Hamburg 17.12.93: Advent Wreaths and Ausländer Aus

Sitting in a café in Blankenese where we’ve just ordered coffee and torte. On the table an Advent wreath, which the waitress lit—three candles. A beautiful sonata on the piano, which I recognize but can’t name.

Outside, the wind is blowing briskly off the Elbe: I see a row of cedars bending over. But of course we know the wind is cold, because we just walked in, after having taken the Wandernweg from Nienstedt. The sun shines intermittently, then rain in between.

Yesterday, our presentation, which was actually at the University, not the Missionsakademie. It seemed to go well—students fairly attentive, and asking what we do to combat racism, whether there is an international neo-Nazi connection to the Ku Klux Klan, etc.: all those serious questions German students ask.

Then E. drove us to the Missionsakademie, where we immediately attended a Gottesdienst prior to a Christmas party. Barbara M. led the former, in the little chapel beneath the guesthouse. Very moving. Barbara M. had a Christmas story, most of which I got, because it was directed to the children (who had just had a Christmas party with presents). The gist was that the three kings could not identify Jesus, who had nothing to do with their gold and silver (or, in the case of one, with his intellectualism). But a child could: he saw the Niedrigkeit of the Christ child, his helplessness and dependence on others.

(N.B. If I write any theological autobiography pieces, talk about how Gélin’s book on the poor of Yahweh deeply influenced me as I began to read theology.)

All this was the more touching, because it was addressed to a multiracial, multicultural audience, mostly people from cast-off countries.

After the reading, we read a litany, in which Barbara M. voiced the sentiments of common sense and power (war and poverty are ineradicable, the only hope is in heaven, etc.), and the audience responded by reading biblical passages about Christ which affirmed his this-worldly salvific import.

Then the party. We were seated at a table with Frau R., the cook (whom we had met last time), a student from Togo, a young German woman from Bochum who will be ordained and pastor a church, and S.W., a theology student from near Lübeck, who will be ordained.

The food was good, if unexciting—a pork roast stuffed with apricots and prunes, a pork tenderloin, a spanakopita, fish in innumerable salads and smoked, two kinds of cole slaw, and a Römmergrot and a chocolate mousse, with bread and cheese, of course.

The big surprise: at table, I mentioned Thomas Mann to S.W. (when I found he was from near Lübeck), Death in Venice, and he winked as he told me the book was a favorite of his. Then, when the young German woman told Steve the “Father” Christmas at the children’s party was a woman, Steve mentioned that this transgressed gender lines, and S.W. winked again.

Gradually S.W. and I found ourselves sitting side by side at the table and I admired his ring. He told me it’s a Ghanaian ring given to men who enter a certain “club” as they mature. It was given to him by a Ghanaian friend.

One thing led to another, as they say, and he offered to take us out to Café Gnosa in St. Georg, which we had wanted to see. I can’t say I loved it. I can count on my fingertips the number of times in my life I have been to a gay bar, so I have nothing really to judge the experience by. Maybe it was the hour or the season, but it seemed a bit dreary—a long, narrow, smoky place with two rooms and tables along the wall.

The waiter was very sweet, though, and we met a cabaret performer and his boyfriend, who were enchanting—or whatever is between nice and enchanting.

Then home, very late, and I slept hardly at all. At 10:30, E. took us to the Stafford café in Nienstedt Marktplatz, where we had been before, for a breakfast of bread (and bread and bread), eggs, sliced meat and cheese, jam, butter, and coffee.

He told us the future of the Missionsakademie is in doubt. As more and more Germans declare no church membership and the church thus loses the 9% tax they pay, there’s talk of financial crisis, compounded by the economic hardships they country faces, the debt the West has assumed from East Germany, and, in particular, the debt the Western church has assumed from the East. At bottom, though, it’s political, he believes, and the talk of cutting expenses by closing the Missionsakademie is really motivated (he believes) by resistance to the “frivolous” third-world concerns of the Akademie.

