A Foreigner Among Foreigners

In 1998, I lived in Munich, huddled within the textured white walls of a tiny efficiency apartment charitably doled out to university students by the city’s Studentenwerk. There, my small room perched several stories above a first floor inhabited, on one side, by an Italian restaurant and, on the other, a police station, whose cars blared their panic-inducing two-tone sirens by night and by day. Down the street, the BMW plant began cutting sheet metal at 7 a.m., even on Saturdays.

From my apartment, I could see the architectural magnificence of the Olydorf, the 1972 Olympic Village, where some people took great pride in their apartments. Their stepped terraces, decorated with flowerboxes and spilling over with vining plants looked beautiful from my large square window. I felt bad for the reciprocal view offered by my sad gray-green building, which was casually shedding small bits of stucco onto the sidewalk below and occasionally onto Moosacherstrasse, which thrummed with the regular movement of cars like blood through arteries.

On Sunday mornings, when I usually suffered from a hangover that robbed me of my peripheral vision, I would force myself to get out and roam the streets, which I did even at night. I had no fears there. Almost no one bothered me. And I say almost because, once, a man did. But that's another story, for another time.

I had an admirer in those days, a dark haired man who worked in the restaurant kitchen, a man who seemed to know my schedule. He would stand outside smoking a cigarette and staring at the cinderblock walls surrounding the dumpsters. He always turned as I left through the glass door, my shoe heels clicking against the broken asphalt. “Ciao, Bella! ” he’d shout loudly at me before tossing his cigarette away and going back inside to--I assumed, based on the rubber gloves in his back pocket--wash dishes.
I usually rode the subway from the Olympia Zentrum stop, where drunks stood by the Imbisse near the heavily populated bicycle lock-up and drank Apfelkorn or the horrible, enamel-dissolving Obstler from tiny bottles they lined up like soldiers on the high, chairless tables. I nodded to the few World War II veterans I had come to recognize, one of whom told me he was kept as a POW by the British. I doubted some of his story because he was forever incandescent with alcohol, pinkish eyes tearing, nose leaking, mucous running like a frightened woman towards his upper lip. If someone had ever struck a match near him, I feared he would explode in one giant conflagration. So, I moved quickly past him, having faltered near him once and having been forced, thanks to my lack of a hard heart, to listen to his story. Not that it was uninteresting, just slightly incoherent, even accusatory. He thought I was British and was quietly giving me the business about his suffering and privations.

Munich's Theatinerkirche, a sight that makes me
teary-eyed. I never thought it would take me so long
to get back.

Often, I traveled to the wide and regal Odeonsplatz, which was the city’s hub. I emerged from the dark earth somewhat recovered and near the base of the towering, ochre-colored Theatinerkirche, with its giant Baroque dome and twin clock towers. Feldherrnhalle stood before me, a massive neoclassical memorial to fallen military leaders and behind it, the shadowy Dodger’s Alley, once travelled by those who wished not to salute another Putsch-related memorial plaque Hitler riveted to the side of the monument that faced the Hofgarten.

And then, the delicious walk to Marienplatz: past the modest Residenztheater and the opulent state opera, whose interior walls were either mirrored with beveled glass or painted an icy blue and accented with silvered acanthus leaf moldings. Beyond this, the shops: furriers; tobacconists, whose scents wafted onto the street with each movement of their shop doors; music stores in whose windows sheet music fanned and gorgeous violins suspended over burgundy velvet. There were ‘antiquariats,’ where I looked for prints and carefully flipped through gently yellowing first editions of Mann’s Buddenbrooks under the disdainful gaze of the storekeeper, who knew I was an impecunious student, but understood by my accent that I was a foreigner with at least one of the currencies then enjoying a high rate of exchange. Still, I often tried to hide my foreignness, and the longer I lived there, the better I became at it, until no one knew I was not one of them--a Bavarian who spoke the same broad vowels and deep-formed consonants authentically.

This was how I spent my days when I was not at the museum, where I catalogued the Wittelsbacher collection, harvested lavender from the roof garden by climbing through the window above my desk, translating correspondence into first halting, then lilting English. I, a foreigner among foreigners, with a disparity soon entirely undetectable.

This was originally written, in slightly different form, for Dan Waber's hypertext project, "That Reminds Me". Soon, there will be more....

