Rue Rude

Killer cucumbers?

Have you been following the e. coli outbreak in Germany? I have, because two of my family members are traveling to Germany-- one is there now, and one is going to Berlin next week. They have both promised me they will eat lots of salad while they are there, but I trust this is just to annoy me.

Today at the farmers' market I asked Gérard, one of the sellers, if people had been avoiding cucumbers. "No, not really," he said, "but I carry only French cucumbers. I did have one man ask specifically for Spanish cucumbers, though!"

"Ça m'étonne!" I said. [That surprises me!]

"Yes, he said it was for his mother-in-law."

Ancestral ruins

    Their ancestral ruins

I went to a beautiful wedding over the weekend, very Catholic, with no fewer than three priests from the families of the bride and groom. It was also one of the friendliest weddings I've been to, and one of the happiest.

In France and Germany, religious Catholics are often very aristocratic or even noble -- which I have learned here is not quite the same thing, at least not to the nobles. This was a noble wedding, but not a snobbish one. I met a bunch of counts and countesses (they seem to be a dime a dozen in France!) and even a couple of princes, although they would never introduce themselves like that-- I just saw the names on the place cards.

Still I was surprised that the priest who gave the final homily began by saying, "All of us here, as children, have climbed around on our ancestral ruins...." We Americans looked around at each other, smiling.

   Our ancestral ruins

Weekend in Munich

This weekend I was in Munich at a friend's party. We stopped by the Oktoberfest for about an hour. The weather was sublime--that's why the Oktoberfest was long ago changed to September-- and the Tracht-wearers were out in force. It's the tradition to wear dirndls or lederhosen (Tracht) to go to the Wies'n [the Meadow where the Oktoberfest is held]. Not just echt Bavarians wear it; blacks and Turks and Asians wear Tracht too. The rule is, if you feel at home in Bavaria, you should wear Tracht.

I have to admit that I have two dirndls, and at the Oktoberfest, I always think I should get a third one.

"Are you ever afraid driving late at night when the Oktoberfest gets out?" I asked a woman taxi driver.

"Oh, no," she said. "Sometimes I have passengers who are ganz besoffen, but they always pay correctly. Once a man did not have enough money, but he paid me the next day. And in Munich, if a taxi driver is robbed, it's always front-page news."

"I meant about drunk driving," I said. "Do you worry about an accident?"

"Some people do drive drunk, but I'm not afraid. You know, starting at ten o'clock-- the Wies'n gets out at eleven-- the police put a blockade across the autobahn. They systematically stop every car for an Alkohol-Kontrolle."

Peter Pan vs Guy Savoy

In America, you are supposed to be young. Men in their late fifties still think of themselves as boys, and feel it is oppressive to dress up. Women start to feel old at age 20 and no one with money has a wobbly chin. Young men don't flirt with older women in the U.S.-- they scarcely acknowledge them. My mother told me she feels "invisible." Old people rarely show up on television or in the movies, and when they do, they are often shown pleading for their smart, sassy kids' attention or respect.

In London, everyone is supposed to be young and cool.  The fashions and the places to go are for 20-year-olds, and fifty-year-olds at parties try to show that they are still as crazy and fun and loud-- and can drink as much-- as when they were at uni.

In Germany, the Alternativen are now establishment and still doesn't want to give up their self-image as youthful iconoclasts and revolutionaries. (Speaking of which, the French Communist party's Fête de l’Humanité was this weekend and 600,000 people were expected. Being a Communist is still pretty mainstream in France. They even have their own boy scouts.) What's funny is there really aren't all that many young people in Germany.

In France, things are different. Watching La cité de la peur for the first time (one of my kids' favorite movies), it didn't occur to me till near the end that the heroine is at least 45 years old and she's the one all the guys are after. You can be an older woman here and still feel very attractive to men. Look at Ségolène Royal! The men seem to enjoy being grownups, too.

