As a kid, I always wanted to build bridges or boats. Mostly boats. As I explained to someone after I had already been living in the US for a few years, my dream had been to be a sheepbuilding engineer. You can imagine the blank stare I got. Anyway, at some point, in the late spring of my final high school year, it occurred to me that to build either of those things, I would need to learn about materials. And materials sounded uncomfortably close to chemistry—a deal breaker. That is why I decided to study math.

There was the question of where to do it. It was clear that I was not going to stay at home—a recipe for civil war. Then it was made clear to me that, with my barely passing grade in German, either I got some real practice in Germany, or within no time I would just remember how to say “Hallo.” So, the plan was to go to Germany for a year. A year that became eleven, but that is another story.

Anyway, one had to decide where in Germany to go. I didn’t come with good grades from school, but for math there was no numerus clausus, meaning that I could choose. I am sure there were plenty of nudges of which I was unaware, but from my point of view, the choosing went as follows: gentle, soft, and delicate as he was, my father basically gave me a list of places he was willing to give me money to go to. Characteristically, it was a list of classical German universities—places like Göttingen. Armed with that list, I looked at the map and saw that Bonn was the closest thing to the western border. And so, Bonn it was. Anyway, my father probably had his reasons for the list and the nudging, but what I can say for sure is that all of that didn’t have anything to do with Bonn being the best imaginable fit for me.

In Bonn, we had very few courses, which, with few exceptions, took place in the morning. There were no exams. The courses were all pass/fail, and to get a pass, you just had to solve some homework, which was then graded by a student a couple of years older than you. Given that that poor soul was not paid much, we were encouraged (or forced) to hand in a solution as a group of three. Besides that, the only rule was that we were not allowed to hand over a photocopy of someone else’s solutions. Photocopying. Copying was fine.

Students in physics or computer science also took the same first-year lectures, and part of those in the second year. We thus filled, at least at the beginning, an auditorium for 500 people. It was a thing to build paper planes and throw them to see how far they made it down the ranks. Some of them made it to the front, and the professors were sometimes exasperated and sometimes sarcastically amused, commenting on the quality of those planes.

The courses went really fast. This is no exaggeration. Starting with the construction of the reals via sequences and such, by January of the first year, we were dealing with multivariable calculus and the implicit function theorem. By the spring, we had learned all the point-set topology and measure theory I know. Differential forms, Stokes’ theorem, and such were the topics of the fall of the second year. We learned all the linear algebra I know by the end of the first year, and by the end of the second, we had covered the Sylow theorems, the Galois correspondence, and the non-existence of a closed formula to solve the quintic. The master class I taught this year in Rennes was a variation, not an extension, of the one offered to third-year undergrads at Bonn. Starting that year, nobody really cared what background you had. If one needed something like the fundamental group, covering theory, or homology, they were maybe defined in class and then just used. It was up to you to learn these things.

The homework sheets invariably consisted of two idiotic problems, one where you had to do something, and finally, a harder one. I still remember many of the hard problems. Here is one from the first year: Build an open subset U of the real line that is homeomorphic to the interior of its closure, and such that the Lebesgue measure of the closure is strictly larger than that of U itself. I am guessing that even if you are a mathematician, you might have to think a bit to solve it. Try. Another one was to prove that the Euler-Mascheroni constant—the limit of the difference between the sum of the first n terms of the harmonic series and the logarithm of n—was irrational. I take it that, since nobody knows whether this is the case or not, this was proof of the sense of humor of the one writing those problem sheets—Christian Kaiser, I believe. We, poor morons, tried to prove that it was irrational, as we had been told to do, and evidently failed. In fact, actually solving those problems was not really the point. At the end of the day, to get the pass, you just needed to solve, in groups, two silly problems a week. In groups of three. No photocopies, though.

The only real quality control of what we learned or didn’t was that at some point, you had to talk to some professor to schedule a 30-minute oral examination. This didn’t happen often. Indeed, in the equivalent of a bachelor’s plus a two-year master’s, you took a grand total of eight exams: four roughly after the second year and four to graduate. Mine were in analysis, algebra, applied math, theoretical physics, Riemannian geometry, probability theory, relativity, and something else I have forgotten. Later, in lieu of a PhD defense, there was a two-hour exam on “mathematics.”

