A Beethoven Nacht in November

First I have to admit I’ve been really lazy about the blog this past week, as I’ve lacked much if not all motivation to do anything but read and imbibe my third or fourth cup of coffee for the day. My excuse is November…moody, complicated, much-lyricized November, the true calendrical trough with its bad weather, cold & flu, and all-but-totally exhausted fall fashion. For instance: the fur-lined over-sized hood and droopy cardigan + tights are about as expired as the bag of spinach sitting in the back of my mini-fridge. (The sort-of end of fresh produce being another major bust of late fall—we don’t really experience this in California, but I’m told that here in Germany one eats sauerkraut in the winter to keep scurvy at bay…)

That said, I’m overcompensating by trying to stay busy. So far, the rest of the month will entail an electronica show, a trip to Strasbourg, a trip to Tuebingen, and vegetarian Thanksgiving. And last Sunday night we went to a performance of Beethoven at the Stadthalle in Heidelberg, which, despite my somewhat lengthy, tangential complaint about November, is meant to be the subject of this post.

As you’ve probably already guessed, going to the orchestra isn’t usually how I spend my time on the weekends. I think people tend to use the word “layman” or “layperson” to describe a blob-ish, anonymous other—someone with whom they’re surely in contact but perhaps not ideally, someone to whom the circumstantial intelligencia may gently extend the stifled sympathy appropriate to those unwittingly impoverished beyond deliverance. But as I’ve already admitted to slothfulness I might as well come out of the closet as a Layperson as well: I know nothing whatsoever about music. Particularly not classical—I’ve seen a fair amount of opera and I really enjoy music, but the absence of any kind of visual component at an orchestra performance puts me pretty seriously out of my comfort zone. Like, what should I do with my eyes?? So to be honest I wasn’t sure how I would like Beethoven Nacht.

I prepared before hand: I wore black, uncomfortable clothing to blend in. I had a double espresso dumped into a large Heisseschokolade. And, as if departing on a long, east-bound Greyhound journey, I packed a pen and notebook, a novel I’m reading (just in case!), a bottle of water, chewing gum, and a camera. I was ready.

Once we arrived there was a minor, unexpected obstacle: we couldn’t find our seats and no one working there seemed to know where they might be. A lengthy search went underway until they panicked, improvised, and gave us two empty spots right behind an obstructing pillar—hardly any view at all!—just in time. The performance was beginning!

The Stadt violinist Philippe Mesin performed first and (in my Lay- estimation) was extremely good. And despite the sort of obstructed view of the stage and my anxiety over not having anything to watch, it was really awesome, actually, to see people playing instruments and exerting so much concentration in unison. The music was really beautiful and, to my surprise, not at all difficult to appreciate, even without any knowledge of its technical nuances. And amazing to me, too, that it was so easy to understand and appreciate the music’s nonverbal expression, immersed as I am in so much unfamiliar language and lost efforts at communication.

After the show I went to use the bathroom like everyone else there. The line was about 20 people long and snaked out of the restroom. I listened to the German language murmuring about (I guessed) the show, about post-show fatigue (it was 4 hours long!), the endless wait for the bathroom. When I finally advanced through the door, there was a very strong, very unexpected and disgusting smell: someone had vomited all over the floor and was smearing it around with a wet paper towel. Whoa! There was still a considerable wait remaining during which we would all be huffing the fumes of stomach acid. It was really awkward. Someone seemed to ask if she needed help, she seemed to reply that she was fine. Other remarks of restrained sympathy and disgust seemed to float through the line.

And then, with total clarity, I heard a woman behind me ask, “ist das Concert so schleckt??” The horrible tension of vomit + evening wear broke; everyone laughed way too hard—especially me because I was so excited to understand my first German joke! Was the concert so bad?? No! It was incredibly awesome!

St. Marien and Marzipan: what’s doing in Luebeck

Luebeck was the second and last stop after Hamburg on this past weekend’s trip. Having lost my itinerary, forgotten my guidebook, and maybe only heard of Luebeck once ever, on the way there I asked one of the other students in the tour group what it was we were going there to see.

“Marzipan.”

The funny thing about a lot of international students hanging out together is that most of us still have very heavy and diverse accents, find entirely different parts of German speech utterly unpronounceable, and generally have a hard time understanding each other.

“What?”