Some pictures from my days in Munich (Part 1)




My apartment at Moosacherstrasse 81, Munich, 1998
You can see apartment buildings
from the Olympic Village outside the window.

  
So, in a recent rush of nostalgia, I went looking for pictures of my time in Munich. I'll be posting the best of them over the next few weeks, grouping them by subject (work, parties, etc.) I have very few of the university, since I spent so little time there. Instead, I spent most of my days at the museum, where I was an intern (and, later, a correspondence translator).

To the left and just below, at right, are pictures of my apartment, which stood along a busy traffic artery, Moosacherstrasse, several blocks from the Olydorf (Olympic Village) and down the street from the BMW plant. It's funny that, a little over a year before I moved to Munich, I received as a gift a series of three 1972 Olympic posters from one of my professors, Klaus Kipphan. Over 12 months later, and somewhat unexpectedly, I would find a Studentenwerk apartment near the repurposed Olympic Village. A great number of my American friends (also Fulbrighters or DAAD recipients) lived in these tiny quarters with the balconies protected from pigeons by soccer nets. I went to more than one party in rooms not much larger than a closet. We were each glad to have our own spaces, though. What a change from the American dorm life so many of us had come from.



The entrance to my Munich apartment.
There's that two-burner stove I talk
about in my "Domestic Goddess" post.
Q: Is that a bottle of Jim Beam near the stove?
A: Why, yes it is.

So, this was the apartment I painted in (in fact, in the image at right, you can see one of my paintings--a small one, on top of the ancient-looking fuse box, from which a white apron also hangs. It's a partial work that I intended to finish by way of other smaller canvases. The painting is a dragon head breathing fire under a full moon. I'm not sure where that work is anymore. It did make it back to the States via slow-freighter mail, but I think I gave it to an old boyfriend when I was in graduate school, so it's probably somewhere in Pittsburgh, if he didn't destroy it or lose it along his own professional journey up to New Haven and back). Sadly, I don't have a picture of my painting corner, which was at the foot of my bed and lit by a desk lamp. Instead, I have a pic the opposite wall (above). There, I was apparently working on a giant charcoal drawing, one that never made it back to the states. I think I ended up tossing it when I was packing up to come home. Anyway, there was something funky about the nose I could never fix.

The last photo, below, is a picture of my desk at the Neue Pinakothek. I used to be able to crawl onto my desk and out the window, where there were beds of lavender. Really, this was part of the building's roof, but it was fully accessible, if you could fit through that metal and glass portal to the outer world. The particular room, in addition to having the long desk, was also the completely temperature-unmodulated "archive room", meaning that the room was populated by large Formica cabinets with doors that locked but were not temperature controlled. Inside these cabinets were catalogues dating back to the 1700s, filled with languorous script that was practically illegible to the contemporary eye. I was in these cabinets often, tracing the ever-changing numbers assigned to paintings in the Wittelsbacher collection, which became the foundation for the Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen (Bavarian State Painting Collection). In the next post, I'll share pics taken while several of us are looking at an X-ray of Ruben's "Massacre of the Innocents" within the Doerner Institute, the Pinakothek's restoration department. Also, there will be pictures of parties with the restoration deparment staff, too. Some very good memories. 


My desk in the archive room
Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Spring  1998

 

How to be a Domestic Goddess

Cream Cheese Frosting and Frozen Carrots
Q: Is that powdered sugar all over the place?
A: Indeed it is.

I am a fully domesticated female. This was not always the case. And no, this does not mean that I wet myself in the house or have failed repeated paper training attempts. No, no, no. It means that I used to be a complete rube in the kitchen.

Years ago, I remember standing in front of my two miniature burners set in the small stainless steel countertop of my Munich apartment, trying to figure out what had made the gorgeous pool of translucent blue goo near the burners. Well, I had made myself pancakes that evening, and I had gotten the burners pretty hot in the process. Months before, at the department store Hertie, I had purchased very cheap silverware, forks and spoons with pretty plastic handles. This, friends, was what had melted and was re-coagulating on my stainless steel cooktop.

