Visiting Germany, April 2015

My third trip to Europe this last April was probably the most interesting thing I did this year.    I decided to fly to Berlin, Germany and after six days or so head to Munich for another six days.  I wanted to make some side trips to interesting cities, and, eventually ended up going to Salzburg, Austria for one day, and to Hohen

Fernsehturm and Church, Berlin

schwangau where the last few Kings of Bavaria had their summer home.  This is where “Mad King” Ludwig I built his magnificent and expensive Neuschwanstein Castle, which is a 19th century fantasy castle in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. After all this I took the train back to Berlin and fly home the next day.  It was two weeks altogether.

To go to Berlin, you have to change planes in Munich anyway so why not visit Munich first and take the train to Berlin and then back to Munich so I could fly home from there?   Apparently it was cheaper to book a flight to Berlin than to fly nonstop to Munich. Berlin does not have a world class airport although they are working on building one in Brandenburg.  I was unsure if it was advisable to just skip the Berlin leg of the trip but as it turned out it was a pleasant journey in a somewhat antiquated jet.  They had to bus us out to a different part of the airport and we climbed on using a moving staircase. 

Berlin was fun.  It was hipster heaven and kind of a museum of the bygone days of communism.    I stayed in the former Eastern sector and most of what I saw was in the Eastern sector.   

statue of German construction worker

The German Democratic Republic was big on massive apartment blocks, statues of Marx and Engels, (forget Lenin, he wasn’t German) and a few memorable building facades illustrating the valiant young socialist youth doing battle with fascism and happy workers building the socialist paradise.  In East Berlin all the streets are named after Socialist heroes of various kinds.   My hostel was right across the street from the U-bahn stop named for Rosa Luxemburg.

down with imperialism

A nearby street was named for Karl Liebknecht.  They were German communists who tried to start a Russian-style revolution in Germany just after the first world war, but the Freikorps paramilitary made short work of them, so they became martyrs to the cause.  When the Soviets finally occupied the Eastern Sector in 1945, they renamed all the streets in the East for these socialist heroes. 

Henry Moore's:  Does this dress make my butt look big? (Munich)

Apparently the Soviets took a lot of art and loot back to Russia with them, which they haven’t returned, but left enough of it behind to fill several large art museums on the Museum Island.   Of course the Germans did a lot of their own looting and pillaging so there you are.  

The Hohenzollern Schloss rises again

The old Hohenzollern Schloss sat in the middle of the Museum Island and was pretty badly damaged in the Second World War.  The Soviets decided to have it demolished and built something else on it.  Now, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall the Germans are rebuilding an exact replica of the Schloss on the original site.  The whole area is a huge construction site.  I feel like maybe I should come back in a few years when it is all finished. 

The only statue of Lenin I could find was in the German Historical Museum.

Lenin rescued from the scrap heap of history

Apparently it was one that was taken from somewhere in Lithuania and scheduled to be melted down but the war ended and it was saved.    As for the Hitler era, it is as though it never existed. It is there, certainly, but you have to go looking for it.  Hitler’s bunker is now buried under a parking lot somewhere.  There are only a few extant buildings from the Hitler era, and the Russians and the German Democratic Republic were not much into historic preservation.   I suppose I could have gone to see the remnants of Dachau or the one near Berlin, but the whole thing is such a downer.  I chose instead to go see the art museums and the antiquities from an older time.  The Gemaldegalerie was excellent, as were the art galleries in Munich and other parts of Berlin.

The Berlin wall still has remnants here and there and there are a few places where it has been preserved, mostly covered extensively with graffiti.  The graffiti is sort of a shape-shifting wall art museum or the best of it is.   The worst of it is just the same as what you can see in Chicago and just as ugly. 

crossing the wall

What is worse is that people continue to mark up and scrawl their names on some really great and interesting mural art.  I think it is a bit like scrawling a moustache on the Mona Lisa.  But hey, it’s outdoors and the weather will destroy it eventually anyway.  Visiting the St. Georgen Friedhof, a large cemetery on the eastern side of Berlin was instructive.  I saw what definitely looked like machine gun tracer, shrapnel and bomb scars on many of the memorials.  I expect that cemetery was once the site of a battle. 

