Tag Archives: Europe 83

Bremen, West Germany, 1983

Posted on by

Around this time of the year 34 years ago, I spent a couple of days in the north German city of Bremen. City-state, actually: Freie Hansestadt Bremen, the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. Once a state in the German Confederation, then a component state of the German Empire, it was merely a city according to the Nazis. Since 1947, it’s been a state again, the smallest in area of the Federal Republic.

Odd, Bremen and Hamburg got to be states again, but not poor old Lübeck. Such are the vagaries of history.

I had a fine time. How could I not? I was a young man with exactly nothing else to do at that moment but see a new city in an interesting old country. I was a free man in Bremen/I felt unfettered and alive… Well, that lyric wouldn’t have quite the same vibe, but that’s not too far off. Anyway, my tourist impulse was in full flower.

This is David and me. He was the brother of a New Yorker friend of mine in Germany, Debbie. Mostly I was by myself in Bremen, but I met up with them toward the end of my visit. The background is the Schnoor, more about which later.
BremenJuly2.83The following is an edited version of what I wrote at the time.

“At Bremen I exited the station, got a map, and experienced the first-time rush of a new place. You aren’t tired, you feel open to the world, you want to look at everything you pass by. I crossed downtown Bremen’s large fussgangerplatz, walked by shops and goods and people, and enjoyed the sights and sounds. That kind of rush doesn’t last long, but it’s great while it does.

“I found the Jugendherberge, an ugly squarish building between downtown and the industrial Weser riverside. Check-in wasn’t until 1:30, so I sat under a bridge near St. Stephen’s and ate the bread and wurst I brought. The brot was a little dry and the wurst something like raw hamburger, but I needed the sustenance.

“Then I checked in and began wandering. I found the Rathaus first, then the famous 1404 statue of Roland. I spent a good while in Bremen Cathedral (St. Petri Dom zu Bremen), marveling at its intricate, aesthetic wonders, such as the painted pillars and the statues illustrating the Parable of the Ten Virgins. Went to the crypt, thought to be the oldest room in Bremen, dedicated in 1066.

“Sometimes I mulled a bit gloomily that time will sooner or later reduce the cathedral to dust — via nuclear attack in August or 10,000 years of erosion or something. But it’s here, now, and so am I. Before I left, I bought a little book about the cathedral.
Bremen Cathedral“Not long after I left, I spotted a series of white dots painted on the sidewalk, with the words Zum Schnoor –> every 30 or 40 feet to go with them. I followed them to the Schnoor. I’d heard that the Schnoor was the oldest surviving section of the city, and so it seems. The Schnoor is focused on a narrow street of that name, lined with aged shops and other buildings. Some of the side streets are even narrower, barely wide enough for two people to pass.

“En route to a church I never got into because it was always locked, I came across Böttcherstraße. Every ten feet or so is another work by one Bernhard Hoetger, some interesting stuff dating from pre-you-know-who Weimar years. Apparently the Nazis didn’t much like the works, but they survived them and the war. [Brick Expressionism, I’ve read, is the term, at least for some of the buildings.] There was also a small cinema tucked away in the area. Showing that evening: Death in Venice. An Italian movie with German subtitles, probably, or dubbed in German. I decided not to go.

“I walked further afield, near some small city lakes, and then to the Übersee Museum Bremen, near the main train station. It’s an ethnographic museum, complete with huts from New Guinea, a Japanese shrine with a manicured garden and a pond with goldfish, and a elegant Burmese temple. All of the labels were in German, but that didn’t matter much [I experienced something similar some years later at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka.]

“There was a special exhibit of schoolchildren’s paintings: ‘Japanese kids see us and German kids see Japan.’ A funny mix of cultural and political images, mostly, tending toward the stereotypical. My favorite was a Japanese drawing of a German with a grinning Volkswagen for a head, eating sausage and drinking beer. Hitler’s face and swastikas were common, as was Beethoven’s face, and some drawings showed Germany torn between the Stars & Stripes and the Hammer & Sickle.

“After the museum I had dinner at the Restaurant Belgrade. For DM 16, I had an excellent Hungarian goulash, potatoes, salad, bread and beer. Returned to the hostel at about 10, very tired, and went to sleep almost at once.

“At breakfast at the hostel I talked with a Japanese girl who’d been to the Bremen Geothe Institut and who was about to go home. She was pleasant, and showed me postcards of Japan. After checking out, I wandered the streets on the other side of the Weser a while, then at 10 took a harbor cruise.

“It was a busy place, with ships from all over, and vast industrial areas along the banks, including a huge drydock belonging to Krupp, and a Kellogg’s factory with enormous murals of Tony the Tiger and Snap, Crackle & Pop on its side. I couldn’t catch a lot of the narration, but it seemed mostly about ship sizes and carrying capacities, so I didn’t mind.

