On a Bus-Stop

 

As I walked to work, I passed the house where a Hispanic family lives with a big black dog.  The dog is a pit bull mix with a head like a tomahawk and, so, I am always a bit skittish when I approach this place.  At this hour, a few minutes before eight a.m., trains on the edge of town hoot mournfully and yellow school buses prowl the residential streets picking up children. 

The door at the home with the pit bull opened partially.  I expected the dog to emerge.  But, instead, a little boy with back pack strapped to his shoulders came out.  He hurried down the steps to the sidewalk and, then, ran ahead of me.  The child was tiny with short legs but he ran quickly toward the bus-stop at the next intersection.  I expected him to tire after a few hundred feet, but he didn’t slow down.  If anything, he ran even more quickly, darting forward to the corner.  There he paused, looking both right and left as he had been taught, and, upon confirming that the intersection was clear, scurried across the street, the first in his race to the bus stop.  The train circling the town whistled again.  In cold weather, parents bring their kids to this bus stop and, then, wait in idling cars nearby, but it was unseasonably warm and no one else was about.  

I crossed the street to where the child was standing.  He had bright eyes and didn’t seem winded at all.

“You are a very good runner,” I told the little boy.

He answered but I didn’t understand what he said.

“You are fleet of foot,” I said to the boy.

“I run fast at school,” the child said proudly.

I turned and walked two blocks in another direction.  A bus was approaching the intersection ahead of me. It stopped and children boarded and their parents who had been standing at the curb, turned to go home.  One of the fathers lit a cigarette.

A woman hurried toward the bus holding the hand of a little girl in a blue-green snow-suit.  The little girl was whining.  It was a protest of some sort.  The woman gestured at the bus a hundred yards away.  The bus driver wasn’t about to wait for late-comers.  Discipline had to be enforced.  Nearing a rail crossing out in the country, tracks parallel to a battered shelter-belt, the train hooted again.

The bus lurched forward, turning at the corner to drive toward the stop where the fast runner was waiting.  The woman turned around with the child, muttering something under her breath.  The little girl began to wail.

I understood that she had not wanted to get up, not wanted to leave the comfort of her warm bed, and had resisted her mother in every way.  But, now, she saw that she was late to the bus and, probably, would be late to school as well and, although, she didn’t want to go, she didn’t want to not go either and would be ashamed to be tardy.  You don’t want to go and, yet, you don’t want to be left behind.  It is a common dilemma.  Many share it.   

Hamburg: Hagenbeck Tierpark

 

1.

Why would you go to a zoo in a foreign country?  An animal is an animal.  A German lion confined in Hamburg’s Hagenbeck Tierpark is no different from a lion on display in Minneapolis or San Diego or, for that matter, Lima or Beijing.  You don’t need to travel to view exotic animals.  They are exhibited at the Minnesota Zoo in Eagan.  

But a month in Hamburg is a long time, enough days and weeks to see just about everything in that city, and, so, Angelica and I took the red line subway (U-Bahn) to Hagenbeck Tierpark, a famous zoo located about seven stops north of Dammtor Station.  

The zoo occupies a large, more or less, level park with its main gate accessed across an open plaza near the train-stop.  An elaborate Japanese pavilion constructed on pads of concrete islands in a koi pond is near the entry kiosk.  A huge shrouded gate, wrapped like a Christo installation, marks the zoo’s historic entrance.  This structure was being renovated when Angelica and I visited and, therefore, was hidden under suspended, drooping acres of canvas drapery.  Postcards show the gates to be thirty feet high, a complicated superstructure built from brown and white terracotta, highlighted with Pompeiian red.  The gate is a rococo fantasy with ornate columns and curved pediments, echoing the shapely s-curves of the trunks of bronze elephants embedded above the entry.  Atop the high towers supporting the wrought iron entrance gates, a bronze polar bear faces its counterpart, a huge lion, on the opposing red-capped pillar.  Outlying domed pavilions adjacent to the central gated entrance support an American Indian, one-and-a half times life-size with war bonnet and tomahawk and a bellicose-looking Mongolian warrior.  (These bronze figures refer, circumspectly, to the zoo’s somewhat sinister history with respect to human exhibits.)  None of this was visible to Angelica and I; we passed between great, slumping cascades of tarpaulin, water cupped overhead in the folds of the construction shrouds.

In the distance, a range of crags towered over a knoll, a skyline of manufactured mountains, also grey and brown about the height of a grain elevator in a lonely one-street village somewhere out on the prairie.  The concrete and plaster crags form the backdrop to one of Hagenbeck’s “panorama” exhibits, that is, his innovative habitats for whole ecosystems of exotic animals – in this case, flamingos, hippos, lions, and wildebeeste in the Serengeti exhibit.  The crags have a theatrical aspect, a sawtooth range of rocky heights, and they can be accessed (I discovered) from the rear via a scary set of winding steps inset in the concrete that leads in a fissure up to an overlook across the lagoon and the habitat.  This habitat with its artificial spires and pinnacles is the zoo’s trademark.  Of course, the ostentatious gate and the Serengeti cliffs were all bombed to rubble in World War Two and had to be rebuilt from the ground up.  

The park is overrun with some kind of rodent that is about the size of a poodle, an animal that looks like a cross between a deer and a guinea big.  These creatures range along the paths nibbling on the shrubbery or browsing the dry leaves.  (I wrote down the name of the species in my notebook but can’t read my handwriting to report to you on that animal.)  The most impressive part of the zoo is the large and complex habitat called “Eismeer” (the sea of ice – a title that invokes the famous Friedrich picture of polar ice entrapping a sailing vessel).  The exhibit is glacial white and blue, another range of fissured concrete and fiber-glass cliffs that abuts a huge lagoon.  You enter the exhibit on a ramp that slopes imperceptibly downward until you find that you under the water in concrete tunnels, facing beluga whales, porpoises, seals, and enormous walruses swimming in the depths of man-made lake.  Blue light suffuses the walkways and the huge animals sweep majestically along the glass walls.  The walruses are particularly remarkable, pink as boiled shrimp and with shaggy, raw-looking faces of whisker and tendril above their large, radiant eyes.  The animals are superb swimmers and they burst through the water like torpedos, moving effortlessly among the blue shadows.  Penguins dive beside the walruses and seals, lithe projectiles piercing the gloom.  At the lowest point in the exhibit, seemingly forty feet below water, a glass wall the size of old-time movie palace screen shimmers with dim blue radiance – sharks are cutting through the cold water among banner-like pennants of colorful fish and huge ominous rays that carry shadow and darkness in their wake.  At one point, I looked up to a skylight and saw tons of walrus hovering overhead, a strange marble cylinder with flippers hanging in the water.

