Europe 1962 (Part 2)

N.B. Before Reading this Post, you probably want to read my earlier post of Europe 1962. This is my trip through Europe in the summer of 1962. The first post covered Britain, France, Belgium and Holland.

When we left our hero, he was driving eastward in his white Opel Rekord station wagon, with the Danish plates, on top of the Zuider Zee heading towards Germany. Having seen many aspects of the small country of Holland (modern Rotterdam, the canals of Amsterdam, the elegance of The Hague, etc.), we were now seeing sparsely populated rural Holland which was flat (surprise, surprise!), and filled with wind mills (even if no one wore wooden shoes). As we drove, on our right we could see forever (ok, so I exaggerate), but on our left our view was blocked because the land rose, perhaps ten feet or so (but memory plays tricks), so all we saw was a grassy berm. "Stop the car", I said and, for one of the few times in my life, someone listened. I got out, climbed the berm and what do you think I saw? [This is a question. You cannot expect a blog like this to give you all of the answers. We are a bare budget operation here, and not yet able to charge the prices for advertising that Matt Drudge can. If I remember that I asked you the question, I will provide you with an answer at the end of this Posting.

We arrived at the German border (die Grenze). Now, entering Germany for me was a little different than entering Belgium, as you might imagine, although I cannot say I was particularly conscious of this until we got into the country. I noted immediately that we were no longer in Holland; things seemed a little different. Not that the Netherlands was a dirty place. Far from it. But Germany seemed especially neat and tidy. Everything in its place. Every village just scrubbed. Was I imagining this? Or was it so? I was not clear, but I felt a bit spooked. (I do not know how, E_____ (who kindly commented on the last Post), D_______ or P_____ felt, I being the only Jewish member of our troup, and we certainly did not discuss the subject, which was not then on my conscious agenda).

This was to be a very short transit visit through this part of Germany, on our way to Denmark. Our longer German visit was to come after we came back from Denmark.

We stopped in Bremerhaven for our only night. Bremerhaven was one of Germany's biggest ports (perhaps it was its biggest port), and the campgrounds were located across a body of water (probably the mouth of the Weser where it empties into the North Sea) from the port itself. So we had the adavantage of a rather rustic camp, well of any normally traveled road, but we had a view of ships and port facilities across the river. It was like being at a drive in movie with an enormous screen. I found it mesmerizing (until the first whistle blew on a ship well before I had planned on getting up the next morning.)

We had supper (details not ever to be recalled, I am sure) and then I went with one of my friends (identity equally erased from memory) for a short walk on a country road, leading away from the campground, and away from the port facilities. It was just a normal road, one or two lanes, gravel or barely paved, with trees and fields, and maybe a house here or there. It was a dark night. The road was not lit.

I became very frightened. I was sure that behind every bush or tree was a Nazi ready to jump out and take me, and I would not be heard from again. (Typically, I will walk anywhere with no fear whatsoever.) I had to get back to the campground. and did.

My memory says that the next morning, we drove to a ferry port in a city called Travemunde, having driven quickly through the old city of Lubeck, with its austere red stone walls and gates. Lubeck, a city of the old Hanseatic League is equally as well now to My Blog readers as the home of novelist Thomas Mann, and of my instructor at the Goethe Institute. (I understand that the world at large recognizes Lubeck as Mann's home, more than it recognizes it as the home of Frau R_____, but for blog readers it is 0% for both, I am sure)

For those who have followed my posts carefully, you will probably quickly realize that, with the exception of crossing of the English Channel, I had never been on a ship. And I should tell you that the boat that crossed the channel was bare-bones transportation, an overnight trip on rough water on a ship with all of the amenities of a Cape May Ferry. You can sit below deck on a hard wooden bench (or lie on the floor), or sit on deck, if the weather permits. (Of course, on an English channel crossing, weather that anywhere else would not be acceptable, is considered more than adequate for sitting up all night in the rain and mist. Which is what I did.)

