The New Joint

Here are some photos of our new apartment, where everything begins fresh.

Here is the view as we walk--or rather, squeeze--in. Mostly stairs and books. The pink kitchen beckons from beyond with the scent of cherry-fennel soup. The tower of paint buckets means that in Germany, where it is difficult to throw anything away, we must wait for a magic moment for these to disappear.

Yes, I wanted the kitchen pink. I love this pink kitchen, and also the pot rack over my head made from and iron door grill, which makes me feel like a gourmet cook. The upturned plate on the cooktop conceals a huge crack which occured during the move. The potholders are honeycombed hexagons--love them. I might have to re-think the cheap green throw rug.

What was great was: how Michael helped me hang up almost everything, drilling like a wild man, for days on end. No more waiting eight months between each home improvement!

More later...

The Heinz Ehrhardt Effect

February 20th would have been the 100th birthday of Heinz Ehrhardt, one of Germany’s most beloved post-war comics, a wirtschaftswunder’s everyman with an extraordinary facility with wordplay to which other comics can only hope to aspire. I admit some of the wordplay is lost on me, but his loveable character isn’t. He is the uncle you wish you’d always had: kind, naive, a certain and stable center of tender good intentions in an ever-faster world. Apparently in real life he was a bit of a workaholic, dying early in the 1970’s of a heart attack, beloved by his four children, who didn’t get enough time with him. Ehrhardt and Loriot are Germany’s greatest comedic influences—both legendary, here.

Lately I saw the film that he made in Einbeck in ca. 1957, (Vater, Mutter und Neun Kinder) which was finished in studios that then existed in Göttingen. It is filmed outside and presumably inside the oldest town drugstore (Apotheke) in the market square, (I have myself bought mosquito repellant there, it is next to our pediatrician) with other scenes taking place on the lake near Northeim.

In it, Heinz is the father of nine, and is concerned with getting several late-teenage children married off. There are charming scenes of small town, idealized German life and but one reference to the difficult times after the war. One daughter apparently enjoys dancing with her own brother a bit too much, which we find out is understandable and healthy when the mother informs her she is not really their daughter, but rather the child of best-friends who died in Hannover during the war—she had been adopted! Everything’s cool with Klaus!

The ever-loveable Heinz good-naturedly surrounded by his adoring daughters in Vater, Mutter und Neun Kinder

There is a subplot which has Heinz sweating it out that he might have had a tipsy and amnesiac indiscretion with the trophy-wife of a local bigshot—but his sensible wife straightens everything out just in time for their 25th wedding anniversary. The actress who plays her is a perfect foil to his bumbling and innocence—more than a bit sharp and earthier than he.

This film was quite influential in its day. The family sings and makes music together (Ehrhardt’s first love was the piano, and he always sings in films), and I can see it may have had an influence on The Sound of Music from 1965. Also, there is a scene where one daughter and her French boyfriend fall into the lake — he offers her his soaking handkerchief with which to dry off, just like Roger does in 101 Dalmatians of 1967, although I must say, to less effect.

The film is a true feel-good movie, but has just enough touches of real life to relieve the sweetness: one son drinks too much champagne at the party and barfs, and one ambitious daughter’s report in the local newspaper unleashes the central misunderstanding, while the two youngest kids have to go without duck at Sunday dinner (and told to lie that they don’t like it!) in order to politely fill the stomach of an unexpected guest. I really liked it more than I thought I might. I can definitely see how it has the same effect for Germans as It’s a Wonderful Life has one me: tears of joy at every year’s viewing.

All in a lather

A particular motif that runs through advertisements, thrillers, and reportage in German culture is that of the woman, alone, showering. Always, the woman is naked under running water, enjoying this private bit of sensuality, unaware that she is being watched. The woman never responds to the viewer who is privy to seeing her at a most vulnerable and private moment.

I’ve seen it on billboards advertising shower equipment. It’s there in vacation reportage detailing ‘what to do’ in Mallorca — presumably having a shower is central to the experience. In any household and clothing catalog like OTTO the bath units will be decorated with a nude woman showing us how they are to be used. I saw it used once thoroughly gratuitously on the old series of Derrick, one of the first detective shows in Germany. Here, a woman had just come home from work and needed to shower (which we saw) before the detectives even showed up at her place to question her. Showering? Had nothing to do with the crime.

(It took me about 5.7 seconds to find this Diana image on a search for German bath products)

Showering-woman is so repeatedly referenced, that nobody questions it. It’s like the sari-wettened-by-rain or the sunset-dance-with-windblown-scarves sequences in every Bollywood film, or the unvanquishable hero theme in American films, featuring a man of super-human strength and remarkable moral integrity — which recalls the early legends of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill...it is an inextricable part of the cultural imagination.

