“Und dein Pass? Für den Autobus?” Yes, my bus pass was in there as well. Upon which was written, in that near-indecipherable curlicue German script, the address of the well-appointed and now fully vulnerable Lebensraum of the Herrmanns. Frau Herrmann was distraught all right, but not about my lost eighty deutsche marks, or the Oregon driver’s license that still had a picture of me as a high-school junior, or my Stash Sack, which I am pretty sure was limited edition. She wasn’t upset for me—in a great exercise on German dative prepositions, she was sehr, sehr böse mit mir, with me, given that I had just imperiled the swimming pool, sauna, wet bar, and creepy antique Nazi money collection. She called me every compound word beginning with dumm in my compact German-to-English dictionary, and then a few new ones. Mercifully, after a hastily convened family summit (“[something something something] done [verb adverb preposition verb verb] so stupid [adverb adjective] and dangerous!” “But [something something verb verb] not [something]!”), it was determined that the Herrmanns would not need to change their locks, as they lived so far out in the boonies, and in such a quiet and uptight neighborhood, that anyone up to no good would be immediately recognizable.
No one ended up robbing them. In fact, the only real result of the kerfuffle was that I fully (and understandably) lost my key privileges, and thus, for the remaining days of my stay, I was forced to buzz myself into the house every time I came home. This was awkward, because although I had no curfew, the buzzer went directly to an intercom in the elder Herrmanns’ boudoir, meaning that for several nights in a row, in order to be let back into the house I’d put in danger, I had “no choice” but to rouse from slumber the very family who continued to house me, despite my acting with all of the consideration and un-Kelly-like foresight of an active heroin addict.
Eventually Christoph, in a rare cameo, showed me where they stashed their hidden key, and all was right with the world once again—until, that is, I was given the assignment to interview the Herrmanns about something interesting having to do with Germany, and without the slightest bit of hesitation (indeed, with more than a slight bit of sanctimony), I chose the Holocaust. To my selectively Jewish self, the Germanness of a person, whether one wanted to be born that way or not, was an immediate call for a lifetime of somber self-reflection, of grave shared responsibility, of Gewissensbiss, remorse, the constant “bite” of one’s conscience, of Schuldbewusstsein, the awareness of one’s guilt, of a debt (Schuld means both) that can never be paid. The distance of several generations from the personages and actions of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (or NSDAP, the preferred German shorthand) was no excuse. The fact that at the time considerably more self-avowed neo-Nazis lived in the U.S. state of Idaho than in all of Germany meant nothing. As far as I was concerned, my very presence in the Fatherland as a selective Jew was both a gift to the Volk and a stubborn reminder of my people’s refusal to be exterminated in our entirety.
So when it came time to sit down and interview the Herrmann daughters, I considered myself a linguistically challenged hybrid of Edward R. Murrow and the Nürnberg interrogators, and my merciless albeit low-syllabic questions took no prisoners—unlike the Herrmanns’ relatives in 1942, in case they forgot for a second, vielen Dank. (Or, for that matter, the Nürnberg interrogators, but this was not a time to think my metaphors all the way through.)
“Do you learn about the Holocaust at school?” I asked Lisette as she yanked her hair into a punishingly tight bun, then resumed scrubbing down the kitchen counter.
“Ja klar,” she said. “Von Anfang bis Ende.” From beginning to end.
“Ende,” I said. Interesting. Interesting.
“How do you feel about it?”
“Uh,” said Lisette. “It was bad. It was really, extremely bad. Obviously.”
“Do you know any Jewish people now?” I asked Gisela.
“Nur dich,” she said, and then took a slug of room-temperature mineral water straight from the bottle. “Just you.”
“Just me,” I repeated, scribbling it down dutifully, giving her my best loaded look. Check and mate, Herrmanns.
I may have committed my share of minor infractions in their house, but fuck if I wasn’t going to remind them that they were almost certainly the direct descendants of people who had either passively or actively participated in the genocide of the tribe with which I selectively identified when, for example, reminding them of their cultural debt to my people made my behavior as a houseguest appear briefly above reproach. Suddenly snubbing your midday soup and ringing that buzzer in the middle of the night doesn’t seem so bad, does it? They didn’t need to know that I hadn’t set foot in a synagogue since 1986.
In the wake of what I assumed was one of the realest cultural confrontations of the Herrmanns’ lives—which they, undoubtedly, viewed as yet another head-scratcher from their poorly groomed exchange student—I was invited to join them on a daylong excursion to the Longest Coffee Table in the World, a food-and-drinks festival where about nine hundred meters of folding furniture was lined up in a field somewhere, and participants partook in the afternoon ritual of coffee and Apfelkuchen (a moist apple cake) in the out-of-doors, in what was allegedly the largest mass consumption of such on the planet. Accompanying the main event (to which I referred in my journal as “some sort of bizarre Strudelfest”) were various carnival-type booths with raffles and other attractions I did not understand. Indeed, when the Herrmanns invited me to this shindig I had no idea where I was being taken, because they explained:
“We’re going to the [something something adjective noun], willst du mitkommen?”