“Marzipan.”

“Is that like a place? a church?”

“No, marzipan! To eat.”

I got a similar response, albeit inflected very differently, from 3 other students, and it was beginning to seem like marzipan was the thing to look forward to. And as it turned out, it really was the (very good) reason for going to Luebeck—that and another (you got it!) church.

The marzipan we have in the U.S. is pretty widely disliked, I think (though of course not so much as licorice). It’s way too sweet, made almost completely of almond extract and high fructose corn syrup, and the texture is really Play-doh-ish. In fact, it is a variety of Play-doh. I’m saying these things and yet I’m no expert, I have almost no idea! because since it’s so gross I tend to avoid it, toss its half-eaten, chocolate covered remains back into the box of Russell-Stover’s and move on with my afternoon. But it’s pretty different thing here, in that it’s actually made mostly of almonds—57% almonds! says the box of marzipan I bought. And it’s totally delicious and, even better, they make it in all different colors and sculpt/mold it into all kinds of shapes—baby Jesus, for instance, or a green bell pepper. I wish I had more pictures, actually, but my camera was nearly out of batteries. My favorite marzipan, though, is what seems to be the standard version, the “kartoffeln.” That is, “potatoes”—balls of marzipan dusted in unsweetened cocoa. It’s actually the least convincing of the endless marzipan object-mimicry, but it really tastes great. And they make marzipan tea! It actually tastes like marzipan, you'd be surprised. I kind of got into this marzipan thing.

That other, somewhat less funny thing we went to Luebeck to see was St. Marien (or St. Maria) basilica, possibly one of the most extraordinary and decidedly grim places I’ve been in a long time. The nave in St. Marien’s church is 38.5 meters, and the spires outside are 125. It was begun in 1251 and apparently set the style for about 70 other succeeding churches in the Baltic region. The night preceding Palm Sunday in 1942, St. Marien’s church was partially destroyed during a British air raid (similar to the story at St. Nikolai’s), and the bells crashed to the ground. The church was reconstructed/restored beginning in 1947 but the bells were left lying in memorial. Here are the pictures:

Perhaps the best and most optimistic thing about the church, though, is a completely ridiculous statue of the devil, twirling his beard and sitting on a rock outside the entrance:

The legend, as described on a plaque outside the church, is that when the first stones of St. Marien’s were laid, the Devil thought they were building a wine bar. He was excited about that idea, so he started to help build it. As a result of his efforts, the church was going up at a remarkably fast pace, until one day he realized what was going on. He was very mad about it, so he grabbed a huge stone to smash in the walls he had just been building when someone shouted to him, “Just stop it, Mr. Devil! Leave what has already been erected! For you we will build a wine bar here in the neighborhood!” So the devil was apparently okay with this, dropped the stone (the one his statue’s sitting on in the picture, of course), and right next-door the workers built the wine cellar of the town hall.

(!!!)

Hamburg Unexpurgated

It’s hard to know where to begin recounting our long weekend in Hamburg without being redundant; without describing an infernally long tour bus ride that began at a way-too early hour of this past Saturday morning that involved some amount of rain. The difference between this trip and the last one to Weimar, however, is that Hamburg was entirely worth it. As one would like to do in real life, I’ll skip the bus ride part and get straight to the city.

Since it’s such a long way (about an 8 hour drive), we got in around 3 in the afternoon. Our first stop was St. Nikolai’s church, the building of which was completed in 1874 in Gothic revival architectural style (so it looks a lot older than it is), and then bombed during an air raid in World War II. Rather than having been rebuilt and restored like so many others, what is left of the church after the bombing remains in ruins in the middle of the city. The result is really spectacular—a traditional religious space turned secular war memorial, rain falling into it. It’s kind of sculptural mise-en-abyme, also, having become a place for other very beautiful works of public art.

Next we checked out the Rathaus of Hamburg. It’s kind of an awesome building and still functions as the seat of government for the city. Then we walked around the canals in the downtown a bit before checking into our hostel.

The place where we stayed is called Meininger hostel, which I actually want to take a minute to recommend. After having slept in at least one if not two completely awful places last year while traveling with my sister, this place was comparatively great—it wasn’t too remotely located, the rooms were very clean and new, breakfast was included in the price, and towels were available for free at the desk (in a lot of places you have to either rent one or bring your own, which (unsurprisingly) I forgot to do). It doesn't have the personality of the smaller hostels, but it's a pretty decent stand-by for comfort/cleanliness in a lot of the bigger cities in Europe. We dropped off our things and went out again to see what there is to do in Hamburg.

