Frankfurt 12.5.05: Phallic Fatuity and Schmucke Schminke

Frankfurt airport, waiting for flight. We spent last night at the airport hotel. Airports have always struck me as perfect matches for purgatory—waiting rooms with little to recommend them except that they’re the “terminal” to which you must go in order to take the final stage of a journey, or initial stage, as it may be.

If airports are purgatory, airport hotels are so a fortiori. There’s no reason at all to be in one except to while away boring hours before a flight takes off. One sleeps badly, tossing and turning for the call one knows will come too early.

And everything is designed for someone else: someone rich, someone svelte, someone who travels frequently, someone male or the kind of female who fits easily into male hierarchical structures—e.g., an airline stewardess.

At the Frankfurt airport, you see all of this in its most methodical, thorough German fashion. Open the minibar and the first thing you discover is a pack of condoms.

Turn on the t.v., and you find that for a modest fee, you can buy non-stop porn from 12 to 12—pornography designed for men, with woman-demeaning titles like “Backdoor Babes.” It’s multilingual, for the convenience of travelers who speak English, French, or German.

It’s European—cosmopolitan, in other words, but with American taste ultimately prevailing, E.g., every film features repeated scenes involving one woman and two men. Europeans are evidently frank about the fact that two men enjoy getting it on with a woman as an excuse and buffer to enjoy homoerotic contact that simultaneously prevents their turning gay.

But in the European originals, there’s always a bit of sword clashing, of penis knocking against penis as the activity proceeds. In these Frankfurt airport hotel films, though, all that’s very carefully edited out. American men cannot admit that they enjoy or want what is the evident—the palpable—purpose of this form of sexual activity: the excitement of male-on-male action, albeit screened and mediated by the woman who makes it all okay.

Hence you see shots where it’s evident that the two members have just rubbed against each other, but the footage has been clipped out lest American male sensibilities be offended.

Which reminds me: the other big consumer of the Frankfurt airport hotel is American servicemen. With them above all, the stew of homoerotic desire that bubbles everywhere in this intensely male-bonded society must never be acknowledged or made conscious. Our infantilism must, at all costs, be carefully preserved. Our way of life depends on it.

Yes, dear reader, I blush to admit I did watch. And became quickly bored. One must do something in purgatory.

Things I learned from this trip: ebenfalls; gleichfalls. In Bad Soden, the doughty little Sparkasse cashier with too much blue eyeshadow who went toe-to-toe with the gentleman of the lost coin said ebenfalls, when I said to her as we checked out, Schönen Abend.

And Schminke. Happened on it in the dictionary, and then began to see it everywhere. The art museum in Köln had a Kinderschminke activity.

I also noticed that Schmuck can apparently be used in adjectival form to mean “pretty," but perhaps in the sense of over-the-top pretty. So I presume one could say, Wie schmucke Schminke! to complement someone’s make-up. Is there any language in the world where that statement is expressed in such outrageously funny words whose sound in no shape, form, or fashion seems to equal the idea expressed?

And so the trip comes to an end. I’m fatigued and low-spirited. Was when I left. Feel the same now, with a few knocks and bumps added.

Travel is frankly taxing. All the props of everyday life are gone—all those mechanisms (“I must work!”) some of us so expertly employ to keep relationship at bay are removed, and there’s only naked encounter, day after day, with one’s traveling companions, when one is supposed to be having fun.

With Steve, it seems that I am always capable of saying something utterly simple and flat, and, to my surprise, I find it has suddenly entered a world of never-never land, and we’re talking about the moon when I started with the sun.

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Sitting in the waiting room listening to my rude compatriots howling into their cell phones, oblivious to anyone around them, brings back to mind our last evening in Köln.

We went to a restaurant near our hotel called Jan von Werth on Christophstrasse. It looked a bit touristy but turned out to be a local hangout. We’d tried to get into a smaller and very local place behind Gereonskirche earlier, only to find every table reserved, and to be told nothing would be free before 7.

The waitress at van Werth was a sweetheart, very solicitous. It helps to speak a bit of the language—helps to soften the ugly American edge. She brought us a snack as we had beer—Schmalz spread thick on brown bread!

Food was good. We both had an Eintopf served in little silver cups with handles, potato, carrot, onion with sliced sausage on top. Then Steve had a Schweineschnitzel with kohlrabi and I a Gulasch with Butterspäztle and Apfelmus. Good, but too much (and too salty) after the Eintopf and two Kölsch.

Anyway—the point I’m wending my way to—at some point, a young German man came in and proceeded to make a call on a cellphone at the bar near us. Had on an ill-fitting and very ugly brown pinstripe suit of some polyester-like material, wide lapels and wide pinstripes. He looked to be involved in some shady, unsavory business—all hole and corner in his expression.

As soon as he gets on the phone, the waitress glides up and tells him firmly he may not work in the restaurant. That strikes me as an interesting and fruitful approach to the encroachment of the cellphone monster.

Not, You’re disturbing people (as you clearly are, but such social strictures increasingly carry little weight with people anywhere). But, This is a Kneipe; people are here to eat and drink, not work. There’s a time and place for everything—a typically German idea: Wohnzimmer activity is not Schlafzimmer activity is not Toilette activity.

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Colm Tóibín, The Master (London: Picador, 2004):

“He envied them their lack of self-consciousness, their unawareness that their American voices, so filled with enthusiasm, were not as original as they imagined, nor as uncomplicated by history as they supposed” (222).

“Remaining invisible, becoming skilled in the art of self-effacement, even to someone whom he had known so long, gave him satisfaction. He was ready to listen, always ready to do that, but not prepared to reveal the mind at work, the imagination, or the depth of feeling” (226).

“Old Newport, the old ladies and the half-Europeanized families, believed in talent, he said, more than they did in money, but that was because they had plenty of money, or had inherited enough never to think about it” (308).

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At the restaurant in Köln (last evening), a group of Asian-American men came in to sit at the bar; they asked the waitress abruptly and insensitively something about the place catering to American needs or tastes. She looked rightfully put out.

They then paraded to the bar and all proceeded to light big cigars, to a man jack. They then discussed in loud puerile tones the virtue of this or that expensive cigar and how to obtain them.

I know such behavior has not gone out of style in the U.S. Far from it, though the cigar-bar craze of the virile 90s seems to have peaked. Still, it strikes me that a certain type of American male goes to Europe to glory in the unrestricted macho freedom still permitted there—or so these types appear to think. European cultures have only begun to restrict where and when one may smoke, and the anti-Puritan sentiment remains very strong.

In the hands of men such as these, though, what an uncouth use these traditions have been put to. The restaurant owner had to come and open the front door, apologizing to us. The we-own-it-all display of showmanship (and for what audience?) was disgusting.

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The way Tóibín tells the story, Henry James—it would be fair to say—may have excelled in the art of learning how to live. He paid a price: he himself never lived fully, though his awareness of the interior lives and motives of others was delicate and prescient.

And perhaps this is the role to which gay men have been relegated . . . . Perhaps it’s the role to which I have been relegated in my family . . . .

Köln 10.5.05: Decentering Touches and Dangerous Memories

As we left Stommeln last evening, having met Herr Wisskirchen, who has written numerous books and articles about the history of Stommeln, he spoke about the importance of remembering. He was headed off to give a lecture about the end of the war, which was officially announced on 8 May 1945, I believe.

He said his students ask why they should be compelled to remember. The guilt is their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’, after all—not theirs. And don’t other countries have their bloody pasts? Genocide in Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia . . . ?

His reply: this is our guilt. This happened on German soil, and not so long ago—barbarous acts perpetrated by a “civilized” people. To forget is to court a repetition of barbarism . . . .

