Berlin, April 27, 2010

This evening we had dinner with a young couple at their exceedingly pleasant home in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin. “Young” means that Johanna (not her real name) is nearing 40, and Hans (not his real name) is slightly younger at 37. Both are professionals. Dahlem is spacious, grassy and tree-lined, a testament to what must have been an exemplar of comfortable bourgeois living anywhere in the early twentieth century.

The couple’s house is full of cheerful contemporary art and surprising examples of pre-1950 furniture design. The structure is “modern,” i.e., its architecture is Bauhaus era in spirit and line. It is one story, all right angles and big windows, I would guess about 2,500 square feet. There is a nice garden with a lawn. The house is one of 24 built in concentric circles around a small lake. The houses were constructed in the early ‘50’s as housing for U.S. Army officers stationed in Berlin. I stumbled mentally the next morning when I realized, with some difficulty given my age, that the original military residents must all be dead. The early days of occupied Berlin are still vivid in my memory.

The couple have a marvelous dog but no children. This was not for lack of trying. Three years or so ago they applied to adopt a child. The third question asked of Johanna by the government social worker in charge was whether she had ever considered divorcing her husband because of their inability to have a child. She was so infuriated and sickened by this soulless intrusion and with other red tape that they gave up temporarily. They are close to re-applying, knowing that they face almost three years of bureaucracy, justification, close inspection and waiting both in Berlin and in Mongolia, Russia or wherever else a child might be found for them.

The question is: Why can a Turkish, Albanian, or Arab mother in a poor neighborhood of Berlin have any number of children, all of which are immediately enrolled in the welfare system, when a respectable couple in good health, with a high income, integrated into the solid echelons of society and with a great zip code in their address have to wait three years before being classified as fit to adopt and raise a baby they intend to rescue from the slums of Calcutta or Shanghai? Forget the loaded language with which this question is phrased, the question deserves a thoughtful answer.