Fort Wetherill

I spend a good deal of time thinking about the past. Not my own past so much as the Past, with a capital "P". It's particularly in your face here on Conanicut Island, where I'm spending a couple of weeks on summer vacation. I don't know if it's the pace of development, (slow) which leaves things like a Revolutionary War gun battery facing the West Passage up Narragansett Bay more or less unchanged after 200 years, or just the fact that lots of stuff happened here, but either way, I'm constantly being confronted here with History.



I took a spin around the island the other day on my Flevobike and wound up riding through the state park at the old Fort Wetherill. Wetherill faces Aquidneck Island (Newport) on the East Passage and has been an important part of the coastal defense of Narragansett Bay, like it's counterpart on the West Passage, since revolutionary times. I was struck by a photo on exhibit there that showed the fort as it was during World War II, when it was the site of an antisubmarine net that stretched across to Fort Adams on the Newport side. The net, or the structure that supported it, is clearly visible as a series of white dots that lead across the bay, with a gap at the center that allowed ships to pass. Most of the buildings in the photo are gone now, but several have been nicely restored. The antisubmarine net is gone as well, but scuba divers still explore the remnants.



The net was guarding Narragansett Bay from German U-Boats, quite likely U-boats made by Krupp, the Ruhrgebiet industrial giant so often sited as the greatest contributor to the industrial heritage currently being celebrated with the Kulturhauptstadt activities this year back in Essen. It's true the U-boats wouldn't have been manufactured in Essen: they were made at a separate plant in Kiel, many miles to the north. But I can't help but feel some irony about the whole thing. And looking at the big picture, it's hard not to come away with a sense of optimism about where the world is today.




I guess I'm hopelessly naive in my optimism, but it seems relatively harmless to me. I quite enjoy riding my bike around the island, and in previous years I've had as much fun riding the Industrial Culture Route in Essen, Duisburg, Dortmund and the like. My plan for world peace involves lots of similarly naive dummies who like to ride bikes around and mind their own business. It's got to be better than lots of hard headed realists who want to blown other people up. In all of my thinking about the past, I hope I've managed to develop some insights as well. I've been told those who can't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. And looking at these photos make me think that would be a real drag.

Wuppersprung

I watched another film from Tom Tykwer last night: Der Krieger und die Kaiserin or The Princess and the Warrior, as it was released in the US. Tykwer is probably best known as the director of Run, Lola, Run, one of the few European films that has played to a financial success in the US market, and I'm sure the distribution companies were hoping to score again with The Princess and the Warrior. If you read the description at Netflix, they bill it as a "heist" film. It's a heist film in the way that the Old Man and the Sea is a book about deep sea sport fishing. Promoting the film in this way is just one of the reasons that so many European films flop at the US box office.

I enjoyed the film and especially the sets. A lot of the action takes place in a psychiatric hospital where the main character, Sissi, played by Franka Potente, works as a nurse. The exterior shots of the hospital are fabulous and the interior made me want to develop a minor psychosis so I could spend some time there. Initially, I was very impressed with the level of psychiatric care in Germany, but then discovered that the set was built for the film. I guess that doesn't mean that German psychiatric care is lousy, but it took the edge off my desire to experience it first hand.

But the best set was the city of Wuppertal itself. Tom Tykwer grew up in Wuppertal, and I've visited it a number of times. It had its heyday at the opening of the nineteenth century as an industrial center, primarily producing textiles. The geography of the region, a long, narrow and steep river valley, hampered continued development and eventually the industry moved north to the Ruhrgebiet. But it left in its wake some beautiful old houses and a linear city, built along the banks of the Wupper and the Schwebebahn line that was constructed over the river. Tykwer uses the Schwebebahn and the steep hills the city grew up on to create some beautiful imagery and distinctive locations throughout the film.

Schwebebahn means something like "suspended pathway" and it's the name for the monorail train that Wuppertal built during its golden age, presumably to give up as little valuable land as possible for public transit. Many Americans are familiar with it because of its most famous image: Tuffi the elephant falling out of a car into the Wupper River in 1950. The Wuppertal zoo director at the time thought it would be a good publicity stunt to take the elephant, a three year old female, for a ride on the famous Schwebebahn. As you (or anyone who gave it more than five seconds thought) would imagine, Tuffi didn't take well to riding in a car that travels suspended from a monorail over a river valley. She ran through the car, smashing windows and injuring passengers. Eventually, she fell out of the car and was captured on film in an image that I can only describe as skuril. I think a good translation for that might be "bizarre" or "fantastic," but neither really seems to do the photo justice.