Apart from the wall there are memorials that preserve the guard towers and the death zone that the German communists called “The anti-fascism defensive rampart” when in actuality it was a wall

old guard tower

put up to prevent East Germany from losing all its skilled workers to the west.   Around Potsdamer Platz I  got a close look at some of the old guard towers with gun ports.  Apparently the wall guards who didn’t have the nerve to shoot people were arrested by the Stasi. 

German beer puts American beer to shame, however, and, being a habitual insomniac, I was regularly down at Belushi’s bar having a late night snack of German potato chips and Franziskaner beer watching some football match between Dusseldorf and Manchester FC. 

Midnight snack

The euro has near parity with the dollar and it was not that expensive.

The rest of the trip I’ll summarize below in probably too much detail: 

April 21.  Went to the Gemaldegalerie, which is in the Kulturforum, near Potsdamer Platz.  Spent several hours there, then went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedaechtniskirche and visited the Berlin Zoo.  That evening I learned that there was going to be a national rail strike.

April 22  I checked out of my hostel and took a couple of streetcars to get to the Hauptbahnhof where they told me that getting to Munich was not impossible. Apparently by re-routing my journey west to Hannover and then south to

train to Berlin

Munich I could get to Munich just about as soon as I would have without the strike.  It took up a day’s time anyway.  I arrived in Munich at around 5 pm. and checked into my hostel.

April 23.  I walked around central Munich, visited two of the major churches of Munich admired the baroque architecture and the Zentralbahnhof.

the famous glockenspiel at Marienplatz, Munich

 

April 24. Caught an early train to Salzburg, Austria, walked the streets of Salzburg, visited the gardens of the Schloss Mirabell, climbed the Kapuchinerberg to the Monastery, 

nice dress but her breath was terrible

saw Stefan Zweig’s memorial, visited the Dom zu Salzburg and had a meal and a beer at a April fest celebration before taking the train back to Munich.

April 25, 2015:  took a train to Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein near Fussen in the Bavarian Alps.  Toured both castles and hiked up to the Marienbrucke which has a nice view of the Castle from

Neuschwanstein tower

above, then took the bus back to the station and took the train back to Munich.

April 26.  That morning took a long walk from my hotel up the Luisenstrasse and visited the old North Cemetery.  Then after lunch somwhere I spent the afternoon at the Alte Pinakothek.  Then I walked down another street, stopped briefly at the Nazi documentation Center, which was closed or under construction. went back to my hostel for a while then walked around the immediate neighborhood.

April 27.  On this day I walked in a southeast direction along Schwanthalerstrasse to the church of Saint Paul near the Theresienwiese. 

From there I went to this large open area where there was a giant carnival going on with rides, etc. that was the Volksfest.  Then I visited the giant Statue of Bavaria and the hall of heroes which contained marble busts of just about every eminent person from Bavaria I had ever heard of and many I hadn’t.  From there I wandered in a easterly direction along the Mozartstrasse and had lunch at the Goetheplatz at the local McDonald’s, before continuing along the Lindwurmstrasse to the Old South Cemetery

which is a huge old cemetery with many fine stones.  After that I followed the Pestalozzistrasse back north to explore the Sendlinger Tor, the Sendlinger Strasse and Oberanger strasse, visited the Asam church and the Viktualenmarkt and had supper at another Nordsee.  I visited the Marienplatz again a couple of times before and after dark.

April 28.  Took the train back to Berlin from Munich, relaxed at the hostel in yet another room at the St. Christopher’s Hostel for one more night.

April 29.  Took a bus back to the airport in Berlin. Took the plane back to Munich, then flew back to the US, arriving around sunset. Our plane passed the southern Tip of Greenland in daylight and I got a nice view of the terrain there before continuing across the icy wastes of Northern Quebec.

New York Scenes

Columbus Day in Manhattan

Father Goose with Cary Grant and Leslie Caron (1964)

In this film you have a man who has done his best to get away from the world, but is not succeeding.  The film opens with the title character, Walter (Cary Grant), as an expat American who seems to have two hobbies, drinking and enjoying his boat.  This is spite of the live fire that is going on around him and the Japanese war in the Pacific.  He also has a casual way with the property of the Royal Navy as represented by the local commander, Houghton (Trevor Howard).   Known to Houghton, he is not arrested but is enlisted somewhat against his will as an observer on an island to watch for enemy Japanese activity.  While he is being dropped off the commander accidentally on purpose damages his boat so he ends up stuck there on the island. 

