by Bruce McCall
My command of the German language, despite a crash Berlitz course before I arrived there, grew haltingly and never approached the far suburbs of fluency. This should have doomed my Heumann, Ogilvy & Mather career. It didn’t; as with air traffic, the universal language of advertising had become and remained English. In the Frankfurt agency, the barrier worked both ways: if you couldn’t speak German, too bad for you; if you couldn’t speak English, tsk-tsk, too bad for you, too.
My social life suffered before I managed to secure a flimsy foothold, distancing me from the culture that had so beguiled me from four thousand miles away. Naiveté, despite having given myself a cram course in German customs and manners, initially led me into Ugly American gaffes. Item: making a beeline for a nearby watering hole was an almost reflexive activity in every New York agency for a band of after-hours cronies (myself included; if I had nothing planned, an evening sometimes seemed to stretch out to infinity). I needed only a couple of weeks to establish my Ugly American credentials. An effort to reproduce the Manhattan bar cruise in a Frankfurt setting quickly revealed itself to be the pathetic mistake of a parvenu.
Three times I invited my German office friend Heidi to join me for a drink or two at some nearby bar. We strolled after work a few times to a seedy-looking nightclub called Old Daddy. (This was far from the strangest loan from English: my favorite was Drugstore Up to Date, apparently an attempt to promise hungry visiting Americans a homelike eatery. The name turned out to be the only American reference in the joint: the menu was strictly schnitzel.) Poor Heidi must have wondered, What’s this clown doing? as we sat inhaling the glamour of a gloomy room empty of life save for two twits. I ordered a bourbon, assuming bourbon was an international refreshment. The waiter-bartender repeated the word as if I’d asked for calves’ brains in anise with a rum chaser. I hazarded a dainty test sip. Blaaaaargh! This bourbon must have been distilled from shoe polish, rat fur, and his own urine by a desperate Devil’s Island escapee. I needed three Cokes to wash the aftertaste out of my mouth. The bill for that puddle of orange liquid was seven American dollars. If that was the cost of never seeing Old Daddy or any other nitespot for the rest of my tenure in Frankfurt, it was a bargain.
Maybe because it was so seldom heard or seen in North America, the German language seemed exotic to me as a kid. Its special quality was a kind of DIY factor: you manipulated it like a box of metal pieces, a verbal Meccano set that could be bolted together into sentence-long words, the sentence concluding with a loud thud where the key word came. Mark Twain wrote that spoken German sounded like a man in a suit of armor falling downstairs, and the language does strike many foreigners as blunt and guttural. I came to suspect that too many spittle-spraying German characters in World War II Hollywood movies, barking like hounds, taught English speakers a vaudevillian sense of the language. As Ute Lemper proves every time she sings, German can also be soft, romantic, and seductive.
Fluency wasn’t even an ambition once I was plunged into the fast-moving language stream. I had thought my fine ear would earn me respect for speaking in clear German: then I heard a recorded snatch of my voice. My spoken German proved to be a twangy joke. In addition to everything else, I sounded funny. After that it got doubly difficult to drag myself into the language.
Few speakers of English could penetrate the idiomatic argot very deeply. Nor the slang and verbal dexterity of a native German. Nor solve the complex, fiendishly constructed crossword puzzle cum Rubik’s Cube of proper German grammar. Copy written in colloquial English and translated into German transmogrified into nonsense. Translation, as I painfully learned, isn’t a simple exchange of words you know into foreign words you don’t. Language is ideas, idioms, expressing different cultural values and constantly in flux. English phrases can be translated into literal German and vice versa, but words alone don’t cut it. They’re the planks that need to be assembled into a house.
I was the agency creative director, in name only. My relationship to the copy and art people mirrored relations between a U.S. advisor and the South Vietnamese military. I had the same lack of faith in my troops. The agency’s creative corps was young and green, and they were expected to learn the Ogilvy credo, its thickets of dos and don’ts, by osmosis. A spectacularly naive assumption. None of them had ever been taught the rudiments of advertising. Most didn’t care: they relied on their linguistic genius to master complex strategies, the yield of expensive research, to pass muster with American standards and Ogilvy dicta.
