For many years I thought about traveling to Germany. My father, who died
when I was 3, and my mother’s second husband, the man who brought me up,
were both German Jews. Although curious about their roots, I had an ingrained
hesitation, an aversion to Germany and things German that kept me from
traveling to their ancestral homes. It was only when my wife Nina became
pregnant that we decided it was time to learn about the past before starting a
new future. When we crossed into Germany, the border was nothing more than a
small creek on a small country road: no guards, no passport inspection,
nothing but a welcoming sign. The skinheads we imagined lurking behind every
corner were nowhere in sight.
My grandmother, Hannah Eichenbronner Strauss, came to America from Germany as
a teenager in the 1890s. Her only child — my father, Fred Strauss — predeceased
her in 1959. Three years later, my mother married Henry Levinstein, my
father’s best friend. It was Henry whom I came to know as Dad and came to think of as
my father. Unlike Fred Strauss, who had been born and raised in New York City,
Dad had been born in Germany, in a little town called Themar that wound up in
East Germany. Dad died in 1986, never having spoken a word about his first 14
years in Germany. Neither did his mother, Nanette, who lived more than half her 101
years in Germany and left there only in 1941.
I don’t know that my mother or two brothers ever asked much about their experiences. I knew that Dad’s father, Moritz, had died in Germany in the late 1930s. I
remembered conflicting stories, that he had died in a concentration camp — or
perhaps not, but that he had been in a concentration camp. After Dad died I
found a few postcards in an old desk. Some were from Moritz, from Buchenwald,
making it clear that he had at least passed through a camp.
My wife and I left for Germany equipped with very few pieces of information
to guide us. One was the name of the village where my grandmother Hannah
had grown up. Weisenbronn is much too small to appear
in most atlases. I found it on a tourist map given to me by an old friend of
my father who knew a little of the family history.
The other piece of information we had was a photograph of Dad as an infant.
There was almost nothing to give away the location of the picture except that
the uppermost part of a building could be seen in the background. In the
photo, Dad couldn’t have been more than 2 years old, so we imagined it came
from 1922 at the latest. The picture could have been taken in Themar or in
some other town; we had no idea. By the time we decided to visit Germany,
there was no one left who could tell us.
As we drove deeper into rural Germany, Nina and I were surprised how much it
looked like the Germany of fairy tales. The dark dense forests. The
villages, perfectly nestled in the folds of soft hills, each with its narrow
church steeple. The ancient houses, spotlessly maintained, no window without
flowers. We found ourselves making fewer comments about skinheads lurking
behind each bend and more about the natural beauty of Deutschland Mitte, as our
map called the country’s midsection.
“Do you have a plan?” Nina asked me for the dozenth time as we approached
Weisenbronn. I didn’t. I supposed only to go to the cemetery and see what we
might find. It wasn’t actually until we passed Rvdelsse, a neighboring
village, that the name Weisenbronn finally appeared on one of the directional
signs that were set at every crossroads, pointing to all the tiny villages in the
area.
Weisenbronn was one of those tiny villages. It sat in the melded laps of a
few low hills and seemed almost to be smug, solidly content in its beauty and
long history. There were no large signs welcoming us to town. No drive-through restaurants. Very little that proclaimed itself loudly or garishly to
be modern or hip or new or improved.
Fields of corn, hay, sunflowers and grapes extended in all directions until
interrupted by the red roofs of neighboring villages. From the
summit of a large hill above Weisenbronn we could see half a dozen such small
farming towns, each with its church steeple and gingerbread Rathaus (town
hall). It was easy to imagine winter smoke rising from hundreds of chimneys,
fueled by the endless cords of stacked firewood that crisscrossed the area
like hedgerows. But we arrived in summer, on a warm, sunny Saturday
afternoon. A cluster of crosses on the village directory marked the Friedhof,
the cemetery. It took just a few minutes to walk there.
Four women were working in the cemetery tidying up. Not a blade of grass was
out of place, no stone unpolished. Every grave was blanketed with plants
and fresh flowers. We said our “Guten Tag” to the ladies and began looking
around.
“You know, there aren’t going to be any Jews in this cemetery,” Nina said,
pointing out what perhaps should have been obvious to us right away. There
was no Hebrew, no Stars of David, on any of the stones.
“Bitte,” I said to one of the ladies. “Meine Obermutter, Eichenbronner, aus
Weisenbronn,” I explained, using up all the broken, incorrect German I had
absorbed. The ladies shook their heads. They didn’t know Eichenbronner.
They didn’t know Strauss either.
Sometimes Nina and I travel well equipped, with guidebooks and dictionaries
and phrasebooks. This time we had decided to go without. In Germany we wanted
to force ourselves to interact with Germans, to question them and depend on
them. We arrived in Weisenbronn speaking no German, with no guidebooks and no English-German dictionary.
“Why don’t you ask her?” Nina suggested, gesturing to an older woman who
stood a few feet away.
“Namen?” she asked. Strauss and Eichenbronner, I told her. Hearing
Eichenbronner, the older woman said to her younger friends, “Hebrdisch”
and “J|discher.”
Immediately I became apprehensive. I had no idea how people would react to
interloping Jews poking around their towns, their cemeteries, their history.
I as much expected to be told to go away as to be helped. But the ladies did not seem the least bit uneasy. I went ahead.
“Ja,” I said while pointing to Nina and me, “J|discher.” I can remember as
a kid thinking it better not to identify myself as a Jew, and even telling
people that, yes, Strauss was German but that my family was Lutheran. Once I
told my mother that I didn’t feel Jewish at all. “Tell that to Hitler when he
comes back,” she said with uncharacteristic bluntness. And here we were, in
Germany, telling complete strangers, the fathers of whom did who knows what in
the war, that we were Jewish.
The older woman said “J|discher Friedhof in Rvdelsse, nicht in Weisenbronn.”
Before heading back to Rvdelsse, we took a quick walk around the town. Weisenbronn itself was as tidy as the cemetery, immaculate homes and perfectly
clean, smooth streets that hardly seemed in need of the repaving that was
going on. In the center of the village were two inns, a convenience store and a
bank with an ATM that would give us money from our account in San Francisco.
And not 50 feet away were half a dozen homes that had barns right behind
them filled with pigs, and front and back yards piled high with Misthaufen,
neatly kept heaps of manure. Everything in Weisenbronn was the stereotype of
German precision — except the air, which reeked, almost burned, with the smell
of fermenting pig waste.
“Do you have a plan?” Nina asked again as Rvdelsse came into view.
“We’ll go to the cemetery,” I told her.
“I can’t believe we came to Germany without a German dictionary,” she said.
We didn’t have to enter the Rvdelsse cemetery to know we were in the wrong
place. Beyond the gates were only crosses. Three women sat outside, keeping
company. We greeted them and asked, “Bitte, J|discher Friedhof?”
This inaugurated a prolonged discussion in which the women clearly disagreed
about the least complicated way to find the Jewish cemetery. One of the women
finally decided to show us. In the car she chatted continuously, in German,
while directing us through town. (A characteristic of all the Germans we met
was that even after it was completely apparent that we did not speak German,
they would just keep prattling along.) “Schl|ssel,” the woman kept saying.
We arrived at the tidy home of a pig farmer. “Moment,” she said before going
into the house.
She came back a few minutes later. In her hand she carried a small canvas
bag the form of which clearly outlined a book. “Juden Freidhof” was written
on the canvas. She turned it over and out slid a key. “Schl|ssel,” she said.
At the edge of town she told us to stop. She was going to her garden and
would not accompany us any farther. Over and over she repeated the directions
to the cemetery — in German. Left, then right, then right again. We nodded
our understanding, but in front of us there was nothing but farmland and open
country. The road wound into the fields and disappeared from sight.
At the first left we curved around a field of blossoming sunflowers. The
first right took us among vineyards and stacks of firewood. The next right
and we were off the pavement, heading into what seemed to be nothing but open
fields. “Oh my,” Nina said softly.
Ahead of us a Star of David, silvery in the shimmering heat of the summer
afternoon, rose above a small building that formed one corner of a large,
walled compound. Inside we could see countless gravestones, most of them hip- or even shoulder-deep in vegetation.
With only the name of a town, we had flown across nine time zones and driven a
day and a half. A twist of the key and the lock on the gate popped open.
Each link of the heavy chain rattled as I pulled it free. We went in.
The weeds in the cemetery were not forgiving ones. Wild roses with
stout shoots and thick thorns grew entangled among flowering purple thistles.
Each step was like breaking trail in the brambles of a fairy-tale thicket.
Flowers bloomed everywhere. Butterflies and bees swarmed, busily at work,
unused to intruders.
Many of the stones had sunken so that only the tops, carved as crowns, were
visible. Those still high above the ground were mainly obscured by weeds.
Only by stamping could we see the engravings. Within minutes Nina had to stop; the bristles of the overgrowth had already made dozens of small cuts on her bare legs.
The weeds weren’t the only obstacles. Termite mounds hidden in the thick
grass gave way like rotten floorboards. My ankles caught on the rusting
andirons and chains that outlined decaying plots. The jagged edges of broken
slabs raked my shins. It was very slow going. Before I had made my way
through the first row, Nina called out, “Did you see over there?”
