The Tower of London

Invasion of England was accomplished by tunnel. The chief resistance we encountered was from French and English immigration staff at the Gare du Nord. For our Eurostar Standard class seats we had paid an extortionate price through the Australian agents which we wouldn’t have had to pay had we been able to deal directly with Eurostar. It reminded Megan of the Intercity to Newcastle; I have to say I prefer travelling in first class, as we did all over the continent, if only because the rude people one encounters are better dressed.

Our little eyrie at Tower Hill is a two-floor flat perched on the fourth and fifth floors of a 1920s building a short walk from the Tower of London. The lower floor is a comfortable living room and kitchen (with a washer/dryer that actually works). Up the spiral staircase (now adorned with a week’s washing) to our bedroom, sitting room and bathroom. Small, but comfortable. For our groceries we have a choice of Tesco on Eastcheap, Sainsbury’s on Fenchurch Street or Waitrose at St Katherine Docks. We prefer the latter because we can stop for a coffee at one of the zillion cafés or restaurants on the docks, which when the sun is shining reminds me of Cronulla or Sydney Harbour.

After dinner on Wednesday night we went for a walk around the manor, seeking out Crutched Friars (another Dornford Yates location), having a half at the East India Arms (a nice little pub outside Lloyds on Fenchurch Street) and looking at Tower and London Bridges from Tower Dock. I love the long twilights at these latitudes.

Thursday morning we took our lives in our hands to face the millions of tourists that have descended upon London for the Royal Wedding. Actually, they haven’t. The town has been fairly quiet for most of the week, because the predicted multitudes haven’t turned up, and many of the locals have taken Tuesday to Thursday off so they could have a ten day break from Good Friday to May Day.

We strolled over to the Tower just before 9 am and joined the brief ticket queue. Wandering quite freely through the Tower precincts we wondered where all the stories came from about queuing for hours for the Crown Jewels. We’re sure it happens, because at the front of and inside the building were cattle runs, with video displays to entertain the bored and anxious masses. But we just walked straight through.

I have to say, the Crown Jewels are impressive. Maces, trumpets, plate galore. You move past the crowns themselves on a travelator, and the reflections from the jewels change as you go. The Cullinan and Koh-i-noor diamonds are literally dazzling. The place must be the most heavily secured outside the Bank of England, but it doesn’t feel like it.



We had a close encounter with a raven, who entertained us by making some unusual vocalisations then destroying the turf in search of grubs. Smart bird. Another refused to be photographed, turning his back to me and saying ‘Nevermore.’

It is strange to see places like the Traitors’ Gate and the Scaffold Site on the Tower Green: places I’ve read so much about for so long, where so much happened, and where there should be so many ghosts, but aren’t. Many places have a weird feeling about them; at Sachsenhausen you know something unspeakable happened as soon as you walk into the place. Tears don’t leave a mark on a place as much as pain.

If you come to the Tower make a point of visiting the Museum of the Royal Fusiliers. It is one of the best-presented exhibits on the site, with displays for most of their campaigns, from the American Revolutionary War through Crimea and the twentieth century to Iraq. One room is dedicated to decorations: cases of them, including twelve Victoria Crosses in a row.

The White Tower, the big building in the middle, is old and impressive, but the exhibits are a bit tiring. Here you can see the armour of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Charles I, whose gorget looks a little battered. (No it doesn’t.) Knives, guns, projectiles, you name it, it’s here. And then there is a display on the history of the White Tower which really doesn’t make much point. The touch-and-feel exhibits were much better at Azincourt. Not enough thought, or the wrong thought, has gone into how these things are displayed. The simplicity of St John’s Chapel in one of the corners of the tower comes as a relief.



Earlier this evening we returned to the Tower for the Ceremony of the Keys. This is the formal locking of the gates of the Tower, and has happened every night for over seven hundred years. We were part of a group of about thirty people who were met at the main gate by the sole female Yeoman Warder (or Beefeater), who took us into the Tower and explained what was about to happen. For centuries the gates were locked at dusk, until 1826 when the Constable of the Tower, Arthur Wellesley (who invented a type of boot in Spain or something) ordered that the locking take place at 10pm, on the grounds that dusk in winter could be as early as 3pm.

We stood in silence at the Traitor’s Gate and waited for the Ceremony to begin. At seven minutes to ten we saw a brass lantern bobbing in the darkness along Water Lane; the Chief Yeoman Warder was approaching with the keys. He was met at the Bloody Tower by an armed military guard (the soldiers with bearskin hats), and together they returned up the lane to lock the gates. Their footsteps faded away; there were faint shouts as the gates were locked and arms presented. When the party returned to where we were, the sentry on duty under the Watergate advanced with pointed gun and challenged them.

Sentry: Halt, who comes there?
Chief Yeoman Warder: The keys.
Sentry: Whose keys?
Chief Yeoman Warder: Queen Elizabeth’s keys.
Sentry: Pass then, all is well.

The party walked under the Bloody Tower into the laneway by the White Tower, and we followed. Another military guard was standing with a bugler at the top of the steps. They presented arms, the Chief Yeoman Warder presented the keys to the Resident Governor and called out ‘God preserve Queen Elizabeth’. To which everyone present replied loudly, ‘Amen!’ (as previously instructed). The bugler played the Last Post, the Resident Governor returned to his residence in the Queen’s House, and the guard returned to the guardhouse. The Tower was secured for the night, and the Warder escorted us to the postern gate.

Battlefields of Northern France, Day 3 – Le confiture carambolage

Thirty generations ago my ancestor Jean sailed from Normandie with Duke William to take part in the thrashing that was Hastings. Sometime later he was granted a piece of land at Cameis in Wales, and took the cognomen Cameys. Thus the family of Kemmis was off and running. So I was looking forward to today’s visit to Bayeux to see the famed tapestry and celebrate yet another family contribution to the history of bloodiness. However…

The first fifty kilometres out of Abbeville took half an hour. The next five took one hour and fifty-five minutes. The effects of a pile-up on the F3 are NOTHING compared to its French counterpart. Every main road in the region was seized up. People became bored, tempers flared, children hit each other in the back seat and grown men fled their vehicles to frolic amidst the daisies and blow dandelions (not me – the guys in the van behind us).

In between changing cds* and soothing the driver’s fevered brow, I sat in the passenger seat doing mental arithmetic. From Bayeux to the D-Day beaches and back, plus looking time; how long to Bayeux itself, how long in the museum with the tapestry, how long for lunch; and how long from Bayeux to our hotel in Rouen. The time required grew larger, and the time available grew smaller. ‘We’ll have to pass on the beaches,’ I announced.

After ten minutes we advanced another one hundred metres and the guys from the van raced into the woods for a toilet stop. ‘Honey, we have to get out of here,’ Megan announced, and at the next chance we turned onto a back road and made our way to Neufchatel-en-Bray. It was almost midday, and the whole schedule was blown. No battlefields for us today. We decided to run for Rouen. The trick was to find a road that wasn’t full of trucks and cars trying to head west. The best option was the D1 going northwest towards the coast. And what’s that town on the coast at the end of the D1?

On 19 August 1942 several thousand Canadian troops launched a raid on Dieppe, partly to cause trouble, partly for reconnaissance. It was a disaster; many died or were captured, and few made it safely back to England.