In black rooms simulating caverns swarms of bats clamber over bananas pinned on spikes.  The air stinks of pneumonia.  In an elephant house, the big animals stand in showers gushing down from the trunks of terracotta elephants – the air in that building is also suffocating with the rank, intense odor of the pachyderms.  Tiles porticos display Ganesha above their arches, openings by which the animals access their exterior pens – it’s too cold for them to be outside today.  In the orangutan environment, a vertical maze of tree-trunks the size of pipe organ cylinders, the beasts are hanging like huge, hairy bait from slack-looking tires and overhead cables.  The orangutans all have names and displays characterize their personalities: for instance, the female Salmi is described as “dreamy, solitary, and likes to sit alone or build elaborate nests.”  The mandrill baboons have neon-red rumps, great spongy excrescences on the back side of their bodies.  The males strut around and, sometimes, try to mount the females who push them away in a desultory way.  The baboons are like sit-com characters: the young bucks posture and the old males brood in out-of-the way niches and the young mothers, with their rabble of babies, clutch nervous-looking infants to their breasts.  A dominant male with a grizzle of grey around his mouth defends his territory, bellowing and chasing away rivals but he seems on the brink of a nervous break-down, twitching with a harried expression.  

Of course, feeding the animals is strictly forbidden (“streng verboten”) but there is moat near an exterior pen for the elephants and a half-dozen of the big animals have come to edge of trench, extending their trunks over the ditch so that visitors can feed them dry leaves.  The elephants have sensitive moist tips to their trunks, fist-sized that are like pale pink hands.  Angelica wants to extend a bouquet of dry leaves in the direction of the elephants but I don’t think she should disobey the big signs prominently displayed and warning against exactly what everyone else is doing.  A slight drizzle is clouding the air.  The elephants are strangely expressive.  You have the illusion, even more than in the case of the rather cartoonish baboons, that you can read their minds and, even, somehow communicate with them.      

2.

Klaus Hagenbeck, the father of Carl, the man who founded the zoo, was a fishmonger.  He kept a half-dozen trained seals and fed them herring down at the fish market in Altona to advertise the freshness of his wares.  Exotic animals were often on show in Hamburg.  The city was once full of sailors who had sailed around the world and, often, they brought back chimpanzees and marmosets and, even, tigers and lions with them from their travels.  Klaus Hagenbeck acquired a small polar bear.  Polar bears also like fish and he fed the animal with herring and cod caught in the North Sea and its estuaries.

Carl inherited the family fish business around 1870 and he quickly discovered that his exotic animals were more valuable as zoological specimens then as props to advertise fresh fish.  Accordingly, he expanded his menagerie and began showing the animals in the zoo that he built in north Hamburg.  

During the 19th century, panoramas were popular forms of entertainment.  A large canvas surface, forming a house-high circular scroll, was painted with elaborately detailed images, often battle scenes or cityscapes.  In order to enhance, the illusion presented by the 360 degree panorama, the foreground to the picture, occupied by the viewers on a sort of panopticon platform (similar to surveillance towers in prisons) was embedded in an artificial landscape consistent with the painted image; for instance, if the battle portrayed took place in a desert, sand and barren stone and a few cactus might be arranged between the panopticon and the enormous canvas; similarly, a painting of the Arctic might feature a white-flocked landscape simulating snow between the viewer and the panorama.  Hagenbeck, who was attuned to all forms of spectacle, operated a few panoramas and he transferred that technique to his animal park, creating “panorama-like” displays in which the terrain around the animal habitats was transformed into a simulacrum of the creature’s natural environment.  This innovation initiated the so-called “Hagenbeck Revolution” – that is, the concept of showing exotic animals in landscapes separated from the public by embankments or moats; this approach to zoological gardens persists until the present day.  

A shrewd publicist (he was friends with P.T. Barnum) Hagenbeck realized that the authenticity of his animal exhibits would be enhanced by installing similarly exotic human beings in his displays.  To that end, Hagenbeck recruited Saimi (Lapplanders) to appear alongside reindeers and polar bears in his Arctic exhibits.  He acquired groups of Nubians to live alongside lions and wildebeest in his African landscapes.  A South Pacific exhibit featured a fully equipped and functioning Samoan village.  These features were popular elements of his animal exhibits.  But, of course, the result wasn’t so propitious, at least, for some of the inhabitants of his human zoos.  For instance, a group of eight Inuits imported from Labrador toured Europe with an exhibit of caribou and polar bears; unfortunately, all of the so-called Eskimos died of small-pox shortly after they were put on display.  

Hagenbeck supplied animals for many European and American circuses.  In fact, he was part-owner of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, an operation that competed with Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey in the early part of the 20th century.  (The show was beset by tragedies: a flood in 1913 destroyed many elephants, horses, and lions; in June 1918, the circus train wrecked near Hammond, Indiana resulting in a horrific kerosene-fired conflagration swept through the derailed cars and 86 people were killed with 126 injured.  In the spirit that “the show must go on,” the catastrophe resulted in only two cancellations and the circus was back on the road in Beloit,Wisconsin three days after the calamity.)  In 1910, Hagenbeck published his autobiography, Beasts and Men.  In the book, he revealed that inhabitants of Rhodesia had reported to his African agents the existence of enormous creatures “half dragon and half elephant.”  Hagenbeck interpreted these accounts as evidence for living dinosaurs in central Africa and he mounted several expeditions in the hope bringing back animals of this sort for his Hamburg zoo.  (Of course, he was successful and the iron-gated cryptosaurus display at the Tierpark remains one of its most popular exhibits; Angelica and I hoped to see the beasts but our timed-tickets had expired when we finally reached that exhibit.)

Appropriately enough, Hagenbeck died in 1913 when he was bitten by a poisonous snake.  

3. 

The curators of the Villa Borghese in Rome preserve in their museum a voluptuous sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte (Napoleon’s sister) made by Canova.  No doubt, the rule that visitors should not touch the creamy flanks and breasts of this statue are relaxed when the doors are closed.  Presumably, people caress the sculpture after-hours – indeed, for all I know, you can buy special all access ticket allowing you to touch the naked gods and goddesses in the collection.  There’s an account somewhere of Robert Hughes, the famous art critic, touring museum show and blithely reaching out to touch art on display to explore the texture of the artifact with his finger-tips.  My point is that if you own an object of art, no one can keep you from touching it or, even, playing with the object.

The same principle applied to Carl Hagenbeck.  There are many pictures showing him petting lions and tigers, for instance, hand-feeding polar bears, and, of course, his demise was related to his nonchalance about coming into close contact with dangerous animals.  In the photographs, Hagenbeck looks like a typical Hamburg merchant-prince – he could have strolled out of the pages of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.  The man had a narrow, handsome face (he looks a little like Max von Sydow) with neatly groomed whiskers on his chin and cheeks, but a bare-shaven upper lip and a clean space of an inch or so below his mouth as well.  Before I knew anything about him, several years ago, I was arrested by a remarkable painting in the Hamburg Kunsthalle (Art Museum).  The canvas is a portrait of Hagenbeck by the great Lovis Corinth and it’s, at once, beautiful and grotesque – you don’t know whether to laugh or gasp with admiration. In the large painting. Hagenbeck stands next to a massive walrus.  The animal collector is skinny and, even, looks a little emaciated.  He’s a skeleton draped in a dark suit wearing a natty fedora hat and holding a cane.  By contrast, the walrus is a mighty barrel of flesh, the focus of the painting.  The creature has a glittering oily surface that is brownish-olive colored with highlights of faint purple and red – the creature’s sides and flippers and gargantuan throat are a bravura exhibition of what oil paint can accomplish.  (Someone said that Rubens showed that oil paint was invented to depict human flesh; I would amend the statement in the presence of this Hamburg painting to say that oil paint was created to represent the slick, wet meaty surface of a walrus.)  The animal has little speck-like eyes and a great beard of tangled whiskers, also contrasting to the less prominent whiskers on Hagenbeck’s scrawny neck.  In the background, some seals sit on an artificial floe of ice and on a fake clifftop a group of reindeer are grazing.  Hagenbeck’s right hand rests familiarly on the walrus’ shoulder.

