1.
I should not complain about the overseas flight on United, the American operator for Lufthansa. My seats were expensive, business class, and I rested on a full-length recliner slotted between adjacent passengers in a sort of cubicle. It was the sort of place where, in a pinch, you could live. But, for me, the peril of long-distance travel is sleeplessness. The night before the flight, I wasn’t able to rest and, on the short hop to Chicago (one hour waiting on the tarmac and taxiing, less than one hour in the air) I felt a little queasy, my eyes burning and my stomach upset. A brontosaurus skeleton, no doubt a facsimile, loomed improbably over Terminal A, the creature’s bony swanlike neck as tall as the concourse. Something was wrong with the transatlantic jet and there was a twenty minute delay with gate agents suggesting that, perhaps, we would have to board a subsequent flight – but the worst didn’t come to pass and the airplane made time with the jetstream at its tail, navigating a flat trajectory over the middle of the ocean, and, eight hours later, landed on time in Frankfurt am Main.
It was long before dawn in Frankfurt with concourses and food malls mostly deserted. The toilets in Germany have a particularly intense disinfectant odor, a smell that doesn’t exactly mask the other malodorous ingredients in the air, but rather seems to enhance their scent – Germans, it seems, want the assurance that things are clean and sanitary but that all original stenches also be present, to remind one, as it were, of their scrupulous efforts at hygiene. The surface-line ride to the train station was over in a few minutes, exploiting, it seems to me now, some uncanny fold in space; I now know that the airport is a half hour ride by cab from the Hauptbahnhof, beyond a belt freeway and some grim, dark forests. The iron girders of the train shed floated in the air among the parallel piers of the platforms and kiosks were peddling pretzels and pastries, the staple of rail travelers in Deutschland. Some pigeons explored the stark geometry of glass and metal overhead and a huge billboard advertised an exhibition of paintings by Lyonel Feininger at the Galerie an der Schirn.
Our train ran from Munich to Stralsund on the Baltic sea, via Frankfurt and many other stops such as Marburg and Goettingen on its way through Hamburg. We sat in First Class in assigned seats. Outside, the day never brightened and turbulent grey skies sometimes reached down to dampen the dark meadows and endless forests. It takes five hours to cross Germany from Frankfurt to Hamburg, complete with some “unplanmaessige Halte” (“unplanned stops” for construction ahead or to allow other oncoming express trains to occupy the rail). Traffic waited at rural crossings in the drizzle, wet windshields and wipers twitching like the tails of cows tormented by flies. In the woods, great globular stork’s nests adorned some of the trees, big shadowy balls of twig a couple yards across. The toilet became progressively more squalid with urine on the floor (the train lurches inconveniently), wet scabs of toilet paper, and a dense funk that the astringent-smelling disinfectant couldn’t banish. A young man with cerebral palsy lurched between cars to use the rest room. When the amenity was occupied, he bellowed as if in pain and punched at the door – note to self: it folds inward to open. The young man had deeply inset eyes and wore a tee-shirt lettered with the name of some hardcore band and he had long, tangled hair.
2.
At the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, crowds of people were thrashing around in the gloom. Our accommodation was one stop away by three surface lines (S-Bahn) running west from the central station. We found the platform and had a fifty-fifty chance of getting on the S-Bahn traveling in the correct direction to Dammtor, the train stop nearest to our rooms. Of course, I wagered wrong and embarked from the platform on the train heading east. It wasn’t a serious mistake. I figured out the error immediately and we got off at Berliner Tor and reversed direction back to the Hauptbahnhof.
On the S-Bahn back to the Hauptbahnhof, an old man with a belligerent grimace was riding in a motorized scooter. No doubt he would have been a MAGA Republican state-side. I infringed a little on his space and he shouted something unintelligible to me. (I can’t understand spoken German nor can I speak the language.) At the Hauptbahnhof, he had to disembark from the train, a serious challenge since the platform was about 20 inches below the doors of the train. Again, the old man barked some command to someone and a worker appeared with a key dangling from a chain in his pocket. The worker unlocked a secret compartment in a cabinet next to the door, slid out a folding aluminum ramp that he used to span the gap between train and platform. All of this took several minutes, a problematic delay since these local trains run at three to five minute intervals, all departures and arrivals scheduled in elaborate charts posted on the platforms. The ramp tilted precipitously between rail-car and the Hauptbahnhof platform and it took two additional train workers and three Good Samaritans to ease the heavy scooter with its Panzer-like tracks down onto the Gleis (platform) – all the time, the old man muttered and moaned. Another old man at the rear of the car, also disabled and atop a throne-like scooter, bellowed at the train workers – it seemed he was angry at the delay.
3.