None of these dozen writers ever came close to solving a creative problem in a logical way. Heinz Blattner, a middle-aged writer and the only one to earn Hank’s trust, served as the informal creative chief and a kind of benign Henry Kissinger, advising him on client attitudes, and a generally useful employee without portfolio. I lunched with Heinz often, to talk about the world beyond the agency. A dyed-in-the-wool liberal, he recounted being drafted into the Hitler-Jugend movement as a fourteen-year-old. He screwed up so badly so often that he got kicked out.
The late sixties were close enough in time to the war that many of the senior HOM employees were veterans. Kurt Meier, the company treasurer, had slogged through the desert in the African campaign. Rommel’s army fell, and Kurt, along with a few thousand other Afrika Corps troops, spent the remainder of the war as a British POW, emerging when peace came with the uniform on his back and perfect English delivered in a plummy British accent.
Herr Rumpler, an account executive, was barely eighteen when the Luftwaffe chose him to train as a fighter pilot. Germany in early 1944 was on the ropes. Aviation gasoline was stingily rationed. Fighter-plane production was at a crawl. Herr Rumpler’s “training” regimen consisted of taxiing a beat-up Me-109 down a short runway, getting airborne, circling the airfield, and landing. The Me-109’s knock-kneed, tall and narrow landing gear, combined with poor forward vision, made it a treacherous aircraft even for veterans of hundreds of takeoffs and landings. It made literal mincemeat of pilot trainees. Certain innocent mistakes led to accidents that meant court-martials for a number of candidates. A few were arrested while clambering out of a smoking wreck and taken away to be shot for the crime of willfully destroying der Fuehrer’s property.
Germans are more intelligent, harder working, and more sophisticated than their advertising counterparts in a flock of other nations. Yet these same people can be arrogant, conceited, narrow-minded, and hostile to suggestions for improving their skills. Molding a competent advertising professional out of such stock is difficult; creating an advertising star is well nigh impossible. The copywriter uneducated in basic advertising theory and practice either learns and develops over time, or quits, or is canned for not trying. That’s true in New York, Brazil, Kuala Lumpur, and modern Germany.
HOM’s Frankfurt office faced another, unique problem. It drew from a small, shallow pool. Talented creative people spurned the place, as did their juniors and every kind of advertising pro in between. Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf—these cities excited the creatively inclined. Culture flourished. Youthful energy led the way. Excitement got into the bloodstream. And there sat Frankfurt. Money was its reigning industry, and it lent the city a dull, orderly image. What gifted writer, artist, musician, or advertising practitioner would be inspired by huge banks, insurers, and other financial enterprises? Frankfurt had a fine zoo and several elegant neighborhoods. But one thing was missing, and it made for the ultimate downer: search the city north and south, west and east, and you’d find that Frankfurt didn’t have a single drop of craziness.
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The writers who had to work with me ranged from surly Hagen Bertram to thoughtful Manfred Klein, sweet-natured Frau Meyer-Rothe, talkative Winfred Lauer, demi-hippie Boris Haneke, the Taciturn Twins Volker Ammon and Hans Schnapka, amiable and evidently talented Jochen Vollbach, hardworking and fast Fred Boos, and Robert Kroeber, stiff as a board and forcing me to stifle a belly laugh whenever he clea
red his throat, snapped to attention, and barked another declaration. Kroeber was difficult to understand, since his compliments, complaints, and criticisms all sounded exactly the same: loud, earnest, and long-winded.*
A Rabelaisian Brit renegade, Ben Nash, was brought aboard by Hank Bernhard, the managing director and six-foot-tall spark plug of the agency. This accorded with the fact that every few years a supremely bright, lavishly gifted eccentric lands in an advertising agency and rattles the windows, but never stays. Ben typified the breed. An erudite Oxonian who spoke German better than most Germans did, he was a witty, irreverent, Oscar Wilde–quoting social companion. His office resounded with laughter and good times. It didn’t hurt Ben’s standing that he ate and drank to excess and helped teach a few creative types the rudiments of going too far.
