Review: Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty sees The Hurt Locker pairing of director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal coming together again to give us a film about the CIA’s decade long manhunt to find Osama Bin Laden, head of Al Qaeda and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. But you know all about him, and, as such, you know how the movie ends. The movie was in production when Bin Laden was caught and killed and its subject was the failure of the hunt for Bin Laden, how it became one woman, Maya’s (Jessica Chastain), obsession. They wrote and shot a new ending which shows Seal Team 6’s raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, giving the film a nice, triumphant ending, which in terms of reality, we’re glad it could have. Unless you’re a terrorist. In which case, you’re probably not so glad. The film’s depiction of the actual raid runs to about twenty five minutes which, as IMDB informs me, is only slightly shorter than the actual raid itself.

So, hooray for tense, realistic, political thrillers then with strong female characters doggedly battling on in the face of adversity against their superiors and a pervasive evil then? No. I haven’t been as bored during a movie since John Huston’s The Dead.

The character of Maya is given no personality of her own. Yes, she is a singleminded, fighting woman in pursuit of a target but that singlemindedness makes her one-dimensional. She has nothing else in life- no friends, no family, no partner, no children, no desire for sex, food, music, books, no other interests. This itself says something about the character. There is clearly some reason behind the quirk in Maya’s personality that allows her to forego the things that most other people live for- some reason she can devote herself to her job and nothing else. This is not necessarily a negative thing, but we see no real motivation behind her drive and no explanation for the void in her character that she plasters over with work. Maya therefore, does not exist as a character in her own right. She exists to be the person that drives this film forward and given that she possesses nothing that we can latch onto in order to empathize or identify with her, we don’t care about her or the film’s forward progression.

We know the ending of Zero Dark Thirty, like we know the ending of Zodiac or All The President’s Men. The film isn’t about the ending, it’s about the process of getting there- a procedural. The difference between this and Zodiac however is the fact in Zodiac, we had characters that were likeable, or at the very least that we could empathize with. We had people that went to see movies, joked with their colleagues, made spaghetti-o’s for their kids and, as a result, we were behind them every painstaking step by intricate step. We cared about the discoveries they made to advance the plot because we cared about them. Maya and her colleagues do not joke with one another or talk about anything other than work. They merely spout abbreviations for two and a half hours- ISI, KSM, UBL (the dialogue in this is very weak and banal for a political thriller). And because we don’t care about the characters in Zero Dark Thirty, the process of finding Bin Laden becomes uninteresting and very long, which is, frankly, unacceptable in a movie in which the audience already knows the ending.

I understand that Bigelow and Boal wanted to create a realistic movie based on true-life accounts and that’s fine- if you’re making a documentary. But there’s such a thing as being ruled by the tyranny of fact. Facts and characters have to be altered sometimes to in order to create interest. I happen to know to that the planning for the raid on Bin Laden’s compound, Operation Neptune Spear, was far more interesting than Zero Dark Thirty acknowledges- a full scale mock-up of the house was even built in North Carolina beforehand for training purposes and Bin Laden dyed his beard black with Just For Men. I know this because of the many fine documentaries made on the subject by the Discovery Channel and their ilk, so I suggest avoiding Zero Dark Thirty and staying in and watching one of those instead.

On driving and such…

Friday, May 18^th

Herself needs to get to Rathfarnham. It’s raining, it’s miserable, the bus is a hike away and we’re running late. It’s half five in the evening. I decide to drive. Deansgrange to Rathfarnham should take, at most, twenty minutes, but no sooner do we leave the house than we get stuck in traffic. Eventually we manage to get onto the dual-carriageway, but I take a wrong turn and end up in the back-arse of Stillorgan, dense with traffic. I indicate to change lanes at a set of traffic lights and motherfucker in a C-Class Merc blows the horn at me. I swear blind at him and give him the finger. The city does this to people. I’m lost in a maze of familiar names, each greyer than the last- Sandyford, Dundrum… I should have taken the M50.

