Talking about the environment

At last check, there are over 14,000 individual blogs reaching 12 million readers today to talk about one topic: the environment. The aim of the project is to get us talking about a better future, but I hope this amounts to more than just a really big BUZZ.

Germany
Since I am using my blog to talk about my travels through central Germany and develop parts of my dissertation work on the history of fear, I might as well start with what I have seen here in Germany. I am interested in things like innovative architecture and organic whole foods markets.

Buy more local, consume more organic
Berlin has more and more "Bio" stores like the one in this picture. "Bio" products are also appearing more and more regularly in conventional grocery stores, so there is a growing market and distribution network in the making much like in the US. For those trying to stay local, there are lively farmers' markets in several parts of the city. I have also seen the growth of this local and whole foods trend in other parts of Germany, especially in the former East Germany in the agricultural region of Thuringia and its cities like Erfurt where I will be in a few weeks. The "Bio" mark on products represents the European Union's system of inspection and regulation for organic and whole food products. In this case, I think a supernational or national system helps. The label carries a strong sense of quality. Moreover, prices for many products are more and more comparable with non-"Bio" alternatives in other stores,. Still, it is a good idea to check out the ingredient labels; many of those "Bio" products have things that may not be right for you. Some of my friends and I try to buy less things, eat more local, more organic, more whole foods and waste almost nothing. I am learning not to necessarily buy the whole foods shipped in extra special from half way around the globe. Berlin also has a municipal composting service, but many people still do not use it or use it properly from experience. Even Germans have some way to go when it comes to food consumption and waste.

Buying fish

Since I am talking about food, I will post a link to the Blue Ocean Institute's "Guide to Ocean Friendly Seafood". We like to eat fish. This guide provides useful information on different types of fish, typical harvest and farming methods, and species health for the purposes of conservation and sustainability. Check it out if you are interested.

Rethinking our buildings

In my limited travels, I think the three most interesting cities in terms of alternative design, green architecture and urban planning have to be Portland, Oregon, New York City and Berlin. Tell us more about other places that are out there! Wind energy is a major state initiative in Germany and outside of Erfurt, for example, I can count four large wind farms on each direction of the compass with between 15-25 mills. Much of the central German landscape, regions like Saxony and Thuringia have substantial wind farms. In Berlin, I notice that some of the new tram stops have glass roofs with embedded solar cells. Berlin is also a fairly green city with parks all over the place. Sometimes from some of the elevated subway lines in central Berlin, I can see green roof tops, even on the tops of corner gas stations. I hear that Germany is a leader in this field, which Americans helped start. There is also quite a large water remediation project on Potsdamer Platz that filters gray water from the whole plaza before letting it enter the neighboring Landwehr canal. There is a very good mass transit system with light gage rail, trams, subways and buses and there are pretty good cycling lanes with coordinated traffic lights for bicycles in many parts of the city.

On the right are details of the GSW headquarters building in the middle of Berlin (renovated in 1999). Those red, orange, pink and white shutters are integral parts of a frame, which drapes the entire western side of the building. The shutters automatically rotate to help regulate the building's use of energy, light and air resources. The architects, Sauerbruch and Hutton, also developed an innovative ventilation system, including an aerodynamic cantilevered roof that generates a strong depression by intensifying the natural thermal currents around the building. One site claims that the building's design cuts energy usage in half. Plus, it is just a beautiful looking structure that should inspire innovative thinking.

