"Who's Afraid of the GEZ?"

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Across the Street

A Halloween in Germany

Advertising for Ronneburg Castle’s Halloween Party describes the holiday as “an originally Celtic celebration that has returned as a party from America to the continent!” which is about as well as you could put it.

While Halloween as celebrated throughout the world today is a witches’ brew of transmogrified traditions brought to America by settlers from the United Kingdom and Ireland, its oldest origins are ancient holidays of the Celts and Romans, both of whom lived in what today is Germany. The Celtic sun festival Samhain (pronounced SOW-win) marked the beginning of the new year; and, as we like to pretend on Halloween these days, on Samhain, the natural and supernatural worlds were believed to mingle. The Romans who camped here on the frontier of their empire, very near to which Ronneburg Castle stands, honored their goddess of orchards, Pomona, on November 1, and cavorted behind masks on Saturnalia, their winter solstice.

Still, Halloween is new to Germany, catching on only within the last twenty years or so. But as I sat nestled in Ronneburg Castle’s courtyard café last Saturday, with golden leaves flitting down from the trees through the afternoon sunlight and onto the table before me, it seemed to me it had found a good home.

Germany wears the Halloween season well, preening in the sights and smells of autumn. Gazing out from Ronneburg Castle’s highest tower you see low rippling hills shrouded in fall foliage the colors of fire, bubbling out of barren brown fields under a bright blue sky. The cool air is piquant with rotting leaves, blanketing still green swaths between the fields, and manure.

Modern Halloween’s grotesqueness abounds in Germany, too. A few years ago in Bochum, not far from Cologne and its almost menacingly-gothic black cathedral, a young Satanist couple sacrificed a friend to the Devil with 66 knife stabs. He was found with a pentagram carved into his chest. Months later in Kassel a 42-year-old computer expert killed and ate a willing man who responded to his online advertisement.

What’s more, some of Halloween’s most popular characters belong to German mythology. Traveling north from Heidelberg to Ronneburg I passed Frankenstein Castle, which today puts on a kind of dinner theater mixer around Halloween. According to local lore, sometime in the late 1600s Lord Johann Konrad Dippel von Frankenstein was found dead in the castle surrounded by corpse parts culled from nearby cemeteries.
Whether the story inspired Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” we’ll never know; but there is compelling evidence that it did. The brothers’ Grimm account of it was translated by her stepmother. And Mary Shelley herself visited Frankenstein Castle in 1814. Her Frankenstein’s monster, or rather Hollywood’s version of it, will try to scare you there – for €18, €8 on Sundays – along with, among freakish others, a werewolf, Freddy Krueger and a gaggle of witches.

Historians say there were never really any witches in Germany, but people thought there were. While Salem was putting theirs on trial, cartographers were sketching Hexen (witches) on broomsticks hovering above the Brocken, the highest peak in Germany’s craggy, storied Harz Mountains. Walpurgisnacht (Witches’ Night) was in May, but Harz dwellers locked up their half-timbered homes on October 31, too - when witches were said to swoop up to the Brocken for an orgy with the Devil - and clutched their blankets until dawn came, and with it, Allerheiligen (All Saints’ Day).



Troubled by lingering pagan festivals, in the ninth century Pope Gregory IV established the Feast of All Saints, on November 1, and on November 2, All Souls’ Day to supplant them. But a few hundred years later Martin Luther again gave October 31 new meaning when on that night in 1517 he nailed his gripes with the Roman Catholic Church to Wittenberg Cathedral’s door, signaling the start of the Protestant Reformation. Much later, as Halloween’s popularity in Germany swelled, eclipsing Reformation Day, Germany’s Evangelical Church wrung their hands and cursed the secular holiday. To remind German trick- or-treaters of that important day in their history, this year church members will hand out Luther Bonbons.

Others here object to Halloween outright. The mayor of Rankweil in German-speaking Austria recently called Halloween a “bad American habit,” and fed up with its accompanying pranks, declared a boycott. At least eight neighboring towns followed. But that’s done little to quell Germany’s growing Halloween enthusiasm. In recent weeks ads for things Halloween were everywhere - Europa Park’s weeklong Halloween-Festival, Halloween pumpkins in Minimal grocery stores, posters for Halloween parties at various bars - pushing in Germany alone, according to an Associated Press report, $170 million in Halloween candy, props and costumes.