The Princess and the Warrior has a more or less "happy" ending for the two misfits the title refers to and I'm happy to report that Tuffi's story also comes out OK in the end. The zoo director was sacked as well as the blockhead transit official who approved the ride. Tuffi landed in the water and swan to shore, uninjured but for some minor cuts and scrapes. The accident location is still remembered with a painted image of Tuffi on a neighboring building and city ordinances forbid the transit of elephants on the Schwebebahn today.

Metropolis


On February 12, 2010, a restored copy of the legendary silent film classic, Metropolis, by Fritz Lang was shown as a part of the Berlin Film Festival. Metropolis is a remarkable film, and has influenced several generations of film makers since its 1926 premiere. Star Wars, Blade Runner and Batman were all shaped by Lang's distinct vision of a futuristic cityscape. Originally over two hours long, Metropolis was cut substantially after its premiere in an effort to make it more profitable. Over the decades, much of the original footage was lost and until recently, no one dreamed that the film could ever be restored to its former glory. Then, in July 2008, a negative of the original premiere cut of the film, including all the lost scenes, was discovered in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. The negative was a mess and required considerable restoration before it could be shown again, but I assume that it will be available to all of us again soon.

The restored film was shown at the Friedrichstadtpalast in Berlin, but was also shown simultaneously on a screen at the Brandenburg Gate in what is known in Germany as a "Public Viewing." The phenomenon of a free public viewing is a tradition I enjoy in Germany but have never experienced in the US. I live in a relatively small city, one where a gathering of more than fifty people who are neither watching a football game nor singing hymns would be eyed with suspicion. So I don't wonder that public viewings are rare here. But do they take place in larger American cities? In Essen in 2006, I had the pleasure of watching many of the Soccer World Cup games in open air settings, but I doubt if anyone can publicly televise similar events in the US. I confess to almost total ignorance of the Super Bowl, but I doubt if the people in New Orleans or elsewhere were able to watch the recent game in a public setting. There is just too much money at stake to show games for free in a public place.

But in Germany the concept of Public Viewing has a long tradition, dating back even to the Summer Olympics of 1936 when public Fernsehstuben (=TV lounges) were made available for people to watch the games. The events weren't called Public Viewings then, that's another Denglisch word, but they enabled the average German citizen to feel a participant in the events and take pride in them. It's what we in America call Socialism. And it's not just a casual socialism, where the German equivalent of Andy Hardy says, "Hey, we can put on a Public Viewing in the old barn!" Public Viewing is a trademark protected name, owned by a company in Magdeburg with a logo and everything. How does a company make money by showing films and sporting events to the public for free? That's a question a guy raised in a free market economy just can't answer. Maybe they get a cut of all the Würstchen sold.


The plot of Metropolis is just another example of the pink tinge that colors many things European. In the film, society is divided into two classes: the wealthy, who live high above the Earth in luxurious skyscrapers, and the workers, who live and toil underground. Naturally, the workers are salt of the earth types and the son of wealthy Johann Fredersen, founder and ruler of Metropolis, falls for Maria, daughter of the worker class and a sort of ultra Polly Purebred character. OK, it's not the most original story, but not many people praise Metropolis for its plot. Excepting maybe Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels. According to Siegfried Kracauer in his book, Von Calagari bis Hitler, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Films, Lang related the following about his connection to the famous National Socialist propaganda minister, "(Goebbels) told me that years before, he and Hitler had seen my film Metropolis in some small town and that at that time Hitler declared that he would like me to make Nazi films." The legend is, Lang took the next train out of Berlin, not stopping to pack a suitcase. He lived in Paris for a short time, but ultimately wound up in Hollywood where he continued a long and illustrious directing career.

I'm currently planning my own return to Berlin and the timing couldn't be better. I'll be there during the 2010 World Cup and I'm looking forward to watching the action on a big screen at one of what I'm sure will be several Public Viewing opportunities. I'll be sure to watch the restored Metropolis beforehand to get in a properly Socialist mood. Capitalists will have to wait a while to purchase the DVD version, but until then, we can all enjoy the restored trailer below.

The Guns of Essen

When there's a lot of snow on the ground, I lose my enthusiasm for riding my bike around town. The cold doesn't improve the situation, but mostly I object to the shrinking road shoulder. Banks of snow and ice push out into the street in places and a relatively pleasant morning commute becomes that much trickier. Then there's the air quality: worst in the US when we're under an inversion and cycling just increases my exposure. Still, I can't really bring myself to drive, so most days I walk to work. It's still cold, the air is still dirty and the average Logan sidewalk looks like a section of the Chilkoot Trail. But when I walk, I can listen to a book on tape and that makes it all worth while.

