Hater's Club

Aaah, another entertaining chapter of ze Germans and ze inferior races. Went to see a play (the premiere of Swiss playwright Lucas Bärfuss' "Die Probe" at the Kammerspiele, actually quite a relief after years of New York Broadway and realist author's theater hell, besides the fact that both theater and afterparty were filled with hordes of hip and pleasant young Munichians) and later back to Schuhmann's, where we joined a group of fellow cultural editors, some of whom I've known for literally decades.

One I'll name Django suddenly went on and on about the mosque they want to build in his neighborhood. This formerly pinko colleague went immediately over the rightwing cliff, talking about those elements who would crowd his streets and that even the Turks in the neighborhood were against it. He praised ousted governor Edmund Stoiber's and interior minister Günter Beckstein's succesful initiatives to block the project. Those two are the Bavarian equivalents to rabid culture war nuts Bill Frist and Tom DeLay. Well, according to them and Django worst of all is the fact that the mosque would be built right next to a Catholic church.

Now my most favorite of all neocons David would most likely agree witht hem, but he would have tried to outdebate me, which was always fun. Django backpedalled right away when I played the atheist card and complained, that those omnipresent Bavarian churchbells insult my secular sensibilities just as much as back in the roaming reporter days the omnipresent calls to prayer in Middle East countries. He switched to the parking space and trafic problems a mosque might create. Coward. At least stick to your guns. Only thing comforting about this was the sense that people at Schuhmann's are not just full of envy and spite, but equal opportunity haters in the old school German sense.

The Hunger

When you come from a cosmopolitan city (like New York, Tokyo, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bombay or Sao Paolo) to a second tier city, you tend to notice a certain hunger in the conversational tone. It’s not that people aren’t informed, well read or experienced. It’s not a hunger for what’s hip and happening either. It’s more a longing for the free flow of conversational sparring. I used to notice this hunger whenever I came to LA, San Franisco, Hamburg and Berlin and mostly in people who were trapped in professional peer groups, which tend to happen rather rapidly in second tier cities.

Can happen here rather swiftly as well. There’s the famous Schumann’s Cocktail Bar where most media people hang out at night and where I recently found myself surrounded by people who not only told me in detail how to do my new job (well, it is a new job, so some advice was definitely appreciated), but also quite adamently who sucks and deserves to get fired asap. German media talk tends to run in circles around topics like that and despite everybody’s insistence that we’re all a gang of brothers and sisters tends to get quite nasty and spiteful.

So here we are, feeling the first pangs of this hunger. Although contrary to Fred I really can’t complain. The new job’s overwhelming, but actually quite exhilarating. It’s like banging out a whole magazine every single day. Great team of sophisticates. My co-chief turns out to be as easily excitable for good ideas as I am, plus he is super-connected here in Germany. And there is of course a whole cast of characters who are happy to escape the trappings of peer pressure talk. Michael, the jazz musician who travels the world to produce archive music. Albert the poet and playwright who gets invited to readings in Colombia and Afghanistan and who gets commissions from faraway places like Korea. Michi the Yoga teacher who runs the local Shivamukti branch, a vegan restaurant and a crowded disco where old faves like Little Louie Vega and the Body & Soul crew spin. Ralf the quantum physicist who gave up his particle accelerating career to write novels. Clemens who's the Munich deputy editor of the pitbull tabloid Bild and of course knows all the juicy details not fit to print. Markus the former Foreign Legionaire now boxing trainer who fought in the Seoul Olympics.