"Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Considerations by the Way in The Conduct of Life, 1860
Diary of My Disastrous Law Career: From Harvard to Heaven Help Me
Chapter 2
This blog answers the question I'm often asked of why I left the practice of law. The short answer is: because my law career was a disaster. In this post, the second post in this blog, I give you examples from the disastrous circumstances of my law career, back when I was a fresh Harvard Law School graduate, in a place and time I found very difficult: Germany in the 1990s. How did I get there? See the previous post about the disasters that were my summer associate jobs. Onward.
Lawyer Job 1: Hamburg
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1996, there I was, where I didn't want to be: Germany. Most of my experiences there had been miserable: I had encountered rude people, anti-foreigner sentiment, the apparently constantly gloomy and rainy weather of Hamburg which was also a quite sleepy town back then, lack of vegetarian food at that time and bacon bits on everything, and no fun. Still, unsinkable, I decided to make the best of it. My then-husband got a wonderful job at a Hamburg law firm, which he enjoyed and where he excelled and was respected, paid nicely, and given a BMW. The partners began obviously grooming him for partnership, a state of affairs he absolutely deserved, and one I would never experience.
After being rejected from my summer associate firm in Chicago for being a woman married to a man from another city and country (don't those words look insane? and possibly illegal?), I had been unable to find a job as a lawyer in the States, where my Harvard Law degree was impressive; neither could I find a job in Hamburg, where the idea of a young American woman lawyer was unknown, with or without a Harvard Law degree.
All I could find was a sort of gig, working with two German lawyers, a partner and a senior associate, at what was the number one law large corporate law firm in Hamburg at that time (most Hamburg firms have since merged into even larger English or American firms), who were in the middle of representing a major American corporation on a deal during Germany's deregulation era and wanted prestige support and a lot of behind-the-scenes document revision. This basically meant a lot of work untangling and rewriting vast numbers of draft English language contracts and ancillary documents so that a US company could buy a German company in a newly de-monopolized industry, doing some drafting and some written translation from German into English (my German was fluent, though I constantly reminded people I was a lawyer, not a translator), and being part of the team so they could tell the American client they had an American Harvard Law grad on board. None of this was the type of law work I had wanted to do; I had wanted to work on intellectual property matters and related litigation, not mergers and acquisitions, but there I was.
The gig also meant coping with hostile law firm partners who were angry that two attorneys from their ranks had brought me on and who took their anger out on me. It meant contending with a female office manager who felt threatened by a woman who wasn't an administrative assistant and who did her best to damage or thwart my professional relationships with other lawyers and with admins. It also meant dealing with gendered and non-gendered abuse, and anti-foreigner attitudes, all for the equivalent of $8.59/hour.
Correct: $8.59/hour. That is not a typo. And there were no benefits or anything of that nature; this was not official full-time employment but a contract role. I wonder if that was a record low wage for a Harvard Law grad at a law firm. I managed to arrange a deferral for my student loans. In the meantime, I had other expenses, like taking the BarBri bar exam preparation course which cost $2,000 at that time. US firms often paid for bar review courses for their new associates -- my classmates who worked at US firms reported this to be true -- but the Hamburg firm refused when I asked. They said they didn't have that kind of expense in Germany. (In Germany, not only was education free, the State paid you to go to school.) I understood that, but it didn't change the fact of the expense. Rather, it highlighted that pretty much nothing about my law career was going the way I had envisioned. The two attorneys in Hamburg wanted a US lawyer, but they didn't want to pay for a US lawyer. I paid for the course; I passed the bar.
As an example of the uncomfortable work environment, several of the partners refused to speak to me, under any circumstances, whether in the elevator, anywhere at the firm, or on the firm outing I attended. It felt weird to say good morning, the standard greeting, cheerfully and in that person's language, and see the person stare straight ahead as if I weren't there. This took on an additional tragicomic dimension at the firm outing. We were riding bicycles in a kind of game where you had to complete this course, and I pedaled up to one of the partners and said hello how are you today. Staring straight ahead and not speaking, he accelerated to get away from me. This stunned me and I suddenly felt hot and shaky, and started to wobble and fall off the bike. As I was falling, I could somehow tell that the ground below was covered in poison ivy. There was something about the acrid smell, even though I had never touched poison ivy before, that I recognized as my face and body approached the ground. I hit the ground, I cried out, the partner pedaled on, and I suffered a terrible rash and even more terribly hurt feelings. Actually that's not tragicomic at all, is it, just mean, sad, and awful.