Last week I was "reading" The Guns of August again, Barbara Tuchman's classic book about the first month of World War I. It's a fabulous book and outrageously entertaining. I know hindsight is 20/20, but there is hardly a general or statesman in the whole 544 pages (or 14 disks) that doesn't come out looking like a complete ass. Field Marshall Sir John French, leader of the British Expeditionary Forces, landed in France only to execute a series of brilliant retreats. His troops could only make contact with the enemy when he made a mistake and forgot to retreat fast enough. The French, under Joffre, felt any battle could be won with proper Gallic élan, thereby neglecting to provide troops with items such as weapons and ammunition. The Germans seemed to have every advantage, but had an incomplete understanding of the value of diplomacy. After a gratuitous violation of Belgian neutrality to open the war, they felt the best way to win back world public opinion would be to execute woman and children in villages along the way to Paris. Mostly the Americans escape the worst of the stupidity by remaining neutral themselves, but the American ambassador to France reinforces the European view of American naïveté by suggesting that when the Germans arrive at the gates of Paris, he'll go out and "talk" to them.

I'm probably being too critical here. Albert I, King of the Belgians, shown here walking with the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel II, acted admirably. He was also very tall and sat a horse well. And Joseph Gallieni, French retired territorial General, whose intelligence, strength of will and resourcefulness saved the French from defeat, certainly deserves our respect. The Germans, under Moltke, had transport figured out to the timing of every axle of rolling stock and the second it would cross the French border, but Gallieni delivered his troops in a fleet of taxi cabs and stopped Moltke cold.

A big part in the first month of the war was played by German arms manufacturer Friedrich Krupp AG of Essen, Germany. It was their siege guns that allowed the Germans to overrun Belgian forts so rapidly. So imagine my surprise as I crested Old Main Hill on campus last week and spotted a ThyssenKrupp delivery truck in the parking lot behind our administration building, just as Ludendorff surrounded Liege in my headphones. It turned out to be nothing more serious than a routine elevator inspection. But it made me wonder about the resemblance of certain Utah State University administrators to General Erich Ludendorff.



Krupp AG merged with Thyssen, another Ruhrgebiet industrial giant, in 2000 and their new world headquarters is nearing completion in the Altendorf neighborhood in Essen. It's the sort of development that makes me really think the world might be getting better. Instead of invading one another's countries, almost everyone in Europe is busy now planning to sell bratwurst or some other local specialty in Essen as a part of the World Cultural Capital celebration. Krupp isn't building siege guns, but is instead insuring my safe transportation to the dean's office on the third floor of Old Main and back. The "Krupp Belt" that wraps around downtown Essen to the west, a phalanx of belching smoke stacks in WWI, and a heap of rubble at the end of WWII, is now a beautiful park with a new north/south boulevard and public transit line. The transformation has taken over one hundred years and I try to keep the long view myself as I walk the frozen trails of Logan, an urban planning waste land in the air pollution capital of Utah. If Europe survived the foolishness of their leaders, there must be hope for Cache Valley too.

When words fail

I still enjoy keeping up with events in Germany even though I'm living back in Utah now. In previous years that could be a little tricky, but the miracle of high speed Internet has made it almost too easy. I can remember years ago, sitting in front of a tinny short-wave radio trying to raise something interesting on Deutsche Welle and having to settle for a listing of ship sailings out of Bremerhaven. Now WDR offers all of their audio content free on their web page. I enjoy the music on Funkhaus Europa, but I also like listening to the news on WDR 2. Sometimes I have trouble choosing among all the great options and it doesn't make much sense to try to listen to them both at the same time. WDR 5 offers a lot of their content as podcasts and so I don't always have to choose. Today, for example, I listened to a good piece that was broadcast yesterday as a part of their Auf Ein Wort feature.

Today, September 1, is the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland and the Polish/German relationship was the subject of yesterday's Auf Ein Wort. In the Ruhrgebiet it's common to meet people with Polish surnames. Mostly, their grandfathers or great grandfathers came in the past to work the coal mines or in heavy industry. I know Poles who visit Germany regularly and Germans with Polish friends and in-laws. So on the surface, it might appear that the relationship is an easy and friendly one, but then again, it's hard to forget the speed and efficiency with which the German Wehrmacht invaded and occupied Poland. And no other victim of Nazi aggression has a stronger reason to complain. Fully ten percent of the Polish population died in the war. It's not a thing many are likely to quickly to forget, nor would we expect them too.

