Ich bin ein Berliner

(from June 2019)

This is being written at Tegel airport. When Berlin was divided into four sections by the allies at the Potsdam conference, they all needed their own airport. Tegel was originally the French one. We are here with time on our hands because we didn’t want to take any chances with the Berlin transport system getting there in time. This was daft really, because the Berlin transport system has been excellent all round. Four means of public transport (overhead railroads, buses and trams at ground level, and then the Tube/Underground/Metro/Subway – take your pick – all integrated, clean and on time.

We have been in Berlin for a religious convention and also as traditional tourists. I could write lots on the history of Berlin and also the history of the group who in the past were generally known as Ernste Bibelforscher, or Earnest Bible Students. The group fell foul of German militarists in World War 1, then Adolf Hitler and finally the GDR (the communist government in East Germany). However, these subjects have been covered extensively elsewhere, and far better than I could.

So this is a tourist snapshot of impressions. Of course, as tourists, we visited historic sites including ancient churches, remnants of the Berlin wall, and the Brandenburg Gate. Napoleon and his troops marked through it, Hitler and his troops marched through it, and in 2019 the Occasionals stumbled through it. That doesn’t have quite the same ring about it but it is one for the family photo album.

We stayed in the former eastern part of the city. The main memory of those times was the line of the Berlin Wall (1961-1989) with small sections still preserved, and also the trams and blocks of flats still overdue for demolition in the former eastern sector. Under the GDR most people had a flat and a job of sorts. When the wall disappeared and Germany reunited many from the eastern sector had difficulty adjusting to the cut and thrust of the capitalist system. West Germans paid an extra tax to help the East after reunification.

So some highlights? One was talking to someone who used to smuggle religious literature into the east for a banned group, who was betrayed and arrested. Years later after the fall of the communist sector he was able to look at his Stasi file (old secret police) and see who betrayed him – actually a friendly West German policeman who was a paid informant for the East.

The most moving experience was visiting Sachsenhausen concentration camp – around 900 Bible Students passed through its gates and many died there. The first conscientious objector to be executed in Nazi Germany in 1939, August Dickman, died there and you could see both a memorial stone and several information boards with his story and that of others of his faith. On the day we visited there were 20 coachloads of visitors. They arrived at different times but all 800 left together singing the song/hymn Forward You Witnesses, which had been written by Erich Frost, while an inmate in Sachsenhausen.

On the history front we travelled a couple of hours to visit Magdeburg. The Bible Students had their European headquarters there from the early 1920s, but the Nazis confiscated the property when they banned the group in 1933. The Jehovah’s Witnesses as they became known finally got it back in 1945, but then in 1950 the East German communists took it off them again.The group remained banned until the Berlin wall came down. Much of the property is rented out but we had a social event in part of it. We were all taught by rote a presentation to use on the bemused citizens of Magdeburg inviting them to the convention. There was much hilarity, but fortunately the locals’ English was a lot better than my German.

The most surreal experience of the trip was on rhe first day. Travelling in an East Berlin hotel elevator, a woman got it, looked at me and said “I know you…” It turned out she had heard me ‘sing’ at a gig back in Southern England.  There are background reasons why we were both there at same time, but it was still one of those weird coincidences in life. The words of Rick from Casablanca came wafting back: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. Play it, Sam…”

So some overall impressions? The Germans seem really keen on recyling. I remember the howls of protest in parts of the UK (although not in Wales) when they started charging for plastic bags – it was Plasticbagageddon! But in Berlin, the bags we were given were paper and the disposable plates were either paper or very thin wood. Plastic water bottles are still in abundance, but they all carry a refundable charge of 25 cents. In the supermarkets there are special machines that accept the bottles, count them, and then spit out a coupon with a credit toward your next shopping experience. If you just leave them around or put them in the trash then the homeless will quickly retrieve them to get the money back. Everyone benefits and maybe there is a little less plastic in the sea as a result.

So we went to a convention with 38,000 in the Olympic Stadium, on the site where Jesse Owens infuriated the Nazis by winning so much in 1936. You can read about this elsewhere if you have a mind to. And we spent nearly two weeks in Berlin. A very clean city (in comparison with other places I won’t mention) with huge squares, wide roads, numerous parks and green spaces, and numerous waterways. We were very impressed and one day would like to go back and fill in more of the gaps.

Coda

On the airplane home the cabin crew as usual used a series of pre-recorded messages to tell us to fasten seatbelts, follow safety instructions and be prepared for the merchandising trolley that would soon block the aistle for anyone desperate to reach the rest room. Someone pressed the wrong button and mellifluous tones informed us that we could now disembark from the front and rear exits.

We were flying at 35,000 feet at the time…

I have never been on a plane full of strangers before who symultaneously all burst into nervous laughter.

A Day Out...

(from 2015)

Mrs O and I went to the theater in Cardiff this week and sat in the dress circle. I surveyed a sea of shiny bald heads before me. Was I the only old codger who still had his own hair? We were at the matinee performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore.

