Foreign Perspectives:

Five European Journalists Reflect on their Time and Experiences Spent in Saginaw

This summer I had an amazing experience. During a month-long trip to Germany, I re-united with seven journalists who had been my guests over the years. Five of them stayed in Saginaw for a week, at a time. I collected their memories of their stays to share with you.

Back in 1995, I was a reporter at WSGW. The news department, powered by veteran newsman Dave Maurer, supported professional development in its reporters. One of these professional development organizations is the Radio and Television News Directors Association or RTNDA. They have a partnership with another, German based organization called the RIAS Berlin Kommission, designed to foster understanding and interaction between German and American journalists.
 

Here are the memories that five journalists have kept over the years, of their time in Saginaw.
 
1999: Regine Fenn

 
Regine and I reunited at the Bavarian Rundfunk headquarters in Munich. She works in the press office now, but was a reporter with “BR” when she visited the Saginaw valley in 1999.
 
Her trip included a visit to Frankenmuth, which, as a Bavarian, had more a touch of home than many other Germans from other regions of the country.
 
“I grew up in the Franconia region of Bavaria”, she recalled over lunch in a charming Munich neighborhood. “So I was surprised to hear my own dialect preserved in the voices of the people in Frankenmuth who spoke German.”
 
Regina’s independent ventures took her into the Thumb for an afternoon, where she was introduced to the regional delicacy, ‘gravy fries’.

“They were grotesque,” she remembered with a laugh. She threatened to introduce me to a Bavarian equivalent, Schweinhaxe, or a boiled ham hock.

But one of her most remarkable memories was something that’s typical, not only for Saginaw, but for many American cities.

“For me, Saginaw was a nice, small town. But you told me when I arrived that I had to rent a car. I couldn’t believe it, because the hotel was almost (across the street) from the radio station. But there were almost no sidewalks.”

2000: Sven Ole Schubert

 
Ole was a freelance journalist with Kobalt productions in 2000. He is also a musician. When we met in Berlin thus summer, we caught up on changes in his professional life. His career, like mine, had taken him into the world of public relations.
 
But music is still important to him. I found out about his current band project, Red House Sugar Farm. They had just produced and released a CD, and launched their own website, www.sugarfarm.de.
 
We met up at Potsdammer Platz, in central Berlin along with another Berlin-Saginaw veteran, Frauke Gust (see below). The three of us had coffee, but when Ole and I sat down for our interview over a beer at a bar called Solar, we were 16 stories above central Berlin.
 
“I remember the city center,” Ole said of his time in mid-Michigan. “It was kind of abandoned, like people had all moved to the suburbs unlike a lot of European cities. You only had a glimpse of what it used to be like, with shops.”
 
“Other things stand out, like street names, Tittabawassee Road,” Ole continued, pronouncing the word carefully, ‘TIH-TUH-BA-WA-SEE’. “And people were very friendly, they took me in their businesses and along for their daily routines. I experienced really down to earth life in Saginaw. It was a nice experience to see the heartland of America. I would not have seen this as a tourist.”
 
2001 (Spring): Tobias Knauf

 
Tobias is from Dresden. The city is known in German-American history because of the WWII firebomb attack that destroyed much of the city in early 1945.
 
Our reunion took place at his home, in a quiet suburb just outside of town. However, I drove through the heart of Dresden to get to his place, including down a very nasty section of cobblestone road near an abandoned military base.
 
“How did you like that road,” Tobias asked me.

“Awful, nearly rattled my car apart,” I answered.

“Well,” he answered, matter-of-factly, “Soviet tanks will do that to a road!”

At his home, over supper, Tobias broke out his photo albums from his stay in Saginaw. We took a look at one of him in a bullet-proof jacket. “I remember my ride-along with the police,” Tobias said with a smile. “We pulled somebody over and he had to arrest the person. The officer took his shotgun from the back seat, and gave it to me and said ‘here, hold this’!
 
But his favorite memory of his trip to Saginaw involves ice fishing and history.
 
