by Glen Chilton
A very large gallery was devoted to dinosaurs. While examining the Tyrannosaurus, I had a delightful little experience. Three children, two boys and a girl, all about ten years old, came up to me and said, “Entschuldigen Sie bitte,” followed by a lot of German that I couldn’t keep up with. Instead of saying something vaguely German like “Ich spreche kaum Deutsch,” or “Ich verstehe nicht,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak German.” They looked at me hopefully, and thrust a small disposable camera at me.” “Oh, you want me to take your photograph?” “Ja!” “In front of the Tyrannosaurus?” “Ja!” I was pleased to find that society hadn’t frightened them into avoiding contact with strangers at all cost. I crouched down as far as I could to frame them with as much of the dinosaur as possible, and clicked off a photo. “Danke. Danke.”
I set off in search of more Frankfurt sights. Tour books speak of the not-to-be-missed opportunity to scan all of Frankfurt afforded by the observation deck of the Main Tower. After paying the 4.50 entry fee, I had to pass through a security check as rigorous as that at any airport. I was directed to walk through a metal detector, while my keys and coins were thoroughly x-rayed and found to be harmless. A lady with a hand wand checked my trouser zipper with a degree of enthusiasm that didn’t seem entirely professional.
After a high-speed elevator ride, I found the view from the observation deck to be truly grand, even though it reminded me that I suffer from a bit of vertigo. The tower’s observation platform is 650 feet above the street, fully four times higher than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. If I were a young lover calling Frankfurt home, I could imagine proposing marriage on the deck on a summer evening as the daylight faded. I could see that Frankfurt had only twelve or fifteen really tall structures, depending on the definition of “really tall,” as most other buildings restricted themselves to just six or seven stories. I spotted the natural history museum with ease, as well as the Frankfurt airport in the distance. I could see the Dom, and the small Römerberg district that somehow missed being destroyed by Allied bombing. But then I had a disquieting thought. I suppose mine was much like the view of Frankfurt for Allied bomber pilots that had come to destroy the city.
With my feet back at street level, I aimed for the Römerberg, a district of cafés, trinket shops, bakeries, jewelry stores, and a rather peculiar toy store that featured in its windows an impressive assortment of railway cars, teddy bears, and playing cards with pictures of naked women. I didn’t buy any. Honestly. I did buy a sandwich, chowing down while looking up at Frankfurt’s Dom, which is not really a cathedral because it doesn’t have an archbishop. Even so, it is quite a sight, constructed of the same sort of beautiful sandstone that was so prominent on the museum. At least, the chunks that I could see were constructed of sandstone—much of the church was hidden from view. Completion of renovation efforts were long overdue, but it was still being rebuilt when I visited in 2004, and the main tower was hidden in a multistory drape. Curiously, this shroud had a giant picture of a racecar advertising Panasonic. I had to wonder what God would think about having His house of worship covered in a giant advertisement. I hope that He would be pragmatic and not at all vengeful.
THE NEXT DAY I earned a few points for gall, at least in my own mind. The only reason I had for traveling to Mainz was a letter written in 1959, housed in the files of Paul Hahn at the Royal Ontario Museum. Someone with a scrawled signature had returned Hahn’s letter of inquiry, indicating that the three Passenger Pigeons, Great Auk, and Labrador Duck in the collection of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Mainz had all been burned. No further details were provided. Presumably the fire had something to do with World War II. I had sent letters and email messages to curator and zoologist Ulrich Schmidt, but these had all gone unanswered. This could, of course, be taken as a signal to stop pestering him, but a small nagging voice inside me urged me to travel to Mainz anyway, just in case the man with the bad handwriting had gotten things wrong. At the very least it was the opportunity to visit the site where a stuffed Labrador Duck had resided before its fiery end.