A young woman in a black dress and a pointy hat sold us tickets to the Ronneburg Castle museum. Inside preparations were underway for the evening’s party. Plastic glow-in-the-dark skeletons drizzled with red paint hung from the battlements, as did, strangely, a life-size cow model. In a small exhibit of medieval torture implements, cobwebs were draped over a rack. A log fire crackled in an open stove, filling neighboring rooms with an eerie swirling smoke.

Meandering through the castle I saw a number of other Americans; judging by their closely-cropped hair, probably soldiers from the nearby U.S. Army base at Hanau. With several hundred thousand American soldiers, airmen and their families living in their midst, Germans experienced Halloween firsthand. When Darmstadt’s German-American Kontakt Club, formed to encourage interaction between Army families and their German neighbors, first put on the haunted house at Frankenstein Castle in the 1970s, it was unique. Now there are Halloween parties everywhere, even in small towns like St. Leon, where Café Ole was holding a Halloween costume contest. Friday night I went to another party in St. Leon, at an American friend’s home. Sometime before the pumpkin carving contest began one of her German neighbors snuck in, giggling behind a plastic witch mask. When the party wound down and her guests lumbered to their cars they found them strewn with toilet paper. The next morning her neighbor owned up to the good-natured prank, grinning.

* * *

On Halloween I sat with a mug of apple cider on the stoop of an apartment building on a U.S. Army installation in Heidelberg, watching costumed children and their parents march through the twilight from building to building for candy. Fences surround the complex, and only those bearing base identification cards are allowed inside. Huddled around a fire pit, residents chatted about the growing number of German trick-or-treaters sneaking on base. One woman’s parents were visiting. They had been stationed at Heidelberg decades ago, and recalled there were no Germans trick-or-treaters then. The woman was annoyed. She had spotted a group of Turkish teenagers lurking by the side gates, notoriously neglected, and had locked them. But plenty of German families were walking in right through the front gate, guarded by private security officers, usually German.

“They’re not even checking IDs!” another woman complained.

“I think it’s nice,” said another.

Just then a tiny little girl, maybe four years old, wearing a black pointy hat shuffled forward from her beaming mother, plastic pumpkin outstretched, and with a telling accent said, “Trick or treat.”

The Good Life

This morning my colleague OB gifted me a bunch of blue portugieser grapes picked from his aunt’s vineyard and invited me to come with him to visit Thomas Duttenhöfer, widely considered one of Germany’s and Europe’s best sculptors. OB had recently met Duttenhöfer at one of his gallery openings, and Duttenhöfer invited him to buy directly from him at home a sketch OB had admired. They eventually made an appointment for this afternoon, but the first time OB phoned Duttenhöfer was away in Paris. Giving me this news OB scrunched his face into a mocking smile that said, “Isn’t that nice?”

OB doesn’t like his job. Before he came here he was a young professor of literature at Mannheim University. In those days he did his work in cafés and by the shore of his favorite lake. And he attended academic conferences in places like Berlin and his beloved Vienna, where in old storied cafés he sometimes happened into stimulating conversations with stars of Europe’s art world. Then the university closed his department. He wrote freelance for awhile, covering exhibitions and gallery openings as he pleased, but in the end a secure job won out. Now he often wonders whether it was worth the sacrifice.

OB still has his pleasures, though, namely art; for which he early developed a love. As a child, when he sometimes visited another of his aunts and her husband who live in Paris, he was steeped in it. His uncle worked there as a photographer and spent most of his days shooting fashion models. Once when they visited OB’s family near Speyer the uncle snuck out to the vineyard and photographed a vine of blue portugieser curled picturesquely around a wire archway. He later sold the image to an association of French vintners. For years they used that photograph of Speyer grapes to market their French wines around the world.

Thomas Duttenhöfer also comes from Speyer, OB told me as we drove north to Darmstadt, still in our workclothes. Entering the city we climbed up through the workaday bramble of the periphery to the Rosenhöhe, formerly the royal vineyard of the Grand Duke of Hesse and now a pleasant public park housing the artist’s colony where Thomas Duttenhöfer lives.

We prowled around his home, a neat, modern concrete and glass place, looking for his front door. Throughout his overgrown yard stood some of his sculptures, most of them surrealistic human forms. A large slanted window formed the back of the house and gave a view into his studio, which looked out onto the park. Coming around the other side we met him on the lawn.

Bearded and wearing disheveled dusty clothes, Duttenhöfer greeted us with handshakes and ushered us into his dining room. Inside there was art everywhere, from framed paintings on the walls and sculptures on the shelves down to the scheme of colors and forms of his furnishings. Inviting us to sit Duttenhöfer retrieved a selection of sketches, and as OB sifted through them, he told us funny stories about the celebrities who had sat for him. After Duttenhöfer had gone on for awhile he suggested a glass of wine. Rising from the table he asked, “Are you wine connoisseurs?” We laughed uncomfortably and said we weren’t, but nodded yes when he said with a smile, “but you are wine drinkers?” He returned with a bottle of dornfelder.