Bringing it all back home
I have been keeping my eyes and ears open for years on alternative living ideas, mulling over designs for our family house and changes in my own life. When I returned to north central PA in 2003 for grad school, I decided I needed to make some basic changes. For one thing, I was glad to be back home in the hills, near the creeks and our family garden (pictured on the left in its winter state). Putting my hands in the soil and tending vegetables, herbs and fruit trees is much more than hippy junk (real hippies rock). Gardening changes my perspective on the environment and my relationship to living things and healthy living. It is also hard work. I have lost berries to birds, peaches to deer, beets to rabbits, tomatoes to groundhogs, broccoli to flea beetles, squash to acidic soil, blueberries to heat and drought, on and on. Planting is not about plugging it in and taking it out when it is done. It involves learning on all kinds of levels about plants, soil, insects, animals, chemistry, etc. But I get to be outside in the sun, wind and rain. My mother and I spend good time together weeding and catching up. We marvel over life and its seasons through the little things in our gardens. We get to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and supplement our diets with the most local of local foods.
Before I left for Germany, I turned the compost one more time and planted the garlic cloves for next year's harvest. I plan to make at least a three season garden. I miss it and look forward to visiting it in December just to see what is going on in its fourth season.
Gardening is also one of the things that many people have been doing in our region for years. Older folks grew up with gardening around here and bring a wealth of experience to what appears to be a good trend (within an older cycle: there was an organic movement around here in the 1960s; look for notes on the old Walnut Acres Farm, which only really exists in a label now). My brother-in-law Yuri has been developing nicer organic gardens over the years. My friends, Kurt and Masha, started their first garden (pictured above with my friends Keith and Alex and their two children Lucy and Ella). Plus my colleague and friend, Jan, and his wife Beth have a plot in a beautiful community garden in the north end of State College. So gardening is alive and well in this part of the country.

Living in State College for graduate school has also put me in contact with a whole group of interesting people centered around a new alternative co-op (on the right). They participate in a local Community Susported Agriculture (CSA) organization. This CSA is made up of local farms that work together, using "environmentally friendly methods to raise a variety of farm products, including vegetables, herbs, flowers, dairy products, eggs, meats, and berries". Paraphrasing their mission, they work together to coordinate growing, marketing, and distribution and provide an abundant and reliable source of fresh, healthy foods to grocery stores, restaurants, and individuals. Right now, they are laying the groundwork for an effort that may one day evolve into a farmer-owned cooperative, supporting a large number of local farmers and supplying food to a great many members of the community. If you are interested, check out the home page for the GroundWorks Farm CSA in the Penns Creek watershed.

Recycle

If you are interested in local recycling networks to get rid of things other people could use or find some things that you could use, please check out the Freecycle Network for a network near you.

Health and well being: yoga
When I returned to graduate school, I found myself generating
stress as I did in my old college days. I knew I liked yoga when my sister introduced it to me years ago. So I decided to find a class somewhere in town and trusted the recommendation of a classmate. There are so many things one can do to bring movement into one's day of sitting, reading and staring into computer screens. For some it is jogging or squash, cycling or soccer. I like those things too and get outside to kayak in the spring when the water is up or cross country ski in the winter when we get the occasional snow. However, yoga helps me integrate my mind, body and spirit through increasingly more and more practice. At first, I went once a week and decided to commit my time and money as an investment in my general health and well being. Practice is part of a long learning process, discovering flexibility in some places and inflexibility even pain in other parts of my body. When stress from work is building up and time seems so precious, that is when I need to go to yoga class the most. When I am in State College, I go to Laurie Bonjo's Iyengar-style class at least three times a week now. I brought my mat with me here to Germany and unroll it all the time in my apartment to practice. Yoga helps me clear my mind, work out the body's kinks, increase my flexibility, make me stronger and healthier. It also helps me focus on the here and now, draw my mind back from its intensity and bring better breathing into my daily activities. It helps that I have an amazing teacher and friend in Laurie Bonjo (that's her above). If you are interested, check out her home page for the Harmony Center.

