Miss Scarlett! Kommen Sie ins Haus!!

Like most European languages, German has two forms of "you"; a polite one (Sie) and an informal one (du). The choice of which one to use is complicated and subtle, and usage has shifted over time and geography. You have to be raised with it to do it right. The discussion of it on the Wikipedia is HERE.





At Dussmann's bookstore in Berlin, I bought a DVD of the  German-dubbed version of "Gone With the Wind." The movie was released just as WWII was ramping up, so the German version didn't come out until afterward, in 1953. 

The movie is a fun  illustration of du/Sie ambiguities. Not only is the plot full of social class differences, but it takes place 150 years ago in a feudal society . The dubbers and subtitlers had to make du/Sie choices all through the movie, because of course the English language screenplay has no such distinctions. 

Naturally, the slaves always address their white owners in the polite form, even when they are barking commands at them, like old Mammy does to bratty Scarlett in the above shot.


When gushing, adoring, nerdy Charles Hamilton proposes to Miss Scarlett, it's all Sie-Sie-Sie up to the moment that she absent-mindedly tells him yes -- then it's immediately all du-du-du.

But the dubbers' ideas for du/Sie were different from the people who wrote the subtitles. In the subtitles (and in the novel), Scarlett's parents call each other "Mr. O'Hara" and "Mrs. O'Hara" even in private conversations, even though they presumably sleep in the same bed (they have 3 daughters). So in the subtitles they use the polite "Sie".  But in the dubbed soundtrack, they are on a first-name basis and call one another "du".

In this scene, on the soundtrack the wife says, "Mein lieber Gerald, du musst den Wilkerson wegschicken" (My dear Gerald, you must send that Wilkerson away). But in the subtitle she says, "Mr. O'Hara, you [polite] must dismiss Wilkerson."

Random photos of German life

 SORRY WE'RE OPEN 

  (ok ha ha)

  

 At the bike rental

                                                                                                                                                                               

                                                        Urban surfing                                                         

       in Munich

                           Watching the trains  

 Space shuttle control panel?--    Oh no, wait. 

Actually, the instructions for using the laundromat in Leipzig

                                              In Leipzig they kill weeds with a flamethrower.

Jump City 

                                                                                              How to watch                    the match

                                                     Menu du jour
at the public restroom

                                         Waiting for the bus

                                       Back in the DDR

Drunk driving,    but it's OK.

A good way to transport tads
though the airport.

When the plane lands in Reykjavik, everybody heads for the snyrtingar.




Back home. Transition from sensible, grown-up security to our own truculent, pants-wetting paranoia.

Mr. Slade Goes to Poland

After I came back to Frankfurt an der Oder from the Seelow Heights battlefield (see posting below), I walked across the Friedensbrücke ("Peace Bridge") from downtown Frankfurt to downtown Słubice in Poland.

There's no border post or anything -- you just go back and forth between countries as you like. Słubice used to be just the part of Frankfurt that was on the other side of the Oder. But then the Red Army came through and the Soviets took a huge chomp out of the Reich and expelled millions of Germans, and pushed the border to the Oder. So now across the river it's in a whole different country. The two towns are very tight with one another now though - the joint university has some classes on one side and others on the other.

As you enter Poland, you see dozens and dozens of "Zigaretten" and "Tabak" signs. I mean, LOTS of them. Apparently, Poland is the place for Germans to go to buy their smokes. There are also lots of "Kantor" signs, where you can exchange your euros for złotys - Poland doesn't do euros.

I just took a short walk, to savor being in a whole nother country (31st one for me). I went into a supermarket and snagged two cans of Polish beer and I asked the very young female check-out clerk if I could pay in euros, and she said yes. So I brought two cans to the checkout and she got out her calculator and figured that I owed her €1.80, which is absurdly too cheap (it should have been about €5). She made a mistake. But, since I don't speak Polish, all I could do was pay her and leave.

Having finished my Polish adventure, I walked back into Germany and took the train back to Berlin. The trip back took less than an hour. So weird.

The Battle of the Seelow Heights

I had read this good book about the Battle of Berlin, so I wanted to come here. About 70 years and 3 weeks ago, the Red Army crossed the River Oder near the town of Frankfurt (the small town Frankfurt near Berlin, not the big-city Frankfurt down south) on their way to take Berlin, and days of bitter fighting (click here) ensued.

Today I took the train from Berlin to Frankfurt an der Oder. Until WWII it was just a town in the middle of northeastern Germany, nowhere near any foreign country. Today, you can walk across the downtown bridge into Poland. It only takes an hour to get there from Berlin, and costs €20 round trip. 