As we sipped Duttenhöfer told us about meeting the Pope, and once being mistaken for Prince Charles. He and OB traded Speyer stories for awhile, too, and after a time OB decided which pieces he liked best and paid Duttenhöfer € 350 for two. As we were leaving Duttenhöfer dug up a few catalogs from recent exhibitions for both OB and I and autographed them. When we said goodbye OB was beaming.

Night was falling as we drove back into the city center. Having decided to eat dinner before going home we fumbled around for awhile looking for a restaurant and finally settled on McDonald’s, as OB had a coupon. As we stood there in line waiting to order OB leaned in and asked, “What do you think Thomas Duttenhöfer eats for dinner tonight? A nice steak?” I shrugged. OB ordered and ate two Big Macs.

Driving south afterwards through the dark OB grumbled about going to work tomorrow, saying he might drink a beer when he got home. Duttenhöfer’s evening, OB speculated, would be better. “After we leave he probably drinks another glass of wine, takes a nap. Tomorrow he gets up when he wants, makes his work. It would be nice, no? Sitting at the window, writing all day?”

Five Strange Minutes

July 22, 2005

Somehow, I knew what he was going to say by the way he was stroking my dog Brodie’s throat.

Brodie is a West Highland terrier, a stocky little white terror that at a get-together of thirty or so other “westies” and their owners a few years ago was overwhelmingly voted cutest dog. Earlier this afternoon I was walking him through our quiet leafy corner of Heidelberg. It was drizzling, and strangely cool for late July. On the street corner opposite our apartment building a small crowd hovered around an ambulance and a mangled bicycle. Having passed them we rounded the corner down the block and nearly collided with a slovenly man lurking in the middle of the sidewalk.

He looked a mess. T-shirt, vest and jeans hanging from his hulking frame. Sparse strands of greasy brown hair plastered to his skull. Fleshy boils bubbling out of his face, neck and the backs of his hands. Looming there, blocking our way, he brandished his yellowed jack-o-lantern teeth through a cross-eyed smile and mumbled in German, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A boy,” I replied, and anticipating his next question added, “he’s five.” Looking serious suddenly, he bent down and began massaging Brodie’s throat. It was disturbing to watch.

He stood up and spoke again, this time in English. “If I would be a girl dog, I would do something not nice with him.”

He leered at Brodie as I fumbled for words. Brodie sniffed obliviously at a fence.

Then it came to me. I said it in German. “Well, have a good day.”

“You, too,” he replied, and we parted ways. A few paces on I was startled to hear myself say aloud, “Brodie, you just got molested.” I turned to look at him, straggling behind me on his leash. He was shitting on the sidewalk.

Live: Antony and the Johnsons

Karlstorbahnhof, Heidelberg, Germany: 22 June 2005

Strolling to the show at sunset through Heidelberg’s old city, I saw so many things that reminded me of Antony and his music I felt like I was in a Herman Hesse novel: a poster for the show that called the band “the kings of the New York art music scene,” and a light post down, another one for the newly-opened Queens Club; a hotel that had turned away Goethe, Germany’s literary poster boy for the lovelorn; a goateed neo-hippie wearing blush and mascara cycling by on the river path.

Considering them I asked myself whether, like surrealistic signs for Hesse’s Steppenwolf, they might be messages to Antony that Heidelberg, Germany was the most perfect place in the universe for him to play that night. Nah, just bullshitting. More to the point, were balls you’d expect a guy Antony’s size (I’d heard 6 feet plus and thick) to have big enough to play his song “Hitler in My Heart”?

We arrived at the Karlstorbahnhof as a dirty red DB train screeched loudly by, handed our tickets to the guy with the laptop in front of him, stopped by the bar, and eased into some black plastic chairs at the back of the room. Filling up nearly all the other seats were 300 or so black-clothes-wearing-expressionistic-chin-hair types, fifty-something burnouts in flannel shirts, and tall lithe college girls, chatting over smokes and bottles of Beck’s and Corona.

The Johnsons appeared and took their seats on stage. Then the guitarist began finger picking a pretty little prelude. A few minutes into it, Antony, head bowed, snuck up on the baby grand opposite them and keyed, almost inaudibly under the applause, the first notes of “My Lady Story.” His voice was stunning, and sounded more earnest than I’d given him credit for after listening a few times to I Am a Bird Now.

