in the end."

Remember this before you go burn your Harry Potter book.

Ancient Jewelry

Museumsinsel, or Museum Island, in Berlin contains five museums: Bode, Pergamon, Neues, Altes, and Old National Gallery, as well as the Berlinerdom, or Cathedral. I was able to go to the Pergamon and Neues Museums. In the latter half of the 19th Century and continuing up to the start of WWII, German archeologists worked extensively in Persia, Asia Minor, and Egypt. The museums contains displays of their findings.

These three pictures of various jewelry show pieces that I think are incredibly "modern," as in they look very much, in color and design, if not the actual stones, like a piece of handmade jewelry one might see today.

6th Century BC in the Neues Museum.

Persian, 300-400 BC, Pergamon Museum.
Assyrian jewelry, about 3000 years old.

Berlin - Organ Pipes

Since I did the organ pipes from Munich last, I'll start out with organ pipes from Berlin. Below is Berlin Cathedral -- Lutheran, I believe. In the second you can see Nicholikirche across the Spree River.

Nicholaikirche. Pardon the Christmas decorations in the middle. This church was heavily damaged in WWII, and was restored by the East German government in the '80s along with the neighborhood, which is the oldest in Berlin. The original church on this site was built around 1290. It is not used as a church but a museum.

Now the pipes -- first Nicholaikirche and then the last one is the Cathedral.