When we got to Dieppe we drove up to the headland overlooking the harbour. We had to put on our jackets because a cold wind was blowing off the Channel and it was less than ten degrees. Waves were dashing against the breakwaters, seagulls were hovering, and the horizon was obscured by mist after a few kilometres. Not having had a chance to do any research we didn’t know what evidence of the raid remained, but we could see part of an old blockhouse or gun position overlooking the harbour entrance.


Once away from the coast the sun came out and the temperature went up, so by Rouen it was twenty degrees. The cathedral is of course impressive, if only for its size. You can see what Monet saw in the western façade, although to get the viewpoint of his paintings you would have to knock down a few trees and possibly some buildings. I may be jaded from having seen too many cathedrals (saw a great one at Abbeville on Saturday), but I was excited by the pillars. Yes, they are massive bits of masonry, but they also play an important part in one of Dornford Yates’s thrillers (Red in the Morning, I think; my mind is fuzzy and for some strange reason I haven’t packed Yates’s complete works in my bag).


I like this part of Rouen; it is like the old town of Cologne, only there is more of it – winding, narrow streets of teetering buildings, cafés and tabacs. We looked for a street that might fit the description of one in Yates’s Shoal Water, a cul de sac home to a den of thieves named the Wet Flag. No cul de sacs, but a disreputable-looking laneway called Rue du Petit Mouton ended in a small square with a narrow exit between buildings. I could imagine the unwary meeting an evil fate there.

Rouen is the place where Jeanne d’Arc met her fate, put on trial in the cathedral and burned at the stake in the marketplace. An ugly modern church covers most of the site now, but at the back the actual location is a garden badly in need of weeding. It’s interesting how the places, unadorned and unexplained as they might be, say more than the monuments.



Tomorrow we invade England.

*We have found that Art vs Science (The Experiment) and the Brand New Heavies (compilation) are good for tollway driving, and Tame Impala (Innerspeaker) is perfect for the open countryside. These things are important.

Battlefields of Northern France, Day 2 – Anzac Day 2011

3 a.m. start, with an orange half-moon in the east. Took the wrong turnoff from the tollway, and got trapped in Amiens. By trial and error we discovered the right road and joined the line of traffic to Villers-Bretonneux.

Our unscheduled excursion cost us about forty minutes, so by the time we parked the car and walked fifteen minutes back to the Australian memorial the service had started. A couple of thousand people sitting quietly in the dark, without enough light to read the programs. The sky was cloudless. It was jumper and coat and scarf weather, but not freezing. By the time the sun had come up so had the breeze, the gloves came out, and people started shivering. With the light we could see people of all ages around us, and hear Australian, English and French accents. Young French couples sat in front of and behind us. That impressed me – it wasn’t just the usual suspects.


Kevin Rudd gave a good speech, full of the motherhood statements that need to be said on occasions like this. Apparently Barry O’Farrell didn’t like it, but I can’t say I saw him haul his backside out of bed at 3 a.m. to be there.

A bugler in khaki played the Last Post from the top of the tower. The Last Post marks the end of the day; at memorial services it symbolises that the dead are no longer on duty and can stand down. As he blew Reveille the flags, Australian and French, were raised from half mast. It was the most moving part of the service.

The Ode of Remembrance was recited in English and French, and we responded to both to show off our language skills, and even had a stab at La Marseillaise. (That’s a bloodthirsty bit of poetry, isn’t it?). A cup of coffee and some croissants laid on by the community of Villers-Bretonneux, and a walk around the memorial to see a misty sunrise out of a Friedrich painting.


When we arrived back at our car we realised that we had parked in Villers-Bretonneux itself, so we walked into town to watch the wreath-laying ceremony at the French Memorial. As we went we ‘bonjoured’ the locals out of habit; you can tell we’ve been in France for a while. At the memorial we had a good position on the edge of a garden, but a group of older package-tour Australians on a pushed past and stood in the shrubbery. I made semi-loud comments about the rudeness of pushy people who trample the gardens of the country in which they are guests. They spoke loudly about the tragedy of leaving their carry-on baggage in the hotel rooms at their last stop, expecting the local slaves to pick it up and put it on the bus for them. Sadly, these days you can’t get good slaves. They blamed everyone but themselves. I didn’t tell them that the garden they were trampling had been recently manured, it would only inflict more distress. A close encounter with KRudd at the end of the ceremony helped them overcome their tragedy.

A beautiful drive through Corbie and up to Pozieres, where in six weeks Australia had more casualties than at Gallipoli. One of those casualties was Charlie Andrews, a railway officer from Lakemba in Sydney aged 22. After joining the 1st Battalion he found a niche as the quartermaster and was very popular. On 19 August 1916 his company was advancing on the heavily-entrenched German position at Mouquet Farm, north-west of Pozieres, when a shell killed Charlie and three other soldiers. The Red Cross located soldiers who had been there and collected their reports for the comfort of the family; however they edited one, to leave out the fact that Charlie was ‘knocked to pieces by a shell’. Mouquet is still a working farm, owned by the same family. Today its fields are covered in canola instead of trenches.


At the farm Megan gathered some small white flowers to take with us to Serre. Charlie’s body was buried near the trench the night he was killed. After the war the Commonwealth Graves Commission asked his family to supply an inscription for a headstone in the proposed war cemetery. They did so, but heard no further word. For several years his father Alfred repeatedly wrote to ask if they had found Charlie’s grave. In 1928 Charlie’s body was located at Pozieres and identified by his identity disc and a ring, which were returned to his father. He was reinterred in Serre Road Cemetery No 2, about 11 kilometres north-west of Mouquet Farm.


I had heard that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission takes very good care of the cemeteries, but I was impressed with how neat they were. It took us a while to find Charlie’s grave, thanks to the idiosyncratic numbering system; but when we did, Megan placed the flowers at the foot of her great-uncle’s headstone. The inscription is there (‘Safe in his Father’s arms’), and I wished we could have told Alfred how good it looked, and how the gravesite looks northeast across the fields.

Battlefields of Northern France, Day 1

Abbeville is a town of about 15,000 people about 2 hours drive north of Paris, 2½ if you follow the sat nav. It sits on the Somme River, an innocuous little stream that has given its name to one of the grimmest impasses of human history. But more of that tomorrow. Today we go back a little further.

To 26 August 1346, in fact, in a little town called Crécy-en-Ponthieu about 20 minutes north of Abbeville. To the north of the village the authorities have built a two-story tower overlooking the fields where England, under Edward III, defeated France and Philip VI at the battle of Crécy. The tower is allegedly the site of the windmill from which Edward watched the battle. Why is Crécy worth remembering? Because it’s where the longbow first showed its supremacy as a weapon, allowing Edward’s Welsh archers to devastate the enemy with its superior range and firing rate.


Agincourt was the battle where Laurence Olivier defeated the French with his declamatory powers and won a BAFTA. Azincourt, on the other hand, is another little village, 30 minutes up the D928 from Crécy. It’s hard to miss; there are very silly painted knights and men-at-arms by the roadside every fifty metres or so as you approach it. The local authorities have made a bit more effort than those at Crécy, having built a museum and tourist centre. I had been told it was rubbish; that was wrong. They have some great displays showing the context and progress of the battle, some artefacts from the site and surrounds, and lots of things for the kiddies, for example getting your photo taken in armour.