E. told us that the front door of the Missionsakademie has been sprayed with anti-foreign neo-Nazi slogans. He and others have told us that Bischöfin Maria Jespen of Hamburg is increasingly embattled, attacked by the Right for her socially critical stands.

And now back to Nienstedt and, I hope, to sleep before our evening lecture.

Hamburg 16.12.93: Christmas Merry-Go-Rounds and Ein Mischmasch

At my post again before the glass door. Rich metaphoric material there: how windows/glass doors invite us beyond, open onto new vistas. Whatever praying is, I seem to do it best before a window.

The weather cold and rainy again: K. last night called it Scheisswetter. I see now that some of the flowers on the balcony—the only plants still green—are miniature roses. They nod bravely in the wind today, buds nipped.

I awoke sick and drugged-feeling. Steve says jet-lag. I say that and more. Panicky day yesterday, first at lunch with W. at an Etruscan restaurant, where the waiter was rude with me for rejecting the tomato soup that accompanied the fettucine with tomato sauce. I chose straciatella instead, and he called the choice ein Mischmasch. I don’t handle these things well, and became so full of panic I ended the meal with diarrhea. Then, similar symptoms at a school Christmas concert we attended last night.

Consequently, at bedtime my intestines groaned and couldn’t sleep. When I did finally fall asleep, I slept heavily until 10 this morning, awaking out of a dream of being chased by ruffians into a cleft in a rooftop, where there were dry leaves and spiderwebs.

Ah, well—the stuff of life: dreams. And mine, like my life, are fragmentary, truncated, disordered, and full of strife and pain.

With our late start yesterday, we saw little of the city. At around 11 (after we had argued foolishly for an hour), we took the UBahn to meet W. at the university. For an hour or so, we walked the streets, looking in shop windows, buying a bottle of cherry juice, because we’re so thirsty still from the arid plane air.

I feel drawn to the young folks I see on the streets and at the university—so serious and intense-seeming, with a self-containment that seems directed to politics and social criticism, rather than self-serving. But I always sense that the other side of that German intellectual abstraction and political passion is fanaticism, as if all the repressed and denied emotions of the unconscious are permitted to go with free rein into “high-minded” causes.

Went to a bathroom for students at the university that seemed somehow to typify German culture. It was white and sparkling, with all graffiti carefully (daily?) removed. But it smelled frankly of ordure. A condom machine was displayed very frankly, too, in the exit, with the word natürlich in its slogan—I thought, a play on “nature,” which sells everything today. It had a picture of a woman putting a banana in her mouth.

After the bathroom, W. After W. and the Etruscans, Steve and I headed in the cold wind, under glowing skies, across the Kennedybrücke to the Kunsthalle.

But as we arrived, we realized we wouldn’t have time to see it, since it was past 3 and we were expected back before 6:30. Also, it’s under construction (i.e., renovation) and not all open.

So we walked instead, thinking we were headed to St. Georg to see sights, but instead coming to a shopping area around Mönckebergstrasse. All was Christmasy and attractive as night fell. In a large department store, we saw a woman with a small dog on a leash. On the twisting streets, stands set up for Christmas, in rows following the curves of the little streets and alleys. The stands were tastefully decorated in that German way, with scenes of this and that—mostly Märchen-like. Most sold Christmas ornaments, but some had gifts—silk ties, scarves, candy made from herbs. And many were eating stands, with pretzels, wurst, praline almonds (“an old German receipt”), pita, shishkebab, pizza, or Getränke hot and cold. Germans eat and drink always and everywhere, and they were doing this duty manfully and womanfully this pre-Christmas evening.

Steve and I had unfortunately stopped at a mirrors-and-polished aluminum bistro before this, to have mineral water and non-alcoholic beer. It had none of the charm of the open-air stands, but appeared to be run by a very appealing gay couple.

One thing I liked very much in the “carnival” displays was a merry-go-round, which was decorated on top with ovals depicting scenes from German history and myth, and on bottom (inside the carousel), with what seemed to be faces of queens. It reminded me ot things we saw in Nienstedtermarktplatz last time we were here, at a fair there. Germans seem to excel at decorating carnival rides and carnival stands, and always in a 19th-century Romantic motif. I wonder why?

