"American expats' jobs on the line as Army leaves Germany"

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Live: Belle and Sebastian

Belle and Sebastian
7 May 2006: BASF Feierabendhaus – Ludwigshafen, Germany

A request for Belle and Sebastian's tour manager: Considering that no one at the show in Ludwigshafen was actually from Ludwigshafen, next time try to book them somewhere that doesn't require a commute; like Heidelberg, where half of us had come from, anyway.

Ludwigshafen. (Not Ludwigsburg, Ed Harcourt; one of the openers, who got astonished laughter from the crowd when he told us he'd never before been to Ludwigsburg.) Hmph.

'The other side of the tracks', my German teacher once called it; though I doubt she'd have said it if she'd been to the other side of other tracks, like the ones in, say, Chicago. Because after you've fought your way down 30 kilometers of rat-race Autobahn, bumbled through 260 or so poorly-marked twists and turns in Mannheim and finally slid down from the bridge over the Rhine and through the Ludwigshafen's BASF office-park metropolis, the concert hall at the Feierabendhaus is actually kind of an oasis. Airy, and cool. Plush theater-style seats, and blazer-wearing ushers to escort you to them. And - highly unusual for Germany - smoke-free. Between openers a girl breezed in with a pretzel. A pretzel. Other side of the tracks, my arse.

So, Belle and Sebastian have been working hard on tour since the beginning of the year, and Stuart Murdoch starts things out saying it's got him so beat he wants to go camp out in the Black Forest. But you wouldn't have detected a derth of energy in the performance, heavy on the new stuff. The critics are right about The Life Pursuit; it's fun.

So fun, even, that guitarist Stevie Jackson couldn't help throwing a lanky arm into a few windmills. The awkward aisle dancing got started early, too, with "Another Sunny Day". After Murdoch complimented the folks stage right, and some girl stage left loudly complained, Hey, what about us? Murdoch hopped down off stage and danced with her in the middle of "Sukie in the Graveyard". Next song and a kid wearing a kilt and stockings scrambles out of his seat and joins the party.

Getting around to the audience banter, Murdoch asked who was from Ludwigshafen, and no one - seriously, no one - spoke up. Heidelberg? Like I said, about half. Mannheim? About the same. Scotland? One. "There's always one," Murdoch joked. And it wasn't the guy in the kilt.

In time he (the kilt guy) returned wiping his brow to his seat. He'd only just sat down when, as Murdoch finally gave in to the girl who'd been calling for "Meat and Potatoes" all night and started it up, he jumped back up and tumbled down aisle and over knees to go dance again.

Murdoch chided the rest of us for looking so tired as he introduced "Your Cover's Blown", and asked us to pretend it was Saturday night, not Sunday. But it was, and it was getting late, and we all had work tomorrow.

Belle and Sebastian honored another audience request, "The Boy From the Arab Strap", when they came back for the encore. But though we waited for a few moments after they'd gone again that's all we got. Still, you had to be grateful for the effort; we all know work can be exhausting.

When a friend heard I was going to see a show at the Feierabendhaus - Feierabend is the German word for quittin' time, by the way - he told me that BASF sends off its retiring employees there with the old gold watch and a buffet dinner. Which is nice, too. It's not a perfect analogy, I know. But hey, cut me some slack: I'm off the clock.

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Courtesy of www.oldheidelberg.com

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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.