TRAVEL WRITINGS

ATTIC NIGHTS


“The strings are false” - Julius Caesar


All around was a desolation there was a one-horse town called Philippi, I called into a cafe and drank cold coffee, a specialty on the Mediterranean. Philippi is such a desolation today that it is hard to believe that this was the site of the biggest and most important battle of the Ancient World, a battle that decided the fate of the world 22 centuries ago. A Norwegian on a tour of the Christian shrines of the Ancient World told me that the battle was bigger than Chickamauga (a battle fought during the American Civil War). Looking more closely at the site of the battle it dawned upon me how obviously it was a site of ambush in fact a giant neon sign saying AMBUSH might have been set up on one of the hillsides. I had also seen the film, ‘Wild One’ Marlon Brando and assorted bikers and Hells Angels thrusting their axes and bowie knives Brando himself astride a Harley Davidson crashing through the massed ranks of rival gangs....

The main town in this area of Macedonia is Drama, famous for holding the International Festival of Short Films each year. Strangely enough, the local fleapit was precisely that, and there seemed to be no sign of a film culture in the locality. I went to see two films while I was in Drama, Gladiator and The Hollow Man. Gladiator is much more enjoyable in Greek, and gives one a sense of the Ancient World. I went to see Gladiator in my fourth week in Drama and could read the subtitles, because the Greek language is in actual fact remarkably easy. The intimidating bit is the alphabet, and it is very intimidating indeed. Some of the confusions are obvious, like going into a taverna, and saying;

“Can I have a P?”

“Is that an R, sir?”

“No a P.”

The reason for this is the Greek symbol Pie, which resembles a Greek arch. The symbol for R is P. This shift amused me, as did others, for by this time I was quite experienced with the Mediterranean languages. Other shifts are nero meaning black in Italian, but meaning water in Greek. The Black Sea, Nero Mare in Latin, was Mavro Thallasa in Greek. I recalled the Louis MacNeice poem, Thallasa, Thallasa these lines come from the Kirou Anabasis of Xenophon. Xenophon led a military expedition into Persia, a mercenary General to Cyrus the Great, and retreated in good order to the shores of Anatolia, one of his men uttering these supposedly immortal words when gazing upon the Mediterranean Sea. But there were more obvious and hilarious linguistic problems, at the launderette Kosmos, having a discussion about the cleaning of my pantalones, strangely, the Italians used the same hilarious archaism, archaic in English that is. It finally dawned on me that there was a standard Mediterranean usage, and that linguistic problems had been ironed out by the creation of common words and phrases used all over the Southern European area, a little like Franglais or Spanglish. I toyed with the idea of creating my own language, a private and personal language, such as Italo-Catalo-Deutsch, or some such, and attempting to sell it as a new Esparanto.

At the cinema that terrible spike had been driven into the foot of Russell Crowe’s foe, a very painful sight for those of us who suffer from athlete's foot. Joaquin Phoenix was thrusting his blade too, like a Sicilian Mafioso, and looking not a bit like the adolescent scumbag he played in To Die For. If you can remember this film, an ordinary gal kills to become a celebrity. With the cultural differentiation and permeating effects of Post-Modernism in popular culture, soon celebrities will kill in order to become ordinary people. Joaquin Phoenix was flailing around with his knife, someone let off a tremendous fart people fell about laughing. I left soon after with my popcorn in hand and headed off to the wine bar to talk to my favourite Greek waitress, she spoke with a Bronx accent, incidentally.

Around Drama a stunning but desolate landscape unfolded. Greece is very mountainous, and because of lack of knowledge of modern crop rotation techniques, the ubiquitous olive tree with its large taproot had exfoliated the terrain. In other words, nothing could be grown but poor tobacco plant. The main Greek industry was the tourist industry, and the urge of every man, child and dog was to fleece the tourists. But tourism had not penetrated far into Macedonia, and it is still a fine place to go for a holiday. To the East Thrace (Thraki to the Greeks) and its two cities Alexandroupolis and Xanthi. The Ancient Thracians had spoken a non-Indo-European language, and were a warlike and ‘tribal’ people, speaking in bar-bars, as the Southern Greeks had thought, i.e. incoherent, nonsense, and therefore, barbaric. Thracian mercenaries had gone to Persia with MegasAlexandros (Alexander the Great). Alexander is not buried in Macedonia (the tombs of the Macedonian Kings are at Pelleas near Thessaloniki, the Capital of Macedonia and second city of Greece after Athens), he died at Persepolis in Persia, and his body is presumably buried in an unknown grave. Not many Macedonians were really interested in history, although they all paid lip service to its greatness, many were more interested in watching Bay Watch (or Bum Watch as my nephew calls it) and the happenings of the local taverna. In Macedonia, traditional Greek culture is more apparent, Western European and American culture, especially pop music, is actually declining. The traditional music played on traditional instruments is very pleasant, although sometimes it can grate on one, and scenes from Zorba the Greek seem to come to mind when it does. Cuisine is also traditional, and probably unchanged since Alexander’s day. One night I was sitting in a taverna by myself wrestling with a village salad and a souvlaki when my neighbour spoke:

“Hi, I am a member of an ethnic minority.”

There was a silence, and I thought that the implication was that the Greeks had nothing to do with him. I assumed that he was an Albanian. The Albanians have been used as slave workers on the fruit and vegetable estates, lowering prices, and were also ostracized and left to their own devices. Many Greeks thought this was unfair, it must be said. But many were also devious and unkind, serving the interests of the estate managers. I talked briefly to this man, but left soon after there was a strange atmosphere in the taverna, everyone seemed distant, estranged.

Back at the cinema, I was sitting with my popcorn watching The Hollow Man. This nondescript show meandered on, just as I meandered home to coffee and baklava. America was still wrestling with its ego through such films as Being John Malkovich to be worthy of much attention. Even their attempts at re-creating the Ancient World seemed pathetic and half-hearted. In this film two people disappear into a portal and enter the mind of John Malkovich, eventually John Malkovich disappears into the portal and realizes that he is John Malkovich, America was growing out of its Anal Fantasy Stage, as Dr Freud would have it. With contempt, I noted that the takings of the American porn industry are enough to clear off a good deal of Third World debt.

In Greece, America was an omnipresent discourse, especially since many Greeks had clearly gone to America to learn English. In modern history, Greece threw off the domination of Turkey in the Civil War, which involved, of course, poets like Lord Byron, buried at Missalonghi with his heart at his feet, literally. Life under the Turks, who conquered the Byzantine Empire in 1456, had been good for the Greek elite, many of whom were directly employed in Constantinople, in the Turkish Civil Service, many Greeks also became Janissaries, the Sultan’s elite guard, and probably served in his harem too. After the Turks departed, England, France et al attempted to impose a foreign King on Greece, firstly a German, and later a Dane. In recent times, the King returned to Greece for a holiday, hotly pursued by fighter planes and naval dreadnoughts, just in case he attempted to assume his old throne. A succession of extremist Right-Wing dictators had ruled Greece throughout the 20th Century. Metaxas during the 2nd World War (he famously said Ohi - no - to Mussolini, defeating his troops on the Italian border too) and then the Colonels in the 1970s. Greece is now a pluralistic democracy, with Eastern Totalitarianism written into many of its mores.

On the Saturday, a yearly parade wound through the streets of Drama, celebrating the anniversary of Metaxas’ famous Ohi. I sat in my flat watching television, the feta-cheese-eating, darkly bearded, fulmigating Greek soldiers, as macho as macho can be, were driving back the blonde hordes of effete German soldiers. I dashed into the bakery Apostolos and came back with honey dripping from my mouth, shirt, trousers it was baklava time again. The procession of soldiers and youth in traditional costume wound gaily through the town like a Chinese processional dragon. Some of my students stopped me, ready for a fight, I had called one of them Malakas (literally, wanker), a traditional Greek greeting which is a term of address or abuse, depending on the tone of voice. This student resembled an extra from Lord of the Flies and his friend looked like Piggy from the same. I kept him at arms length, just in case he leapt at me with his karate skills, and made a dash to the creperie to talk to another of my friends. Perikles said, “You must be a mangas (literally, a streetwise, cool, dude),” his dog Lara leapt and cart wheeled in the air, outside the procession had diminished the street was strewn with litter, rubbish. Lara didn’t, at this stage, spontaneously combust, but came down with a profound thud, behind me the creperie girl laughed; I looked askew, sideways at Perikles.

Greek is the oldest of all Western languages, as a spoken language it is 4000 years old, and as a written language, 2500 years old, but Mandarin Chinese is even older. Eastern civilization pre-dates Western. To me, it sounded very Eastern indeed, even the greeting, Yasu or the plural Yasus seems Biblical. It is the language of Homer, of Sophocles, of Plato (or Platon, as my students constantly reminded me), and of Demis Roussos, that famous larded singer of yesteryear. After Alexander’s conquests, Greek became the language of the Western World, and Alexander’s lack of snobbery and philistinism helped to spread it farther and farther through the former Persian Empire. After his death, the Empire was divided between his Successors, Generals who had fought at his great battles, Granicus, Guagamala, in Asia Minor and Asia. Ptolemy took Egypt, Seleucus, Syria, Lysimachus, Macedonia, and so on. Alexandria’s fame as an intellectual center spread through the Ancient World, and Caesar’s burning of its magnificent library seems as much a propaganda coup as a spent match. The Kingdom of Pontus, whose most famous ruler was Mithradites, was the second most famous Macedonian Kingdom, its Capital rivaled Alexandria. Pontus is beside the Northern shore of the Black Sea, and many Greeks still live there, they set up Friendship Societies to support the events of the Greek Civil War. Today, they are bi-lingual, Russian and Greek speakers.

I am beginning to write a novel, in the first part, a supercomputer is invented which begins to duplicate reality, the second part is Alexander’s last dream at Persepolis, and the third is concerned with rehearsals of Mozart’s opera Mithradites Re d’Pontus, with lots of arcane references to the rituals of Freemasonry. I wake up, it is all a dream, honey drips from my shirt, trousers, soon the room is over-flowing with honey, I am lying beside someone, it is the beautiful Princess Roxanne, she bites me on the cheek, a roar, and a whistling noise. Silence.

“Well Brother Peachy, let us say that we met on the level, and left on the square for the sake of the poor widow’s son.”

“Yes, Brother Kipling.”

John Huston’s film The Man Who Would be King reminded me of the days when Hollywood directors were Hollywood directors, not anally-fixated, would-be academics, obsessed with the idea of their own celebrity, to die for, indeed. I wandered down to the cinema again, but there was nothing on worth seeing. It is Saturday night, Drama is crowded with young people life is thrilling, exotic even sexy. Sultry heat, steam, palm trees, the stuff of those Hollywood adverts, but this time it is real, even the lemons on the lemon trees are real, olives ripen in the open. The people who first inhabited Greece found the living easy, and were therefore enabled to think, and not toil perpetually. The climate in Southern France is also very like Greece, but nothing happened there, some indefinable occurred, giving us the philosophers, poets and mathematicians who built the civilization of the West.

The presence of succeeding civilizations had impinged on my mind in Greece I had learnt some parts of a language that I thought to be impenetrable, and elitist, snobbish. Greek is a utilitarian language, far from being elitist, but it became elitist because of the elitist educational system of the West. It holds mysteries and marvels but it is perfectly accessible to almost anyone.

Greece is now a small and insignificant country, a backwater in every sense, and is still opening out from its domination by the Colonels, and the consequences of the Civil War that followed the defeat of Hitler.

The sun shone on the island of Thassos, on the town of Kavalla, and even on poor old Philippi, there was dancing in the tavernas, on the tables, in the streets. Everything is a negotiation with the sun in the Mediterranean world, and the power of the sun is as old as Greek and World Civilization. I sat in the shade, honey dripping everywhere, remembering the bit in Gladiator where....

MACEDONIAN MOONLIGHT

The train station was deserted, for it was past mid-night, in fact it was now 4PM. Flowering cactus and the clicking of grasshoppers. He sat down to a bowl of chickenhead soup with Voula and Kostos. Lungs, kidneys, livers, mangled heads, organs, a great deal of spew in this soup and nothing else. The stars hung like the illuminated organs of this poor chicken, he was strung out too on a mixture of pills, cigarettes and ouzo, having talked to a plethora of nomadic Greek young males, on the train all in search of the eternal She.

“Don’t give her your number,” they told him, always lie…”

The eternal and infinite basin of soup reflected the starlight, starlight wrapped around the finite darkness of the railway station. His employers, Miss Voula and Kostos took this appropriate moment to show him his flat. We went there by car, and insisted, even though he was dog tired in showing him how everything worked. They kindly left him some food and a little wine in the freezer.

He went to bed and woke in the morning to the din of a scooter making its fart fart noise in my street. Later, possibly three weeks after his arrival, he found out that the street was called Markopolous Street. At first he imagined that this was a reference to the Venetian explorer, Marco Polo, but later found out from one of his students that it was the name of a fireman who had died fighting a blaze. There seemed to be some crisis in Drama’s social services, with suicides among firemen being particularly high - perhaps they were driven mad by the sheer boredom of the place, this may have been their perception, it was hardly his. Beside his flat was the bakery and confectioners, Apostolos, which served up magnificent and cheap helpings of baklava, a famous Greek cake composed of filo pastry and honey. Apostolos also did various variations on the standard baklava recipe, all greedily gorged down on a Friday evening after college, a day he left for pigging out. At this stage his Greek was non-existent and he relied on guides for everything. Later he could make out names and words quite easily. The town was full of little tavernas, cafes, interesting shops. Just the usual shops that are found in any town. At his corner were two confectioners. The first stocked a wide range of goods and was always packed with items and customers. Next door a little man sat in a dingier shop with his few items on display. He learnt that many Greeks have an independent spirit and would rather own their own little shop, even if it was stocked with poor quality items quite empty as was this gentlemens. The town exhibited this schizophrenia, success contrasted with failure.

One dingy old antiques shop had a fox’s head on display. He noticed it everyday as he walked to College. He bought it and propped it up in his room as a cure for insomnia, sitting upright in bed every night to see Macedonian moonlight glinting off its beady eyes or waking in the morning to see its loving nose gently rubbing his shins. Until the ghastly occurrence of remembering that it was, after all, dead, and entertaining that instantaneous panic attack which he could only regard as the first pangs of that thing, what is it…er…well…love. O my Midnight Thought Fox, he thought, I love you a bit more than the girls in the taverna, because your affections never change, your relationship to me is as constant as the Macedonian moonlight itself, some day you may make yourself useful about the flat too, as an ashtray, until your fur and even your beady eyes are immolated in a smoky haze.

That Sunday afternoon he set out to Kavala to do some swimming. It was October, but because of the effects of Global Warming, it felt like a lovely, loveable, June day. He left my fox behind to guard the flat, hired a taxi for the afternoon, and set off. The driver spoke a little German and English, although he was convinced that his fragmentary grasp of both languages was fluency. He looked a little like, in fact very like the French movie star Jean Paul Belmondo, the likeness was stunning, but he decided not to mention it, he might have thought that I meant he wasn’t as good looking as X, or that Y certainly had a big nose and didn’t suit Frenchstyle period suits, leaning out of taxis with mangled fag peering out of the corner of his mouth, dark sunglasses and pistol stringing his waist. We drove out of Drama, past the villages of Doxata and Phillipi and into the coastal resort, Kavalla. The island Thassos glimmered in the sunlight, a ferry was just setting of with its cargo of locals. There were no holiday-makers at this time of year. Overlooking the town a Byzantine castro (castle). He wandered up the maze of streets and climbed up to its battlements one pissing-it-down Saturday afternoon. On the way he was almost savaged by a little dog (He noticed the exponential tendency in dogs, their size, and their potential to produce noisy and ferocious barking.).

Beside the castle is the house of Mehmet Ali, sometime Pasha of Egypt under the Ottoman Empire. Today it looks rather like the house of a wizard. For sometime he wondered whether this was a set for some Hollywood sword and sorcery fable, but then he realised that it was a museum. There is also a statue of Ali beside the house wielding his scimitar and striking out at those long dead rebels who fought the Ottoman Empire for Greek Independence. (Oddly, some Greeks he spoke to still blamed their long subjugation by the Turks as the explanation for the amazing decline in the Renaissance that gripped Greece from the time of Omeros (Homer) to the eventual conquest of the Successor States (the Macedonian successors to Alexander the Great, the Ptolomies, the Seleucids and the various Leagues of Greek City States that controlled the rest of Greece) - by the Romans - mainly engineered by cunning flank charges on Macedonian pike phalanxes by cohorts of Roman legionaries.

The taxi skeltered on through beachside villages, tavernas and amusement arcades, all shut now in the off season. Eventually an age later my driver stopped at a massive expanse of beach. Amazingly, he waited for over two hours for just 5000 Drachma (about £2.50) as he lay on the beach. An empty beach in Greece in ‘Winter’. Then he went swimming, playing among the mutant, radioactive fishes in the bay. He remembered well WB Yeats’ poem Byzantium and the magnificent lines ‘that dolphin torn, that gong tormented sea…’ What could Yeats have made of Greece today, might he not have written, ‘that mutant dolphin no longer crossing a gong tormented sea, but floating to the bottom of it with a bellyful of anacid.’ What’s a mutant dolphin between friends, he mused. Yeats' view of Greece (or Byzantium, as he styled it. The Greek-speaking and Eastern part of the Roman Empire which survived after the fall of Rome and the Western part to Attila the Hun and his minions.) was idealised long before all the Chemical Inc & Subsiduaries got to work with their noxious odours and gases wafting (my way, of course). Not so much gilded cockerels, Emperor’s Thrones, peacocks and the like. But having one’s eyes gouged out by a big, hairy Byzantine trooper. Not even clad in regulation white gear, but with bravura boots, thongs, skintight mail, and a magnificent, smelly codpiece dangling before ones nose, as swords lanced ones head, neck, severed ones eyeballs, ears. The brutes, he thought, but how they must have loved it. Better than Hollywood, better than warm Madras curry slithering down into bellybutton and scalding genitals, better than tables and chairs, better even than the Cambridge Pocket Wittgenstein (the book I had beside my towel at the time). So much for the modern world, all the greatness has passed, passing. Passing as the oilslick, the poisoned seagull, the herds of bacterium-coated trout fished out of lonely synthetic lakes on the Isle of Skye. Dancing, dancing fish, their silvered skins and fins flipping out of the water, greedily grabbed by earnest extras from former retarded Scottish Tourist Board depictions of the Highlands & Islands a la Rob Roy.

STARSHIP TROOPER

“Lt Seblon, can you hear me, we have real problems in Loading Bay 1, repeat, real problems, get your ass down here at once!”

He suddenly realised that he had fallen through a parallel universe and into Michael McMerely’s story. Shit, he mused, it must have been the anacid on one of those platinum fishes, too much by his understanding of Quantum Physics. Yes, a trail of slime on his fingers confirmed my belief.

Lt Seblon appeared, not embodied, as he had believed. It was merely a plasmogram issued by credit card in some galaxy 75 million light years away, at the credit holding firm he had taken over by a defaulter who had re-mortgaged a minor Universe and then found that it had only another two million light years before its Big Bang came to an end.

“Can’t you see I’m busy, what is it.”

He opened his eyes and incredulous light gaped into the gap between my eyelid and retina.

“Come, Mr Paul, we must return to Drama, it is evening.”

(He hated the way Mediterranean people called him ‘Mr Paul’, they must have thought that I was English. This is the way one must address a young English gentleman, they must have thought, for to their minds I was English and not Irish or Northern Irish.)

Another car chase through the streets of Kavala later we arrived at Markopoulous Street. He realised that something was wrong, because, even though my bedroom window was hanging off its hinges, nothing whatsoever had been stolen, nor was a thief waiting for me in my kitchen to beg dinner. In truth Drama was crimefree because there was nothing in Drama worth stealing.

In a very short time he had set my rucksack down in the flat and walked over the road to make a telephone call. Thousands of little fart fart motorbikes and mopeds sped past. A little man was sitting over in the adjoining tenement block playing on a peculiar Greek stringed instrument. On the wall in front of him was a beautiful graffiti of a Greek hoplite replete with helmet, black crest and the word Ellas (Greece) in white lettering on a black shield.

ATHENS AIRPORT

He walked out of the airport terminal and walked over to a desk where a clerk was sitting and seemingly attempting to prise his hands apart with a ruler.

