Category Archives: Germany

Navigating Health and Community in Germany as a Returned Immigrant: Trains, Sport, and Food

Posted on January 10, 2026 by | Leave a comment

I emigrated in 1987 to the United States of America leaving Germany in 1985 to study oceanography in the United Kingdom. After graduate school, marriage, kids, U.S. citizenship, career, and finally retirement I arrived again in Germany, again as an immigrant, but now to the country where I was born. Renting a 2-bedroom appartment in the port city of Bremerhaven near the North Sea, I just received a 2-year residence permit. My status is that of a “former German” who speaks the language. With it came a work permit and a clear path to regain my long lost German citizenship.

Arriving in Bremerhaven from Greenland in Oct. 2025.

My first action in my new/old country was to take an 8-hour train ride to my 44-year High School reunion in Gross-Gerau. It felt good to re-connect with 5-6 people (out of ~200) with whom I shared classes and interests in motorcycles, history, politics, and travel. Oh, the price of the train ticket was about $60 return. Furthermore, this “Deutschland-Ticket” allows me to use ALL local trains, subways, and buses in ALL of Germany for an entire month. It was subsequently used to visit my parents 4 hours away and even friends and collegues in Denmark 6 hours away. Keep in mind, though, that while trains in Germany no longer run on time, they still go on at least an hourly schedule between 6 am and midnight on almost all routes. So, should you miss a train somewhere, well, relax a little, have a bite to eat or drink, chat with people, and take the next train at the always busy train stations.

Train travel in Germany: Berlin, Bremerhaven, and along the Rhine Valley near Koblenz in 2025.

Next, I joined a local tabletennis club, the Geestemünder TV for $15/month. It takes less than 10 minutes on a bicycle to reach each of the 2 public schools where our club uses the gym in the evenings to practice. Many members have keys to open on mondays, tuesdays, wednesdays, and thursdays. It was supposed to run fridays also, but nobody shows up then. Communication happens via WhatsApp in diverse groups of friends, teams, or the entire club. Our club is surrounded by perhaps 50 similar clubs located to the north, east, and south by the rural County of Cuxhaven:

Location of Cuxhaven and Bremerhaven (red area), Germany. The blue areas in the north are the Baltic Sea (top-right) and North Sea (top-left). Hamburg is the largest city about 2 train hours east. I was born in Lübeck on the Baltic Sea and raised close to Denmark 8 miles from the North Sea. [Source].

Within a week I was added to a competitive travel team. You can watch my competitive prowness in the 3rd county league online at www.mytischtennis.de. There are about 16 different county leagues, each league has about 10 teams, and each team has at least 4 players. That comes to about 640 active and competitive players for a small rural county where 200,000 people live plus the 110,000 people who live in Bremerhaven. Leagues are sorted by skill level (scored daily after each play). Above the county leagues there also exist several regional, state, and national leagues up to the professional “Bundesliga.” Here average salaries are $30,000 to $50,000 per year, so, it is not a get-rich-quick scheme. For comparison, a full-time city bus-driver in Bremerhaven makes about $40,000 per year before taxes.

It is these sport clubs (“Sportvereine” in German) that hold Germany together socially and mix up its populations. The people on my team range from 16 to 69 years of age. I train with people aged 12 as well as people aged 78 as well as teenagers from Ukraine, Russia, and Syria. I play with people who have lived and worked the port, construction, government, or academia for the last 40 years. After each competitive match a social gathering of who played follows over beer or juice as well as snacks that range from a warm sausage to fruit and sandwiches. Stories of games, people, life, and adventures follow before everyone heads home. Oh, people no longer smoke during these indoor socials, but people frequently disappear outside for a cigarette even between games. So not everyone does this for healthy living …

Stepping off the ship back last fall, I noticed difficulty breathing while bicycling, playing table tennis, or even climbing the stairs to my 3rd floor apartment. I visited a doctors office 5 minutes on foot from my home without an appointment. Within an hour a doctor interviewed me, initiated a blood test, and gave me referals. When the blood indicated the possibility of a blood clot in my lung (pulmonary embolism) in the evening of the same day, the doctor called me back to her office to pick up the prescription of a blood thinner. With 10 minutes to spare before closing time of the pharmacy I picked up a 90-day supply (200 tablets of 5 mg) of Eliquis for about $280. It removed the embolism within a week. The charge for the doctor’s visit and blood test was $140. My doctor also prescribed an inconclusive chest x-ray ($60) and a very conclusive Cat-Scan of my lung after a tracer was injected into my veins to map the flow of blood through my lungs ($520).