I had a revelation about this. Could it be that the utter hell of French schools, lycées, prépas and universities, not to speak of the endless stages [internships] before people manage to get a job, or the soul-destroying trauma of getting a French driver's license, actually makes it easier for French kids to look forward to growing up and escaping into the privileges of adulthood?

*[Welcome to prépa. Your basin and your mattress are under your bench. You are allowed one minute a week to pee, and one hour at Christmas to celebrate with your family.]

Trümmerfrauen, the Rubble Women

A couple of days ago I had some deliverymen from Germany at my house here in Paris, nice guys who worked hard for hours and kept up a steady stream of jokes and good humor.

One of them stood looking at my bookshelves. "You like to read," he said.

"Ja," I said. "Do you?"

"Ja," he said. "I see you have a lot of books on World War II."

I was slightly embarrassed at all those books on Hitler, Nazis, the Holocaust, D-Day, etc.. "It's nothing new-- I've been interested in World War II since I was a little girl." I didn't say that I'd become obsessed with the war when I first lived in Germany, like so many people who move there.

"My mother was 17 years old at the end of the war," he said.  "She was a Trümmerfrau, spent ten years of her life cleaning up the rubble. She lost her two brothers in the war. One at Stalingrad. Kopfschuss. Shot in the head. One stepped on a German mine in the retreat from Russia. My father was in the Hitler Youth. He said everyone wanted to be in it, it was an honor and a lot of fun. They didn't know any better, they were children. They've spent the rest of their lives being sorry for it.

"I'm interested in World War II, too," he said, "but in Germany I couldn't have a bookshelf like this. Everyone would say I was a Nazi."

The Trümmerfrauen were a tragic generation. They were little girls, trained to be mothers only, as the Hitler Youth took all German children; they spent their adolescence at war. Half the young men died or came home wounded; after the war, Germany was rubble and the women had to rebuild the whole country from the ruins. When Germany started to be prosperous again, their youth was gone. And all along, of course, people outside Germany felt they got what they had richly deserved. They had been the enemy. They were the generation that had been the most convinced Nazis.

A Trümmerfrau, Helene Lohe, taught me German as my babysitter years ago when I first moved to Germany. I'll write about her some day.

Here are two statues to the Trümmerfrauen in Berlin, and a couple of photos of the real ones.

Morning walk and breakfast, Frankfurt

Anomalies of German life: buying a bus ticket in Frankfurt (where 20% of the population is foreign)

You can get a €40 fine if you haven't figured out how to buy a bus ticket by the time you have to get on. You won't have.

Snow flurries in Frankfurt

What weird weather. Tomorrow is the first day of spring, and it's snowing.

The French peasants, with their generation after generation attached to the soil, believed that snow in March was a good sign for rain later. I hope they're right this year. There is a drought.

Neige de mars, vaut un parc.  Snow in March is worth a park. [A large garden]

A mars poudreux, avril pluvieux. Powdery March, rainy April.

Autant de gelées en mars, autant de rosées en avril.  As many freezes in March as dews in April.

Northern Europe feels as if it is rushing toward the sun. I love the way it is going to get lighter and lighter and lighter in the evenings from now on. I'm not a morning person, and the long evenings give me more time outside. Here are some photos of a sunset walk by the river in Frankfurt last week. By summer, it will be like this till ten o'clock at night. It's one of the things I love about Europe.

Legend says that Frankfurt was founded when Charlemagne and his small army were being chased by a horde of  heathen Saxons. They came in haste to the river Main (pronounced Mine), which you see in these pictures, and stopped in dismay. Then suddenly a doe came bursting out of the woods and splashed across the river at the only ford. Since that day the place has been known as Frank-ford (Frankfurt). I love to think that there was a time when this was all covered by forests and so unknown that people didn't even know there was a river here. However, another more likely story, since the city cathedral area has been settled since the Stone Age,  and the Romans were here, is that the name means "Free ford" because you didn't have to pay to cross. Either way, Charlemagne liked Frankfurt and that was the origin of the city. It has been a free city since 1220.

