Dresden + Berlin
If Dresden had an unreal quality to it, it wasn't because one felt like he was (the troll or the prince?) walking around in a fairy tale, though once it would have felt just that way, awash in Baroque exuberance. Rather, despite its small beauty and typically European good sense, its unreality, its sense of foreignness came from the open space and new construction that made the whole city into an open-air shopping mall. So many perfect surfaces disinvite the imperfect creature from resting, even visually, in the townscape, the way insects feel out-of-place in a clean room.
If Dresden had an unreal quality to it, it wasn't because one felt like he was (the troll or the prince?) walking around in a fairy tale, though once it would have felt just that way, awash in Baroque exuberance. Rather, despite its small beauty and typically European good sense, its unreality, its sense of foreignness came from the open space and new construction that made the whole city into an open-air shopping mall. So many perfect surfaces disinvite the imperfect creature from resting, even visually, in the townscape, the way insects feel out-of-place in a clean room.
The vacation began, for me at least, in the Berlin Hauptbanhoff, a new technological and civic splendor, set in the middle of what might be a war zone in some forgotten Eastern European kleptocracy, rather than in the economic engine of the West. Every building was scaffolded outside--even Rome, in the run-up to the Jubilee was less under-construction--and the street itself plowed through like a furrow. It was like landing on Mars.
We walked too far and I carried the bags, and then we found our cool hotel, the Tryp Mitte, along another depressed street and went out into the city to find it full of style and charm of the big-city sort that shuns the Belle Epoque. Everything looked done by the Soviets (much of it was) or the Americans, the two worst guardians of town-planning imaginable, beating their hammers of industry in alternating blows on poor blasted Berlin.
For all that though, there are artists here, and where there are artists, there is flourishing: coffee shops, bookstores, good ethnic food. I could easily see us living here, and in a sense, I'm glad we weren't stationed in such a vital place, because it would make our homecoming less likely, or less satisfying.
We saw mostly the exteriors of buildings, its being Monday and nearly everything major closed, but had a good time of it anyway, thanks in large part to the excellent food and cute shops for pottering about in.
Back home it's been work and reading, which is nice, as Spring--the shyest girl at the party!--blinks her eyes in the corner, hoping to be noticed.
Upon Arrival
After being squeezed from the great sausage-casing in the sky that is modern air transport, what one notices upon landing is the first thing one sees, that is, what he can't help but notice: the airport. Our wildest movies about future utopias don't equal the present good sense and design featured even in 2nd-rate cities like Stuttgart. Immediately, everything is calm and beautiful. The passport control officer is kind and gentle, without the trace of sarcasm and suspicion and boredom that mark his American counterpart.
But the goodness starts even before that transaction. Here, the boarding gate--what is that tube called that rolls up to an aircraft door?-- has windows and smart metal railings so that, instead of the anxious shuffle toward who-know-what-fate, the passengers disembark in a leisurely cantor, looking up at the sky, watching the men at work below.
And even before that, we knew that entering the EU was entering a different sort of place; seen from the sky over Baden-Wurttemberg, villages huddle in crevices and along rivers without a trace of sprawl, and this is not some romantic idyll, or town treasured for being picaresque. Stuttgart is a manufacturing hub: the head of Mercedes, Porche, Siemens, Bosch, and several other international conglomerates. What would be in America a huge warehouse district is here perfectly-squared fields. There is literally corn growing right up to the edge of the tarmac.
Once off the plane it is all leather seats and trim people in sexy clothes, glass walls and orderliness everywhere. Instead of a McDonald's, there are fresh sandwich shops with subs piled up, overfilled with colorful vegetables. All things bright and beautiful, indeed. Then, the stupefyingly gorgeous car rental stands, then the sane and talented drivers--quick and controlled--as our cab (itself a Mercedes; they all are here) whipped us out to suburban Bad Canstatt, where our sensible, if a bit rural, hostel is found.
They let us check in five hours early and we use all of them for sleep.