The consequence of this lack of formal requirements was that one was incredibly free. During my first year, I spent every day many hours drinking really bad, watery coffee—often in Caritas—with a bunch of Spanish-speaking people. Some of them were employed at the embassies that had not yet moved to Berlin. There were a couple of guys from Córdoba trying to make a living playing Galician bagpipes on the street, who had a really elaborate way to travel from Andalusia to the Rhineland without paying any ticket. There were posh girls from Barcelona who explained to everybody that Catalonia is the most European part of Spain. There were Spanish students worried about the fact that when Germans were told to help themselves to the goodies (say, lomo) brought back from home, they wouldn’t understand that their role was to try it once, say that it was fantastic, try it again, say that it was the best thing they had ever tried, and then politely stop trying it, understanding that what they had in front of them was precious. There was the Spanish linguist studying pre-Roman Iberian languages, who, for the birth of a baby, wrote his congratulatory message in Sanskrit. It said something about the gods making butter flow through the baby’s veins, or something like that. The landlord of the parents of that baby wanted to smoke those renters out. To do that, he asked the city to replace the regulat tradh can by a much smaller one. Every time one passed by their house, one left with a package—la merienda—of diapers to dispose of somewhere else. There was a Colombian sports reporter who had once married in Colombia, in church. Later, when already in Germany, he divorced and remarried. The issue was that, at least at the time, a religious marriage had legal power in Colombia. Now, since the Catholic Church would not dissolve his previous religious marriage, he was bigamous, at least in Colombia. He might have been only bigamous in Colombia, but meeting someone bigamous was a first for me. It was also a first to meet openly homosexual people.

Compared with that zoo, the people at the university—by which I mean the people I met in the courses—were much more “normal,” whatever that might mean. Still, since at the beginning we were 500 in that auditorium, there was also a lot of fauna. This was magnified by the fact that the university was not really structured in years, and that one ended up meeting and hanging out with older people. In any case, since Germans had a year more of high school than in Spain, and since the guys did military service before going to college, most people were anyway older than me. Also, at the time, the real social divide in the German university was between the very few permanent full professors and everybody else. This meant that everybody but the full professors went to the parties organized by the Fachschaft—the student committee, almost a trade union. These parties always happened in the corresponding institute, and one often went to those of other institutes. The ones run by the geography Fachschaft were pretty good. Anyway, these parties were often organized by two different Fachschaften. I guess that physics brought the guys, and Ernährung und Haushaltswissenschaften (sciences of nutrition and household) the girls.

Among the students, there were quite a few children of Greek, Italian, or Turkish Gastarbeiter. There were people from Eastern Germany who had gone to burn in London the money with which they had been bribed by the “original” West German owners to move out of the buildings they had occupied when East Germany collapsed and the people who had been living there moved west. There was a surprising number of people obsessed with handball. There were cute blond girls studying Lehramt (the parallel branch to the usual university curriculum, the one you took to become a teacher) who found me funny and amusing but not more than that. There were the almost professional fussball players who always had gloves with them so that the handles didn’t slide. I had a frustrated crush on one of them, a girl who constantly had an incredibly strong smell of hand or body lotion. There were plenty of people who had spent an Erasmus year in some random place, basically for the fun of it: Coimbra, Granada, Perugia, and places like that. There was the very tiny girl from East Germany—Jena, I believe—who had joined all the people who started doing 100 km walks when they lost their jobs after the East German factories closed. She was at the university with a stipend because she had done well in the math Olympiad. In Bonn, there were quite a few people with such math Olympiad related stipends. There were people who had been studying forever, who knew a lot, who probably were in some way damaged by life but who, for the time being, just seemed to like being students. There were a lot of really smart people. There were plenty of Russians, mostly Jews or ethnically German. Or maybe Russians who late in life had discovered that they had an ethnically German or Jewish grandmother. Anybody coming from the old Soviet Union was Russian, and none of them seemed to mind that description. Least of all the Ukrainians, or at least those I knew. This has surely, and understandably, changed now. There were lots of Russian parties. It was the time of Russian Disco, I guess. There was the guy who played chess for the German national team well enough to be paid for it, who decided to try boxing but gave up after six months because he was just hitting the bag instead of having proper fights, who knew how to throw knives pretty well, who liked picking up mushrooms and ended up later mildly poisoning me with them, who would invite people who came to his dorm to preach the Bible to enter his room, roll a joint, offer them tea, and start discussing theology with them until they left out of despair. This is the smartest guy I have ever met. A wunderkind. A waste of natural resources. He is Jewish. Before going to Germany, I had never met anyone Jewish.

