Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide

by Douglas S. Mack

  It’s not hard to see the markers of globalization and the way that it infuses culture A with culture B, even though they are located a hemisphere apart. What’s less visible, and at times more confounding to the outside observer, is the more subtle, localized version of this within Europe. We’ve moved away from the package tour as the main way to see Europe, but Europe has become more like a package tour itself, a moving target of cultures becoming more homogenous in some ways and more dissimilar in others. Having a front-row view of this common culture’s emergence, two steps forward, one step back, and in ways intentional and accidental, is one of the most intriguing parts of the modern Grand Tour. Even those travelers who are not on a whirlwind If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium jaunt around the Continent can be forgiven for forgetting where they are.

  After we left the EU, Lee and I walked through a working-class immigrant neighborhood, which had a burned-out look but also a phoenix spirit, a renewed, remixed streetscape where I could see, without turning my head, Arabic shop signs, English posters, and street signs in Dutch and French—competing with, contradicting, and complementing each other all at once.

  In this baffling era, on this baffling continent, there is no tangible, unified European identity. There never will be. Brussels is Exhibit A both for and against that statement.

  Berlin

  Twice the City It Was

  There’s a lively, electric feel to the city;

  a drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die mood;

  an urge to experience the new and different.

  —Europe on Five Dollars a Day

  Nineteen seventy-two. The Continent was open; the tourists were everywhere. The U.S. economy was faltering, but even this was not enough to dissuade the masses from heading abroad, although it did mean that Arthur Frommer was finally forced to adjust his titular budget for the first time, to Europe on $5 and $10 a Day.

  The previous decade had been good to Frommer. He’d sold a lot of books, branched out to other areas of the travel industry, and become something of a pop culture phenomenon. By 1963 he was selling 150,000 copies of E5D annually; four years later, sales were up to 200,000, though this figure understates his true influence, because many people were lending the books to friends. Five thousand readers were writing to Frommer each year with feedback and tips of their own.

  “This year three hundred fifty thousand Americans—one out of five who travel to Europe—will go with Arthur Frommer,” observed Nora Ephron in a 1967 New York Times profile. “They will eat with Arthur Frommer and, as something of a witticism has it, sleep with Arthur Frommer.”

  E5D was the bestselling travel guide in print.

  Even Temple Fielding had to concede that Frommer was on to something. Mind you, he wouldn’t say so on the record. In 1968, John McPhee wrote a sprawling profile of Fielding for the New Yorker, in which there is just one mention of his budget-minded competitor; it read, in its entirety: “Fielding does not think much of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day. ‘We don’t respect Frommer,’ he told me in an even, sad voice.” Curiously, McPhee didn’t push him on this, and he even opened his profile by stating that Fielding’s competitors were still “scarcely visible behind him”—though, in truth, the numbers and the zeitgeist said otherwise. Fielding’s actions betrayed his unspoken concerns—in 1967, he released a new book called Fielding’s Super-Economy Guide to Europe. I found a 1968 edition, the back cover of which says, “Let’s face it—it’s not realistic to expect to travel in Europe on a budget of only five dollars a day any more.” Temple Fielding was on the defensive, falling behind the upstart competitor.

  But a surprising obstacle had come into Frommer’s—and tourism’s—way: the U.S. government, the very entity that had helped promote mass tourism in the first place as a component of the Marshall Plan. The government’s new message was “See America first.” On New Year’s Day 1968, with the U.S. economy in decline, President Johnson proposed significant new taxes on tourist expenditures overseas and called for Americans to cut back on journeys abroad. The nation’s economic woes, the Johnson administration asserted, were in large part due to American tourists spending billions of dollars overseas; the nation’s “balance of payments” was askew. Johnson established a Commission on the U.S. Balance of Payments and recruited Frommer to serve on it, a tacit acknowledgment of the guidebook guru’s key role in creating the tourist boom.

