On re-watching a Christmas Show

 

On Christmas Eve, after the gifts had been opened, the buffet of cocktail wieners with deviled eggs and quiche among other things left alone and its leftovers put away, after my adult children had gone home for the night and after my wife, very ill with a holiday cold threatening to become pneumonia, returned upstairs to her sick bed, I sat for awhile in the living room listening to the rain fizzing and percolating outside in the alley and splashing against the window sills.  The Christmas tree shoved up against the so-called “hot bench” – that is, a radiator concealed under a wooden frame once lined with pillows (the pillows are all long lost now) – showed itself to itself in the black mirror of the picture window and a red star with long red rays was also doubled in the glass, both hanging ornament and its reflection floating in the darkness.  Such moments conspire with the gloom of winter and sad, fragrant nostalgia to engender morbid thoughts and, so, after looking into the rainy shadows for a few minutes, I thought it best to watch something on TV.

Usually, over the Christmas holiday, I watch a Netflix show called A Very Murray Christmas, a program that takes the form of a dysfunctional variety show, eight or nine songs performed as part of a sentimental musical comedy.  For some reason, I enjoy this show and admire its performances and beautiful cinematography.  No one else in my family cares anything at all about this TV program, streaming on Netflix always at this time of year, and, so, I always watch it alone.  (I have written about this on several other occasions and it might be interesting to consider my earlier reflections on this subject as set forth on my blog – but this would require that I delve into the past and I always find this topic disturbing, unsettling even, since my past is now vastly larger than my ever-diminishing future.  After I am gone, perhaps, someone can find these earlier essays, print them down from the cyberspace where they are now archived, and collate the writings into a slender memorial volume.)  Sofia Coppola directed A Very Murray Christmas and the show is beautiful in a reticent, stammering sort of way – it seems a variant on her famous 2003 movie starring Bill Murray, Lost in Translation, a film that has the same bittersweet and lonesome texture, also involving a half-forgotten entertainer stranded in a luxury hotel.  Indeed, I suppose the A Very Murray Christmas is a sort of elegant, abbreviated pendant to Lost in Translation.  

Here is what A Very Murray Christmas is about: Bill Murray, the comedian and movie star (famous for movies like Ghostbusters and his appearances on Saturday Night Live) is trapped in a blizzard in the Hotel Carlyle on Christmas Eve.  Murray has agreed to emcee a variety show scheduled to be shot live in Bemelman’s Bar in the hotel.  This show is to be shot on-the-cheap: famous audience members are represented by canned footage from last year’s Golden Globes Award Show – it’s possible, but not probable, that the heart-throb George Clooney will appear with the singer Miley Cyrus; however, this seems unlikely and, indeed, it seems possibnle that the contracts engaging those luminaries are merely aspirational, notional, as it were.  Murray is morose and humiliated by the TV show that he fears will be a disaster.  And his anxiety has increased exponentially due to a blizzard that has, in effect, cut off the island of Manhattan and rendered travel impossible.  With his side-man, the pianist, Paul Shaffer (also the film’s musical director), Murray complains about the situation, reprising to some extent his earlier role as the title character in Scrooged (1988 - Richard Donner); he sings some Christmas blues while Shaffer tickles the ivories as the star’s factotum, Dimitri Dimitrov (called “Double D”), makes martinis in the posh, if somewhat desolate-looking, hotel suite overlooking Central Park – the movie is shot in wintry blues and greys with the Bemelman’s set filmed like a warm earth-colored grotto, the famous Central Park mural in the bar sporadically visible behind the actors.  Murray, who looks ridiculous wearing reindeer antlers, complains about the show.  But his contractual obligations lead him down from the hotel room, descending the stairwells since power is only intermittent in New York City, to the Carlyle’s Bar and Café.  At the bottom of the steps, he meets Michael Cera in an inconsequential throwaway part as a rapacious Hollywood agent – part of the film’s charm is its haphazard, improvised-seeming script.  The scene with Cera, which has an abrasive tone, can’t go anywhere and the character vanishes from the show, establishing a thematic motif – later Chris Rock press-ganged into singing a song with Murray will flee the set when the power, finally goes out once and for all and plunges the café and bar into darkness; Murray’s two producers, cynical women who bully their star, also vanish as the show progresses.  As the live-feed begins, Murray is overcome with despair and begins weeping.  He runs out into the storm where he encounters Chris Rock.  Murray treats Rock as his long-lost friend and confidante but, in fact, they seem to be strangers – for instance, in a slightly racist moment, Murray assumes that Rock is a rapper, causing the Black comedian to ask: “Man, do you really know me at all?”  When the power goes out, Rock escapes to everyone’s relief – he can’t sing and his rendition of “Do you hear what I hear” with Murray is an atonal mess.  (By contrast, Murray’s voice is wrecked with whiskey and he sings as if he has a bad cold, but his phrasing is immaculate, jazz-inflected – he assembles his lyrics in a charming way that reminds me of Frank Sinatra or Willie Nelson or, even, Louis Armstrong; the instrument is terrible but it is beautifully played.)  

The power failure yields a force majeure defense as to Bill Murray’s contract and the variety show is abandoned.  Everyone gets drunk and feasts on lavish food that is sure to spoil if not consumed immediately – the freezers and refrigerators aren’t operating.  The film’s characters, crowded together in the dark, warm cavern of the café and bar, sing Christmas songs to one another – there’s a bravura blues performance by Maya Rudolph as a lonely middle-aged woman drinking what she calls a “Soiled Kimono”, several other songs are excellently performed and, then, this part of the show ends with  a great version of “The Fairy Tale of New York City” in which everyone takes a part.  (“It was Christmas Eve in the drunk tank / An old man said to me: “Won’t see another”; the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, the creator of the song, died on November 30, 2023).  A couple’s marriage ceremony has been ruined by the storm; no one can attend their wedding.  They are quarreling but Bill Murray counsels them to reconcile and, soon, all is well with them – these tiny subplots don’t amount to much of anything and, although they are efficiently presented, seem intentionally inconsequential.  Alternately drinking shots of tequila and fiery Slivovitz plum brandy, Murray gets very drunk and passes out.  While unconscious, he dreams of a somewhat tacky, if effectively staged, Christmas show featuring George Clooney and Miley Cyrus who appear on the wintery white set riding on Santa’s sleigh.  “Very elegant for a soundstage in Queens,” Clooney remarks. There are three or four more songs performed in faux Las Vegas-style.  Murray wakes in the cool, chill light of his hotel suite.  After the technicolor extravaganza on the soundstage, the world is monochromatic again except for the sunny highlight of a tall glass of orange juice served by Dimitri.  Paul Shaffer is still tickling the ivories.  Murray goes to the window overlooking Central Park and mutters “Merry Christmas to all.”   

A Very Murray Christmas is damned with faint praise: critics consensus is that it’s mostly okay.  No one in my family liked the show when it first aired.  I suppose that the exact nature of the program’s appeal to me, which remains mysterious as far as I am concerned, is one of the reasons that I watch A Very Murray Christmas every year – I scrutinize faces and songs and inspect the mise-en-scene for clues about myself.  When you watch a program for sentimental reasons, year after year, you are really watching yourself watching.  The images on screen are refracted through your past experience of them.  Why did I laugh at that last year or the year before?  Why am I not laughing now? What was it about this scene or this cameo appearance that once moved me?  Layers of previous interpretation and emotion color the experience of the show.  The show is no longer about its ostensible subject matter but has become a sort of mirror in which you see yourself reflected and, not just at the current moment, but historically, across previous viewings of the program.  Re-watching a TV show or a movie, at least if this occurs at regular intervals, is a meditation on the self.