As soon as I get a clear stretch, I drive like a maniac. I manage to induce understeer on a roundabout. We get there late, but I leave her off and head for home at a much calmer pace… Or so I would have had I not found the motorway packed solid due to a car on fire and gone back through Dundrum where I get snarled up in a mile-long traffic jam moving much slower than walking pace. I have heartburn, the beginnings of a headache and I’m dying for a piss. It’s my first time driving in rush-hour traffic in Dublin and I hope it’ll be my last. Now I know why everyone in this town does drugs. Around Sandyford, I seriously contemplate suicide- I’d be home quicker. How can people live like this?

 

Saturday, May 19^th

We’re heading to Meath. I pick her up in Rathfarnham and only get a little lost on the way. I’m deeply unimpressed by the fact it costs three quid to pass through the M50. Bring back the fucking toll bridge. I decide I’m not paying the toll on the M3 and so take a route along back roads, ending up in Trim. It’s not where I want to be, but it’s vivid green after a night of rain, the cow parsley is in bloom and it’s not the city which makes me very happy to be here. Lines of Phil Larkin spring to mind.

The Hill of Tara isn’t just a disappointment- it’s an abomination. Tara was the seat of the former kings of Ireland, a place of pagans and mysticism- a deeply important place in Ireland’s ancient history. According to the annals of old, the High Kings were inaugurated there and in order to receive their kingship, drank ale and symbolically married the goddess Medb. Yet even before that, Tara was important- on top of the hill sits the Mound of the Hostages, a small Neolithic passage tomb whose passage lines up with the sunrise on the Celtic festivals of Samhain and Imbolc, around November 8^th and February 1^st respectively. Around 1900, Tara was excavated (and damaged) by a group called the British Israelists who were trying to find the Holy Grail.

A story goes that in 433 AD, St. Patrick lit an Easter fire on the nearby Hill of Slane to defy the pagan High King Lóegaire mac Néill who had decreed that while a ceremonial fire burned on Tara, no fires were allowed to burn anywhere else in his kingdom. Patrick lit a massive fire on the Hill of Slane which drew the wrath and ire of Lóegaire. The ancient texts have Patrick and Lóegaire at odds with one another for the rest of their lives, some versions having Lóegaire converting to Christianity on his deathbed, others having him cursed. Nevertheless, the story marks Tara out as a place very much belonging to an ancient and druidic but remarkably civilized culture (ancient Irish law makes considerably more sense than modern law), predating by thousands of years, the fad of Christianity. Why, then, is there not only a fucking church, but a statue of that smug cunt St. Patrick there? Why celebrate Ireland’s descent into the post-tribal dark ages?

The cemetery has chestnut trees and hyacinths and it’s pretty all the same and I store it away in my mind for future reference as a film location. We stroll up the hill and it’s cold and windswept for May. It should feel different. It should feel like more than just a field, but it doesn’t. The tourists somewhat ruin the illusion of something mystical. The statue of St. Patrick conjures up images of mass in the ‘70s and Novenas in Knock- in other words, the exact antithesis to what Tara should stand for. It’s typically Catholic- first they rape our children, then they rape our landscape. Should have expected it really.

The Mound of the Hostages is all fenced off for excavation and mostly covered with a tarpaulin, which rather negates the point of anyone visiting to experience history firsthand. Tara has been so badly mismanaged, it’s hard to even know where to start, although I’d get rid of that fucking statue before I did anything. The nearby village is cheap and tacky too, seemingly fed only by the tourist trade at Tara. The visitor’s centre needs to be moved elsewhere. Moving it a half mile down the hill wouldn’t hurt, out of sight and mind for those pilgrims on the hill. Managing a historical site like Tara isn’t hard to do well- they’ve done it brilliantly at our next stop, Newgrange.

