David Kirby
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Germany
On Monday, Germany’s minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the Sinti and the Roma; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.
—The New York Times, January 29, 2008
A couple of Germans are going at it like teenagers
on what turns out to be the wrong elevator, though
I don’t know that yet, in the Hilton New York
as I try to get from the forty-fifth floor, where
my room is, to the thirty-ninth, to meet a friend, only
this is one of those “smart” hotels where different
elevators go to different sets of floors so you can get
to where you want to go faster, unless you’re me,
and here are these two Deutschers, just kissing like camels
and grabbing at die grossen Butzen und die schöne
Titzen und so weiter and so forth and so on—
“Mein Gott in Himmel!” I cry as we plunge past my floor
and toward the lobby, though that’s at least in part
because I ate a brownie from the mini-bar in my room
while reading a Greil Marcus essay on Camille
Paglia’s take on Lockwood’s dream in Emily
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in which he breaks
his bedroom window because the ghost child
Catherine (that is, neither adult Catherine
who is in love with Heathcliff but who marries Edgar
nor baby girl Cathy, her daughter, who is forced
by Heathcliff to marry his son Linton) is rapping on it
and he, Lockwood, pulls her wrist back and forth
across the broken pane “till the blood ran
down and soaked the bedclothes”—that’s enough to make
anyone cry out in German when startled by
two passionate citizens of that sovereign nation making out
in an elevator hurtling towards God knows
where. Or maybe I said “Ach du lieber!”—
I don’t know. Anyway, I said something, because now
the Germans are glaring at me as though I’m the one
committing the German equivalent of a faux pas!
When I get to the thirty-ninth floor and tell my friend
about this encounter, he asks, “How did you
know they were German?”and I say, “They were making out
in German!” I mean, they were, like, yanken sie
pants and swappen sie spit!—okay, they weren’t
saying that stuff, but still. You can tell. Or I can. If, as Emily
Dickinson says, Nature is a haunted house and Art
a house that tries to be haunted, then what the hell
is an elevator? I admire you, Germany:
what other nation in the world puts up memorials
to commemorate its own shame? Or our own
shame: “We too are so dazzled by power and money
as to forget our essential fragility,”says Primo Levi,
“forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto
is fenced in, that beyond the fence stand the lords
of death, and not far away the train is waiting.”
Though if the trains are indeed waiting, as I believe
they are, then is that not all the more reason
to festoon the station waiting room with garlands
and streamers, to have as grand a gallimaufry
as possible, a real hullabaloo, hoedown,
husking bee? During and after which, let men
and women come together: let the men be East
Germany, all big ideas that never quite pan out,
and let the women be West Germany, be beer,
Beethoven, bratwurst. Let them come together
in room and even elevator—maybe especially
elevator! And should a kerfuffle ensue,
let there be a kerfuffle, then, an uproar, a racket,
a shivaree, even, a megillah. Let there be a fanfare.
Let the Cold War between the sexes be a Hot one—
“Hot pants!” says James Brown. Let there
be howitzers, and let ‘em shoot candy.
"Germany" first published in Southern Review, 45 (Summer 2009), 466-68.
Bio
David Kirby is the author of Talking About Movies With Jesus and other books of poetry. His latest book, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll (Continuum, 2009), was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement of London as a "hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense." For more information, go to www.davidkirby.com.