When I was a child, TV shows and movies were experienced once and, then, lost.  Of course, there were re-runs but they were unpredictable.  People didn’t control what they saw and when, but, rather, were at the mercy of the networks and their advertisers.  A movie shown on TV, at least, before I was forty, was a radically different experience than the same film projected in a theater.  In the theater, the movie was bright and big and immersive.  On TV, particularly the little black-and-white sets on which re-runs of movies were shown, the pictures were tamed, domesticated and, even, censored – famous scenes were missing or defanged and the footage was all fissured with veins of tawdry advertising that ripped you out of the movie and hurled you, like a castaway, onto the beaches of particularly desolate commerce.  I studied movie reviews and knew that there were certain filmmakers that one should admire and, on late-night TV, between 11 and 1, I watched movies like Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, but couldn’t for the life of me see what all the fuss was about – attractive people with dubbed voices stalked about shadowy landscapes, everything listless and depopulated and demoralized.  The only movie that appeared regularly on TV at predictable intervals was The Wizard of Oz and, so, that film became the mirror, the speculum par excellence: children memorized the lines and observed themselves observing the movie and, I suppose, millions of men in my generation first discovered that they were Gay by investigating their own responses to this movie that appeared every year like a comet in its mathematically precise orbit, dragging its glowing tail across the planet and irradiating everyone under its influence.  Otherwise, TV shows and movies were experiences that you threw away like used kleenex.  Nothing was really built to last: Hollywood hid its past products in vaults and periodically recycled the film-stock for its silver nitrate surfaces and, now and then, the combustible celluloid ignited and whole decades of movies and movie-going went up in smoke to no one’s particular chagrin.  It was all disposable, engineered for one-time use and, then, flushed away.  Even the film repertory houses of my college years were complicit in this culture of abandonment and desuetude – I recall seeing Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on a disfigured 16 millimeter print, the silent film haphazardly spliced together from fragments and scored to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring playing incessantly on a loop; Renoir’s The Rules of the Game was screened with subtitles so bleached-out at the bottom of the screen that I had no idea what the movie was about and Kurosawa pictures were projected through celluloid that seemed to have been drowned in salt-water or buried in the earth like pots of fermenting kim chee.  It was so hard to simply see these pictures, to grasp what the faint and blurry shadows meant on the screen, that all your energy went into the simple act of watching, decoding the ruined images, and, therefore, you couldn’t attend to yourself watching the movie and reacting to it.

But this is different today when everything, more or less, can be seen by clicking a button on a digital menu and, so, watching A Very Murray Christmas becomes an exercise in watching myself watching, a descent into memory and the illusion of meaning, a nostalgia that is not about a real past, but about a sentimental or intellectual reaction to a reaction that is now distilled by memory.  It’s the ghost, as it were, of Christmas past, an admonitory warning that what you were you are now longer and soon will no more.  Because this is the paradox, the deeper you go into this hall of mirrors, the more you study yourself studying yourself, the closer you come to something really impenetrable:   in the end, there is no one really there at all; it’s all imaginary – in the heart, where you thought your soul was to be found, there is only an absence and darkness.  Bill Murray’s sad eyes and the mask of his face, his sudden mercurial bursts of rage or despair or joy simply expose the truth that here and now, on this darkest day of the year, there is no one even home: the self that watches itself watching finds no foothold in the cold shadows – no one is here at all.

Hamburg: Planten un Blome -- War Memorials of a Certain Kind and a Blue World

 

1.   

European cities were once protected by walls.  Hamburg is no exception, although the Elbe river, fractured into dozens of channels both natural and manmade, complicated the geography of its fortifications.  Many cities in Europe have regal Ring Strasse encircling the urban centers; these Ring Strasse (“Ring Roads”) generally occupy the place where the protective walls once enclosed the town.  When the walls were removed as obsolete – no good against modern artillery or aerial bombardment and a corset deforming the city’s growth – then, wide circular avenues, often lined with ornate public buildings, were built in their place.  In Hamburg, the walls were semi-circular arcs, anchored on their flanks by the Elbe, and, so, when removed didn’t create circular ring roads.  Planten un Blome, an endearing low German phrase for “plants and flowers,” is a park located in the territory where the City’s old walls were once located.  Originally, a smaller park was located within the walls and the fortifications commanded a view across open country, cleared so that it could be shelled in the event of a siege encroaching on the city.  These areas have now been consolidated into a green, meticulously landscaped system of parks extending in an arc along the transit of the old walls – indeed, the names of these places “Wallanlagen,” “Kleine Wallanlagen”, and “Grosse Walleanlagen”, tracts of parkland divided by boulevards marking erstwhile city gates and access to the urban core, signify their origin – “Wallanlagen” means “Places occupied by the Wall.”  

Planten un Blome is the fortification park closest to Dammtor station, the transit hub most proximate to our apartment. The place is notable for an exquisite Japanese tea garden, some ultra-modernist greenhouses cantilevered over a lagoon, and some south-facing terraces landscaped with Mediterranean flora stepping down to a canal spanned by several bridges.  Taxis congregate on the edge of the park south of Dammtor station and broad paved paths lead into Planten un Blomen, sidewalks leading between complex heaps of brush and shrubbery.  A U-Bahn, Stephansplatz station, opens downward into the underground, the steps accessing the platforms below adjacent to a little concrete block kiosk, a bookstore that displays outdoors used volumes wrapped in plastic against the perpetual mist.  Across from Stephansplatz U-Bahn stop, there is a broad, busy boulevard with a multi-story casino, a movie theater advertising the most recent incarnation of The Hunger Games franchise, and a park beside the modernist vault of the opera house named after Gustav Mahler (who once conducted the Hamburg Opera orchestra.)  Some monuments to recent wars are next to the boulevard at the edge of Planten un Blome.  These are worth examining and I will describe them below.

The entrance into the park at the Stephansplatz U-Bahn entry, a sort of funnel leading into the earth beneath the park, leads directly to an elaborate fantasy of small cliffs and shrubs with flamboyantly red leaves.  The red shrubs guide the eye along a streambed, without water now although marked with oval puddles.  The streambed is a shallow gulch between heaps of sculpted boulders and filled with small metallic-grey pebbles.  At the end of the gulch, a tea house is framed by the brilliant scarlet bushes, a small elegant structure on the other side of a shallow basin also lined with polished-looking stones.  You can climb over some threshold boulders and navigate a way between the puddles to the pulpit of rocks that overlooks the teahouse.  Everything is compact and, beyond the tea house, you can see people strolling on some of the paths that loop through the garden.  

The far northwest side of the park is dominated by a slender tower, a Radisson Blue hotel that has been somehow inserted into the edge of Planten un Blome.  At night, the hotel is a column of deep blue neon glowing over the landscape of artificial cliffs like shelves at its base.  In Summer, waterfalls dance down these steps chiseled into the hillside above the lagoon, a ribbon of water that looks like one of the City’s many fleet or canals, here cut-off from the river and the larger system of shipping channels into a formation like an ox-box lake.  A white greenhouse with slanting glass roof and solar panels hovers over the edge of the deep indentation filled with water and transplanted trees shaggy with vine dip their limp branches into the water; small trails thread through the flowering underbrush, still green despite the short November days where festive-looking berries droop down from the wet branches.  The south-facing terraces over the water-course have been planted with Mediterranean vegetation, some cactus and spiky agave punctuating the retaining walls among olive trees and the flower-bed steps that they support.  Of course, Germans like taxonomy and many of the plants in the terrace gardens have labels identifying the things growing there.  The landscape is convoluted, a wrinkle or fold in space, that creates implausible distances between points that would otherwise be near: it is only a hundred yards to the grey, cathedral-like shed of the Dammtor Station, another hundred yards to the spike of the Radisson Blue, the same distance in the other direction to the yellow-tiled passage descending from the bookstore kiosk at the Stephansplatz U-Bahn stop, but the park is heaped up here between these points, folded onto itself with moist, shadowy seams and ridges like the drapery in a 16th century engraving.  

2.

