Incoherent Scribblings

Love Immigrant

In my experience, there seem to be two main categories of expatriates: career/relocation expatriates who, along with their significant others, are sent to a foreign country for work-related reasons and love immigrants.

As the name suggests, a love immigrant comes to a foreign country with no other security than his or her love for a person with a passport different than his or her own. A love immigrant may or may not ever plan to “officially” assimilate into her adopted country by acquiring another or additional citizenship, but every love immigrant comes with the intention of staying forever.

Like culturally homogeneous couples, couples that include a love immigrant face the task of keeping their love alive. However, in addition to this enormous undertaking, a love immigrant also faces the challenge of integrating into an unfamiliar society. She must start a life with new friends and acquaintances and carve out an identity that allows her to be more than just “X’s significant other.” Additionally, the love immigrant will face some degree of culture shock, may have to learn a new language, try to get a job, and might want to start a family.

Some love immigrants seamlessly make the transition into a foreign society while others have a much harder time. It takes a great leap of faith to become a love immigrant and most, if not all, would say that it was worth it.

However, it is a cold hard fact that in this day and age, culturally homogeneous or not, many relationships no longer last forever. People grow apart and love withers and dies.

This situation is never easy, but for a love immigrant it is additionally complex as he or she must confront a multitude of issues. However, first and foremost in her mind is the fundamental matter of whether or not she should stay in her adopted country or return to her native land. Many factors come into play when answering this question and it is probably the most difficult decision of all, but once it is made the rest falls into place.

I should know… I was a love immigrant.

Project Guglhupf - Part Two

Marble Guglhupf
Originally uploaded by blondelibrarian.

It is currently 28 degrees Celsius outside (83 F) and I have no air conditioning. So… what do I decide to do today? Yep, you guessed it! Bake a cake!

Since I wrote my post about the Guglhupf, I have been inundated with requests for my Guglhupf recipe in English and being the accommodating blogger that I am, I decided to go ahead and post my recipe for all those who are interested.

The recipe that I use comes from a book that I borrowed from my MIL called Perlen der Wiener Küche (Pearls of the Viennese Kitchen), copyright 1960 and is, as far as I know, out-of-print.

The first time I made this recipe I made it directly from the book with a little help from A. (Since the book is from Austria, there are a lot of Austrian words in it as opposed to German ones.) and overall it didn’t turn out too bad. The only glitch was that my oven runs hot. Unfortunately I didn’t realize this until after I had baked the cake for the suggested time and ended up burning the edges!

This time, however, I remembered that the oven runs hot, so in addition to translating the recipe from German into English and adding the Imperial equivalents for the metric units, I also remembered to watch my cake a little closer.

Anyway, here is the Guglhupf recipe for your enjoyment. As soon as mine cools off a bit so that I can “frost” it, I will be sure and take a picture. (For best results, use the metric units. The Imperial units are only approximations.)

160 g (½ cup) Butter
120 g (½ cup) Sugar
Pinch of Salt
Ground peel of ¼ Lemon
4 Eggs (divided)
25 g (1 Tablespoon) Baking Powder
40 g (1/3 cup) Raisins soaked in Cognac (optional)
40 g (1/3 cup) ground Almonds
40 g (1/3 cup) Vanilla Sugar OR 40 g (1/3 cup) Sugar + 1 teaspoon Vanilla
280 g (2 cups) Flour (sifted)
1/6 Liter/166 ml (2/3 cup) Milk
Powdered Sugar

Preheat oven to 175 C (350 F). Lightly grease and flour a 20cm (9″) bundt pan.

In a large bowl, cream together butter, sugar, salt, and lemon peel. Stir in the egg yolks until very creamy. Stir in baking powder. Mix in the almonds (and raisins).

In a medium bowl, mix egg whites and vanilla sugar together until stiff peaks form. Stir the egg whites into the butter mixture a spoonful at a time. Stir in flour and milk.

Pour batter into bundt pan. The pan should be about ¾ full. Bake with the oven door open a crack for 15 minutes or until the batter has risen to the top (or very nearly to the top) of the pan. Close the oven door and bake for another 45-50 minutes (mine is usually done in about 30 minutes) or until toothpick comes out clean. After cake cools, dust with powdered sugar.

For a marble guglhupf: Pour half the batter in the bundt pan. Add 1 tablespoon of cocoa to the remaining batter and stir. Pour the cocoa batter into the pan and using a knife, gently stir into the plain batter. Bake as above.

Breaking the Silence

I know it’s been a long time since I last updated, but honestly I just haven’t had a lot to say about my life in Germany lately.

Even so, I did do a very European thing the other night: For the first time in the four years that I have lived here, on Saturday night A. and I watched the Eurovision Song Contest.

From what I understand, the Eurovision Song Contest is about as important around here as the World Cup. (For my American readers out there, the World Cup is this big soccer tournament that is held every four years and is just as important to the rest of the world as the Super Bowl is to Americans.)

Though A. had seen the Eurovision Song Contest numerous times as a kid, we had never bothered to watch it since coming to Germany because we don’t listen to the kind of music it is usually associated with: Catchy pop songs, big ballads, and folk music.

However, this year was different: This year rock came to Eurovision from Finland in the form of a “horror rock” group who dress in monster costumes and call themselves Lordi… Now that is the kind of music that A. and I listen to!

