Neither Here Nor There

by Bill Bryson

  I woke in a square of sunshine, too hot and bright to sleep through, and stumbled to the window to find a gorgeous morning blazing away outside, much too gorgeous to waste. The Hauptbahnhoff concourse and the street below, the Kirchenallee, were so brightly bathed in sunlight that I had to shield my eyes. I had a hangover you could sell to science, but after two cups of strong coffee at a sunny table outside the Popp, a handful of aspirins, two cigarettes and a cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm, I felt tolerably human and was able to undertake a gentle stroll to the waterfront through the dappled sunshine of St Pauli Park. There wasn’t much to see upon arrival, just cranes and dockyards and the broad, sluggish estuary of the Elbe. I thought of what Konrad Adenauer used to say: ‘You can smell Prussia when you get to the Elbe.’ I could only smell dead fish, or at least I assumed it was dead fish. Maybe it was Prussians.

  In the 1930s, the docks at Hamburg employed 100,000 people. Now the number is barely 1,200, though it is still the second busiest port in Europe (after Rotterdam), with a volume of trade equal to the whole of Austria’s. Until just a couple of weeks before, I could have witnessed the interesting sight of freighters unloading grain from their aft holds and redepositing it in their forward holds as a way of extracting additional funds from the ever-beneficent EEC. With its flair for grandiose fuck-ups, the EEC for years paid special subsidies to shippers for grain that was produced in one part of the Common Market and re-exported from another, so shippers taking a consignment from, say, France to Russia discovered that they could make a fortune by stopping off at Hamburg en route and pointlessly unloading the cargo and then reloading it. This little ruse enriched the shippers by a mere £42 million before the bureaucrats of the EEC realized that the money could be much better spent on something else – themselves, say – and put a stop to the practice.

  I walked a few hundred yards inland and uphill to the Reeperbahn, that famed mile-long avenue of sin. It looked disappointingly unlusty. Of course, sinful places never look their best in daylight. I remember thinking even in Las Vegas that it all looked rather endearingly pathetic when viewed over a cup of coffee and a doughnut. All that noise and electric energy that is loosed at dusk vanishes with the desert sun and it all suddenly seems as thin and one-dimensional as a film set. But even allowing for this, the Reeperbahn looked tame stuff, especially after Amsterdam. I had envisioned it as a narrow, pedestrianized street packed on both sides with bars, sex shops, peep shows, strip clubs and all the other things a sailor needs to revive a salty dick, but this was almost a normal city street, busy with traffic flowing between the western suburbs and the downtown. There was a fair sprinkling of seamy joints, but also a lot of more or less normal establishments – restaurants, coffee shops, souvenir stores, jeans shops, even a furniture store and a theatre showing the inescapable Cats. Almost the only thing that told you this was a neighbourhood of dim repute was the hard look on the people’s faces. They all had that gaunt, washed-out look of people who run funfair stalls.

  The really seedy attractions were on the side streets, like Grosse Freiheit, which I turned up now. I walked as far as the Kaiserkeller at No. 36, where the Beatles used to play. Most of the other businesses along the street were given over to live sex shows, and I was interested to note that the photos of the artistes on display outside were unusually – I am tempted to say unwisely – candid. In my experience, places such as these always show pictures of famously beautiful women like Christie Brinkley and Raquel Welsh, which I dare say even the most inexperienced sailor from Tristan da Cunha must realize is not what he’s likely to encounter inside, but at least they leave you wondering what you are going to find. These pictures, however, showed gyrating women of frightfully advanced years – women with maroon hair and thighs that put me in mind of flowing lava. These ladies must have been past their best when the Beatles were playing. They weren’t just over the hill; they were pinpricks on the horizon.

  The sex shops, too, were as nothing compared to those of Amsterdam, though they did do a nice line in inflatable dolls, which I studied closely, never having seen one outside a Benny Hill sketch. I was particularly taken with an inflatable companion called the Aphrodite, which sold for 129 marks. The photograph on the front was of a delectably attractive brunette in a transparent négligée. Either this was cruelly misleading or they have made more progress with vinyl in recent years than I had realized.