I explained Ben’s advertising career to myself as not so unusual for a certain type of Brit. Oxford and Cambridge seem to produce scores of brilliant young men who can’t find their groove and wander the world having fun until their destiny arrives. Ben was of that ilk: intellectually far superior to the art of selling common things to the common man. I observed a man who despised himself for ducking the career he could and should have carved for himself back in Blighty. A surfeit of wine and beer loosened his tongue: he ridiculed the Ogilvy credo and Hank’s diligence behind his back. Ben generated gales of hot wind but little outstanding work. I admired his brains and bonhomie, but he disappointed my expectations. Heumann, Ogilvy & Mather, starved for talent, couldn’t afford morons. Neither could it afford overeducated footdraggers who hitched a ride and used an agency as a place to hide from their own talents.
Creative turnover was brisk—and financially costly to the agency. Germany had been the leader, early in the century, in legislating social services and worker protection against the power of employers, and this protection continued in the post-Nazi world. By law a union representative sat on the board of every company. Firings conferred liberal benefits on the firee—including payment of half a year’s salary regardless of the reason for his or her having been bounced. Plus, if he or she so chose, there would be a hearing on the whys and wherefores of the dismissal, with the ultimate decision rendered by a regional government official. These arbitrators were seldom able to distinguish between the work performed by a truck driver and that expected of an advertising copywriter. Thus it was easier, and cheaper, to get by with mediocre talents; the shortfall would be repaired—by me.
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Hank’s blind spot was his wretched performance in human relations. He was a sender, not a receiver, and was so focused on end results that he wasn’t aware that morale in his creative department sucked. Nor would he have cared. People as people didn’t interest him. His few efforts at personal diplomacy scraped my senses like fingernails on a blackboard: he talked too much and listened too little. He couldn’t read minds. Or facial expressions. It never occurred to him that writers and art directors differed from one another, in temperament, in brainpower, in motivation, and in their pursuit of David Ogilvy’s philosophy of advertising. Hank didn’t discuss, he lectured. His victim wasn’t expected to talk. Nodding would do. Hank used these occasions to ventilate, until the poor bastard on the receiving end stumbled away in confusion. Our boss’s body was a pressurized tank. If it wasn’t vented every so often, it would explode.
I was no Mr. Chips as a teacher. Some copywriters appeared to have a humble interest in at least trying to expand their advertising savvy but were foiled by my lack of empathy, zero patience for slowpokes, and misunderstandings in the endless skirmish between my German and their English, and their German and my English. Yet my linguistic ineptitude actually did little to weaken my value. Hank needed me, to spot and fix headlines and text, but far more urgently to act as strategist, conceptualist, sounding board, and creative cleanup man. He’d define the issues to be dealt with in an ad—“separating the fly shit from the pepper,” as he put it. Their value was to cleave through the bafflegab, identify the real problems, and aim straight at the target. A well-written memo requires a supple brain. In this, Hank is tied with David Ogilvy for first place. Reading the clear, spare, inarguable conclusions in their memos was one of the keener pleasures of my advertising career.
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In my three years of living and working in Frankfurt, only twice did I earn an invitation to a German home. My social leprosy was probably not the main reason: by hoary tradition, wives and children were kept invisible to auslanders. German high schools stick to the idea that education means learning: no proms, no basketball teams. The American horror of being seen dining alone in a restaurant and the implied pathos of the lone social outcast doesn’t fly in Germany.
Although this culture may seem cold to the casual observer, it isn’t; German life is more formal than the American style, but it’s just as human. (Consider the “du” ceremony, held when two friends acknowledge that this particular relationship has matured into a more intimate, meaningful bond. The standard German word for “you” goes from the formal sie to the informal du. And it does so for life.)