In one large department store, a stunning display of chocolates in every shape, size, and form—many in Christmas motifs, of course. W. says these go on sale after Christmas.

Another shop all cards, Christmas ornaments, art supplies, leather notebooks and binders. Clean, tasteful, and shop folks so helpful.

Then home, Abendbrot, and out to the school concert in which T. sang and A. played sax. It was in a Lutheran church packed chock full of parents and others, who talked boisterously until the concert began, and times between. A number of the songs sung were spirituals—“Oh Happy Day,” “Go Down, Moses”—and were sung with something approaching gusto and bodily enactment, if not wild gusto. It was actually rather charming to hear the German children sing the spirituals, with their prominent front-of-mouth L’s—“Let my people go”—and the way the Hamburgers seem to turn short I’s into short E’s—“He washed my sens away.”

And now to dress and prepare for the afternoon presentation at the Missionsakademie, and our transfer there.

Hamburg 15.12.93: The Bones of Cities and Christmas on the Horizon

Waking now my first morning in Germany. Feel very jet-lagged, run through the mill. It’s 9:15 A.M.

I’m sitting at the window in W. and K.’s dining room, the room in which Steve and I are sleeping. It’s a door, really, giving onto a balcony, a glass door with windows on either side. The curtains are still drawn, because Steve is—surprisingly!—still sleeping; but I’ve opened them a crack. Cold air is pouring in from a half-open window above the door.

It’s gray and overcast, and I can see from the ruffling of the sere foliage of some summer flowers on the balcony that a slight wind is blowing. Across the way, another row of apartment buildings built of old red brick with a high sloped brown roof of what may or may not be tile. And window after window, several with balconies similar to the W.’s. Last night, I could see Christmas trees in a few rooms, all with white lights only. I saw few Christmas decorations in any part of Germany we drove through yesterday; I saw few in Hamburg as we drove into the city, either.

Woke actually at 4 A.M., and lay awake an hour or so in my usual terror, hearing sirens, the UBahn trains, cars beginning to drive—all those city sounds one pays attention to in a strange city, at least for the first several days. Now it’s surprisingly quiet—but Gryphiusstrasse is almost a cul-de-sac—a very short street lined with rows of 3 and 4-story apartment buildings on either side, trees in front and yards in back. Must be very pleasant in summer.

Last night at dinner W. spoke a bit re: the war, at my none-too-overt prodding. He said that neither his nor K.’s father speaks often of the war. K.’s father has a bullet in his head (W.: “We use that to explain many things”), and W.’s took a bullet in the leg after the war was over, when his enemy (a Russian soldier?) did not want to kill him. W. said the story in his mother’s family is that his grandfather resisted joining the Nazi party until his grandmother said that now’s the time—it’ll harm us not to join. He said neither his nor K.’s father wanted to go to war, because they couldn’t believe the Nazi promises, and felt no enmity towards the Allies.

With all the quiet of the day and street, I wonder about the screams and sirens and bombs of the war. Can cities feel in their bones the horrors of past atrocities? Does Hamburg live hunched for other wars? Or, since people have lived so long in Europe, and these cities have known so many wars, does the life people live in these places afterwards redeem the past? Is this why an atrocious sadness lives on only in some places that have been the scenes of war crimes—Auschwitz, etc.?

And me. Away from home, I struggle with all my old demons. I awoke thinking that the worst of these is a practically well-nigh insoluble quandary re: who I am, what I’m to do in life. When one combines this with my crippling sense of the sadness and senselessness of life, then . . . .

Hamburg 14.12.1993: Student Demonstrations and Turkish Cheeses

Arrived in Germany about 9:30 A.M. It’s nearly 7 P.M., and we’re waiting to eat supper at W. and K.’s in Hamburg.

An uneventful flight. When we landed, picked up our rental car in Frankfurt and drove to Hamburg. I.e., Steve drove and I slept fitfully, since neither of us slept on the plane.

