Globetrotter Grady in Berlin

Despite the fact that pretty much no one else in the group was all that impressed by Berlin, I had a great time there and thought it was an amazing city. We only got to spend about four days there, and what little time we had was sometimes spent on pointless activities, but after all was said and done we got to do some pretty neat things.

We arrived at our hotel Thursday evening, and quickly discovered that it had communal showers in the grand European tradition. Sorry though I am to admit it, I am still a bit of a prude when it comes to such things, and spent an interesting and uncomfortable four days showering with large, talkative European men.

Thursday evening about five of us went to see a variety show at the Winter Garten on Potsdamer Strasse, which is this beautiful theater in the classic vaudeville style. Brass handrails, the flashing lights outlining the stage, employees in evening dress- the place had everything. The show was equally excellent, with a variety of gymnasts and so forth, and one really outstanding old school entertainer. That guy was pretty amazing. Let me tell you about him.

He comes out on the stage and starts chatting with us, dropping little jokes here and there that were really pretty clever- quite a few of them were plays on words that you wouldn't get unless you knew a little German and English, and he's dropping in references to American radio shows from the '30s. And while he's got his patter running, he's doing little tricks for us- a bit of juggling, a bit of balancing a top hat on his nose. Except he's not perfect; every once in a while he wouldn't quite catch the hat he was trying to flip from his foot to his head, or he'd miss a ball juggling, or something. But he was great fun to listen to, and everyone in the audience was like, "What a charming old man, I certainly don't expect him to pull off every trick flawlessly." So as he continues with his act, he pulls out a teacup and saucer. He balances the saucer on his foot, and flips it up and catches it on his head, and we're all like, "Yay! Good job!" Then he puts the teacup on his foot and flips it up, catching it on top of the saucer. So now we're all like, "Wow, that's pretty cool." Then he takes out another teacup and saucer (all while keeping up the banter) and does the same thing. And we're suitably impressed, but we're getting worried, because he keeps wandering around the stage with these teacups balanced on his head, and he's good, but he's not perfect, and they're rattling around a lot, and we don't want him to embarass himself by having them fall. So next he breaks out another teacup and saucer. Has a little trouble balancing them on his foot without letting the other fall off his head, but manages it. Flips the saucer up, and catches it. Flips the teacup up, it almost misses, the whole stack is wobbling, it almost falls, we gasp, but he manages to catch it. So now he has a stack of three teacups and three saucers balanced on his head, and we're impressed. Next he takes out a tea kettle.

Teacups rattling, he leans down and balances the tea kettle on his foot. We're all thinking, "Oh, come on man, you can do it. You're so old and funny, don't screw up now." He flicks his foot. The kettle flips up through the air and lands squarely on top of the stack, which doesn't even quiver.

The man was stringing us along the entire time. He knew exactly what he was doing, and had perfected the technique of making deliberate failures look like mistakes. The whole act, he was building a skeptical audience up to the point where they were completely empathizing with the performer. I have never seen anyone work the audience as well as he did.

On Friday, we had some tasty, tasty Brötchen for breakfast, and then piled on the bus for a "Grand Tour through the City." It was conducted by some random friend of Professor Klabes', and wasn't the greatest. Bus tours to begin with leave quite a bit to be desired, and the high point of this one was the moment when the guide said, "Oh, and by the way, that was the Brandenburger Tör we just passed, turn around quick and you might get a picture." Ah well. Friday afternoon we visited the Checkpoint Charlie museum, which is small and badly designed but very interesting. After that, I strongarmed a couple of people into visiting the Judisches Museum, which is an architectural marvel, and also a damn good museum, following which we wandered around the streets of Berlin and grabbed some dinner before taking the S-Bahn back to the hotel.

