Udo

=Udo= media type="custom" key="8217818"

Bio/Geo Information
My interviewee was born in Germany and he lived there for the majority of his life. Germany is a country in Central Europe. It borders the Baltic Sea, and the North Sea, it is also between the Netherlands, and Poland, it is south of Denmark. It isn’t a big country, slightly smaller than Montana. It has lowlands in the north, and up lands in the south. It also has the Bavarian Alps in the south. It has a population 82,282,988 people. It has a lot of waterways and roadways. The capitol of this country is Berlin.

Udo Dittmar is an electrical engineer who works for a German company called Daetwyler. He moved to the United States seventeen years ago and met his wife and has been married to her for thirteen years. He has become the president of his company and says that there is still a lot of discrimination the United States and wants that to change.

** Creative Writing **
** Udo Dittmar **

Udo Dittmar was born in Germany and moved over to the United States 17 years ago. He has met his wife and has two children that live in the United States. He works as a president for an electrical engineering company.

//“There is still a lot of discrimination and I hope that it will change.”//

The Wall
by Cristian Dittmar

Today is just like the others. I wake up and get ready to go to school. I must hurry if I don’t want to be late for my first day of school. I have always dreamt of what my first day would be like. In my mind I picture a nice teacher and a class full of friends. Hopefully my dreams come true. I have to ride my bike to school just like all of my friends but my bike is old. It used to be my dad’s. He said that if I take good care of it then I can get a new one, a red one. I realize now that I am running late, so I just hop on my bike and start on my way. As I approach to my school, I see a large group of people standing near a television. At first I don’t really think much of it but then I grow curious. I ride closer and soon realize that whatever is going on is a big deal. I ask “What’s going on here?” and someone answers, “It’s the wall, its finally coming down.” When I heard this news I was so ecstatic. The first thing that comes to my mind was my friend Jurg. He lives in Eastern Germany. I have visited him a couple of times and I hope that they can recover from what they have been through. I don’t remember how the separation of Eastern and Western Germany came to be but it’s been really hard on Jurg and his family. The last time I went to Eastern Germany I went through the security checkpoints. The guards were scary. They made me take everything out of my pockets and clothes to make sure that I wasn’t smuggling anything illegal across the border. After all this boils down I head back on my way to school. As I enter the school my teacher greets me. She’s nothing like I wanted her to be. She’s old and grumpy, but I can deal with her. Later I meet some people and we talk and learn and read, and then finally it’s the end of the day and I am ready to go home. As soon as I get home I tell my parents all about my day and how it was fun but I had a grumpy teacher. Then I told them about the group of people I saw this morning. I told them that the wall was coming down and that Germany will be a united country again. My mom was almost as excited as me but my dad on the other hand not so much. I can’t sleep well tonight because I lay and think of the fun times me and Jurg used to have and that they might be able to happen again. The days drag on and on and then finally the news comes. “It’s down, it’s down” it’s all over the papers and the news. I want to go and visit Jurg right now but I must wait. Then as the weekend comes to an end I finally get to hang out with Jurg and we go sledding it was the thing we had the most fun doing. We hung out every day for 2 weeks and then he moved next door to me and started going to my school. We went to school for 2 years together and then one day he stopped coming. I wondered if he was just sick but as the days dragged on I finally went over to his house and his parents told me that Jurg drowned in the bath tub two nights ago. I cried and cried and cried but then I realized that he is in a much better place and will be a lot happier and I eventually moved on.

Cristian Dittmar

** Transcript **
Cristian: Hey, can you tell us your name?

Udo: Udo Dittmar

Cristian: And how do you spell that?

Udo: U-D-O D-I-T-T-M-A-R

Cristian: So what country were you born in?

Udo: Germany.

Cristian: And what city in Germany?

Udo: Stadtlohn.

Cristian: Were in Germany is Stadtlohn located?

Udo: North Rhine- Westphalia, Near the Netherlands border, so it’s probably North Western Germany, North Western Part.

Cristian: Have you lived in any other Countries?

Udo: Not lived but visited.

Cristian: Can you name a few of those countries?

Udo: Africa, Egypt in Africa, South Africa, China, Japan, India, a lot of European countries, like Spain, Italy, and so on.

Cristian: All right, so why did you choose to come to the United States?

Udo: I was working here, and I met my wife, so that’s why I moved over here.

Cristian: How did you meet your wife in the United States?