The bits and pieces I saw as I awoke were interesting. We took the Autobahn to Kassel and Hannover, then Hamburg. Snowed in the hills around Kassel. Here and there, lots of pretty villages and old farms in the good-looking farmland. Most buildings had red roofs—tile? The oldest farms had buildings attached to one another, as if they had grown together.

I missed the Lüneberg Heath, which I had wanted to see—slept through it. Steve says it was flat and attractive. By the time I awoke from my last nap, we were climbing towards Hamburg—i.e., meeting the few hills between the Heath and Hamburg. Lots of birch, reminding me of Scandinavia. In fact, with the cold, misty weather and overcast skies. It felt much like being in Finland last year.

This all sounds so prosaic and reportorial because I’m frantically exhausted with lack of sleep and jet lag. Hard to get the mind to do more than think one syllable ahead of another.

Hamburg interesting as we drove into it—some kind of student demonstration for Ausländer near the Hamburg main Bahnhof, every noisy and inspirited. Scary, a bit, because of the spirit—perhaps no accident the 18th century feared enthusiasm, Plato’s divine madness of the theos within. But I would believe just as fiercely in enthusiasm in another time and place.

And so supper and to bed. I’m bone, bone tired.

Just had supper—Kasseler Rippchen, sauerkraut, potatoes, sausages, mustard and horseradish, with a wonderful appetizer of Turkish sheep’s cheese and Turkish olives, both very salty and hunger-inducing, with delicious breads (pumpernickel, rye, sunflower), and a delicious French red wine.

Over the Atlantic 4.1.99: Flying and Going...Where?

The final pages of this journal, but I have no finality in me—i.e., no summative wisdom or insight. Over the Atlantic now, en route to Atlanta, having slept little in the night, because unable to sleep on the plane.

Writing: I keep returning to it, but not doing it. It’s not just lack of time and the disorder of my life; it’s also (primarily?) the quandary of what to write about. That quandary concerns both subject matter in general and genre. I know I’m not a poet, though I admire poets above all other writers, and would dearly love to be one. I seem to have had (very) small success as a theological writer. I feel I have a novel somewhere in me, perhaps, though have little idea of a focus for it.

Meanwhile, I’m less and less interested in keeping a journal, or in analyzing myself or my life. I feel . . . weak . . . as I’ve never felt before, weak and on my way to old age, without much of anything to show for my life.

Dreams of salvation dance through my brain. I’ve lived in this seemingly nowhere space for a long time, now—too long. What can make life better, I wonder?

Hamburg 2.1.2000: Die Pilgerin and Living into the Millennium

On the train home new year’s morning, all the sodden and sedate revelers around me, all I could wonder about was how people forget. How do we forget the 8 million Jews? The mentally and physically challenged, the gays, the Slavs, the Gypsies?

How have we so quickly forgotten the sheer facticity of slavery? How have we—our churches—forgotten segregation, which we defended? How does anyone celebrate again, with such unatoned-for guilt hanging over us?

+ + + + +

A detailed dream last night, visiting my father’s law office, with an inner dialogue going on inside me: I recognize that I give too little honor or attention to my father, and that it would mean much to him to have these; and at the same time, his drunken meanness has leached respect out of my heart.

It strikes me as I record the vivid details of this dream in my journal that I’ve now lived beyond the year in which my father died—i.e., 13th December of my 49th year. The dream/my inner self invites me to make peace with my father? As I write that it would be important to him for me to show honor, I actually write important to me.

My father’s gone. I live on. How to do so, the dream seems to ask? My vocation’s teaching, but in the dream, my office is contiguous to his, and I am not even sure of the office number—muddled, befuddled, in terms of vocation and purpose. He wanted me to choose the law as a vocation, and I defied him to do . . . what?

All this vs. the German context, travel, nature, new experience, these lazy decompression days, which enable me to dive deeper. The depths of inner calling will keep reasserting themselves.

The dream occurred on the 4th floor, the top floor: the final quarter of my life? It does feel that way. I’m not sure this is the floor I belong on, with my father who’s dead!

