BERLIN JOURNAL, September, 1999
Oct. 6, 1999
Well, here it is Monday, the first day of my husband's conference. Quite a busy day. We started out with the most incredible breakfast buffet I have ever seen. I went for the wurst and the lox this time, but I guess I'll stick to the muesli for the duration. I'm kind of glad I ate so much, though, because our Stadtrundumfahrt (guided tour) was more than four hours long, and our tour guide could not be described as particularly concerned about the comfort of her guests. She was really on about Berlin architecture, of which there is a lot, and there's a lot more coming. They ought to call East Berlin Baustelle (construction site) Berlin. There are hundreds of grandiose new buildings going up. At the same time, ordinary Berliners are actually being ordered to leave to make place for the officials and support personnel moving in from Bonn. Imagine that.
Mad building boom in former East Berlin.View from hotel room incl. Friederichstr. Bahnhof
The hotel we're staying in (Maritim) has the above mentioned fabulous buffet and is quite nice except for the really hideous blobby "abstract art" everywhere. It was one of the five luxury hotels built in East Berlin for party favorites and was privatized. It's expensive, but hey, we don't have to pay for it.
Well, as has been so often observed, the things people have suffered here have made them hard. And they are hard. Surfaces are hard and shiny. I note that everything is as smooth and shiny as possible. Lots of glass. No nubbly, cozy things to pick up dust and dirt. Nice smooth hairdos. They were not always thus, if I can judge by a photo I saw in a book I bought of a group of terrified Berliners in a bomb shelter. They have baskets, furs, tweeds, etc. etc. A poor woman hiding her face behind her fox stole is wearing a pair of high-heeled black shoes. All dressed up for the air raid. What a picture. (Berlin 1945 p 17.)
People in general here are at best neutral-never friendly. I could tell they hate dark-looking foreigners by the way they gave me the cold fish eye when I walked into the shops. (With my Hawaiian tan and aloha shirt I stand out as a person of dubious racial qualities. Less southern looking people in Berlin are better treated and express surprise and disbelief at my tales of discrimination.) We're in the former eastern sector here, and perhaps they dislike foreigners more than those in the western sector.
What a bully of a city this is. Every building proclaims its superiority to mere flesh and blood. There's a lot of selling space, and at least right around here everything is ludicrously overpriced. Haven't been to any Kaufhäuser (department stores) yet, though. I went into a shoe store to find some walking shoes a little more stylish than my comfortable shoes and a little more comfortable than my stylish shoes, and the saleslady, who was decked out in an improbable and expensive red outfit, lots of jewelry and makeup and bright yellow hair, brought me one shoe to try on. I requested a sock, and she gave me one. She handed me the shoe, which I put on. I said, "It's too short." She said,"Yes, it is," took the shoe back, and that was it. What a dynamic salesperson!!! I'll bet the store was an Exquisitenladen in the old days, (Note: These stores had high quality merchandise that had to be paid for in hard currency from the west) and the saleswoman was accustomed to a better clientele, and certainly never had to deal with Americans. Some places will take VISA for any purchase, no matter how small. Other places demand a minimum purchase of 50 DM. My husband and I had lunch in a (brand new) pub. I ate a marvelous salami belegtes Brot (or Stulle, as they call it). To die for!!!!Boy, you can't complain about the food here!!!They must get a lot of it from Poland, etc. I notice that fruit is very expensive. I can't skip mentioning the schnitzel I had last night. The pork was just wonderful.
To back up a little bit: our Frankfurt hotel was a trip in itself. Terry took a lot of pictures of the wingy décor. I really dug it. It was groovy. We had a nice meal close to the hotel; we sat outdoors and watched an international crowd of slimeballs and sleazebags pass by--potty old guys with young Asian or African women, blonde tarts, pimps and druggies. The usual urban scene.
