Have you ever been to Frankfurt? Some people love it.
I extended a layover on my way to Italy by a day to discover Germany, whose language I’d been studying and had lots of happy thoughts about. And while I had all my Italian accommodation lined up, I thought it would be extra fun for my first trip to Germany to leave it all to the fates in Frankfurt.
So with camping-size backpack on my back, and otherwise normal-size backpack on my front (otherwise, had it not been stuffed to the gills (Here’s a picture showing off its most useful feature when I bought it in Hong Kong’s TST… before it was stolen)), I navigated through Arrivals and was directed by a helpful baggage area money changer down the escalator to the subway station where I’d be able to take a train into town.
Which was where I found myself trying to understand a dense grid of information, looking like someone had populated an Excel spreadsheet with dummy data to appear impressive, and probably entirely accurate and useful to the patient and literate German.
So I studied it, worked it, cracked its code and from that felt the satisfaction of perseverance. I’m just kidding, I asked the guy next to me, the only guy there, who was reading it as well. Or rather actually reading it. And wearing a cowboy hat.
He was kind and smiled and explained how to get into town: get on the train and get off at the first stop. Pretty straightforward.
I couldn’t place his American accent though. Maybe the cowboy hat was throwing me off, setting expectations.
He was German, he said, and just returned home from a year in the American South-West where presumably he mastered our language.
I did as bidden and got off the train at the first stop, and through the terminal and out into the platz, ducking into the first cafe I could find. My plan, such as it was, had been that of course I’d find wifi immediately and from thence book a hotel and onward to victory. It was a little more complicated. But I managed and found the cheapest nearest hotel, neither as cheap nor as near as I’d hoped, but the nice thing about Euros, if not kilometers, is that they sound like less than they actually are.
So I crossed the cafe’s platz, and the wide cross street, and into the wider pedestrian boulevard which shot straight from the train station to what I would learn later was the European Central Bank tower, with its gaudy, great Euro symbol in electric blue hanging like a shingle.
The pedestrian boulevard was fascinating. All of this German stuff. Look at it all. Dönner stalls, advertisements which look normal except that they say funny things, and sex shops and prostitutes, and more sex shops… Wait a minute, I thought, is it just me or is there a preponderance of sex-related retailers here? I shyly and sidelong scanned the windows. And decided it was just me.
These Germans, I figured, they’re European. It’s just the way. It’s me that’s the problem. Me and all my kind, we’re just prudes. This is the way things are. And I maybe strode a little more confident in my newfound worldliness.
…
I took a corner and located my hotel, a dump of a shoebox, not the worst or the smallest I’ve stayed in, not even for the money, but still… So I got outta there, assuming statistically all of my possessions including the computers I depended on for my livelihood would be fine, and went out to explore the Deutschland I’d been thinking and dreaming of.
I walked to and discovered the ECB. They had a gift shop and I didn’t buy a poker chip with the Euro symbol on it (in retrospect, seems like a poor choice of knick-knack for the ECB gift shop).
I popped into an extremely quaint and traditional restaurant, sunken several steps beneath the sidewalk, all wood and dark, looked at the menu, chatted with the proprietor and promised to return when I was hungry (I wouldn’t, in fact. I knew I wouldn’t be back. I lied.).
And returned finally to the platz in front of the ECB, almost directly beneath the aforementioned tacky Euro symbol, where an Apfelwein festival was transpiring. I knew enough German to know that that meant cider (OK, it took me a minute to put it together), and I liked the sound of cider on this chill, early evening, particularly as it began to drizzle.
There were several carts, each serving their own apfelwein, as well as sauerkraut and snacks. I moved one to the next sampling everything and drinking hard cider. And finally came to settle at the one with the gal behind the counter who maybe was giving me the eye?
I drank her cider and then drank more. And still more. Who knew there were so many varieties? And then it started to rain. And then it really started to rain. The cart had an awning off the top which extended about a foot over the part where we fine patrons stood. And so we stood. What wound up being for quite a while. With nowhere to go and no one to talk to except for the person standing next to me (the woman behind the counter having, as it turned out, not been giving me the eye), I chatted up a middle-aged man in a suit. Let’s call him Wolf.
Wolf was in banking, which is apparently the second-oldest profession in Frankfurt, and I… well, I really had nothing to say about banking. So we talked about German history.
My first few hours in Germany. I’m a little drunk. He’s a little drunk. And there you have it: German History. Obviously I’m abbreviating the course of our conversation quite a bit here, but… well… Wolf was a little peeved about the whole collective guilt thing. It wouldn’t be the last time I would get this sentiment. But Wolf, unlike the younger Germans I’d talk to about it later, went a bit further. And, well, kinda blamed the Jews. Not for World War II, of course, but basically for making him feel bad today.
Two things occur to me, first that Wolf’s comments, and those of other Germans I’d meet later in other parts of Germany and Europe, belied a frustration with the collective guilt they seemed to feel they’d been made to feel all their lives. Guilt for wrongs they hadn’t committed personally, but rather their fathers or grandfathers had. As a German closer to my own age on a train to Munich and Oktoberfest said: history class growing up was learning how you’re bad.
One wonders if there’s any relation between this sentiment and the recent resurgence of nationalist populist powers in the country. Looking to those who’d make them feel good for being just who they are (if at the rhetorical, and perhaps otherwise, expense of those who aren’t).
The other thing that occurs is a diffuse and low-level antisemitism I’d catch wind of from time to time throughout The Continent. Chatting with people who I’d otherwise thought to be much like me (you know, not that racist), I’d be stopped short by some aside about The Jews controlling global finance, or similar. And I’d catch myself and say, if internally, hang on.
Now I’m not Jewish, but I attended more Passovers and Hanukkahs and Shabots growing up than the sacraments of the religion which I suppose I was born into (so how’s that for Jewish street cred). And we have these antennae we put out when talking to people, certain shibboleths we deploy, unthinkingly, looking for the social, political, class differentiator, ideological pronouncement, if only inferred falling funny on the ear. We do these things unconsciously with people we meet back home and they largely work, provide us with the dubious comfort of distinguishing Us from Them. And they should work. The model was built there. Home.
But abroad the strata are different somehow. You’re so like so many people and they’re like you in so many ways, except when they’re not. It’s disorienting.
…
Oh, and the boulevard between the trainstation and the ECB, the one with all the sex shops, is the red light district. I’d gotten off the train and remained strictly within its borders and returned to the train for the whole of my visit to Frankfurt and the whole of my first visit to Germany. And assumed, like with the few people I met, as we do all too easily, that this small map was the territory.
(But kinda crazy, huh, that the stretch carrying one directly from the train to the ECB, and entire banking district of Frankfurt, of all of Europe, is all sex?)