And why is he dead? He felt defeated, too, a failure like me? Dealing with him, making peach with him, is making peace with his own life and its torments.

All this against the context of teaching, too, which I seem to do well—but less as teacher-scholar than as therapist of troubled classes. What is my calling?

+ + + + +

Barlach museum: his wooden frieze figures—so much emotion compressed into such a compact space. IF only I could write poems like that. (Rilke did.) I especially like the old blind woman—the studied mildness of her expression, her folded, composed hands.

I like, too, the simple worn leather bench I’m sitting on—leather-covered, that is. The Germans do things like this so well, so carefully, and yet at the same time, with a throw-away air of insouciance.

(Now at the postcard display in the foyer): turns out I was wrong. The blind woman was Die Pilgerin. However, what I wrote about her features, her hands, seems even more appropriate, now that I know she was a pilgrim. I’m also struck by the figure of a believing man. Maybe the goal for me this millennium is to be a better pilgrim and believer?

Hamburg 1.1.2000: Eating Berliners and Dancing Strauss Waltzes

It seemed so momentous when I thought of it as a child, the year 2000. Now I write it as casually as I might have written 1999. It’s, after all, only a new day.

Still, I’ve lived now into a new century, as my grandparents all did. Just as I look back and speak so confidently of “that” century, the 19th, my nieces and nephews and their children will talk about “my” century as a time almost unimaginable. How hard it is to understand the lives of others, the hearts and thoughts of others—even of the other our childhood selves become as we proceed through adulthood.

And in this year, I head to the pinnacle of middle age and onto senility. How? How has it happened that I’m now middle-aged and have undoubtedly lived more than half of my life? And have accomplished next to nothing? I’m becoming one of those old men whom failure haunts like the smell of a stale restaurant haunts the clothes after one has eaten there.

When I was little—5? 6? 7? momentous years for me—I used to ask my mother, “Will I live to 2000? She thought I would. Then I’d ask if she’d be alive then. Of that, she was less certain. Unthinkable to me, then, that my life could span a period in which my mother was gone.

She is gone, for all intents and purposes. I see her as often as possible, helpless to reach or help or even sustain her. I love her, still, and often cry when I’ve seen her. My heart still leaps into my throat when her care facility calls.

But her death will, in many ways, be anticlimactic, when it occurs. I’ve let go over and over, and accepted that’s all I can do, now. There’s peace in that acceptance, but also defeat: I’m weary after the long years of struggle with her, her unbending iron will and malicious purpose, her unswayable intent to destroy herself and anyone that cared for her. She won, and the guardianship judge’s treatment of Steve and me only underscores that, in the most brutal way possible. (May God make Alice Gray face what she does to families when she mistreats gay children who provide care for aging parents, and soon—from my mouth to God’s ears!)

+ + + + +

New Year’s eve in Hamburg, 1999-2000. It begins at W. and K.’s apartment with coffee and Berliners filled with apple butter, followed by champagne (not Sekt, but the real thing). Wolfram’s childhood friend V. is there with wife V. He is drily cold, as he was the first time we met, but recalls the circumstances as precisely as I do. His wife has an eye that looks off to the side, a louche eye. Why did I not notice that when we first met? As she talks, she draws her mouth up and extends her lips outward, as German women often do. There’s a haughtiness about the gesture, though otherwise, she doesn’t seem to be a haughty woman.

K. and V. are in plain black shifts. K.’s is low-waisted, rather emphasizing her square build. As she shleps coffee and cups to us, I see in her carriage the outlines of the old woman she’ll become not too many years down the road, though her complexion is surprisingly dewy for a woman of her age, who smokes to boot.

The champagne talk is about V. and V.’s golf trip to California, Claifornia wineries, then, in German, about a trip to the Middle East. V. describes a hotel at which they stayed in Turkey, the number of room, the cost, the food. Germans love talk like this, about vacations to hot lands, with precise descriptions of the conditions one encounters and how much things cost. We had almost precisely the same conversation with the Schindler cousins the night they took us to Steinerwirtz to meet the other cousins—first Weihnachtstag.

