Munich - Aschaffenburg - Hamburg

 Munich - Aschaffenburg – Hamburg

Was ich nicht gezeichnet habe,habe ich nicht gesehen.  (= If I haven’t sketched it, I haven’t seen it.)

Goethe

If you love Germany, better not to visit it.

Borges

1: An Interrupted Trip and a Detour to Baltimore

The trip was ill-starred.  The omens were bad.  It was clear that something bad would happen to me in Germany.  As I grow older, I regard travel, particularly abroad, with fear and trembling.  There are too many possibilities for calamity and I’m old now, weak and without resilience.

You might ask me what specific omens were inauspicious.  My response would be vague.  All omens, I might insist, were sinister.  But this is evasion.  In fact, there wasn’t any actual evidence from which the doom that I anticipated could be predicted.  I’m afraid that the prophecy here is self-fulfilling.  Bad things happen to those who anticipate the occurrence of such misfortunes.  The foreboding sense of catastrophe looming over my trip to Germany was entirely a matter of anxiety, an irrational worry in other words that sought evidence for itself everywhere, but, in fact, found no factual traction anywhere but in this pernicious (il)logic: if you worry, there must be a cause for worry and a cause for worry is always a basis to anticipate the worst from imminent events – no matter that this reasoning is completely circular.  

So, it came down to this: on the verge of my visit to Germany, I had a premonition of disaster rooted in a strangely persistent and cinematically detailed vision: I am standing on a street corner in Munich, drenched in sweat and blinded by the sun.  I am drinking dirty water from a plastic bottle that I have just dipped in the Rhine or the Elbe or whatever river flows under the stone bridges of the ancient city in which I am lost.  My shirt is untucked.  My shoes are untied and my toes blistered and there is a bronze saint, a gloomy shadow, glaring down at me from a nook in an old brick wall.  I’ve lost my way and can’t get home.  

On September 27, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond, planning to return home to New York City.  Poe never reached New York.  On October 3, 1849, he was found delirious in a tavern in Baltimore.  Poe was dressed in shabby clothing that were not his own.  The writer was incoherent and helpless.  He was said to be filthy, suffering from “swelling” in his brain – although the cause for this condition was never established.  Poe was taken to a pauper’s hospital where he died on October 7, 1849.  No one knows why he ended-up in Baltimore nor how he was diverted away from his destination, nor what happened to him.  In his delirium, Poe muttered the name “Reynolds” several times.  But what this name had to do with his awful condition remains unknown.  

It seemed to me that something similar could happen to me in Germany. 

2: Itinerary

Angelica and I departed for Germany, flying on Icelandair and, accordingly, through Reykavik.  We were scheduled to leave on Thursday in the early evening, land at Reykavik around six in the morning local time, and, then, reach Munich around 1:30 pm.  We planned to stay one night in Munich and, then, were booked with train tickets to Aschaffenburg, a small city about forty miles from Frankfort.  We had hotel reservations (Ibis Styles) for two nights in Aschaffenburg – Angelica had concert tickets to see a band that she admires, The Lord of the Lost, on Sunday night at a venue called the Colos-Saal (“Colossal.” Get it: Saal = Concert Hall).  On Monday, mid-afternoon, we were scheduled to take a local train to Frankfort and, then, board the ICE (Express) to Hamburg.  We had reservations for five nights at the Hotel Hafen (Hafen = Harbor) in Hamburg.  Then, we had morning flight via Icelandair to Copenhagen, from Copenhagen to Reykavik, and, then, to Minnneapolis, arriving around 6:30 pm.  

The schedule frightened me: too many close connections.  Air travel in the United States was horribly snarled with hundreds of flight cancellations daily – the airlines have overbooked and were far beyond their capacity to serve the numbers of travelers planning to fly.  (As a result of COVID, the airlines had reduced their staffs and the number of pilots available and, indeed, had many jets actually side-lined and not serviceable.  But the fact that there is no plane available and no one to fly the jet if one could be found has never deterred the airlines from selling tickets to passengers for non-existent flights.)   Although I didn’t know for sure, I suspected that the situation was likely similar in Europe – there are no longer strictly local phenomenon; disease and economies are all entwined.

Of course, my anxious mind reverted to visions in which Angelica and I were wandering half-crazed through a foreign airport, unable to make our connections, and, therefore, indefinitely stranded.

3: A historical precedent of dubious relevance

Somewhere in family genealogies, there is a story of Reverend Beckmann’s last trip to Hamburg.  The anecdote, which I am unable to confirm, had this approximate form: After serving his congregation in rural Iowa for many years, the congregation raised money to send its beloved pastor to Hamburg and northern Germany so that he could re-visit his seminary in Wartburg or Erfurt, the place where the minister, as a young man, had completed his theological training and, of course, the home of many uncles and aunts.  Pastor Beckmann sailed to Hamburg, disembarked there and spent several weeks visiting his old haunts, the beer-halls where he had drank as a young man, fellow students now grown old as well as a few elderly professors, and visited with family members.  After a pleasant sojourn, Pastor Beckmann returned to the port and embarked for New York City and trains running westward to Iowa.  I recall, I think, that he left Germany from Bremen.  

In the middle of the ocean, Pastor Beckmann was moved to conduct Gottesdienst (= worship) on the rolling deck of the ocean liner.  He recited some of the liturgy, speaking, of course, in German, and read scripture to the assembled congregants.  In the middle of a hymn that he was leading, he suffered some kind of stroke, sudden apoplexy, and fell dead to the ground.

For several generations, it was the custom among pastors in my father’s family to finish their theological studies in northern Germany.  Near my desk in my law office, I have a colored postcard showing the Jungfernsteg and Alster in Hamburg.  The postcard is addressed to my paternal grandfather, “Reverend John Beckmann” in Albion, Nebraska with a jocular salutation “Dear Rev.”  The handwriting is very clear, letters rounded in what seems to be a woman’s script.  The text says that the writer who is unknown to me has just returned to “Hamburg after many conferences including Berlin.”  The correspondent says that she (or more like “he”) will be pleased to give a talk on this trip.  The writer says that it may be a couple of weeks before film (presumably pictures taken in Germany) will be developed but that he can give the speech earlier if the Reverend John Beckmann wishes.  The postcard shows the fashionable promenade along the Alster, a river impounded into a lake in the center of Hamburg.  The perspective is aerial and buildings are white, their reflections shimmering in the smooth water.  Some of the roofs are covered in red tiles after the northern European custom and several small white ferries are plying the lake next to circular kiosk (presumably selling tickets for water excursions) flying a small pennant-shaped flag.  The city looks orderly with no trace of bombing damage although I suspect that the picture post-card dates back to the year of my birth 1954 or earlier.  It’s an orderly-looking image, taken from an aerial perspective (lower I suppose than the bombers that dropped their ordinance on the city) with tiny figures strolling along the water, cars parked in a neat row along the Jungfernsteg, some grey distant clouds drifting over the far sweep of buildings veined with green wooded parks.  Only a single church steeple is visible.  One of the ferries drags behind it a vee-shaped wake, disturbing the calm waters.  

4.  A hike from HHH

The Icelandair flight departs from Terminal 2, that is, the terminal at the Minneapolis Airport named after Hubert H. Humphrey.  Angelica and I arrive by Uber very early.  There’s no Icelandair gate agents on-hand – apparently, they open their baggage check two hours before the scheduled departure at 7:25 pm.  The HHH terminal is not crowded and security is relatively manageable.  There’s not much available in terms in restaurants and shops, but this is fine with me.  

After waiting for a half-hour, I decide that we should make the trek over to the Main Terminal (#1) to exchange some currency for Euros.  We have no place to check our luggage and so we drag it along with us over several hundred yards of moving conveyors in long, empty corridors toan  escalator that descends to a forlorn-looking train platform.  It’s hot outside.  In the distance, behind a long, featureless hangar, I see a foreboding thunderhead pushing itself up out of the lakes and prairie like a colossal mushroom.  The column of cloud is fluted and its involutions are painted pink by the oblique evening sunlight.

We reach the terminal after a five minute train ride, hike around in a series of tunnels and, then, find ourselves walking along sidewalk behind massive parking ramps stacked up over us.  It’s fifteen minute walk into more underground plazas where confused travelers are staggering around, heavily laden (as our we) with our luggage.  At last, we reach the escalator up to the main terminal.  I ask the security guard whether currency exchange is beyond the huge lines of travelers waiting to be processed by TSA.  The air feels wet and sultry in the main terminal.  “No, you have to go through security to get to the currency exchange,” the guard says, shrugging.  So we turn around and make our way back to the HHH terminal after a pointless hike among parking lots and endless concourses where moving walkways whisper to the few passengers making their way through the vast buildings.

5.  First-class

Angelica and I fly first-class to Munich.  It’s a ridiculous extravagance that makes me feel vaguely guilty, somehow complicit in the climate change destroying the world.  Of course, we board first and, then, sit back drinking Prosecco while the plane slowly fills with coach class travelers.  

Airborne, we are plied with drinks and served an elaborate, overly rich, meal that upsets my stomach. A young woman is seated in the row ahead of us on the plane.  She has a red face and seems to be dressed in loose-fitting pajamas and it’s pretty obvious that she doesn’t understand anything about air travel, let alone the luxuries in First Class.  The Icelandair ice maidens serving as stewardesses are clearly irritated with her.  She kicks off her shoes and jabs her bare, reddish (boiled-looking) feet at the bulkhead and whenever alcoholic drinks are offered she asks for two or three, an amenity that she is now allowed.  She asks other travelers about the service in First Class, that is, what is allowed and what is not.  Her seat-mate flees for another First Class berth a few rows behind us, obviously alarmed at the way that she sprawls across her recliner, drizzling candy wrappers and other garbage all over the aisle and compartment.  She asks for several blankets and lolls across two seats, sometimes moaning quietly.  The stewardesses are appalled but, of course, obliged to be courteous.  It’s hard to interpret the young woman’s presence in first-class, but, obviously, someone has paid a lot of money to transport her overseas – she is bound for Heathrow Airport in London.  The girl’s face is sunburned, as if she spent too much time outside at a lake, and her features are a bit sharp, ferret-like fringed by a ring of sun-bleached dishwater blonde hair.  For much of the flight, she has her face mostly covered in a sleep mask and, of course, she snores.  She ignores the seat-belt signs and traipses back and forth on her lobster-red bare feet to the toilet.    

But who am I fooling.  I’m just as clueless as our fellow-passenger.  I’ve flown first-class two times in my life, once when I was bumped from a flight in Amsterdam and, later, comped with first-class seats back from Europe and once when I traveled to and from Los Angeles with a prosperous client – the two men with whom I traveled called “coach” “cattle class.”  So I’m not much more sophisticated that the hapless girl with the sunburn and pajamas.  

There’s a trick flying first class – the stewardesses offer all sorts of food, snacks, drinks.  But, of course, the point is that the offer is made.  In most cases, the prudent traveler should turn down these amenities.

6: North Pole

Somewhere over Labrador, the cloud cover fifteen-thousand feet below the jet darkens to an inky blue.  But the upper air remains brilliant, a dome of bright blue rising over pink and orange strata riding atop the dark clouds.  The sun shines perpetually over the North Pole in June and so, try as it might, the day is unable to fade away and the sun hangs low in the sky, a bright jewel against the pale cerulean ether.

Then, the clouds begin to surge bronze, then, gold.  It’s becoming light over the north Atlantic.  Greenland shows between cleft clouds, a high plateau where ice rings a pale, cream-colored lake.  Then, the plane drops down to the volcanic fields of rubble at Keflavik airport where it’s a bright morning, little cinder cones gleaming around the edges next to the turmoil of the sea.  

7:   Confusion at Keflavik

In the crowded terminal at Keflavik, gate agents divide passengers into three categories: people with Icelandic or EU passports, those with non-EU passports, and travelers to London, the rest of the UK and Scotland and Ireland.  The first category of passengers walk past a kiosk, closed this time of the morning (six a.m.) and they are home.  Non-EU passports stand in long line zigzagging between rope barriers for a pointless passport check – exactly why Iceland requires this formality is unclear to me: the border control workers seem to be partly asleep and scarcely gaze at the proffered documents.  The line moves quickly but it’s long.  On the wall, a mural-sized LED flashes greetings to travelers – “the Northern Lights (written in Icelandic) welcomes you to Iceland”; then, there’s a picture of shaggy horse (Hestur) which also “welcomes you to Iceland” – this latter part of the greeting written in English.  Travelers bound for the UK and Ireland are shunted into a different concourse – for some reason, they don’t have to pass through border control.  

After six-hours in the air, I feel queasy, over-fed, gloomy with the gin cocktail that I consumed.  I’m anxious about the connection to Munich, although the Icelandair gate staff says that “there’s no problem – all planes are being held for passengers.”  (People in Iceland speak perfect idiomatic English – they sound like the proverbial man on the six-o’clock news.  Icelandic, a form of old Norse, by contrast is a completely inscrutable language – it’s cognates to English are so remote that they can’t be seen with the naked eye and words on signs are enormously long and seem to be completely impossible to pronounce.)

In the line waiting for clearance at Border Control, I see the girl with pinched, sunburned face standing haplessly in the queue.  I approach her.  “You’re going to Heathrow right?” I ask.  “Yeah,” she says.  “You shouldn’t be in the line,” I tell her.  “You don’t have to go through passport control to get to London.”  “No one told me,” she says.  (This is wrong – the declaration that passengers to the UK don’t have to go through the border agents was made several times on-board our flight and, then, the Ice-maidens in their crisp uniforms and wearing stylish berets also advised the girl, responding to her somewhat panicked questions.  And, further, gate agents in the concourse have divided the passengers into categories with respect to the lines waiting to board their next flight.  The girl looks baffled.  I step out of line for a moment to point her in the direction of burly gate agent with a Viking’s big red beard.  “Talk to him, talk to him,” I tell her.  “You are waiting in the wrong line.  You need to get on the plane to Heathrow.”  The girl shuffles off, sighing.  

8.  Offenbarung

 

On the flight from Keflavik to Munich, I put on the head phones offered by one of the ice nymphs and listened to some Icelandic music.  (Icelandair’s playlist features nothing but artists from the island-nation.)  One of the pieces, Der Klang der Offenbarung des Goettlichen (“The Sound of the Revelation of the Divine”), a symphonic suites by Kjarten Sveinsson, was impressive in gloomy, droning way, music like a bad toothache, perhaps, and I didn’t sleep, but drifted in and out of foreboding visions about calamity in Germany.  Kjarten is a founder of the Icelandic trance-rock group, Sigur Ros, and the symphonic suite playing in my ear phones was composed for a theater-piece premiered in Berlin.  Most of the Icelandic music on offer was uninteresting – how many great artists can a small nation like Iceland produce?  Although on reflection, the country has, in fact, been the home of one world-class novelist (Halldor Laxness), Bjork, and, now, Sjon, a writer about whom I am ambivalent but, nonetheless, talented.  Genius, I’ve always thought, is statistical, an accident, one great artist mysteriously appearing among several million, the rarest of anomalies, a bit like some horrible genetic mutation that produces an infant with cyclopean one eye or a woman with ivory horns.  

One of the flight attendants was Cambodian, a young prince with bright indignant eyes, rail-thin and haughty.  It was odd to hear him speaking Icelandic to Ice Maidens, eyes flashing with irritation at the loathsome passengers in the plane, strings of incomprehensible consonants sliding out of his lips in a vexed purr.  There was nothing to see from the window – northern Europe was swathed in dense, humid-looking clouds.

9: The Luggage Cemetery

The plane dropped out of the clouds and bounced a couple times on the Munich tarmac, before taxiing to a nondescript terminal shaped like a cross between a chemical factory and long, aerodynamically-shaped wing.  In the terminal, we were directed to a baggage claim in a large room with glass windows opening onto rain-wet runways, some distant shelter belts tossed in the wind.  The European air-system is every bit as distressed (in the Summer of 2022) as the American transportation grid, thousands of flights either canceled or delayed, and the big baggage claim hall was a graveyard of lost luggage.  Thousands of bags and suitcases of all descriptions stood in rows like tombstones, each item, I supposed, jammed with people’s medication and travel itineraries, their sex-toys and underwear, souvenirs for friends and family.  The jumble of luggage was alarming and, as we entered the baggage claim, we had to thread our way through the suitcases and parcels, some of them sinister-looking cans or metal boxes like trunks in which to store explosives and ammo.  In the single foul-smelling restroom, all the stalls were locked – perhaps, they had flooded from overuse.  There was no place to go to the toilet, a serious problem after a long air flight and my bowels felt a bit, loose, unstable – what time was it really?  Three or four in the morning, perhaps, and, maybe, time to visit the restroom for my daily constitutional, except that the toilets were all inoperable.  Traveling always creates uncertainties about when to use the facilities (the answer is at every opportunity) because your body doesn’t know what time it is and may make demands on you that you don’t expect.  I felt queasy and sat on a bench glumly watching the parade of bags and boxes conveyed along a figure-eight-shaped course, a pattern like the sign of some useless and baffling infinity.  As it happened, just as Angelica was despairing as to lost luggage, our packs emerged and we were able to escape the purgatorial baggage claim for the humid concourses of the Munich airport.  I found a toilet but, by this point, the urge had passed – this is always also a bad sign since bowels can’t remain repressed for long.

We found the train station buried under the terminal, changed some money, and bought two 28 Euro tickets to Munich.  (This was also a mistake: we could have bought the 9 Euro pass good for the whole month, but didn’t know exactly how to access that special ticket, the so-called ABO.)  The countryside seen from the slow train was rural, tiny villages standing among withered, drought-stricken fields, flat terrain with hedgerows on the horizon, and, at each small siding, hundreds of bicycles parked by people who apparently commuted by rail to Munich.  Rain streaked the glass windows.  

10.  A Wet Walk in Munich

The Hauptbahnhof in Munich was busy.  We engaged our cell-phones to guide us to the Drei Loewen (= “Three Lions”), the hotel near the train-station where we would spend the night.  Exhaustion confounded us and we couldn’t figure out the directions that the phones were signaling to us.  It was raining, not hard but persistently, on the complicated grid of streets, sidewalks, traffic islands, and tram-tracks encircling the station and the neighborhood, as you might expect, was seedy, full of cut-rate Doner-Kebab kiosks, vendors selling soggy pretzels and curry-wurst, bums of all kinds sleeping under metal tables to keep out of the worst of the rain, intimidating beggars with no limbs sprawled out like spiny obstacles in the middle of the wet sidewalk.  We made a couple circuits of the train station without finding the place, even though the phones were advising that the hotel was only 300 feet away.  The traffic around the Hauptbahnhof was heavy, cabs and buses and rattling streetcars crisscrossing the streets that were all clogged with orange construction barriers and slices of pedestrian island in the middle of the froth and surge of cars.  I was afraid that the rain would dampen my cell-phone and make the “handy” (as it is called in Germany) inoperable.  My glasses were wet and speckled with raindrops and I couldn’t see well enough to safely cross the street.  Angelica and I stood hopelessly in the rain, muttering that we were completely lost, and, at that point, a kind woman and her friend, hearing our distress, looked at our phones, pointed us in the right direction and, in fact, “Three Lions” was visible from where we were standing in the cloud of grey drizzle, just down a side-street and 300 feet away.  

11.  Wittelbacher Cenotaph and the Evil One’s footprint

I probably won’t be in Europe again. Perhaps, this was my last trip.  And, so, I thought that I should, as they say, improve the time by venturing out into the labyrinth of the big city.  When you have traveled seven time zones, it’s a mistake to go to bed upon arrival – at least, this is what I’ve been told and what I believe.  The traveler must acclimate to the local time and go to bed when others in that destination are accustomed to sleep.  So I looked at some maps and decided that we should go out into the rain and walk to the Frauenkirche (= Church of Our Lady), apparently a landmark of some importance about seven-tenths of a mile from our hotel.  At the end of the street where our hotel was located, we found a broad boulevard that led past various armless and legless beggars to the arc of a big Ringstrasse, one of those large circular roadways built on the curving tract of land where medieval walls had once protected the city center.  A fountain was spurting water up into the drizzle and there was a wide, noble concourse that led between renaissance palaces (reconstructed, of course, because everything in Germany was bombed into rubble by 1945), past office buildings bearing stucco cherubs and bronze angels blowing trumpets, beyond an old cloister, and, then, to the tall twin towers of the old church (old/new as well because rebuilt after the war).  The parapets of the church were encrusted with gesticulating saints and supernatural beings, bronze surfaces that apparently clawed sleet out of the sky in wintertime and armored those figures with ice that could cascade down into the plaza with deadly effect – the walls of the church warned pedestrians with big signs to not loiter under the ecclesiastical ramparts in snowy weather since discus- or bowling ball sized chunks of ice were prone to plunge down from the heights and brain unsuspecting visitors.

Inside the Frauenkirche, Christ hangs on a forty-foot cross dangling over the center of the nave, Our Lord’s enormous feet pierced by a spike of nail a meter long. The church is white inside, surprisingly bright and airy with great arches reaching up to join in the vault overhead.  Along one side of church, behind the ranks of pews, a huge bronze monument crouches like a tarantula, dark and hairy with halberds and swords, a massive relic roped off by barriers of the kind you might see in shots showing Hollywood celebrities entering the hall for the Academy Awards, no movie stars here just this great clotted spatter of broiled metal. The cenotaph was built in the early 17th century by an artist skilled in various media (a bit like Duerer), one Hans Krumpper.  The monument commemorates Ludwig IV, a monarch who died in 1324, and, so, the bronze tribute was decidedly posthumous when made.  The thing is impressive, if hideous, a clod of bronze like a great elongated crown suspended over a plates of metal like doors opening into the earth under which, one supposes, the body of the king was supposed to be buried, except the skeleton was never found (or, at least, not reliably identified) and so the tomb is one without a corpse – hence, the technical title “cenotaph.”  Some effete-looking page-boys waving scepters sit along the edges of the crown-shaped bronze canopy and the four corners of the cenotaph are defended by burly, hirsute knights with enormous lances and swords.  The thing never really coheres except as dark, burnt-up looking blob of metal, and, when you stare at the monument, all you can really see are discontinuous bits and pieces of decoration - here a mace, there a retainer holding flagpole on which an old banner is hung, the coil of a baldachin column, a fragment of an inscription.  On the floor nearby, also roped off, there’s a big incised footprint of the devil.  Satan visited the Church shortly after it was finished, about the time Columbus sailed the oceans blue, and mocked the interior for having no windows.  God was watching and gave the devil the boot, but the Evil One left his foot print impressed into one of the tiles near the Church entrance.  The Devil had brought with him a gale to tear down the Church but when God gave him the bum’s rush, he departed in such haste that he left the mighty wind behind – it now surges around the huge red-brick exterior, vexing worshipers and knocking deadly projectiles of ice off the shoulders and bellies of the bronze saints on the roof.

12.   Gemuetlichkeit

The pedestrian concourse is gay, crowded with well-dressed people window-shopping at the boutiques or studying menus posted outside restaurants.  Despite the warm drizzle, musicians are playing in alleyways and next to fountains that push up their spurting, pale jets of water into the falling damp and there’s a carnival atmosphere. Around the oblong red-brick mass of the Frauenkirche, expensive restaurants and bespoke tailor shops with heavy velour drapes nestle up against the cathedral like piglets nursing on a sow’s teats.  A high-end hotel (“Hotel am Dom”) displays silver and gold tabernacles in its lobby.  It seems that this is the domain of elegant and sinister Catholic elite that Heinrich Boll described in his bitter post-war book Billiards at Half-Past Nine, although, if I recall correctly, that novel was set in Cologne, not Munich.  

We go into the Augustiner Brauhaus for supper.  There’s always the initial shock of entering a restaurant in a foreign country, uncertainty as to whether you will be seated, flurries of mumbled words in a language that you can’t quite decipher, all the local patrons, of course, accustomed to everything and anxious to shoulder confused American tourists out of the way, signs that are hard to read and aggrieved-looking waitresses, here costumed as beer-maids in an operetta, except that the costume is more like a uniform since these are, indeed, authentic Bierkeller girls in an actual Bierkeller.  A small ensemble with blaring trumpets and tubas is playing some high-velocity hip-hop tune and a couple guys in Lederhosen and green vests are rapping in Bavarian, a strange scene surrounded by a crowd that is bobbing up and down to the music.  The restaurant is cavernous with huge wooden tables and ancient wooden bars like altars scattered here and there under the brick arches.  I order some Wurst and Augustiner beer from a haggard-looking waitress with sharp features – she looks German but, at least, half of the beer-maids are East Asian or African, although all of them dressed identically in white smocks and blouse with an embroidered fringe at the bodice.  Although the place is supposed to be a shrine to Gemuetlichkeit, the folks at the huge, heavy tables don’t seem much different from people you would see in an American restaurant – they stare at their phones, sip beer from tall mugs, and seem either disoriented or uncomfortable with the noise and the crowd, intimidated by the agile waitresses dodging here and there with platters of food.  After awhile, the Bavarian hip-hop and polka band stops playing and, then, they march in a slouching single-file through the dining rooms and up some stairs toward a banquet hall.  Some of the men have hunter’s caps sporting pheasant feathers that droop and flex like insect antennae.  The band members have been joined by some other group of hooligans, young men in paramilitary-looking culottes and white shirts under hunter-green jackets.  Everyone in the group look like extras in one of Fassbinder’s more sardonic films.  

A sign declares: “Hier in Stammhause braute die Familie Wagner von 1817 zu 1884 Augustiner Bier.” (= Here in this convivial house, the Wagner family has brewed Augustiner beer from...)  The last of Putsch-boys vanishes into the banqueting hall.  Another legend inscribed on an arch tells us that the “Munich Purity Law has been in effect since 1487" – a somewhat sinister inscription except that it refers to beer and not some sort of racial or ethnic ideology.  I’m not good with credit and debit cards in the United States, always flummoxed by complications when I try to pay, and, when the waitress presents me with the charges, I think, I misunderstand the prompts on the little cell-phone-sized computer terminal and, attempting to tip her 20 %, probably authorize a lordly gratuity of .2 %, a misfire that causes her to seem even more glum and downtrodden than when we first met her an hour before.  

At the end of the concourse, where the royal way between renaissance-styled palaces and public buildings (all erected between 1960 and 1994), opens onto the Ringstrasse, a big demonstration is underway.  The drizzle has stopped and the clouds are shattered into pale, white shards overhead.  People are standing against the flaring jets of the big fountain, waving Ukrainian flags in the air.  Most of the signs held by the demonstrators are written in English.  Perched on the marble balustrade surrounding the fountain, a couple of girls are shouting into loudspeakers.  I can’t understand any of their words except Schmerzen (= pain and sorrow) and Untermenschen.  

13.  Pink flesh falling out of the sky

The Alte Pinakotek, a famous art museum, is located seven-tenths of a mile from The Three Lions and, in the morning, we check our baggage with the front desk and walk past the mutilated beggars, lying like land mines on the sidewalk, up to the Ringstrasse and, then, along deserted streets to the museum-quarter.  The big condominium or apartment buildings hover over streets green with trees and there are embassies lurking behind gates and walls.  The pattern of streets is all diagonal, with tiny squares lit up with more fountains plashing and gurgling next to the sidewalk.  A traffic circle wraps around an obelisk dedicated to some war or other.  Statues gesture in the green shadows.  We’re a little tired and jet-lagged and so we sit for a time on the bench beneath a bronze statue of a haggard-looking man. Justus von Liebig.  The man has sharp features, like a bird of prey.  I wonder who he was.   