Clearly, the ‘showering woman’ motif goes at least as far back as the Greek myth of Diana being watched by Actaeon. The popularity of this motif as an attention-grabber isn’t only about nudity. It is about the tension of seeing something we have not been invited to see, that maybe we are not developed enough to see. It is brave to open our eyes and challenge what we are accustomed to, and thereby gain knowledge; it is human to be curious. They call it voyeurism, which makes it seem diagnosable and weird. Seeing what is normally hidden and private alters our perception. To watch and take the risk of both being caught and being transformed by what we see – is a human desire. Curiosity is a desire in us to evolve.

The theme in art history is well-established. This painting from the 18th century is by Francois Boucher and is a fleshy excuse to see Diana nekkid.

In the myth, Diana the huntress lives alone, thoroughly independent in the forest, using her own superior skills as huntress to remain separate from society and men. She has determined to kill any man who invades her territory, or attempts to view her in her natural state. Diana also appears as a deer, so of course hunters seek her perpetually...but don’t always know who is Diana and who is just a deer—a goddess is expert at shapeshifting.

This fountain from Schloss Schönbrunn pleasure gardens in Salzburg, Austria shows Actaeon before the dogs get to him.

Actaeon is a hunter who watches Diana as she is dressing or bathing under a waterfall in the forest. He is riveted, and seeks to become her mate. Because he may be as good a hunter as she, he stands a chance. But he has seen her, exposed, without being invited. It’s not just that she’s naked and has a great body. In her nakedness, she is in a state of absolute unity with All of Nature, and this is a mind-splitting, soul-exploding revelation. He has seen her embody this merging, the stunning beauty of it, and cannot survive in the same form to tell the tale. His being able to see her at all means that he is extraordinarily skilled, and his vision of nature transforms him so that he both becomes as a god, and as an animal – her male counterpart. She turns him into a stag – he becomes merged, too – and his own hunting dogs bring him down.

The action, or the hunt, at Schloss Schönbrunn gardens begins with a thorough and unexpected soaking of all the Dianas seated at this table. In the early 1800's, this meant that muslin dresses would have become see-through. The garden follows a mythic story line in which pleasure and erotic play are highlighted by themes in classical myth. Lovers in this setting become the hunters or the hunted. The Diana/Actaeon myth is prominent in the garden design and features.

(Since Actaeon brought dogs to help him dominate nature during the hunt means that he is later destroyed by his own bit of ‘overkill.’ Diana doesn’t need dogs to be the best hunter. There is a message here: we will be brought down by our own attempts to undermine the sacred law, the perfection with which everything works in nature. We succeed when we merge with nature, when we commune-icate. When we force it and try to get the upper hand, our own vanity will rip out our throats.)

The hunting cult in middle Europe was perhaps the single greatest focus of non-religious imagination in the modern era (post 1500). The effect this motif had on art, architecture, and design cannot be underestimated; it was omnipresent – even though, or perhaps because it belonged to the elite, to landowners.

This strange dual-sided festival mask from 18th Century Austria turns the myth on its head. One side shows a benign and friendly deer, the other side shows a horny deer with sharp teeth. Clearly this is no majestic Bambi.

The mid-20th Century magister Robert Cochrane suggested in private letters that this motif must be studied in order to understand traditional witchcraft at all. He hinted that the roebuck-in-the-thicket, the hiding stag of the forest, is tantamount to the hidden wisdom at the heart of nature itself, and that the hunter’s sacred task of capturing the deer was a metaphor for the human’s sacred task of attaining this wisdom.

At right is a hunter's dish from Bavaria which features a stag being trailed by a very small dog. The stag carries in its mouth a sort of golden fruit, and its heart is prominent. The hunted stag motif appears abundantly on household objects.

In our time many are ashamed of hunting because it causes pain to animals, so it is difficult to understand that in the past, sacred-hunters understood that a deer will never be brought down, can not be captured, without its spiritual consent...that the deer is in no way an insensible victim of its fate, but rather that deer play a sacred and willing role in a human’s attempt to merge with the earth—no matter how they struggle to survive the hunt.

To imagine that an animal would spiritually conspire to sacrifice itself so that we people can evolve means that we have to give up the perception that death is bad. We would see everything as interrelated, abandon our attachment to conflict and competition as the central rules of life – and rather know that everything (the universe, God) is on our side to help us attain wisdom. As we attain this wisdom, we find our most evolved state is to be on the side of nature.

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.