We loved the Hauptbahnhof (main railway station). It was very bright and cheery in this late summer weather on a nice Sunday morning. And we had a fabulous Salamibrot there, too. An older fellow with some time on his hands amused himself by giving some crap to the girl behind the counter about using paper cups instead of glass. She was foreign and dark, of course, probably Turkish. I remember getting garbage like that from people when I lived in Germany in the early 70's. Like the cashier at the grocery store in my Freiburg neighborhood who asked me if I was ever going to put any flowers in my window. MYOB is not a concept to them. It's kind of a zero tolerance policy toward those who don't do things the way they think they should be done.
Back to Berlin: I like learning something about the geography of this place. And seeing the Brandenburg Gate and a section of the Wall also interested me. But what really fascinates is the Bausucht (compulsion to build) here. It's nuts. For all their interest in architecture, there probably is not a single really beautiful building,to my eyes at least, in the whole city. Something about the bitterness of the people shows in all their works. Well, I'm going to start reading my books. I think I'll look at the one on Berlin, 1945 first.
Berlin is built on an alluvial bed, and now that there's so much construction going on, there are streets with overground pipes running along them that pump out the water (brightly painted, like the Pompidou Center exterior). Anyway, what a place. I thought about the tour guide again and realized that she was working very hard, but she did not seem to get the point. Or she was defining her job in a way I wouldn't. After all, if you want mere information, there's books for that. Working very hard doesn't always get the job done. She really blew it at the end by complaining out loud that she didn't like to do tours, because people would wander off and everything would get off schedule, this said while waiting for a man who was, in fact, sitting in the bus all the time, but that did not keep her from blaming him anyway. She would not be able to keep a job as a tour guide in the U.S. She did not provide for pit stops, for instance. She could be described as correct but unfriendly, I would say-- very interested in her self-presentation but not in her audience.
Even I got taken in for a short time (say, about 24 hours) by what seemed to be a very tolerant attitude toward outsiders here, but that's all on the surface, of course. Since Berlin has become the capital city of Germany again, Berliners want to think of themselves as cosmopolites, but they are hard people, unwelcoming to strangers and newcomers. Furthermore, like most Germans, they have all kinds of complex feelings about Americans, having twice lost wars to us.
One thing they're really working on here is the Bewältingung (processing the past) and of course, with customary Teutonic thoroughness, they are doing a perfect job of coming to terms with their negative history and overcoming it. The families of all those murdered Jews should be overjoyed, though I have not heard that they are.
I have been reading a collection from an Ausstellung, (exhibit) called Berlin 1945. (Reinhard Ruerup Verlag Willmuth Arenhoevel.) As Christine Mueller, the Reed professor I took a seminar on the Third Reich from says, they wrote down and took pictures of everything, documented, archived, and you can do a pretty complete job of reconstruction now. Combining the research on both east and west materials is creating the best historical records ever made. This book has material in it that I had no idea of, and probably lots of historical specialists didn't know these things either-- such things as the existence of a Flugblatt (leaflet) in perfect German, dropped just before the surrender, telling the Berliners to give up. So obviously, there were Germans fighting with the Soviet army. Or that Berlin was full of children, and the authorities kept trying to ship them out of the city, but the mothers resisted when no one could tell them where the children would be sent.
It actually took setting a flag on the Reichstag Dome to stop the fighting. 100,000 Soviet troops lost their lives in the Battle of Berlin. The Germans fought to the end, even sending out old men to dig trenches to stop the tanks or setting streetcars up as barriers. etc. etc.
A friend of mine who is here has been researching her father's family, who had a resort in the Sudentenland (Poland). She wanted to go see the place, but they were warned that if they took a rental car, it would likely be stolen, so they're bagging it. I don't know if this is true, of course. Berlin Philharmonic Tonight (Mahler, unfortunately.) Well, it should be a very cultural experience.
