Category: Blogs A-J

There are times when things are so bad that I think the worst mistake I ever made was moving to Germany in 1993. But then I reflect that, for a while, at least, I had a very exciting life as a writer for the Wall Street Journal Europe who got to travel all over the place and write about art and culture. I also had a radio show which I really enjoyed, as did my many listeners, some of whom still remember it seven years later.

There are other times when I think the worst mistake I ever made was loaning a great deal of money to a friend who has still not paid me back, and who may never do so. But neither of us could have forseen that the sure thing would be cancelled when some people flew planes into the World Trade Center. I mean, what civilian could have predicted that?

But two years ago I made a mistake which has finally caught up with me, and which has cancelled any remaining affection I may have had for living in Germany. It’s a mistake anyone living here might make, so let me explain.

When I was whizzing around Europe for the Journal, I nearly always took the train. My territory was central Europe and Scandinavia, so it made sense: one day going there, one day reporting the story, one day back — and the story would inevitably get written subconsciously on that return journey. So it made sense for me to obtain a Bahn Card, the discount card you can buy from Deutsche Bahn. Back then, there was only one kind of Bahn Card: it gave you 50% off of every ticket, and it had a Rail Plus supplement, which gave you half off of tickets on rail lines in a number of other countries. It wasn’t cheap, but, as I once realized, one round-trip ticket to Copenhagen paid for it.

I bought one in 2004, but that was around when the work started to fall off spectacularly. My editor at the Journal had been replaced, and suddenly I wasn’t getting any work at all from them. Or, for that matter, from anyone else, at least not the kind of work that required me to travel. I missed travelling — I still do. But when 2005 came around, I realized I had better uses for what little money I had than a Bahn Card.

Nonetheless, although I hadn’t ordered one or renewed it on the website as I’d usually done, one came in the mail. Then Deutsche Bahn tried taking the money out of my bank account, but failed, because there wasn’t enough. They sent me a notice. I replied that I didn’t want the card and wasn’t going to pay for it or use it. And that, I thought, was the end of it.

I didn’t pay for it, and I didn’t use it. At the end of April, 2006, I got a stern warning from them ordering me to pay them. I wrote back and repeated that I had not requested the card, and had not used it. And that, I thought, was the end of it yet again.

It wasn’t. Shortly thereafter I started getting bills from lawyers. The €64 Bahn Card debt was now encumbered with legal fees, fees for, as far as I could tell, writing me a letter. And they were big fees, too. Now, I’d gotten letters like this before from mysterious phone companies who thought I owed them money. I ignored them, and they went away. That’s what I decided to do with these letters.

Big mistake. In October, they told me I owed €116.42. In November, it was suddenly €169.70. In December, it was €185.67. On December 7, I was found guilty of indebtedness by a court in Baden-Baden and a judgement was mailed to me in a jaundice-colored yellow envelope.

Now, in America, this would be a black spot on your credit record. My credit here is already terrible. For one thing, I am considered very unstable because I don’t have a regularly occurring income. I live in a country where nobody is self-employed, where if you don’t draw a regular salary, there’s only one bank (the one I use, of course) which will allow you an account. (I once knew a guy who was hired on a freelance basis to come to Germany to teach corporate communications to a major bank. After he was ordered to close his account with them because he wasn’t making regular deposits, he asked his clients what kind of message they thought they were sending. They shrugged and told him to go to another bank. He had plenty of clients in the States, so he just up and left instead.)

So I didn’t think anything more of this until last week. That was when I got a letter from an Obergerichtsvollzieher, one of those words whose individual components you have to look up in the dictionary, but which eventually revealed itself to be “high court bailiff.” I mentioned this to someone and was told “You are in terrible trouble. You’re going to have to hide your computer and all your CDs. You’re going to have to empty out your apartment. They have the right to seize everything you own in payment of the debt — and they will. They can take your bed. They can take your silverware. They have unlimited license.” I thought this was paranoia.

It’s not.

They really can do all of these things. No matter if the value of the goods seized is many times the value of the debt. They will do it because they can. Can they deprive you of your means of making a living? In the United States, the law is very clear about this: you can’t impound a violinist’s violin, or a mechanic’s tools. But in Germany, you can.

A couple of friends rushed over to help. They perused the letters, made notes, hemmed and hawed. “You know,” one of them mused, “when it comes to stuff like this, Kafka was a documentarian.” No kidding.