“Can I have a medium priced hotel in a reasonable area?”

“Yes, of course, Sir, we have one right in the centre, here it is.”

He pointed at an area which he could only remember as Omeron, it was very central, and since he didn’t have a clue about Athens decided to chance it.

“I’ll take it, can you give me directions to the taxi rank?”

The airport clerk motioned at a rank of taxis drawn up outside the main building.

He could only describe the ensuing journey as an alphabetical maze, as he sped through Athens and through an entirely new alphabet. He recognised the symbols, of course, from the mathematics he had been taught at school, there was Pi, there Omega, there Epsilon and so on. More matheme than language, or somewhere between matheme and language.

When he arrived at his hotel he realised that he had been conned. This was not a reasonable area. As he walked around the square there were sex shows everywhere, blue movies, prostitutes on each corner. At one point he stepped over an unfortunate who was lying in a pool of his own blood. This was not a reasonable area, this was Athen’s red light district.

MURPHY 1 BRITISH MUSEUM 0

The next day he stood upon the Parthenon and in an instant solved a problem which had been dominating Anglo-Greek relations for some time. The Elgin Marbles re-named as the Acropolis Marbles were in fact the Parthenon Marbles. This is important because the British Museum now calls them The Acropolis Marbles. But Acropolis is just the Greek word for any defended hilltop fort, only the Parthenon is specific to Athens.

VRIL

The whirr and thud of engines. He was aware that he was alone. In the room a thousand wax mannequins. A black spot is receding and dimming, now growing, on a white backdrop. On the wall, a mirror. Behind it the figure death and the last sylph in Belinda’s hair.

WHAT THE SEARCH ENGINE SAID

He walked into the internet café and inserted ‘my obituary’ into the google directory. After the flash of a button: ‘Abducted by a group of aliens (who had been cleverly infesting literature since the time of Dryden, Addison, Steele and Pope) in their alien spacecraft, for three days and three nights they (had sex with him) as a route to their bio-cybernetic-synthetic observations on the human race (now published by the University of Delaware Press, $90 - add to your shopping basket?) they seemed to be an extremist sect of would-be Neo-Rosicrucianism-Seventh-Day-Adventist-Jehovahs-Witnesses, (in reality a knitting circle enagaged in the production of sylph’s wings). He begged to be taken back but was rejected at that time because of flatfeet/hunchedback/handless/armless/nameless/headless.’

To send a message of condolence please send your message (and donation) to: Sylphswings@Plutocrat.com
All proceeds will go towards the purchase of an authentic Viking longboat, bunches of arrows, firepots and for the hiring of authentic rustics. Please go to Channel 50 at 10PM on the 12th of May for simultaneous transmission of this unique event brought to you courtesy of Channel 50 and with your presenter Dick van Sturm.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR DONATION
HAVE A NICE DAY!

It has been noted that those talented people of civilisation make it their life’s work to write out notation concerning politics, history, literature and philosophy. However, only those geniuses that stand above the rank and file of talent, make the business of their lives and art the study of fairies. Have we not seen the plays of Shakespeare with his A Midsummers Night’s Dream, or, in the realm of music, Richard Wagner’s opera Die Feen? The sorts, types, varieties of fairies, the variable and the constant, the understanding that illuminates the mythical human past (and differentiates it from the (often) adled, drink-sweetened and rosy-spectacled memories of childhood that many an old codger mumbling in his or her zimmerframe coughs up at the Old Peoples’ Home on a bridge evening).

FIRST ENCOUNTER

“I know that you’re very busy at present with the new Universe you purchased, but I’d like you to have a look at this.”

“Yes, what is it?”

I opened the loading bay door. A hole was apparent at the bottom of the stairs that led to the loading bay hatch, the access point for any docking ship.

“I see what you mean, how long has this problem been apparent?”

He stepped backwards as an automatic reaction to Lt Seblon. Ever since he had embarked on the course of muscle relaxants he had been, well, more than a little tensed up. Actually he had become aggressive. He found himself falling into a vortex. He realised before long that Lt Seblon had left his plasmogram on and it was taking him up (if ‘up’ was at all an appropriate word).

INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR

I found the internet café after venturing down a street which bent back on itself in a weird U shape with cross-latticed interconnecting streets criss-crossing and bending off into central Athens. Sitting over one of the worst cappucinos he had ever tasted (problematically, Greek food and drink was always tasty, but invariably cold)
UP THE REPUBLIC!

The North Central Spanish plain is something like an endless car factory, a desert, and various Visigothic, Christian and Moorish castles thrown into a pot. Inhabitable it is in not, although it has its inhabitants. The administrative centre of Spain, Madrid, is supposed to bind the regions together. Spain’s Parliament, El Cortes, is in Madrid, as are many art galleries and Museums, most famously El Prado, flanked, as it is, with statues of Goya (pronounced Goja) and Velasquez (pronounced Belafqueth).

“What do you think of King Juan Carlos?”

“I think he is an idiot!”

I leant back in my chair as the air conditioning whirred. Intense sunlight poured through the window.

Later on I sat in the internet café. A song was being played about how a young man from Donegal had come to Spain to fight (and die) in the International Brigades.

As I walked back through the town centre that peculiar dry heat, typical of Spain saturated my clothes, my hair.

One day I walked to the edge of the town and found some old field artillery and heavy machine guns. The spot was dignified with a board which had the word ‘Military Museum’ spelt out in black acrylic paint. All the guns seemed to be pointing towards the offices of the Guardia Civil. Perhaps with a little reactivation I might carry off the last battle cry of the Republic!

In those heady days (what else can one say about La Guerra Civil - The Spanish Civil War - except ‘those heady days’!) General Yague’s Army of Africa, the core of veterans that constituted Franco’s elite troops, and Andre Malraux’s fighter squadron had operated in this area. Andre Malraux (1901-1976), a French novelist famous for his work Man’s Estate, an account of the Communist Revolution in China in the 1920s, and Days of Hope, an account of his actions in the Spanish Civil War. Later he fought for the French Resistance in World War Two and ended up in deGaulle’s Post-war Cabinet as Minister for Culture from 1959-1969. By this time his Left-Wing idealism must have worn off, for he compromised his views rapidly and joined a quite far Right government. I had assumed that Malraux was an adventurer in the Ernest Hemingway mould, but was surprised to find out that he had been involved in various art scams, selling major artworks bought in China at inflated prices in Europe. Furthermore, some doubt has been cast on the actual efficacy of his leadership in both the Civil War and World War Two. One account that I read mentioned that Malraux was the kind of man that lost the war for the Republic, alongside a further account of his military incompetence and ineptitude.

Speaking of Ernest Hemingway. I realised that the Republic was a fashion item for intellectuals of the period, for no intellectal or artist dared to call him or herself a fascist (in fact there had been quite a few that had done just that, G.B.Shaw, H.G.Wells, Ezra Pound, W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and many others had flirted with fascism for at least part of their lives. In the case of Pound this proved to be near-fatal as he found himself broadcasting radio programmes for Benito Mussolini. After World War Two he ended up in a mental institute, narrowly avoiding execution as a traitor.). Ernest Hemingway was the Republic’s trumpcard, a famous American novelist and anti-fascist, who lent the Republic credence and respectability on the world stage and penned off a novel about the conflict For Whom the Bell Tolls. Other intellectuals lent the Republic vocal support (when asked for his views on the matter, Samuel Beckett simply replied ‘Up the Republic!’), George Orwell fought for the Anarchist militia POUM (supposedly Trotskyites or Anarchists, in reality the militia of the party of Left-Communist Reconstruction whose secretary had happened to have been Leon Trotsky’s secretary!) in the Barcelona area, and the poet John Cornford was killed in action with one of the International Brigades. Some 40,000 foreigners ended up fighting for the Republic, on Fascist side there were only 1000, and virtually none of these men came for adventure, they all fought for a cause.

In the great football match that is history, it was FC Fascists 2 FC Republic 0 until, well, until the two Western democracies Britain and France came to the painful realisation that Fascism as a political movement was eventually going to overthrow them too, and moved to defend their buffer in the East, Poland, against Soviet Communism and German Nazism. But it was Britain specifically that had opposed support for the Republic, for France’s Socialist Popular Front government was naturally sympathetic, preferring to wait on the sidelines, for the Republic was packed full of ‘dangerous Socialists and Bolsheviks’. Had Britain aided the Republic the 2nd World War might have been pre-empted or curtailed. As ever it was a case of a house divided against itself and collapsing: Britain’s ruling classes had too much in common with the Fascists, and not enough in common with the Spanish masses to countenance the arms shipments that would have guaranteed a Republican victory.

“Dos cervezas, por favore?”

In the pub Alto Rey (High King) I had gone to look for Dave the ESL teacher, but found nothing but a dope sodden haze. Not unusually the barmaid offered me a free drink. Sizzling heat in mid-summer, the sour smell of marajuana which was flowing plentifully among the compadres.

At the College I discreetly asked some of my students about Guadalajara, for that was the town that I was teaching in (there is another Guadalajara in Mexico, Mexico’s second city after Mexico City). They told me that Guadalajara was one of the only towns in Spain still to have a statue of the dictator Franco and one of an even earlier Spanish dictator, Primo de Rivera. They indicated that there were some fascist symbols left on Government offices in the town. These men seemed to be surprised at this. Many of them were workers from Madrid, and regarded the eccentrities of the townspeople as a sign of their dire lack of sophistication and political education. Which was unsurprising, since the authorities in Guadalajara controlled the education system and therefore the minds of the people. Most of the locals had quite recently come from the pueblos (villages) of the surrounding area and pronounced words with a thick peasant dialect and alternative pronunciation. For instance, Madrith, Amistath, Bajadoleth, instead of Madrid, Amistad and Bayadoled (Valledolid).

But not all of the people of Guadalajara were controlled by the authorities, as I discovered in one dimly-lit pub. A sign with an Anarchist symbol and the slogan Reclama los Calles! (Reclaim the Streets!). Many of the banks had Anarchy symbols and slogans daubed on them, there were punky types with (presently retro-trendy or unfashionable in Britain) Mohican haircuts, and the all-round regalia of the Punk. In many ways this town seemed to be a short step away from the 1970s, which either meant that the United Kingdom had silently evolved, or, what is more likely, had reverted back to those former and unpleasant Imperialist practices before the ascendency of the British Labour Party after the 1945 election.

Back in the pub Dave the ESL teacher was bantering me with his latest conspiracy theory and account of world history. In brief he argued that the rulers of the world (bound together as the New World Order - what a fascist titling that is! - and their latest ideology of Neo-Liberalism) were all related to each other and could trace their genes back through the Knights Templar to Jesus and beyond. After telling me that I would certainly not be welcome among Britain’s ruling classes (because, as he explained, I would not have the right genes…) he slipped in the fact that he was an ex-public schoolboy.

Which is what the novelist and political journalist George Orwell had been (a graduate of that great bastion of the English ruling classes, Eton College).

Sobriety had replaced recklessness as I wandered back to my piso (apartment) with a fair awareness of what was going on around me, ie that the streets were virtually empty even though it was quite early on a Friday night. Things get busy late in Spain, with the early evening period regarded as a mealtime. I passed the Plaza de Toros (bullring) on my left (a great pleasure in Southern Spain, although it is less popular in Northern Spain. Apparantly Barcelona’s bullring is only a tourist attraction. There is also bullfighting in Latin America, Portugal, and Southern France. I never went to see a bullfight, but watched some bullfights on TV. Apart from its obvious exotic appeal it seemed to me to be very boring. At one point I tried to read Ernest Hemingway’s novel Death in the Afternoon but found that I couldn’t identify with the facts and statistics of the sport, although I realised something of Hemingway’s fascination with this primordial ‘blood and sand’ event.).

In the main Plaza (square - prounounced ‘platha’) Pablo Iglesias I stood to make a phone call. Suddenly someone grabbed my ankle. I looked down and a little gypsy girl crawled out from under the phone box. She came at me somewhat aggressively, and, surprised, I backed off. The town had a small gypsy population. The gypsies (if political correctness allows me to use this world, more politically correct terms are ‘travellers’ or ‘travelling people’) were clearly not of Spanish origin but Romanies, originating from South-Central Europe. Other distinct ethnic minorities in Spain were, most notably, the Jews, (known as Sefardic Jews, ie those Jews from North Africa and Spain as distinct from European, Russian or African Jews.), but also the Basques in El Pais Vasco, and many of the ‘Moros’ (this was the racist term that the Spanish gave to those North African Moroccans, Berbers or Tuaregs who today use Spain as a tourist destination, often in Winter). Up to recently scholarship had suggested that the Arabs of Medieval Spain practised a good deal more tolerance than their Christian counterparts, although this view has now been questioned. In Medieval Christian Spain Jews were made to wear a compulsory red and yellow badge of identification (eerily echoing the enforcement of coloured triangles for the various groups imprisoned by the Nazis in their concentration camps) , depictions of Jews wearing this badge can be found in the chapel of Santa Lucia in Tarragona. The most plausible history states that the Jews gained acceptance in the early Medieval period, but were later expelled from the peninsula in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Castille.

The little girl ran away. With no social security in Spain anyone who is unemployed, or very young and from a poor family, has to construct a placard and put their hand out. Afterwards I regretted that I hadn’t thrown her 100 pesetas, or taken her into the café for a soft drink.

In the café Canas yTapas I spoke to the Polish waitress. She couldn’t speak English, so we communicated through Spanish. I wondered why she was so far away from home. She told me that she had had to come to Spain to seek work, that after the fall of the former Communist regime in Poland the economy hadn’t accomplished an economic miracle, and that the Poles had been made many promises that weren’t ultimately fulfilled. In Poland Solidarity had left power and the Communists, re-modelled as a Social-Democratic Party, had slipped back into power. A sad realisation about the nature of promises in the Capitalist world had been gained, because this was a gain.

I walked back to the pub Alto Rey. In Spain place names tell their own story. Plaza Pablo Iglesias named after Pablo Iglesias (literally Paul Church) a 19th Century Spanish Socialist and one of the founders of the orthodox Spanish Socialist movement. But the orthodox Spanish Socialist movement was not to be the dominating factor in Spanish politics. Karl Marx and Frederic Engels had once remarked, ‘we must leave Spain to him!” This him was the Russian Anarchist leader Prince Mikhail Alesandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876). Bakunin was Marx and Engel’s main rival in the First International. Bakunin espoused Anarchism, a political philosophy that dispenses with any form of Vanguardism (the Marxist belief that the proletariat need to be led by a core of professional revolutionaries organised in a party structure) in favour of spontaneous action and wildcat strikes, and in Spain, notably, anti-clericalism. The Spanish clergy originally had great control over education, and detested and tried to prevent the people from gaining reading skills. With reading skills they might read the works of Karl Marx or Mikhail Bakunin, or any book of any kind that might lift them beyond the abysmal ignorance and squalor in which they lived. Anarchism had its most profound influence in semi-industrialised, agrarian and peasant societies, because its main tenet might be said to be a reversion to a pre-industrialised society (many Anarchists might dispute this). Thus, Anarchism has its roots in France, its most famous exemplar there being Pierre Proudhon with his timeless epigram ‘Property is theft’. France was an agrarian society for much longer than Britain, where social upheavals such as Chartism had normally been of a non-violent character, (the Peterloo massacre is one notable exception). The two other countries enraptured with Anarchism were Russia and Spain, each positioned at the opposite ends of Europe and both partly belonging to another Continent, Spain being the only Western European country to have been once occupied by a non-European power, and most of Russia having been submerged in Asia. The non-European or semi-European nature of both of these countries is one explanation for their fervour for Anarchism, and for Left-Wing political movements in general.

Spain had also taken its eccentric route on the Right, with various groups and factions, two competing groups of Monarchists, Carlists and Alphonsists, Right-Wing Catholic organisations such as Opus Dei, the Falange, who were not recognisably Fascists. Franco was very much an orthodox Right-Winger in that his main enemy was the Left, he had none of the obnoxious racial theories of Hitler in Germany. Franco kept Spain out of World War 2, sending the Blue Legion to fight and die on the Eastern Front. He stayed in power until 1975, abdicating then in favour of Rey Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos then established, what he called, a constitutional Monarchy. A Republican might have called it a bourgeois democracy.

As I rounded the corner a car sped past and stopped abruptly. I spoke English to the two men inside and they replied to me in German.

“Sprechen sie Englisch?”

They replied in broken English that they could and told me that they could give me a life home. This was my first introduction to Klaus and Bernhard. As we prematurely crashed into the nearest wall and I emerged shaking it dawned upon me that Klaus was as drunk as a lord. Undeterred he sped away and somehow managed to back into a parking lot right next to his apartment.

As we sat upstairs Klaus explained to me that he was a carpark attendant in Madrid and that Bernhard had come to Spain to seek a more relaxing lifestyle, and not one tied up with the eternal drag of jobs and mortgages that are the eternal obsessions of German life and society. The Germans have a far greater foothold in Spain than the British, with British people in Spain relegated to the world of language teaching. The Germans were much sought after by firms there possibly because of their reputation as engineers, and possibly because of their former links with Franco’s fascist regime.

In the pub Dave the ESL teacher is lighting up his umpteemth spliff, Bernhard is playing with a huge bottle full of beer, soon everyone is covered with Spanish beer.

Spain is a landscape where ideals and realities meet, and are somehow entwined. Looking beyond the red flags and the black flags there is a landscape with an inkblot seeping through every tree, through every blade of grass, through the red clay, through every Moorish turret, through the limpid eyes of each bird, donkey, horse and through the Andulasian peasant who sits for a day dreaming up every Picasso painting in existence, and then forgets them at the end of his siesta. It is a world of casual genius, uncompromising ideologies, of comedy, of abstract and round images, illogical routes to supremely simple goals and solutions, and of confusing routes to inordinately insane and obtuse non-answers. It is still best summed up in Miguel Cervantes novel Don Quixote, and in the abstract summation of the dichotomy in man between the dreamer and the realist, between the madman Don Quixote and the cynical realist Sancho Panza. Everything else that Spain has offered the world seems to be a further fugue on this original theme.

die Vergangenheit

It was a windy afternoon in Autumn (Herbst), dead leaves blew down Karl-Frederich Strasse.

In the Guidebook, ‘between Freiburg and Baden-Baden, Emmendingen, Psychiatric Hospital.’

It is true that Emmendingen was a quiet village, but the Psychiatric Hospital held more devils for the writers of the Guidebook, than for the village’s inhabitants, who were mostly untroubled by the local population of mental patients.

On the train to Emmendingen from Freiburg one night, I sat down with a group of Punks and Anarchists, and reached for my regulation, well-watered alcoholic beverage, which I reserved for the train. The young man beside me told me that his father was an Apache Indian, and that he spoke fluent Apache. He arched his eyebrows, and said,

“I am Bond, James Bond….”

In the pub Zum Fuchs (After the Fox, or Off to the Fox, German prepositions were an immense problematic for me, the Germans said the same about English prepositions…) an old wino told me that the Bahnhof (Station) had razor wire raised above the crossing, to prevent the self-harm that the mental patients customarily tried to commit upon themselves. I never went to the Hospital to have a look, but I knew that its presence lowered the rents. I had also been told by the Freiburgers not to go near the village, because of the ‘mad house’.

The town also had the odd mad artist, in the Café Hinterhaus, a local sculptor, with a minor reputation, would customarily come in with leaves and branches in his hair, and a plastic bag over his head. Behaviour like that is regarded as the eccentricities of genius, when a Mozart commits them, when it is a minor or unknown artist, the verdict is ‘insanity’, which is not to say that he wasn’t colourful. I laughed at his banter with Frank, who served the coffees and ejected the unworthy.

Die Vergangenheit. That is a word with a multiplicity of possibilities, it sounds abstract, harsh and unrelenting, which is what I supposed most of all was the chief characteristic of the German language. The words Heil, Achtung and Verboten came to my mind, mostly gleaned from war films, which peppered our small screens from time to time. I discovered that the little ending ‘dom’ added to some English words was heit in German hence Freiheit is ‘Freedom’ in English and so on. The word Vergangenheit means ‘the past’ in English, I supposed it might mean ‘multi-storey car park’ or something else equally multi-part. German has the facility to build up new nouns from parts, in English we can also fashion many new verbs, but many nouns enter our language through foreign languages rather than as fundamentally new coinages.