Wednesday. My friend does not care for my critical stance toward Germans, since she has some German ancestry. She looks like she belongs here, so no one hassles her on the street or in the stores. I soft-pedal it for her sake, but my objections to the Teutonic snow job really anger her. She thought it was terrible of me to express my opinion of the Mahler concert, given by the Berlin Philharmonic. Terry expressed his opinion by sleeping through the whole thing, but that was apparently OK. That just showed that he is a philistine who doesn't appreciate the higher things, but I actively disliked this Germanic cultural offering yet managed to stay awake for most of it, only nodding off intermittently. I thought the concert hall, the precision orchestra, the perfectly behaved crowd - which gave a long ovation and was even totally silent until the orchestra and conductor (an Italian) signaled that they could clap-expressed an extreme of German cultural arrogance. Such generosity toward an Italian conductor. Are Germans at last growing up and becoming international? Don't bet on it. The German public proved that they could get all dressed up, pay a lot of money for their (nonetheless heavily subsidized) tickets, and make a great display of enjoyment of their hard-working musicians and guest conductor on this historical day, the first day that the German parliament held a session in Berlin. (Sept 7, 1999). Mahler's 9th is such a bore. The orchestra played with unearthly precision. It was everything critics of German music making complain about-technically perfect but soulless. I listened in vain for soaring moments in the entire one and one half-hour Leistung, although somewhere around the end of the third movement something indescribable happened when the whole orchestra sounded like a single instrument. For my money, Mahler wrote some great Lieder, but he really couldn't write a symphony, or to be fair, I don't like his symphonies. All that whimsy whamsy folkishness. Poor dead Jewish Mahler being trotted out to stand for dead German - Jewish culture. He thought he was a German (well, Austrian) until he had to flee for his life. The whole experience really kind of made me sick.
There are rumblings everywhere. Maurice Droun, permanent secretary of the French Academy, foresees conflict between Germany and France for European dominance. (International Herald Tribune, Sept. 8, p. 1) I think he's right. I overheard two young Germans at the breakfast table complaining that they were being shortchanged in their own country because of the relative handicap of not having fluent German speakers at their conference. Their stance was that they were not being properly understood. Maybe.
I headed out from the hotel onto a shopping street and found some amusing postcards, featuring the well-known Berlin humor, and a great pair of shoes.
The shoes were $40.00 American and would cost at least $100.00 for that quality in the U.S. The saleswoman, vast, overdressed, and very angry in the heat, must have been an Ossi(from the former East Germany). She was extremely rude and kept an eye on me the whole time to make sure I didn't steal anyth
The countryside and the weather here remind me of Toronto. It's very flat and there is a lot of water around, so on hot summer days it gets a little sticky though not terribly humid. There's not much air pollution, and the transportation system makes it so easy to get around that there are not nearly as many cars here as there would be in a city of almost three million in the States. They have those great Finnish potatoes that I could eat every day. Potatoes, cabbage and meat or sausage make a perfectly acceptable every day diet, and you can ring a lot of changes on them so you don't get tired of them, especially with the kind of cheeses, etc. that you can get. I love the food here and could eat this diet for the rest of my life and not miss other kinds of food, but I feel the same about the totally different diet that I have in Hawaii.
I do think living here would wear me down. I originally hesitated to add this anecdote to my journal, but it perhaps needs to be told. I went to the Berlin Synagogue (The original synagogue was, of course, destroyed in Kristallnacht and later rebuilt) to see the exhibit there and was met at the front door by a huge blond man in uniform. He barked at me to give him my purse. I said, "OK, just let me get my wallet out," and started rummaging for it. Ignoring my words, he grabbed my purse and started pulling on it and shouting at me, right in my face. I yanked hard, got my purse away from him, turned and left, saying "Es lohnt sich nicht," meaning, who wants to deal with a jerk like you. I really had been looking forward to seeing the exhibit, too. A dark face, a culpable person, that's how they think.
Well, this is Prussia. I really feel the difference from Southern Germany or Switzerland, where people did not hassle me, since so many there are Latin looking. The loss of nature is a strong element in Prussian culture, so this is what I'm picking up. Here is a place, settled for thousands of years, repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. Death is layers and layers deep. Wherever they have excavated, you smell these odd odors that make you sneeze.
© 2001 Marianna Scheffer
Here is a more recent take on Berlin from German Joys. Electrocute the pigeons! [oops. link appears to be broken.]
March 2009: This video from Spiegel is a howl! The gist of it is that there is a campaign right now to try to get Berliners to be friendlier. Good luck! It's such a kick to see them trying to smile! But it is a comfort to know that they are as rude to each other as they were to me!
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