Sometimes we would get a peek of Germanness if we were staying far enough in the boonies to opt for a Gasthof (inn) instead of a youth hostel—the strange “double” beds that were made of two singles pushed together, with their massive feather pillows and their duvets folded down the middle instead of spread out; the showers next to the beds and toilets in the hallway; the staggering breakfast spreads of rolls, cheeses, cold cuts, and mounds of butter; the squat, unsmiling ladies who would walk around the table asking Möchten Sie Kaffee oder Tee? (Kaffee. My answer was always Kaffee; it, like the beer in Cologne, was small but potent.)
But no matter where we went, the specifics of the tour-bus culture meant that just about the only conversations I had with Germans were the brief, rehearsed Mein-Bett-ist-geschlossen–type exchanges that took place at restaurants and bars. The only way to go off-script was to tether myself to one of the German heritage speakers (people with German parents or grandparents) in the group, who spoke with the sort of idiosyncratic conversational fluency that came from speaking a language at home but never taking classes in it. Our group’s most charismatic heritage speaker was a Bavarian kid named Henrik, who, about one week in, taught me, Freddie, and Anneke how to say eine Flasche Weißwein zum Mitnehmen, or “one bottle of white wine to go,” which the proprietor of a quiet pub was all too happy to grant each of us, one at a time, even so much as uncorking them so that we could take them into an empty town square and down them under the low summer sky, giggling into the night, surrounded by empty bakeries and butchers in half-timbered houses that looked like the Seven Dwarfs’ vacation homes.
“You guys,” I said, two-thirds of my Flasche deep. “You guys. You guys. What if the white wine in this village is infected with some deadly disease, and that’s why the guy at the Kneipe sold us each a bottle for three marks fifty? And everybody knows it but the tourists? And then all the tourists will start keeling over, and there will be a really good-looking kid at our next hostel, and I’ll fall in love with him but never say anything to him, and then I’ll die of the wine disease, and I wear too much makeup and my hair looks ridiculous?”
“Well, your hair does look ridiculous,” said Freddie. “I’ve been meaning to tell you since the airport. I liked it a lot better before.”
“Tadzio,” I said.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Schuman?” said Henrik. “That doesn’t even—whoa, Katze, dude!” A stray cat skittered across the cobblestones and ducked behind one of the fake-looking adorable buildings.
“Rebecca really likes Death in Venice,” explained Freddie.
“Venice?” said Henrik.
“Tadzio!” I cried, and took another swig of wine. Nobody understood me. Nobody would ever understand me, really. It was the most poetic loneliness. If only I’d had someone to share it with.
The cat yowled. Awash with longing—general longing, random pangs of specific longing for the early days of Dylan Gellner, and also for the affections of a person I hadn’t met yet, somebody who would want to talk about Death in Venice at two in the morning in a tiny German village whose name I didn’t know, over cheap German white wine consumed directly from the bottle in the out-of-doors—I grabbed one of Freddie’s cigarettes. I lit it and took a massive pull of burnt filter fumes before I noticed I’d put it in my mouth backward. “Tadzio!”
The next morning, I almost missed the bus, and as I scrambled on, hair askew, green of face, pores reeking of vinegar, Herr Neudorf turned the tour-guide microphone up to its highest setting.
“OH, WEBECCAAAAAAAA,” he said, as I attempted to open my window as wide as it would go and stick my head out like a dog. “I SEE YOU! I CALL YOUR MUZZAH! I CALL HER WIGHT NOW! Now, meine Damen und Herren, today we’re going to see a wonderful old town that dates back to the Mittelalter, Rothenburg ob der Tauber. We go to a special medieval torture museum, where we see devices invented to torture women who were too loud! Speaking of which—Webecca, the things I will tell your muzzah!”
Rothenburg ob der Tauber is indeed an old-fashioned walled town, with old-German signage and old-German houses and old-German winding narrow lanes—which are accordingly crammed with modern-day international tourists with not an actual German in sight. It’s arguably the least authentic of all Germany’s “authentic” old-German attractions: in fact, a good 70 percent of the historical sites I shuffled through in my hungover haze were replicas, which Herr Neudorf pronounced weplica, erected out of the war’s rubble, which he pronounced wubble. But it was there, of all places, that I had my first true encounter with German culture.
My white-wine-to-go hangover had just begun to abate when the group sat down to dinner at a rustic pub in a small village near Rothenburg. As an adornment to my beer, I—a vegetarian since the age of ten, much to the Schumans’ annoyance—was brought the vegetarische Speise on offer: broccoli with melted cheese, on top of which had been sprinkled a generous portion of cubed ham. I was ready to remove each speck manually; growing up in an uncooperative carnivorous family, you embrace the pick-it-off method. But Layla—that was the tiny beautiful girl’s name, the one from another college that Freddie had the hots for—in addition to being tiny and beautiful and good at German, was also a stricter Vegetarierin, and she was adamant: “Es gibt aber Fleisch darauf!” (“But there’s meat on it!”)
