March 18 - Altona

We were back to “cloudy with occasional rain” weather, which I was quickly becoming convinced was the modal weather forecast for this area of Germany. We were both still slightly sore and stiff from the previous day, so we ruled out a big hike or bike ride for the day. Monika proposed we do the Altona Museum and, not having any better ideas, I agreed. After the 9:00 a.m. pumpkin time for our CC Karten we took the S-Bahn over to Altona, changing trains in Dammtor to stay on the surface and see the sights along the way.

In Altona we decided to just take a look around and see if the Hertie and Kaufhof department stores were still there like the ones we had shopped at downtown. I was surprised to find that both of them were gone. The Hertie store had been converted to a mini-mall called Mercado Markt and the Kaufhof had been converted to offices and a bargain-basement place attached to the train station. The Mercado Markt seemed to be a thriving mall with quite an eclectic collection of boutiques, food stores, imbisses, and even a bar. It smelled so good that we decided to have an early lunch of fried potatoes and a Frikadelle for Monika and a Karbonnade (pork chop) for me. The potatoes were fried with onion plus bits of bacon and ham, so altho they weren’t low fat, they were quite tasty.

We used the bathrooms in the Mercado Markt, which had an attendant who, of course, expected a tip. I did have some change to tip her, and as I did so she said, “Thank You” in English and then turning to her coworker she added in German, “I can always pick them out.” I hadn’t said a word, so I didn’t think my American accent could have tipped her off, so I took a quick glance in the mirror to see if there were any other clues that I was an American. Here is what I saw: A “New Balance” rain jacket over a checked flannel shirt that would have blended in perfectly in a camp of Canadian lumberjacks but stuck out like a sore thumb in Germany. Plus, I was wearing a hip belt that had a “Deer Park” water bottle on one side and a big Olympus camera bag on the other on top of trousers with cuffs (they were cheap) and hiking boots rather than normal shoes. Even my hair was white in front but black in back, resembling nothing so much as an aging Elvis or the two-tone paint job on a ’56 Chevy. In retrospect, I guess she didn’t have to be exactly clairvoyant to pick up the fact that I was American. I might as well have been wearing my American flag jacket and singing Cohan’s, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” at the top of my lungs.

After lunch we strolled down Museum Street because it led, coincidentally enough, to the Altona Museum. We passed a fountain that represented the struggle between Altona and Hamburg over the fish market, which nowadays might generate a ho-hum reaction but in the sixteenth century it was a Very Big Deal. Altona belonged to Prussia whereas Hamburg was a free Hanseatic city, so whoever bagged the fish market would get the tax money that went along the fish trade, and that made it important. Altona ultimately got the fish market, but Hamburg went on to become the big international port, so I guess everything worked out for the best. Monika grew up just down the street (see Wanderung 2), so that made it even more ironic that she cannot stand sight, smell, or taste of fish in any form, which kind of limits my dietary choices at home.

Anyway, we paid our 6 Euro entrance fee, checked our bags, and wandered off toward the first section of the museum that contained models of ships and old farm buildings. An adjoining section on geology had two surprises, first that Altona was right next to a huge salt dome that was apparently miles across and thousands of feet deep, and second that they were pumping oil from some areas around these domes in the Schleswig Holstein area. Who knew?

Part of the museum was a large art gallery specializing in nautical themes in general and the Hamburg-Altona area in particular. Some of the Impressionist-era paintings were quite good in evoking moods or events connected with the sea or aspects of city life. I once again felt my interest slipping as the style changed to modern art and we kind of slid thru the end of it. I had a similar reaction to a special show of ink or pencil drawings in a different gallery—the drawings were uniformly a type of line-and-circle over-simplification of real objects that just didn’t say anything to me altho some reached the level of “cute”.

I had somewhat more interest in a gallery of traditional dress styles from the last couple of centuries, some of which were quite elaborate costumes. I wondered if my 18th Century sister Lois would also like them since as far as I could tell some of them dated from her period of interest. Monika read a plaque about the display that claimed they had much more information about the Sunday best and formal clothes of those periods due to the fact that those clothes were often preserved while the everyday clothes were simply worn out. I thought Lois might also be interested in a large display of antique silverware, dishes, glassware, and porcelain from Germany and England. Some of those things were real works of art, in my opinion, and I tried the best I could to take pictures (allowed) without using my flash (prohibited).