I attended many German classes in Freiburg, which was not so much to do with the history of language, as language used in common parlance, in everyday speech. This diachronic view of language was only taught in University Linguistics Departments, the synchronic approach predominated in teaching German as a foreign language. For instance, it was necessary that the students know that the German word Volk is ideologically loaded (with resonance of the Nazis, and their definition of the people as a White, Aryan racial group, as opposed to Semitic, Slav or Negroid racial types, who were classified by them as sub-humans) but that it simply means ‘people’ in English. The conflict between a (diachronic) historically rooted view of culture and society, and a perception of culture and society as fundamentally ahistorical (summed up succinctly, in Henry Ford’s famous aphorism, ‘History is bunk’) coloured my stay in Germany.

I was in Emmendingen to discover the past, that is what interested me most of all, not the present which was altogether in an exponential falling off into banality, that is until September the 11th and the Terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, brought the contemporary back into focus. At first the scare mongering and propaganda convinced me that this was Armageddon (Private Eye ran a copy soon after the attack with a cover depicting the President receiving news of the attack and his aide saying ‘It’s Armageddon Sir.’ And Bush replying, ‘Well Arm a gedden out of here,’ a satirical reference to the amount of time Bush spent away from Camp David and Washington after the attack shepherded by Air Force 1 out of danger, some leading American politicians and even his own staff felt that he spent too long in the air). I imagined my call up papers being sent to my home in Belfast, well, I thought, I can hide out here, while the war takes its course.

In essence, Emmendingen was a very interesting place, with a great deal of history, its depiction by the Guide book as ‘a psychiatric hospital’ was most unfair, and a gross mis-representation. The salient points of Emmendingen’s past were the village’s horse painters (Emmendingen, geburtsstadt des Pferdemalers Fritz Boehle, Emmendingen, birthplace of the horse painter Fritz Boehle), the first manned attempt at flight in Germany, which ended up in a dung heap (An dieser Stelle landete der Ingenieur Carl Friedrich Meerwein mit seinem selbstgebauten Flug-Apparat nach dem ersten Flugversuch Deutschlands, Anno Domini, 1784, at this site in 1784 the engineer Carl Friedrich Meerwein made the first manned flight in Germany with his self-driven flying apparatus) and the meeting of the poet, dramatist and novelist, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) with his sister Cornelia Schlosser-Goethe (1750-1777) in May 1775. The villagers were clearly proud of their connection with Goethe, Germany’s greatest author admired Sage and creator, for many, of the German language and German national consciousness. By the Station an alley Cornelia Passage, named after Cornelia Schlosser-Goethe, who died two years after the meeting, aged 27. The Schlosser’s house is now the public library. Her tragic early death struck me as strange, since her older brother lived for so long, and came through so many serious illnesses. Her grave was also somewhere in the village, but having a dislike of graveyards I stayed away. At the meeting of Cornelia and Johann Wolfgang was Cornelia’s husband, Johann Georg Schlosser, a local dignitary, a host of other minor officials, and the poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) a minor, tragic Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) poet, and subject of an unfinished short story by Georg Buchner (1813-1837) (the German playwright, who died at the age of 23 and left us the plays Danton’s Tod, Leonce und Lena, Woyzceck and an unfinished short story about the mad Sturm und Drang poet Lenz - Buchner was regarded as a scientist who wasted his life with the writing of plays and an interest and passion for revolutionary politics, which got him into trouble on more than one occasion...). Goethe’s stay lasted for two weeks, he possibly went from pub to pub, listening to stories and local gossip, or walked into the forest for walks and tours.

Obviously, a central element of the past, debated more than any other past event, that was present by its absence in Emmendingen, the Holocaust, Endlosung der Juden Frage (Final Solution of the Jewish Question), Shoah (Hebrew for ‘annihilation’). The Synagogue was in the centre of the village until the Nazis dynamited it in 1939, subsequently showing real Nazi contempt by billing the Jewish Community for the dynamite and work time. The local Jews gave the German Government (the Nazis) the Synagogue and its grounds in payment. After the war the ground was returned to them, but they were left with the task of re-building the Synagogue themselves. Today, they are still short of the funds for re-building. Beside the square where the Synagogue once was is a plaque, which ends gegen Rassenwahn und Faschimus (against racial fantasy and Fascism). Typically, in Germany, these lofty platitudes only appeared after the event. There are now few Jews left in Germany, perhaps as few as 50,000. As I walked around the square, I spotted a little Museum. It was dedicated to Emmendignen’s Jews. I went there one Sunday and looked at the exhibits, mostly objects of importance to the Jewish religion and potted history of the village’s Jews. I conversed with the curator, an Italian, and one of the many foreigners (Turks, Kurds, Iranians, Poles, there were many Poles in the apartment block on Brunnenstrasse, where I eventually found an apartment). The former Gasthaus Ochsen (at the corner of Karl-Friedrich Strasse) was originally a Guest House, then a cigarette factory, and finally the Deportation Centre for the village’s Jews, who were sent to Auschwitz in 1940. Today it is a doctor’s surgery and apartments. (I was offered the top storey apartment when I first went to Emmendingen, I noted the irony that obviously none of the villagers wanted to live there, and bequeathed it to a foreigner to make what he could of it. The apartment was clean, unfurnished and very large, too big for me to live in and heat successfully, so in the end I rejected the opportunity to live with the village’s past. But as I stood outside Gasthaus Ochsen (Guesthouse Oxen) I contemplated the soft, limpid eyes of the oxen carved on the door’s lintel, gazing down at me as if from immemorable time, from out of the distant past.)

The forest surrounded Emmendingen, the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), of course, famous for its Black Forest Gateau. That is, at least, my only previous association with this place. I had heard of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) formerly Rector of the University of Freiburg, where I taught a few creative writing classes. Heidegger is rated as a Great Philosopher, at least for his impenetrable work, Sein und Zeit, his contribution to the now unfashionable Existentialist philosophy, and for his infamous connection with the Nazis who he had supported. In brief, Heidegger had given a speech in 1933, in his position as Rector of the University, in support of Hitler and the Nazis. His support wavered after this, and he ended up in 1944 being sent to the Rhine Dykes, as that ‘most expendable of University Professors’. Martin Heidegger is at best a figure of controversy. He was born in this part of Germany and had a hut in Todtneuberg, where he worked on his philosophical speculations. Another famous person born in the Schwarzwald was Herman Hesse (1864-1947), who lived for the most part in Switzerland and India. His fame had peaked in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, when the vogue for India and Buddhist Mysticism had been at its height, with everyone from The Beatles to Hesse, who was by then dead taking their cue from the East. The point is that Hesse had been there a lot earlier than John, Paul, George (RIP), and Ringo, in 1911, when the Journey to the East was a decidedly bizarre preoccupation for any European.

But my chief interest in the Forest was its metaphorical significance. What did it mean beyond what it was? A forest, dim and spectral, with mysteries and secrets, where the rehearsal for the Future of Germany took place, where primeval acts of terror and violence took place, that were to overshadow the future, present and past. The Forest represented the unkempt and wild places of the German Romantic temperament and imagination, as opposed to the well-ordered garden of the Enlightenment (in German the word Enlightenment is Aufklarung). The two forces, the Enlightenment and Romanticism are summed up for me in the contrasting music of Mozart and Beethoven, the first mathematically sublime, the second elemental and passionate. The historian Craig is very critical of the Romantics, and sees them as the forebears of the Nazis, with their emphasis on inspiration against reason, their cult of genius and eccentricity as a sign of genius, and their central metaphor of the forest, as against the orderly garden of the Enlightenment. History for the Enlightenment was an orderly space of facts and dates, for the Romantics, history was adumbrated in the dream, the fairy story, the journey; history was a purely symbolic manifestation, a shadow to be deciphered by those who would or could. The Romantics were closer to a Freudian account of the subconscious than we can know, but clearly the figures of Wagner, Nietzsche and Freud figure large in any account of the legacy of the Romantic movement in Germany.

One previous encounter with tales of the German forest had been through the stories of the Brothers Grimm. Jacob Ludwig Karl, the elder of the brothers Grimm, was born in 1785, and Wilhelm Karl in the following year. They both studied at Marburg, and from 1808 to 1829 mainly worked in Kassel as state-appointed librarians, Jacob also assisting in diplomatic missions between 1813 and 1815 and again in 1848. Both brothers had been professors at Gottingen for several years when in 1837 they became two of the seven leading Gottingen academics dismissed from their posts by the new King of Hannover for their liberal political views. In 1840 they were invited to settle in Berlin as members of the Academy of Sciences, and here they remained until their deaths (Wilhelm died in 1859 and Jacob in 1863).

Jacob, one of Germany’s greatest scholars, is justly regarded as the founder of the scientific study of the German language and medieval German literature. His most monumental achievements were the Deutsche Grammatik (1819-37) and, with his brother’s assistance, the initiation of the great Deutsches Worterbuch, the many volumes of which were not completed by later scholars until 1961 and which has become the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. Between them, and often in collaboration, the Grimms were responsible for pioneering work on medieval texts, heroic epics, legends and mythology, and for many other contributions to the study of ancient German culture. One of their most remarkable publications was the Kinder-und Hausmarchen (1812, with many subsequent editions), which remains to this day the most famous collection of folktales in the world.

Germans have a great culture of ‘wellness’ (in English the word is ‘fitness’, ‘wellness’ seems suspect as an English adjective). Bicycles are everywhere. The trains are generally fantastic, but, for some Germans there is over-dependence on the culture of the car. Thus, the Black Forest can be viewed from a car, but not as Goethe might have viewed it, as he walked through the villages and their streets and lanes. Of course, he may also have had a horse, or a carriage. Thus I only ever viewed the Black Forest from a distance, in a train or car. Distances were also a problem, getting to Kandel, the second highest peak in the Black Forest, took 45 minutes by car, there was an extensive ski-run at the top, and a hotel, closed in early December when I visited it. The climate exhibited a schizophrenia of hot summers and cold winters that was not evident in my native Ireland, where, you might say, it was bloody cold and wet all the time.

If the rest of the Black Forest, apart from Freiburg im Breisgau and Emmendingen, was largely unknown to me, these two centres still afforded a great deal. As well as the culture of the outdoors, there was also a culture of saunas and springs. Saunas were literally everywhere. Eugenkeidelbad had thermal waters bubbling up from underneath the Black Forest and lots of saunas, Schwimmbads (swimming pools), Freibads (open air pools, used extensively in the Summertime), and simply more and more saunas. There were also many medical baths. These aspects of German life are very important in informing any non-German reader of the German character (if any people really have a ‘character’). At the baths I met many Volk Deutsch, Germans from Poland, the Baltic States and Russia, from as far away as Uzbekistan and Tajekistan. The Volk Deutsch I found to be much friendlier than the local Germans. Most of them had left Russia after the Wende (change) in 1989-90, and the Communist implosion. Afterwards Russia had descended into criminality, mafia gangs dominated Russian cities with a plethora of violence and intimidation, and the incompetent leadership of Boris Yeltsin had only made matters worse. I watched the new Russian leader Vladimir Putin (Der Spiegel - or The Mirror - Germany’s cleverest and most erudite weekly magazine now that Stern - The Star - has become more topical and generalised in its focus - called Putin, Russland’s neuer starker mann - Russia’s new strong man. I suppose this means that he was the new Ivan the Terrible, aka the new Tyrant.) give a keynote speech before the German Parliament. His German was very good, he made reference to and quoted from Kant, Schiller and Goethe. The Germans were very impressed by Putin’s attempt to speak German well, to do honour to their glorious past, another sign of a thaw in Russo-German relations. Obviously, relations between the West and the DDR (Deutsche Demokratik Republik), Russia’s puppet regime in Eastern Europe, had been icy in the midst of the Cold War. I made friends with one Russian from the Baltic State of Latvia (in German, Lettland) who taught me Russian in exchange for English. From him I learned that the word Bolshoi means big in English, that gorod is the Russian word for city, and that God means Bog. The Russian alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, is based partly on the Greek alphabet, which is obviously of non-Latin origin but also upon the Hebrew and the Latin alphabets. I recognised some paralellisms between Russian and German. Russian, like German, is an inflected language (an inflected language has a case system which determines word order. In German the cases are nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Latin has a further two cases, vocative and ablative. Russian, like Latin, has two more cases than German. English possesses vestigial cases, but cases proper left English at the time of the Mayflower. In brief, the nominative case is the subject, the accusative case the object, the dative the indirect object and the genitive is the possessive.) He had come from Riga to do research in semi-conductors at the university. To my mind semi-conductors were largely a mystery, a vast extension of my basic mathematics and physics. He explained to me that he had read Herbert Wells, Robert Burns, both symbols for the former Socialist project, now in very sad decline. He also told me how sad people had been in Riga when Communism finally collapsed, a fact that surprised me, since I always presumed that the Baltic States were solidly anti-Russian and anti-Communist. During the 2nd World War many men from the Baltic States and the Ukraine had joined the German army, and constituted some of the best SS Divisions that Hitler possessed, committing many atrocities in the East before the demise of the Nazi regime in 1945. He felt that valuable aspects of the former Soviet system could be welded to the Capitalist system, to make a synthesis of two systems. He explained to me that the strength of the Soviet system had been education, especially mathematics and physics, and that other aspects of these regimes could be models for new, projected Capitalist societies, which would benefit from a synthesis of values. He spoke good German, explaining to me that his mother had been a teacher of German, but was now a Rentner (pensioner), and had given him the proto-typical Russian name, Igor, from the opera Prince Igor by Borodin. His father had taught Russian at a State school, fought in the 2nd World War in the Russian army, and had ended up as a Headmaster, before retiring. He told me a great deal about the Russian experience in Afghanistan (a combined Northern Alliance army and American airforce was currently fighting another war in that country), he had known a Captain of Paratroopers in the Russian army, who had told him that killing people was a messy and unpleasant business, a fact which it hardly took a genius to ascertain. And also about Russian policy in the Balkans, describing the Kosovo Liberation Army as a bunch of murderous thugs and brigands who initiated a war against the Serbs. The view in the West is that Milosevic, the Serb leader, initiated his paramilitaries in Kosovo to ethnically cleanse the Kosovo Albanians in Kosovo (some thousands of Albanians were placed in Kosovo after the 2nd World War, and grew to be a substantial minority). The Russians do not recognise the Court in the Hague either, which is now trying the former Serb leader. They see the Court as a puppet of NATO and the West and not as an independent Court. A similar bifurcation of opinion happened when the KLA and its allies once again went to war in Macedonia (the so-called Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). They claimed that they were fighting for more rights (Albanians are denied language rights in the FYROM, ie their language Albanian isn't recognised as an official State language) and for representation in the country’s Civil Service and Police Force, whereas their enemies in Macedonia claimed that they were fighting for a Greater Albania, a region which would incorporate all the Albanians of Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo in one country. In the end NATO once again had to intervene in this conflict and a compromise of sorts was brokered. Today the region is still unstable, and it is perhaps just a matter of time before another war begins in the Balkans, even though Milosevic is now at the Hague facing impending trial for War Crimes.

We often strolled through Martinstor together, Freiburg’s central district. Martinstor is clearly a Medieval city gateway. I discovered a plaque on one side which commemerated the burning of three witches, drei Hexen verbrennt with the familiar platitudes urging us to think about Unmenschlichkeit (inhumanity). Next to Martinstor is the pub Schlappen where it was possible to find good food, whisky and beer, the internet café, Ping Wing, and a vegetarian restaurant. Igor found a picture of the witch burning in the museum in Martinstor, but after persistent attempts to find it I gave up. At the off-kino (a film theatre which exhibits alternative or arts cinema - there were four cinemas in Freiburg. The Cinemax, a utilitarian cinema showing mostly Hollywood fare, with some oldies and classics on a Tuesday, the UFA film theatre, which was supposed to be an Arts Cinema, but which showed most of the Hollywood fare regurgitated at the Cinemax. UFA originally produced films, and was Germany’s Hollywood in the 1920s, with directors such as Murnau, Fritz Lang and many other stars who subsequently left for America after or even before the rise of Hitler. The UFA company was owned by the businessman Alfred Hugenburg, who also ran an extreme Right-Wing party, the DNVP (Deutschenationale Volkspartei; German National Peoples’ Party) which later allied with Hitler to give him his majority in the 1933 elections. Many high street banks and chains allied themselves with the Nazis, still visible on the highstreet, they suffered only punitive damages after the war) I watched Shadow of the Vampire, a film dealing with Murnau’s earlier silent era classic Nosferatu. In the film the vampire, originally played by Max Shreck, but replaced in this version by Willem Dafoe, devours the film crew at the end, with the exception of Murnau - played by John Malkovitch - having the last laugh after all, as it escapes immolation by the sun’s rays at the end of the film. Perhaps the vampire is an incarnation of Hitler, escaping final destruction to be reborn in a different place and time. I mused at the title, is it the shadow of the vampire, or the shadow of Hitler? At the same time Der Spiegel was running a historical retrospective on the Nazi era, entitled ‘Hitler’s Long Shadow’. Of course, this was also another revision of the Nazi period, for obvious reasons Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany and France, so Der Spiegel’s account did not move far from the accepted version of events, as contrasted with the Revisionist historian David Irving, whose revision of the Holocaust was overturned in court in his action against the Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt.). Watching it in German seemed appropriate, although I struggled to understand more than a few words, at this point I had only been in Germany a few weeks. Later I saw Apocalypse Now Redux in the same cinema, a classic I have always admired. In German it is even more fascinating, even though the studio was full of beer-drinking Germans (in Germany it is normal to drink alcohol at a public film showing, another contrast with English sobriety in public places outside the bar, and possibly a sign that the Germans had no fear of drunkeness and alchohol-inspired behaviour). Another film which I watched repeatedly was Tim Burton’s Planet der Affen (Planet of the Apes) mainly for the gourgeous visuals, and the humour inspired by a pack of monkeys speaking German. I went one night with a Korean friend who was similarly fascinated. At Xmas the two children’s films were the main fare, the disappointing Harry Potter and the better Der Herr der Ringe (The Lord of the Rings). Inbetween came Schokolade zum Fruhstuck (this was the German title of the film The Diary of Bridget Jones), which was lighter and funnier, again I was lost because of my lack of fluent German, but picked up the odd word and sentence. Going to the cinema was a good way of becoming immersed in German, since many of the Germans spoke good English, and would prefer to practice their English with you, than give you practice with your German. In any case, the local dialect Badisch, was supposedly impenetrable, although I understood it quite well after a while.

There was a definite culture of music in Freiburg, in fact the presence of music was everywhere. Concerts were advertised all the time, and there was a training school for opera singers in the city, I met a trainee, Claudia, one evening on the tram. I went to a Wagner opera, Der Fliegende Hollander, at Freiburg’s opera house in the Summer time, just before the Summer recess, and then a concert of Claude Debussy’s piano works, and a concert featuring works by two modern Japanese composers as well as a standard Mozart piano concerto. The day after I was sitting in the sauna of the Hotel Dorint, which is beside the concert hall, when a diminutive Japanese man entered.

“Are you a performer with the orchestra,” I asked him.
“No, I’m a composer,” he answered.

This Japanese gentleman was obviously the composer of one of the suites of modern music. He told me that the term ‘atonal’ (atonal music was pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) in the 1920s, although aspects of atonality can be seen in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and in Wagner’s operas, particularly the prelude to Das Rheingold . These works pre-figured Schoenberg’s later experiments and his atonal system, prefigured in such works as Verklarte Nacht - Transfigured Night - the atonal system dispenses with the harmonic scale used in Western musical history) was no longer used, and that it is now just known as ‘modern music’. He added that his opera King Lear would be premiering in Covent Garden after his stay in Freiburg. At his concert a woman had remarked to me that this modern music was like science fiction to her, compared to the famliar work of the repertoire. Later I met a German composer in Emmendingen and we agreed to begin work on an opera.

The autumn leaves blew down Karl Friedrich Straße. The house fronts looked like blank, pious faces, eternally silent. The house fronts a bare façade, rising towards me like the faces of pious pilgrims wending their way to church on Sunday morning.