  Johnson’s efforts, like Fielding’s, were too little, too late. The momentum of tourism was unstoppable; the pursuit of the American Dream now led clearly across the Atlantic. In fact, Christopher Endy notes in Cold War Holidays that many pundits (on both the right and the left of the political spectrum) viewed Johnson’s appeal as an enticement to travel, a way to defy an embattled president in the midst of an unpopular war in Vietnam. Some equated Johnson’s entreaty with Communist travel restrictions, labeling it antiegalitarian, un-American. On balance, Endy says, Johnson’s effort was doomed from the start, and in 1969 tourist spending in western Europe topped the billion-dollar mark for the first time.

  Richard Nixon, ever the opportunist, spoke out against Johnson’s travel stance on the campaign trail in 1968, defending tourism as a middle-class American right. When elected, though, Nixon was forced to deal with the continued economic decline, and in 1971 he devalued the dollar—which, in turn, created higher prices for Americans abroad. Nixon had inadvertently succeeded where Johnson had failed, tightening the financial reins on American travelers.

  But restlessness is perhaps the most enduring of human traits. Americans didn’t stay home, they just made sure that they spent less when they went abroad—and thanks to Frommer, they had the template for doing so. Airlines, too, encouraged travel by slashing prices, thanks in part to the 1970 debut of the first jumbo jet, the Boeing 747-100, a wide-body airplane more than twice as large as its predecessor, the 707, and able to carry more than four hundred and fifty passengers. Students in particular kept traveling in droves. With job prospects drying up, “rather than spend the summer idle, they are using the meager savings they had hoped would eventually finance a future trip to travel now,” wrote Paul Goldberger—a Yale undergrad who had toured Europe twice and is today the architecture critic for the New Yorker—in the New York Times in June 1971. He added that “[a]n estimated record of 750,000” students were heading to the Continent that summer, following Frommer’s lead.

  Arthur Frommer essentially initiated “if not the Junior Year abroad then certainly the drop-out one,” Stanley Elkin wrote in a 1972 profile for Harper’s. “Indeed, in a way, he invented abroad itself.”

  Elkin’s kicker: “It’s no accident that Arthur Frommer, the Pill, and the credit card are simultaneous phenomena. Everybody deserves everything. You only live once. Screwing for everybody and Europe for everybody too. This is the egalitarian key to a proper understanding of Europe on Five Dollars a Day.”

  War does have a tendency to screw things up. The Continent wasn’t really open in 1972, of course—all that Cold War and Iron Curtain stuff, well, it got in the way. There were few tourists in Prague, for example, one of the travel hot spots of the modern era, and not many Americans were hopping on a train from Brussels to Berlin, as Lee and I were doing now.

  “Don’t mention the war.”

  The middle-aged British men in the seats behind us thought that this was the funniest one-liner ever and kept circling back to it as we sped through the German countryside. They paused their banter only to listen to the announcements that blared over the PA system in German, French, Dutch, and English. The messages got substantially shorter with each translation. Alarmingly shorter. I timed them: one German version was a minute and forty seconds long; the English translation was eleven seconds. What were they not telling us?

  Eventually I pieced together a few of the tinny broadcasts. When an attendant stopped next to our seats and said several sentences in German, I was pretty sure I knew what she was saying.

  “Ja,” I replied.

&
nbsp; She gave a cheery nod and went on her way.

  “Did you understand that?” Lee asked, incredulously.

  “Well, not the words, maybe, but the general—”

  “You can’t just smile and nod! That could have been vital information!”

  I shrugged. “She was probably just repeating what they’ve been saying on the loudspeaker: the train isn’t going all the way to Berlin, so we have to get off and switch in Cologne. The words were about the same.”

  “About the same? May I remind you, Doug: you don’t speak any German.”

  “True. But I bet it was the train switch.” A little voice in my brain, though, was agreeing with Lee: Are you trying to get yourself killed?

  Lee shook his head and laughed. “Maybe. But still…”

  As we disembarked in Cologne, the last words I heard came in a stage whisper that sounded like a threat: “Don’t mention the war.”