So, within 4 weeks I had both a solid diagnosis and successful treatment of a serious health issue. The total cost came to under $1000. In the USA the medication alone would cost $1153 AFTER 40% discount that Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer offer to those who buy Eliquis directly from them bypassing pharmacies. This “reduction” was triggered by pressure from the U.S. Government as reported by CNBC.

Every legal resident of Germany must have health insurance. That is the Law in Germany. Neither visa nor residence permit is issued without proof of health insurance. The market for short-term (1-6 months) health insurance is competitive and tailors to immigrants, expats, and long-term travelers. Within a week of arrival, I had purchased such insurance for $58/month for 6 months. As I do have excellent health insurance in the USA (at ~$2300/month for my family; I pay 20% or $500/month and my former employer the rest), I here went with the absolute bare minimum required by German Law, so it will be interesting to see what it will cover. I just submitted the bills for reimburstment and expect very little, but I may be surprised, as I was, when I paid the low cost of the outstanding health care that I received in one of the poorest cities in Germany.

In the meantime, an unusual snowstorm called “Ellie” hit northern Germany yesterday. Schools were closed, trains were canceled, and people were asked to stay home … which I did. Today, however, I was back on my bicycle to head to the farmers market to buy my bread, eggs, vegetables, and meats. Only my favorite cheese stand was not there today. Here are a few photos of my kitchen and living room today as well as my parked bicycle and some scenery during an afternoon walk around the block along the water:

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Exploring Greenland’s Coastal Currents: A Journey of Discovery with Icebreaker Polarstern

Posted on November 8, 2025 by | Leave a comment

Icebreaker Polarstern reached its home port of Bremerhaven in Germany just before Orkan “Joshua” hit northern Germany hard. The ship returned after 3 month at sea with 48 crew and 46 scientists working on ocean biology, chemistry, and physics. The 7-week expedition from Svalbard to Greenland and back to Germany culminated 3 years of planing and preparations led by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). As one of 46 scientists I stepped onto the ship almost two months ago in Longyearbyen. We planned to explore what moves ice and fresh Arctic water into the Atlantic Ocean with sensors to probe the coastal circulation.  Analyzing these data, I will now live in Bremerhaven for a few months.

The map above shows where we went to the north of Greenland. I am coloring the coastal ocean shallower than 1000 m in light blue and the deeper ocean in dark blue. Our 2025 Polarstern data are the red symbols while yellow and blue symbols show data locations from 1964 ice island, 2007 icebreaker,  and 2013 helicopter surveys. This area contains the last and thickest sea ice of the Arctic Ocean and prior ocean observations originate from floating ice islands that both the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. used during the Cold War 1947-91 such as the Arlis-1964 track (yellow line). Helicopter surveys collected a few data in 2013 (blue symbols) while the Swedish icebreaker Oden collected data along two lines farther offshore (yellow symbols).

Now how does Greenland look from the ship? Well, there is always ice and it is always cold. The coldest days we had near the coast when the skies were clear. The coldest day we had -20 C, that is -4 F for my American friends, but most of the time we had clouds and storms with temperatures warmer at -12 C (10 F) with clouds and little visibility. It snowed alot and shoveling the ship’s deck was an almost daily chore. A relaxing “cruise” it was not. We worked sensors systems in the windy cold outside during all hours of the day and night. Pictures like the above were almost always taken during my 8 hours “off” that for me was from 08:00 to 16:00, because my shift was from 16:00 to 24:00. After a phone call to my wife after midnight and a peppermint tea to warm up, I slept from 01:00 to breakfast at 07:30. As almost all scientists aboard I shared my cabin with others, so there is not too much privacy. The photos below show my bunk bed (I slept atop), shared work spaces, and the rarely empty dining room. We often ate in shifts, too, because not all 50 people would fit the dining room in one sitting. So we often had 2 sittings. A comfortable living room was next door for desert, tea, coffee, games, and conversations.

