becoming german
I was reading an article in NEON the other day on becoming german, it is a really neat project a grad student is doing after living in Germany for the past 15 years but always feeling left out of conversations with her friends when the topic turned to childhood memories, so she decided to put together a database of memories submitted via her website which would allow people, for example, who wanted to know what there favorite book would have been when they were five years old growing up in munich, mine apparently would have been charlie and the chocolate factory, and my favorite characters would have been the umpalumpas. ahhhh, if I had only been german, wait, no I think that that was my favorite book when I was five. But the web site also has the ability to only give results from west or east germany, which means that one can look into the different cultural elements that go into making the modern german. So if you are one of the 5 people in the world who longs for childhood memories of growing up in in the vaterland your prayers have been answered.