MUNICH DIARY

Was haben wir Getan?

The newspapers are full of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki anniversary, the headlines in Der Spiegel boast ´Was haben wir Getan? (well we´ve pre-empted the end of WW2 by testing our weapons, what else, what a strange question that only a German newspaper could ask...an American friend has just reminded me that ´My God, what have we done?´were the words of Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, written into his log just after the bomb was dropped.) Strangely I only find out now that getan means done which shows that I´m still discovering lots of little, fundamental and obvious bits of German. Yesterday I was in Schwabing, now a pale shadow of ist former self. No one bothered to tell me that this is where the street artists hang out. The stuff they sell is the most obvious kitsch and junk even beneath the standards of purveyors of junk. Sad to say that in this area lived Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky, Klee and the rest. I can´t even say that today it is particularly successful as a touristic centre either. Cinemas packed with the usual Hollywood fodder, fast food ristorants and many of the usual bars and cafes that engulf such places. My sketching is going well and I am bringing home 3 or so fine sketches each day. Alexander has gone to Salzburg today for a short holiday, I was supposed to meet WW but he wasn´t at home so I went to the Glypothek and also sketched the wonderful statue by Max Ernst beside the LenbachHaus. Last night I went to Nordbad, infested by secretaries from BMW, well better than saying that they are presently taking the arbeitslosgeld, isn´t it? On Mittwoch I met Benjamin there, a banker who lives in the Schwabing area and works for Dresdner Bank (the 3rd biggest bank after Deutsches and HypoVerein). It was raining so predictably he had gone to the sauna, found him in the warm bath staring at a starless ceiling. He had some usual practical advice for me, because bankers are nothing but practical but then they do not cross the Rubicon, the Alps (over a predictable pile of Big Mac Meals and dying Gauls, there´s nothing like a dying Gaul before breakfast...)

Rommel was born in Wurttemburg. In this region they speak the Swabian dialect (there is also a related Swabian dialect in western Bavaria). Albert Einstein was also born nr Ulm. He lived in the street where I am presently staying between 1885 and 1895. His fathers electronics business went bust and the family then moved to Switzerland. There are still little shops in the street selling electronics gadgets and instruments. My friend Alexander was born in Alexander although his family originated in Yugoslavia. His mother is VolksDeutsch (a German living in the East), his father a Yugoslav, they were on the Allied side during the war. (it is quite easy to see why he is my friend then. A lot of the Germans don´t say very much to me which more or less tells me that they view me as an enemy combatant still or at least as an outsider, even though I am more cosmopolitan, educated and broad minded than many of my contemporaries in Belfast. Martha is also more westernised than the average Bavarian who can be very German/Bavarian indeed. She speaks very good English but Alexander barely speaks English, in fact his English is actually worse than my German
Name: Erwin Rommel
Variant Name: Desert Fox
Birth Date: November 15, 1891
Death Date: October 14, 1944
Place of Birth: Heidenheim, Swabia, Germany
Place of Death: Herrlingen, Germany
Nationality: German
Gender: Male
Occupations: field marshall, soldier
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Biography Text
The German field marshal Erwin Rommel (1891-1944), known as the "Desert Fox," achieved fame as a brilliant desert-warfare tactician in World War II.
Erwin Rommel was born in Heidenheim near Ulm on Nov. 15, 1891, into an old Swabian middle-class family. After a traditional classical education, he joined the 124th Infantry Regiment as an officer cadet in 1910 and was commissioned as second lieutenant 2 years later. In World War I he served on the Western front in France and immediately distinguished himself as an outstanding soldier. In 1915 he was awarded the Iron Cross Class I. From autumn 1915 to 1918 he served in a mountain unit in Romania and on the Italian front, where, for unusual bravery in his capture of Monte Matajur, he was cited for the highest award offered in the German army, the Pour le Mérite, at the unprecedented age of 27.
After the war Rommel spent the 1920s as a captain with a regiment near Stuttgart. In the fall of 1929 he commenced his distinguished ca..... (2.1 pages / 642 words in this biography)


Scwabing intrigues me just for the fact that it was the region that the legendary General, The Desert Fox, Irwin Rommel came from. I understand his son Manfred(still alive) was the mayor of Stuttgart.
Ever been to Essen? met an interesting elderly gentleman from there at a pub the other day... he married a Bavarian woman, which would have been practically forbidden over in Germany at that time, but fine over here where anything goes of course. Also, how is the weather over there? I imagine its pleasant...