Now what about science, you may ask. Here we made a major discovery, I felt. A mathematician used her craft to predict a coastal current to the north of Greenland that, I admit, made no sense to me as it contradicted 30+ years of training and intuition in which direction such currents would flow, that is, the coast should be on the right hand side looking in the direction of the flow. The curious thing was that to the north of Greenland it should go in the opposite direction, that is, with the coast on the left. In Claudia’s numerical computer model run for months on super computers, this current-in-the-wrong-direction was a both prominent and persistent feature. I always discarded it as an unrealistic feature of some computer code run amok. And yet, when we actually reach the coast of northern Greenland and I measure ocean currents from a ship sensor that runs 24/7 to tell me current speed and direction, here this weired or “wrong” current was. It screamed at me from the screen the moment I plotted the data and shared it with Claudia who was aboard with the comment: “Your model is right and my intuition was wrong. Your current is at the same location, the same speed, and in the same direction as your model said it would.” Furthermore, a distinct and separate way to estimate ocean currents from ocean temperature and salinity observations showed the exact same thing. That’s now two good complementary confirmation of the current that nobody has ever seen or measured … until now that we aboard Polarstern did so on Sept.-23, 2025:

The map on the left shows our study area to the north of North Greenland. On it in red are sticks whose length indicate the speed or strength of the ocean current (at 56 meters below the surface) while its orientation gives the direction of the current. The light blue is shallow and dark blue is deep water as before. The current is sluggish offshore with a weak component to the south. In contrast, closest to the coast of North Greenland we find long sticks that point to towards the left (west by north-west). This is Claudia’s Coastal Current.

The two plots on the left provide more detail, as it shows how the current varies with depth and distance from the coast along a line from the coast towards offshore. The bottom of the shallow ocean is the black line from 100-m to 350-m meter at a distance of 20-40 km from the coast. The top-left panel shows the current (in colors) across the section where blue colors indicate currents flow into the page while red colors indicate currents that flow out of the page towards us viewing it with the coast on the left. The bottom-left panel shows the velocity component along the section with a flow that is mostly onshore near the surface.

There is so much more to this story as well as additional stories, notice the red dots in the top-left panel between 150-m and 300-m depth that indicate a strong flow to the south and east, but I save this for later. I also do not wish to tell you about the two ocean sensors we quickly deployed at this location to stay there until we, perhaps, recover them with new data next year or the year there after. I do wish to close this essay, however, with the view of Greenland that we had where we discovered Claudia’s coastal current. Science is fun, exciting, and always surprises.

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Posted in Computing, Germany, Greenland, Ice Cover, Ice Island, Oceanography, Polar Exploration, Polarstern

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Faith, Freedom, and War: German Summer School in Ukraine

Posted on June 30, 2025 by | Leave a comment

The Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv invited me to teach at their Summer Language School. Until last week I worked with ~50 Ukrainian students from about 10 in the morning to 5 in the evening monday through saturday. We met daily in classrooms, on the lawn outside, and in pubs over food and beer. The main purpose of the Summer School for the 17-21 year old students was to learn German as their second, third, or fourth foreign language. Their Ukrainian teachers knew every rule of German grammar, spoke perfect German, and half of them had PhDs in German literature, linguistics, education, and/or language theory.

Students and teachers alike love their country, their faith, and their freedom deeply. All hate the war that Russia wages on them personally: Every day Russia tries to kill them by drones and missiles, tries to erase their history, tries to pillage their resources, and tries to exterminate their language, culture, and freedom. Russia’s war is present in Ukraine at every location for every person at all times. Nevertheless, I went to open-air concerts, bars, restaurants, and churches filled with joyous young and old people with and without small children. This very public life serves as a defiant and powerful act of resistance to Russia’s war as does vibrant street art and music.