On the edge of Planten un Blome, next to the busy avenue called Gorch-Fock-Wall, a big cube of pale, greyish sandstone sits on the knoll next to the subway entrance.  This is a memorial to the dead soldiers of the Great War.  A legion of indomitable troops, all of them with shouldered rifles, march across the stone surface carved in deep relief with bulb-shaped helmets and grimly set pointed jaws.  The soldiers are cut into the rock in columns, receding into the sandstone, rank after rank of them marching in a pointless procession around the edges of the house-sized block.  The marching men seem to uphold the heavy upper part of the square stone block, creating something of effect of a host of carytid-figures bearing the weight of the war on their shoulders and the tips of their carbines.  The monument commemorates the 2nd Hanseatic regiment #76, a Hamburg infantry unit that fought in many battles in the First World War.  A list of these encounters is inscribed at the base of the stone beneath the blunt, wedge-shaped frieze of the marching men’s boots.  On the wall above the carved soldiers, these words appear “Deutschland muss leben / und wenn wir sterben muss” (“Germany must live even though we had to die.”)

Dedicated in 1936, the big grey block of incised sandstone has an impenetrable density.  Whatever one might think of its ideology, the frieze of men marching indomitably to their deaths has a monumental dignity.  Of course, these sorts of demonstrations of raw, mechanized patriotism are controversial in this county and, from time to time, vandals chisel off noses and fingers and helmets, creating abscesses like smallpox scars in the stone.  Nearby, a small, neat tent is nestled between two ivy-overgrown walls that delimit the knoll’s commemorative space on which the altar-like monument is built from the rest of the park.  The tent is made of green vinyl, staked down on the lawn, with a little stack of bottles nearby, a bivouac for a homeless man.  (Germans recycle; each bottle is worth five cents, and the homeless often support themselves with this subsidy.)  A dozen paces from the 76th regiment war memorial, a ribbon of aluminum letters cast between hollow rails twists around a concrete base, forming a contorted inscription suspended in the air.  If there were sunlight, the letters on their brackets of metal would cast a complicated skein of shadows against the pavement but the sun can scarcely be remembered at this time of year.  This is a monument to German war deserters, here portrayed as fighters against Fascism, and intended as a counterweight to the ponderous block of stone borne by the marching troops.  And, not content with this adversary monument, as it were, another anti-war Denkmal stands a little distance away from the pavilion dedicated to the deserters.  This memorial to the victims of Fascism is a shattered wall, broken down by the spear-points of a deconstructed swastika that seems to be smashing through the structure like a wrecking ball.  The figure of a corpse with flattened face and shoulders, leans against the collapsing wall, an inarticulate mass of suffering cast in bronze with rough surfaces like a mutilated Giacometti.  This monument is a mess, a tangle of ugly forms, and hard to decipher, although it is obviously meant to be disturbing.  A metal stanchion with an inscription in gold letters says that “Germany commenced a war of aggression and annihilation against its neighbors” – these words identified as a decree of the Reichstag and precisely numbered (and dated) for reference.   

The contrast between the clearly expressed heroic intent of the Regimental monument and the adjacent counter-monuments is startling.  To succeed, a public memorial must be about something.  The monument to the dead soldiers of 76th is ostensibly about heroism and sacrifice; it doesn’t glorify war explicitly and the marching ranks of troops are all dead men, shades walking in files into the underworld.  But, nonetheless, the memorial has a point; it articulates a message from the dead, who speak in the words chopped into the top of the altar, a message from the Fallen to the living; it speaks to the obligations the living have to the dead.  The nearby monuments to the Third Reich deserters and the victims of fascism are wholly negative – they are about negative qualities: that is, an absence of meaning, the pointlessness of war and sacrifice, the lies that are told in service of disastrous political decisions, depictions of untruths not truths – if these things impose obligations it is hard to say what they are.  It’s not so easy to make a memorial to an absence, to negative qualities – to defeat and nothingness.  And, so, there’s a sour odor of panic about the counter-memorials.  Something has to be said in opposition to the marching martyrs of the 76th Regiment, the legion of men (the huge block of sandstone proclaims) who gave their lives so that Germany would survive.  But the only thing that can be said, as witness the confusing welter of ineffectual counter-monuments is: Not this.  Look at the memorial to the 76th and, then, reply “Not this.”  But, then, what?

3.

The purpose for my trip to Hamburg in November 2023 was to attend concerts presented by the German goth band, the Lord of the Lost.  My daughter, Angelica, is, perhaps, the band’s most loyal and obsessively dedicated fan. She is the band’s number one fan in all the world; among all the Lost, she is the most lost.  The Lord of the Lost, led by Chris Harms, a native of Hamburg, produced a video in Altona, one of the boroughs of the city.  The interior locations featured in this video were shot inside a cathedral-like space identified as the Kultur Kirche otherwise known as the Johannes Evangelical Church.  Angelica wanted to visit this place and so we took the S-Bahn to the Holstenstrasse stop, supposedly a three minute “Fussweg” (“walk”) from the Church.  

It’s three minutes from the S-Bahn station if you know the way, but, of course, longer if you aren’t familiar with the environs, a middle-class neighborhood with sooty-looking apartment buildings overlooking a web of tree-lined streets intersecting in wet, cramped corners, nothing exactly at right angles with the lanes arrowing off in eccentric directions.  At street-level, some businesses glowed faintly like embers at the base of the gloom red-brick structures.  In Hamburg, you navigate by church steeples, making your way from one tower to the next, and there were several grim-looking “Turme” here, a bit misleading because nearer steeples can seem larger then the more distant and more lofty towers – generally, you look for the tallest steeple, walk to it,  and this will turn out to be your destination, although here there were several intermediate belfries at schools and borough halls to complicate the path.

We found the church after some false turns, a narrow soaring heap of red bricks, “Klinkerbau” as it is called here, stabbed upward into the wet sky.  Everything was damp and the trees were laden with fat droplets that would have sparkled in the light if there were any rays available, but it was dark this morning, like the inside of a moist limestone cave.  A homeless man had spread his sleeping bag under the pointed gothic threshold to the church, resting tightly against the tall bronze door at the base of huge brick spire.  Other doors to the church were locked and Angelica wanted to try the front entrance under the sharply pointed arch overhead, but the figure in the sleeping bag, an enigmatic faceless mummy muffled against the cold prevented her from approaching too closely.  

“I’m not going to step over that guy,” Angelica said.

I remarked that if the door were open, the cocoon of the sleeping bag would be inside and not outside on the cold steps.  The church looked dark and sinister, with gloomy windows and orifices haunted by pigeons high overhead.  According to its website, the Kultur Kirche can be rented for 24 hour stints at the rate of 2500 euros for weekdays and Sunday afternoons.  (The charge costs 3000 euros for Friday).  Photos show the interior of the church as bright, with mosaics that seem vaguely Byzantine decorating the pillars and Romanesque round vaults inside.  The place is heavily scheduled with plays and travel lectures and candle-light rock and roll concerts on every weekend.  But it was closed to us.  We paced around the red stony heap of the building, trying all doors without success.   The church is said to be neo-Gothic in style, designed by a famous Hamburg architect, and built around 1875.  Of course, the place was bombed into a roofless, cavernous ruin in 1943 but was rebuilt since it was, then, an important neighborhood parish church.  The Johannes Kirche burned again in 1994 and was rebuilt once more.  There are Sunday services, but the structure’s main function now is to host cultural events, film screenings and concerts and poetry slams.  A performance of several symphonies by Beethoven was scheduled for the upcoming weekend.  I told Angelica that if she wanted to see the inside, we could come back in a couple days and attend the concert.  She wasn’t interested.  