The big dream: rethinking our home
I have had many ideas for our family home in north central PA and I have been mulling them over for years. Since my family seemed most interested in integrating innovative technologies into our house and thinking about the family's future in relationship to the home, I decided to focus our efforts on considering alternative energy. My girlfriend, Nicole, put me in touch with a new local company called Envinity to see what we could do (check out the link if you like). They are a great group of people and they approach their work in a personable way. As an extra benefit, talking about alternative energy with them has brought my family together in interesting and exciting new ways.
As a first step, we had the Envinity guys conduct an energy audit on the house for about $500. This involved surveying the house, going over its energy systems, doors, windows, electrical outlets and insulation from top to bottom. They then used a big fan to create a pressure differential in the house and see how and where air was leaking out. They fed those results into their super powerful computer programs and came up with an energy audit and a list of possible improvements we could make with the time it would take for those improvements to pay back our investment.
The first steps are basic, frugal, do-it-yourself. Over the next year, we are collecting materials to improve the building's insulation. Our house looses heat through a door into the attic and through electrical outlets. So we purchasing things like electrical outlet insulation covers, weather stripping and door sweeps (to seal the door jambs) plus thinking about other little things we can do to make the house more energy efficient before considering bigger ideas. For one thing, we are reducing the energy envelope of the house - that space we need to air condition - by sealing the hallway door to the basement.
We have also decided to invest in solar heating water. We can do this almost year round in this part of the country. Plus heating water usually takes up a third of the energy budget because of those pesky hydrogen bonds. Installations can run up to several thousand dollars for a house like ours, but we will save hundreds of dollars on those heating bills and the technology pays itself back in about 18 years.
The biggest decision involves a "closed" geo-thermal heating and cooling system. This technology uses the temperature differential of the ground and air to its advantage. In the summer the system draws water from a series of small wells spaced around the outside of the house and sends it coursing through the interior of the home to draw heat from the warmer air. In the colder months, the system reverses itself, drawing warmth from the ground below to heat the water and send it coursing through the home. These systems cost more than $20,000 to install for a house our size, but the energy savings are in the thousands of dollars and the system will pay the initial investment back in about 16 years. It is an extremely efficient heating and cooling system and we can combine it with a heat recapture and ventilation system that will help bring fresh air into that sealed interior space and recapture heat that may be lost through conventional venting.
What surprised me the most was the cost for photovoltaic systems (solar generated electricity). These systems can run over $30,000 for a house like ours and they pay themselves back in over 100 years. The technology and the markets are simply not there yet for serious consideration for any sanely budgeting family.
One last part of this family plan: my mother's office and medical practice. When our parents moved out here from New York City in the early 1970s, my father converted the original garage of the house into my mother's medical offices where she still practices to this day. When I was 14 I helped my father and a construction crew build an addition. My mother is nearing retirement, so it is time to think about the future of our family. My sister is a local hospice caregiver and developing her own practices as a certified massage therapist and yoga instructor. So we want to redesign the old office space and make a health and wellness center where my sister would have a beautiful new yoga studio and massage room and my mother could still see the occasional patient. Thinking about these things gets us all excited, but there is much work ahead for us to make this happen.

On a walk from the Kottbussertor to the Friedrichstrasse

I went looking for a building on this sunny afternoon that I'll tell you more about on Blog Action Day. I found some interesting things along the way in the architectural history of Berlin.
If you are interested, please check out the link.

Primary source 4: Protestant sermons from Erfurt

@ the Evangelical Central Archives (EZA)

I went back to the central church archives in the eastern part of Berlin-Kreuzberg today. The Protestant Church played a very important role in Germany at the turn of 20th century and I am interested in how this role looked for the first part of my study. I think this period has much to tell historians about our analysis of culture and Germany's struggle with modernity in the early Weimar Republic, and subsequently, Nazism and after 1945. I think this history may also have something to tell us about how Germans deal with fear today (See Sabine Bode's new book on German Angst. I am reviewing it for H-German in the early spring of 2008).

In the Imperial period (1880-1914/18), Protestant Church leaders strongly advocated for the Prussian monarchy and actively girded Germans for war as did most Protestant leaders across western Europe at that time. Most Germans were Protestant and in Thuringia they made up an overwhelming majority of the population. Most churches presided over districts drawn across their city maps. They estimated the numbers of people living in their districts from anywhere between 12,000 and 18,000 individual souls. They saw themselves as important administrators for those areas and supported many civic efforts and relief programs. Even before the First World War, many churches found themselves strapped for the necessary resources. In 1918/19 most churches experienced a wave of members leaving and found themselves surrounded by more and more non-believers, smaller alternative Christian communities like the Jehovah's Witnesses, Adventists and Baptists, and hostile elements in the new communist movement. Still, between 300 and 500 people regularly attended services and those numbers doubled for the church holiday services.

I found a few sermons and church bulletins from ministers in Erfurt and Magdeburg (in Saxony-Anhalt). Protestant ministers never seemed to be too far away from talking about fear and that gives me an important view to how a few ministers expressed fear and and how they offered ways for Germans to deal with those fears. The number one fear was for one's soul and then for the souls of other believers around the reader or listener. They also discussed the fear of death and how to deal with death, but also questioned the way the Prussian state would order Germans to commemorate death, reminding their public about death as a religious form of sacrifice or eternal damnation.

