Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  “Basically, the evolutionary purpose of play, from my analysis, is to allow children to practice controlling their own behavior, solving their own problems, planning and carrying out a plan—in a sense to practice being an adult because that’s the situation where they’re in control,” he said. “When adults are around, they’re not in charge of their own activities. There’s an adult there either telling them what to do, solving their problems, or advising them.”

  In his book Free to Learn, Gray advocates for play-based schools that take this idea to its logical conclusion: schools without curriculum and children who are allowed to learn the way nature intended, through their own self-directed exploration—through play. While much of his book reminded me of our kita’s democratic philosophy, I couldn’t see the German public school system with its revered teachers and carefully tracked courses embracing the idea of primary and secondary schools totally based on free play. However, many German parents and educators do value and promote the ability of children to play without adult interference at almost every opportunity. We saw it every day in the freewheeling garden at kita and in the hands-off approach at hort—and simply in the frequent sight of children moving by themselves through our neighborhood.

  Surrounded by this culture, Zac and I were forced to confront our relatively overprotective attitudes as American parents. We had many discussions about how much freedom we should give Sophia, and little by little, as situations presented themselves, we began to let her do more and more by herself.

  One Saturday afternoon the whole family decided to go to Dragon Park. It was a sunny, spring day, and the playground was full. Sophia ran into a group of friends from school, including Katti, and none of their parents were with them. We let her go play with her friends on the other side of the playground and tried to give her some space while we stayed with Ozzie. After some time, we were ready to leave the park to get some coffee and ice cream, but Sophia didn’t want to go. She asked to stay—playing with her friends was more important than ice cream! Zac and I looked at each other. We knew another time had arrived when maybe we should step back a little.

  So we left Sophia behind at the park, while Zac, Ozzie, and I went around the corner to a café. The adults ordered frothy cappuccinos, and Ozzie had a giant cone with sprinkles. It should have been lovely, but something—someone—was obviously missing.

  “I’m having a hard time enjoying this,” I confessed.

  “I know, me too,” Zac said.

  “Are we doing the right thing?”

  “Of course we are,” he said.

  “What if she’s climbing and falls and gets hurt?”

  “She won’t.”

  “But what if—” I said. It was really hard not to play that game.

  “If she falls, someone will help her,” Zac said. “They will send someone to get us.”

  She didn’t fall or get hurt. Zac and I drank our coffees and waited the extra special long time it takes for Ozzie to eat an ice cream cone. By the time we returned to the playground, her friends had left, and Sophia was by herself swinging so high on the swing the chains went slack for a moment before they pulled her back. When she saw us, Sophia jumped off the swing, all smiles.

  “Can I have some ice cream now?”

  9

  Dangerous Things

  Every once in a while, a bomb is found in Berlin. With all the building going on in the city, construction crews inevitably uncover unexploded ordnance left over from World War II. Whenever this happens, everything stops until disposal teams determine if the bomb is still viable and, if so, neutralize it. The discovery of bombs shut down the S-Bahn trains many times while we lived in Berlin.

  Once an old bomb was found near Zac’s research institute, which is located in an East German town that was nearly leveled during the war. At lunch, the other scientists discussed the discovery, and realizing that Zac was among them, one of his colleagues tried to reassure him. “Don’t worry, it’s a Soviet one, not American,” he said.

  “Oh, I know,” Zac quipped, “if it was American, it would have exploded.” Only half the table laughed. Zac said he didn’t think the scientists from East Germany appreciated his joke.

  Unexploded bombs are dangerous reminders of the legacy of World War II in Germany. According to the magazine Der Spiegel, the Allies dropped an estimated 1.9 million tons of bombs on Germany during a five-year strategic offensive in the war, and seventy years later, Germans are still uncovering 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions every year.

  With this history and the ongoing threat of buried bombs, you might think average Germans wouldn’t enjoy the sound of anything exploding. But here I present the cultural paradox of the German New Year’s Eve, the holiday they call “Sylvester.” On New Year’s Eve at midnight in Berlin, practically every man, woman, and child in the city goes out into the streets to shoot off their own personal fireworks. And I am not talking about sparklers or even Roman candles. They were the real thing. Rockets launched out of empty champagne bottles placed on the street that shoot high into the air and explode into huge flowers of colored sparks—ones that change color, sizzle, and dive in different directions. Then there are the ones that make a quick flash followed by an extremely loud bang that rattles the windows of buildings. People fire off so many that at five past midnight, smoke fills the streets in a dense fog. From above, it must look like the entire city is on fire.

  We enjoyed our first New Year’s in Berlin from the relative safety of our fifth-floor apartment, with the doors to our balcony securely closed. It was an amazing, beautiful, and terrifying experience all at the same time. (And later, annoying, because some people don’t stop at midnight, so the early morning of January 1 is riddled with sudden random explosions.)

  I do not have a good explanation why Germans like to start the New Year with a dangerous free-for-all display of fireworks. Another expat suggested that Germans love to do this because they are so reserved most of the time that they need one night a year to really cut loose. I’ve thought that maybe they like to celebrate with explosives as a way to defy their history with war and terror, a way to thumb their nose at fear. But that could be overthinking it. They may just really, really like fireworks.

