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Ute Lemper, Germany and me
Aug. 20th, 2004 08:23 amI've been listening to Ute Lemper's records for a while, but I had never seen her perform until the show the other night in Central Park. Her stage energy in the first half or so of the perfromance screamed early-70s Bowie... just she seemed like a restless animal, and with that shock of obnoxiously red hair and strange humour tinged with hysteria, it seemed to fit. Eventually she calmed down though, and as all caberet singers do told us stories.
I have never been to Germany, although it was one of the obsessions of my childhood, thanks mainly to my mother's compulsive interest in German art and my watching too much MTV while in Italy. My junior year of high school I decided I wanted to study abroad there, but my mother said it would hurt her, were I to do so, because we are Jews. My mother who wore strange jewlery of melted-seeming gold set around prints of Klimpt paintings. My mother who introduced me to German art, because I hated painting and she thought the highly stylized nature of some of their work might appeal to me who was more interested in advertising and industrial design.
So I did not go to Germany, resented my mother for a bit, and understood perfectly well this was something not ever to speak of again.
Of course, Germany is one of those places that exists is our collective imaginations now. We've Cabaret to thank for that, and Hitler of course. The Berlin Wall, and then its coming down. I remember watching that on TV over dinner with my parents, and then hiding in my room to cry because I never through I should see such a thing and if I had had money, I would have gotten on a plane that night.
In college, I stumbled on a book that has become one of my favourites -- Arc d'X by Steve Erickson (summary: a scientist, noticing a clock tick backward a single second while pondering his dead wife discovers that between December 31, 1999 and January 1, 2000 will be a Day X, made up of time devoted to memories of all things lost. As the world rushes towards this date, places meet that never should have. Sally Hemmings (who is a solid and persistant haunting when it comes to Erickson and his work both fiction and not) appears at length. And in Berlin, where the animals have escaped the zoo and unknown people are rebuilding the Berlin Wall in the middle of the night out of papers from the files of the secret police, a writer goes to meet a woman in a hotel to discover she is the Queen of Swords. -- it's a weird book, and I love it to pieces and everyone should read it) which takes place in a number of locales of our collective imagination, Berlin included. And his image of the city has long stayed with me.
At the concert, Lemper talked about the Berlin of the 80s and 90s. Talked about how shocking it was to her that the Wall came down, and then how after that they slowly cleared the mines, and dug foundations for news things and all of that. She talked about the Potsdammerplatz which is a place name I think I've only ever heard spoken aloud by Erickson, and how in cleaning up after the Wall, one day they found a bunker. A Nazi bunker. A Hitler bunker. She says these words in the tone of an adult telling horror stories they shouldn't to children. Should we be scared? should we be uncomfortable? Here's a German, and she's talking about... that.
The authorities went inside the bunker and the walls were covered with massive murals of German soldiers, arms outstretched and winged (and here she makes one arm undulate like a wing as she tells the rest of the story), sheltering blonde women (she spits this, but also seems to pity them their fineness). So they tried to blow up the bunkers. But the concrete was too thick, the walls shook, and the murals crumbled a bit, but the bunkers would not come down. So they stuffed them up, filled all those holes as quick as they could with concete and then built shopping centers over them.
Despite working at a German company, I've never really heard Germans talk about Germany before. I've heard Germans say the things they feel the world expects them to say. I've heard Germans nearly fetishize my Jewishness, and I've heard them tread delicately, intent on proving they are not what I think, when they do not even know what I think. They are shy about the place they are from and more inclined to talk about the differences in our educational systems and economies or their sympathy for us in 9/11, than they are to talk about if they love their home, or what their cities feel like or what it means to be German.
Lemper called Germany preposterous with a joyful, hysterical laugh early on in the concert before she told this story, and the story moved me to tears, because her home had changed so much in those short years of the Wall coming down she could no longer recognize it, and it filled her with wonder, and horror and haunting. And the efficiency with which her nation is both always trying to atone for its past and shutter it up... it seems to shock her. She lives here now.