Udo: As I said I was working here and she went to a line dance class, and I was in the same hotel were the classes were so I met her there.

Cristian: That’s very interesting. Have you ever been discriminated against or denied anything because of being an immigrant?

Udo: Yeah several times.

Cristian: Could you tell us about a few of these times?

Udo: For example discriminated is in that way you are treated different when you get pulled over, you are treated different when you apply for a visa, citizenship, and there’s a lot of things that are still happening today. You wait six hours in a line and then they tell you “Oh sorry the counter is closed you have to come back tomorrow.”

Cristian: Did you feel any pressure from family members back home when you moved to the United States?

Udo: No.

Cristian: They didn’t want you to stay or try to steer you any way?

Udo: No, because you can travel back to Germany six hours by plane.

Cristian: So do you think you made the right choice immigrating to the United States?

Udo: Yeah

Cristian: Is there anything you miss about Germany?

Udo: Yeah, vacation, you see in Germany everybody has six weeks vacation, when you start a job, here you start with two weeks and to six weeks you need to get work very, very long for a company. The other thing is Germany has a lot of holidays, they only work 38 hours, and they get six weeks paid when they are ill and they are a lot of different social benefits in Germany that I’m missing here.

Cristian: What kind of jobs did you have when you lived in Germany?

Udo: I was an engineer.

Cristian: Were there any big companies you worked for?

Udo: I worked for Seamen’s, I worked Philips, I worked for Kempner Industries which are all companies with a couple thousand employees and at the end I worked for a small company with around 100 people, ATG.

Cristian: And when you moved to the United States did you continue with the same work?

Udo: Yeah, The ATG bought a facility in the States so that’s how I moved over here.

Cristian: And you still work for ATG?

Udo: No they closed the facility down and I switched to Daetwyler, which is in the same line of business, printing, Gravure printing business. And we build machines for that business.

Cristian: You said that there were a lot of social event things, that you got off work for in Germany, and you miss that in the united states? So what sort of things were they?

Udo: As I said they have a lot of holidays, you see like Christmas, they have the first Christmas day off and the second Christmas day off, they have on Easter, two holidays, they have a lot of religious holidays because in Germany there are two main religions, there are the protestant religion and the Catholic religion, and you see these are all holidays for everybody, not only for the government or only for the church.

Cristian: All right did you have a lot of trouble picking up English when you first moved here?

Udo: No, I can understand it but I still have a bad dialect, because I work for a German company, in the states and speak at least every half-day German.

Cristian: So you got to the United States by an airplane right?

Udo: Yeah

Cristian: How did they get all of your stuff here? Did it come by airplane?

Udo: No you see when I moved over here I shipped everything in a container, not with an airplane. So all of my stuff got packed up and shipped over here by boat and then it got unloaded here.

Cristian: So how do you compare the government from Germany to the United States? Like which one do you prefer and how are they different and the same.

Udo: Well they are mainly very similar, the thing is the president here has a lot of power which is not the case in Germany, the president in Germany doesn’t have any power at all in Germany it’s the chancellor which has the most power.

Cristian: Are they elected by the people the same way?

Udo: It’s very similar to, you see we don’t elect the president the parliament does, but you see we elect the parliament

Cristian: So how are the living conditions the same from here and in Germany?

Udo: You see they are mainly the same the thing is that Germany builds the structure more sturdy so in Germany a house is built for a hundred years so most of the houses are built out of brick instead of out of wood, so that’s the main difference. A lot of things here are built for just a lifetime of a person but in Germany a house is built for a hundred or two hundred years. It’s a different philosophy

Cristian: So in Germany is the education the same as in America ?

Udo: You see it;s different too, I think that the education in Germany is better, because the schools are free, so in you want to go to college or go to a university you receive a lot of money from the government instead of paying for the schools.

Cristian: Thank you for your time. That will be all

Analysis
Through this project we learned a lot about immigration. The goal of this project was to compare and contrast immigration from the early 1900’s to present day. We learned that immigrants had a lot harder time in the 1900’s they had to get evaluated by people to see if they had a disease that could potentially spread through the states. We had to do an integrated project that incorporated all of our classes. In Language Arts we had to write a creative writing piece that told a story about our interviewee. In Math we had to learn about the population growth or decay and had to make graphs over the data. In history we conducted an interview and created a podcast. In science and in health we learned about the diseases that were spread during the times of early immigration and had to create so sort of product to explain it. And in art we made boxes to show things that were an important part of our interviewees’ life.