The cemetery was large, perhaps three acres or more. Nina pointed to a far
corner I had not yet seen where there were hundreds of graves. It seemed
pointless. Many of the stones were corroding, with large fragments flaking
away as if from pieces of stale pastry. Only the marble markers were legible. Yet
many of those were in Hebrew. It would have taken us forever to decipher
them. Nina, pregnant, impatient with the improbability of it all, waited
uncomfortably. My “plan” was not working. I finished the first row having
found nothing. There were Rossmans, Sterns, lots of Sondheims and one
Einstein. But no Eichenbronners and no Strausses.
From beyond the cemetery walls, fields rolled down to red-roofed Rvdelsse.
The cascade of a church carillon spilled over the cemetery. It was a gorgeous
afternoon. My jeans were damp with sweat. Pollen caked my hands and neck.
My every pore itched with the heat. I began the second row of 30 graves.
It took me 45 minutes to work through the first two rows. I thought I would
plod through the next four and then take a cursory look at the hundreds of
other stones. A few graves into the third row I stepped on the overgrowth and
saw “Samson Eichenbronner” clearly marked in black marble. The year of death:
1923. Next to Samson was Louise Eichenbronner, died 1926. I had never heard
either of those names. Were these my great-grandparents? The grimy sweat
that had soaked my jeans turned chill with the discovery. I continued
looking.
We spent two more hours in the cemetery, finding no more Eichenbronners. As
I looked, Nina read through the visitors’ book that we had been given with the
key. There were excerpts from German books on Jewish cemeteries and hundreds
of signatures, mainly in German but many in Hebrew and a few in English. As
we left the cemetery an ultralight plane flew overhead. A hot-air balloon
rose not far away, perhaps on a late afternoon tour of the vineyards. I leafed
through the visitors’ book and although I could understand almost nothing of
what was written, I was overcome with a sense of connection and deep sadness.
Here were dozens of people who had come to this out-of-the-way cemetery,
trying to make sense of a senseless past. It felt as though history was
washing through us even as it had ignored and abandoned these hundreds of
graves.
At the house where we had picked up the key it took a minute or two for the
old man to answer his door. Thirty steps away, 50 pigs clustered at the barn
gate. The smell was overwhelming. I handed him the book and the key.
“Danke,” I said. His face and hands were rough, hard-worked. He took the
things from me and said nothing. I had no idea who he was or why he was in
charge of the key. I had no way to ask.
We sat in the car as I jotted down some notes. The old man came out of the
house and slowly, stiffly, walked over. He leaned down and put his head in
the window. Somehow we signaled that our visit had been worthwhile. He
hung around for a few minutes as though he expected that we would learn German just from his presence. But we didn’t. He nodded, and went back to his house.
We had dinner that night at the only place that was open in Weisenbronn. Our
waiter suggested what type of wurst we should have and what type of local beer
I might try. We told him that we were looking for family roots.
“You forgot one small detail,” Nina said as the waiter went to the kitchen.
I hadn’t told him we were Jewish, still nervous about how that “small detail”
might be received. The waiter came back and told us that no one in the place
knew any Eichenbronners. That’s when I told him we were Jewish and that there
hadn’t been anyone in the town for a long time. “Obviously,” he said, quietly.
In a word that might have been cynical, he somehow combined his limited English
with melancholy and compassion. I explained that as far as I knew the
Eichenbronners had left before Hitler. “Anyway …” he said, as though that
fact should give very little consolation.
A while later he returned with a name and number. We should contact the
Burghermeister, Herr M|ller, who knew all the local history and spoke English
fluently. He would be able to help us.
The next morning I tried to call Burghermeister M|ller. But the pay phone
wouldn’t take coins and, on a Sunday morning in a small town in Germany, there
was no place where I could buy a phone card. Plus Nina was anxious to
move on. We had found the cemetery. We had found names. Perhaps that was
enough.
“Let’s at least drive around town before we leave,” I said. In the car it
wouldn’t take long to cover Weisenbronn’s few streets.
We could have missed it just as easily as we saw it. In the first block one
of the homes had a signboard with the name M|ller carved on it. As we passed,
a man came out the front door.
“Herr M|ller?” I asked.
“Ja,” he said.
“Burghermeister M|ller?” I asked to make certain.
“Ja,” he said.
“Sprechen Sie Englisch?” I asked.
“Nein,” he answered.
With my crippled, elemental German, I explained about “Meine J|discher
Grossmutter aus Weisenbronn.”
“Moment,” he said gesturing for us to wait as he left the house.
Ten minutes later he reappeared with an elegant, 60ish woman. She had
short gray hair and a chiffon scarf draped over her red jacket, which seemed
very fashionable in a town whose every corner smelled of animal waste.
I again explained about Meine Grossmutter Eichenbronner and Frau Hoffman
answered, in very good English, that she knew “a great deal” about “your great-grandfather,” Samson Eichenbronner. “What would you like to know?” she said.
It was 10:30 in the morning. We spent the next five and a half hours with
Frau Hoffman.
On the patio behind the Burghermeister’s home, Frau Hoffman told us of Samson
Eichenbronner’s service in the Prussian-French war of 1870-71 and how he had
started the local veterans’ club after the German victory. She explained his
cattle-trading business: buying them in Rhvn, an impoverished area far
away; shipping them by train to the railhead a few miles north of town; and
then hiring local boys to drive them south to Weisenbronn.
Frau Hoffman then took us down Kobaldstrasse and showed us the Eichenbronner home.
She told us how the Jewish community leader, Herr Herbert, had resisted on
Kristallnacht, the night of breaking glass, when the Nazis ransacked his house,
and how he never returned after being taken away.
I still wasn’t entirely certain that Samson Eichenbronner was indeed my
great-grandfather. From the pay phone on the corner, I called AT&T Direct and
was talking to my mother in New York in seconds. “How many brothers and
sisters did Grandma Strauss have?” I asked her. It was early in the morning
in New York, and it took Mom a while to wake up and gather her thoughts.
“Oh I don’t know. There were a lot,” she said. “Maybe 10 or 12. I
think only three or four came to this country.” Frau Hoffman had said there
had been eight children.
“What did Grandma Strauss’ father do?” I asked. Mom said she thought he was
a Pferdehdndler, which is literally horse trader. But the German word is very
close to Fleischhdndler, or cattle or meat dealer. The numbers, the dates,
the occupations were all close enough. Samson Eichenbronner was certainly one
of the ancestors I had come to Germany never imagining to find.
We wondered why this elegant schoolteacher had become so interested in
local Jewish history. She explained that in 1982 one of her sons had begun a
history of the Jewish population of Weisenbronn as a school assignment. Many
people did not want to talk at that time, but one man, who had once worked for
Samson Eichenbronner, spoke so voluminously that the son grew tired and called
in his mother for help. Soon she became more interested than he. Now
retired after 40 years as an art teacher, she continued to research local
Jewish history. Nina asked her why.
As a teacher (and a German), Frau Hoffman was very precise with her words.
She told us that “bad things, evil things” had happened in Weisenbronn.
She thought people, particularly the younger generations, should know — even if some did
not want to know. Frau Hoffman was also a religious person. She had been to
church that morning, and to the cemetery and to her garden as well.
She told us that there were things in her past, more precisely in her
parents’ past, that made her feel guilty. It wasn’t so much guilt, she
explained, but a sense of sadness and remorse. While she grew up
knowing that bad things had happened to Jews, she first believed as she had
been told: that they had only happened in Berlin and the other big cities. But
there was also the memory of smelling fire as a 6-year-old in her
home town of Nvrdlingen and then seeing the charred remains of the synagogue
the next day. And the memory of the first time she saw an adult cry,
when a Christian neighbor and family friend came to her childhood home after
his Jewish wife had been taken away. He sat there among his neighbors and
sobbed.
Over lunch at the Gasthaus, we talked about how thrilled she was when Germany
was reunified and how she had never believed it would happen, how she was certain
it could never happen and how her relatives from East Germany showed up at
her door the very day the border opened. I sensed that because of the
separation she had experienced in her own family, she understood why Jews
sometimes come back to Weisenbronn.
She explained that the Rvdelsse cemetery dated from 1432. “Can you imagine?
That’s 60 years before Columbus,” I said to Nina, trying to grasp the notion
of Jews, my ancestors, having lived in one place for 500 years. I have moved
nearly 20 times in the last 20 years. Here families once lived — and some
still do — in one place for half a millennium.
Nina asked Frau Hoffman why the cemetery was even still there. She figured
that the Nazis would have attempted to erase every trace of Jewish existence,
even that of the dead. Frau Hoffman explained that the local people have
always been deeply religious and even those who were the most ardent Nazis
would not disturb the dead. Somehow that transcended their idea of who should
live.
From her file, Frau Hoffman pulled out the Weisenbronn census. The Germans
had been very precise about record-keeping. In 1910 there had been 836 people
in town and 44 Jews. In 1925, the population had risen to 882 but the number
of Jews was down to 27. In 1939 it had fallen to nine. In 1942 the census
became more precise, enumerated monthly. In February of 1942 there were three
Jews left in Weisenbronn. In March, there were none.