Most of what I know about the invasion of Poland comes from my multiple readings of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel, Maus. I read it first in German as a part of, what in my house, we call the "comic book method" of language study. I only got about 40% of the text that first time through, but the pictures helped a lot. As a rule I don't usually read books that are written in English in translation but this book is probably a good exception to that rule. The main character is Vladek, Spiegelman's father, and his difficulty with German syntax comes across as more genuine in German. Plus, the Nazi/cat soldiers are scarier auf deutsch.

German Chancellor Willy Brandt made a famous gesture of reconciliation with Poland in 1970 when he fell to his knees after placing a wreath at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto, but it wasn't well received by everyone at home. According to a survey done by Der Spiegel after the event, 48% of West Germans felt the gesture was over done. His opposition tried to use the symbolic action against him in a vote of no confidence held by the Bundestag in 1972 and Brandt survived by only two votes. If Poles want to see that as a fresh affront though, they should also remember that a short time later Brandt won re-election by a landslide: the best showing ever by his party (SPD) in a national election.

According to Wolf Scheller, the author of the Auf ein Wort piece I listened to, we shouldn't have any over ambitious expectations for friendly relations between this current generation of Germans and Poles. German and Polish catholic bishops celebrated a mass together today to commemorate the 1939 invasion, but the wounds are deep. Scheller suggests that it will take a new generation of citizens and that Germans and Poles need to get to know one another better for true reconciliation to take place. But gestures like Willy Brandt's certainly can't hurt. He was asked often about his actions and explained them this way:

Under the weight of recent history, I did what people do when words fail them. In this way I commemorated millions of murdered people.

After reading Maus again this past year for the third time, I'd say his actions were justified and courageous.

From Bauhaus to my house

Every year I teach a course at Utah State University about the Bauhaus. It's a pretty idiosyncratic course since it's based on my own personal interests. I'm not an art historian, so I can't claim the course has any real academic rigor. What it does have going for it is that I teach it as a part of a study abroad experience and have access to all kinds of primary sources that would be out of the question for an on-campus course. There are some readings for the course and I do require written assignments as well, but the bulk of the class happens in casual conversations in museums, over dinner or traveling on the Straßenbahn. I try to relate the artifacts of the Bauhaus to political history, to the particularities of German culture and to our own current attitudes about design. A best case scenario for how the course works: while under way to a museum somewhere in the Ruhrgebiet, I tell the student group that I need to stop into a bank for a minute and they should wait for me in the lobby. I leave them for a while and inevitably a sharp eyed student notices that the lobby furniture is vaguely familiar and says, "Hey, isn't that like... a Marcel Breuer chair?" When I return, discussion is underway and they have a million questions for me. There's no better way to drive home the point that the Bauhaus was about developing products for mass production, not painting and drawing.

This year is the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar and cities around Germany are celebrating with some fabulous exhibitions. I find the situation ironic, since after a full year in Germany with lots of travel and museum experiences, I didn't see even one of the exhibitions that are getting so much press now. Now that I'm back in the US, I'm trying to figure out how that happened.

It's really not so very surprising when I think it through. I've been to the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin 10 or 20 times. Likewise the Albers Museum in Bottrop and the Museum Für Angewandte Kunst in Berlin. I've visited the Gropius building in Dessau and seen countless works by artists that worked as "Masters of Form" during the Bauhaus 14 year run. I may be a little over saturated by Bauhaus stuff.

I also find it a little paradoxical that my own house in Logan is so much not in keeping with the Bauhaus aesthetic. One could maybe make an argument that it fits into the William Morris "Arts & Crafts" thinking, but honestly, it's just a farm shack with a series of not very well thought out lean-tos. If there's a foundation under that part of the a house that serves as a kitchen, I can't find any real evidence for it. Walls, floors and ceilings meet at something approximating 90 degrees but follow Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle more often than not. Still, I like my house and admire the vernacular wisdom that went into building it. On days when the temperature breaks 100, my house is cool. The ground floor walls are lined with mud-brick and it's oriented in a way that minimizes heat gain in summer.



The "desirable" homes in Logan, built in the last ten years, tend to be in the neighborhoods up on the hillsides. Many are 5000 square foot barns that feature a three story wall of windows facing southwest. Heat gain? No problem, there's a central air conditioner in the back yard. Out in front there's probably a Sport Utility Vehicle with a bumper sticker exhorting readers to reduce their carbon footprint. These kinds of houses win awards from architectural journals, but if I were in charge, their designers would win different kinds of awards. The kind that would involve jail time.