I was still stuck on it when, a few bars into the second song, Antony threw his hands up from the keys to his face and laughed. “I said, ‘Mr. Pickle,’” he said, shaking his head. “It was supposed to be ‘like some cripple,’ and I said ‘Mr. Pickle.’ I’m really sorry, you guys.”

After a few covers (Nico (born in Germany), Moondog (died in Germany), and Leonard Cohen), Antony asked the audience to sing a duet with him. Instructing us he said, “Imagine you have this little silver fish swimming around, um, right here,” pointing to where his throat met his breast bone, “and it makes this humming sound, like this,” he added, humming a single note. We hummed that note together, guys an octave lower, and over our low droning Antony sang to us. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. Seriously.

He closed with “Hope There’s Someone,” and as he and the Johnsons walked off stage, a round woman in her thirties wearing a turquoise T-shirt scurried up behind them and handed Antony a bouquet of white lillies.

We clapped for the encore like an army of robots, beating out a crisp static rhythm until, not thirty seconds after they’d left, Antony, wearing a purse over his right shoulder, led the band back onstage for one more song. And then they were gone.

On our way out I cashed in my bottle for the €1 deposit I’d paid, and some minutes later, at a gelato stand in the old city, I used it buy a kugel of the sweetest flavor they had.

A Night at the Opera

When my girlfriend Feleicia’s boss at the AAFES bookstore, Rob, who has four master's degrees in opera performance, told her he’d scored her and I free tickets to “Zaubern” at the Schwetzinger Schloss Rokokotheater, all he said about it, having seen it himself, was that it was a modern opera, about a man who loses his mind.

I didn’t know what a modern opera was so I looked it up online. On the Seattle Opera’s website, under its Opera 101 section, I found this:

Many modern operas concern the anxiety and alienation of twentieth-century life.

Modern opera explores contemporary themes using techniques drawn from
twentieth-century musical, visual, and narrative art forms.

Shortly before the opera began Tuesday evening, Feleicia and I explored a few of the acres and acres of elegant gardens on the Schloss grounds. The Schwetzinger Schloss is an icing-pink Baroque palace, and is billed in tourist brochures as the “Versailles of the Palatinate.” Mozart visited Schwetzingen and the Schloss three times, first as a touring child prodigy in 1763, and after his later visits wrote of them, “This is a town where you can make genuinely beautiful music.” His operas still pack the Rokokotheater.

Tickets were still available for “Zaubern” when we picked up ours at will call. They were comp tickets from the mezzo soprano, Betsy Horne, who is from Kansas, and great seats; third row, center. The seats themselves (maybe 200 on the floor) were tiny, wood, and painted with a cream-colored lacquer. The rest of the theater was equally antique, and in rococo style; ornate, fantastical, and fake. Plaster lion heads peeking through clumps of plaster grapes on the undulating walls of the balconies. Column shapes melting out of the walls near the stage, painted to look like blue marble. Things like that.

People were still seating themselves when the orchestra began to tune their instruments. They were still tuning them as the doors were closed and the lights were dimmed. From my seat I could see into the pit and my best view was of three musicians seated along the outer stage-right rim. One, a fat-cheeked Japanese young man with a thin beard along his jowls, cleared his throat and then made a clicking noise, like the one you would make to govern a horse. A Kevin Kline lookalike in a tuxedo sitting next to him made the same clicking noise, and so did others I couldn’t see. Then there was the sound of a half-dozen newspapers rustling, and a bell tone or two. German text was projected onto the the upper left corner of the black curtain that still concealed the stage. The curtain rose.

Behind a screen that separated the stage from the audience, a man in his thirties wearing an oversized pink suit stuffed to make him look fat perched halfway up the inclined wall of a metal cage the width and height of the entire stage, looking bewildered. Discordant strings were plucked, giving the impression of a black widow spider gliding across its web toward prey.

The man peered through a rolled-up sheet of white paper, unrolled it and inspected it. Then he showed it to us. It was blank. He folded it up, put it in his pocket, waved a wand at it, removed the paper from his pocket, unfolded it, scanned it, looked startled, showed it to the audience. Printed on it in black block letters was, “HANS.”

A woman’s voice boomed from somewhere above. My German is terrible, but I thought she said, “where to, Hans?”

