Homage to Catatonia: Teutonic Stares

It’s time to talk about German staring.

I feel there is too little discussion even among my Anglo-Saxon friends here in Berlin about this, but for those many who have never been to Germany it must suffice that goggling is common here: on the metro, in cafés and shops, even walking down the street. The gaze is hard to illustrate – a mix of vague mistrust and the kind of inquiring look with which one might address a tropical fish at the aquarium. There is trepidation in the eyes, certainly, though falling short of the you’re-not-from-round-here gawp one would receive walking into next village’s pub.

When working before university at a German vineyard I was assured (as it were) by the host family that this trait was a part of everyday life and told not to be worried by it; in any case it was something which mainly happened to disabled people. Wait, what? Yes, several of us have witnessed it: crippled old men or the blind, subject to looks of wonder and disbelief from grown Germans. Far from an expat niggle, this is an issue which transcends national characteristic and glides into the behavioural sphere. To my gut feeling it is anti-social, not simply because my parents, like most, told me it was rude to stare, but because it implies some sort of barrier, behind which the starer may or may not be making some secret judgement.

Moreover, there exists a philosophical conclusion that a stare becomes a stare only once somebody notices, be it the recipient or a third party observer. This is the essential part of this rather petty gripe: once the stare(s) come to your attention (and they will), they don’t even flinch. Gaping back appears to be the only way to induce a reaction, which produces a ridiculous scenario from which you can only walk away feeling like a lairy thug, when in reality your pride is hurt, and insecurity begs you to check whether that toothpaste lip-liner applied itself again this morning (C suffers from this – no known cure).

I suppose it is too much to expect societal change with a phenomenon so deeply entrenched, and an article exploring its roots would be at best culturally insensitive. I wouldn’t presume that this gawking appears nowhere but Germany; I merely wonder why, in a people with whom we actually share a good deal, it is so obvious. Whilst we’re on the topic of national stereotypes, I feel odd to say that I would not mind so much being stared at by an Inuit, or a pygmy tribesman from Papua New Guinea; it is the queer familiarity I feel with my ancestral buddy from the continent – Jurgen, say – which rankles, as he sits there nursing his soy latte, regarding C and I, enraptured not so much by our conversation (understandable) as by the heads talking: Berliners in general seem to have neither strawberry-blonde hair, olive skin nor green eyes in abundance, treating such attributes with suspicion (hint: only the hair is mine). In far-flung corners of this country, less dense or international than, say, a capital city, one could put it down to the yokel-factor. Aber Berlin nicht.

I should grow thicker skin, and some bigger cojones too while I’m at it, no doubt. The problem is that, as I stride into yet another Neukölln café they look like they’ve just seen my cojones and aren’t that impressed. Christ, all I wanted was to sit down over a cup of tea and complain politely about my host nation, WHY ARE YOU ALL STARING?

In Praise of Ausgeglichenheitsgefühl

Had a great day at the flea market of Mauerpark today – it is one of Berlin’s shabbier spaces but a perfect layout for the market atmosphere, where with good German sense your route takes you in a long loop, ending at the food tents. Two lanes of traffic (don’t walk down the wrong one) ensures that an economic flow of purses is maintained. I don’t really know what I was expecting on way there, but I suppose I should have conjured something like this.

I listened to an interesting talk on TED.com last night about combating the rush of the modern world. The speaker had evidently never visited Berlin, where workers’ lives seem to be played out at half speed. I get the sense in London, and I can imagine it is something similar in New York, that people are driven around the city by that special adrenaline that comes only when you know there is a good chance of being late for something. I have done it, and because the inner city is actually a small area, one becomes aware of exactly how long 5 minutes is. It ceases to be a throwaway estimate, and becomes the precise number of seconds it takes to walk (briskly) from Holborn underground station to the Strand. This is dangerous, and begets journey-time optimisation, where if you just hurry that little bit, you can spend an extra 90 seconds sucking down a venti cappuccino in an armchair, instead of on-the-go, doing the medium-pace walk to prevent spillage and probably becoming stuck behind the glacial gait of the Spanish Tourist. No no, you sit and stretch calf muscles, sharpening your elbows.