He tows the damaged boat to a lagoon in his dinghy and puts up camouflage so it won't be spotted from the air, but the larger boat is not seaworthy any more and ends up partially sunk in the lagoon.   So he settles down to life as a Royal Navy enemy spotter.  

At this juncture he is sent to investigate a distress call from a nearby island in his dinghy.

  There he discovers that the observer for that island has been killed and what is more that a group of seven schoolgirls and their guardian a fortyish schoolteacher (Leslie Caron)  have been stranded on the island.   Exactly why or how I don't remember,   They are the children of diplomatic personnel.  but agree to go with him back to his island.  It becomes clear they can barely fit in his little boat but they do and they make it back to his island.  

When they do, the stage is set for Walter to develop, albeit reluctantly, fatherly and protective instincts that for him up till then he had little use.   

It is a cute tale that follows a rather predictable course but I was not overly bothered by that.  The little girls are adorable and the interaction between Grant and Caron is entertaining.   It is a story that is part Gilligan's Island and part African Queen.  The villainous and threatening Japanese serve to move the story along.  I enjoyed the film.

French Cinema: Moliere by Laurent Tirard (2007)

Molière was a French playwright and actor who lived in the middle of the 17th century.  At the outset of the film you sense that his life was not an easy one.  We see him tossed in prison for unpaid debts.  This is biographical but what follows is fiction, and a kind of a pastiche of Moliere's comedies, for which he was deservedly famous. 

In this story he is bailed out of this bad situation by a wealthy merchant, M. Jourdain,  who has  desires for a noble woman, Celemine, even though he is already married.  To capture her heart, he hires Molière to instruct him in acting and to consult on the play that he has written to impress her. 

The comedy ensues from these ill-fated efforts and the schemings of his "friend" Dorante who is a member of the French nobility but is financially strained.  Indeed, his chateau is falling to pieces and is needing of much expensive renovation. 

So there you have it, the rich merchant in search of noble connections and a Count in search of a new infusion of money.  His son wants to work, but to the nobility to work is beneath their dignity.    

Everyone in this story has an angle and a secret objective.  While Jourdain is attempting not very successfully to woo Celemine 17th century style, Moliere is having more success with his neglected wife.   And because it is a comedy drawn from Moliere's own famous comedies, all's well that ends well. It is a beautifully photographed and enjoyable period comedy.     

 

Steve McQueen in "Bullitt" (1968)

This is a first rate detective thriller which stacks up quite well compared to Clint Eastwood in "Dirty Harry", which came out three years later.  It is fascinating as a kind of sixties time capsule.  There is for example Robert Duvall in a small part as a taxi driver and Jacqueline Bisset as Bullitt's wife.  There is Robert Vaughn, looking like an earlier day Matthew Broderick, and most famous as TV's  Man from UNCLE who plays an officious asshole politician.  There is of course Steve McQueen who plays the hard-bitten police detective in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, San Francisco. 

Bullitt's long suffering mustang

And there is the memorable chase scene through the vertical grid of the city, which forces a grid on terrain that should never have had a grid imposed on it.  

Two interesting things about the airport scenes too, there's some guy smoking a cigarette while waiting to  board the aircraft, and when the bad guy is cornered in the back of the aircraft and jumps to the tarmac  he pulls out a gun to fire at Bullitt.   I mean who would smoke anywhere in an airport and most obviously in line to get on a plane, and who would just happen to have his shoulder holstered pistol carried around as nonchalantly as if one were carrying an i-phone on board.  Things have changed certainly.

Vaughn and McQueen

Like most detective stories, the plot is confusing, did not make sense, or maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention.  There were loose threads of narrative that one would hope to tie together but never are.  The whole reason Bullitt was involved in this matter was to help ensure the safety of a government witness against the mob.  Frank Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) wishes to use the man as a surprise witness in the senate hearing in San Francisco the following Monday.  All Bullitt has to do is ensure his safety for the weekend.  Unfortunately somehow the hit men track the witness down and break into the the room, shooting the police detective and the government witness.  

The bad guys

One wonders why if they didn't have time to finish the job there in the seedy hotel, why did they think they would have time to do the job in the hospital later?  Obviously because otherwise there would have been no story.   Bad guys in general are notoriously bad shots, even with a pump action shotgun.  Later they prove they are not very good at safe driving either.  