Dammtor is an impressive Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) train station in the middle of Hamburg’s convention and exhibition hall district. (Dammtor, servicing both three or four S-Bahn routes, and “Fernverkehr” trains as well – that is, long distance routes -- is nicknamed the “Kaiser’s Bahnhof”; this is because that the first train arriving at the new station in 1906 was occupied by the Kaiser who, then, dedicated the place as an integral part of the local rail transport system.) The station is beautifully symmetrical, not so vast as the central Hauptbahnhof, and, therefore, its noble proportions are readily appreciated. The shed is decorated with stone pilasters crowned with strange barrel-sized faces – they look like owlish old men or possibly staring sibyls or witches and pigeons whirl around their hooded eyes. Above the main entrances, a goddess looks down impassively, her face bland and without expression – she symbolizes, I suppose, fortune, good or bad or indifferent, which attends upon all travels; her face is a riddle that can not be solved. The inside of the station, below the elevated platforms, is full of people at all hours of the day and there is a DB Reise Zentrum (“Deutschbahn Travel Center”), La Crobag, a place that sells thick, chewy bread in various forms together with bottles of beer, several Donor kebab places, a bookstore and a WC (it costs one euro to enter); you can also find a Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s and a Mr. Clou (smoothies) in the station. These places are mostly unheated and the corridors are cold and a little dark. During my month in Hamburg, we passed through this place dozens of times.
In my mind, Hamburg’s directions are defined by whether you are going north away from the Elbe harbor or south toward the waterfront and the suburbs across the river. West by S-Bahn leads to Altona (“All-to-nah” or ‘too near’ to Hamburg and, then, the San Francisco-style suburb of Blankenese; east by S-Bahn leads to the Hauptbahnhof, the famous Rathaus (“City Hall”) and the elite shopping districts along the Jungfernstieg and the Alstersee, a large lake that looks a bit like Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis. To the north of the Dammtor station, that is, walking away from the harbor, a complicated and rather perilous roadway has to be crossed in three transits under supervision of semaphores controlling the parallel lanes of traffic. Some of the lights are misleading – for instance, a red light for a more distant lane has no bearing on traffic just off the curb that shoots by with shocking speed, a herd of Mercedes Benz autos and light-colored panel trucks and roaring buses. A misstep here will cost you your life. Several bicycle lanes, designated rather faintly by reddish cobbles on the sidewalk, also crisscross here and the bike riders speed past at full speed never pausing nor yielding to the pedestrians – if you aren’t vigilant, you will be run-down by the bicyclists who claim priority over both the roads and the sidewalks, bellowing indignantly as they swoop past if you invade their space. (There are always hundreds of bikes zooming by you, sometimes only hair’s breadth from your legs or feet or arms, and, in Germany, the bicyclists proclaim: “Here we don’t yield for the traffic; we are the traffic.”)
Beyond the roaring traffic, the Moorweide, a park extends between elegant terrace-style houses. The townhomes are white with clean lines, seemingly built a hundred and thirty years ago and they are immaculately preserved behind spiky iron fences. (The neighborhood reminded me of the Georgian terraces at Kensington in London.) A sidewalk covered with plate-sized fallen maple leaves crosses the wet park under stately colonnades of trees; smaller shrubbery is still green and, even, shows red and purple berries or wilted but still intact flowers. Beside the sidewalk, a sculpture by Henry Moore, “Recumbent Figure”, all polished hollows and dolphin-smooth curves, flanks the path. An extremely expensive haute cuisine restaurant, Henryks, occupies the bottom level of a huge hotel. Some gas-fired heaters stand among wrought-iron white tables and rock and roll is playing in the foyer. Zero-level or “0 Etage” suites in the buildings (what we would term the ground or first floor) are occupied by the offices of Rechtsanwalt and -anwaltin (male and female lawyers), beauty salons and spas, plastic (“esthetica”) surgery places featuring “microneedling” and eyelid lifts and other forms of torturous beauty regimens. Several theosophical bookstores, including one dedicated to the works of Rudolf Steiner, are also interspersed among the art galleries and expensive barber shops. The university occupies a series of converging lanes to the west of the neighborhood; the bronze dome of a astronomical observatory bulges over stately halls and libraries in which shelves full of books are visible. Jews lived here once and the streets are dotted with so-called “Stolpersteine” – that is, “stumbling stones”. These are four-inch square brass plaques inset in the pavement and marked with names and, then, a terse recital of the fate of the person who once lived at this address – these are mostly dire: deported, murdered, or committed suicide. Some of the victims simply vanished into the bloodlands of the east. A few escaped to America. There was a synagogue here in 1933 and, at least, 19,000 Jews, but, of course, they are all now gone.
Our accommodations are ridiculously expensive and luxurious. I’m ashamed to say any more about them. Cold drizzle falls from the sky – “Schiet Wetter” as they say here, a phrase that sounds like what it means.
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