There is still a big forest south of Frankfurt, owned by the city since the Middle Ages. Within it there are Stone Age graves, thousand-year-old oaks, and nightingales. I like this statue of a wild boar family at Unterschweinstiege (under-swine-crossing).

Anomalies of German life: medical toothpaste

This is what you find when you look for toothpaste in a German grocery store.

German children, or not

The news about the German birthrate, yesterday, is making big waves here in Germany (where I am stuck, but not for much longer!). Experts, academics and politicians are now demanding that childless people get smaller pensions than parents,  or pay more into the retirement system.

When I saw R last night, I asked him why he thought the German birthrate was declining.

"We are a very child-unfriendly society.  Children don't fit into people's plans." He pointed out that there is little support from the government for parents. I said that American parents got little support from the government, either. R said that the few German nursery schools were oversubscribed, "and it would never cross anyone's mind to start a new one."

"Americans don't have public nursery schools either," I said. "That can't be the reason. " (Although in France, almost all children start school at age 3, petite section maternelle.) R said that he thought the most important reason was that people felt their children would face a difficult future.

Germans talk about a difficult future. Yet when you look around you, Germans look prosperous. Houses are well-kept-up, everyone has a shiny car (or else),  people dress-- well, I can't say they dress well. You have rarely seen so many ugly shoes and coats. But they don't look poor.

"The majority still has it pretty good here. And that's why nothing changes."

R said his daughter did very well on her Abitur (the end-of-high-school exams, like the French baccalauréat). She got into one of the best medical schools in Germany. Medical school here begins right after high school, and the universities are all public and free, creating the endless-studies syndrome-- Germans all seem to have Ph.Ds.

R's daughter wants to become a pediatrician-- and then move to England or Spain. R himself is planning to move to Switzerland once his son has finished school.

We exchanged news of the As who have moved to Australia, and of B who has decided to go there for a year with her family-- but it's her second time to go there for the year, and her oldest son is in his third year there. "I think they won't come back," R said.

I thought of other Germans I know: the Hs, whose sons are growing up British; the Fs, who are raising theirs in Italian; the Ps in Portugal; the Ks in France; the Hs and the Ls sending their kids to London. In fact offhand I can't think of any German friends whose children plan to stay in Germany.

Then we went out to dinner. The restaurant was packed, perhaps 150 people, but there were only three waiters in the whole place. They were all from the former Yugoslavia.

The empty cradle

Caption: "He's an only child, isn't he?" "He is now!"
[Cartoon by Martin Perscheid]

I'm still in Germany, aaaargh! Taking care of business. R is coming over to deliver a gift at 18h. R is a guy who sits down with his family and four calendars, every New Year's Day, and plots out every holiday for the whole year. They must save a lot of money that way, but it doesn't seem quite human to me....or is that just my undisciplined French side speaking?

A report came out of Berlin today that has the German media in an uproar. Germany has the lowest birthrate in the world. (I translated this article on it.)

I'm not surprised, in spite of Germany's generous Kindergeld (child-money). Every family gets Kindergeld in Germany--154 euros a month per child, or 179 per child from four children onwards--until the child is 27 years old, if he or she is still in school or job training.

The biggest problems are the schools and people's attitudes. German schools get out at lunch, five days a week. And the attitude is very much that mothers should not work.

My four best German women friends are all doctors, who all went through many expensive years of excellent public schooling and public higher education. They all quit their jobs when their children were small, except one who moved to Australia (and still works). This is considered normal.

The real problem is not people like them, however (they each have three children). Having several children is practically a sign of wealth in Germany. The real problem is that working-class women are not having children. I am not sure why this is, but the whole culture is against them, from the school hours to the "kinderfeindlich" [child-unfriendly] restaurants and stores, from the German über-emphasis on long vacations in exotic places, to the popular political "Greens" who think the world is far too crowded already, to the very term "Rabenmutter" (raven-mother), which means a neglectful mother, and which you still hear quite a lot, usually "humorously" applied to working mothers.