Then on to the train station to meet two other members of the party, a woman on W.’s faculty who teaches intercultural studies and her man (I had the feeling he isn’t her husband), a translator. I catch no names; introductions are curt, formal, cold.

Instructor lady has that deep-red hennaed hair German women like, and inquisitive, intelligent brown eyes. She practices intercultural studies by talking to Steve and me, at first in German, then in English. Man-friend is stolid, refusing to be engaged. On the train, he sits across from me. I try to catch his eye and broach a conversation, twice. Nothing. He won’t meet my gaze. As the evening goes on, he puts on heavy-rimmed (black-framed) glasses, that add to my impression he intends to armor himself against contact. He seems ill at ease and unhappy; my sense is that instructor lady calls the shots and is not entirely satisfied with him.

The party’s at a small theater in Altona, with a round ceiling of oak built in a vaguely shippish style, with beams leading to a central eye that seems designed to open in summer. Tables have been set up all over the room, whose floor is also of oak strips. Each party has its own table, with names on tabs in the glasses; all this has been discussed, precisely, in German at W. and K.’s.

The entrance hall has a buffet table its whole length, with trays of food. We’re greeted by desultory greeters, all in black. Who they are and precisely where we are (i.e., why we’re there) is not very clear to me.

Sekt appears as if by magic, on trays carried around the room by Spanish-looking watiers, who glide lithely, as if on silent wheels. Everyone in each cluster waits, of course, to drink until all in the cluster have glasses in hand. Then the ritual of clinking, toasting, eyeballing each person in the group, and drinking.

People come up and are introduced. I catch no names and still have little idea what the gathering’s all about, what draws this particular group together. One man’s a 40-something Düsseldorfer who says jut for gut. W. teases him about his Rhineland Plattdeutsch dialect. He looks a bit like some German film director, real or imagined, wears a leather jacket, and blows smoke in a practiced way through a nose whose nose hairs could stand some clipping.

Chat, chat, laugh, drink more Sekt, smoke if you’re so inclined, and then as if by silent command, people sit at the tables. One of the black-dressed greeters, gray hair cut almost scalp-level, gets onto the stage and reads a prepared text, three pages (of course; this is Germany). The first lines, greeting us, I understand without a hitch; then, I become lost—something about dictionary definitions of “millennium.” It’s all evidently facetious, since people laugh. As it goes on, there’s that slightly desperate awareness of lots of food just kept at bay outside, that German gatherings of this sort always produce.

We rush to the buffet. Fried this or that—egg rolls? empanadas?—with bowls of papadums broken chip-size. Lamb curry, duck and vegetables Chinese style, spinach au gratin (an odd choice, given all the other dishes), and various salads, beet ones, potato ones, cucumber ones, a muddy, mysterious one that turns out to have some sweet sauce like hoisin and ground peanuts—disconcerting, mixed with the other salads. There are also cheese and lox platters, which I forgo.

The egg rolls and empanadas turn out to have a tasteless dough that doesn’t seem to betoken either an Oriental or a Latin American delicacy. Sure enough, the egg rolls have a liver filling and the empanadas a mystery meat heavily and rather grotesquely spiced with something that seems a bit curryish and a bit cayenneish, but not quite either. (The Nachtisch will present us with similar mysteries.) I taste both, and pass them to Steve. Having discovered seasonings, the Germans by god use them, in that dull, unimaginative dialectic way the culture has: nothing can be a bit of this or that, and heaven forbid, both simultaneously; it’s either tasteless, or seasoned to high heavens. A Schlafzimmer’s for sleeping, not eating, and I rather suspect, not for reading, given the way the bed’s are made. A Wohnzimmer’s for Wohning, not lounging, not reading, certainly not eating. Germans seem constitutionally averse to the light touch, the ironic, the double entendre, and that makes their earnest, intensely methodical approach to “exotic” cuisines ludicrouse.

We eat, earnestly, absorbed in the process. No sparking chatter—food here, food gone. Several of us return for seconds and even thirds. A French red wine is copiously consumed. As the bottles are emptied, new ones appear, along with mineral water, as if by magic, as the dark-skinned waiters glide among us.