I’ve always wanted to visit the Alte Pinakothek.  When I was a child sixty years ago, my father checked out a book about the gallery in a Time-Life series about famous art museums of the world.  I recall poring over pictures in the Pinakothek collection by Albrecht Altdorfer, particularly his Alexanderschlacht (= Alexander’s Battle), a canvas swarming with tiny figures engaged in violent combat, the whole panorama seen as if from a drone hovering overhead and set against a chaotic jumble of improbably steep and rugged mountains.  In the sky above the carnage, a scroll names the battle, it’s date and the date the Altdorfer painted this picture.  The scroll is weirdly animate, weaponized even, aggressively surveying the action as if to direct air-strikes.  The Time-Life books showed other pictures in the museum, including some salacious-looking nudes by Cranach and some eerie paintings by Hans Baldung Grien, but it was the garish and theatrical Alexanderschlacht, I’m sorry to admit, that I wanted to see in person and with my own eyes.  

At the Alte Pinakothek, some kind of children’s event was underway on the big, spacious lawns – they are long and bare and look like soccer-fields.  The children were dressed in strange medieval costumes and engaged in long, inscrutable conferences with their similarly garbed chaperones.  Some buses were parked along a parade route and, now and then, musicians spurted a few bars of melody into the air.  The art museum itself is austere to the point of minimalism, a huge brick structure towering over the grassy malls, devoid of ornament, essentially a giant warehouse or, perhaps, windowless mausoleum for the art entombed inside.  The interior of the Pinakothek is also barren, big walls of marble rising up to the upper galleries where, it seems, all of the art is stored.  The place has a clammy, underground feeling even when you know that are mounted on a high plateau overlooking the big lawns around the structure.  (Leo von Klenze designed the museum for Ludwig I in 1826, making the gallery, perhaps, the first public art museum in the world.  The interior, particularly the entrance loggia, was once very ornate, but bombs cleared away the clutter and the neo-baroque ornamentation was not restored when the building was rebuilt before being reopened again in 1957.)  

On the ground floor, a temporary exhibition of pastels from the 18th century occupies a series of hushed rooms with muted green walls.  It’s an exhibition for connoisseurs – all the pictures, although handsome enough individually, look more or less the same and distinctions between them are too subtle for my eye.  The Old Masters, for whom the museum is famous, are on the upper level, reached by an enormous and daunting stairway, a vast slope of white stone, constructed in some way as to disguise the landings or terraces in the ascent.  The visitor faces a mass of steps blurring into one another in the distance rising without any interruption to the Obergalerie.  In fact, as you trudge up the stairs, several landings provide some respite from what would otherwise be a daunting climb.  But, notwithstanding, those pale marble terraces, you are winded when you reach the top, sweating and out-of-breath which is, perhaps, the breathless condition in which you are supposed to view the artworks.  

There’s no point is describing the collection.  You can look it up on the Internet and, probably, see more pictures than were on display when I hiked through the galleries – some of them, of course, were closed for refurbishing.  Duerer’s (in)famous self-portrait as Christ can be seen in the Pinakothek and there’s a fabulous nocturne by Adam Elsheimer, “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” in which a tiny fire illumines the faces of Jesus and Mary under a sky glittering with realistically painted stars.  Most notably, the museum has a couple of rooms full of Rubens paintings, huge technicolor productions, the cinema of its time with effects in paint that would now be accomplished by CGI.  There are acres of bodies falling out of heaven into hell, squirming, lavish pink nudes, obese and howling as they plop like over-ripe fruit into the inferno.  These things are awesome, but, also, appalling in some profound way.  Also appalling, although comical is Tintoretto’s picture of Venus and Vulcan – the nude goddess sprawls across a sort of renaissance love-seat, drawing back a diaphanous veil covering her loins.  An infant incongruously occupies the other half of the love-seat.  Vulcan is leaning forward, bearded, burly, a look of prurient curiosity on his hirsute face – he reaches forward to probe his wife’s groin, searching for clues to her infidelity.  (It’s not clear whether finding such evidence would enrage or excite the Blacksmith to the Gods.)  The really remarkable feature to the canvas is that Mars, portrayed as smarmy youth with a sort of penile helmet, is peeping out of a dog house in which he has sought refuge near the white pulled-taffy body of the goddess.  (A small lap dog, looking more dignified than the war god, crouches near Venus’ feet.)

And, of course, there is the “Issus’ Schlacht”, otherwise called “Alexander’s Battle”, a canvas smaller than I expected and, so, even more lavishly detailed and intricate with its legions of centurions battling turbaned Asian cavalry against a fantasy landscape of streams and enameled-green meadows and Alpine peaks like the jagged teeth of sharks.  I think the great Greek painter, Apelles, the greatest artist in the ancient world, composed a famous image of the battle as Issus, known to us today from the mosaic discovered in the House of the Faun at Pompeii.  (Apelles, who lived in the fourth century B.C., probably painted the battle between the forces of Alexander the Great and Darius of Persia based on written and verbal accounts of the fight that occurred in 333 before the Common Era.)   Albrecht Altdorfer made his painting of the battle about 300 years before the mosaic copied from Apelles’ original was excavated in 1830 and, so, there is no argument that the classical image influenced the German painter – however, both art works feature frenzied action with innumerable figures depicted in an exercise of almost-gratuitous virtuosity (the mosaic found in the House of the Faun is made from 1.5 million glass tessarae.)   I seem to remember that concealed somewhere in the multitudes of soldiers, female camp followers and cavalry, there is a detail of defeated commander committing suicide.  I can the picture for that vignette but it’s a wearying chaos of minute swarming figures to peruse and I don’t find this detail.  Near the center of the canvas, Darius rolls over fallen foes in his gold chariot, a tiny flower-like parasol protecting him from the Egyptian sun – the battle was fought near the Nile.  In the distance, beyond the strange mountain range, the sun and moon are contending over a bay filled with tiny ships, a veil of cloud shielding the two celestial bodies from one another.  Far in the distance, Altdorfer has painted a thorn-like spike on an island – this is apparently the tower of Babel, a structure almost invisible in the tumult on the canvas.  The huge Rubens’ images of Hell and damnation seem eerily silent.  Altdorfer’s battle, a “miniature Iliad” as proclaimed by Schlegel, cries out – the colors shudder and murmur: if you approach the picture closely, you can hear its alarum although as if broadcast through a tinny transistor radio.  But if you get that close, an electronic alarm sounds, pulsing through the galleries, and a guard will come to warn you away.  

14: False Alarm

In the morning, before we walked to the Alte Pinakothek, Angelica checked her cell-phone on which she had stored our train tickets for later in the day – we had first-class seats on the ICE (Express) train from Munich to Nuremburg with transfer to another Express to Aschaffenburg.  When she located, the ticket for this trip on her telephone, the itinerary showed that we were scheduled to depart at 9:25 am.  She showed me this ticket at 8:30 just after I had taken a shower.  “How can this be?” I cried.  We had purchased the tickets to Aschaffenburg several weeks earlier on the Internet and thought that we were scheduled to depart at 4:25 in the afternoon.  (These schedules were a little confusing because Germans keep time according to 24 hour system: 4:25 pm is 16:25 H in Deutschland.)  We jammed our clothes into the suitcases, checked the room to make sure nothing was lost, and, then, rushed out of the hotel, hoofing it to the Hauptbahnhof.  An entry to the station by subway was only a block away and we were wandering the vast subterranean concourses under the city streets by 8:45.  It took us a few minutes to get oriented and find the platforms from which DeutscheBahn express trains departed.  According to the displays mounted in the concourses, there was, in fact, a train leaving for Nuremburg at 9:35.  We stood sweating and anxious among the crowds of people hurrying through the station.  Shops around us were selling pastries and sandwiches to travelers and, periodically, announcement were barked at us from loudspeakers.  Angelica checked her cell-phone and the tickets that I had seen marked for departure at 9:25 had simply vanished.  She accessed the ticket for the afternoon train and, exactly as our itinerary stated, departure was at 16:25.  I have no idea what we both saw that triggered our gallop to the train station.  

We limped back to the Three Lions.  In the courtyard, between the four wings of the hotel, an eight-foot stucco lion, painted in gold, lifted his paw to quaff a foamy mug of Hofbrauhaus beer.  On his head, the lion wore a crown with pointed finials in its gold head-band.

15: A Bahnhof is not an Airport

American travelers from the Midwest, at least, are apt to imagine that a German train station is like airport back home.  This assumption is false and, if you rely upon it, you will come to grief.  Airports in the States have elaborate security involving grumpy TSA agents and long lines.  There is nothing like these checkpoints in Germany.  Germans regard trains as a convenient and highly reliable form of transportation and the station is not a place in which to wait to see if your specific train-route is delayed or canceled.  The trains run, more or less, on time and go where they are supposed to go and weather doesn’t affect the system as it does in the United States or, indeed, at any airport.  Therefore, people don’t anticipate waiting for any length of time for their train.  They pass through the train station in a matter of ten or fifteen minutes.  Unlike American airports, no one arrives an hour or two or three hours before their departure.  Travelers regard the station as liminal – it’s the threshold to the efficient, comfortable, and punctual trains.  No one even checks your tickets.  During the whole time that we were in Germany, no one ever asked to see a ticket (with one exception on an ICE route), on either the express or local or city (subway and el) routes.  It’s just assumed that you are a German and, therefore, obedient to rules and social norms and that, in any event, everyone rides essentially for free on the state-subsidized 9 Euro pass.  Therefore, German train-stations don’t have lounges or much in the way of waiting areas – they are just concourses that disgorge into train sheds with long concrete platforms stretching out along the tracks.  Similarly, in the area near train shed, the food kiosks are all monotonously similar – behind glass, trays of pasties, croissants, and sandwiches are on-sale.  You can get a Broetchen or a little slice of fruit tort or, if you dare, a sandwich.  Many Germans are, apparently, vegetarians, at least when they travel, and the sandwiches are often crusty, slightly stale bread with fragments of cucumber (with the skin still on), tomatoes, radish and onion all cemented down by some kind of marmite.  (Marmite was invented in Munich by Justus von Liebig; it’s  sandwich spread made from yeast and hops byproducts left-over after beer is brewed – I think it’s fair to say that it is not to all tastes.)  There are no bars in German train stations, generally no sit-down restaurants, and no cute little souvenir shops – you can buy a newspaper or a magazine or trade-paperback but that’s about it.

And, since, people aren’t expected to linger in a Bahnhof, toilets are few and far between.  Near the train sheds, and beneath them, you can spend a euro to enter a white room with corridors leading to typical European toilets, that is, tiny closets with floor to ceiling white doors (and a handle that shows red when occupied).  These toilets are akin to the amenities on airplanes and cramped, even unpleasantly small, vertical coffins in which to do your business and get the hell out.  As you enter, the turnstile rotates once your coin is recognized by the mechanism under the slot.  Men go right; women turn to the left.  A girl, generally a hard-bitten immigrant wearing a hair net, rubber apron and rubber gloves, is stationed at the turnstile to open a side-gate for hardship cases.  “Clean and Refreshing” is the place’s motto, reflecting the tendency in Germany and Europe as a whole to express important messages in English.  For two euros, you can buy a shower in a similarly tiny and coffin-like box.  Other immigrants, mostly women from Thailand and Myanmar, manned the corridors between showers and toilets with mops and buckets of soap-frothy water.  Most travelers avoid the train-station toilets, although they are clean and hygienic – there are larger toilets on the Zug, one to each Wagon (= train car).

16:   Waiting where there is no place to wait

Angelica and I, unaware that it’s not prudent to wait at a German train station, made our way back to the Hauptbahnhof after visiting the Alte Pinakothek.  We reached the station at about 1:30, that is three hours before our scheduled departure.  We wanted to leave plenty of time get through train security (of which there is none) and to adjust if our route was delayed or re-scheduled (this rarely happens with DeutscheBahn).  The concourse display only shows departures in the next hour and, so, although there were several trains to Nuremburg none was our specific ICE “product” as it is called on the ticket.  

At first, we had the idea of waiting in the train shed.   But there are only a few benches under the huge canopy of girders and taut metal.  The aprons between trains were crowded and there was no place to sit.  So we withdrew into an cheerless annex, a place with a few metal benches next to a grim-looking corridor lined with lockers.  The DB information offices were above the annex, located beyond some metal stairs and a concrete cat-walk. A half-dozen street people were slouched on the metal benches and clearly the cement-block walls and floors here had been used as a urinal – the air was muddy with the smell of fermenting piss.  We sat in the annex urinal for a half hour and ate some pastry but the atmosphere was too dispiriting and so we dragged our luggage out into the open air near the station, the stubs of streets all dead-ending at the Hauptbahnhof and Doner Kebab and curry-wurst nooks.  Taxis were waiting at the curb and crowds of people were dodging the mutilated beggars.

17: Old Neptune flashes his triton over an open-air toilet

We walked down one of the busy lanes, always keeping the Bahnhof in sight, and came to a park.  The park was ringed with a shabby, little urban woods, a tattered veil of greenery that strangely enough deadened the street sounds within the place. The center of the park was open with a big baroque fountain surrounded by a stone terrace lined with benches facing the display of leaping water.  Groups of people, some of them pushing barrows full of bulging plastic and paper sacks, were seated in the shade of the trees overhanging the plaza.  (It was warm and the benches in the curve around the fountain exposed to the direct sunlight were vacant; we sat there for an hour and as the sun advanced through the sky, inexorably changing the arrangement of shadow, the people loitering in the park moved to stay under the shade cast by the big, old trees.)  Thirty-feet tall, Neptune with the body of Arnold Schwartzenegger, belligerently brandished his triton, surrounded by distressed, thrashing sea-horses buried in waves of alabaster.  A few mothers with strollers were standing next to the spray of water, dipping their toddlers in the basin under the sea-god and his steeds.  

The people around us spoke some kind of Slavic language.  They looked like maintenance workers, cleaning women and street crews who were off-work and tarrying for an hour or so in the park.  The babble of voices mingled with the babble of the water splashing in the fountain and it was the sort of time and place in which sleep sidles up to you and whispers seductively in your ear.  

Later, we marched back to the Bahnhof a couple blocks away.  On the walk along the sidewalk next to the park, I watched a couple of men strolling ahead of us.  Suddenly, one of them, without any hesitation, turned aside and slipped through the palisade of shrubs and trees next to the pavement.  He moved decisively, vanishing without a trace in the greenery. I supposed that he was seeking out a shady place to answer the call of nature.  The Bahnhof toilets are clean but they cost a euro (you get chit called Bon-Voucher for shitting in one of those upright white-metal caskets, but it’s the sort of thing you can’t bring yourself to use and so it ends up becoming a bookmark until it’s lost) and the railroad facilities seem somehow insalubrious.  

We reached the train station early, still with 45 minutes to wait.  The Zug to Nuremburg was on-time and it whisked us away at 4:25. The train car (Wagon 11) was mostly empty and silent. 

18: Fairy Tale

People say you can see the Alps from Munich but I didn’t know in what direction to look and, in any event, the country was a little misty, humid-looking under grey lugubrious skies.

The landscape was rural with a secretive aspect.  Sometimes, I saw one or two cars waiting at train crossings through which we passed.  It was Express and the train slowed for little villages, invariably a short platform surrounded by some decaying brick buildings, a couple church steeples in the distance, the town cupped in low green hills. About forty-five km south of Nuremburg, the hills grew larger and more imposing and the forest seemed deeper with fewer fields chopped into the verdure for agriculture.  Up on the hillsides, small castles brooded over picturesque towns built on terraces, red tile roofs winking at us through strobe of trees lining the track.  The sun had now emerged from the mists.

The train-shed at Nuremburg was full of birds wafting over the long sleek trains.  An insurance company named after the city had marked the glass windows in the half-circle of shed’s arch over the train-station with huge letters spelling out NURNBERG. 

We made the transfer to the ICE Zug to Aschaffenburg.  After an hour or so, the country tightened around big river, apparently the Main, high water scarcely confined to its green, lush banks.  The train followed the course of the river, curving where Main curved, and passing through small towns at intervals of five to ten miles.  The towns were nudged up against the flat, smooth bore of the river and they seemed to be completely deserted at this hour – it was approaching 8:00 but still very bright out, the sun gliding with us, through the tops of the green wooded hills as we moved.  The landscape seemed a puzzle that the train had to solve: the valleys were growing tighter with more steep hillsides, broken here and there by chimneys of pale limestone and it wasn’t clear to me how the Zug would extricate itself from the continually constricting gorge above the dark green-brown river.  The solution, of course, was four long tunnels and, then, train emerged into the light on the other side of the ridge, descending down toward Aschaffenburg as if on a magic carpet.

   

19:   Wrong Way Again

It’s a rule of nature, apparently, that when you are in an unfamiliar city, you will always, invariably, exit the subway or train station in precisely the wrong direction from the way that you need to go to reach your destination.  This principle applied to our exit from the small train station at Aschaffenburg.  We found our way upward from a grooved walkway under the tracks and found ourselves among cheerless alleyways and dead-end streets where the local kids were skateboarding between grey houses and apartment blocks.  This was no the way to the city center and, so, we reversed our path, hiked under the train tracks again and emerged on the other side.  Here festive crowds of people were milling about – it was some kind of local holiday – and Dixieland jazz sounded in the distance, a concert in a park perhaps, or in one of the little squares among curving streets that were all intertwined like the fingers of two hands folded together.  People were sitting at sidewalk cafes and the shop windows were full expensive Asian rugs and muted works of art, all tasteful and refined.  The town had something of the vibe of Santa Fe, and, although it was after nine-o’clock (2100), the streets were lively with groups of people promenading beneath vaguely medieval-looking buildings.  

We found our Hotel (Ibis Styles) without any difficulty.  The lobby was full of Germans who had apparently come here from Frankfurt am Main for the festivities.  People were drinking wine at the bar.  After checking-in, we walked two blocks to pasta place called APOSTO.  The restaurant was full of people of all ages, old couples and kids, families with their dogs sitting outside under aluminum umbrellas.  APOSTO featured “punk-pasta”, that is, platters of noodles served with a weird glaze of sauce made from surreal combinations of ingredients.  I ordered the “Pink Plate” – the sauce was made from cream infused with radishes and salmon and crushed cauliflower; the plate was, in fact, gaudy and the sauce was bright neon-pink.  Most of the dishes were vegetarian.  I watched a couple in their sixties languorously eating some sort of lavish pastry shared between them.  Our waiter was obviously gay and pleasantly rude and arrogant.  The atmosphere in the town was about as remote from the way things seemed in Munich as one could imagine.  

20.  A Stumbling Block and the Hell of cables and Plumbing

The next morning, Angelica and I set out to explore the town.  Streets led to interesting places every two or three blocks.  It was all compact, curving lanes lined with five or six story flats with expensive-looking clothing and furniture shops on ground level.  Cultivated European esthetics ruled in the furniture storefronts that sold not so much furniture as furnishings for elegant abodes with nice views  from their windows – little Tibetan Buddhas made from scuffed brass, rugs with a vaguely Navajo design, urns and vases and weird veiled figures with an admonitory mien, a warning, it seemed, that the persons owning such things should not become too vain or attached to them.  Architect’s studios lined the streets and there was nothing so vulgar as a bodega or confectionary or, for that matter, a Doner Kebab place.  The Germans in Aschaffenburg had done their duty by the past: every two or three blocks, there were Stolpersteine (= Stumbling Blocks) inset in the sidewalk, contrary to the name, brass plaques discretely placed flush with the surface of the walkway so that, in fact, you couldn’t stumble over these things if you tried.  The Stolpersteine named Jewish citizens of Aschaffenburg who had homes or businesses in the area, an inscription reminding you of that person or family’s business, often with date of birth and always concluding with the phrase Ermordet in (with a place name and date) (= Murdered in some Concentration Camp on some specified date).  Sometimes the word Ermordet was followed by more precise and ghastly information such “gassed” or “starved to death” or “shot”.  You have to stoop to read these plates embedded in the walkway and they are a sobering reminder, of course, of the calamities that befell this place and its people 80 years ago.  But there are also other little metal panels set in the sidewalks, access points for gas or electrical or fiber optic cables, small manholes, as it were, and, then, larger ones cast with the embossed emblem for the City of Aschaffenburg, a bishop in pointed cap carrying under one arm a model of a Gothic cathedral and it’s a little jarring to see the memorials to the slaughtered Jews and the Resistance fighters and journalists all dropped down to the level of the infrastructure in the strata below the streets.  The Stolpersteine are on the same level literally with all the other enigmatic gateways into the underworld. Among tangled coils of cable and fistula full of wires and plumbing, there’s a Hades full of the unquiet spirits of those Ermordet between 1933 and 1945, the whole twisted path downward hissing and sparking and trickling with foul water.

The street with the nice shops ends in a Ringstrasse that curves around the medieval core of the city, the town built on the terrace above the Main.  A big disembodied head made of carved stone spits water in an elegant arc toward another head half as large set atop of grating through which the fountain’s spray recycles back to the pursed granite lips –they seem to be whistling but, instead of sound, water spurts forth drenching the smaller reciprocal figure.  A couple of old men with canes are sitting on benches near the fountain.  Women are walking small dogs.

It’s early.  We follow the Ringstrasse a few hundred feet to the last vestige of the City wall, an old tower made from crumbling masonry (although now discretely reinforced) – it’s the Ghost Tower where apparitions sometimes appear, a humble-enough edifice only half the size of the housing blocks on both side of the roadway.  We walk into a little park beyond the tower where the sidewalk dips into an underground shopping mall.  More fountains splash, flecks of water shining like neon in the bright slanting rays of morning sunlight.

Angelica suddenly has to find a toilet.  Fortunately, there’s a shopping mall buried under the park and she gets to the restroom on time.  Swarthy janitors are swabbing the tiles in the mall.  I leave two euros with the Slavic attendant in the toilet.  The festival is underway in the old medieval quarter of the town and you can hear bands playing and people sometimes raising a great cheer that resonates in the bright meadows of the park. 

21.  Rome carried over the Alps

In the town square, Frank Days are underway.  Lots of people stand in the bright sunlight, drinking beer sold by vendors and eating pretzels.  Street musicians are performing and children are splashing in the fountains and small parades are staged in the nearby streets, little brass bands, beauty queens in open cars, young men and women marching forward on stilts – it’s all slightly grotesque like one of Lyonel Feininger’s street scenes (perhaps, “Carnival in Arcuiel”), the marchers casting long shadows and the stilt-walkers like Daddy Longlegs spiders hovering the tops of the heads of onlookers.  Somewhere around here, there is supposed to be a big palace, but I don’t see it anywhere.  A speaker is shouting into a microphone, apparently jovially because people laugh.  Aschaffenburg is part of Franconia, which, in turn, is on the northwest border of Bavaria, but still within the Bayrischen state.  People here regard themselves as Franconians or Franks and speak a local dialect that is different from Bavarian, and Frank Days, apparently, celebrates their heritage.  Some balloons escape and are wafted up into the sky.  A choir is singing at the end of one of the streets radiating away from the sunny plaza.

Beyond the plaza, the city opens to the Main River and, suddenly, I see the Palace, so large and imposing that it seems impossible that I had not glimpsed the building before.  Perhaps, I mistook the giant edifice for a distant range of mountains or a vast outcropping of bluff-stone above the river.  Buses are lined up in the traffic circle at the Schloss, not tourists but visitors to Frank Days and crowds are milling around under the vast ramparts of the castle.  The royal residence, called the Johannisburg Schloss is the pride of Aschaffenburg, towering over the green and languid river, a colossus made from scarlet sandstone that has now aged, and been seared, to the color of baked beans and barbeque sauce.  The structure is noble, a huge symmetrical enclosure around a courtyard with four immense towers and an old keep built from lighter colored stone with a great mansard-roof of green bronze.  The palace is often featured on travel brochures and the current Viking River-Cruises advertisement on TV shows the castle, a long white boat drawn up against the flanks of the castle in the Main River at its base.  An ecumenical church service is underway in the courtyard of the palace and that space is full of people seated on a folding chairs facing a stage where several big choirs are performing part of a Bach cantata with a small chamber orchestra.  It’s already warm in the courtyard and the worshipers are wearing white shirts or floral blouses and the people’s collars and cuffs are lit to the point of incandescence by the sun. 

The palace was built around 1615 and remains the most impressive example of renaissance German architecture in the country and, indeed, the mighty structure, originally constructed for the Bishop of Aschaffenburg (the town has always been an important ecclesiastical stronghold) seems remarkably pure, the distillation of a simple, important argument about power and governance.  Because it’s Frank 

Days, Eintritt (= entrance admission) into the palace is free.  Inside the vaulted archway, large enough for the passage of a locomotive, there’s some stairways curving up around the entrance to the second story where there is a small museum, some antique chairs, tapestries, and furnishings (medieval junk too old to throw away) and windows that look out over the palace courtyard where the service is underway, an informal event since lots of people are drinking beer and eating sausages sold by vendors located in booths under the courtyard ramparts.  The art in the museum is mostly undistinguished although there are some curiosities: a nocturne called Rettung der Ertrinkender (= Saving a drowning person) is so black that almost nothing can be discerned: there’s a firefly-light of a torch in the lower left corner and, if you strain your eyes, you can see a couple of pudgy faces lit by the flames and a figure slumped between the rescuers who seem to be on a sort of canoe scarcely visible in the black river.  When your eyes adjust to the painting’s apparently monochrome black, you can see black shadows within the black:  the silhouette of the Johannisburg Palace.  (The label says the painting was originally displayed in the palace’s chapel and the picture seems to have some kind of allegorical meaning although to the naked eye, it seems just a slab of black on black, like one of Rothko’s more bleak paintings.)  Nearby, a little canvas called Der Tier-Frieden (= “The animal’s peace”) replicates Edward Hicks, an infant lies among peaceful beasts, lions and lambs and tigers all reposing like toy stuffed animals under stylized trees on a green meadow.  

Three large galleries contain an exhibit called Rom ueber die Alpen tragen (= To Carry Rome over the Alps), gloomy chambers full of models of Roman ruins all carefully cut from cork.  (The collection represents the largest collection of cork miniature models in the world – it seems there is someone  keeping track of superlatives of that kind.)  The little models are decayed to a somber grey (perhaps they always had that hue) and depict in precise detail places like the Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla, and various other shrines and ruined temples.  Each miniature is accompanied by a little stylized human figure to establish scale – the little cut-outs imitate Le Corbusier’s figures of people.  The models are protected by glass and, as is generally the case with such things, a few of them are fascinating but the legion of models, forty or fifty, ultimately become depressing, even, nightmarish.  Clearly, the display is a symptom of pathology, possibly merely obsession but, probably, something worse.  Everything in this palace was bombed to fragments, but the little models, obviously so fragile that they teeter on the edge of extinction even as you look at them, survived – undoubtedly hidden in some local salt mine or cavern.  A famous painting of Goethe, wearing tight white pants and sprawled on the greensward in the Italian campagna is reproduced next to the four-foot high model of the colosseum (ancient Rome’s Colo - Saal).  The quotation is worth stating in full, particularly in light of the history of the Johannisburg Schloss:

Diese Menschen arbeitete fuer die Ewigkeit, es war auf alle Kalkuliert, nur auf den Unsinn der Verwuester nicht, dem alles weichen muss.  (= These people built for eternity and every things was calculated to this effect, but didn’t take into consideration the insanity of the destroyers to whom everything must yield.)

