Amerika’s First Millionär

Johann Jakob Astor (his mother probably called him 'Hansi') made his money off fur, protectionism, and the ever popular real estate...after showing up in North America with a few bucks and a few flutes in 1784. He later financed, among other things, the first US community on the Pacific coast, discovery of the South Pass through the Rockies, Audubon, Poe, and the New York Public Library.



Astor hailed from the small village (Dörfchen) of Walldorf, near the Rhine in the northeast corner of Baden-Württemberg, also the home of SAP (the current city architect of Walldorf is an Astor, Dieter). He wasn’t directly responsible for the salad (that was the maître d’), or even the hotel, that was great-grandson John Jacob Astor IV (who went down with the Titanic, after deciding to return from an extended trip to Europe due to his wife’s pregnancy—they had gone there hoping to wait out the negative publicity stemming from the fact that she was 30 years younger than he was). No, he was not even the founder of the school (that was that kook Rudolf Steiner...a Germanic kook and therefore highly touted in this country, now an American kook, say, Mr. Hubbard, scares folks here just as much as anyone—more, actually).



The first Waldorf school, complete with racist theories which come with the territory when you decide to make up the world in your own head, was commissioned by the Zigarettenfabrik Waldorf-Astoria in Stuttgart in 1919. They used to include trading cards with packs of cigarettes between world wars, subject matter ranged from the German colonies to, you know, the Wehrmacht.

Palimpsest

World’s third best airport, unbelievably still surrounded by a pattern of fields that seems simultaneously medieval and democratic. These shapes were governed by the fact that a field was as long as your oxen could plow without a rest, and as wide as what you could accomplish in a day. The airport is next to the river, which seems rather quaint, as if they needed it to turn mill wheels or dump their sewage into. One can also clearly see the Autobahn



(signs for which are color-coded according to which german-speaking country you are in, and numbers for which are determined by the state it's in and its degree of regionalness, if you will). I have never been to this airport in a car. We go around the corner and down an escalator, and 45 minutes later emerge from a covered area in the middle of the top photograph...right in front of Terminal 2 (Lufthansa).
As long as we are in the country, it’s bonehead sociology all the way. People simply cannot conceive of how time-consuming this is. It involves Germans, Americans, and every other tribe over here. This morning I read a review of a comedy I just may order (strictly for purposes of research), which read, “Americans are such an easy target - they take themselves much more seriously than we do!” This from someone in Tyne and Wear, England, a name dating all the way back to the early 1970's...something to do with bringing coals to Newcastle, I think.
Last night it was a TV movie (a romance, the occasional viewing of these turns out to be the biggest surprise of my life—but the language is just so darned easy to understand). It was a Jules and Jim type story about former members of a Wohngemeinschaft (‘dwelling community’—or shared apt.) in the sixties. The music was great (the Germans’ guilty pleasure that I like best is the wide-spread use of great old American music, and don’t take the guilty pleasure part too seriously, we preface everything with guilty here). One of them had become a (drumroll) Spießer (shpeessuh). Stemming from the 17th century ‘Spießbürger’ (armed citizen), the short form came into use in the late 19th century to denote narrow-mindedness or the state of being bourgeois (engstirnig, literally ‘tight-brained’...well, tight-foreheaded, but that makes no sense). The term got a big lift in 1968 of course, and many Germans today are adamant about letting you know that they are not a Spießer...no matter how desperately they pursued their Bulthaup kitchen or flat screen TV. As in the U.S., or probably anywhere, the Spießer gets nowhere without parental funds. On the other hand, the proverbial self-made man (der Emporkömmling, having nothing to do with pork), actually has negative connotations here. It means an ‘up-and-comer’—but is understood as an arriviste. Things have a way of flopping themselves over when undergoing transmutation from English to German, or vice versa. For instance höflich, which means polite, but is derived from courtly. Hardly bringing to mind the ‘niceness’ that it implies in English. Even the simple ‘It’s me’ (it is I) becomes ‘Ich bin’s’ (I am it). Is it me, or am I it? I think, therefore I am a non sequitur. You’re it.