DER TURM by Uwe Tellkamp

When I was in Germany my girlfriend Annette gave me this book as a farewell gift and she mentioned that it was presently the rave in Germany. It takes place in Dresden, formerly East Germany, in the 1980s before the Wall came down. The time set is the last ten years of the German Democratic Republic. And as Annette told me many people who had lived through that period confirmed that this what exactly how it was in East Germany.  The style, heavy at first sight, reminded me somehow of Thomas Mann; the story moves from one episode to the next in quick jumps, back and force, erratically it seems.

DER TURM (tower), situated in a formerly very good part of Dresden, is where most of the characters of the story live— now not a very impressive dwelling anymore.  It’s gray and old and tightly inhabitated by  many various characters. The main character is Christian, still in school, at the beginning of the story. He wants to study medicine like his father and he is quite serious about it. The party favors a worker’s class but  the group of people living in the "Turm" (tower) do not exactly fit this line. There is Christian’s uncle, an editor for a publishing house. Everybody is keenly aware that the polical allegiance to the party and nation is essential and must be upheld.  

Christian lives with his family in the TURM. Living conditions are crowded and at times new people are assigned to move in. The story starts with his father Richard’s 50^th birthday and the attending group of intellectuals seems fairly comfortable; they even enjoy a few privileges. Doctors are held in considerable esteem. The uncle, Meno, is part of the local literary establishment and his meetings and conversations give a frank overview of the difficulties that exist with censorship. But discussions about this are always very open and then limits are set.  But you feel the heavy weight and demands of the official party line.  In addition, there is a good glimpse at the truly privileged — an entirely different world!

Ordinary living styles and period details are described, like standing in lines at shops endlessly for each individual item and then buying whatever you can get your hands on. A long queue forms somewhere and is immediately joined simply because one never knows,  and it might be something that is hardly available.  It is all very tedious and lots of time is spent also on the smallest pieces of bureaucracy. It seems laughable when you are sent to the end of the line again and again because you had filled out a form not quite correctly, or forgot to mention something/anything! This is the way it is, and nobody complains much about it!

Christian himself is a very self-conscious, acne suffering teenager with incredible ambition and drive. He buries himself in books; his dream is to achieve fame and adulation. With all his ambitions though Christian runs into trouble many times with his outbursts; he is found with a Nazi book and there are many other grave "missteps." Only “good behavior” will guarantee an university spot to study medicine He decides however for some reason to sign up for military service which is completely opposite to his intellectual make up. He barely scrapes by and his future is hanging in the air and finally ruined. The system does not tolerate a lot. He completely loses all his idealism and it is heartbreaking to see him get lost and losing his focus. I had the distinct feeling that the author Uwe Tellkamp identified himself with Christian. Or maybe he writes about himself? 

A wonderful epic or, even better, a historical documentary close to a thousand pages and it is sometimes towards the end tedious to follow. There are many characters involved and the story goes back and force — in a confusing way. The drab limitations of East Germany and the grayness took me back to the first time when I visited East Berlin through Check Point Charlie: it looked shockingly colorless, the smell of coal burning stoves was hanging in the streets, the lack of flowers was obvious,  the stores were boring and the quiet streets lacked energy. The story ends when in 1989 the Berlin Wall comes down. 

Movie

The Last Station

http://www.edgewateronline.com/

I live across Manhattan with a beautiful view over the Hudson and the skyline at all times. There is the George Washington Bridge to cross into NYC very near. And that's what we normally do when we want to see a movie, go to shows, see dances, or end up in any one of the many museums. I have always the distinct impression that we are supposed to chuck your  brain once you head back — what I mean is that it seems that culture stops the very moment that you cross the GW Bridge back to New Jersey. The movie houses in NJ are all big and loud, and popcorn infused ten-plexes with mainly Hollywood movies. But then again, surprise, there is one old movie house from the 30's left  in a little town, Teaneck, NJ offering great movies at a very decent price, only $4.75. They have divided this theater into four separate theaters and  kept the old charming style, including one of the old ticket selling boxes and lovely posters and wooden sparkling stairways —  it all transports you back to another era once you enter the theater.  And this is where we go when we are too lazy to run to NYC. So on Sunday we saw:

"The Last Station" is a movie about Leo Tolstoy dealing with the very last part of his life featuring  Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. I think it is a Oscar nominated film. I had read Anna Karenia  but knew relatively little about Tolstoy. The movie was perfect and transported one immediately into Tolstoy's very stately estate, Poliyama.  His wife, the Baroness was played by Helen Mirren. Boy, she takes over in her crazy love for him. I looked it up on the internet later and the movie follows their real life story pretty accurately.