Eventually there were no more questions to ask. It was time to go. We
thanked Frau Hoffman and told her as best we could that what she was doing was
a very good thing. As we left Weisenbronn, Nina said, “You know what she does is so
wonderful. And she’s doing it just because it’s the right thing to do.” It
seemed to us that we had been guided to her. There had been too many
coincidences along the way for it to simply have been chance.
Had the gravestone been illegible, as so many were, perhaps we would have
driven on. Had we not seen Burghermeister M|ller’s sign, had he not been at
home, had Frau Hoffman not been at her home when Herr M|ller bicycled over, we
would have left Weisenbronn with only memories of graves. There would have been no other pictures, because our camera battery had given out just after we arrived. In a little town in Germany, on a Sunday, there was no place to buy
a replacement.
I‘m preparing my nieces for the trip to Nuremberg’s Christkindlesmarkt, the world’s largest celebration of Christmas and the coming of St. Nicolaus. We’re in Wurzberg, 71 miles east of Frankfurt, where my sister- and brother-in-law have recently been stationed by the U.S. Army. It’s snowing outside and we’re cozy indoors, but this is not exactly a scene Norman Rockwell would have painted: The nieces are fighting over who gets to play piano first for auntie and uncle; when a winner emerges, the loser sulks for a moment, then finds amusement in teaching her 18-month-old brother to say “shit.” Dad is out, working a second job to pay for Christmas and the expenses of living at the mercy of the deutsche mark with three kids, and as the baby chants, “Chit! Chad! Chet!” my husband and his sister are discussing who’s divorced among their childhood schoolmates.
Because I don’t have kids, I worry too much, so I take the nieces aside for a talk before they’re plunged into what I suspect will be an outing heavily freighted with religion. As a Zen-influenced Episcopalian from San Francisco, my greatest hope is that our nieces can inhabit a sort of spiritual nuclear-free zone. With their parents, I’d like to help my nieces grow a warm and loving pocket in themselves that would help them know and understand the oneness of all people, the importance of fairness and faith, the idea of grace. But God is a bit of a touchy subject in this family: Both my husband and sister-in-law are non-practicing Jewish atheists who’ve battled with their parents over marrying non-Jews. And we have only a few days together. So my goal for the girls is for them not be too confused by the mosh of Baroque cathedrals, Bavarian folk customs and mass-produced Christmas ornaments that make up the colossal Christkindlesmarkt of Nuremberg — to bring back something positive from our trip.
“What do you know about churches?” I ask as the 10-year-old, Zee, colors, and the 5-year-old, Maya, braids my hair. Zee, like most firstborn, is eager to perform. “You pray, you get to take sips of wine and then they make you eat nasty plastic crackers,” she says.
Her sister, Maya, is duly impressed. “Does everyone have to go to the churches tomorrow?” she asks. “Why do people eat plastic crackers?”
I’d hoped to avoid the full catechistic rap. Zee tries for bonus points. “We have to eat those crackers — so we don’t waste food.”
Maya, already the family diplomat, tries to cap the subject. “We don’t go to church, and we don’t even put up decorations for Halloween,” she says.
Knowing that the large crhche in the Hauptmarkt at Nuremberg’s Town Hall Square is a major attraction, I ask if they know what the birth-in-a-manger thing is about. Zee has absorbed the whole Cecil B. DeMille version through TV, about a star and three guys coming with gifts, and Mary and Joseph being homeless, and Jesus being born in a barn. “Why didn’t God give them a hotel?” asks Maya.
In the morning, the traffic report says Autobahn 3 to Nuremberg is code red, or extremely slippery, from the four inches of snow that fell overnight. Having mastered the booklet of German driving rules provided to the military (“Wow, ‘Flipping off an Army officer is a $2,000 fine!’” my husband reads aloud. “There are also fines for honking in town and touch-parking”), we set off into the snowstorm, driving behind big rigs that break up the snow and trying to avoid the skids that have sent a handful of cars into ditches. Hill after hill of the local vineyards is blanketed white, with gnarled arms of riesling and pinot plants poking through. The vineyards give way to forests as we settle into the autobahn routine of driving on the right for as long as your patience holds out, then venturing into the fast lane and praying a speeding Porsche doesn’t rear-end you. We turn off at Nuremberg in just two hours despite the snow and traffic.
After we’re parked and bundled up to the eyeballs, we waddle to the bridge over the River Pegnitz and down to the red and white-striped booths of the market, along Konigstrasse and Burgstrasse. Row after row of booths offer miniature wishing wells, painted gingerbread houses, straw stars, beeswax figurines, metal snowflakes, crystal icicles and about a thousand varieties of painted wooden nutcrackers. In between them are the candy, cookie, wurst and wine booths. Gluhwein, the sweet, hot mulled wine that shoppers sip to stay warm, perfumes the air with citrus and cloves. The nieces laugh at miniature Bavarian figures built out of walnuts, prunes and figs, especially a pair in which a nut-headed wife is about to beat in the face of her fig-headed husband, who is swooning and holding his beer stein aloft.
The miles of aisles of colored glass ornaments, wind chimes, bells, angels and stars tinkle in the lightly snowy air. The warm scent of fresh-baked stollen, the fruit-studded bread covered with powdered sugar, pulls the nieces to one booth. In the course of the day we eat apple strudel, butter cookies, springerle, various smoked, wine-boiled and grilled wursts, hot potato pancakes and strange, chocolate-covered, bomb-shaped confections filled with marshmallow fluff. At lunch, Maya picks at her boiled cabbage. Austrian tourists who share our table encourage her to eat it. “It’s good for the constitution,” says one Austrian, pounding his fists into his chest and smiling. Maya seeks out her mother. “Do I have to eat the sour-crap?” she asks. It’s time for more fresh air.
Searching for the perfect ornament, the girls point out a ceramic figurine, and I assume we’re headed for a discussion of who’s who at the crhche. But it’s a false alarm — they’re interested in something to the left, a caricatured Bavarian toting a garlic rope.
“It’s a hard sell,” my husband teases about the crhche. “Imagine trying to market them as action figures: ‘The wise men! Collect all three!’” he bellows, TV style. In addition to Garlic Man, the girls identify other members of the Bavarian pantheon, including the Gun Toter, the Old Guy With a Beard and a Pipe, and the Hornblower. I’m hoping they don’t notice the miniature crhche in some strange, dried tuber that’s for sale, or the Pink-Marshmallow-Jesus-in-a-Chocolate-Shoe, obviously laid on for Danish tourists.
Zee notices another shoe ornament, and explains that the shoes are left out for St. Nicolaus. “I think he’s a relative of Santa’s,” she says. Finally, the nieces find an ornament stand selling, among other things, a milk-white, plastic baby nested into a moss-filled walnut. “Jesus on the half-shell?” whispers my husband, threatening our ditente.
“Why did they put Jesus in a nut?” asks Maya. I consider the possible Kaspar David Friederich naturalism/Joseph Campbell answer (Germans like to think of God in Nature) and the Economics 101 answer (they had a large supply of walnuts and thought if they put Christ in them they’d really sell), but settle on simplicity. “They thought that was pretty,” I say.
Finally, after choirs and more cookies, when the kids complain that their feet are frozen and the spires of St. Lorenz Kirche and the Altes Rathaus are lit against a dark sky, we buy giant, heart-shaped gingerbread cookie necklaces whose frosting spells “Ich Liebe Dich” and stand aside as the schoolchildren of Nuremberg begin to file past with colored paper lanterns. It’s a rite held each Dec. 10, which references advent, or the season of darkness. The fluttery candlelight that fills the brightly colored suns, moons and brilliantly hued box lanterns, drifting in the cold air from a string tied to a small stick, is breathtaking. But the nieces are tired, and since there are no lanterns for sale (they’re strictly homemade), they’re ready to go home.
On the walk to the car, I tell them that before the Holy Roman Empire brought its religion to this part of Franconia, children made paper lanterns to bring light to the very long nights, and to remind people of the cycle of seasons and the spirit of spring that waits in the ground. They think about this for a moment. “So spring is always there,” says Maya. The three of us curl up together in the back seat for the long ride home.
Almost four years ago, on a hot summer afternoon in Pasadena, Calif., an Italian Buddhist watched a white leather sphere sail into the sky and covered his face in despair. Thousands of miles to the south, an entire nation began its riotous celebration, and the 1994 World Cup — international soccer’s blind date with the United States — had reached its ambiguous conclusion.
You might say it was the kind of date that ends with a lingering kiss on the doorstep rather than a passionate, long-term coupling: Although the ’94 tournament was a great success on its own terms, drawing more fans than any previous World Cup, it did not catapult soccer to the forefront of American pop culture, or suddenly turn the U.S. into an international soccer superpower. Even for the beleaguered minority of American soccer snobs — in whose number I count myself — that was too much to hope. To labor the metaphor just a little further, it was also the kind of date that subtly changes the two parties’ perceptions of who they are, and leaves them increasingly curious about each other. Staging its crowning spectacle in an essentially neutral country made soccer stronger in its time of crisis, and gave Americans the chance to experience the obsessive, carnivalesque and even deranged passions that attend this often bewildering game. Americans always appreciate scale even if they don’t understand it, and the sheer color and bigness of the World Cup surely accelerated a process that was happening anyway: The planet’s favorite sport, smuggled past the Border Patrol by immigrants and adopted en masse by 11-year-old suburbanites, was insinuating itself into a permanent niche in our sports landscape.
