Philadelphia, September 9, 2025  Moving the Berlin Wall

I touched the Berlin Wall in Berlin, when my mother last visited me. “I want to see the East Side Gallery again,” she said. Then we walked past the graffiti-covered sections of the wall. While she told me what it was like in divided Berlin and how she used the money she had to exchange at the border in East German marks to buy a copy of Karl Marx's Capital, I ran my hand over the concrete—until the skin on my fingertips turned completely rough.

Here in Philadelphia, I can't touch the Berlin Wall. Here in Philadelphia, the Berlin Wall is behind Plexiglas. A friend of mine shipped it over, and it didn't cost us anything! We had two pieces of the Berlin Wall, one of which is now at the embassy. It's the one that was in worse condition, says the elderly gentleman who is showing Sonali and me around the German Society of Pennsylvania. The Society is based in what is, by American standards, an old villa dating from 1888. It is the oldest representative of a national community in the USA, he says. Founded back then to advocate for the rights of German emigrants, who, upon arrival, had to repay their passage with backbreaking labor. Today, the focus here is on preserving German culture, says the gentleman from Leipzig, where Sonali and I are studying at the German Literature Institute and where he returned after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because there was work to be done, as he says. I already had family here, he says, referring to Pennsylvania. But I took on the landscape where my family used to have an estate, in the area where coal was mined in the GDR and which has since disappeared.
Coal in Leipzig contains more sulfur than in the Ruhr region, he says. He tells me about the landscape of his childhood and the black dust that settled over it due to the use of fossil fuels, and that he wanted to reverse that: I wanted it to look beautiful again, he says, and I think I succeeded. Today, there are lakes around Leipzig where we go swimming in the summer, Sonali and I say and laugh. Next time I’m in Leipzig in the summer, by the lake, I’ll think of him, and of how it used to rain black dust here.

Pennsylvania has the highest number of people with German heritage. But we don’t have an Oktoberfest, the man from Leipzig tells us. Everyone here does that! Our beer festivals are very popular, though, he adds, and I nod while sipping a Yuengling beer. America’s oldest brewery, it says on the bottle. The library we’re now being shown is old too. It is on the top floor of the villa, and it’s even been used as a film set. But unfortunately, no one borrows German books anymore, says the second elderly gentleman giving us the tour of the Society. Over time, the library has become a research library. We speak German the entire time. Then we talk about soccer. His team, Borussia Mönchengladbach, and mine, Hamburger Sportverein, recently tied. We shrug. Sonali has nothing to say about this, and the men mostly address me anyway and besides, she doesn’t drink beer, she prefers wine, and soccer isn’t really her thing. Well, we actually wanted to host your reading here, among all the books, the two men tell us, but the renovations are behind schedule, and the back part of the reading room is still covered.

Our evening takes place in the Society’s basement hall, paneled in veneer wood. Carved crests of the German federal states hang on the walls. On the pillar next to where I’m sitting, there’s the white horse on a red background. Lower Saxony, wherever I go. It looks just like the rooms of the shooting clubs where my friends from the past used to celebrate their birthdays, and it smells the same too. We’re introduced, and by now we’re speaking English, as “Writers from Germany on a tour through the United States.” Sonali reads a text in flawless English, with a British accent. I read a text in English and with an accent that people here understand, but one I’m embarrassed by. Then we take questions from the audience. When a German teacher asks whether we see the growing influence of English on the German language as a threat, we talk about how change can be a good thing. Our reflections on linguistic evolution and the impact of voices long excluded from literature echo through the hall, amplified by the microphone.
Then someone is allowed to ask one final question, but they lose themselves in a winding monologue that leads nowhere, eventually arriving in Russia. What to make of Dostoevsky remains unanswered tonight. Russia feels distant here; Germany feels close to us. Only a short time later, Russian drones will enter European territory.