I won't say anything more about the story other than to say that it it was a great film and held my interest easily throughout.  The fact that Bullitt was a married man with a loving wife (Jacqueline Bisset no less)

and we see a lot of her made me think she was doomed.  In an action film, whenever a man has a happy married relationship with a woman she is doomed.  Well almost always.    Watch the film.

Wolfgang Peterson's "Das Boot" The directors cut (1981)

This is a great film about WWII submarine warfare.  Never mind the fact that they were on the wrong side of the war in service to an evil regime.  Apart from the masters they served, they were merely men who were trying to do their best they could in a system they did not fully understand.  Like the American sailors in "From Here to Eternity", most of the enlisted men were scarcely men at all, but boys.  And their preoccupations were wine, women, and song before and after doing their highly unpleasant jobs is an example of  a universal of human nature at least in Western culture.  .  

Submariners of any nationality have long had to contend with the claustrophobic environment of the interior of their ship, and not much else. 

The sweat and stink of a crew of maybe 20 men who work in shifts cut off from sunlight and any sense of night and day.   And as increasingly becomes the case towards the end of the Second World War, the hunters were also the hunted, as increasingly sophisticated methods of anti-submarine warfare drew the noose tighter on the very ones who were trying to strangle the vital sea links between North America and Great Britain.  The fact is that of the approximately 40,000 sailors in the U-boat service for

Germany, only 10,000 survived the war.  Underwater locating technology and both sides, depth charges, and ASDIC (Sonar) fortunately evened the odds in favor of the Allies before the end of the war.   

There are some memorable scenes in this film, which swings continually from calm to horror/terror and back again.  In one scene they are surveying the burning wreck of an allied tanker, and assuming that the convoy would have picked up the survivors hours ago, they send in a torpedo as a coup de grace. 

It is only then that they discover that the survivors have not been rescued, and that by sending a gratuitous torpedo its way they have ensured that the survivors would not survive. And the scenes where they are desperately trying to fix the engines and the pumps while submerged, even resting on the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar.   

I have no way of judging the "realism" of this film, other than it seemed plenty "real" to me:  the claustrophobia, the bad air, the

tight spaces, the dim light, the sounds of the metal plates of the ship creaking and snapping as the pressure of the water becomes greater and greater, even in the quieter moments when the captain put on various samples of his record collection for broadcast throughout the submarine.  As I have said, a great film and perhaps the greatest sub warfare film ever made.  Never mind that it was over 3 hours long in the director's cut, it was gripping from beginning to end.

British Film: Stephan Elliott's Easy Virtue (2008)

Another take on the British minor nobility, which are clearly a dying breed.  This one is set in 1920s England in a large country house and a troubled family with two daughters who are destined to become spinsters and a husband who is cold and distant (Colin Firth).  The head of the household is clearly the mother, who is dismayed when her only son comes home from the south of France with a new American wife in tow.  She is a race car driver whom he met and had a whirlwind romance.  However much was not worked out apparently when he tied the knot. 

She had not bargained for his obnoxious family, and he had not bargained for her less than immaculate past.  The women in the house instantly despise her, and this sets up the comedy that follows.  The Whittakers are fox hunters and like to go shooting, and the new wife (Jessica Biel) is dead against blood sports. 

They want the boy to take over the family estate, which is danger of being sold off and subdivided owing to their precarious finances, and she wants the boy to move to London with her and (horrors!) work for a living.  Even the art they like is different.  The family likes the old traditional stuff, and she likes Picasso and even brings one from Paris which she says is a representation of her.

  

A deft combination of comedy and pathos, I will not spoil the ending, except to say that is was a satisfying ending.  I highly recommend the film.  

British Film: The Ruling Class (1972) starring Peter O'Toole

 Of course there is nothing  funny at all about schizophrenia, but the awkwardness of a group of rich people faced with schizophrenia in the main heir to the house of Gurney might be.  And against the backdrop of trying to maintain the proprieties and traditions of British nobility, it can be.  The fact that Jack (Peter O'Toole) suffers the delusion that he is Jesus, the son of God, leads to some amusing dialogue.  He wears his hair long in the fashion of Jesus, he has installed a giant cross platform in the main hall of the house and goes up there to nap. 

His uncle and aunt and his adult son, who also live at the ancestral home, plot more or less openly to have Jack committed once they can get him to produce a male heir. 

The members of the household of the 14th Earl of Gurney are an adulterous bunch, the German psychiatrist, Herder, in the nearby insane asylum/ mental hospital is having an affair with the aunt.  The uncle offers up his mistress, Grace, as Jack's wife.  Jack and Grace are duly married in the Church of England with all the festivity one would expect. 