At any rate, the Travemunde to Denmark ferry was something of another species. It was, to my mind, an extraordinary ship, very large, and with better (and certainly more) food than we had seen yet on our trip. It was on this floating restaurant that I first learned that in Denmark, we would be getting variety upon variety of smorrebrod (pardon me if I mis-name something), and when added to the salads and raw and smoked fishes of incredible variety, the smorrebrod created a smorgesbord. I then learned that I smorrebrod is simply a sandwich with the top bread missing, and that for the next several days, this is what we would be eating. (I did not know that the Danish diet was semi-Atkins; neither did Atkins, I am sure.)

I think we landed south of Copenhagen and drove through bucolic farm country, making me think that I would like Denmark. And I did, but when I got to Copenhagen, my reaction was different from that of the other places we had visited. There was nothing there (outside of the Tivoli Gardens) that I wanted to see. I knew there were museums, and palaces, and all of that, and you could take a side trip to Elsinore, but it all seemed rather meaningless to me in the historical big-picture of things, and I guess I was ready for a rest. So I hardly did any sight seeing there. I recognized the place as a "I'd like to live there, but have no need to visit it" sort of place.

And, unfortunately, the Tivoli Gardens, which I thought would be very exciting and loads of fun, were, to me, very bland.

A few final comments on Copenhagen. The Danish girls, like the Dutch girls (in contrast to the English, French and Belgian) were all very attractive. (I thought it might be places where the ethnic adjective started with "D"; perhaps I should have made plans to go to Dahomey or Dubai? No, probably not Dubai, unless I brought my x-ray glasses). But it was more than attractive. They all wore short, but full skirts, and when they danced, which they did each night in the Tivoli Gardens, their skirts swirled up to reveal their underwear. Which were all in colors or patterns meant to be seen. I am talking , I think, about teenage girls, or maybe those in their young 20s. I thought it very strange, but obviously visually exciting.

I remember we did go to one concert in the Tivoli (we heard quite a bit of music on the trip). It was a full evening of pieces by the Danish composer, Nielsen. Boring, boring, boring, I thought. No wonder no one outside Denmark listened to his music.

Copenhagen is on an island, and we drove across the bridge (?) back to the Danish mainland, and then down to Germany through Schleswig-Holstein. I was very excited to be in a place as well known as Schlewig-Holstein, but I couldn't remember why it was well known. Still not sure. Think it has to do with the Treaty of Versailles, or is it Bismark?

Then we stayed in Hamburg the next night before venturing on to Berlin. I was still in my fear of Germany mode, and this was heightened once again, when we went to the Zillertal, a well known beer hall. Long wooden tables and benches. Overweight serving women, with blond hair and peasant dress, serving mugs of German beer. All beer in Germany then was German beer, and I am not sure any of it was bottled. I am not much of a beer drinker, and Germany beer was to me less drinkable than the barely potable Budweiser, because it was so much richer. It tasted alive to me (I can still taste the taste I tasted then) and I did not like it.

At the front of the enormous Zillertal (and I mean it was big, and full, and noisy) was a stage, on which was a continuously playing leder-hosen clad oom-pah band. They were playing what I would call all German drinking songs (although a drinking song afficianado would probably tell me I was generalizing), and would have "guest conductors" come on stage. The guest conductors were men (all were men) who were too drunk to realize that their pals at their tables (who were generally family memebers, egged on by the women) wanted them to make a fool of themselves, which they did.

The patrons all knew the songs and sang along, and there were loud, unisonal (probably not a real word) "Prosts" from the standing crowd for each staggering conductor (of course the conductors and the music being played were not related).

Again, I was scared to death. Everyone was having a good time, enjoying the festivities. But that is the problem. Everyone. My feeling was that this showed the German proclivity for acting in unison, and joining the crowd. Whether it was "Prosst-ing" a drunk, or killing the Jews, I thought they all would join in.