An example from my first day at the firm, of not fitting in, or running legs-first into gendered disrespect: I was excited for my first day, and chose a very professional sheath dress and matching jacket to wear, with low heeled pumps, pearls, and a scarf. Very lawyerly, right, and it seems my look is what women lawyers are still wearing now, 20 years later but with the more colorful shoes that are an option today. When I arrived, other (male) lawyers in the lobby stared at my legs. At my initial meetings that first day, everyone (men) stared at my legs. I thought maybe I had gotten some dirt on my legs getting out of the car, but I didn't see anything. The next day, and throughout the week, always wearing skirts or dresses, I noticed that people kept looking at my legs. I observed that all of the lawyers were men, dressed in suits (with pants), and most of the women at the firm were administrative assistants, dressed in jeans. The office manager and librarian were women, often in pants. I discussed this with one of the administrative assistants, who said she was glad to wear jeans so that no one bothered her.
There wasn't a template for what women lawyers in Germany should wear. This was likely due in part to the fact that there weren't many women lawyers in Germany at all. Data shows that in 2016, 34.4% of German lawyers were women. I haven't been able to find official data for the percentage of women lawyers 20 years before that, when I was a new lawyer, but we know that women weren't allowed to become lawyers in Germany at all before 1922, and I observed that where I worked, the percentage of female attorneys in the Hamburg office was 0% plus or minus me.
The template for the male lawyers seemed to be to stare at my legs daily, in the corridor, in meetings, anywhere. Daily. Every day. (Looking back, I think some of them may have been conflicted: ignore her entirely, or stare at her legs?) Anyone with eyes can take a glance at my lovely legs, or at the lovely legs of the other billions of people on this planet who have legs, but this intense staring was something new to me, and struck me as deeply unprofessional. I think I was the thrill of the day for some of the German lawyers, which felt disrespectful toward me, and diminished any respect I would have had for them. In fairness, some of the people at this firm were very nice -- you can meet nice people everywhere -- and I ended up becoming friends with some of the other young attorneys. Still: every day someone stared at my legs. Every day. Daily.
What would you have done about the Leg Situation if you were me? Wear pants, bought by saving up your $8.59? Encouraged blindfolds for the men since they were the ones with the problem, not me? Put a sticker on your leg that said Made You Look? Wonder why men could live their lives without this drama? What I did was keep wearing what I wanted to wear, which was fully appropriate, skirts and dresses, comporting myself with my usual demeanor, and giving condescending looks that weren't seen because people weren't looking at my eyes.
Meanwhile, more trouble: the office manager oversaw the administrative assistants, and seemed to resent that they liked me, which they did because I was nice to them. One of the admins was assigned to type my revisions on the contracts involving the large American client, and at first did so eagerly. We spoke German together, as I did with everyone in the office, but the documents were in English, and the admin was glad to have a chance to practice her English through this project. She was a sweet and somewhat meek person who was easily bullied by lawyers and the office manager, and I was one of the few people at the firm who was kind to her. (Spoiler alert: I would continue to find and subvert this lawyer-bullying-admin dynamic throughout my disastrous law career.) Sometimes the admin couldn't read what I had written, or there was some other confusion surrounding our complex web of documents. I always took the time to sit down and go through everything with her so that we could create a perfect finished product. She appreciated this, and we developed a positive working relationship, which began to inspire her to greater self-esteem.
The office manager, evidently wishing to re-assert dominance over the admin, told her that my expectation that she would complete my sometimes very involved revisions was unreasonable -- "unzumutbar." The admin turned hostile toward me too, refusing -- or being forbidden by the office manager? -- to type the next round of revisions. This escalated to the German attorneys, who were upset that workflow had stopped and who had heard from the office manager that I was to blame. I told them that in the US, it wouldn't be unusual for an attorney to type up his or her own revisions of this nature, and that I wouldn't mind doing so if the admin had other work the firm needed her to do. I knew though that having an attorney type his or her own revisions was just not done in Germany at that time; most attorneys used dictaphones similar to those in old movies (here is a video clip of the Double Indemnity (1944) dictaphone scene) to tape record what they wanted their admins to type. Dictaphones seemed like ancient relics to me, and my giving written revisions instead of tape recorded revisions seemed radical in Germany! So I suggested that if the office manager wouldn't let the admin type these written revisions, perhaps they would like me to send the revisions to an outside secretarial service to type. The lawyers decided there was no reason for such an expense, and had the admin go back to typing my revisions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Considerations by the Way in The Conduct of Life, 1860
Diary of My Disastrous Law Career: From Harvard to Heaven Help Me
Chapter 2
This blog answers the question I'm often asked of why I left the practice of law. The short answer is: because my law career was a disaster. In this post, the second post in this blog, I give you examples from the disastrous circumstances of my law career, back when I was a fresh Harvard Law School graduate, in a place and time I found very difficult: Germany in the 1990s. How did I get there? See the previous post about the disasters that were my summer associate jobs. Onward.