City Library
On Friday, Amber and I went into Stuttgart to see the Opera, about which more later, and made a detour en route to visit the newly remodeled Stuttgart City Library. I knew, depute the lack of directional specificity on the part of Broom-Helga the Wicked, our typically-Swabian helper at the tourist office, that we had the right building because I'd seen the drawings from
, but we approached the glowing stack of blue cubes with some hesitation, not only because it looked so little like a library, and not only because it was raining and we didn't want to wander too far into what looked like a construction zone cum office park, but because the only markings on the building's exterior were some three characters in Arabic, carved into the white stone. If I've seen a less-reassuring approach, I'm sure I couldn't name it.
Once inside though, all is well. Or, nearly all: there aren't any books for awhile. They begin on the fourth floor. The first few floors are given over to "media," which is usually done badly, but which Stuttgart manages to do pretty well here. There are rows of flatscreen TV's, listening stations for the vast music library (this is Germany after all) including private listening rooms full of couches and pretty-serious equipment, and various adolescents strewn about like shwarma wrappers plugged into the laptops one can rent from the desk for less admirable forms of "research."
The central receiving room is a giant cube, white and undecorated, without furniture or markings, and while this enthusiast appreciates the grand gesture, the space does feel a little wasted in this case. What do we need all that absence
for
, in a space like this? Libraries are for contemplation, sure, but isn't it active contemplation we're after, rather than the absence one hopes for in a cloister?
When, having wound around the exterior up four flights of white tunneling, and having shaken off the suspicious feeling that someone might be above, watching and promising cheese, the books appear and color explodes everywhere.
Another experiment in the linearity of libraries, not unlike Rem Koolhaas' stunning (and similarly difficult) glass refraction in downtown Seattle, the Biblio anchors a developing area off the Schlossplatz that attempts to lure both tourists and residents through the sleek, if over-planned, spaces between the skyscrapers, towards a feeling for the real daily life of this sturdy and serious place.
Building by
What it's Like Living in a 500-year-old Building
When my wife and I first moved to Germany, we thought we might live in Stuttgart, the main metropolis in Baden-Wurttemberg, and that I would commute to Tuebingen to teach classes. Once we saw the sleepy, lovely, medieval college-town of Tuebingen though, we knew immediately that it would make a better home base. Unfortunately, everyone else seems to have had the same idea and so the small town was experiencing an unprecedented housing shortage. Students literally dropped out of the University because they couldn't find a place to live.
After a few (very expensive) days in a University Guest House, during which we tried to figure out a) the German housing market b) the German phone system--note: you can't just put coins in and make calls--and c) the locker-rental scheme at the train station, which held all our worldly belongings, including, interestingly, Amber's guitar, we found a half-timbered building directly on the Neckar river facing the park. Built in 1478.
It was beautiful: perfectly-located about a mile from my offices and directly above a bakery. It was also the filthiest place I've ever seen. The man showing it to us cringed when we said we'd take it. "Really?" he asked, incredulous. Imagine Mrs. Havisham's place from
Great Expectations
and you more or less have it. The house hadn't seen a broom since the 1970's, from which era there were (and are) piles of magazines to attest to the proprietor's war on hygienic living.
We cleaned for days. We threw things out with righteous zeal.
We put furniture in the attic, for which we were later reprimanded, and pulled down others and dusted, rolled, tipped, stored, piled and otherwise organized where we could, holding everything in pinched fingers as if it might be contagious. It's one of the more disgusting projects I've been a part of, and I'm saying this as a former part-time janitor at an elementary school, who knows whereof he speaks.
Everything slants at whimsical angles; there are splints holding up every furnishing that isn't nailed to the sometime floor. The wiring is mostly electrical tape and the lighting (who plans ahead for lighting in the 15th century?) bare bulbs hanging from strings. Some of the installation is crumpled up paper sacks from the grocery, which I know because I thought of pulling one down in one of my more zealous fits. None of this would matter, of couse, had the place been decently cared-for, which finally--the house creaks like mad, but can it sigh in relief?--for this year at least, it will be.
The effort was worth it. We now have a charming flat in the center of town in a building that's literally post-card perfect; it is featured in every advertisement for the town of Tuebingen, and has come quite a way in these last months, now a serene escape along the river's bend from whose windows we watch swans and tourists, the latter pointing their cameras at our half-timbered tumble-down home.
After:
