Granta 165, page 13
The word tourist has negative connotations. The phrase German tourist has many negative connotations. It is an exciting time to be an American tourist in Europe: we are much less hated than we have been in the recent past. Meanwhile, visitors from other countries are becoming very annoying, and at least we still have the glamour of the previous century and, despite the odds, our willingness to spend money. Plus, we’re really friendly, you know? Occasionally a European in my midst will attempt a feeble complaint about a loud American woman TikToking about the absence of tap water on the Continent, but today there are a couple of varieties of tourist reviled more than we. The British, who can’t be helped; the Australians, who, because they’re good-looking, have no idea that they’re just like the British, and so are, on top of the drunken doofishness, cocky; and the Germans.
Contemporary hatred of German tourists focuses on debauchery in the areas known as Schinkenstrasse (Ham Street) and Bierstrasse (Beer Street) in Mallorca – in 2023, one Spanish expat newspaper claimed residents now find them ‘as boozy and awful as the Brits’ because they ‘throw themselves from balconies, they keep mixing their drinks all day . . . they fall asleep in people’s gardens, and they are being robbed.’ But for much of the twentieth century their particularities while traveling abroad were interpreted as evidence for Nazism’s success. ‘All Central Europe seems to me to be enacting a fantasy which I cannot interpret,’ Rebecca West writes at the beginning of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her magisterial Balkan travelogue written in the 1930s and published in 1941. On her way to Croatia, she shares a train car with two German couples who reveal themselves to be ‘unhappy muddlers, who were so nice and so incomprehensible, and so apparently doomed to disaster of a kind so special that it was impossible for anybody not of their blood to imagine how it could be averted. It added to their eerie quality that on paper these people would seem the most practical and sensible people.’ One of the men was, according to his wife, ‘very ill with a nervous disorder affecting the stomach which made him unable to make decisions’; they were on their way to a Dalmatian island in the hope that the sun and air would solve it. None of these Germans is in the Nazi Party – indeed, they resent and fear the Nazis, and the men are both especially daunted by the capriciousness of the Nazi tax system – but they are to West clearly representative of how and why the Nazis came to power: they are simultaneously entitled and desperate for guidance. They lament the absence of German food on the train car and dread the weeks they’ll spend without it, despite West’s extolling of then-Yugoslavia’s ‘romantic soups’; they kick a young ‘Latin’ traveler with a second-class ticket out of their first-class carriage to make room for West and her husband, who impresses them with his perfect ‘real German German’. When a conductor comes around, the Germans reveal that they have second-class tickets, too.
When one has very little to do, the schedule fills up rapidly. It somehow became difficult, if not impossible, to visit the sauna twice a day, though that had been our intention. My inexpert opinion is that most of the benefits of spa treatments come down to two things: increased circulation and enforced relaxation. They are not magical, or so scientific that you need a doctor to explain them. What we are used to from living in Germany is a very hot sauna – 90 degrees Celsius – undertaken nude. You see what you can stand until you can’t stand it anymore. With practice you can stand more. A normally punishing icy shower transforms into relief. It shocks me when people fear or doubt the efficacy of the very hot sauna; it’s almost too obviously a spiritually educational experience.
Still, we are not immune to the exhilarations of modernity. When we arrived in our room, we were greeted with a long printout of available spa treatments. This was overwhelmingly exciting until we realized many of the treatments required a doctor’s consultation before and after, both of which cost money, and might kill or permanently injure you. A shorter list of normal spa treatments was more manageable. Beyond the hotel, you could also purchase a session at the local ‘beer spa,’ stylized variously as beer spa beerland and spa beerland, which involves renting a private room where you can drink and bathe in actual beer, ‘beer extracts’ and ‘beer herbal mixture’. They actually have these all over the world. There is at least one article online called ‘Why Bathing in Beer Could Be the Healthiest Thing You Do All Summer.’ It has many alleged benefits; all the treatments do.
‘The idea of the beer spa is, basically, what if I could be just like a cow but have all the desires of a man?’ Thom said as we photographed the beer spa beerland sign.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sleeping in a bed of hay’ – this is one of the things you get at the beer spa – ‘drinking so much I can only roll around,’ he said. ‘Masturbating, presumably.’
‘I don’t think cows masturbate?’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ he replied.
‘I think dolphins are the only animals that masturbate,’ I replied.
‘What do you mean?’ he replied again. I was actually wrong about that, but it’s a non sequitur.
We took mineral baths instead. This is the marquee treatment at the Nové Lázně. Germans love carbonated water, so it follows that they also like to bathe in it. After you soak in the tub for twenty minutes or so, an employee comes in and wraps you up in towels and sheets. ‘Like baby,’ she says approvingly. The thing about anecdotes like this is that they can seem stereotypical, and thus offensive. But of course if you don’t speak much English, ‘like baby’ is going to be one of the phrases you can produce, especially if your job is swaddling adults like babies. After the baths, Thom and I reconvened in the hallway, whose horrible smell, always stronger in the morning, we could now fully appreciate. We were euphoric. Our skin was soft. We felt productive.