There’s a pause after dinner, seemingly unplanned and thus decidedly not in Ordnung. This produces an undercurrent of angst in the room. The word Nachtisch is heard here and there, as if a question is emerging from someone’s troubled sleep.

The Natchtisch comes, piecemeal. It is foregone by no one, though V. had refused the Berliners at W. and K.’s, saying the holidays had wrecked her figure. It’s rather touching, and alarming, to see all these German adults soberly eating the two scoops of ice cream topped by whipped cream that we’re all allotted. The Frau next to me, the wife of a theologian at the university, almost signs with relief, as she receives her ice cream.

I make the mistake of asking what flavor the ice cream is. Vanilla, she shoots back peremptorily. It’s not, I’m certain. There’s some . . . other . . . flavor. Her husband disagrees with her, but can’t name the flavor, either. I suggests Eierlikör or nutmeg, knowing it’s not quite either of those. No, she maintains, having ditched the vanilla thesis. It’s something Indian (Indian!?). I try coriander. Not that, they think. We all give up and finish spooning in the mystery concoction.

After the ice cream, the professor’s wife—an East Prussian refugee raised in Oberbayern after the war—is in fine form. She tells me a joke, blushing and warning me it’s naughty. Bill Clinton and the pope die. Clinton goes to heaven and the pope to hell. The pope got to the Petrus who acknowledges a mistake has been made. The men’s judgments are reversed. They meet halfway, as they change locations. The pope tells Bill Clinton he’s excited to go to heaven to meet the Virgin Maria. Bill Clinton says, “I’m sorry, but you’re too late.”

And now dancing. Chairs are put away and music begins to throb from a sound stage at ceiling level—heavy, pounding rock with American lyrics. Immediately almost the entire room gets up to dance. The professor and his wife (H., I now discover) have taken blue glittery stars from the table and inserted them into their glasses frames. They cavort with grimaces approaching joy on their faces.

Four, five non-stop American rock tunes and almost the entire room sits down, sweating, again as if by a silent command, though the music goes on. I’m intensely uncomfortable. Being forced to dance in heterosexual unites always feels to me like pretending something that’s not, for me. I can tell that my not dancing, and Steve’s not dancing, Is Noticed. We’re breaking some code of Alles in Ordnung, and giving offense.

There are same-sex couples dancing, however, though most of these are pairs of high school girls, and they raise nary an eyebrow. There’s also a strange pairing of two men who may or may not be dancing together. I had seen them talking at a nearby table, faces close together, previously, and it was clear to me that the older of the two was attracted to the younger.

The younger has on a sink-tight black t-shirt displaying his shapely biceps, and jeans. In a gay setting, he’d be instantly recognized as gay. But not here: he seems to have a woman in tow, though, granted, she seems more interested in him than vice versa. The older man seems unattached.

I think they see me watching them dance together. They immediately stop, sit down, and then get up again, this time each with a female partner. Throughout the evening, though, each dances alone through many dances, black t-shirt furtively eyeing other men. No women ever ask black t-shirt to dance with them, though some even ask Steve and me to dance. That says to me he’d be better off not pretending anymore.

There’s another intriguing cluster of young men. One, in a gray woolen suit coat, is drinking beer out of the bottle in a nervous way as he sits talking to another young man. Another had played the piano up till dinner—tall, willowy, Oscar Wildeish, but occasionally hanging onto a pretty young woman who may or may not be with him.

And then there’s blond boy, an intensely driven, and very good, dancer in black shirt and tie and black pants. He dances now and again with a young woman in one of those Rastafarian-type hats, and pantomimes the lyrics of every song, gyrating his hips, grinding against her ass when appropriate, grabbing his crotch.

But all this seems to be theater—not look-at-me theater (there is one of those Astaire couples on the dance floor), not look-at-me-I’m-straight theater. This is a young man who loves to boogie and do the disco thing to the max. He’s beside himself with the delight of dancing, and will do it with anyone.