Hamburg: A City of the Dead

 

1.

Before departing for Germany, I was anxious and endured sleepless nights of worry.  Premonitions of doom haunted me, but I was unable to imagine exactly what that doom would be like.  

Years ago, I sent a letter to a college professor whom I admired.  This was Wolfgang Taraba, the man who conducted a graduate seminar in German lyric poetry that I attended.  Professor Taraba was melancholy but charismatic with leonine head and a swarthy complexion.  In his study, he had Nietzsche’s ghostly death mask displayed on his wall.  At an end of the year party, he showed me pictures of his lost homeland, the flat plains of eastern Prussia now occupied by Poland or Russia.  The photographs were in black-and-white, images of places that no one (except I suppose Professor Taraba) could even imagine in color: dour Romanesque churches, polders, sea shores hedged with small, wind-tortured brush, a lake in a bowl of hills and prehistoric dolmen in a pine forest. (As we paged through the picture-book, the pale mask of the dead man flared over my shoulder in the gloom like a torch.) Professor Taraba’s potato salad was made with fifty ingredients.  He smoked a foul-smelling cigar in the seminar room, filling the place with blue haze.  After the collapse of the old DDR, he traveled to East Germany to visit some of his old haunts.  The letter I wrote to him was returned undeliverable.  On his visit to Germany, something terrible had happened and he died.  I don’t know if he is buried in Germany or Minnesota where he taught the poetry of Hoelderlin, Heine, and Gottfried Benn.  Professor Taraba’s death burdened me.  I supposed that I was now the age that he had been when he made his fatal trip to Germany.

The year before, when I traveled to Hamburg, I thought of going to see Ohlsdorf cemetery a few miles outside of the city center and harbor district.  But Angelica and I had other things to do and the cemetery was a low priority and, so, we didn’t make the trip.  On this visit to Hamburg, I would be in the city much longer and, so, I thought that I could make time to take the train to the outskirts to see the graveyard.  In fact, when I tried to imagine myself in Hamburg in the weeks before boarding our flight to Germany, the only picture that I could conjure was a winding pathway under trees drizzling dead leaves down on my shoulders.  Some graves the color of ground-mist stood among funereal pines.  I saw myself from the rear, a classical Rueckenfigur of the kind painted by Caspar David Friedrich, trudging along ahead of myself in a sere, autumnal landscape.   Every time I thought of Hamburg and my upcoming trip to that city, this image appeared in my minld’s eye.

2.

On the first full day that we were in Hamburg, Angelica and I walked across the park near our flat and, then, through the tumult in the Dammtor Bahnhof to the Stephansplatz subway station.  We bought city transport tickets good for a month (79 euros a piece) and, armed with those Fahrkarte,  took the blue line north to Ohlsdorf station.  It was an easy trip, a straight shot with no transfers, and a good way to get acclimated to the Hamburg mass transit system.  

The blue line runs through darkness underground for three or so stops.  Then, the train traverses a brick-walled trench, open overhead with its walls overgrown by ivy and coarse, raw-looking brush, the sort of rank, tough flora that grows in gravel, sending spiny tendrils upward toward the top of the pit.  This sort of landscape, tracks strewn with debris and broken glass, grimy weeds, and vines only partially veiling the colorful scrolls and swollen lettering of the graffiti on the walls, could be anywhere in the world – it’s the same vista in Philadelphia or near Newark or at the outskirts of Paris or Berlin.  

After awhile in the roaring passage between the cracked brick walls, the train-line ascended up into the full light of day and ran along an iron trestle over a canal.  The canal was one of the innumerable Fleet that crisscross watery Hamburg.  Big villas tapped into the ruler-straight canal with small docks or stone steps descending through neo-classical bowers and little punts were moored in the water.  Farther into the suburbs, the right-of-way was swarmed with tiny allotments where vegetable gardens were now overgrown or swamped in leaves, small sheds and huts with thatched roofs and a generally ruinous aspect huddled next to the protective dike of the train embankment.  

Ohlsdorf Station is bright, with some pastry and bread kiosks on the platform between the rail lines and better restaurants below in a small shopping center with newstands and ice-cream places.  It’s a busy station because trains running to the airport angle away from the superstructure built over the underground rail-line.  (It’s confusing if you notice that here the U-Bahn or subway runs on the embankment on the surface, three stories above the S-Bahn or surface-rail that is here accessed underground.)   A busy roadway runs parallel the train tracks, passing through a neighborhood where most of the shops have a mortuary theme: there are places where you can buy big wreathes, floral arrangements with bright red and yellow blossoms, caskets, and elaborate memorial stones inlaid with bronze or gilt letters.  The cemetery is on the other side of the road, built among some low, rolling hills that are heavily wooded, and enclosed by a high iron fence.  Among the trees, the steep gables of funeral chapels are visible at intervals hovering over the broad crowns of oaks and the spiked triangular spires of the evergreens and there is a strange, monumental building shaped like flattened pyramid at the edge of the park.     

  

3.

Ohlsdorf Cemetery is the largest graveyard in the world.  It encompasses more acreage than Central Park in New York City and, according to an informational sign, is nine times the size of Vatican City.  Unlike Central Park, this city of the dead is mostly empty.  When we walked its winding paths and looping ring roads, no one was there.  Sometimes, in the distance, I saw an elderly couple, obviously power-walking as exercise, a cardio work-out among the tombs, and, in clearings, here and there, a solitary figure contemplated grave-markers, or sat silently on a bench beside carefully landscaped ponds, everything designed to seem natural, but, in fact, engineered to create that effect.  The place wasn’t wild but mildly “wildish”; it wasn’t a wilderness or the forest primeval, although everything was contrived to present an effect of the studious, nonchalant disarray of unmanaged nature.  (Is there today such a thing as unmanaged nature?  Was there ever?  At Yosemite, for instance, the Native Americans carefully pruned and cropped trees to enhance their acorn harvests and, periodically, they burnt away the underbrush.)  