To which the astonished waitress replied: “Das ist doch kein Fleisch—das ist Schinken!” For emphasis, she repeated it in English: “Theht’s not meat—it’s hehm. Hehm!”
After a week of castles and churches, after a year of adjective endings and Thomas Mann, my first real and substantive German cultural learning experience was the discovery that until a unit of meat reaches a certain size, it counts as parsley.
That size, by the way, is the size of a Wurst, which in 1995 I described as “a cardiac-infarction-provoking mixture of gristle, innocent baby cows and the last place a hog’s food visits before it leaves his body,” thus making me loads of new friends on the bus. (I couldn’t say anything besides Ich bin vegetarisch in German, which means “I am suitable for a vegetarian to eat.”) The “actual meat” on offer for the normal people in the Münster group that night was Knackwurst, which gets its name (“cracking”) because it swells during cooking, and then when you bite into it, it “cracks” and spooges sausage-juice all over you, which I guess is supposed to be a positive? I tried not to watch the carnage—and also tried not to be consumed with Aschenbachian longing for my dearly departed broccoli with cheese—as I tucked into the plate of mushy spaghetti and ketchup I was brought after Layla cowed the waitress. I was lucky, though—we were in Bavaria, and if our hosts had wanted to treat us to something really special, they would have made Weißwurst, or “white sausage,” which is made from veal and fatty bacon, and so perishable that, so the saying goes, such a treat shouldn’t live to hear the church bells ring at noon.
As the tour bus continued its zigzag through the Fatherland and Herr Neudorf continued in his threats to call my muzzah, I realized that, in the words of Goethe’s Faust, from the play Faust (which I had not yet read, being an eighteen-year-old idiot interested only in Kafka and, very recently, Thomas Mann), two souls dwelled in my decidedly unvoluptuous breast.
Part of me drank in every difference, every drop of German history, which seemed equally majestic and abhorrent (I finally figured out how to use that word). That part of me enjoyed the ache of solitude as I looked out the window at the verdant landscape whizzing by, protected from a country full of strangers by a bus full of strangers. I was having, I insisted to myself, a transformative experience, changing into a grown-up thanks to a much-needed change in perspective brought on by the hundreds of years of history around me (at a safe distance, natürlich). The other part felt monstrous in my alienation—stuffed so far down into myself that nobody could reach me there, regarding the world, as Kafka wrote, with the gaze of an animal, trapped inside my own disgusting shell of otherness. The alienation was twofold: both from the language, which had the gall not to be immediately and magically understandable, and from the new American friends who shared this experience with me and yet didn’t understand the profundity of my deepest soul the way they should have after two weeks drinking beer together.
It was a good thing, then, that I was so excellent at German by the time I stumbled off the bus and into the perplexed non-embrace of my new host family, the Herrmanns, because I had no trouble using my powerful arsenal of language to express the many nuances of my inner Sturm und Drang. Wait, no: I was functionally illiterate, perpetually confused and resentful—and I imagine even all of that would have been akzeptierbar, had I not also committed the unforgivable misdeed of losing track of select personal belongings.
3.
Lebensraum
n. habitat, from living and space
ex. Rooming with Germans in their natural Lebensraum gives a person ample opportunity to remind them, in various subtle ways, how the Nazis perverted the word Lebensraum (among other things).
As I stepped off the bus into the Münster parking lot where our host families were to greet us, Herr Neudorf, with one final threat to call my muzzah, motioned me over to an enclave of very tanned, very blond Germans. I watched the father’s bronzed brow compress, as he said: “You don’t look like your picture.”
Du siehst ja ganz anders aus, echoed the woman I assumed was my new mommy, regarding me like a show dog who turned out to be so inbred that he had one really short leg.
It was true. Not about my legs, both equally short, but the rest. We’d been asked to supply a photo so that our host families would recognize us, but in the age of the film camera, the most recent snap I had was one of my senior portraits from high school: pre–pixie cut, pre-bleach, pre–freshman-fifteen, and pre-cigarettes, and thus depicting an altogether different girl in a far more innocent (or at any rate marginally less obnoxious) time.
The Herrmann family had been expecting an earnest-faced child with chestnut ringlets that cascaded down to her elbows. I didn’t know the German for bait and switch, but judging by the looks on my new family’s Antlitze that was one bit of cross-cultural communication that didn’t need words. They had, it turns out, chosen me largely because of my supposed physical similarities to their previous and much-beloved exchange student, Kelly, also in possession of long brunette waves, a pale complexion, and light gray-blue eyes, which stared at me daily from the large soft-focus picture of her they kept on the mantel in their lushly appointed foyer. Kelly, I would learn, was so adored that Herr Herrmann thought of her as a “third daughter.” Apparently they had been in the market for a fourth, but clearly wanted to exchange the goods that ended up stumbling off the bus reeking of Riesling sweat and stale Drum.