I was quite chuffed, although perhaps I wouldn't have been had I realised I look like Harry Potter.

The story of Agincourt (25 October 1415) can be found on Wikipedia and in Henry V. What the former says that Shakespeare doesn’t is that the rearguard of Henry’s army was led by Thomas, Lord de Camoys. This fine fellow was in fact the cousin of my great-times-sixteen grandfather, so for me it wasn’t just another place where the French had the shit kicked out of them. As well as an ‘artist’s impression’ of cousin Tom his armorial bearings were on display:


So I was doubly chuffed.

The battlefield of course is now covered in clover and canola, and you wouldn’t know from looking at it that it was where the history of France and England changed.

A place where the history of England could have changed but didn’t is La Coupole. Another 40 minutes up the D928, just south of St Omer, this is where the Germans built a base from which to shower London with V2 rockets in 1943-44. Using slave labour they constructed a complex of tunnels and galleries, and a huge concrete dome, 75 metres in diameter and 5 metres thick, in which they could assemble the rockets for launch across the Channel from the chalk quarry just outside. Fortunately in 1944, 617 squadron (the Dambusters) dropped some humungous bombs (‘tallboys’ for those who know the story) and made the launch site unusable. A good thing too, because it was nearly ready.


The dome sits on the hill above the quarry like a huge cockroach of aging concrete. Down in the chalk tunnels it is very cold, something you feel very much when you come in from 26 degree sunshine. A lift takes you up inside the dome, where it’s warmer and looks like the villain's headquarters in a James Bond movie. As well as the story of the V1s and V2s (with examples) the museum describes the German occupation of the Pas de Calais and the experiences of the slaves of the Dora-Mittelwerk camp in Germany who made the rockets. It also follows the trail of the German rocket scientists to America and their role in the space race. A fascinating place that we only knew about because Megan discovered something on the web by accident. But gee we were glad to get out into the warmth again.

Stanley Kubrick exhibition, Cinematheque Française

Back to Paris via a couple of days in Cologne, in which I caught up with an old girlfriend (Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus - usually in the Musee d’Orsay, temporarily in an exhibition at the very good Wallraf-Richartz Museum), ate half a pig, and didn’t have to put up with a leaking toilet or a smelly washing machine that didn’t work properly (our fate in Berlin). The people are friendly and the beer is lovely (Gaffer kölsche). The Cathedral is astounding, a huge rocket ship, beautiful and light-filled. But the priests are rude and cranky. They make Berlin museum attendants look charming and amiable, and more than justify the Reformation.

The forementioned washing machine meant that we had some domestic duties to take care of on our first morning in Paris. I will never forget the sight of the Palais Garnier majestic and dazzling in the morning sun as we lugged our washing down the Avenue de l’Opéra to the laundromat. A quick drying cycle and excellent timing on the Metro, and we were at the front door at opening time of the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française at Bercy near the Gare de Lyon.

The Cinémathèque is a Frank Gehry-designed building that is as confused inside as it is complex outside. There are logical dissonances in the layout; that’s a polite way of saying it’s a bloody mess. It seems like they bought a ready-made interior and made it fit into the building.

The permanent collection has a few dissonances of its own. The history of French cinema is a long and glorious one; after all, they invented it. So where are the Lumiére brothers? Some objects relating to Georges Meliés, but nothing earlier. Then there’s a jump to some jewellery worn by those well-known French actresses Theda Bara and Louise Brooks; some set designs for those well-known French movies Metropolis and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari; and Ringo Starr’s Pope costume from Lisztomania by that well-known French director Ken Russell. Oh, and that thing that happened in the 50s and 60s – the ‘nouvelle vague’? Doesn’t rate a mention – not a sniff of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais or Chabrol in the air. Not so much a crap exhibition as one that completely misses the point. This is a case of buying something and making it fit; it is based on two idiosyncratic private collections, and they haven’t done much to fill out the gaps. It’s like calling a place a restaurant and not selling food.

Incidentally, the Cinémathèque has a restaurant, ‘Restaurant 51’, which doesn’t serve food.

The Kubrick exhibition, however, is brilliant. It should be, it wasn’t curated by the Cinémathèque. It spreads over two floors, with the exhibits on most of his films on floor 5 and those on the last two films, his photography and the films he planned but didn’t make (Napoleon, Aryan Papers and A.I.) on floor 7. That arrangement doesn’t quite work; it would have made more sense if the photography and unmade films had been presented chronologically with the other films, so that we could see for example the influence of Napoleon on Barry Lyndon. Again, it’s buying something and making it fit. But the content is so good it’s a minor point.

It’s all there for all of them – photos, scripts, production documents, designs, cameras, posters and publicity materials, tickets and other ephemera, props, costumes, clips from the films and the inevitable interview with Martin Scorsese. My favourites:

• the script for Paths of Glory
• HAL’s ‘face’ from 2001
• the set model for the War Room in Dr Strangelove (‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!’)
• the friendly and funny letter Nabokov sent Kubrick concerning the script for Lolita (with a great line that I can’t remember but is very Nabokov)
• the droog suit and turntable from A Clockwork Orange• the axes from The Shining

Makes me want to watch them all again. Is it really twelve years since he died?

Bonhoeffer-Haus

The Heerstraße estate in western Charlottenburg was established in the 1920s and 1930s as a suburb for professional people, and since then it hasn’t really changed. It is very leafy with lots of birds, which sing very loudly. Other than that it is very quiet, which is surprising considering what surrounds it. In the 1930s the government built the Olympia Studium to the north-west, and the Avus autobahn/grand prix racetrack to the south-east. The Bonhoeffer family moved to the house at Marienburger Allee 43 in 1935, when Karl Bonhoeffer retired from practice and teaching as a psychiatrist. It became the focus for the large Bonhoeffer family, and Dietrich always lived there whenever he was in Berlin. The house is now a ‘Memorial and Place of Encounter’ where people can visit to learn about Bonhoeffer and research his theology and his involvement in the resistance against Hitler.

We had arranged to visit the Bonhoeffer-Haus simply by emailing Dr Knut Hämmerling, the house coordinator. Knut is very laid back while preserving all the formalities. He met us at the door and showed us the best bit of carpet to dry our shoes on so we wouldn’t track moisture through the house. The hallway was full of shoes; part of the house is used as accommodation for pastoral students, so I felt right at home.

Knut took us through to what was once the dining room and is now the office, with an enormous collection of works and other material by and about Bonhoeffer, in a number of languages. Swapping my theologian brain for the uni administrator one, I realised that as a research centre with a very limited budget it must be a tough job keeping on top of all the Bonhoeffer research and publications, but they do their best.

The living room is unfussy and full of light, not filled with the overstuffed décor and furniture I had expected but simple, stylish and warm, with copies of family portraits on the wall and a view into the back garden.

When you know the story of a family, to stand in their house is like being invited into their lives, a privilege, not like standing in a museum or even the Buddenbrooks House. You are where their joys and sadnesses occurred. When Karl Bonhoeffer retired he still saw private patients, and when not in professional use his consulting rooms on the left side of the house were the place of many family celebrations. One famous one was the celebration of Professor Bonhoeffer’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1943. While the extended family ate and drank and played Bach for their father, the brothers Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and their brothers-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans von Dohnanyi were sweating it out waiting to hear the outcome of a plan to assassinate Hitler. To stand in that room knowing that, and what happened later...

