Even if your first instinct is to not like Germany, it’s hard to sustain that feeling. Whatever else you may say about it, it just seems to work.
Back in the day I used to spend a lot of time in the Fatherland. General Motors (actually, in Germany it was Adam Opel Motors) had it’s headquarters in Russelsheim near Frankfort and I had to pay hommage to the muckety mucks as well as deal with our own folks there from time to time. Almost all my previous time here has been work related with little time for tourism or idle observations. Not so now. Well, technically I’m working for the next couple of days, but not like I used to work.
I arrived yesterday after a surprisingly nice flight on AA to a new terminal at Frankfort am Main. Why can’t we seem to manage new terminals at our aging airports in the US. Been to LAX lately? How about JFK? By the time I’d checked in, tried the breakfast buffet and taken a short nap it had started to rain…which it pretty much did for the rest of my stay. Some things never change. But a lot has changed here. One can’t help but notice. On the surface, Frankfort looked pretty much the same. Lots of tallish glass buildings of dubious architecture. Large apartment blocks of undistinguished character, and a few attempts at capturing the look and feel of pre-war Germany by doing the Hansel and Gretel type rehab.
As I’m sure you remember, Frankfort was 85% destroyed by allied bombing in the mid to later stages of WWII. I mean bombed absolutely flat. One bombing raid conducted by the 8th Air Force of the United States was credited with killing 5000 people. Not to mention creating a lot of piles of brick. I can only speculate as to whether the bombs distinguished with much precision the difference between those wearing uniforms and those not. But back to the future. They rebuilt (with our help) and now Frankfort is a booming financial center with a population of over 700.000. While it’s only fifth in size among German cities, it may be first in influence due to the concentration of both German and foreign financial institutions located here.
Ok. We all know the general characteristics of Germany and the German people. It starts out….it’s a nice place, but I wouldn’t want to live there. The German people are humorless, overweight and overbearing. They wear funny clothes and little felt hats with a small feather. They drink barrels of beer and eat the fatty parts of pigs stuffed with potatoes and large, lumpy noodles. Germany itself is populated by large cars driven too fast and highways, (autobahns) that accommodate a form of kamikaze driving technique. The trains run on time but their language is unintelligible to anyone not named Goethe. Their art runs to the bizarre from horribly depressing paintings to sculptures that even the artists don’t pretend to understand. Germany has lots of trees and rivers which are more or less appreciated in the abstract. Germans pretend to enjoy them, but what the really like is sitting in a huge beer tents in October (or any other month) knocking back unending quantities of lager (which they call Pils for pilsner) and eating pigs knuckles served by heavy but fetching beer maids who can handle up to 8 liters of suds at a time.
I know all of this sounds negative, and perhaps I have overgeneralized just a bit about Germany and Germans. There are many good things here as well. There are big, fast cars and…well, there are a lot of big, fast cars. And oh, yes there is the money thing. They are solvent. For a country of slightly less land mass than Montana they are have become the 4th largest economy in the world at about $3.3 trillion. Montana, on the other hand, is 48th in the US at $36 billion. Montana has more oil and elk though.
I didn’t intend for this to become a tutorial on things Germanic, so let me get on to my impressions after a 20 year absence. In no particular order:
1.They now have bacon on their breakfast buffets….and fried eggs. I know this may not seem like much, but I was used to the buffet ladened with mystery meats, soft cheeses, wilted lettuce leaves, and soft boiled eggs. In the old days if they tried to offer what passed for bacon, one was well advised to cut a wide swath around it.
2. One kg of vine ripened tomatoes (2.2 pounds) costs 1 Euro. That’s about $.70 per pound compared to $2.99 at our local Whole Foods. So they are doing something right. On the other hand, petrol is about $10.00 per gallon. Hmmm.
3. Trains and train stations. You know what I’m going to say here. They are fantastic. Since it was raining yesterday and the museums are closed on Mondays, I decided to look over the train station. Yes, I know that doesn’t reflect well on my imagination. The bottom line….I didn’t want to leave. I could live there. Restaurants and food stalls of high quality and amazing diversity. Books shops and newsstands that have to be seen to be believed. I could buy a magazine or a newspaper from pretty much any place in the world. Post office, bank, video arcade, beer garden, wine bar, grocery store…it had it all. And it was clean, well organized and absent of homeless people trying to cage money.
4. Food. Let me say three words about German food. Sausage, sausage, sausage. I’m a man who never saw a sausage he didn’t like and there’s a lot for me to like here. I stood and watched a vendor at a sausage (wurst) stand serve his customers. You could get any one of a dozen different offerings chopped, on a bun, on a stick or solo. With mustard, mystery sauce, dry flavorings or plain. Wow. All for the price of a tasteless 7-11 dog at home.
5. Speaking of dogs, they don’t have many. I couldn’t figure this out for awhile until I read the small print in my Frommers. They tax dogs. I don’t know how much, but it must be significant. Compared to Paris, Frankfurt is a relative dog desert. And, get this, they have banned 13 breeds who the Germans have determined to be “attack breeds”. That is to say they are too aggressive for polite society. I guess they learned something from the War. Oh, I almost forgot, they have identified another 29 breeds that are almost aggressive and require that these be muzzled before they can face the public. Is this a great country or what? If they could only keep the remaining ones from barking and sh**ing on the sidewalks.
6. Diversity. This was never a big objective of the Germans, but they’ve got it in spades now. In the old days, all you saw around here besides a few tourists and American business men were Germans and Turks. The Germans were here because, well, they were born here, but the Turks were brought in in the 50’s to supplement the German workers that had been lost in the war. They needed someone to do the heavy lifting, and it was the Turks they chose. One small problem though. They forgot to figure out how to get them out after they let them in. But now, this place just reeks of diversity. All hues of color, all manner of language and culture, a regular smorgasbord of foods. I’ll betcha that Adolf is absolutely spinning in his grave….if he has one. I must say, I like it a lot better now.
7. Language. Unfortunately they still speak German here, but they speak a lot of other stuff as well, and their English has improved. Well, at least the Turkish guy at the front desk spoke it well, and even with a New Jersey accent.
I’m sure I’ll figure out some more items of interest as I travel around the country, and I’ll be glad to share it with you as well, but you will be in control of the delete button. I’ll be going to Nuremberg next and I’ve been boning up on my limited knowledge of the infamous Nuremberg trials. That’s just a teaser to keep you tuned in.
Gary in Germany.