And that was not all we did in Hamburg. There was more. Hamburg had a notorious district, which I think was called St. Paul. It was filled with "night clubs", each one raunchier than the last. I have to rely on my friends to tell me if I am imagining what I am going to say next, if I may have read about it, or if it actually existed. I remember a bar, where the entertainment was was women mud-wrestling. And I remember a bar where there were horses inside. Possible?

From Hamburg, it was on to Berlin. Not many people went into Berlin in those days. Of course, Germany was divided, East and West, and Berlin was itself internationalized (English, French, Russian and American zones) but inside East Germany. After the 1948 Berlin airlift, road access was available by autobahn, but if you got off on the wrong exit, you were clearly at risk. You would be somewhere you had no right to be.

When you got to the East Germany border on the autobahn, you needed to go through East Germany customs. It was there that I learned a little about Communist occupation. It was clear that western travelers to Berlin were not to be encouraged, and the customs house was set up avoid encouragement. I remember there were three lines: You had to go to each, although all could obviously have been done at one. One line was passport control, one was money control, and one was baggage control. There were three windows. You started at the middle window, then the left, and then the right, meaning that people were continually walking in front and in back of you (or you were doing the cutting), creating as much chaos in this otherwise overly organized Germany society as possible.

When we got to Berlin, which although still showing some war weariness was already a thriving city, we followed the directions to the campgrounds. It took a long time to get there, and the location was more suburban than urban. It was clear that the area known as Berlin and open to international travel, was more than just a center city.

What do I remember about Berlin? Mostly the Brandenberg Gate, formerly at the head of Unter den Linden (now in East Berlin), the shell of the Reichstag as you approached Brandenberg (burned by the Nazis in 1933 and not yet restored), the monument to Soviet War dead and the Russian guards which were in the American Sector, as luck would have it. The active restaurants and shops on Kufurstendamstrasse, which I think I had my first German venison. The zoo. The Berlin Wall, only about a year old. Checkpoint Charlie, one of the (I think) 3 checkpoints into East Berlin.

And I remember what happened.

1. First, I remember trying to go to the zoo in our Opel, turning onto a road marked "Tiergarten" and driving along as the road became narrower and narrower, only too late realizing that we were driving along a foot path leading to the zoo, but no one seemed to mind.

2. I remember going to a nightclub near Checkpoint Charlie, which was an old established place of entertainment, or perhaps a new place built as a replica of an old, I don't remember. The gimmick here was that every table was connected to every other one by telephone, so if you saw someone who looked interesting to you, you just had to pick up the phone, dial and say hello. Rumors of what happened through the phones at this club were everywhere.

The club was crowded, and the four of us sat at our table all night. We of course were too shy to call any other table, and no one called us. But it appeared to us that everyone else was calling everyone else, and that they were all having a terrific time and we were nothing but lowly American wallflowers. (In retrospect, it is comforting to say that we only imagined that to be the case, but in fact I think that was exactly the case.)

At any rate, I remember leaving very late at night, to find two of our college classmates (one of whom was Steven V. Roberts of journalism and wife Cokie fame) also leaving and lacking transportation, beseeching us for a ride back downtown (even though we were not going downtown). Of course we took them. If they had any gratitude for not leaving them stranded at the gates of Checkpoint Charlie, they never showed it, and I do not trust Steve Roberts to this day.

Dropping them off at some late hour, I recall getting back to the campsite about 3 a.m. (in Berlin in July at 3 a.m., the sun is already beginning to rise). The gates to the camp were closed (many European campsite had lock-down times), so we figured that we had to break in to our tents and sleeping bags, by climbing over. The wire gates would have been pretty easy to climb over, but were were afraid of being spotted, and shot on the spot, so we decided to move away to a more secluded spot.

We found a spot where the fence was stone and rough enough that it seemed like we could climb over it, that there would be a place to lodge our feet. No sooner had we started, however, than big searchlights focused right on us. We then realized that we were about to climb over the Berlin Wall (not downtown where it was well known, but in this far-suburb, as the wall surrounded all of the Berlin area), and to be the only four American students ever to be shot trying to enter East Germany over the wall (East Germans who attempted to climb to Berlin were in fact being shot).

