“It’s symbolism,” one reporter explained when I asked why the front page layout 1) is ALWAYS identical, and 2) why the featured front page photograph NEVER depicts war, violence, crime, highway bash-ups, perp  walks or any of the other incidents that papers in the U.S. rely on.

“You really have to read the cutline,” she added.

Symbolism. Must read the cutline. With those two factors, FAZ editors demand that readers not only view the front page, but also interact with it.

My reaction: “Huh?”

But, bolstered by a dedication to cross-cultural (trans-Atlantic, the  Burns fellowship people would say) understanding, and a growing trust in the people who put out this German institution each day, I began to read the cutlines. Every day.

Even so, the concept didn’t clearly make sense until the FAZ photo editor invited me and my husband (a former photojournalist) to visit his offices.

We were greeted on the second floor with a series of amazing shots one FAZ photographer snapped on Sept. 11, 2001, when he was in New York City to cover fashion week. He came back not with glimpses of Lagerfeld and Versace, but with the story of a lifetime.

Herr Jung, the photo editor, moved us on to a wall of FAZ front pages and began to explain his process for selecting The Front Page Photograph – arguably the most important piece of the modern FAZ. This newspaper didn’t begin allowing photos on the front page until a few years ago. But when it did, editors decided to try something different.

A few examples:

1. A close-in shot of a housewife scraping spaetzle (a mainstay in German cuisine) into a pot. The headline: Flour, eggs. salt. The cutline: Angela Merkel (Germany’s chancellor) needs only a few basic items to run this country.

2. An X-ray of the neck portion of a spinal cord, turned sideways and looking strategically like a racecar. The story: A famous race car driver whose neck had been injured wants to get back into the races.

3. A close-up of the fingerprint of a government official. The story: The government official was amid a tough fight pertaining to privacy.

4. A polar bear buries its head in the snow. The story: Failure to reach an agreement at climate change conference.

“It was risky, but now many people would say they can’t imagine the FAZ without this front page photo,” Jung said.

Jung’s explanation made me feel so proud to be part of an industry that, despite storms constantly gathering that threaten us, and a never-ending barrage of Gallup polls insisting that no one cares about or trusts the media (My dream Gallup poll headline: “Gallup poll finds that real journalists usually know better what readers need to know that do the readers themselves.”), continues to innovate, even on that old-fashioned broadsheet paper. At the FAZ, they do it with well-honed instincts about what makes readers buzz. They do it with humor, and with a deep understanding of what’s important.

Thank you, FAZ!

My kind of city (Stuttgart)

Gratuitous Netherlands photo

Lemonade stands forever! (and in every country)

The lovely Chelsea (in rainy Koblenz)

Mr. Darcy!

More mushrooms (just because they are so beautiful that Ms. O'Keefe should paint them.)

Berlin knows

Gathered - reminders in Berlin

In Berlin

My city: Frankfurt

It's the future

Where faith is lodged in little more than tradition.

Mama in charge

Licia Ronzulli, Italian MEP,  at the European Parliament in Strasbourg with her newborn girl this week. (Reuters / Vincent Kessler)

(via Senses Five)

The half-liter bier: It's standard in Germany

…und salsa tanzen. Die perfect Freitag abend in Deutschland. Plus, any time spent with the fearless FAZ intern crew is time well spent.)

Just as I’m wrapping things up here, I’m discovering that the real Frankfurt averts its eyes from visitors who do nothing more than fly in for a few days for business meetings. To really experience this city, it’s imperative to put in the effort. My initial impression that Frankfurt is little more than bankers and their playthings has been happily proven false. Most of all, I love the idea of a city that hides its true face from passers-by.

Like any good relationship, Frankfurt blooms when pursued.

My long walks proved fruitful this week when I discovered a series of dressmakers working in their shops in the city’s north end.

Beautiful wool...

...und silk

Everyone is preparing for autumn…

Marzipan

….but the weather finally feels like summer.

In Frankfurt, pockets of Germany

My daily life

The girls in the room where I work each day are so kind to me. They zip in and out for interviews, and when they’re back, they type furiously, hardly taking time to engage in frivolity.

But when they do, they do their best to include me.

It usually goes something like this:

“Krista, what do you think about our editors?”

“Bitte, wir mussen Deutsch sprechen,” I say, still hopeful that every little bit of German conversation will result in some new vocabulary gem.

They smile kindly, willing to indulge my fanciful belief that a normal conversation is possible on so little language skill.

“Was denkst du über unsere Redakteure?”

“Oh, ummmm…”

At this point, the whole thing begins to break down.

There is lots of rapid conversation around me, sometimes requiring everyone in the room to gather closely to listen to whispered revelations.

Now, I don’t know if girls in the States talk quite this fast, but I can understand MUCH less during these tête-à-têtes than I can when I’m listening to German spoken by other people. I lean in close, hopeful that perhaps a better angle will improve my comprehension. I nod knowingly. I laugh heartily.

I have no idea what’s going on.

And in such situations, it’s never entirely clear who is asking who, what. It’s only when there’s a sudden silence that I realize something’s gone wrong.

“Krista?” someone usually says, slowly and deliberately. “Waaaas Deeeeeenkst Duuuuuuu?”

I try to look pensive. Sometimes, it helps to exhale slowly. By the time I get around to slowly shaking my head in some sort of a vague signal indicating that I both agree and commiserate, everyone is laughing politely.

The worst is when I’m typing away, tuning everyone out. The German in the background turns into a low buzz. During those times, when my mind is focused on the English on my computer screen, it doesn’t matter what they’re saying, or how slowly they’re saying it: I don’t hear it.