The trouble is that a country that doesn't have children doesn't turn into a wonderful empty country full of forests and wolves, as many of the Greens seem to wish (it's not an accident that pre-Christian Germans used to worship trees...). Although as a matter of fact the wolves are coming back into East Germany's deserted forests now.

No, historically a population that declines just loses control of its own country to other people.

Time and its discontents

Germans are terrifyingly punctual. If someone is three minutes late, he will pour out apologies. Once a real estate agent just went home, deeply insulted, when we were five minutes late.

As you might expect, watches are important in Germany. Salespeople openly stare at your wrist to judge you by the watch you wear. I feel sure there are more watch magazines per capita than in any other country.

Watch mania affects many Americans who move to Germany, too. I know one who bought a very expensive, beautiful watch he had dreamed of for many years, as a Christmas present to himself when his ship came in. When he came into work after Christmas, a co-worker said, "I see you have a [expensive watch name here]."

Proudly, the American said, "Yes!" and held it out to be admired.

"I myself have a Lange," said the co-worker. Smugly.

Transatlantic

I bought a bunch of magazines for the plane. American Vogue had a feature article about Segolène Royal, the French présidentiable who is more popular with the French electorate than within her own party, the Socialists ("The presidential race is not a beauty contest," said one Socialist senator cattily). She is a remarkable, elegant woman of 52, a top French political figure, who has four children with another politico, also a présidentiable, François Hollande. They are not married. (I don't get that. Surely having children with someone is a lot bigger commitment than getting married.)

"I believe I can beat Sarkozy,"she told the interviewer. "He talks about making a clean break, but I am the clean break."
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I was sitting in the exit row next to a young man going to Tel Aviv, who asked the flight attendant if the sandwich had ham in it. I assumed he was Jewish, but he was an Israeli-Palestinian from a Christian family. It was odd to hear his lazy American vowels and know his native language was Arabic. He spoke Hebrew too.

He was a kind, slightly pudgy young man of 28 with a five o'clock shadow, who works long hours in a butcher shop in a Florida retirement community. "The old people like me because I'm very patient." We talked about his large family, his grandmother who tried living in Florida with her children, but missed the old country too much and went back to Tel Aviv. "It's such a nice place to live," he said longingly.
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At baggage claim at the Frankfurt Airport ("Fraport: the Airport Forum") , I was struck again, as I have been many times before, by the physical difference between the French and the Germans. The average German is just much taller. What a difference something like that must have made in wars in the old days.

The airport is so big that employees ride around on bicycles. It's the second-biggest airport in Europe, after London Heathrow, but a lot pleasanter.

The signs saying "Keep your airport clean" and "Takeaway here" are in English. All the people at the check-in desks and most of the businessmen flying in or out speak good English. In Germany, your English is an exact marker of your social status.

You could easily believe, at the airport, that the German language is gradually dying out.

Milchkaffee and a baby

I had breakfast at this pleasant museum cafe, surrounded by peaceful Germans reading the newspapers. I ordered a big slice of homemade orange cake with whipped cream and a Milchkaffee.

One man had brought a tiny baby in an infant seat and sat near me on the wall bench you see behind the coat rack. In Germany it is normal to share tables, without having to ask, and he needed space to put the baby seat. He jumped up though when I coughed a few times, smiled apologetically, and moved across the room. (I don't blame him.)

You often see men alone with babies, on weekdays, in Germany and Scandinavia. It's quite rare in France.

When I got up to get a second delicious cup of Milchkaffee, he was standing near the cash register holding the seat, and the clerk, who looked Iranian-German, was cooing at the baby.