Near the entrance to the cemetery by the Ohlsdorf station – of course, there are other entrances by other train stops – a columbarium, chapel and crematorium are aligned along the roadway and fused together  into a sort of austere clinker-brick shopping mall for death and its appurtenances.  You can buy a ticket to watch a cremation – not every day but on some weekends, or tour an art exhibit, or buy burial plots in the adjacent forest.  A small museum of funerary art stands apart from the complex.  When I was at Ohsldorf, the museum was always shuttered, a couple of example of monuments showing different fashions in gravestones over the decades studded the lawn nearby.  Across the lane, there’s one of Hamburg’s ubiquitous monuments to the victims of fascism, a towering wall pierced with innumerable alcoves that hold small bell-shaped urns.  On the wall, these words are inscribed: Remember our Death / Remember our Suffering / Man is brother to Man / We died because of Injustice.  You, the Living, recognize your Duty.  The German word for “duty,” that is, Pflicht, is ominous.  All organized murder is carried out in the name of duty.  What would the world look like if people were taught to ignore duty or, even, to oppose its iron laws?

4.

At an information kiosk at Ohlsdorf station cemetery entrance, you can pick up a map of the park.  The map depicts the location of major trails linking the roads that intersect among the trees as elongated loops.  A dozen chapels are scattered across the grounds.  These are modestly proportioned, graceful buildings in which services can be conducted for interments on the grounds nearby.  The chapels have a rustic appearance, some of them with shingled sides, and, among the rhododendrons, they have a somewhat gloomy, dour aspect.  The first couple chapels near the entrance are a few hundred yards away from the perimeter of the Friedhof and are easily reached.  But, when I searched for more remote worship buildings, Angelic and I found ourselves confused by the curving trails that twist through the woods and, after a while, we just kept returning to same chapels that we had previously seen, hiking in circles without knowing it.

In the oldest part of the graveyard, close to the station entrance, a heavy ashlar embedded in grass among flower beds marks the grave of Philip Otto Runge, the great early Romantic painter.  (His works occupy a room next to the Friedrich gallery at the Hamburg Kunsthalle.)  Runge’s grave stands along a grassy promenade flanked by flowers with big blossoms still drooping over the wet lawn.  On a low hillside, above the graves, a life-size Christ the Redeemer stands like a pillar of white smoke.  

I’m looking for the grave of Hans Albers, the movie actor, buried, according to the map near Gustaf Gruendgens, also a director and actor.  Someone named Jan Fedder is also interred in this general area, the grave marked prominently as an important attraction.  I find the traffic circle in the forest where these graves are supposed to be located, but cardinal directions are reversed, it seems, in this city of the dead, and, although I know I am close to my destination, the granite headstones are hidden in thickets with slender, overgrown paths between them.  In a clearing, a small classical temple with grey doric columns protects its cell of profound darkness.  The day is lightless but the little temple-mausoleum shimmers as if slick with olive oil.  We are disoriented and rambling here and there, among small burial tracts in the soaking forest where colonies of wet graves are located.  A German-speaking group of visitors, led by a tourguide, crosses and re-crosses the still and empty lane.  We hover nearby and, at last, find Albers’ grave, a big rough-hewn block of granite surrounded by bushes with surprisingly bright purple berries.  The berries seem improbably livid, as if plastic of some kind, but touching them, I feel that they are real, organic and soft to the touch.  Nearby, Fedder’s gravesite is baroque with a large granite cross with a full-size mourning figure cast in streaked dark bronze at its base.  (The tomb looks ancient, but Fedder died recently: 2019.)  The tour group pauses respectfully in front of Fedder’s pompous grave and people take pictures.  A cast iron fence protects the burial plot under the big stark cross and there is a post-office box near the gate so that visitors can leave messages for the film and TV star.  Fedder specialized in playing north German characters on the screen – he was in Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot and, later, became famous for playing a crude, gruff copper in the crimi, Grossstadtrevier.  He is one of those figures very much beloved among Germans in Hamburg but entirely unknown to the rest of the world.  (To some extent, the great actor Hans Albers shares a similar fate – Germans revere him for his work in The Blue Angel, Grosse Freiheit #7, and many other movies; he was also a singer, a bit like Frank Sinatra although, perhaps, with a more melancholy cast. He was renowned for his huge, shining eyes. But no one knows anything about him in the English-speaking world.)

I know that there is an impressive memorial to the victims of the aerial bombing raid on Hamburg in July 1943, Operation Gomorrha.  (The firestorm which killed between 40,000 and 60,000 civilians disrupted the production of Grosse Freiheit #7, the Hans Albers’ melodrama directed by Helmut Kaeutner and the movie’s Hamburg locations had to be moved away from the ruined city to studios in Prague.)  Locating myself on the map at the Albers’ grave, Angelica and I set out along the road to find the air raid graves.  A light drizzle falls and its cool and I’m not really dressed well for the weather.  We reach the next chapel on the lane, pause there to rest on a bus-stop bench for a few minutes and I examine the map.  It seems that a trail leads beside a small chain of ponds in the direction of the bombing victims’ monument.  But I can’t determine the scale or distance.  The sculptor Gerhardt Marcks carved figures in a barrel-vault niche in a massive wall at the site.  Charon, the boatman in Hades, glowers at the living who have come to the monument – his face is fierce and rather disconcertingly looks like the visage of a great ape, a gorilla or King Kong; the dead stand in a row on his low-slung, toboggan-shaped boat – they are like sad people waiting for the saddest bus in the world: a naked man squats with his head in his hands, a woman and two children stand stoically in the center of gondola, and another naked man, corpulent with a bald head faces in the direction of the gloomy shore to which they are being transported.  (The name of the work is “The Crossing of the River Styx”.)  The work exudes despair and, probably, is not something worth seeing in person, but I make the monument my destination and we set off along a path lined with mournful willow trees.

5.

We walk for a long way, pausing at intersections to study the map.  A lagoon with stone crosses on its banks displays some big lily pads.  Small clearings are occupied by little stony colonies of the dead.  We take several turns in the path to approach the war victim’s monument.  Somewhere in these glades, the British War Graves commission manages an acre of uniform stone slabs marked the resting place of English soldiers who perished at a POW camp on the Frisian Islands during World War One.  Ahead of me, I see an old man with a white beard walking among the tombs.  I follow in his footsteps.  I can’t see his face, only his back and shoulders.  After a half-hour, we glimpse a chapel that looks a bit like a rustic hunting lodge.  Pushing through some shaggy shrubbery, we see that a lane runs along the front of the chapel and there is a bus stop.  This is the same place from which we embarked forty minutes ago; we have just made a round loop through the graves.  Then, it occurs to me that this place is truly huge and that we have explored only a tiny corner of the cemetery and that the war graves must be a mile away or more.  

We’re footsore and so we limp back to the train station for a cinnamon roll (“Franzbrot”).

6.

My son, Martin, traveled to Germany and remained for a couple weeks.  On one of the last days that he was in Hamburg, we took the blue line back to Ohlsdorf to see if we could locate the British Expeditionary Force cemetery and the monument to the air raid dead there.  It had been raining intermittently and the station at the city of the dead was slick with brownish slush on the concrete platform and floors below.  Trucks and cars churned through puddles of water at the intersections.  The wreaths and bouquets at the florist’s shop seemed faded.  More than two weeks had passed since my last visit to the cemetery, but it was not appreciably colder on this day, although the rain was more challenging.  The remnants of flowers blossoming among the topiary by Runge’s grave were greyer and gave the impression of being ancient like horticultural specimens preserved in formaldehyde.

