THE joy of visiting new places is seeing what’s different from home; the joy of living in new places is when those differences begin to feel like home. So when I moved to Hamburg for an extended sabbatical at the beginning of the year, I was looking forward to becoming accustomed to the subtle distinctions, the local flavours, the cultural variations.
When I arrived, however, the country was gripped by a most predictable piece of entertainment – The Voice of Germany. Cultural globalisation, it turns out, isn’t epitomised by Hollywood movie posters or billboards featuring international football stars, but by TV talent shows with celebrities offering caustic judgment on pop wannabes. The format is the entertainment equivalent of gold, an internationally agreed unit of value, with youngsters attempting cover versions of Rihanna the equivalent of exploited miners.
And in a brilliant twist that I realised could only happen in Germany, one of the judges was an Irishman, Rea Garvey. Arguably our most unheralded musical export, Garvey left Co Kerry in the late 1990s and made his way to Germany where he put together a group, Reamonn, and became a huge star — he’s even palled around with Barack Obama.
Not only was The Voice of Germany an ever so slightly modified variation of an immediately recognisable product, but its judges were ever so slightly modified variations of immediately recognisable personalities, with Garvey being a kind of Deutsch-ified Bono figure, only funnier and less self-regarding.
Needless to say, and perhaps in a slightly forced effort to go native, I immediately fell for The Voice of Germany – following every undeserved ejection and unlikely success was an effortless way of adjusting to my new home.
I thought I had the place cracked after that. All the idiosyncrasies that might baffle some other newcomer barely caused me a moment’s pause. Who knew Germans were so fond of their cake shops and bakeries? Why did every cafe have a pile of well-worn board games in the corner? When did it become acceptable for dogs to accompany their masters to restaurants and bars and clubs? How can Germans be so incredibly obedient when it comes to things like crossing the street, and yet refuse to cease smoking in bars? Is it public policy to have a playground for every 10 children, or does it just seem that way? All these eccentricities felt perfectly natural in no time – even when I came across a local tabloid that ran with a front-page exposé on the epidemic of jaywalking, of all things, I found it only slightly peculiar.
The sense of comfort in cultural contrast was bound to end, of course. It happened one day when my girlfriend and I visited Hamburg’s Art and Design museum, which features world-class collections of Art Deco interiors and historical musical instruments, among other things.
We entered the season’s flagship exhibit – an entire wing of the museum dedicated to a German singer and artist by the name of Udo Lindenberg. It afforded Lindenberg the sort of treatment that might be given to Bob Dylan or Andy Warhol, with room after room of his costumes, effects, album covers and canvases. And suddenly all was strange again – who the hell was this guy? Lindenberg, it turned out, was a survivor of the 1970s German rock scene,
one of the most successful figures to sing in German, rather than English, and whose gravelly voice and famous stetson were iconic in their own right.
And yet the entire exhibition seemed wildly disproportionate. His name was written in 15ft letters on the floor. Glass cabinets displayed gaudy stage costumes. A mock astronaut suit from one tour hung on the ceiling. One wall was lined with album covers spanning his entire career – they looked like an expert pastiche of every dreadful album cover from every genre in the history of popular music. One room featured a recreation of his suite in Hamburg’s famed Hotel Atlantic. His music blared from speakers and screens, coming across like an ersatz take on Lou Reed’s “difficult” period.
And his art, his horrendous art was everywhere, crudely drawn cartoons on giant canvasses, full of conical breasts and slapped-on dashes of paint and almost every one featuring his signature touch, a self-portrait with his famous hat, like an X-rated Where’s Wally. It was as if Spinal Tap actually existed and was being rewarded with a career-retrospective in the Tate Modern.
Any notion I had that I was adjusting well to Germany had to be thrown out the window – I was ill-equipped to judge this exhibition, too ignorant to know of Lindenberg’s historical importance, too steeped in my own musical and artistic prejudices to appreciate his work, and too new to the place to be able to detect any sense of irony.
I’d been duped by The Voice of Germany and fooled by Rea Garvey – Lindenberg was a mystery to me, a baffling anomaly, and suddenly, so was Hamburg, so was Germany. If the joy of living in another place is when the differences begin to feel like home, I realised then that this was only ever going to be a long visit.