Of course, there's everything to do! It was Saturday night on Halloween weekend in Germany’s second most populated city that is also home to the notorious St. Pauli red-light district. The city is apparently full of great bars—we went to a sofa lounge called Zoe’s where we tried the local beer, Astra (it was decent but I have a general complaint about the hype surrounding German beer that I’ll save for a later post), and another place called Rosie’s, which served very cheap drinks and played an amazing mix of 60s soul music.

Appropriately buzzed, we went to see if St. Pauli could live up to its reputation. And disappointingly, I don’t actually know. The pictures here are of Reeperbahnstrasse and Grosse Freiheit (fantastically translating to “Great Freedom”) but apparently the majority of bordellos are located on Herbertstrasse, where it’s completely verboten for any woman (who is not a prostitute) to set foot. According to one guide book, women who have gone on Herbertstrasse have had verbal abuse and buckets of beer or urine thrown upon them. This isn’t how it works in Amsterdam, where (at least in my experience there) anyone who wants to see what's happening can. It’s just such a weird and seemingly out-of-date prohibition that I have no idea what it means, no idea how to engage with it. So I didn't. Limited as our voyeurism was, we walked around a bit and had the icky, ambivalent feeling that legalized prostitution tends to leave behind in a person. Then we went to a pretty ordinary bar/dance club on Reeperbahn and ended our night around 3am—not nearly late enough, however, to keep up with the Hamburgers, who smoothly transition from the night clubs to the Fish Market, which opens between 5 and 6 in the morning on Sundays to feed disheveled partiers. Instead, we went back to the Hostel for about 4 hours of sleep before making our way there.

The fish market is the best! If you’ve been to Pike’s Place in Seattle, it’s quite similar to that—except that Hamburg’s Fish Market is about 3 times the size, and they don’t sell coffee as much as they do beer—lots and lots of it to all the Germans continuing or just starting to party in the early morning. We took these pictures around 9am to the sounds of an American rock music cover band doing Steppenwolf and Green Day:

After the Fish Market we took a boat ride tour of the harbor on the Elbe, which is so big it seems like the ocean. I think the pictures mostly speak for themselves, except that it’s so interesting how exciting and aesthetically pleasing industry and shipping are to pretty much everyone. And seeing really, impossibly big stuff, like cranes that can move 3-times-Titantic-sized ships. Why do we like this? We really do.

Hauptkirche St. Michaelis was next. I am beginning to understand why people say they’re over the churches of Europe and don’t really care much about seeing another one—sightseeing in some cities is almost exclusively comprised of visiting Big Impressive Church after Big Impressive Church. Who knows how long this will last, but I’m still really impressed. What was so awesome about St. Michaelis, however, wasn’t really the church itself. The inside of it is gaudy and looks like a theater in a Rococo-ish palace. And the architecture is not as awesome as that of bombed St. Nikolai’s. But we were able to climb the stairs to the top of St Michaelis’s, which gave a nice (if foggy) view of the city. And on the way down the bells in the tower started ringing—of course, this must happen, well, at least every hour of the day, but it seemed especially lucky to experience it. Passing within 3 feet of the enormous bells was an event for the entire body—you could feel the sound vibrating at the very center of your chest and stomach, and left you feeling shaky afterward for a good ten minutes. It was a completely awesome sound experience that was, gratefully, totally beyond photography.

After St. Michaelis and a coffee break to get out of the rain, we went to the Kunsthalle, which is far too big to have covered in the amount of time we had to spend there—it’s actually two enormous buildings that are connected by an underground tunnel, an entire wing of which is dedicated to contemporary art. We saw mostly the old stuff, though, and some really fantastic 19th and 20th century pieces—particular favorites were Paul Klee’s Revolution des Viadukts, Edward Munch’s Madonna, and a lot of great pieces by Emil Nolde, whose work I hadn’t seen much of before.

That was pretty much the end of the day, as well as our time in Hamburg. Unable to rally for more drinking and St Pauli debauchery, we settled for pizza.

The next morning, we left for Luebeck.