Mainz is a community of 200,000 residents. The trip southwest from Frankfurt was on one of Germany’s less zoomy train lines. Not nearly as stylish as an ICE or an EC, an IC, or even an IR, it wasn’t quite as far down the list as an S-Bahn, but it was certainly in the second half of the alphabet. The train stopped at the Frankfurt airport and a lot of little communities where no one wanted to get on or off. The one fellow who detrained at Raunheim seemed frightened. Perhaps it is the site of a Cold War nuclear waste disposal facility.
Unlike the region around the main train station in Frankfurt, rich in drug addicts and sex shops, the region around the main train station in Mainz was rich in pastry shops and schoolchildren on day trips. Instead of using the small map of Mainz that I had ripped out of my guidebook, I chose to follow a pulse of children on the assumption that they were heading somewhere wonderful. This didn’t work out at all, partly because the teacher was having trouble keeping the children all together, so that both the head and tail of the group were moving at a treacle pace, with the middlemost bits pulsing forward and back. I finally consulted my map, looked at a few street names, and then pulled out my compass. The task was compounded by roads with their own festive sense of direction, street names that changed every 50 yards, and a sudden and unexpected reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles. My map could not possibly have been right. The streets of Mainz may be navigable if you were born there and had never left. They may be just the ticket to confuse an invading army of foot soldiers, but they were completely useless to me on my first hour in town.
A kindly-looking gentleman getting ready to cycle away watched me with sympathy. Or possibly scorn. When asked, he graciously got back off his bicycle, pulled out his reading glasses, and peered at my map. After more than a minute of peering he was able to use my pencil to mark where I was.
After passing down some improbably minor streets, and rechecking my orientation at every intersection, I found a building labeled Naturhistorisches Museum. In fact, I found two. One looked likely to house the public display, and the other to house administrative offices. I entered the latter. I explained to a very helpful receptionist that I was looking for Dr. Ulrich Schmidt. She said that they had no one by that name, but that they did have someone named Dr. Ulrich Schmidt. My German accent must be absolutely awful. I asked if I might see Dr. Schmidt, but was told that this would be a problem because he was in Rwanda. Surely I misheard. Instead, she took me to see the Assistant Director of the museum, Dr. Herbert Lutz, a scholarly-looking fellow with speckled gray and brown hair and beard, who took my business card and read it from start to finish. My speech about Labrador Ducks and the reason for my visit to Mainz seemed to genuinely interest him, which was particularly gracious considering I had dropped in without warning (at least to him) and was asking for his time in what was likely a busy workday.
Lutz started to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Dr. Schmidt was indeed in Rwanda. The museum had been working on ties with colleagues in Rwanda for quite some time. Personnel from Mainz had trained two Rwandans in curatorial skills, but both had been killed in the recent war. Despite horrific setbacks, the Rwandan museum of natural history was ready to throw open its doors to the public and Schmidt was there to help. Lutz went on to explain that the gentleman with the really bad handwriting who had written to Hahn was named Stadelmann, who served as a museum director of sorts in the years following the war. In the spring of 1945, like just about everything else in Germany, the museum had been hit by bombs, reportedly the night before evacuation of the natural history collection was due to begin. The bombs completed their intended job of making a hellish mess of the building, destroying much of the collection and its records. However, anything that could be salvaged from the wreckage was set aside. With a charred foot over here, a blackened fossil over there, and almost no surviving paperwork, sixty years later the museum was still trying to figure out exactly what was what. Lutz explained that
by 1959 it was unlikely that Stadelmann had come to terms with everything that had survived the bombing. There was a chance that the Labrador Duck, or bits of it, might still be in the collection. Quite likely the museum had no written record of having ever owned a Labrador Duck. Lutz took a photocopy of my letter from Stadelmann to Hahn and we went in search of the person who could give me a definitive answer.
Lutz and I left the administrative building, and using a back door, entered the building used to house the public display. Constructed in the fifteenth century as a monastery, after World War II it had been rebuilt rather cheaply and was now in need of a complete overhaul. This is all very well, but the people who hold the purse strings at Mainz City Hall didn’t see the museum as a big priority. It was much lower in importance than the city’s annual carnival, for instance. I could see where paint was jumping off the walls, and the ceiling had goopy water stains.