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| Pretty but melancholy Hamburg, in a photo I took around 1997, while working as a depressingly underpaid and disrespected lawyer. |
Lawyer Job 1: Hamburg
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1996, there I was, where I didn't want to be: Germany. Most of my experiences there had been miserable: I had encountered rude people, anti-foreigner sentiment, the apparently constantly gloomy and rainy weather of Hamburg which was also a quite sleepy town back then, lack of vegetarian food at that time and bacon bits on everything, and no fun. Still, unsinkable, I decided to make the best of it. My then-husband got a wonderful job at a Hamburg law firm, which he enjoyed and where he excelled and was respected, paid nicely, and given a BMW. The partners began obviously grooming him for partnership, a state of affairs he absolutely deserved, and one I would never experience.
After being rejected from my summer associate firm in Chicago for being a woman married to a man from another city and country (don't those words look insane? and possibly illegal?), I had been unable to find a job as a lawyer in the States, where my Harvard Law degree was impressive; neither could I find a job in Hamburg, where the idea of a young American woman lawyer was unknown, with or without a Harvard Law degree.
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All I could find was a sort of gig, working with two German lawyers, a partner and a senior associate, at what was the number one law large corporate law firm in Hamburg at that time (most Hamburg firms have since merged into even larger English or American firms), who were in the middle of representing a major American corporation on a deal during Germany's deregulation era and wanted prestige support and a lot of behind-the-scenes document revision. This basically meant a lot of work untangling and rewriting vast numbers of draft English language contracts and ancillary documents so that a US company could buy a German company in a newly de-monopolized industry, doing some drafting and some written translation from German into English (my German was fluent, though I constantly reminded people I was a lawyer, not a translator), and being part of the team so they could tell the American client they had an American Harvard Law grad on board. None of this was the type of law work I had wanted to do; I had wanted to work on intellectual property matters and related litigation, not mergers and acquisitions, but there I was.
The gig also meant coping with hostile law firm partners who were angry that two attorneys from their ranks had brought me on and who took their anger out on me. It meant contending with a female office manager who felt threatened by a woman who wasn't an administrative assistant and who did her best to damage or thwart my professional relationships with other lawyers and with admins. It also meant dealing with gendered and non-gendered abuse, and anti-foreigner attitudes, all for the equivalent of $8.59/hour.
Correct: $8.59/hour. That is not a typo. And there were no benefits or anything of that nature; this was not official full-time employment but a contract role. I wonder if that was a record low wage for a Harvard Law grad at a law firm. I managed to arrange a deferral for my student loans. In the meantime, I had other expenses, like taking the BarBri bar exam preparation course which cost $2,000 at that time. US firms often paid for bar review courses for their new associates -- my classmates who worked at US firms reported this to be true -- but the Hamburg firm refused when I asked. They said they didn't have that kind of expense in Germany. (In Germany, not only was education free, the State paid you to go to school.) I understood that, but it didn't change the fact of the expense. Rather, it highlighted that pretty much nothing about my law career was going the way I had envisioned. The two attorneys in Hamburg wanted a US lawyer, but they didn't want to pay for a US lawyer. I paid for the course; I passed the bar.
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As an example of the uncomfortable work environment, several of the partners refused to speak to me, under any circumstances, whether in the elevator, anywhere at the firm, or on the firm outing I attended. It felt weird to say good morning, the standard greeting, cheerfully and in that person's language, and see the person stare straight ahead as if I weren't there. This took on an additional tragicomic dimension at the firm outing. We were riding bicycles in a kind of game where you had to complete this course, and I pedaled up to one of the partners and said hello how are you today. Staring straight ahead and not speaking, he accelerated to get away from me. This stunned me and I suddenly felt hot and shaky, and started to wobble and fall off the bike. As I was falling, I could somehow tell that the ground below was covered in poison ivy. There was something about the acrid smell, even though I had never touched poison ivy before, that I recognized as my face and body approached the ground. I hit the ground, I cried out, the partner pedaled on, and I suffered a terrible rash and even more terribly hurt feelings. Actually that's not tragicomic at all, is it, just mean, sad, and awful.
An example from my first day at the firm, of not fitting in, or running legs-first into gendered disrespect: I was excited for my first day, and chose a very professional sheath dress and matching jacket to wear, with low heeled pumps, pearls, and a scarf. Very lawyerly, right, and it seems my look is what women lawyers are still wearing now, 20 years later but with the more colorful shoes that are an option today. When I arrived, other (male) lawyers in the lobby stared at my legs. At my initial meetings that first day, everyone (men) stared at my legs. I thought maybe I had gotten some dirt on my legs getting out of the car, but I didn't see anything. The next day, and throughout the week, always wearing skirts or dresses, I noticed that people kept looking at my legs. I observed that all of the lawyers were men, dressed in suits (with pants), and most of the women at the firm were administrative assistants, dressed in jeans. The office manager and librarian were women, often in pants. I discussed this with one of the administrative assistants, who said she was glad to wear jeans so that no one bothered her.