As mentioned, Thom is a large man. His caloric needs are significant. The daily buffet, with its geriatric hours and gestures toward what is healthy and easy to digest, could not sustain him. I am sympathetic to this problem but not the type to bring protein bars for my boyfriend everywhere I go, though as many girlfriends will know, sometimes it is better to maternally fill your purse with snacks than to suffer the consequences of their absence. On the second day of the trip, we planned to have a couple of treatments and work. I did this shockingly diligently. The trip was working, for me, but at times it seemed we were on parallel journeys. ‘Are you hungry?’ Thom would ask hopefully at 11 a.m., 4 p.m. – not at all the buffet hours. No, I would say. We weren’t doing anything. I had a massage appointment. How could I be hungry?
By 4.30 p.m., the situation had worsened. Thom needed to visit, he said, the Wiener Café, the Viennese café in the basement decorated as such. I was about to finish editing an essay. I asked if it would bother him if I met him in the Wiener Café when I was done. He said no, he didn’t mind, but he had to go right then. He was starving. I said the gap between men and women is wide and maybe even unbridgeable. He left.
Fifteen minutes later I found the Wiener Café dark and empty. The significance of this development was grave. It must have closed at 5 p.m. Maybe even 4 p.m. The hotel had taken up the German custom of not keeping businesses open at times when they are likely to do business. It is normal in Berlin to encounter coffee shops that don’t open until 10 or 11 a.m. on weekdays. I imagined Thom, hungry, forlorn, roaming the labyrinthine passages of the hotel, having lost the ability to speak. I found him sitting in the bar, despondent. His face looked like it was melting. He was hamming it up, but he needed ham. I looked to the bartender, who was uninterested in us. Dinner was in half an hour. ‘Tell her, “Don’t worry, he is a vulnerable man and I am his girlfriend,”’ he said. ‘But say it in Czech.’
Weakly, he typed this message into Google Translate on his phone. He began to giggle. ‘The word for “girlfriend” means “the one I cuddle with”,’ he said.
The next day we adopted a new strategy: constant treats. We ate breakfast followed by Viennese coffees – coffee with whipped cream – and a slice of Viennese cake. This was luxurious and I enjoyed it. Thom ordered a second Viennese coffee, about which I said nothing. I had an appointment to get dry-brushed and I believe in personal agency.
When I returned from the dry-brushing – they let you keep the brushes! – I saw in front of Thom not only a third Viennese coffee but also another cake. Again I said nothing. He was exuberant.
‘I was just standing at the window and that man said to me, “Eh [German way], du bist ein Sportler!” ’ Thom said. ‘Even though my belly is full of cake.’
As the day wore on, my mood remained steady; I was actually working for once in my life. Thom, however, was becoming dark and concerning.
‘I think it’s the barometric pressure,’ he said wearily. ‘It’s just not a good day.’
In the afternoon I suggested we take a walk, which we had not really been doing, and visit a little food market on the square. We got beer, sausage and a traditional fried cheese whose mountain origins Thom eagerly explained to me. But even this did not boost his mood.
‘Do you think maybe,’ I proposed at 5 p.m., the worst hour of the day, ‘you have eaten too much dairy?’
‘Sheep’s milk barely has lactose,’ he replied sharply. ‘And I’m not lactose-intolerant! My ancestors brought dairy to the world!’ He was referring to the Tatars.
I listed what he had consumed that day. When I got to the second slice of cake I began to laugh. He was having a sugar crash, aggravated surely by his caffeine addiction. ‘I think you are having a dairy crisis,’ I said mischievously. Days of working in bed had made me happy enough to make jokes.
‘I’m not!’ he cried. ‘It’s not a dairy crisis!’
Marienbad has long inspired emotional volatility in its visitors. ‘These people are the most miserable on earth,’ Aleichem writes. ‘They crave food and aren’t allowed to eat. They yearn to travel and can’t. They desire nothing better than to lie down and aren’t permitted.’ In the United States, the wellness industry has responded to the commodification of the self by coming up with evermore specific pseudoscientific syndromes and accompanying solutions, the pursuit of which can distract you from your real problem, life; in Central European spa towns they’re still hawking the benefits of the periodic table. When there is nothing to see or do, tiny vacillations in mood are the only thing to pay attention to. When you’re not a true believer in the possibility of a cure, your mind has space to wander to dark places. Nietzsche, another famous weakling, sought relief from migraines in Marienbad and found only bitterness and resentment. ‘The people are so ugly here, and a steak costs 80 kreuzer,’ he wrote to his mother in 1880. ‘It is like being in an evil world.’ Though he planned to leave after a month, he was too sick to make the journey home, so he had to stay another four weeks, beset not only by the headaches but also by his memories of his former friend Richard Wagner, with whom he’d had a falling-out after Nietzsche wrote ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ in 1876. After years of idolizing obsession followed by mutual adoration, Nietzsche had become ambivalent about the much older man, not so much as a composer – he praised him in the text – but as a person and foreboding representative of Germany’s past. Famously, Wagner sucked, and Nietzsche had all sorts of other philosophical complaints about how Wagner’s particular brand of decadence was of the decaying kind, spiritually weak, the latter’s antisemitism and alleged Christianity being only two of several examples. If you have a lot in common otherwise, if you love each other, sometimes differences in perspective and temperament don’t really matter, until they do. Disappointment follows, and a sense of betrayal: how could you stray from the path? I thought we were taking it together.