Tolstoy became very liberal at the end of his life. His wife and muse, the Countess Sofya disagrees with him completely and uses every trick of seduction on her husband's loyal disciple whom she believes was the person responsible for Tolstoy signing a new will that leaves his work and property to the Russian people. Tolstoy finally decides to leave her — and ten days later he dies at a train station in Southern Russia. The sorrow of the Russian people who adored him is well displayed. The Countess gets what she wants which is the rights to his work. I looked at photos of the "real" Sofya who bore 13 children but she does not look anything like Helen Mirren who is very regal and exciting in this movie. What an actress. And, oh boy, what a brilliant tour-de-force it was. Sofya  is crazed at the end (if not crazy),  but it must have been once a very tumultous love affair that deteriorated over the years and ended so sadly.

Klezmer Music

The Ukrainian Museum on Second Avenue in NYC advertised Klezmer music. 

http://www.ukrainianmuseum.org/

I had heard only once the life tones of kletzmer music and that was so long ago at the Cloisters, but it always stayed clearly in my mind. When it came up again at the Ukrainian Museum I thought this will be a good! The museum itself is a very new, modern and simple building, white and pristine, featuring different folk art and aspects of the cultural heritage. On exhibition this time were traditional embroidered or woven national costumes, colorful skirts and scarves and hats which looked lovely against the simple white walls of the museum which displayed huge, colorful modern paintings. 

Chairs were set up at the center of the museum in a square. The performers were two men — Michael Alpert, a composer and singer who also fiddled beautifully on his violin, and Julian Kytasty, also a composer and singer who played the bandura instruments of which he had brought at least four or five which he constantly interchanged. These artistic looking instruments date back to the 7^th century and look something between lute and harp.

The concert was NIGHT SONGS FROM A NEIGHBORING VILLAGE, ballads and folk songs from East European Jewish and Ukranian traditions. The two men were very relaxed and entertaining;  Julian Kytasty had brought four or five banduras, large and small,  instruments which he constantly interchanged; plenty of explanations to the program, musings and quips were included. At the end you could not help but sing along (or hum along, at least). Some people in the audience of course knew the Yiddish lyrics and were able to sing along very joyfully. It ended up to be quite some community affair, including some great dancing steps by Michael Alpert — he was in great form. What enjoyment!  And there was a wine and cheese reception immediately after the performance. We were absolutely relaxed and refreshed when we walked out into the New York snow night again — ready for a good meal! Easy to have on Second Avenue. What a nice evening it had been.  

THE NORTH WALL • THE WHITE RIBBON • KARL MAY

Foreign Films

It is for many years now that I favor foreign films 
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/12/the_best_foreign_films_of_2009.html

the smaller productions, the less glamorous lifes, the more modest stories and the easier to follow plots which in my opinion avoid disappointment  and confusion. Also the story keeps lingering in your mind long after.  I saw the Oscar nominated AVATAR but “no” I cannot get excited about green people 

and a fairy tale plot.

 I was able to see three German movies in a row (I am not partial, of course not!) The first one was THE NORTH WALL referring to the steep Eiger North Wall, great. I sat at the edge of my seat. The first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger mountain in the Mont Blanc region in Switzerland by two climbers in the summer of 1936. Beautiful, tragic and spellbinding. I loved it.

The next movie was THE WHITE RIBBON (Das Weisse Band) by Michael Haneke, writer, director.  http://www.sonyclassics.com/thewhiteribbon/

Strange events happen in a small village in the north of Germany during the years just before World War I. It takes you into the darkness of humanity and the foreshadowing of Germany in the 1930s.  Everything seems quiet and orderly in the village until accidents occur that are never easily understood. The narrator is the school teacher and the whole village starts to get worried. A horse ridden by the doctor crashes into a wire and severely wounds him; a barn is set on fire, a farmer hangs himself, the baron’s son disappears, a bird gets stabbed in a cage and so on.

The children behave more and more unruly, nobody knows why. The pastor, a particularly strict character, had tied a white ribbon to the arms of his two eldest children, a boy and a girl, at the beginning of the events to remind them permanently of their duties to purity. But almost no family is a stranger to child abuse with brutal beatings and the children of the village seem to be the heart of the mystery. But there is no real answer to all of this. It ends with the start of World War I and one walks out off the movie quite disturbed and without answers.

KARL MAY played at the MOMA and I ran to see it:

a Hans-Juergen Syberberg production. I had read most of his books when I was young (and so had almost everybody else in my age group). Old Shatterhand, Winnetou are all characters that were ingrained into all of us. Our dog was then named Hadji after one of the characters, short for: Omar Ben Hadji Abul Abbas Ibn Hadji Dawud al Gossarah — I still remember the full name!) There were these very exact descriptions of American Indians, their habits,  and American landscape and prairies — all of this was extremely exotic to us.