The average age of the audience was - well, shall we say a bit older than me. Struggling to get refreshments in the interval meant mixing it with assorted walking aids that may have served their owners well, but risked Occasional taking a header straight into the bosom of the girl selling ices on the stairs.

I have a soft spot for HMS Pinafore. The daft plot revolves around the old English attitude towards class, and double standards, and patriotism, and cronyism. The “ruler of the Queen’s Navy” (that is Queen Victoria) gets his position through never going to sea. And the plot device - babies switched at birth was sort of reused by W S Gilbert’s scripts rather a lot. If you liked old-fashioned British humor, irony and puns, and knew a bit about late 19^th century British society, you would be in your element. And if you didn’t, but just liked silly songs and silly dances - well, you could still enjoy it.

My grandfather used to produce G and S operas at the Alhambra Theater, Bradford, in the 1920s. My grandmother, who was always short and rotund, played most of the comic middle-aged women for him in these operas. Gilbert had a very cruel streak to him when it came to writing about women of “a certain age” - and “Little” Buttercup in Pinafore was one of my grandmother’s favorites. After some bad experiences with people ripping off their stuff - generally featuring America - G and S tied down their domestic productions to the letter of the dialog and stage directions. It was only when the copyright expired 50 years after Gilbert’s death that things could be relaxed. The first “unauthorised” production by Sir Tyrone Guthrie in London was of HMS Pinafore. My grandmother was still short and rotund, but a little old lady by then, and took me as a young lad to see it. She spent the whole performance noting how they’d changed a lyric here, and changed the stage around there, and that bit of “business” - THAT wasn’t in the original.

Now of course G and S can be done every which way. We used to go regularly each year to the festival held in the Spa Town of Buxton, and various companies rang changes with modern dress, modern references in patter songs, and even audience participation. But last year we did America instead. This year we did rather a lot of folk festivals, so this theater trip was our only G and S experience for a while. But we knew the theater company and had seen a number of the cast before. They had ‘done’ the regular festival in the summer and were now taking out three operas in three days on tour.

The age of the audience probably reflected the time of day, as well as the age of the material. But at G and S festivals we have seen audiences full of teenagers laugh at fellow teenagers performing. And very good they were too. We have seen university drama clubs put on the operas - generally very badly. But probably the worst experience was a university production we saw - not at the festival, but at a theater linked to a university on the British South Coast. They put on The Yeoman of the Guard, which is a lot more serious than the rest of the canon. But there was one violin in the orchestra that was out of tune. Only slightly, but with a violin that is more than enough. Every time the orchestra struck up, there was this off-putting sound - off-putting to both the audience and increasingly to the players as they tried unsuccessfully to keep straight faces and stay in tune. A gentle murmur and titter sort of increased each time the offending instrument struck up and totally trashed the pathos of the piece. We thought that at half-time they would do something about it, but maybe the player was a professor’s wife or a director’s girl-friend or something. She stayed. We contemplated leaving. But there are some things in life you can still enjoy for all the wrong reasons.

Perhaps my worst G and S experience was a version of The Pirates of Penzance we saw at an open air theater at the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans. The players were good, the weather was good (always a plus for open air) and we were all set to enjoy the afternoon, when the two seats next to me were finally occupied - about ten minutes after the start of the performance. A gentleman who could probably have made the record books for obesity, came and plonked himself down next to me, and on top of me - so great was the overlap. A very strange grey-haired old lady who may have been his mother, sat on the other side of him. As the singers were getting into their stride with “We Sail the Ocean Blue”, he suddenly started eating his packed lunch. I remember it was a strange kind of salad that would normally feed four, which required a plastic fork, which he promptly lost down the back of the seat in front. His mother downed a bottle of coke - from the bottle - which was incongruous to say the least, and then decided that she needed to go to what Americans quaintly call “the rest room”. I may have remarked before in a long-forgotten piece, but in Britain these are not rooms where you would choose to rest or even linger longer than necessary - certainly not when attached to an open air museum celebrating the joys of the past. Back and forth she came several times. At the interval we thought they had gone and breathed a sigh of relief, but five minutes into the second half, they were back - for more.

What made the experience memorable for all the wrong reasons is that I knew about thirty in the audience. We had very recently visited a congregation for a week’s visit, and they had all seen us in smart suit, smart bag, encouraging smile, that sort of thing. I think they’d obviously organised a sort of group outing, and just seeing us there in casual clothes was a novelty. But when they saw our plight, you could see it made their day. Forget G and S - watching Occasional (although they didn’t know him as such) be swamped and crushed and battered throughout the performance, sort of gave them a spring in their step - even though they were seated. I can still see them all trying to keep straight faces and shove handkerchiefs into mouths, while making continual covert backward glances throughout the performance. I know from later contact that many of them also gleefully remembered that day - and it wasn’t opera that made it.

But what is it they say about humor? It’s nearly always based on someone else’s misfortune.