Emmendingen is a village (Dorf) on the edge of the Schwarzwald (Black Forest). It is known as the Gateway to the Black Forest and it is here that the Black Forest begins. The locals speak a dialect of German, Badisch, which is far removed from the Hoch Deutsch (High German) spoken in Northern Germany (the best Hoch Deutsch is spoken in the area around Hannover, Niedersachsen). Many of the older people, especially in the little villages speak an even more archaic dialect of German, Allemanisch, named after a Germanic people who lived in this area at the time of the Roman Empire. Allemanisch is dying out, (I didn’t meet anyone who spoke Allemanisch, but noticed that there was an Allemanisch Wortbuch -dictionary - in the book shop in Emmendingen.) as regional dialects become increasingly threatened by the homogenization of the German language as a result of encroaching American Imperialism. In fact some Germans expressed their concerns that they now compulsorily speak English because of the predominance of America as a world power and American English as the language of business. Is Germany now merely a colony of America? A taxi driver in Freiburg expressed these fears to me one night,

‘We are merely a colony of America and we must speak English, our German language is secondary…American Capitalism is ruining the world... Well, I hope I´m not here to see it...´

These concerns exist side by side with an apathetic acceptance of the world, and my feeling of a very limited political awareness. I was very surprised how conservative people were, but perhaps that is because I come from Belfast which has been a war zone for thirty years of my life, and where people are naturally politicized by ‘the troubles’. Of course, Southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria, have a reputation for conservatism. In Switzerland, the Swiss equivalent of our National Front polls 25% of the vote, as opposed to less than 1% in Britain. The same is true in Austria, as we have seen with the recent trouble over the election of Jörg Haider.

But I was also told that Freiburg was a grüne Stadt (Green City), grüne as opposed to Rot (Red). Old-style Marxist radicalism, as encapsulated in the DDR (Deutsche Democratik Republik) has little political purchase. In fact it might be said that the old Left-Wing project is now completely dead in Germany. The SPD´s (Socialist Partei Deutschland, the equivalent of the British Labour Party) ´Socialism´ in alliance with Die Grüne (The Greens) is now in power in Bonn. I met some students at the Stusi (This is an abbreviation for Student accommodation block) Bar who were members of Linksruck (Left Turn) the sister organization of the British Socialist Workers’ Party. This party’s version of Marxism is derived from the life and writings of Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the 1905 and October 1917 revolutions in Russia and subsequently commander of the Russian army in the period of the Russian Civil War. In 1939 he was assassinated by an agent of Stalin in Mexico City. They told me that their organization, which was in alliance with the new anti-Globalisation campaign, had been criminalized by the authorities with the backing of Schroeder’s ‘Socialists’, although it also seemed obvious to me that their activities were open and legal, even though the police occasionally read their paper.

When I was in Freiburg I decided to buy some toy soldiers and try to find an opponent for a wargame. This consists of two opposing armies of tiny lead or plastic soldiers ‘fighting’ each other, and melee and other decisions being decided by factors and the roll of a dice. But when I asked if I could put up a little note in the model shop that sold the plastic figures and models I was told that this was not allowed. Freiburg was a Green City, and wargaming was really just another rehearsal for the militarism that had blighted Germany’s past. At the same time Schilly, the Green representative in Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder’s Cabinet, whose party had campaigned on a pacifist ticket, went along with Schroeder’s decision to support America in its war in Afghanistan, and America’s all embracing ‘war against terrorism’. Surely this is an example of the schizophrenia inherent in Capitalism, as divulged by Deleuze and Guattari in their pioneering study The Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: or as depicted by members of the Frankfurt School of Marxists, theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Adorno, Bloch and Horkheimer. I was disallowed from playing a game with toy soldiers that could hurt no one. At the same time a Minister and a Party that had campaigned for pacifism was embarking on a war of dubious legality in terms of international law, a war in which perhaps 20,000 or more people, both Taleban soldiers and Afghan civilians were killed, and many others mutilated, wounded, homeless and starving, and a war in which, as we have seen, the Geneva Convention was largely ignored.

Just after the September 11th attack I marched on a protest for peace through the center of Freiburg. Banners with slogans such as Wir wollen kein Krieg (We don’t need war) and Krieg ist keine losung (War is no solution), as well as some banners expressing solidarity with the State of Israel, which, as we also know, is completely bound up with state terrorism. Of course the Germans may have felt that they had to express solidarity with Israel as a result of Germany’s tainted past.

I think that these were chilling examples of those paradoxes that seem to be etched into the very fabric of Capitalism. These bizarre and senseless conjunctions, so like the fragmented and nonsensical utterances of a schizophrenic and yet accepted by seemingly sane people. I was also warned to stay away from a village described as a ‘psychiatric hospital’, but which was really very quiet, lovely, beautiful, and crammed full of fascinating history. I would have been genuinely disturbed, but these paradoxes do not only belong to Freiburg, or to Southern Germany, they are everywhere, even in my native, Belfast.

Heaps of dead leaves, facades.

On Saturday Igor and I regularly went on trips to local towns in France. One Saturday afternoon we left for Colmar, a town over the German border. We took a bus and train connection, and arrived in Colmar in early afternoon. I had only ever been to towns and cities in Northern and Southern France. Colmar had a distinct flavour, not quite French and not quite German. We set off to find a cheap restaurant at Igor’s insistence, despite my protest that we were tired and would only wander for hours through the town, looking for something that probably did not exist. Eventually, tired and footsore, we arrived at a little café and bought quiche lorraine, but it was not really very cheap. It was Igor’s first taste of quiche, he also spoke no French whatever, so it was left to me to order the food and drinks. The quiche was very bad indeed, in spite of this it was still enjoyable, the red wine was sour, as dry red wine often is.

BERLIN DIARY


03.08.04

Kismet Kindl

Hi, just a lot of hard work. I´ve been plagued with blisters, that as well as the ligament injury. Blisters are usually a sign of ill-fitting shoes, the shoes I bought just before I left a new pair of walking shoes, very tough. It is hot here, about 30 grad celsius pro tag. I´m using a very thick, black Indian ink pen to draw some of Berlin´s monuments. It gives them a Gothic feel. I sold a sketch of the Brandenburger Tor to a Berliner, for 30 euroes. It shows, you have to keep to the most obvious landmarks, most recognisable people or sites, to feed the public otherwise they aren´t interested. My stay here has been relatively lonely, especially the latter half. Not having a job is a big problem. I think I could make it here if I had more time and more resources but even a cheap hotel is 30 euroes per night. It would be okay if I was selling sketches every hour but I´ve only sold one. It would also be possible with a permit for street art which happens to be very expensive in Berlin and much dearer than London, for instance. Tonight I was in the Kaufhauf des Westens (Dept store of the West), v impressive, grand building and then sketched the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtnisse Kirche (also known as ´Hollow Tooth´ because the roof was blown up by an Allied bomb). Inside is the Stalingrad Madonna, a sketch made by a German doctor at Stalingrad - on the back of a map. Berlin must have been incredible before WW2, most of it is now destroyed.

I´m just inside the Eastern sector, at Potsdamer Platz. It is an amazing jungle of skyscrapers but was undeveloped before the Wende. I have a cheaper and better hotel now. The staff are personable, only speak a little English and are very grateful to have a customer who speaks German to them. It is clearly quite unusual since German is such a difficult language to master. The pity is that my German level is just below theirs but within 6 months I´d be fluent too. The night porter is an amazing gentleman, quintessentially civilised (and eminently Gay), helps me with my German and clearly would like to spend the night with me too.
M wrote today to call me Hamsterbäcke (hamster mouth). I call her Frau Schweinimaus, pig mouse, after her dogs.
Tschußie,
Paul

I forgot, in Germany a great deal of political correctness circulates about the Dritten Reich. If Germans are now so politically correct about their last, why didn´t they prevent the Dritten Reich? Is it possibly because they were defeated? If it takes political defeat to make embarrassment, it can´t really be a very profound embarrassment since presumably if the Dritten Reich had won - but then questions like that are meaningless really. To my mind Hitler was just as capable a politician as Churchill, Roosevelt and possibly more so than Stalin. And if you want evidence of their human rights abuses, then they aren´t difficult to find because their acts stain the conscience of humanity everywhere, from Ireland to India, from South Africa to Mexico, from Siberia to Georgia. What are we left with then? Might is right? Nazi Germany was defeated because it was militarily not morally weaker and Nürnburg is the perfect example of victor´s justice.
We could move onto a world without force and that can only be achieved through new technological and scientific discoveries, something that would give every person on the planet their personal hydrogen bomb. Then who would be brave enough to use it? To do so would mean mutually assured destruction? Just underlines the perfect futility of hatred, doesn´t it?

Topographie des Terrors

Dear M,

I visited this retro theme park of the Dritten Reich. The faces of Heydrich, Heß, Himmler almost have a homeliness and are certainly as familiar as the faces of many old friends. There are some hilarious photos - a platoon of Wehrmacht infantrymen form the shape of a swastika and fire a volley into the air. It’s hard not to be reminded of the camp Hollywood choreography a la Busby Berkeley when you see this. There are the many sobering but rather predictable photos of the opfers. I think with so much that is predictable I started to question the meanings of some of the photos. Of course photos of a pogrom in Poland could be photos of a pogrom almost anywhere, doctored, produced, sexed up. At a very basic level the Museum presumes an uncritical and unquestioning audience which is not to say that many, if not all of the images are true, real or whatever. But we´re not led to ask the question - does the camera ever lie which would have made the exhibition very interesting indeed, questioning its own terms and veracity? I might have believed in it then.

Berliner Sicherheit

These are 2 complexes of tall buildings nr Potsdamer Platz. The wall intersected through this area, indeed small sections have been preserved. It seems to have been built with steel skeleton filled with concrete, a very typical process of manufacture. Joseph Beuys famously remarked that the wall was 18 inches too low. The buildings in the area are gargantuan structures filled with glass. There is no intimation of a war against terror for the buildings seem built with terrorists in mind so seemingly vulnerable they are to bombs & Co. However I noticed that there is a visible checkpoint and low walls nr the American Embassy and the British Embassy is blocked off too. All very like Checkpoint Charlie used to be, there's a reconstruction of it at Koch Strasse U-Bahn halt. I walked down the street where the British Embassy is and a policeman seemed to be making some incredible incantation. I stopped and watched him for 2 minutes. I think he must have been saying some old Indian prayer, the one that begins ´getta me out of here...´
So, here I am undermining national security and blowing holes through the war against terror. Another thing to say is that Berlin is just incredibly cheap. In fact it is possible to live here on practically nothing, in fact nothing is a great deal in Berlin, a poor city compared with other Western European national capitals. Because of the relatively late entry of Germany into the hall of nations (also the name of my hotel), it’s easy to see how a whacko provincial movement of crackbrained one-idea loonatics could have pre-empted my attempt at a coup. (namely, running past Daimler City with a red flag, joost like that bit in ´Modern Times´....)

Wien

Heute Ich habe sehr Groß Zahnschmerz, Ich rauche zu viel. Ich war in Wien mit Igor Stepanov auch. Er ist ein besser (sandwich maker) als pyhsiker. Wien ist schrecklich, ein (total crisis in the social services, all the phones are kaputt. A very dark place, one legged beggars, all the things you loved and lived in ´The Third Man´are true.) Igor has a little toaster, excellent gouda on bread and then toasted. The café down the street charged me 18 euroes for a local call, I protested, a HitlerJugend type thug put his arm around me. A good swivelling distance away, ice settled in a glass. These are economics of the blackest market. Everyone has changed to Handies - mobile phones - or is being forcepped to. I got lost. It was the middle of the night. I yelled up to the balcony and somehow the gargantuan Russian curmudgeon shouted hoarsely back. Yet more evidence that I have the luck of the Devil or maybe so much bad luck that my good luck seems amazing. He recognised my screams and then tried to feed me pickled gherkins, now almost like currency in Russia where even shoelaces and spit are worth much more than the local dosh. Beware the rides of March, a well-known strassenbahn halt in Wien. The Fried Museum, another well-known U-Bahn halt, where the theroes of Fraud were tossed and toasted across and across the Platz. Thredoniacial hushed tomes and even more beggars, lamp-lit but everything was squelched, you know. Wien Deutsch is definitely Sud Deutsch. On the way back (but to where) stopped in München for the night. My heart stopped - not me - at Rohrbach, for Frau Schweinimaus lives there, einen kleinen Romantischen Frau mit drei Großen Hunds. Discovered that I was sitting on top of my electric toothbrush.

Muenchen

Now I´m in München I see what a toy town it is compared to Berlin. Still München is a bit cleaner. It just has nothing to compare with Friedrichstraße or Potsdamer Platz. I´m amazed that I didn´t see this before but then I was never in Berlin before. Tonight I went to the sauna, a very traditional and popular German pleasure. Again I just yearned to get back to Berlin, to the sauna near the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche. In Berlin I was just around the corner from the Friedhof where Hegel, Fichte, Brecht\Wiegel lie. Now there´s history. Not that München doesn´t have history either but it all seems charming and slightly nonsensically eccentric in a König Ludwig\Richard Wagner way.

Potsdamer Platz/Babelburg

I'm in Berlin. Right now I'm at Potsdamer Platz, once Europe´s Time Square. For a long time it declined until the Wende in 1989. Since then it has been rebuilt with some works of architectural genius. At my window now are some remarkable skyscrapers and all the glass that any errant bomber could want. There are lots of cinemas here and a film museum which gives us a clue as to the nature of this place. It is the hub of cosmopolitan, of internationalism and international communication in Europe.

I think Nietzsche is one of the people who might have prevented the Nazi Movement. Nazism grew out of centuries of Christian sponsored anti-semitism in Europe. It especially originated from the Catholic Church, an institution that hated Nietzsche for his anti-christian, yet positive and progressive theories. I think Nietzsche has been used as a scapegoat. The various complex messages of his work go far beyond Nazism and anyone with a cursory knowledge of the ideas of Hitler will see no connection between his ideas and Nietzsches. Nietzsche influenced so many art movements and people from across the political spectrum. He had a universalism that was always going to be displaced in some way and an obvious propensity to be mis-understood as every great thinker is. By setting up N as a scapegoat, most of the justified anger could be directed his way and not against the set up of religious charlatans and mystifiers.

Today I went to Babelsburg, the German Hollywood until the destruction of Berlin in 1945. This theme park is really for kiddies and the trips on a U Boat and the set piece from Mad Max are fun to be involved in, if not just for the mass enjoyment, clapping and laughable stunts. I talked to the artist there about exhibiting in Berlin. She seemed to think I'd have a chance. She demonstrates to people how art functions in regard to film. As well as this there are sections on film & architecture, a quite straightforward projection from the architecture of houses and interiors and most of the stuff I saw at M´s house last summer. The Caligari facade is great fun and the facade from The Pianist is good too, especially when you knock against it with a ringing hollowness. I thought if I pushed hard enough the facade would fall over just like in the Buster Keaton films.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

As I wandered into Alexanderplatz the sky was sputnik yellow, lower sounds, lower still than could possibly be registered by the semi-radar of mutant dolphins, were recorded by the jugs on my head (sometimes called ears). In a flash of translucent light, light enfolded within light:
I stepped forward - 'I am your Saviour and I have come to guarantee that there will be plentiful hamburgers at the resurrection. You have been governed by schism and then by ism for too long. Take them....' (opens a rucksack and begins to dispense Big Macs)
The strange light and eerie low sounds disappeared. I realised that the shining bright clothes were merely rags and that far from being a Saviour I was, indeed, a - Leper. Determined to pre-empt the usual ejection from town or the predictable tarring and feathering that accompanies the arrival of every Messiah, I stepped into an art gallery run by autonomen with strange names like RAN 42 and Monika (wearing white socks with deliberative metonymies and arrows to a variety of - adequately dubbed you might say- Marlene Dietrich incarnations.) I explained the scratchings on the wall as a Darwinian shift, even a Doppler shift, from blob to astronaut back to blob again. Cauliflower ears disguised as seats and RAN 42 asking for a cigarette.
'Monika wants Gaulloises black.'
Lurking between the columns, my mind so seemingly composed of poetic scenes, Greek or Roman facades and nymphs sporting in the vaginal waves but really a post-nuclear landscape with desire etched at the very centre, burnt out derelicts and penile projectiles aimed at the sun's very centre, I set out to fetch the cigarettes.

Marlene Dietrich's Bones

So I touched it, it fell overNow I am wanted for the radical dismantling of a zillion yr old Brachiosaurus. This art is too radical by far.What thoughts touched that Brachiosaurus. Think?Wilhelm Humboldt, a very old Prussian, constructed this fiend on this site.He saw much through its eyes, he even gorged himself on the appropriate leaves to make it all so spectacularly real.A very old Darwinist eating even older leaves. For the zillionth time, no I didn't feed the Brachiosaurus bones to my dog. My dog has better taste.I leant over to feel Monika's bum and brushed the Brachiosaurus on the way past. In moments a heap of dust and I even missed Monika's bum who had by this time gone into the next room and was oblivious to everything.We ran down the street. RAN42, another autonomen, greeted us. kein praktikum, Herr Murphy, Wilhelm Humboldt chair in the study of Jurassic paleontologynatürlich www.theengine.net


KIOSK

Hier ist's getan
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.

Goethe - Faust 2


At Koeln Hauptbahnhof I was approached by a prostitute but had to catch the direct connection to Koblenz. She was a wasted, dragged out of the Rhine creature, with painted on eyebrows and heroin breath. Somehow the Germans do this identikit woman better than anyone.

"You can come back to my home, or I will come to your hotel room. You...you're a NATO soldier..."

In Koblenz I did a Bewerbungs GeSpricht (job interview) on the way to pick up a rather complex translation on CD Rom with what turned out to be an attractive Ossi girl.

I met a Polish girl, we went sketching together. On Sunday (we were supposed to meet Sunday) I phoned her:'der Pabst ist gestorben’ (the Pope is dead - she'd gone to Church - all day).The whole thing washed over me. Now he is displayed in a Church in Rome and 1000s of people queue to see the body of some old man. Let's face it the Pope had some odd views and was very anti-Communist. I'm sure he remembers how his predecessor tacitly approved of the immolation of the Jews.
Isn't the world so fucking strange. A silly old bugger, vague anti-semite with strange views on sexuality, contraception and very much into control - dies - 1000s of people want to view his greying corpse. I would have thought, just chuck the silly old bugger into a sack, throw his greying corpse into the Tiber. But maybe I am odd? This girl has gone to Church when she could have spent a day of love with me. She has gone to pray for a doddery old fool when she could have been seeing some more of the world. Does she listen to the views of fools? Is she a pork-head?

To be perfectly honest, ideas come into my head - on the U-Bahn, Strassenbahn, usually - sometimes I'm slumped in my seat pissing myself laughing but I'm sure those thoughts I'm having are very dark and very sad. I'm not an extreme Protestant, in fact I despise Protestantism even more than I detest Catholicism. I merely believe in material facts, like a pleasant Sunday spent with a friend rather than sitting in some dank, reeking of piss, old Cathedral with some flatulent Catholics, all intent on groping each other's husband or wife. The latter sounds like a vision of Hell, like something from the book Catholics are meant to abide by...whatever. Maybe she thinks that if she goes to the Cathedral, that the Pope or one of the Pope's friends, will send her a brown envelope stuffed with money. They suck, they all suck.

Somehow an en masse submission to x number US journals resulting in a single acceptance slip seems to me the most chilling Totalitarian message ever.

I thought to buy the self-inflicting torture machine this morning but was stopped through lack of LOOT, one of the great anti-Totalitarian messages of Capitalist civilisation, God bless it.

A perfect day, walking back over the bridge to the Jugendherberge and fell through a wormhole (a hole in the space/time continuum). Luckily for me I ended up right back here. Köln Dom resembles the dark monolith I dreamt of, blacker than obsidian, dappled with star glimmer (yes and a very nice DVD player, a drink's cabinet), the atom bomb of its day. They clearly had a concept of the past back then since the people of the Middle Ages (or the Upper-Class, educated people) clearly wanted to leave something for posterity. But since human beings have been around they have been so vain as to suppose that a future cares for them. That's what sadness is, you see. Animals really don't have it or if they do, it’s heavily disguised. I don't really 'know' anything. I suppose it depends on whether I can get a job or not but something has come up. It seems that it will be possible to work as an Übersetzer. At this point this hardly depends on location, just upon access to a computer and the internet which is free at most libraries. Perhaps I can do some Englisch nachhilfe too. If we meet it will be as likely as two logs falling off a waterfall or finding fool's gold.