Goethe wrote these words after visiting the Baths of Caracalla and the Nymph’s Grotto.  (The legend to the picture of the poet points out that the grave of Metella is visible in the background of the painting – all three monuments are displayed nearby in gloomy three-dimensions as cork models in the gallery.)  The models are like drab wedding cakes and, generally, built on that scale, dingy heaps of dough and frosting freezer-frozen for some anniversary in a couple hundred years, and, in fact, the builder of these miniatures was the Court Confectioner, Carl May and his son Georg May, a servant of Carl Friedrich von Dahlberg, the last Kurfurst - Archbishop of Aschaffenburg.  

The day is becoming warm and the air in the castle is heavy, still, and oppressive.  Only a tiny fragment of the vast building is open and one wonders what the other rooms contain.  Of course, I have no desire to see those rooms and their numerosity hangs over the whole experience like a storm cloud or the memory of a nightmare.    

22: Ebenso hartnaeckig wie Sinnlos

More miniature models under glass occupy a gallery overlooking the Main River.  These models show the palace in various iterations.  Some of the models show the original construction of the castle and its evolution over several hundred years to the renaissance palace finally completed for the Archbishop in 1620.  Another model show the palace in ruins, great craters in its walls and the tall towers melted down into talus fields of shattered rubble.  This was the appearance of the Johannisburg Schloss in 1947.  Everyone knows that it’s relatively easy to destroy things.  The palace was built in about ten years without machinery and using human muscle (with horsepower) and ingenuity alone.  It took the authorities in Aschaffenburg 50 years (1951 to 2001) to restore the building after it was devastated in World War Two.

Napoleon declared that morale is a factor three times more important than materiel.  The desperate and bloody Battle of Aschaffenburg fought for ten days between March 25 and April 3, 1945 illustrates this  proposition.  Racing across central Germany, the 7th and 3rd American Armies reached the Main river bridge near Aschaffenburg on the 25th of March.  Some tanks crossed the bridge, surprised that the German defenders had failed to destroy the span.  The Americans began encircling Aschaffenburg and set up artillery to begin bombardment of the Johannisburg Castle, located on the highest point overlooking the Main River.  

Hitler had declared Aschaffenburg a Festigungs-Stadt (= fortified city) and ordered the defenders to engage the Americans and “fight to the last cartridge”.  The city’s population had swollen to 38,000 with refugees, but there were very few combat-ready soldiers in the town.  Most of the defenders were walking wounded German soldiers from a military hospital in the city, some Nazi party officials, and Volksturm troops, that is, old men and boys conscripted into the war effort.  The commander was Emil Lamberth, a decorated World War One veteran and a former schoolteacher. Lamberth took Hitler’s orders seriously.  He hanged a deserter for Fahnenflucht (= fleeing the flag) leaving the body dangling from a lamppost outside a wine shop near the City Square.  Later, during the fighting, he hanged a Luftwaffe officer who declined to join the fray because he was an air force man and not interested in the house-to-house infantry fighting in the town.  Lamberth also left that body dangling from a street lamp.  (After the War, Lamberth was convicted of murder, but claimed extenuating circumstances – following Nazi party official orders – and served four years in prison.)

The Americans were led by George Patton.  Patton thought the easy capture of the town was a foregone conclusion.  The German army was collapsing on all fronts and the Russians were approaching Berlin.  All regular units of the German army fighting in the west of Deutschland had been savaged in the Battle of the Bulge and weren’t combat-ready.  Patton ordered air strikes on the town, focusing on its major landmark, the Johannisburg.  However, to Patton’s surprise, the Germans didn’t surrender and, indeed, launched a series of counter-attacks.  The fighting continued with high casualties for nine more days.  Ultimately, Lambeth surrendered by displaying white flags from the smashed ramparts of the Johannisburg on the third of April, two days after Easter.  By that time, almost all of the German defenders had been killed or wounded – the casualty rate among the German forces exceeded 60 %.  Lambeth insisted that military formalities be observed when he surrendered.  He refused to capitulate to any American officer of lesser rank and, at last, a battalion commander had to be brought from the rear to meet with the German officer in the ruins of the Palace.  During the fighting, the entire city was smashed to rubble by “Long Tom” howitzer shelling, white phosphorus bombs and American air-strikes.  Most military historians agree that the Germans won the battle by delaying the American advance for an improbable ten days when greatly outnumbered and lacking armor comparable to the American tanks (and, of course, without any air cover.)

In the palace today, there are some pictures of the ruined town and the ghastly specter of the shattered towers of the palace rising like broken teeth from the moraines of broken masonry.  One of the four corner-towers collapsed in a terrifying avalanche of blackened rubble in 1947.  A printed label on the model of the ruined palace says that the defense of the town was ebenso hartnaeckig wie sinnlos (= as stubborn as it was pointless.)  Hitler killed himself on April 30, Berlin fell on May 2, and the war ended with unconditional surrender on 8th of May 1945.

23: Lit best by Phosphorus

Georg Ridinger, the architect of the Johannisburg, commissioned a stone carver, Hans Juncker, to make an alabaster altar with backing wall in the palace chapel.  This was an important place, the chapel where the Archbishop of Mainz, Johann Schweikhard von Cronberg, celebrated Mass and so no expense was spared with regard to both the palace and sacred spaces inside the building.  Juncker’s altar is, in fact, a three-story wall, a pale gleaming cliff of alabaster in which life-size figures pose and gesture in stone alcoves under canopies of winged angels.  Jesus dangles from a cross in the center of the wall, enclosed by a rounded arch from which stone scrolls sprout bearing contemplative angels gazing off into space.  Archbishop Schweikhard, the chapel’s donor, stands separated from Jesus by a marble wall – clutching a big model of the Church, the Archbishop is obviously larger than Christ and more important it seems.  Above Jesus, some condor-sized angels lift a coat of arms, probably Schweikhard’s family heraldry.  In the register above two martyrs display the instruments of their torture – a jolly-looking round pillar and another cross.  The whole structure ends above in a turret in which two more angels elevate a sphere in which another cross is implanted.  The alabaster statues have been carefully individualized.  St. John, standing at the foot of the cross, has his mouth open in grimacing cry and he looks half-crazed with grief.  A centurion next to him is asleep on his feet and apparently snoring.  (If you listen closely in the silent chapel, you can hear him breathing.) The angels are bored bureaucrats, staff at some celestial Department of Motor Vehicle registration, and they barely suppress yawns of contempt at the petrified hurly-burly around them.  

Juncker’s altar wall is astonishing.  It was probably displayed to its most impressive advantage by the white phosphorus grenades that burned in its nooks and crannies on Good Friday during the Battle of Aschaffenburg.  The brilliant flames chewed at the stone and lit the statues so that they seemed to lunge and dance in the fire.  When the blaze was over, the altar wall’s alabaster was fissured and cleft. The roof collapsed a few years later and the rain and snow fell on Juncker’s masterpiece and, then, when it froze the pry-bars of the ice tore the charred alabaster cliff down.  It wasn’t finally restored to something like its original condition until 2014.  

24: Strange birds

The ecumenical service is finished and the congregation is dispersed on the lawns in front of the deep, grassy moat in front of the Palace.  

Angelica and I walk along the sidewalk paralleling the steep bluff dropping down to the river.  It’s an idyllic scene today, peaceful and still.  Several swans are gliding through the green weeds at the edge of blue, rippling Main.  Overhead, large birds with black stripes on their white wings swoop down over the water, probably looking for fish or frogs.  The birds are very elegant and the black bands on their wings give them the gentlemanly air of mourners at an elite funeral.  

On the terraces below, gardens flaring with bright flowers edge groves of trees.  Some elaborate royal gazebos hide in the shadows of woods.  Far upriver, a railroad trestle crosses the Main.  

25: Poop right and you’ll shit on the doctor.  

Ludwig I, the Bavarian King, made Aschaffenburg’s Johannisburg his summer palace.  Each June, he traveled to the Aschaffenburg and lived until September in the Schloss.  Ludwig was kind fellow and, more or less, admired by his people.  He was a lady’s man and his subjects envied his dalliances with the movie stars of his day.  (He had celebrated liaisons with Jenny Digby, an English actress, and, later, Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer and courtesan.)  Ludwig I was more interested in pleasure and his hobbies than governing and, when the rebellions of 1848 convulsed Germany, he abdicated the throne and retreated to Nice in France where he lived out the rest of his life in luxe et volupte. Ludwig’s son, Maximilian, made of sterner stuff, ascended to the throne after his father’s abdication.  Maximilian’s son, Ludwig II, is renowned as the mad (and last) King of Bavaria, the ruler who bankrupted his realm constructing fairy-tale castles while mooning over his unrequited love for Richard Wagner.

In the gardens along the Main, Ludwig I commissioned his State architect to construct a full-scale replica of a villa at Pompeii.  The place is modeled after the so-called House of Castor and Pollux and was built between 1843 and 1849.  Like everything else in Aschaffenburg, the villa was shattered by bombing, in this case on November 21, 1944.  Reconstruction of the building began in 1960 and wasn’t completed until 2001.

The ersatz-Roman villa is plastered lime-white, a compound of small rooms arranged around two courtyards open to the elements.  In one courtyard, a fountain gurgles and a babyish winged Eros gambols above the basin into which the dancing water falls.  The walls are painted dark bull’s blood red along their bases but brighten at eye-level where little mincing figures imitating Roman mural painting stand amidst stylized gardens and bowers.  On the upper level, balconies overlook the limpid Main in its valley; on the other side of the building, the hill rises in terraces on which grapes are growing on spidery wooden arbors.  It’s a pretty place and the villa embodies classical repose and well-being.  There are some display cases with old Roman coins and a few trays with small, cracked figurines looted in Italy in the late 18th century and brought back to Aschaffenburg.  The rooms and open-air galleries are mostly empty – there’s only a couple of tourists with bemused expressions strolling the arcades.  Although it’s a pleasure villa, the Pompejanum, as it’s called, has something of the refined and still atmosphere of a cloister.

In a stair-well descending to the first level, the catastrophe that I imagine looming over this trip almost happens.  Angelica slips on the polished concrete steps and falls down, bouncing down against me, so that I am knocked forward.  But I don’t fall and Angelica, although with bruised leg and thigh, seems to be, more or less, okay.  A nasty-looking brown-purple bruise billows up like a storm cloud on her calf.  The whole event is inexplicable, as if some vengeful fury, nudged her shoulder to make her fall.

In the latrine, there’s an opening cut into a slab of limestone like a yoke for an oxen.  The room is dim and a little airless compared to the breezes that circulate throughout the rest of the villa. (I imagine the breezes as young women in diaphanous silk garments that shudder very slighty as they pace through the rooms, musing on the murals and the little display cases containing eroded coins.)  On the wall of the toilet, the architect has playfully inscribed Hic cacavit bene (= hier kackte es sich gut or “here you shit well.”).  On the label next to the graffiti, these words appear: Freund, du vergisst das Sprichwort: kacke gut und scheiss auf die Artzte (= “Friend, you’ve forgotten the maxim: Poop well and shit on the doctors.”).

26: Kim Kardashian demands that you cross-dress as a woman.

We re-trace our way back up the hill, taking a path that leads to a deserted residential lane with elaborate houses behind brick walls.  The festivities are still underway in the town square: more speeches and music, small processions marching here and there under flags that I don’t recognize, stiltwalkers brooding over the parades and women wearing white frocks that, apparently, imitate peasant costume in this tribe in the mid-1800's.  But a block or two beyond the square and the big promenade in front of the Schloss, it’s silent once more, medieval streets and alleys sweltering in the sun and nothing moving, an abandoned movie-set it seems with another plaza on a hillside with steps oozing down out of the shadows cast by the old abbey and church.  Some ancient pubs surround the square, but the space is dominated by a spiky church and cloister that hug the highest point on the hill above the river.  This is the Stiftspfarrei St. Peter und Alexander, once an important “collegial church” whatever that means in the renaissance.  There’s a museum in the building, free during Frank Days, something one doesn’t expect to be of much interest, musty ecclesiastical relics, I suppose, possibly some clerical garments and a few cracked communion chalices.  But, in fact, the place is large, with eccentric galleries resting on uneven medieval floors, all sorts of trip-hazards at thresholds where one level has subsided a few feet beneath another adjacent room, and the collection is astonishing.  

Archbishop Albrecht, assigned to Halle, commissioned the premiere painter of the Reformation, Lucas Cranach d. A (with an umlaut = der Aelterer –the Elder) to make a big altar-piece for this Church.  Halle inclined toward the Lutheran persuasion and, so, Albrecht had to decamp to the more reliably Catholic Aschaffenburg, bringing with him as his pride and joy, Cranach’s painting.  The altar-piece about fifteen feet tall and brilliantly painted in startling reds and vivid blues.  It’s a vast cartoonish affair and, when we happened upon it, in a carefully climate-controlled room (the rest of the galleries were airless and sweltering), we stopped to rub our eyes in disbelief.  The colors on the lime-wood panels are as vivid as commercial advertising which, I suppose, in a way the thing is – after all, Albrecht has himself depicted holding his Stiftskirche under his arm like football and there are other local grandees shown kneeling at the foot of a huge pale orb in which the resurrected Christ, wrapped in a billowing scarlet cloak, stands in mid-air, benevolently looking down at figures luridly portrayed in the space between his bright bubble and the frame of the altar’s central panel.  To the left, a crowd of naked people, featuring some lynx-eyed courtesans with Kim Kardashian buttocks, are gathered to be summoned into heaven.  Above them, also squeezed between Christ’s bright orb and the edge of the panel, a dozen or so little monsters are festering in darkness – many-legged horrors with eyes on stalks or dragon-fly wings protruding from what seem like wood-stave barrels.  To the right, a group of Roman centurions dressed like 16th century Landesknechts are slobbering open-mouthed, blissfully snoring and unaware of the resurrection occurring adjacent to them.  A goliath beetle with horns and hinged ebony jaws squats on the ground next to the delicate feet of the woman with the sly expression and Kardashian ass.  On the wall facing the triptych, there’s a small Cranach painting that is striking and undeniably kinky: Hercules is half-concealed in a woman’s veil, wearing a nun’s wimple, and holds a distaff in his hands – the agent of his transvestism, Omphale glances sideways at the travestied hero, her face slightly porcine and her hair severely pulled back over her bulging forehead (bare bulging foreheads were as much the focus of erotic attention as naked ankles and bare buttocks in the early 16th century).  Omphale has a nonchalant expression although her little eyes are shrewd and malign.  Hercules is apparently her slave, made to wear women’s clothing, and, although the muscle-man looks confused, it’s not at all clear that the situation distresses him.  Perhaps, Hercules is content in this role.  Cranach could do everything: he painted shrewd, interrogative, and revealing portraits, excelled in lurid religious art, and made erotic images to the order of his perverse patrons that have an arousing frisson to this day.  

The guards here are in the room across the hall filled with reliquaries and monstrances made from solid gold and silver and, so, we have room with the spectacular Cranach paintings all to ourselves.  

27: An Encounter with the impoverished Dead

A couple of rooms in the Stiftsmuseum are devoted to artifacts excavated from Reihengraeber (= Row-graves) discovered at the village of Wenigumstadt, a town with about 2000 inhabitants eight or nine miles southwest of Aschaffenburg.  Around 1970, archaeologists found a cemetery on a steep hillside above the Main.  People have been looting Reihengraeber for 1500 years but this cemetery was mostly intact and, therefore, has special significance.

The so-called Reihengraeber culture, now considered a misnomer, refers to mortuary practices endemic in western Europe during the early middle ages, the Merovingian era between 400 and 800 AD.  Since many different, unrelated groups of people buried their dead in “row graves” at that time, the name for this phenomenon doesn’t really describe a specific culture, but, rather, simply a common funerary practice during this period.  Row graves are neatly arranged trenches, each containing a single cadaver in which the dead have been buried with grave-goods.  Although the people buried in this way were Christians, they retained many pagan customs, particularly the habit of interring the dead with so-called inalienable property.  (Inalienable property refers to objects closely associated with a person that according to Saxon law codes could not be transferred to heirs or sold to strangers – because these items were inalienable, they were buried with the dead person who had made or owned these things.)  Curiously, the graves all show evidence of having been re-opened, sometimes several times.  No one knows what this means: either someone was plundering the graves or objects were removed, used in some kind of ritual, and, then, restored to their place next to the skeleton buried without casket or sarcophagus in the earth.  Since the graves at Wenigumstadt seem to have escaped later looting – people dug up these hoards often during the 17th through 19th centuries – the latter explanation for reopening the graves seems most likely: relatives of the dead opened the graves to examine and, apparently, briefly use the artifacts previously committed to the earth.

Most of the artifacts in the Stiftsmuseum are humble, small things like thimbles, rings, a woman’s necklace, bone buttons, small knives and brooches and little ornamental axes.  Gender is defined by the offerings left with corpses: men are buried with weapons, sometimes, little pointed bronze caps, and hunting equipment; women are found with instruments used for weaving and cooking.  Although these objects are not flashy and can be readily overlooked in favor of the big glittering, jewel-studded monstrances and gilded ecclesiastical crooks in the other galleries, the grave goods are peculiarly redolent of the people with whom these things were “entangled” (to use Ian Hodder’s archaeological parlance) and scrutinizing these glass cases, you have a strong sense of the presence of the dead.  They are all around us, groping for their needles and embroidery frames and betrothal rings, feeling about in the darkness for their pocket-knives and switchblades and little, ornamental daggers.  The cold hands of the dead seek the things with which they were familiar and you can imagine them haunting these display cases, hovering in the air like the baby-heads with insect wings painted next to the risen Christ on the Cranach altar-piece.  As Flannery O’Connor wrote somewhere: ‘You can’t be poorer than dead’.  And, these Merovingian graves in slit trenches with their scatter of baubles seem to have been a way to alleviate the poverty of deceased. 

28: Impf protest

When the day is warmest, Angelica and I sit at a café a block from the Bahnhof eating late lunch on the sidewalk in the building’s shadow.  Three or four vans approach rolling slowly down a side-street and there’s a Polizei patrol car behind the vehicles taking up the rear of a small rag-tag procession.  At first, it looks like another variant on the parsimonious little Frank Days parade in the town square, but, then, we hear some voices raised and see that some of the marching men and women are brandishing posters.  One of the signs says Aschaffenburg Steh Auf! (= Aschaffenburg stand up!”) There’s another more elaborate sign carried by middle-aged man wearing sunglasses that says something to the effect: “I’m a teacher and didn’t join this profession TO TORTURE CHILDREN!”  The “torture of children” here referenced is a mandatory vaccine against COVID.  The women in the group are all Nature-Maidens, wearing Greek-style peplos and they look a bit like Isadora Duncan, although indignant, red-faced, sweating.  A lady-cop ambles alongside the cop car and, where there is a little traffic island, near the entry to the train station, the procession comes to a stop shouting slogans, mostly in English.  Some soccer hooligans are drinking warm beer near the traffic island and they began shouting something and a mad man of the kind that people cross the street to avoid begins bawling like a bull-calf.  It’s an odd spectacle but it lasts only a few minutes and, then, the little circus moves on the lady cop and cop car trailing the procession as they move down another lane.

29.  Napalm recording artists, LOTL

In 2007, Chris Harms, a young man in Hamburg, began recording songs that he posted on My Space.  Harms had been a singer with other bands in the Hamburg music scene and his initial solo efforts on My Space were praised by fans.  He formed a band with four other members that he called The Lord of the Lost.  With the band, Harms released 7 records including most recently a Goth-Metal operetta called Judas.  Napalm Records, a label in Austria, produces and distributes his work.  It’s popular with Goths in Germany and the band has a sizeable following in other European countries, particularly Hungary.  

Chris Harms seems to be about 35.  He’s slender and athletic-looking.  His eyes, surrounded by raccoon eye-shadow, are piercing and his presence is commanding.  The other members of his current band are Class Grenayde, Pi, Gared Dirge and Niklas Kahl.  Needless to say some of these are stage-names.  Harms has said that his favorite bands include Nine-inch Nails, Rammstein, and Lady Gaga.

In 2022, The Lord of the Lost toured with Iron Maiden.  Between arena shows, the band scheduled gigs at smaller venues, including the Colos-Saal in Aschaffenburg.  The band uses platforms on stage that look like grated metal packing cases turned upside down to rest on wire-rims.  These platforms allow Harms to stand above the band when he sings or provide a vantage from which the guitar players can grind out their solos.  During a concert in May, Chris lunged onto one of these platforms which hadn’t been properly secured.  The metal box received the piston blow of his heavy black Doc Martens boot and see-sawed so that Chris was flung violently to the ground.  Landing “ass over tea-kettle” as it is sometimes said, Chris rolled over and rose to his feet and continued the song.  You can watch this mishap on You-Tube.  

Rock and Roll with its thunderous volume, lances of flashing strobe lights, and mobs of fans synchronized in a Bacchic frenzy always tends toward the Messianic.  With LOTL’s most recent album, Judas, this tendency seems particularly evident.  Chris Harms goes by the nickname “the Lord”.  In his most recent record, contrived as a rock opera, the Lord has become Judas, and, indeed, sings in his name.  The record espouses a theology derived, it seems, from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Three Versions of Jesus,” although this religious theory has been independently invented many times by many people.  In Borges’ story, a Swedish scholar argues that Judas has been unfairly maligned as the traitor who betrayed Christ.  In fact, the scholar asserts, Judas was an integral part of God’s plan for salvation and, in fact, assumed the role of betrayer as part of the deity’s divine plan.  If the true savior is the one who takes upon himself the scorn of the world, who could be more despised than the man who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, took thirty pieces of silver for his treachery, and, later, died by hanging with his bowels spilling out on the ground?  By this interpretation, the true son of God isn’t Jesus at all but Judas, the most wretched and despised of all humanity.  Nikos Kazantzakis develops this theme in his Last Temptation of Christ, a novel adapted to the screen by Martin Scorsese.  And there are other versions to the same effect.

As it happens, Borges’ speculations about Judas have an ancient correlate.  In 1999, National Geographic published translations of a fragmentary Gospel of Judas preserved in Coptic on severely damaged papyrus scrolls.  These scrolls argue that Judas was specially appointed by God, a “cloud of light”, to betray the savior and effect a division between the two classes of human beings on earth.  One class sacrifices animals, obeys the old law, and engages in “cannibalism” by eating Christ in the Communion sacrament – these people are born without souls and, when they die, are snuffed out without a trace.  The other class of sentients beings have souls and they reject all aspects of the Law; they are free beings who are immortal and have nothing to do with the flesh and its sufferings.  The most beautiful of these beings was Judas who betrayed Jesus so as to vanquish the old law.  LOTL promotes these ideas in their new record and Harms speaks for Judas.  Sometimes, he performs concert versions of his operetta in churches with long tapers burning to cast a spooky light on the band with their cadaverous white-painted faces and darkly shadowed eyes.  Concert-goers wear robes to experience this musical sacrament.  A small chamber orchestra performs as well.    

30.  Marches of the (gemuetlich) Damned

No robes are in evidence in the line waiting outside the Colos-Saal, but everyone is in uniform (except me).  LOTL fans wear black from head to toe, dark trousers and tee-shirts emblazoned with the name of the band.  The older fans have been following LOTL for years and they sport shirts for Goth music festivals, souvenirs with lists of performing bands inscribed in white letters, including, of course, our headliners for tonight – this shows credibility, an allegiance to LOTL when it was merely one among many head-banger bands.  Some of the tee-shirts say: Lord of the Fucking Lost, but most just identify the band and, perhaps, the venue where they performed.  Inside the uniforms, LOTL fans are nondescript, generally slightly overweight with round jovial faces and eccentric hair cut in retro-punk style, but nothing too extreme.  The usual retinue of piercings decorate their faces and they seem happy this evening, standing in some groups and whispering to one another.  I’m wearing a checked plaid shirt, striped white and blue, showing some color and, of course, no one else is dressed in that way.  If I thought about the incongruity in my style of dress, I suppose I would imagine that in the line of eighty or ninety people queued up at the door to the venue, I’m the only person fully visible.  Everyone else blends into black with heavy black boots and janitor-style black pants.  

The line waits along the edge of a construction site where the fronts of several buildings on the Gasse are being repaired, a cyclone fence next to us and some plywood hoardings close enough that I can lean on those boards.  (The panels are covered with smiley faces, handprints, colorful flowers with painted petals and green thick stems – the children from the Brentano Primary School have painted murals on the hoardings.)  I can’t tell what people are saying although the mood is friendly and, even, expansive.  But Germans are reticent and reserved, even when they are among friends and standing in line for a heavy metal concert.  It’s warm and the line grows behind us, snaking down to the boulevard at the bottom of the hill.  My phone rings: it’s Julie’s brother, Rick.  My wife’s sister, Janet, is dying, perhaps, even as we wait to enter the concert hall and Rick is concerned that Julie hasn’t answered her phone.  I send a text message to my wife – thousands of miles from Austin, we are still connected, I guess, and subject to bad news and good as well from Minnesota and Minneapolis where poor Janet is now mostly comatose (leukemia is killing her) and the middle of Germany, a place that looks like Wisconsin or the driftless area around Lacrosse and Winona, is, perhaps, not so very far from home after all.  My back aches.  I don’t like standing for long periods of time.  The air is warm and humid.  A few people in line hoot when the bass player with his small blonde girlfriend come down a side-street.  He didn’t get the message that the band is off-loading its gear on the other side of the block in an alley behind the concert hall inaccessible from where we are waiting.  Angelica recognizes the man and excitement makes her hop up and down in the line.

Germans are punctual, even when it comes to heavy metal venues, and the doors open a few minutes before seven p.m.  The sky is still bright on July 3 in northern Europe and a pale haze, perhaps, humidity from the river hangs over the sidewalk and the dingy-looking Colos-Saal, just a store-front with a window plastered with concert posters and a door leading into the building block.  The crowd surges, but in a restrained way – no one needs to be told to not push or shove – and we make a turn and are borne past a table where a couple of young men scan our tickets.  Later, this table will be used to sell LOTL merch.  Angelica, bless her heart, has sent the Colos-Saal proprietors an email that I am an old man and won’t be able stand for the next four hours and, so, albeit reluctantly, one of the kids gives me a metal bar stool with the stern admonition that I must keep it to the side and not interfere with the people gathered under the stage.  

