Grave Thoughts Indeed – Part 4 – The Oktoberfest

26 May 2021

(Click here for parts 1, 2 and 3)

Grave Thoughts Indeed — Oktoberfest. Read by Brenda Arnold

Munich is known first and foremost for its annual Volksfest that attracts six million visitors from around the world, a number that makes you question its “folksiness” – but whatever. Tracing its roots takes you back to – where else? – the Alter Südfriedhof (the old cemetery in Munich). Many of the institutions associated with this sprawling, brawling two-week party took shape under the leadership of men buried right here.

Grave Thoughts Indeed – Part 3 – Royal rollicking and frolicking

The Alter Südfriedhof dates to the 14^th century, but most of its graves tell the tale of Munich’s movers and shakers from the 1800s, a time when the city’s population doubled. More people meant more buildings, streets and institutions. But this was also an era that saw one of Munich’s most famous scandals involving its king, one which left traces here in this cemetery.

How war shaped the Alter Südfriedhof

Grave Thoughts Indeed – Part 2

Small German towns have monuments to the dead of the two world wars, sometimes combined into one, with all the names of the locals who died. The Alter Südfriedhof has no such monuments or graves. But war left its impact nonetheless, beginning with one that came centuries before.

Grave Thoughts Indeed – How War Shaped the Alter Südfriedhof, read by Brenda Arnold

World Wars – the prequel

Long before the twentieth century, another conflict raged across Europe so deadly that it too is sometimes referred to as a “world war”: The Thirty Years’ War.

Grave Thoughts Indeed

To take a stroll through the Alter Südfriedhof cemetery in Munich is to revisit its history. Pestilence and death, war, aristocratic scandals – even the Oktoberfest are all written into the epitaphs of people who shaped the city. It feels like the who’s who of Bavaria are all buried in this one spot (though by no means all of them are). In this four-part series – yes, four – I will reveal some of the most intriguing stories behind the stones. The history of the cemetery, as you will see, reflects the history of both the city and society at large.

Stand down, parler, this word is too good to debauch

Language is constantly in flux. Words come, words go, and sometimes their meaning changes altogether. Long gone are the days when I associated the word “gay“ with being happy, dancing around the room and singing one of my favorite songs from the musical Camelot. When you leave your home country as I did, you must also pay close attention to language changes that happen in your absence, causing you to call a club by its 1980s name: disco. Then the advent of the internet brought about the expression “brick and mortar” to denote a physical store rather than an online merchant.

From Munich to Philadelphia with love

14 December 2020

One of my best friends in the U.S. has a son in Philadelphia. After it became clear that Philly voters were going to tip Pennsylvania for Biden, his son texted him these two words: “You’re welcome.”

His father knew precisely what his son was referring to, a reflection of how intensely Americans experienced this election, one like no other in living memory. Many Americans like me may live abroad, but we experienced it just as vividly from afar.

Italiano – no problemo for meo

An Italian class had a big surprise in store

30 October 2020

Being a freelancer also means being free to schedule my time. No longer must I squeeze in dentist appointments around meetings, whooshing swiftly past the boss’s office hoping he won’t see me. Now I get to take time off not just for tooth maintenance, but to do frivolous things – like take an Italian class.

This is easy to do in Germany, the land of organizational prowess. They have something here with the unpronounceable name of Volkshochschule, which despite

Spectators turned spectacle

Corona’s surprising effect on an evening at the theater

21 October 2020

My favorite small theater has reopened after months of lockdown and we are attending a two-woman show called Primacomedy. I return here with mixed feelings. Would it be full? How will they deal with the social distancing inside the theater?

Mail-in ballots are sometimes the only way to vote

They should be foolproof

9 October 2020

A recent story on National Public Radio drove home to me the scope of the problem of mail-in ballots. A woman described how she accidentally mailed hers without putting it into the second envelope that went inside the first one. Too late, she realized her error.

Her ballot probably wasn’t counted.

That’s because the technology behind ballots lags behind the high-tech reality of the rest of the world. Some ballots are sent by e-mail, a laudable step, but the format of some like my ballot from Virginia is more of a cross between a kindergarten crafts project and a Franz Kafka novel.

I print out a seemingly endless stream of ballot and instruction documents, which I then carefully study. Various columns offer different candidates for several offices. First come the candidates for president – easy. This is followed by the candidates for local judges, school board and city council members. I google them to check on their track record to see what they have accomplished so far in their lives, in office or elsewhere.

Some columns have just one candidate. That’s makes it easy, although I’m not sure that can be called a vote.

To cast my vote, I carefully fill in the oval next to the candidate’s name, and suddenly I am back at the Iowa tests in grade school. I am sitting at a long table with the rest of the third grade, spaced apart (rather corona-like, come to think of it) everyone sitting rigidly behind two sharpened No. 2 pencils. A god-like proctor gives a signal, whereupon everyone simultaneously picks up a pencil and starts coloring in ovals. We had been thoroughly drilled on the dire consequences of a pencil straying outside of an oval. After the prescribed time limit the proctor barks “Pencils down!” All comply immediately, in unison, placing our pencils on the table, test-taking machines in perfect synchronicity.