“Back on land, I visited the church opposite the Dom, Unser Lieben Frauen Kirche, the second-oldest church in the city, and not as ornate as the cathedral. I took a tour of the Rathaus, and as Steve promised, the place has remarkable woodwork. For example, the puti-like faces on some of the chairs managed to have lustful and leering expressions. The Rathaus also has a fine collection of model ships, mostly the 17th-century Bremen fleet, and an assortment of portraits of Holy Roman Emperors.

“As if that wasn’t enough, I then went to the Ludwig Roselius Museum, which houses paintings & furniture & gold & maps from the 17th and 18th centuries. Saw the original black painting of Martin Luther that I’ve seen reproduced a number of other places [Lucas Cranach].

“My energy was low by this time, but I walked some more, returning to the Böttcherstraße at 3 and hearing the chimes of the Glockenspiel House and seeing the rotating woodcarvings of explorers and airmen. Met Debbie and David soon after, and we repaired to a nearby cafe for beer. They’d been there the day. Returned to Lüneburg soon after on a faster direct train, and had dinner together at another Yugoslav restaurant. For DM 14, got Serbian combo of meat, rice and beans, along with beer.”

One more thing. In Bremen, near the Schnoor, I found a memorial I didn’t expect. I made notes about it in my Bremen Cathedral book, which is what I had at hand.
Bremen CathedralUnsere Jüdischen mitbürger

Martha Goldberg
Dr. Adolf Goldberg
Heinrich Rosenblum
Leopold Sinasohn
Selma Swinitzki

Wurden in dieser Stadt in der Nacht vom 9. zum 10.11.1938 ermordet.

Murdered during Kristallnacht, in other words. This is what the plaque looks like. Remarkably, Adolf Goldberg has a Wiki page, which also tells me that the memorial was erected in 1982, only a short time before I saw it.

Nonstop-Kino, Last Day of July 1983

Posted on by

Why do I still have a movie ticket stub after a third of century? Don’t ask. I don’t save all of them, or even very many. This one, yes. On July 31, 1983, I went to the Nonstop-Kino in Innsbruck, Austria.

Nonstop-Kino Innsbruck 1983Rich and I took in a screening of Manhattan that afternoon. All together only four people — including the two of us — were at the show. Even so, in an example of doing what the Romans do, or in this case the Austrians, we actually sat in Row 6, Seats 7 and 8.

I’ve seen movies in London (Return of the Jedi and Babette’s Feast and Duck Soup) and Rome (I forget what) and of course many in Japan and some in other Asian countries, but the cinemas in the German-speaking world are the only ones I’ve encountered that sold seats like a live theater.

Manhattan was dubbed in German. I’d seen movie before, so that didn’t matter, but I didn’t think the voice actor doing Woody Allen was a good fit. In the age of the Internet, it’s easy enough to find out that the voice actor who’s done Allen for years — the Synchronsprecher, love that word — is one Wolfgang Draeger (who also was Sir Robin in Monty Python und Die Ritter der Kokosnuß). Apparently Draeger’s highly esteemed, especially for doing Allen. Still, I didn’t care for the match. His voice wasn’t nebbish enough.

Marzipan Day

Posted on by

Lübeck, June 28, 1983

Breakfast with Karen and Cindy, then boarded a bus for Lübeck. Nice ride up, lots of greenery, and as we approached, a view of the seven spires of Lübeck. Before we entered the city center (Zentrum) we stopped at a wide place in the road and disembarked. Three busloads of tourists, crowding around to take a look — from a distance, behind a large sign warning us to proceed no further — at a mean-looking fence and a grim guard tower, looking just like one you’d see over a prison wall. InterGerman Border, June 1983We’d come to the border with the DDR. We were told that there are guard towers like the one we saw every 500 meters along the intra-German border. [I forget who took this picture of Steve, me, and Rich.]

The first place we went to in the Zentrum was Marienkirche, St. Mary’s, an enormous, ornate, brickwork Lutheran church. It burned down during the war, but has been restored to what I assume was former glory. In one corner of the church, the bells that used to hang above lie broken on the floor, left as a memorial to the destruction. The story is that as the church burned, the bells rang and rang, moved by the rising heat, until they crashed to the floor. It’s a very effective memorial.

The church’s astronomical clock is an ornate marvel too, also rebuilt after the original was destroyed. It shows the hour and minute, of course, but also shows planetary positions, phases of the sun and moon, and signs of the zodiac. The town hall (Rathaus) was also well worth seeing.