The room is gloomy and already warm, although there is a sort of cool vapor luminous under the stage lights.  The hall is about the size of two standard-unit shipping containers, forty-five feet wide and sixty feet long.  There are no chairs although a shelf runs along the sides of the space, apparently where concert-goers can put their drinks.  A small bar opens to the left side of the stage, an alcove with a couple black-shirts behind a counter: beer is on tap but soda pop and water are sold out of large glass-fronted coolers.  I shove my barstool up to the shelf right at the corner between the wall along the concert hall and arched stucco opening into the bar.  On the wall, there are six-foot tall photographs of musicians, I suppose, but I don’t recognize any of them.  The staff at the Colos-Saal wear black Bob Dylan tee-shirts.  A music video is playing on a screen behind the bandstand.  For an hour, I sit on my stool, sweating and watching the music videos which involve white-faced singers, brows and chins sometimes decorated with bright oozing blood, shrieking at the camera. All the men in these bands have shaved their heads to conceal their early onset male-pattern baldness. It’s all heavy-metal garbage, the sort of thing in which I have no interest.  

Gradually, the hall fills to capacity and, then, the crowd herniates into the service space at the end of the room and plugs up the opening into the bar.  I’m next to a tall Aryan-looking German man, probably about 35 and his willowy blonde girlfriend or wife.  They don’t look too unconventional.  In fact, I wonder about the babysitter who is likely watching their blonde child this evening.  The man seems enthusiastic, sipping his beer, and, sometimes, bopping up and down.  The woman looks bored and slightly resentful.  It seems unlikely to me that she shares her consort’s enthusiasm for this event.  She also sips beer and, sometimes, checks her phone.  Probably, she is texting the babysitter to verify that Alles ist in Ordnung.  People slide between people, filling up the interstices in the crowd until there is simply no space at all remaining.  Curiously, this is sort of a family event for some folks in the crowd – I see a few three-generation fans: grandpa with yellow beard, daughter and son-in-law and, even, a couple scrawny grandkids with their LOTL shirts limp and over-sized over their bony shoulders.  One woman is in a wheelchair that is swarmed on all sides.  Angelica has gone up the front of crowd to stand in the mob directly under the stage.  Immediately beneath the bandstand, most of the girls have low-cut shirts the better to display their decolletage.  

The press of the crowd makes me a little breathless.  There are too many people crammed into this room and, as I survey the mob, I don’t see any plausible escape routes.  A formless black wall presses against me and, from time to time, I’m jostled by people in the crowd.  Sometimes, a white face swims  into view, “petals on a wet black bough”, and its sweltering.  Bodies are like hot coals crushed together and the whole place is warm to the point of incandescence except that the humidity keeps things from igniting: it’s all friction and pressure and, if I think about the situation with any clarity, of course, I might well panic and try to flee the room, except that panic is out of the question because flight is also an impossibility – there’s too many people clogging up the concert hall.  Somewhere in here, there must be a toilet but I can’t imagine where it is located or how one would access it.  The place throbs and seems to beat like a great congested heart and the darkness is shot through with laser-like spotlights and red-green-blue beams and the surly roar off the screen that covers the wall where the music videos sounds under the crowd noise like distant surf.  The videos are apparently advertising coming attractions at the venue (Live bei uns with a date) and when the last ends with New Year’s Eve 2022, the screen goes dark and the warm-up band ambles out onto stage to tepid cries and hoots from the audience.

This band is called Scarlet Dorn (Dorn = thorn) and the lead singer is a girl with vampire red lips and long black hair.  Her two guitarist also have long black hair and they thrash their heads in time to make their locks spin around the back of their head in a sort of propeller motion.  It looks ridiculous but most of the crowd doesn’t seem to care.  The young woman strikes surly poses and pumps her fist in the air and her band keeps up a thudding concussive beat.  It’s loud, of course, but not so high decibel as to compete with the main act.  (These sorts of things are carefully calculated.) Sometimes, the lead guitarist plays little machine-gun solos that sound like simplified versions of what Chuck Berry was doing 65 years ago, when poor Aschaffenburg was still mostly just a field of blackened rubble.

Scarlet Dorn plays for exactly an hour and the crew sets up LOTL’s equipment in an efficient manner and, at about 9:10 (2130 local time here), Chris Harms marches out on the stage with his band and begins to play.  It’s loud but the amplification is bearable and the sound is good.  The concert would be entertaining, even inspiring, perhaps, except for the venue which is so relentlessly crowded and so steamy that everything happening here is just barely tolerable.  Like all rock and roll icons, Chris, the Lord, looks great, better even then in his videos and promotional picture, and he’s thin as a rail, almost serpentine, and, certainly, enthusiastic and agile.  He shouts greetings to the audience and, although I can’t understand most of what he’s saying, it’s pretty apparent that he’s happy to be playing a smaller room after the sports stadium venues where his band has been opening for Iron Maiden.  (A couple of his band members are sporting black Iron Maiden tee-shirts).  Between songs, Chris says something to the effect that he’s pleased with the fans in the hot, crowded room and that he’s glad he can perform for them in a more intimate setting and, of course, I know that musicians love to perform, that playing music is what they live for, and, therefore, I think he’s completely sincere.  Here, if he shades his eyes a little, he can see to the back of the hall and measure the reaction of the audience to his songs and, I suppose, that it’s gratifying to observe the sea of enthusiastically upraised hands like fine, pale seaweed waving back and forth in the hot, underwater atmosphere of the club.  Cell-phones poke up over the crowd like periscopes and Chris seems to salute them.  

LOTL plays a number of “Judas” songs, several of them built like a Beethoven theme, on a simple two note motif: Ju - das.  The crowd knows all the words by heart (they are largely in English) and sings along.  Chris has a guitar that lights up and, even, flashes rhythmically like some sort of perverse neon advertisement and he holds the instrument across his arms like Dexter Gordon holds his saxophone like a lamb lost and, then, found, against his chest in ‘Round Midnight or like Moses cradling the tablets of the law next to his heart and belly.  Germans like marches and about half of the songs have that character – the beat thuds hard against the ground, predictably, enough, boots pounding pavement, and, with everyone singing, there’s a military aspect to the music, as if we are hearing heavy-metal versions of Wehrmacht favorites like O du schoener Westerwald.  In fact, there’s a sort of Gemuetlichkeit about the whole proceedings, a cheery, convivial spirit in the hall involving lots of dancing and sing-along choruses.  Some of the Rammstein-influenced numbers are exciting with the two guitarist standing on their wire-mesh pedestals and thrashing away, synchronized by the music so that it seems that they are performing a coordinated dance, stomping on the platform and shaking their shoulders and, even, dropping to a sort of feral crouch at, more or less, the same time.  The crowd now is one integrated black beast.  When Chris talks, the place is so silent that you could hear a pin drop but, then, the music resumes and you feel hollow, as if you are drum on which the music is beating. The performers shake their heads in time to the music and a bright nimbus of sweat sprays off them, caught in the lance-beams of light. Toward the end of the concert, people seem to wash up against the walls and they look tall, as if mounted on the shoulders of other concert-goers, stiltwalkers casting long grotesque shadows as the whirling red lights on the stage rake across them.  The kids from the three generation LOTL fans are hopping up and down in a frenzy.  The Aryan youth is whirling around like a dervish although his wife has now fled into the bar to escape the heat and crush. The woman in the wheel chair is up on her feet – it’s a miracle! She can walk! Angelica comes out of the combat zone flushed and half-dead with exhaustion.  I slip into the bar and buy two bottles of water but my hands are so sweaty and numb that I can’t figure out how to get them open.  There’s a final thunderous climax, some song everyone knows and, then, the band bows and struts of the stage.    It’s 11:00 (2300) and, probably, curfew for performances like this in Aschaffenburg and Germans are obedient people – if the rules say you quit at 11:00, you follow the rules.

There’s no encore.  Recorded music surges from speakers, the Village People’s YMCA, a song played, I guess, half-ironically but no doubt an impressive Schlager in its own right and the disco-tune works well to play the crowd out of the hall and onto the street where it’s still 80 degrees but vastly cooler than the oven of the Colos-Saal on Ross-Strasse here in Aschaffenburg.  As I am departing the hall, my phone rings.  Who could this be at this time of night?  I scream into the phone but it’s too loud and I can’t tell who has called me and, then, the call drops.  The phone screen shows a Minneapolis number.  Perhaps, it’s bad news about Janet.  Out on Ross-Strasse, where it’s quiet and where the crowd simply melts away, oozing into alleys and sidestreets, I return the call.  To my surprise, it’s a friend from Minneapolis, an old college professor whom I know.  He’s amazed that I’m in Germany.  Of course, I’ve forgotten about the time difference – it’s probably four in the afternoon in Minneapolis.  It’s astounding to receive calls from the Midwest here in Germany.  The world is full of wonders.  I tell my friend that I will be traveling to Hamburg tomorrow.  He reminds me that Brahms was born and raised in that city and that he played in the brothels by the harbor.  

31: Terrapin ecstasy

In the bright, cool morning, before our afternoon train to Hamburg, we saunter past the disembodied head statue still contemptuously spitting water, through the low walls near the Ghost Tower, and, then, into the public gardens.  The park is a couple blocks wide and, perhaps, a third of a mile long, fountains in the green shadow of hedges and big trees.  In the corner of the park nearest Ross Strasse, a radiant curve of water shaped like an integral sign encloses a small isle.  The ruins of a abbey destroyed in the Reformation occupy the little island: an open arch dangling vines where stained glass was once, part of a crumbling stone tower, and a burly-looking wall entirely clad in green lustrous ivy.  The landscape and the view over the pond has been carefully curated – probably during the era of the Brothers Grimm, because the entire monument is echt-Romantisch.  A snow-white swan glides along the flooded moat, neck and head also shaped like some elegant mathematical sign in calculus.  The swan’s feathers are reflected like a moving cloud in the pond.  On a big flat stone fallen from the rampart into the lagoon, three large painted turtles are worshiping the sun.  They are motionless, their blunt heads with eyes closed, telescoped on snake-necks as far from the hoods of their shells as possible.  Presumably, the sleeping turtles sunbathing on their yard of warm rock are happy in a turtle-ish way, as happy as a turtle can be which is, I think, a state of ecstasy beyond anything humans can experience.  

32.   It turned out okay for him

Down a medieval alley and across from the mighty Johannisburg Schloss, we find an old church, the Katholische Pfarrkirche zu unsere lieber Frau (=Catholic Parish Church of our Lady).  This is the oldest church in Aschaffenburg, although like the ship of Theseus in Plutarch’s account, reconstructed over the ten centuries since its founding in every possible way, including, of course, a complete rebuild after being bombed into rubble in a night air raid on October 27, 1944.  The church is empty when we visit, completely silent with the sort of stillness that suggests that there could never be any sort of loud sounds in the interior – at least, after the shell of brick was pierced by the falling bombs.  The structure is Romanesque, at least with regard to exterior walls, and so there are no pointed arches or vaults.  Thick stone walls support an almost flat ceiling, a huge expanse on which a fresco has been painted.  It’s hard to appreciate ceiling frescos because you have to crane your head and neck into unnatural positions and the whole slightly curving mural is a formless jumble of pastel pinks and salmon reds, unnaturally faded it seems, although more likely the original color-scheme was delicate and its hues not really yet deteriorated.  At first, the enormous pictorial field, a sort of tilted panorama of immense proportions looks abstract, like a tastefully neutered version of Jackson Pollock or Philip Guston during his abstract expressionist phase.  There are veins of celestial yellow with pink and red and pale blue floating overhead.  In fact, if you look more closely, the fresco is figurative, although after the manner of Picasso’s classical phase – big statuesque figures with bulky torsos toppling over one another, gesturing with either very tiny frond-like hands or giant lumps of toes and feet.  A variety of religious scenes from the Bible all blur into one another climaxing in the Virgin Mary’s rather limp ascension into heaven over the altar.  Behind us, in the choir loft, a huge pipe organ rears its howitzer barrels over the sanctuary.  A black and white photograph displayed on the wall shows that the church interior was rococo before the bombs melted down all the stucco saints and cherubs and pale angels bearing musical instruments (the pictorial program was the Adoration of Lamb after the manner of Jan van Eyck and 24 figures from the Apocalypse of St. John). There’s no trace of this decoration today and the church has reverted to its austere Romanesque origins.  On one of the walls the church’s 11th century tympanum, eroded into mostly formless knobs of stone, is displayed in an alcove.

The ceiling fresco was painted by an artist named Hermann Kaspar between September 1964 and January 1966.  Kaspar, who was born in 1904, was a child of the century – he began his art career as a rebel, one of the Young Turks associated with Munich secession.  But, by 1933, he had fallen into line with the prevailing ideology and was a loyal Nazi.  He applied his knowledge of classical art to devise ornamental meanders on National Socialist buildings featuring interlocked swastikas and was given the prestigious commission to design the impressive tribunals and temporary cenotaphs and obelisks at the Nuremburg rallies.  When his old art teacher and professor of fine arts was jailed by the Nazis for making decadent art, Kaspar gladly took his place and, opportunistically, profited from the man’s imprisonment.  In 1944, Dr. Goebbels awarded him the honor of being one of the Reich’s one-thousand Gottbegnadte Kuenstler (= Artist with god-bestowed gifts).  

After the War, Kaspar’s opportunism and Nazi party affiliations, were forgiven.  Lots of people with useful talents were in the same position as Kaspar and, for things to proceed with the Wirtschaftswunder (applicable to art as well), it was sometimes best to turn a blind eye to the past.  So Kaspar, given the prestigious commission to supervise painting the vast mural at the Aschaffenburg Church was allowed to profit, as it were, from Nazi iniquity: the Nazis caused a war, the war caused the destruction of the ancient church, the ancient church had to be rebuilt and who was better situated to receive fees from rebuilding the Church than Hermann Kaspar.  By the time that he assumed the Aschaffenburg commission, Kaspar was a full professor and much-honored.  He died in his bed, surrounded by adoring students and family members, at his villa on the Bodensee (Lake Constance)in 1986.

  

An inscription on the wall in the church adopts a somewhat arch tone: “(Hermann’s post-war career) is one of many cases that show that de-Nazification of the society in the young democracy was neglected.”

33: Mainz SP RE 57

We take the late afternoon commuter train to Frankfurt.  Aschaffenburg is really just a remote suburb of Frankfurt and people apparently routinely travel to and from the big city for their work.  There are no assigned seats on the train and its extremely crowded, an unpleasant trip for us since we are lugging our Gepaecke on this leg of our trip to Hamburg.

The train is very slow.  It dawdles across an unpleasant urban landscape, village to village, with tank farms and ugly factories sprouting up all along the right of way.  Some of the tiny towns even have two train stops: East and West Bumfuck as it were.  It takes about an hour for the train to reach Frankfurt.  We rattle across some big bridges over a big river.  The water shoulders huge becalmed barges and the city skyline is all glass and steel, but, nonetheless, a medieval-looking mess of skyscrapers with finials like lances, swords, and halberds.  We’re 12 minutes late to the train-shed in Frankfurt, a significant delay as far as Germans are concerned.

34: Strangers on a Train

In the first-class compartment, Angelica and I are assigned seats at a table across from an old man with a stiff brush of blonde-grey hair.  Our fellow-passenger is carrying a small suitcase with a heavy shapeless duffel bag, the kind of tote in which a sailor might haul his gear.  He has a little trouble hefting the duffel bag overhead – it’s droopy and shapeless and seems to be filled with fist-sized rocks.  A young man, asigned a seat across from him, takes the bag from the old man’s grip and installs it overhead on the metal rack along the ceiling of the car.  The two exchange some words that I can’t understand.  Once, the train gets underway, the young man hurries up to the front of the car, ten or twelve seats away, saying something to the effect that he will return when the ICE reaches Hamburg to help him with his gear.  The old man has courtly manners and bows slightly.

Central Germany is very pretty with elegant-looking forests lapping up against hilltops where there are old castles, structures so old that they look like eroded pinnacles and ramparts of natural rock.  The ridges are not particularly high or rugged and, yet, the train penetrates the hills passing through innumerable tunnels.  Most of the trees in the forest seem to be some species of red pine.  The trunks are spindly and lift up the crowns of the trees, competing with each other for available sunlight so that the tops of the pines sprout upward into the sky like airy flowers.  The trees have reddish, scaly bark and there are paths between the pines all soft and rust-colored with needles.  The under-story of the forest isn’t congested with brush and it’s obvious that these woods have been carefully managed, probably for centuries, even, millennia.  In the gloom under the pines, I can see that the paths branch and lead to other branching paths and that the whole forest is a garden of forking trails.

I’ve been this way before.  Part of the ICE route leads past some old towns associated with Martin Luther and one city has a huge heap of yellow and bronze-colored tailings from some sort of mine nearby, a barren ridge like a livid scar above the wooded hills.  (A few years ago, we came past these places on a train from Berlin to the Frankfurt airport.)  An hour south of Hamburg, the hills shrink to small wooded knolls on a great, flat plain.  Then, there are no knolls at all, just turgid waterways and open fields with wind turbines chopping at the skies.  

The trains slows to rumble through Hamburg’s suburbs.  Everyone gets up and starts pulling down their luggage from the overhead racks.  I nod to the old man and ask him if I can help with the bulging canvas Matrosen-bag.  He is a little disdainful.  

“We’re at least ten minutes from the station,” he says.

He adds that he has lived in Hamburg all his life.  

The old man asks us about our business in Hamburg.  “Just visiting to see the sights,” I tell him.  “Well, it is a wonderful city,” he says.  “The most beautiful in Germany.”

He asks if we have “people” we are visiting.  

When I tell him “no”, he asks how long we will be in town.

“Five days,” I say.

The old man says that if we meet him, he will give us a special guided tour of the places that no tourists know to visit.  “The secrets of the city,” he says. 

“We might take you up on that offer,” I reply.  

The old man says that he has business until Thursday.  “But I will be coming into town on Thursday,” he says.  “Call me and I will give you my special tour.  Places where no one from out-of-town ever goes.”

“This sounds wonderful,” I say.

He hands me a business card marked with an elegant red cartouche in which there are Chinese characters.  The business card identifies him as Juergen Seemann, the Schatzmeister der Bambusrunde.  Herr Seemann (a good name for someone from this nautical city – Seemann means “sailor”) is a board member of the Taiwan-Freundeskreis Bambusrunde e.V. (= Taiwan Friendship Circle of the Bamboo Round Table, eingetragener Verein, that is, “registered association”).  This seems exotic to me and I have no idea what sort of organization might bear the name, “Friends of the Bamboo Round Table”.)  What is a Schatzmeister, Herr Seemann’s role in this arcane association?

“Please call me and we will meet,” Herr Seemann says.

We have reached the train-station.  We hike along the platform.  I offer to help Seemann with his heavy canvas seaman’s bag, but he declines.  He tells me that he has come from a couple days in Frankfurt where he attended a funeral and he has brought back “some things” as he mysteriously says for his friends.

Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof is gritty, iron girders supporting a big metal shed where sea-gulls are darting overhead.  

“Where are you staying?”  Seemann says.

“Hotel Hafen,” I say.

“Oh, very good, C’est magnifique.” the old man says.  

We walk out to the taxi-stand and Herr Seemann tells me that Hotel is very close, only about “ten euro” fare.  The sky over the city is pale with the diffuse evening light characteristic of northern Europe.  The air feels moist.  Some elaborate buildings with glass domes and cupolas lie on the other side of tram-tracks.  Big brick steeples like huge intercontinental missiles or space-faring rocket ships loom over the streets.  Sea gulls batter the air with their white wings.

“I’ll call you on Wednesday,” I say, nodding to Herr Seemann. I wonder if I have made some kind of hideous mistake.

35.  C’est Magnifique

Herr S– is right.  The taxi fare to Hotel Hafen is 11 euros.  The cab follows some tree-lined streets, past sidewalk cafes and shops.  The city is green, leafy, and cool – it smells like Duluth with icy breezes skipping between old, stucco buildings.  

The hotel is a white box with a captain’s turret on its roof.  It’s surrounded by a shadowy woods, old trees clustered around some pale glass buildings nearby, modest eight-story skyscrapers with grass lawns in the park-like forest.  (Nothing in Hamburg is allowed to be built exceeding the height of the tallest of the five great steeples arranged in a quincunx on the terrace above the Elbe River.)  On a wooded hilltop, a monumental figure of a knight looms over the landscape – there seem to be people on that height, perhaps, seated at tables at the base of the stone warrior.

The Hotel Hafen (Hafen= harbor) is a remodeled rest home for old sailors.  It’s a dim Wunderkammer full of nautical artifacts, and, other wonderful souvenirs of the sea-faring life.  One glass case near the entry is filled with elegantly built ships in glass bottles.  Displays of coral and amethyst occupy the corners of the corridors.  In the bar, there’s a mural of a giant octopus with bulging, intelligent eyes casting its tentacles, the color of a Rubens’ nude, over the dining booths and racks of booze.  On the stairway landings (girded with cast-iron rails), there are a big brass compasses, nautical tillers for turning the massive white brick barge of the hotel as it rocks to and fro at sea, antique seaman’s trunks, racks full of harpoons and hooked lances and tritons.  Paintings hang on spaces on the walls between the display cases and show smudged tempests at sea, dark and grim pictures of seascapes and sinking vessels and an whale that seems to impale itself on the timber masts of a sailing ship – an image so dark and smoke-stained that it is scarcely legible, like something in an old novel I once read.  

In the room, there’s a brass fixture above the bed where a round, perfectly red and unblemished apple sits in a metal cup: “An Apple a Day,” the legend reads in German, “Keeps the Doctor Away.”   Best not to get scurvy during your travels around the watery parts of the globe...

The windows can be opened in two different directions and, something approximating a sea-breeze, blows over the curtains – we are, at least, 80 kilometers away from the actual sea – and we can look down from tree-clad terrace, over an intimidating-looking flight (or flights) of concrete stairs to the river.  A complex of massive grey ashlar walls pierced with medieval-looking arched corridors leads to the Elbe where passenger boats are zigzagging across the water.  On the opposing river-bank, perhaps, a half-mile distant, huge boats are moored under colossal hoists for raising cargo, big bent forks of iron that tower over the river.  An enormous mural advertising Der Loewe Koenig (= “the Lion King”) runs like a chyron along the bottom of a 1000 meter-long warehouse.  It’s a spectacular scene and enlivened by the gushes of cold air coursing up from the water and through the open windows into the hotel room.

The sun is setting.  The huge river with its different canals and piers and enormous aerial hoists catches the twilight seeping out of air and holds it for us to admire.  

36.  Alles in Ordnung

So far everything has gone well.  

37.  A Soldier in the Army of Liberation

On the Hafen side of the hotel, the onion-dome of a huge beer-brewing vat has been turned into a fountain.  Water glissades down the curved surface of this bronze dome.  It takes some imagination to conceive of the big, functional-looking object as monumental art.  Steps dropping down the steep incline to the road running parallel to the harbor and its piers are interrupted by three terraces.  On the top terrace, a homeless person encamped, apparently for several days, although there is now no one occupying the little bivouac: a sleeping bag remains tangled around a pipe-rail and there are some blankets and other unseemly looking debris on the landing.  We are at the hotel for five days and no one tampers with the squalid squat, the crowds of people descending the steps or climbing up to the hotel atop the river-bank simply step over or around the trash.  

The air is fresh, cool, and the sunlight, although bright, has no bite – the town has the climate of Duluth, it seems.  Wind skitters over the blue-green panels of the Elbe and obscures those mirrors in which the clear sky and its flotilla of clouds are reflected.

The steps leading down from the river bluff end among tram-tracks and parking spots near the big Expressionist stone-works of the tourist piers.  A block down the avenue, a subway station is cut into the side of the hill.  The U-Bahn here isn’t underground at all but runs on an elevated track with scenic views of the harbor and its colossal infrastructure.  The old city is squeezed into an isthmus of land between the Elbe and the Alstersee, a lake that runs in a wide diagonal away from the waterfront.  The Jungfernsteg, as pictured in my old postcard, is a promenade along the bank of the Alstersee where the lake water bounds the city-center.  Water is everywhere, brick-lined canals (they are called Fleet in Platt-Deutsch) carved into the landscape to load and unload cargo ships that once were piloted right into the tangle of narrow streets between the river and the lake.  Now, the Fleet are too shallow to be navigable by modern vessels and so the capillaries of water reaching into the lanes and alleys of Hamburg are mostly ornamental, a network of lagoons spanned by innumerable bridges and iron walkways. 

At the intricate center of these interlocking fingers of water clutching streets and lapping at the ankles of old churches, the town’s Rathaus stands above a broad public square.  A trench-like canal forms one edge of the Platz.  The Rathaus is enormous, a fortification with steep green-copper gables on its sheer roof and hundreds of windows (so it seems) symmetrically arrayed in an Florentine renaissance facade.  Each floor of the Rathaus has ranks of windows shaped differently from the registers above and below, although the whole structure seems rational and harmonious.  A huge tower as spiny and thorned at its top as a cactus looms over the city hall’s center.  Fountains are spurting in the courtyard of the Rathaus enclosed by the four wings of the building and the interior, so far as we can see, is a burrow of ominous and heavy vaults.  There’s a historical installation in the foyer, an account of civil unrest in Hamburg during the sixties – the exhibit is typically Teutonic with lots of black-and-white pictures showing agitated men with long hair and bra-less women waving flags and banners, the images drowned in a sea of text, far too much for anyone to read, but, I suppose, oppressively complete in its account of those turbulent times.

On one side of the Town-hall plaza there’s forty-foot monolith perched on the concrete ledge over the canal.  In Bauhaus-style lettering, a laconic legend commemorates the dead in the war between 1914-1918.  On the other side of the plaza, a curious humanoid figure, a little larger than life-size (although who knows the real size for space-aliens or specters like this thing) stands on a plinth heavily plated with bronze bas relief panels.  The humanoid has a sleek head and shoulders, a smooth mostly featureless head like an owl or an otter, some sort of sea-mammal standing on its hind legs.  In fact, the monument commemorates the place in the town square where the Nazis burned books written by the Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine.  Once a more classically realistic statue stood near this point, Heine with a pen in hand looking across the town-square toward the canal joining the blue Alstersee to the salt-water Elbe.  The panels show heavy-set pig-faced authorities melting down Heine’s statue in a fan of scuffed bronze flames.  On the other side of the monument, books are being shoveled into the fire.  There’s a inscription sufficiently eloquent that I wrote down its words:

Ich habe nie grossen Wert gelegt auf Dichter-ruhm und, ob man meine Lieder preiset oder tadelt, es kuemmert mich wenig.  Aber ein Schwert sollt ihr mir auf den Sarg legen, denn ich war a braver Soldat  im Befreiungskrieg der Menschheit.

(= I have never put much value in a poet’s fame and, whether one praises my songs or criticizes them, doesn’trouble me one way or the other.  But you should lay a sword on my casket because I was a courageous soldier in theWar to liberate humanity.”  – words said to have been written by Heinrich Heine in 1829.) 

38.  A little colloquy in conversational German

The streets around the Jungfernsteg are lined with expensive shops: Gucci, Hermes, etc.  The grid of streets is superimposed upon a black mesh of canals or, perhaps, it is vice-versa.  The shops are empty, dim green aquariums where one might expect to see exotic angelfish if there were any fish at all.  The places are so exquisite that they are hermetically sealed, by appointment only, perhaps, and, of course, the super-wealthy can’t be troubled to make appointments – it is beneath their dignity. 