This must seem quaint and amusing to a visiting Berliner, and indeed I had no such thoughts as I pottered about Prenzlauer Berg. ‘Potter’ being the correct term for what I was doing, a derivative of the obsolete verb poten, ‘to push or poke’, gaining the meaning of listless wandering around the mid-18th century. Interestingly, ‘poking around’ has the same meaning and particular relevance to the marketplace – poking into a basket of junk is the only way that you’ll get your grubby mitts on the the prize at the bottom – in my case, a whisk. It should improve my cheese sauce in ways unimaginable to the humble fork, but if it doesn’t I can blame its shoddy design and know that I only parted with 50 cents for it. Probably East-German too.

But this seems to be beside the point, which was that, even for a Sunday morning, there was a great deal of pottering, poking and ambling going on. The streets of the districts near to me wouldn’t trouble the judges at a beauty contest, but the average German pedestrian, as a rule, more considers the pavement in front of them than swallows it up. This may explain the reluctance to jay-walk. I have come to the conclusion that it is not so much a violation of their societal code, but a condemnation of rushing. Why is that Englishman crossing while the red man shows? He must be late. Germans aren’t late, therefore they needn’t rush. I can’t help myself doing it but there was a particularly painful situation yesterday, where an enormous road had to be crossed. It had two lanes for traffic and one for the tram, three separate pedestrian crossings in a row. The road was on a gentle hill, very long and clear. It was so clear, in fact, that I started to wonder whether the red man was stuck. The Germans stood next to me, stony faced. They knew I wanted to go – had me marked down for an Ausländer from the start. But we waited. And waited. The lanes were empty for at least a few hundred yards. I could see groups huddled up to crossings at various points down the road – not swinging their heads this way and that, shuffling impatiently – but staring across at the red man. I became agitated and my eyes darted around, looking for assurance. I had reached the far side by the time the lights changed, but I slunk into Warschauer Straße station feeling ashamed nonetheless.

Streets are wider here, thick enough for bicycle lanes throughout the city. If cycling in London is akin to being that motorised rabbit at a greyhound race, then cycling in Berlin is like being a swan. The bicycles here are what civilised people ride. They probably became extinct in British towns around the time of the First World War and we are left with middle-aged men on wafer-thin bullet bikes wearing three-quarter length condoms. What is so bad about sitting on a cushioned seat and pushing leisurely from an upright position, minimising discomfort and exertion? We must reclaim this at some point, it is too English for Europeans alone to have.  

One Mother to Rule Us All… Plus Kanzlerin™, Now Available on Prescription for Language Students

With three days to go until Germany awakens to a freshly-elected governmental administration, I should use this time to ponder the various outcomes of the re-shuffled Bundestag. Will Angie, dubbed ‘Mutti‘ by the electorate, retain her dominion as Kanzlerin? It has been suggested by The Economist that she is the woman to continue to lead Europe, using her cautious, scientific approach to policy to unite the entire continent and drag it from the financial doldrums.

It is certainly interesting that she seems to have secured a robust lead in the polls until now without having really promised anything to her nation. A huge CDU poster had been unveiled today at the side of Wiener Straße near to where we turn down our own road. It depicts nothing but a simple, almost complacent message, to the effect of: ‘CDU: So that Germany continues to be properly governed.’ It is neither heart-stirring nor impassioned, and reflects the style of the current premier. I doubt that the massive grey crows who lurk ominously around Kreuzberg’s shadows will be convinced though. They have chicks to feed and their zero hours contracts are giving Die Linke a field day in our immigrant district. Wage inequality and the cost of living are hot topics here, and Germany’s outwardly-rosy economy is undermined by a growing social divide and a skills shortage due to lagging education. Such a cocktail ensures stubbornly high unemployment, and these should have been thorns in Merkel’s left side. Instead she has cemented her status as democrat extraordinaire by slowly but surely poaching ground on the left, to which stand all the other major parties but the pragmatically named Alternative für Deutschland. The majority of the electorate hasn’t seemed to have noticed it thus far, but come tomorrow morning, I would wager, safely, that this particular campaign slogan may have come under artistic consideration from some of my neighbours.

But then again I only said that I should consider these events. The thing that really struck me as that first paragraph spewed out was how Kanzlerin sounds more like a type of anxiety medication than the position of World’s Most Powerful Mutter. Could have done with some of the stuff today, for the stress of some of the small conversations with your average German is becoming too much. Confidence, followed by hesitation, then embarrassment and finally shame:

Me: Wie viel kostet das, bitte?

Hans: Vier-zwanzig bitte. Danke, haben Sie vielleicht ein bisschen Kleingeld?