Newgrange is a real treat after the debacle at Tara. It has a visitor’s centre, which is small, perfectly informative and most importantly, a mile and a half away from the site. The museum has some cool models including a recreation of a “phallic stone” found at the tomb at Knowth. The stone, though not exactly penis shaped looks more like something that’d be found in a higher-end sex shop, albeit in a more polished state. It has all sorts of designs on it, including a ribbed texture up along the shaft, perhaps designed for a lady’s pleasure or the more libertine of Neolithic men.

We cross the River Boyne on a narrow suspension bridge and get on a minibus that takes us up to the tomb. In school, I studied Newgrange in great depth and drew it in art-history classes. Nothing could have prepared me for the scale of it in reality. Newgrange is enormous. The mound is fronted by a white quartz wall which, according to Michael O’Kelly, the archaeologist that excavated the site, is how Newgrange would have looked originally. I have my doubts. Though the quartz pebbles were found on the site, O’Kelly’s wall looks far too modern and a little out of place.

So what is Newgrange? Newgrange is a Neolithic mound built around 3200 BC making it older that Stonehenge and the Pyramids. It is 250ft in diameter and 40ft high with a passage going 60ft inside the structure to an inner chamber. The place is decorated with all manner of Neolithic artwork carved into the rocks and for 5000 years, the inner chamber has remained bone dry thanks to an impressive corbelled roof. Nobody knows the exact purpose of Newgrange, but human remains have been found in the inner chamber and on the Winter Solstice every year, the sun shines through a box above the main door, casting a beam of sunlight down the passage that illuminates the inner chamber for a few minutes. Perhaps Newgrange was a burial tomb. Perhaps it was some kind of calendar or temple of appease the gods. Perhaps it was all three. Nevertheless, it was a magnificent undertaking, the giant stones having been moved from dozens of miles away in an age without power when the country was still heavily forested, presumably by boat and some kind of rope and pulley system.

Until 1699, Newgrange was just a large mound in a field until a local landowner ordered his men to dig up the hill to quarry some stone. The men started digging and immediately discovered the entrance to the tomb. Over the next hundred and fifty years or so, Newgrange became a minor tourist attraction until it was taken over by the state in 1882. Minor archaeological work took place, but it wasn’t until 1962 when Michael O’Kelly led a major excavation of the site did we learn much, much more about the structure.

Newgrange is part of a much larger complex known as Brú na Boinne (a World Heritage Site) and in addition to Newgrange, there are hundreds of ancient structures in the area, including Dowth and Knowth, two other richly decorated passage tombs.

We walk around the mound and are taken inside by the tour guide, the passage narrow and cold. The inner chamber is like a cavern, illuminated by electric light. The guide explains more the mechanics of the place- about the corbelled roof and the Winter Solstice. I look around and see Victorian graffiti carved into the rocks, some of it remarkably accomplished in terms of penmanship. Stone basins in which human remains were found still sit where they were. The guide turns out the lights and it’s pitch dark. Not a photon to be seen. It’s blacker than black. She fades up the lights to give the impression of what it looks like on the Solstice when the sun shines in and hits the back of the chamber, though in reality, she says, it’s far brighter and warmer- it looks golden. She tells us we can enter a lottery to get into the passage on the Solstice to witness the sunrise and only fifty people are chosen every year, so we jump at the chance when we get back to the visitor’s centre and take one last look at the stone dildo before leaving.

Newgrange is a perfect illustration of how to manage a historical site. Entrance is ludicrously cheap for something so special and for such an experience as getting to go inside one of the marvels of the ancient world. For once, the Office of Public Works has done something absolutely right and I hope nothing changes, because as tourist attractions go, Newgrange is pretty damn special.

But it’s more than just a tourist attraction. There’s something profound about visiting Newgrange- something that Tara is lacking. Maybe it’s the carvings in the rocks- the work of artists 5000 years ago. I’m quite certain nothing I do will ever last that long. My words will fade from memory, the paper on which they’re written will disintegrate. My images on celluloid will turn to dust, computers of the future won’t be able to read Microsoft Works files. In 5000 years, what will remain of any of us, let alone our work?