And I was so proud of myself for understanding the modal-separable-prefix construction of willst du mitkommen (“do you want to come along?”) that I smiled and nodded and got in the car. Because if there was anything my hard-hitting interview taught me, it was that it’s a good idea to ride to an undisclosed location with a bunch of Germans who vaguely dislike you. For the record, it was a sparklingly blue day, everyone was in a fine mood, and the Apfelkuchen was (as Apfelkuchen usually is) magnificent, the perfect mixture of tender and doughy, not too sweet, not too tart. And the coffee was terrific: smooth, oily, and strong as hell (not unlike, I imagine, the Aryan weightlifting specimens at the 1936 Olympics).
As is common in outdoor food-and-drinks festivals in Germany and Austria, patrons at the Longest Coffee Table in the World paid a five-mark deposit for their ceramic mugs, which was reclaimable upon said mugs’ safe return or, in case the drinker traipsed off with it, effectively cemented a legitimate purchase. Once again, I did not understand any of this at the time, which is why I was both surprised and moved that the Herrmanns pointed to the blue-and-white Kaffeetasse I held in my hands, painted admirably literally with a picture of Germans enjoying coffee and cake and the slogan DIE LÄNGSTE KAFFEETAFEL DER WELT, and proclaimed: “This is for you!”
And they say none of us will ever see any reparations.
Aside from that single day of family cake enjoyment, the primary activity that finally endeared the Herrmanns to me (and vice versa) was my absence. Despite the periodic discomforts of my residency there—no photograph of me, in any state of grooming, would ever grace their mantel—they gamely agreed to look after my gargantuan suitcase and most of my array of questionable synthetic garments during the final month of my trip, which first involved returning to the tour bus—my old friend—for a somber sojourn to the former German Democratic Republic and the Buchenwald concentration camp, and then, at long last, two weeks with my Eurail pass, most of which I planned to spend on a pilgrimage to Prague, where I would walk in Kafka’s shadow and visit his corpse, an activity I assumed he was looking forward to as much as I was.
My final destination was Amsterdam, where I had vague plans to meet up with every friend I knew who was currently backpacking in Europe—plans that somehow came to fruition, despite the fact that nobody involved had a cell phone or even access to e-mail, and that almost everybody involved was spectacularly high for most of the time. While in Amsterdam I also partook in several important cultural expeditions, such as waiting outside—and then being turned away from—the Heineken Brewery (tours booked up months in advance), the Van Gogh Museum (closed on Mondays), and the Anne Frank House (you think you can just walk in to the Anne Frank House without waiting in line for seven hours? Maybe if you’re Gary from Take That you can). The only museum that granted me admittance was the Museum of Sex, which did not have anything in it I could not otherwise learn from one of my many unintentional diversions into the Red Light District, where I was equally shocked to behold both live legal prostitutes and—displayed in the window of a porn shop with all of the pride of a freshly baked baguette—a dildo approximately the size and width of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s arm. I also made the excellent decision to blow the last of my travel budget on a “souvenir” from an establishment called Body Manipulations, by which I mean I had my right nostril pierced by a mild-mannered Dutch lesbian who wielded a hollow needle with the grace of a surgeon.
Thus, it was with pupils fully dilated, a new hole in my face, and my clothes and skin oozing with hashish that, on my penultimate day in Europe, I took the short train ride back across the border into Germany to see the Herrmanns one more time and retrieve the balance of my luggage. And, despite the fact that I was newly punctured, clearly intoxicated, and smelled substantially worse than Bath & Body Works raspberry-cassis exfoliating soap (which had run out shortly before I left their house), the Herrmanns answered the door legitimately amused to see me.
“Hallo, Rebecca!” said Frau Herrmann, working her lips into an actual smile. “You’ve stuck something in your nose!”
She then proceeded to feed me a full Mittagessen, which I scarfed as I fielded as many questions as I could about my trip. Because it turns out that what makes you savor boiled potatoes in white sauce is two weeks spending your food budget on ice cream, beer, and drugs. And the surest remedy for your remedial German is two weeks trying to get by with your absolute jack-diddley-squat zero Czech or Dutch. And the best way to appreciate the uptight strangers who begrudgingly housed you for a month is to spend two weeks sleeping on train-car floors and on the business end of snoring frat guys in grimy twenty-person backpacker hostel rooms. The Herrmanns even schlepped all the way back to the train station in those BMWs with me and my giant suitcase—which was now just a bit heavier due to the addition of my keepsake cup from the Longest Coffee Table on Earth. I brought that mug back with me to college and, for the rest of my student years, assigned it the function of topmost honor in my Lebensraum: my ashtray.