Me: Natürlich. Moment, bitte, ich habe’s hier. [rummages in wallet]

Hans: Fjfklwne2wpk0 -!£%VjswjndwnuHJ43 flkwe;kfewfjkli’\s;’\;’c6^&fkelw jfklewm z.

Me: …

Hans: My most humble apologies – as a matter of fact there’s no need to worry good sir, I have the small change in question right here.

It will get better, and more often than not the conversation is conducted amicably in German, with simple words exchanged by both parties. But for now, the humiliation of failure dictated to you in your own language rankles a little.

Ein Brief aus dem Schwarzwald: Hans, Trier and The German Question

Perhaps there is no acceptable state in which to contemplate the essential and fundamental attributes of the ur-German. Take Black Forest-dwelling Hans the woodchopper, who divides his time between providing for his family and pet bear, and composing impenetrable poetry which probes, broods at the tense core of human existence. It is a pity that he and his country must suffer the burden of the 20th century. I am haunted recently by a letter, and my own recollections, that disturb in their own way the Germanic Question.

DON’T. MENTION. THE WAR.

It is too late. The Question is knocking at the door now, and as I type it’s smuggled quickly inside by its friend, Taboo. It will get quite heavy from here on in – the kind of rumination that must be conducted by greasy candlelight amid stacks of dusty parchment scrolls.

The city of Trier nestles up to the River Moselle on the western edge of the Rhineland-Palatinate, near to Germany’s Luxembourgish border. It is a point in the valley that could stake a claim to the most colourful history of any city in Europe. Lying in a strip of land fiercely contested, occupied and re-claimed over the centuries, it has been at various points the most powerful settlement in the Western Territories of the Roman Empire, marshalling a wing that stretched from North Africa to Britannia – and at others, the subject of sackings and claimants: Germanics; Franks, Huns, Vikings and, naturally, Vandals. Thus the city’s atmosphere is one of permanence, the passion of uprising and rebellion in the face of repression. On the facade of the Red House of Trier is inscribed a grain of this obduracy:

“ANTE ROMAM TREVIRIS STETIT ANNIS MILLE TRECENTIS. PERSTET ET AETERNA PACE FRVATVR. AMEN.” (“Thirteen hundred years before Rome, Trier stood. May it stand on and enjoy eternal peace. Amen.”)

In a letter written in 1928 by D.H. Lawrence and published in 1934, the writer recounts a bleak trip back to the Germany through the Rhineland that he does not quite seem to know any more. I cannot shake off the creeping horror of the landscape’s description, as Lawrence evokes the interwar ravage the area has suffered, now under French occupation – all its Teutonic soul sucked away under the eaves of the Black Forest. He feels it already escaping and regressing, Germany’s life-force retreating towards the evil of “Tartary” in the East. But as he wrenches from the numbing practical effects of the Great War, his thoughts turn to the Forest he is journeying near. With chilling prescience:

But at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring out of this still-unconquered Black Forest. You stiffen your backbone and you listen to the night. There is a sense of danger. It is not the people. They don’t seem dangerous. Out of the very air comes a sense of danger, a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger.

Something has happened. Something has happened which has not yet eventuated. The old spell of the old world has broken, and the old, bristling, savage spirit has set in.

One can sense the great impasse that this civilisation has come to. There is no progress. The crippling economy heads towards destruction and all the while the menace of the forest hints an inconceivably ancient barbarism. Lawrence’s depiction of a medieval tribalism poisons the image of youth and education, it reduces the students of Heidelberg and their alien, forced socialism to feudal savages “like loose, roving gangs of broken, scattered tribes”.

The imagery of a void, a social vacuum is hard to evade. It prompts Lawrence to recoil in fear at the ends to which this old force seeks. He is sensitive to greater movements and shifts in Germany: of cultural memory, of the Empires that were, of Time itself.

And it all looks as if the years were wheeling swiftly backwards, no more onwards. Like a spring that is broken and whirls swiftly back, so time seems to be whirling with mysterious swiftness to a sort of death. Whirling to the ghost of the old Middle Ages of Germany, then to the Roman days, then to the days of the silent forest and the dangerous, lurking barbarians.