In Frankfurt I boarded the bus to Seelow village to the north, then walked about a mile to the Seelow Heights battle museum. It's surrounded by military graveyards, and was established by the post-war Soviet occupiers as a memorial to the "Red Army's glorious liberation of Germany from fascist Nazism." Now it has morphed into a plain old battle museum, but the tanks, guns, and rocket launchers displayed outside are Red Army ones.

I ran into a snaggle-toothed old Russian guy from Leningrad -- um, that is, from "Zankt Pyetyerboork," outside among the weaponry, and we chatted in Russian and German. We took pictures of one another with one another's cameras (his camera had roll film in it).

Since he was a snaggle-toothed old Russian I somehow had the goofy urge (which I fortunately resisted) to ask him if he had fought in the battle. It turned out he was the exact same age as me, which

means that both him and the snaggle-toothed American (me) were going-on-two years old and pooping their diapers on opposite sides of the world, as the desperate and agonizing three-day bloodbath took place.

There are organizations that are still digging up bodies in the woods all around this area, and trying to identify them and find their next-of-kin.

RB Leipzig

Friday evening I took the streetcar to the league match between RB Leipzig and SV Sandhausen at the Red Bull Arena over by the river Elster. As I noted earlier, the "Fanshop" I went into in the Leipzig train station had regalia and spirit-wear for all the big teams, but NOT for RB Leipzig, its own city team. That probably reflects the wide contempt in which the team is held thoughout the country and even here. Big corporations are taking over our sports!

Well, indeed. In Red Bull Arena, the drink to buy is Red Bull, in umpteen flavors. 

Most of the arriving fans were wearing the team colors (with "DIE ROTEN BULLEN written on them) and waving banners 

and bar towels. There were lots of beer and wurst stands selling to people (including me) at inflated prices. My goodness, how the beer is drunk here. It seemed like everybody was drinking beer from cool plastic 1/2-liter cups with a big handle that you can hang over the seat in front of you. 

You had to get frisked on the way in. The match was fun to watch. The stadium was only about 1/3 full, but the flag-waving, chanting bunch at the RB's goal were enthusiastic.  The mascot was a guy in a silly red bull suit, dancing around and cheer-leading. The main chant was "Ole, ole Leipzig!" (bulls. Get it?). After I had seen the scene and how it all was, and to anticipate the departing crowds, I bought an RB Leipzig ball cap and left early.

No longer a tourist.

I have ridden a bicycle and the streetcars and the buses and the trains in Bavaria, Saxony, and Brandenburg, and I have done my laundry and gone to a German league soccer game and argued in German with officious German railroad employees and got a German haircut. So I consider myself no longer to be a tourist. I am staying in the very heart of Berlin now, so I completely empathize with what President Kennedy meant when he uttered the famous assertion, "I am a jelly doughnut."

Leipzig - Sublime to Banal

The tombstone of Richard Wagner's mother and sister,

stumbled upon in an ancient graveyard on the way to the washateria.

Solemn shrines of Munich

My guidebook says there are more religious relics in Munich than in any city outside of Rome. A spirit of contemplative peace and comfort fills one's heart when one is in the presence of such shrines. I came across two of them today.

St. Munditia

She was a 3d-century martyr but few details about her life are known. She was dug up from the catacombs of Rome and shipped up to St. Peter's Church in Munich during the Reformation, to buck up the local Catholics against the satanic heresy of Protestantism. They put her into a crystal reliquary after dressing her up in a party dress and putting googly eyes in her skull sockets. Take THAT, you dirty Protestants!

St. Michael Jackson

On his 1997 tour, like most big celebrities and people a lot more important than us, he stayed at the fancy-shmancy Hotel Bayerischer Hof. (It's not where he dangled the baby over the balcony though - that was in Berlin.) Now that he has been canonized, his fans have repurposed a statue opposite the hotel of some dumb Italian composer nobody ever heard of, and made it into a Michael shrine. The devotees of his cult keep the shrine cleaned up and tidy, as one of them is doing in the photos. By the way, you can be a devotee too! Click HERE to learn how!

Munich Frauenkirche

Outside the train station in Nördlingen the other day, I noticed the words "both world wars" on a stone memorial, so I went to take a look. The inscription said the memorial is dedicated "to the victims of both world wars." No "valiant heroes" or "Our Troops" bullshit. Just "to the victims." I thought that was interesting. And kind of heartening.

Now I'm in Munich, the city that Hitler named "The Capital City of Our Movement." Today I visited the Munich City Museum (which is very well done), and then I went to a 7:00pm service at the cathedral, the famous Frauenkirche. I went mainly because I read that "The Cathedral Chorus" and "The Cathedral Brass" were going to perform, and I like that kind of music.

It's a nice big, tall, narrow cathedral; but it doesn't look old, duh!, since it was rebuilt after we bombed the shit out of it when I was a baby.