One Saturday morning in 1969 I watched from my apartment balcony on Schillerstrasse as the cops shot water cannons at Red Rudi Dutschke and a ragtag mob of followers. That was as close as I got to involvement with the scary, tumultuous, wacky sixties unfolding in the States. This estrangement from my times and contemporary life began to gnaw at me. Here I was, in a three-piece brown tweed suit and fifties haircut, grappling with the destiny of Rolf dog food and Frisch und Frei spray deodorant while America was convulsing.
My appetite for the news and the feel of American life forced me to the only English-speaking radio available: the American Forces Network, or AFN (formerly the Armed Forces Network, but changed on the theory of Let’s Not Alarm the Natives). A five-minute newscast, mainly dependent on generic wire-service fragments, kicked off every hour. The AFN held the rare distinction of being broadcast from a time warp—the late fifties. Rock and roll barely existed. Stale radio dramas of the fifties abounded. Art Baker hosted a late-night program—a feat indeed: Art had been dead for years.
Yet isolation can sometimes be productive. Advertising has its limitations for the creatively inclined: self-expression plays no role, because it’s never about you. It’s a blunt tool, impersonal and anonymous, for broadcasting effusions inspired by marketing strategies. My one creative and intellectual outlet in Frankfurt was letter writing. I composed long messages from Mitteleuropa for a circle of friends and relatives—Chris, Mike, Hugh—venting and japing and unloading on pet subjects (like the above tirade). These were the days before faxes, the Internet, and the cell phone obliterated the personal letter. My curmudgeonly nature leads me to persist in letter writing, except that today it’s not via the U.S. Postal Service.
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The Daimler-Benz offices in Stuttgart were the Vatican to serious devotees of automotive excellence. There, hundreds of engineers labored to advance automotive technology in every aspect of performance. Safety was a priority due to conscience, not government prodding. These were serious people doing important work, yet HOM’s requests for information almost always elicited a response. Our team was small and serious. We met with various engineers for briefings on specific subjects; circled the test track and the stomach-turning “high wall”; toured casting foundries and the huge assembly works in Sindelfingen; and were ushered into a nearby domed room for presentations of new models by the chief stylist, Bruno Sacco. Data was gleaned, not necessarily for use in advertising but to give us insight into the philosophy behind the product. The founder of the automobile in 1886, and the company he formed to build new models, was Gottlieb Daimler. His motto was Das Beste oder Nichts—The Best or Nothing. He believed it. His successors still do.
Driving a Mercedes-Benz on the Autobahn was at first a fright, then a thrill, and ultimately a serenely smooth
means of travel. Since Germany has historically hesitated to impose artificial speed limits, Mercedes-Benz has long recognized the need to build cars capable of sustained Autobahn performance. The firm demands engineering standards of total integrity, along the way earning numerous key patents and countless advances in safety and stability. Germans take their cars and their driving seriously. Tough annual inspections keep junkers off the road. Drunk drivers go to jail, period. The cars around you are clean and driven with pride. (The automatic car wash has been laggard in catching on; allowing machines to do that job is seen by German car owners as akin to paying some stranger to wash your wife.) Road safety ranks high on the government’s priority list. Leave the Autobahn and drive the smooth back roads, and if you have an accident the road was probably not to blame. Weather may be, though. Northern Europe dwells in a meteorological sewer: rain and fog cover the land year-round. (My Mercedes roadster, a convertible, had its top folded down on exactly one weekend in the summer of 1968.)
Autobahn rest stops were spotless oases. For sale was damn near anything you needed and some things you craved—including beer, wine, and liquor. Every time I stopped I wondered why these places reduced the U.S. counterpart to black comedy: fatty fast food, sugary candy, grotty bathrooms, and vending machines for everything else. Yet Americans spend more time in their cars and rack up more miles than any other nationalities. Contrasts with back home were invidious enough to make expatriation seem a sane and sensible alternative.