Nothing much has happened today except that I went into a bookshop, an interesting one. The owner and his friends were clearly all pissed but pretending not to be. He told me the names of the writers, whose photos he had on the wall, including some obvious ones and ones I´d never heard of. There were German writers, Irish writers and Virginia Woolf. Tells you something about 20th century writing and 21st. He had photos of Joyce and Beckett, all a bit obvious. I don´t think he knew very much about contemporary writing. I asked him if he knew Feibig but he shook his head. Then I asked for Bayerisch writers and he brought me a cheapo boxed set of Lord Byron´s poetry, must have mis-heard me. His friends mentioned Karl Valentin (re München) and some other writers I hadn´t heard of. The selection was a bit obvious. Then I bought some cheapo paperbacks by T.Mann out of politeness. You get the feeling that you almost have to buy when you go into a bookshop here but the books are v cheap. I then walked into an art gallery, some v bad photos blown up onto canvas. A US woman artist using ancient photo equipment and taking photos of ACW battlefields and passing this off as art! It was the biggest heap of junk I have ever seen! Prices of 35,000 euroes on most of them. The photos were v over-exposed, cloudy with something like elephant semen rubbed onto them. I wouldn´t have given five quid for the lot. In fact, I would have wanted to be paid to take one away. Köln (because that´s where I am) has a more interesting, younger arts scene than München but Berlin is better. The galleries aren´t as wonderful as the ones in München. No one as lovely and funny as Martha here.

I've met lots of girls like that. They thrive in semi-developed backwaters like Ireland or Poland. Trouble is that they are just so totally uninteresting in every way. There is always a boyfriend lurking in the background, even when there isn't a boyfriend one will appear like Mephistopheles rising from the stage when needed. He is just a device to ward away guys like me who are 'taking the piss'. (ie taking the piss in the eyes of girls like this) Girls like this are really just worthless and a total waste of time. The only thing of entertainment value that might happen is if she sends the boyfriend to deal with me that she must do because her values and ideas about sex and relationships have been demonstrated to be inauthentic and valueless. I've learnt, from experience, not to be at all afraid of this boyfriend however big, strong or aggressive he is. Because I am intelligent, fit and strong and he is a basic monkey (let's face it, only a monkey could be with a girl like that), the fight will be of little interest except to see if he can get to intensive care before his head falls off.

Interestingly just spent 4 hrs in Starbucks (a good place to meet Germans who want to swop German for English) translating Doktor Faustus and Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (‘Doctor Faustus’ and ‘Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man’). Outrageously, this girl didn't know the Faust-saga. I explained to her that Mann, a Liberal, was alienated by the Hitler regime (ie not simply radicals, Leftists and Jews) and left, firstly for die Schweiz and then Amerika. Interestingly, he returned to Zürich nach der Krieg which must have meant that he only intended to live in Amerika while the Hitler regime was in power. Looks like Mann had the uncanny knack of staying on the winning side, more important than anything, even more important than being on the side that was right. (I take it that sometimes the morally inferior side wins a war?) I don't know if the Dritten Reich was morally inferior? I think there were truths on both sides. Goebbels spent most of the '30s attacking Britain's human rights record and Imperialism which had been bloody, esp in Ireland which explains why so many Republicans took refuge in Berlin in 1939. Anyway, she was most pleasant and has now left to go to West Köln where she no-doubt lives (in a pleasant suburb with trees and presently no-Jews, ie different from no Jews but unlike no-trees). His books are beautiful but in German they seem cumbersome and ungainly. Most Germans I've met say they like to read his books most of all, even more than Goethe who is considered archaic, something one does at school as we do boring, old Shakespeare (Shakespeare is considered boring because he is often taught so badly). The bookshop owner - I've remembered - said that the novels of Karl May are rubbish and only suitable for small children. (Kennst du Karl May? Old Shatterhand und viele andere Romans? Hitler's Lieblings Romaner!) This interests me because I read that most Germans read Goethe out of duty and Karl May for pleasure but this is clearly untrue. That was an interesting encounter. On the way out of the cafe, the waitress told my friend that she was surprised at how good my German was. This is really pleasing and shows that the hard work is paying off. Physically this girl was not attractive to me but looks are not the only thing we find attractive in women. (she became more attractive as the evening wore on….)

You are locked out of your apartment in downtown Wien. An arrangement has been made by the night porter with a local cafe who need you to use their telephone. As a result of a crisis in the Viennese social service structure you have to go into a local cafe to make a short distance call to the night porter to open the door to your apartment. You make the call, they charge you 20 euroes for the pleasure and an argument ensues. Out of the shadows a Hitlerjugend appears with a cosh. You lie in a pool of blood until the ambulance arrives. At hospital you die and go to Heaven/Hell.
In Heaven/Hell you discover that x has sent an e-mail alleging that you are a child molester. The address of the internet cafe where the e-mail is sent from is -68 Mariahilfer Str., Wien, OstrreichGo there, arrest everyone, kill everyone.You are now alone in a cave composing a last rhapsodic symphony but the question is:
Is there something more than Harry Lime in the Viennese sewers?

You have to remember the fragile flowers trampled down by every Uebermensch but then I remembered that Uebermensch really means everyman not superman. I found this out in the Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum in Berlin. Beate Uhse had been a Messerschmidt test pilot, not a dictator's mother.

I wrote this because I saw a photo of Hitler's mother this morning. An attractive woman with black hair. It would be impossible to say that she was ugly and Hitler resembled her much more than his father who was also pictured wearing one of those Nietzsche moustaches - one of those handle bar moustaches (that must have proliferated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire?).

My advice is, just keep with it. Remember Zeno's paradox,the race is not always to the swift...
In the event of an emergency I have the e-mail address of a person who may help you:
president@whitehouse.gov
and this letter
Dear President Bush,the Murphyman has come to the area to speak of the Greek Tragedians and make double entendre and verbal paradox. I would appreciate it if you could immolate him using the deadly death ray.Yours sincerely,Simon Jenner
a drone in outer space will extend a robotic arm
drone

the Murphyman
earth
speed of the drone = 1000 miles per hourtrajectory = 45 degreesspeed of the Murphyman = 5 miles per hourtime taken to immolate the Murphyman = 3.5 seconds
press the button, eradicate the Murphyman!

Behind the Hauptbahnhof the Dom leered drunkenly, obsidian black, a dark avatar or demon, a Mephistopheles leaping from the opera pit to tempt another errant Faust. (Faust meant 'fist' in German, a fist, perhaps, to beat away presumptions or misconceptions, to beat away at the audience or reader.) The Dom was a Medieval creation that had somehow survived into the modern world. Even today it is simply enormous, although newer, even bigger tower blocks and skyscrapers dominated the Koeln cityscape, a gigantic testimony to the human will to leave a memorial to the future. It pointed skywards, towards heaven or God, because that is where the Medieval mind placed the separate meanings of spirituality or creativity or the human soul.

The prostitute had mistaken me for a NATO soldier. I was wearing a blue alpine coat, grey slacks and a shirt and tie, neatly dressed for once in my interview clothes. Her approach was unexpected and the directness of her offer quite shocking to me. How innocent I must have appeared to her! In truth I found this case of mistaken identity very shocking indeed (okay dear, I'm a sensitive poet, not a brute with a rifle or machine gun...).

How closely these tropes mimicked the machinery of the opera or theatrical stage, where notions of good and evil are never so simplistically reductive as straightforward damnation or salvation. Where it seems somehow that rich men, for instance, are often evil and do evil things to become rich yet pay their historians, scribes and biographers to depict them as whited sepulchres. The Medieval mind was apparently simplistic and its worldview religious in origin. The theatre was therefore its natural successor, in a cultural sense anyway and the voice of the new, nascent mercantile class that replaced the earlier feudal, religious one.

While I was in Koeln the Pope died - der Pabst ist gestorben - beamed the front pages of every newspaper. Typically, the Dom was the focus for most of the pomp and circumstance surrounding this event. Another, German Pope was to be elected, replacing a Pope who had dominated the Cold War era. He had been Polish and chosen, probably, to represent the great, unfolding era of the Kaltes Krieg and the eventual triumphalism of Capitalism, the free market and liberty, however correctly or erroneously this term was used or abused. I felt his recommendations on contraception in Africa were criminal. It is difficult to believe how anyone in such a position of authority could make such pronouncements given the AIDS crisis on that continent. Personally, I was surprised that a German Pope was chosen, especially a Bavarian one who had fought in the Wehrmacht circa 1945. I had thought a Latin American or African Pope might have been the logical choice given the Catholic Church's decline in Europe and present rise in the Developing or 3rd World. Now that the 2nd World has ceased to exist and the plethora of Eastern Europeans and Russians in London and even in Belfast is a testimony to this, all drifting West for better pay and conditions, the only war left is the much-heralded, much talked about, war against terrorism and this was clearly a West/East standoff or the much-heralded, much-vaunted, clash of civilisations.

The Hauptbahnhof was clearly a dangerous place (or so the guidebook said but writers of guidebooks always want to make out that the world is a good deal more dangerous than it really is and concomitantly those writers want to appear to be a good deal tougher than they really are.), packed with travellers and much human driftwood. There were many kiosks, bistros and cafes, all selling junk food and the usual international press, yellow press and airport/train station novels. In fact, I was reading Hans Magnus Enzenburger's collection of poetry, Kiosk, finding help to translate it from a variety of fellow travellers, one of whom happened to be a wine merchant and very knowledgeable about the English language too. Perhaps kiosk, this temporary, boarded structure selling the usual confectionaries, newspapers and all the rest of the very ordinary necessities of everyday life, including beer and schnapps of course, condoms, kleenex, tampex, was a metaphor for the flux and temporariness of modern life. Predictably, these boarded structures employed Iranians, Iraqis or Turks ('Deutsche leute sind nicht hofflich', one told me, 'the Germans are impolite.' I think the source of this complaint lay in the system of class and race that the Germans, English, French, Spanish, Italians, ie all Western Europeans, employed.) Not only was there a class system but also a system of race for most menial or poorly paid jobs were done by these people. Toilet cleaners were mainly black women. I spoke to one at the McDonalds next to the station, generally she was happy with her lot but wondered why her employer took a cut of her wages (generally speaking, no one had to leave 50 cents or a euro for the cleaner, it was therefore an entirely voluntary act. This is different from Britain, where toilets are usually free but gives work and a chance to someone who might not normally have a chance. This woman came from Africa and seemed to me to be in very good spirits and glad now to be moving onto a better job.)

Across the road from the McDonalds, the Dom soared skywards, the atom bomb of its day. In other words, a spectacular feat of architecture but I didn't venture inside. The truth is that there is so much religion in old Europe, so little Christianity and so many monuments, tombs, Cathedrals. I explored some of the local Museums and Art Galleries but my heart simply wasn't in it. Culture just seemed boring and irrelevant, very nice for those who could afford it but the reality for everyone else was the relentless search for money and work. The system had created in me the desire to search for work. This meant that work equated with decency and normality, insistence that any other kind of work, writing, for instance, or painting, wasn't work but something else, a luxury, unpaid labour, an endless, trivial, bourgeois parlour game, very comfortable, very safe and very boring and very financially impoverishing. There was no money in it, of course, for me because my writing was 'bad' (my father wasn't eminent, successful or rich and didn't go to Oxbridge and I went to a below average school and didn't have a posh, upper class background - but then one could go on and on making excuses, call them explanations, for failure) and not 'good'. This is also called 'liberty' in the 'free world', the 'freedom' to explain the system but not to participate in it, ultimately the freedom to be ignored, or, worse still, patronised or condescended to. The system had endless condescension to offer but very little money. The system had endless amounts of 'liberty' to offer, not real freedom but the right to be a talking head. Talking, of course, empties the pocket when one has to pay for it. This is what the internet and e-mail was generally about, so too telephones, letters and the rest of the communicatory media. It was good to talk, that way even more Capitalists could relieve any person of their cash in return for the illusion of 'liberty'. This was now a world where communication was fraudulent, seemingly limitless, was endlessly accessible but also endlessly useless since apparent aloneness, fragmentation and atomisation was even more apparent than before. But real freedom was something else. What it was and how to find it was something the black woman toilet cleaner told me or the dialectic we maintained, however brief. Why does my employer take a cut of my wages, for he does no work? My question, why do you accept this system of exploitation and not try to overthrow it? What makes you think that your employer is necessary? Why can't you kick him out of your life and take the cut that he expects? Will moving onto another job really make things better or will it mean even more exploitation? Obviously, another job just means even more (probable) white, male or female bastards, even more exploitation. It may mean better pay and conditions but probably yet more people, mostly male and white, who will come to depend on you. It is their dependency not yours that is the question. How long can they sustain this illusion and how will you become independent of them? What they do is a matter of absolutely no interest. Let them rot. Let them crawl in the gutter. Let them become toilet cleaners, menials. Let them die, they deserve no better. Did they care about either you or me? (Okay, maybe this woman now has a job which is somehow better than being a slave. But is the truth not that wage slavery is merely a more efficient system of exploitation than slavery was? As well as the obvious cruelties of plantations, some plantation owners treated their slaves rather well and those slaves may have been better cared for by those plantation owners than they are under our so-called ‘free market’ system.)

Taking a ride on a lightbeam

Atom bombs, quarks and quantum mechanics were also on my mind, for it was the anniversary of Albert Einstein's discovery/invention of of time and space (1905-2005). On the cover of Der Spiegel a picture of Einstein pointing at space bending and the banner Die Erfindung von Zeit und Raum (The discovery of time and space). In basic terms, this discovery/invention meant that space and time, the mechanics of the Universe were no longer independent but now predicated upon an observer. Einstein famously declared 'is the train travelling to Berlin or is Berlin travelling to the train' meaning that space and time were relative to the observer and not independent of him/her. What he was reacting against/to was the Newtonian account of the Universe as a perfectly ordered, symmetrical entity, revolving and evolving almost like a mechanical clock, perfectly independently, perfectly ordered. But Newtonian physics was also perfectly wrong (I don't think there is any such thing as a wrong answer in physics, merely speculations that turned out to be incomplete or simplistic). Einsteinian physics is also cognate with the ethos of Post-Modernism where all meta-narratives or over-arching systems are rejected or ejected. The Universe was no longer ordered in a systematic way but was evolving in a much more volatile and uncertain manner and this could now be explained through Einstein's Relativity Theory and General Relativity Theory (Spezielle Relativitatstheorie und Allgemeine Relativitatstheorie). But what did all this matter to this black woman toilet cleaner? Einstein's theories hadn't changed things? Even after Relativity Theory and the immense strides that physics had made in a single century, there were still the exploiters and the exploited, just two sides to the tracks. Maybe Einstein's theories, like Karl Marx's, weren't as profound as they seemed, or, seemingly profound, they were impossible to open up, to make accessible, to those outside the academy, in the so-called 'real world'. In other words, were these theories irrelevant because they could not be boiled down and made accessible to the average person in the street or is complexity just a necessary part of advanced ideas. Average, ordinary people are just excluded from specialised knowledge, knowledge that is necessary to maintain or create advanced physics, advanced science, advanced technology. Karl Marx, unlike Einstein, sought to persuade the mass of people of the necessity of revolution but, even so, his work Das Kapital (The Capital) is broadly inaccessible. Although Marx might have espoused interest in persuading workers of the rightness of his views, he did little to forward their interests by writing an unreadable tome in literary, philosophical German (which was already a very advanced discourse. Other German philosophers, like Kant or Hegel, who weren't really revolutionaries in the sense that Marx was, are also quite unreadable for those who lack the 'gateway' vocabulary. This is only something that might be learnt at a University, an institution that the black female toilet cleaner was probably excluded from.)

Of course, there was also the theory that all of the significant European poetry, philosophy and art had been created by black Africans. How could Europeans, with their Imperialist thuggery ever create such monuments of intellect and art? It is true that both Beethoven and Marx appear to be black from the lithographs, paintings and photographs of these historical personages (Beethoven appears to be very swarthy and Marx was nicknamed 'the Moor') but there is no real genealogical evidence to support this view although many arguments supporting Beethoven's blackness had been published after his death. It is mere speculation but points towards the essential difference of European artists, philosophers and poets from their militaristic, mercantilist or aristocratic peers. It might also have been that they were black, Gay and manic-depressive, most of the evidence pointed in support of the latter, for instance.

Der Spiegel adumbrated Einstein's theories with diagrams and text, all neatly picked out by my fluorescent underliner. I picked out terms like schwerer Himmelskorper (heavier heavenly body) or Zeitraum (timespace). Interestingly, the writers of Der Spiegel were not beyond incorporating Americanisms into their text. Einstein exemplified the life of a misunderstood or ignored genius, vom Mr Nobody zum Jahrhundertgenie (from Mr Nobody to genius of the century) Der Spiegel beamed. But Einstein was never Mr Nobody although he may have been mistaken for a Joe Average (for which there was a term in German -).

The Dom had survived into the era of preservation, when people had begun to preserve the past, not destroy it. Before the Dom was built, circa 1300 A.D. a great deal of the past had been destroyed. Europe was a basic pig sty compared with Byzantium (theoretically, Christians and allies although this didn't stop the Crusaders from sacking Byzantium in 1203. At this time the population of Byzantium numbered 250,000 souls. It was a vast megalopolis at this time compared to cities like Paris, Rome or London whose inhabitants numbered only thirty or so thousand.) or the Arabic world. The Arab Empire stretched from Spain to India and the cosmopolitan Arabian scientists, poets and philosophers had thought to preserve the learning of the Greeks, forging an intriguing mix of the Koran and Aristotelianism. From these teachings and writings, the Christian world derived all its Neo-Platonic or Neo-Aristotelian lore. Obviously, once people thought to preserve the past they began to reflect upon their own personal and intimate pasts, not simply the past as encapsulated in history books, a confetti of facts and dates adding up to what? Koeln's Dom survived into the era of preservation, a message in a bottle thrown into the sea - time (and was, in fact, surrounded by even further Roman antiquities thoughtfully uncovered by modern day archaelogists.) It typified the Modernist search for the past, for history and the modern urge towards reflection and self-reflection.

The Faust myth dominated my imaginative view of Germany, but, in truth, there was little evidence that Germans even knew who Faust was or what the significance of the story for Germany might be. The average, not very highly educated Germans I met didn't know anything about Faust and would have found Goethe's work or the other books on the subject, inordinately boring and irrelevant. In short, the Faust myth was first given a make-over by Christopher Marlowe in the Renaissance, as the play Dr Faustus. Marlowe died in a duel in Deptford, London, imitating in his life some of the over-reaching, crypto-Nietzschean themes of his own play. Faust thinks that knowledge is more important than wisdom and unwisely sells his soul to the Devil in the guise of Mephistopheles in exchange for all knowledge. Eventually, and through many misadventures, Faust is somehow redeemed and offered salvation. The play was based on a well known folk tale that had circulated Europe from Medieval times onwards. The second great interpretation of the tale is by Goethe, Germany's greatest writer. His Faust is written in two parts. The first reflects his youth and middle period preoccupations, for at this point Goethe was nothing more than a Romantic poet of the Sturm und Drang movement. The second part was written in Goethe’s old age and reflects upon a deepening insight and many disparate themes including politics and economics that reflect his occupation as politician and economist at Weimar, the so-called 'sage of Weimar' (sage is an archaism for savant or wise man). In truth Faust 2 is a very difficult text for the English reader and the various translations largely inadequate. The Faust myth was again re-utilised by Thomas Mann in his Doktor Faustus (Written between 1943 and 1947, Doktor Faustus expresses its author's shock and grief about the political, cultural, and moral corruption of his native Germany under the impact of a seemingly unforeseeable resurgence of wholesale barbarism. As in previous novels, Mann is primarily interested in the ideological changes that precede and motivate social action. The artist, once again, is perceived as the conscious and often unconscionable perpetrator of crucial reversals of value without which neither a Goebbels nor a Himmler could have assumed their cruel hegemony. On this level, Doktor Faustus is a bitter indictment of Germany's creative elite for its self-serving experiments with anarchic powers that were to destroy not only the elite itself but also the society for which it should have felt responsible.) a novel about the mentally ill, syphllitic composer Adrian Lewerkuehn as a key or cipher to the Nazi era and its descent from transcendental, cultural preoccupations into nihilism, and pan-nationalist aggression leading to the destruction of Europe, an ultimately suicidal, self-destructive obsession with death. Mann's son, Klaus Mann, also chipped in with his version of the myth, Mephisto, about a failed or failing theatrical director who sells his soul to the Nazis for fame and temporal glory, actually based on the controversial career of Gustav Gruendgens, director of Duesseldorf's Schauspielhaus between 1947 and 1955.