The first sermon also imagines a hostile world and paints a picture of a type of community that I find interesting for its vision and how it would later influence newer forms of political culture in Germany in some interesting and important ways. The second source is a set of excerpts from a sermon and bulletin from another pastor in Erfurt. He reacted to Germany in the wake of its defeat in the First World War and preached a path for Germany's renewal through a Christian spiritual re-awakening at a time when Germans were pulling apart their society.

The last record that I shall add soon comes from among the church archives of Magdeburg in northwest neighboring Saxony-Anhalt. From these materials, I can see how German Christians battled Confessing Christians for control over local churches, their pastorships and teachings. The source I want to show you is one minister's report of his Gestapo interrogation. Those records reveal how German Christians terrorized local religious communities in the 1930s and how the Protestant church focused its resistance along these lines of Christian tradition. That said, I am still perplexed by how Christians could not muster the courage to protest the racial transformation of Germany. I think one of the keys to answering that questions may lie in the first source below and what happened to the vision of Germany as a diverse form of civil society.


1875: Imagining Germany

On May 24, 1875, the pastor from the Regler Church in Erfurt, Dr. Baerwinkel, gave a sermon at the Ulrich Church in Halle a./S. for a meeting of the Evangelical Union. His church published an edition and one copy ended up in the EZA records for the Regler Church.

What I found most interesting was how Dr. Baerwinkel talked about the kind of place his listeners should make. He invoked a story from the Old Testament book of Nehemia 4, 1-9 . That story recounts opposition to the Jewish rebuilding of Jerusalem and Dr. Baerwinkel uses this passage to paint this picture of Germany about four years after the creation of the modern German nation state in 1871. For example, he states:

We are of one opinion that the city of God we would like to build must have walls. It is necessary to give this city a mighty border so that one knows how far this territory reaches and where foreign lands begin. It must be a wall so solid that the foxes cannot find a way. Yes, this city of God, our church, must become a mighty fortress and a free place for everyone who calls out in the name of the Lord and seek shelter within its walls, but also a powerful place of arms for the battle against the unbelievers and the amoral of the world.
[...] our task here is the same as it should be in focus everywhere: proclaim the word of God, toil with our hands in the realm of God, practice the actions of the good Samaritan, take care of the sick or call sinners to repent. The is the same task we are given when we hear the sermon or fold our hands in prayer for our soul's salvation.

What I find interesting is that fortress-mentality that can almost seem ubiquitous in central Germany in the form of inscriptions on church architecture or in the verses of the Luther hymn, "A mighty fortress is our God". Even more striking to me is the reading of the Old Testament. This city of God is for believers. That does not necessarily preclude Jews, but it views everyone else as enemies. It is at once a militant and a compassionate vision of Germany. What happened to these visions are strands in my analysis for the 1920s.


1921: The German soul is sick

The second source comes from Pastor Kohlschmidt of the Augustiner Church. Pastor Kohlschmidt appears to heave been a prolific writer. The first excerpt is from his sermon, "Be at peace", in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Martin Luther Day, which the church subsequently published in a local newspaper as a three part series. Pastor Kohlschmidt's sermon captures the sense of Germany's catastrophic loss in the wake of the First World War and the feeling of occupation by foreigners, most likely the French, but possibly others, maybe Jews or communists. Pastor Kohlschmidt believes that Germans have accepted the materialism of England and France, which in turn has fractured German society much like 400 years ago during the religious wars. So Pastor Kohlschmidt invokes Luther as the German hero and admonishes Germans to turn to Jesus Christ in order to help heal Germany's sick soul. For example, Pastor Kohlschmidt writes:

[...] 400 years have passed by since that memorable day. We write the year 1921, a year not of salvation but of disaster; a year and a time of calamity […] what kind of salvation do we need? Just like 400 years ago, we are a divided people. Back then, foreigner sat upon the throne. The foreigners are now more than ever our masters.

[…] Materialism, despite Kant and Fichte, has almost stifled the German mind. Materialism has mechanized work and flattened thinking. And it has led into a form of dogmatism […]. It has atomized society and mocked reverence. It has turned duty into egotism, truth into perjury and morality into fornication […] And so it has happened as it had to happen. If Luther were to make his way from Wittenberg to Erfurt via Halle, Leipzig and Merseburg, what would he find? What would he say?

