Week 04: Cold Cuts and Cults

Staring out the window like I'm in a movie but everyone on the train stares at us

Order Up

We had our last German-language orientation course this week and then our favourite teacher, Kathrin, will return to the cruise ship she lives on every two weeks. So bon voyage. I have heard of a lot of random jobs, but she teaches cruise employees from different countries German so they can speak to tourists while on the seas. As Marie-Antoinette said, “That takes the cake” or something like that. More commuting this week, much of it spent commuting to and from our living space and falling asleep on public transit, so Bonne nuit and with the cold cuts this week, Bon appétit!

The Bread

• Top slice: The relief from everyone after we finished our final tests and projects of orientation was almost tangible. We had a rehearsal presentation the day before in which I realised that improvising German for 12 minutes trying to interpret art was not, in fact, the best idea. But the picnic after in the Außer Alster Park? The American’s Best Idea. :)

• Bottom Slice: Headed to Berlin this week. We will have breakfast at the hotel each morning which I am curious about. Northern Europe is quite fond of their cold cuts on bread and on their coast, briny fish. Will report back next week.

  

  The full programme group, finally all together.

The Filling

So naturally, now that my German is perfect I can focus on my French, which this week was randomly filled with. Here are the characters in order of appearance:

• I celebrated my hell on wheels bike ride on Monday with McDonald’s French Fries. Very cross-cultural of me.

• Before we met, both Isa and I vividly remembered the Alsace region which is directly on the border of southwest Germany and France. Isa donated me some Camembert cheese which, like French, I still cannot pronounce.

• We spent so much time outside this week as we had gorgeous weather. I went on many runs to clear my head and many walks where the willow trees along the river are unparalleled. In German, they are called Trauerweide where (Traurig = sad and Weide = pasture). In French it is Saule pleureur in which pleurer = mourner. There are so many of them in the Friedhof Ohlsdorf, the largest rural cemetery in the world, and the topic of an entire class I will be trying out at the university. It seems morbid, but I am really intrigued to delve into the physical landscape design and how the original pastures were cleared to make this cemetery in the 1880s and throughout Europe, cemeteries such as Père Lachaise were not places of sadness but picturesque landscape gardens.

  

  Picturesque friend Isa and one of many willow trees. Everyone in my program owns a pair of overalls and we are diehards for the pastoral lifestyle.

• Speaking of cemeteries, the professor, Norbert Fischer is also a specialist on maritime infrastructure and city building. We took a boat ride on the harbour yesterday and the promenade was littered with tourists. Once again, the somewhat traumatic historical legacy of the harbour is juxtaposed with tourists drinking or posing in front of buildings built on the back of labourers. Hamburg’s harbour was the site of many satellite concentration camps, part of the greater Neuengamme camp. Many of the gorgeous brick buildings on the harbour where tourists flock and I have absentmindedly taken photos of for the aesthetic were forcibly built by concentration camp prisoners whose families and communities were decimated, but laboured to build infrastructure in the interest of oppressors. This power structure is replicated throughout history and literally in our infra(structure). ‘Industrial-chic’ aesthetics have become desirable for art galleries and cafes and we romanticise the working class. Hamburg is home to three of the biggest cruise ship ports in Europe and photographers aestheticise the behemoth container ships. I don’t have any intelligent things really to say here or the right to be self-righteous but here, I find such a stark intersection of art history, tourist culture, urban studies, and outside of the academic context, deep mourning for the histories of peoples erased then and now.

  

• My parents returned from France last week and this week, German students from our long-standing exchange with Überlingen arrived in Iowa. The two German chaperones are my brother’s host student parent and my own. Sabina Rosebrock, a French teacher. Apparently I say “ja” in German like “jahw” which is a southern Germany thing? Have I picked up a dialect from spending time in the south?

• My final presentation topic was a comparative analysis between two German artists who were involved with the Beatles in 1960: Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann. All the literature I read classified them as “Exis” of a sub-culture that arose in Hamburg and influenced by the French existentialists. Kirchherr is accredited with being the first to style the Beatles in a fashion that resisted the clean boy-band look and her own interest in looking different could be accredited to the post-WWII climate of Germany in which people were incredibly cautious to embrace the new and rising Rock music scene. Not sure if all-black is alternative anymore—its the standard look for tech club goers.

  “Film, art, fashion, existentialism, Sartre. . . . That’s why I got into that all-black look. We invented our own scene and fashion. We were all art students, and our biggest urge in life at the time was to be different.”

• Another movie from the Hamburg International Film Festival. It was in French and called Viking (2022) directed by a Canadian director Stéphane Lafleur who sat two feet away from me in the theatre the entire screening. The description of the movie is weird and classified as a ‘sci-fi' pseudo-comedy but I highly recommend it for its dry and absurd humour and its high ratings at the Cannes Festival this year. It is definitely an art film and can be hard to follow with all the hard cuts from scene to scene. The strength of the film scene in Toronto reminded me of my friend Alice from Lyon, France. Her favourite director is Xavier Dolan and then I remembered as well, that a good friend of mine, Caroline, studied Cinema at Bowdoin and is from Toronto and speaks French. So maybe this is the universe telling me I should not ironically try to learn it.

• Isa and I logged around 10k steps before 4am this morning. Don’t ask why just know that we talked about eating French Toast for like 20 minutes straight on a long walk and then out of nowhere, a baked potato from one of our German friends was procured.

The Sauce

“The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.” — Charles Baudelaire

Ah yes. The flâneur. No need to explain this long-known French concept but someone please explain why the German-stare is a thing? The amount of prolonged eye contact filled with judgement I have received while on the train or running through the park is significant. On Friday, my program group had a picnic and several people stopped to stare at us as if they had never seen five people lounge on a blanket in the sun. We speculate that these parks in the middle of the city and near the richest part of Hamburg are more spaces for flâneur-ing, people watching while walking stylishly, in contrast to plaid, overall wearing students seeing how many grapes they can fit in their mouth.

Mystery Meat

Last week’s image was an art piece and installation called “Station of the Cross” in the basement of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Paul Thek, the artist, had a short but incredibly illustrious career in New York City and his presence in Germany and throughout Europe remains strong. I will keep an eye out in Berlin for more of his work.

Mystery meat paired with a juice box of course.

»Kunst ist Liturgie; und wenn das Publikum auf den heiligen Charakter der Sym­bole reagiert, dann hoffe ich, dass ich mein Ziel erreicht habe, wenigstens in jenem Moment.« — Paul Thek