The Faust myth was not specifically of German origin but became a specifically German myth. It seemed to indicate that there was something wrong with Germans at the level of will, the urge to over-reach, the will to obtain knowledge and power but also to misuse them in the service of a miscreant or extremist project. In this way the Faust myth (or legend) prefigured the philosophy and teachings of Frederick Nietzsche, the pre-eminent example of over-reaching in German history. Nietzsche spoke of the will to power, to domination, (he would have viewed this as the reality of the human condition, Christianity being, very simply, an unrealistic account of the human condition, according to his writings.) the uselessness, out datedness and irrelevance of Christian morality in the parable of the camel, the lion and the child, for instance, a parable which is part of his work Also Sprach Zarathustra. In this parable, the camel is burdened down by Christian morality and its concomitant hypocrisy, then by an act of perverse, nihilistic violence (and I'm not recommending this to the readers at home...), such as Raskolnikov's murder of the pawnbroker and his sister, in Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, Christian morality is overturned. Eventually, man returns to his/her origins, achieving once again the simplicity and naivety of the child. Nietzsche spoke of the new man being ungovernable or ungoverned by traditional morality in his work Jenseits von Guten und Bosen (Beyond Good and Evil) which has often been misinterpreted as amoral and nihilistic. The Nietzschean Uebermensch is not exactly synonymous with the Faust myth but it seems superficially cognate. Given that the myth was not even of specific German origin, nor was the first adaptation of the myth into literature even German but English, it then seems that most of the attributes of Faust and the way in which the story serves as a parable of Teutonic folly or of Nazism, are largely a later attempt at connectedness of what is essentially a disconnected and accidental or arbitrary amalgamation in the service of propaganda as are most of the superficial, simplistic and mostly spurious accounts of Nietzsche's philosophy, teachings and of his life that circulate publicly.

At the Hauptbahnhof, outside the McDonalds, three adolescents were being arrested and handcuffed by plain clothes policemen. A vagrant had moved into the opening of an arcade and had begun to play his guitar, his every worldy item seemingly scattered around him in a heap of bags and suitcases and an old bike propped up by a pile of magazines and books. Two cops had arrived to ask for his licence. He pretended to have one then admitted that he didn't and was being moved on. Such scenes of desolation, such pathetic refugees, such social detritus. But was I not there too, was I not among them? Being at the border once again, not only a physical border but the intellectual borderlands where intellectual miscegenation and the stragglers, phantasms of the unconscious, tarried. Hungry, pale, desperate, these messengers seeped into my mind, a ragged, miserable hoard, an army. Dawn infested with bleakness, grey light and mizzling rain.

Outside my hotel window, a view of the Dom. Light rain was falling. The sky was grey as the Rhine. The railway bridge arched into the distance. Trains were arriving and then leaving, falling into the day and into the night. Their never ending motion, the drizzle, the tip of the Dom pointing skywards.

Claudia Thermen, Koeln

Einen sehr nettes Thermen mit Dusch, Bad und Sauna und einen Russisch banja, in der naehe von Koeln. Man musst mit Strassenbahn gegehen. AgrippaBad in der Stadt Mitte ist auch schoen. Ich Glaube Sauna ist besser fuer meinen Gesundheit als bier und zigaretten. Ich habe viele Aufguss, ein bissen Tee oder Mineral Wasser mit Gas, Suppe oder Brotchen und manche zigaretten. Kaffee nicht, aber spaeter im abend. Denn Ich einen Dampfbad und mehr Dusch haben. (can you tell me more about German modal auxiliary verbs?)
Dear Sir or Madam,can you please disperse the enclosed ad to anyone who might need it? Please note that I am currently staying in München and therefore available for interview and to work as an English teacher in Germany, Austria or Switzerland.Yours sincerely,Paul Murphy, BA (Hons), MA www.postpressed.com.au
Even more new writing on Germany @ www.theengine.net
+ Paul McCarthy, Gerhard Richter in Munich
++ new writing from Catalunya
+++Simon Jenner on Richard Wagner, Sophokles/Hölderlin at the Glyptothek, Munich


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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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)

Schwabing intrigues me just for the fact that it was the region that the legendary General, The DesertFox, 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... hemarried 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... martha hartl wrote:

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 an 

FIRENZE MUSEI

Of course the place to start any investigation into the Renaissance is the Galleria Academia, Florence. File past the Byzantine Medievalism of those church frescoes and idealised icons (quite childlike really although for this see Jacob Burckhardt). Before the Renaissance even supposedly important people as Kings, Emperors, Popes were hardly differentiated from the mass in pictorial representation giving this art its iconic or Byzantine status, a stark flatness and lifelessness. The concept of the individual as differentiated from the mass dates from the Renaissance or even from the earlier mini-Renaissance of the 13th century properly identified with the work of Giotto - Giotto's art is still clearly very similar to Byzantine art - and the newly found celebration of individuality and individualism (it is hard to see that they are exactly the same thing, something that Reagen/Thatcher never quite resolved preferring instead an anti-social or a-social autism as the social norm. 'There is no such thing as society, there are individuals and there are families.' - M.Thatcher The madwoman had become head of the asylum.) but also the rediscovery of perspective and perspectival mathematics that had been lost since the time of the Greeks and Romans. The David is a work of almost cartoonlike sublimity, which was my first thought because you see the humour of this all too idealised, perfected human being. Of course the homo-erotic origins of this masterpiece are everywhere palpable and the supposed tolerance of the Medicis, legendary. Even today Florentines are very uninterested in religion but very interested in commerce which perhaps give us a clue to the origins of the Renaissance here. The stifling influence of Catholicism clearly unaffected the secular Florentines and left their intellectuals with the freedom to begin open inquiry into the nature and origins of the universe. The birth of self-consciousness, individualism, liberal values, competition among equals, all grist to the mill to the likes of Ken Clarke. (Kenneth Clarke's book and subsequent TV series 'Civilisation' dealt with art history in a broadly aristocratic and elitest manner implying that only certain people with enlightened sensibilities and - of course - superior intelligence could possibly appreciate or understand art. It was therefore his task to interpret the Great Art of the past for us mere mortals. Another contemporary account of art history, also made in the 1970s, was John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing', an equally dismal - in my view - account of Western Art through the lens of Marxism, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. The problem with this series was that it shared the same set of assumptions of the Clarke book and series, that an enlightened and superior being could somehow interpret the Western Tradition . Both views now seem equally dated and meaningless and seem to indicate the polarisation of views and general unreality that surrounded the projects of 'intellectuals' in this period.) I met many Florentine artists completing imitations of Boticelli's or other masterpieces which seemed to me to be a total waste of time. However, they seemed quite pleased with the few euroes they were tossed for such work. The Youth Hostel is wonderful and the pensiones in the centre very cheap although make sure you get some proper air conditioning if it is July or August and make sure to get some protection for the flies that breed in the River Arno. Walk onto the Uffizi gallery but pause to see the spot where the heretic and martyr Savanarolla attained his martyrdom.  He began the 'bonfire of the vanities', an event predicated on mass hysteria whereby mirrors and other fripperies were heaped up and burned.  The event clearly left an indelible imprint on the minds of Florentines and still stains their conscience hence the memorial. The Uffizi gallery (Uffizi means offices in Italian and was formerly the governmental offices of the Florentine Republic) is a rambling and unkempt edifice to the works of Florence's posterity. It was clear that nothing of much note had come out of Florence in the intervening years between the Renaissance and now and that Florentines spent their time flogging kitschy junk to the flocks of tourists who came scudding through the town (mainly in Summer). However, the city still has a preserved feel to it, as if nothing much had really changed since the days of Leonardo and Michaelangelo. For me the works of Sandro Botticelli are outstanding testimonies to the work of those artists of the past and retain a feeling of Utopia, of the Utopia that Tuscany might have been in the era before industrialisation. (yes, but they still had cancer and TB and cholera and typhus, no antibiotics, no sophisticated dentistry or medicine..) Botticelli seemed to me to be the most secular of all the artists. The kindness, beauty of his heroines restrained through his interest in Plato and then filtered through the required lens of Christianity (for most of the patronage for artists originated from the Church at this time) contrasted with the sombre, cold palate of Leonardo and the over-luscious, hot palate of Michaelangelo. For all that Botticelli's painting still has a flat quality, the face of his Venus has the look of an idealised Madonna rather than a woman of flesh and blood. She is still an undifferentiated type rather than a differentiated individual. Primavera is perhaps a better example of his art, for the idealised figure of Spring seems to stand, in all her late Medieval rainment, as a modern woman. Then there is the work of Caravaggio, an enfant terrible whose work includes the low-life world he inhabited with its anger, vitriol and resentment. In fact, resentment is written into every brush stroke, resentment at social exclusion, the company of criminals, cohabitation with prostitutes. He was also, of course, a murderer (I previously viewed his last habitation, a dungeon in Malta). Michaelangelo Merisi de Carravaggio had an intense sense of honour, as was expected of a 'gentleman' of his era ,and any perceived insult would result in some form of duel. So ultimately he killed a man during a tennis match over some perceived slight and fled from Rome to Sicily and thence to Malta, to the protection of the Knights of St John. This 'protection' didn't last very long and it was only a matter of time before Carravaggio found himself in their dungeon at Medina. His fiery Medusa is clearly the vivid face of a prostitute he knew and her wildness and possible criminality still live in those fierce, terrible eyes.

The work of these Florentines contrasts with the German art collected in the gallery representing artists such as Lukas Cranach and Albrecht Duerer. Essentially the intellectual of the Renaissance, Duerer's Melancholia 1 is a revolution not only in art but in man. It divulges a state of mind not clearly delineated in earlier times, namely boredom. The angel depicted in the painting is surrounded by the tools of his/her - for this angel seems to be essentially transgendered or hermaphroditic - craft which include mathematical, geometrical and occult tools and symbols such as the magic square and polyhedron. However, the angel is disinterested in the contemplation of art but only in him/herself. This is something more than boredom, ennui or introspection, it is a suicidal melancholy bordering on madness. This painting is the first modern work of art, its technique is foreshadowed in Hamlet and opens the dichotomy of the human mind that can create but also simultaneously destroy. This bifurcation leads us as surely to the glories of Hamlet or Beethoven's 5th symphony Fate, as it does to Auschwitz, the Gulag or Hiroshima. It depicts an extremity that had hardly been touched upon in earlier times. With this painting the extremity of man as angel, divinely created, capable of self-transcendence, ennobling intellect and emotions, and man as demon, monster or more correctly, animal, really begins. Previous to this man as reflected in art was surely an innocent and much less self-reflexive creature. The ability to reflect upon experience and thus remodel the self and its image had really begun but the consequences in terms of art are clearly benign. It is less obvious what the scientific consequences might be and is a question at this time of the beginnings of the division between science and religion, of science and morality. Once science had become divided from religion, because I assume that religion is really a primitive form of scientific understanding, morality as a consequence became a much more difficult, complex question. It was presumed that moral values were part of the absolute ordering of the universe and therefore granted and evolving from God and therefore biblical scripture. The dislocation between religious and secular values leads to the evolution of relative moral values rather than absolute ones and demonstrates that morality is a functional convenience and ultimately a social front. The supreme, heightened individualism of The David therefore becomes distorted, as it surely must, into a symbol of the Aryan Superman. The work clearly pre-figures the Socialist Realism of Totalitarian regimes which are totally lacking in the good humour clearly present in Michaelangelo's masterpiece, its real power and monumentalism inserting instead a pseudo monumentalism. Hitler's mass of soldiers in line dissolves easily into a Busby Berkely dance troupe and the intense choreography of demonic tyranny contrasted in a hilariously kitschy way with those musicals underscores the way in which the open marketplace of true capitalism is subverted by the will to win in that marketplace at any cost and thereby the monopoly capitalist thesis as outlined by Marx becomes palpable.

Yes, there are many things to say in reply obviously this is something of a self-analysis because all analysis reaches back into the repressed core of ones own experience. Goethe called his autobiography 'fragments of a great confession' thus illuminating the centrality of the relationship between the priest and the confessional or between the analyst and the analysand in more modern parlance. I think self-love (although I really think narcissism is a seperate category and ought to be regarded as symptoms of something quite aberrant whatever that is) is central to the artist's experience and that self-love is directed towards the perfection of art rather than the attainment of fulfillment of love in life of the object - whoops - of a physical loved one.
One also thinks of Dante and God knows how many Renaissance artists.


WAGNER - AN IRISH PERSPECTIVE

The stage looked set for a Brecht/Weill collaborative piece. I sat beside an American who alternately twisted on the hams of his buttocks, in front of me two perfectly blonde girls (perfect Aryan types - with a nod to Herr Hitler’s racialist agenda - I chortled to myself). The opera was Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman), Wagner’s first ‘hit’, following a string of flops, his three early operas, Die Feen (The Fairies), Liebesverbot (Forbidden Love) and Rienzi (a partial hit). The first two are rarely seen in public today, Der Fliegende Hollander essentially began the composer’s career. Surprisingly, it is thought that the earlier opera Rienzi (after a novel by Bulwer Lytton - I once owned an antique copy of this book, but never read it…) exercised most influence over the Fuhrer, although Hitler was also known to be partial to The Merry Widow, a schmaltzy alternative to the epic grandeur of Rienzi, a tragedy set in Renaissance Italy. The Renaissance Prince was a model for Hitler, combining qualities of Machiavellian cynicism and Bismarckian realpolitik. In Der Fliegende Hollander the Dutchman, to be saved from a life of wandering the seas in his ghost ship replete with ghostly crew (perhaps not the best partying atmosphere) must be redeemed by the love of a ‘pure woman’ (it is a nice thought that such a thing might once have existed, I chuckled to myself…). Sounded eerily biographical, somehow echoing the composer’s tribulations and wanderings. As the opera scores magnificence resounded through Freiburg’s Opera House, my own nagging pains began to become more transparent than those onstage. My pains, Wagner’s pains, and the uplifting - I could hardly say Leitmotif, this technical term was not introduced until the writing of Der Ring der Nibelungen - crescendo of the orchestra somehow synthesised feelings, pain and the overwhelming thirst that afflicted me, it was a balmy night in the hottest of all German towns - Freiburg im Breisgau.

The only other German city that I had had any experience of was Hannover, in the German Bundesland of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony). Hannover (Hahnoovver to the locals) is a business centre, Freiburg an attractive University town, also essentially turistic. First, the Gothic Munster (Cathedral, in Northern Germany the word for Cathedral is Dom, but Kathedral is also used) attracted my attention, the gloomy Gothic Madonna and many gargoyles and other ornamental figures which decorated the Munster, more than a nod to the Mariolatry which dominates Catholicism (within the many Protestant Churches, idols, Polytheism and Mariolatry - adoration of the Virgin Mary as another ‘God’ - a strictly forbidden, there is only - and this may be another variety of Polytheism - the three in one, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, as contrasted with the strict Monotheism of Judaism).

I come from a village in Ireland, now absorbed into the greater Belfast area. Ballyhackamore (literally, ‘town of the big horse shit’ in Gaelic) is a quiet and semi-affluent area, populated

It is 1972 and I am in the large front room of my family’s house in Cyprus Park, across the street a green van, a number of soldiers climb out and slam doors shut. This time not a sectarian incident, but a real German bomb in the back garden of our neighbour’s house, buried in the garden for nearly 30 years (Belfast was blitzed by the Germans, its significance as a shipping centre - Harland & Woolf was the biggest shipyard in the world, and it was there that the Titanic was launched. Today the Yard is completely defunct, with the world trade in shipping drying up, and contracts going to rivals in other countries, soon the site will be made into a theme park or cinema and leisure complex.) Apart from this incident, some hints and suggestions that Britain and Ireland did not constitute the whole world.

Summer is the marching season in Ulster, and one of the most important marches goes through Ballyhackamore, an explanation of its significance might exhaust pages of expostulation. This is on the 1st of July, the anniversary of the 1st day of the battle of the Somme, when the 36th Ulster Division was largely decimated by German machine gun and artillery fire. (The 36th Ulster Division was formed by Lord Edward Carson - as a private army which would be used in the case of an uprising or insurrection in Dublin by the IRA - forever afterwards Protestants and Loyalists - those loyal to the Crown, but not to the British Government, which is perpetually supposed to be selling out Ulster - believed in a conspiracy by the British High Command to annihilate the Division). My only personal connection with this event in Loyalist History was my Grandfather, a mountain gunner in India and on the Western Front, wounded by shrapnel at the Battle of the Somme, and died some ten years after the war in a nursing home in Portadown. Of course, the other important march in the marching season is the 12th of July (all those Orangemen, Orange sashes, flutes, drums and bowler hats), which celebrates the defeat of the Catholic King James by the forces of King William at the Battle of the Boyne, in the Boyne Valley, near Dublin. Forever after the British Succession would be Protestant, even today a Catholic Monarch would be unconstitutional. King Billy is always depicted in Protestant lore on a white charger, laying into various Teagues and Fenians (slang words for Catholics, the Fenian Brotherhood fought for a United Ireland in the 1860s, with various terrorist bombings on the mainland, and a proposed but defeated coup in Ireland, and Teagues, as far as I can ascertain, dates back to the Renaissance, and is mentioned in the Protestant jingle of the era, Lullibelerlo - Lullibelerlo bullen a law, Ho Brother Teague.etc, etc…)

So, German bombs, the Battle of the Somme, King Billy, and possibly all three, King Billy on his white charger, galloping through the neighbour's back garden to the crescendo of bomb, splintered bullet, scattered sandbags, the shriek of Stukas overhead, the pitch and moan of AA Flak, and of course, the Overture to The Flying Dutchman booming in the background.

I am possibly too busy telling my German readers about East Belfast to adequately describe an auslanders (foreigners) view of Freiburg.

As I write this it is late afternoon. The sky is grey the rain falls, the dead fall of rain and leaves, trees scowl…

Paul Murphy teaches Creative Writing at the University of Freiburg in the Schwarzwald, if you are interested in sharing poems, short stories or any other kinds of fiction, you can e-mail him at Clitophon@Yahoo.com or contact him by writing to Englische Literaturwissenschaft, Alberts-Ludwig Universaet, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-W, Deutschland.
 

Ferien in die Schweiz

(HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND)

I was standing in a bar in Basel, Switzerland. A group of English workmen from the aircraft factory spoke to me in lowered voices. At the edges of the bar stood solitary women. A woman with massive breasts and plastic ‘retro-trendy’ outfit served drinks. The women circled and then one came over to me, stroked my arm.

“Can you buy me a drink?” she asked

I had taken the mid-afternoon connection to Basel (this is the German spelling, the Swiss spelling is Basle) from Freiburg HauptBahnhof (Central Station). Unusually my passport was checked twice, once by the German Grenze Polizei (Border Police) and once on the Swiss side. I found accommodation at the Jugendherberge (Youth Hostel) by the Rhine, a well-appointed establishment.

A Swiss city, as the Guide Book said, is very like a Swiss watch, miniature, perfectly ordered. Entering a Swiss city is like taking the top off that watch to observe the orderly life below. Everything ran on time, perfectly. I walked out of the Youth Hostel and to the top of the hill, past the old Church. Incredibly I was outside the house of Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), a nineteenth-century Swiss art and cultural historian.Professor at the University of Basel, and teacher and mentor of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). As I walked on I passed the Kunst Gallerie (Art Gallery), a retrospective of the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin was happening. Then past the Antikken Museum. Both Burckhardt and Nietzsche had once lived in the city. Nietzsche, pensioned off from his University Professorship at the age of 24, as a result of an unknown, but incurable mental illness, which we today surmise, but do not know for certain, was tertiary syphilis. Basel had aspects of academic magnificence and sordid, dimly lit nightclubs and brothels. Nietzsche, it must be said, might have applauded the concordance of the two. An extensive red-light district sheltered on the opposite side of the river, in Klein Basel (the city was divided between Klein Basel and Gross Basel, Little Basel and Big Basel, divided by the river Rhine). One night I accidentally walked into a brothel, Der Rot Katze Klub (The Red Cat Club). At first I hardly realised what it was. At the bar sat some young English guys, working at the aircraft factory nearby, and some older Swiss gentlemen. Around the edges of the bar circled a group of women. I spoke to one of them. She had just come from Milan, probably on the night train. I addressed her in my broken Italian, and then left after a beer. I mused to myself on the way back to the Youth Hostel that evening - was this a similar brothel to the one that the young Nietzsche had visited in Basel a century before? The thought amused me, as I passed the church and entered the hall of the Hostel.

