2033-04-01

There’s a rite of passage every year in Berlin of taking a day trip to Bielefeld, an hour and a half away by ICE, every 10 minutes. The idea is to be able to retort to aging millennials who joke that Bielefeld does not exist than they’ve actually been there.

The Abitur is coming soon, and 12th-grade students are supposed to study, but Adam Mansour, Katja Brühl, Max Kleinert, and Nora Martinek are going in Bielefeld. It is not the best day to travel. Friday is a school day, even if it’s short enough it ended at 13:30, and it’s also a popular travel day so the tickets were a bit more expensive, and Adam had to convince his parents it’s worth spending 80€ and all the Germans do it. But at least today it means they don’t have to wake up at 7:00 tomorrow.

On the train going west, Katja keeps complaining about how the train bypasses Magdeburg because of 1980s-90s politics. She says she was looking for labor-related museums in Bielefeld but couldn’t find any; instead, she talks about how the mayor of Hanover is leading a red-black coalition and it’s not the SPD that she’s voting for in September or the SPD that subsidized childcare in Berlin that let her parents afford to have children.

The other three don’t find her annoying. Max and Nora come from much wealthier families, and Nora’s is scratching 10,000€/month, but when Katja talks about how thanks to education reforms pushed on the Länder by the Green-led federal government she could go to the same school as them, they don’t feel either attacked or guilty. They feel happy that they know her and Adam. They listen to what she says about Jusos and housing, the EU, feminism, or comprehensive schools, and it clicks with them because it’s their world too. They know that there are people who resent that the cities are growing faster and associate immigration with social problems; but they associate immigration with Adam’s parents, or with Nora, who only moved to Germany when she was five but who nobody ever calls an immigrant. Adam, in turn, does get called a Syrian immigrant, even though he was born in Germany, his parents having arrived just before the 2015 wave.

There are some American tourists on the train, talking about how pretty Germany is and how they wished the United States could have such a system. Max leans forward and says, “every time they’re on a train, they talk just about the train,” figuring circumlocutions because the Americans might recognize the German word Amerikaner and realize he is talking about them. Nora and Katja giggle, and Adam then joins too.

Otherwise, they try to distract themselves by talking about the exams and about university plans. All plan to go, and all have been told by teachers that they should get good enough grades to go where they want, but Max wants to study medicine and needs to get a 1.0 to get past the numerus clausus. “Do you want me to test you?” Adam asks him.

“Lol.”

They are all competitive about grades, even Katja, who told them once that neoliberal models of academic competition promoted inequality, and the Greens should do more to prevent what she calls the Americanization of German education. But Max told them when they planned the trip last week that he was treating it as his vacation day when he wouldn’t need to think about school.

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Getting off the train, they start walking toward city hall; Bielefeld doesn’t have a bikeshare system, unlike Berlin, and bringing a bike on the ICE is not allowed. Adam insists on stopping on the way and taking detours to photograph buildings; most aren’t architecturally notable, but they’re different from how Berlin looks.

They run to the Natural History Museum and the Kunsthalle. The museum closes at 17:00 and they have less than an hour, then less an hour at the Kunsthalle until it closes at 18:00. They furiously photograph exhibits when they don’t have enough time to look at them and talk about them.

Adam is especially frantic at the archeology section, just because of the reminder of what he is giving up. He has read a lot of popular history and for the longest time wanted to go study it, but felt like he wouldn’t be able to get work with a humanistic degree and instead went for the real stream at school. When he met Katja two years ago he felt like this choice was confirmed – Katja for all her political interests is going to study environmental engineering and at no point expressed doubt about it.

Max spits on the Richard Kaselowsky memorial when the staff isn’t looking, distracted by other customers. In Berlin he might not even do this, but in Bielefeld he wouldn’t mind getting thrown out of a museum if worst came to worst. Nora and Adam didn’t know the history so as they go in he tells them Kaselowsky was a Nazi and so was the museum’s founder Rudolf Oetker, and the Oetker heirs had to return a few items that may have been stolen from Jewish owners in the Holocaust.

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They find a döner place with good reviews and good falafel for Katja and are eating there. Normally they’d go out and get different things in Berlin, but Bielefeld is still a small city and even with Germany’s rapid immigration in the 2020s it doesn’t have Berlin’s majority-migration-background demographics.

Where they’re sitting overlooks the pedestrianized streets of the old city. There are some bikes, some pedestrians, some walking delivery drones. Berlin has a few of these zones within the Ring but they’re not contiguous and Bild accuses the Greens of promoting car-free zones for everyone except the federal government.

They talk about where they want to go, but Max and Katja are hesitant to publicly say what they feel about where they are. It’s Nora who openly says that she’s having fun and that Bielefeld definitely exists no matter what her parents say, but she wouldn’t want to live here. She doesn’t know if she wants to stay in Berlin – she wants to go to TU Munich, partly to see more places, partly because of some parental pressure to leave home – but Bielefeld feels a little too dörferlich.

They all laugh, and Adam says that judging by how his parents describe Daraa, it was a lot smaller than this. He says that they didn’t ever describe Daraa as especially lively, and always compared it negatively with Berlin when he was young and then eventually they just stopped talking about it, it stopped being important to them. Max and Katja nod and start comparing Bielefeld to parts of Germany they know well through extended family – Max’s father is from Münster and his mother’s family is in Göttingen and Hamburg, Katja’s parents are both from Berlin but her mother has family in Fürstenwalde.

And then somehow it drifts back to the election. Katja is worried the Union might win the election this time, stop free work migration, and freeze the carbon taxes at present levels. Adam doesn’t have family left in Syria but they have a few classmates who have family in India, in Vietnam, in Turkey. For the most part things are okay, but there’s always the occasional teacher or group of students who still think Neukölln and Gesundbrunnen are bad neighborhoods; they know who to avoid because people who are racist always find something negative to say to Adam specifically.

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But for now, they have one another, and they have exams to score highly on to move on and go to university, and they have two hours to kill in Bielefeld until the ICE train they booked in advance departs to take them back home.