My head was spinning in anticipation. Was it possible that I was about to rediscover a precious specimen thought to have been destroyed sixty years before? Could it be that the stuffed Labrador Duck was just waiting for me to come along and spot it? A Mr. Hildebrand listened to the story in German. Lutz got his response in German. I practiced my look of casual aloofness and probably failed miserably. At this point, I really wish I could report to you that the Labrador Duck, Great Auk, and three Passenger Pigeons were sitting in the corner of a basement, a bit dusty and a bit smoky, but otherwise in fine shape. Regrettably, I can’t. Hildebrand explained that these birds had been well and truly incinerated, with not a trace remaining.
I was provided with a ticket labeled Freier Eintritt, and so I got to enter yet another museum without paying. Unlike some of the world’s great museums that I had visited, and with the deepest respect for the people working at the Natural History Museum, who were shackled by a too-small budget, this one was in pretty ratty shape. One can do only so much with a fifteenth-century monastery, but this wasn’t it. The paint scheme was straight out of your grandparents’ kitchen, circa 1955. Lightbulbs were burned out; radiators were exposed; some of the explanatory labels had been constructed decades before on a manual typewriter. I saw little artistic flair. Most of the displays left me asking why in the world I, or anyone else, should care. Room 12, labeled Heimische Tiere, was probably the best of the lot, with some effective, if dated, displays of animals arranged by habitat type, including field and stream, woodland, and creatures to be found near the house. Inexplicably, one end wall was covered with a hundred mounted heads of horned animals. Or just the skull and horns. Or just the horns.
This is not to say that the museum has nothing to be proud of. It has three stuffed quaggas that survived the war when so many other specimens were lost. The combination of stallion, mare, and foal represents a good chunk of the world’s entire collection of this species of extinct horse-cum-zebra. I was told that there was now interest in genetic analysis to determine if the foal was the offspring of the adults on display. These three specimens are housed adequately, but whoever is in charge of finances for the rest of this museum should be ashamed and embarrassed.
Disappointed by the museum, but determined not to be disappointed by Mainz, I set off to discover something about it. I ate my take-away lunch in a small square in the shadow of St. Christoph Gutenberg Pfarrkirche. Dating to the ninth century, the church is dedicated to St. Christopher, but is better known as the parish church where Johann Gutenberg was probably baptized. You will probably remember Gutenberg as the whiz kid who invented the printing press. According to the people at the Association for the Beatification of Gutenberg, the Mainz hero began life as Johann Gensfleisch but changed his name to Gutenberg, feeling that “Beautiful Mountain” was a more dignified surname than “Goose Flesh.”
I found the tourist information office, despite a series of signs that pointed me to the middle of the Rhine, the city’s crematorium, and the transit of Venus across the Sun. The woman behind the desk provided me with an annotated map of Mainz. Out of English versions, she was able to provide me one with marginal notes in French. She circled the Dom and the church of St. Stephen as places that absolutely should not, could not, must not be missed. I baited her. “I understand that there is a natural history museum in town.” “Yes,” she said, “It’s…it’s right…” She couldn’t immediately find it on the map. “Is it any good? Is it worth a trip?” Diplomatically, she neither lied nor warned me off. “Yeah…well…well…We all had to go there as children, but…yeah…it’s okay.” Mainz city councillors should hear this sort of halfhearted endorsement.
I strolled to the river. What a river it is. Romans had been sensible enough to build a settlement where the Main meets the Rhine. The Romans knew a river when they saw one; the Rhine runs more than 800 miles from the Swiss Alps through Liechtenstein, Austria, France, Germany, and Holland before emptying into the North Sea. I was delighted to see that, unlike so many other great rivers in Europe, this one had some actual commercial traffic. Each barge that chugged by had a single gray automobile on deck. A little less useful than a lifeboat, I would have thought.