Wagner and his wife Cosima blamed Nietzsche’s turn on masturbation and his Jewish friends. They all cared too much about Germany, but in critically diverging ways. ‘It’s for the best,’ absolutely everyone will tell you. Neither rest cures nor reasonable advice helps. ‘How often I dream about [Wagner], and always in the spirit of our former intimacy,’ Nietzsche wrote to a friend. ‘All that is now over, and what use is it to know that in many respects he was in the wrong?’ Time is what heals, unless you go insane before it can.
The sauna is exhausting, even when you can only manage once a day. On our last night, we hit play on the movie while lying in bed after dinner. When it became clear that the stark shadowy lawns and elaborate interiors were not the same shadowy lawns and elaborate interiors we had been traversing ourselves, that the delight of recognition would not be ours, it became even harder to stay awake. What’s more, the film is incredibly boring, and should not be watched on a computer. I am not against boring movies; I am merely, sadly, a realist. Its themes might have made me sad if Marienbad still carried its associations with loss and memory, but the place has become a straightforward representation of a very specific idea of the past, no longer a site of vague, moody possibility. Is it all in her mind? In his? Might the man pushing the woman to remember him represent a psychoanalyst, a drill sergeant of the unconscious, holding place for some other man she might actually remember, if pressed long and hard enough? Might they all be dead, or in limbo, or in a dream? It will never be certain, but that uncertainty has become certain, obvious, possibly even boring. We never finished the movie, but the trip was great.
THE TEXTURE OF ANGEL MATTER
Yoko Tawada
translated from the german by susan bernofsky
The man standing in front of Patrik looks very Trans-Tibetan. This is the first time Patrik has ever used this Celan word, which he’s been warming beneath his feathers for a long time now, without knowing what group of people or languages would hatch from it. The man really does look Trans-Tibetan; this is a subjective impression, and the purpose of adjectives is to support subjectivity.
The man asks permission to join Patrik at his table. The language he speaks is no rara avis requiring a recherché description like Trans-Himalayan or Sino-Tibetan. He speaks a straightforward German with a faint accent. Other tables are occupied, and it’s only logical, it seems to Patrik, for two men to share a table in solidarity.
‘My name is Leo-Eric Fu,’ the man says, elegantly extending his hand and then quickly withdrawing it before Patrik can respond. Patrik understands that a greeting need not be physically consummated. There’s a question buzzing circles in his head. Should a person reveal their full name right at the outset when making a fleeting cafe acquaintance, or are all three components – Leo, Eric and Fu – his first names? Patrik is cautious and offers only the first of his given names.
‘My name is Patrik.’
‘I know,’ Leo-Eric answers with an understanding nod. Patrik is unnerved, uncertain how to interpret this reply. Leo-Eric then says he’s often observed Patrik sitting in this cafe – the last time, in fact, reading the book of poems Fadensonnen (Threadsuns). Patrik has no memory of this, but it’s certainly possible he was reading poetry at the cafe, especially since he was planning to give a paper at a Paul Celan conference in Paris. At the moment, he isn’t sure if he’ll be cleared to participate or if he’ll be struck from the list of speakers as an oversensitive crackpot.
‘You intend to give a talk on the book Threadsuns?’
‘It’s possible I intended to a few weeks ago. But now, no.’
‘Why not?’
Patrik can’t find an answer to this question, so he quickly invents a reason, looking down.
‘I don’t like conferences.’
‘Why not?’
‘I find it a stressful situation, being observed from all sides. Everyone suddenly wearing devils’ masks.’
‘What do you mean? I don’t follow.’
‘First the talk, then questions, answers, discussion: it’s like a play at the theater.’
‘Society is a theater, it seems to me. Democracy requires a backstory, a narrative structure and well-rehearsed variations. You can’t build a democracy on authentic feelings alone.’
Patrik looks up again, wondering if this Leo-Eric isn’t a freedom fighter from Hong Kong. A moment later he erases this spontaneous conjecture from his brain-page. Someone from Beijing could be a freedom fighter too. Patrik himself is the one least likely to be democracy-minded.
‘I don’t like questions, criticism or discussion,’ Patrik responds. ‘But you can’t say that out loud, and when it comes right down to it, I don’t think it’s all right that I am the way I am.’
‘What displeases you about discussion culture? Do explain, I’m genuinely curious.’
A storm of chaos swirls up inside Patrik’s head; it’s a torment to be unable to sort out the multitude of multicolored thought-scraps. He invents a new theory, which at least gives him something to hold on to: Leo-Eric is collecting clips of people making anti-democratic statements. He’s using a hidden microphone, recording the authentic voices of EU citizens and selling them to countries where they’ll be used as teaching material in language classes. Patrik taps three fingertips against the forehead behind which this absurd theory is taking shape. He’s like a woodpecker hunting nice fat thought-worms in the bark to gobble up.