These rooms have now been converted into a large seminar room with an exhibition about Bonhoeffer’s life and work. Nine large panels line the sides of the room with photos and documents but no explanatory labels. This allows the guide to adjust the level of commentary and explanation to the knowledge and understanding of the visitors. Since we already knew a lot about Bonhoeffer, Knut let us ask questions about the things that interested us.

Upstairs in the attic is the study where Bonhoeffer wrote part of his Ethics and the essay ‘After Ten Years’ (on the need to take action against Hitler), and where he was arrested by the Gestapo on 5 April 1943. It’s a room I could quite happily work in. Some of his own furniture is still here: a simple desk, with a stylish lamp and chair; his harmonium (he was an accomplished musician), still playable but in need of tuning; and the original bookshelves, lined with copies of the works he owned (the originals are in the Stadtbibliothek with Bonhoeffer’s papers). The window overlooks number 42 next door, where his sister and her husband lived with their children. Dietrich would watch the children playing in the yard and throw sweets to them. A single bed has been placed in the same position as Bonhoeffer’s to show how the bachelor theologian lived.

While standing in the study I recalled how his parents wrote to him in prison to ask which books he wanted taken down to the cellar to be protected from the air raids, and I can imagine the trouble it took to move the harpsichord down the winding stairs. I’m not surprised he wrote to them saying ‘Don’t go to too much trouble.’

Back downstairs we signed the guest book, and Knut very kindly showed us where Kevin Rudd signed when he visited a couple of years ago. Bonhoeffer would be embarrassed by some of the attention he gets, but he would be grateful that people like KRudd (and me) are taking his ideas seriously and trying to put them into practice.

*7/8/2011: Actually the attempt happened during preparations for the party some time earlier - you get confused when you're writing on the run. But my point still stands.

Sachsenhausen

KZ Sachsenhausen lies at the end of a twenty minute trudge from Oranienburg station, which is a forty minute train ride from Berlin. Small groups of people are all walking in the same direction through the cold, wind and rain and the streets torn up for roadworks. There are lots of tour groups, mostly young people, English, German and Swedish. All the local youths have a number two cut, which is ridiculous for today’s weather.

After the information centre you walk down a road for a couple of hundred metres, with a high concrete wall on one side and old buildings, some in ruins, some in great shape, on the right or southern side. If you look at your map you will see that these were the SS troop quarters. Then you turn left into the camp proper. The first section is a perimeter zone, which has been planted with tress and memorials. On the right is the museum, which today is shut ‘for technical reasons’.



Straight ahead is the camp entrance, Tower A, a guardhouse with a gate bearing the notorious ‘Arbeit macht frei’. There is an odd feeling. I know what that sign means, literally and figuratively, yet I feel a barrier go up between me and its real significance. In places like this, with the perpetrators and victims long gone and only relics to testify to their experience, we are removed from the reality. Our imaginations and hearts can bridge the distance only so far, and our minds give us other levels of protection too. I can only wonder what the locals felt when the Allies forced them to tour the concentration camps by the busload, and whether this same distance was possible with the smell still in the air.

We are thankful for our coats and scarves and umbrellas as we walk through the gate, because the weather is bitter. The Soviets reconstructed some of the barracks from original materials in the late 1950s as a memorial against fascism (!), and in spite of arson attacks by right-wingers they are still in good condition. Barracks 38 and 39 lie in the ‘small camp’ to the south east of the triangle of the main camp. These two barracks were the home of many Jewish prisoners in the late pre-war period, and contain displays on the treatment of Jewish prisoners. They are the only buildings here now, but there were many others, each now marked by a concrete block with a number on it. It was here in the small camp that the Nazis placed special prisoners who had skills the Reich needed, such as counterfeiting and forgery. The German film ‘The Counterfeiters’ tells the story of some of these prisoners. I was glad that we had seen it a few months ago on tv, as it gave us some hooks to hang our ideas on.





Just north of these barracks is the prison, where the Nazis held people for special treatment, political enemies like Hans von Dohnanyi. One of the leaders of the military conspiracy against Hitler, he was held, tortured and eventually executed here, on the same day as his brother-in-law Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The prison is one of the few original buildings left, and the huge stretch of empty ground looks ominous. When it was full of barracks it would have looked less forbidding, in spite of the brutality. You can see what’s left of the ‘Shoe-testing Track’, where prisoners were forced to jog for hours ‘testing shoes’. Whoever thought of that was truly evil.

We walk across the rainswept ground to the other side of the triangle, to Station Z, where prisoners were forced to run down into a trench and were then shot. Next to that is what is left of the crematorium, including three or four ovens. To the west is a large gravelled area marking the pit where the ashes were disposed of (‘buried’ seems too deliberate and careful an act).





Even though we haven’t seen the Pathology Building and the Soviet camp, an hour and a half in the cold and wet is enough. We trudge back through the mud to find somewhere in Oranienburg that sells hot chocolate. It’s only when we are sitting in the warmth of the café waiting for our order that I realise I am utterly weary, not just from fighting the cold but from keeping the emotion in check underneath the analytical eye and the questioning mind.

Horrorpallooza, part 1

In our first forty-eight hours in the capital of the Bundesrepublik, in spite of the coldest and wettest weather we have had since we came to Europe, we have set forth in search of Berlin’s most notable historical attractions and now bring you some of the finest reminders of the cavalcade of cruelty that twentieth-century Germany both inflicted and suffered.

Monday 11 April
On our first afternoon we ventured out from our Invalidenstraße base and walked through the Scheunenviertel to Unter den Linden. The Scheunenviertel is very Surry Hills, cafés, design boutiques and exhibition spaces (one currently has a Robert Mapplethorpe show). It is also the old Jewish quarter, and one of its most prominent buildings is the Neue Synagogue, a delightfully oriental-looking building with a huge blue and gold dome you can see for miles.

This area was of course DDR controlled for forty years, and didn’t they do a wonderful job looking after it. The old East Berlin has some of the most disgusting looking buildings I have seen anywhere. They weren’t so much designed as designated, were built badly and have been maintained with the same loving care ever since. We thought it hilarious that on one restored building in Humboldt University they left evidence of damage of the past, labelled ‘WWII bullet holes’, post WWII repairs’, and ‘DDR neglect’. Who said Germans don’t have a sense of humour?

When we reached Unter den Linden I was temporarily Stendahl-syndromed at being on this legendary avenue, in the middle of East Berlin, with the Brandenburg Gate at one end and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden across the road (how many performances have I heard from there?). We took a quick look at the second-hand bookstands outside the university, crossed the road and walked into the square beside the Staatsoper.

I was looking for a hole in the ground, but not just any hole. The Bebelplatz, in 1933 when it was called the Operplatz, was the location of the first book-burning by the Nazis. The hole is in fact a window, a memorial built in the 1990s. You look down and see a room full of bookshelves – no books, just bookshelves. There are plaques on either side, but the empty shelves speak louder than plaques.




On one of the plaques is a quote from Heinrich Heine which translates as ‘It was a prediction that, where man burns books, in the end he will burn people.’ Heine wrote that in 1820.