Marching toward the center of town, I found the Dom, although it looked a lot more like a fortress than a cathedral. The windows that pierced the outer walls are the sort seen often in British castles, designed to make it easy to fire arrows down on potential invaders. About two dozen people had seated themselves in pews on the right side of the nave, but no one was seated on the left side. Risking some horrible faux pas, I plunked myself down on the left side. From my vantage point, the Dom seemed to be saying: “This monument to our praise of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit will still be standing long after the memory of humankind has passed from the Earth.” Parishioners may be bathed in warm light on a bright Sunday, but it was all a bit bleak the day I visited. Much of the construction had been completed in dark red sandstone, with dark marble floors and an acute shortage of windows. There was also a surprising paucity of tributes to God.
At the entrance to the Dom, there was a large sign written in German, English, Spanish, Italian, Sanskrit, Croatian, Djiboutian, and !Kung click language, explaining that, as a house of worship, a degree of decorum in style of dress was appropriate. As I sat contemplating the nature of my immortal soul, and why the Dom’s columns were square instead of round, a couple off to my left got into an argument. They were dressed in matching cut-off jeans, T-shirts, and denim baseball caps. The argument, loud and prolonged, concerned a message displayed on their digital camera. “Look,” she shouted, “it says right there, ‘Picture is blurred.’” “Well, I don’t care what it says,” he replied. “For what we paid for that camera, it had better be in focus!”
The Gutenberg Museum, Mainz’s most popular museum, was just down the way. The people of Mainz are very proud of Gutenberg, and very proud of God, presumably not in that order. After all, there is only one Gutenberg Museum in Mainz and lots of really big churches. Without Gutenberg there would be no cheap erotic novels, but without God, reasoned the citizens of Mainz, there wouldn’t be much of anything. Not having gone to the Gutenberg Museum in Strasbourg the previous summer, in a sense of fair play, I didn’t go to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.
EVERYONE IS ENTITLED to a bad day now and then. Once in a while, for reasons completely beyond your control, a day goes wrong from beginning to end. On a morning with an important meeting, your water heater dies without warning and your hair must be washed in cold water in the kitchen sink. Your cat gets sick on the carpet. Your nose begins to bleed for no good reason. Pixies move your car keys from the hall closet where they are placed carefully every day to a dark corner of the laundry room. Not that keys would do you any good because your car has a flat, and the spare tire, checked just last week, is now inexplicably flat too. There is no predicting such days; these things just happen, and you comfort yourself by humming tunes from Broadway musicals. You are a nice person and, being a nice person, you don’t want to make anyone else miserable. But try as you might to keep it all
to yourself, your bad day takes on a life of its own, and when you finally get to work, you pass it along. And as long as it doesn’t happen too often, no one really minds.
But when bad days happen to the same person again and again, and that person makes an art form out of passing along their bad mood, a reputation is in the making. Some miserable people lose their friends, and some lose their jobs, but some manage to hang on and pollute their immediate world. In some cases the poisoned atmosphere can linger, even after the poisoner has moved on to new challenges. This is my theory to explain why some workplaces have a reputation for being uncooperative and inefficient year after year. Everyone knows it, but no one knows how to stop it.
The Zoologisches Institut der Universität Tübingen was digging itself out from under a reputation for being uncooperative and inefficient. When I had contacted the museum about ten years earlier, asking about their Labrador Duck, cooperation and efficiency were nowhere to be seen. The response to my first letter warned me that the curator was extremely reluctant to respond to inquiries because of “internationally organized gangs” that had stolen specimens from the museum. I passed along contact details for well-placed persons in the world of ornithology who could vouch for my honorable character, but this effort did not elicit any response. The response to another request two months later explained that I could expect help shortly. In this case, “shortly” meant “never,” and, in the end, I couldn’t even get an acknowledgment that the museum really had a Labrador Duck. Luckily, all of that had changed in the interval, and my new contact, Dr. Erich Weber, was being entirely enthusiastic and cooperative.