The church occupies an irregularly shaped parcel of land, a wedge-shaped plaza with some small hedges, an old tree behind an iron fence with pointed posts, and a strange spectral apparition, a column concealed in drooping wet tarpaulin, a sort of pale ghost under the flanks of the big church.  The apparition was a war memorial, here to the Hamburg 31st Infantry, another division that fought with distinction in the First World War.  This memorial, apparently, was so toxic that it had to be hidden under a marble-colored drizzle of heavy canvas shrouds.  Chain-link fences were wrapped around the disgraced monument and, here and there, the tarp draperies were in disarray.  We could see some concentric plinths stacked atop one another like lilypads, then, the bare toes of sculptured warriors, upright figures with their heads concealed by the shrouds, apparently “Roland Figures”, that is, knights holding huge swords between their feet, upholding the Right with stone blades embedded at their tips in the pedestal and rising up to the chiseled, muscular sternums of the statues.  Some kind of obelisk to which the tarps were tacked formed the back rest for the Roland Figures of which there seemed to be three, although the whole shape of the monument and its exact characteristics remained unclear, hidden by heavy veils of canvas.  

(Photographs of the monument show some words cut into the round pad-shaped plinths stacked like an elaborate wedding cake at the base of a “Klinker”- brick pillar.  The Roland Figures, apparently nude, stand on the three sides of the column forming an equilateral triangle – the figures are impassive, with breasts and shoulders heavily muscled like weightlifters or a bodybuilder such Arnold Schwartzenegger.  They are either asleep or comatose with bland, mask-like faces and hooded eyes.  None of this was clear when Angelica and I saw the monument, swathed as it was in a heavy, sculptural drapery of wet canvas.)

The Church website notes with disapproval that the monument to the 31st Infantry regiment was a site for frequent observances by army veterans until the mid-seventies when the soldiers of the Great War became, more or less, extinct.  After the demise of the last of the regimental members, the memorial was simply an embarrassment, an alarming pile of red bricks built in a discredited style to commemorate events thought to have been toxic in their own right.  In 1994, students at a local vocational school designed a counter-memorial, three large acrylic transparencies corresponding to the three admonitory knights with their shield-like swords.  The transparencies are displayed on the lawn about twenty feet from the pillar of red brick.  On these transparent sheets of acrylic, there are printed in frosted outline, concentration camp victims or, perhaps, dying prisoners of war or people suffering the effects of famine.  The victims are bald with gaunt skeletal faces and bulging eyes in deep, dark eye-sockets.  The colossal figures seem to crouch or knead their hands together as if to implore mercy or squat with bony knees tilted up to mimic the high spear-point of the church steeple and the lower prominence of the brick obelisk.  The images are powerful and apotropaic, but, also, bear an unfortunate allusion.  Contrived before Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the figures pre-date Gollum, crouching in his cold pool in the film, catching frogs for his dinner and mourning the loss of his “precious”.  But the movie, seen by just about everyone, now makes visitors beholding the counter-memorial think of Gollum first and Auschwitz second or, even, third.  A naive viewer might ask why the people in this neighborhood have elected to erect three huge images of the grotesque and tormented Gollum under the spire of their church.       

4.

Returning from dinner in the teeming Sterneschanze district, we exited the train at one end of Dammtor platform, took the nearby escalator into the station, and, then, advanced into a tunnel suffused with blue light.  The light was intense, not exactly festive, but bright enough to instill the tunnel walls with a neon-blue azure.  Where were we?  The tunnel was a place we had never been, although we had marched through this railroad station a dozen times or more.  

Outside the tunnel, the trees and the brows of the grassy hills were all bathed in a deep blue glow.  We were standing under the monolith of the Radisson Blue Hotel and its beacon lights had colored the entire landscape – the ornamental gardens, the wet trees, the rain emerging from the black sky and lying at our feet in luminous sky-colored puddles.  

It was remarkable to find that a single wrong turn, that emerging from the familiar Dammtor station on its unfamiliar west side yielded this strange and magical landscape.  

Berlin and Hamburg: Bode Museum, Virgins, and La Sepia in Sternschanze

 

1.

Berlin’s Bode Museum occupies the northern corner of a four or five acre island in the Spree River at  Mitte, or the center of the city.  A number of famous cultural institutions are packed together on the island to the extent that the place is called “Museum Island”.  The Pergamon Museum is here, closed for renovations until 2026, as well as the Altes Museum, with its intimidating facade of colossal Doric columns supporting a pediment long as a train and adorned with an inscription in gold letters each about a yard tall – I don’t know what the inscription says: it is written in Latin, apparently celebrating the generosity of a Prussian King.  The famous bust of Nefertiti, presently a cause celebre between Germany and the Egyptians, sits in a small rotunda in the middle of the Altes Museum.  Also nearby is the Neues Museum, a picture gallery, designed as well to mimic a classical temple, albeit rather pinched in comparison to the jumbo-sized Altes Museum – its colonnade perches atop a tall pedestal with steps steep as a Maya temple leading up to its portico and walled interior.  By contrast with these imitation Parthenons, the Bode Museum sits like a luxury liner at the  prow of the island, a huge building with an Italianate renaissance facade curved gracefully around the river’s bend where the channel divides to enclose this spit of land with the Spree’s turgid, if rippling, and perceptible, currents.  The array of large windows within sandstone gables in two stacked registers rising over the pointed tip of the island epitomize grace and lucidity.  A brown dome surmounts the semi-circular curve of building looming over the split Spree canal – the rotunda neither soars nor is flattened to squat atop the building, but rather, expresses a reticent solemnity, justly proportioned and elevated over walls pierced by planet-shaped round windows at the base of the dome.  The place looks like a cross between a palace and some sort of austere, ennobled fortification.   

Like all great cities, Berlin is a combination of the majestic and squalid.  From the Haeckescher Markt S-Bahn station, an arcade under the tracks opens on some narrow lanes crooked here as they follow the twisting contour of the river.  We walk along an alleyway that is filthy with debris, the wreckage left by squatters including slabs of cardboard flattened to make mattress-like platforms on which to rest, tangles of rags and discarded clothing, windrows of bottles and paper sacks, this whole doleful spectacle of desolation smelling strongly of urine and excrement.  Some alcoves in the built-up brick embankment where the trains course back and forth overhead open into shallow recesses, also heaped with garbage.  The whole length of the alley is swarmed with foraging pigeons and seems to whisper things in your ear that your would rather not hear.  At the end of this passageway, the structures part on both sides of this cold groove in the city and the sky appears overhead stretched taut as a drum and, then, the canal intervenes, the Spree below tamed by concrete ledges and eerie-looking flights of dank stone steps leading down to the black waters that surround the island.  In the mist, another huge dome rises over the back side of the island and some street vendors are shoving pushcarts into place in the plazas between the museums and a couple of white swans with black domino masks over their eyes glide next to their reflections mirrored in the channel.

The Bode Museum’s interior, on the other side of the bridge across the river, is majestic.  Immense stairs lined with red carpet descend from high marble galleries lined with polished columns that look like agates.  An enormous equestrian statue sits at the bottom of the carpeted steps.  The dome of the building is a marble blossom overhead radiating white and yellow pillars around its circumference.  The building’s guts seem to consist of two large blocks of rooms wrapped around pale interior courtyards.  Beyond the grandiose entrance, there is yet another atrium where larger-than-life princes, also sculpted from icy-looking stone, scowl down at the visitor dwarfed by the cascades of white steps and the pillars thrust up to support the roof with its glass skylights and imperial colonnades.  It looks like the pompous lobby to an opera house.  At this hour, about 10:30 in the morning, the place is still and empty.  The long perspectives across galleries are vacant and motionless; congregations of carved figures stand at intervals, populating the halls with ornate images that always seem to be either on the verge of moving or that, perhaps, were gesticulating at you just before your eye focused on them.  The energy is all potential, like springs in repose, wrought in the coiled twists and sinewy contrapposto of the statuary.    