We walk eight or nine blocks, a chilly wind at our backs, and the neighborhood changes – the pale limestone-colored facades are behind us now and we are among apartment buildings made with bricks enclosing stoic-looking courtyards.  A church steeple is embedded in the bright sky.  These towers are enormous and the pedestrian can’t assess scale – you walk toward one of these looming, masonry spikes and the steeple simply seems to recede in front of you.  How tall can a church be?  Distances are misleading if you measure them by church steeples?  In fact, some of towers are almost 350 feet tall and it’s not a stroll of a few blocks to reach them, rather, a distance of a half mile or more. 

We come upon a big bureaucratic structure, about three blocks from the tall steeple that has been guiding us.  This is the Hamburg City Historical Museum.  A little park with trees shimmering in the cool breeze nestles against the nondescript high-rise.  We enter through a side-door and immediately encounter people who tell us that the museum is closed for a couple days, apparently requiring some renovations.  On the steps outside the City Museum, I encounter a man with a red face and oval glasses leading a couple of elementary school-aged children.  I decide to say a few helpful words in German:

“Es ist geschlossen,” I say.

“Geschlossen?  Warum?” the man replies.

We are having a little conversation in German.

“Ich weiss nicht,” I say.

The man turns to his grandchildren and says in English with a slight London accent: “It’s closed, but it’s not clear why.”  

39.  Your goose is cooked!

Near the Rathaus, there are a couple churches: one of them is the St. Petri Church.  Inside, there are white vaults, pews, a pipe organ like a rank of steel storage bins in the choir loft.  A big portrait of Martin Luther hangs on the wall.  Luther looks a bull-dog in vestments.  There is a strange detail: a big swan stands proudly next to the Reformer: it’s as if the bull-mastiff preacher is taking his belligerent-looking pet swan for a walk.

A label on the wall explains that when Jan Hus, Luther’s Bohemian precursor was burned at the stake, the heretic proclaimed to his executioners: “You can cook a goose today but one-hundred years from now, a swan will arise that you won’t be able to shut-up.  My death will be your death, Pope!”  In Bohemian, Hus means Gans or “goose”.  I suppose this is the origin of the idiom for disaster: “His goose was cooked.”

39.  Lemons and melted metal

The sun is warm when we reach the mighty St. Michaelis Evangelical Church.  The spear of the steeple casts a sharp shadow like a vast gnomon over the city.  Some special service is underway in the sanctuary and so that part of the church is closed to the public.  We pay eight euros to ride an elevator up to a windy platform where iron bars protect us from the abyss.  The pointed cap of the steeple is overhead, unseen, of course, from this vantage inside the heap of masonry.  Hamburg stretches out flat and uniform in all directions on the watery plain – the city is green and glittering with lakes; some idiosyncratic skyscrapers with twisted glass walls are scattered at intervals across the landscape – they look like discarded toys or chess-pieces and are squat, much shorter than the brick spears of the church-steeples.  The harbor seems to be divided into vast bath-tub shaped channels, obviously man-made, and a forest of 15 story warehouses, apparently all of them identical, split one branch of the Elbe into several narrow gorges that pierce the masonry plateau comprised by the Speicher (= warehouse buildings).  On a promontory between limbs of the big river stands a tower of the Elbphilharmonie, a glass box poised atop a lower steel and stone box, the structure’s summit framed as a blue, irregular ripple of reflecting panels, like waves on the sea or, more exactly, the hair of some giant personage combed up into an elaborate pompadour greased, as it were, by the Brylcreem sun.  It’s a cold shivery place to stand.  Unlike American cities, there is no central encrustation of crystal skyscrapers – this city takes the form a vast and precise uniformity, curving streets, high-rises, even low hills all clinging tightly to the earth’s surface, stapled down by steeples, as if in fear of being cast away into great, pale sky.

Like everything in Hamburg, St. Michaelis, one of the icons for the city, has been burned and bombed, destroyed and rebuilt.  In this case, the Church has died several times, but by the natural deaths to which urban spaces are heir – in 1906, the old church burned to the ground.  In the crypt, some of ancient lead cupolas are displayed, melted by intense heat into a semblance of big grotesque marshmallow, soft, pillowy shapes seared by fire.  A big expanse of cobblestone flanks the church. On a concrete bier, three steel bells, cleft and, therefore, no longer useable are displayed.  During World War One, the congregation removed its bronze bells from the tower and had them melted down to make cannons.  One of the bells is inscribed: Ewigkeit die Zeit leucht hinein, a laconic motto that I take to mean: “The Light of Eternity shines within Time.”  A long row of plaques set in the brick-tiled plaza under the church displays donors who contributed to the church’s renovation.  One of them is Helmut Schmidt, a Hamburg native, who’s features are incised in a block of stone (an unflattering resemblance that makes the Chancellor look like a Weimar-era libertine – he seems to be wearing eye-shadow and waves a cigarette under this chin in a fey gesture).  The stone plaque reads: Hamburg war mein Revier / St. Michaelis mein Anker (= Hamburg was my stomping ground / St. Michaelis was my anchor.)

A couple blocks down the street, a statue of an old woman, life-size, offers passers-by Citrone (= lemons).  Lemons are a remedy for scurvy and, apparently, sailors passing through this neighborhood on the way to the brothels, purchased the fruit to protect themselves against that condition.    

40.  A revolting repast

It’s six blocks, more or less, to the subway station and, then, just two stops to the Landungsbruecke and the concrete steps leading to the hotel.  During the walk, I have a swift, lancing pain in my right sinus, then, a hollow feeling like the onset of a headache that one can avoid by thinking about something else.  A pinched nerve, I think, in my back causes my thighs to burn a little and, then, tingle with the pins-and-needles numbness.  Maybe, something isn’t exactly right.  

At the waterfront, a row of wooden sheds stands along the river-walk behind the arched tunnels piercing the fortress of the boat-landing.  Old men with Santa Claus beards are selling tickets for harbor excursions to tourists.  The old men wear nautical outfits with brass buttons and the sea captain hats.  I go to a kiosk and buy two tickets for a night-time cruise on the river, the so-called Hafen Lichterfahrt.  Then, I sit at steel table under a steel awning to eat a curry-wurst with fries.  There’s too much curry-sauce and chunks of sausage are drowned in the pinkish-orange stuff.  Along the wharf, white ferries come and go crowded with tourists.  Overhead, a tall clocktower formidably proportioned with huge grey blocks of abrasive-looking granite chimes the hour.  In Germany, all clock towers are reliably set to the current time and, if equipped with bells, toll the hour as well, although apparently using some inscrutable nautical system that cycles between one and six tones.  The sun is bright on the water.  Angelica wants to buy some souvenirs.  The big granite structure that opens onto the piers has alcoves cut into its front facing the river-side road and parking spots and these places sell souvenirs of the Hanseatic Stadt, Hamburg.  I don’t feel exactly right and so I trudge up the endless flight of steps to the hotel where I plan to take a nap.

41.

The Hafen Lichterfahrt departs from the pier at 10:30 and so we have time to take the subway up to the Reeperbahn station maybe a mile from the Hotel.  

It’s late in the afternoon and the sun has gathered together all its heat to warm the streets in the red light district.  Above the harbor, it’s not so chilly and the reeking alleys between the sex-shops and brothels exude a foul, wet and clammy breath.  The street isn’t too crowded and there aren’t any streetwalkers in evidence in the bright late-afternoon light.  The sidewalk is lined with dive-bars and small boutiques selling S & M lingerie or, perhaps, just Goth gear.  Of course, there are marijuana dispensaries, storefronts full of elaborate water-pipes, and, even, a place that seems to be selling handguns – the firearms are displayed in the window, an array of nasty little pistols that you can pick up for about 275 euros.  (This merchandise on offer is the last thing I expected to see in Deutschland).  A couple blocks from the subway exit and across the boulevard, a four-story building, apparently made from the flimsiest sort of plywood bears the words Sex House.  Windows are represented above the sidewalk entrance, recessed niches that are blind cubby holes on which the white profiles of women are stenciled.  The women are Barbie-doll-thin and kicking their legs in the air or squatting in contortionist postures.  The Sex-House is entered through the Titty-Twister Bar, an establishment advertised by a naked girl with tassels twirling over her nipples.  Next to the Titty Twister, there’s another saloon, enigmatically named GRIZZLY, the letters outlined in pale blue neon that is lit, but emitting no perceptible light in the broad and deep sunshine brightening the Reeperbahn.  The Beatles played in this vicinity sixty years ago and pictures of the lads adorn some of the storefront windows, tucked in displays of dildos and sex-harnesses, jade Buddhas and gypsum unicorns rearing up on their hindlegs among Pokemon and Magic cards.  One store peddles Tyrant Trading Cards featuring Catherine the Great, Hitler, Genghis Khan, and George W. Bush.  

An alley opens into a courtyard surrounded by sketchy-looking hotels, probably brothels of some kind, and dismal-looking curry-wurst and doner-kebab places.  Like the Sex House, everything seems to have been patched together from low-weight plywood and the structures are the sort of things that you see at a carnival or on the Midway at the State Fair, facades crudely painted with naked women, motorcycle gangs, cowboys and red Indians.  It’s all provisional, contingent, walls and signs that seem ephemeral as if a mere gust of wind might scattered these plywood panels all over the dirty sidewalk.  A small knot of people are gathered next to a modest fountain over which a primitive statue of Hans Albers, the patron saint of the Reeperbahn, is mounted on what seems to be an improvised concrete plinth.  The figure isn’t monumental – far from it; in fact, Albers is Hobbit-sized, shaped from boxy-looking cubes of raw-looking cement.  The famous actor and cabaret singer wears a sailor’s cap.  My first impression is that he’s been built from battered luggage, stacked up to form the semblance of a man.  A tour-guide is telling jokes but I can’t decipher any of his words.  The group of nine or twelve people laughs appreciatively and the water splashes in the fountain under Alber’s cubist feet and the windows in the whore houses overlooking the courtyard have all been tacked shut with more planks of plywood.  (Hans Albers was born in the St. Georg district of Hamburg in 1891, actually an upscale neighborhood by the Aussenalstersee.  His connection to the Reeperbahn is mostly cinematic – he appeared in some popular movies set in Hamburg’s redlight and his signature ballad was “Auf der Reeper nachts um halb Eins” (= “On the Reeper at night at half-past midnight”).  The title of this song is incised into the cement base of the statue above the fountain in graffiti-script along with a similarly crude line-drawing of a voluptuous naked woman brandishing a whip and riding on a crawling man.  Next to his sketch, seemingly made with a pointed stick in the wet cement, the name Immendort is also scribbled.  The neo-Expressionist, Joerg Immendorf apparently designed the statue here and the thing, is ugly and grotesque, but striking.  Albers was in many famous German movies, notably The Blue Angel and the war-time epic Muenchhausen (1944) and he even played the role of Frederick the Great in a couple films, although he was best known for playing world-weary picaresque heroes, sea-tramps and drifters and cabaret singers.  The actor was so well-loved that he was effectively untouchable – although he had a Jewish girlfriend, the Nazis looked the other way until the very last days of the regime when Albers had to export the woman to Switzerland.  He remained famous and an important box-office draw until his death in 1960.  Albers seems to have been a rough-and-ready equivalent of Frank Sinatra.  On the slip-covers of his records, the singer appears with a cigarette, usually wearing seaman’s cap and pea-coat.)

The Reeperbahn, which means “Rope-makers’ Street” is the center of St. Pauli district in Hamburg, and, having been decimated by AIDS first and COVID most recently, has seen better days.  The notorious Herbertstrasse is near Hans Albers Square, a stub of street where the prostitutes displayed themselves behind floor to ceiling plate glass windows in gaudy, tabloid-flares of green and red and blue and pink neon-light.  The street is barred with a wooden barricade plastered with cigarette ads and, where you have to take a sharp right behind the barrier to enter the place, there are several red and white-lettered placards that read  Zutritt fuer Jugendlich unter 18 und Frauen Verboten (= No entry for youths under 18 and women.)  Out on the Reeperbahn itself, the facades are all blind eyes, nailed shut to the world, whatever goes on inside is invisible, literally obscene in the sense of happening in some gloomy space off-stage.  But along the 100 yard length of the Herbertstrasse, the girls are on show.  Because I am under 18 and have female characteristics, the red and white sign scares me away.  Above the ground level on the street, the stucco buildings are painted purple and pink and green.  

In the alleys and little trash-strewn courtyards, pigeons strut and preen.  The famous live-sex shows at the Safari, Colibri, the Regina, and Salambo are all defunct.  The neighborhood is being gentrified and in 20 years nothing will remain but a fading whiff of scandal and the Davidwache, a narrow church-shaped police station featured often in exterior shots in German television-Krimi. Where the street opens onto several parks, the Stage Operettenhaus is playing the musical version of Rocky and tourists disgorged from buses are hurrying into the building decorated with big murals of bleeding boxers.  A hundred yards beyond the theater, two little conjoined skyscrapers twist around one another – these are the so-called “Dancing buildings” (Tanzende Tuerme), supposedly representing a couple doing the tango beyond the boulevard of Spielbuden near the St. Pauli U-Bahn station.  

42.  Black Lives Matter

Bismarck on a great circular pedestal, all pillars, stone steps, and viewing platforms under the giant’s armored feet, gazes across at the Tanzende Tuerme from the heights of a steep wooded knoll overlooking the St. Pauli Station.  We ascend the hill on a sidewalk, climbing above the pleasant park where people are playing with dogs and lovers cuddling on blankets on the grass, musicians strumming guitars in long shadows cast by the trees.  The famous man looming above this all is bald with a bland, indifferent face carved from pale yellow granite.  His protuberant eyebrows are each about a yard long.  The Denkmal is fashioned as a so-called Roland-Figur, that is, a colossus accoutered in the armor of a medieval knight bearing a naked blade.  On this hilltop, Bismarck stands upright, a mighty pillar with head, hands, and greaves posed against the sky with a huge sword resting between his mailed boots, the bare tip of the blade reaching to the level of his heart.  These sorts of statues are common in Germany and the weapon is called the Gerichtsschwert (= Sword of Justice), sometimes also described as a Hinrichtungsschwert (= Execution Sword).  Apparently, figures of this kind represent the power vested in the City Council – in this case, the executive authority of the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg.  (When the statue was raised in 1906, the Denkmal had important political significance: Hamburg had been a free city, not beholding to any Prince since the 13th century, and it was jealous of its liberties. Bismarck enticed Hamburg into joining German Federation by offering the mercantile city respite from government taxes on warehoused goods, thus, transforming Hamburg into an even more prominent  shipping hub.)  We can’t see the lower half of the monument because it is now a construction site, the subject of expensive and complex (as well as controversial) renovation. Twelve-foot high hoardings surround the entire structure and we make a circuit on a dirt trail running along the fence.  The wooden walls are entirely covered with graffiti, some of it spectacular: fighting robots and anti-Nato slogans (Natod = Na-Death), intricate abstractions, stencils of George Floyd next to big Black Lives Matter insignia, Robert Crumb-style figures truckin’ along the base of the plywood barriers.  Photographs showing the Bismarck monument before 2020, when the project began, depict the entire base of the monument covered in graffiti, brightly painted, and, from a distance, resplendent, producing a sort of stained glass effect that seems to lighten, even, liberate the weighty plinth on which the Great Man stands.  Renovation of the monument led to demonstrations in the park.  Some members of the Left revile Bismarck as a proto-Nazi, Imperialist, and racist agent of Colonialism and, when the matter came to a vote, there were ballots cast to knock the thing down.  Air raids had split the figure and it was repaired with temporary measures and, left alone, would probably come toppling down in the next decade or so – one can imagine Bismarck’s round bullet-head rolling like a mighty boulder down the hillside.    

Enormous catacombs corkscrew down into the high hill under the monument and they were used as air-raid shelters during the War.  Bombs pitted the hill but didn’t topple the Denkmal. The City promises to use these catacombs as an exhibit to “recontextualize” Bismarck and his legacy.  In other words, Hamburg intends a counter-monument inside the round temple on which the Founder stands.  (I think the best way to recontextualize the monument would be to install an abortion clinic, a gay bar, and a porno place in the catacombs under the structure.)  The hilltop is windy and the Roland-Figur seems to ring like a tuning fork in the cold breeze.  Vibrations are complex; kids are smoking dope in the bushes that ring the hilltop and you can smell the skunk in the air.

When we checked in at the Hafen Hotel, it was sunset and, when I looked across the wooded park toward the last light of the day, I glimpsed elegant and youthful Germans sitting at tables with white table-cloths under the aegis of the pale-amber colossus.  Rays of sunlight glimmered in champagne flutes that these fortunate people were raising in toasts and waiters in tuxedos circulated among the guests and, somewhere, in the lush green woods a chamber orchestra was playing.  But this vision must have been of Xanadu. Under Bismarck’s broad breast and sword, there are only heaps of jack-hammered debris, graffiti-smeared fences and gates wired shut next to the battered stone steps leading up to base of the monument.  There are people on these heights but they are alone and furtive.  

43.  A Gory Apron

Ideas are stuck in my head.  It’s like a tune you can’t get out of your brain, but, instead, a morbid fantasy entangled with your thoughts that just keeps mindlessly repeating itself.  The old man, Juergen Seemann, Schatzmeister of the Bamboo Round-Table, has lured us into some grim cellar where he intends to hack us apart with surgical instruments.  Corpses are hanging on meat hooks.  With an impassive face, bland as a mask, the killer limps toward his pinioned victims.  He is wearing a butcher’s apron stained with gore.  I’m trying to nap before the Hafen Lichterfahrt but the image of the sinister old man haunts me and, I think, it’s all avoidable – the surgical instruments encrusted with rotting blood, the filthy apron, the cellar full of mutilated corpses: I don’t have to participate in any of this, but, of course, I will.

44.  The Maid of the Mist

We board the Klein-Erna.  The little vessel is already crowded and people are drinking beer and wine in plastic glasses.  The wind is cold and most of the tourists on the tour-boat are wearing windbreakers and, even, stocking caps.  (By contrast, I didn’t pack anything warm and wear a short-sleeved shirt and, even before, the boat is underway, I am shivering in the chill breeze blowing off the water.)  The people who arrived before us are below on the deck behind the captain’s cockpit.  They can’t see as well as those of us perched on the upper deck at the stern of the tour-boat but, undoubtedly, its warmer below.  The bar is lit by Christmas tree lights and there’s merry music coming from the loudspeakers.

We’re underway.  A jaunty German pop song shudders in the air and people are singing along with the chorus.  It’s something about greeting the sun as it rises, incongruous since we are setting out after 10:30 pm in the dark with only a few ribbons of fading yellow light on the horizon.  The lyrics of the song are in English – Germans must associate happiness, prosperity, freedom, good times, even nostalgia with the English language.  The Klein-Erna is surprisingly fleet and, soon enough, we are skimming over the water along the famous fish-market at Altona, a Hamburg neighborhood under the bluff occupied by St. Pauli.  The city shows domes and steeples and little glass box skyscrapers along the hillside, everything glittering with elegant lights outlining the facades.  We slip into one of the long harbors running parallel to the main course of the Elbe, a huge expanse of dark water occupied by towering vessel onto which shipping containers are being loaded.  Apparently, this work proceeds around the clock and gantries like the skeletons of Gothic cathedrals are lowering blue and orange and yellow containers, each as long as a freight car onto the deck of the boat.  The vessel is a hundred feet tall, great iron flanks overhanging the frothy black channel and the captain says in German that the boat is more than 400 meters long.  The Klein Erna like a mosquito stabs its prow at the enormous vessel and the captain powers the tour-boat so close to the metal cliffs above us that there is a collective gasp of breath – are we about to crash?  But, then, the boat backwaters and rotates away from calamity, skirting the sides of the ocean-going vessel as we cruise its length.  The ship is majestic and the mighty gantries rising on sequoia-sized steel trunks are awe-inspiring.  It reminds me of a sentence in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, a passage in the aggressively provocative introduction to her book: Paglia says something to the effect that when she sees a construction crane hauled through traffic she feels the desire to genuflect before the enormous device – it’s like the icon of a saint drawn through the streets during a religious festival: This is what Men have made!  The huge shipping vessel inspires similar thoughts – from this range, the thing is too close to be encompassed in a glance or, even, a sequence of glances: iron stacked with iron, the containers piled ten stories high on the gargantuan decks of this ship, everything strangely silent, no one in sight although shipping containers are suspended in mid-air from their cradles in the shoreside gantries.  

Across the Elbe, on the Hamburg side of the river, fireworks blossom in the sky.  We buzz along past the ElbPhilarmonie – two tiny figures 200 feet above the river peer down at us, shadowy forms standing at the guardrail under the glass heights of the concert hall.  In a dry-dock, the yacht of Russian oligarch is wrapped in white shrouds like a Christo artwork – the sleek aerodynamic shape of the yacht is stylized, made even more elegant, by the veil of linen-white fabric.  (The captain informs us that the yacht cost 780 million euros.)  Farther along the estuary, we shoot past Dock 11, the largest dry-dock in Europe, a huge island mid-stream fifteen-stories high, an empty cavernous hangar lit like a movie-set or an operating theater.  It’s darker farther down the river where the channel splits off into narrow brick-walled sluices, the canals reaching into the Speicherstadt (= warehouse city).  Bridges like flattened iron arches span the channel and, when the boat shoots under them, the bricks and metal deck roar with sinister echoes and you feel like have to wince and crouch to avoid being decapitated by the spans.  With each bridge, the people on the Klein-Erna gasp and, even, send up a shriek like amusement park patrons riding a roller-coaster.  There is something dystopian about the huge sector of identical warehouses, all of them windowless fortresses towering over the channel that becomes narrower and more claustrophobic, capped with tighter-fitting bridges and walkways.  The warehouses are dramatically lit with hidden yellow lights that fan up, flaring across the impassive and featureless brickwalls.  Each warehouse has a bulging vertical pillar, a rolling column that must, I suppose, house some kind of narrow, spiral stair affording access to the individual levels in the ten-story buildings.  The warehouses crowd together – there’s no space between them and they all share common walls and their vaults rise up into the night, lost in the darkness overhead.  Thousands of these buildings, completely the same except for numbers on white panels affixed to each warehouse surround us and, at last, the channel is exhausted and we come to black lagoon that seems to be about the size of swimming pool, a dead end in the heart of warehouse-city that has come to resemble, more and more, a natural phenomenon, a mindless iteration of cliffs and brick towers, a landscape and not anything built by the hands of men.  It seems completely improbable that the captain can turns the tour-boat around in this tiny sloshing tub of inky water, but, somehow, the vessel reverses direction and, then, the boat gathers speed and rushes as if in a sort of panic through the cave-like canals, seeking the comparatively open water of the river.  Behind us a white wake accumulates and washes against the warehouses rooted in the water and I can see the pale waves thudding up against old brick steps leading down to the canal’s surface between its masonry banks.  A light bulb throbs over one of these landings and I can see the Klein-Erna’s wake wash over the steps and burst against the stone wall.

On the way back to the dock, as the tour-boat swoops and spins through the canals, the loudpeakers blare movie music, first the theme from the Harry Potter movies, all bombast and fanfares, and, then, the love song from Titanic.  The captain takes the curves fast accelerating around the brick piers and the cold wind washes over our faces and the whole thing is strangely exhilarating, a spectacle of motion and air with water leaping around the vessel on all sides, the steeples of Hamburg lit theatrically and the city’s towers glowing as if on fire on the banks of the Elbe.

Once, twenty years ago or more, I went to Niagara Falls and paid to board the Maid of the Mist, a little boat that cruises up to the base of the waterfalls.  Tourists are issued yellow rain-slickers because the spray from the waterfall rages all around the small boat.  I recall that the Maid approached the cataract and was half-drowned in the cold mist blowing off the plunge-pool beneath the wild, falling walls of water.  Then, the boat reversed and pulled away from the brink of the torrent dashing down in front of us and, at the exact instant, that the little vessel had backed out of the white spray so that the cataract was visible, the loudspeaker announced: “Ladies and Gentleman, Niagara Falls!”  And with this announcement, it was as if the waterfall had been harnessed specifically to entertain us, as if we had reversed our motion out of the chaos of falling water, into a mighty amphitheater in which glazed-green pillars of falling water plunged into the river on all sides of us, an enormous spectacle contrived just for our own astonishment and awe.  

45.  Klein Erna

Klein Erna, as I later learn, is a bit of local color.  Klein (= little)  Erna refers to a ten-year-old Hamburg girl, the subject of many jokes and witty aphorisms.  Humor is famously inscrutable and impossible (mostly) to translate and I’ve read a half-dozen or so supposedly witty remarks attributed to Klein Erna and can’t make head nor tail of them.  

It’s like the expression Moin! that is specific to Hamburg and the north coast along the Baltic Sea.  “Moin” means “hello” or, at least, is used in that context – although it’s an all-purpose word and can be used as an expression of enthusiasm or a farewell.  (Moi in Finnish means “hello”; moi-moi means goodbye.)  Most etymologies trace the word to Morgen (= morning, as in “good morning”), but there is a Frisian cognate that means “good” or “beautiful” and, probably, the expression’s origin is stretched between several languages and many meanings.

When the Klein Erna set forth on the Hafen Lichterfahrt, everyone raised a toast and shouted Moin! 

46. Hypnagogia

I can’t sleep.  The boat tour sweeps into a backwater and a man with a gory apron beckons to me: Moin! he cries.  I seem to have a caught a chill from the night-time excursion on the Elbe.

47.  Virtue-signaling and soft-core porn

Like many museums caught in the tides of the politically correct, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is ready and willing to score points off its own paintings.  It’s a bit peculiar, but many art museums, particularly those with large collections of 19th century paintings, are more than enthusiastic about denouncing works that they display.  In general, I think, the sympathies of the gallery-goer are aligned with the hapless paintings subjected to the injustice of being pruriently shown, while simultaneously deplored as racist, sexist, orientalist, imperialist, and the like.  If this art is, indeed, politically suspect and a prelude to actual injustice, then, why put it on display in the first place?  These enormous beaux artes buildings have cellars after all, even, I suppose, dungeons where evil art can be concealed and punished.  I suppose there are lots of well-heeled private collectors to whom this post-modern version of degenerate art could be deaccessioned.  But, of course, these practical measures would defeat the purpose of exposing these paintings to public ridicule – the idea is to titillate while congratulating the spectator on his or her virtue.