Poor German people! Other people say that today who call for salvation and offer themselves as saviors. Economic reform, socialization, school reform, new philosophy! […]

This is about the soul of our people, not our minds or our hands. Our soul is sick and therefore our ways of thinking, our entire writing and endeavors. […] Be at peace! That is how Luther advised us 400 years ago. This peace is not something that the world can give us; only he who bore the burdens of humanity, Jesus Christ!

1925: Totenfest: commemorating death and dealing with fear

In a second piece from an Augustiner Church's bulletin from 1925, Pastor Kohlschmidt talks about the holiday commemorating the dead. According to Pastor Kohlschmidt, this festival did not always exist in Germany. Over one hundred years earlier, Kaiser Wilhelm Friedrich III had ordered Prussians to remember those who had sacrificed their lives in the wars against Napoleon. Here, Pastor Kohlenschmidt claims that Germans have forgotten the origins of this festival, but asserts a deeper meaning behind the notion of death than simply dying for a nation state's wars on earth. Pastor Kohlschmidt invokes the fear of death without salvation and admonishes his readers that they really should be more concerned with where they end up in the afterlife. For example, he writes:

Is that really the deepest meaning of Totenfest? Are we allowed to say that dying means becoming blessed? No, the Holy Scriptures says that only those who die in the Lord are blessed. How many have died and have not wanted to know about the Lord while living? How often is the inscription, “Here rests in the Lord”, only an untrue form of speaking? More true is the word:

“Who acts according to my word,

To him I open the gates of peace;

Who transgresses against me, will not find what he seeks!

I come knocking at your door.”

Therefore Totenfest should remind us that we too must die. The earnest, bitter earnest question should press upon us and never let go, “Where do I want to spend eternity?"

Just who felt this fear of damnation is unclear. The churches presided over districts with populations in the tens of thousands, but only 300 to 400 regularly attended services. So on the one hand, the fear of damnation may not have had that much of an affect on Germans. On the other hand, however, there were significant groups of practicing Christians and that will influence their views of Germany, the Weimar Republic and the idea of Germany's renewal through religious practice.

Primary source 3: through the clippings of the Imperial Rural Union

For the past two days I have been looking through the press clippings of the Reichslandbund at the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfeld (the history of the building complex is posted above in German).

The Reichslandbund (Rlb) is translated as the Natural Rural League on the Wikipedia.org site, but that does not make much sense. I would translate it as the Imperial Rural Union, which still does not say much. In 1921, two German agricultural associations united to form the Rlb. Large landowners dominated its politics and it formed a large network of local associations and newspapers to advance the interests of "big" German agriculture alongside those of industry and labor in the Weimar Republic. Benjamin Ziemann suggested I take a look in their press archive, which goes back into the 1890s and reads like a gigantic collection of newspaper articles from newspapers all over Germany that the Rlb organized into a wide range of topics.

Since the collection is so large, I chose to first look at the press collection on Thuringia (Thueringen), the central German region in my study (depicted at left in pink on the map of Germany during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933)). There is so much material that I chose the collection bound in a book for the years 1921-1924. I was interested in these years in particular because of the rise of the Nazi Party in Bavaria to the south and what I knew from earlier research about the rise in political violence and anti-Semitism all around Germany during that time. I wanted to see what fear looked like through this collection and how Germans responded.

Since the collection is primarily newspapers, although other materials occasionally pop up, many of the "voices" among these article clippings are middle class and Protestant, although they collections also include the newspapers of the local agricultural union, the communists and the social democrats. Among the middle class papers, there are conservative, nationalist, racist and democratic voices. It is hard to approach fear this way because I am really looking for descriptions of individual expressions of fear, but I am struck by how much fear does come up in this sampling of German newspapers and the way that Germans were transforming their politics.