As with any shock rock group, Lordi stirred up controversy in Athens even before they went on stage and of course, this made A. and I all the more eager to see them perform. The “controversy” is nothing that any fan of Alice Cooper, Kiss, or Marilyn Manson hasn’t heard before: They are Satanists; they are corrupting family values, etc., etc.

Lordi was scheduled to perform seventeenth out of twenty four entries, so A. and I had to sit through 16 mostly whiney songs and then had to wait as the German commentator warned parents to shield their children’s eyes for the three minutes that the monster rockers performed. (Interestingly enough there were no warnings given when scantily-clad women from various countries performed. Oh yeah, that’s right, we’re in Europe, not America: Sex is OK here, violence is not.)

“Hardrock Halleluiah” was the song and as a hard rock/heavy metal fan I think I can say it wasn’t too bad. In my opinion it was far from the death and/or speed metal that I was all too familiar with in my youth and frankly I wasn’t even close to shocked. I rather enjoyed the performance and though I was rooting for them, I really didn’t give them much of a chance to place very highly, let alone win.

Yet win they did and it pleased me to think that in this pop-and-hiphop-infested world that maybe real rock and roll isn’t dead after all.

Integration Step #698

In a renewed attempt at integrating into German society, today I have finally abandoned another one of those sure-fired signs that was always giving me away as an American.

Have I stopped eating french-fries with my fingers? Well, yes (in public at least), but that isn’t it.

No, what I have done is much more significant: I have chosen to renounce a particular thing that is such a fashion faux-pas that practically anywhere in Europe it will scream to any observant eye that you are an American.

This blunder is something that I was aware of even before I moved to Germany, but at the same time something so ingrained in my psyche that even though I have tried in the past to refrain from purchasing this particular object, I just couldn’t do it.

However, today when I went in search of this particular item once again, I made a concentrated effort to make sure that I did not choose that which would doom me repeat the mistakes of the past… Today when I went shopping, for the first time since my childhood, I did not buy a WHITE pair of tennis shoes (aka sneakers, trainers, etc.)!

Yes, I know: Since I knew that it was such a fashion no-no it really shouldn’t have taken me four years to buy a pair of tennis shoes that wasn’t white, but I had my reasons.

The first pair of tennies that I bought in Germany weren’t completely white: They had colorful side designs and I decided that counted. However, I knew even as I bought them that they stood out. But being that I am not a complete fashion slave and I liked them, I went ahead and bought them anyway.

About a year and a half later I was in need of a new pair of sneakers and at that point when I went shopping I obediently looked at lots of shoes that were anything but white. However, in the end, the pair that I purchased were once again white (with shiny silver stripes).

Even though I knew that white sneakers would point out my American ways, I couldn’t resist buying them. When I looked at red, purple, or green shoes the only thing I could think of was what the red pair would look like if I wore a pink T-shirt or what the green ones with yellow stripes would look like if I decided to wear lavender socks. My reasoning was even though white was “American” at least they would go with anything that I might decide to wear.

This time around however, not only did I almost completely ignore white, I also decided to skip the screaming red, purple, and green tennis shoes. I focused on ones a bit more neutral in color such as brown, black, or even navy. And this new strategy produced results: I am now the proud owner of an attractive pair of navy tennis shoes. (Adidas, if you must know.)

So now, based solely on my new sneakers, you can just go ahead and hand me honorary European citizenship, because you can no longer pick this American out of a crowd based on her goofy bright white Nikes.

On Citizenship

citizen: noun a legally recognized subject or national of a state of commonwealth, either native or naturalized

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been following a story here in Germany that centers on the introduction of citizenship tests.

The main controversy concerns whether or not these tests unfairly target Muslims and their compatibility with local (aka “German”) values, but that isn’t why I have been following the story: I have been following the story because as a result of my marriage to A., I am more than likely a permanent resident of Germany and after I have lived here for a few more years I could technically apply for German citizenship.

Honestly, though I have thought about it from time to time, abandoning my American citizenship for German citizenship is something that I am not sure if I could do. If dual citizenship were option for me I might consider it, but according to both American and German law, it isn’t.

A. claims that citizenship is just another “piece of paper” and honestly doesn’t understand my reluctance to abandon my American passport. Because A. is technically an Austrian citizen who has never lived in his “home” country, I believe that the reason he doesn’t understand my perspective is because he doesn’t have a real sense of what a person’s citizenship can mean to his or her identity.

I don’t fault him for his view, but I just feel that no matter how long I live in Germany, how well I speak the language, or how much I know about German history and culture, it will never make me solely German. If I were to become a German citizen I would feel like a fraud because no matter where my destiny takes me, I was born and raised in the United States and those experiences mark me as forever American.

That is not to say that I don’t believe that as an expatriate I don’t have a responsibility to attempt to integrate myself into German society: I think I do merely out of respect for the place where I am living and the people that I am interacting with. However, on the other hand, I don’t believe that during the process I can’t also be an American.

Some days I wonder at how successful my attempts to integrate into Germany really are: After all, A. and I still speak English together and if you walk into my house it looks like a little slice of America. However, though I might not be tempted to become an official German citizen any time soon even if I can successfully pass a completely unauthorized German citizenship quiz, the idea of becoming the equivalent of a “permanent resident” seems just a little more feasible than it did four years ago.