Coincidentally, that's exactly what happened to the students that were still around when the Nazis showed up at the Berlin factory building that housed the Bauhaus on 11 April, 1933. It was just a few weeks after the Reichstag fire and Hitler had been Chancellor for only about three months. The school had been on the decline for several years already but the Berlin police† made it official by arresting about 32 students and searching the school for Bolshevik propaganda and evidence of decadency. As I gaze out at the McMansions from my own back yard, I ask myself, where are the Nazi paramilitary units when you really need them? And I'm comforted to know, that regardless of what some people might think about my house, no one would ever be likely to see it as decadent.


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†There was tension between the regular Berlin police and the NSDAP jackboot types and it's the subject of an interesting series of novels by Philip Kerr. I haven't actually read any of them all the way through yet, but I think they're pretty good. They were the subject of a recent NPR piece you can read/listen to here.

Walküre

When I was growing up, there was a series of advertisements I often saw in the magazines grown ups read. Each ad featured a man, very well dressed and wearing an eye patch. The eye patch always stood out in a way that made the ads difficult for me to understand. Were they promoting this particular one-eyed guy? If so, who was he? At eight I had better things to think about and didn't waste much time on these ads, but now I know that they were considered by many to be ground breaking. The man who conceived of them, David Ogilvy, has been hailed as the inventor of direct marketing (a dubious distinction) and a trend setting genius. I also know now that the images were shirt advertisements. The model for the series, which became the signature images for Hathaway Shirts, was Baron George Wrangell, emigre nephew of a White Russian general. There was nothing wrong with either of his eyes. The patch was intended to make the ads distinctive, and since I still remember them, I guess it worked.

I was thinking about those ads this morning after viewing the most recent film from Tom Cruise last night. The film, Operation Valkyrie, came out while I was in Germany and got a lot of attention there. There are at least two German films that deal with the same story and in addition to showing them, German television also ran interviews with the daughter of Colonel von Stauffenberg (the character portrayed by Cruise in the film) and some documentaries about the German internal war resistance. Anyhow, I saw the Tom Cruise film last night and it was a real yawn. I went to bed wondering why the film was even made, and woke up convinced that it was all an excuse to get Tom Cruise into an eye patch.

When I was a kid, and the Hathaway ads were running in magazines, any normal kid wanted to be a cowboy. I had cowboy boots, a couple of six guns, holsters, a lariat, and of course, a cowboy hat. Several, in fact. But today everything is pirates. At the store where I do most of my shopping, cutlasses are an impulse purchase. Infants fly the jolly rodger from the seat of their disposable diapers. I don't understand the romance of the pirate, but it's big. I think Mr. Cruise and his agent figured that with all the good pirate roles being grabbed up by Johnny Depp, they needed to look elsewhere for eye patch possibilities. Cruise did look good in the patch, but it wasn't really enough to sustain the film.

The von Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler failed as we all know, and anyone who's read Tolstoy knows that virtually ALL military operations go to hell in a hand basket as soon as things get rolling. In that way, they're a little like sabbaticals, or like my sabbaticals anyhow, in which my best intentions and plans fall to pieces in the first weeks I'm gone. This time around I had problems with banking, credit cards, Internet access and a home phone, which I never managed to get installed. But on my return to Utah, I discovered that even our mail was completely fouled up. I, of course, filed a change of address card, and I had one person lined up to check any mail that got through that. A second person started forwarding my mail around December and ultimately the very helpful tenant who was renting my house began opening anything that looked like a bill in order to keep us out of debtor's prison.

Still, when we arrived home last week, one of the first things we did was open a stack of Christmas cards from 2008. Most of them were not the kind of commercial cards that feature a snow covered cottage or a smiling Santa, but rather personal photographs of the sender's family. In fact, most of them were photographs of only the children of the family, none of whom were wearing pirate regalia. Does this signify a return to the true meaning of the holiday? Who knows. I'll just say Frohe Weihnachten and try to get on top of my own holiday greetings in 2009.

Hurricane of '38

On September 21, 1938, Winston Churchill condemned the coming annexation of Sudetenland by Adolf Hitler's Nazi government in Germany. This area in what was then Czechoslovakia was primarily German-speaking, but had been denied Germany in the reshuffling of Europe after WWI. Hitler's move to annex was a big story internationally, but on this side of the Atlantic the story was quickly pushed aside as a late summer hurricane moved north at previously unheard of speed and made landfall on eastern Long Island, with its far western edge just brushing NYC.