I smelled the familiar incense out on the street even before I got in. I got a seat, and then, right near me, in solemn procession came acolytes with candles, priests, bishops, and then the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, Reinhard Marx, in his cardinal hat and rich ecclesiastical robes of state, carrying his crosier, and handing out blessings right and left. (I got me one.)

The music was really great, but the sermon was even better (who knew?). It turns out that this service was in remembrance of the liberation of Dachau, 70 years ago. Marx was very up-front about what the parents and grandparents of the people sitting in that church had been involved with. He mentioned the horror that overtook the American soldiers when they liberated Dachau "just a few kilometers from where we are right now."

Marx's sermon, in a nutshell, was: How can we atone for all that Nazi stuff? His answer was: We can't. All we can do is pray.

I looked up Marx, and I kinda like him. He an anti-corporate lefty. He says he's not allowed to marry a same-sex couple, but he'll bless their union if they ask him to.

It occurred to me that it would be nice if senior clerics in our own country started to speak out in defense and remembrance of the victims of the lawless invasions and concocted wars perpetrated by our own leaders (Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). That is, ALL of the victims -- not just the tiny minority of them that were "Our Troops." Just sayin'.

All this was just after I had spent the day in the city museum where there is a 1932 election campaign flyer that reads "Can a Catholic vote for National Socialism?" It went on to say that Adolf Hitler is "a devout, spiritual Catholic," so of COURSE you can vote for him. Hmm.

I suppose it would be silly of me, based on a few impressions, to draw any conclusions about what the Germans think about their past, and the different ways they deal with it, considering that it's all a total mishmash. But it's all very interesting.

Munich

My Munich squat is just inside an old city gate from the train station. It's not really a squat -- its a worn apartment, three-flights-up a circular wooden staircase, rehabbed over the decades, in a century-old building, shared by two students who rent out a room and their hospitality to make ends meet. And it's kept very clean. But I call it a squat because of its young, smart, socially-conscious inhabitants and its purple-painted bathtub.

Munich was the cradle of Nazism and it got the hell bombed out of it, but you'd never know it now. They put the old center back the way it was, so it looks medieval and pretty, probably even nicer than if it hadn't been bombed and had just been kept up.

But the pedestrianized street just inside the gate looks all modern, and it was flocking and surging with happy crowds of people, and lit up with big signs. I couldn't decide which of Bavaria's exotic wonders to explore first -- T.J. Maxx? Urban Outfitters? Crabtree & Evelyn? Foot Locker? Maybe the McDonalds has McSpätzle! Nah. I skipped all that stuff.

Instead, I walked around. It's a great walking city - lots to gawk at and read about. You could spend hours just sitting and figuring out the 17th- and 18th-century epitaphs built into the sides of the old churches. Here's a poor infantry general who fell on the field in 1709, in the War of the Spanish Succession, poor guy. Only 57 years old. I wonder if his side won.

It's Sunday, so after seeing the big museum I'll try to go to the evening service at the Frauenkirche and listen to the choirs and the brass concert.


A random thing I noticed: 24 out of 25 Germans will stand at a pedestrian crossing waiting for the signal to turn green, even if you can see for a long way in both directions and no traffic could possibly come for a while. They talk to one another or stare gormlessly into the middle distance, waiting for the little green man to light up.

Nördlingen

Wanting to see an even smaller German town, I took the train from Augsburg to Nördlingen, up north across the Danube. I had to change trains, or "umsteigen" ("climb around") as the Germans say, to reach it.

Back in the middle ages, Nördlingen was a frisky up-and-coming commercial town with a bright future. But then the durned Thirty Years War came along and dashed its hopes. Now it is famous for three things:
1) Its circular town wall is completely intact, and you can walk on it all the way around the town (Photos here: )
2) It is located in the Ries Crater, the best preserved meteor impact crater in Europe.
3) It was the home of the famous 15th-century prostitute Els von Eystett.

Fifteen million years ago, a half-mile wide meteor hit Europe at 42,000 mph right where Nördlingen is now, with the force of 1.8 million Hiroshima bombs. (OMG!) It didn't strike fear into people's hearts though, because people's hearts hadn't evolved yet. But it must have killed millions of elephant- hippo- deer- and squirrel-like animals and other little critters that were living then. The town has an excellent museum that shows you everything you ever wanted to know about meteor impacts all over the world and the solar system.