It isn’t realistic to suggest that soccer will soon, if ever, be as big in the American spectator-sports pantheon as baseball, basketball or football. (Supplanting hockey, another imported niche sport that may be wearing out its welcome, is another matter.) But “America’s soccer nation,” to borrow a phrase from George Vecsey of the New York Times, has grown extraordinarily broad and diverse, stretching from immigrant-rich urban hotbeds like East Los Angeles and Newark, N.J., to middle-class strongholds around Portland, Ore., and Dallas-Fort Worth. As the planet’s attention turns to France this week for the opening of the 1998 World Cup — where the hot topics are striking airline workers, Algerian terrorists, English hooligans and a gap-toothed kid named Ronaldo from the slums outside Rio — it’s worth recognizing how far American soccer has come.
Major League Soccer, the 12-team U.S. pro league that arose in the wake of World Cup ’94, is a weird, low-rent affair in many ways. It has made several lamentable rule changes in an effort to make the game more comprehensible to non-fans, and its team names (the Dallas Burn? the San Jose Clash?) seem lifted from some marketing student’s MBA thesis. But MLS continues to draw respectable crowds in near-total media obscurity (the league-wide attendance average is about 14,000 per game). More importantly, its level of play has improved dramatically. If you’re one of the soccer snobs who spurned the league for its Madison Avenue cheese factor, or who gave up during its often-laughable first season, I strongly advise you not to miss this year’s edition of the Los Angeles Galaxy — a slashing, high-scoring team of speed burners who combine South American flair with North American grit. Professional competition at this improved level has in turn toughened and sharpened the U.S. national team, previously an unstable mix of foreign-based players and near-amateurs.
The American team that will play Germany in Paris on Monday is by far the best ever to represent this country, a tirelessly athletic side that plays sound positional and tactical soccer and doesn’t surrender goals easily. Its accomplishments over the last year have been impressive: The Americans held Mexico to a goalless draw in a crucial qualifying match before an enormous, enraged crowd at the high altitude of Mexico City; rode red-hot goalkeeper Kasey Keller to an astonishing 1-0 win over world champion Brazil; and thoroughly dominated Austria in a 3-0 victory in Vienna. Unfortunately for them, expectations were unfairly raised by the far less talented and interesting ’94 squad, which snuck into the round of 16 on a fluke, after a Colombian defender put the ball into his own net. (He was later murdered, perhaps by drug lords, in apparent retribution for his mistake.) In addition, this year’s team must play two of the most talented sides in Europe, Germany and Yugoslavia (the name still officially used by Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian government), and two of its games may be drowned in political hype: When the U.S. plays Iran on June 21, it will mark the first significant athletic competition between the two since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the Yugoslavia game on June 25 will undoubtedly be tinged by tensions over the Serbs’ latest round of atrocities in the Kosovo region. In short, for all the team’s improvement, it will take a bigger miracle than ’94′s to get them out of the first round. Soccer, like life, is full of injustice.
To return to our agonized Buddhist for a moment, any honest soccer fan will admit that the finale of USA ’94 was a prodigious anticlimax. After 120 minutes of scoreless, tentative play in the championship (a 90-minute game plus a half-hour of overtime), the phlegmatic Italian star Roberto Baggio — yes, a Zen practitioner — missed the last penalty kick in the tie-breaking shootout, giving the trophy to Brazil. A potentially classic matchup between the two most skillful soccer teams in the world had fizzled out in a grotesque blunder.
But perhaps even that was instructive. More than most sports, this one traffics in heartbreak and disappointment, and, all things considered, world soccer came back from its American vacation stronger and healthier than it had been in years. Friendly, enthusiastic crowds and modern facilities made the deadly stadium collapses and violent tribal outbreaks of European soccer’s recent past fade into memory, and the style of play (aside from the championship game) was mostly freewheeling and attractive, free of the choppy, defensive slog often encountered at the sport’s top levels. Indeed, the soccer establishment gathers in France secure in the knowledge that its game has, if anything, grown dramatically in exposure and popularity in the intervening four years.
Europe and Latin America have produced an exciting new generation of star players, foremost among them Ronaldo, the 21-year-old Brazilian who has almost certainly replaced Michael Jordan as the planet’s most famous athlete. The top professional leagues — the English Premier League, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A and the Spanish Primera Liga — have begun to see themselves as leaders of a global industry, recruiting players from all continents and broadcasting their games by satellite around the world. A European super-league, involving such elite teams as Arsenal (London), Manchester United, A.C. Milan, Juventus (Turin), Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, is expected to emerge within a few years. And soccer fever is spreading rapidly through the densely populated nations of East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — the 2002 World Cup will be shared by Japan and South Korea, with the 2006 tournament probably destined for South Africa.
It’s impossible to exaggerate the effect the Cup will have on daily life in most of the 32 countries represented at France ’98. Ordinary business will slow to a crawl for most of the next four weeks, and stop altogether whenever the national team is actually playing. (As many as 2 billion people, or one-third of the world’s population, are expected to watch the World Cup final on July 12. The National Basketball Association finals, perhaps Jordan’s final showcase, should top out at around 600 million viewers.) As for the U.S., well, as I say, we’re a lot more soccer-friendly than we used to be. The Disney-owned ABC/ESPN combo will broadcast every minute of every World Cup match live, a first for American TV. (Even during USA ’94, some games were only available on tape-delay.) Ratings will be somewhere north of the National Hockey League, but nowhere near “Seinfeld”/Super Bowl levels. In practice, if you walk into a sports bar in a major city, the Cup will probably be on — unless there’s a baseball game opposite it on another channel.
My private theory is that there is in fact a cryptic, matter/antimatter relationship between baseball and soccer — that the space soccer occupies in the souls of (male) Europeans and South Americans is filled, in norteamericanos, by baseball. This theory, I believe, can even account for the anomalous cases of Japan and Mexico, where both sports are widely popular: In each of those countries, American influence has ground like a tectonic plate against underlying and in some ways opposing traditions, producing a tense, peculiar cultural mélange.
Superficially, no two sports could be more different. Soccer at least bears certain formal similarities to football (11 players a side, with each team defending a goal on a rectangular field) and basketball (which also combines positional strategy with fluid, improvisational play). But football and basketball are modern inventions, whereas baseball and soccer developed deep in the rural, pre-industrial past before being codified in the mid-19th century. An early version of baseball was played in both England and colonial America; the game is mentioned, of all places, in Jane Austen’s 1796 novel “Northanger Abbey.” Along with cricket, its posh English cousin, baseball presumably descends from stick-and-ball games played by medieval shepherds (the legend that Abner Doubleday invented it in 1839 in Cooperstown, N.Y., has been convincingly rejected). Soccer is older still; it can be directly traced to a game played by the Roman legions in Gaul, and similar games were played much earlier by the Assyrians, Egyptians and ancient Chinese. Amusingly, a historical article published by the National Soccer Hall of Fame explains that by the 12th century in England, “the game had become a violent mob sport with no rules and any sort of behavior condoned” — not much has changed on the Sceptered Isle, evidently, in 800 years.
As befits such bucolic ancientness, both sports are deeply concerned with history and tradition. Both reward the obsessive, the purist, the acolyte far more than the casual observer. Both have childishly simple objectives — touch all four bases; put this ball in that net without using your hands — yet require almost impossible feats of athleticism and coordination, and seem to their devotees to be possessed of almost mystical depth. Both create a highly elastic sense of time, although in entirely different ways. Baseball, of course, is the only major team sport (besides cricket) that has no clock, and a single inning may take anywhere from two minutes to an hour or more. Soccer, although divided into 45-minute halves, is played in a nearly continuous flow of patterns that form, break down and reassemble, mesmerizing its fans into a kind of high-anxiety fugue state; add to this the fact that official time is kept only by the referee (except in the new and improved MLS), so players and fans never know exactly how much time remains.
Let’s be frank — another connection between these sports is that both bore nonbelievers out of their skulls. There’s no mystery to this, and it’s not solely a matter of incomprehension. All sports torture their fans in various ways, and both baseball and soccer do so with extended periods of stultifying tedium. “Fever Pitch,” English novelist Nick Hornby’s marvelously funny memoir about his lifelong obsession with the London team Arsenal, is full of self-recriminating accounts of all the atrocious matches he’s sat through. Hornby refers to soccer as a form of “entertainment as pain,” and writes that “the natural state of the [soccer] fan is bitter disappointment.” But boredom and irritation are part of a fan’s ritual allegiance to the sport; as though bargaining with the Old Testament God, we believe we must suffer through the bad games to deserve the brilliant ones.