As I drive home, I think about how six months ago, I’d never have been able to come here. I didn’t have a car. I’d never have been able to get out to the middle of nowhere to see a place like this. It really is freedom, the ability to hit the open road and go discover places. The thing about Newgrange is that it was built by people who lived so close to the land so as to be a part of it. The people here on this little island today still have that blood in their veins, and as such, are we not part of the land too? To drive to Newgrange is to discover that and in discovering that we discover a little bit about who we are. A drive to Newgrange isn’t just a trip to the country – it’s a trip to the heart of what makes us, us.

　

Sunday, May 20^th

I’m leaving Dublin for a while and going back down home. Herself has to go to Walkinstown so, around four, we set off, hitting the motorway in all its grey and megalithic glory. We’re there soon enough and I drop her off and point the car home.

I’m faced with a choice- take the motorway home or go down the back roads? I decide that it’s too nice a day to be stuck in a sweaty car on a motorway, so I get off the M50 and onto the N81.

I head out of Tallaght on straight and boring dual-carriageway, not getting any luck at the traffic lights. I out-accelerate a Fiat Panda off the lights, but he puts up a good fight. His car is nearly ten years newer than mine, but I guess I’m just more bored than him. At the next set of lights, I get outrun by a sociopath in an Audi, because, let’s face it, since their mass-exodus from BMW, all sociopaths now drive Audis.

Soon, the road narrows, the traffic lights disappear and the road starts to get twisty. I lean on the throttle a little heavier. The great thing about the N81 is that, because it’s a “national route”, one can, quite legally, drive at wholly inappropriate speeds. I’m climbing up towards the mountains, kissing the apexes of tight, fast corners, the road ahead, empty. I pass Blessington and I drive out past the lakes, the Wicklow Mountains just across the way with the Palladian mansion, Russborough House, the site of a whole bunch of art robberies since the ‘70s, on the right.

I stop at Poulaphouca to look at the hydroelectric dam. There’s a pretty decent view from the road and at this time of year, it’s surrounded by trees and it looks almost pretty in its 1940s concrete ugliness. I stroll down to the bridge, built in the 19^th Century which crosses the once famous Poulaphouca Waterfall which, was, once upon a time, a glorious thing, Ireland’s most famous waterfall until it was reduced to a mere trickle by the dam. The bridge is largely obscured by trees, but a glance over the parapet and a walk down by the side of the gorge gives an idea of how bloody massive it is. From the riverbed to the top of the arch is 150ft which, when viewed from lower down is almost frightening. When the reservoir behind the dam gets too full, the electricity company opens the floodgates on the dam and the surge of water reanimates the waterfall, at least for a while.

I keep driving south. I’m past Poulaphouca and going through glacial valleys on a smooth, empty road, the River Slaney to my right, barely a stream, crossed by quaint little stone bridges. I’m used to seeing the Slaney much closer to the sea I think of how curious it is that the wide, muddy monster is, up here in the mountains, a sprightly little brook and how it picks up such power along the way.

Mile after mile on tarmac, winding like a black ribbon around hills and past cottages, I think of how much better this is than the motorway and how even my little shitbox becomes a pleasure to drive. I’m in Baltinglass and I take a wrong turn and end up in a market square and I’m half glad of it because I realise that Baltinglass is a timewarp of a place. Very few things in that square have changed since the ‘60s at least. It’s another location I’ll use in my great Irish epic.

I’m past Baltinglass and leaving Wicklow, going into County Carlow. The roads get tighter, but they’re still smooth and I keep my speed up. I go through Rathvilly, crossing the narrow bridge, passing the old corn mill.

The roads beyond Rathvilly change. They get even tighter and narrower, and, even though this is still a national route, I slow down a little bit, the road weaving through estate land, cow parsley abundant. Somehow, the drive gets even better. I love the feel of the wheel in my hand on the tight, right-angled corners, the sensation of dropping down the gears on the way in, and accelerating out. The handling in the Fiat is terrible, but today, on this road, in the sunshine, radio off, just me, it and the road, it didn’t feel half bad.