There wasn't a template for what women lawyers in Germany should wear. This was likely due in part to the fact that there weren't many women lawyers in Germany at all. Data shows that in 2016, 34.4% of German lawyers were women. I haven't been able to find official data for the percentage of women lawyers 20 years before that, when I was a new lawyer, but we know that women weren't allowed to become lawyers in Germany at all before 1922, and I observed that where I worked, the percentage of female attorneys in the Hamburg office was 0% plus or minus me.
The template for the male lawyers seemed to be to stare at my legs daily, in the corridor, in meetings, anywhere. Daily. Every day. (Looking back, I think some of them may have been conflicted: ignore her entirely, or stare at her legs?) Anyone with eyes can take a glance at my lovely legs, or at the lovely legs of the other billions of people on this planet who have legs, but this intense staring was something new to me, and struck me as deeply unprofessional. I think I was the thrill of the day for some of the German lawyers, which felt disrespectful toward me, and diminished any respect I would have had for them. In fairness, some of the people at this firm were very nice -- you can meet nice people everywhere -- and I ended up becoming friends with some of the other young attorneys. Still: every day someone stared at my legs. Every day. Daily.
What would you have done about the Leg Situation if you were me? Wear pants, bought by saving up your $8.59? Encouraged blindfolds for the men since they were the ones with the problem, not me? Put a sticker on your leg that said Made You Look? Wonder why men could live their lives without this drama? What I did was keep wearing what I wanted to wear, which was fully appropriate, skirts and dresses, comporting myself with my usual demeanor, and giving condescending looks that weren't seen because people weren't looking at my eyes.
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| The legs that shut down Hamburg: here I am (center) on vacation in Paris in 1997 with my then-husband, and a friend of mine from America with whom we met up, during the time I worked in Hamburg. A friend of my friend took the photo. In my casual skirt, you can see more expanse of my legs than the stare-obsessed male lawyers at the office could, as I wore somewhat longer work skirts and dresses. Hem length didn't stop the German lawyers from sometimes going through entire meetings without looking at my face, only my legs. Incidentally, the fashion of the 1990s wasn't so different from the fashion of 2019, especially if you like classic / vintage JCrew / prep styles like I do. |
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| Now historical photo of Notre Dame, and other sights of Paris along the Seine river, which I took in 1997. My favorite thing about Hamburg was that it was just a one-hour flight away from Paris, where overall I had been happy as a Harvard College exchange student. |
Meanwhile, more trouble: the office manager oversaw the administrative assistants, and seemed to resent that they liked me, which they did because I was nice to them. One of the admins was assigned to type my revisions on the contracts involving the large American client, and at first did so eagerly. We spoke German together, as I did with everyone in the office, but the documents were in English, and the admin was glad to have a chance to practice her English through this project. She was a sweet and somewhat meek person who was easily bullied by lawyers and the office manager, and I was one of the few people at the firm who was kind to her. (Spoiler alert: I would continue to find and subvert this lawyer-bullying-admin dynamic throughout my disastrous law career.) Sometimes the admin couldn't read what I had written, or there was some other confusion surrounding our complex web of documents. I always took the time to sit down and go through everything with her so that we could create a perfect finished product. She appreciated this, and we developed a positive working relationship, which began to inspire her to greater self-esteem.
The office manager, evidently wishing to re-assert dominance over the admin, told her that my expectation that she would complete my sometimes very involved revisions was unreasonable -- "unzumutbar." The admin turned hostile toward me too, refusing -- or being forbidden by the office manager? -- to type the next round of revisions. This escalated to the German attorneys, who were upset that workflow had stopped and who had heard from the office manager that I was to blame. I told them that in the US, it wouldn't be unusual for an attorney to type up his or her own revisions of this nature, and that I wouldn't mind doing so if the admin had other work the firm needed her to do. I knew though that having an attorney type his or her own revisions was just not done in Germany at that time; most attorneys used dictaphones similar to those in old movies (here is a video clip of the Double Indemnity (1944) dictaphone scene) to tape record what they wanted their admins to type. Dictaphones seemed like ancient relics to me, and my giving written revisions instead of tape recorded revisions seemed radical in Germany! So I suggested that if the office manager wouldn't let the admin type these written revisions, perhaps they would like me to send the revisions to an outside secretarial service to type. The lawyers decided there was no reason for such an expense, and had the admin go back to typing my revisions.
The partner was really quite nice and seemed to have empathy which some of his partners failed to display, and he appreciated my work though he generally didn't or couldn't protect me. Sometimes I used the fact of my low pay to protect me. For example, my mother's 50th birthday was coming up, and I planned to fly to Chicago to celebrate. I told the lawyers that I could work remotely during my short trip, which would be mainly over a weekend, so that they would hardly notice I was gone. The senior associate said I couldn't go. The partner said of course I should go to my mom's 50th birthday party. They went back and forth a bit, and I said that if it would be a problem to have me gone during the project, I could simply quit this contract gig (which would have made the other partners happy) and let someone else take over my role, because I didn't want to hold up the project, and because, as they knew, I wasn't doing this for the money. The senior associate relented, and off I flew.
