I’ll never forget the laughter that spurted out of me when the word Beschleunigung tickled its way past the vellus hairs in my ear canal. The word escaped out of a heavy mustache worn by a slightly balding, average-height former East German physics teacher. He rapped a pointer on the whiteboard and traced a curve plotted on an x/y axis.
Beh-schloy-knee-gungggg, he repeated.
The gold foil on my German dictionary was starting to peel off. I flipped through to the B section and found the translation: Acceleration.
Nice! I dig that.
The term embedded itself in the deep folds of my brain, and even to this day, when I hear it, I reexperience the same delight that coursed through me the first time I heard the syllables combine into that concept.
It’s probably the “schloy” or maybe it’s the “knee-GUNG.”
Or just all of it.
~
This whole scene transpired over a quarter century ago, in a tiny high school planted next to a tiny cemetery* in a tiny thousand-year-old town called Colditz, on the outskirts of Leipzig, deep in what had been an industrial hotbed of the former German Democratic Republic.
(* I often looked over at the gravestones beyond the wall of the schoolyard … what is all this homework for, if we’re just going to spend eternity there … but I digress)
The town’s claim to fame? Boasting one of the largest castles in Germany that had once been used as a POW camp during WW2 (called Oflag IV-C). During my immersive exchange year—where everyone’s second language was Russian, not English (a theoretical boon to my ability to become fluent in German)—busloads of British tourists would periodically swarm the place, on the hunt to fulfill their destiny of revisiting remnants of WW2 at any cost.
The officers held in the Colditz castle made a sport of escaping. Their creative streak became enshrined in cultural memorabilia such as games, books, and films called Escape from Colditz, and other such sensational titles, glutting eBay.
After the war, the town happened to be in the area of Germany that landed in Stalin’s lap, and a porcelain factory kept most of the citizens employed, creating tableware for the entire eastern block under the brand name Mitropa. The castle was converted into a huge hospital where most of the town’s residents had been born.
A Mitropa creamer in the kitchenette at the Celestial Arts Education Library.
My arrival in Colditz came nine years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, eighteen months before Y2K failed, and well before I ever learned how to drive a car, which is to say, before I knew what it felt like to accelerate in a vehicle.
My perception of the local area was entirely distorted. I had no idea how small the village was (5,000 people) compared to where I’d been living in the United States (115,000 people). My inability to experience acceleration, and thus calculate distance, extension, and relative population density, allowed me to marinate happily in this petri dish of a community, which had been diligently working on its own infrastructural integration into the Western half of Europe.
My first impression, when I was told I’d be going to live in former East Germany was of cold—because Cold War—and a sense of bleakness, but really, a void. Not much had been shared with me in school yet about what the Cold War really meant beyond “east” is somehow other, and scary, and probably grey, like watching black and white TV instead of technicolor. But the host family I got matched with sounded awesome, and I didn’t have any reason to request a change, so I went with it.
Before we got matched with our respective families, the other students on the exchange fellowship (Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, or CBYX for short) spent a month getting acclimated to Germany in a youth hostel in Tübingen. While everyone else was busy learning that the drinking age in Germany was much lower, and that the people in Irish pubs spoke English freely, I was obsessed with the fact that Johannes Kepler had lived in Tübingen, and I spent my free time tracking down any trace of his life there. And going to the internet café to read Astro.com in German to try to learn more German and more astrology at the same time. Super efficient!
The summer days flew by, and soon it was time to disband the wild party to the various corners of the country. I boarded the train with trepidation, knowing that my time in the west was over.
When I arrived in Colditz I found a vibrant system of the latest technology and structural innovations far more impressive compared to what I saw in the former west. The Marshall Plan had invested in rebuilding western German infrastructure after the Second World War, achieving an “economic miracle”… but that had been decades ago, and the buildings and facilities openly displayed the patina of having been completed in the 70s.
In pre-millennial, late 90s former East Germany, everything seemed super futuristic because the infrastructural renovations were seriously fresh. The 40+ years of socialism had supply chain stressors that had left the cities and villages in various states of disrepair that needed immediate attention. And so attention was paid.
Rather than sitting in some grey wasteland, I found myself in a riveting, hypermodernizing zone. It wasn’t cold. It was cool, cooler than I could have ever imagined.
~
I’m taking you down this memory lane to highlight the tickle of new words that flow down our ear canals, the page flip of translation, the delight of comprehension, of seeing with fresh eyes and taking action.
The sense of time shifts relative to the novelty we bring to our surroundings. Seen from space, the time experienced by West and East Germany was the same. From within the West, post-Marshall Plan investment made West German life seem to surge ahead of the stagnation in the East. After the fall of the wall, the eastern half seemed to surged ahead of the already rebuilt West. Change ushers in apparent acceleration, even if it’s mostly an illusion.
For this bound, examine your surroundings, your routines. Realize where old investments and upgrades have become antiquated or neglected. Feel the slow and steady uptick in speed (acceleration, Beschleunigung!) as you risk the temporary instability required for true change.
Focus on passages: sounds from vocal chords to ear canals; lightbeams from letters on page to optic nerves; POWs through tunnels to forests; tea through porcelain pot to porcelain cup; high school student from America to far east Germany; broken buildings to rewired electrical and plumbing. Last millennium to this one… 2050 is closer to us now than 1989.
It’s time to lay new tracks, let momentum build.
See you again on May 3rd (at 4:25pm PDT) for our next bound prompt.
A collection of astrological Colditz Porzellan cups in the kitchenette at CAELi.
Cover photo by Paul Smith on Unsplash.