The only violence at the Berlin Opera on Monday was done onstage, when King Idomeneo came out with a bag full of heads and placed each of them, carefully, on chairs: Buddha, Jesus, Poseidon, Mohammed. One man yelled "Aufhören!" Someone else yelled "Weiter so!" and then people booed and cheered. For a translation of the German, and a full account of the evening, go read my piece in the LA Times.

The place was a fecking journo circus — among all the klieg lights and pushy TV crews I was so embarrassed to belong to the trade that I kept my notebook hidden and wound up, for my sins, interviewed no less than three times on camera and microphone. I made sure to spout nonsense so the interviews wouldn't get used. It reminded me of when Ratzinger became Pope. Stringers and reporters descended on St. Hedwig's Cathedral only to find out how few practicing Catholics live in Berlin. A young woman with a radio microphone looked at all of us waiting on the steps and said, "Hm. More journalists than people."

by michael scott moore

In Faust's Metropolis, Alexandra Richie's fat history of Berlin, there's a quote from Communist officialdom on the occasion of Bruce Springsteen's debut in East Germany, with a little album called Born in the USA:

[this] does not represent the importation of bourgeois ideology — neither does it mean that the fans of Bruce Springsteen in the GDR would prefer to have been born in the USA, as the lyrics of the title might suggest. Nor does this mean that we regard Bruce Springsteen as an advocate of Socialist ideology. And least of all should it be seen as an indication of a pragmatic surrender of socialist views.

Priceless. I remember Reagan misinterpreting those lyrics, too.

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by michael scott moore

This appalling man Udo Voigt is not just head of a marginal neo-Nazi party but now a duly-elected politician in the Treptow-Köpenick district of Berlin. He's the guy who said, last year in a town called Gera, in a speech delivered between sets by white-supremacist hatecore bands, “We don’t want a multicultural society! We know what that brings! In Berlin we’ve learned about the first school without a single German child. Should this be the future of Germany? [...]

“Anyone who wants this to be the future of Germany should vote for the established parties! Whoever doesn’t want this to be the future of Germany should send the NPD to the national parliament! [...] We need, in Germany, at last, a true national politics. We have a dream — that the Federal Republic of Germany should go into the dustbin of history, as quickly as possible, just like the GDR. That’s our dream. We dream of a free and prosperous and peaceful Germany for true Germans […] We have the blood of our fathers flowing in our veins and we are proud!”

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by michael scott moore 

You know there's something wrong when a country's politicians make tougher noises about free speech than its established artists, even if the artist in question directs a traditional and heavily-subsidized opera house in west Berlin.

Kristen Harms at the Deutsche Oper canned a revival of Idomeneo this fall because of a scene that involves Mohammed's head on a platter (next to Jesus' and the Buddha's and Poseidon's).

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by michael scott moore

Is this true? Or is it just Berliners? Since I moved here I've noticed that German strangers, as a rule, don't try to maintain the regulation* 18 inches off my person when I walk down the street or try to shop in a crammed grocery store. What they do, instead, is lurch in front of me if I happen to be in the way while I scan the cheese.

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by michael scott moore

Utter malicious nonsense about Günter Grass can be read here, here, and (for old time's sake) here. Normally I like Hermann the German's blog, but he leads the pack with a sentence that sums up the posturing of the peanut gallery: "One of the leading German Gutmenschen of the past two centuries, Günter Grass somehow forgot to mention in the last one that he was also bad once, too."

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by michael scott moore

This is a deodorant ad in Berlin. The caption means (yes) "Irresistibly Beautiful Armpits."

For me armpits have never been much of a thing, but I have noticed a distinct change in European women's shaving habits since the Wall fell. When I was in Germany and France and Spain at the end of the 80s you could still make a joke about riding public transportation and being shocked -- shocked! -- by the masculine underarm hair on otherwise stunning continental women.