The map of the cemetery became increasingly sodden in my pocket and, at the folds, was illegible.  We set off at a brisk pace, understanding that the park was immense and that it would take a long time to hike to those areas that interested us. For awhile, we walked along one of the lanes, but our destination was on the other side of the park and, so, we needed to follow paths through the woods to reach the other ring-road in the cemetery.  We passed several chapels and, then, followed a trail toward the loop across the forest.  A central roadway, bifurcating the cemetery, passed by a chapel surrounded by pines and shaped a bit like an oriental fantasy with a tile roof turned upward pagoda-style at the eaves below a faux-mosque  copper dome.  In a shell of reinforced and transparent plastic, a bench marked a bus-stop on a route that apparently looped around the cemetery.  No bus was in sight and so we continued on a curving path guarded by bronze angels melted into sagging postures of grief, sometimes dense encampments of graves clustered together around still, silent fountains scummy with entrapped rainwater, in other places no graves at all, just old trees and undergrowth and, at the end of a sidewalk buried in brown leaves, a stone mausoleum with brass door and stained glass clasped in a gothic lead frame.  Sometimes, I thought I saw an old man, ahead of us, shoulders hunched over a little as he paced through the forest.

Either the map was incorrect or I read it wrong.  The curving trail didn’t run straight to the north loop road but came to a tee, dividing right and left in the middle of a groove of dark, wet pines.  Some wood-framed bins of clippings and rotting flowers marked the place where the trail came to an end at this parting of the ways.  I was turned-around and couldn’t figure out directions because there were no landmarks that I could correlate to the map.  We turned right and walked in the drizzle for a half-hour before coming to a road.  Next to the lane there was a chapel with curled pagoda eaves and a copper mosque-like dome.  We sat at the bus-stop for a while.

In the distance, a bus approached.  The vehicle slowed when the driver saw us sitting on the bench.  I didn’t know where the bus was going and was afraid to venture onto it.  Behind greenish glass, the shadowy bus driver nodded to us.  A couple of shrouded figures with pale faces were sitting near the back of the bus.  I gestured that we were not going to board and Martin and I backed away from the busstop.  The vehicle slowed a little but, then, lumbered down the road.  

We decided that there was no hope of ever finding the places for which we were searching and, so, we set off in the opposite direction to where I thought the entry by the train station was located.  There seemed to be another U-Bahn stop on the other side of the cemetery.  We walked for another half-hour, came upon a gate and found that we had come to the park entrance across the busy road from the train station with the connections to the airport.  To get anywhere in this city of the dead, choose the direction that seems completely wrong and go that way – sooner or later, you will reach your goal since the only way to reach a place here seems to be go the way opposite to where you imagine that you should go.  

7. 

Near the Ohlsdorf station exit, the cemetery’s crematorium rears up over iron lances of perimeter fence and the busy road channeling traffic parallel to the park border.  The crematorium is a ziggurat of grey-brown brick, the wedge-shaped tower flanked by a low mathematically symmetrical arcade of dark shadowy recesses, each brick on the right equivalent to a brick on the left.  The structure seems Babylonian, neo-Assyrian, with some elongated grim-looking angels adorning the austere mass of brick wall below the pyramid of the tower.  The steeply sloping s sides of the ziggurat are lined with bronze grooved panels with a pale-green patina.  

The “New Ohlsdorf Crematorium” as it is known was designed by Hamburg’s leading architect, Fritz Schumacher.  Beginning in 1906, Schumache, then, about forty was appointed to serve as Hamburg’s city planner and architect in charge of public projects.  Born in Bogota, Columbia to parents of the mercantile class from Bremen, Schumacher was a leading exponent of what is called “Backsteinexpressionismus” – that is “brick expressionism” – and a number of his large, hulking buildings survive in Hamburg, particularly in the financial district by the harbor.  Schumacher’s last commission was the crematorium at Ohlsdorf and its an impressively majestic edifice, eschewing classicism for a more monumental archaic Mesopotamian style.  The structure is heavy, immobile, an expression of the enduring, humble, and, yet, formidable qualities of brick – you set one brick upon another and, then, another and you repeat the process until you have a mountain.  The artificial peak of the crematorium is built with a summit of hatched brick laid vertically as opposed to the horizontal courses comprising the body of the ziggurat.  These recessed box-like complications to the tower’s top cap the structure and give it’s surface an intricacy in which shadow and light might play to interesting effect if there were only any sunlight here.  But, on the day I saw the crematorium, the sky was overcast and rainy and so the inlay on top of the pyramid read as a dull sequence of shallow cubby-holes.

Schumacher readily assimilated himself to the Nazi regime and won many prizes for his work.  In 1944, the Nazis gave him the Goethe Prize for his distinguished work in architecture.  He lived long enough (dying in 1946) to see his city smashed like crockery by Allied bombing.  

Adjacent to the crematorium, another chapel-like space holds bronze urns, dark forms against an array of pale stained glass windows.  Wan yellow light streams into the columbarium and the floors and walls are white so that the place seems bright and open.  The cylinders full of ash and bone are curved like naked women.  The air is heavily perfumed with the scent of flowers.  

Hamburg: A Secret Society

 

In Germany, we were always operating under a cloud of ignorance, not quite understanding things going on around us.  Things weren’t remarkably strange, they were just a little bit “off”, slightly disorienting, although all it takes is a minor misunderstanding to result in  some appalling misadventure.  An example of this fog of unknowing, although without the dire results of some of the confusions that beset us, was Angelica’s and my visit to the Speise Kabinett (“The Food Chamber”) at the Masonic lodge, called the Mozart Saal.  On our first night in Hamburg, and a couple of times thereafter, Angelica and I walked along Moorweidenstrasse, past some odd intersections configured like stars with radiating lanes to a major street, Rothenbaumstrasse, a north-south boulevard lined with expensive shops and restaurants.  On the route to Rothenbaumstrasse, where we ate at a Spanish tapas place one night and, later, at Shalimar, an Indian restaurant, we walked past a noble-looking edifice looking across the lane to the university’s library and some laboratory buildings.  This was the Mozart Saal, a freemason lodge, housed in a dignified white structure with tall, bright windows under pointed pediments, a high door opening from atop a lofty exterior flight of stairs, and pale pilasters rising four stories to support the place’s complicated roof comprised of various vaults and arches and flattened steeples.  The first night we strolled past the place, limousines were lined up outside and four umbrellas, open like great flower-blossoms, were inserted in the screen of shrubs in front of the building, awaiting deployment by several porters standing along the iron fence who were assisting people disemboguing from the columns of sleek back cars. The people were elegantly dressed, couples with men in tuxedos and long frock coats and women wearing furs with jewels studding their rather extravagant cleavages.  It looked like an impossibly expensive gathering in a remarkably refined setting and I remarked to Angelica that it didn’t seem that we would be visiting the place’s in-house restaurant anytime soon.  The rain hadn’t yet started and so the umbrellas had more of a decorative function than otherwise.  I think we ate at the tapas place, octopus and shrimp served on beds of saffron rice, and, then, went to the grocery store on Rothenbaumstrasse, a place that Angelica quarried for nigiri, sushi, and various exotic kinds of chocolates and potato chips.  (Germans have wheeled bags that they use for shopping.  The idea of buying food for more than two days is unknown to them.  They buy food for their evening meal and a Brotchen for breakfast, a sesame roll or Franzbrot that is “cinnamon roll”, and produce – the vegetables and fruit in German grocery stores is invariably plump, perfectly ripened, and fantastically fresh, dewy as if just plucked from the vine.  Near Hamburg, there’s a fertile plain where a million fruit trees grow – the south-facing terraces along the Elbe are warm and relatively temperate and grapes used to make wine grow there.  This vast produce or truck-farming territory is called “Altes Land” – the “Old Land” – and this is where the vegetables and fruits are grown and harvested for sale in Hamburg grocery stores.)  On our way back from the grocery, pulling our wheeled bag over the cobble stones, we passed the Mozart Saal again; the limousines had been replaced by police cars and guards were standing on the sidewalk under the white terraces of the lodge and the rain that had fallen while we in the restaurant and, then, grocery store, had ceased so that the white globes outlining the tall door to the lodge were now enorbed with pale foggy mist, adorned by the drizzle in the air.  The four umbrellas remained open like vinyl shields stabbed into the wet shrubs in front of the place. 