“I took a trip north of Saginaw during my stay,” he started. And there, I saw some people out fishing on the ice.” He started out on the ice to do a story about the fishermen, and one of the men, hearing his accent, asked him where he was from.
 
“Germany”, he answered.

“Where in Germany?” the fisherman countered.

 “Dresden”

The man thought for a moment, and then asked, “Do they have a blue bridge there?”

Tobias said, “Yes, the Blue Wonder Bridge.”
 
The man went on to tell Tobias that he had been a P-51 pilot during WWII. He and his squadron had used the bridge as a landmark during bombing runs. He told Tobias that one day, when clouds obscured the city, he spotted the bridge, but turned the wrong way and ended up over Prague.
 
Tobias is with MDR broadcasting, where he was when I first met him nine years ago.
 
2001 Fall: Hans Joachim Bürkert

 
Joachim, or ‘Joe’ as he asked me to call him because of the difficulty most Americans have with the name Joachim, arrived on the heels of the September 11th attack on America. He recalled that his travel program was almost scrapped because of the attack.
 
“At first, they thought, no we will not go,” Joe remembered, but then the trip proceeded

(Author’s note: While I was traveling in Germany, two more German soldiers died in Afghanistan, bring to 38 the number of uniformed German soldiers and police who have died fighting with Americans since September 11th.)
 
Joe arrived in Saginaw in time to see a community patriotic rally at Wendler Arena, which was both a commemoration and a time to mourn those lives lost in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania.

“This could not happen in Germany,” Joe said at the time about the rally. “Germans do not have this same sense of patriotism, because of our past.”

Our reunion included a stroll through Heidelberg’s historic downtown, largely untouched since the late middle ages and a walk over the river Nekar. We stopped for a coffee and a chat.

“I remember the German language group,” Joe said. Over the years, I had assembled a small group of German speakers in and around town, including my former WSGW colleague, J.J. Boehm. “The most important thing that I remember is meeting very friendly people everywhere I went.”

As we enjoyed our coffee, I reminded Joe of his comments about Saginaw and patriotism in 2001, and asked if he felt the same thing still applied in Germany.
 
“No,” he offered, “something has changed. A few years ago, Germany hosted the World Cup (of soccer). Germans were waiving flags and painting flags on their faces and generally proud of being Germans in a patriotic way.”
 

Joe is now working with a theater troop of foreign students at the University of Heidelberg and does occasional work in radio.
 

2002: Frauke Gust

 
Frauke is a film critic for Radio Berlin-Brandenburg. We met, along with my other Berlin guest, Ole Schubert, at Potsdammer Platz. Frauke was on her way to a screening of the new Transformers movie. Her first report on the movie was that it was “horrible… I hate it!”

We had coffee at a corner café, in a location which, when I was there in 1995, was still scarred by the remains of the Berlin Wall, including the remains of a guard tower. Today, it looks like Times Square, with modern shopping centers, an entertainment district, hotels and even some local color. A man with a street-ready team of huskies was mushing his pack with a street sled.
 
One of her memories was a common observation of her colleagues. “I would have liked to walk around Saginaw. It is a small town, but you needed your car everywhere,” she said somewhat exasperatedly. “In New York and Berlin, you can walk around, but I would have liked to walk more.”
 
Frauke’s recalled an evening out with other women in the media. “I was one of the girls for a night,” she remembered, of an evening out with some of the area’s news reporters. She even remembered her drink of choice, which she sounded out phonetically, “Vahd-kah Crahn-berry”, in a flawless mid-Michigan accent.
           
“I had a deeper understanding of your culture by meeting people inside my profession,” she noted. Her travels included both radio and television stations, and a little broadcast entertainment experience as well.
 
“I remember going to a Polish restaurant (Krzysiak’s house in Bay City) and everyone was making their own omelets. Plus they had a heavy pastry which I tried.” Paczki, despite its European origins, remains an acquired taste!
           
You can heck out a video compilation of my colleagues  memories at www.cameronknowles.com and search for more photos of my trip by ‘friending me’ at Facebook.