A loyal Forschungsjahr reader recently left a comment and a question asking if I could report on the 1938 New England Hurricane. Can I ever. One of my earliest memories is of my father's stories of the Hurricane of '38. One story involved a double date with a couple of gals from Brooklyn on the night of the storm. My dad was working in Manhattan and after a movie (presumably on 42nd St.) it was decided that the group of young revelers should take a drive out to Jones Beach. It was a silly night to take such a drive. Even though NY City didn't get the full force of the hurricane, they were still driving in a blinding rain and trees were down on the way to the huge public beach on Long Island's south shore. My father described how he pulled into the parking lot, disoriented by the wind, rain and darkness. He saw lights and commotion ahead of him, stopped the car, and one of the gals (I'm reasonably sure she would have been named Doris) opened a door and stepped out. Into ankle deep water.



Record hide tides drove water inland all over New England and most older buildings in towns like Providence, Bridgeport and New London have brass plaques showing how high it went. The 1938 Hurricane may be nameless to this day, but its presence is still very real to New Englanders and to Rhode Islanders in particular. About 600 people died in the hurricane, and most of them died in Rhode Island. My wife recently met an older man at the hardware store here in town whose sister died in what may well be the most tragic event of the '38 Hurricane. It took place at Mackerel Cove in Jamestown on the afternoon of the 21st. Mackerel Cove is a narrow strip of sand that connects the main part of the island to the southern Beavertail chunk where I live. I ride over this strip every day and yesterday I stopped to photograph the 1938 highwater markers that have recently been placed on all the telephone poles along the road. On the afternoon the hurricane hit, a school bus tried to cross here to Beavertail, bringing a group of kids home, some of whom lived at the light house. The bus stalled in the waves and the kids held hands as they tried to cross to safety in the rising waves. Seven of them drowned that day including the sister of the man my wife spoke to. The bodies were washed up on shore all along Narragansett Bay.



The destruction from the storm was so wide spread that even into the fifties, after the results of Hitler's move into the Sudetenland had played out fully and Germany was well into the Wirtschaftswunder period, some damage could still be seen around New England. More often though, towns and people rebuilt. My dad went back the next summer to Lamphier's Cove and rebuilt the family summer dwelling. Lamphier's Cove was a community of New Haven residents who moved to the shore for the summer months. Property owners all pooled their tiny plots and created a resident association, sharing a spring for fresh water and some communal outhouses. It all sounds vaguely socialist to me, hard to reconcile with the fact that, as far as I know, my father voted for Nixon every time he got the chance. But every summer the Terry family moved to the end of the trolley line in Branford and lived in a tent on Lamphier's Cove.

It was the tent and the wooden platform it rested on that went north with the hurricane and in the summer of 1939, my father worked with his brothers and my grandfather to rebuild. In its second incarnation, the tent became a two room cottage where I spent a lot of summer weekend days myself, alternately pulling eels out of the questionable waters of the cove, or avoiding the attention of my two maiden aunts who lived there with my grandmother. These two aunts were well-meaning, but in an effort to appear "with it" they often used the expression "Super!" Imagine my surprise when I landed in Germany thirty years later to find that "Super!" was a completely standard expression, having no undercurrent of dorkiness associated with it. Some people use the alternate, "Supi!" but I never hear either expression without thinking of Harriet and Dottie and those filthy eels at Lamphier's Cove.

Der Tod von Benno Ohnesorg

Bild, or the Bild-Zeitung, as it is sometimes called, is a hugely popular daily newspaper in Germany and in the opinion of some, a cause for national shame. It's the largest selling newspaper in Europe, but stories are often based on very thin evidence and headlines are always sensational. Stories in Bild are written at about a fifth grade level
and in many ways it would make ideal reading for someone like me who's language skills are less than perfect. But for a variety of reasons, not limited to the generous and sleazy cheesecake always featured just below the fold on page one, I can't even pick one up when it's laying unclaimed next to me on the streetcar.

Bild tends to polarize people in Germany. In a country that takes newspaper journalism very seriously, Bild seems an insult to the level of excellence established and maintained by papers like the Süddeutsche Zeitung, or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. But more than that, Bild has a long history as a conservative paper that allows its editorial point of view to shape (and at times maybe create) the news. Into the 1980's, Bild, founded by Axel Springer in 1952, still referred to East Germany as the Soviet Occupation Zone and only began using the GDR official name a little later in quotes. When university student Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by Karl-Heinz Kurras, a West Berlin police officer during a protest against the visit of the Shah of Iran in 1967, Bild actively shaped public opinion against the student movement and supported the need for police to defend themselves with deadly force.



