Tag Archives: Hamburg

Postscript: Hamburger Helper

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.

Don’t mention the war

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.

Continue reading →

On the farm

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.

Continue reading →

Public displays of affection

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.

Continue reading →

How to look German

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.

Continue reading →

World famous in Germany

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.

Hamburg introduction

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.

Continue reading →

Back

We’re back from Hamburg. I will write lots more later, obviously; I’m still catching up on everything.

I have about 250 photos, so watch out for upcoming Flickr action.

Right now I’m upgrading our home server’s hard drive so I can add a photo library area. That and some stupid Debian update made the machine unbootable (spurious GRUB errors), so I’m switching it to Ubuntu like my laptop. It seems that since Sarge finally shipped, debian-testing has become debian-unstable, with bleeding edge broken releases of core packages a regular occurrence. (Not that PAM is fixed yet or anything.)

Politics

Wednesday’s Guardian had a story with the headline Bush names rightwing Republican as CIA chief. I half expected to see a story elsewhere on the page saying Study confirms bears defecate in woods or Pope announces he isn’t Jewish. Yes, I’m talking about the guy who says he’s not qualified for a job at the CIA.

Also yesterday, Wikipedia’s featured article was MKULTRA. I must admit, I was amazed by some of the details. It makes me realize that the Church of Scientology’s rabid hatred of psychiatry makes some kind of sense, in the 50s and 60s context of the cult’s growth. Did L. Ron Hubbard know that the leader of the World Psychiatric Association was carrying out experiments that involved deliberately putting people into comas and giving them electroshock at 30x normal voltage? Or did he merely suspect?

Thirdly, a quick pointer to Jeff The Pacifist Bomb, written back before the Iraq war but not posted until now.

In case you missed it:

The retrial of a Moroccan man convicted of involvement in the September 11 attacks appeared to be in doubt last night after the Bush administration refused to allow two key al-Qaida suspects to give evidence.

On the first day of the new trial of Mounir el Motassadeq, a court in Hamburg was told that the US had refused to allow its al-Qaida suspects to be questioned in Germany.

Mr Motassadeq, 30, is accused of plotting the attacks in 2001 together with Mohamed Atta and other members of Hamburg’s al-Qaida cell.

Washington’s announcement came as Mr Motassadeq’s defence lawyer tried to have the case thrown out. Josef Graessle-Muenscher told the court it would be impossible to find out what had really happened on September 11 because al-Qaida suspects in US custody had probably been tortured.

“In this swamp of torture and prison camps, no court can ascertain the truth any more,” he said in an intervention detailing US abuses of prisoners, especially at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba

—Guardian 2004-08-11

Yup, you read it right—one of the guys who the German government believe helped plan the 9/11 attacks may walk free because the Bush administration won’t let suspects held in Guatánamo Bay give evidence.

Remind me, why are they there again?

No, but I’ve trodden in some

German Composer Stockhausen Apologizes
The Associated Press
Sep 19 2001 1:27PM

HAMBURG, Germany (AP)—German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen apologized for calling last week’s attacks on the United States a “work of art”—words that prompted the cancelation of four concerts in this northern city.

The 73-year-old Stockhausen, one of Germany’s best-known postwar composers, had described the attacks as “the greatest work of art one can imagine.”

“That minds accomplish in one act something that we in music can’t dream of, that people rehearse like mad for 10 years—totally fanatically—for a concert and then die—that’s the greatest work of art there is in the entire cosmos,” he said Sunday.

Organizers of a music festival in Hamburg promptly canceled four concerts of Stockhausen’s music.

The composer has since apologized for the comments, which he made Sunday during a press conference, Hamburg’s top culture official Christina Weiss said Tuesday.

Stockhausen told Hamburg officials he meant to compare the attacks to “a production of the devil, Lucifer’s work of art,” said culture department spokesman Ingo Mix.

“If anyone feels hurt by what I said at the press conference, I ask their forgiveness, because I have never felt or thought what was read into my words,” the composer said, according to Weiss.

However, festival organizers still consider staging Stockhausen’s music inappropriate in view of his “unconsidered verbal gaffes,” Weiss said. The music festival itself will continue.

Stockhausen gained fame through his avant-garde works in the 1960s and 70s. He later moved to huge music theater and other projects, some involving military equipment, that have been less popular.