The drive here yesterday was a bit scary for the first couple of hours. Right outside of Reims, there was a snowstorm and the road got so slippery that you could feel the tires slipping and then catching, skidding and then the ABS would kick in. All the traffic-- there was a lot of traffic-- slowed down to a crawl as we entered an almost-whiteout, with big chunks of hail-snow hurtling against the windshield, and suddenly thick ridges of icy snow appeared in the road. The tank truck right in front of me started sliding around on the road. I could see a car in a ditch on the other side of the road. It was surreal just at that moment to hear Radio France Info announce that the driving alert had been lifted for Champagne-Ardennes (where I was) and Lorraine.

It was the worst driving I'd experienced since a snowstorm many years ago in western Massachusetts, when I had to get off the interstate, driving almost blind, skidding terrifyingly, and find a motel in a blizzard. I certainly don't think most of the French drivers around me have as much experience as I do of that kind of weather. So  why were they going so fast the second they could see again? As I stayed in the truck lane, I could see them speeding by almost bumper-to-bumper on the shiny white road at 140 kph. I noticed the truckers and the foreigners from snowy countries-- for some reason there were a lot of Slovakians yesterday-- ignored them, and went slowly till the road was black again.

A Tale of Two Movies: German business vs U.S. business

D went to see a German movie called "Barfuss," which some friends of ours had told him they loved. He called me up in disgust afterwards. "It's just another one of those movies where the businessman is the villain," he said. "The movie ends with the hero deciding not to take a high-paying business job because it would be selling out." He described the plot to me and I said, "But how is he going to support the girl? She's mentally ill, she can't work?"

"No, instead they just live happily ever after on welfare, I suppose. The problem is that they can, in Germany," D said. "It's the trouble with this country! Their whole way of life is made possible by those evil businessmen, but they just don't get it!"

I had just watched a very different movie under duress. It was called "Mr Deeds" and is about a hick from New Hampshire who inherits his great-uncle's multi-billion-dollar company. All through the movie, the assumption is that the great-uncle was a pretty cool guy and ran a good company. Of course, the villains were ALSO evil businessmen (yawn) who were trying to destroy the good company. It wasn't just assumed that all businessmen were evil. I think that Americans identify with entrepreneurs much more than Europeans do.

In France I don't think I have ever seen a movie where the high-level businessmen weren't evil, either.

I heard on the radio that in the last three months of 2005, France created a total of 900 new jobs. Nationwide.

Driving from Germany to France

It was snowing this afternoon when I left Germany to drive back to Paris. The snow fell all last night and I opened the window to look out in the middle of the night. It was soft and peaceful and so quiet. I still have a sort of awed reverence for snow that probably comes from falling under the spell of the Narnia books at age 7 while living in southern Louisiana. The opening of the first one is a little girl who finds her way through a wardrobe into a snowy landscape in a magical country. Anyway, I have always loved snow and I was so happy to look out at it that it completely escaped me that I was going to have to drive six hours in it.

This morning as my car, which doesn't have snow tires because you never need them in Paris, skidded all over the white icy road, I almost thought better of it and was about to take the train. But the main roads were clear and I ended up with no trouble.

Driving from Germany to France, you pass through Lorraine, which still has long landscapes of open hills rolling to the horizon. It's one of the emptiest parts of France and the French air force sometimes practices its low-flying over it. Once I saw the Patrouille de France flying back and forth in formation (the French equivalent of the Blue Angels, or the British Red Arrows) north of the highway. The land is so empty that it's easy to let your imagination wander back in time and think of all the invasions that have marched in and out of France over those long rolling hills. The Gauls, the Romans, the Goths, the Burgundians, Attila the Hun, the Franks, Charlemagne! Attila burned down the cathedral at Metz on Easter, 451. I always think of that when I drive through Metz (which the French pronounce "Mess").