Tuesday 12 April
The next morning we finally got out of East Berlin by walking under the Brandenburg Gate. We strolled through a beautiful park to see the Reichstag building, the burning of which in 1933 was a key event in the ascent of Hitler. Then another stroll a block or two south of the Brandenburg Gate, and a field of concrete blocks emerges gradually from the road.

This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, or as everyone refers to it, the Holocaust Memorial: a couple of thousand concrete blocks of different heights, like sarcophagi, set in neat lines on an undulating surface. It works as a piece of art, and it’s one of the most effective memorials I’ve ever seen. What do they represent? Coffins? Individuals? Grave markers? It doesn’t matter. It’s the magnitude of the thing that counts, thousands of concrete stele covering a large city block.

The different heights, from a few centimetres up to three or four metres, break the line so that your still have a sense of scale and your eyes are not numbed by repetition. Lots of school groups, laughing and taking photos of each other amongst the blocks, before being herded into lines to go down into the documentation centre below. Some might complain about light-heartedness at such a place, but I don’t think the dead would begrudge the living for their joy.

From the south-eastern corner of the Holocaust Memorial, cross Hannah-Arendt-Straße into Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße and walk south for a block. You will come to a car park in front of a block of flats, with a large sign by the entry.

Doesn’t look much, but it’s where the Führerbunker was, or still is if you count the holes filled with rubble. (A lot of the guide books record the wrong address, or have it marked wrong on the map. It is at the corner of In den Ministergärten and Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße.) The sign deals with the history of the site from the war until the present, and usefully has a diagram showing the location of the bunker complex in relation to the present buildings and roads. The car park you’re standing in front of is the location of Hitler’s quarters. It seems such a bland setting for the hang-out of a monster, but it’s also satisfying to remember it’s where it all ended for him. Which is why it’s so fascinating – if you’re not sure you’re in the right place, look for a parked bus. (Rule of thumb in Berlin: if you see a tourist coach or a group of people gawking at something, it’s either Nazi stuff or Communist stuff.)


And the good thing is, the Jews get a magnificent memorial, where a quiet qaddish can be said, while Adolf gets a carpark, where a loud ‘Fuck you’ is more appropriate.

Wednesday 13 April
A wet, cold day, Megan sent me out of the house to cheer up while she waited for the landlord to come and inspect the broken toilet. I thought about cutting through the cemetery but instead walked down Invalidenstraße and turned into Ackerstraße. After a couple of minutes I saw a crowd of people standing around some display boards, and thought ‘Here we are.’ Across the road was a watch tower about thirty years old, and I realised, ‘That’s not just a watch tower. It’s one of those watch towers.’

On Bernauer Straße a section of the border zone has been preserved as a memorial, the Gedänkstätte Berliner Mauer. The display boards show the history of this section and how the closing of the border affected the community, especially the parish of St Sophiens, whose church and grounds (partly) were demolished to widen the border strip.

From the observation tower across Bernauer Straße you look directly over a preserved portion of the death zone – the watch tower, sand, lights, and wire. To the east of this the strip has been grassed over and opened up, with relics of the wall and memorials. You can get a sense of scale, you can see how much room they took from the cemetery and the houses and buildings they demolished.




Down on the border strip itself there are about 150 metres of the original wall. Sections removed because they are believed to have covered remains of WWII victims have been moved to the back of the area. A path takes you through interpretive displays with photos and sound recordings, memorials, and a Window of Remembrance, a wall with photos or spaces for each person killed trying to cross the border. Some enclosed sections show what’s left of the lights and wiring conduits.


Walking down Gartnerstraße to get home, I saw sections of wall still in place, and derelict buildings. The DDR isn’t just in the memorial sections, it’s all around you in this part of Berlin.

Carmen, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 13 April 2011

Charlottenburg is a fairly charmless shopping area southwest of the Tiergarten. When we got off the train I looked around and realised, ‘We’re not going to get a decent cup of coffee around here.’ The Deutsche Oper is a fairly charmless building in the postwar ‘what the hell are people?’ style so prevalent in Berlin. The foyers are vast, soulless spaces divided by glass and extensive cloakroom facilities. And the auditorium has teak panelling.

I picked up our tickets from the box office and froze. They were the right tickets; the only problem was the magic word Familientag on it. Tonight’s show was a family performance. They didn’t mention that when I bought the tickets on the website. You know what a family performance means? It means a house full of school kids, restless noises and laughter at unexpected times. It also means a second string cast.

When I received the cast list my heart sank. The two leads were both ‘ill’ (of course they’d be ill, it’s a familientag, full of people who don’t know their operatic arse from their elbow).

I should be clear, I was not apprehensive because the leads had been replaced – that happens all the time, and you hear some fantastic performances unexpectedly. It was the name beside Carmen: Anita Rachvelishvili.

I thought she’d been booted out of opera and started another career in a completely different field, like McDonald’s.

Let me explain. The season at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan opens the same day every year, December 7. It is a huge occasion: royalty, presidents, celebrities all go, and it is broadcast live on tv in Italy, France and Germany. Usually it’s a cracker of a night: in 2007 it was an astounding Tristan und Isolde, a classic performance (which is available on DVD), in 2008 an interesting Don Carlo with a Don Carlo who looked a lot like Humpty Dumpty, and last year Das Rheingold with the brilliant René Pape as Wotan. But 2009? That was the year Daniel Barenboim conducted Carmen with his new find Anita Rachvelishvili.

I heard reports of the performance and thought it was just opera-bitchery. No one could be that bad, not at the season opening. I got hold of a copy of the video from the usual sources and watched it. I couldn’t make it to the end of the first act. She was not good. What did Barenboim see in her? I will add, a couple of things were worth watching: Jonas Kaufmann’s performance of the Flower Aria and the look on Rachvelishvili's and Barenboim's faces at the curtain calls when they realised people were booing. I thought, well we won’t see any more of her. Famous last words.

It was a traditional production, over thirty years old, but it still looked good. Heidi Stober (Micaela) has a great voice, not ‘girly’ like most Micaelas, but still looks the ‘angelic girl next door’. Andrew Richards, the substitute Don José, has a good light tenor, but is not someone you would expect to be singing lead at a first-rank house like the Deutsche Oper. His voice really only works at high volume – his tone at the pianissimo in the Flower Duet was thin and colourless. (Listen to Kaufmann on YouTube to hear how it should be done.) Bastiaan Everink (Escamillo) sang ahead of the orchestra consistently, and his spoken dialogue was totally unintelligible; it could have been in Klingon and no one would have known.

And Rachvelishvili? A big, HUGE voice that can fill a big hall with the greatest of ease. That’s what they see in her: a big voice, well-produced right through her range. But so boring. No character, no individuality, and no flexibility. She can sing two ways, loud or not at all. And no stage presence. Carmen is a man eater, but Rachvelishvili's Carmen couldn’t eat an orange.

At the interval Megan said, ‘Let’s go.’ I didn’t need to have my arm twisted. We paid our respects at Bizet’s grave when we visited Pere Lachaise in Paris; I’ll bet there are some strange whirring sounds coming from it tonight.

Anyway, the kids seemed to be having a great time, and I don’t begrudge them that one bit.