This isn’t the place to discuss the kind of 8-2 baseball game that suddenly stops dead around the sixth inning and devolves into the kind of timeless nothingness otherwise achieved only in Wagner’s “Parsifal.” But I can assure you that among the 48 first-round matches of this year’s World Cup, there will be at least one or two deadly dull contests in which neither team will make any serious effort to score goals. (There is indeed such a thing as an exciting 0-0 draw in soccer, but we’ll leave that for the advanced lesson.) There will be several more in which one team will score a lucky goal early, then pack eight or nine men in front of its own goal, punt the ball downfield without chasing it and ruthlessly chop down any opposing player who dares to foray forward. Fans of the teams involved will watch such games on tenterhooks, for they know that, as unlikely as it may seem, a sudden defensive miscue or a lightning strike from midfield could destabilize the whole mind-numbing equation. The souls who really deserve your pity are those who watch such games because they have no choice — those who, for example, will get up early Friday morning to watch Paraguay play Bulgaria, and who will do so without hope, without expectation, without passion, but simply because they must. (Don’t call me that morning — I’ll be, um, working.) There will also, I promise, be a game or two (or more, if we’re really lucky) in France ’98 that will become soccer lore. Games like the 1958 final in which a teenager named Pelé scored twice against Sweden and his astonishing Brazil team taught the world what il jogo bonito meant; or the 1986 quarterfinal in which Argentina’s mercurial superstar Diego Maradona called on “la mano de Dios” to defeat England and avenge his nation’s humiliation in the Falklands; or the cruel, cruel semifinal of 1982, when les bleus, the long-suffering French team, scored twice in overtime against arch rival West Germany, only to see the relentless Teutons storm back, hammer two home in the final minutes to tie, then win the penalty-kick shootout. And the thing is, there’s no way to be sure, absolutely sure, that Friday’s Paraguay-Bulgaria clash won’t be one of those.
In brilliant and dreadful games alike, the best way to decode the apparently amorphous flow of soccer is to make sense of the alignment of players on the field. With 22 players running around trying to deceive each other, there’s a certain degree of chaos theory involved in even the best-played games — but following the action is a lot easier if you can tell the accidental patterns from the intentional ones. The most common alignment in soccer is a defensive-minded setup called the 4-4-2, meaning that there are four defenders positioned in front of the goalkeeper, four midfielders seeking to control play in the center and two forwards hanging around the opponent’s goal hoping to score. If the team is leading, the four midfielders will drift backward, creating an eight-man defense; if the team needs a goal, they’ll move forward to help form a six-man attack. There are many variations on this theme; the one most relevant to American fans at the moment is the unorthodox 3-6-1 formation that U.S. coach Steve Sampson has developed for the World Cup, in an effort to cover up the Americans’ weaknesses and capitalize on their athletic ability and team speed.
One of the keys to this alignment is the tremendous confidence Sampson has in goalkeeper Keller, a Washington state native who has excelled for several seasons in the English Premier League. Whatever hope the Americans have for advancing in the tournament rests with the unflappable Keller, who made numerous impossible saves against Brazil in the stunning 1-0 U.S. win over the champs in February. That game alone made clear how much stronger the U.S. team has become. Playing against a 10-man Brazil team in the ’94 Cup, the Americans never came close to scoring; the only element of suspense was how long it would take the Brazilians to penetrate the U.S. defense. Today, with a little luck, the U.S. has a fighting chance against any side in the world.
Directly in front of Keller is 37-year-old Thomas Dooley, the German-born son of an American serviceman and veteran of nine seasons in the Bundesliga. As the sweeper, or central defender, and team captain, Dooley is supposed to take on any attacking players who break free near the goal, keep a cool head and distribute the ball out of the back. The other defenders, “marking backs” with specific assignments to guard, or “mark,” opposing forwards, will almost certainly be Eddie Pope and David Regis. Pope, a rising star in MLS with two-time champions D.C. United, is one of a modest but growing contingent of African-Americans in soccer. Regis is also black, but his story is completely different — a native of Martinique who stars for the Karlsruhe team in Germany, he became a U.S. citizen (through marriage) less than a month ago. These are two of the most talented players on the team, and will often come forward to join the attack; Pope is known for driving headers on goal, while Regis has a dangerous long-range shot.
Of Sampson’s six midfielders, two are really “wingers,” speedy players who dash up and down the flanks of the field from goal to goal, from defense to offense, as the action dictates. These roles will probably be filled by Cobi Jones, the lightning-quick Detroiter who has scored seemingly at will this year for the Los Angeles Galaxy, and Californian Frankie Hejduk of the Tampa Bay Mutiny, at 23 the youngest player on the team. The two most fixed slots on the field belong to the least experienced players, defensive midfielders Chad Deering and Brian Maisonneuve. Deering, a Texan who plays in Germany, and Maisonneuve, who plays for the Columbus Crew in MLS, will “stay home,” in coaching parlance — they should rarely be seen in the offensive zone (unless the team is behind in the late going), and must pick up defensive coverage if Pope or Regis go forward.
The most important offensive player on the American team is midfielder Claudio Reyna, a New Jersey native who plays with Deering at Wolfsburg in Germany. An agile ball-handler with speed and tremendous vision of the field, he plays a role similar to that of a basketball point guard — penetrating the defensive alignment and creating scoring chances for his teammates or himself. Reyna’s partner at offensive midfielder will probably be Ernie Stewart, the team’s best blend of skill and experience. Another military brat, Stewart was born and raised in the Netherlands, where he plays professionally for NAC Breda. That leaves the lone forward, or “striker,” who hangs around near the opponent’s goal, using up defenders’ energies and hoping a loose ball bounces his way. Sampson almost seems to use this position as a decoy — to some extent, this entire alignment is an effort to adjust for the team’s dearth of star strikers. Eric Wynalda, the career American scoring leader, is recovering from a knee injury and looks slow and rusty. Roy Wegerle, a 34-year-old South African immigrant who once played in England, is a hard-working journeyman who’s no longer a lethal scorer. Nonetheless, Wegerle may start, since Sampson seems to lack confidence in Brian McBride, who stars alongside Maisonneuve in Columbus but has had little success in international play.
The theory behind the 3-6-1 is that eight of the 10 field players will join the attack at some point — even Dooley is likely to come forward once or twice — and that all of them are capable of scoring. These flexible waves of Yanks pouring forward will eventually find cracks, Sampson hopes, even in the technically superb German defense. Meanwhile, all those young, agile bodies clogging up the midfield will frustrate the ponderous, tradition-bound attackers of Germany and Yugoslavia, dispossessing them of the ball and launching devastating counterattacks. You can’t fault Sampson for trying something new and ambitious; the U.S. team wasn’t going to beat Germany with slow-footed defenders Marcelo Balboa and Alexi Lalas — two World Cup vets now riding the bench — doggedly manning the back line. In fact, after Hejduk, McBride and Reyna scored in the impressive 3-0 victory over Austria in April, Sampson had his team and the American media momentarily convinced that he had the German behemoth measured for the kill.
Maybe he does: Sampson’s reign as the first American-born coach of the U.S. team has been characterized by uncanny good fortune when it’s most needed. But the fragility of his experimental alignment was exposed when Reyna missed a few games with minor injuries and the U.S. attack fired blanks against Macedonia and Scotland, while mistimed forward waves allowed dangerous scoring chances to opponents. By far the likeliest scenario is that the American team, which for all its speed and conditioning lacks basic ball-handling skills, will be dismantled by the powerhouse Germans and outgunned by the explosive Serbs. Sampson will face public displeasure and lose his job, a big-name foreign coach will be hired at great expense to build the 2002 team and American soccer will continue its slow, incremental build. But Sampson’s gamble is a worthy one. A cheap goal and a few outrageous saves from Kasey Keller on Monday evening in Paris, and the team with the funny formation — the implausible offspring, if you like, of soccer’s 1994 blind date with America — will make front-page headlines around the world.
What German city has the highest percentage of foreigners, the most drugs and crime and the biggest budget for culture? Berlin? Guess again. It’s Frankfurt, the headquarters of Germany’s principal stock exchange, the all-powerful German Bundesbank (German Federal Reserve) and the new European Central Bank; the city that, on Jan. 1, 1999, will place its hands firmly on the levers of the Euro, Europe’s new single currency.
Frankfurt has had to reinvent itself since wartime air raids destroyed most of its historical monuments and well-preserved medieval quarter — so the city today does not proffer much in the way of Old World charm. This financial capital on the River Main (pronounced “Mine”) is abrasive, hard-headed and rich; its glass and concrete skyscrapers are occupied by banks or insurance companies and its nickname is “Mainhattan.” In addition to finance, wealth is generated by industry, particularly in engineering, chemicals
and printing and publishing.
As a result, most travelers who venture to Frankfurt are actually bound not for the city itself but for a trade fair — one of the 50,000 congresses, conferences and seminars held each year. The international fairs, in particular, are a Mecca to people in a given industry, whether it be cars, fashion, medical high-tech or consumer goods. The Congress Center Messe Frankfurt has recently completed a massive expansion, and now 2,300 participants can sleep under the same roof in the new Maritim hotel next door. Along with the new facilities there is a new marketing campaign launched by six leading conference hotels and the Congress Center, “Conventions Unlimited” — known as C.U. in Frankfurt. (Event planners can find out more by calling 49/(0)69/7575 3000; “49″ is the international calling code for Germany; drop the first “0″ when dialing from outside the country.)
