a blog by Peter Leonard
The Fulbright program in Germany is huge — they have many English-language teachers spread throughout the country, in addition to the regular researchers — and as part of that size advantage they’re able to organize an annual Seminar in Berlin during April. The German office extends an offer to nearby countries to participate, and thanks to the Stockholm office’s prioritization of this event, Swedish Fulbrighters can join in at no cost.
This all led to me being in Berlin from April 6th - 10th, and on Sunday the grantees in Sweden all went out to explore the area around our hotel on Alexanderplatz. This part of the city is dominated by the former East German television tower, which looms like a leftover from from the set of Kubrick’s 2001.
Some of us couldn’t resist the traveling pretzel-sellers:
While others went inside the cathedral to take wide-angle shots:
I was also selected to give a 5-minute presentation about my dissertation research. Five minutes is harder than you might think; you spend most of your time preparing trying to remove points from your argument so that it hangs together without running over a chronological cliff. The German gentleman who was in charge of the research presentations ran the show with an iron fist in a steel glove, and nobody dared go longer than the time allotted.
The good news is that my talk was the absolute first one of the entire conference, which led to me being completely relaxed after 9:15 am on Monday. We had lunch with a grantee in Ireland at the new Galleria Kaufhof on Alexanderplatz:
…and that evening we had the opening ceremony at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the beloved “pregnant oyster” of a building which functioned originally as a German-American, and more recently intercultural, center. The evening included a keynote talk by McKinsey consultant Martin Stuchtey, an expert on market-based solutions to climate change, and was also notable because it was the first time an American grantee in Sweden has been asked to give a talk during the opening ceremony: Jean Kjellstrand, who’s up in Umeå this year:
During the ensuing reception a number of us got to go on a German-language-only tour of the Neues Museum, a subject which I’ll tackle in the next post.