Being a lawyer who was not treated like the other lawyers was to become a recurring theme. For example, when it came time for the firm's annual summit, at which lawyers from every office (Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, etc.) gathered offsite, I was invited yet not fully included. Here's what happened: at one of the meetings, all 200 or so lawyers gathered in a large hall, and a senior partner introduced each new attorney by name and shared some background details about each individual, who stood and received some polite applause. I was passed over and not mentioned, perhaps because I was a contract attorney? Yet, I was invited to the event, and it was odd to be sitting with another new attorney who was mentioned while I was not. We whispered about whether I should introduce myself to the group, a third lawyer joined our whispered discussion, and I thought: I've got nothing to lose, and maybe something to gain by making it known throughout the wider firm that there was an American lawyer from Harvard in their midst. My whispering colleagues agreed. I stood up, interrupted the senior partner, and introduced myself. I was seated in the back, and 200 lawyers swung around to look at me. Luckily, shyness was not a problem for me. The senior partner did not acknowledge my interruption at all -- I guess he was part of Team Ignore -- but afterward, a dozen young attorneys came up to me and said everyone wanted to meet me after that bold self-introduction! The old guard, however, seemed to grow more hostile toward me. I was to find no mentor or sponsor at that firm.
As a side note, and speaking of fashion: I remember so much from these old days vividly, including what I wore on that particular day of introducing myself at the attorney summit, namely a chocolate brown wool boucle suit (a skirt suit, of course) with a gold and white scarf. The scarf was by Hermes, my first one from that brand, a gift from my in-laws who had noticed my love of scarves. After that first Hermes, I was hooked. I still have it; it is now a true vintage scarf!
Being a lawyer who was not treated like the other lawyers was to become a recurring theme. For example, when it came time for the firm's annual summit, at which lawyers from every office (Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, etc.) gathered offsite, I was invited yet not fully included. Here's what happened: at one of the meetings, all 200 or so lawyers gathered in a large hall, and a senior partner introduced each new attorney by name and shared some background details about each individual, who stood and received some polite applause. I was passed over and not mentioned, perhaps because I was a contract attorney? Yet, I was invited to the event, and it was odd to be sitting with another new attorney who was mentioned while I was not. We whispered about whether I should introduce myself to the group, a third lawyer joined our whispered discussion, and I thought: I've got nothing to lose, and maybe something to gain by making it known throughout the wider firm that there was an American lawyer from Harvard in their midst. My whispering colleagues agreed. I stood up, interrupted the senior partner, and introduced myself. I was seated in the back, and 200 lawyers swung around to look at me. Luckily, shyness was not a problem for me. The senior partner did not acknowledge my interruption at all -- I guess he was part of Team Ignore -- but afterward, a dozen young attorneys came up to me and said everyone wanted to meet me after that bold self-introduction! The old guard, however, seemed to grow more hostile toward me. I was to find no mentor or sponsor at that firm.
As a side note, and speaking of fashion: I remember so much from these old days vividly, including what I wore on that particular day of introducing myself at the attorney summit, namely a chocolate brown wool boucle suit (a skirt suit, of course) with a gold and white scarf. The scarf was by Hermes, my first one from that brand, a gift from my in-laws who had noticed my love of scarves. After that first Hermes, I was hooked. I still have it; it is now a true vintage scarf!
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| See the scarf that has seen it all. |
So, why was I doing any of this? Would you have taken this gig? I thought it would be important to have a placeholder on my resume instead of a gap, to show firms in the US when I went back that I had been working and developing my skills. Moreover, I took initiative and branched out from working on just the one deal at the firm, and did some work for other attorneys at the firm -- those who would speak to me, that is -- and tried to flesh out this opportunity as much as possible, or at least learn and build relationships. I hadn't given up.
I did give up on this particular firm after the holiday party. The day before the party, when one of the partners walked around giggling and telling all the women (basically admins plus me) to wear slit skirts to the party, I realized that it was a problem not having an HR department besides the hostile and self-aggrandizing office manager. Nor was there a full complement of workplace anti-harassment laws in Germany at that time. I asked this partner: are you joking? He giggled and reminded us again to wear slit skirts. The party itself could also have been a case study on sexual harassment. One male attorney called me a prude and insulted me until I walked away. Another, who was visibly drunk, kept asking me my age, and laughing, repeating this around a dozen times.
I revisited the question of why I was doing this. Why was I working for almost no money, for people I didn't respect, who didn't respect me, in an environment almost devoid of empathy, doing work I didn't enjoy? Where was my ikigai -- life and career I loved, with spiritual and practical harmony? Things couldn't possibly be this bad in the US, could they, my summer experiences notwithstanding? I quit without another job.