A few months later, I was standing in front of those same gas ring-sized electric burners, and I was complaining about the watery consistency of my sundried tomato cream sauce. Believe me, this may sound like a particularly advanced culinary project for one so admittedly incapable, but I was not being an adventurous cook. I was merely copying a receipe my Mom often made when I was home. I stirred. I stirred some more. It simply would not thicken. My boyfriend at the time, a linguist for whom I was cooking, came up to the stove, looked into the pot, pulled at his goatee and said casually, "Maybe you can make a roux?"

"A what?" I asked, still looking down at this runny salmon-colored offering. Momentarily, my brain answered, you'll rue the day you suggested this.

"You know, a little flour in water?" He looked amused, twisting his whiskers between his thumb and forefinger.

"How do you know this?" I asked. This was early1998, the era before total Food Network domination.

He shrugged, "I learned to cook for myself in college."

Yeah, but a roux? Who makes a roux in college? I spent my college years heating up Ramen noodles and eating Pop Tarts, for pete's sake.

Fast forward to 2000, when I was dating this man. He had cooked for me, so I decided to cook something for him...bake something, actually. At the time, I did not understand the intricate chemistry of baking. Me, read cook books? Surely you jest. I played with acrylic paint and polymer clay, not sugar and flour. Consequently, I had no idea that too much liquid and too much baking powder meant a small culinary catastrophe. Soon, the cute little cupcakes I intended for said boyfriend were running over the sides of the muffin tin and sizzling on the bottom of the oven. But this was not the nightmare part. No, the nightmare began as my oven began emitting thin ribbons of gray smoke from its vents. This eventually turned into giant plumes of black smoke.

Sadly, I had a very touchy fire alarm. It often went off when I blew out a candle in my bedroom. And while I knew the damn thing would likely begin its piercing squeal, I did not have the sense to take the cupcakes out of the oven. (It should be noted this extraorindarily delightful auditory device was not wired to the fire department, so no clanging red engine ever arrived, much to my relief).

No, Poindexter here opened every window and stood flapping a wet tea towel for all she was worth in the direction of these windows, hoping to usher out the plume of noxious odor (look at that carmelization!) that was issuing like a forest fire from my range. When I finally got things under control, I cracked the hall door, and realized that someone had placed the floor's giant chrome-plated fire exstinguisher on my threshhold. Har, har, neighbors. Har, har, har.

Yeah...looking back on it now, I think I was pretty stupid, too. I will tell you, though, that the part of the cupcakes that baked around the edges were actually pretty good, although they formed one solid semi-leaden mass across the top of the muffin tin. Hard to get out, that.

My mother, by comparison, is a fantastic cook, and even though I remember her having lit up her oven mits several times when I was in high school (I'm serious...once, I heard her calling "help!" from the kitchen while I was reading a Rolling Stone article on, of all people, John Holmes.) I often wondered where that culinary genius had gone and why it had passed me over. Certainly my great grandmother, a farm woman, had been locally famous for her pies, a bit of useful knowledge spread about by eager farmhands who liked to work on the Leib dairy because of the lunches she served.

So, based on my track record, I began to think that perhaps the "cooks well" gene was actually a recessive trait, and I got the "makes a mean cheese egg" gene from my Papa. However, things are getting better.

Around the time I attempted to make cupcakes for B. Stanley, I read an article in the New York Review of Books (maybe it was The New Republic...I don't remember exactly) about Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking. The reviewer claimed that she had roomed with Lawson in college, and that the woman (now married to Charles Saatchi, last time I checked) was absolutely incapable of baking or cooking anything. I immediately thought: "Thank goodness, there's hope for me yet."


Savannah's new dragon dress from a 1960s pattern

(still, of course, under construction)

And despite a mishap yesterday with my new pressure cooker (nothing serious, I assure you) and fun with powdered sugar today (see picture above), I have been doing fairly well. And I can say with confidence that I have made the transition from feral female, given to painting, writing and drinking, to domestic...um, well I won't say 'goddess' because there is a helluva lot of dust in this living room and sometimes, I get bleach marks on things and I have absolutely no idea how it happens (what, are there bleach gnomes that just run around sprinkling laundry piles with Clorox? And are they the same ones that steal mine and Michael's socks? Really, inquiring minds want to know).

Anyway, let's just say I've become relatively domestic, and I have to say, it's pretty nice. And while we're on this topic, check out the dress I'm making from a 1960s pattern (yes, I know, it doesn't look like a dress yet, but it will...last night, I put the darts in.)