I had never been inside the Bode Museum.  Visitors, I think, tend toward the other more famous institutions on the island with their iconic collections – art by Menzel and Friedrich in the picture gallery and the Egyptian antiquities in the Altes Museum and, of course, the mighty Ishtar Gate and the Ionic Greek altar in the Pergamon Museum.  But, I would like to recommend the Bode – it’s too big and encyclopedic for close scrutiny and, if you want to see everything in the place, it will take you a week and, so, you will have to resolve to simply walk past many extraordinary things on display.  The quality of the sculptures, however, is remarkable and in every one of the museum’s 150 rooms there is something to delight and confound the eye.  The collection is figurative and religious statuary from the Roman era to the 19th century – the things on exhibit are three dimensional, poised on waist-high platforms and, in most cases, you have to stroll around the sculptures to fully appreciate them.  The textures of the polished stone and hewn wood; the inlaid amber eyes and the cool marble, like ice cream, veined with colors of iron like blood and amethyst and emerald – all of these things plead with you to touch them, to run your fingers over this simulation of flesh and muscle, although, of course, this temptation, overwhelming as it might be, must be resisted.  God is crucified in just about every corner of the hundred or more rooms; small cases glitter with coins and medallions and there are heaps of bright porcelain, mosaics that glint like broken glass, every sort of thing menacing or seductive to the eye and the eye’s touch – you worry the edges of stone images in your mind like you might tongue a broken tooth in your jaw.

2.

The ten-thousand masterpieces of figurative statuary in the Bode Museum convinces me of one thing:  from the dawn of time, one of human kind’s most obsessive pursuits, has been the making of images representing gods and saints, objects of erotic delectation, figures of hideous pain and torment.  Since I am a writer, I think of human enterprise primarily in terms of literature, poetry, the written word.  But, there is a more primordial urge, it seems, to sculpt and carve and turn blocks of stone or hunks of wood into life-like figures.  In the New World, in most places where I have lived, this impulse is concealed – there aren’t forests of sculpture competing for your eye in shopping malls or the plazas of American cities.  But in Europe, and, I suppose, most everywhere else on the planet, an imponderable amount of energy, skill, and craft has been devoted to making mostly life-size devotional images. (This seems to be the occult economy of the world, an enormous web of transactions all devoted to making artistic images of things that already exist in the transient substance of bone, flesh, and blood.) The primary occupation of mankind, thus, seems to be the creation of images, that is the production of objects resembling human faces and bodies.  The cells of the Bode Museum, one interlocked chamber after another, are like honey combs in a beehive, brimming over with a sweet surfeit of images of angels, demons, gods and saints, every manner of animal and human being.  In Herman Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund, a novel I read while I was in Germany, one of book’s protagonists, Goldmund, spends three years carving an ardent figure of the disciple Johannes (“John”) from a fat column of linden-wood.  If it takes three years to make a thing of this kind, how many millennia of craftsmanship are represented by the thousands of statues in the Bode Museum’s collection?

3.    

Here you will meet five-hundred portrait busts, either ardent or soldierly or distinguished, determined and proud or bland as an accountant or estates and trusts lawyer, some anguished with unspeakable martyrdom or equally inexpressible pleasure  – all variations on the expressions to which humans are heir presented here encyclopedically... A rotund St. Denis carries his head like a basketball cradled in hands cupped under his breastbone and a hermaphrodite carved in greyish marble swoons in the center of a little room decorated like a garden pavilion – try not to look at his genitals in a patch of moss and fallen leaf under his navel!  Against the wall, a fat man with merry countenance grins at you while, in the corridor, St. George, righteous and erect, leans on his devil-killing lance while a swine-sized demon writhes underfoot, tail arched to reveal the slot of a vulva on its belly.  A hundred demure virgins in garments elaborately chased into sinuous folds and drapes look down on the galleries where one or two or three visitors pause among the mob of figures or stumble to the repose of a bench; one virgin is resplendent in an orange dress and she shines like a neon light above a kebab place in the Reeperbahn; a Greek philosopher knocked from some cathedral perch is the color of smoke whirling off a fire, lean and haggard with a shaggy beard and a narrow, elongated head, all stretched like some sort of silly putty or charcoal haze congealed into this slim sprig of stone; wild men with hairy shoulders peer through trellises of carved vine and the fall of the rebel angels, interlocked in a puzzle of finely worked ivory, baffles the eye with its insect-sized, entwined forms, all shaped into a white lattice; Christ,as large as you or I, sits astride a humble, dog-like donkey, set on wheels to be dragged in a procession, and Mary Magdalene claws her way out of the stone tablet of her tomb, the sepulcher shattered, as if by an earthquake and some sort of foetus sprouting from her thigh like a plague boil (discomfited angels flee from this calamity) and, against the wall, two martial figures, almost twice life-sized graciously beckon – their beards are savage like inverted flames and they wear vast plumes on their helmets, twisting, rearing serpent-shaped forms that make them look like gorgons; each carries an unfurled, fragile-seeming banner and their faces and hands are painted peach pink.  In recesses clad in stone the color of freshly slaughtered pork (veined with fat), more pale saints twist their heads on piles of marble garments, faces like white roses opening to your eyes and, at last, there are Gothic sculptures by Tilman Riemenschneider, the four evangelists with their beasts beside their scriptorium benches and their heads all turned and tilted so that they seem to chime like great bells and, nearby, a street scene in three-dimensions, a matron among the city-fathers who wear hats that look like the belfries of 13th century cathedrals, lime wood cut in smooth shapely grooves and curves and eloquent hands alive with gestures that I can’t quite read, expressive long fingers and palms as smooth as rocks turned and polished by the tides of the sea and great staring eyes that seem to strain to meet your gaze... and, so, it continues, an exhausting tactile spectacle room after  room, with laminated guides in wooden slots by the figures, admonitory texts about the role of women and homosexuals in the Roman empire and  Byzantium and medieval times as well, a lectionary reminding us, perhaps, not to be too proud of the progress that we think we have achieved because there is always more to do in the fight for equality and liberation, and, although not all handsome young men portrayed suffering and dying or in raptures of ecstasy or praying or brandishing arms, although not all of these are meant to be homosexual, these figures are designed (so it is maintained) to inspire desire, even, lust with respect to the male body, just as the images of women are frequently entangled with misogynism and repulsion  – at least, so it is maintained in a hundred and fifty rigid cards coated in cold plastic and written in both English and German – an arsenal of politically correct interpretation, take it or leave it as you wish.  

4.

Tilman Riemenschneider’s four evangelists gracing the Bode Museum (Berlin Staatliche Museum) are figures from the predella of an altarpiece at Muennerstadt, carved in lindenwood (or lime-tree wood).  The figures were made when Riemenschneider was 30 or 32, around 1490.  (Linden trees were cultivated expressly as a source for woodcutting material – lime wood from genus Tilla is less dense than other hardwoods, shows less susceptibility to warping, and is readily worked with the knife and chisel.)  Riemenschneider was born in the heart of Germany and spent his life in various villages and cities around the Frankfurt area.  He seems to have been influenced by the great late-Gothic engraver Martin Schongauer and many of his figures have the faintly elongated, expressionistic contours of the saints and martyrs in Schongauer’s wood cuts and copper plates.  Riemenschneider is famous for his Madonnas whose faces are said to be “inward-looking” –what this means is unclear to me since a countenance is always exterior even when brooding about some inner anguish.  (Most art criticism is eloquent gibberish).  