For the next hour, surreal characters took turns tormenting Hans, while the orchestra played what sounded like the soundtrack to a horror film. A man wearing a giant hand and a muscle suit made of cushions stabbed himself through the forearm with an aluminum foil knife. Betsy Horne and a few other women wearing tight black pants and tank tops and cat masks bit Hans’ ankles. Voices shrieked. Hans hummed and rocked, his jaw dropping and snapping shut like he was a nutcracker doll. Paper crinkled. The Kevin Kline lookalike panted like a dog, and when he looked up sheepishly into the audience, he and I momentarily locked eyes. A woman who seemed to be a talk show host cried into a microphone while a video image of her was projected both behind her onto a ten-foot oval screen and, much larger, onto the screen that covered the stage. Then a young couple, a red-haired woman and a chubby guy, both wearing just white underwear with red handprints on them, turned up inside Hans’s cage, emerging from under blankets. Hans, looking awed, carressed each of them. And then, as the lovers together shoved open the rear panel of the cage, the curtain dropped for intermission.

The lights came up and by the time I stood and turned toward the rear of the theater, nearly all the seats were empty. I went to the edge of the pit and catalogued the instruments. In front of each of the clicking guys’ chairs was a silver Casio keyboard. A man with wild gray hair tuned a Les Paul. A cello lay propped up on its side against a chair. There were racks of copper chimes, a sitar, and a saxophone, too, as well as a number of traditional orchestral instruments.

We followed an elderly couple out into the lobby. Other elderly couples sipped mamosas at the bar. Still more clustered in small groups outside in the gardens, chatting quietly in the dusk against a soft-focus backdrop of gushing stone fountains, manicured shrubs and gravel lanes lined with tall graceful trees. Nearly everyone looked over seventy, and wore suits and gowns from a different time. Aside from Feleicia and I, the only people younger than retirement age I saw there were a woman in her thirties with hair dyed the dark shade of red that’s popular with middle-aged German women, and a man in his twenties with tussled bleached hair wearing billowing pants that looked like they’d been made by cutting down the middle of a skirt and sewing together the resulting flaps into pant legs.

Pressed together outside against the building, Feleicia and I played for a moment at analyzing the opera’s plot. She had studied theater in college and explained that experimental theater was more popular in Europe, especially Germany, than in the States. She thought the same might be true of modern opera. She looked away for a moment, toward a brick in the red sandstone patio that read “Rokokotheater - Built in 1752,” then turned her face up suddenly and with entreating eyes, said, “Rob says it gets more exciting in the second half.”

A warning bell rang, sounding just like an old school bell, and a few minutes later, when it rang again, we returned to our seats. The elderly couple at the end of our row stood to let us by, bowing slightly and smiling as we passed. When the curtain rose we saw that Hans had removed his jacket, which hung now on one of the bars of his cage. And while a man mummy-wrapped in bandages crawled across the stage dragging an IV stand, and later while the chubby lover pulled a foot-long rubber penis out of his briefs and took his partner from behind, and still later, after Hans found his way out of his cage for the first time, Hans continued to strip.

The action became more difficult to follow towards the end. On stage at the same time were the man with the muscle suit, tipping his red cowboy hat again and again; and the lady cats, slinking around under the cage; and a nurse, squeeling that the mummy-man, now tucked into a hospital bed tipped up like a car on two wheels, “already stinks”; and a young man and woman dressed like futuristic boy scouts, bouncing up and down in-synch on a hidden trampoline. And then it was just Hans; hunched over and straddling a few bars in the roof of the cage, wearing only his boxer shorts and the fat suit, gazing down into the cage.

A ten-foot-tall image of Hans’s grinning wide-eyed face, in green and pink hues, was projected onto the rear screen. The same image was then projected onto the front screen, too, and after hovering there for a moment it began to shrink and fade. Then more faces floated in from the sides of the screen, also fading and shrinking as they receded along with the first, as though into a vortex at the rear of the stage. Violins droned. People moaned. The faces that came in from all sides arrived smaller and smaller, shrinking and fading, floating into the vortex, then more, and more, now a constellation of ghostly faces, growing smaller and more numerous, now just dozens of oval-shaped white lights, shrinking and fading. And then silence, and the final curtain.

The next morning when I got to work I dropped in on my friend and colleague, Dr. Oliver Bentz. Oliver has a doctorate in German literature and is a freelance writer on culture for a few of the major papers in the south of Germany and in Vienna. I told him that last night I’d seen a modern opera.

“Ohhhhh, modern opera,” he replied, making O shapes with his mouth and eyes. Then he leaned forward in his swivel chair, and smiling and rubbing his hands together, he asked, “Was it music, or was it just a lot of crying around?”