Terrible lesson: You can simultaneously be used and unwanted. Indeed, disrespect often encompasses both.
I respected myself. My job/gig had not been nourishing mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or physically/economically. It was more like a sin against nature, humanity, and self. My husband -- who happily was having a positive experience at his law firm -- was supportive and reinforced my self-respect, reminding me that "no one is allowed to treat you like an object."
Positive lesson: I can always make the best of a bad situation. But I was tired of bad situations, and I can choose to quit them.
Between Jobs: Hamburg
Between Jobs: Hamburg
I said goodbye to the firm, and went home to my then husband's and my apartment in Hamburg. I read, wrote, and rearranged the apartment. I visited chocolate and pastry shops (as a chocolate maniac since childhood, and as a vegetarian in Germany, these shops were crucial), and took adult ballet classes. I wished there were volunteer opportunities in Germany, but that wasn't part of the culture, as social programs were funded by taxes (the highest tax bracket was 51%) and run by the State, and volunteering wasn't something people did.
Writing is something I have done all my life, and I have a cache of essays and stories I wrote in Germany (in English) in the 1990s, some comedic, some sad, often reflecting or commenting upon culture shock. I'm thinking of how to weave them into these memoirs, or whether to gather them into a book. In the meantime, here is one of the comedic essays, from 1993 when my then new German husband and I first spent some extended time together in his country, about not taking his name upon marriage -- another choice that marked me to the locals as an eccentric American.
In addition to seeking solace through writing, I also sought vegetables in meaty Germany (there's an essay on that in my trove, too). I started going to the Turkish vegetable markets in Hamburg, and I took up Thai and Indian cooking because being a vegetarian in Germany at that time (which I have been since college) meant being creative. I had some fun with my vegetarianism: I hosted dinner parties for friends, including my former law firm colleagues and their wives and girlfriends; dinner parties were the thing then (there wasn't much to do in Hamburg back then), and Germans always showed up precisely on time. A college friend from America visited, which was so much fun, and I held a special dinner party to welcome her. At the end of each dinner, I would ask my guests what was missing. They would say: "gar nichts," absolutely nothing, it was delicious! Then I would ask them: Where was the meat? Their eyes would grow wide as it dawned on them that they had just eaten a large vegetarian meal without knowing it, and they had liked it! It was all in good fun, and they knew what to expect next time!
In case you're wondering, my meat-eating husband was a great sport about all of this: he didn't mind eating vegetarian at these dinner events. He was one of those people who ate whatever was at hand, in a non-fussy way that you could see as philosophical: eat to live, not live to eat. Moreover, we always did the grocery shopping together whether there was a dinner party or not, and he always did the dishes (and the laundry), dinner party or not. He didn't expect me to be a household servant. Wasn't I lucky to have a feminist husband!
The dark side of the situation, which is a little bit hard to write about but I think it is important that I do so: dinner parties suited my husband more than going out, because he was withdrawing from social life and from friends, and didn't want to go out. His increasing social isolation, mood swings, paranoia, exhaustion, "circumstantial speech," and other symptoms were enormously alarming, and were among the signs of serious trouble that had already manifested. He refused to seek help though, even when more serious trouble arrived soon. I sensed too that if we stayed on this path, as my husband was pushing away friends and activities he loved, but still turning to me for emotional comfort, that would one day change and he would push me away as well. I loved him, but he had stopped loving everything else he loved, so wouldn't he stop loving me too?
Meanwhile, I had ideas for businesses I wanted to start, and talked these over with my husband as we were still able to chat about everything at that time. Starting a small business was almost impossible in Germany in those days, unless you had the equivalent of around $50,000 to deposit into a capital account, which I didn't. Math quiz: at $8.59/hour, I could have earned $50,000 how quickly? One of the businesses I wanted to start was an in-home art gallery, to show and sell works by friends of mine, but my husband didn't think that was a good idea, in part because having people over for dinner was about all he could take at that time.
I sat in on a couple of classes at the local university's law school with a friend of my husband's who was still in school, including a fascinating lecture by a professor who had been a child during the Nazi era and said he remembered that when children acted up, adults would tell them to behave or they'd be sent off in trains to the camps. Sort of like threatening to take away Internet or video games today, parents in his day would threaten to send kids off to illegal prison work camps and gas chambers. The professor's point was well made that the German people during World War II knew about the concentration camps, and that their later denial was a lie. I remember that lecture vividly also because the regular students talked loudly with each other during the professor's talk, completely ignoring him, as if they were not in class at all. This was normal at German universities; students went to class but talked over the professor. They didn't listen, or participate actively in their education, or seem to take their education seriously at all. This kind of disrespect for the professor by students, and for their own education, was shocking to me and did not happen at Harvard, where we were geeks, intellectuals, we loved learning. Did I mention that I did not find Germany an easy place to live?
