Back to Stuttgart

When I enter the train station of Stuttgart, another flood of memories courses through my mind. I was last here in 1994. My former home-stay brother, Okofo, came to pick me up and take me to his mother’s apartment in Stuttgart-Neugereut. This is the first place in which I lived in Germany in 1990. It was the summer after the Berlin Wall had fallen. I was seventeen years old and my classmate, Jason, and I were on a one month program supported by the American Association of Teachers of German. We each had a home-stay family and we went to the local school with our home-stay siblings.

For me, it was an exciting time. My home-stay mother hailed from Leipzig and she had married a man from Ghana who no longer lived with her. She had a daughter who lived and worked in Berlin. I never met her, but Okofo took me everywhere to his favorite haunts and to meet his friends. We visited Tuebingen, Heidelberg and Muenchen together.

I had three years of German by that point, but I could not really communicate too much with them. Yet I had so much to take in that summer. Stuttgart is not Berlin as my adviser’s wife, Natascha, will tell you, but it was still impressive for me. I was struck by Stuttgart’s urban development, huge residential living projects built around the schools, parks and mass transit system. Coming back, Stuttgart has a 1970s retro feel to it, but it still impresses me for its level of urban planning, modern designs and development. Stuttgart is known for the headquarters of automobile manufacturers like Mercedes and Porsche and postmodern buildings that showcase their cars and the feeling of speed. However, I am also struck by the “green” level to Stuttgart’s development. Both hotels in which I have been staying, for example, have green roofs. Plus Stuttgart is in the lower western corner of Germany and even has a transnational feeling linked to neighboring France.

I plan on telling you all more about the conference I am attending here on “Dealing with Fear”, but for now a few more memories. Germany won the World Cup of soccer that summer. It was the first unified team for Germany and was a moment of symbolic and collective importance for a country that would rapidly face the challenges of re-unification. It was, for instance, the summer in which the Federal Republic of Germany instituted the currency reforms, which would have an immediate impact on East German pensions and jobs long connected with the Soviet Block’s economic system. Pensioners did not fair too badly with the currency exchange. Massive unemployment in the East, however, was the other effect. The criticisms from West Germans about the money their state had to give out to help bolster the eastern half had not grown that loud yet.

But as a seventeen year old, none of this was in view. My host mother was so excited because she could see her relatives from East Germany, some of whom she had not seen in forty years. My German was bad enough, but I could not understand a lick of their Saxon accents. As I mention in my biographical notes, these events would motivate me to continue my study of German back home in high school and beyond.

When I came back to visit my host mother in 1994, I was in my third year at university and in Germany for the summer semester at Freiburg in Breisgau. My German was much better by then. My spoken German was still a mess, but good enough to talk at greater length with my guest mother, Barbara Addai. She told me some of her story. She was a young girl during the Second World War and remembered how the Russians entered Leipzig. Her brother had a job at one of the local factories and was told that the Russians wanted him. He took off on his bike and I am not sure if Barbara ever saw him again. She broke down in tears as she began to recount those first days and months when the Russians occupied East Germany and she told me that she too eventually fled to West Germany where she became a kindergarten teacher in Stuttgart.

I last saw Barbara in the fall of 2002. I was then living in Berlin and attending the Humboldt University. She was in town to visit her daughter and she met me at the café in the university’s main building. She was tickled to learn that I had continued my studies in German and German history and we had a nice hour together talking about her family. Okofo, she told me, was involved in radio broadcasting around Stuttgart and I told her that he had the deep resonating voice that listeners would love. She also told me that she was dying of cancer. I gave her a big hug and told her I would try to see her again. We wrote each other one more time. She told me she had moved into a hospice care facility for cancer patients and gave me the address. I wrote one more time, but never heard back. I am still looking for Okofo.