For 30 years Karl May turned out 40 pages a day of adventure fiction and lived at the end of his life  in his house "Villa Shatterland."  He neglected to tell anybody that he spent the first part of his life in prison where he wrote a good part of his books. He never lived in any of the countries that he described so lovingly and so detailed. He manufactured fake degrees for himself and, most shocking to his fans, he'd somehow failed to mention that, as a young man, he had been imprisoned for a total of more than seven years for various offenses, including thievery. And this is also where he wrote many of his stories.

The whole movie was shot in a pinkish tint, in a dramatic and even a bit sentimental way. Maybe it was rather long. Hans-Juergen Syberberg (he also did Ludwig, the Virgin King) included the most beautiful music — Mahler, Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven,  in different variations. What a picture.

SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ by Primo Levi

I had read the book and its continuation THE AWAKENING very long ago. I remember that I was then deeply moved.  I could not understand at all when I learned from the news that Primo Levi had committed suicide in Rome later on,  some time in the 70's or 80's. It was never quite clear whether this was indeed a suicide or just a bad accident. But it struck me deeply that after surviving such a difficult life and overcoming mile high obstacles to reach freedom, after virtually wandering all through Europe by foot back to Italy, after writing several books, after making a new life, he needed to end his life. But nowadays and almost daily we read about solders returning from a war and suffering from it long time afterwards.

By chance, the book fell into my hands again and I had decided to quickly read it again. Except this time I felt more affected and more impressed by his simple style of repeating his innocent arrival at Auschwitz in l943, with the famous sign on the gates “Arbeit Macht Frei", the non-ending human misery and the non-ending disregard for human beings. How differently this vast suffering group of people tries to survive against all odds. Everybody is deprived the same way — they look like  skeletons, they lost everything,  don't own anything but their own body.  Stalk naked, no hair, skin and bones and all look miserably alike; always terribly hungry, sick and cold, they walk on without any hope that this part of their life will ever end — and most of them are able to hang on to life! It is a semi-existence and it surprised me that some men were just faring a bit better than others, better in so far that they would find subtle means in a place where everything has it’s price. It’s brutally honest in it’s day-to-day description. Primo Levi survives only because the camp becomes deserted just before the Allies arrive and he happens to be in the hospital because of scarlet fever — of course all the patients were left behind on their own.

Jay and I had just visited the Dachau concentration camp  a few weeks back. This visit combined with reading the story again reminds me of  the dangers of our apathy and our own responsibility in the face of human cruelty. See how little we bother to do!

Four German cities!

BERLIN • HAMBURG • MUNICH • DRESDEN




At the end of last year we went to Germany http://www.germany-tourism.de/ — This actually it was my birthday and Christmas present: We flew into Berlin (living in an old renovated and fantastic East Berlin apartment), then we traveled via ICE train to my hometown Hamburg where we stayed for five days, and then we took another 7 ½ h trip via ICE to Munich. Each city was different, each city was inspiring and enlightening!

Berlin, 

The new Capital combines  East and West Berlin since the wall came down in 1989 and the East is now magnificently rebuilt. It is a hip city with lots of young people strolling around on many wide avenues and this reminded me a bit of New York. It appears to me that there seems to be little attempt to hide the worst decades in German history. After the "Wall" came down, the city placed its vanished Jews near the center of its collective consciousness, maybe to reclaim international status. You are easily able to see a full array of its crime scenes. There is the Holocaust Memorial (so very impressive it is walking through huge stone slabs that form a grid ‑ reminding me of a cemetery with mass graves or coffins, digging themselves into the ground and coming up again. Very intimidating. We visited the Holocaust Museum designed by Liberman with a very confusing lay-out of; stood quietly at the place where the book burning took place, visited the newly rebuilt beautiful Synagogue (last time I saw it was all rubble). Oh, what a great huge city it is with magnificent buildings, great museums on the Museumsinsel  (museum island) not far from Alexanderplatz, the Brandenburger Tor, Unter den Linden and so many other famous sites.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Hamburg 

Well, every time I come back I like my hometown more. It’s a conservative, commercial and dignified city, and a very cultural place; made into a city in the year 800. An important seaport on the Elbe River, with old storage houses, a beautiful old quarter, big fine mansions, a huge lake in the center of town, and canals and waterways that all go into the Elbe river, it’s called the "Venice of the North" and rightly so. It’s rich and very attractive. This town was completely flattened, the biggest first fire storm devastated it completely in July 1943, burned it down for days and flattened it leaving behind a most horrible scene of human misery.  This attack killed 38,000 people and since this was not yet the end of the war many more attacks followed. But Hamburg was rebuilt long ago and is a great Northern beauty!