The road passes by Verdun, which is now Verdun, Ville de la Paix. Verdun, City of Peace. You come down a long, long hill and the city is at the bottom. Those few miles cost half a million lives and half a million wounded  in World War One. Several times I have stopped and taken tours around the battlefields, cemeteries, the Tranchée des Baionettes (where in 1916 a trench fell in over two standing platoons of soldiers, who were buried alive with their bayonets sticking out of the earth), and the underground village at the fort Douaumont, a French stronghold captured by the Germans in February, 1916. It's easy to see why it was such an important loss. Douaumont is the highest ground for many, many miles-- from here to Paris is almost flat. In front of Douaumont is one of many huge cemeteries in the area. It's very moving to see those rows and rows and rows of white crosses extending out of sight as far as you can see. If those young men had lived, so many of the best young men, I can't help thinking the last century would have been so much better and different. Maybe Hitler would never have come to power.

Then you go through the city of Rheims (Reims in French), where Clovis was crowned the first Christian king of France, and where all the kings of France were crowned afterwards. It's a lovely town with a famous laughing angel carved into its cathedral, whose spire you can see many miles across the plains. At the gas stations near Rheims, you can buy champagne along with your windshield wiper fluid or oil. I passed a salt-spraying truck that sent rattling streams of salt against my poor car. The French still use salt on their roads, although I believe the U.S. stopped decades ago for environmental reasons.

Then you go past Château-Thierry, where my grandfather was wounded so badly in July, 1918, he spent a year in the hospital. There is a big American cemetery there. There are so many American cemeteries all over France that the U.S. embassy here has a special official in charge of them. It's strange to see how close the battles were to Paris. One was so close that Paris taxis famously helped bring troops up to the front.

Disneyland is next; right after the last toll. This was one of the many concessions Disney got from the French government to persuade them to put the park in the Paris area rather than in Spain. Today as I drove by in the early darkness and the grim sky I wondered if Disney ever regrets that decision.

Then across the beautiful city, home to my apartment and a nice glass of red wine!

A rude word on the telephone

I am in Germany right now, a country I love and feel protective of-- so many people don't love it. It is freezing cold-- Germany is in the middle of a "klirrende Kaltwelle"[shivering cold wave] as I heard on the news yesterday. It's not colder than New York or Chicago are all winter long, but western Europeans usually have mild weather.

I learned something funny about my cell phone today. Calling from one cell phone to another in the wrong country can get expensive, so I decided to send a "Bonne année" [Happy New Year] message to my friend Caroline via SMS (French for a text message). I had the auto-complete on, and to my surprise, when I typed in "bonne" the first choice was "comme" [like] and  the second choice was "conne" [feminine of con-- ruder though]. Bonne came only third.

Makes me wonder what other surprises lurk in the auto-complete! And who decides on the order!

Pre-Christmas Saturday at the marché

I never feel like going to the marché on Saturday morning. (It's across from the fashion museum, left.) I'm very lazy and like to sleep in (la grasse matinée). But it always ends up being fun. Today I saw one of my nicest neighbors (in fur coat and Jaguar: I now know that is a sign that she doesn't quite belong; in fact she is Italian) and also a bunch of nice commerçants who have known me for years. But even the ones I don't know are fun. "Allez,allez mesdames, les plus belles dames viennent chez moi!" There is always a jolly ambience at the marché. I usually go toward the end of the morning, just because I am not very matinale, but that has the advantage that the commerçants want to get rid of their merchandise and not have to put it back in the truck. Today I got two kilos of delicious clementines for 2 euros and two big pineapples for one euro.

Another thing that I still find amazing after all these years: every single time I go to the marché I see some vegetable, fruit, fish or fowl I've never seen before. Today it was these black tomatoes, and a kind of tiny, twisty root vegetable called crosne.

When I got to my main vegetable man, he was alone. Usually he is with his wife. He had a somber expression, and when he came over to shake my hand, I said, "Vous allez bien?" and he shook his head.

"My wife is in the hospital with the flu," he said, "and I'm not feeling very well myself. I had to do all this alone, starting at two in the morning."