We walked by this enigmatic place a dozen times and, one afternoon, I paused to peruse the menu posted next to the steps leading up into the lodge.  The food on offer at the Speise Kabinett seemed surprisingly affordable and, so, on one of our last nights in town (Martin had gone back to Fargo), Angelica and I marched through the falling sleet – it had become much colder – to eat our supper in the Mozart Saal.  

The huge weighty door was carefully balanced and opened easily and without a sound and the restaurant was up a short flight of stairs along a corridor that led into the lodge’s interior.  The ceilings were very high and the rooms had a spacious aspect, very clean-looking and austere, and the café, as it were, was also a bit stern-looking with big windows opening out onto the sidewalk and the grassy lawns beyond, now pale with snow, and the library at the University where solemn shadowy throngs of books were visible under glass, volumes shelved close to the windows beyond the park. The two waitresses wore tight-fitting white blouses and black slacks and they had a vaguely depraved look, glittering eyes as if they had both been smoking dope with the cooks somewhere in an interior courtyard within the lodge.  A group of old men were seated at a table in the corner, away from the windows, drinking cognac and whispering conspiratorially to one another.  There were about five old men and they all had distinguished-looking beards and a vaguely piratical appearances and each of them – and this seemed strange to me – were carrying leather briefcases.  The briefcases had an official appearance, like the sort of valises you see chained to people’s wrists in spy movies.  Sometimes, one of the old men would fish around in his breast pocket, extract a large, moist-looking cigar, and, then, depart from the table to some hidden room where smoking was allowed.  Another couple of old men came in, not together, but as humid isolates with a little dandruff of sleet on their shoulders.  Each old man had a briefcase in his hand and, after looking about the dining room, suddenly smiled at their brothers seated at the table near the bar and went to take a place there.  The old men rose to greet one another, embraced, and kissed each other  on the cheeks, all the while clutching briefcases against thigh or ribs.  Two tables of matronly ladies glared at us when we entered the restaurant – their looks, like daggers, said something like: “How dare they?”  The women were clad in fur coats and their white hands glittered with rings and necklaces.  

I tried to order in German but to no avail.  The girl heard my accent and immediately, as if by reflex, switched into English.  Angelica had a Fanta and some kind of potato casserole garnished with mushrooms (“champignons”) in cream sauce.  I ordered “Zander filet” with Weinkraut and fingerling potatoes.  I asked the girl “Was bedeutet ‘Zander’?”  She answered in English:  “It’s a kind of fish.”  Of course, the obvious next question was “What kind of fish?”  But I didn’t think that would be a useful inquiry.  Rather, it would be liking asking what “tuna” means – it’s a name and means “tuna”, or what is the meaning of the color “blue.”  So I nodded as if I understood completely, although I did not, and waited for my Alsterwasser (or “Diesel”) as it is sometimes called: that is, Lager beer mixed with lemonade, a drink that the people in Hamburg like, although, perhaps, not in Winter – whenever I ordered this stuff, people looked at me with odd dismay and, sometimes, the waiter would say: “Surely, you know that its beer with lemonade” as if no one but a person from Hamburg could ever possibly enjoy such a peculiar beverage.

I continued to watch the old men at the table by the bar.  One by one, they got up, apparently ambling into some interior chamber in the cloister to smoke their cigars (all of them had big cigars tucked in their breast pockets) and, then, returning to a table that had grown in its census since they had departed, several more old fellows present, in suit and tie and clasping onto their briefcases – these encounters involved more handshakes and more kisses on the cheeks.         

The “Zanderfilet” arrived and it was, as advertised, ‘Zander’, whatever that means, a sweetish white fish in a white sauce.  There was a perfectly shaped dome of purplish sauerkraut on the plate.  The sauerkraut was the color of diluted red wine.  I took a bite of the kraut and winced: it was incredibly tart, almost stinging to the taste buds, and I thought that this sort of food couldn’t be good for you and that it was really too intense to eat.  But I took a second bite and that was better than the first bite and, then, a third bite that tasted better than the second and, before I knew it, I was working my way with gusto through the bowl-sized heap of Weinkraut on the table.  

A few minutes later, a young man entered wearing a red velvet cape.  The young man had a leather “student” cap on his head, a sort of flattened beret with a short brim.  I knew the outfit – the young man was a member of a Burschenverein – that is, a student or “lads” club.  The youth’s hat had a red lid over the back of his head and he wore an armband decorated with an oak leaf.  I pointed out the lad to Angelica and said, as a joke, “he’s a member of student fencing club but I don’t know where his sword is.”  This was a flippant remark since I had no idea what the outlandish costume signified.  The old men with their mysterious briefcases ignored the student.  Then, the first youth was followed by another and another, similarly outfitted, and, indeed, each of these men were carrying swords sheathed like pool cues in their hands.  In fact, it was an academic dueling club and I scrutinized the faces of the young men as they entered for the beauty mark, that is, the Mensur or dueling scar.  

After dinner, I paid and walked toward the table where the briefcase brothers were assembled sipping cognac from diamond-like snifters.  I looked down the corridor and saw that there was a rococo hall with cherubs gamboling over doorways in terra cotta bouquets and a round cameo-shaped ceiling, offset by white plaster concentric rings painted pink; the oval cameo in the ceiling was tinted light blue like the sky just before dawn.  The duelists were nowhere to be seen.  I expected to hear the strains of an aria by Mozart sounding in the distance – indeed, the whole place looked a bit like a set from The Magic Flute.  