This reminds me: I looked into becoming an official University of Hamburg student, as a way to continue learning, and to defer my student loans a bit longer. This proved impossible because I could not produce my high school diploma, which seemed to have gone missing when my mother moved from our suburban house to a condo in downtown Chicago, or we thought possibly it had been destroyed when the basement of the suburban house flooded. I sent copies of my Harvard Law School and Harvard College diplomas with my application, but was told that without a high school diploma, my application could not be accepted. I tried to get a replacement copy from my high school, but they didn't understand why the German university wouldn't just accept my college and law school diplomas; plus, I graduated from high school in 1986, at age 16 (yes, I am the remains of a child genius : ), before the digital age had taken deep hold; copies of things from that time were not so easy to come by. I understood that most of the German university's applicants were applying directly from high school, and that's why they required high school diplomas. But the university staff didn't seem to want to understand that I couldn't have acquired a college or law degree without a high school diploma, so my high school diploma was in a sense encompassed within my later diplomas. To me, this was an example of German bureaucracy and inflexibility; not doing what is efficient as is the German stereotype, but doing what is predictable based on the rules, even if those rules don't work. I abandoned the plan.
Writing is something I have done all my life, and I have a cache of essays and stories I wrote in Germany (in English) in the 1990s, some comedic, some sad, often reflecting or commenting upon culture shock. I'm thinking of how to weave them into these memoirs, or whether to gather them into a book. In the meantime, here is one of the comedic essays, from 1993 when my then new German husband and I first spent some extended time together in his country, about not taking his name upon marriage -- another choice that marked me to the locals as an eccentric American.
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| A peek at one of my essays from the '90s, which I have in hard copy and need to get retyped. |
In addition to seeking solace through writing, I also sought vegetables in meaty Germany (there's an essay on that in my trove, too). I started going to the Turkish vegetable markets in Hamburg, and I took up Thai and Indian cooking because being a vegetarian in Germany at that time (which I have been since college) meant being creative. I had some fun with my vegetarianism: I hosted dinner parties for friends, including my former law firm colleagues and their wives and girlfriends; dinner parties were the thing then (there wasn't much to do in Hamburg back then), and Germans always showed up precisely on time. A college friend from America visited, which was so much fun, and I held a special dinner party to welcome her. At the end of each dinner, I would ask my guests what was missing. They would say: "gar nichts," absolutely nothing, it was delicious! Then I would ask them: Where was the meat? Their eyes would grow wide as it dawned on them that they had just eaten a large vegetarian meal without knowing it, and they had liked it! It was all in good fun, and they knew what to expect next time!
In case you're wondering, my meat-eating husband was a great sport about all of this: he didn't mind eating vegetarian at these dinner events. He was one of those people who ate whatever was at hand, in a non-fussy way that you could see as philosophical: eat to live, not live to eat. Moreover, we always did the grocery shopping together whether there was a dinner party or not, and he always did the dishes (and the laundry), dinner party or not. He didn't expect me to be a household servant. Wasn't I lucky to have a feminist husband!
The dark side of the situation, which is a little bit hard to write about but I think it is important that I do so: dinner parties suited my husband more than going out, because he was withdrawing from social life and from friends, and didn't want to go out. His increasing social isolation, mood swings, paranoia, exhaustion, "circumstantial speech," and other symptoms were enormously alarming, and were among the signs of serious trouble that had already manifested. He refused to seek help though, even when more serious trouble arrived soon. I sensed too that if we stayed on this path, as my husband was pushing away friends and activities he loved, but still turning to me for emotional comfort, that would one day change and he would push me away as well. I loved him, but he had stopped loving everything else he loved, so wouldn't he stop loving me too?
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| Homesick: I enjoyed holding dinner parties in Hamburg, including to celebrate American holidays, and cooking food like my own take on deep dish pizzas from my hometown of Chicago -- and making chocolate desserts, naturally. I wouldn't tell anyone they'd eaten a vegetarian meal until afterward. My German friends, many of whom were accustomed to eating pork at literally every meal, were always amazed that a vegetarian meal could be so delicious! |
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| Also from my dinner party album and planning book: some of my hand-drawn placecards, which went with the handwritten menus and invitations. I had time on my hands when I wasn't attempting to cope with the apparent total lack of a viable career as a lawyer, and was glad to have the creative outlet of meals and decor, plus writing, reading (I read all of Shakespeare at one point in Hamburg), and acting (in German, one show, details to come). None of this paid off my student loans or added to my resume as a lawyer, however, which were concerns of mine. |
Meanwhile, I had ideas for businesses I wanted to start, and talked these over with my husband as we were still able to chat about everything at that time. Starting a small business was almost impossible in Germany in those days, unless you had the equivalent of around $50,000 to deposit into a capital account, which I didn't. Math quiz: at $8.59/hour, I could have earned $50,000 how quickly? One of the businesses I wanted to start was an in-home art gallery, to show and sell works by friends of mine, but my husband didn't think that was a good idea, in part because having people over for dinner was about all he could take at that time.