Riemenschneider is claimed to be the model for the master woodcarver Nikolai in Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund, the 1933 novel that read while in Hamburg.  (Goldmund is bewitched by a Virgin carved by Nikolai and tries to become an apprentice to the master woodcarver; Nikolai recognizes that Goldmund is a free-spirit whose ecstasies and privations have elevated him far beyond other apprentices and determines that he will teach the young man but not formally engage the unruly youth as his student.  Later, Goldmund carves a brilliantly expressive Johannes figure, the evangelist John, and Nikolai asks the young man to join him in his workshop, marry his comely daughter, and, even, urges his acceptance to the local woodcarvers’ trade guild; Goldmund feels that these privileges will be an imposition on his freedom and, so, he departs the city where he has sought refuge for three years, returns to wandering the forests and meadows, and, later, almost perishes in the plague) After his death in 1531, Riemenschneider was forgotten and, during his life time, not a famous figure such as Albrecht Duerer, his contemporary.  His gravestone was accidentally discovered in 1822 and, gradually, his corpus of work was defined and his fame as an exemplar of German piety grew in a manner parallel to the expansion of German nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Hesse’s oblique reference to him in his novel is part of this subsequent history of rediscovery and has, of course, unfortunate connections to the cult of the Deutsch artist during the Nazi period.

Riemenschneider’s piety, both ecstatic and curiously reticent and refined, is thought to embody the intellectual currents that fueled the Protestant Reformation.  In 1525, during the Peasant’s Rebellion, a savage popular manifestation of the Reformation (although denounced by Luther), Tilman Riemenschneider was on the wrong side of the conflict.  During this period, master craftsmen had considerable prestige, and Riemenschneider was on the Wuerzburg City Council.  The Council was ordered to arrest and fight rebelling peasants who had taken refuge in the city.  Riemenschneider and his colleagues refused and, later, in a pitched battle outside the city gates, eight-thousand peasant rebels were slaughtered.  The Crown Prince of Wuerzburg detained the City Fathers, including Riemenschneider, and had them tortured.  It was alleged that Riemenschneider’s hands were crushed and that this brought an end to his wood carving.  The story is seductive but, almost certainly, untrue.

5.

In the Sailor’s Chapel in Hamburg, the St. Katherina Kirche, there is a lissome wooden sculpture of the its patron made around 1350.  St. Catherine  has a sweet, round face and cocks her head as if hearing some remote, almost imperceptible music.  She wears a scarlet tunic and dress around which a cloak the color of brass (with an inner lining that is bright blue) is wrapped.  Her cheeks are round and faintly rosy and, atop her head, she has a crown with ludicrous-looking spires of ornate, oriental crosses, fleur-de-lys of gilt tracery work.  Of course, the church heavens are filled with a vast pipe organ that looks like a burnished instrument of war, but, otherwise, most of the walls are bare.  Bombing stripped the altars of these churches in 1943 and calcined their interiors and this place, standing above the Nikolia Fleet, a narrow channel incised into the city, was relatively poor and could not be restored to its full pomp and magnificence.  Bach performed on the predecessor of this organ and the church pastor, Phillip Nikolai was the great composer’s librettist –Nikolai wrote the text to the cantata “Wachet auf, Ruft uns die Stimme” (sometimes translated as “Sleeper’s Awake”).  Today, all of these churches are engaged in vigorous advocacy on the question of Ukraine and its war with Russia and, under the altar in the empty St. Katherina’s Kirche, I found a cell-phone next to a very neatly bound sheaf of wheat – a theatrical work on the Holodomer (or Ukrainian famine induced by Stalin) is performed here nightly. An elaborate art work, white tapestries showing female figures about twice life-size walking away from the spectator, is hung along the side of the nave.  The art installation, seemingly a comment on Friedrich’s famous “Rueckenfigure” of the “Wanderer above the Sea of Mist” is entitled, with Brechtian self-confidence: “By closely observing others, you may see a resemblance of your self.”  

St. Catherine’s Church is the second oldest structure surviving in the Hamburg, only a stone’s throw away from the vast brick ramparts of the “Warehouse City” and the narrow, medieval tenements where the sailor’s wives once lived among brewers and small craftsmen. The somber dark waters of the canal hold the reflection of the high steeple on their bosom.  Of course, it’s not clear how the age of buildings should be measured in this city – it was bombed into rubble in July of 1943 and photographs show the hulk of a enormous bell lying like some kind of perverse fallen fruit in a shambles of broken walls, smashed brick and masonry.  Everything visible today had to be rebuilt.  

6.

On one of our last night’s in Hamburg, Angelica and I went to La Sepia, a Portuguese restaurant in the Sternschanze district.  Sternschanze station is one stop to the west on the S-bahn line from Dammtor and, therefore, close to where we were lodged.  The neighborhood is a funky mix of bars, dance clubs, and restaurants, some of them so popular that lines of people are waiting on the sidewalk outside.  The buildings are old and, apparently, this is a part of town that is being gentrified. The haggard-looking buildings tower over silky ribbons of neon at street-level and music simmers in alleys and at intersections.  

There are several Portuguese districts in Hamburg, neighborhoods characterized by Tapas restaurants and seafood places. (The old Portuguese Viertel is near Landungsbruecke, the excursion pier on the harbor, in a tangle of old streets under the river bluff.)  La Sepia, named I suppose for the ink squirted by distressed Mediterranean and Atlantic squid, is one of the older establishments in Sternenschanze, dating back to the hippy era in the early ‘70's when the place was mostly a haven for squatters.  

The restaurant smells strongly, if not unpleasantly of steamed and broiled fish, and there are fat old men working as waiters, gruff fellows who are not to be trifled with.  There’s a menu in inept English and, also, offerings in German neatly written in a sort of laborious long-hand on a chalkboard.  A little after we enter the restaurant and are seated, a family with husband and wife and three teenage children are escorted to a table near us.  The oldest son seems to have returned from some scholastic endeavors abroad and he is very effusive, speaking enthusiastically and, at length, to the apparent delight of his handsome father and mother.  These are fit, athletic-looking Germans, neatly dressed and groomed, well-equipped for the perpetual rain outside with thick plush coats and fur-lined hoods.  I order “limbs of Polpo” –that is, octopus – and platter arrives with fat rubbery-looking (although relatively tender) tentacles grilled until their tips are a little charred.  

The two teenage daughters don’t seem much interested in their brother’s narrative and, so, they scroll through their cell-phone messages in a desultory way.  The youngest daughter has a pale, perfectly round face that seems somewhat blurry to me, a milky forehead and a very slightly receding chin.  She is beautiful and looks familiar to me.  Where have I seen these slender shoulders and petal-like hands and this unfocused, wan face with white cheeks just slightly suffused with rose, petal-mouth with a discrete underbite?  Then, it occurs to me that I am seeing the figure of the Virgin as she appears in a hundred carved effigies in the Bode Museum, cream complexion slightly tinted with the only faintest flare of cheeks.  The Greek word for “virgin” means “young woman” and I imagine that the master woodcutters who carved these religious figures based them on the thirteen- and fourteen-year old girls that they saw on the streets or who might be persuaded with sweets and trinkets to pose for them.  How old is the Virgin Mary in the Gospels?  Isn’t she a young girl, a teenager, just like this pale apparition sitting fifteen feet from me and engrossed in texts on her cell-phone? 

Hamburg: Arrival, Dammtor, and the Moorweide

 

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.         

Germany: Stolpersteine

 

They are mostly inconspicuous, but, when your eye is trained to see them, “Stolpersteine” embedded in urban sidewalks in Germany are, at once, ubiquitous and inescapable.  These “stumbling stones” are square bronze plates, engraved with letters and dates, inlaid flush to the surface of the concrete underfoot.  “Stolpersteine” remember the victims of Nazi persecution.  The plates, about four inches square (10 cm x 10 cm), are incised with a name, in some cases a profession, and, then, three dates.  The first date is marked “Geboren” (that is, “born”); the second date is labeled “Deportiert” – that is, “deported.” Typically, a third date follows in a column below the “deportation” information; this line is inscribed “Ermordert” (“murdered”) and identifies a concentration camp: Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, Buchenwald, etc.  In some instances, the final line on the plaque isn’t quite so dire: some of these victims escaped to the Netherlands or America; “uberlebt” that is “survived”.  Several “Stolpersteine” that I inspected end in the word “unbekannt” – this expression usually follows deportations to Riga or some place else in the East and means that no one knows what happened to the person after they were arrested and transported.  In several cases, I observed “Stolpersteine” inscribed “Flucht in den Tod” – “fled into death”, an euphemism that means “Selbstmord” or “suicide”.  The plates show variations: most begin with the small lettered words: “Hier wohnte” – that is, “Here lived” followed by a name.  Some mark locations of executions: “Hier gehenkt” – “Hanged here”.  Sometimes additional information is provided although in laconic form: “deprived of rights”, “humiliated”, “imprisoned” and so on.  In the case of women, a maiden name is sometimes stated.  There is enough variation in the inscriptions to warrant inspection of individual plaques.  You have to stoop to read them and, in some cases, foot traffic has blurred the incised letters.  