Making it worse was the fact that it was Easter weekend. One of my friends wrote a letter for me to send to the bailiff explaining things. I had a copy of the letter to Deutsche Bahn. I faxed both to the bailiff, and got ready to call him during office hours. Or should I say hour: he is available for one hour, two days a week. And my last chance for any mercy was to reach him on Tuesday.

It took thirty minutes, but I got him on the phone. Miraculously, he spoke a little English, enough to tell me that there was nothing he could do to mitigate my guilty sentence and that all I could do was pay him before April 19. Oh, and the price, which now included his fee, which was nowhere in any of the paperwork in my hands, was now €225.

A couple of weeks ago, when I got back from Texas, I found yet another note that the postal customs people had seized yet another package of the CDs people send me for review. I’ve taken to letting them send them back, because in most cases it’ll be yet another singer-songwriter I’ll wind up tossing after a couple of tracks, and the Postzollamt is way the hell down in Wilmersdorf. But this was from a label that puts out stuff I like, so I schlepped down there to rescue it. I was confronted with a sign stating that, due to a lack of personnel, waiting times had increased significantly, and that after registering, I was to wait in the new, utterly undecorated, waiting room next door. Which I did, for over an hour, a fourfold increase in their previous record. When I finally had my name called, the woman with the package asked me to open it. I told her (and pointed out on the customs label, which never does any good) that these were promotional items, that I was a journalist, and so on. She grabbed one of the CDs and pointed to the bar-code. “This has to be blacked out so that this item can’t be sold!” she yelled. I told her I wasn’t the one who’d sent it. “You tell them that they have to do this!” She seemed genuinely angry. Or maybe it was just the stress of working somewhere where you knew everyone you met hated you.

What these incidents drove home for me was that there are two Germanies. One is occupied by the people who are my friends and my friends’ friends and husbands and wives, the ones I met when I had the (German) girlfriend who led to my moving here, the ones I hung out with when I did move, the ones I’ve worked with and for. Then there are the ones who run the place, obsessed with a perverted, rigid, narrow need for “Ordnung,” which translates directly as “order,” but is much, much more. Ordnung is conformity; Ordnung is submission; Ordnung is the petty regulations that don’t let you recycle glass on Sunday, that make all onions the same size; Ordnung is why I’ve stopped listening to music, because I have to use headphones after 10pm no matter what, or my neighbors next door will call the police. Not because they’re disturbed by it. No: because they can.

Thinking about Ordnung leads to a lot of other places I’m not going to go right now, mostly because it’s a nice day and I’m trying very hard not to slip down the slope of depression that is almost inevitable when I think of what I could be doing with that €225 I’m going to be parting with soon. I’ve already been for a long walk (my CD player stopped working, so I went to Alexanderplatz to price a new one: looks like about €60 goes out the window on that one) and although my landlord’s mother (one of the Ordnung Germans if there ever was one, as the bitter gurn that suffices for her face makes clear) is here, so far I’ve avoided contact with her. If the checks come in on time, I’ll have the money in time for the bailiff, and — in one of those too-good-to-be-true coincidences — there’s even a possibility that Jim’s Mistake will pay for My Mistake in part.

But I’m very, very tired of Ordnung, and very, very tired of living here. I gave a lot to this city, and I never got a whole hell of a lot back. It’s time to move on, to somewhere with just a little bit less Ordnung and a lot more capacity for fun.

In 1970, I lived in Sausalito, which is the town that’s at the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Despite what the town is now, back then there were still little enclaves of funk, and my apartment, needless to say, was one of them. It was set on a steep hill, so that although it was technically a basement, there was still a nice view of Richardson Bay, the fishing fleet (yes, there was still a fishing fleet), and Mt. Tamalpais.

One person I’d always inevitably get to know would be my mailman, because back then I was inundated with free records, and, less frequently, books. The records would come sometimes in outrageous boxes with promo trinkets in them, the books were always heavy, and so there was always a lot of mail at my house. At one point, my mailman was a jolly young guy with wire-framed glasses, who seemed too smart to be in this for a career — you saw a lot of folks like that working in the Post Office in those days. This one’s name was Jim, and sometimes he’d stop to chat for a moment. Nice guy.