  Our tour the next morning began on the former East Berlin side of the Brandenburg Gate. At a Starbucks. Next to the Museum Kennedys. Naturally. Frommer didn’t recommend this tour, of course (though it’s worth noting that it was free, so Frommer would have approved)—but then, he didn’t have many suggestions for seeing the sights of East Berlin. Not much to do there, he says. He’d gone. He’d seen the bleak streets and sampled the sausages, which tasted like they were “sawdust-filled.”

  There were about fifty people milling around when we got to the Starbucks. In the plaza near the gate were even more tourists, plus a guy dressed as an American soldier from World War II and selling war-related knickknacks; a living statue in a form-fitting yellow outfit; and someone dressed in a sort of Winnie the Pooh knockoff costume—basically, the same scene you’ll find in any tourist area in any city in the New Old World. I should have expected this, I realized: it’s a tourist landmark, so of course there’s a Starbucks and a living statue. But up to this point, my knowledge of East Berlin began and ended with grainy images of people clambering over and tearing down a wall on a certain night in November 1989. (I was eight years old then, watching the events unfold on a television in my third-grade classroom. My teacher told us it was important, that we should remember this forever. I duly committed it to memory, although I doubt I appreciated the full significance for another decade or so.)

  Surrounding us, on the sides of this large, open square, were an array of squat buildings, mostly stone, all fairly nondescript. There was one that was a bit nicer-looking than the others, its copper mansard roof patinated to a jade hue. It was the only structure that most of our tour group photographed—upstaging even the Brandenburg Gate itself—after our guide told us its historical significance.

  “Do you recall, several years ago, when Michael Jackson dangled his baby from a hotel balcony?” the guide asked, her face and voice entirely deadpan. “This is it. The MJ-baby-dangling hotel. Take your photos. I will not judge you.”

  We couldn’t resist.

  Our guide was British (as we had already discovered, tour guides might know the city better than many locals, but most of them are not, in fact, locals). Her name was Ines the Sixteenth. That’s right: the sixteenth. Her family has been giving firstborn daughters that name since long before my country was even founded. Welcome to Europe. She had short, reddish hair, a checkered scarf, and a flair for the dramatic, investing each story with emotion and, when appropriate, more of that dry humor. It felt like exactly the right tone for this city.

  “You are wondering why I’ve stopped you here,” she said as we stood in the middle of a parking lot. “Mind the dog poo,” she added, pointing to the ground. We all took a step back, forming an inadvertent circle around the offending pile, which only gave it added prominence.

  This was the site of Hitler’s bunker, she explained, the place where Der Führer died. It had been converted to its banal, utilitarian use and intentionally left landmark-free to prevent neo-Nazi nutjobs from treating it as a memorial.

  “You can’t make a whole city a museum,” Ines XVI said. “You don’t want to. The only commemoration that Hitler gets here is a small pile of dog poo. I think that’s appropriate.”

  Lee and I struck up conversations with our fellow tourists in our group of about thirty. Most of them, like us, were in their mid- to late twenties, recent college graduates or young professionals. I’ll confess to expecting, almost hoping for, some stereotypical stoner-hippie-“I’m not a tourist” types—they would add some anecdotal color as they passed around a joint and played Hacky Sack every time we stopped. I came up empty. Everyone was inquisitive and engaged, peppering our guide with questions and genuinely interested in the landmarks and history.

  Sally, a law school student from the United States, was eager to discuss literature and gave me tips on books about Berlin’s history. Jian, a shy recent college grad from Malaysia, was midway through a long-planned Grand Tour on his way back home after studying in England. He had put in long hours as a waiter in London to save up for this trip, and he was savoring every moment, taking a photo roughly every ten steps. A few in our group, to my surprise, were from other parts of Germany. At least ten were from Australia. Lee asked if they were all traveling together. “No,” one of them said with a patient grin that suggested she must get that question a lot. “There are just a lot of Aussies in Europe.”

  Ines XVI stopped us again.

  “This is not the Berlin Wall,” she said, an inkling of a smirk showing as she pointed to a fence. “It is a wall to protect the Berlin Wall”—her hand shifted slightly to the tall, graffiti-covered concrete slabs behind the fence—“from tourists looking to chip off a piece for a souvenir. It’s said that if you took all the pieces that have been sold to tourists since the wall came down, you could rebuild the wall three times over.”