She sang songs in French, Spanish, German, English, Yiddish, Hewbrew and Arabic. And mostly what I learned, including from looking at her, is that Germany is a place of beautiful, uncomfortable things. Which is maybe why I wanted always to go there.
I have never been to Germany, although it was one of the obsessions of my childhood, thanks mainly to my mother's compulsive interest in German art and my watching too much MTV while in Italy. My junior year of high school I decided I wanted to study abroad there, but my mother said it would hurt her, were I to do so, because we are Jews. My mother who wore strange jewlery of melted-seeming gold set around prints of Klimpt paintings. My mother who introduced me to German art, because I hated painting and she thought the highly stylized nature of some of their work might appeal to me who was more interested in advertising and industrial design.
So I did not go to Germany, resented my mother for a bit, and understood perfectly well this was something not ever to speak of again.
Of course, Germany is one of those places that exists is our collective imaginations now. We've Cabaret to thank for that, and Hitler of course. The Berlin Wall, and then its coming down. I remember watching that on TV over dinner with my parents, and then hiding in my room to cry because I never through I should see such a thing and if I had had money, I would have gotten on a plane that night.
In college, I stumbled on a book that has become one of my favourites -- Arc d'X by Steve Erickson (summary: a scientist, noticing a clock tick backward a single second while pondering his dead wife discovers that between December 31, 1999 and January 1, 2000 will be a Day X, made up of time devoted to memories of all things lost. As the world rushes towards this date, places meet that never should have. Sally Hemmings (who is a solid and persistant haunting when it comes to Erickson and his work both fiction and not) appears at length. And in Berlin, where the animals have escaped the zoo and unknown people are rebuilding the Berlin Wall in the middle of the night out of papers from the files of the secret police, a writer goes to meet a woman in a hotel to discover she is the Queen of Swords. -- it's a weird book, and I love it to pieces and everyone should read it) which takes place in a number of locales of our collective imagination, Berlin included. And his image of the city has long stayed with me.
At the concert, Lemper talked about the Berlin of the 80s and 90s. Talked about how shocking it was to her that the Wall came down, and then how after that they slowly cleared the mines, and dug foundations for news things and all of that. She talked about the Potsdammerplatz which is a place name I think I've only ever heard spoken aloud by Erickson, and how in cleaning up after the Wall, one day they found a bunker. A Nazi bunker. A Hitler bunker. She says these words in the tone of an adult telling horror stories they shouldn't to children. Should we be scared? should we be uncomfortable? Here's a German, and she's talking about... that.
The authorities went inside the bunker and the walls were covered with massive murals of German soldiers, arms outstretched and winged (and here she makes one arm undulate like a wing as she tells the rest of the story), sheltering blonde women (she spits this, but also seems to pity them their fineness). So they tried to blow up the bunkers. But the concrete was too thick, the walls shook, and the murals crumbled a bit, but the bunkers would not come down. So they stuffed them up, filled all those holes as quick as they could with concete and then built shopping centers over them.
Despite working at a German company, I've never really heard Germans talk about Germany before. I've heard Germans say the things they feel the world expects them to say. I've heard Germans nearly fetishize my Jewishness, and I've heard them tread delicately, intent on proving they are not what I think, when they do not even know what I think. They are shy about the place they are from and more inclined to talk about the differences in our educational systems and economies or their sympathy for us in 9/11, than they are to talk about if they love their home, or what their cities feel like or what it means to be German.
Lemper called Germany preposterous with a joyful, hysterical laugh early on in the concert before she told this story, and the story moved me to tears, because her home had changed so much in those short years of the Wall coming down she could no longer recognize it, and it filled her with wonder, and horror and haunting. And the efficiency with which her nation is both always trying to atone for its past and shutter it up... it seems to shock her. She lives here now.
She sang songs in French, Spanish, German, English, Yiddish, Hewbrew and Arabic. And mostly what I learned, including from looking at her, is that Germany is a place of beautiful, uncomfortable things. Which is maybe why I wanted always to go there.