The Hamburg Kunsthalle is an ornate building with a central stairway that sweeps upward in a grand architectural gesture to the galleries that enclose the marble atrium, itself lushly decorated with huge 19th century murals.  The first hall, above the steps, features a tendentious display called Making History: Hans Makart und die Salonmalerie des 19. Jahrhunderts (= Hans Makart and the Salon Painting of the 19th Century).  The centerpiece of this show, and the chief object of opprobrium, is an enormous canvas “The Entry of Charles the Fifth into Antwerp”, fifty square meters of elaborately costumed figures in a procession containing a half-dozen naked girls, mostly blonde, carrying scepters and swords.  The women are next to the hooves of the horse on which the King, a handsome, if somewhat effete youth in a ludicrous beret, rides.  The lad gestures with open hand at two of the girls who shyly (after all they are bare-naked) look away from him toward a pyramidal heap of women, all elaborately coiffed and gowned, who seem to be presenting a rather limp, even boneless, child to the handsome young prince.  There are probably a two dozen figures in the huge picture including Duerer, whose Christ-like visage appears against the darkness of a viewing platform clad in some kind of dark burgundy fabric.  The painting has its origin in a note that Albrecht Duerer made to himself after observing the spectacle shown on the canvas: “The gates (of Antwerp) were exquisitely adorned with small intimate plays, great jubiiation and tableaux of beautiful maidens, the like of which I have rarely seen.”  Makart, a famous Viennese artist in his day (1840 - 1884), interprets Duerer’s remark to justify the nudes surrounding the monarch.  (This seems questionable to me: Duerer’s German says schoenen Jungfrauenbildern – that is, “lovely pictures of young women or virgins”.   I don’t think there’s any warrant to believe that naked girls were part of the spectacle presented to Charles V when he entered Antwerp.  Obviously, Makart simply wanted an excuse to paint some nudes amidst the sumptuous display of furs and silks and rose buds strewn under the horse’s hooves.)   The authors of the bulletin available to visitors at the exhibition present an learned exposition of early 16th century tableaux vivants, describing them as allegorical representations in which partly nude women stood atop platforms enacting virtues generally portrayed as handsome naked girls – this explanation also seems dubious to me and gives the salacious Hans Makart way too much credit for what is, in effect, Victorian-era soft-core pornography.  (The author of the brochure notes virtuously that the women “usually stood on grandstands (bad translation for “tribunes”) well above what was going-on (and) under no circumstances did they act directly before the feet of the Emperor as he rode past.”  How the writer knows these things is unexplained and no sources are cited.  Here one can detect German anxiety about how to address the problematic naked girls in Makart’s huge painting.  Under no circumstances should anyone decry the nudity of the women – this would be bourgeois and evidence prudishness about the unclothed body; modern Germans like nude beaches and enjoy sunbathing in Greece sans bikini bottom and bikini top and, therefore, the mere fact that the woman are naked is not here the issue.  What seems deplorable is the mixture of sumptuously clad figures in all their period regalia and naked girls, what’s more beneath the gesturing monarch.)  The brochure poses some rhetorical questions about sexism and gender relations, all of which are to be answered to detriment of Makart’s vulgar display.  The other big academic pictures ranged around the room are similarly “interrogated” for orientalism, racism, and kitschy sentimentality.  

I don’t defend Makart.  His picture deserves what it gets.  (The brochure-writer doesn’t mention that the painting was embargoed in the United States when it was shipped there for display.  The censorship was effected by no less than postal commissioner Anthony Comstock and, although this censorious tone of the brochure is consistent with American “Comstockery,” as it was called, the writers would be appalled to be compared with that public figure.)  Furthermore, the tone of the interpretative brochure, although gently insistent, isn’t obviously arrogant or, even, dogmatic.  The viewer, the brochure suggests, should make up his or her mind while keeping in view the ideological principles implicit in the writing.  In my view, the Makart painting has something to do with the fact that the artist was commissioned to design triumphal arches, parade cars, and costumes for the 1879 Silver Wedding anniversary of the Emperor Franz Joseph.  Probably, the procession painted on the huge canvas represents some kind of wish fulfillment, an example of the splendor that Makart would have implemented in his triumphal procession if contemporary mores had allowed.  These sorts of triumphs are all imaginary in any event:  Duerer himself designed a spectacular parade involving monstrous animals and naked Ethiopians for the Hapsburg Maximillian I and, in turn, his labor derived from Mantegna’s “Triumph of Caesar” itself based on classical precedents.  Makart was a serious artist with serious pretensions and he wanted us to take his big picture seriously at least in terms of its bravura technique and carefully designed color scheme.  But, on the face of things, the image is ridiculous and, probably, even slightly ironic, a little “tongue-in-cheek” – after all, pictures are commerce and there’s money to be made off people who pay to be scandalized.

48.  The Human Zoo

The Kunsthalle is famous for its collection of north German romantics, particularly Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich.  Runge gets a good-sized gallery with his most important paintings on display: the allegorical cycle on the times of the day is represented by an incomplete but luminous painting of morning, glorious with dewy light and flowers with angels framing a meadow where a toy-like naked infant lies.  Defying gravity, an angel falls upward, diving into the bright sky.  There is Runge’s “Rest on the Flight into Egypt”with its curiously naive, even primitive, draftsmanship, similar to the artist’s painting of “Peter on the Sea” in which Christ reaches down to pull the apostle from a green, marmoreal wave, as dense and stiff and solid as stone.  The uncanny painting of the Huelsenbeck children, in my view Runge’s masterpiece, is endlessly fascinating: a boy in a green “onesie” (as it might be called today) waves a branch at the spectator as he stands next to his sister wearing a white frock; the two older children are tugging at a wagon occupied by a fat baby, an implacable little emperor who gazes blandly at us, certainly one of the most remarkable images of the stolid, complacent, mindlessness of infancy.  Everything about the picture repays close examination: the grove of allegorical sunflowers is also botanically accurate and there is an elaborate white picket fence with spherical finials that runs in strict perspective into the depths of the picture, an eerie exercise in perspective that guides the eye to a sort of greenhouse with glass windows and a whole miniature landscape with farmhouses and steeples and hedgerows.  The children aren’t idealized and the gesturing boy casts an optically correct shadow over the girl.  The baby’s fat, inert feet contrasted with the wooden wheels of the cart in which the infant sits are particularly indelible, even, precious.  This painting must be viewed in contrast to Runge’s portrait of his parents, a gloomy dark-clad couple standing against a rather sinister-looking wall with the two elder children in the Huelsenbeck picture at their feet, the boy looking up at the adults with a mixture of amazement and horror.  This is our fate: we are transformed from optimistic, playful and imaginative children into specters of ourselves, – the little boy and girl mirror the old husband and his grim wife, a vertical highlight striking against the lustrous silk of the woman’s garment, producing an effect like the Hinrichtungsschwert emblazoned on her cloak.

Casper Friedrich’s pictures are in the next gallery, very small pictures mostly, still, and stony.  The doomed Hoffnung (= Hope) caught in the grip of the Arctic sea is splendid for its strangeness – the towers and pinnacles of ice crushing the ship are the color of amber washed up on the beaches of the Baltic Sea.  A group of schoolchildren are gathered on the floor around an attractive teacher who sits on a little folding stool.  She points at Friedrich’s most famous painting, “The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” and asks the students to interpret the picture.  The room is hushed. No one ventures a comment.

In other rooms, there are some fine paintings by Lovis Corinth, an artist too little appreciated outside of Germany.  “Carl Hagenbeck in his Zoo” shows the haggard impresario, gaunt in a loose black suit, standing next to an enormous walrus exuberantly painted in sleek greens and browns with red and turquoise highlights.  Hagenbeck has his hand on the walruses shoulder and the creature’s whiskers are shaggy, like coils of barbed wire, intended, I think, to rhyme with the neck-beard adorning the animal-importer.  Some polar bears in the distance are painted like a Greek chorus.  (Mercifully, there’s no label denouncing Hagenbeck although the wonderful painting is a part of the cell-phone tour and, I suppose, he is properly excoriated in that commentary.  Hagenbeck, famous for importing wild animals for his zoo in Hamburg wasn’t content to display beasts only.  He also set up a human zoo in which Ethiopians, Bushmen, Hottentots, Pygmies and Inuit (Eskimos) were displayed.  The “human zoo” toured and the eight Inuit all caught small-pox and died.)  Max Beckmann’s spooky picture of seals squatting under a big, fatal-looking hoop complements Corinth’s picture of the zookeeper.  Beckmann seems to have regarded seals as “selkies,” that is, some elegant and enigmatic reincarnation of human souls and the round hoop, motivated by their circus tricks, I think, is an image for the cycle of incarnation and rebirth.  In another picture, Beckmann shows us Prometheus on a circus stage, a schematically rendered bird with blue wings, really just an enlarged songbird, carving open his breast with its beak while the man howls melodramatically.  Like the seals, Prometheus is displayed under incandescent lights within a theatrical arch. For some reason, he also has blue wings that mimic the feathers of the bird tormenting him.  At his feet, a chef in white toque is carving some sort of beast while a woman points a flaming torch up at Prometheus; a nude woman, as gratuitous and probably offensive as Makart’s naked girls, sprawls next to the banquet table.  

Otto Dix’s “Mother and Child” comments on Runge’s paintings of parents and children.  The mother looks exhausted.  No doubt she is tired from caring for her demonic infant, a hideous monster from the id that glares out at us.  

It’s raining outside of the museum and there’s a big platform of masonry between the old Kunsthalle and the adjacent museum of contemporary art.  The heap of masonry is some sort of artwork and you can traverse it, although the wet bricks are a bit slippery.  The stuff in the Hamburg museum of contemporary art is mostly execrable – ugly abstractions, stacks of postcards making obscure political points (you can take one or two for a souvenir), shards of neon hissing in dark rooms and TV screens displaying people grimacing and making enigmatic gestures.  The place is deserted and completely silent.    

48.  Mahnmal

The rain stops and the clouds overhead dissolve.  Streets brighten and umbrellas are returned to their scabbards.

We walk to the ruins of St. Nikolai Church, a Mahnmal (=admonitory memorial).  Death from the air shattered the church and dropped its walls and pointed Gothic arches, but the steeple withstood the white phosphorus and explosives.  Nothing seems so irredeemably dead as the ruin of a church tower – not only is the congregation destroyed and its pastors burned to ashes, but the faith is fatally shattered and God with his communion of Saints murdered as well.  The huge steeple was hideous before it was smashed and charred, a neo-Gothic monstrosity prickling with stone serrated edges and little crosses like truncheons and spikes fortifying the masonry shells of windows, a hurtful object designed, it seemed, to lacerate the skies with its pointed finials and brutal saw-tooth edges and, of course, being bombed into ruins doesn’t improve the appearance of the tower.  At the base of this monstrous, burned thing, some forlorn vaulted arches rise above patches of flowers and there are big billboards printed with gloomy pictures (and lots and lots of print) decrying wars in Somalia, Afghanistan, and, of course, Ukraine.  A brick wall that remained after the air attack now supports a chalky plaster surface that displays a ragged-looking drawing of the crucifixion by Oscar Kokoschka – it’s apparently a sketch for a mosaic made in commemoration of the War and its atrocities, gracing some other church in Hamburg.

This downtown church had a small congregation when it was fire-bombed and it was deemed pointless to rebuild things here and so the stark, ravaged tower and the remnants of arches and walls were restored sufficiently to keep them from toppling over and preserved as a war memorial.  But time heals some wounds, at least, and the austere, even pristine, purity of the place has been monetized, at least, a bit – there’s a dark crypt, an atrocity museum, that you can visit for six euros and an elevator will whisk you to a viewing platform in the steeple 250 feet above the City.  Gradually, these Mahnmal lose their aura of stark horror and become more tourist-friendly – I suppose that one day there will be a gaudy virtual reality exhibit in the crypt where, for a fee, visitors can experience fire-bombing and, then, as a consolation, the reconstruction of Hamburg.

At the viewing platform, big photographs are posed against the modern-day vistas of city and streets, showing the appearance of Hamburg after Operation Gomorrah, the huge aerial attacks by British and American bombers in July and August 1943.   (The US bombed the harbor; the Brits carpet-bombed the residential neighborhoods). The assault on July 25, 1943 killed 34,000 people in a single night (among them 5000 children), mutilated 120,000 more and led to the displacement of 950,000 people who fled the flaming ruins for the countryside.  Over 250,000 apartments were burned into uninhabitability.  These sorts of statistics, of course, might encourage a certain furtive sympathy for the Germans, a sentiment which those composing these placards are swift to refute: (these casualties) fielen letzlich der Aggressionspolitik der Nationalsozialisten und ihrem Weltmachanspruch und der von ihnen Barbarisierung des Krieg zum Opfer (= these casualties fell victim, in the final analysis, to the aggressive politics of the National Socialists and their ambitions to control the world as well their barbarization of war.)

49.  Paternoster lifts

It seems a long hike from the St. Nikolai memorial to the Chilehaus, but this is probably an illusion produced by the circuitous route that we take.  The Chilehaus is an icon of Expressionist architecture, a ten-story trading emporium and office building located in the so-called Kontordistrict, a former slum squeezed between Fleet (canals) that was decimated by cholera in the 1890's.  The tenements here were replaced by massive brick buildings as a kind of urban renewal project.  The Chilehaus was commissioned by a Hamburg merchant, Henry Sloman, whose wealth was based on the export of salt-peter from islands buried in guano off the coast of Chili.  No one knows what the building cost – it was erected between 1922 and 1924, at the height of the inflation in Germany after World War One and, so, expenses reached astronomical dimensions although crews were paid in currency so debased as to be virtually without value.  The site was soggy and floating caissons had to be embedded under the hulking mass of the huge brick structure and there are said to be thousands of steel rods driven into the mire to support the building.  (Pumps in the basement labor around the clock to push water away from the Chilehaus and enter the nearby canals.)  Furthermore, the shape of the lot on which the building was raised is idiosyncratic, a very narrow slice of land that comes to a rather-Gothic point where two streets join at a severely acute angle.  The building is designed to look like a ship with a pointed prow, but this elevation or perspective seems mostly invisible at street-level – as far as I could determine there is really only vantage from which the Chilehaus appears as massive sailing vessel, a brick ship of imponderable mass and incalculable weight, somehow stranded at the intersection of two streets.  From that perspective, the tower’s knife-edge facade, constructed of overhanging brick courses, is, indeed, dramatic, and, the structure even seems curiously airy and light as it soars upward to its pointed beak-like roof.  (I think the building represents a sea-going bird, an albatross, perhaps, or gull, the kind of creatures that obligingly produced the guano on which the structure figuratively rests.)

Fritz Hoeger designed the Chilehaus.  He wasn’t academically qualified as an architect and, indeed, began in the trades as a carpenter when he flunked out of High School at 14.  But he was one of Germany’s leading builders and the Chilehaus is his masterpiece.  The building, like its fellows in this quarter, is made from dark “clinker-brick” with chevron patterns over its entrances, elaborate masonry decorations surrounding the doors.  A medieval-style tunnel opens into an austere courtyard where some small cafes offer lunch to the office workers between topiary bushes in big pots.  Although on first impression, the tower is featureless, just a huge rampart of bricks, on closer inspection, you can see all sorts of unusual details – the walls are studded with lighter colored bricks that create a syncopated effect and there are caprices in concrete under the eaves: bears and a little water-bearer and geese.  At the prow of the brick sailing ship, an enormous stone condor, symbolizing Chile and the Andes, built with a torso like a pot-bellied stove stands sentinel over the entrance.  

Nothing stops us from going inside and, so, Angelica and I enter one of the mausoleum-like vaults leading to the somewhat dank corridors in the tower. The interior is richly polychrome with glazed purple and blue tile squeezed out between courses of porcelain-green brick.  There’s a bench along the wall on a stair landing and we sit for awhile in the shadows.  Modern elevators have replaced the old paternoster lifts, running in continuous loop from the basement to the penthouse level.  The scary paternoster lifts (you accessed them by timing your jump into the moving compartment) were removed in 1991 and the present elevators installed at that time.  

50.  Another version of the Alexanderschlacht

We have tickets for Miniatur Wunderland timed for 2:45 pm, but we reach the attraction early.  Needless to say, Germans take their timed tickets seriously and, so, after climbing four floors to reach the entrance in one of the Speicherstadt warehouses, we’re told to come back later.  Long lines have gathered for entrance into the nearby Hamburg Dungeon, a wax museum full of tableaux featuring locally-themed atrocities.  I avoid these kinds of places but the people waiting to be admitted to the Chamber of Horrors are enthusiastic, chattering happily as they queue up to see witches tortured and burned at the stake, the great fire of 1842 with mannequins melting in pretend flames, the pirate Klaus Stoertebecker beheaded for his crimes, the cholera epidemic that ravaged the Kontordistrict in 1892, various shuffling sadists and murderers in bloody aprons, staggering through dark alleys and, of course, an assortment of medieval punishments depicted in gory detail.  Perhaps, in a few generations, the Dungeon will feature a display depicting bombs falling from the sky in the great aerial attack of July 24, 1943 – imagine the possibilities of that exhibit complete with fragmentary corpses and flaring searchlights above gouts of red flame, wax figures half-buried in clinker-brick, and a soundtrack throbbing with plane engines and huge concussions.  The more sedate Museum of Tariffs and Import Taxation is also nearby, but, the place doesn’t sound too appealing and, so, Angelica and I opt to wait to cross one of the innumerable bridges and stroll for a while in the narrow, shadowy streets of the Kontordistrict.  The tide is low and the canals, now, display sleek aprons of dark mud along the edges of the water, just narrow threads of black ooze at the center of the Fleets.  The mud afflicts me: I’m starting to feel sick with my muscles aching, a burning sensation across the fronts of my upper-thighs, my head congested with a cough tickling in the back of throat.

Miniatur Wunderland is basically a vastly extended model railway set-up.  Little trains wind through detailed landscapes with cities and harbors and mock-ups of Alpine resorts.  The train track is about ten miles in length, apparently, all interconnected although this isn’t evident to the visitor wandering between the crowded exhibits.  Model trains run on three levels in the building and the environment is starkly utilitarian, even, bleak – walls are bare except for exhibit cases showing installations that, apparently, are in process or didn’t make the grade for the displays sutured together by the continuous loop of tracks.  Unlike the cork models depicting Roman monuments, everything preserves the same scale and there are millions (I suppose) of little figurines representing people gathered together in streets or at rock concerts or watching soccer games or awaiting the Pope’s appearance at St.Peter’s or marching in vast parades along city streets.  The little figures, each of which seems to be carefully detailed and, somehow, different from one another (this can’t be literally true) establish the proportion for the exhibits.  As with the cork models at the Johannesburg or tourist attractions like the House on the Rock or the Wall Drug, the enormous display seems evidence of some kind of madness, obsession, even, delirium.  It’s overwhelming and, ultimately, futile.  You peer down onto the teeming landscapes, densely populated by the little figures who are fighting, arresting one another (there are miniature police forces), picking each others pockets or making love, and you wonder what could inspire or impel someone to create a thing like this.  Of course, the exhibits have now run-away from their original inspirations and seem to be proliferating of their own accord – it’s as if the armies of little figures are somehow giving birth to new generations but without the elderly dying-off and, so, the population just keeps increasing, sometimes with catastrophic effects. At an airport, planes accelerate, lift off, and vanish into a swirling cloud bank but one has crashed on a side-runway and fire trucks race to its rescue.  Some of the city-scapes are set on timers – the sun rises and sets over the Hamburg Landungsbruecke and Angelica and I survey the landscape of steps leading up to the miniature Hotel Hafen to see if we are, perhaps, shown there, Angelica in the lead as I hobble up the steps with legs and arms aching from sickness while taxi-cabs and trams and subways on elevated rails whirl about the city streets.  In the darkness, the tiny city glows and its church steeples are lit like Christmas trees except for the somber St. Nikolai Kirche that rises in a black silhouette above the dark canals and little tourist-boats wiggling through the narrow Fleet.  If you look carefully, all sorts of tiny melodramas are underway: husbands and wives quarrel, little sedans crash, a helicopter rescues stranded rock-climbers on an Alpine peak.  Funicular rails lift skiers up to the top of their ski-runs and hang-gliders and base-jumpers lunge off cliffs and beneath a small village, there’s a show-cave complete with a glittering stream and tiny spelunkers pushing themselves through key-hole size openings while tourists gawk at the stalactites and stalagmites from paved trails.  In a green and pleasant landscape, several police cars are gathered among sadly wilting sunflowers – a corpse lies naked and face-down, drowned in a creek and ambulance medics are gingerly approaching the dead body while the cops wave away gawkers who have stumbled upon the grisly scene.  A balloon drifts through the sky and hikers explore a gorge in the mountains and in an Old West town somewhere near the gaudy towers and follies of Las Vegas, some pioneers are marching in a procession with mules, a few prospectors, Indians draped in blankets and some pilgrims in covered wagons.  

A control room featuring banks of monitors is manned by young men who studiously scan the screens and make adjustments with joy-sticks and trigger-like controls.  The place reminds me of Albrecht Altdorfer’s swarming canvas of the Alexanderschlacht, the Battle of Issus seen from the perspective of God almighty.  A tumult of voices arises over the exhibits and I can’t tell if it’s the little people chattering and whooping at one another or the tourists gobbling like turkeys and the whole thing is horrible, dizzying, an abyss – perhaps, somewhere in a secret gallery overhead there is another display showing the Miniatur Wunderland itself with thousands of tiny figures grouped around flickering displays while trains the size of ants dart here and there in this artificial world.   

51.  A Skyscraper goes missing

Angelica falls outside Miniatur Wunderland and badly bruises her knee and calf.  Her legs are already discolored with wounds from when she slipped on the concrete steps in the Pompejanum in Aschaffenburg and, now, she has tears in her eyes and is hobbling along a black canal moaning a little to herself, a pathetic spectacle, to be sure, and I’m not well either, limping a little myself as we walk to the end of the promontory lined with warehouses.  (We’ve shrunk now, not much larger than the tiny figures in the Wunderland marching along like ants in a column.)  Then, we take another turn and walk toward where I imagine the sea intersects with the Elbe, except that place is fifty miles away and the river here is a series of flat lagoons nested among the pier-like extensions of land, as if the water had become a runway or series of runways in a liquid airport set down next to the city.  The warehouses slip behind us and we’re on a prairie where everything has been hacked down and, where I expect to see the 340 foot tall ElbPhilarmonie with its glass walls and roof with rippling tents of mirror, there’s nothing at all, just desolate intersections and featureless new buildings that don’t yet seem to have any tenants, a vast flat expanse of vacant lots that droop down to the glaze and glare of yet another estuary of river, here, it seems one river after another stacked up along the flat plain and all images of one another and, even, the profile of the city has somehow slipped out of sight, hidden behind a wall of bland office buildings.  Where has the concert hall and hotel with its towering viewing platforms gone?  The structure is visible from everywhere in the city except this empty terrace with low walls marked with graffiti and big ponds of water among austere slabs of concrete.  How is this possible?  We find a subway, brand new and completely empty, walls and ceiling all lined with antiseptic tiles as if in a hospital.  The train arrives, whisks us under one of the many prongs of the river and, then, it’s all familiar again, the harbor with the shipping containers stacked on them, the tour-boats, and, of course, the ElbPhilarmonie exactly where it is supposed to be on the most prominent spit of land in the middle of the river.

The squatter encampment on the steps leading up to the Hotel is starting to annoy me.  Why can’t the Germans clean up this mess?  This afternoon, the steps seem longer and more steep and I am breathing heavily when I reach the landing where the sleeping bag is now dangling from a thornbush and the ripped blankets knotted together and the splatter of cups and plastic bottles and food wrappers beneath the pipe railing on the stairs.  I feel very ill, dizzy and my sinuses seem inflamed.  

52.  An Excuse not Accepted

It seems pretty obvious that things are deteriorating and that it may be imprudent, not to say physically impossible, to meet with Juergen Seemann, Schatzmeister of the Taiwan Bambusrunde, on Thursday morning.  I phone the number shown on the business card and Herr Seemann answers.  I explain that I’m sick, that it is probably a cold, or, maybe, allergies, and that I think it would be imprudent for me to meet with him tomorrow morning.  “Oh no,” he says.  “I am coming into the City in any event and you must meet me.” I repeat that I am ill.  “No, no, no,” he replies.  “You must meet me.  I will show you places that no tourist ever sees.”

Herr Seemann is adamant and, so, I agree that I will meet him.  He tells us to wait for him in front of the Stadt Rathaus at 2:15 pm.  

I’m feverish, alternately hot and cold, and, sometimes, the chill air blowing up from the harbor and through the open windows is a lancet, cutting deep with a sort of electric shock.  Acrostics occur to me, but the first lines of the sonnets or limericks are comprised of objects: stacks of things, advertising slogans, architectural details resolving into short phrases that, at first, appear so solid that you could step on them, use them as a flight of stairs although to what aim, I don’t know.  My thoughts present me with slowly materializing ideas, concepts that blur the distinctions between words and physical objects and that gesture to me through a spectral haze of delirium: Vaults, Ionic columns, Dentilated Cornice.  The assembled things become words become a single concept and, then, begin to dissolve.  I’m not asleep but not awake either and my joints all ache and, beyond the window, the harbor hums and throbs like a great dynamo.  Ornate Column, Interior Design Variations.  The window is dark.  Who knows the hour?  Then: Call Out Vile Individual Duress – a slogan that becomes a figure that stands on the steps waving to me: Impf denial.  Time passes.  I get up to use the toilet: Calamity Of Virulent Infectious Disease.  Who is at fault?  The old man arrives in a Mercedes Benz.  He hops on goat-hooves through a vaulted cellar.  He’s carrying a bone-saw and has an apron smeared with gore.  Chinese Origin Vehemently In Dispute.  The acrostics multiply.  Then, the window brightens a little.  The harbor below tinkles and bells chime in mysterious sequences of sounds and, from a distance, the miniature work of the shipping container works begins and the tugs crawl down the river and the tour-boats begin once more their endless rounds.

A new day has begun.

53.  Pink fish salad

I feel miserable, but the sun is shining, at least, early in the morning.  As the day progresses, clouds sweep over the city and, usually, by mid-morning the drizzle has begun.  Angelica goes down to the breakfast buffet to bring me a plate of food, some cold cuts and a slice of liverwurst with a couple flaky, sweet pastries.  (The Hotel Hafen has an enormous, and expensive, breakfast buffet served in the bar with the mural of the flailing octopus: there are all sorts of fish balls and sinister fish salads, scrambled eggs, also, and Spiegeleier (= mirror eggs, although apparently the name for “fried eggs sunny side up”), various sausages, pickles, toast and fruit jams, compotes, oranges, apples, lemons, melon balls, baked beans and different sorts of fish-soups, oatmeal and waffles and pancakes, every imaginable kind of pastry, and so on.  Much of these viands, attractively posed on platters, seem appealing but some of this stuff, for instance, the pink salad of mayonnaise and radish with pickled, minced fish is too much for my taste-buds, the sort of thing that will leave a flavor in your mouth for half the day or half the week.)  After eating, I take a shower.  I’ve come thousands of miles to see Hamburg and there’s no point sitting around ill in a hotel room.  So we walk down the steps, past the squatter’s increasingly trampled bivouac, and, then, to the subway.  