It’s instructive to think of Frankfurt as a great port city that thrives off airborne rather than seaborne trade. It has the foreign babble, the international flair and the sleaze of a port city. Already the city’s largest employer (52,000 people), the airport handles 39 million passengers a year — and is expanding, spurred on by the deregulation of airline travel in Europe. Its facilities include a shopping mall with 100 shops, three movie theaters, 20 restaurants, a disco, a chapel and an exhibition gallery (tel. 069/690-1 for flight information, or see the Web page.)
A taxi from the airport to the main train station costs about 40 DM. But the subway is so fast and reliable — it only takes 11 minutes to reach the city — that it is usually not worth calling a taxi.
WHERE TO STAY
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No traveler in his or her right mind shows up without a hotel reservation during a major trade fair. Rooms are not only hard to find then, they cost up to 50 percent more, particularly during the Book Fair (early October) and the twice yearly International Fair for Consumer Goods (late February and late August). On the other hand, rooms often go begging when no trade fair is on; always test the waters by asking for a “corporate” or “weekend” rate.
The city’s tourist offices (located in the main train station and the mail square of the old town at Rvmerberg 27, tel. 069/2123 8800) run a central reservation system for hotel rooms called Frankfurt Soft (069/2123 0808, fax 069/2124 0512). They also sell the useful Frankfurt Card — a pass allowing unlimited travel on public transport in the city and to the airport, and a 50 percent reduction on admission to 15 museums (10 DM for one day, 15 DM for two days). If you are attending a conference, ask for a Congress Ticket (5 DM), a one-day ticket that is valid for unlimited use of public transport in the city (inner zone) and to the airport.
The Westend is the best neighborhood for the business traveler. It contains the sprawling Messe, or trade fair center, and borders on the main train station. There are many good restaurants and smaller hotels located in the quiet, residential side streets. Palmenhof is in a renovated Jugendstil (German art nouveau) villa. The alcoves of its seafood restaurant, Bastei, are perfect for private business meals (Bockenheimer Landstr. 89, tel. 069/753-0060, fax 069/7530-0666). Hotel Westend is a family-run establishment crowded with French antiques and media types (Westendstr. 15, tel. 069/746702, fax 069/745396). Each of the 11 rooms at Hotel Robert Mayer, located in another turn-of-the-century villa, has been decorated by a different Frankfurt artist. You might find yourself contemplating an abstract newspaper collage from the comfort of a replica Louis XIV armchair. Rooms are wired for modems and ISDN (Robert-Mayer-Strasse 44, tel. 069/970910, fax 069/9709-1010).
Hessischer Hof is a top choice in the multiple-dollar-sign class. The furnishings in both public and guest rooms are French 18th century antiques and reproductions and there are salons for private lunches and dinners for groups of six or more. The breakfast buffet is served in a room decorated with Napoleonic-era porcelain, gilt mirrors and chandeliers (Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage 40, tel. 069/75400, fax 069/7540-2924).
Hotels facing the train station itself are a distant second choice, and the hotels in the adjoining red light district should be avoided altogether. However good the facilities inside the hotel, there is an intimidating gantlet of drug users and street people outside.
Frankfurt’s transportation system links every neighborhood and suburb with such efficiency that it is no big disadvantage to stay on the fringes of the city, where many hotels are located, in Sachsenhausen, Niederrad or at the airport.
The stock exchange is one good place to take the city’s pulse. It has a
visitors’ gallery overlooking the main trading hall (Börsenplatz Gallery,
tel. 069/21010, open weekdays 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.). New market highs are almost
a daily event now as German investors, many of whom once dismissed stocks
as a form of gambling, buy into equities with the same white-hot enthusiasm
as American baby boomers. It helps that Germany has no capital gains tax.
The traffic-free Römerberg (main square) of the old town was reconstructed
after World War II. The Römer is the town hall where Holy Roman emperors
held lavish coronation banquets. The “medieval” buildings facing it are
pure reconstructions, with modern interiors.
Just east of the main square (on Domplatz) is a more authentic piece of
the past, St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral, a Gothic church where 30 emperors of
the Holy Roman Empire were crowned. It is one of the few historic buildings
that escaped serious damage during World War II.
Another church, just west of the square, commemorates events of 150 years
ago, a year of living dangerously that ended in bloodshed and repression.
Germany was not a unified country in 1848, of course, when its various
city-states and principalities elected Germany’s first national parliament.
Its members sat in St. Paul’s Church for much of the year, drawing up plans
for a union of German-speaking peoples based on democratic principles.
Unfortunately, they neglected to create an army while debating the finer
points of constitutional government, and an alliance of reactionaries and
Prussian militarists put an end to their work.
The Goethehaus and Museum (Grosser Hirschgraben 23, tel. 069/28284), also
in the old town, was the birthplace and first home of Germany’s most famous
writer. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe studied law and became a member of the
bar in Frankfurt before turning his full attention to writing. He sealed
his fame with the tragic love story, “Die Leiden des jungen Werthers” (“The
Sorrows of Young Werther”), a novel that has inspired countless copycat suicides. This is also where Goethe wrote the first version of
his masterpiece, “Faust” (minus the pious, happy ending of Part II). The
recently reopened museum overflows with works of art that inspired Goethe,
himself an amateur painter, and exhibits about Sturm und Drang (Storm and
Stress), a movement of writers and artists who promoted the romantic cult
of the young genius in rebellion against society — an idea still going
strong a century and a half later.
On the opposite bank of the Main River, in the neighborhood of Sachsenhausen,
the Museum Embankment offers a remarkable landscape of exhibits within
the space of two long blocks. Strolling down Schaumainkai, you pass the
Liebieghaus (No. 71), a collection of sculpture spanning two millennia
displayed in a 19th century villa; the Staedelsches Kunstinstitut (Stadel
Art Institute, No. 63), housing some of Germany’s major art treasures,
including paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Renoir and Monet; and museums
dedicated to the German postal system (No. 53) architecture (No. 43),
cinema (No. 41), non-European ethnology (No. 29) and applied arts (No. 17).
The Frankfurt tourist office arranges walking tours on demand (tel.
069/2123-8953), tailored to individual interests; their English-speaking
guides can instruct you about the Holy Roman emperors, the young Goethe,
the long history of the Jewish community in Frankfurt or its modern
architecture. The city is compact and there is no need to tour it by bus,
but such tours are available for 44 DM.
EATING AROUND
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Thanks to the flood of travelers on expense accounts and a large foreign
population, Frankfurt has a wide range of restaurants, from chic to ethnic.
If the company is paying and per diem is not an issue, make a reservation
at Brückenkeller (Schützenstr. 6, tel. 069/296068) or Humperdinck
(Grüneburgweg. 95, tel. 069/9720-3154). Both are leading exponents of
neue Küche, German nouvelle cuisine. In the middle price range, Gargantua
serves up creative versions of German classics and French-accented dishes
in a Westend dining room decorated with contemporary art (Liebigstr. 47,
tel. 069/720718); and chef Stephan Döpfner at Maingau restaurant in
Sachsenhausen is making a name for himself with dishes like rack of venison
in a walnut crust (Schifferstr. 38-40, tel. 069/617001).
The humble hot dog (Frankfurter Wurstschen) is Frankfurt’s one
contribution to world cuisine. The locals also eat Grüne
sösse (Green sauce), a sauce of cream and herbs served with potatoes and hard-boiled
eggs, and Handkäs mit Musik, a gelatinous cheese covered with raw onions,
oil and vinegar, served with bread and butter (an acquired taste for many,
the “music” refers to its side effects). All of these things are washed
down by apfelwein, a strong, tart cider served in earthenware krugs in
taverns like Wagner (Schweizer Strasse 71, tel. 069/612565) and
Fichtekränzi (Wallstrasse 5, tel. 069/612778), both in Sachsenhausen.
AFTER HOURS
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Most of the big hotels have bars, discos and nightclubs that are
nondescript but useful places for a drink with associates. Jimmy’s Bar
(Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage 40, tel. 069/614559) is an expensive, intimate
watering hole that ranks as the best bar in Germany according to many who
have imbibed bartender Andre’s $10 whisky sours; one hears a lot of Russian
spoken there nowadays.
Local night life is ideologically divided between Szene (trendy and chic)
and Alternative (subcultural). For Szene, go to Schirn Cafe, stunning for
its architecture and 120-foot-long bar (Römerberg tel. 069/291732).
Tigerpalast is a 1920s ballroom reincarnated as Frankfurt’s best variety
theater with a restaurant popular among local politicians (Heiligkreuzgasse
20, tel. 069/9200-2225, dinner only). Euronet’s computers (with Internet
access) are overshadowed by its sleek interior and ensemble of five bars,
restaurant, bistro and sushi bar (Willy-Brandt-Platz, tel. 069/2429370).
The Nordend (North End) bars/bistros Harvey’s (Bornheimer Landstrasse 64,
tel. 069/497303) and Grössenwahn (Lenaustrasse 97, 069/599356) attract both
gay and straight yuppies and yumpies (Young Urban Marxist Professionals).