Postscript: My extremely rude comments above do not seem to have affected Ms Rachvelishvili's career one bit, as she has gone on to considerable success across Europe and America. She has developed a greater flexibility and control in her voice, and may yet become one of the great mezzos of our time. [Dec 2018]

Götterdämmerung, Hamburger Staatsoper, 10 April 2011

The curtain opens onto a dark empty stage. The orchestra begins with the music from Brünnhilde’s awakening in Siegfried, only now it sounds ominous. You realise that in the darkness the set is slowly rising from below. The Norns stand on a gantry overlooking an apartment. While the Norns re-tell the story so far, a mime takes place below. Siegfried has his head down on the table, the newspaper open before him. Brünnhilde is asleep in the bedroom. She awakes, comes into the living room and comforts the restless Siegfried, then goes back to bed. Siegfried drinks beer, stands looking out through the window at the blank wall opposite, and goes into the bedroom and watches Brünnhilde as she sleeps. The Norns disappear, the sun rises, and Brünnhilde awakes. As she sings ‘Zu neue Taten’, bidding her heroic husband to set forth and do new deeds, she makes coffee and sets the table for breakfast.

Siegfried goes off to new adventures. He stands on the apron of the stage checking his map. The first set sinks, and we see a two story house (rooms without walls), moving slowly from the back of the stage. The house is on a revolve, and as the act progresses the action moves from one room to another. This is the set we will see for the rest of the opera, and it is a brilliant idea, both in line and at odds with the rest of Claus Guth’s production concept. In line with, because it places the action inside a dwelling, like every other scene in the cycle; at odds with, because it is a new way of telling the story that breaks too radically from what we have seen before.

But it works. Boring sections (the nanna naps) become compelling, so that the two hours of the first act fly. Hagen, son of Alberich and half brother of Gunter and Gutrun, hatches a plot to get the ring by proposing Siegfried as a mate for Gutrun. When Siegfried arrives he is bamboozled by a magic potion into forgetting Brünnhile and falling in love with Gutrun. It should be said that Siegfried was probably attracted to her anyway; as the great Wagner scholar Anna Russell points out, Gutrun is the first woman he meets who isn’t his aunt. Siegfried has a great idea: Gunter doesn’t have a bride, but Siegfried knows where he can get one! There’s a woman on this rock surrounded by flames; if Siegfried puts on the magic helmet (magic helmet?)* he can pretend to be Gunter and take Brünnhilde. Which he does. (I’ve skipped a bit here but you won’t miss it.)

In act two Brünnhilde turns up, really pissed off with Wotan because she thinks he lied to her (about only the greatest hero being able to penetrate the fire). She wonders where the hell Siegfried is so he can rescue her, and sees him marrying this Aryan bitch, so she’s really pissed off with him too. She tells Gunter and Hagen that she married Siegfried ages ago, so now Gunter is pissed off with Siegfried. (Hagen pretends he’s pissed off, but he’s really pleased.) In act three Hagen kills Siegfried (skipped another couple of bits, but no matter), and Brünnhilde realises that it was a setup. She returns the ring to the Rhinemaidens to restore order and throws herself on Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Valhalla and all the gods burn and disappear. The end. (I'm not making this up, you know.)**

I could not begin to tell you how this was portrayed in this production, but it was masterful. The changes of focus between rooms and levels was always interesting, and done in ways that are not in the libretto but made dramatic sense. While the first three parts of this production would not particularly impress on video, this Götterdämmerung has to be seen to be appreciated.

Christian Franz (Siegfried) tended to undersing, partly to husband his voice for the big scenes and partly because he was tired after three nights of singing. In his act three aria he had all the voice he needed, but was overwhelmed by the orchestra. This was a problem for everyone; Simone Young had the orchestra at full volume when she should have held it back, leaving the big guns for the showpieces like Siegfried’s funeral march and the finale. Katarina Dalayman (Brünnhilde) also had all the voice she needed; she is no Nilsson or Varnay but she sang strongly until the end. Sir John Tomlinson, one of the best Wotan’s of the last thirty years, sang Hagen with his deep, black bass. Yes, there were weaknesses in a voice near the end of its career, but Tomlinson has the musicianship to work around them, and his acting skills and presence were wonderful to see.

My favourite bit? The very end, when Brünnhilde sees Siegfried in their apartment in a vision as she dies, just as Siegfried saw her when he died. A very moving way to end, in keeping with the humanity shown through the previous fifteen hours of music.

*Bugs Bunny reference
**Anna Russell reference

Museums in Hamburg

There are lots of museums in Hamburg. Here are some of the ones we passed on:

• Speicherstadtmuseum – spices and trade – the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte has a large section on this, plus a lot more

• Prototyp car museum - while it’s an interesting collection of cars there weren’t many cars from the F1 era, 1950 onwards

• The Bucerius Kunst Forum near the Rathaus, the Deichtorhalle and the Kunstverein are all dedicated to contemporary art, which is two too many - you have to wade through too much rubbish to see the gems.

• Beatlesmania – overpriced and inauthentic. Do what we did, walk down the Reeperbahn to the Beatles-Platz and up Große Freiheit to see the Kaiserkeller and the Indra Club. Sure, the Reeperbahn’s full of skinheads and creepy pervs, but it’s the echt stench that the Beatles breathed back in ’62.

• Museum für Künst und Gewerbe – the arts and crafts museum – only because we didn’t have time.

What we did visit:

The Kunsthalle, to the north of the Hauptbahnhof, has four sections – old masters, new masters, twentieth-century, and contemporary. The old masters include Cranach, Holbein, Canaletto, Rubens, Goya, Van Dyck, Tiepolo, Rembrandt – old masters, basically. It also has some beautiful altarpieces by Meister Bertram from the fourteenth century. The new masters include Schorr von Carolsfeld, Böchlein, Bonnard, Rossetti, Redon, Delacroix, Corot, Degas, Van Gogh, Monet – new masters basically. Plus a room of Friedrichs – thirteen of ’em, including ‘Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer’, a Romantic icon. His coat is green – I’d always thought it was black.

The Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (Hamburg History Museum) is set in Planten un Blomen, a park of flower beds and lakes, among ruins of the large houses destroyed in the Great Fire of 1842 (which started incidentally a few doors up from us in Deichstraße – probably a tourist with a cigarette after a late night). It records the social and mercantile history of Hamburg from the Middle Ages through to the twenty-first century. The ‘Hamburg in the 20th century’ covers two floors and looks at everything from the empire, the first world war, inflation, life and persecution under the swastika, the fire storm, recovery and reconstruction, the rise of consumer society and the ‘economic miracle’, the sixties and the Beatles, alternative politics, and life after reunification. In one word, comprehensive, and with some great reconstructions of a bomb shelter, a 1950s middle class living room and ‘communal accommodation’ of the 1960s. All of which are well-labelled; I found myself by habit translating the German out loud for Megan until she said ‘English underneath, honey.’

Two other floors deal with previous centuries. They are a bit light on artefacts but tell the story. There isn’t much on music in Hamburg (some trumpets and keyboards), but the musical history of Hamburg can be seen and heard in the statues and theatres and churches.

They have a huge collection of (huge) model ships plus models of the port and town in various eras. But the piece de resistance is what must be the world’s largest model railway, based on elements of the Hamburg-Harburg line. Passenger trains, goods trains, taking up a whole wing of the museum. It wasn’t running when we were there, as it was a quiet day, and you would need at least two Fat Controllers to keep it operating. But very, very impressive.

The staff are officious, in the customary German ‘these are the rules’ way which is usually well-intended but here was a little arrogant. (I like to think we got them on a bad day.)