I’m a little foggy this morning and, so, at first we take the wrong train.  But it’s easy enough to reverse our error and return to downtown.  We walk around the streets near the Rathaus, enter a few churches, that are, more or less, all the same, and, then, walk down to Deichstrasse, a couple of narrow alleys where row-houses line a canal.  This is where the Great Fire of 1842 began at 24 Deichstrasse a little before one in the morning on May 5, flames first glimpsed in Eduard Cohen’s cigar factory.  In each church tower (Tuerme) fire watchmen were posted and they immediately sounded the alarm.  The dense array of taverns and tenements and warehouses around the Deichstrasse were wooden or half-timbered with tall, pointed gables and the flames easily leaped through common walls from building to building.  When structures collapsed, they fell forward across the streets and set adjacent neighborhoods on fire.  It was low tide and the leather hoses that the firefighters used to pump water from the Fleet swiftly exhausted the available resources in the canals.  Water pressure was insufficient to spray upper levels of the burning buildings and, in any event, the leather hoses were too heavy and rigid to be dragged up ladders.  The fire burned for three days, notwithstanding efforts by the fire fighters to create fire-breaks by dynamiting buildings in the path of the advancing blaze.  Much of the city, including the town’s oldest church, the Nikolai Kirche with its 350 foot steeple, succumbed to the flames. (It would be destroyed a second time a century later in the man-made firestorm of July 1943.)   Efforts to combat the blaze stalled when looting erupted in the city streets and many militia-men had to turn from fire-fighting to crowd-control.  In the end, 51 people died, including 22 fire-fighters.  The first news photograph in the world was taken from atop the Hamburg Stock Exchange – the picture shows an expanse of pier covered in ruins, rows of battered-looking walls clogged with wreckage; the flattening of the city opens up views onto the harbor where rows of sepulchral black ships are moored.  The man who took the picture, Hermann Blow owned a Daguerrotype-studio in town and the photograph was widely distributed and engraved for publication in America, England, and the rest of Europe.  (Blow was sickened by the fumes from chemicals used to create his pictures and died in 1850.)

On the morning of our visit, some walking tours are gathered along the faux-antique facades lining Deichstrasse.  A plaque marks the place where the blaze started and, next door, there is Dante’s Gelato where people are patiently waiting in line for a “hell of a good” ice-cream.  The path into the Inferno is narrow but populous.  The day before we couldn’t find the Chile House.  Now, it seems to loom over us at every intersection.  Around two in the afternoon, we hike back up to the City Square and wait in front of the Rathaus for the appearance of Juergen Seemann.  I’ve put a half-dozen ibuprofen in my shirt pocket and have eaten some Dayquil to fortify me for the afternoon’s tour.

54.  Three places never visited by Tourists

Now comes the part of my report, Dear Reader, that involves warm, human interaction.  If you prefer descriptions of bombing and architecture and paintings, then, perhaps, you should skip the next couple pages. “Man delights in man” – so it is written in the Icelandic Edda.  But there are limits on this delight and if you are irritated (or, even, appalled) by accounts of warm, human interaction, then, I encourage you to avoid this part of my narrative and move along to my account of the intricately detailed model ships in the International Maritime Museum or the immensely protracted and loft escalators in the ElbPhilharmonie Building.  

At the appointed time, Herr Seemann approaches, an older gentleman that I recalled, lugging with him a big shopping bag filled with wrapped parcels. (It turns out he’s carrying two pictures to be framed.) He walks with a limp and there’s a crook to his neck.  Herr Seemann takes us into the Rathaus where he says that we must understand the history of his city and that Angelica should take notes as to his remarks.  (He is only half kidding.)  Herr Seemann tells us that he has plenty of time because he lost his wife a few months ago and, now, at age 82, is on his own.  He starts his account of Hamburg with the Hanseatic League and supplies names, dates, and events in the City’s history.  Then, he tells us that he will show us parts of Hamburg that are outside of the areas that tourists visit, the secrets of the City, so to speak.  “Can you walk?” he asks me.  It would seem that the question should be posed reciprocally – after all, he is 82: can he walk?

We cross the town square.  The slight drizzle has abated and a splash of sun enlivens the Alstersee.  The first stop is St. Jacobi, a nearby church that Angelica and I have not visited.  The place is quiet inside and Herr Seemann sits on a pew.  He tells us that he used to come to this place with his wife to listen to chamber orchestra concerts and organ recitals.  The organ is magnificent, a huge pewter and brass colossus in the choir loft flanked by elegant Baroque angels blowing narrow floral-looking trumpets.  The trumpets are enormously extended like the sensate trunks of elephants.  

Limping along the street, Herr Seemann, in offhand comments, provides a sort of autobiography.  He was born in 1940 in Hamburg in a home near the Aussenalstersee, a lake that is twin to the body of water that probes into downtown near the City Hall and the Jungfernsee.  He wasn’t a very good student and didn’t achieve grades sufficient to allow him to attend college.  Instead, he was routed into a career in the shipping trades, of course, integral to Hamburg during the Wirtschaftswunder.  By law, Herr Seemann says that German companies are (or were) required to train their young employees in all aspects of the business so that workers could find a niche in the trade and enjoy a lifelong career.  Herr Seemann became a shipping agent.  Apparently, a successful promoter, Herr Seemann traveled around the world and was charged with entertaining the customers of his firm, something that he accomplished at lavish feasts.  He had an unlimited expense account and was, apparently, popular at the best restaurants in town.  Herr Seemann’s “Bamboo Round Table” is an organization that advocates for the rights of an independent Taiwan, a place that he sometimes calls “Formosa”.  He is a deacon at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Lutheran Church in the suburban neighborhood in Hamburg where he resides.  It is his habit to come weekly by U-Bahn into the inner city, his old haunts, as it were: his optometrist and physicians occupy offices near the Stadt Rathaus and he buys his clothing at downtown stores and has his hair cut by the same barber who used to keep Chancellor Helmut Schmidt well-groomed.  He now does his own laundry and, with an old crony, sorts his socks, making sure that they are properly organized by color and size.  Herr Seemann’s buddy has suggested that, henceforth, he buy only black socks in a single size and style.  It seems unlikely that he will use a bone-saw to amputate our limbs in his underground dungeon.  No doubt, he hasn’t visited that cellar in some time because he admits he has trouble climbing stairs.  The gruesome scenes in his torture chambers are unfrequented and his victims are all reduced to bone and leathery petrified skin.  

After the Church, he escorts us a half-dozen blocks to the Chile Haus.  We round the block and Herr Seemann finds the vantage that best displays the prow of the brick ship to our view.  “Do you see?” he asks.  “It looks like a sailing vessel.”  

“I see the resemblance,” I reply.  Angelica smirks.  Herr Seemann asks her if she sees how the skyscraper looks like a ship.  “Yes,” she responds, although a bit reluctantly.  Our guide points out the stone condor atop the front entrance.  Some of the concrete figures in the facade are trapped behind wire net.  Apparently, like other structures with ornate figures decorating their walls, these sculptures are prone to shed limbs and noses and their weapons if they are armed, bombarding pedestrians on the sidewalk.

“What is it like inside?” I ask.  “I’ll show you,” Herr Seemann tells us and we walk into the courtyard behind the huge angular clinker-brick walls.

“See!” Herr Seemann says.  “No tourists ever come here.”

“I wonder what the building is like inside,” I say.

“I don’t know,” our host says.  “I’ve never been inside.”

We walk a few blocks back toward the Rathaus.  A garden appears ahead of us with wind-tossed heaps of flowers and some curious broken arches, a bit like figures stooping between the trees and blooming shrubbery.  We come to some larger arches and, rounding them, I see the sketch by Kokoschka, twice life-size on the pale chalky wall enclosed by broken vaults: it’s the Nikolai Mahnmal, scorched and despairing, rising over a cluster of big signs decrying wars in Ukraine and Myanmar.  

“Kokoschka,” Herr Seemann says.  “There’s a mural made from glass bits in another church based on this design.”

We walk up to the kiosk selling tickets for the lift to the viewing platform on the burnt steeple.  Herr Seemann is tired and sits on a bench.  He tells me that when he was a young man, he attended concerts at the Amerika Haus, jazz mostly and lectures on American history and democracy.  “It was wonderful,” Herr Seemann says.  He tells me that next month the Bamboo-Roundtable is hosting a lecture at a Chinese restaurant downtown that inclines toward Taiwan as opposed to mainland China.  The lecture he says is called Quo Vadis Taiwan. 

Then, after he has rested a little, Herr Seemann leads us to Deichstrasse, deserted at this time of day.  He points at a bank with ATM’s in its entryway.  This place was once a restaurant that featured the finest oysters in Hamburg.  Herr Seemann came here often when entertaining customers.  “I had an unlimited expense account,” he says proudly.

55.   A gory apron

At Deichstrasse, we sit outdoors at a cafe and Herr Seemann buys me a beer.  (Angelica has soda pop.)  He points to each (new) old facade in the row of restaurants and pubs lining the sidewalk.  The story is the same for each place: once an elegant and very expensive restaurant was located in that building, but it has long since been replaced by the businesses now operating, enterprises that he doesn’t know, would not patronize, and of which he seems to harbor some general feelings of disapprobation.  The old restaurants were better, more high-class, and the food more expertly prepared.  These were the venues where he entertained customers when he was a prince in the City.  The street is now deserted, slipping down to the muddy Fleet at the end of the lane.  

An old waiter is sitting on an iron bench and smoking a cigarette. German waiters always have a worried expression on their face and this man looks as if some kind of awful calamity is about to befall him.  Herr Seemann exchanges some words with the waiter who is mopping his brow with a dishwasher’s towel.  The waiter rises and goes into the café, returning a few minutes later with a middle-aged woman with dark hair and sharp, rough features.  I notice that she’s wearing a butcher’s apron blotched and streaked with blood. 

Herr Seemann is delighted.  “I know her,” he tells me happily.  “She recalls me from the days when I brought customers here.”

The woman seems pleased to see Herr Seemann as well and she sits down wearily next to him at the sidewalk table.  Of course, she also lights a cigarette.  Herr Seemann chats with her and I can faintly discern that they are talking about the death of his wife.  The conversation is nonchalant.  The woman asks if it was sudden and Herr Seemann say that yes, it was very sudden, unexpected.  The woman says something to the effect that, perhaps, that was for the best.  

It’s the mid-afternoon lull and the woman, it seems, has been preparing for the dinner rush.  She finishes her cigarette, nods to Herr Seemann and goes back into the café.  

“She recalls me very vividly,” Herr Seemann says.

56.  Bruno Ganz

It’s now time to walk across the street and transact business with respect to the pictures that Herr Seemann has brought with him to be framed.  He advises me that the framing salon is the very best in Hamburg and that he has been its patron for forty years.  

“You must come with me,” he tells me and leads the way across the faux-cobblestone street to the picture-framing place.  We enter the business and a man emerges to greet us.  Herr Seemann seems to know the man although I have the impression that the recognition isn’t mutual.  My guide introduces me as an American from Minnesota and the craftsman nods at me a bit suspiciously.

Herr Seemann has two pictures: one of them shows his wife’s grandparents in peasant costume, apparently a betrothal photograph.  The man and woman in the picture have small heads with pinched features and the festive garments that they are wearing seem uncomfortable and ill-fitting.  The mahogany picture frame has developed a crack and has to be re-framed.  The framer measures the picture with a little metal ruler.  The second picture is about the size of a post-card.  It shows a flowering tree, cut from bright paper, a Scherenschnitte.

“It is by an artist friend of my wife,” the old man says.

The picture-framer lights a cigarette himself and scrutinizes the image.  He measures it and makes some comments that I can’t decipher and, then, a price is agreed-upon.  The framer writes a receipt and hands it to Herr Seemann.

Later, we are sitting at the café table.  Angelica has gone inside to use the restroom.

“Why did you want to come to Hamburg?” Herr Seemann ask me.

The actual reason has to do with Angelica’s interest in seeing the hometown haunts of Chris Harms of the LOTL.  But I know this reason would confuse Herr Seemann and so I say: “Many years ago, when I was in college, I saw a movie by Wim Wenders called The American Friend.  It was set in Hamburg.  Here is the extraordinary thing: the hero in the movie was a picture-framer, just like the guy we just saw.  A craftsman.  The role was played by Bruno Ganz.”

I have the impression that Herr Seemann hasn’t spent much time in cinemas.  He looks puzzled, even sad.

57.  You were little in Hamburg and you shall be old there as well.

We walk back to the Rathaus.  It’s about five o’clock and the streets around the Jungfernsteg are thronged.  Herr Seemann says that we will take a bus to view a beautiful and peaceful lake.  We put on our masks.  Public transportation in Germany remains under a mask mandate and this is rigorously enforced.

A long red tram rattles along the street and stops where we are waiting.  We climb aboard.

Herr Seemann says that he hasn’t been in the States very much, only six or seven times.  He was in New York City where he has relatives and Los Angeles where his sister lives.  Herr Seemann visited Atlanta once with a delegation from his congregation at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Evangelical Church.  The meeting was unsatisfactory.  The Black Baptists at the MLK Foundation weren’t particularly welcoming and they seemed slightly offended that a Lutheran church in Hamburg had been named after the Civil Rights hero without their consent.  “I had the impression they wanted something from us,” Herr Seemann says.  Once, he visited San Francisco.  On another occasion, he was in Sparta, North Carolina.  With his wife, he traveled by train from Denver to San Francisco, a memorable excursion.  

“I talk every week with my sister in LA,” Herr Seemann says.  “I am encouraging her to leave LA and come back to Hamburg.  I tell her: ‘You were a little girl in Hamburg and you should come back to be an old woman here as well.’ She’s considering it.”

The tram becomes very crowded and people are standing in the aisles.  Herr Seemann doesn’t approve of the 9 Euro train fare.  “You see,” he says, “everyone is riding.  Whole families.  They should walk.  It’s very crowded.”  I don’t remark upon the fact that its rush hour and it looks like most people are simply returning home from work.

A somewhat frumpy lady wearing a scarf over her grey hair comes to the front of the tram and leans over to talk to the driver.  Herr Seemann listens to the conversation.  “It seems,” he says, “that there is a young man near where she is seated who is not wearing his mask.”

“She’s squealing on him.”

“It is her duty,” Herr Seemann says.  The tram driver brakes the bus, slowing to shout commands at the kid.  The kid, who I can’t see behind us, shouts something back.  But, as the tram slows, he jumps out onto the street and angrily struts away.     

58.  Bde Maka Ska

We get off the tram in a quiet, green neighborhood where there are big white houses with red tile roofs.  At intersections, there are elegant-looking restaurants.  Clearly, this is a very nice part of town, perhaps 25 blocks from the Jungfernsteg.  

Herr Seemann says that this was where he lived as a child, attended primary school, and met his wife.  We amble along the sidewalk under the leafy trees shimmering a little in the windy late afternoon.  Some people are walking dogs.  Expensive cars line the curbs.  

Herr Seemann says that, in this neighborhood, you could measure a family’s wealth by the street on which they lived.  The closer the home to the lake, the more prosperous the family.  This principle still seems to apply although I don’t see anything that looks even remotely shabby in this part of town.  

When he was a boy, he walked with his friends 100 meters ahead of the girls, one of whom he would marry.  “They kept far behind us,” Herr Seemann says, “so as not to be offended by the bad language that we used.”  We pass the place where his primary school was once located.  There’s no trace of the school today.  He shows us the vacant lot where his family’s house was located.  It’s now a small lawn forming a perimeter around the parking lot for a dry-cleaning place.  

After walking several blocks, we come to a big lake, the Aussenalstersee.  Some sailboats are tacking against the freshening wind and small white-caps decorate the water.  Across the lake, we can see more elegant manor-houses, a small church and a little dome-shaped kiosk, possibly a boat house.  On our side of the water, there’s a concrete fishing pier extending out into the lake lined by small skiffs.  A flag shows the direction of the wind and, sometimes, the clouds part a little to pour sunlight onto the lake.  

“It’s beautiful,” I say.  “It reminds me of a big lake in Minneapolis.  It’s called Lake Calhoun.”

I can’t recall the new Indian name for the lake; I think it means “White Earth Lake”.

Herr Seemann is lost in thought and doesn’t seem to be paying any attention.  He points to a steeple far away, on the other side of lake.  “That’s my church,” he says.  

“I skated here often with my sister,” Herr Seemann says.  “In those days, there was much snow and winters were cold.  Now, the lakes never freeze and it never snows.  The climate has changed.”

I tell Herr Seemann that I used to skate on Lake Como is St.Paul.  

Herr Seemann tells us that this neighborhood was not bombed.  “Here is where the Nazi officers and generals all lived,” he says.  “But the strategy was to bomb the working class neighborhoods at the harbor.  The plan was to cause the people to rebel. But it didn’t work.  It just caused hatred.”

He sighs.  A sailboat dances on the water.

On the way back to the main street and the bus-line, Herr Seemann points out two landmarks.  The first is a big classically built structure with a lofty red sandstone facade and an ornate entrance framed by carved pilasters.  “This was the Ethnographic Museum of Volkerkunde,” he says.  “I was a tour-guide there for many years.  For my job, I visited many places in the South Seas and Asia.  But I will not go in the place now.  They’ve turned it into the museum of exploitation and the crimes of colonialism.”

“Political correctness,” I say.

He doesn’t seem to recognize the phrase.

“I will not go in there now,” he repeats.

“There seems to be similar controversy about the Bismarck Denkmal,” I say.

“It’s nonsense,” he says.  “We wouldn’t exist except for Bismarck.”

“The capitol of North Dakota is named after Bismarck,” I say.

He doesn’t seem to understand that comment either.

After a few blocks, we come to the second landmark, a very large Chinese restaurant with a tea-garden and ornamental pavilions and koi ponds.  The restaurant has a huge heavy roof and grinning lion-dogs guard its gated entryway.

“The best Chinese restaurant in town,” Herr Seemann tells me.  “But, unfortunately, very closely associated with the government in Beijing.  When I dine here, I keep my politics to myself.”

The tram takes us to a S-Bahn station.  Herr Seemann would like Angelica and I to ride with him on the train to his stop where he can show us his house.  But it’s now 7:00 pm and getting cold quickly and we agree to part.  Herr Seemann stands on one side of the train tracks and we are on the opposite platform.  It begins to drizzle again.  Our train arrives before his.

59.  Confidence

After an uncomfortable night, we set out again, masked and shuttling along the harbor in the direction of Hamburg’s center.  We are planning to visit the International Maritime Museum, another tourist attraction in the Speicherstadt, and I must admit a certain skepticism – the town is full of model ships (there must be a hundred of them in our hotel alone), and why should I pay to see a couple thousand more of these things.

At an underground station where we transfer from one U-Bahn to another, a blind man marches down the platform, tapping his cane against the concrete in a pattern that sweeps back and forth in front of his feet.  The blind man comes to a halt in an eccentric position on the pier between tracks, an odd location next to an iron girder embedded between platform and ceiling, but, presumably, a location that is somehow propitious as far as he is concerned.  Panting wearily, our train arrives and the blind man efficiently locates the gap between the car and the platform, finds the proper height to step up onto the train and boards.  I’m impressed with his acumen.  He moves more confidently than I do.

We ride two stops and the blind man rises, aiming himself toward the sliding door.  “Do you need assistance?” I ask.  “Oh, no,” the blind man replies: “I know where I am.”  (Of course, I know where I am also, somewhere underneath Hamburg, but I might well need assistance.)  The blind man exits the train and we follow him through the station to the escalator that leads to the surface.  It’s murky outside and rain has made the old cobblestones slippery.  The blind man raises his umbrella and marches along a Fleet to a door marked with a big sign Dialog im Dunkeln (= Dialogue in the Dark).  I suspected that this was his destination.  The place is a tourist attraction in which visitors are ushered into a pitch-black environment in which they interact with blind people and, even, eat a meal with them.  The meal, in particular, results in a comical mess spilled on the table that is revealed to the sighted persons to their dismay after their repast.   

60.  A Media tycoon

We stay in the shade of the warehouses as the rain falls.  It’s a wet way to the International Maritime Museum, not without the sort of missteps and dead ends that the jaunty blind man would eschew.  

The museum represents a private collection, objects assembled by Peter Tamm, a news mogul in Hamburg (formerly the chairman of the Board of the media empire Axel Springer GmbH; this company published a number of illustrated periodicals including Bild, had middle-Right political connections, and it’s offices were attacked, at one point by the Baader-Meinhof gang).  When he was a small boy, an aunt gave him a model ship.  Herr Tamm prized the little ship and, as his fortune grew, began to acquire other miniatures of famous sailing and war ships.  In 2008, Tamm’s collection was installed in the International Maritime Museum, initially a controversial proposition for Hamburg on several grounds: first, the renovation of the old warehouse in which the collection was installed involved government money, possibly 30 million euros; second, Tamm’s centrist right politics made him suspect in Hamburg, a city with largely liberal inclinations; and, third, Tamm’s models of battleships and submarines, as well as naval regalia from the Nazi-zeit caused some critics to accuse him of militarism, a serious charge in pacifist Germany.  (Germany is world capital of “politically correct” ideology.)  In fact, Tamm’s museum is so tastefully appointed and intelligently curated that it overcomes all objections.  And, to my surprise, I found the exhibits remarkably interesting.  Nonetheless, the place bears the imprint of the journalist and media tycoon and, like Miniatur Wunderland, the museum has an obsessive quality, an atmosphere of mania almost that verges on delirium.

Like Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud,” the center of the whole enterprise is strangely nondescript, humble, almost microscopic: the tiny model ship given to Tamm by his Aunt is a chip of metal, about the size of a thumbnail, a detailed miniature of a yacht.  It seems odd that such an object, noteworthy primarily due to its very small size, would engender the kind of monomania obvious in the museum.  The little metal yacht rests in a display case next to the museum entrance, flanked by a picture of the dyspeptic-looking Tamm and a fresh bouquet of flowers in his memory.  The museum’s galleries occupy all ten stories of the warehouse building.  Interior walls have been mostly removed and the structure’s wooden floors polished to fine sheen and structural girders and joists are exposed like modernist sculpture among the exhibits.  Large cast-iron steps lead between floors and the entire place has a spacious, even airy, quality. 

Of course, it’s all too much, an exercise in grandiose excess – there are supposedly 2300 miniature ships on display, most of them resting like intricate, preserved insects in plexi-glass cases.  Each model is carefully labeled – some of them are large and occupy whole rooms, others are small, fist-sized.  The model ships are everywhere – they rest in cases in the corridors leading to the toilets, next to the elevators, beside fire-extinguishers and sprinkler control panels.  Large rooms are devoted to military and nautical uniforms, badges, regalia, and sailor’s hats.  There are thousands of weapons, hooks, harpoons, compasses and steering gear, tillers, rudders, various types of canoe paddles, fifty or sixty different types of sounding lines for determining water depth (together with a mini-essay on Mark Twain and the meaning of his pseudonym with some examples of lead-weighted river-boat sounds).  There are slave shackles from the Middle Passage, medals of valor, official decrees, noteworthy telegrams issuing orders or reporting calamities at sea, 500 or so different spy-glasses, field binoculars, travel posters, and full room mock-ups of elegant tourist cabins and captain’s quarters.  You can see nautical maps by the hundreds and whole galleries full of maritime paintings, of course, a well-established genre with innumerable examples on display.  

The oldest known ship in a bottle is on display next to several hundred other artifacts of this kind.  In another case, there is the world’s oldest preserved message in a bottle, a 101-year-old postcard thrown into the sea by a tourist from Berlin visiting a resort in Denmark.  The post card bears several stamps, as if, perhaps, this type of mail delivery also required postage.  The message on the card is water-stained and illegible.  Although the museum is carefully curated and everything neatly labeled in informative German and English, there’s an element of madness to the collection – if someone in the  center of Australia carved a model canoe out of a ghost-gum tree’s wood, the object has been acquired, catalogued and put in a case with a half-dozen boomerangs used to hunt seals on the beaches of Tasmania.  A carrier pigeon that flew 13,000 km in 47 days is preserved in a nearby case – the pigeon’s odyssey was a newspaper stunt and the message borne by the elegant-looking corpse-bird is not known.  

Walls are covered by beautifully colored and expertly designed tourist posters.  On of them advertises a night-voyage to Bremen from Hamburg: elegantly dressed gentlemen and ladies promenade under the moonlight along the Hamburg Landungsbruecke, the men are skinny and grotesque with handle-bar moustaches and nattily-tilted top hats.  Other posters show lissome native girls in South America, charming attractions that the traveler could access through the Hamburg-Sud line.  Advertisements encourage Germans to emigrate to the United States.    Several rooms are devoted to the HAPAG-Lloyd 20 foot equivalent unit – that is, the original of the storage containers that now are stacked in towering ramparts along the Elbe River.  A forty-foot model shows a container ship of the kind we saw during the harbor cruise and there are acres of wall text explaining the history of storage container shipping.

Quantity is the watchword in this museum: if one artifact is good, a dozen are better, and a hundred objects, of course, provides a master-class in compare and contrast, for instance with respect to tritons or ceremonial swords or anchors.  The excess is oppressive, but the museum is designed with an intuitive pattern of circulation, a path of discovery, as it were, that draws you from one place to another seamlessly.  Apparently, there are thematic principles at work in the displays but much of this stuff is purely anecdotal.  One gallery is devoted to Cape Horniers, that is, seaman who rounded Cape Horn is sailing ships, a route complicated by tempests and forceful prevailing winds – a map shows one vessel that required something like ninety days to navigate around the storm-vexed cape.  The ship’s course is a nightmare of reversals and backtracking and wind-driven detours out into the center of the ocean, all plotted on big chart that reveals the sea around the southern tip of South America to be a perilous and intricate labyrinth.  Cape Horn veterans are listed in a log book and the names (with supporting dates on which the sailors managed the passage) have been crossed-out, apparently one-by-one when the old men died.  A black stroke, probably a bit of dark tape, is neatly applied to the names of each deceased mariner.  Above the display, a stuffed albatross with malicious beady eyes glares down at us.

61.  The Titanic

Of course, war at sea is central to the exhibits.  How could it not be?  There are engravings of pirates rotting in suspended cages, war ships blowing each other apart, a ghostly plaster cast life-mask of Lord Nelson, grappling hooks and cannons.  A model depicts the Cap Arcona, a German ship sent to the bottom by the British on May 3, 1945 only five days before the war in Europe ended. The Cap Arcona was carrying 5000 KZ Haeftlinge (= concentration camp prisoners) after successfully completing three trips evacuating refugees from the Ostgebiete (= Eastern territories or East Prussia).  By the end of the War, everyone was killing everyone indiscriminately and the British, hoping to murder large numbers of German civilians, bombed the ship, a luxury liner that had been converted to service in the war.  Incendiary bombs dropped by Hawker Typhoon Mark I bombers set the ship on fire and it capsized.  The British fighter pilots were under orders to strafe the people struggling in the sea and, so, they flew low over the water firing at the hapless prisoners, slaughtering them by the hundreds.  In the end, everyone on the boat was dead, either incinerated, blown to pieces by machine gun fire, or drowned.  Of course, these events are what we would regard as a particularly egregious war crime, but the Germans are careful to not blame anyone but the Nazis.  Nearby, a case displays the most controversial exhibit in the museum, the ceremonial baton bestowed upon Admiral Karl Doenitz, a knobby-looking blue staff with gold insignia embedded in it.  Doenitz directed the German navy during World War II and, after Hitler committed suicide, led the country for about 20 days before its final capitulation.  Doenitz was tried at Nuremburg and spent ten years in Spandau Prison in Berlin, convicted of the crimes of directing that slave labor be employed in Nazi ship-building and charges that he ordered his marines to shoot unarmed prisoners – a bit like the British order to strafe the victims of the Cap Arcona bombing.  Of course, Doenitz main offense was that he was a charismatic Nazi, in his younger years an archetypal “Blonde Beast” as a submariner, and, indeed, the architect of a very effective U-Boot campaign against allied vessels and shipping.  Doenitz never admitted any guilt and lived to be 89 – he was released from Spandau after ten years in 1956.  He’s buried under a cross in a wooded cemetery in Schleswig-Holstein.  Although uniforms and Nazi military regalia were banned, more than a 100 Iron Cross recipients supposedly attended his funeral.  Admiral Doenitz remains a flash-point in German politics and the country’s complicated relationship with its past and the presence of the imperial baton in the museum triggered protests.  Ironically, there’s no evidence that the artifact on display is even authentic.  The baton was easily counterfeited and several dozen of these things are periodically on the market, generally available with a certificate of authenticity for about $25,000 a piece.  The object in Peter Tamm’s museum rests in a velvet-lined case and there is a photograph showing Admiral Doenitz holding the artifact in his hand.  Whether this proves anything is unclear.