  In large, lurid letters the box listed Aphrodite’s many features: LIFE SIZED!, SOFT FLESH-LIKE SKIN!, INVITING ANUS! (Beg pardon?), MOVABLE EYES! (Ugh) and LUSCIOUS VAGINA THAT VIBRATES AT YOUR COMMAND!

  Yeah, but can she cook? I thought.

  There was another one called a Chinese Love Doll 980. ‘For a Long-Lasting Relationship,’ it promised sincerely, and then in bolder letters added: EXTRA THICK VINYL RUBBER. Kind of takes the romance out of it, don’t you think? This was clearly a model for the more practical types. On the other hand it also had a VIBRATING VAGINA AND ANUS and TITS THAT GET HOT! ! Below this it promised: SMELL LIKE A REAL WOMAN.

  All these claims were given in a variety of languages. It was interesting to see that the German versions all sounded coarse and bestial: LEBENGROSSE, VOLLE JUNGE BRUSTE, LIEBENDER MUND. The same words in Spanish sounded delicate and romantic: ANO TENTADOR, DELICIOSA VAGINA QUE VIBRA A TU ORDEN, LABIOS AMOROSOS. You could almost imagine ordering these in a restaurant (‘I’ll have the Ano Tentador lightly grilled and a bottle of Labios Amorosos ’88’). The same things in German sounded like a wake-up call at a prison camp.

  I was fascinated. Who buys these things? Presumably the manufacturers wouldn’t include a vibrating anus or tits that get hot if the demand wasn’t there. So who’s clamouring for them? And how does anyone bring himself to make the purchase? Do you tell the person behind the counter it’s for a friend? Can you imagine taking it home on the tram and worrying all the time that the bag will split and it will flop out or self-inflate or, worse still, that you’ll be killed in a crash and all the next week the papers will be full of headlines like ‘POLICE IDENTIFY RUBBER-DOLL MAN’ above a smiling picture of you from your high-school year book? I couldn’t handle the tension. Imagine having friends drop in unexpectedly when you were just about to pop the champagne cork and settle down for a romantic evening with your vinyl companion and having to shove her up the chimney and then worry for the rest of the evening that you’ve left the box on the bed or some other give-away lying around. (‘By the way, who’s the other place setting for, Bill?’)

  Perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps these people aren’t the least embarrassed about their abnormal infatuations. Perhaps they talk about it freely with their friends, sit around bars saying, ‘Did I tell you I just traded up to an Arabian Nights Model 280? The eyes don’t move, but the anus gives good action.’ Maybe they even bring them along. ‘Helmut, I’d like you to meet my new 440. Mind her tits. They get hot.’

  With this intriguing thought to chew on, I strolled back to the city centre past the massive law courts and concert hall and along an avenue interestingly named Gorch-Fock-Wall, which sounded to me like the answer to a riddle (‘What does Gorch do when he can’t find his inflatable doll?’), and had a look around the shopping streets and classy arcades packed into the area between the huge town hall and Inner Alster.

  It was getting on for midday and people were sitting out in the sunny plazas having lunch or eating ice-creams. Almost without exception they looked healthy and prosperous and often were strikingly good-looking. I remembered German cities from twenty years before being full of businessmen who looked just as Germans were supposed to look – fat and arrogant. You would see them gorging themselves on piles of sausages and potatoes and gulping with full mouths from litre tankards of golden beer at all hours of the day, but now they seemed to be picking delicately at salads and fish, and looking fit and tanned – and, more than that, friendly and happy. Maybe this was just a Hamburg trait. Hamburg is after all closer to Denmark and Sweden and even England than it is
to Munich, so perhaps it is atypical of Germany.