There are about 6500 “Stolpersteine” in Hamburg.  Sixty-one thousand of them, give or take a few hundred, are embedded in sidewalks throughout Germany, but, also, in the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, and Finland and other countries where the Nazis murdered people.  (In fact, the first of these Stolpersteine were installed in Salzburg in 1997 – the Germans are orderly people and all of them are duly permitted and registered.)  Most of the victims are Jews, although some are identified as homosexual, political opponents of the regime, mentally ill and disabled people as well as Romany.  

The vast project involving the installation of these memorial markers began with a concept published in 1995 and was initiated by a Cologne artist, Gunter Demnig.  The “Stolperstein” are concrete paving blocks with brass plates affixed to the side exposed on the sidewalk.  Of course, they require care and maintenance.  Non-profit foundations manage the Stolpersteine and detailed registries with additional biographical data are available on-line. The installation of these commemorative plates is ongoing – additional research is underway and new Stolpersteine are always being added to the inventory now existing.  

In German, a “Stolpersteine” is a “stumbling block” – that is, idiomatically, a problem that will not go away.  Before the Nazis, when someone stumbled or tripped, a German folk expression might be spoken: “A Jew must be buried here.”  During the Nazi period, Jewish cemeteries were ripped up and their gravestones pressed into service as part of roads and sidewalks.  Accordingly, the Stolpersteine are resonant with many aspects of German language and culture.  However, the term phrase “stumbling block” is metaphorical – the plates are pressed flat to the surface of the sidewalk and, in fact, you can’t actually trip over them.  

Stolpersteine impressed into the edges or corners of sidewalks don’t weather and retain their “new penny” patina – they shine brightly in the sun.  One thinks of coins set on the eyes of corpses.  The Stolpersteine are like those coins, obols under the tongue of the dead, or pennies decking the eyelids of a cadaver.  They are watchful, but inert, always looking up at you with their penny eyes.       

2.

Three Stolpersteine are inset in the sidewalk (“Trottoir”) outside of 3 Heimhuder Strasse where I am staying in Hamburg.  I study them closely, squatting to read the words bitten into the brass tablets.  The plaques are arrayed in an L-shape on the sidewalk directly leading to the cream-colored townhouse’s front door.

It’s always raining and wet plate-sized maple leaves, pumpkin-colored, are draped over the brass plates.  A sodden cigarette butt is embedded in a crack in the cobble-stones next to the plaques.  The maple leaves have precise edges and nature has made them elegant and, even, one might say, eloquent, an articulation of autumn with its mists and low-hanging clouds.  There are many Stolperstein in the neighborhood, sometimes, groups of five or six in an array at the threshold of restaurants, offices, and boutiques in the neighborhood.  At first, I pause to read each one of them.  

The 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht falls on the weekend of November 9 and 10.  The Stolpersteine now are, indeed, obstacles to be navigated around.  Small votive candles are burning next to them and modest bouquets of flowers are strewn on the pavement near the memorials.  You can stumble over these improvised memorials and, in fact, some of the candles are broken and there are smears of white wax trodden into the concrete, gobs and skids of the stuff.  (Kristallnacht was an organized riot in the Fall of 1938 in which mobs destroyed Jewish stores and left the streets and sidewalks littered with gouts of broken glass.)  The votive candles, extinquished by the steady rain or knocked onto their sides, remain on the pavement until Sunday night when they are removed.  The scabs of white wax remain on the concrete until washed away by the rain – in some cases, this takes a week.  Although human hands must have placed the candles and lit them, and, although people must have removed the wet, wilted flowers and the glass bulbs containing the candles, I never see anyone doing this – it’s as if the candles and the flowers have emerged from the pavement spontaneously, blossoming with orange flickering flame and bright petals for 48 hours and, then, vanishing.  

3.

After the anniversary of Kristallnacht, I am less attentive to the Stolpersteine.  Habit and custom have dulled my apprehension of the memorial plaques.  At the end of my month in Hamburg, I can scarcely see them at all.  People pass over the brass inscriptions heedlessly – after all, they are made to be walked upon.  In some places, rubbish accumulates around them.  A beer bottle is broken near some Stolpersteine on a street nearby and shards of glass bracket them, and rasp under foot.  Of course, there are wandering dogs.  It takes an inquiring eye to activate them, to bring the inscriptions to life and, after a while, the eye dulls and that Stolpersteine are inert, paralyzed by our inattention, dim and faded amidst the shapely fallen leaves.  

Berlin: On the Reichstag and Brandenburg Tor

 Berlin: Reichstag and Brandenburg Tor

If all goes well, by no means a fait accompli, on Deutsche Bahn, it is eighty minutes by rail from Hamburg to Berlin.  The high-speed ICE train runs non-stop from Hamburg’s hauptbahnhof to Berlin-Spandau (a few travelers may get off there) and, then, to Berlin’s central station in Mitte (“mid-town”).  Between the two cities, the country is forested, colonnades of virginal white birches contrasting with tall, stiff-looking red pines.  Sometimes, the land clears for a moment on small patches of wet furrows – I am traveling in mid-November – all enclosed by the gloomy woods, The express train slows to glide through deserted stations in small cheerless-looking towns, lonely platforms under the eaves of wooden sheds though which you might glimpse a couple streets dead-ending at the grim railroad buildings, a brick church on the nub of a hill, perhaps, a grocery store flying little yellow and blue pennants to show that it is open, standing near some bicycles shackled to utility poles.  

After the woods and empty wet meadows, Berlin Hauptbahnhof is an explosion of color and light, swarming with people on the modern metal balconies and stairwells overlooking crowded parallel platforms, the whole spectacle lit by advertisements and illuminated curry wurst and pastry booths.  At this time of year, the beer and soft drink kiosks sell “Gluehwein” at 3.5 euros a mug.  

The escalator lifting us from the train platforms (“Gleise” or “tracks”) glides past a brightly lit display that reads: “Mitte Bahnhof – der Reichstag ist noch um die Ecke – that is, “Central Station – the Reichstag is just around the corner.”  This is true: emerging from the station, I can see the grim shell of the Reichstag building rising over a nondescript jumble of glass and concrete structures, the loop of a grey river flowing in the  abstract groove of a concrete trough in the foreground.  Distances are deceptive.  It’s hard to get a sense of the scale of the Reichstag building, a structure that is much larger (and, therefore, more remote) than one might, at first, expect.  

We walk for fifteen minutes, making a few false starts at first, but reaching the Leonardo Hotel without too much difficulty.  The air spurts a little cold rain and the streets are wet.  There’s an Irish pub across the street from the hotel located at Brecht Plaza.  The famous Berliner Ensemble occupies a highrise across a desolate patch of grass and shrubbery; some neon scribbled along the top of the building describes the show now on offer at the theater.  

At check-in, the clerk, an attractive young woman, insists that we are on “business’ and not pleasure.  But, of course, there’s no business purpose for this trip.  She asks three times with insinuation that we are traveling for business and, each time, we give the wrong answer.  This is puzzling until she explains the stakes: “There is no city tax if you are here for business,” she says.  On three rooms rented for the night, avoiding the tax saves us enough money for “a couple of beers” she says.