Indeed, it didn’t help matters that the day I met the Herrmanns was the day after Herr Neudorf’s notorious bus-tour sendoff: a wine-tasting party, at which he was not satisfied until every participant “tasted” two liters of syrupy German vintage and belted out “Du, du liegst mir im Herzen” in a perfect accent, while linking arms and swaying back and forth.
The Herrmanns, it turned out, had never seen anyone who embodied the postgrunge aesthetic quite like me. The prevailing fashion in my subculture—dresses straight from the Elaine-from-Seinfeld collection, baggy jeans held up with huge belts, vintage polyester bowling shirts, dark-purple lipstick, massive Doc Martens, short hair plastered down with little-girl clips—differed greatly from the flowing flaxen locks, snug, brightly colored pants, and modest fitted tees covered in nonsensical English logos (“Feel It Easy!”) favored by mid-nineties German youth. And this is how I came to present myself to the uniformly unimpressed Herrmanns, all decked out in my finery, and sporting a short, straw-yellow coif that—especially juxtaposed with their staid Aryan real-blondness—appeared to be the result of a minor nuclear accident.
The Herrmanns lived in a small village outside Münster called Wolbeck. They drove BMWs and they had a tanning bed (or Solarium) in their house, a fact painfully evident from the matching tangerine complexions that set off the luminous flaxen locks of the children and Frau Herrmann, and the platinum-silver hair of Herr Herrmann, who was both the oldest and the shortest member of his family, and whose substantial potbelly and jaunty legs looked tailor-made for Lederhose. He looked like an imp who’d made sound financial investments. Frau Herrmann had remarkable posture and a disarming glare; her makeup was immaculate; her lips were pursed in a perennial straight line; her hair, blond as that of her progeny with the help of an upscale Friseur (stylist), was set in an immobile Princess Diana coif. The two Herrmann daughters, Lisette (seventeen) and Gisela (fifteen), were in high school, which I was astounded to learn was in session all through July. Lisette, a head taller than me with hair down to her waist, was studying to be a ballet teacher and was correspondingly willowy. She was also charmingly cavalier about cheating at school: the sole ironclad rule about our homestays was that our family was not to speak to us in English, but it was a rule Lisette broke a few times in private, in exchange for me doing all of her English homework. (I wonder if her teacher noticed a strange but temporary uptick in the word random and the term having issues.) She was also enrolled in Fahrschule, or driving school, so that she would be ready to take her driving test at eighteen, and when she found out I’d been driving (poorly) since I was Gisela’s age, she was aghast. “But don’t worry,” I said. “When you turn eighteen in America, you can buy a gun.”
Gisela, meanwhile, was identical to her sister save for a prodigious set of curves, every centimeter of which was on display in her American jeans that had gone out of style shortly before the sexual revolution, which she pronounced Levees fünf null eins. (“Why do you wear your pants so large?” she asked. Unable to explain the nuances of body dysmorphia auf Deutsch, I just told her it was the style, which was also true, but largely because most of America suffered from body dysmorphia.) There was also a third Herrmann child, Christoph, who wasn’t a child at all but a twenty-four-year-old student who still lived at home (not abnormal for a German), but I didn’t see hair or hide of him for weeks.
I would glean most of these Herrmann-related facts via hand gestures and low-level snooping in my early days im Herrmannshaus, but all I knew for the first two hours of our acquaintanceship was that they did not approve of my heavily cultivated look, nor were they impressed with my preferences in literature.
“So, Rebecca!” bellowed Herr Herrmann from the front seat of one of the Beemers, as he screeched around the bend of a narrow village road at approximately a billion kilometers per hour. He pronounced it like most Germans do, which is sadly not Webecca: the R rolled in the back of the throat, then a long, stressed first e. Rrrrrreeeeey-beeeeeeeey-kaaaaa. I dug my hands into the sumptuous leather interior and hoped they wouldn’t leave a mark. “Where does your interest in German come from?”
Delighted to have understood the question in German, I cleared my throat (I’d learned some preemptive phlegm-avoidance tactics during my stilted conversations of the past few weeks) and said: “I love the literature of Franz Kafka. I would like to read Franz Kafka in the original.”
Frau Herrmann snorted. “Er war aber kein Deutscher!” (He wasn’t a German!) “He was from Czechoslovakia!”
“I think it’s just called the Czech Republic now, Mama,” said Gisela. “I’ve never read anything by him,” she said to me. I wanted to tell her that I was exactly her age when he changed the course of my life forever (kind of), but I didn’t know how.
“He wrote in German, though,” I said.
“You should read some real German authors!” said Herr Herrmann. “Goethe. Schiller. Echte Deutsche.”