Meanwhile the manservant Tucker, a closet "Bolshie" who drinks too much,  is making snide remarks about the upper classes and seems to be Jack's only real friend.  

In time a male heir is born, also named Jack.  Now the uncle can spring his trap.  He calls over the psychiatric examiner to determine in his judgment whether Jack is insane or not.   However Jack has suddenly and seemingly "recovered" from his delusions that he is Jesus, owing to a staged confrontation with another mental patient who also thinks of himself as God.  This is effected with the help of the asylum director Herder who brings this lunatic along with two dark suited men to restrain him during a thunderstorm.  It seems to work.

 The next day, Jack is shorn of his Jesus locks, the beard, and is apparently recovered.  He now calls himself "Jack" which is his given name and seems ready and willing to assume his new duties as the 14th Earl of Gurney.   

It gradually becomes clear that Jack is not "recovered" at all.  Unfortunately Jack has merely traded one delusional identity as Jesus for another, that of "Jack the Ripper".

  As the Earl he is accepted along with his now harsh views of criminal justice and the best way to quell civil disorder.  Whereas Jesus was the Prince of Peace and the God of Love,  Jack is none of this.    However as a stodgy conservative in the House of Lords he fits right in.  His young wife is truly in love with him, his aunt is in love with him, and that's too bad, because he's Jack the Ripper and he murders them both.  End of story.

Clearly this is not the kind of film you would take a date to, expecting to score the late innings.  It is funny and even brilliant in parts, but the frequent swings between stark realism and whimsy (and even song and dance) is liable to cause the viewer to suffer from plot whiplash.   Are we watching a story of a madman or are we going mad ourselves?  Meanwhile the fox during the fox hunt pauses to relieve itself against a tree.

Harlaxton Manor, which is now owned by the University of Evansville.

  

The Magic Christian (1969) starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr

I remember Badfinger's song "Come and Get It" from way back in my misspent youth in the early 1970s, however the film which inspired it was another thing.  I saw it for the first time this week, and it was about what I expected.  The late 1960s and early 1970s were a pretty crazy time, and if you like this sort of surreal humor and practical jokes so much the better.

Basically it is the story of fabulously rich Sir Guy Grand, whose hobby is playing practical jokes, mainly through the application of cash.  It was loosely adapted from the Terry Southern comic novel of the same name.  In the film Grand (Peter Sellers) meets a homeless man, subsequently known as Youngman Grand (Ringo Starr) in a London Park and legally adopts him.

  For example, for a large amount of money he bribes one of the teams competing in a regatta on the Thames to ram the other team's boat.   In another scene he persuades an actor playing Hamlet to do a strip tease while reciting his soliloquy "To be or not to be".   In another one they go grouse hunting with a   stuffy aristocratic set, and when the grouse is flushed, they turn bombs and missiles on the bird, finally flushing and simultaneously cooking the poor things with a flame thrower. 

He lives in a suitably grand country house with two female relations, Dame Agnes and Esther Grand.  They watch scenes of violent civil disorder and mayhem while pleasantly lolling in the parlor, or playing a game of battleships with live ammunition.

Christopher Lee as Ship's Vampire

The jokes are increasingly big ones as the film moves along.   Finally he commissions a luxury ocean liner with room only for the very richest passengers.    Here things reach a climax of silliness with various odd and untoward events ending with a mock abandon ship order where they emerge to discover the same Tower Bridge in London whence they had departed.    Finally Guy and Youngman preside over the ultimate practical joke. 

They fill a small swimming pool sized vat with urine, blood, and animal excrement and tempt the button down London city types to chase free money, which they are, in spite of the smell.  

It is moderately funny, this picture.  I guess the surreal humor takes a little getting used to.  One of the fun things about watching this picture are the numerous cameo performances, including Yul Brynner in drag singing to a passive bar sitter played by Roman Polanski, a traffic warden played by Spike Milligan (one of Sellers'
costars in the old Goon show), 

  Raquel Welch heading a room full of naked female galley slaves,  a salesman at Sotheby's played by John Cleese, the ship's vampire played by Christopher Lee, the Oxford coach of the regatta team (Richard Attenborough) and even Graham Chapman as one of the team members.   

The film can be seen on You Tube here.