During the time of those protests, which were mirrored in countries around the world, including the US, where our own Kent State shooting has many parallels to the killing of Benno Ohnesorg, lines were drawn along traditional Right/Left boundaries. Student activists protested against the new capitalist government which was supported by the United States and, in the eyes of the students, was simply a neo-Fascist follower of the Nazi regime. At rallies and speaches, they often used the rhetoric of the East German state and the vocabulary of Marxism. As the movement developed over several years and the actions of a violent, radical splinter group of the student movement began to dominate headlines, groups like the Red Army Faction actually formed secret alliances with the German Democratic Republic in the East.

On the other side, police, members of the conservative and centrist middle class and the politicians they elected, all used anticommunist rhetoric to support actions against the protesters and back up the policeman, Kurras, who was tried for Ohnesorg's murder in two separate trials. He was seen as a champion of pro western Capitalism and cleared of all charges in 1970. He eventually reached the level of Detective Chief Inspector in the Berlin police department. He has never shown any remorse for his actions and in fact commented on them by stating that "anyone who attacks me is crushed" (Wer mich angreift, wird vernichtet. Aus. Feierabend. So ist das zu sehen.) By all accounts, he is an authoritarian type, not given to self doubt and a strong supporter of order and obedience. And last weekend it was announced in the German press that he was also a secret supporter of the East German State, a communist party member and Stasi agent. (Stasi = Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the official secret police of East Germany.)

If this fact had been made known in 1967, it's unlikely that any of the left wing protesters would have believed it. More probably they would have assumed it were just another trick of the bourgeoisie neo-Fascists. But the facts are now clear, discovered by accident in the mountain of documents left behind by the fall of East Germany and the Stasi. Kurras, now in his 80's doesn't deny his membership in the party. So looking back, we can see that virtually all participants were allied with their own natural enemies and working at cross purposes to their own interests. The East German Communist party allied itself with radical activists to destabilize the West German government although they hated disorder and hippies and disobedience above all other evils. The students joined forces with the very people who were at least indirectly responsible for killing the left's greatest martyr. Western capitalists joined ranks and did everything in their power to unknowingly protect a communist secret agent. And with hindsight it's easy to see that the fight wasn't about socialism versus capitalism. The true battle front was running perpendicular to the one we were all watching so closely and the good news is, the good guys won, albeit completely by accident.

This story is still unfolding and the Stasi archives likely hold many more secrets, although it's hard for me to imagine any could top this revelation. There is no evidence to suggest that Kurras was acting under orders from his Stasi controllers when he shot Ohnesorg, but his actions contributed significantly to the speed and intensity with which the left wing student movement turned violent. Like the Reichstag fire in 1933 that Adolf Hitler used to solidify his power base, the Ohnesorg murder was a rallying cry for left. But the truth of the Reichstag fire is still unknown. In the case of Ohnesorg's murder, the truth has come out with the shock and certitude of a Hitchcock plot twist in the final frames of the film. Bild Zeitung is reporting on the story too, but with no mention of its former support of Karl-Heinz Kurras and certainly no apologies. I guess I didn't expect any.

Moseltal

I've had innumerable conversations with citizens of Germany who have tried to explain America to me. I'm sure that with their more objective point of view they must have some insights I've missed, but let's face it: the idea is absurd. I've lived in the States my whole life more or less, and they've seen a bunch of films made from Steven King novels, but they want to explain my country to me? Ich don't think so.

And I know many Americans, most of whom have never been to Germany, and they in turn want to explain Germany to me. They think they know all about it because they watched Hogan's Heroes every week in the 60's, so now they're experts. But the world is complex, too complex for such instant evaluations. Still, we need to file our experiences into mental shoe boxes in order to understand them. I've found, in fact, that the less I know about a topic, the more confident my opinion about it can be. Having spent three years living in Germany, I find that my picture of what Germany represents or what it means to be German is more complicated than ever. My cycling trip in the Mosel Valley just added to that complexity with a series of experiences that defy the mental shoe box.

I don't think it's possible or profitable to categorize all of our experiences, but it seems to be a universally human trait. The fact is that every country is filled with contradictions and Germany is no exception. The stereotype is, all Germans drink beer and lots of it. The reality is revealed in the view from my guesthouse window in Lösnich. Everyone in the Moseltal makes and drinks wine. Beer is an also ran.



I learned in fourth grade that Germany was the land of the barbarians. Home to the germanic tribes that sacked Rome. The reality is, Trier was the largest Roman city north of the Alps. The Moseltal is filled with the ruins and artifacts of hundreds of years of Roman culture. They planted the grapes, built the terraces and watched the show at the Trier amphitheater. The city gate is still standing and in good shape.