This is precisely why I cannot accept Ratzinger’s pretense that the church is the sole bastion of salvation and light in a dark and wicked world. To pretend so is to forget how the church closed its eyes in the Nazi times, or how it actively assisted the Nazis.

This is why Metz speaks of holding onto dangerous memories, even when they sting us. The memory of Jesus is such a memory, for Metz. Whereas Ratzinger remembers a church that pulled against Nazism, Metz remembers—in the same region, Bavaria—going to church, the whole village, singing and praying, and pretending that right outside the village, Jews were not being murdered and incinerated.

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Yesterday at the café in Pulheim, Steve pointed out to me that after the alte Damen and their daughters had had coffee and cake, one of the old women said, “Why don’t we have champagne now?” And so they did—a happy hour, indeed. They were a very pleasant bunch.

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I think of how I can recall the specific moment I learned some inconsequential German word. E.g., wahrscheinlich. That was in Jöhlingen, as we read the church books and electricity went off. Steve asked the secretary if this had happened throughout the village, and she replied, Wahrscheinlich nicht.

I had never heard the word before, but I worked it out in my head: wahr = true, schein = appear, and lich is, of course, the –ly suffix: trueappearingly = probably.

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Looking out a café window near Neumarkt. We’ve just had Milchkaffe with Apfelkuchen (Steve) and Monschnecken (me). The apple was especially wonderful, in a crust of buttery short pastry overlaid with almond slices, all flavored with a tiny bit of lemon zest and nutmeg. Nice to sit after a morning of walking and shopping.

We’ve bought lavender bags with hand-worked rose crowns on them—but not German work. I suspect they’re done in Asia. Also got an assortment of chocolates in the Schnäppchen basement of Karstadt.

Such typical Cologne people and scenes as we sit here: a chunky middle-aged lady in a tight brown jacket sauntering by, a cigarette held in the corner of her mouth; an apartment building across the street, that functional post-war architecture that’s all over Köln. It’s graceless, lacks any sense of style, and is usually dirty and with cracks in it.

Yet the Kölners have given it their own little stamp of style. I saw on the street today a cover of a power box on the side of a building, whimsically painted with two smiling, colorful cats holding hands.

And out of the corner of my eye, I see the woman in the corner across from us studiously downing her salad. She’s every bit the proper matron, stylish in a pink plaid linen jacket. Yet in her well-coiffed blond hair, cut no-nonsense short, is one streak of bright red, swirling up in a semicircle above her left eyebrow.

That’s Köln: the outrageous, unexpected little touch that nicely decenters everything. Perhaps it’s a way of saying they don’t entirely belong to anyone, these Roman-French-Jewish Germans on the Rhine whose mayor stoutly repudiated Hitler.

Köln 9.5.05: Stars of David and Kollwitz Pietà

As the cards tucked into the journal indicate, a visit to the Käthe Kollwitz museum at Neumarkt yesterday. A woman at a table near the entrance offered me a gift. Like the fool I am, I blushed and said no thanks—not listening or fully understanding. She persisted: a choice of balloons or cards, not both!

To cover my foolishness, I said (all this in my stumbling German): “But they’re for children.” “Ah, no, for all visitors,” she replied. I furtively palmed my cards, thanked her profusely, and walked off. They came with a nice little clip-style bookmark which is coming in handy for the book I’m reading—Colm Tóibín’s novel about Henry James’s life.

I had seen several of the Kollwitzes, and have a card of her engraving of the mother sheltering her children—“Let not the seed for sowing be milled.” Still, seeing these (again) brought tears to my eyes, and it does so to write about them.

It’s the need to shelter, so characteristic of women throughout history. And yet how ineffectual women often are at keeping their loved ones safe. If only Kollwitz had been heard! She could see; she could not prevent. And so her bronzes and engravings of women and children saying goodbye to their husbands and fathers as the men go to war, their faces hidden in grief behind all-encompassing hands, and her breathtaking Pietà, which I’d never seen.

