Furor of the People

While lounging the Sunday away a great drama of Munich style class warfare unfolded below our window. The tram car couldn't pass, because some Porsche with double wide sports wheels was parked just a bit too far into the street. Aaah, the furor of the people. Some tattooed mullet head coming to the help of the tram car conductor went as far as activating the Porsche's alarm, then tried to lift the car to no avail, which got him to resort to a wonderful tourette cascade of Bavarian expletives. When the blocked tram cars were finally four trains deep a rather embarrassed young yuppie in short shorts appeared and sped away in horrified silence.

The scene reminded me of one of the latest editorials of German Vanity Fair editor Ulf Poschardt. His editorials are a treasure trove of fun quotes somewhere between "Neo-conservatism For Dummies" and serious contenders for the Marie Antoinette Award (we read them to each other aloud almost every week). So there he was complaining in length how some "eco squares" let out the air of the tires of the Alfa Romeo he was test driving that week, not realizing how little gas such a sports car uses and how many solar panels can be found on the roofs of the mansions in the posh neighborhoods around Berlin. Hard to capture the brilliance of the original.

So far German Vanity Fair's been quite a fresh air in the German magazine landscape though, which has been dominated by lad mags and TV guides for the past ten or something years. It's weekly and has been projecting a kind of worldliness missing from German media. Well, it's not quite up to par with the US original. Besides the fact that the editorials make you wonder, if liberal doyen Graydon Carter knows what rabid neocon ideologue has been hired as his German equivalent, there's the chronic lack of glamorous celebrities in Germany (chancellorette Angela Merkel and orphaned polar bear cub Knut being the only German covers of international relevance so far).

The latest issue had fun failure of marketing though. Attached to the issue was a CD with 10 "Vanity Fair summer music hits 2007". Now American Vanity Fair has enclosed CDs before, which mostly featured music for people who are too rich, too successful or otherwise too busy to pay attention to the latest evolutions of pop history, i.e. white jazz vocals, maudlin indie Rock that has made it to the Top 10 or retro soul from Britain. So it's quite compatible to the brand and target group of Vanity Fair. Something went seriously wrong on the German compilation though, which starts with Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime" and ends with Kool & the Gang's "Celebration", two songs that have no redeeming values, no matter how much camp irony you put into it. Neither do Euro Dance classics like Chocolate's "Ritmo de la noche" or Shannon's "Let the Music Play". The key to this strange array of margarita party faves is found on the cover. "Selected by you", it says there, so there must've been some readers' poll or sweepstakes. Which reveals the real reason why there hasn't been a German equivalent to Vanity Fair or the New Yorker before, even though German journalists have been fantasizing about doing them for decades.

The reason for the lack of sophisticated general interest magazines other than two or three newsweeklies in Germany lies in Jean Baudrillard's quote: "America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version." As a consequence German glamour rags regularly run out of native celebrities to cover, so they always come back to the same geriatric cast of polo tournaments and product placement galas. This is the only reason, why oddities like the countess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and her offspring can sustain their status as hipster celebrities, even though the countess' only claim to Pop fame were hairstyles which she wore in the 80s, that would've made A Flock Of Seagulls look like a bunch of skinheads. Now that she's a rabid catholic fundamentalist, very much opposed to secular democracy, she maybe shouldn't be given the type of adulating coverage normally reserved for harmless film stars. But what you gonna do.

Capital Glamour

The largest daily newspaper of Germany threw a party the other day. Not exactly a party, more a function. For politicans and clients, so the staging was quite regal. They had rented the Bode Museum in Berlin, an opulent place with massive halls overloaded with stucco and statures and treasures from mideaval times. Since the fine cuisine situation in Berlin is even more dire than in Munich, they had hired Käfer, the Bavarian equivalent of Dean & De Lucca, to do the catering, so there was great meats and finger foods and the signature dish of Bavarian pretension, pasta with truffles drowned in heavy cream sauce.

For me it was of course quite exciting to mingle in a room full of political A-list celebrities who I've known only from news photos. Our chancelorette Angela Merkel stopped by and since she lives only across the bridge from the museum hung out for quite a while to chat in length with the editor in chief and his deputy. There were her fierce social democrat counterparts in the grand coalition Mr. Müntefering and Mr. Gabriel, who sport Viking beards and the swagger of cruiser weight champs. Well, their grand coalitioning ain't no picknick, so it's good to know we got some Social Democrats in fighting condition there. Of course one shouldn't be blinded by the glamour of the moment and forget, that those were the Social Democrats who sold the German middle class down the river of big industry under a chancellor who not only had the time to sue the press for stories about his alleged unnatural hair color, but also the chutzpe to join Swiss media moguls and Russian oligarchs just weeks after stepping down from office. And despite her no-nonsense approach Chancelorette Merkel is of course a hardcore neo-liberal, shifting the tax burden further to the middle and lower classes, while neglecting her leadership responsibilities in the EU becaus of some anachronist Eastern European trust in the mighty US of A as her saviour.

Otherwise the capital glamour of Berlin tends to reconfirm the troubling news about German society's overaging. American functions like this tend to be sprinkled with the best, brightest and cutest of the young generation. All Berlin had to offer on the non-political celeb front was a graying director of TV comedies and an aging starlet named Jenny Elvers whose only claim to fame is that she got knocked up by one of the inmates of the local Big Brother TV show franchise. Well, there were some young, bright and cute people, but they were fellow journos, so that doesn't count as glamour.

My friend Niklas took me for a latenite spin around the city though. He's the art and architecture critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung's main competitor Frankfurter Allgemeine. Architecturally Berlin is quite glamorous. More in Grandmaster Flash „Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" kind of sense, than in the Frank Sinatra city hymn style. Still, we did some speeding on the twenty laned Stalin Allee (ok, it felt like twenty lane and it's not named after Stalin anymore), where the former Communist government built fabulously modern appartment high rises to pretend all's groovy in the Socialist world. There's an interesting mix of people living there now. On the one side you still have old party faithfuls and remnants of the high cadres of East German secret police, on the other side you have hip thirtysomethings who like the moderinst touch and urban feel of these places. Looking at their appartments you might think there's only few distinctions, since both tend to live in fabulous 60s and 70s furniture. Only the window drapes are an instant give-away, with the old commies hanging lace and the hipsters sporting aluminum or cotton.

We had some drinks at the Greenwich Bar, where everybody I visit in Berlin always has drinks, we drove by Reem Koohlhaas' fabulous embassy for the Netherlands and the beautiful rows of Gründerzeit houses in Berlin West, the next morning I met his incredibly cute new daughter, who know how to play her toddler charm to the max, I had lunch with one of Germany's star scribes Lothar Müller, whose anglo-saxon writing sensibilites are a refreshing non-ideological breeze, I visited my old mentor Markus whose new offices have a direct view of the zoo, so he looks out on Flamingos and beavers and monkeys, who make surreal tropical noises, I collected juicy stories and rumors about German media, where the fight for a pole position in the run to be the successor to newsweekly Spiegel's editor in chief Stefan Aust has blessed us with some infighting and scheming worthy of a Hollywood bitch battle. I left in the afternoon from Berlin's main airport, which still looks like the airport for Kalamazoo. Hey! This is our capital. By very recent choice.