Other highlights of the trip included visiting the Pergamon Museum, and getting to see the opera Eugene Onegin. Now, Pergamon was a city in ancient Greece that built a huge altar to either Zeus or Athena, and it's been reconstructed inside this musuem. And when I say 'huge' there, I mean, seriously, you walk into the first room of this musuem and are dwarfed by this massive, wide set of steps leading up to the altar. It's just unbelievable. They also have just a shit-ton of other artifacts from antiquity, from several different areas of the world. The other things that really stick out in my mind are the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way from Babylon. Babylon, folks. Now, keep in mind that these are building-size structures that have been reconstructed inside this musuem, and I didn't even come close to making it through the entire thing. If you should ever wake up one day and discover you're in Berlin, this is a good place to spend a week or so. And the crazy thing is that this is just one museum on this island in the middle of Spree River with something like four other world-famous museums on it.

Moving on, the last thing I wanted to mention was Eugene Onegin. The text is a poem written by Pushkin using an unusual rhyme scheme that has since become known as an Onegin stanza. The music was by Tchaikovsky. I won't pretend to know exactly what was going on, but the music was pretty, the staging was interesting, and after I got back to the states I read a little about the text, and it turns out it's got a fairly interesting history. Nabokov did a crazy translation of it that a lot of people hate. And interestingly enough, Douglas Hofstadter, the mathematician who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach has also written a verse translation of Onegin. All this has convinced me to read it. Right after I get through the new Potter...

Charles Johnston's translation of Eugene Onegin

In conclusion, the most consistently amusing thing about the entire German trip was Herr Klabes. As proof positive, I submit this photo:

Globetrotter Grady in Amsterdam

Continuing in the travel journal mindset, let's talk a bit about Amsterdam, where I went along with a bunch of other people on the Münster program this past weekend. And what a weekend it was.

First off, we left the Münster Hauptbahnhof on Friday, and made it as far as Bad Bentheim on the German border before we found out that the railroad employees in the Netherlands were on strike. So we piled off the train the train and onto buses, for which we paid 35€. The theory was that we would be reimbursed, but it looks as though Deutsche Bahn might have other ideas. Anyhow.

We got to Amsterdam without a definite place to stay, which is not the best idea in the world, but luckily there were enough spots left at a place called Hans Brinker. Not quite expensive enough to be a hotel, not quite sketchy enough to be a hostel, it occupies a delightfully ambiguous middle ground. It had hostel style rooms, so you probably get to stay with a bunch of people you don't know, but it was cheap, not horribly dirty, and it had a bar/resturant/common room type of thing on the first floor. Quality place.

The most important thing to know about Amsterdam is this: when you're walking around the city, there will be signposts at many corners with writing on them. Those are not the names of streets. The names of steets are on placards attached to the sides of buildings on the corner. Very important.

So over the course of the next two days, I got to see the Van Gogh Musuem, the Rijcks Museum, the Heineken Experience (actually really cool), walk through De Wallen (without making a stop anywhere, sadly), and visit a coffee shop to sample their selection of pot brownies, pot bonbons, pot muffins, pot milkshakes, and pot. So all in all, it was a really awesome trip. Two and a half days, though, is time to do no more than scratch the surface; the city is amazing and huge, and there were about twenty other things I would have liked to have done. Another time.

Amsterdam is not nearly as seedy as everyone makes it out to be, particularly the red light district. Yes, true, there are real, live prostitutes lining the streets, but there are also real, live tourists filling every nook and cranny as well. There are flashy lights and loud music and people absolutely everywhere. The first couple of times I felt someone's hand in my pocket I got pretty excited, but the thrird time it happened I realized it was merely one of Amsterdam's famous pickpockets plying his noble trade. Thank god I had nothing worth stealing. Though most people will tell you to worry about muggers and whatnot, the street cleaners in Amsterdam are definitely the scariest thing about the city. I saw them eat at least three people.

In the end, it was a great time. The museums were cheap and incredible. The pot also was not to be sneezed at. I had a joint and a brownie, and finally got good and properly stoned for the first, and probably last, time in my life. I think there are pictures of it somewhere; I definitely remember bright flashes of light. The best part was that the pre-rolled joints come in little factory sealed packages. Factory sealed pot. Beautiful.

Ein Kommentar

We read a short fable by Kafka today in the German literature course I'm kind of taking here in Münster. It seemed really good to me, so feast your eyes upon both the original, a translation by my own hand, and some comments we made about it.