4.
Schriftverkehr
n. correspondence, from text and intercourse.
ex. The opposite of writerly solitude is Schriftverkehr. (And also regular Verkehr.)
In the opening scene of Before Sunrise—the 1995 film that created outsized expectations in a million heady, angst-ridden college students, or at any rate in one, named me—Ethan Hawke’s character Jesse meets Julie Delpy’s character Celine when they overhear an Austrian married couple scream at each other on a train. Neither Jesse nor Celine speaks German, so the particulars of the fight (which is about how the husband thinks the wife is an alcoholic) are lost on them. Still, they bond over the public display of acrimony and strike up a conversation that doesn’t end until twenty-four hours later—when they part ways as the loves of each other’s lives.
I wonder what would have happened to them if, instead, they’d overheard a nineteen-year-old girl with a well-tended head of American hair shriek at a ticket-taker, “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” Maybe they wouldn’t even have noticed each other, because Ethan Hawke would have boinked the do-you-speak-English girl instead. I don’t know. What I do know is that I witnessed such a display on a Prague-bound train at the tail end of my first summer in Europe, which also happened to fall some scant half-year after Before Sunrise caused me to assume my future spouse would manifest himself on one or another form of rail transport. And, flanked by my new study-abroad friends from Münster, Layla, Justin, and Freddie, my instinct was to put on hold my search for a soul mate, roll my cosmopolitan eyes, feel superior, and eavesdrop.
The ticket-taker, who was a Czech woman with a mullet, answered the girl in the way all unamused bemulleted Czech ticket-takers do when asked if they speak English in All-Caps American: “A little bit.” That was, of course, far too modest; she spoke English quite well—had, in fact, just done so to my group five minutes prior—and had likely deployed this answer to avoid prolonging this particular conversation. If you wanted to talk to someone who only spoke a little bit of a language, that would be me; I had attempted to memorize five phrases of Czech, with wildly incorrect pronunciation, from my Let’s Go travel guide. Many well-meaning (but misinformed) friends have assumed at different points in my life that because Germany and the Czech Republic are adjacent, German and Czech are similar, or at any rate speaking German in the Czech Republic will get you understood. What it will get you is well-deserved nasty looks for reminding the Czechs of their hundreds of years of Austrian colonization, which were followed near-on directly by two decades of war and genocidal annexation.
Sure, there was once a thriving Prague German dialect and a substantial German-speaking minority (of which the Kafka family, like most Jews, was a part), but that business was all well in the past by the time I boarded the train during this particular summer, practicing those five Czech phrases with unstartling ineptitude, given that Czech, to the untrained Anglophone ear, is about as intuitive as dolphin noises. But still, the simple fact that I was trying at all—that I had wished the self-same questionably coiffed conductor a dobrý den and muttered děkuje (or something sort of like it) in thanks after she checked my ticket—made me, I hoped, a different caliber of traveler than that girl at the other end of the car, who I surmised must have learned the All-Caps technique from her parents condescending to their household employees.
“HOW LONG TO PRAGUE?” said the girl, who had not taken the hint that the conductor didn’t want to hang out.
“I’m sorry?”
The girl pointed theatrically to her watch. “HOW MANY HOURS UNTIL WE GET TO PRAGUE?”
We were about eighty kilometers away, and had in fact just crossed the Czech border, enduring the minor excitement of passport control in the days before the European Union, by which I mean fifteen stern-looking Czech police stormed the train (also with mullets, possibly the new country’s national haircut). They’d sternly checked our passports, then bestowed them with stern stamps full of strange words with too many consonants and accents on letters I didn’t know could have them. To answer the girl’s question, it took about an hour to travel eighty kilometers by rail, but on that day, the train was subject to a fifteen-minute delay, on account of the fact that Ms. How Many Hours and her colleagues attempted to present the conductor with Eurail passes, which were not valid in the Czech Republic in 1995. The train squealed to a halt, the girls surrounded in an instant by the stern-looking border cops and three more conductors. Now this was worth at least a quick scene in the melancholy, atmospheric Linklater rip-off movie I had decided to shoot in my head for the duration of my train travels. Was there an impishly handsome man-boy reading Klaus Kinski’s autobiography anywhere on that car, perchance?
I craned my neck as How Many Hours and her friends pooled their cash to see if they had enough money to buy Czech Railways tickets for those final eighty kilometers (I’d purchased a thirty-nine-dollar “Prague Excursion” add-on to my own Eurail pass, which was, given the Czech Railways prices in 1995, an obscene overcharge).
“What about DEUTSCH?” she asked. “Will you take DEUTSCH?”
Across from me, Justin snorted.
“Yes,” said the conductor. “We will take deutsche marks.”