To me one of the most interesting sections of the museum was a display of toys, many of which were crafted in the Erzgebirge region we had visited in Wanderung 2. We again saw examples of the wooden rings from which animals were crafted, as well as some of the finished animals, but there were an awful lot of other antique toys. I particularly enjoyed a beautifully crafted working model steam engine about 1 cubic foot in size—the display card said the craftsman who made it had used it to power a rotating Christmas tree! With the steam engine huffing and puffing and the tree spinning around, that must have been quite a sight! There was also a classroom with dolls in it plus the more typical antique dollhouses, but one thing I had never seen before were several examples of working doll-sized stoves. One was an electric stove with working “burners”, and one of the others might have used coal or wood (I wasn’t sure), but they were accurately reproduced down to the tiniest detail. I expect they would have been a blast for a young girl to use, especially if she could really cook something on it. I got a strong impulse to play with some of the antique toy trains they had there—they were just so cute with the tiny European style carriages and were obviously meant to be played with (preferably with grandchildren), not just displayed.

A more sober exhibit was a special exhibition of the photographs of 4 Jewish photographers who were active in Hamburg in the 20s and 30s. They were, of course, quite good and the best of their work was displayed in the exhibit. But also on display were the letters from the Nazi authorities that simply closed them down and forced them to sell their studios at fire sale prices. Those plus the letters that threw them out of the Hamburg photographic society that they had helped found were really heartbreaking. The good news was that all four had managed to emigrate to the U.S., Australia, and South Africa and reestablish their careers. Less lucky, however, were some of their photographic subjects—in one display of 6 portraits only one escaped the death camps by emigrating to the U.S. I have to give the German society in general and the Altona Museum in particular credit for facing the unpleasant aspects of Nazi history in a straight up, unflinching manner. In fact, it does raise the issue of whether the U.S. can face up to unpleasant aspects of its history in a similarly direct and unvarnished way, such as the invasion of Canada during the War of 1812, the unjustified war with Mexico in 1848, the bloody putsch against Salvador Allende that we engineered in Chile in the 1970s, and similar actions.

We found ourselves gravitating to the benches and resting more and more often as the afternoon wore on, so we finally packed it in and worked our way back to Reinbek before our 4:00 p.m. pumpkin time. There we relaxed with a Kaffeetrinken and watched a Germanized version of Star Trek: Next Generation. The familiar characters and situations help me interpret the German, so I seem to be getting about 80% of the gist of it with programs like that.

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The evening news reported that the new Spanish government has talked about withdrawing all Spanish troops from Iraq by June 1st. From what I watched on German national news, it looks to me like Al Qaeda had won a huge victory by simply slaughtering innocent civilians in Spain.

As I saw it, the chronology was:

• Bomb blasts kill almost 200 and injure over 1,000 just before elections for a new Spanish parliament.
• Spanish Government (conservatives) blame the Basque ETA movement.
• ETA denies responsibility, Al Qaeda claims responsibility for bombings.
• Spanish people stage largest demonstrations in the history of Spain.
• Spanish people throw conservatives out of power and elect socialists.
• Socialists start planning for the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq in June.
• President Bush dressed in a military flight suit lands on an U.S. aircraft carrier under a huge banner announcing “Mission Accomplished”—no, wait, that came earlier!

So I didn’t know whether this had much coverage on U.S. news stations or what spin the Bush administration put on it, but it seemed clear to me that with 12 cell phone bombs the Al Qaeda terrorists succeeded in forcing Spain out of the Iraq war coalition. That left us and the Brits holding the bag. That the terrorism struggle is really the conflict between an Islamic fundamentalist way of life and a modern western way of life was brought out into the open by the bombing threats now being leveled against France for its prohibition of girls wearing the Islamic-required headscarves in French public schools. I don’t agree with the French prohibition of the headscarves, but they apparently see this as a fundamental affront to their culture (Can’t cherchez le femme if you can’t see their hair? Sacre bleu!). Similarly, the Islamic fundamentalists apparently see keeping their women in head scarves as something worth killing hundreds of innocent people for, which I simply can’t comprehend at all. That all suggested to me that we are in for a really long cultural struggle where one side, at least, has an ends-justifies-the-means mentality coupled with an utter contempt for human life. In any case, it could be a long struggle with the Islamic extremists who are, as Tony Blair put it, trying to fight against an entire modern western civilization. But I also had to ask where are the Islamic moderates in all of this? I did not once hear a firm, clear, and uncompromising denunciation of any terrorist act by any Moslem cleric. Not once. That goes for terrorist acts that have killed hundreds and thousands of innocent non-Moslems like 9-11, but also for terrorist acts that have done nothing more than slaughter tens or hundreds of devout Moslems like the Sunni-Shiite mosque bombings. No one has said something like “Holy Allah, for God’s sake let’s stop murdering people!” Is there some fundamental affinity of the belief structure of Islam to terrorism that makes the clergy loath to denounce it? If that’s not true, then why does the clergy tacitly condone these loathsome acts? My guess was that unless and until the rank and file clergy do start denouncing terrorism, the easily led sheep of their flocks will continue to be seduced with glorious calls for Jihad against the Great Satan and recruited by the extremists as cannon fodder. With these admittedly rather depressing thoughts running thru my mind, I retired for the evening.