The people of Ukraine need our weapons to protect their freedom to be human and to be free from the violence, terror, and oppression imposed by Russia on them. Never have I seen a people believing in God as strongly as the Ukrainian students and teachers whom I met last 3 weeks. Furthermore, Lviv centers many overlapping faiths with churches of the Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Ukrainian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and even a small Jewish community. Furthermore, I met both atheist and agnostic students studying at the Ukrainian Catholic University. This rich and diverse tapestry of believes exists in overlapping circles of ancient history, song, prayers, and common purpose. All are united and opposed to Russia’s terror of random death by drone or missile. People are tired, yes, tired and exhaused by 3.5 years of war, but people are united for the noble purpose to be free, to be at peace with their neighbors, and to be part of a liberal and democratic Europe. Russia responded to these desires with war, because Russia perceives a free, creative, and productive Ukraine as a threat to its own sclerotic, decadent, and corrupt society.

Unlike Russia, Ukraine values individual life and liberty, but Russia has 4 soldiers for every one Ukraine has. How can I best help my Ukrainian friends in their just defence to protect their freedom and to be part of a peaceful Europe? They need air defence radars and missile systems, they need artillery shells and cannons, they need tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets, they need drones and electronic jamming gear. I struggle with this question, write and call my U.S. senators and Congresswoman in Delaware to support Ukraine, and talk to friends and family about my travels to Ukraine, but it all seems puny and I am frustrated and impatient. In those moments I recall the wise words passed on to me 2 weeks ago by an older man of Irish-Catholic faith:

Act like the world depends on you,
but pray it depends on God.

Ignatius of Antioch (~100 AD)
Ignatius of Antioch

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Walking Lviv 2024: Legacy of Viking, Russian, and German Occupations

Posted on June 29, 2024 by | Leave a comment

The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin claims Ukraine based on a false reading of “Kyivan Rus” (see map below) about 1100 years ago. With equal ignorance I here claim it for Sweden or Denmark or Lithuania or Poland, because the Kyivan Rus were a mishmash of Slavic, Viking, and nomadic tribes who settled and ruled the forests and steppes between the Baltic and Black Seas between 800 to 1100 AD. Furthermore, while “Rus” is the root for “Russia” (or “Russland” in German), “Rus” derives from the Old Norse “rods” which means “men who row.”

Putting another spin on old histories, I proclaim that Russia is, historically, a fringe principality that belongs to Ukraine. So, lets call Putin’s claim to Ukraine what it is: A colonial, imperialistic land grab along the same lines of an Adolf Hitler and a Joseph Stalin who divided Eastern Europe in 1939 with no regard to the people they both oppressed and slaughtered. Visiting Lviv in the summer of 2024, I find the bloody histories of these “Bloodlands” (Snyder, 2010) everywhere:

On my evening stroll on my first day in Lviv I stumble across an overgrown and unkept green space at the end of a small and winding residential street up a hill. Along my accidental path I find a 10 feet high wooden cross near semi-collapsed and overgrown one-story buildings that resemble barracks. Red poppies and barbed wire enclose the cross while burnt candles litter its base. An inscription in both Ukrainian and English tells me, that I am standing within Stalag-328 where 140,000 prisonors of war (POW) were murdered 1941-44. Nazi-Germany maintained this POW camp where the death rate among its Soviet, Belgian, French, and Italian soldiers exceeded 50%.

Half an hour later I find a huge 3-story building along a busy road that covers an entire city block. Later I find out, that this is the St. Bridget’s Convent for Women built in the 17th century, but it serves as a prison for the last 250 years which perhaps explains its decrepit look on Horodotska Street. On one of its walls I find a plaque in Ukrainian, Polish, and English stating that the Stalin’s Secret Police, the NKVD, shot 1,172 citizens of Lviv in this building on 19th of June 1941. This massacre at the Brygidki prison was part of a mass killing throughout Soviet occupied Poland and Ukraine.