Frankfurt’s passion for modern jazz is best savored in the smoky cellar of
the Frankfurter Jazzkeller (Kleine Bockenheimerstr. 18, tel. 069/288537).
The city is a center of techno music, too, and offers celebrity DJs and
ear-splitting, computer-generated beat in places like Omen (Junghofstrasse
14, tel. 069/282233) and Dorian Gray at the airport. Although people from
all walks of life show up at techno parties, most are a lot closer to 18
than 30; many of them take ecstasy to make the most of it (“no pills, no
action,” as one doorman puts it).
A man or woman in need of what Germans call Gemütlichkeit (a cross between
coziness and companionship) should try sitting at a communal table
in a Sachsenhausen apple-wine tavern. A meal of eggs and green sauce, with
a Japanese tourist at one elbow and a visiting Daimler Benz engineer at the
other, is almost guaranteed to distract the weary road warrior from
free-market Storm and Stress. After a few krugs of apfelwein, the sentiment
flows, even in a city that has sold its soul.
For the past 50 years, Welsh writer Jan Morris has been dauntlessly exploring the world and eloquently describing her explorations, initially for British newspapers, later for Rolling Stone magazine and then for magazines and newspapers around the world. During those decades, she has also produced some 30 books, many of which are considered travel classics, including “Pax Britannica,” “The World of Venice,” “The Matter of Wales,” Spain,” “Oxford,” “Sydney” and “Hong Kong.”
Her new book, “Fifty Years of Europe: An Album,” is in many ways the culmination of her career as a traveler and a writer. Brilliantly organized as a series of vignettes grouped around five themes — religion, ethnic identity, nation-building, commonalities and attempts at union — “Fifty Years” brings together all the qualities that distinguish Morris’ best travel writing: an eye for the telling detail and anecdote; an immense knowledge of history, politics, literature and art; a sensitivity to the common and everyday; an extraordinarily vivid and musical prose; and finally an unfailing cheerfulness, humility and sense of humor.
To my mind, Morris is the greatest travel writer alive today — “travel writer” in the grandest sense of one who captures a place in all its fullness and profundity. And “Fifty Years” embodies and illuminates the wide-ranging riches of this art. In its innovative organization, the book is a departure; in its range and depth of subject, it is a synthesis. In total — as the excerpts we offer here can only barely suggest — it is Morris’ chef d-oeuvre.
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In the country
The French countryside of my youth often looked (at least in my memory now) like a slow ballet of horsedrawn plows — plows wherever you looked, some going one way, some another, serenaded by soaring songbirds and watched by rich fat cattle. France seemed to me then permanently old-fashioned. It was still peasant country, I used to think. The Alpine village I settled in for a while in the 1950s was several generations behind the times. In the autumn it used to be visited by an itinerant steam distillery, and with much chuffing and hissing its apple crop was turned into a powerful kind of schnapps, to be tasted in back kitchens beside steaming cauldrons of soup more or less permanently simmering on the stove. I collected our mail each day from the village bar, for there in midmorning I knew I would find the postman enjoying his cognac.
I doubt if a single Percheron draws a single plow in France now. Most of the birds seem to be of the invisibly chirpy persuasion, twitching about in copses, and the cattle are mostly anaemic Charollais, which look as though they have been drained of their blood for the making of black puddings. Even in our village of Savoie the ski culture has fallen upon the old ways, the high cow chalets have been turned into holiday homes, and I doubt if the postman has time for his midmorning brandy. For me the lost innocence of Europe, itself no more than the product of a romantic imagination in its youth, will remain always a memory of long ago in France.
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An Invitation
Allow me to invite you to Sunday lunch at a French country restaurant of the old kind, circa 1955. Neither fast food nor gastronomic pretension has yet corrupted the establishment, which is in one of those ancient towns of central France where the streets wind upward from the railway track, through scowling walls of medievalism, until they debouch in the square outside the cathedral door, surveyed by huge stone animals from the cathedral tower and prowled around on Sunday mornings by cats and desultory tourists. The restaurant displays its menu in a large flowery script in a brass frame, and in most respects remains more or less as it has been for several centuries. Madame the proprietress looks an epitome of everything false and narrow-minded. One waiter seems to be some sort of duke, the other is evidently the village idiot. At the table next to ours sits a prosperous local family out for its Sunday dinner, well-known to the proprietress and esteemed throughout the community — solemn, voluminously napkined, serious and consistent eaters who eye us out of the corners of their piggy eyes as they chew their veal. The veal is, as a matter of fact, rather stringy. I do not doubt the bill will be erroneous. I am sure Madame despises us as much as we distrust her. But what a contrary delight it all is, is it not? How nourishing still the vegetables, fresh from Madame’s garden! How excellent the wine, from the vineyard down the hill! How stately that duke! How endearing the idiot! How mollifying the farewells of the family at the next table, when with bows and cautious smiles they fold their napkins and leave us! How persuasive, after all, even the steely charm of Madame herself! With real gratitude we wrap the old-fashioned Frenchness of that luncheon around us like a cloak, and return cherished to the world of the 1990s. Ah, oy sont les dijeuners d’antan?
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All is not lost
But all is not lost! More successfully than most countries, France has achieved an equilibrium between the old and the new. As the twentieth century draws toward its close the French are indeed a very modern people. I first really felt in touch with cyberspace in the 1980s when, visiting a French country inn somewhere, I found the chef calling up his day’s luncheon menu on a computer, from some central database of gastronomy. Today nothing seems to me quite so elegantly futuristic as the solar-powered telephones that gently revolve, like sunflowers, beside French autoroutes. No capital in Europe is more smoothly organized than Paris, and a true image of our fin de sihcle is the spectacle of the great Paris-Lyon-Marseilles Train ` Grand Vitesse sweeping down the Rhone valley at 180 mph.
Yet by most standards life in the French countryside still seems amiably and enviably close to the soil. The songbirds may have gone, but the swallows still whirl around on summer evenings. Widowers shout greetings to each other as they wobble home on their bicycles, long loaves protruding from their saddlebags. Gentlefolk stroll in the autumnal gardens of their villas. At the wood’s edge the logs are still chopped and Virgilianly piled. Aromatic smoke lingers. The buzz of the vilomoteur merges comfortably — well, fairly comfortably — with the buzz of the bees. Picnic parties spread their cloths beside dragonfly pools as in painters’ fancies long ago. More happily than anywhere else trees and rivers, cities and highways, seem to coexist by mutual arrangement, a harmonious balance between the natural and the invented.
For me one of the most comforting components of this arrangement is the continuing French attitude toward animals. French people seem to recognize what Montaigne, the patron saint of animal equality, called, “a certain obligation and mixed commerce” between man and beast. We may forcefeed you for your liver, they seem to say to their fellow creatures, boil you alive, snare you on migrations or bottle you in brine, but at least we will deal with you man, so to speak, to man. I raised the matter once at a cafi beside whose door a very fat and surly golden Labrador lay sluggishily where everyone would trip over it. It was a very old dog, said the proprietor, one did not care to disturb the animal: but when I mentioned Montaigne’s notion of commerce and obligation he seemed to think it mere sophistry. “I owe the dog nothing, it owes me nothing, one day it will die and then — pfft!” The dog did not budge an inch as, precariously balancing my coffee cup, I stepped across it to find a table on the patio outside: but remembering where I was, I restrained myself from giving it a good kick as I passed, to hasten the pfft.
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A fling of France
What I love to do is to drive on a bright sunny day, with the roof of the car open, at a scudding speed around the Piriphirique, the ring road that surrounds the city of Paris. The scudding speed is advisable, or awful French drivers will more or less run you off the road. The sunny day is essential, because it turns an expedition that could be dismal, exhausting or even alarming into an exhilarating fling of France. The road snakes around the capital, rather than circling it, and offers jerky flashes of Frenchness as in an avant-garde silent movie: now a drab industrial quarter, now a pictorial row of poplars — a tedious white housing estate, barges chugging down a canal — a grand boulevard for an instant, a cluster of medieval houses, the sudden swoosh of a tunnel, a couple of vast juggernauts deafeningly overtaking you — and always present, brooding but radiant, just off-stage the most magnificent capital in Europe.
This is not only France encapsulated: to my mind it is 1990s France all over. For most of us by now, for most of the time, France is a sequence of flashes, a kaleidoscope repeatedly shaken as we hurry across its varied landscapes to the particular French spot that means most to us. When the milords traveled this way in their creaking high-wheeled carriages it must have been more of a continuum, and the slowly passing scenes had a classical clarity, shaped and ample despite the frightful bumps in the road. Now we are all surrealists, and as France hurtles through our windshields and away through our rearview mirrors its images are disjointed and contradictory. You want tragedy? It hangs to this day over the elegiac trench-landscapes of the north. You want hedonism? Napkined tables beckon to us through the windows of snug and steamy restaurants as we rush by, wine awaits the tasting in a thousand hospitable caves. Wildness? Bleak bare places are around us now: granite places, moorland, heroic monasteries, uninviting hotels on mountain passes. Romance? Here is the sweet creeping in of violets, ochers and tawny browns that speak of the Mediterranean. Marsh country of the Gypsies, pale estuaries of oystermen, windy grasslands where menhirs stand and Celtic names jump out at us from roadside signs in the rain — all this, all this grand fling of France, comes into my mind as I drive around the Paris ring road: and now that France itself is so relentlessly, so furiously on the go, I sometimes feel that the grand old nation itself is pounding, head down, foot on the floor, radio blaring, around its own historical Piriphirique.