Later we visited a large store specializing in marzipan. I’d never had marzipan before, never heard of it until I read about it in a guidebook. [I don’t know the name of the shop, but I suspect it was the renowned Café Niederegger in the Zentrum, which has a shop for the confections.] The variety of marzipan shapes you can buy is astonishing: large and small items, bricks and loafs, figurines and abstractions.

At 2:15 the bus took us to Travemünde, on the mouth of the River Trave and looking out onto the Baltic Sea. I sat with Bob, who lives in the Philippines, and Crystal from North Dakota, in a café as we drank coffee, tea, and chocolate, a watched the weather change with astonishing speed, from sunny to cloudy to rainy to sunny again, with the clouds always driven across the sky by strong winds we couldn’t feel closer to the ground.

Grindelwald Graffiti

Posted on by

In early August 1983, I made my way to Grindelwald, Switzerland. I could describe the majestic alpine scenery to be enjoyed there, or the memorable walk up to the Blue Cave, which is carved in a glacier, or the stunning cable-car ride. Instead, I’m going to relay the graffiti I found in the men’s room of the Grindelwald Youth Hostel all those years ago, which I recorded in my travel diary.

All of it was English, oddly enough. I bet it’s a unique array of information, even in the petabyte – exabyte? — realms of the Internet, even though I’ve seen a few of the lines elsewhere.

Time flies when you’re unconscious.

Sprio Agnew is an anagram for “Grow a penis.”

Spitoon rules the cosmos.

Stamp out quicksand.

Beware of limbo dancers.

Six months ago I couldn’t spell El Salvador. Now I’m going to die there.

Why does everyone scream when I say Waffen SS?

Toto, have we found the hostel yet?

The wall also featured a cartoon of the man in charge of the hostel, who was known as the “warden.” I knew it was the warden because the figure was labeled that. I never had any run-ins with the warden. I don’t even remember meeting him.

Speech balloons from his mouth said:

Bring up some f—king firewood!!! Or we’ll burn your f—king passports!!! If there’s not a s—tload of firewood up here by 12:00 we’ll kick everyone’s ass!!!

Under the cartoon were comments about the warden.

Who says Himmler’s dead?

He makes me vomit.

Nazis got to live, too.

This is the best hostel I’ve been in in 15 months, all due to the warden.

There was also a long rant that I didn’t record word-for-word, the gist of which was that the Australians should be glad that the Americans “saved them in WWII.” It concluded, “If it weren’t for us, you Aussies would be speaking Japanese.”

Under that, someone else had written: Then at least someone could understand them. 

The quality of bathroom graffiti, never very high, is probably down these days, and it might even be a fading phenomenon. Why write there when you can use web site comment sections?

Goethe Institut, Lüneburg

Posted on by

It’s the oddest thing: looking at this snapshot, taken 30 years ago this month, I can remember the name of only one person in the picture besides me, but I remember almost everyone’s nationality. Then again, the grundstufe 1 class at the Goethe Institut in Lüneburg, West Germany, in the summer of ’83 was a motley one, representing four continents and at least 10 countries. That must have made an impression on a lad traveling outside of his country for the first time.

I was traveling that summer with college friends Rich and Steve. It was their idea to study German in Germany, the better to read philosophy. My interest in 19th-century continental philosophers wasn’t as keen as theirs, but I thought spending five or so weeks in one place, taking classes in the morning and knocking around the rest of the time, would be a good idea. And so it was.

How they picked Lüneburg, I don’t remember, but it’s a fine Lower Saxony town near Hamburg. I ought to ask them sometime. They might not remember either. Rich and Steve knew some German already, so were in a higher class. I was in the beginner class, grundstufe 1. One day, the class went outside an lined up for a photo.

On the upper row, beginning on the left, are three Americans. The fellow on the farthest left was nicknamed Howdy Doody (by the other Americans) for his red hair, small stature, and childishness. Fourth on the left was Herr Witt, our teacher. A fitting name, since he was a lively, entertaining teacher. Next, and to the back, a Japanese fellow. Then me. Next to me, a Finn, who was something of a celebrity on Finnish children’s TV, if I remember right. I ought to remember his name, since he lived in the same building as I did, and we spoke fairly often, but I don’t. Behind him, a Frenchman, and then a South American whose nation I forgot. At the end is an Italian woman.

On the lower row, beginning on the left, two Italian girls; Howdy Doody in particular was fond of flirting with the girl second to left, and she was fond of brushing him off. The black fellow was from Canada. Next to him, another Japanese guy. I ran into him one day at the Lüneburg McDonald’s, and we had lunch together. Next to him, a Venezuelan, and finally a Hungarian, our only classmate from behind the Iron Curtain.