ritas kleine welt

in celebration of international women's day, here are four portraits of women from my family. my great-great-grandmother singer, my great-great-grandmother trültzsch and her daughters, johanne and gertraud, my great-grandmother and great-aunt respectively. when these four ladies were born, women in germany had not yet acquired the right to vote!

the work for equality for women is not over yet. not by a long shot. but! this country has sure come a long way since 1919.

here's to all the women of the world and their struggle for equality and a life in simple human decency.

the evening began with me starting to bother birgit with caps from starsky&hutch. she didn't complain. or, if she did, she didn't present a convincing front to the world in general and me in particular. and before you know it, one thing lead to another and we started fiddling around with the stills, tapping into each our creative sides.

birgit and i went for a walk through berlin on friday afternoon in order to secure some tickets for the world premiere of the restored metropolis. (we were short of ten people in front of us when the box office closed. dang!) on our way to the friedrichstadtpalast, we crossed one of the many bridges across the river spree. this is what we saw...

shoes are a girl's best friend!

1) finished marking the first-years' exams

2) made someone laugh

3) eating my first kimchi

instead of just counting off the different stations of my life in the past 365 days, let me just show you, what i did on the occassion. spanning from one new year's eve to another, it seems like most of my activities have been taped either by night or underground with an equal lack of proper light.

have a great evening filled with fun, friends, music and laughter! but also make sure that you all get home savely. after all, i want to see you all again next year!

ps. images taken from the gold rush (1925) and stiched together by ce moi.

pps. and whatever every media outlet is saying, decades have never lasted 9 years! we still have one more year to go for the first decade of this century. one more year to mess up or make good. let's pray for the latter one!

five days away from christmas, in christian parley on the fourth sunday in advent, i thought i should finally get into the spirit of the season and make a day of it. so in the order of appearance, here's what i did today.

sitting here with my breakfast (cheese on toast and a welsh tea with milk), watching the snow fall outside and looking forward to watching the gold rush on the big screen with a number of people in the english department this evening. it doesn't need much for happiness.

when i came to my office today, i stopped by my pigeon hole really quickly just to see whether some of the house mail had been delivered and if some form had to be returned. there really was a form that needed signing, but on top of it all, there was also a small paper envelope.

let me just say, little gestures like that are the best picker-uppers in the world. a little bit of validation of what i do here at the university with teaching literature and cultural studies sure helps LOADS. because, frankly, i most often get the impression that my seminars are one thing above all: pointless. but every once and a while there's something like this...

what it boils down to is power. censorship and denial of free speech is exercising that power over others. it is in no way any different from good old orwell's newspeak. the moment your and my speech is restricted by whomever thinks so fit, that moment our freedom is diminished.

use your power and speak!

monday just after i had finished teaching the second round of shakespeare's lusty world of sonnets, i was on my way to berlin to celebrate 20 years of the opening of the iron curtain together with birgit and christoph. at first it was wet. and then there were lots of people. and then we had a hunch that the people in front of their tellies saw much much much more and also heard what was being said. but still it was great fun! it's not every day that a nation gets to celebrate its freedom and invite the whole world to the party.

and then, shortly after midnight, christoph found himself in the arms of two obliging ladies who wished him a happy birthday.

before you continue with the content behind the cut, please, take the time to re-watch the original broadcast of the tagesschau with a very happy anchorman announcing the opening of the east-german borders.

walking home from the leuschnerplatz after midnight last friday, the official lichtfest was already over and the nearly 100,000 leipziger had already gone home to sleep. the city was empty and quiet again. but unlike twenty years ago this was not a quietness of dread, but of calm and peace. there's a unique spirit in this city which you can encounter every day. it's got nothing to do with being showy or over the top. it's being content with what's here and taking pride in what has been achieved. it's a marvelous little place.

on 9 october, 1989, the prayers for peace began in the nikolaikirche in leipzig. thousands of leipzigers had begun gathering each monday to pray for a peaceful solution to the bubbling conflicts in what was to become the final year of the GDR. for his level-headed guidance and the repeated call for, 'keine gewalt!' (no violence!), the reverend christian führer was later awarded the augsburger peace prize. yesterday, twenty years after the first monday prayers, he repeated the reading of the sermon on the mount. guests of honour were the german president, horst köhler, saxony's prime minister, stanislaw tillich, leipzig's mayor, burkhard jung. but no one received a greater cheer of welcome than germany's former foreign minister, hans-dietrich genscher. the people of leipzig welcomed him with standing ovations.

following the shapes of autumn, here are the colours that go along with them. please keep in mind that these pictures were taken with a hand-held camera whilst creeping and crawling through the underbrush in one of the largest, uninterrupted woods in germany. there was just no way i would have managed to log a tripod through these woods. except for hurling it at wild boars, it wouldn't have helped much anyway, as i was nearly lying on my stomach during most of these pictures.