And aren't Germans supposed to be a little wild? Pierced tongues, shaved heads, tattooed eyelids, Rastafarian armpit hair... Yes, it's all relatively common at, for example, a Gymnasium in Berlin-Friedrichshain, and that's before the students show up. But this Konditorei, where I breakfasted in Trier, was preserved like a museum for the Spiessers of the 1960's, and the women who work there have never pierced anything more dramatic than a Schokowalnußkuchen, and then only to see if it were time to take it out of the oven.



It seems to me, that as soon as I learn enough to define a stereotype, I find a dozen exceptions that make me re-think my original thesis. Probably I'm better off not trying to draw any conclusions, but then I come back to a fundamental truth: Germany is distinctly different when compared with, say, Poland. And France is distinct from Spain. There are differences, but they're complicated and not easily grasped. For me it all became clear with a beautiful Jungendstil gate I saw in Traben-Trarbach, just before boarding a train back to Essen.



Clearly influenced by Art Nouveau, this arched gate on the bridge between the town's two halves is distinctly German in the way color is used, in it's proportions and in the romantic reference to the castle seen in the turrets on either side of the arch. But what really struck me was the small traffic sign down at street level. Yes, you may be driving through the vineyards of the Mosel, visiting one of the most charming tourist cities in all of Rheinland-Pfalz, but what's really important is that you know the proper speed limit in case you need to cross the bridge in your tank. It's the kind of detail that's just not left to chance in Germany.

A Planned Community

South of Frankfurt an der Oder, right on the Polish border, there's a city called Eisenhüttenstadt. Formerly it was known as Stalinstadt and before that Wohnstadt. I visited it over the Easter weekend primarily because I had read that it was an excellent example of Soviet-style city planning. The site on the Oder river was chosen after increasing tensions between East and West Germany made it difficult to bring steel products into the East sector from the Ruhrgebiet. A steel production industrial city was needed in the East and this particular piece of land had a number of advantages for German Democratic Republic planners, the first one being that it was a clean slate. There was nothing built there and the city could be laid out properly. River transportation was available as well as a good rail infrastructure.

Then, having made my decision to visit, I learned about the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR. It's a very small museum devoted to daily life in the German Democratic Republic and it's in Eisenhüttenstadt. For any readers who might find themselves on the eastern border of Germany with an afternoon to kill, it's a must-see.

Like many of my generation, I'm intrigued by stories from behind the "Iron Curtain." The night my older siblings told me that the world was ending is one of my earliest memories. "In the morning, you'll be dead!" they reported gleefully. It was October of 1962 and Khrushchev and Kennedy were facing off over Cuba. Halloween was going to be ruined and I had a great cannibal costume I was planning. United Nations Secretary-General U Thant worked hard to find a peaceful compromise and it cost my mom just as much effort to reassure me that I wouldn't be blown up soon. Not before Christmas in any case. So my life, at least that part of it that I am aware of, really began with the cold war. Six years of grade school with the School Sisters of Notre Dame didn't help to give me a balanced view of communism. So, I had plenty of assumptions about life in the former GDR when I first came to Germany, four years after the Wall came down. But I have to say, not many of my assumptions are reinforced by current experiences. Not that I'm soft on Communism. When I think of the Stasi payroll, with what seems like the entire citizenry being paid to spy on each other, it seems like an inefficient system to say the least. But visiting the Dokumentationszentrum in Eisenhüttenstadt shows a side of this vicious police state that made me a little nostalgic for the old times. By the time I got to the video interview with the man who invented a tent that could be mounted on the roof of a Trabant, I was a convert of sorts.



The museum is housed in one of the Soviet style developments that represent the first phase of building in Eisenhüttenstadt. The buildings are well planned, and use the same kind of inner Hof set up that I've seen on the Stalin/Frankfurter Allee in Berlin. Later money was short and the Plattenbau took over, but these first buildings were quite nice. The museum is in the former daycare center for the community and the main stairs leading up are decorated with really wonderful stained glass. When I walked by the Plattenbau later in the day, my enthusiasm for the worker's paradise was dampened some, but no system is perfect, right?





Now that the wall is down, a new spirit reigns in Eisenhüttenstadt. The Plattenbau is being abandoned and new development is springing up all over. I'm glad the West won, but I'm not sure about current city planning in this new capitalist era in the former East Germany. I walked by a brand new shopping center in Eisenhüttenstadt called "City Center" and it's a toss up for me whether it looks more like Ogden, UT or Patterson, NJ. Either way, I think I prefer having the missiles in Cuba.