Then, I find myself looking, ridiculously, for some sort of a cover when someone appears right next to my desk and, practically knocking on my computer screen, asks if I’m going to go to lunch with them. I turn around. Everyone is waiting, jackets on, smiling sweetly. In most cases, they’ve asked me several times if I want to come along. I just didn’t hear it. My consciousness, in those moments, was in English.

These girls, truly, deserve gold medals. Or perhaps just nice floral bouquets.

Bonanza

That’s what the flask-toting Canadian journalist wrote in an email welcoming my friend and I to her gloriously sunlit apartment in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood.

 The best coffee in Berlin? If the city was like any other in Germany, it wouldn’t take much to beat out the competition. However, I tend to trust any journalist so old-school that she carries her Scotch with her. And if it truly was good coffee, it was worth much more than five-minute walk. So, with a “It’s more about the journey than the destination” attitude, my friend and I set out toward Bonanza.

W-O-W.

 Knowing what I now know about this place, I would have braved an hour-long S-Bahn ride, let alone a five-minute walk. The baristas serve up spot-on coffee and espresso, and even the sweets were fabulous. Our chocolate croissants were completely fresh, and my friend, who stopped by again the next day, reported that the cheesecake was divine.

 Most importantly, Bonanza knows that good coffee is worth a short wait. These days, I take a few minutes’ delay between when I order and when the coffee appears as a very good sign.

 If you live in Berlin (or anywhere within S-Bahn distance), give Bonanza a try. If I lived in Berlin, I would be sure to get an apartment nearby. It’s just that good.

Basically, all the things people usually go to Berlin to see.

Instead, two days in a row, I bought a day pass for the U-bahn, headed in the vague direction of a neighborhood that sounded interesting, and wandered.

Wander in Deutsch = Hiking in English

I like to think about all the people who stood where I stood, and what they might have seen 30, 60, 80 or 100 years ago.

Makin' it pretty

I like to think about the people who are here now, and the people who should have been here now.

In the old Jewish quarter

I like to think about how people learned to follow the rules, then learned to break them, and how that history shapes Berlin culture today.

A little honesty

And about how busting that wall in 1989 created such chaos with people on the move, finally, that some of the old squats in the city’s east are still squats today.

Urban Kunst

In Tacheles

Nachbarschaft for the cool kids

Oranienburger Str.

Berliner Frühstuck

I saw a lot of creativity. A portrait of my feet was made by a photography student (“You’re either a foot fetishist or you’re telling me the truth,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth,” he said. I believed him.) A temperamental artist criticized my German. I ate dinner with a Serbian trumpeteer, an American opera singer and various other interessant Leute.

It was exactly what I had hoped to find.

Checkpoint Charlie

This is the verse that informed my concept of a curtain strong enough to divide worlds. In ancient Israel, it was the Holy of Holies separated from the rest of the earth, in all of its sinfulness that God cannot abide.

As far as curtains go, the one in Solomon’s temple was serious, my Sunday School teachers said. Only the most powerful Jewish priests could even approach the curtain, and even the highest among them wore bells on their raiments and dragged a rope, tied to one foot, behind them. If the bells stopped jingling when the priest was behind the curtain, the others knew God had struck him down, and the slain religious leader was pulled out, so as to not expose the others to the same fate.

I was just a kid when I first heard this story, and I was spooked.

That’s not the only drama surrounding the one of the Bible’s most celebrated textiles. The cloth was, at minimum, four inches thick, but more likely up to three feet thick! It was so heavy it took many men to draw it back far enough for the one chosen priest to slip through.

The curtain was so sturdy that it protected sinful men from the gaze of a righteous God who demanded justice for their sin. And it could only be an act of God (through the death of Jesus) that had the power to miraculously rip that curtain, granting mankind direct access through Jesus as spotless high priest.

With this foundational knowledge of draperies, one might imagine my confusion when I first heard the term “Iron Curtain.” I understood that this modern-day curtain separated a once-united land, and was responsible for the deaths of those who attempted to cross through without proper clearance. In terms of physical make-up, it seemed quite reasonable to me that this new curtain could have been crafted from iron. After all, if fabric could be woven several inches thick and at a weight that required many men to move, could not iron conversely be somehow molded into pleated valances? And with modern-day factories, I reasoned, why shouldn’t a curtain be manufactured wide enough to span entire countries?

My confusion persisted longer than I care to admit. In late 1989, when West and East Germans met atop the wall that had divided them, a television set flickered on somewhere in Oregon.

“Watch this,” I was told. “Remember what you see. It’s important.”

There was talk of chisels and sledgehammers, of heated words and a Cold War, of a new era in modern history.

But where, I wondered, was the curtain?

At some point, the truth became clear (that was around the same time that I discovered that the rope-around-the-ankle portion of the Holy of Holies story had no Biblical basis.)

Yet my fascination with division, on pain of death, remains. This morning, while walking through Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, a friend and I saw a metal tile built into the sidewalk. “Berliner Mauer, 1961-1989.” We paused to consider our discovery and take a few photos.

Berlin, ohne Mauer

Hours later, while walking the same road, I noticed that we had walked right over as many as three identical tiles before seeing the one that caught our attention. Where once stood a physical wall, that caused deaths for many and enormous suffering for those who lived, there is now free access. I stopped and stood next to one tile. Minutes passed. Berliners who passed by nodded knowingly. “Tourist,” they seemed to be thinking. When I pulled out my camera, a few rolled their eyes. Cars sped by. The Berliners kept walking.

Today, they can.