Scheiße – Lady Gaga 2011

What is it about Germany? Perched in regal dominion at the top of Europe, staring down we the lowly Latins from their height of efficient mass production and world domination, they truly are one of the great nations of these past centuries. Not weighed down with the brash and flash teenage-ish angst of the United States or the permanently middle-aged up-their-own-bum-ness of the UK, Germany is a synonym for practical, durable if a little bit boring. Personified in real life 3D living human form by their Kanzlerin, Angela Merkel, who looks like someone’s stay-at-home-mum, not the leader of the 4^th largest economy in the world.

Luxury cars, making sheiße-loads of money and war; as far as national heritage is concerned, they’ve certainly got a patchy track record. But look around you, there is a little bit of practically perfect German everywhere.

  Berlin - Alt meets Neue

Beer. The Belgians might lay claim to inventing it but the Bavarians made it commercially viable and also patented the recipe that is used around the world today; hops and barley. Most notoriously, they will all spend the next two weeks drinking it semi-professionally in Munich’s annual Oktoberfest. Only the Germans could create a national world-class tourist event out of the chronic consumption of gigantic jugs of beer. After you have imbibed your body-weight in alcoholic bubbly ambery goodness, why not get in the most expensive commercial car on earth and drive yourself home? 

Perhaps you don’t work for that monolith of money accumulation Deutsche Bank, where the Germans have quietly mastered the mass-production of cold hard cash without the by-product of teetering risk that sent London down it’s own City sewers. If you work for a normal non-German bank, you might not be able to afford the Audi, the Beamer, the Porsche or the Merc but even the affordable pedestrian family cars like Opel and VW would be considered luxury vehicles outside the money lined walls of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

  Hamburg says to Venice - we can do it too...and be clean!

 

Italians would argue that the German cars are not as beautiful, or fabricated in as many eye-searing colours as they like to make them in Modena. However Germans manufacture practicality, durability and safety, not shiny, trendy and transient like Enzo the Lothario and his open-shirted amicos. Which, incidentally is why so many become roadkill upon their oh-so-cool Vespas and Piaggios.

There are myriad examples of hard wearing, durable if rather yawn and boring Germanic enterprise that is always a little less cool than the product of the suave and sunny South or the spanky shiny New World. Hugo Boss’s suits do not radiate the Brad Pitt sexy winking eye of Armani. Miele make your home stainless steel and staid while Kitchenaid will make your benchtops ooze with Nigella’s sultry sexiness. If you need German medicine to make you well the French have enough wine to make you sick again.

Mastering practicality and mass-produced and good quality normal is hardly the ideal Petri dish for culturing the liberal arts. Most of the artistic and funny Germans like Mozart and the excellent Christoph Walz are actually from the Italianate west in Austria. Germany is after all the country that made David Hasselhof an international music star and whose most famous dance involves slapping your partner while wearing braces and shorts.

In order to pluck the famous Germans from the zeitgeist we are obliged to look to the heights of modern celebrity, Supermodels. One, most famous for resembling a French sex-symbol, Claudia Schiffer and another most noted for her exceptional Valkyrien prow and talent for walking in stilettos while wearing 9-foot feathered wings, Heidi Klum. Exceptionally beautiful they are, but certainly not oozing the smouldering come-hither-ness of the modern crop of Amazons from Brazil and the East.

I got my first job when I was fourteen. I worked at the Conditorei Patisserie Schwarz in Wentworth Falls where I went to high school. Every Sunday I would wake up at stupid o’clock and catch a train for an hour to sell and serve Bretzels, Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and Linzer slice to the local hippie types that have congregated at the top of the Blue Mountains since time immemorial. I learned to speak enough German to banter with the owners, a married couple from Bavaria. He was a trained pastry chef and she ran the café. I imagine they had moved to Australia because selling Black Forest Cake in the Black Forest is not so unique and probably doesn’t earn you quite so much money as it does when you sell it in the Blue Mountains.

I went on to study German at university and promptly forgot it all the day after I graduated; I never liked the sound of it, staccatoing off my tongue in guttural bursts of unlike the romance and syrupy nasal vowels of French. In the years living in Europe, I’ve had the good fortune to visit and remind myself how happy I am to get back to the comparative dinged-up Renault insanity that is Paris. I don’t miss learning the words, but I do miss those cakes.

 

Comments

[Tonybullant@gmail.com]

I enjoyed reading your blog, as usual.