Essen prepares for the Weihnachtsmarkt: Burgplatz Ferriswheel

Hilarious Nazi Gags

This past week I was in Berlin working for the Fulbright Kommision. They had me interviewing German students who have applied for a stipend to travel to the U.S. and study at an American university. It was interesting to me to compare and contrast my experience this time with the first time I did this in 1994. We were in Bonn back then and Berlin wasn't yet the Hauptstadt. And I was struck by how many of the students we interviewed brought up the Nazi past and how they would deal with it as they traveled in America.

No students brought that topic to the discussion this time around and it seems to be right in sync with the renewed interest in German cooking and a willingness to fly the German flag. It's hard to be sure about cause and effect, but I feel this is related to a willingness to deal with the nazi issue in a humorous way. Take this short film for example. It started showing as a kind of mock public service announcement in theaters about 7-8 years ago. For those of you who speak no German, I think you'll find the sight gags still make it worth while. If you can follow the commentary, it's even funnier.

Dani Levy, director of Alles auf Zucker, did a Hitler comedy recently named, Mein Führer. I've never seen it, but I am familiar with the Kitler site. It features photographs of cats (Kätze) that look like Adolf Hitler. It's not strictly speaking a "German" website, but it's well known in Germany. I spent some time there and was amazed at how strong the resemblances are. I'm reading Art Spiegelmann's Maus at the moment and one of the conventions that he uses throughout the book is to portray the different nationalities as animals. The Poles are pigs, the Jews are mice and the Germans cats. On the front cover of most editions is a drawing of Hitler as a cat and it may have planted a seed in the people who got the Kitler website up and running.

Overall, it seems like a healthy thing that the nazi topic, and Hitler in particular, are finally loosing some of their taboo. I've heard it said that we'll know when the World War II era is really over, when a child born in Germany is given the name Adolf. I don't know if it's happened, but if not yet, it can't be too far off.

Spaziergang with Thore

The weather has been fabulous this past week and I had the pleasure a stroll with my new buddy, Thore. We spent the morning in Werden, visiting the Post, several bakeries (no one had Maisbrötchen!) and buying tickets for an upcoming trip to Berlin. We also walked along the Ruhr for a distance and I have to say, I've rarely had the pleasure of better company. Thore can make a sort of humming sound while we walk and as his stroller rolls over the cobbles, his voice sounds a little like an outboard motor. He also attracts the attention of passers-by and going in and out of the Post, people were falling all over themselves to hold the doors for us. He's got a mom and dad and they tend to monopolize his time, but I'm hoping we can get together more in the coming year.

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

People-watching is, on average, much better in the city than in a smaller town. It seems in a smaller community there is a weaker need to define yourself as "other." I imagine most people recognize their own individuality more easily in a smaller community. Whatever the reason, just watching the world go by can be a fascinating occupation in a place like the Ruhrgebiet.

We were at the opera in Düsseldorf this past weekend. The production was a rarely performed piece by Richard Strauss in which all the main characters are first killed and then resurrected over the course of the next two hours or so. Current American cinema has a bad reputation because it always has to give us the "happy ending," but Hollywood has nothing on the opera. We all know the scene in recent American films, in which, typically, the male lead is forced to proclaim his undying love for the female lead in a public place: the more onlookers the better. In the opera, characters have to proclaim their love in the same sort of way, but in the one we saw, Die Frau ohne Schatten, the audience includes supernatural beings and both parties are dripping blood. It doesn't get much more dramatic.

The people-watching at the opera was great too. The audience is better-heeled than the crowd around the bahnhof, but you get the same kind of extremes. I'm pretty sure I saw a Nehru jacket being worn by one patron. Haircolor, jewelry, shoes... I felt as though I should have had a check list the way birders do. But my best sighting, the equivalent of an ivory-billed woodpecker so to speak, came on the train on the way to Düsseldorf. I sat across from a young couple who had obviously spent a lot of time getting ready for the evening. She was Dolly Parton meets Nina Hagen. A red check gingham blouse and a thin sliver of what looked like PVC pipe lodged in a dramatically gauged out ear. From one point of view, she looked as though she would have been comfortable at one of my mom's bridge parties. Then you notice the two tiny silver balls hanging from her nose and you want to offer her your handkerchief. He was a cross between, maybe, James Dean and Vince Price. White t-shirt, tight jeans, but a big belt buckle with a skull on it. They were probably on their way to a disco, but I couldn't help thinking about them as the opera cast came out for their twentieth or thirtieth bow. At some level, my traveling companions and the world of opera or maybe just the world of "high" art have in common a love of the dramatic and neither is overly concerned with restraint or good taste. And both provide wonderful entertainment.

Polska

We took a short trip east this week, stopping for a while in Frankfurt an der Oder and Berlin. Frankfurt Oder is a small city in the former East Germany, right on the Polish border. As a point of reference, there is a series of documentary films about a group of people from the town of Golzow (1) that might ring a bell with some readers. Golzow is not far from Frankfurt an der Oder. Of course, if you haven’t seen the films, this won’t help much. You can google it or it could be there is still an atlas laying around somewhere.

Anyhow, Frankfurt an der Oder is a nice city and a little time capsule of the German Democratic Republic. The renovations began in a lot of the former eastern cities before the ink was dry on the reunification documents, but some are not progressing as fast as others. Frankfurt is a little behind and it’s still possible to see some not-yet-renovated pre-war architecture, as well as some good examples of the soviet era stuff. When I was growing up, we were told that these people were the among the most evil on the planet. Now I find they’ve mostly got little teddy bears collecting East German dust on almost every free square centimeter of their homes, many with little signs around their necks that say, “Ich liebe dich!”

And unlike John Kerry, we didn’t forget Poland. We walked across the short bridge and spent a day there. It turns out that you can still buy a decent apple in a store these days, and you only need go as far as Poland. We got a bag of crisp, tart, juicy apples for 2 or 300 zloty. We also stopped for lunch. My Polish isn’t as good as my Czech, and I don’t speak any Czech. So instead of ginger ale, we wound up with two very large Polish beers. 0,5 liters, to be exact. We made the best of it and got ourselves across the bridge again to Germany without incident.

Berlin was fabulous. We saw The Great Dictator at the Babylon, Berlin’s last great silent film era movie theater. Also paid our respects at Senefelder Platz to the discoverer of the lithographic process, walked by the site of Käthe Kollwitz’s home and managed to avoid going into any museums for over three days. Still, it’s nice to be home in Essen again.
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(1) Named, in fact, The Children of Golzow; it’s very much like the amazing group of films by Michael Apted often called the “Up Series.”