History is full of Käthe Kollwitzes, deep-souled, deep-seeing, able only to stand by and grieve as tragedy unfolds. I identify in many ways with her, though I lack her purity of vision and intensity of commitment.

All this in a café in Pulheim (writing, that is), as happy hour unfolds. Yep, that’s what it says—Monday, happy hour. Surrounded by middle-aged women and their mothers eating enormous slices of cake, drinking coffee, and nattering happily away. It’s stiflingly hot in here, but admittedly cold and wet outside.

We’ve just come from the Stommeln cemetery, up on a hill behind the old part of town. Stommeln is built in a kind of little valley running out from the Rhine, surrounded by pretty rolling hills.

The Friedhof has the remains of the old medieval St. Martin’s church in it, which seem to have been rebuilt later into a usable church. It’s a beautiful cemetery, well-cared for and with old monuments, one erected by the Catholic Verein in 1874, with names of those who died or left, including “J.J. Schmitz, Amerika”—Steve’s ancestor Johannes Josef Schmitz.

For some reason, the area around Köln has some very old cemeteries—that is, older cemeteries seem to have survived here and not to have been replaced, as in other areas. On the way into Köln from Pulheim is what appears to be an old Jewish cemetery.

Speaking of which, it appears that two of Steve’s families from here may have Jewish roots—Canis (= Kahn) and Cöne (= Cohn/Kohn). His immigrant ancestor Johannes Schmitz had a grandmother Katherina Canis and John Schmitz’s wife Gertrude Ott had a grandmother Gertrude Cönen. The Friedhof has monuments from World War I to fallen villagers, including two with Stars of David.

Oh, the other large monument to which I alluded before—it’s commemorating the villagers’ service vs. or on behalf of Napoleon: I didn’t read carefully.

It, too, included Kahns, with that spelling. How badly Germany repaid these Jewish citizens for their contributions to the Fatherland, when Nazi times came.

Stommeln/Köln 8.5.05: Celebrating for Celebration's Sake

I awoke to the sound of the church bell chiming eight and doves or pigeons (don’t the Germans call the latter Tauben?) cooing softly outside the window. A nice sound—or, rather, combination of sounds—after a bad night.

I went to bed furious with Steve for various reasons: well, his stolid, never-varying German methodicalness, perfected. All night cars zipped past under the window, going where, I know not. We must be on a main road, perhaps feeding out of Köln.

As I write, peering out the café window (of our Gasthaus zur Trapp), I see branches down in the park, small ones, under a linden. Wind was very fierce at times yesterday. The roadway was white with horse chestnut blooms blown from the trees, flecked with bits of green leaves. The downed limbs in the little park, black and convoluted, look like ribs or horns of some animal that died there and has long since decayed.

I feel very gray today, very much without hope or meaning. Everything seems to conspire to produce such feelings: my weight and lack of sound health, the last U.S. elections, the unbelievable circus around John Paul’s death, and now Ratzinger. And conflict with Steve, above all.

I feel very much like Nick, the protagonist of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel Line of Beauty, which I’ve just finished. Those brutal scenes at the end, where the Feddens, with whom he had lived as family, voice frankly their distaste for him, their absolute dissatisfaction with his performance as a never-quite-acknowledged servant, though the fiction was that he was family (and though he paid them rent to be the unsatisfactory servant).

It’s there in black and white: the lengths to which self-righteous bourgeois society at the end of the 20th century will go to pin all moral failings and corruption on gay men. He’s the worm in the apple, the little parasite who has wormed himself into the family to feed vicariously on its energies since family is denied to him. He’s the hostile observer let inside the gates only to open them to the barbarian hordes.

He’s all that was ever said about the Jews—one of us, capable of incredible mimicry so that we hardly know he’s there as the malicious parasitic presence. He’s all the more frightening because he appears to be so capable of adaptation and imitation. And all this from adulterers and inside traders who are mopping up in the reign of the Lady Thatcher . . . .