The Cap Arcona exists in three worlds.  On the sea's surface, the boat sheds passengers, falling as flaming debris into the sea.  At the bottom of the sea, the ship is embedded in green mud amidst a debris field of belt buckles and crumbling leather shoes, all that remains of the bodies that rained down on these shadowy, submerged meadows.  And, a few years before it was sunk, exterior shots of the Cap Arcona, then equipped as a luxury cruise vessel, represented the good ship RMS Titanic in the UFA film of that same name released in 1943.  The shots of panic on the sinking Titanic, intended as a critique of English and American Capitalism, were a little too evocative of the fear and desperation experienced by German civilians under aerial bombardment and, so, Josef Goebbels suppressed the film and, indeed, ordered the execution of its director.  The film had no premiere in Germany – the night before it was scheduled to be shown, the RAF destroyed the movie theater where the picture was to be screened.  Although the movie wasn’t shown in Germany, later four extended sequences from the picture were cannibalized for insertion into the British picture A Night to Remember, another film about the loss of the Titanic.  

The Cap Arcona catastrophe is mirrored by another 1945 calamity in East Prussia’s coastal waters.  The Wilhelm Gustloff was a cruise ship designed for the vacations of middle and working class families.  The vessel was a Kraft durch Freude (= strength through joy) vessel – that is, a cruise ship intended to increase the morale of Germans of moderate income exhausted by the war effort.  By 1944, the Wehrmacht’s retreat under Russian attack dislodged enormous numbers of desperate refugees from their homes in the Ostgebiete.  These people made their way, often under fire, to cities on the Baltic in what is now Poland.  The Wilhelm Gustloff was commissioned to participate in Unternehmen Rettung (= Operation Rescue), plying the Baltic waters to ferry displaced East Prussians to Hamburg and other north German ports remote from the chaotic fighting on the Russian front.  On January 30, 1945, a Russian submarine of the S-13 class torpedoed the Wilhelm Gustloff while it was underway transporting about 10,000 refugees to the ports in the West.  The ship went down in the frigid waters and only 1,239 of its passengers survived – this is probably the worst nautical disaster in history.  (The exodus of East Prussians across present-day Poland is the subject of Walter Kempowski’s excellent novel Alles Unsonst (= All in vain) and the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is central to Guenter Grass’ 2002 Krebsgang (= Crabwalk).)  Tamm’s maritime museum preserves an ensemble of finely crafted wicker chairs retrieved from frigid waters off Gotenkaufen (today Gyokia, Poland) where the Gustloff sank.  These were deck chairs and some photographs show chubby Germans in ill-fitting bathing suits lounging on them during the Gustloff’s Kraft durch Freude days.  I don’t feel well and this diet of death by fire, bullet, and drowning is disheartening.  It would be good to rest my weary legs and sit on these shapely, elegant looking deck chairs.  But they are up on a wooden dais, flanked by big blow-up pictures displaying pasty-looking Germans relaxing in the bracing sea air.  I look around for security and there is no one around – who is going to tamper with these sorts of artifacts.  In the next gallery, a torpedo hangs from ceiling joists, sleek and lethal as a shark.  I expect an alarm to sound when I venture up onto the platform but the museum is deathly still.  At a nearby window, rain drops trickle down the glass.  I lower myself into a deck chair and, immediately, the ship rolls underneath me and the rain bores holes in the smoke pouring out of steamer’s smokestacks overhead and a sinister-looking albatross, eyes avid with malice, shrieks at me.  Best to raise myself from the lounging chair, a tricky proposition, and flee from these disturbed seas.  Porpoises lunge from the waves and a sodden corpse floats face-down in the water while sunflowers on the banks of the water droop their heads in dismay.

Aren’t we just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

62.  The Last Level is Missing

Exhibits at the Maritime Museum are supposed occupy ten full stories (or decks) in the warehouse building.  But, when I reach the ninth deck, there seems to be nothing overhead.  The last of the cast-iron stairs rises to this final floor and, then, the ceiling presses down hard and decisively over us and we have come to the top and ultimate display. 

Three small galleries, richly appointed with dark walls and velvety carpet, contain Peter Tamm’s treasures.  These are miniature ships, most of them about the size of a loaf of bread, fashioned from mother-of-pearl, pink coral, amber, silver and gold.  The museum also houses about a dozen so-called Knochenschiffe (= bone-ships).  These are remarkably detailed miniature vessels that have been carved from animal bones, mostly I think, retrieved from stew-mutton and polished to the fine sheen of ivory.  The bone-ships were made between 1792 and 1815 in British prisoner-of-war camps detaining captured French soldiers.  During the Napoleonic Wars, more than 122,000 French prisoners were held in awful conditions at port cities in England.  These prisoners were kept on “hulks,” that is, decaying sea-going vessels too moribund to venture onto the high seas.  As the population of captives increased, the prisoners were transferred into camps on land at places like Dartmoor and along the Scottish coast.  These prisoners were underfed, scurvy-ridden, and, some of them supplemented their food allotments, by trading elaborate Knochenschiffen carved from stew bones for increased rations.  Authentic bone-ships are very rare.  However, of course, Herr Tamm purchased several of them, including a large four-foot tall “warship-of-the-line,” probably the largest artifact of this kind. Apparently, some British sea-captains commissioned bone-ship models of their vessels.  These relics of the miseries of the Napoleonic Wars are highlights of Peter Tamm’s huge collection.  

Beyond, and above this, we can not go.  The harbor is now bright and the little tourboats coursing through the waters trail bright, glistening white wakes.

63.  Bad Architects

Herzog & de Meuron is a prestige architectural firm.  Like many famous architectural enterprises, they specialize in ruining previously existing buildings.  The Swiss architects designed the ElbPhilharmonie complex in Hamburg, heaping up the glass tower with its wavy top on a nondescript modern mastaba of brick warehouse, the so-called Kaiserspeicher.  (The building stands on the tip of a promontory between the Elbe’s main channel and the grid of canals enervating the Warehouse City – a steeple-turreted Bismarck-era warehouse stood here before World War Two, an elaborate and opulent-looking structure the emulated the Renaissance-styling at the City Rathaus.  The war crushed this building into irreparable ruin and it was replaced by the mortuary slab of the windowless brick Speicher erected over the rubble in 1962.  The music hall, a luxury hotel and some very upscale condominiums were stacked on top of the plinth of the 1962 warehouse by the Herzog & de Meuron team.)

Because of its prominent location and iconic glass roof, the ElbPhilarmonie is a must-see tourist destination.  A helpful multi-lingual young man admits visitors to the structure one by one on a free ticket basis – someone hands you a ticket that you surrender ten paces later at a glass kiosk next to the entrance escalator.  This escalator, undulating upward in two stages, is famous – it’s the longest and tallest escalator in the world, rising to a height of 82 meters above the Kaiserspeicher pier.  The escalator’s slope is surprisingly gradual and there is a landing in the middle of the huge yellow-lit fistula boring through the side of the tower and, so, the ascent isn’t daunting at all.  Somehow, the fools at Herzog & de Meuron have managed to take the fun and fear-factor out of the climb to the heights.  

But, in fact, it’s not the heights to which one ascends.  Rather, the escalator ends in a spacious, unimpressive-looking hotel lobby that cuts through the center of the erection – remarkably enough all of the concert halls are overhead.  Again, Herzog & de Meuron have demonstrated their skill in configuring very ingeniously fragmented space and stripping the drama from the building.  Once, you learn that all the “action,” as it were, is upstairs, the broad vistas and open design of the central lobby takes on a somewhat pinched aspect: we’re squeezed between the chilly mausoleum of the pre-existing warehouse and the airy heights.  An observation deck runs around the perimeter of the building affording superb views of the working harbor and the city with its five church steeples and innumerable canals.  However, the effect is underwhelming because the bulk of the glass tower is above, stacked overhead so that the viewer never has the sense of having attained any real height at all -- notwithstanding the dizzying abyss surrounding the structure.  There’s not much to do in the building because the famous concert halls are above, beyond locked doors atop grandiose white cascade of steps – it seems that great music halls need fancifully huge stairways to convey glittering audiences to and from the concert venues: this is foremost a place to see and be seen.  Apparently, the Westin Hamburg Hotel occupies one side of the glass tower.  The concert halls, a recital space and main hall with terraces of seats surrounding a central stage, are in the center of the building.  Hamburg’s super-wealthy own condominiums with the best views – these are apartments at the point of the structure where the Kaiserspeicher divides the waters.  

Herzog & de Meuron wrecked the Walker Art Center in 2005.  The firm fragmented a coherent interior space and created a jigsaw of galleries that don’t intersect.  (The first couple times I visited the place immediately after it was complete, I missed several exhibitions because I couldn’t find them.)  The WAC, confusingly, has two entrances – one from a gloomy underground parking lot and the second at Groveland Place facing the downtown basilica.  Since everyone, more or less arrives by car, people bypass the main entrance that opens onto the museum’s wonderful sculpture garden.  The design is so perverse that the primary bookstore in the Center is cut off from the main exhibition spaces and located in a dead end part of the building – since COVID that whole part of the structure has been simply placed off-limits: this means that about a quarter of the space in the museum is essentially useless.  One would think that Swiss-based architects would have some sense that height equals drama – but the lofty elements of the WAC are squandered: apparently the best views of the environs are from offices in tower accessible only to museum officials and staff.  Probably based on anxiety that the Art Museum would be invidiously compared to some rather ornate Victorian churches across the street (they are also ugly but in their own special way), Herzog & de Meuron fogged most of the plate glass windows that would provide a perspective on those buildings.  Although the windows are large, they are obscured except for a ribbon along the base of the sloping hallway.  In Minnesota, this means that for five months of the year, people walking down the hallway can see only grey and filthy heaps of snow and ice-chunks plowed up from the avenue, some grimy sidewalk, dog shit, and an endless procession of cars fogged with winter-salt roaring by – the churches are mostly invisible.  This is not so much of a problem now that the book store and information desks in that abandoned wing of the museum have been sealed-off.  There’s usually never anyone in that hallway and, so, another important aspect of the structure, the planned ceremonial entrance to the galleries, is now completely non-functional.

Herzog & de Meuron famously contracted for the use of slave labor to build the grotesque stadium used in the grotesque Beijing Olympics.  When the ElbPhilharmonie was inaugurated with several spectacular concerts – the place is after all a concert hall in one of Europe’s most important cities – the musicians complained that couldn’t hear anything and that the acoustics were awful.  

64. Tunnel to Nowhere

LOTL produced a music-video set in some dismal-looking underground location, an interminable tunnel with converging perspectives on a grim, florescent-lit distance.  This seems the perfect space for German heavy metal enthusiasts to tromp around in their military-grade boots, perfecting their wan and chalky complexions – the non-tans favored by these gothic creatures of the night.

It turns out that the music video was staged in the old Elbe Tunnel, a third-of-a-mile long tube bored under the mucky bottom of the river.  A great engineering feat when it was built, the tunnel was constructed 80 feet below the surface and, of course, under the water-table and river-bed.  The tunnel’s depth, and weight of water overhead, meant pressurized caissons had to inserted below the river so that the passageway could be built.  Working in caissons is dangerous – laborers may suffer decompression sickness upon emerging from the work-site and three men died from the “Bends” while digging the Elbe Tunnel.  (About a hundred men had to be hospitalized and almost a thousand workers suffered some symptoms of decompression sickness.) 

The passage is sometimes called the St. Pauli Tunnel because the Hamburg access is under the river bluffs on the east side of the Landungsbruecke – that is, in Altona adjacent to the St. Pauli district famous for the Reeperbahn.  A round neo-Gothic building with a green copper cupola encloses the entrance shaft, a deep pit into which pedestrians (and bicyclists) are fed by two side-by-side elevators.  The access shaft is built in the style of the massive ashlar walls at the Landungsbruecke and, indeed, the structure is contemporary with the formidable ramparts and vaulted passages onto the tourist pier.  One of the elevators contains train tracks and is large enough to transport several vehicles down to the grade of the tunnel – once upon a time, people could drive through tunnel to the Elbe’s opposite side.  When we entered, the elevator with the concrete floor lined with tracks was occupied mostly by bicyclists.  We took some temporary wooden steps down to the bottom of the shaft.  Construction of some sort was underway and the shaft was full of grim-looking machinery.

The tube itself is lined with greenish tile like the interior of a subway toilet.  At intervals, terra-cotta plaques are embedded in the curving tile walls – the plaques are Jugendstil depictions of flounder and crabs with their pincers raised in a menacing display, otters, and even some rats nesting in an old boot.  By this time, my stamina was decreased and the slog under the Elbe to the opposite side seemed like something imagined in a nightmare.  The fronts of my thighs were burning with a tingling sensation, electric shocks traversing skin that was otherwise numb and my sinuses were congested, shoulders and neck and back aching with a dull, remorseless pain.  (This tunnel also figures in Wim Wenders Der Amerikanische Freund where it functions as sort of an anteroom to Hades.)

The tunnel, surprisingly, seems to lead to nowhere.  Once there was probably some kind of vibrant community on the north bank of the Elbe, but it has long vanished.  In the bright sunlight, we saw vacant lots stretching out to vast stacks of vivid day-glo storage containers behind chain-link fences, sidewalks running along battered streets where there are no buildings, a few featureless warehouses stranded amidst marshes.  Some abandoned cars are parked along the empty streets and the walkway above the exit shaft (I suppose exit and entrance are a matter of perspective) channels pedestrians to a low, iron-fenced terrace overlooking the Elbe.  From this vantage, the city rises up along the opposing shore of the huge river and the monumental churches are like spikes stapling down the warehouses and the green streets and the knoll where bald Bismarck stands with his huge sword clutched to his breast. A Vietnamese food truck is parked on a strip of asphalt stranded in the vacant lots.  A vendor is selling balloons.  But there’s really nothing on this side of the Elbe.

On the way back to the Hotel, the tunnel quivers with the voices of the dead.

65.  Halb-Sieben auf Reep

We have reservations to eat in the elegant hotel dining room.  This would ordinarily be a treat, an extravagance for our last night in Hamburg, but, unfortunately, I don’t feel well and the meal is an ordeal.  I have sea-bass, I think, expertly prepared but so subtly flavored as to be almost tasteless.  (Maybe, the virus is affecting my taste-buds.)

The plane departs for Copenhagen at 9:00 am and, since we don’t know the Hamburg airport (or how long it takes to get there), I set an alarm for 5:30 am.  I think it would be beneficial to sleep without nightmares and obsessive looping thoughts and, so, we look on a phone app for a pharmacy nearby.  I’d like to get some Nyquil (or the German equivalent) to knock myself out.  The app tells us that the closest pharmacy open at this time is on the Reeperbahn, about a half-mile away.  So we set out for the drugstore, walking along the shady lanes to the Tanzende Tuerme and the St. Pauli U-Bahn station.  The drug store is supposed to be nearby, a block or so away from the musical theater where tour buses are dropping off people at the Rocky Balboa operetta.  

The pharmacy isn’t where it’s supposed to be.  We trek back and forth along the Reeperbahn but can’t locate the place.  (I would expect that any self-respecting brothel-district would have fine, 24-hour pharmacies – but this drug-store is hiding itself.)  At last, we locate an abandoned store-front with a vaguely clinical mien, more antiseptic green tiles.  This must have once been the pharmacy but it’s been closed, it seems, since the COVID virus attacked – that is, inexplicably shut-down just at the time when it was most needed.  I press my face to the glass.  A couple of platter-sized bird-catching Hamburg tarantulas scuttle away from my shadow, moving like ultra-nimble and swift crabs across the dusty floor.  A family of rats has taken up residence in a prostitute’s thigh-high leather boots.  I see their pink noses peeping out of the decaying leather.

On the way back to the Hotel Hafen, we get lost among apartment flats.  Bismarck’s bald stone head catches the pink light of the setting sun.  Once again, I see the elegant café among the treetops on the sandstone terraces of the monument.  Waiters in tuxedos are carrying trays with flutes of champagne.  The champagne in its crystal glasses also catches the fading light.  Women in evening gowns look down from the hilltop on the harbor, the churches, the tourist boats chugging along the channels, the forest of warehouses where it is already dark and shadowy.  

66.  Three Airports and Albanian Air

I assumed that I wouldn’t be able to sleep and so tossed and turned on the hard hotel mattress, thereby, of course, fulfilling my own prophecy.  But I must have slept because the night seemed improbably short, only a matter of a couple hours at most before the alarm woke me.  Down the hill, under the open window, the harbor tinkled and hooted.  Maybe, a bedraggled urban fox slept in a nest made from the squatter’s abandoned sleeping bag.

Hamburg was grey and it was a little before dawn.  On a digital sign, a message flashed HAMBURG WETTER .  This seemed odd.  How could things get “wetter”?  There had been some rain every day we were in town.  But the German word for “weather” is Wetter and, so, my bemusement was a result of misreading the sign – paradoxically, it seemed that my ability to understand German had worsened with my visit to the country.  Near the airport, we encountered some detours.  The Allies had bombed during the night and some of the streets were trenches full of clinker-bricks between beheaded apartment buildings.

As at the Minneapolis airport, the gate agents for Icelandair were no place in evidence.  Someone employed by Lufthansa told us that they usually showed-up about an hour before the first morning flight.  The word “usually” troubled me.

No one appeared until about 40 minutes before take-off and, then, the gate-agent was an African of Somali origin, however, from Greenland.  He had trouble booting up his computer.  But we checked our luggage and made it to the gate on time.  The airplane was a small regional jet, a cramped tube, in which we sat crushed together and sweating.  Although we were nominally in first class, this meant nothing on this leg of the trip – all seats were equal in that claustrophobic little plane.

The airport in Copenhagen is on some sort of a desert island, a brown wind-blown heap of sand and heather in the middle of the sea.  As the plane descended, I could see many mermaids in the water, big shapeless grey creatures, probably manatee of some kind.  The next leg of the flight was to Keflavik in Iceland.  We were ushered to a waiting room on a lower level in the airport, adjacent to the runways.  Dust was flying around, kicked up by the strong ocean winds. We had felt them jostling the little jet as it landed on the island after our forty minute flight.

There was no jet-way to the flight to Keflavik and so the gate-agent, an Icelandic Laotian, directed us to a bus waiting on the nearby tarmac.  The wind outside was cold.  There was no place to sit on the bus.  It was like a subway car without seats, a metal box from which you dangled suspended from overhead straps.  I was faint with exhaustion and ached everywhere and the sides of my thighs were completely numb except for sudden, startling shocks that caused my knees to buckle.  The bus idled and idled and idled, probably for twenty minutes or more, apparently waiting for the last travelers to make their way to the gate.  The despair that you feel when traveling by air is that you are prisoner of a system over which you have no control.  You are, in effect, entirely without any agency once you reach the airport and, as the trip progresses, more and more freedoms are stripped away from you, until mid-air, you find yourself waiting outside a tiny water-closet while the plane bucks under you like a wild animal, completely powerless and reduced to the status of someone who, in effect, has to ask permission to urinate.  We like to think we are the masters of our own fate, but air travel puts the lie to this proposition. The longer we waited in the bus, the more likely, it seemed, that the flight would be delayed or, even, cancelled.  On the streets of Hamburg, I had heard young people bemoaning the fact that they had to drive to Barcelona (a place where every European seems to spend holidays) – airplanes were too unpredictable and too many flights had been canceled.  The longer we waited, the more anxious I became and the fire at the edges of my thighs, just above the belt line, was close to incapicitating me.  At last, the bus lurched forward, driving leisurely along the concourses to a battered-looking jet waiting at the edge of a runway.  Someone moaned.  Icelandair had borrowed the airplane from one of its competitors.  As we hobbled up the portable stairway, the stewardess said that this was an old Boeing 767 “Three-hundreder”.  

The plane’s interior was like a bus only far more uncomfortable.  In the cavernous interior, seats were installed in long rows as if in a movie theater and they seemed unstable, screwed into the chassis and secured by bolts that were slowly loosening with the plane’s vibrations. The 767 was a reject airliner leased, I suppose,  from Bulgaria Air or, perhaps, Makedonski Aviotransport, the national flag carrier for the Republic of Macedonia.  The plane’s crew, also, seemed to be on loan.  Several scrawny blondes patrolled the creaking aisles of the jet in stiletto high-heels wearing robin’s egg blue uniforms and retro-pillbox hats of the sort sported by Jacqueline Kennedy back in the day.  The stewards had huge moustaches and towering epaulettes so that they looked like supernumeraries in some Opera bouffe set in Albania or provincial Turkey.  The 767 shuddered as it reluctantly climbed off the runway and, since I was near the front of the cabin, I saw that the rattling ascent knocked a number of cabinet doors off their hinges, spilling trays into the forward compartment as well as other pieces of the molding that broke free and dropped like guillotines, grazing crew members and crashing onto the floor.  The jet seemed to be assembled from random parts held together by duct tape.  So much for our three-thousand dollar first class tickets.  

At Rekyavik, long lines besieged the custom officials.  All flights were delayed and we landed after the scheduled departure time for the last leg of our return to Minneapolis.  A red-bearded Viking, speaking perfect idiomatic Engish (and without accent, or, perhaps, a faint Midwestern accent possibly derived from the Coen brothers’ Fargo, the way that English is pronounced in Iceland) met the worried travelers in the concourse and assured them that all flights from Europe were delayed and that the planes were being held at their gates.  This assurance, I suppose, was intended to keep the travelers from rebelling against the long lines packed between black elastic ribbons and stanchions in a vaguely swastika-shaped meander in front of passport control stations.  “Don’t worry!  Don’t worry!” the Viking and several Shield Maidens said: “Planes are being held for you.”

Finally, we were released into the adjacent concourse.  Apparently, the pilots and crew on the Keflavik to Minneapolis flight hadn’t received the memo about holding planes until all ticketed passengers were seated.  Angelica and I confronted several quizzical gate agents.  “The plane is about to depart,” the agents told us with an air of disapproval.  We flashed our tickets, were hustled down the jet way and were the last passengers seated on the plane.  It was a close thing and, again, evidence for the utter helplessness of travelers entrapped in the air flight system with its arbitrary and inscrutable regimes of delay alternating with panicked haste.  

So the plane rose over the sea-battered volcanic rubble and fumaroles below leaked sulphur mist into the air and, then, we reached the zenith, the bright blue sky that is the ceiling over the top of the world.  In the passenger cabin behind us, some alpacas were grazing on small bales of hay and gorillas wearing Depends diapers were seated in the back rows.  When the stewardess came to serve us our First Class Meal (which I rejected because my stomach felt uneasy) she was wearing a rubbery-looking white apron stained with gore and bits of yellow fatty tissue.

67: COVID Diary and a Lost Soul

Like Caesar’s Gaul, the human spirit is divided into three parts: reason (nous) guides our decisions; passion (thymos) animates us and inspires action and the soul (psyche) is the indefinable essence that integrates these parts and connects them with what us innermost and, therefore, paradoxically most radically transcendent.  People lose their reason and are unable to exercise judgement; cognition might be impaired but the afflicted person retains his or her core identity.  Similarly, one can grow indifferent to the pleasures of the world and become numb to fear and its sibling, desire, but psyche persists and, in the most crucial way, the personality of the impaired man or woman remains intact.  But, it is a terrible thing to lose the integrating essence, the connective tissue between the immanent and transcendent, that is, the soul.

Mid-air I took another Dayquil and some Ibuprofen.  Both legs felt numb except for periodic stabbing pains and I had a headache.  When I closed my eyes, I saw myself on the rainy streets of Munich, dodging red and yellow trams, my shirt untucked and with a bottle of muddy water scooped from the Elbe in my trembling hand.  (The river that flows through Munich is the Isar not the Elbe and, so, I had no idea why I was slaking my throat with diesel-flavored Elbe water: Hamburg is Wetter.)  I wasn’t asleep, the Dayquil kept me awake, if not alert, and I found myself gazing down at Greenland.  There were huge blue holes in the ice-cap and waterfalls larger than a hundred Niagaras powered corkscrews of mist up into the sky.  Something was loosening.  The polar ice on which the world rotates was damaged and decaying.  COVID had eroded the anchors that held my soul in place and I could feel that faculty becoming unmoored and unstable.

Mighty ranges of mountains, riven with fjords, rose over the Labrador coastline.  The sun blazed low in the West and the shadows of peaks carved into pinnacles by glacial ice extended many miles out into the ocean.  In the abyss, I saw snowfields glittering.  The plane shuddered slightly and rocked the way that a cradle rocks and this motion loosened my soul from its last moorings so that it evanesced, rising like a vapor over my head and, then, because psyche is made of finest and most insubstantial gossamer, penetrating through the metal shell of the airplane, mingling with the subzero torch of the jet stream and, then, simply evaporating into the void.  I inhaled sharply to catch some of the soul-stuff in my throat and sinuses but this was in vain.  My soul was gone, melted into nothingness.

I can still reason and, even, sometimes feel pleasure, mostly when I am eating food that I enjoy.  When my psyche departed, it tore free some aspects of my ability to think and make judgements – there is a slight fog now inhabiting my brain, a sort of disconnection between thought and action.  Most of my senses are muted.  I perceive the world through layers of some grey and bland insulating substance and my vision has been affected – it’s blurry now and imprecise.  But the worst effect of this sublimation of my soul-stuff is that I feel hollow as if there’s a cavity at the heart of my being.  

68.   Aftermath

We made it through customs without any hassle.  I sat on a bench outside the international terminal, paralyzed, waiting for the Uber to arrive.  I was relieved to be back in Minnesota, but, now, understood that I would have to reckon with the consequences of what had happened to me in Germany, the bloody apron and the plastic bottle of poisonous river water.  I was home but was sick and would, in fact, remain sick in one way or the other for the rest of the Summer.  Indeed, dear Reader, I am ill even as I write these words and, perhaps, you have sensed this as a certain deficit in my prose.

The next day, I took a home COVID test and found that I was infected with the virus.

And, so, ends my account of my trip to Germany.

August 26, 2022