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by michael scott moore 

You, wherever you are, might think you're having a heat wave. But Berlin has been like a Swedish sauna for two weeks. It's hard to believe this place ever gets cold. I'll admit London may be worse ("The London underground system, the oldest in the world, was a furnace on Tuesday with a record temperature of 47 C"), but the heat in Berlin somehow manages to be humid and dry at the same time -- muggy thunderstorm weather that the stone buildings and sandy ground trap and radiate into the sky at night. July may be the hottest month here in a century. If this keeps up 2006 may also be sunnier than 2003, which was especially hard on the French but produced some of the best German Riesling in almost fifty years.

Fabrica blog reports on a less savory aspect of football mania:

Mark Frauenfelder: Two men were arrested in Berlin on suspicion of filling soccer balls with concrete and then placing them in public areas with signs encouraging people to kick the balls.

Police said they had identified a 26-year-old and a 29-year-old and had found a workshop in their apartment where they made the balls. The two are accused of causing serious physical injury, dangerous obstruction of traffic and causing injury through negligence, police said.

by michael scott moore 

The first goal Italy scored last night, in late overtime, happened so fast that most of the crowd on Zionskirchstrasse failed to notice. But it was like the shot that killed the President. "Why's that Italian player celebrating? Oh God --"

All of Berlin fell silent, I think, except for some Italian cafes. Germans in the overflowing restaurants and bars, who had been following the game like a single fan, started behaving like frustrated individuals again -- getting in each other's way, kicking empty beer bottles, drifting into the street with useless plastic horns.

Ah, well. The whole German-pride thing was getting scary anyhow. As a consolation prize I offer this link to webcams at
Berlin's Olympic Stadium, which you can use on Sunday to watch the crowd as nations with better food sqare off for the title.

Photo credit: Bowslerised 

by michael scott moore

This may look to American readers like a soccer stadium. Maybe even one of those massive sports and music venues that go by pompous classical names in the US -- "Forum," "Coliseum" -- when they're not named after office-supply-store chains. In fact, as Berlin readers already know, it's just the Adidas Arena, a smallish model of Hitler's Olympic Stadium and a "branded environment" thrown up near the Reichstag for the duration of the World Cup, where people can watch a bit of soccer. Live soccer? Like in the real Olympic Stadium?

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by michael scott moore

Hoppegarten on the outskirts of Berlin has cut-rate horse racing every several weeks in the summer, and today, on an all-blogger field trip that included Ed Ward and Bowleserised, I won just about enough for a cup of coffee. Ed remembers Hoppegarten from the days when it was virtually still a DDR track, and Bowleserised is a horse expert.

All I could do was nod my head. In my triumphant fourth race, Romantic Man pulled ahead of River Woods to surprise everyone and hand me a winning ticket; but here I think we're watching Pushy Guest shove in front of Tassilio and Miss Anita for a Sieg in the second. The track has its own stud farm, and most of the horses are local, although some come from Poland and Sweden and even the United States.

Photo Credit: Spurlos

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by michael scott moore

We seem to have fallen off the wagon with our summer hot dog series here at Radio Free Mike, but don't worry. Here's another Mr. Miller stand in Berlin, blocks away from the first one, and even closer to the sexually ambiguous Fiberglas hot dog on Kastanienallee. One Radio Free Mike commenter has previously noted the disturbing Mr. Miller motto, "Eat Here, Diet Home" -- clearly visible in this photo. Smithsonian argues that hot dogs are quintessentially American, but has no idea where the name comes from:

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by michael scott moore 

The World Cup starts in Munich today, and Spiegel Online has a little something about the proper name for "football." It's not what you think.

by bowleserised 

What I Saw by Joseph Roth, as translated by Michael Hofmann, was my birthday present from Chenda this year and it's superb. Roth was a journalist and flâneur pacing the streets of Berlin between 1920 and 1933, hating what he saw and then describing it all in loving detail. You get the dive bars, the bathhouses, tales from the S-bahn and the tenements, nightclubs, cinemas and book burnings*.

If Beaman hasn't read it I'll eat my fancy hat; it's very tempting to want to do a parallel, 2006 version in a blog (though the Beaman-ster is doing his own thing, and very nicely too). Too much for me to quote here, though I'll type out a little.

I'm annoyed by the blurb on this edition which brays, "As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re-creates the tragi-comic world of 1920s Berlin...", as though Herr Issyvoo was the sole yardstick for anyone writing about Weimar Berlin.

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