Ein Kommentar
Es war sehr früh am Morgen, die Straβen rein und leer, ich ging zum Bahnhof. Als ich eine Turmuhr mit meiner verglich, sah ich, daβŸ es schon viel später war, als ich geglaubt hatte, ich muβŸte mich sehr beeilen, der Schrecken über diese Entdeckung lieβŸ mich im Weg unsicher werden, ich kannte mich in dieser Stadt noch nicht sehr gut aus, glücklicherweise war ein Schutzmann in der Nähe, ich lief zu ihm und fragte ihn atemlos nach dem Weg. Er lächelte und sagte: "Von mir willst du den Weg erfahren?" "Ja," sagte ich, "da ich ihn selbst nicht finden kann." "Gib's auf, gib's auf" sagte er und wandte sich mit einem groβŸen Schwunge ab, so wie Leute, die mit ihrem Lachen allein sein wollen.

And here follows my attempt at a translation:

A Commentary
It was very early in the morning, the street clean and vacant, I was going to the train station. When I compared the clock in a tower with my own, I saw that it was much later than I had thought, I needed to make great haste, the shock of this discovery left me unsure of my way, I did not yet know this city well, fortunately there was a policeman nearby, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He laughed and said: "You want to learn the way from me?" "Yes," I said, "for I cannot find it myself." "Give it up, give it up" he said and turned away with a great swing, as people do who wish to be alone with their laughter.

This was a great story for me, first because it's short enough for me to get my head around in German, and second because it's very interesting. I was surprised by how quickly problems arose in translating it; there are always certain elements of language that can't be conveniently rendered in another tongue, but the fact that I saw instances of that in a piece this short was unexpected. There are two places in this story where my translation fails to capture the subtext of the original.

The first, and less problematic of the two, is the part which reads "luckily there was a policeman nearby." The word Kafka uses, "Schutzmann," is definitely referring to a police officer, but its literal meaning is more along the lines of "man who protects," the implication being that he is both a representative of the authority of the state, but also has a more allegorical function, which I'll mention below.

The second problematic passage is the 'answer' the policeman gives when he is asked about the way: "Von mir willst du den Weg erfahren?" The important point here is that, in the original, the policeman addresses the narrator with 'du' rather that 'Sie.' In German, there are two ways to say 'you' to someone, one of which is formal and used for speaking to most people you meet, and the other is informal and used only for speaking to friends, peers, and children. Unless the policeman and the narrator are very well acquainted, he is being very rude and patronizing by implying that the narrator is like a child.

Now for deeper meaning: in our class, we read this as a parable pointing out the futility of looking to the state/church authority for guidance. Consider: we have the character of the narrator walking through an empty city who raises his head to a clock tower, just as a man will look to heaven for guidance. Instead of a traditional god, however, the narrator's eyes meet with a symbol of earthly authority. Comparing his clock with the one in the tower and finding that they don't match, he naturally assumes his is incorrect. The picture we have is that of a man who seeks to work within the system, where the system is the church or the bureaucracy, which are equivalent in Kafka's eyes.

The problem for the narrator comes when he finds that he does not know how to find his way through the city; he is an alien there. Going to the obvious figure in search of help leads nowhere- the policeman either doesn't know or isn't telling. The narrator asking for the "way" is an obvious metaphor for finding the way in a religious sense, and Kafka again equates religion and bureaucracy by posed such a loaded question not to a priest but to a police officer. The narrator naturally receives no enlightenment from the officer, and you could read the name "protection man" as being an implication that his function is to 'protect' the narrator from the discovery of the empty void behind the facade of authority. We're left with the image of the narrator running through empty, meaningless streets looking for a way that does not exist.

Of course, it's easy for me to interpret it that way, since I hate bureaucracies too. We should all just stop paying taxes and live in a demand -driven econo-government. Yeah. Anyhow, I thought it was a pretty well-crafted little story, and hopefully you at least enjoyed reading Kafka, if not my comments.