Siegfried, Hamburger Staatsoper, Wednesday 6 April 2011

According to Wagner, Act I of Siegfried takes place in Mime’s cave, a refuge in the forest in which Mime tries to reforge Siegmund’s sword. Productions since the 1970s have tended to emphasise the industrial or the primitive in this scenario; Claus Guth’s production takes a domestic angle.

Mime and Siegfried, now a teenager, sleep on campbeds in a squat. Mime has raised Siegfried since he found Sieglinde dying in childbirth. He pours the breakfast cereal for Siegfried, and takes the clean sheets out of the washing machine to hang them up on the line. Siegfried throws the cereal across the room, because he hates Mime. At the same time he is conflicted by the feelings of affection he has for the dwarf. He wonders who his parents really are.

To mend his father’s sword at the end of the act, Siegfried creates a fire in a hole in the floor, throwing in the bedding and some kerosene. He pulls the washing machine motor out of its case and uses it as a lathe to grind the metal; a saucepan serves as a crucible, and the washing machine case is the anvil on which he works the metal. He tempers the sword with beer, then finishes the bottle.

Falk Struckmann seems to find the Wanderer (Wotan in disguise) a more congenial role. He has recovered from his Sunday night problems, having only a little trouble with some big notes at the end of the question scene. Peter Galliard is a stronger-toned Mime than most. Christian Franz (Siegfried) was a little underpowered in the forging scene, but good enough.

The Act II curtain opens on a large picture window, looking out into a thick forest. Alberich (Wolfgang Koch) and the Wanderer swap insults and wake Fafner (Alexander Tsymbalyuk, as fabulous as he was in the first two operas), who has now turned into a dragon through sitting on his treasure for years (let that be a warning to you all). There is an atavistic thrill in hearing three deep, big voices soar out over a big orchestra.

Two questions a seasoned Ring-watcher takes into Act II of Siegfried are ‘How will they show the dragon?’ and ‘How will they show the Woodbird?’ Well, at first they didn’t show the dragon at all. He only appeared after being mortally wounded by Siegfried, in his original guise as Fafner. The Woodbird (the huge-voiced Gabriele Rossmanith) is Siegfried’s counterpart, in the same t-shirt and shorts, literally mirroring him in the window.

Act III opens in a huge library, with Erda (Deborah Humble) a librarian or researcher looking for lost wisdom amongst the books and papers. She is powerful and assertive, giving the Wanderer hell. The following scene, where Siegfried confronts his grandfather and breaks Wotan’s spear, also takes place in the library. When the curtain rises for the third scene we see an altered version of the dormitory where Wotan left Brünnhilde (Katarina Dalayman) surrounded by fire. Siegfried, the youth without fear, walks through the fire, discovers the first woman he has ever met, and is terrified out of his skull. The ensuing forty minutes is played with both comedy and drama. Siegfried is terrified, realising that he must grow up, and Brünnhilde warm, loving, fearful and resistant in turn; all of which is sung and played with passion and strength. Of course the audience went bananas at the end – the music takes you up and up and finishes at a high.

Again, the horns were the weak link in the orchestra, for example racing ahead in the Act III prelude. But the ‘Forest Murmurs’ were magical and Brünnhilde’s awakening was ecstatic, as they should be. People who think Wagner’s music full of bombast will be surprised by the limpid beauty in these pieces.

Guth’s direction has brought out the compassion and comfort that the male characters are both trying to express and receive. Siegfried caresses Mime gently after he has killed him. Erda holds the Wanderer’s head against her breast; Brünnhilde does the same with Siegfried. The male characters are not mindless thugs, but feeling beings needing warmth and comfort. Siegfried is a man who wants to love; Wotan realises that he should have loved more.

Part four, Götterdämmerung, on Sunday night, when there will be tears before bedtime.

Mann und Marzipan

Lübeck, a forty-five minute train ride north-east of Hamburg, is connected to three Nobel prize winners – Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, and Willy Brandt. It is also the home of marzipan.

While each of the Nobel prize winners has a Haus dedicated to them, we visited only one on Monday – the Buddenbrookhaus, dedicated the works of the Mann family, in particular one work, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (which I love, hence our visit).

From 1842 to 1883 Mengstraße 4 was the family home and business headquarters of the Manns, a family of successful businessmen and local politicians. When writing Thomas Mann used the home, and the town around it, as the setting for his novel about the rise and fall of a Lübeck business family. Unfortunately in 1942 the house was destroyed by fire after a British air raid, and only the façade was left. The house was restored in the 1950s, and became a museum when it was bought by the city in the 1990s.

In the absence of the original fabric of the building (except for the façade), the foundation did not try to reproduce the house as it was during the residence of the Manns. Instead it has been decorated in contemporary style, as an exhibition space rather than a historic building. This has freed them to do some interesting things.

The ground floor, behind the entrance shop, has a permanent exhibition on the lives and careers of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and Thomas’ children, with photos, documents and artefacts, and extensive labels in German and English. If you new nothing about the Manns before you entered you would learn everything you needed to know here. The next floor is an exhibition space, but the top floor is the gem. As well as a centre for Mann scholars, they have recreated two rooms from the book, the Dining Room and the Landscape Room, where most of the action takes place. It is the night before the family moves out of the house, when Thomas Buddenbrook dreams of things that have happened there. You take a copy of Buddenbrooks in your language (there is a shelf with a range of translations) and walk around the rooms, reading the passages noted on the labels and imagining the scenes happening before you. In spite of myself I found it emotionally involving. The family record book noting Toni’s engagement, Hanno’s puppet theatre, the harmonium with the music from Tristan und Isolde – can something be ‘authentic’ when the information and physical materials are imaginary or unoriginal? Perhaps because our imaginary geographies are a way of ordering our world they can be as important to us as the physically-real ones. The map we followed in Paris was as much the one in our hearts as the one in the guide book.

Eventually reality called and we sought lunch. I.G. Niederegger brought marzipan to Germany in the early nineteenth century (he is mentioned in Buddenbrooks), and from there it spread all over the western world. Anyone who enjoys almonds and sugar should be grateful to the man. The Café Niederegger is conveniently located just around the corner from Buddenbrookhaus, directly opposite the Rathaus (Town Hall). The ground floor is their retail outlet, a wonderland of shiny paper and chocolatey smells which detained us briefly on our way out. Upstairs they serve fabulous quiche lorraine in the kind of décor that works in Germany but in Sydney would make me ill.

I should note that as we were waiting for our train Hamburg station we investigated the newsagents. I have never seen a newsagents that sold Nietzsche and Hildegard of Bingen alongside Stephen King and Dan Brown. I would like to have seen Nietzsche’s lost work, Mann und Marzipan: ‘The map we follow in our stomachs is the most important of all. And he strode forth from his cave into the valley below in search of noms.’

Die Walküre, Hamburger Staatsoper, 3 April 2011

We now come out of the clouds, away from Tolkien-on-steroids to a more human story, about the redeeming power of love, the pain of loss, and the devastation caused by greed.

At the beginning we see the rectangular platform on which the rock and bed were placed in Rheingold. This time we see a kitchen sink and table, and on the side of the platform is a big, red on-off switch. Why?