  At all events, this relaxed and genial air was something that I hadn’t associated with Germans before, at least not those aged over twenty-five. There was no whiff of arrogance here, just a quiet confidence, which was clearly justified by the material wealth around them. All those little doubts we’ve all had about the wisdom of letting the Germans become the masters of Europe evaporated in the Hamburg sunshine. Forty-five years ago Hamburg was rubble. Virtually everything around me was new, even when it didn’t look it. The people had made their city, and even themselves, rich and elegant and handsome through their cleverness and hard work, and they had every right to be arrogant about it, but they were not, and I admired them for that.

  I don’t think I can ever altogether forgive the Germans their past, not as long as I can wonder if that friendly old waiter who brings me my coffee might have spent his youth bayonetting babies or herding Jews into gas ovens. Some things are so monstrous as to be unpardonable. But I don’t see how anyone could go to Germany now and believe for a moment that that could ever happen again. Germans, it struck me, are becoming the new Americans – rich, ambitious, hard-working, health-conscious, sure of their place in the world. Seeing Hamburg now, I was happy to hand them my destiny – happier, at any rate, than leaving it to those who have spent the last forty years turning Britain into a kind of nation-state equivalent of Woolworth’s.

  One thing hadn’t changed: the women still don’t shave their armpits. This has always puzzled me in a vague sort of way. They all look so beautiful and stylish, and then they lift up their arms and there’s a Brillo pad hanging there. I know some people think it’s earthy, but so are turnips and I don’t see anyone hanging those in their armpits. Still, if failure to deal with secondary pubic hairs is the worst trait the Germans take with them into the closing years of the century, then I for my part shall be content to let them lead us into the new millennium. Not that we will have the slightest fucking choice, mind you.

  All these lithe and attractive bodies began to depress me, especially after I caught sight of myself reflected in a store window and realized that I was the fat one now. After spending the first twenty-five years of my life looking as if my mother had mated with a stick insect, these sudden reflected glimpses of rolling blubber still come as a shock. Even now I have to stop myself from giving a good-morning smile to the fat guy every time I get into a mirrored lift. I tried a diet once, but the trouble is they so easily get out of control. I lost four pounds in the first week and was delighted until it occurred to me that at this rate in only a little over a year I would vanish altogether. So it came as something of a relief to discover that in the second week I put all the weight back on (I was on a special diet of my own devising called the Pizza and Ice-Cream Diet) and I still draw comfort from the thought that if there is ever a global famine I will still be bounding around, possibly even playing a little tennis, while the rest of you are lying there twitching your last.

  I devoted the afternoon to a walk around the immense Outer Alster. I hadn’t intended to spend the whole afternoon there, but it was so beautiful that I couldn’t pull myself away. Sailing boats dotted the water, and little red and white ferries plied endlessly beneath a sky of benign clouds, taking passengers between the rich northern quarters of the city and the distant downtown. A narrow park, full of joggers and lovers and occasional benchloads of winos (who looked remarkably fit and prosperous considering their vocation), encircled the lake and offered one enchantment after another. Every view across the water was framed by sturdy oaks and trembling willows, and offered distant prospects of the city: the space-needle eminence of a TV tower, a few scattered skyscrapers, and for the rest copper roofs and church spires that looked as if they had been there for ever.

  On the streets around the perimeter of the lake, and as far back into the surrounding streets as you cared to wander, stood huge houses of every architectural style, with nothing in common but their grandness. Where the lake occasionally wandered off into placid backwaters, the houses had immense shady lawns running down to the water’s edge, with gazebos and summer houses and their own jetties. It must be very agreeable to live on a lake in a grand house and go to work by foot or bike around the lake or by ferry across it or even aboard your own boat and to emerge at the other end at such a rich and handsome city centre. What a perfect life you could lead in Hamburg.

  10. Copenhagen

  I took a train to Copenhagen. I like travelling by train in Denmark because you are forever getting on and off ferries. It takes longer, but it’s more fun. I don’t know how anyone could fail to experience that frisson of excitement that comes with pulling up alongside a vast white ship that is about to sail away with you aboard it. I grew up a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, so for me any sea voyage, however brief, remains a novelty. But I noticed that even the Danes and Germans, for whom this must be routine, were peering out of the windows with an air of expectancy as we reached the docks at Puttgarden and our train was shunted onto the ferry, the Karl Carstens.