In September 1921, Thuringia held its state parliamentary elections and the "Red Block" of Social Democrats (SPD), Independent Social Democrats (USPD) and Communists (KPD) were able to form a ruling coalition with a combined vote of more than 51%. The middle class Democrats were already well on the way to decline from their early successes in the first Weimar elections, but the other, more conservative middle class parties did very well. Much of the press clippings reflects their positions. Their authors very closely followed the decisions of the ruling "Red Block" coalition and the actions of everyday people who supported Social Democracy or Communism in Thuringian communities and they tended to play on the fears that middle class, Protestant Germans associated with the "Reds". Historians such as Helge Matthiesen have pointed out these trends before, but my research brings out some of the dimensions of these political battles even more. For example, conservative middle class authors tended to play the religion card more so than I think we know. So when the "Red Block" announced a new law in October 1921 that eliminated official state status in Thuringia for the holidays celebrating the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther's birthday (on October 31 and November 9 respectively), many papers carried headlines that stylized the decision as the beginning salvo in a new "Cultural War" (Kulturkampf) . The law also made the founding of the Weimar Republic (also on November 9) the new state holiday. Dissenting papers noted how the new law would eliminate religious education and choirs in the schools and reported cases of local ministers and teachers protesting the new law. The Rlb's local papers used the law's promulgation to condemn the entire Weimar Republic. In many cases, the dissenting papers exaggerated the very nature of the law, claiming that the socialists and communists wanted to destroy freedom and moral values and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat and the masses. They portrayed political appointments and hiring practices of the ruling state government as infiltrations, allowing socialists and communists to work in the local police forces, and claiming that the government unfairly granted amnesty to people accused of "political crimes" (in their view, to mostly socialists and marxists), while more aggressively prosecuting rightwing associations and censoring their media like the film Fredericus rex after the rightwing assassination of the German-Jewish industrial and political leader, Walther Rathenau in June 1922. In this context, as Matthiesen has noted, conservative middle class authors railed against the powerlessness of the middle classes and called for a unified middle class voting block of their own made up of Protestants, craftsmen and farmers.

What also struck me about these records was how central Thuringia was to German politics in the early 1920s. My project assumes this approach and the archival materials I saw today focus on the region. So these approaches slants my view a bit, but it was remarkable how many papers from other regions picked up on the developments in Thuringia and even claimed that this region was the cultural battleground and political laboratory of Germany. Thuringia was a newly organized political state that contemporary authors often referred to as "Greater Thuringia". Locals writers initially talked excitedly of the possibilities for the idea of a Middle Germany (Mitteldeutschland), but the fear of a "red" central Germany made national headlines in 1921 and 1922 as something Germans should fear. Papers closely followed the region's events, picking up on the terrorist tactics of local communists who organized paramilitary organizations, conducted house searches, stopped local commercial traffic and attacked right-wing demonstrations. When the socialist and communist leaders of the central German states of Braunschweig, Saxony and Greater Thuringia gathered in Dresden to discuss their regional cooperation, papers across Germany painted the picture of socialist Middle Germany as a grave danger to the nation (the Reich).
I have not yet found much public reaction to the rise in anti-Semitism in this region in 1922 and 1923, but I have found files in this collection that thematized this issue too. I will come back in another week to see those. Meanwhile, I am also struck by the region's connections to events in Bavaria and Berlin. With the possibility of a "red" Central Germany, conservative leaders in southern Thuringia were seriously considering joining their districts to the Federal state of Bavaria. In the fall of 1923, hyperinflation, rising unemployment and the French occupation of the Ruhr industrial valley in western Germany dominated the national headlines. Meanwhile, the national government ordered the military in Thuringia and Saxony to keep order, especially against the threat of communist violence and pending revolution. However, a new group calling themselves the National Socialists were literally reported to be massing paramilitary units on the southern borders of Thuringia and the rumor was they were going to seize power in Munich and march on Berlin.

Blog Action Day

Hello everyone,

this post is a little change of pace from my blog's objectives, but it is in line with everything I believe in and want to do. Here is another little idea that I have picked up from Larissa Chace Smith's wonderful blog. On October 15, 2007, thousands of bloggers are going to focus their individual blogging projects on the issue of the environment. If you are interested, please check out the web site for Blog Action Day and see what you could do. In one form or another, we are all going to draw awareness to the environment and I imagine that there are many interesting people out there who are going to think up some creative things. If you are a blogger or know one, please consider passing on the Blog Action Day environmental initiative to them and please check back on our blogs on October 15th for what we create.