This was in the 1970s. Have we really not improved the technology since then? There is quite a bit more at stake here than determining whether budding 10-year-old cowboys in Montana are better at reading than their soon-to-be surfing counterparts in Florida.

The future of the free world is being threatened and here we are, worrying about keeping the pen inside the oval so our vote will be counted.

But I’m still not finished. Having completed the color-by-number exercise, I take out my scissors, tape and crayons. (All right, maybe not the crayons, but they were in the same box, OK?). Rereading the instructions carefully, I now get to construct my very own envelope that goes into another, outside mailer. The dashed lines for the folds are numbered one, two and three.

Oops, I folded number three first – are they going to throw out my ballot? I undo it and start over. I’m not going to forfeit my vote over a fold – and if so, would that be called a foldfeit? I’m sure as heck not risking anything as scary-sounding as foldfeiting.

Each state has its own format – ah, the joys of federalism! Some require this second envelope and others do not. I have two friends from Michigan who both consulted me for assistance in filling out their absentee ballots.

“Where’s the other envelope?!”

I was shouting at my friend Maria, who began rifling through the pile of ballot papers she had printed out. We were sitting at her kitchen table, piles of documents and laptop at hand, trying desperately to be good citizens of our homeland.

“It won’t count if you don’t put it in the other envelope! Find it – now!”

We shuffled the papers in a frenzied search for the elusive envelope.

But careful double-checking of page numbers and a magnifying glass for the fine print revealed that Michigan doesn’t require a second envelope. Whew! We nearly risked her ballot’s becoming a paving stone on the way to disaster.

There is a continental divide between the importance of the ballot and the difficulty it takes to fill it out. It’s like the scene in Zoomania where the hyperactive rabbit zooms (and I mean zooms, not Zooms) into the Department of Motor Vehicles to trace the owner of a license plate who is a suspect in a crime. The rabbit literally bounces with energy and is desperate to move fast, thrilled that his buddy the fox has a friend at the DMV who can help out. This friend turns out to be a sloth, who despite being named Flash, handles the problem, well, slothfully.

There must be a better way. If the government wants us to vote – and I am clinging to my belief that it does – they must make it more user friendly. Amazon could give a helping hand here. They continually tinker with their website to offer oh-so-easy purchases and have become the benchmark for the user experience.

Why not introduce one-click voting? I refuse to believe that isn’t possible. But even if security experts insist that printed ballots must be used, Jeff could probably help out there as well. Returning a product is the hard-copy version of one click: Print the shipping label and content list, pop them in the package and tape it shut. Voilà. I can’t imagine Amazon rejecting a returned package because I used leftover blue duct tape to close it, cut out the mailing label crooked or turned the package into an unidentifiable lump of tape and paper in the process. Not that I would ever send off a package looking like that.

Surely a team of UX experts could offer expert advice to voting officials. I don’t doubt that these people have good intentions, but the road to hell and low voter turnout is paved with messy ovals and crookedly folded ballots.

While we’re at it, why on earth do Americans still have to vote on a Tuesday, requiring them to take off work? In Europe they always vote on a Sunday – even here in Bavaria, where the powerful Catholic church has managed to squeeze countless religious holidays into the calendar. But even the staunchly conservative church here does not object to voting on a Sunday. Germans know the price of a shattered government, as every family bears deep scars from their last famously failed democratic episode.

Skipping church pales next to the danger of a failed democracy.

I was terrified that my daughter, away at college, would not follow the instructions on the second inside envelope, thereby rendering her ballot invalid. So I printed, folded and taped it, mailing it with a post-it note containing these motherly instructions, which I thought were fairly kind and subtle:

“Sign, date, place in large envelope and mail ASAP! 😊”

Upon receiving it, she texted me her translation of my message:

“I know that you’re a bit chaotic sometimes honey and I understand BUT IT‘S ONLY THE FUTURE OF MY GODDAMN COUNTRY AT STAKE SO if you could not fuck it up that would be great!“

She seems to understand the urgency of the situation. I hope voting officials do, too.

Brenda Arnold

The Oktoberfest was canceled due to COVID-19

But Munich refuses to take it lying down

1 October 2020

“Rahoo-doray-rahoo-doray, welcome Christmas, Christmastime!”

So sing the Whos in Dr. Seuss’ iconic The Grinch who stole Christmas, in which the evil-hearted Grinch steals all their presents, food and decorations. But the Whos refuse to let their holiday be ruined, forming a circle around the community Christmas tree to sing carols, regardless of the lack of trappings.

Munich is reacting similarly to the cancellation of its two-week long festival that, its name notwithstanding, always kicks off mid-September. In normal years, six million tourists descend upon the city to join the fun, but locals from Munich and