Live from Austin!

Food turned out to be less of a problem than in Berlin, oddly enough. There seemed to be lots of vegetarian restaurants, and we found a vegetarische imbiss at Schantzenstrasse and Susannenstrasse.

I also got the impression that people were more friendly than in Berlin. Then again, perhaps it was my imagination, a side effect of my becoming more used to Germany.

Josef had an original LP from the first release of Autobahn. The band look like big geeks in the photo, and the sleeve credits Conny Plank. (His name was removed from later editions.)

CD shopping was made more annoying by the fact that nowhere seems to take credit cards, not even big stores. If you don’t have an EC card with a PIN, forget it.

Stereotypes sometimes have an element of truth to them. While we were in Hamburg, Josef and Ute helped rothko to polish the text of her German scrapbooking site. The original text talks about the enthusiasm of TLC scrapbookers for the business. For our hosts, this proved to be the most difficult piece to translate, and it took a long time for them to come up with an acceptable German phrase for “enthusiastic”. Apparently the literal translation of the word would be viewed with great suspicion in a business context, particularly when said by an American.

This reminded me of my two favorite jokes about Germans:

1. Q: How many Germans does it take to change a light bulb?
   A: One, and he does it with ruthless efficiency.

2. Q: Why did the German cross the road?
   A: Because the traffic lights indicated that it was appropriate to do so.

We got to the airport for our return at around 06:30. The queue was very, very long. The airline official checked my passport and visa (permanent resident card). Then he asked for my driver’s license. After that, he wanted proof of employment. Fortunately my medical insurance card has IBM’s logo on it.

This is all the result of the US government decreeing that airlines should pay the cost of deporting people. Ironically, if you don’t have a visa at all then you’re OK as far as the airlines are concerned, because it means they’re not on the hook; it’s if you do have a visa that they have to triple-check everything, just in case the visa is fraudulent or you can’t continue to meet the terms of your residence.

Next, we had to queue for the metal detector. My passport was checked again. Then we walked through to the hallway beyond, and walked to the departure gate…where there was another security checkpoint, with another queue. My passport was checked a third time, and everything went through another round of metal detection, this time using a wand.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get more ridiculous, I realized that they were hand-searching the carry-on luggage of every single passenger. I cooperated with removing every single item from my bag, so they could be checked one by one.

The guard noticed the TRIO DVD and grinned. “Trashy,” he commented. It turned out that he had been a fan back in their early days, before they became famous, when they were playing obscure Hamburg clubs. Somehow this puts a more human feeling to the proceedings, and makes it all seem better.

When we got to Newark, we had to collect our luggage. We re-checked it, and it was scanned again. Then, we had to go through security, for what was my third round of metal detection and fourth round of passport checking.

At immigration, I was handed back my documents with a smile and “Welcome home”. Maybe I was fragile from the 8 hours on the plane and the repeated security screenings, but I felt genuinely touched. And not in a full-body-cavity-search kind of way.

When Josef showed us to our rooms, I couldn’t help noticing the Spitfire. It was a model, painstakingly constructed from a kit. Unlike the models I had built as a child this one was painted properly, and of course it had the correct RAF insignia. It was in a glass display case next to a model of a Messerschmitt, and one of some kind of US fighter plane I didn’t recognize.

I’d always been more into tanks as a child. I had a book about them, and a die-cast German Leopard tank that I would frequently disassemble and reassemble. When we visited Bournemouth in 2003 I got to visit the nearby Tank Museum and admire their collection. If it was OK for me to have an interest in World War II tanks, I told myself, surely it was normal for a German of roughly my age to have an interest in World War II aircraft?

In fact, we soon learned that Josef had worked in the Navy, as a liaison officer for groups of British sailors. I tried to imagine being a German in charge of a bunch of drunken English sailors. He’d probably heard slurs I couldn’t even begin to dream up, but I didn’t particularly want to talk about them, and dodged a couple of conversational gambits.

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After the weekend, we go to stay with Käthe and Herbert for a few days. They live in an old farmhouse in the Altes Land, south of the Elbe. It’s a fruit farm, growing apples, pears, plums, and probably a few other kinds of fruit in small quantities. Like many small European farms it’s 100% organic, with three modern windmills providing some of its electrical power needs.

Herbert speaks some English, but is self-taught, and a little hard of hearing. Käthe’s English is better. Still, I can’t help thinking that if I’d known that one day I’d be spending time in a farmhouse in Germany, I’d have paid more attention in German lessons. Not that it would have helped that much—when they’re talking to each other, Herbert and Käthe speak Plat Deutsch, modern Low German. It sounds like a mix of German and Middle English.