We find out in the second act, when we see a model of the kitchen in Wotan’s office. The power switch is for his use; everything that happened in Act I, the encounter between his children Sieglinde and Siegmund, is at Wotan’s instigation. Guth has used the sets and the business to bring out this point, on which the whole storyline turns. Wotan has placed his hopes for recovery of the Ring on Siegmund, but Siegmund cannot do it, because he is Wotan’s puppet, not a free agent. Bound by his honour, Wotan has to cut Siegmund loose to meet his doom. Brünnhilde, Wotan’s daughter (and the Valkyrie of the title), disobeys her father and tries to protect Siegmund. So Wotan’s heart is twice broken, because he must punish his favourite child for her transgression against his honour.

The production worked consistently until Act III, when we found the Valkyries practicing martial arts in a reformatory dormitory. The martial arts made sense, but the reformatory? Perhaps another of Guth’s school memories?

Angela Denoke (Sieglinde) was just as compelling as when we saw her as Katya Kabanova in Paris. She has an intensity of presence and a command of her whole body, acting gifts that are reasonably rare among opera singers. Christian Franz sang Siegmund, in addition to the Siegfrieds he is to sing later in the week (in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung). This isn’t usually done, because each of the three parts is a tough sing. Franz was a bit out of voice, and tried a lyrical approach to ‘Winterstürme’, but it sounded merely underpowered. Alexander Tsymbalyuk followed up Friday’s Fafner with a beautifully sung Hunding, and Katarina Dalayman (Brünnhilde) sang a strong ‘Hojotoho’ (a tough tune to start your night with), and her announcement to Siegmund of his impending death was enthralling.

But the star of the show was Falk Struckmann. His voice is not the prettiest, but he gets all the notes and is expressive. In Act III he was thrilling, giving it everything – perhaps too much. Suddenly there were missed high notes, either not reached or avoided by taking a lower alternative. Either he had strained his voice or he had a rogue piece of phlegm on his vocal cords.

This is where opera is like sport – everyone is on the edge of their seat, wondering if he will pull off the spectacular coup he needs to finish. The end of Walküre is a fifteen minute scene where Wotan farewells his daughter and sets the ring of fire around her, one of the most moving pieces of music in all opera. Somehow Struckmann got there without cracking, with all the expression and feeling the music calls for. When he stepped out for his solo curtain call the place went crazy. There is an energy in the audience that you don’t usually get at the opera; perhaps it’s a Ring thing, where we all go on a journey together over a week. It should be bedlam when the cycle finishes on Sunday night.

Das Rheingold, Hamburger Staatsoper, 1 April 2011

A few days ago I mentioned my fear that Rheingold might be set in a wind farm. That wasn’t just being clever. When you go to the opera in Germany, one thing you won’t see is a traditional production. Every town has its own opera theatre, and the audience has seen every work a zillion times, so they want something a bit different. The start of this tendency has been attributed to Patrice Chereau’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1976, when the first scene of Rheingold took place at a hydroelectric dam.

No power plants of any sort in Hamburg’s first scene – we got a bedroom! The three little Rhinemaidens were having a pajama party in a great bed, when Alberich the gardener, looking a little like Bill Bailey, sees them through the window while he is spraying pesticide. The little vixens start flirting with him, he tries to get off with them. In an egregiously tedious piece in the program book,* the director Claus Guth says that elements of this production were inspired by some of his experiences as a boy. This was obviously from the ‘Penthouse letters behind D-Block’ stage, but instead of ‘wocka-wocka’ guitar we get the Philharmoniker Hamburg. The girls are just teasing, he gets cranky, and runs off with the Rhinegold.

Scene 2 takes place in Wotan’s house, the ‘Attic of the World’ according to Guth. Does your attic have a large rock in the middle of it? Wotan’s does.

The rest of the opera has more of the same. Not sure what Guth’s overall concept is, or if he has one, but it all had a strange sort of logic which worked. Loge (Jurgen Sächer), who everyone makes a point of saying is a trickster, performs magic tricks. He enters wearing a top hat, cane and gold sparkly jacket, like an escapee from the Folies Bergere – a couple of times he twirled, but didn’t start tapping. (I instantly thought of An American in Paris– ‘I’ll build a stairway to paradise…’). There were many touches like this that demonstrated that Guth wasn’t trying to show off but does know how to tell a story. While it didn’t work all the time, his direction kept things moving so it never gets boring. (A treacherous admission for a Wagnerite to make, but if Homer merely nods, Wagner has the occasional nanna-nap.)

Falk Struckmann (Wotan) sang acceptably all night, but seems to be saving himself for Sunday night’s Die Walküre. Both the giants looked handsome (trust me, that’s an innovation) and sang well instead of barking their parts. Tigran Martirossian’s Fasolt was lyrical and moving, and Freia was believable when she almost fell for him. Alexander Tsymbalyuk (Fafner) has a rich bass which makes me look forward to when he turns into a dragon (part three, on Wednesday night). For me the star was Wolfgang Koch (Alberich), who always found the musical line, and delivered ‘Bin ich nun frei?’ with a creepy malevolence and beautiful tone.

The prelude started in complete darkness, the famous E flat emerging from the primordial depths, but what should be one of the really magical moments in all of opera was accompanied by a coughing obbligato which made me think we were back in Sydney. The Staatsoper has a wonderful acoustic, everything in balance and projecting well to the back of the house. Simone Young had the orchestra playing well, bringing out the chamber-music elements of the music that Pierre Boulez found but keeping the textures full (so it sounded like an orchestra, not a string quartet). We noticed two things in the curtain calls:

1. The Hamburgers love Simone.
2. She was wearing flatties (we think), a sign that she is getting sensible (once we saw her conduct Meistersinger in stilettos).

For the record the ring itself is a bracelet which looks a bit like a fat gold Rolex.

*In German; I gave up after the first page.

St Nikolai Kirche and Speicherstadt

One of our jobs this morning was to find a machine that would take our cards. Lucred-up, we ventured forth on pleasure bent, but went to St Nikolai instead (left, seen from the canal behind the Deichstraße). St Nikolai was once the tallest building in the world, but like the rest of Hamburg was almost obliterated by the Allies in 1943. What is left of it – the tower, the sanctuary and the cellar, has been ‘restored’ (ie tidied-up) as a memorial for the victims of war and persecution from 1933-45. The cellar is a documentation-centre (not a ‘museum’) with photos of the devastation of Hamburg, with artefacts and stained glass (removed for safe-keeping during the war) and a section showing the reciprocal damage caused by the Germans in Warsaw and Coventry. In the open space which previously was the church are sculptures, including ‘The ordeal’, a bronze statue set on bricks recovered from the Sandbostel concentration camp in Lower Saxony.

A lift takes you 76 metres up the tower to an amazing view of Hamburg. From there you can see the Elbphilharmonie, the new concert hall to be opened in 2012.

It is part of Hafen-City the redevelopment of the old port area, the Speicherstadt.


This is a beautiful area, old bondstores alongside canals, but like the Rocks is full of overpriced tourist-traps, like Miniature Wunderland and Hamburg Dungeon. Instead we headed for the Kaffesrösterei, where as the names suggests they roast coffee and sell it to lucky people like us. Here is a photo of a woman who is enjoying her first decent cappuccino in two weeks:


In Paris we looked like locals; here we look like tourists, but we don’t mind, because we look like tourists from Paris.