  New Year’s is also one example of how Germans approach dangerous things in a much different way than Americans. I shouldn’t have been surprised when Sophia came home from school with a piece of paper asking that she be allowed to play with matches. Following the air project that had them building flying machines, her school had moved on to the element of fire. We were asked to let our children light candles and help them conduct experiments with fire at home to complement the other work they were doing in the classroom.

  Sophia was super excited and wanted to do it right away. We got some candles out for dinner and handed her a box of matches. She’d already learned how to light them at school and waved me off impatiently when I tried to instruct her. She wanted to show us her new skill, so we stood back and watched as Sophia lit the match. Delight danced in her eyes as she carefully touched the match to the candlewick. Then she stepped back and waved the match in the air until it went out. She looked at us across the table and smiled. I shook my head. I couldn’t believe we were letting our eight-year-old daughter play with matches—something I was taught never, ever to do.

  The Art of Fire

  This approach to fire education is partly the result of the work of Kain Karawahn, a German fire performance artist turned fire-safety educator. In 1984, Karawahn set a section of the Berlin Wall on fire. He told me his intention wasn’t to destroy the wall but to make art. He felt trapped in the political island that was then West Berlin and the fire was his vision of escape. “When you set a concrete wall on fire just for a few seconds, it’s a statement of freedom,” he said.

  Karawahn has worked in many mediums, but all of his art centers on the theme of the human relationship to fire. He has put on fire performances throughout Germany and held exhibitions in the United S
tates, including in New York and Seattle. Even with big budgets for his projects, Karawahn felt unsatisfied with his ability to reach only relatively limited audiences within the art world. Then in 2004, a German kindergarten asked him to do a workshop on fire, and he found his best audience.

  Karawahn’s workshops go against the old wisdom that children should never play with fire—instead he encourages them to engage with fire in a safe way. In the language of children, he teaches five-year-olds to build a “happy fire,” one that doesn’t destroy anything or burn anyone.

  On the first day of Karawahn’s five-day workshop, he has children light matches, a lot of them: about twenty children ignite 1,000 matches. “You have to go for saturation,” Karawahn explained. “If you like ice cream and suddenly you get as much ice cream as you want, after ten ice creams you are sick, and you don’t want to eat it anymore. It’s the same with the fire.”

  By the end of the workshop, Karawahn has his young charges making their own mini campfires outside and attempting to cook sausages on them. This activity quickly teaches children that making a fire is a social activity, that they need to pair up so one can feed the fire to keep it going while the other one cooks food over it.

  Karawahn’s kindergarten workshops gained praise from teachers and parents and soon caught the attention of fire-safety organizations. Unfallkasse Berlin, an insurance company, and Das Sichere Haus, a nonprofit comprised of governmental agencies, insurance companies, and associations focused on safety, partnered with Karawahn to produce a fire activity guide for children called “Fascination Fire!” which gives parents and educators the tools to help introduce children to fire in a safe way.

  Although it might seem counterintuitive that insurance agencies would back such an approach, Karawahn says it directly addresses a pattern with fire accidents and young children. Our natural fascination with fire can be so strong that prohibiting children from using it just means they will do it in secret, for example, by lighting matches in their bedroom with the door closed while their parents are busy with something else. If they’ve never had any experience with matches, Karawahn said, the children don’t know how to hold them or put them out, so they burn their fingers, drop the match, and perhaps catch a carpet or bedsheet on fire. In the most tragic cases, instead of calling out for help, young children who’ve been strictly told never to play with matches are so afraid of getting into trouble, they hide. By the time adults discover the fire, the children can die from lack of oxygen or smoke inhalation.

  This is why Karawahn is so passionate about advocating for children to play with fire and learn how to manage it in a safe way. He has won awards for his fire education program and taught many teachers in kitas and primary schools how to bring these fire lessons into their classrooms. Yet he has not won over everyone in Germany. While his approach has been accepted in Berlin and Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin, it has yet to spread to the other regions. Still, Karawahn’s approach to fire reflects an ongoing shift in the German attitude toward children using dangerous things.

  Tools

  An old German nursery rhyme, which is also the title of a 1960s pop song, goes: “Messer, gabel, schere, licht sind für kleine kinder nicht,” or “Knives, forks, scissors, and flames are not for little children.” Siegbert Warwitz, a German psychologist and educator who has studied risk extensively, said this attitude was a thing of the past, from a time when children were told to avoid everything potentially dangerous. “The modern pedagogical method is for adults to teach children early on how to handle these objects safely,” Warwitz said. “Otherwise children will explore them in secret, which is when they become truly dangerous.”

  This is the same idea behind Karawahn’s fire project, and I’ve seen this approach to tools in action in Berlin. Both my children were given things in kita and at school that I’d never expect them to be allowed to use at such a young age.

  At kita, children as young as three participated in cooking projects. Sophia’s favorite was when they made a fruit salad. A group of students went to the store with the teacher to buy the food. They washed and prepared the salad, and cut the fruit themselves with knives. She was four at the time. She was so excited about the project, she told me all about it the moment I picked her up.