A little later, we walk to the Reichstag.  The stroll is along the concrete canal in which the Spree flows.  On one bank, the Reichstag looms over small adjacent buildings, reconstructed from the rubble and, apparently, administrative offices – the structures are handsome with vaguely renaissance exteriors spikes on their window-sills like knitting needles to repel pigeons.  (Across the river, big ultra-modern buildings house chambers for legislative functions – the buildings seem to be burst apart, disassembled into intersecting planes and boxes separated shadowy voids; the architecture is like the deconstructionist work of Peter Eisenman, geometric white facades slotted with oblong and square openings.  A few hundred yards away, an actual work by Eisenman fills a plaza – the 2006 monument to the murdered Jews of Europe, several acres covered with squashed stelae, stone boxes massed together to create a huge, impenetrable labyrinth that looks like something midway between a graveyard and construction site.)  In this neighborhood, the Reichstag looms over everything like a bad dream, a hulking mass of smoke-colored masonry with its glass dome exposed like a tumor over the vast, foreboding portico.  On the pediment over the great, war-scarred columns, the words “Dem Deutschen Volk” are inscribed – a curious grammatical construction; the “German People” are syntactically the object of some sentence, but what exactly is said in that sentence remains unclear.  (I think “Dem Deutschen Volk” expresses something like “this building is dedicated to the German people”,  however, with the prefatory phrase omitted.)  The building is like congealed smoke and ash.  The dome, made transparent by the English architect, Norman Foster, when the structure was restored, gives the huge edifice, something of the quality of a colossal and perverse gumball machine, emptied of its candy and standing in the corner of a car repair shop or decaying commercial arcade.  Construction makes a maze of trenches, earth movers, and trailer sheds in front of the building and its hard to get a reasonable vantage on the Reichstag.  Cell-phone pictures don’t really succeed and the wire fences and hoardings prevent you from getting close enough to the towering facade to inspect its aerial terraces where men bearing huge swords menace the sky.  

This is ground-zero for the lamentable history of Germany in the twentieth century, a place so haunted that the East Germans in the DDR left the ruin alone, preferring to use the tongues of its lawns for sunbathing in mild weather.  Inside the transparent dome (at first, I typed “doom”) some shadowy tourists hover in mid-air, ascending the spiral walkways to the vantage atop the glass rotunda.  (I have earlier noted that Foster’s goal, that is, creating a structure that exemplifies “transparency” is a failure both as an architectural conceit and symbol; I’ve been in the dome and, from the spiral ramp, you look down on the coffin lid of a sealed interior.  Whatever is going on in there is completely invisible. And, in Berlin, the air itself is congested, thick with memory and despair, and so the bulb of the dome isn’t exactly transparent in any weather.  When it’s hot the dome seems to be filled with steam; in the cold, the atmosphere is opaque, pressing closely against the glass that runs with rain and condensed mist.)

The Brandenburg Tor is remarkably close to the Reichstag, just beyond a grey mall where a tangle of trees marks the edges of the Tierpark.  The walk between the Tor and the Reichstag takes less than ten minutes, a testimony as to how closely nested the old East and West Berlin were – the Reichstag was on the DDR side, within the old Soviet sector, and the Tor, of course, the symbol of West Berlin, although located on the exact line of the Wall.  The great gate with its austere fluted columns is the pedestal for a great bronze quadriga, a chariot drawn by enormous horses on which a towering goddess holds the reins.  The quadriga isn’t a mere ornament at the gate’s summit, but rather the raison d’etre for the structure, a huge sculpture that seems disproportionately large when viewed from beneath the Tor – the clump of metal horses, rearing and plunging, and the howitzer barrel of the goddess tower overhead, atop the gate like a vast bronze tarantula or some sort of bizarre, plumed hat.  Originally, the figure of the goddess was described as Eirene, that is, the Greek deity associated with peace, but during the Napoleonic wars, the wreath hovering over the colossus was re-cast as a warlike eagle on an imperial standard.  (The Nazis added an iron cross to the standard.)  The great gate with its vast doric columns rising without bases is flanked by smaller classical temples (“stoa” or, originally, port of entry custom houses) annexed to the towering walls of the structure, smaller buildings with dark oblong openings and sepulchral polished stone concealing their interiors.  

The Brandenburg Tor marks the end of the royal procession way from the palace a mile away to the Tierpark, a green sector once populated with wild boar and deer for the King’s hunting pleasure.  The mile-long lane is planted with stately linden trees (hence it’s name “Unter den Linden”) and, now, lined with expensive hotels and big marble embassy buildings.  The quadriga is so large, so disproportionate, as to seem a sort of eyesore and it can’t be oriented in any way that makes sense – if the bronze chariot with its tutelary goddess is supposed to protect the city, then, it should face out from the flat plinth atop the gate – but, instead, it faces toward the palace, not defensive, but rather, somehow, admonitory and, even, threatening. Everything about the structure seems paradoxical and, on the day that I visited, standing in the grey sleet, the inside surfaces of the gate where completely sheathed in long plywood boxes over which white plastic had been stretched as tight as a drum.  This rendered the gate curiously abstract, just a bland facade without openings of any kind (in fact, under the hoardings, there are six columns – the outer passageways once for use by commoners with the central arcade restricted to use by members of the royal court.)  Neither the columns nor the passages between them were visible and the quadriga, with its wind-blown drapery and agitated bronze horse-flesh, the goddess again bearing the halo of the wreath of peace, sits on the ledge above the broad triumphal way like a kind of over-sized and hideous knickknack.  People stood under the featureless wall of wood and plastic grumbling as they adjusted their cameras to make disappointing pictures.  

(Although I didn’t know it at the time, a “eco-terrorist group” as they are characterized in the German media, “The Last Generation”, used fire extinguishers to spray orange paint all over the columns supporting the flat-ledge of the gate.  This was on September 17, 2023.  The wall of wood and plastic sheathing covered repair measures underway when I visited in mid-November, about six weeks later.  “The Last Generation” have engaged in showy protests over what they regard as the destruction of the natural world by climate change.  They have obliterated paintings by Monet and glued themselves to canvases by Van Gogh – why exactly they vent their wrath on inoffensive works of art is unclear to me.  By contrast, however, I would note that anyone would be hard-pressed to characterize the mighty and aggressive Brandenburg Tor as inoffensive – rather, it symbolizes all sorts of things, many of them malign.)

One of the most expensive hotels in the world, the Adlon Kempinski, stands in the shadow of the great gate.  (There is an art museum as well right under the plinths of the triumphal arch – when I was in Berlin, a big show of works by Edith Clever were advertised, the actress and singer’s sorrowful face with high Slavic-looking cheeks looking down from a fifty foot tall banner.)  The entire width of the street in front of the hotel was occupied with black limousines and sinister-looking panel trucks.  Stanchions had been set up to exclude pedestrians from nearby sidewalks and the median between the lanes and phalanxes of motorcycle cops were gathered at all intersections.  A group of men in boxy business suits were loading teletypes and copying machines into one of the vans.  Obviously, some affair of state had been underway but, as one might expect, the nature of the diplomatic mission and its participants was obscure – whatever conclave had occurred resulting in this exodus from the alabaster corridors of the Adlon, was confidential and privileged  and worried-looking men with cell-phones to their ears stood among the parked limousines, a whole motorcade of dark Mercedes Benz vehicles, awaiting whatever it was that was about to happen.

The route from the Tor to our hotel led past the bland and understated ramparts of the American embassy, a place almost hidden from sight with a tiny name-plaque next to its security door.  Rows of cops were standing there as well and the sidewalk was blocked with more metal barricades so that we had to cross the street to get back to the Spree channel and its bridges and the Berliner Ensemble building at Brecht Plaza.  Rain fell in a desultory way, peppering the puddles at intersections.  In the distance, sirens hooted.