Over the last few years, in between managing an adult education center on 18th Street and developing youth-education programs for Mayor Daley, Gabriele Strohschen ran a series of what she calls “cross-cultural exchanges”: educators from around the globe came to swap teaching strategies with their counterparts in Chicago.
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She gave her first reading at Chicago’s Underground Wonder Bar on Walton. “Once I’d done this one little reading onstage,” Strohschen recalls, “I said, man, wouldn’t this be great to share with other cultures?” Several months, many long-distance calls, and one fund-raiser later, the Uberlyriker (tongue-in-cheek German for “superpoets”)–a group of black, white, and Hispanic novice and veteran poetry writers–arrived in Frankfurt.
The poets read in cultural centers in what was once East Berlin and in the formerly East German town of Erfurt, where, in each case, Strohschen estimates that less than a fourth of the audience knew English. “It wasn’t a language they learned in school,” she says. “They learned Russian.”
“But, he said, the hardest thing for me is to learn how to make choices. I’ve always been told by society, by government, or by the school, what to do. And I said, well, what do you do? And he said I don’t know, I’m just waiting.”
