Hamburg Sketches

The smell of fishmeal was rancid, and the powdery substance was everywhere, adding a pale, dusty color to everything, and everytime my old gray typewriter typed, clouds of fishmeal powder rose from the keys. The kind, moustached director of the facility sat at a nearby desk. “They will smell you on the train when you return home,” he had explained. “Ignore them. This is a port city. This is what we do here.”

The director loved his job. He loved the industry of it all. The organization, the punctuality, the effort of work.

I found myself yearning for my lunch break, which I took early. I would walk out to the docks and stare at the water, looking for evidence of life; little fish or small aquatic bugs. To find something surprising, and alive.

My internship was a taste of the structure of work life that would come after college, and this is why there was a tinge of sadness I felt while crouched dockside: the idea that looking for critters in puddles was in my rearview mirror. The future was Bills of Lading, and typewriters.

I had been making friends in Bremen. There was my neighbor Kurt, who would stick his cigarette butts in his neighbor’s flower beds. “I am doing it so her flowers die! She is such a bitch!”  There was Dirk and Otto, who would take me to the red light district in Hamburg, show me the old prostitutes in the windows, and lambast me repeatedly for my Americanisms, such as holding a paper coffee cup while walking. 

I finally do find a laundromat, although its  windows are facing the sun, and it’s burning up inside. I struggle to accomplish the simple task of getting our clothes in the washing units, confused by the payment system, surprised by how much of my German had vanished.

I left the laundromat in search of a water fountain --- but instead I found an ice cream shop. Perfect. Two scoops, please, I said in German, I think. “Okay, so you are sure you want two scoops?” he said, looking concerned. In this heat, I could really use three. “No, you’re right, I should have three scoops.” 

“You mean like this?” the ice cream man said, wrapping his hand around an ice cream. “Yes! Yes!” I said, ravished and parched with heat.

When he handed me my ice cream, it was a single scoop wrapped in three layers of parchment paper, which was difficult to remove; the process of which caused the ice cream to partially fall apart and melt.

Hearing and seeing a language you used to speak helps bring it back, but it takes weeks, not days, to return.

Speicherstadt and the Miniatur Wunderland

Hamburg’s most sought after tourist draw is the multistory Miniatur Wunderland; a monstrous collection of tiny worlds on the scale of model trains in the Speicherstadt District of Hamburg.

Jane and I are taking our son and his cousin to see the museum, and getting there means walking across an endless variety of bridges and walkways. Walking toward the Speicherstadt District, through a rhapsody of sleek ultramodern constructions, historic timber-framed buildings and colonnaded streets, I cannot help but to be reminded of the many books and Youtube videos our son consumed as a child. Industrial scenes. Big trucks. Miniature railroads. Not only that, but his love for these young boy fantasies often came through a northern German lens. If he was watching a video of miniature construction trucks plying through dirt, it would have filmed in a place like a miniature model convention in a place like Berlin or Hannover; the adult filmmakers transfixed by their miniature world realistically depicting industry, progress, construction and efficiency.

Having leaned over my son’s shoulder through all those early years, the resemblance between those scenes and this northern German city are remarkable, and I think there is something to that—in work and play, northern Germans are captivated by the machinery of progress.

Why is this? Most of northern Germany, for most of its history, was unnavigable marshland and swamp. Northern Germany flourished as it tamed its wild marshy landscapes into canals and other controlled waterways. The name Hamburg itself means "Swampy Fortress". Do these unique characteristics come from hundreds of years of harnessing the natural landscape into a built world?

Is it any wonder, then, that the city’s most magnificent architecture, like the brick warehouse buildings of Speicherstadt, are industrial works of art, and that even the most magnificent residential buildings rise from the industrial neighborhoods are themselves lustrous symbols of progress?

Miniatur Wunderland, so popular that ticketed reservations are required, is swarming with tourists from around the world. Throngs pack into this four story world of model trains, tiny cities and rural landscapes, studying the little worlds.

To see this little world is to recognize that I have the worldbuilder itch in me too. I often prefer the overhead view of worldbuilding fiction over literature which depicts life up close. When my son was a toddler, I would build him intricate ten-story wooden block railroad sets, with the tracks wandering through tunnels and through wooden-block castles. Unable to pronounce the word “truck”, his eyes would glaze over at large-wheeled vehicles, and he would cry out, “fock, fock, fock!”

My night-time stories to him, which grew more elaborate with age, tended to be worldbuilding stories, where the kingdoms, cities, fleets of ships and island economies dictated the story more than the individual characters. To remember a character’s name, I would visualize a map of my fictionalized world. The point of the story; the arc of it was always that a world was in the process of growing, stabilizing, becoming a more civilized place. 

As the characters in these night-time worlds grew into the hundreds, and the stories played out over years, I came to realize that I relied on my top-down view of the story in order to tell it. 

Now, looking down at these fantastic little northern German-made worlds, I can see the resemblance in this ambition to create worlds; to represent progress and industry, to my own way of seeing in life. So, how do I reconcile this with Jerry Garcia’s Watts Towers? "Instead of making something that lasts forever, I thought, I think I’d rather have fun." And the fishmeal facility director, with his organization, his punctuality. "This is what we do here!"

Towards the end of our visit to the Miniatur Wunderland, I see a display representing a miniature man riding a miniature bicycle. His coat-tails appear to be swaying behind him, as if he is riding fast. This reminds me of the final days of my internship in Bremen, when I decided one evening to go out on my bicycle and just ride around. It was the first time I shed the expectation to hang out with my new friends, or to go somewhere specific. I just drove the bicycle through the city. I would buy fresh cherries, wrapped in newspaper, and sit in the park watching people go by. I dared myself into new neighborhoods.   

It was just a slight modification to how I was consuming Bremen, but it changed everything for me. I was having fun, learning how travel was just a broad canvas to improvise on.

Hafencity and the Elbe River

To celebrate our reunion, dozens of us board a tour boat, which will take us through Hamburg’s water canals, along the architecture-rich Elbe, and finally out into the industrial port sections of the massive rivers.

All of this is impressive, but I don’t believe I have ever been on a tour that celebrated the hulls of massive container ships, rail-mounted cranes, heavy-lifters and warehouse buildings.

And seeing all my relatives, all of them connected to northern Germany, staring down these massive machines of industry and progress like toddlers immersed in a book about big-wheeled trucks, I can’t help to wonder if maybe that trait which wants us to build model railroads and great industrial landscapes, has indeed been passed on to me, and on to my son?