For context, the Hitler-Stalin treaty of 1939 divided Poland such that Lviv was occupied by Stalin’s troops from 1939-41. About 1.25 Mil. “Enemies of the People” of Polish and Ukrainian descent where deported in 2 years. This occupation ended when Nazi-Germany invaded the Soviet Union and captured Lviv on 30th of June 1941. Throughout Lviv, Poland, and Ukraine the NKVD committed massacres of local populations. In Lviv alone about 7,000 Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish citizen were shot or blow up in their prison cells days before Hitler’s troops entered the city to start another massive killing cycle.

Immediately after German troops occupied Lviv progroms of the Jewish population started. Encouraged and supported by German authorities members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) belonging to militias of Stepan Bandera participated in the progroms June 30 to July 2 and July 25 to July-30 (Himka, 2011). More than 6,000 Jews were murdered this first month of German occupation of Lviv. Inciting the local population to round-up, humiliate, and kill Jewish men, women, and children, German propaganda justified the progroms with the NKVD massacres by falsely blaming the Jewish population for it. While OUN leadership never directly endorsed participation in the progroms, they also did nothing to stop their members who participated enthusiastically. Their hatred of Poles and Jews, however, was part of an ideological program modeled on the German and Italian totalitarian regimes headed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.


“Jewish woman chased by Ukrainian crowd during the pogrom. Yad Vashem Photo Collection, 80DO2″.

The photo above was taken the first day of the Lviv Progrom July-1, 1941 by an unknown photographer who stands on Vesela Street a block north-east of the Opera House. I walked those streets admiring street art and murals not knowing what had happened on these streets 83 years before: A grown woman has her dress ripped off, has her face bloodied, and is chased with wodden sticks by a mob of teenagers. She has only shoes and undergarments left to protect her, as she runs up a hill in terror while a large crowd of spectators in the background care not. Himka (2011) reproduces this photo and places it into a larger context.

On my way home from Brygidki Prison I pass a beautiful mural that brings me back into the present. The blue and yellow of the mural reminds me of the colors of the Ukrainian flag. The braided flowers on the head perhaps symbolize this person as a women from Ukrainian. In my present sad mind, I see the the same human in both the symbol of a Ukrainian woman in this mural and the actual Ukrainian women in the 1941 photo. The paint peeling reveals red brick and an arch, but I also see an accidental thumbs-up sign in red. The mural is about two blocks west of the Opera House and thus near the center where the Lviv progroms took place.

The bottom photo shows the Opera House from the north. There probably is a story in the small peaceful statue and the building directly behind it, but I do not (yet) know it.

Later that day my first Air Raid Alarm woke me up at night. In this war Vladimir Putin wants to re-establish the old Soviet Empire with the boundaries that Hitler and Stalin had agreed upon in 1939. The past is in the present and both are insane.

P.S.: Edited Oct.-20, 2024 by rewriting the last paragraph and removing some ill-fitting photos.

References:

Himka, J.-P., 2011: The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd. Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 53, No. 2/4, 209-243.

Plokhy, S., 2021: The Gates of Europe, a History of Ukraine, Basic Books, New York, NY.

Snyder, T., 2010: Bloodlands, Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, New York, NY.

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Lviv, Ukraine, 2024: A Traveler’s Perspective on History, Culture, and Conflict

Posted on June 24, 2024 by | Leave a comment

Lviv lies about 40 miles east of the Polish border in Ukraine. It is closer to peaceful Hamburg in Germany (1200 km) than it is to destroyed Mariupol in Ukraine (1250 km). Leaving Hamburg by train, I arrived 20 hours later in Lviv where I spent the next 7 days. As a scientist I planned to collect my own data to calibrate media reportings. I wanted to test second-hand opinions to perhaps revise them based on first-hand observations to better anticipate the future and my actions within it. How can I best support Ukraine in its current war with Russia?