But one day he showed up and announced that he was quitting. “Yup. I’ve saved up enough money and me and my girlfriend are going to do something we’ve always wanted to do: go to Africa.” Now, this was a surprise, especially since Jim was white (and I presumed his girlfriend was, too). There was something of a vogue for middle-class black Americans to visit Africa back then, but you didn’t get many white tourists from the States. It was also a surprise because I’d gotten a book in the mail called Bright Continent, by Susan Blumenthal, an American woman who’d done the same thing and published a guidebook to sub-Saharan Africa. Remember, this was in the days before Lonely Planet and so on — it was 1974 or so, and books like this just didn’t exist. I’d taken a look in it and gotten hooked; it was not only useful as a guide, but it was fun to read.

So I mentioned this to Jim, and he said sure, he’d love to look at it. “Take it with you,” I suggested. “Bring it back when you get back.”

And he did. It remains one of my treasures: beat up, bookmarked with odd bus tickets and harissa-can labels, annotated with corrections and amplifications. I’ve never been to sub-Saharan (or super-Saharan, for that matter) Africa, but I’ve got a book that has.

I’m not sure what happened next, but I lost track of Jim and eventually moved to Texas.

Fast forward.

Last year, I heard from Jim again. He’d found this blog, and was bemoaning the fact that he’d been in Berlin some months earlier, and hadn’t known I was here. He was in Portland, Oregon now, selling real estate and hoping to find something else to do, but loving Oregon and hoping I could visit. Well, that was sort of out of the question, but it sure was good to hear from him, and yes, it was too bad that he hadn’t known I was here. But, I said in my e-mail back to him, I had a friend in Eugene, Oregon, who constantly fantasized about moving to Portland but didn’t seem to be doing anything about it. Not only that, I figured Jim would like this guy and maybe he could kick his butt gently enough so that he’d move and realize his dream while putting a couple of bucks in Jim’s pocket.

And that’s just what happened: Brett and his wife Carole had dinner with Jim one evening when they were in town for some musical event and Jim wound up showing them a place that they wound up buying. Everybody’s happy: Brett’s doing a lot more good work and is much happier being out of the decaying hippie/university surroundings he was in, Carole’s doing fine with her artwork and other innumerable projects, and Jim’s got a couple of people he likes to hang out with.

I like happy endings, myself, but there’s more. To thank me for sending him customers, Jim sent me a gift. It’s a €200 gift certificate redeemable at the restaurant Quarré or the “gourmet restaurant” Lorenz Adlon at the Hotel Adlon. It expires on April 19 and cannot be renewed.

And when I saw it, my heart sank. I knew he meant well, and yet the Adlon pretty much represents a huge hunk of what I don’t like about this city. It’s got a horrible reputation as a place to stay: I once helped an editor for Conde Nast Traveller research a story on Berlin, and he was staying there, went for a walk, and was refused re-entry because he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He finally convinced the doorman to accompany him to the front desk, where they conceded that he was, indeed, a guest. Then there was the young African woman who was fired for wearing her hair in an “unconventional” style, albeit one traditional to her people — and hardly outrageous. The stories go on and on; the high-end travellers I know avoid the place.

The idea that I could get into one of their restaurants without a jacket and tie, too, is ludicrous. That’s not the way I dresss, nor is it the way you have to dress in most restaurants here. One nice thing about Berlin is that, outside of government circles, anyway, it’s very informal. I don’t want to eat where the Bonners eat anyway, so they can have their jackets and ties.

Jim was, understandably, distressed that I was upset by this gift. Why, he said, he’d been to the Adlon and it didn’t seem like that kind of place. And couldn’t I borrow a jacket and tie? (Answer: no. From whom? Nobody I know has one either!)

I’ve tried not thinking about this for a while, but it occurred to me recently that the clock was ticking on this gift, so I took it down the other day and saw the date. I honestly don’t know what to do. I don’t think they check ID when you cash it in, so maybe I should sell it. But I don’t know anyone who’d want to buy it, either. Should I hit Craigslist? Just let it expire quietly in its folder here by my desk? It’s only eight days away.

Some day, I hope, I’ll visit Portland. I also hope I’ll have enough money to take Jim out to dinner and explain the cultural nuance behind all of this. Meanwhile, I’ve got a white elephant with a Quadriga on it making me feel guilty.