I sat in on a couple of classes at the local university's law school with a friend of my husband's who was still in school, including a fascinating lecture by a professor who had been a child during the Nazi era and said he remembered that when children acted up, adults would tell them to behave or they'd be sent off in trains to the camps. Sort of like threatening to take away Internet or video games today, parents in his day would threaten to send kids off to illegal prison work camps and gas chambers. The professor's point was well made that the German people during World War II knew about the concentration camps, and that their later denial was a lie. I remember that lecture vividly also because the regular students talked loudly with each other during the professor's talk, completely ignoring him, as if they were not in class at all. This was normal at German universities; students went to class but talked over the professor. They didn't listen, or participate actively in their education, or seem to take their education seriously at all. This kind of disrespect for the professor by students, and for their own education, was shocking to me and did not happen at Harvard, where we were geeks, intellectuals, we loved learning. Did I mention that I did not find Germany an easy place to live?
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| Beloved Harvard. This one isn't a vintage photo; I took it in 2017 (and it's on my Instagram @chocolateuplift) when I returned to speak at a women's leadership conference at the Law School. My message to the students was: follow your passions and goals, not someone else's. And if your passion is BigLaw, have a back-up passion, because today data shows that only 19% of equity partners are women, and they are paid 80% of what the men receive. |
This reminds me: I looked into becoming an official University of Hamburg student, as a way to continue learning, and to defer my student loans a bit longer. This proved impossible because I could not produce my high school diploma, which seemed to have gone missing when my mother moved from our suburban house to a condo in downtown Chicago, or we thought possibly it had been destroyed when the basement of the suburban house flooded. I sent copies of my Harvard Law School and Harvard College diplomas with my application, but was told that without a high school diploma, my application could not be accepted. I tried to get a replacement copy from my high school, but they didn't understand why the German university wouldn't just accept my college and law school diplomas; plus, I graduated from high school in 1986, at age 16 (yes, I am the remains of a child genius : ), before the digital age had taken deep hold; copies of things from that time were not so easy to come by. I understood that most of the German university's applicants were applying directly from high school, and that's why they required high school diplomas. But the university staff didn't seem to want to understand that I couldn't have acquired a college or law degree without a high school diploma, so my high school diploma was in a sense encompassed within my later diplomas. To me, this was an example of German bureaucracy and inflexibility; not doing what is efficient as is the German stereotype, but doing what is predictable based on the rules, even if those rules don't work. I abandoned the plan.
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| Harvard College, Bachelor of Arts degree, 1990; I graduated at age 20 after having graduated high school at age 16. Harvard Law School, Juris Doctor degree, 1996; I graduated at age 26. My 1986 high school diploma had gone missing, and a German university wouldn't accept my higher education diplomas as proof of my having graduated high school, even though, generally, you can't get diplomas like these without graduating from high school first. By the way, if your calculations show that I didn't go straight through from college (4-year program) to law school (3-year program), your calculations are correct! I took a few gap years, one after college and two after my first year of law school, for travel and work! Harvard Law School was marvelous about my gap years, holding my spot for me every time. |
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| Look what turned up later: my wayward high school diploma. |
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| University of Hamburg, this one's for you. |
I was growing frustrated and depressed. I am a high-energy person, and I didn't have the right outlet or focus for that energy. I had graduated from Harvard Law School, and hadn't found a way to use my degree in a satisfying environment. My husband got sick, and wouldn't get help. I pondered next steps. America was an option, and I was still homesick, but would my husband still come and if so would the voices he was hearing come with him? (Spoiler alert: untreated schizophrenia is an awful tragedy.) How about entrepreneurship, though it was expensive in Germany and not supported there at that time? Or, should I do something chocolatey or otherwise food-related? Should I try to keep my career as a lawyer alive by finding another job in Hamburg? Though these memoirs focus on my law career, my husband's illness was foremost in my mind and in my life as his sickness expanded and darkened. But home and work were linked, perhaps more than I saw at the time: if he couldn't work, or if I needed to leave Germany, what would be the economics of the situation?
Terrible lesson: Life and career can become a tangle of disasters due to circumstances I can't control.
Positive lesson: I can always make decisions based on my principles, regardless of time, place, or tangle.
If I could go back in time, I would give younger me, and everyone involved, a big embrace of love.
Hint: the disasters of my disastrous law career and the lessons to be learned from bad times at work and bad times at home were not over yet.
To be continued...!
Valerie Beck
Terrible lesson: Life and career can become a tangle of disasters due to circumstances I can't control.
Positive lesson: I can always make decisions based on my principles, regardless of time, place, or tangle.
If I could go back in time, I would give younger me, and everyone involved, a big embrace of love.
To be continued...!
Valerie Beck
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