Betreff: Was haben wir getan?
the newspapers are full of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki anniversary, the headlines in Der Spiegel boast ´Was haben wir Getan? (well we´ve pre-empted the end of WW2 by testing our weapons, what else, what a strange question that only a German newspaper could ask...)strangely I only find out now that getan means done which shows that I´m still discovering lots of little, fundamental and obvious bits of German.
Together with a foto of victims of the Hiroshima bomb the headline might mean:
What have we done to deserve this? as an acuse by the victims.
I saw a report about that on TV last week, that was so terribly well done almost like a science fiction. But unfortunately it was no science fiction!
They showed the strange huge cloud arising after the explosion. Many thousand innocent people, women, children died at once within a few seconds. These were the lucky ones. Old men and women, very few have survived until old age, told about their experiences and their terrible sufferings: In the following seconds everything, bodies, houses, metal, wood, glass everything was thrown through the air. Then fire burned everywhere. All the people had terrible wounds, burnt skin, many were buried beneath the collapsed houses, many tousand died after some terrible hours or days, many died because there was no water to drink. An old nurse said: "There was a little pool behind the hospital. Many ran there to drink and cool their burnt skin. But more and more people jumped in and the first one were drowned........" An old man said, the wounded peope from the east of the city went to the west looking their relations, for help, for water and the people from the west to the east because they didn´t know there was destruction everywhere........
We all know many people who had survived suffered for a long time and died of cancer and other deseases. Years later babies died or were born deformedly.........
Between the pictures of incredible desaster and suffering we saw the soldiers, who did their job exactly and carefully: those who prepared the bomb, the pilot who got a medal afterwards, because he did his job so successfully..........

yes, I agree that they are like sculptor´s drawings (I´m glad you said that because I was thinking it...except that I don´t sculpt...) I agree with you about the US, there is something lacking in terms of much cynicism but not really the balls to back it up. I think ´Nam made them look silly and they´ve been sucking their plums, both literally and metaphorically, ever since. One vital clue to the Presidency was the ´Nam war record but it never really got going because Kerry looked (literally) like a revived corpse or something other from the imaginings of Mary Shelley. Today Alexander´s holiday began so we went to Nordbad for a sauna. For breakfast we ate München Weißwurst and Weißbier. When you do Prost with Weißbier you click the bottom of the glass. With the bier in the Maß, the top. Alexander drinks an awful lot and most times its just a case of me staying a bit offside until the getting pissed contest is over and then going off to the Glyptothek for more work. Unfortunately we got involved in an awful drinking contest 2 weeks ago which I was sucked into, met an American girl and brought her back to the flat. All I can remember is coming to in a hotel room but I was alone by this stage and awfully hung over. Then the next night Alexander and I were in the Hofbrauhaus when I asked him if his spell as a homosexual had helped his psychosis when he answered in a booming voice ýes I have had sex with men on several occasions´and an American woman with her family turned around and asked us to be quiet. I stormed out in a real huff, citing both the Stasi and the Gestapo to her and met Alexander at the flat later on, he having disappeared off to the pissoir in the meantime. Today he told me it was Gay Day in Nordbad, but it wasn´t. However, there were clearly Gay men and women there, München being very Gay tolerant. Alexander slept in the Ruheraum and I had 4 aufguß before he came to and ambled off for Currywurst.

every day I write up my diary and send it to one or two people or paste it up at my website)
You didn´t tell me about the StadtMuseum, why? It is very interesting indeed, for me the most interesting museum in Munich. There was a fine exhibition on Wagner and music under National Socialism, a fashion museum, a puppet and circus museum (the distorting mirrors are funny but also a little disturbing. I preferred the elongating mirror...), a photographic exhibition which was very good among many other interesting things. Would you like to go there with me some time?
Alexander helped me (sometimes) with my German and it is improving all the time. At times I am almost fluent.
So, how are you Schweinimausdead? I like, care for you, you are nice and make fine pumpkin dessert.
Alexander doesn´t cook for himself very much. I buy breakfast, semmel mit käse und schinken und müsli mit milch immer. So, you see, I always look after myself like the cat with the cream.
But the language barrier is still a huge problem for me. Really I would need 2 months more of classes before I could feel really confident about my German. But then German is difficult as even Germans admit.
Today was very uneventful, Munich has emptied because August really is a holiday month for the Germans. Unlike the UK, most Germans are off in August and heading off to the beach, which might mean Spain, Italy or Greece. I walked through the university district, asking at shops and restaurants if anyone wanted to buy my sketches, there was only one definite expression of interest. I walked into a gallery and there was an old German woman, the owner, a man and an aggressive and large dog which I initially had to fight off because it was clearly interested in biting my testacles off which it had mistaken for a large cat or a rabbit. The old woman couldn´t speak English or German. I handed her my web site address, ´we don´t need it´she replied. The Germans are very loathe to buy from passing tradesmen, even to look at their work, but the Italians, Spanish and Greeks are much more open to this kind of approach. Most things operate through networks, friends, contacts in Germany and their society has quite a cold, authoritarian, unfriendly atmosphere about it. I really felt like telling the old German woman to stick it up her ringpiece, I really did, and then giving the dog a kick in the head but then I remembered decorum and left. She was like a forgettable piece of National Socialist art, her dog lolling on the carpet, a strangers testacles lodged in its putrid maw, the man playing a game of pocket billiards as I struggled for my next piece of bread. The scene, a cartoon from the fetid imagination of Georg Groß or a singspiel from the pen of Bert Brecht.
Then (after this intermittent bout of S & M) I went to a cafe nr the Siegs Tor (Victory Gate, enscribed upon it, ´for the Bavarian army´, the Bavarian army that imploded somewhere nr Calais, circa 1944 or at the Battle of the Bulge) and made sketches, first of the Tor (victory in a chariot drawn by lions, what a biting irony. The great ticker tape Triumphal March off the end of the pier.) and then of the fountain across the Straße. I thought to sell my sketch of the Tor, I sold another sketch of the Brandenburg Tor in Berlin. After some causal enquiries, I left and caught the U - Bahn to Goetheplatz.