  “You cut fruit? With a knife!” I exclaimed.

  “It was a kinder knife,” she assured me. “Not too sharp.”

  From then on she would often come into the kitchen when I was cooking and ask to help cut the fruits and vegetables. At first, I gave her a butter knife, but after a few rounds of frustration, I found something sharper and sat with her and showed her how to use it.

  As my kids grew older, they participated in more projects that involved the use of tools that were either close to versions adults would use or were the actual, real thing. In primary school, Sophia had more cooking projects using real knives. On her school trip, the children in her class were invited to bring pocketknives so they could whittle wood.

  At home, my attempts at introducing child-safe tools were rebuffed. I once bought Ozzie a pair of plastic scissors that were designed only to cut paper. I think he tried using these once before deciding they were lame (they were). He took to stealing his sister’s scissors until I finally relented and got him a sharp pair of his own.

  Adventure Play

  The children also found a host of dangerous things at the abenteuerspielplätze (“adventure playgrounds”) of Berlin. As I’ve mentioned, all German playgrounds tend to have more exciting and dangerous structures than American playgrounds, but adventure playgrounds are another thing entirely. These spaces are designed specifically to encourage children to experience the risk of wild, free play, even in the middle of a big city.

  Adventure playgrounds come in many styles, but most feature opportunities for kids to build forts and tree houses, cook food on open fires, and try out a variety of tools. Some even let children take care of farm animals. Kids can also simply play in a space meant specifically for them. At each site, adult staff or volunteers are usually present, but they are there to help with projects or to teach classes, not to supervise the children’s play.

  Adventure playgrounds are not a German invention. They were first developed by the country’s northern neighbor, Denmark, but Germans eagerly adopted the concept in the 1960s and ’70s. Today, there are many such free-form play spaces throughout Germany. Berlin has one for nearly every neighborhood district. The adventure playground in our corner of the city was called “Forcki,” nicknamed after the larger park, Forckenbeckplatz, that was its home.

  Forcki is a bauspielplatz, a construction playground, where children are encouraged to build all kinds of things, including towering forts. Forcki was first opened in 1993 and seemed pretty well built out by the time we saw it—multiple handcrafted wooden towers crowded the grounds, creating a maze of plank boxes for children to explore. The playground advertises its attractions for kids in a long list: “Adventure, excitement, action, good moods, bad moods … making fire, building, destroying, axes, hammers, nails, screwdrivers, large and small saws, cold, heat, wind, sun, moon, chatting, laughing, being sad, running, jumping, playing …” It goes on that way for several more lines apparently offering the children a chance at playing in ways that are not always safe, not always happy, yet offer a lot of freedom and excitement.

  Adventure parks like Forcki are aimed at children ages seven to thirteen. Sophia was at the start of that age range, and Ozzie was younger. Burdened by cautious American parents, both our children didn’t visit these parks by themselves. Sophia did go to Forcki with groups from her school several times to play among the creaky towers and roast stockbrot (“stick bread”) on an open fire.

  We also visited several other adventure playgrounds as a family. Ozzie’s favorite type were kinderbauernhof (“child farms”), which had all kinds of farm animals on site: rabbits, ducks, geese, sheep, goats, pigs. Some even had horses. One of the best was Pinke Panke, located north of Berlin.
We visited this child farm on a cold misty day in March, when it seemed the whole place was nothing but a huge mud puddle. Little kids like Ozzie seemed particularly drawn to these places, and there were plenty of parents at Pinke Panke, ferrying their young ones around to see the animals like at a visit to the zoo. But several primary school children were also there on their own, helping feed the livestock and mucking out stalls with pitchforks and rakes.

  When we went into the main building for cocoa and coffee, we shared a long table with a large group of teenagers who were half playing board games but mostly talking and joking around. Clearly they thought of this old barn as their space. I thought it was incredible that any type of “playground” could hold the attention of such a wide range of young people from wide-eyed toddlers to wisecracking adolescents.

  Even for older kids, adventure playgrounds offer an enticing mix of freedom and risk. They are allowed to do almost anything they want and are openly invited to try out tools normally reserved for adults. At Kolle 37, an adventure playground tucked between trendy restaurants in the bustling Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, someone had set out a marble block on a stump, along with a chisel and a heavy metal hammer. Just lying there. No instructors hovering nearby. When we visited, Sophia picked up the tools gingerly, feeling their weight before putting them down again. A few moments later, two children about nine or ten years old came running by. They skidded to stop at the block, and a girl picked up the hammer and gave the block a few resounding blows before tearing off again. This struck me as an accident waiting to happen.

  Accidents do happen at adventure playgrounds, even bad ones. The German courts haven’t often sided with people seeking to sue for damages or to change the playgrounds to make them safer. In a 1978 case, which the play-advocacy group ABA Association calls “the adventure playground judgment,” a German federal court ruled against an injured person in part because the purpose of adventure playgrounds is to educate children about the “existence of risk” and teach them through daring how to manage “the dangers of daily life.” In other words, the dangers in these play spaces are real, on purpose, and no one is responsible for managing the risk but the child.