As this year winds down to a close, I’ve been thinking it’d be a cool thing to write down some of the expectations I had before coming to Germany, and the realities that I ended up experiencing over here. Needless to say, I spent weeks and months during the buildup to this year imagining up a million different ways this would all turn out, where I would go, what I would do, and pretty much none of it happened the way I anticipated. I’ll probably have more later, but here are a few:
1) I would have brilliant, Wunderkind students. Every German I’d ever met until coming to Hamburg in September spoke fantastic English. And by fantastic I mean that sometimes when I’d try to have conversations with them in my own choppy, mutilated version of their language they’d simply switch to English mid-sentence and carry on as if I was speaking with any other normal American. This gave me a pretty distorted perspective on the level of English in Germany, and gave me really inflated expectations for my students. I thought if everybody that I ever tried to speak German with pretty much spoke perfect English already that the level of language instruction in German schools must be incredibly advanced. What’s more, English is one of the few required subjects to take in German schools, so I figured that any given class would be incredibly fluent compared to its American counterparts.
Well, I was wrong. I packed along the Norton Anthology of Poetry (a leftover from my Intro to Poetry course in college), hoping to use it in class and do some lessons on poetry, and after a few weeks I barely even gave a thought to opening it. It’s not that the students are horrible. On the contrary, some of them are REALLY good--incredibly good when you consider that they only ever get three to four hours of English instruction per week—but it’s not on the level I expected. I’ve seen fifth graders draw a dozen questions marks on a test instead of answering the questions because they didn’t understand anything; had seventh graders ask me what the word “but” means in German; seen tenth graders who still say “Have you a pen?” instead of “Do you have a pen?” after six years of English. So I had to readjust my expectations and take things slower than I wanted, and after I came to grips with that I started being much more effective at teaching.
2) I’d live with Germans, only have German friends, and be completely integrated into the city. Before coming over here I expected complete, total, 100% immersion into the culture. When I was in Berlin in the summer before senior year I mostly ran around with the other Americans in my study abroad program. Granted, I still learned a lot of German in a very short amount of time, but aside for the German I was living with and the professors at school I had very little contact with the people of Berlin themselves. This time around I was more interested in getting totally surrounded by the German culture, and was convinced that I’d barely have any other American friends.
This, too, turned out to be an expectation that didn’t pan out. Had I lived in a smaller city with no other Fulbrighters or other teaching assistants this may have turned out differently, but after a whole ten months in Hamburg I’ve made relatively few German friends. At the orientation I met the other three guys who were placed in Hamburg with me (John, Brendan, and Karl), and from the beginning we’ve spent a lot of time around each other. I had been nervous about making friends before coming, but I didn’t realize how lonely things can be in reality when you arrive in a new city. It was a huge mental adjustment building a life over here, getting used to the school, and trying to integrate myself into the city. At the beginning all four of us were pretty much in the same boat, and didn’t know anyone else in Hamburg, so we all hung out with each other. As much as I wanted to get really deep into the city, I hadn’t stopped to consider how nice it is to have people around you who are in the same position as you are and who are going through the same things. Even though we speak a ton of English around each other, it has been really valuable to have the other Fulbrighters here in Hamburg and around the area as well. By now we’ve all become really good friends.
And even besides Karl, Brendan, and John, I at least managed to make a lot of European friends. There are similar assistant teacher programs for a lot of European countries alongside the Fulbright program in Germany, so there was actually a little mini network of 20-something expatriates all throughout the city. As I think I mentioned, my (now ex-) roommate Loic (another assistant like me) is French, and I’ve made a ton of French, Spanish, English, Polish, and even French Canadian friends. For the most part we all spoke German amongst each other too, so even if I didn’t necessarily get the German friends I was looking for, I at least found a bunch of people to practice the language with.
3) I’d spend this year in Germany, have my fill, and want to be back in the USA by the end of it. For a long time the song Starlight by Muse was the sort of guiding philosophy for this experience, one lyric in particular: “Starlight / I will be chasing it, Starlight / until the end of my life / I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore.” I saw Germany as my Starlight: that thing out at the far reaches of space, something that you spend your entire life reaching out for at the expense of your friends and family and everyone back home. Heading out here for a whole year would mean sacrificing to some degree all my relationships back home. I could stay back and make sure I kept all of those friendships and stayed in close contact, or I could step into the spaceship and disappear for a while, out chasing some sort of fantastical, far flung adventure on the other side of the world. And after all, I wouldn’t be out there forever, I’d come back eventually, and everyone would still be there when I got back. As the bridge in Starlight goes: “I’ll never let you go / if you promise not to fade away.”
And now it’s turning out to be the exact opposite: I don’t want to leave! I entirely underestimated the effect being over here for so long would have on me. When you get down to it, I just really enjoy the life over here: always not quite in my element, always just a little outside of the culture. I’m not German, and that gives me a unique appreciation for a lot of things in this country. For the most part it’s a lot of fun not quite belonging to the culture of a place—until you’re a foreigner yourself you can’t quite understand the double-edged nature of being a stranger in a strange land. How simple things like registering your address with the city government or getting a haircut spark deep-rooted spasms of loathing and terror in you because of all the unknown and confusing vocabulary you’ll come up against; how you’re always the most interesting person at any given party, even though it’s sometimes really hard to loosen up your tongue and really use the language to your full ability (Astra helps); how the locals find your accent and imperfect grasp of their grammar endearing and “sympathisch.” It seems really boring in comparison to think of going back to America, where I know how everything works and I’m just another Ami among hundreds of millions.
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