Munich

in Bavaria is a completely different city with a different style of houses, many of them stately and well preserved, some of them are "cute". This city had also major air raids leaving behind parts of Munich  erased and homeless and dead people. The third largest city after Berlin + Hamburg; it is a very “personal” city with a widespread park, the Englischer Garten, in the middle of town.  Everybody knows Munich for its beer gardens and the Octoberfest in the Hofbraeuhaus, something I was not interested in visiting. But you cannot help it, beer is served all over in large mugs that you think you never can finish, but you can! As in all the other cities at this time of the year you find the Christmas Markets where gifts, crafts and food is sold, and of course the “Glühwein” — hot spiced wine. It comes in pretty mugs to be returned against the two Euros that had to be pledged at purchase. People sit around in the streets, or hover over high tables drinking their beer and wine, talking, and munching delicious food from early morning to late night. I did not see a single paper or styrofoam cup in all of Germany, everybody is very serious about recycling. In the streets, garbage cans in different colors stand around like proud soldiers marked: white glass, green glass, brown glass, paper, plastic. And people use it.

Since we had  only three days in Munich we had to use our time well; the first day we went sightseeing, but were also sitting in beautiful cafes drinking wine or beer and eating good food. We walked around to catch as many historical sites as possible, first taking one of these sightseeing hop-on hop off buses and than walking around until we couldn't do it anymore.  On the second day we took a trip by train to Dachau, the concentration camp near Garmisch (and a very sobering trip of course but we were glad that we included it). On the third day,  we ventured into the Alps and visited Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein Castle, a fantasy castle high in the mountains. And it also involved some walking up there. Great!           

I talked to many people in Germany; i.e. the cab driver who came from Vietnam and told me that he lived there for 10 years, had three kids in school and did not have to pay for their education. A small exception was his oldest son who will go to the University for 500 Euros per semester. Just one example of social services in Germany. Everybody has health insurance, imagine, you can go to the dentist whenever you “please”. There is lots of complaining also, the taxes are high and so is unemployment. But you are paid for a full year or longer once you loose your job, vacation time starts with six weeks, there is an extra salary in summer (to pay for your vacation!) and a bonus at Christmas time. It all did not at all sound bad to me. You travel by train, bus, subway, and trolley easily and we did not need a car at all. 

Dresden

We did not visit Dresden. I had been there a good ten years ago and I think this city belongs into this group. I recently opened the New York Magazine and discovered this great article about the new Dresden! This city was flattened by the Allies in 1945 and devastated by the most horrible fire storm that lasted many days. Dresden was located in East Germany and the government was too poor to rebuild more than just a few of the historic buildings. But in the past two decades after the fall of the Wall most of the city center — the great churches, the Semper Oper, the Albertinum Museum, the Zwinger, the royal palace  — have been restored and Dresden on the Elbe is now again a real Baroque fantasia. My last visit was before the wall came down and discovered then that the famous Frauenkirche and the whole historical city was still in ruins. To my astonishment everything is rebuilt now and breathtakingly beautifully restored. The Frauenkirche with its great dome stands there as if nothing ever happened. The façade incorporates some of the burned bricks of the original church and that gives it a strange appearance. The cupola’s Biblical frescos are reproduced so bright that they looked cartoonish — so some people say  — but the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche was important. I probably will like it a lot once I go there!

I had read that of Dresden’s prewar Jewish population of 6,000 only 198 survived, but Dresden’s Jews are hardly remembered here! A new synagogue has been rebuilt but in a contemporary style. That's it — in contrast to Berlin! But it is a great place with all these old "new" landmark towers, the "Schloss", the cobblestones!

I read many books about the holocaust and the subsequent destruction of Germany and the following books left a lasting impression on me: On the Natural History of Destruction by G.W. Sebald, The Fire, The Bombing of Germany 1940-45, Nossack’s The End, or the Victor Klemperer diaries from 1933-45, I Bear Witness. Klemperer was a literature professor married to an “Aryan” woman and this helped him to survive. His very readable diaries are also available in English in nine volumes.
Just in case you are interested.

To see these cities now in their full glory makes it hard to imagine the complete destruction that occured not so long ago. It all looks so perfectly normal now, the whole country is perfectly restored, life has revived splendidly, the infrastructure is great and a thousand times better than it is in the US. One hundred thirtyone towns were attacked and a million tons of bombs were dropped. People must have had an enormous will to overcome obstacles to start over again. Was this only possible by instantly forgetting what had happened because it was too painful to think about it? Some people say so. I remember when I started school that the teachers did not know how to deal with all of the past, so the whole topic was just skipped. But I hear from my friends who went to school a few years later that instructions about this period are very intensive and not at all avoided.  And I always will remember that in the case of Germany the "reconstruction" was only accomplished with the great help of the Americans — the Marshall Plan, the Air Lifts.

I of course got carried away here; all I had in mind was to write about the three visits to Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and ended up with four cities! It was a good trip, short and memorable forever.