As to the famous 15th-century prostitute -- you know how some old randomly-preserved record can give you an insight into everyday life that you don't see in the history books? Well, here's a good example. They should make it into an HBO miniseries:

Thursday April 30

I went to the public market in the morning. It was full of beautiful fruit, vegetables, and flowers. There was quite a bit of the white asparagus that the Germans like. I walked to the medieval and highly decorated Ste. Anna church, with its attached “Luther Steps” museum which was well worth seeing. Luther stayed here when it was a monastery. The pope sent a legate down to terrorize him. The legate yelled at him but he yelled right back. The church went Protestant a few years later, ha ha.

They were having a small prayer service while I was there, and their chanting sounded just exactly like the Catholic chanting of my youth, except it was in German. There are dozens of dead people buried in the walls and floor, and I was wondering if, after the Reformation, the corpses who chose to remain Catholic were dug up and moved up to the Catholic cathedral a mile north.

I walked up to the Dom, the ancient cathedral which is still Catholic. It is also full of dozens of dead people in the walls and floor, with stone and marble tributes, some elaborate. Next to it is a little plaza with Roman-era ruins.

I also visited the beautiful synagogue, built in about 1913. The Nazis set it on fire on Kristallnacht in '38, but because there were adjacent goyish establishments, including a gas station, the fire brigade extinguished the fire instead of watching it burn, as was they usually did when Jewish-owned buildings were burning. After that it was used as a place to gather Jews enroute to their death, and as administrative offices. It has now been restored and there is a very nice museum cataloging Jewish life in Augsburg through the centuries.

Then I walked to the train station and bought my ticket to the town of Nördlingen, which I plan to visit tomorrow.

There are plenty of platzes with fountains and benches, and people enjoying the spring sunshine. When tottering around looking at stuff, you have to dodge bikes and streetcars.

Vignettes:

When you pass a person on an empty street, the other person doesn’t say hi.


People don’t say Guten Tag here. They say “Grüß Gott,” usually heard as “Sget!”


Hardly anybody wears a hat or sunglasses, even when it’s sunny.

In the Karlstadt department store, I saw a dapper older gentleman with his little dog on a leash, perusing the displays of the weird men’s euro-underwear.

Here are some Hungarian potato chips. You can't GET them in America!

Day One - to Germany

Tuesday afternoon I drove from Delaware to Dulles Airport. I had to backtrack on the Virginia beltway TWICE, because in Virginia they don't call the Dulles Toll Road "The Dulles Toll Road." They call it some number instead. I took the toll road instead of the free road because I had arranged to park at a nearby hotel.

Security was intense. They x-rayed my whole body with the machine, and then a big beefy TSA guy asked what the "massive object" in my back pocket was. I had forgotten to take out my wallet and passport. So he looked them over and inside of them, and then he rubbed chemical-infused papers on the palms of my hands. Then he told me he had to pat me down on the ass and inner thighs, which he did. I was a little bit insulted that he thought rubber gloves were necessary, but I didn't say anything. He said I had a nice ass, but I bet he says that to everybody. 

As advertised, the Icelandair flight offered no food and no freebees except a small soft drink. The seats were bad but by no means the worst. Iceland looked like a lake of frozen mud. The airport buildings and the dwellings I could see sort of reminded me of Alice Springs, except there were no trees at all, let alone gum trees.

I thought it was kind of charming that the Icelanders wanted to stamp my passport. What a perky li’l country! But when I got off the plane in Munich and walked from the plane right out onto the street, I realized that in Iceland I had somehow entered the Eurozone (although Iceland doesn’t use euros).

I got euros from the wall, got the bus to the Munich Hauptbahnhof (a LONG bus ride -- the city is big, like Chicago) and bought a ticket to Augsburg from the machine, and hopped right on the train. In an hour I was here, and clumpedy-clumped my carry-on across town on the cobblestones. The Airbnb place I’m staying is in the back of Madame Tamtam’s seamstress shop. She (real name Rebecca) gives lessons in sewing and garment design in the shop out front. The building is about 500 years old, and I think it has the original front door and massive iron latch.

The east side of town is a series of little parallel streams. You can see them down below and alongside the streets, and there are railings so you don’t fall in. At the end of the street there is an overfall with a spiffy little electric generator tucked between the buildings, humming away. The little streams flow into the river Lech, which runs northward to the Danube.

Rebecca doesn’t have wifi so I compute and get coffee at Henry’s Coffee on the Rathausplatz, using their wifi.

Augsburg is a very pretty, booming, middle-size town, which is just what I was looking for. It’s bustling with shoppers and eaters, and some beggars and buskers. I hear Turkish on the street, but I’m not noticing tourists at all, and that’s pretty nice. Maybe it’s snobby of me, but I like it. The multi-level center has a maze of cobbled street, passageways, fountains, and stone steps.

For over a year, I’ve been studying German on my phone at the fitness center instead of working out, and it made a difference. The signs are almost all transparent now, and I can order my train ticket from the machine and my food at eateries.