Wagner and Anti-Semitism
That if you say just one bad word against the State of Israel or the Jews that you´re an anti-semite and it just ain´t true, some of my best friends are Jews if you say you´re fond of the music of Wagner then you´re an anti-semite this is odd since maintaining a liking for the music of Beethoven doesn´t automatically equate with being in assent with the politics of Napoleon before he crowned himself Emperor or with the ethos of Romanticism, does it?
why is Wagner a scapegoat? or is he a scapegoat at all? the answer is to be found in a general intellectual movement towards equation which isn´t to be found in the intellectual ethos of earlier centuries. this equation is also against the heart and soul of the Enlightenment which preaches tolerance and liberty and paradoxically those who make these equations very simply claim the Enlightenment as their world view.
Can you tease this out a but further?

Maybe Spengler or Nietzsche were right after all. I decline to be a weather prophet and certainly reading the thoughts of the anointed ones of the past is only a temporary weather vane. At least I got it right in the Guardian letter, the lake has filled and filled beyond brimming, teeming with corpses, alligators, reef sharks, nodules of wisdom and the flotation gallery of great thinkers whose thoughts have been encapsulated in our anthologies then spat out by the West. I saw it in my dreams (how can you visualise the drowned body of a child, bloated with putrid swamp water and half-eaten by alligators...) or rather nightmares because I have very vivid, apocalyptic, decline of the west nightmares.

Educating Rita

This time, the gridlock did for them. Unsurprisingly, really, since the mass hysteria envisaged in my dream is now a reality. The damage was only slight, slighter than predicted. Power stations blew up, 675,000 people were without electricity, a mere bagatelle really. A terrible atom bomb of a dream has exploded, a Pandora's Box maybe.

When I turn on TV they talk about the latest area to implode, but they haven't noticed the correlation, not yet anyway. Every time I say something, (its a dark prophetic dream, the mewings of a child falling through an eternity of swamp water into darker and darker shoals of reef sharks but, predictably, they're not listening.) it happens.

Your looking at Albrecht Duerer's etching of the Knight, Death and the Devil but it doesn't make sense. At the bottom of the picture you notice a dark blotch which has started spreading. If you turn it around in a mirror, one of those fairground mirrors, you see an eternity, a nightmarishly large shoal of reef sharks and they are reclaiming what they lost in the Jurassic era and they are also growing bigger all the time. They are selling ice creams, passing the time by wearing silly hats, playing the harmonica, games of dice and watching the bubbles on the lake of fire (the one provided by the Great Architect for the immolation of Bush and Blair) pop with a pleasing and trite pop. But the bubbles of the corpses of Bush and Blair will be all the more pleasing, trite and the reef sharks will increase their prices by 10p for a 99 when the crowd comes to watch the immolation of Death and the Devil.


I have a cold and a headache. This is a result of the Föhn, a wind that sweeps up from the Alps to the south. People always mention it. It almost seems to have a supernatural connotation. I dont know.

Last night I woke up went down and everything seemed perfectly normal. A rope hangs down from my landing to the floor, about 10 floors below: it seems to me to
be like an eery scene from that old Roger Corman film, ´The Pit and the Pendulum´with Vincent Price. Do you remember those old 60s B movies by Corman? Some night I´m going to swing down on it, scaring the neighbours with whoops and yahoos and crunch to the ground screaming ´the bells´or something like this.

My next door neighbour, Ben, has a family. I rarely see him. He´s African and I´m sure he feels displaced. He was playing a load of reggae music last night but he
doesnt bother me at all.

None of them do which is also eerie.