In Bonn, there were also the religious visits to the flea market, from where most of my possessions came. Most of them useless, but dirt cheap. A samovar, anyone? There was the patrolling of the streets on the days when people put bulky things they wanted to throw away. This is how rooms and apartments were largely furnished. There were the visits to the Turkish stores—like “Russian,” “Turkish” was an adjective applied to anybody who could plausibly, seen from the moon, be thought of as being Turkish. I guess that one also bought normal things in those stores, but it definitely was the source of huge watermelons and Turkish coffee. There were the parties in a park, where some people always played soccer—I tried—while others barbecued, where one drank beer and buckets (literally) of sangria, and which sometimes ended, after loud singing of Abba and all sorts of Schlager, when the birds started singing themselves. Evidently, in the winter, the parties were indoors, and there was neither soccer nor barbecuing. These parties often still ended on the rooftop of whatever dorm we had been partying in. I am sure it was illegal to go there. In any case, it happened a few times that, going back, I fell asleep in the tram, waking up with it full of people going to work, after probably having completed its route a few times with me snoring inside. I guess—or maybe I hope—that I was not the only one to whom that ever happened.

Some, but few, of these people—few even among those who went on to get a PhD—have academic jobs dispersed around the world. That I can think of now: Germany, Sweden, Canada, Australia, France, and the US, but I am probably missing some. Others became school teachers, bankers, consultants, fund managers, IT people working for industry, and things like that. I have lost track of most of them. I am guessing that the bagpipers must be doing something else now.

Anyway, the reason why I write all of this is to make clear that, while we did learn a lot of math—more precisely, that if you were into it, you could learn a lot of math—there was a lot of weird, interesting, unpredictable life outside. One worked, but other than that, one was really free. One also didn’t have to work all the time. Nobody controlled you. The system made clear that the German university was not a high school—die Deutsche Universität ist nicht verschult—and that it was up to oneself what and when one did whatever one did. For some people, this was criminal. If it was up to you to schedule those few exams, you never felt any kind of time pressure, and there was nothing stopping people from drifting into a sort of limbo. This happened to a lot of people. At the time, it really bothered me because it felt that nobody was taking responsibility for anything, but for me, it was great. I guess that I liked math and that I was lucky to get to talk early to my advisor-to-be. She would say things full of common sense, like “you get more money as a PhD student than as an undergrad,” and those bits of wisdom were enough to push me to decide to take those exams fast. In any case, I won the lottery with my advisor. She was (and is) a kind of complicated human being, but I won the lottery. And learned a lot of math from her. I guess it helped that, from pretty early on, I didn’t have any difficulty going and asking her what books I should read, and then assuming that she would have time to hear my reports of what I had learned. I guess that, having seen two of them operating at home, bumbling around and being useless—like everybody else—I never felt intimidated by professors. I have often thought that this was something that made my academic career infinitely simpler.

Now, I am not writing all of this because I like thinking of it or because I am right now in Germany, although that is also true, but because I was thinking about the being. I guess that I think often about where she will study. Now, there is very little real basis for any of that. It is life fiction, I guess. I mean, next year she will enter middle school, and currently, her main obsession is soccer. The first thing that she says when asked what she would like to be as an adult is “Olympic ice skater.” Seconds later, she gives “air traffic controller” as a second option. This idea of the air traffic controller has been, by now, a constant for years. I am not sure where the idea came from—although I suspect that my mother, who definitely has been one, was involved. Anyway, it is not that the being is otherwise obsessed by planes and such, but the fixation of becoming an air traffic controller seems such a constant that I would not be surprised if she actually ended up doing something that had to do with planes or flying. Anyway, as it is the case for everybody, the being will end up doing a combination of what is possible and whatever the fuck she wants to do. But what I really hope is that she finds something she really likes, that she finds herself in a place where she is challenged, that she has luck with the people around her, and equally important, that she gets to see the zoo that people can be. I want her to be somewhere she feels free to be herself, that she gets laid, that she sleeps in after some party, that she enjoys the beauty of early morning, much more beautiful when one is going to bed than to some lecture. That she is surrounded by people who like life, who do weird things, who care about Sanskrit or boxing. That she meets people of incredibly different backgrounds than herself. That she meets really smart people who go to Coimbra for a year for the fun of it. I have seen enough of elite universities, and it is much harder to meet Cordobese bagpipers there than it was in a massified place like Bonn. Maybe things have changed in Bonn as well. Anyways, I just hope that she goes somewhere where life is a zoo.

P.S.: Here I just wrote about the good parts of Germany. There were also other aspects, things that got more oppressive the longer I was there, the more established I was. As I put it at some point, I loved living in Bonn, and then, when I left, I started breathing.