Basel, the second largest city in Switzerland (Population (1990) 171 888), was a major literary centre during the Reformation. The scholar Erasmus taught at the University (founded 1460). The Renaissance Rathaus (Town Hall) was decorated with many symbols of Swiss nationhood, as well as many vivid, colourful, Cantonal flags. Today Switzerland is still divided into Cantons. The first Cantons to form an alliance were the forest communities of Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden on 1st, August 1291. Central to the agreement was the assertion that they would not recognise any external judge or law. Their pact of mutual assistance is seen as the origin of the Swiss Confederation and the inaugural document is still preserved in the canton of Schwyz. The Latin name for the confederation, Confederatio Helvetica, survives in the ‘CH’ abbreviation for Switzerland (used on car number plates). Further Cantons joined the original three, and Switzerland enjoyed great military successes against the Austrians and then Charles the Bold of Burgundy (perhaps the epithet ‘Bold’ was a bit excessive, perhaps ‘rash’ or ‘stupid’ might have suited him better), until they over-reached themselves and were defeated by the French and the Venetians at the Battle of Marignano in 1515. At this stage the Swiss decided to withdraw from the international scene by renouncing expansionist policies and declaring their neutrality. Since their skill and courage was unrivalled, Swiss soldiers were used by other Continental armies as mercenaries. The benefits of neutrality at home, and aggression abroad for pay began to fail when Swiss mercenaries increasingly found themselves on opposing sides, as during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1709. Swiss military prowess was initially built on the fanaticism of a mainly infantry army equipped with the halberd, a short spear combined with an axe, which was used to cut away the reins and stirrups of cavalrymen. Later on Swiss infantry adopted the pike as a weapon, a 20ft spear, which was mostly used to counter the battlefield prowess of the Medieval Knight, seen by many as the Panzer tank of its day (indeed, the German word Panzer, which English people think is the German word for tank, originally meant armour.). As military equipment changed and became more expensive, especially with the advent of firearms, neutrality came to seem to be a more realistic and sensible option. In fact, the Swiss became adept at exploiting other nation’s woes, as they reaped the financial rewards of soldiering, without having the destruction and havoc created by war in their backyard. There is still a feeling among some people that the Swiss are callous and selfish, preferring to use their famed neutrality as a fig leaf to hide their brazen hypocrisy. This came into focus recently with the furore over Nazi gold, as the Swiss government finally made payments to Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Swiss bankers helped the Nazi regime by laundering stolen Jewish assets, even their gold teeth torn from the mouths of the dead at Belsen and Auschwitz, then smelted into gold bars. Further, Switzerland, like many other countries including Britain and the US, had shown great reluctance in admitting Germany’s fleeing Jewish communities. Millions might have been saved, but in the end the Swiss had to make a financial settlement to victims of Nazi warcrimes.

Swiss German (Schwystertutsch) is entirely different from the German spoken in Germany, the perfect Hoch Deutsch of Hannover, the Allemanisch and Badisch dialects of Baden-Wurtemburg, or the Franconian dialect of Bayern (Bavaria). In essence vocabulary differs very little. I discovered that Gruezi (Hallo) was cognate to Bavarian Gruss Gott (literally, Great God, meaning Hallo), and that goodbye was Uf Wiederluge, not Auf Wiedersehen as in Germany. Further, the word for bicycle was the French velo, not Fahrrad as in Germany, and danke (thanks) was often mursee (not French merci). Also, the word Ferien meaning vacation, was much more likely to be used than the word Urlaub, although Ferien is also used in Germany, where its use is something analogous to the difference between the American ‘vacation’ and the English ‘holiday’. Apart from these differences of vocabulary, the grammar of Swiss German is entirely different from High German. In fact there are few grammatical rules, except those that are locally accepted. Swiss German is not a written language, but a spoken one. Whenever the Swiss write they use High German. There is no formalised grammar, and there are great variations from district to district within the German-speaking part of Switzerland. The other languages spoken in Switzerland are French, Italian and Romanisch (which is a Latin language, related to French and Spanish, and which has now almost completely died out.).

After Basel, I travelled onto Zurich, a city with associations of artistic innovation, Bohemians and political exiles. It was in Zurich that the artistic movement Dada was founded in the disillusionment and ferment of ideas that followed the end of the Great War. The birth of the movement is accepted to be the creation of the Cabaret Voltaire in February 1916 by Hugo Ball. Raucous artistic events (including poetry, singing and dancing) were held at a room in a pub at Spiegelgasse 1, in the heart of the Old Town. The Alsatian artist, Hans Arp, and especially the Romanian poet, Tristan Tzara, were key figures in these early days. The city boasts the names Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), James Joyce (1882-1941), Leon Trotsky (1979-1940) and Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924). The Youth Hostel in Zurich was, if anything, better, than the one in Basel, the tram service superb (most of these small European cities operated tram services, instead of the usual buses or tube that I had been used to in the U. K., very simply because they are committed to reducing noise and pollution.), the city spacious and extremely well kept. The city is divided in two by the River Limmat, with the familiar Red Light area spread along the river’s Northern flank.

On Saturday there was a Love Parade through the centre of the city. Love Parades are a common occurrence in Continental European cities, an opportunity to dress up and attempt to dazzle. There were many people from Germany and Austria, and also some from as far away as Thailand. I met an American girl, Rachel from Seattle - who had been studying creative writing in Rome - at the Youth Hostel, and we went downtown to observe. Later we went to a film together, after some deliberation, I persuaded her to go to a Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) retrospective, his film La Peau Douce (The Soft Skin). The film is a classic of the French nouvelle vague (The new wave of French cinema of the 1960s. Another director of the nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard, was born in Switzerland, but later moved to France. Switzerland has few opportunities for native artists, so just as many artists, philosophers and political leaders have come to Switzerland for the scenery, or for urgent reasons of political asylum, then many Swiss have left to find opportunities abroad. Some of those who left are, Louis Chevrolet (founder of the Chevrolet Manufacturing Company in 1911, producer of archetypal ‘American’ automobiles), Cesar Ritz (1850-1918), (13th child of a poor Upper Valais family, and founder of the Ritz luxury hotels), Ursula Andress (1936-) (actress, famous for her bikini-clad appearance in the Bond film Dr No), Erich Van Danikan, (expounder of far-fetched early-history theories in the 1970s bestseller, Chariots of the Gods? Apparantly Van Danikan is still writing and lecturing about his 'discoveries' in the face of immense scepticism, it must be said.), Le Corbusier (1887-1965), (architectural innovator, often believed to be French) and Albert Hofmann, (the first person to synthesise and experiment with lysergic acid diethylamide [LSD]). In the film a jealous wife kills her husband who is having an affair with another woman. French courts are very lenient in sentencing a husband or wife who commits a crime passionel (crime of passion), commonly reducing their sentence to manslaughter. The understated sexuality in the film was the main attraction for me, since so many modern films seem to rely on over-heated sex scenes. It was pleasant to go back to a time when understatement worked to greater effect than overstatement. Crassness seems to be one of the problems of our age.

I was surprised that there was not more evidence of cosmopolitan culture in Zurich. Many of the cinemas, for instance, seemed to rely on Hollywood films. Cinemas showing Continental films were few (on the tram one night a Swiss woman told me that she avoided the mainstream cinemas because of the preponderance of ‘Hollywood shit’, a statement that I applauded). At the time the latest Hollywood blockbuster was the dire Pearl Harbour, a film I went to see in Meiringen, a village in the heart of the Bernese Oberland, simply because there was no other form of entertainment, and only one cinema. With this film Hollywood had surely reached the bottom of the bucket. The film received a pasting from the critics, who also viewed it as the nadir of Hollywood cinema.

After Zurich I travelled on by train to Interlaken. It must be said that Swiss trains are superb, although I noted that many of the menial jobs on board such trains are taken by Blacks, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Kosovo Albanians, (46,000 of whom were allowed into Switzerland at the time of the Kosovo crisis - I talked to one Kosovo Albanian, a very nice chap, who offered me a free coffee when I told him that I had lived for a time in the Greek part of Macedonia, and spoke with him a few words of Greek - unfortunately I speak no Albanian. Referring to the political crisis in the Balkans, he said, “We are prisoners of our history, now the Albanians must go with America and Britain, and the other Balkan States with Russia.”), a symptom of racism that extends itself across most of the Western world. Switzerland, like its neighbour Austria, is very conservative (women were only given the vote in 1973), with a significant share of the vote going towards the Swiss People’s Party, which is based, like Jorg Haider’s Austrian Freedom Party, on anti-immigration and hostility to the European Union. The EU is seen as a safeguard against the future rise of Fascism in Europe, but the seeds of Fascism will continue to grow in Switzerland until it take steps to join the EU, and leave behind its famed neutrality. Austria joined the EU in 1996. At the same time Jorg Haider’s party began to rise, probably because there was no strong Austrian centre to absorb opposition to the EU in a democratic direction. Thus, leaving the EU may activate those crypto-fascists who are normally dormant and satisfied as they were with Austrian neutrality and its stringent immigration procedure. If Switzerland does become a member of the EU, the step will have to be planned carefully. Today it is possible to work in Switzerland if a foreigner can do a job a Swiss cannot do, or if one marries a Swiss. The Swiss authorities are very careful about who they let in. Switzerland is largely crime free, and any foreigner coming to live in the country is carefully vetted. Of course, the coin of neutrality has two sides, many revolutionaries and fugitives from unpleasant regimes and dictatorships hid for a time in Switzerland: Richard Wagner, Voltaire, Lenin, Trotsky, the Russian Anarchist Mikhail Bakhunin and many others.

The train swung through Bern, Thun and then to Interlaken (meaning ‘between lakes’, ie between the lakes Brienzsee and Thunsee). My first sight of the Alps up close, the three mountains, Jungfrau, Eiger, Monch, actually quite far in the distance, but looking as if they were 5 minutes walk away. I talked to a Scottish couple as I disembarked and walked through the amazingly synthetic looking, but nevertheless well-ordered (this was Switzerland, after all) streets. I headed straight to a private Herberge (Hostel), Balmer’s Herberge, for the public Youth Hostel was full up. Balmers is a hostel with very strong American connections, in fact it is owned by Americans, and the clientele were mostly young Americans, Canadians and Australians, with a few English people, and no Continentals. I presumed that this was a sign of something. Across the road was the Youth Hostel Funny Farm, which had a very antipodean ambience, with guitar playing and songs around an open-air bonfire every night into the small hours. I stayed for a few days, managing to climb a glacier, Stein Glacier (Stone Glacier), led, of course, by a Guide, a local man called Hanno (I wondered if he had any Carthaginian relations, Hannibal had led his elephants through the Alps several thousand years before my arrival, descending into Italy to surprise and defeat the Roman armies at the Battles of Cannae and Lake Trasimene.). We took a mini-bus ride to the glacier, and then ascended. The climb was 2000 or so metres, and by the time I got to the crevasse, I felt as if my hips had been slowly roasted over an open fire. We had to stop half way up. I had been given the Black Box to carry and had to give it to one of the Venezuelans who carried the two or three helmets I also had been given. At the top of the glacier we (I was with a party of Americans and Venezuelans, my climbing partner was a young girl from Mexico City, who proved to be most agile when it came to climbing) descended into a crevasse, and then were supposed to climb out again with the aid of crampons and ice axes (which Hanno called ‘giggles’, this seemed to be a local Swiss word). I swung on the end of the rope for some 20 minutes. Hanno had to attend to a young American girl who immediately had a panic attack when she descended into the crevasse, with its 80 metre drop. This was a response that I was very surprised at, for I assumed that she was an experienced climber and I the dunce of the party. I tried to dig the crampons into the ice, but at every kick of my boot my muscles felt jelly-like, and at every swing of the ice axe my arms grew ever more exhausted. I thought I would just dangle forever and I had no trust of the rope, a sign of an inexperienced climber as I was told later. Eventually, I swung the axes in, they bit on the ice, the crampons stuck, and I slowly ascended. I felt utterly exhausted, my muscles ached, and on the way down I had a great struggle in not falling over and breaking a leg. The little Mexican girl swung into the crevasse and clambered about it like a mountain goat. For the rest of the time at the crevasse lip I simply stood, held the rope, and recovered. Later we clambered back down and reached the bottom of the glacier and the glacier lake. Yodels echo off the sides of mountains we tried it out after Hanno had showed us how it was done. Up to a mile of the glacier had disappeared in the last hundred years or so and now it is disappearing very quickly indeed. This is due to the effects of Global Warming, which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. Some glaciers in the Alps had disappeared altogether and are now probably lost forever. Unless there is another sharp change in world climate, many other glaciers like Stein Glacier will disappear too, or so Hanno assured us. (Having no access to scientific measuring equipmenta, and not being an environmental scientist I have to rely on their opinions, or on the opinions of local experts.) Hanno also told us that the Mountains sometimes turn pink due to a covering of sand blown all the way from the Sahara desert in Africa.

In the Hostel afterwards I noticed that the ice boot had dug into my foot, and a neat hole had been drilled into my ankle. The cold must have killed the pain while I was on the glacier. I stayed put for three days while my ankle healed but there was no need for a doctor since the wound wasn’t deep enough.

After a short time I grew sick of speaking English all the time, and journeyed onto Brienz, at the end of Brienzsee in order to meet more Swiss and to speak Schwystertutsch. After all, I had come to the Alps to experience real Swiss culture, and not to meet a load of Americans, who, although friendly, were not my raison d’etre for being in the Alps. Interlaken divides two great, deep lakes, Brienzsee and Thunsee, which seem to be both extremely deep and cold. I took the ferry to Brienz. As I arrived I spotted a great wooden Swiss chalet, which bore the traditional antler horns, and the inscription, Hier wohntin Byron, Goethe, Uhland (Here stayed Byron, Goethe, Uhland. Byron and Shelley both had associations with Switzerland. Mary Shelley wrote her novel Frankenstein as part of a competition between her husband, Byron and herself to write a tale of horror, at Villa Diodati just outside Geneva, in French-speaking Switzerland. When Goethe travelled through Switzerland he noted the monumentalism and grandeur of the Alps.). I stayed in the Youth Hostel in Brienz, receiving an invite to a pop concert in a place called Schrandli, via a village, Meiringen. I hired a bicycle and cycled through the valley (Tal) one glorious, August afternoon. Meiringen is home to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Holmes (in a fictional encounter with the sinister Professor Moriarty) was pushed off the nearby Reichenbach Falls, miraculously accomplishing a later resurrection to appear in another Arthur Conan-Doyle story. In the small Museum there are various pieces of Holmes memorabilia, a reconstruction of his study in London, and a portrait of Arthur Conan-Doyle himself. It must be said that the villagers made rather a lot of the Holmes/Conan-Doyle connection, really pushing the links to the point of overkill. I took the cog-wheeled train to the top of the falls, to view the spot where Moriarty pushed Holmes off. Later I took the cable car to Schrandli. At the pop concert flyers were handed out advertising a demonstration at Luzerne against Globalisation, and to protest against the incarceration of anti-Globalisation protesters at Genoa, as well as the killing of a young Italian Anarchist at the Genoa protest. The concert was a platform for local Swiss bands. The first band was a pleasant country and western outfit with a humorous edge, there then followed bands playing unbelievably fast Punk Rock music. I wandered off and lay on a bank of grass with a local Swiss girl and watched the shooting stars exhaust themselves against the mountain’s silhouettes. At 2PM I had had enough, and half-drunk as I was, cycled down the mountain with two Swiss behind me lighting my progress with torches. At the bottom of the mountain I turned into the village centre and decided to cross the valley. I stopped at (what seemed to be a dog handling club) where I was warned on no account to cross the valley at that time of night. Being drunk, I ignored their good advice and set off, but found that there was absolutely no light in the valley whatsoever. I crashed the bike into a barbed wire fence and frog-marched the 14 or so kilometres to the Youth Hostel arriving there at 5PM or so. In the morning I checked my minor injuries with a local doctor, set off across the valley and retrieved the bicycle.

Later that day I took the train to Meiringen and stayed in a cheap hotel there, having had my fill of Youth Hostels. I was exceptionally careful, because I found out very quickly that 49 people had died on the mountains so far that year (it was only early August), and listened carefully to the advices of the local Swiss. Like all mountain dwelling people, the Highland Swiss are very conservative. A local man, in no way intellectually immature or otherwise, told me that the local girls would of course go out with foreigners, just so long as they weren’t ‘niggers or Yugoslavs’ (I wondered if this was because black men and Yugloslavs might have extra large penises?). The Yugoslavs were also presently locally, as well as the Albanians. There had been instances of violent confrontations between them in Interlaken, as a local told me. She also told me that the American visitors had helped the local Swiss to overcome their natural shyness, and to adapt to the mores of American Capitalism, with its brashness, egotism and self-selling. The Americans could become too much, though, as I found out. After a while one longed for a shyer, more reserved sensibility. I found out that not only did Koreans and Americans get in trouble in the mountains (usually through their own naivety, such as attempting a conquest of the Eiger - the second highest peak in the region at 3870 metres, the highest is the Jungfrau at 4037 metres - wearing nothing but a pair of training shoes) but also the Flatlanders from Basel, Bern and Zurich. The Flatlanders are by and large cosmopolitan, sophisticated and urbane, the Highlanders more robust, down to earth and conservative.

After experiencing the pleasures of the Jungfaujoch (a train from Lauterbrunnen that ascends to Kleine Scheidigg, and then to the Jungfraujoch. This is the highest point in Europe accessible by train. The Sphinx complex at the top is a miracle of engineering, many of the Bond films featured scenes filmed here. One Swiss gentleman told me that it was perhaps one of the 20 most significant feats of engineering in the world today. On the way back down to Kleine Scheidigg I met a film crew filming an advertisement for the Salt Lake City Olympics. Many of the crew had worked on the Bond films. (I tried to engage them with discourse on film history and criticism, but their background was mostly technical). I then stayed at Grindelwald, just below the Eiger (later, in Wintertime, I stayed in Lauterbrunnen, Murren and Grindelwald, taking a skiing lesson at Kleine Scheidigg), and took the cablecar to the base of the mountain, where I took photos of some pigs merrily rolling in a dung heap and rode a toboggan.

I left after a few days, travelling back to Interlaken Ost (Interlaken has two stations, Interlaken Ost and West), then back through Luzerne and Basel. In Basel I saw Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (in German Odyssie im Weltraum. The German for space is Weltraum, literally ‘world room’. I found it strange that the Germans saw the Universe as World-centred, a very egocentric perspective, I thought), which was showing in English, with German and French subtitles, the first time I have ever seen a film in three languages. The film, with its theme tune, the ‘world riddle’ from Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, seemed appropriate to the city where Nietzsche had lived, and essentially began his academic career.

I walked to the station. As I entered, I glanced over my shoulder at Basel, a city both miniature and extremely beautiful. In essence I hadn’t felt far from home there, or in the rest of Switzerland.
Lady with the Ermine

I don't know, what is an ermine? I thought, a vase or a fur coat, turns out it's some kind of elongated semi-rat.

Being intensely self-regarding or intensely self-possessed, Leonardo sought to throw the intensity of his emotions into his art not his life. Thus, the palette is typically smoky and darker hues predominate. It looks as if Michaelangelo had found a cache of magic mushrooms or some other naturally grown hallucinogenic which probably took his mind off all the horrors of pre-modern living in Edenic Firenze and then Roma, la Capella Sistina.

comment: 'If I'd listened to you I'd still be mending old fireplaces, not painting this wonderful ceiling.'
- Michaelangelo de Pizzeria

Sandro Botticeli was evolving out of Byzantine ikons but his Venus still looks looks a) stupid b) vapid c) vacant d) unindividuated e) very like a Byzantine ikon of the Virgin
Primavera is about how Eden came to be destroyed unleashing all kinds of immigrants and travellers onto the Tuscan countryside to be eaten by flies, burnt by the Italian sun, compose a sestina by the wayside, be arrested by the Carabinieri, or more probably, the tax police, for tax evasion.