"What, load and unload the truck alone?" I said. It is also really cold out today, although with a beautiful pale blue sky. "Couldn't any of the children help?" They are a handsome older couple from the Maghreb [North Africa] with six successful French children. It's a hard life for older people, having a stand at the marché in all weathers, going to the Halles de Rungis out by Orly airport every morning at three or four o'clock to buy fruits and vegetables from the farmers, then loading them into the truck, driving to Paris, unloading them for the start of the marché, then loading all the unbought stuff back into the truck for the next day's marché in a different part of town.

"The children all have jobs now," he said wistfully. "Even my daughter who's a pharmacist, and could normally have helped, she's en garde this weekend." [At all times of day or night, 365 days a year, there must be an open pharmacy in each arrondissement of Paris. The pharmacies take turns to be en garde and every pharmacy is supposed to post a list of the garde pharmacies in its window when it is closed.]

After all that, it was a little embarrassing to have to ask for my vegetables. I probably bought a little more than I would have otherwise. After I paid and put my things away, I went to shake hands goodbye, but he was already waiting on the next customer.

The last thing I picked up was some flowers. There are several florists at the marché, and I don't usually go to the one who has the best flowers-- she's odieuse and always manages to say something nasty to each of her customers. Instead I go to the friendly people who sell these chemical-sprayed Christmas trees (they also sell nice normal ones). Today the owner would not let me take the first poinsettia I chose, and picked out a much nicer one for me from the truck; then she instructed one of her sons to accompany me back to the car because I had too much to carry. "Bon weekend!" he said as he waved me off. Even though it took me twenty minutes to find a parking spot near my house, I still came home in such a good mood.
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D was in Leipzig last night for the big World Cup draw. It was a big spectacle with hundreds of millions of people watching on television. I hadn't thought anything of D's being there, except that Leipzig has a famous Christmas market, until I turned on Radio France Info and that's all they reported on all evening.

"Do you know how many people would give their eyeteeth to have been there last night?" I said.

"Yeah," said D, who is not a big sports fan. "And I was bored!"

The hundred-year-old law

Today is the hundredth anniversary of a law that explains a lot of the strange things about France: the Loi de 1905 sur la Laïcité (law on the separation of church and state). The relations between France, the "eldest daughter of the Church," and the Catholic Church have been tense since before the Revolution. The Church was seen by many of the revolutionaries as another kind of tyrannical ancien régime. The Church in turn views the secularism of the government as attacking not only itself as an institution but also the cultural identity of the nation. The law was violently fought by the Church, but in the end it brought some peace to the subject and is considered a given in France today.

It says that all churches and other religious buildings belong to the government, which maintains them and lets religions use them for free as long as they are used for religious purposes. Of course, when the Law of 1905 was passed, there was not a single mosque in France. Now Islam, in spite of its non-European roots, is the second religion in the country. This law has now forced some French mayors to finance the construction of mosques.

Another quirk of the French church-and-state "separation" is that religious schools, and any private schools, are subsidized, as long as they agree to follow the standard French curriculum. This is called being "under contract," and it makes the schools quite cheap compared to the "out of contract" schools. About 13% of elementary schools are private, but 40% of lycées.

Every country in Europe deals with religion in its own way. In Germany, they ask you on your tax form what your religion is. When D first moved there, he thought it was an arbitrary question and none of the government's business. For a joke, he scribbled in "Hindu." To his dismay, he found out that he was now a fairly large contributor to the Hindu church of Germany! These church tax payments have another real-life result. If you don't pay, you often can't get married in a church, have your child christened, or have a Christian burial.  Most people are Christian enough in their major life ceremonies that they pay up-- the default choice. You have to sign a declaration to leave the church. In Bavaria, which is aggressively Christian, to the point of having crosses in every public school classroom (they are removed only if a parent formally objects), there is even a school holiday called Buss- und Bettag (Repent and Pray Day). It's in November. Until 1995 it was a national holiday.