  A few minutes later, we arrived at what I would come to think of as the ultimate symbol of Berlin then and now: Checkpoint Charlie.

  This is perhaps the most potent of Cold War landmarks, where East literally met West. In Europe on Five Dollars a Day, Frommer notes that it was actually quite simple for tourists to come here—the wall was there to keep Easterners in, not others out. If you wanted to cross the border, no problem: “register your name with the American MP’s at Checkpoint Charlie, tell them the time at which you plan to return, and if you’re not there at that time, they’ll take action.”

  We paused on a street corner and Ines XVI told us a few of the stories of this place. She was in her element, theatrical and lively. She told us about the West Berlin man whose fiancée had been stranded on the East Berlin side when the wall went up. As a Westerner, he was allowed to visit her, but she couldn’t leave. So he bought the lowest-riding car he could find, then had a mechanic friend drop it even lower. When he returned to Checkpoint Charlie after his next visit, the guards came out to ask him about his companion.

  “He pushed her head down, gunned the engine,” Ines XVI said as we hung on her every word, “and they liimboooed under the gate as fast as they could. The American soldiers on the other side applauded as they sped off.”

  I looked over at the American soldier manning the re-created station now for our touristic benefit. He was munching a candy bar, holding an American flag, and casting a surly look at passersby. We all aimed our cameras at him.

  “No photo without tip!” he growled in Russian-accented English.

  He gestured to a nearby booth where another bored soldier, this one a North African dressed as an East German, stood next to a camera on a tripod. Fitting, I mused, that the symbol of the fall of Communism is now a capitalist enterprise. Freedom isn’t free.

  The guardhouse/Ye Olde Cold War attraction sat in the middle of Friedrichstrasse. On one side of the street was the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. We didn’t have time to visit, but it looked Serious and Informative. On the other side of the street was Snackpoint Charlie—actual name—a food court with a Subway, a kebab stand, and a restaurant advertising “Asian Sushi Fusion Food.” Surprisingly, none of these appeared to o
ffer cheesily named foods like a Berlin Wall-dorf Salad or a U-Boat Sub. Surely, I thought, those will be here soon.

  At that moment, in September 2009, unified Berlin was still a teenager; it would turn twenty later that year.

  “And like a teenager,” Ines XVI said, “it’s still gawky and awkward,” still testing new things, figuring out its identity, and growing, growing, growing. Most of all, the city seemed unsure what to make of its complicated history, which is why Checkpoint Charlie is such a striking emblem of Berlin both then and now.

  A block away from Checkpoint Charlie, in East German territory, a long fence along the sidewalk bore a series of signs with a detailed history of the wall. There were photos, illustrations, and text in multiple languages; it was a moving testament to the tyranny this city and country had suffered. Right at the end of the line of historical markers was another sign, a sandwich board, blocking the sidewalk: “Ben & Jerry’s Sold Here.” A few steps later was a souvenir shop with tacky T-shirts.

  I can’t express how common this scene was—or how dizzying and jarring. The city seemingly can’t decide whether it wants to dwell on the past or focus on the future. So it tries to do both, with no buffer zone between the two. (By the way, this making-sense-of-history is such a central issue in modern Germany that they have a term for it. Take a deep breath: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld translates it as “the process of coming to terms with or mastering the past,” in particular the Holocaust and the Third Reich.)

  There are monuments all over: the Holocaust Memorial, with its haunting field of stone blocks of various sizes, orderly and yet chaotic; the sunken room full of empty shelves on the square where the Nazis burned books; the double rows of cobblestones that trace the line of the Berlin Wall, showing the seam where the nation was ripped apart and is slowly, even now, being sewn back together. And then, just another half stride beyond, is a billboard or a mall or a cluster of souvenir shops. The sunken room marking the book burnings is almost literally in the shadow of a three-story-tall BMW advertisement that dominates one side of the square.