Outside the lodge, on the sidewalk, there were stanchions set up to control a crowd that didn’t seem to have materialized.  No one was nearby.  Several squad cars of Polizei and two ambulances were blocking traffic on the one-way.  A half dozen girl cops with dark eyes and hair, apparently of Turkish extraction were loitering by the bushes.  It had warmed enough to convert the snow to a dismal drizzle pecking away in the trees and branches.  

So it was at the Mozart Saal in Hamburg at the end of the month of November, 2023.  

Hamburg: Floods and Canals

On the news, I see that Hamburg flooded a couple days ago.  Some pictures show the Altona Fish Market with panel trucks bobbing around in the murky water.  Although it’s not immediately evident in calm weather, Hamburg is prone to floods.  Apparently, powerful storms on the North Sea blast a tidal surge back at the Elbe’s mouth at Cuxhaven.  This causes the river to stall, with waves and tidal currents pressing water back up the river.  When there is heavy rain over northern Germany (lower Saxony), the Elbe overflows and the river’s water dammed up at its mouth on the North Sea reverses direction and floods Hamburg and other areas upstream.  This part of Germany is very low, flat, and marshy – there are innumerable turgid-looking canals that crisscross the low country; villages are marked by tall steeples and, at any given place on the plain, you can see six or seven towns with their church-towers poking up in the sky, rising over the dreary, monotonous horizon. (The area is called “Lower” Saxony after the German word “Nieder”, meaning “low to the ground” – hence, the “nether” in Netherlands which the area resembles topographically.  There are dikes and polders in this part of Germany; the most famous novella from this area is Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter – “The White Horseman” – a story about a great tempest and the collapse of the dikes on the North Sea resulting in deadly flooding.  The book has the flavor of the famous narratives from Holland about plucky little lads sticking their thumb in the dike to hold back the sea.)  Hamburg, of course, is incised with canals called “Fleets” – these were manmade channels cut into the swamps to provide shipping access to the miles and miles of warehouses around the center of the downtown area.  The city is watery in all respects.  There are two large lakes where the Elbe was impounded in medieval times to create milling districts – these are the Binnenalster and the Aussenalster, that is, the inner Alster and the Outer Alster, both bodies of water on the scale of the Minneapolis lake once known as a Lake Calhoun (I can’t recall how to spell its Lakota name).  In fact, the Outer Alster lined with luxury hotels, for instance the famous Hotel Atlantic Kempinski, a huge white edifice that dips down to the water and, then, further along the sweep of the shore, the gold and silver dome of the Imam Ali Mosque replicates the parks along the rim of the Minneapolis lake, the white hotels on the north side of the water, and the gilded dome of the Greek Orthodox church, St. Mary’s, at  34th and Irving – indeed, the resemblance between the Minneapolis lake and the Aussenalster extends to the multitude of sail boats that ply their waters and the city skyline that hovers over both of these lakes.  In fact, I suppose you can make a further comparison – just as the Binnenalster and the Aussenalster are separated by a narrow throat of land (with the John F. Kennedy Bridge over the channel between them), so Lake Calhoun is divided from Lake Harriet by another narrow strip of park land planted with rose gardens.  Even several miles from the Elbe River, ruler-straight canals cut through the suburbs of Hamburg, overhung with willow trees and with mansions built along them stretching fingers of dock into the water where pontoon boats and rowing skiffs are moored.  All of this water creates a most picturesque effect except, of course, when things get out of hand and the river overflows.   

On February 16, 1962, the equivalent of a hurricane whirled down from the North Pole, devastated parts of England, and, then, pushed its storm surge up the so-called German bight at Cuxhaven.  The dikes broke apart all along the river and, because the storm had knocked out all power, there was no way to warn people of the flood.  One-sixth of Hamburg, about sixty miles from the North Sea, flooded, mostly in the working class neighborhoods to the south of the Elbe.  These were the places where the dockworkers and the armies of laborers in the shipbuilding yards lived.  (This part of Hamburg always suffers.  During Operation Gomorrha in the summer of 1943, the British bombers leveled most of the area of Hamburg south of the Elbe to cripple the shipbuilding and harbor facilities.  The Nazi officials all lived, comfortably enough, in the area to the west of the Altersee lakes – this is where we stayed when we visited – and the bombers didn’t waste their munitions on those areas; hence, many elegant and palatial houses from the Imperial period before the First World War survive in those neighborhoods.)  Several hundred people were drowned in Hamburg and the city was devastated with 60,000 citizens displaced from their homes.  The dikes were all cleft apart and leaking and the situation was dire.  The so-called “Police Senator” on the City Council, Helmut Schmidt, called out the German equivalent of the National Guard in violation of the federal constitution – in Germany, the government is forbidden from using the military for civil defense and internal affairs.  Army troops stabilized the dikes, set up tent cities, and began work repairing the innumerable buildings wrecked by the cyclone and its attendant flood.  At first, Schmidt was threatened with impeachment since his summons to the local units of the Guard was unconstitutional; later, he was praised as the hero who saved Hamburg, fame that led to his later ascent to power as West Germany’s Chancellor.  (Schmidt is present all over Hamburg.  There are many pictures of him on buildings and monuments – generally, he has a cigarette in his mouth and wears a sailor’s leather cap.  His wife, Loki, was apparently very wealthy – many estates and parks in the area bear her name, seemingly tracts of land that she donated to the City.  At St. Michael’s Church, there’s a monument to Schmidt that cites one of his famous quotes: Hamburg war dein Revier; St. Michel dein Anker, Tschuess.”  This means roughly “Hamburg was your stomping ground; St. Michael’s your anchor, bye-bye.”  – in fact, these words, often attributed to Schmidt were spoken by Jan Fedder, a local TV personality – he had a nightly news show broadcast throughout Germany.  No one knows about Fedder in this country and so the quote is generally said to be about Schmidt about whom people do know a few things.  When I was at Ohlstedt Cemetery, I saw the elaborate monument to Fedder, a huge baroque cross replete with angels and droopy-looking mourners – it’s modern; Fedder died in 2019.)

On the second-to-last day that I was in Hamburg, I went to see the huge Flak tower at Friedrichstrasse and, then, planned to walk down to the Reeperbahn, about 15 blocks, and, thence, to the harbor.  It was raining pretty hard under the massive concrete ramparts of the Flak Tower and, so, I took the subway down to the Reeperbahn station, walked over to the Davidstrasse Wache, the famous local police station (it’s featured in innumerable crime shows in Germany) and, then, turned south to the harbor.  As you might expect, the Red Light district on the Reeperbahn is only four city-blocks from the steep stairs dropping down the river banks to the harbor.  (The Reeperbahn is conveniently located for sailors disembarking on the Elbe at the various piers and docks below the hill.)   As I walked down to the water, it began to rain again, a soft, all-encompassing drizzle.  At the base of the steps leading from the bluff to the water, I walked west along the dike to the Altona Fish Market.  The Fish Market opens directly onto the river, occupying a terrace about eight feet below the adjacent boulevard.  The building is a sort of temple to fish; it has a bronze weathervane depicting a dolphin and the huge doors to the place are decorated with bronze lobsters and octopus.  The structure was built around 1906 and extends for a hundred yards along the waterfront.  When I visited, some husky workmen were hauling tables out of the shadowy interior of the market building.  (The place is well-known for the show that the fish vendors put on every Sunday morning at six a.m.  Restaurant supply companies send emissaries to pick out the best fish for the tables of their clients and, since everyone knows everyone else, the fish merchants insult the buyers and vice-versa and, apparently, a good time is had by all, including hundreds of German tourists who come to enjoy the witty and obscene repartee – something that would be opaque to me since, of course, the merchants and buyers speak in vulgar, idiomatic Low German, Platt-Deutsch, and, since I couldn’t understand even conventional High German as spoken in Hamburg, all of the witticisms would have been completely Greek to me.)  I slipped around the side of the truck into which the stevedores were loading their tables and ventured a few feet into the Fish Market building.  The structure was full of wonderful-looking balconies and stairs all made from black wrought iron, a sort of architectural cast-iron fantasia soaring up over the cold concrete floors.  