  Here’s a tip for you if you ever travel on a Scandinavian ferry. Don’t be the first off the train, because everyone will follow you, trusting you to find the way into the main part of the ship. I was in a group of about 300 people following a flustered man in a grey trilby who led us on a two-mile hike around the cargo deck, taking us up and down long avenues of railway carriages and huge canvas-sided trucks, casting irritated glances back at us as if he wished we would just go away, but we knew that our only hope was to stick to him like glue and, sure enough, he eventually found a red button on the wall, which when pressed opened a secret hatch to the stairwell.

  Overcome with new frissons of excitement, everyone clambered hurriedly up the metal stairs and made straight for the buffet. You could tell the nationality of the people by what they went for. The Germans all had plates piled high with meat and potatoes, the Danes had Carlsbergs and cream cakes, the Swedes one piece of Ryvita with a little dead fish on it. The queues were too much for me, so I went up on the top deck and stood out in the sunshine and gusty breeze as the boat cast off and, with a sound oddly like a washing machine on its first cycle, headed across the twelve miles of white-capped water between northern Germany and the Danish island of Lolland. There were about eight of us, all men, standing in the stiff breeze, pretending we weren’t perishing. Slowly Puttgarden receded behind us in a wake of foam and before long Lolland appeared over the horizon and began to glide towards us, like a huge low-lying sea monster.

  You cannot beat sea travel, if you ask me, but there’s not much of it left these days. Even now grand plans are under way to run bridges or tunnels between all the main islands of Denmark and between Copenhagen and Sweden, and even across this stretch of water between Puttgarden and Rödbyhavn, so that people will be able to zip across it in ten minutes and scarcely notice that they have moved from one country to another. This new European impulse to blur the boundaries between countries seems a mite misguided to me.

  At Rödbyhavn, our frissons spent, we all reboarded the train and rode listlessly through the rest of the afternoon to Copenhagen. Denmark was much neater and emptier than northern Germany had been. There were no factories as there had been in Germany and none of that farmyard clutter of abandoned tractors and rusting implements that you see in Belgium and Holland. Big electricity-generating wind turbines, their three-bladed fans spinning sluggishly, were dotted around the low hillsides and stood in ranks in the shallow coastal bays. It was a pity, I thought with that kind of distant casualness that comes with looking at things that are already sliding from view, that they hadn’t made them more attractive – like scaled-up Dutch windmills perhaps.

  It seemed odd and sad that mankind could for centuries have so effortlessly graced the landscape with structures that seemed made for it – little arched bridges and stone farmhouses, churches, windmills, windingroads, hedgerows – and now appeared quite unable to do anything to the countryside that wasn�
��t like a slap across the face. These days everything has at best a sleek utility, like the dully practical windmills slipping past with the scenery outside my train window, or else it looks cheap and temporary, like the tin sheds and concrete hangars that pass for superstores on the edge of every medium-sized town. We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

  We reached Copenhagen’s central station at a little after five, but the station tourist office was already closed. Beside it stood a board with the names of thirty or so hotels and alongside each hotel was a small red light to indicate whether it was full or not. About two-thirds of the lights were lit, but there was no map to show where the hotels stood in relation to the station. I considered for a moment jotting down some of the names and addresses, but I didn’t altogether trust the board and in any case the addresses were meaningless unless I could find a map of the city.

  Perplexed, I turned to find a Danish bag lady clasping my forearm and addressing me in a cheerful babble. These people have an uncanny way of knowing when I hit town. They must have a newsletter or something. We wandered together through the station, I looking distractedly for a map of the city on a wall, she holding onto my arm and sharing demented confidences with me. I suppose we must have looked an odd sight. A businessman stared at us over the top of a newspaper as we wandered past. ‘Blind date,’ I explained confidentially, but he just kept staring.