So I find myself surrounded by German and dialects of German, and for a while it makes my brain hurt. By late afternoon my language processing regions have spent hours trying to decode the strange noises around me and are tired out.

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For our second day in Hamburg, rothko had arranged a German scrapbooking meetup. We got the bus into Harburg, then got onto the S-bahn to head into the city at around noon.

Just after we boarded the train, a young couple got on. I’d guess that they were in their 20s. He had short dark hair and looked as if he’d been awake for a couple of days; a slight sheen of sweat, disheveled clothes and a good dose of stubble. She was thin and tall, with red-streaked dark hair and various piercings. She was also clearly extremely drunk.

He sat down facing the same direction as us, one row ahead in the carriage. She swayed uneasily after him, dropped her bag on the seat in front of him along with a bottle of unspecified liquor, and then sat astride him, facing us. As the train started moving they began making out. After a few minutes she struggled with her belt and jeans for a while, and before long it was clear to everyone in the carriage that they were having sex.

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Hamburg sits on the Elbe river, a few kilometers inland. A cunning tax dodge in 1189 propelled it into becoming Europe’s second largest port, and a world class red light district soon followed, surrounded by dive bars and seedy nightclubs. These days the city is keener to present the area through rose-tinted John Lennon glasses, omitting to mention that the Beatles played the Star-Club mostly because they couldn’t get a paying gig anywhere else in 1962.

The Elbe is apparently pretty deep, because the Queen Mary 2 was there. She’s the largest ocean liner in the world, making the Titanic look small in comparison. She takes around 7 days to cross the Atlantic, at a price of $1000+. Mind you, that’s not much more than we paid for our tickets, and if they have broadband on the ship I wouldn’t even need to use up vacation days on the crossing. I bet the food’s nicer than Continental. If they toned down the swanky ballrooms a bit and made it cheaper, they could have a compelling business proposition. But I digress.

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We like to think that we are immune to propaganda. Yes, other feeble-minded individuals may allow their attitudes to be shaped by the media and their surroundings, but we’re sure that we are far too smart for that.

In 1975, John Cleese savagely satirized British attitudes to Germany, in the classic Fawlty Towers episode The Germans. After a blow to the head, hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty loses his ability to self-censor. While taking a dinner order from some German guests, he proceeds to blurt out the names of Nazis; eventually he descends into xenophobic ranting.

The sad thing is that after 30 more years, nothing much has changed.

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Once it was decided that we were going to Hamburg, I decided to do some research and see if there were any of the famous Germans I knew of were from Hamburg. In particular, I wanted to know if any of the musicians or bands I’m a fan of happened to be from the area. The answer, unsurprisingly, was yes.

Holger Hiller was born in Hamburg. He played in various local bands, founded a band called Palais Schaumberg, then went on to a solo career in which he created the first album to be constructed entirely of samples from other albums—and a length of plastic drainpipe. He moved to Berlin in 2003.

Also from Hamburg were Xmal Deutschland, all-female Gothic/new wave band signed to 4AD records in the 1980s. Vocalist Anja Huwe has gone on to be a serious artist, and still lives in Hamburg.

TRIO aren’t from Hamburg; they’re from Großenkneten, which is about 150km south west, the other side of Bremen. You can tell because they printed their home address on the front of their first album. Like the Beatles, they played sleazy Hamburg clubs in their early days. They’re best known outside Germany for their one international hit, Da da da ich lieb dich nicht du liebst mich nicht aha aha aha. The concept of the band was to strip down popular music as far as possible; the drummer had a ‘kit’ comprised of one bass drum, one snare drum and a cymbal, musical accompaniment was largely provided by a single guitar, and the vocalist (Stephan Remmler) also played Casio toy keyboards on some tracks.

Stephan Remmler has gone on to have a solo career, and I discovered that he released a new album with a very electronic and TRIO-like sound earlier this year.

I’m not entirely sure if Eloy are from Hamburg, but their first album was recorded there. They’re a kind of prog rock/heavy metal mix with Buddhist influences.

KMFDM started out in Hamburg. I don’t think I need to say anything more about them, they’re well enough known worldwide.

And that’s about it, as far as I know. Most of the other German bands I’ve heard of are from Düsseldorf (Die Krupps, Kraftwerk, Westbam, NEU!, Die Toten Hosen, Mouse on Mars) or Berlin (Tangerine Dream, Nina Hagen, Rammstein, Stereo Total).