And, of course, what he’s blamed for ultimately has nothing at all to do with their real shortcomings, their real travesties, which are exposed by their daughter . . . .

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Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Picador, 2004): “Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something, too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental missions” (255).

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Köln: we’ve checked into our hotel, Zur Kupferkessel, and have just walked across to St. Gereon’s church and then down to the cathedral. We’re now having raspberry torte, nougat bretzel, and milchkaffee in a café on Breitgasse, and a band comes by, resplendent, totally unexpected, gloriously meretricious. It’s preceded by slim dark women wearing hats like airline stewardess caps and highstepping. The band, only 20 or so men playing extraordinarily well and very loudly, have black hats like from the Franco-Prussian wars, with bright red plumes bobbing as they play.

What are they celebrating? Steve thought it was a parish group—but if a saint’s festival, why no statue, no priest, no religious regalia? If mothers' day, there’s no sign of that, either.

It’s like a celebration of nothing, celebrating for celebration’s sake. I’m interpreting it as a private welcome to Köln, the city that celebrates to celebrate.

People speak loudly, boisterously in this region. They cry out in the streets in a way that would be distinctly frowned on in other areas of Germany, especially the north.

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Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder (New York: HarperCollins, 2002): “I’ve spent hundreds of pages, even whole novels, trying to explain what home means to me. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing I ever write about. Home is place, geography, and psyche; it’s a matter of survival and safety, a condition of attachment and self-definition . . . . Homelessness is the loss of community and finally of the self” (197-8).

“Whatever else ‘home’ might be called, it must surely be a fundamental human license. In every culture on earth, the right to live in a home is probably the first condition of citizenship and humanity” (198).

“Home is where all justice begins” (201).

Stommeln 7.5.05: Kölsch and Maibäume

Now in Stommeln outside Köln. We drove here from Wiesbaden this morning, arriving shortly after noon, and took a room for one night in a small hotel on the street with the church.

Interesting towns, with small brick cottages. The churches are also brick, beautiful brickwork. It’s hard to say how old much of it is. A history of our hotel says it was built 1646-8, and is the oldest house in town. The history implies the town was built around that time—why so late? An extension of Köln?

But the sign for the synagogue says the Jewish community here dates from the early 1300s. So the town can’t have first been built in the 1600s. What does the little history mean?

A different feel here than anywhere I’ve been in Germany. The architecture looks at times like something out of Amsterdam—those steep-gabled buildings with steps and whorls leading up to the gable. Landscape is flat, too, though nowhere near so flat as Holland.

Some houses painted colors I’ve never seen in Germany—strong Mediterranean blue, bright orange. And trees have colored streamers—obviously Maibäume—something I didn’t see anywhere in the Taunus region, Marburg, or Wiesbaden.

Wonderful meal this evening at a place near the town Bahnhof recommended by the hotel owner—Bauernstube. Steve had a leg of lamb—thick steaks—in a Madeira sauce with green beans in bunches and Dauphinoise potatoes. I had schnitzel in mushroom cream sauce with spätzle and salad.

Before we ate, they brought us asparagus salad—wonderful, in a creamy vinaigrette that wasn’t sweet. Almost impossible to find a non-sweet dressing in Germany. With the asparagus was chopped ham, and there was onion or leek also. Delicious!

The spätzle were so much better than in Marburg, and the schnitzels (two of them) were enormous. I could eat only one and Steve had the other.

His green beans had been cooked with an herb that was, I suspect, summer savory. Isn’t that what Germans call Bohnenkraut? They were wrapped into bunches (Bohnenbönchen) with bacon. The Dauphinoise potatoes were very rich—croquettes flavored with nutmeg.

With all of this, several glasses of Kölsch, light and refreshing. I like the small glasses, so you don’t feel as if you’re drinking like a pig. Sauf dich voll und friss dich dick . . . .