The U.S. Department of State advises “Ukraine – Level 4: Do not travel” in dark red letters, because it is a country at war. I ignored this advice, but nevertheless registered details of my travel plans with the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program. I also followed my government’s advice on how to prepare for travel to high-risk areas such as making a notarized will and to communicate daily with my wife. I do the same when backpacking for 30 days in Yosemite, Adam Ansel, and John Muir Wilderness areas in California. Looking back, I believe that visiting Lviv is less dangerous than visiting Fordyce, Arkansas (population 3,400). Death by random shooting in this town is about 1 person killed for every 1000 residents as of yesterday. In Lviv death by random Russian missile is about 1 person killed for every 100,000 residents. The last Russian missile hit Lviv (population 700,000) a year ago and killed 7 people. Air defences, too, have improved the last 12 month thanks to Norwegian, U.S., and German systems.

My voyage to eastern and across central Europe brought me into spaces that were violently contested during the last 1000 years. Recall that the current border between Poland and Ukraine was drawn in 1939 when Adolf Hitler of Germany and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union divided Poland (as well as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) a mere 10 days before World War Two. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls these lands “Bloodlands” where the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the Soviet Union killed between 10 and 20 Million women, children, and men from 1933 to 1945. My father was born 1934 and my family celebrated his 90th birthday the weekend before I left for Lviv.

My voyage started at my parents home in Neustadt on the western edge of the Baltic Sea at 6 am. A first train got me to the old Hanseatic town of Luebeck, a second train to Hamburg, and a third train to Berlin. Here I bought the missing train ticket #5 from Przemysl in Poland to Lviv in Ukraine before boarding train #4 from Berlin to Przemysl. My reserved seat for the next 10 hours placed me opposite to a young Ukrainian artist traveling home to Kyiv. Along the way she introduced me to Lviv where she had lived in a prior life. Her pointers of Lviv places to visit, eat, and walk provided me with major initial reference points. As she had crossed the border into Ukraine many times before, we went for a evening stroll in Przemysl and found a busy beer-garden where we had a beer and gin tonic. Despite this “delay,” we still had to wait for 3 hours to be allowed on the next train that was 2 hours late. A large group of perhaps 20 Orthodox Jewish men with U.S. passports were waiting as well. I asked one of them what language they were speaking and he replied “Jiddish.” Bente Kahan’s music from her album “Farewell Cracow” was on my mind even more now than it was prior to this voyage. Once this last train left Poland just before midnight, the mood became somber.

Ukrainian border guards checked passports on the train while different heavily armed military personel counted the number of passengers at least 3 times independently of each other. It was pitch dark outside without any lights visible anywhere. The train, too, had lights dimmed. After a very short 45 minutes the train to Kyiv made its first stop in Lviv and I got off.

It was about 3:30 am local time and I had no idea how to get the 2 miles from the train station to my bed. During the general curfew from midnight to 5 am all public transportation stops. Nobody at Lviv’s station spoke English and I could not read the cyrillic signs. So I stumbled along dead tired hoping, first, that my GPS would lead the way and, second, police enforcing the curfew may be sympathetic towards a tired and lost American tourist.

Sun light came out when I arrived in my small appartment at 4 am. The Wifi worked flawlessly and I called my wife via WhatsApp. It was only 9 pm in Delaware and we talked for an hour on what had happened this long day. Then I let my Ukrainian AirBnB host, Olya, know that I had arrived:

Olya: Everything went well. A person found me at the train station. He did not speak English, but I had pen and paper prepared as well as lat/lon of your place on my GPS that I use for hiking in the woods. He followed my direction and got me within 200 m. The rest was easy including the hour-long WhatsApp phone call with my wife from inside your appartment using your Wifi. It “only” took me 22 hours total door-to-door, so I will now head for some sleep … which is hard, because it is light outside, curfew is over, and I already saw so many cool stuff in the dark that I want to head outside to explore more, but my wife told me to sleep a few hours and wise man is one who listens to his wife … or so i am told by wiser men than myself. ~Andreas

I was writing the above lines with this view of the bed, desk, fridge (red), and the door to the bathroom, shower, washing machine and dryer. The entrance is the door on the right. This was my home away from home for the next 7 days where I rested after long walks to explore Lviv, its culture, history, public life, and people. The internet speeds in Lviv were faster than those in either Germany or at home in Delaware.

As a teaser for my next post I show the first three photos that I took the next morning after 4 hours of sleep within 5 minutes walking from my bed in Lviv.

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