Other famous Hamburgers include Heinrich Hertz (first to demonstrate electromagnetic radiation), and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Oh, and Telemann and Brahms.

I have to admit that Hamburg had never made it to my shortlist of places I wanted to visit. Apparently I’m not alone in that respect, because research soon revealed that there weren’t any English-language guidebooks about Hamburg in print. I started assembling what information I could from online sources, while rothko purchased 2 German guidebooks and started reading those.

The reason for our choice of destination was simple: both sides of rothko’s family can be traced back to Hamburg. It was to be a visit to the ancestral homeland, and a chance to do some genealogical research. We would be staying with some distant relatives who had visited Minnesota many years before.

The shortest air journey from Austin to Hamburg is two hops via Continental. Unfortunately, the timing is less than ideal; the first flight leaves Austin at 06:30, and on arrival in Newark there’s a 6 hour gap before the connecting flight to Hamburg. Factoring in the recommendation that you arrive 2 hours prior to departure, drive time to the aiport, parking, shuttle buses and so on, I realized I was going to have to wake up around 04:00 at the latest.

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Theodore Dalrymple writes about the German psyche, and how even now Germans find it hard to feel national pride, or even anger at what was done to them in Dresden. My German roots are distant enough that I’ll have to take his word for that. However, he then goes on to diagnose a deep malaise in modern Germany:

The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy’s, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. […] Nor are the comforts of victimhood available to the Germans as they survey the devastation of their homeland.

Of course, that pre-supposes that modern architecture is “devastation”. Apparently Dalrymple feels that the proper response to the end of World War II would have been to replicas of the destroyed classical architecture and make Germany a kind of Weimar Disneyland with compulsory lederhosen for all.

Instead, the influence of the bauhaus is everywhere. Though a few old Gothic typeface street signs remain, minimalist sans-serif typography is almost ubiquitous. And why not? The bauhaus is a piece of 20th Century culture Germany can be proud of; it profoundly influenced the entire world—and Hitler hated it.

So, I say better to look forward with modern architecture, than to build faux reproductions of the medieval Germanic buildings that Hitler loved.

Collective pride is denied the Germans because, if pride is taken in the achievements of one’s national ancestors, it follows that shame for what they have done must also be accepted.

What can I say? Apparently Mr Dalrymple hasn’t spent much time in the company of ordinary Americans. Even now, US torture is being written off as the responsibility of a few “bad apples”, as the architect of the policy gets moved into the Attorney General’s office, and SUVs sport magnetic “God Bless Our Troops” ribbons.

A young German once said to me, “I don’t feel German, I feel European.” This sounded false to my ears: it had the same effect upon me as the squeal of chalk on a blackboard, and sent a shiver down my spine. One might as well say, “I don’t feel human, I feel mammalian.”

Hyperbole aside, it’s not surprising that a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph would be horrified by the thought of identifying as European. But what’s wrong with saying “I don’t feel human, I feel mammalian”? Am I the only person to have thought that while reading the newspaper?

Coincidentally, National Geographic reports that scientists have successfully fused human and animal cells, and that plans are underway to engineer mice with human-style (albeit very small) brains. There’s an obvious joke about chimp/human hybrids, but I don’t really need to spell it out, do I?

The news from the House of Pain led one person on Slashdot to ask: if we can “uplift” animals to a more human-like state, why shouldn’t we do so? My response was that if we do, they might start thinking and behaving like humans. If you want to know what’s wrong with that, ask a German.

Don’t get me wrong, I know a number of wonderful human beings. I’m just not wild about humanity as a whole. In that respect my philosophy has something in common with that of Bill Hicks (authentic Texan): as he put it, “We’re a virus with shoes”

I’m a nervous traveler. I’ve been to Belgium, Canada, France, Germany (including the former East, just after the wall came down), Italy, Luxembourg, Russia, Spain, and of course various places in the USA. Including rural Alabama, which is pretty damn scary. I’ve survived it all, but nevertheless, I’m still a nervous traveler.

It’s not the plane flight. Once I’m on the plane, I’m fine. I can relax, because everything is now someone else’s problem. No, it’s everything leading up to the plane flight.

Unfortunately, I have to face four plane flights in the next two months—a trip to Minnesota, and a business trip to DisneyWorld (yes, really). With alleged extra airport security hassle to increase my stress levels. I got my first attack of nervousness this afternoon.