I am not sure how we spent the rest of the night. But that ended our climbing attempts, I think.

3. Of course, I wondered what every middle aged German adult had done during the war. I remember thinking this as we had our venison on Kurfurstendamstrasse. Our waiter was an older man, so naturally I thought the worst of him. He asked us where we were from and we told him. He then told us that he had been to the United States. Asking him where and when, he said he was in South Carolina during the war. He was surprised that we did not know that there were prison camps in South Carolina (and perhaps elsewhere) where German prisoners of war were incarcerated during the war. I felt very dumb.

4. Having seen where Checkpoint Charlie was, one day I took off on my own to explore East Berlin. I went to Checkpoint Charlie and checked myself in. This was not a smart thing to do, going into East Berlin by oneself, because if anything happened to you, you were out of contact with the world. I realized that East Berlin contained the center of old Berlin, the most elegant of commercial and residential areas (and today is re-finding itself as the center of a combined Berlin), although they had clearly seen better days. I saw how bland everything was compared to the excitement of West Berlin. I saw some of the old museums, which were well metained. Crossing near one of them (Ethnological Museum? Is there such a building in Berlin?), when about six soldiers walked out of a door (I was crossing a Platz in front of the museum) and began, at a very fast pace, goose stepping towards me. I froze. Once again, I knew I was a goner. And I was more than a little surprised when they marched right past me (I could have reached out and touched them) as if I was invisible. They were changing the guard at some monument nearby. My heart skipped many beats.

Later that day, I was taking a picture of a building that I thought impressive, and I actually was stopped by two East German soldiers, who told me that it was forbidden to take a picture of that particular building. I played dumb saying, in English, "I was just trying to take a picture of that particular building". They wanted to confiscate my camera and film. I did not want to lose either, for more than obvious reasons. But I also did not want to arrested (and in my mind therefore killed) for failure to obey an order. I simply repeated my mantra: "I was just trying to take a picture of that particular building". I could understand most of what they were saying and was more than a little relieved to hear them say, "let him go". I went directly back to Checkpoint Charlie.

5. We were driving down the road to the Brandenberg Gate, when all of a sudden there was a police siren behind us, and we were clearly being waved to the side of the road. I was driving, I think. I did not know what we had done, but again feared the worst (we were in West Berlin, of course).

When the policeman walked to our window, I was very concerned, but he said "I didn't mean to scare you, but noticed you had Danish plates. My wife and I are going to Denmark for a vacation next month. I wondered if you can give us some tips."

We were sort of dumbfounded, and he was extremely embarrassed when he found out we were not Danish. He told us that he wanted to do something for us to make up for stopping us, and asked us if we wanted to see the Reichstag up close. Of course, the Reichstag had been closed and off limits to all tourists since 1933 (it is now restored and again the home of the German parliament, which was in 1962 meeting in Bonn). We said, sure, and he said "Follow me", and we had a police escort, siren blaring, through the streets of Berlin on our way to the Reichstag. We went past the police barrier, parked our car, went in with him, and saw the charred and totally ruined first floor filled with Russian graffiti (it was the Russians who first entered Berlin at the end of WWII), sort of 'Kilroy was here' writ large. He then took us to the top of the buildng, where the British (it was in the British zone) maintained a military observation point, with telescopes, etc., pointing over the wall, watching what was going on in East Berlin. I remember being asked if we wanted to look through the viewing equipment but do not remember if we did or not, before some British officer came on the scene and was dumbfounded to find us where we were. There was no question, but that we had to leave immediately.

Once again, I think I have written more than enough for one post. So we will have to finish Germany, and move on to Austria and Italy, later. You are probably wondering if I remembered to answer the open question I left you with about the ten foot berm in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, I have not remembered. Perhaps you can remind me.