Including the young man in the gray coat, with whom he dances repeatedly throughout the evening, grinding his hips, grabbing his crotch, etc. But this time with some obvious attraction. Steve says one of the young female couples watches all this with intent interest. Our eyes are not the only eyes on this couple.

At the end, all three dance together, blond boy, jacket boy, and piano boy, as if throwing off all pretense (though I see jacket boy dance with no one except blond boy all night).

As the evening goes on, middle-aged women also dance together, including K. and someone else. Not a single other male couple besides blond boy and jacket boy, and Steve and I for two or three dances, ever materializes. Middle-aged “straight” men just can’t cross that line, it seems, just as, in the Oberpfalz village church, I saw not one man on the woman’s side of the church, though some women sat on the men’s side.

The dancing is interrupted by fireworks at midnight outside, the biggest display in Europe. They go on and on and on—again, Teutonic thoroughness. Among us, many of the partygoers also set off fireworks, often dangerously close. The air is sultry with spent gunpowder and smoke. A woman leans over and says to me in what sounds like a Jamaican-accented English (though she’s German), “I don’t like it. It’s like the very devil himself.”

We go back in and Strauss waltzes begin to blare from the loudspeaker. As long as they play, not one gay couple dances. Strauss and the waltz symbolize something, and that something is decidedly heterosexual—gallant men in uniforms, bowing and simpering belles in low-cut tops and hoop skirts.

I’m rather surprised at the alacrity with which all these supposedly politically engaged (i.e., W. and the other professors, and the Green Party leader of Hamburg) folks run to the waltzes. They must know that this part of German heritage seems, in many people’s minds, to have coexisted smugly with concentration camps. Weren’t Strauss waltzes played by some camp commandoes for relaxation after they’d tortured victims?)

There is a bit of kitsch about the way some couples dance the waltzes in a vastly overdone way, bouncing like boisterous peasants, rather than gliding like civilized 19th-cnetury burghers and aristocrats. The Green Party lady and her husband, a tiny long-haired man with the face of the comic actor Dennis Miller, in particular take each waltz over the top. As the “Blue Danube” begins, V., who’s sitting next to me, exclaims in German, “Oh! The beautiful ‘Blue Danube’!” Sensing that she wants me to invite her to dance (her husband V. is with K.), I studiously eat the bowl of soup we were given after our fireworks display, head down and pretend-oblivious. I despise my churlishness, but I haven’t waltzed in years and would be a disaster.

All evening, there are only the two kinds of music, the loud American rock, to which the Germans dance excitedly, many of them mimicking the lyrics and acting them out (blond boy and “Like a Virgin” are a class act); and the Strauss waltzes. There are none of the slow dances that came as predictably as May sunshine at my high school sock hops, every third or fourth song. Again, the German mind seems to have difficulty with both: and. It’s always either: or, one alternative dialectically negating the other.

At 3:30 or so, V. and V. leave and I beg Steve for us to do the same, knowing we have to take the train back to Nienstedt. We do leave about 4:15.

Steve gets us onto the wrong train, and we have to wait at the next station to return. Lots of uncertainty about which train to take. After much backing and forthing, we finally get to the Altona station, where we have to switch trains to the Wedel train.

Both the train to Altona and out of it are chock full, though it’s now past 5 A.M. Lots of the partygoers are suddenly drunk young people with schnapps or wine bottles and beer cans. On the Wedel train, I almost step into a puddle of vomit. The drunkest of all are chattering away in drink-slowed, slurred German on handies, as the Germans call cell phones.

But both trains also have an ample supply of children, adults, senior citizens (at 5 A.M.!) of all social classes. As we exit the Wedel train at Hochkamp, a well-heeled middle-aged Nienstedter couple exit with us. The woman stumbles over someone on the way out of the train and says, “Entschuldigung,” in a commanding, but drunken, voice. The couple march ahead of us to their street of fine mansions. The station and streets are littered with an unbelievable amount of firecracker rubbish. New Year’s day, the millennium, year of our Lord 2000, Hamburg.