There are 9 different kinds of police in Tuscany.

A Tuscan sunwheel, a typical Tuscan ikon and very contemporary. I sold my first work to a dealer in Italianate porcelain, art and other variegated knick knacks exemplifying the Campanian countryside or Tarento or Messina even. But since absolutely no one outside Italy knows the difference, he bought the paintings, passed them off as the work of a minor Tuscan master and offered me 130 euroes for the lot, just enough to pay off the hotel bill and make it in time for the train to Milano. By this time I had become master of oil pastel. The ones that adhere like lipstick.

Art Theft München

I went into München a complete innocent with a revolution in art in my folder. Being thrown out of a large number of cafes, mistaken as a vagrant made my way to a strange farm where I finished the painting of the tractor, the one in the terrible dream of tractors taking over the world. Almost being eaten alive by bees and evading a strange dog that seemed to have fallen in love with my shoes, I swallowed the bottle of Loewenbrau and hiked off to examine yet another theory of why artists happen to be different from sword swallowers, most politicians, rag & bone men, military analysts, counter-insurgency students, low-intensity-operations Professors. I sat in the Altes Pinakothek with my tru luv, a red-haired goblet from a town near Riga, but she wasn't riding a tiger (if you remember the limerick). Explaining that parallel lines meet but exemplifying the theory with a parachute, a rounded glass of Zinfandel and nearing the kind of people that Joseph Beuys escaped from, I decided I was too young to die and drove into a pile of onlookers.

PM

MALTA

“That is the great hotel that no man comes back from.”

The battlements, towers, ships, soldiers, silk flags, awnings, castle, portcullis, the ivory, gold, strutting peacocks, and the bitter, bitter lemons, too juicy and ripe to be plucked.

My taxi driver, Francis Appap, who picked me up at the airport and offered a round trip of the island for twenty Maltese pounds, gesticulated towards a necropolis, one of those Mediterranean graveyards, with little bungalows for the dead.

I was in Malta. To be precise I was in the Maltese capital, Valletta.

The dawn sky reflected the aluminium wing tip, as another Mediterranean sun rose. The thieves and Mafia that I had been warned about in Catania failed to materialise so that early morning I flew to Malta.

My driver took me to the Governor’s Palace (where the oranges and lemons are too beautiful to eat, and squirrels dance around the gardens - it ran through my mind that squirrels are really rats with long tails, I don’t know why but the thought gave me great amusement for the rest of the day), then around the city’s walls and battlements, built by the Knights Hospitallers after they occupied the island in 1530. They were driven out of Rhodes by the Ottoman Turks, (who were by this time building a great empire in the Mediterranean), and then transposed to Malta. Then my taxi driver drove on to Medina, known as the Silent City, although it didn’t seem to be very silent on that particular day anyway, and a Roman Villa. My taxi driver, with some insistence, maintained that I should see the main dungeon of the Knights Hospitallers. I descended into a surprisingly pleasant below ground level dungeon and eventually stood before the same cell that Michaelangelo Merisi Caravaggio had once been held in. Forced to leave his native Italy, as a result of killing a man after a disputed tennis match, he then wandered to Naples, Sicily, and thence to Malta. The Knights were initially honoured by his presence, and made him a Brother Knight, but then threw him into this pitch-black dungeon. I suppose the moral of the story is, never trust a Knight (somewhat adapting Johnny Rotten’s words, ‘never trust a hippy’, to that effect, never trust a Maltese taxi driver).

Back in Valletta, I paid Francis 20 Maltese pounds, and then went for a pint in The Pub. This was the same pub where the English actor Oliver Reed had dropped dead a few months before. I commiserated with the owner’s wife, a small Mediterranean woman. Her husband had died a week after Ollie departure, and certainly if he had been binging along with Ollie there is little wonder. I had admired him in Ken Russell’s film 'Women in Love', but he did nothing else to commend his acting talents, a big ego, fat wallet, and a certain lack of education, (especially about how fatal it is to mix fame, talent and alcohol) had done for him.

The Brothel Keepers Daughter
Reflections on European Brothels

My childhood in Belfast was dominated by a quasi-mythical place named duBarrys, a brothel in the area we knew as ‘the Docks’. This was the equivalent of ‘sailortown’, an area filled with docks, foreign ships, and foreign sailors, all of whom, of course, had been at sea for many months. Obviously, when these sailors arrived in Belfast they headed straight for duBarrys or some similar brothel. By the time I had grown up a little more duBarrys was simply a derelict building. Eventually it became McHughs, a pub for Young Upwardly Mobile People. By this time there had been a lot of changes in Belfast and in Northern Ireland generally. An era of repression had dawned with ‘the troubles’ and the advent of the Reverend Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party. The stolid citizens that constituted the followers of the DUP picketed every part of the permissive society that penetrated the supposed backwater that is Northern Ireland. When a Sex Shop opened in Belfast they appeared. On pissing-it-down-days with placards, singing Christian hymns and handing out their ubiquitous handbills. They were there when the Gilbert & George exhibition came. They were out in force when any kind of Liberalism dared to stand up and be counted. They were so lacking in everyway that they braved the cold, steely wind and rain of Belfast on a Saturday afternoon, with their placards, gospel songs and megaphones barking out slogans and threatening Hell fire and damnation.

One evening I was taking a taxi ride through Belfast. As always I struck up a conversation with the taxi driver. After exchanging the usual pleasantries I managed to move him onto the topic of permissiveness. Perhaps the conversation just moved in this direction anyway. He told me that there had been many brothels in Belfast back in the 50s and 60s, but that the Rev Ian had been responsible for closing them all down (this is the sort of thing one learns from taxi drivers, stolid citizenry knows to shut up about the recent past of a city and its brothel culture). So, a culture of brothels had existed, in Belfast but was no more. My former supervisor at Queen’s University Belfast told me that there had been a brothel at Bradbury Place in Belfast. He told me that it had been heavily disguised as a hairdressers, for no one was ever spotted having their hair cut there. The world of brothels is obviously heavily involved with fronts, disguises and facades. The willingness to hide the real meaning of a place is bound up with the actual attitudes of bourgeois hypocrisy. This exists, yes, we use it, but propriety and the forbidden fruit that we dabble in forces us to disguise it as something else. The real meaning of love and marriage in bourgeois society are sterile, fruitless nothingness between a man and a woman who both hate each other and live in their own private Hell, male desperation seeking an outlet in the cash nexus of paid for sex.

Most people I know hate the idea of prostitution. The DUPers hate it because of the sin that sex outside marriage - and even within marriage - was (they call it fornication and adultery). Perhaps they hated sex because women experienced uncontrolled orgasm. This was the greatest threat to their male hegemony, if the feminine orgasm was to exist it had to exist in an appropriate context and be carefully policed. Further, they also hated homosexuality, or any alternative form of sexuality that existed beyond the simple-minded sexual and imaginative lives they must have led, and the Bible phrases that told them of the consequences of illicit sex, namely damnation. Feminists hated prostitution because of the exploitation and objectification of women involved (obviously these feminists lived in sheltered areas and had led sheltered lives. Had they never heard of the gigolo or male prostitute, or of brothels for heterosexual women and Gays & Lesbians - or do these things just exist in some ultra-Liberal San Francisco of the imagination?). It seemed to me that all these extremists had one thing in common: the obliteration of sex and the raising of the great totemic, phallocratic symbolisation, the dominance of the middle-class male’s orgasm as the only form of legitimate pleasure (obviously the feminists were chasing a different goal, but one which depended on a similar anti-Liberal agenda).

I was walking down the mainstreet of Basel, Switzerland, sat down at the Irish/English Pub, the one just before the main square leads in directions towards KleinBasel and up to the top of the hill towards the outskirts and the Youth Hostel. I met a young English guy who offered me the experience of artichoke in the next door vegetarian restaurant, a strange fruit with unfolding leaves and a tiny husk of sweetness. As the leaves unfolded the gorgeous men and women of Basel walked past. It occurred to me that Germans were so much taller than British people (many of the women looking down at me, an experience that I was unused to in the UK.).

As evening came we took the tram into KleinBasel. We alighted at the bridge, walked up through the ramshackle streets with firm cobbling, past some Institutes of the University, an exhibition of Tibetan art and down again to the bridge and across the River Rhine. This was the edge of Basel’s Red Light District. We peered into some of the brothels which were by no means seedy. They seemed inherently civilised, well-kept and well-managed. Some Thai girls shouted down at us to negotiate a price. They suggested 100 Swiss francs (about £40).

Inside I stood at the bar. A group of English workmen from the aircraft factory spoke to me in lowered voices. At the edges of the bar stood solitary women. A woman with massive breasts and plastic ‘retro-trendy’ outfit served drinks at the bar. The women circled and then one came over to me and stroked my arm.

“Can you buy me a drink?” she asked

I had taken the mid-afternoon connection to Basel from Freiburg HauptBahnhof. Unusually my passport was checked twice, once by the German Border Police and once on the Swiss side. I found accommodation at the Youth Hostel by the Rhine, a well-appointed establishment.

A Swiss city, as the Guide Book said, is very like a Swiss watch, miniature and perfectly ordered. Entering a Swiss city is like taking the top off that watch to observe the orderly life below. Everything ran on time, perfectly. I walked out of the Youth Hostel and to the top of the hill, past the old Church. Incredibly I was outside the house of Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), a 19th Century Swiss art and cultural historian, Professor at the University of Basel, and teacher and mentor of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). As I walked on I passed the Kunstgallerie. A retrospective of the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin was happening, past the Museum of Antiquities and got on a tram. Both Burckhardt and Nietzsche had lived in the city. Nietzsche, pensioned off from his University Professorship at the age of 24, as a result of an unknown, but incurable mental illness, which we today surmise, but do not know for certain, was a result of syphilis. Before the era of penicillin ‘an evening with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury’ (at roughly this time Mercury was thought, quite wrongly, to alleviate the symptoms of venereal disease.) was a terrifying prospect The illness had three distinct stages. In the primary stage chancres (hard ulcers) would appear around the genitals about 25 days after contraction of the illness. These chancres disappeared after about eight weeks, but weeks or months afterwards the rash of secondary syphilis appeared. Arthritis, meningitis and hepatitis might then occur. Without treatment the tertiary stage of syphilis might happen up to 30 years after contraction of the illness, giving rise to a variety of symptoms, including large tumour-like masses (gummas) in many organs, heart disease, blindness, and madness and paralysis (general paralysis of the insane). The disease could be passed on through an infected mother to her child (congenital syphilis). Syphilis appears in Henrik Ibsen’s drama Ghosts as a metaphor for the paralysing strictures and conventions of 19th Century bourgeois society. The play was rejected by that bourgeois society, became a cause celebre in avante garde theatre circles of the era, often being performed in dingy backstreet semi-theatres. Syphilis was the illness that summed up 19th Century society. An illness born of shoddy sexual dealings, unbearable hypocrisy, fronts and facades, leading to madness and ,ultimately, to death. Many intellectual besides Nietzsche contracted it, Franz Schubert, for instance, the composer. Awkward scholarly or artistic men with poor social skills and utterly unattractive to any cool, streetwise woman, seeking furtive thrills with so-called ‘ladies of the night’.

Basel had aspects of academic magnificence and sordid, dimly lit nightclubs and brothels. Nietzsche, it must be said, might have applauded the concordance of the two. An extensive red-light district sheltered on the opposite side of the river, in Klein Basel (the city was divided between Klein Basel and Gross Basel, Little Basel and Big Basel, divided by the river Rhine). One night I walked into a brothel with a young English chap who I had met in the English pub on Basel’s central Strasse. This was Der Rot Katze Klub (The Red Cat Club). At the bar sat some young English guys, working at the aircraft factory nearby, and some older Swiss gentlemen. Around the edges of the bar circled a group of women, some were slim, white, good-looking, others were black, a little heavier perhaps, but good-looking too, and all dressed in trendy, modern, expensive gear. I spoke to one of them. This woman had just come from Milan, probably on the night train. She looked like many women I had met in Italy, slim, attractive in a Mediterranean way. I addressed her in broken Italian, I told her that I had taught English in Sicily.

“Io sono Paolo, Io lavorado in Enna, Sicilia. Io sono maestro Inglese.”

She took a polite interest in this. Then I quietly informed her that I hadn’t come for sex, but merely for a beer (of course, my real reason was simple curiousity). On the way back to the Youth Hostel, those Thai prostitutes peered down upon us from the upper story of their brothel, they seemed like sentinels, guardians of the upper air. The prostitutes in The Red Cat Club had wanted 250 SF (just over £100). You had to buy them a glass of champagne too, which cost 23SF and then negotiate a price with the Madam, for she could be bartered with. The English guys from the aircraft factory told us this, they also said that since they were neither rich, nor spoke German with any fluency, that they had to come to this relatively up-market brothel.

On the way back to the Youth Hostel that evening I mused - was this a similar brothel to the one that the young Nietzsche had visited in Basel a century before? The thought amused me, as I passed the church and entered the hall of the Hostel. Of course, I should have just asked the prostitutes: ‘which one of you has the super-charged muff?’ Genius has its price, but is not better to write a book like Ecce Homo (Nietzsche’s last and least coherent work, written just before he collapsed in the Palazio Turin after writing a series of strange letters.) than be a long distance lorry driver all your life?

I went back to the brothel some weeks later with Peter, a Californian friend. Later I heard that Peter had visited a prostitute in Frankfurt. By that time he was more alive to German mores, and experiencing some personal liberation. He had attended an all male military academy in the States, and, even though he was 21 had never had a relationship with a girl or woman. He seemed to be very eager to develop an adult relationship, or even any kind of relationship - with a woman. I felt like warning him, but what of it. Growing up is hard when one has been offered a whole series of phoney, corny, false superiorities - being a hard American military man, being a man, being an adult. He told me that his father had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam and had a deep-seated problem with control. Because, figuring it out rationally, when one has a payload of bombs and is about to rain those bombs down upon Vietnamese peasants, one has the lives of thousands of people in one’s hands. And yet it is so impersonal, this act of, not killing, but obliteration. God-like ominiscience combined with heartfelt inadequacy poisoned his later relationships and his life.

Apart from the brothel culture of Basel, there was a very sophisticated culture of baths and saunas around Freiburg im Breisgau (I taught some creative writing classes at the University there.). My friend Sergey, a Russian, studying for a PhD in chemistry, accompanied me on many journeys to the baths of the Black Forest. I would call the saunas a more subtle and interesting form of brothel, for both sexes mixed there and neither sex wore clothes. This was completely amazing and novel to me at first, growing up in repressoville Belfast, where everyone covers up. Here were adult people behaving and being treated like adult people. The saunas were always civilised, no woman was ever attacked or insulted in my experience, and there was always the challenge of flirtation, or the exchange of e-mail addresses. Furthermore, women sometimes, and always in the public baths, had the choice of a women only sauna or mixed saunas. Sergey told me that one woman that he was friendly with, a Ukrainian and a widow, went to Haslachbad (a public bath in Freiburg, there were four public baths in the city.) to display herself, ie to display her body and find a suitable mate. I think there was something of this in the rationale behind visits to the sauna, but social behaviour was always very cool. No one ever spoke to me without my first engaging them in conversation. I must say that I never got onto the German wavelength completely, although I liked many aspects of their society. I could never understand their rather aloof stance, and deduced from this that they must be very intellectualised. The Germans were capable of friendship but hardly warmth. That was until I met Gerhard Steinberg. Gerhard, a Muenchner from the neighbouring State of Bayern (Bavaria) was formerly a journalist on the local edition of the SudDeutsch Zeitung, the German equivalent of the British newspaper The Independent (I'm not sure what the American equivalent of The Independent might be. The Independent is a Liberal newspaper. It is a newspaper I rarely buy, the best thing about it was that it had very few supplements and glossy pull outs. My Uncle dispenses with these by dangling the newspaper in the shop and allowing all the pull outs, bills, supplements, advertising holidays, hotels or condoms to fall on the floor and be swept away, puked on by a child, or shat on by a neighbourhood dog. It is his Sunday - because he buys these supplement loaded papers on a Sunday - statement against the “Free Market”.) He was also a writer of several travel books about Latin America, German versions of our Lonely Planet books. I got the feeling that I was really very academic when I met Gerhard and not very hip, tending to touch on subjects that weren’t really on the tips of everyone’s tongue. I was very disillusioned. Far from the Germans representing sophistication in science, mathematics, philosophy and art, they were, seemingly, very like many of the people in Belfast, very low-brow, very average with no interesting or intriguing angles on the world.

Sergey and I went to many saunas, in fact Sergey had a peculiar fascination with saunas, for he was desperate to find a woman. I have never seen any other man so virile and so frustrated, even though he had a girlfriend in Hungary. We also went to Basel, to visit the Kunstgallerie. Sergey said that it was all ‘blat’ ( the name of a prostitute in Russian). Blat to Paul Klee, blat to Arnold Bocklin, blat to Dada! Blat to blat and blat to all that!

Sergey gradually filled me in on the happenings in Russia over the years in regards to prostitutes. The early Bolsheviks were keen to bring women into the Communist movement. This was one of their central tenets, and even though there were the Rosa Luxembourgs, the Ruth Fischers, their experiments had limited success. After World War 2, so many men had died in Hitler’s male chauvinist war that many women were left to do the work of men. When these women entered the medical profession as doctors en masse there were definite problems, the experiment was a failure or so the history books said. Further, brothels were abolished as a symptom of bourgeois society, of the exchange system of commodity translated to the sexual arena. They were brought back in the Brezhnev or Gorbachov era, simply because many complained, that, because of their difficult personalities, they could not live with a partner. Under Capitalism the attitude towards personality was a laissez faire one, under ‘Socialism’ (because I regard these so-called Communist regimes as State Capitalist regimes) definite attempts were made to create a Socialist personality, which was a positive, hopeful, quite false and made up Socialist personality, and not a negative, downtrodden Capitalist one. The market for personality was very like the market for art. Taste and money orientated everything. Outlined, silhouetted and foreshadowed everything. Every personality appeared as if in a blurred negative, or as if through the eyes of a drunk or junky. Every social propriety, everything good, each kind act, every decent expression, every public moral act, was a sham. Read a good intention as greed. Giving to charity, the greedy desire to be another Mother Theresa. Caring for the elderly, a way of coping with one’s own deep-seated dread of death. As one friend said to me, when people weep at funerals they ‘re really weeping for themselves!

Waldurkurbad, Westbad, Haslachbad: these were the scenes of our debaucheries. In the end they amounted to almost nothing. At Waldkurbad we went to an alternative evening of massage. Most of the people there were heterosexual couples. Silly, twangy Indian style music, the odour of incense, a vague reminiscence of the atmosphere of a trashy take on a Hermann Hesse novel. I left after vainly attempting to give Sergey a massage and sat in the sauna. The guitarist was sitting there, totally alone, totally naked. I had staggered through the woods to get to Waldkurbad, got lost inside a football stadium (we were in Freiburg im Breisgau, Freiburg is a premier division football club in the German Bundesleague), and eventually found the sauna, reclusive among the evergreens. My German was terrible, I had lost my way in a vast forest (the Schwarzwald - the Black Forest), I was in Germany receiving a massage from a stroppy Russian physicist.

Desire is a vital aspect of our lives. Yet I found nothing but dishonesty when it came to social and sexual relationships. Desire is distorted by the commodity relations which we deal with in our everyday lives, in this sense ‘shopping and fucking’ become one. Prostitution is simply an articulation, a ‘necessary evil’ that evolves out of the failure of those relationships. In a sense, banning prostitution does not go to the root of the problem. If there is a problem it is certainly omni-present in Belfast, with all its repression, taboos and shiboleths. But the stolid citizenry there can sort that problem out for themselves, I certainly don’t hope to make a difference without becoming a scapegoat, and who wants to be a scapegoat?

I am walking down Basel mainstreet. I ask my friend,

“What is Capitalism?”

“It’s a chain letter!” he replies.

“No”, I answered, “it’s a pair of breasts at the end of a motorway!”