Paint it Charles-Bronson Brown

I have a theory that Germans became conditioned to continual renovation after 1945 or so. Before then I believe they could quite happily live with old things around them, making use of old latches and squeaky shutters, iron door handles and layers of wallpaper. But after so many buildings were destroyed during bombings, the entire sides of houses caved-in and exposed embarassingly for the entire world to see, like underpants on a clothesline...I think that with all the new construction and renewal of the 1950’s it became untenable for every generation afterwards to live with shabby things. Shabby and old is immediately regarded with disgust as being dirty and unsound.

In the English speaking world, shabby and old are equal to comfortable and homey, and sometimes: eccentric and creative and devil-may-care. “Shabby chic” trends come and go in America by the decade. Even in a Modern and Streamlined and Minimalist decade Americans like to create ironic counterpoints by decorating with old and peeling milkmaid stools, chunks of blasted plaster covered with Bollywood posters, chipped and cracked pastel pottery assembled into a visually delicious displays. In the west, where I spent most of my American life, everything is so new and in a state of continual transformation, that we are actually starved for shabbiness, for history we can touch.

A friend of mine in America had bought a tiny home built in the 1930’s in a trendy part of town. The kitchen had last been updated during the Nixon administration, and the cupboards were tortuously dark, Charles Bronson-brown and the counters were so chipped and peeling it looked like someone was trying to make guacamole from the original avocado (before avocado was cool again) and its effect on the mind was hallucinatory, like a dream involving a broken-down car and some guy from the Rockford Files. But this friend and her husband were both professionals, newly capable of buying whatever they wanted. She made excuses for the kitchen, but its hideousness was actually a matter of pride to her. Her hesitancy-to-renovate proved to us how little she cared about being in style, how unpretentious she was.

In the American west, this attitude: that you are above such things, that you’re tough enough to live with adversity, you shrug it off, that you’re not some effete who sniffs at the stylistically unacceptable—this ability to live with scruffiness is admired. Its the same with the Australians: they call this ‘dagginess,’ a not-okayness (from the word for the turds hanging off a sheep’s backend: DAG) and its an ironically cool quality of deliberately going against the grain, being out of step with the trends. It is one of the ingredients in “coolness.”

The Germans know this, too. All the most admired people or at least celebrities do exactly as they like: they wear scruffy photographer’s vests like the actor Götz Georg, they insult people shockingly like the fertility-clown Dieter Bohlen, they chain smoke into advanced age despite all the warnings like Helmut Schmidt. German coolness is made up of moving to your own drumbeat, too, but its also made of keeping things in order, completing the necessities of life on time and efficiently, even when it doesn’t show. When you can do both, baby: you’re a superstar.