And so we move solemnly towards the crux and the horror, the great rending of the 20th century. Who are the “lurking barbarians”? They are not a people who exist in today’s central Europe. Yet if there is nothing tangible, then what remains – an ever-dimming echo of resistance; rebellion? Did or does Lawrence’s tribal “ghost” exist? The answers are no more clear from a social, geographic or anthropological perspective. I suspect that to understand is to be in the quiet deeps of the Wald, the dark and opaque breed of forest that contributes to Germany’s fame. That is the ur-setting that bred many of the dark tales that much of the western world sanitise and nurture their children with to this day.

At the beginning of the 19th century the Brothers Grimm dedicated themselves to collecting memories. They drew from the oldest depths of Germanic folklore and language and created, in the midst of a romanticist wave, a set of Märchen, fairytales that could be canonised and appropriated by the German spirit. Influenced by the writings of Herder and their law professor Friedrich von Savigny, they yearned for a unified Germany and hoped that their contributions to the language and philology of their nation would aid this. But they reveal in their tales both the beautiful and cruel shades of existence, a mixture of the pastoral idyll and the underlying cruelty of adults that grow up to oppress and rule. Witches and wolves, innocence and deceit.

Unification would meet with bitter resistance from all corners of a huge, dynastic sprawl. The enormously wealthy Bavaria not least, for it represented and continues to resemble the fairytale kingdom itself – a bountiful country within a land of countries. Again I hear the whispering echo on an icy winter wind that Lawrence perceived, of insurrection to a centralising force – to Rome, to the Emperor. How endures it? The answer to this one I believe is clearer. The area that was Germania before it was Germany is vast and feudal. The lesser kingdoms and city-states grew to desire solidarity; the larger to expand and claim territory. This tension holds within it fear, brutality and wildness. Two millenia ago the central power was Rome, its weapon of choice: a beautiful, pure Christian mission enforced by the Lord’s righteous yet surprisingly bloodthirsty blade. Resistance grew and the Empire diminished. Swords and sandals were usurped by the ancient power of the woodland barbarian. Yet Christ’s seed was sown. The second, Holy Roman Empire followed when the mantle was lifted up from the remnants of the West Roman Empire. Otto I was crowned King, Kaiser, Caesar, Emperor of the civilised world.

Then a glorious reign and unbroken descent of Emperors for 800 years. Yet all the while, central power diminished. The ruling powers could not support the weight of such numbers of territories. Thus kings, dukes and bishops clawed back dominion and influence. It was this allowance that marked the Empire’s success and longevity – instead of smashing heads until they fell in line, devolution allowed for cultural diversity and tribal identification.

Modernity would change this. The industrial revolutions would break the old-money, medieval alliances. Dynasties with such grandeur of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns would topple.

And all the while our friend Hans sits by his log-cabin window and wonders at the stars. He jots a quick line or two on the mercurial moon as it slips out from a cloud, dappling the floor of fallen needles; turning his black forest silver. Next morning, after waking and filling Herman the Bear’s water bucket from the stream, he kicks back on his porch and sniffs at the sweet pine scent of his home. Eva brings out a nettle-tea and the paper. It is Sunday, after all. The Süddeutsche Zeitung has a strange piece running today. There have been riots in Munich after a radical zealot attempted to storm a beer hall and seize national power. Lines crease across Hans’ forehead and he stares silently into the forest.

As is the case with all good fairytales, surely the story of the third Reich, the one that this time would last for ten hundred years, must have a happy ending. It actually had a number of different endings, but they are stories for another chilly winter night, and none of them are filled with mirth. At this point the Germanic Question is becoming uneasy, and even Taboo is shifting in his chair, so allow me to turn over the last leaf. For towards the end, Mr. Lawrence’s letter betrays a sentiment that wrongs Hans in his peaceful, wooden hut:

Something about the Germanic races is unalterable. White skinned, elemental, and dangerous.

Here he could not be more wrong.

It is the landscape, the very bones of the Wald, that are elemental and dangerous. It is the distant, grey memory of kingdoms and empires past that is elemental and dangerous. They linger and speak to the soul, awakening a primal fear. National Socialism was no product of its people, but of the physical, political and economic landscape which allowed Germany to be poisoned.

After the end of the Second World War, the Allies gathered the defeated German generals and drove them purposefully through the city of Trier. It had been heavily bombed, and they would have been confronted by the crumbling, battered ruins of Ancient and Holy Roman rule – a lesson in the history of oppression that few could forget. I wonder if, rumbling past these decaying symbols of a long-forgotten dominion, they happened to discern an inscription, etched defiantly on the front of the Red House.