It is strange to us Americans that in Europe, religion is something the government must somehow pay for. Yet that doesn't seem to keep it going. There is no more secular society on earth. An Italian friend once told me that after two world wars fought on European soil, most people could not believe in Providence any more.

...Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in....

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

        --From "Dover Beach" (1867) by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Saint Nicholas Day at the Christmas Market

Yesterday D and I met after work at the Christmas market. It was just getting dark and it was a happy scene. Gingerbread stands, merry-go-rounds (whirling at a dizzying pace, much faster than American ones, which makes me think ours are so slow for legal reasons: sad), places selling glass and wooden Christmas-tree ornaments and wooden Christmas-creche figures complete with the Bethlehem stables and moss, an art fair inside the city hall, stalls selling candy canes and sheepskin gloves and peculiar-looking colored-paper lanterns, toy stalls, candle stalls, pancake and waffle stalls. My favorite stand is the big one that sells not only Glühwein (hot mulled wine) but all kinds of other delicious hot drinks, from egg nog to blueberry and plum wine and even ("der Insider-Tip!") hot Caipirinhas! I had hot blackberry wine and D had hot cherry wine. His smelled like children's medicine to me, but mine was so delicious,  I am almost tempted to pass back by the Christmas market today on my way out of town back to Paris. When you pay for a glass of hot wine at the Christmas market stalls, they give you a nice ceramic cup with a design of this year's market on it, and a little token. You are paying a Pfand or deposit on the cup, and have to return the cup and the token to get your money back. That means you have to stand in line twice, once to pay and once to return the Pfand (you pay for a Pfand whenever you buy takeaway drinks in Germany, including soft drinks and mineral water). But the Christmas market is not about hurrying! There was live music playing, and I finally heard some Christmas carols-- also, oddly, some tunes from "Fiddler on the Roof."

There were a lot of wildly over-excited children, but for a change everyone smiled at them and petted them instead of schimpfing. I heard one old lady say to a child who wasn't hers: "Heute Abend kommt der Nikolaus, nicht wahr?" [Tonight Saint Nicholas is coming, isn't he?] The child's eyes glowed. It was Sankt-Nikolaus-Tag, when good children leave their shoes or stockings out and find gifts in them in the morning. Nikolaus usually comes with an angel and with der Schwarze Peter, a scary-looking chimneysweep character dressed all in black who punishes bad children by leaving them only pieces of coal.

I actually know a German my age who told me when he was little he got just some coal in his stocking one year. Reaction to that sort of thing probably explains why there are quite a few German children of this generation who have never heard the word "Nein."

D and I stopped at a Gänsebraten (roast goose) stall, but we each just had a sausage. I think the Germans make the best sausage in the world. Mine was a Thüringer.  You order the sausage, which is about a foot long, and they fold it into a Brötchen (a bread roll). You put mustard on it, and  voilà! It was delicious. We took our sausages to a stand-table next to the stall and I noticed a bunch of warmly dressed American children, some black, some white, who had been listening in on our conversation with the stall owner with big eyes-- I think because we were speaking German to the stall owner, but English to each other. There are very few black Americans in this part of the world, and  most of them here are from the military bases. I always feel an immediate kinship when I see my compatriots, but to them, with my white face,  I'm just another German till I open my mouth. I said, "Hi!"and the children said "H!"shyly back. Their mothers were in a conversation with another American business-expat they had come across at the stand-table. The Christmas market is an obligatory stop for all new expats and was full not only of Americans but of Chinese, Italians and eastern Europeans. The American mothers were just leaving with their children after having eaten. "Our husbands are all in Iraq,"one of them explained.

"God bless them,"said the other expat. "I hope you have a good Christmas and that they come home safely."

The children stopped playing. They collected around their mothers as if to protect them, and one of them stood up straight like a soldier and answered soberly, "Thank you, ma'am."