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How they looked
There used to be a specifically English look, too. I used to be able to recognize an Englishman anywhere in the world, not simply by his bearing or his manners, but actually by his face. Now I am never so confident. The English Gentleman, one of the most easily identifiable people on earth, is virtually extinct, and the rest of the nation has lost its distinctive appearances. This is partly biological. The English are no longer the homogenous Caucasian islanders who stood so complacently in island isolation, and hundreds of thousands of Asians, Africans and Latins have contributed their genes to the stock during my half-century. Turn on London television in the 1990s and you would get the impression that half the population were immigrants. Although this is partly the distortion of positive discrimination, still there are not many parts of England that do not have their immigrant residents, some of them as English as anyone in everything but look.
But the changed appearance is not merely ethnic. Even the purest English face is different now. It is more blurred, less Northern-looking. Diet has contributed, and wider education, and the changing manner of speaking, and central heating (considered sissy fifty years ago, and still a bit wimpish to me), but I think it is chiefly a matter of history. Fifty years ago the English were enormously proud of themselves. They had won a fearful war in epic style, led by a statesman of charismatic genius, under the aegis of a royal house that was so universally admired and believed by 40 percent of the population, so surveys showed, to be divinely chosen. The English knew themselves to be special. When I went to London in the 1940s I felt I was visiting the heart of an immense historical organism, spread around the globe, to which hundreds of millions of people of every faith and color looked in something approaching reverence. When I was abroad, the grave sound of Big Ben on the BBC World Service, and the resonant, almost ecclesiastical way in which the announcer declaimed “This is London” over the often crackling and fluctuating airwaves, made me feel that England was somewhere permanently unique on the planet. London might be battered and impoverished, but it was still in most British minds the center of all things, the best, the biggest, the oldest, the eternal.
No wonder the English face was so distinctive, and no wonder that in the half-century since then it has lost its edge. It was the face of confidence, whatever its class. One can imagine a citizen looking at it in a mirror in those days, when people still knew their Gilbert and Sullivan, and thinking with horror that it might have been the face of a Rooshian, a Frenchman or a Prooshian. Thank God he had resisted all temptations to look like other nations! It remained unmistakably the face of an Englishman.
From A Stranger in Venice
(1906), by Max Beerbohm
Often, after passing through the streets of London, I have wondered what on earth the inhabitants would look like if they had no longer the thought of their preeminence to sustain them.
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City of Culture
What a pleasure to stroll through the streets of Weimar, a little German city whose distinction has traditionally been elegantly cultural! In the late eighteenth century the young Duke Carl August made his capital a happy retreat for artistic geniuses, and ever since Weimar has basked in the memory of their names. There is a pleasant restaurant, you will be told, behind the Liszthaus. Turn right at the Goethehaus to get to the bus station. You want the Schillerhaus? That’s easy: just go straight down Schillerstrasse from the Goethe and Schiller statue. And agreeable indeed it is to amble around the town among these illustrious shades, now and then taking an ice cream beneath its trees. The streets are mostly quiet and gentle. Small boys wade across the little river Ilm with fishing rods. Street musicians agreeably play. Delectable parks and gardens are everywhere. It is easy to imagine young Carl August promenading with lyricists on each arm, bowing right and left to his affectionate subjects. I know of no city so instinct with the idea of beauty as a political conception, as part of the established order — and not the beauty of pomp and majesty, either, but an amiable, entertaining, chamber-music kind of beauty.
But here’s a terrible thing. As the literary capital of Germany, the repository of its immortal poetic spirit, a retreat of nature-worship and mythic dreams, Weimar became beloved of the Nazis, and it loved the Nazis in return. Its mixture of Hitler and Goethe, wrote Thomas Mann fastidiously in 1932, was “particularly disturbing.” In the market square stands the Elephant Hotel, and all the waters of Ilm cannot wash the taint from this unfortunate hostelry. It is a handsome 1930s building, but redecorated inside in a glittery, chromy style that irresistibly suggests the imminent arrival of swaggering gauleiters and their women. This impression is all too true. Hitler and his crew were particularly fond of the hotel, and more than once the Führer spoke from its balcony to enthusiastic crowds in the square outside.
So enamoured were the Nazis of Weimar, in fact, that they erected there one of their most celebrated and characteristic monuments. The site they chose was on the lovely hill of Ettersberg, just outside the city, which Goethe himself had long before made famous — he loved to sit and meditate beneath an oak tree there. One evening I paid a reluctant visit to this place, now a popular tourist site well-publicized in the town. My taxi-driver, a gregarious soul, chatted cheerfully to me all the way. Had I enjoyed my stay in Weimar? Did I visit the Goethehaus? What did I think of the food? Did I know that Weimar was to be the European City of Culture in 1999, at the end of the millennium? Congratulations, I said. Recognition once more for the city of Goethe and Schiller. “Exactly,” said the taxi-driver, and just then we turned up the side road to Buchenwald.
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Country style
In the days of the Communists, East Germany seemed to me one of the most terrible places of all, and the legacy of industrial pollution was to linger for years and years. On the other hand, the Communists having been less than advanced in their agricultural methods, the wide plains of the Brandenburg countryside were mercifully unsterilized by chemicals, which left them wonderfully fresh and natural — unkempt, since half the fields had gone to seed, and half the trees needed trimming, but still gloriously organic. All day long the skylarks sang above my head, when I traveled among those lovely landscapes, and there were meadows full of poppies, and long avenues of fruit-laden cherry trees, and now and then storks’ nests, those fairytale emblems of old Europe, comfortably on chimneys above cobbled hamlets. Once I saw three storks flying high and majestically over Berlin itself: I suspect mine is the last generation ever to see such a sight.
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Ashamed
Once in the 1980s I found myself a trifle lost when driving through Rostock, on Germany’s Baltic coast, and I faltered and swerved as I tried to find my way on the street map. Immediately there was an irritable blast of the horn from the car behind. Rostock was notorious at that time for recent racist attacks upon Turkish immigrants, and my blood boiled. “Damned Germans,” I found myself saying, “They never change. Can’t the brute see I’m a stranger here?” — and I turned around in my seat prepared to give him that rude gesture of the Welch archers, as in Vienna. Gott in Himmel, he was a very intemperate Asian. I blushed, even to myself, especially as I have experienced almost nothing but kindness from Germans of all kinds, under communism as under capitalism, during my fifty years of Europe.
I am a child of the wars, though, and have not always been so generous in return. With a pang I remember still the young Germans I met at a party in Baden-Baden in the early 1950s, when the nation was still sunk in shame and disillusion. They were about my own age, bred by Hitler Youth out of defeat, and our conversation was wary. We skirted around recent history, we evaded questions of morality, but even so I found, when we parted company at last, that one woman was in tears — tears of mortification, to compare her self-doubts, her guilt and her sense of undeserved bad luck with the unabashed pride of nation which in those days I could not help displaying. Thirty years later I made a television film with a German television crew, traveling through several European countries. Strangers often asked us what we were up to, and I always made a point of saying that while the director and his crew were German, I was from Wales. “You are ashamed to be thought one of us,” the director accused me mournfully one day: and though I declined to admit it, so I was.
These are people of God, too. More than any other European people they have been the instrument of the most divine of the arts, music, perhaps because of the special rhythms of their language, perhaps because Martin Luther, their greatest prophet, made music intrinsic to his religion. Even at their most degraded they have honored this spark within themselves — even sadistic officers at concentration camps felt the necessity, whether in truth or in charade, to show themselves lovers of music. Out of this tormented and often cruel national psyche have come the glories of Bach and Beethoven — a cliché indeed, but still a mystery. Nothing moves me more than to enter one of the great German cathedrals, very likely in its day a positive cauldron of racialism, and to hear one of the tremendous Bach chorales thundering down the nave — an ultimate expression, to my mind, of human aspiration, and a supreme glory of Europe.
I went to Berlin in 1991 for the two hundredth anniversary of the Brandenburg Gate, an anniversary of awful possibility. The gate was a triumph of Prussian vainglory, undeniably an arch of hubris. It had been restored at last after the mutilations of war, and its shining quadriga was once again equipped with the Iron Cross and Prussian Eagle pointedly absent during the Communist years. Through it overblown victory parades had passed, and the plumed pageantries of state visits, and the railway coach from Compiègne towed in vindictive triumph. The long anniversary celebrations ended with a perfomance of “Deutschland Über Alles,” and what a nightmare that might have been! I prepared to scowl. But it was played by a string quartet, in Haydn’s delicate last version of the melody: and its gentle cadences, drifting over the silent crowd, through the lights of the great reviving city, were enough to melt a Junker’s heart.