The Road to RENOvation

We were lucky when we moved in here that the former occupant had left the place as a pigsty, because that way, we could be taking it over in an unrenovated condition, and when we move out, I won’t have to paint everything white again. Oh good, because I am not a person who can live with white walls. However, an unrenovated condition means that some things may never be fixed. Ah, well. It means that I have faded Digimon stickers on the back of my bedroom door and my overhead ceiling wires have given up the ghost. Plus, we’ve been scraping a flaccid-looking beach scene-photo wallpaper off one living room wall, and repainting window alcoves that were cheddar cheese yellow. Seriously.

I try to explain to German friends, who are so fond of renovating, that the word “renovation” is not an old one. In the mid-20th century, one of the only places Americans could get a quick and easy divorce was in Reno, Nevada. People of means would take a two week vacation there at a dude ranch, drink Tom Collinses, wait for their papers to come through, and end up legally divorced, ready for the train back home. When you returned from your trip, folks would ask you where you’d been, and the standard comeback was: “I’ve been RENO-vated!” They’d been made a-new.

Actually, the Germans may as well have invented renovation, so they don’t tend to believe this actually-true bit of linguistic history. A friend of mine decided that they absolutely had to renovate their kitchen. She seemed quite put out by it. It would be a total drag and whirlwind of time and money, but it was necessary - they could not put up with it as it was. The kitchen was tiny and squeaky clean, there were many mugs hanging about, everything was exposed as it often is in European kitchens, but it didn’t seem out-of-date or gross.

Well, she was talking about the wallpaper. The white wallpaper was about seven or eight years old, and it absolutely had to be changed. When I visited again two months later, she asked me what I thought of the kitchen. At first I laughed because I assumed she had put off the renovation for the future, and this was an impulse with which I could thoroughly empathize. No, really, what do you think? Looking around, I could discern no difference. They had moved everything out of that tiny kitchen, every hook, every mug, a massive stand of cookbooks, and replaced the white wallpaper with similar white wallpaper, and then put everything back exactly as it was before. It had taken one chaotic weekend. The kitchen had barely changed at all, but presumably it felt better about itself. This is called: renovation.

In America, renovation is knocking out walls and adding entire stories after you’ve lived in a place half-happily, half-dissatisfied for years on end, intending one day to redo the place. Having many Big Plans that you intend to One Day Accomplish means you can always keep them just out of reach like The Other Side of Pook’s Green Hills. One attempts to keep a yin-yang balance between “I can live with it” and advanced self-disgust, before any commitment-to-change occurs.

When you finally take the plunge, you have taken a step into spending a great deal of sweat and marital harmony mustering and taming rebellious or lazy or over-booked construction workers. If you go to all the trouble, one thing is absolutely certain: you and everyone you know must without a doubt be able to see the difference at the end. The change, in fact, should be stunning. Otherwise, you would have. to be. crazy.

Finding the Thread

Whenever somebody forgets what they were going to say, in German they say: "Ich habe die Faden verloren"...I've lost the thread. Anyone who sews knows how frustrating this can be. I had just until recently seemed to lose the thread of my life. I was living in a huge, cold house across from the windy forest with my three children after my husband and I decided not to live together anymore. We had come here five years ago, seeking European adventure, and also unconsciously, trying to escape an increasing sense of losing the thread of our marriage.

I don't feel like talking about the past, because it now feels as if my life is newly begun again. I will probably fill in the missing threads in posts to come. However, in the past two weeks, we--my daughter and two sons, my ex-husband and my friend Michael--moved everything we have, all twenty years of accrued married and family life, everything we needed, thought we needed, and couldn't let go of, into this small apartment.

It is in an undistinguished building along the main artery in the town, and it lies directly behind a mattress store. I have to tell people that's where I live: behind the mattress store. Believe me, I'd rather tell them that I live next to the waterfall, down a forest glade at the end of the abandoned 18th century stone quarry overgrown with ivy and moss. But, there it is.

The apartment itself is fine. It is about two levels up in a cavernous and echoey building refurbished who knows when, probably the 1980's, with a glass door outfitted with blue plastic pulls, meant to loosen anyday now, so they too must be replaced. Germans seem to leave the bone structure of their buildings intact, thankfully, while they continually change and alter the doors, the windows, the stairs--in fact, everything inside, with a regularity that is, to me, alarming. It just about destroys the character of the interiors, ultimately, as most of the new materials are plastic and in short order they wobble and squeak, and break down.

When you walk in, there is a lovely shining wood staircase leading to the upper floor, underneath the roof. Big, blocky wooden beams hold the roof above our heads, and the walls are partially slanted. There are seven small windows which let in an amazing amount of light. The windows are by Velux, and they are absolutely expensive in America, but just rather nice, here.