But the place was forbidden.  One of the laborers hailed me and said a few words of which I understood only one:  heraus – that is, “get out.”  I obliged and walked down the promenade at the edge of the water.  This is where the flood struck in late December.  The water surged over the dikes along the river and set afloat the few panel trucks parked alongside the fish-market temple – at least, this is what the photos depicted.  Guidebooks to Hamburg warn visitors not to park too close to the Elbe in foul weather.  Apparently, this happens frequently and cars stranded in the flood are destroyed by the salty sea water knocked back up the channels by the tempest at sea.  The North Sea is called “blanke Hans” – that is, “empty, naked, sheer, barren” Hans (the adjective blank doesn’t translate well into English). There’s a poem about the city of Rungholdt, a prosperous medieval town that was destroyed in the great Mannetrunkene (“man-drowning”flood) of St. Marcellus Day in 1364.  The poem is called Trutz, blanke Hans – that is, “I defy you bare Hans” – and was written by the Prussian poet, Detlev von Lilienkron.  The verse begins Heut bin ich ueber Rungholt gefahren / Die Stadt geht unter vor sechshundert Jahren  – “Today I sailed over Rungholt / The city sank 600 years ago.”

Hamburg, suspended over the Elbe waters, is sometimes called the Venice of the North.  At the end of the 19th century, elite shopping districts were built along the canal that stretches from the Binnenalster to the Elbe – this lane of water is called the Alsterfleet, debouching into the Elbe at the Baumwalle dike a mile southwest on the waterfront.  Where the Alsterfleet arrows into the so-called “Old City”, passing the famous Rathaus and its large plaza, shops were built under a vaguely Moorish arcade, elegant white arches imitating buildings in the Piazza San Marco in Venice.  One can imagine, if with some difficulty, gondoliers plying the coffee-colored water next to the Rathaus square.  Seagulls strut on the granite escarpment over the Alsterfleet and there are swans with black beaks skating over the chilly water and, under the looming, statue-studded facade of the Rathaus, a tall monolith shadows the water, a memorial to 40,000 of the city’s sons who perished in the Great Wall.  The vertical slab stands about 35 feet tall and the Gedenkstein or stela is incised with a low relief showing a mother and child enclosed within a single oblong groove.  The mother and child, sculpted by Ernst Barlach, are austerely linear, depicted in simplified outline and resemble at outsized Egyptian hieroglyph.  Barlach was friends with Kaethe Koellwitz and his female figures default to her mournful, gaunt features.  The monolith was controversial from the outset.  Its unveiling in August 1931 was accompanied by the removal of an equestrian statue of the late German emperor from the Rathaus Marktplatz and, as with Confederate monuments recently in this country, responses to stela were polarized; of course, there were plenty of German Nationalists who resented the extraction of the Kaiser from the promenade overlooking the canal.  Of course, when the Nazis came to power, grieving figures sculpted by Barlach onto the face of the monolith overlooking the canal were chiseled away, replaced by a relief of an eagle soaring over the Alsterfleet.  In 1948, the City Fathers restored the Barlach relief.

Angelica and I crossed the John F. Kennedy bridge over the channel between the Binnenalster at the Rathaus and the larger Aussenalster.  It was dark, cold, and raining and we were on a mission, walking to a sushi restaurant selected by Angelica for our evening meal.  She had directions on her phone, an ambitious hike of 1.9 miles to the restaurant, rather too far, I thought, but she was responsible for managing this meal and so I deferred to her judgment.  We set out about forty-five minutes before our reservation, hurrying through the Moorweide park to sidewalks skirting the station at Dammtor and, then, along a diagonal road running parallel to the embankment on which elevated trains scooted back and forth.  For the first half-mile, the chief peril was bicycles spinning suddenly toward us out of the darkness or appearing at our elbows as they zoomed by.  In alcoves under the elevated train tracks, homeless people lurked, crouching next to small barricades built from cardboard boxes.  At the Kennedy bridge, the way opened up and we could see across the estuary.  The lights of the downtown Christmas market made a brilliant pattern in the dark waters, reflections that looked like an abstraction by Paul Klee, and the inky ridge of the Rathaus hung over the lagoon like a mountain range. On a raft floating in the middle of the Binnenalster, a forty-foot Christmas tree made a ladder of lights up into the falling rain, a similar ladder descending into the water was mirrored below.  

On the other side of the JFK bridge, the phone directions didn’t make any sense.  The great white ice-berg of the Kempinski Atlantic rose over the treelined promenades along the Aussenalster.  We made our way through alley-like fissures next to the hotel and, then, walked along empty sidewalks toward a bright cluster of lights a couple blocks away.  As it happened, we were on the east side of the Hauptbahnhof and the streets became more crowded as we made our way toward the train station.  The square around the train shed and its rows of kiosks and fast food places was busy and there were buses arriving every minute or so, pulling up to a big terminal with high, greenish windows.  The sushi place was a stone’ throw from the main train station, on the other side of some divided one-way lanes where buses and taxis were servicing the Bahnhof.  This was a bright area, a relief after traversing the windy and wet darkness around the JFK bridge.  The moral seemed to be that the city folds in on itself – you can expand distances by choosing bad or improbable routes, but everything is actually tightly clenched together, with folds almost meeting.  The Hauptbahnhof is only a ninety-second ride by elevated train from the Dammtor.  We could have reached this place in twelve minutes, not the forty that it took us to reach the restaurant on foot.  After eating, we rode the El, here designated as S-Bahn, from out of the teeming bowels of the Hauptbahnhof to the Dammtor and, then, were back home in only a quarter of an hour, mostly high and dry on the train.  

Transport over the Elbe and its neighboring wetlands was once perilous.  The oldest artifact on display in the Museum of the City of Hamburg is a fifteen-hundred year old sword fished out of a bog when the edges of the river were dredged a century ago.  The sword was found embedded in the mud with several daggers and lance-points.  The waters here were once perceived as mortal enemies, unpredictable, swift with secretive currents, and prone to flood.  Warriors placated this foe by drowning their weapons in the river as a kind of offering to the water-gods that haunted the place.