The N81, which runs from the gates of Trinity College in Dublin and runs down through west Wicklow into Carlow, ends just after the town of Tullow. For me, it’s only a short hop home from there along some decidedly narrower, rougher laneways. On the drive home, I absolutely fell in love with a road. The N81 is my nomination for the best driving road in Ireland for a whole lot of reasons- it’s fast, it’s got a great set of corners and straights, it’s tight, but just wide enough for it to be nice and safe and the scenery is to die for- grey cities, purple mountains, blue lakes, green fields, yellow fields, stone bridges- it’s a haze of vivid colours and sensations and sights. In the right car, that road is driving perfection. So don’t go clogging it up on me.

Werner Herzog: World-View Through Documentary

It could never be argued that Werner Herzog is an ordinary man, let alone an ordinary filmmaker. His personal story is littered with almost folkloric anecdotes. He didn’t make a phone call until the age of seventeen. To get started as a filmmaker, he stole a 35mm camera from the Munich Film School. In 1970, he jumped into a field of cactuses following the shooting of Even Dwarfs Started Small. In 1974, he walked from Paris to Munich to visit his dying friend Lotte Eisner. Following a promise to Errol Morris, he ate his shoe as documented in Les Blank’s documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. In 2006, he rescued actor Joaquin Phoenix from an overturned car. Shortly afterwards, while conducting an interview with Mark Kermode from the BBC, he was shot, on camera, but insisted on continuing with the interview.

Herzog’s professional life is perhaps more extraordinary. In 1972, he went to the Peruvian jungle with a crew of eight to make Aguirre, the Wrath of God. This was the first of his collaborations with the great madman Klaus Kinski. On the set of Aguirre, Herzog reputedly threatened to shoot Kinski and then himself if Kinski left the set. Nevertheless, Herzog worked with Kinski again on Nosferatu and Woyzeck. In 1982, Herzog made Fitzcarraldo, again with Kinski about an Irish rubber baron who drags a steamship over a mountain in an attempt to bring opera to the jungle. Herzog and his crew actually dragged a 320 ton riverboat over a mountain. The insanity of this movie, it’s production difficulties and Klaus Kinski’s ravings are well documented in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams and in Herzog’s own elegy to Kinski, My Best Fiend.

From those few facts, we can easily deduce that given the strangeness of Herzog’s personal and professional lives, he is a man with a rather distinctive world view.

The element that defines the chief struggle in many of Herzog’s fictional films and documentaries is the protagonist’s battle with nature. From his early works like The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, to others like Little Dieter Needs to Fly, My Best Fiend and Grizzly Man, he shows a fascination with men who leave the modern, urban world behind and immerse themselves in the wilderness. Why do they do it?

Timothy Treadwell, the protagonist of Grizzly Man travels to Alaska to live with grizzly bears. It seems that Treadwell is in love with the bears, has a strong desire to protect them from poachers. He travels to Alaska for thirteen summers in a row with his video camera documenting his time spent with the bears of the Katmai National Park. In doing this, he becomes something of a minor celebrity, taking his footage back, editing it and travelling around to schools, appearing on television. Again, it seems that this is why Treadwell undertakes this dangerous and thankless task. During the course of Grizzly Man however, Treadwell reveals he has problems connecting to people, especially women and it appears as if Treadwell, in fact, comes to Alaska to escape people, leading a misanthropic hermitage, bonding with the bears, seemingly closer to them than to people. What is Herzog searching for in his documentaries? Specifically, what is he searching for in Grizzly Man? In a Herzog documentary, if a person enters nature, they will be stripped back to their basest personality traits. Immersion in nature reveals more about a person than any psychologist. In Treadwell’s case, life in nature, time spent alone with just his camera and the bears reveals him to be misanthropic individual. His attitude to the bears reveals either gross stupidity or genuine mental illness. I’m inclined to think the latter. The way he anthropomorphises the bears is symptomatic of a form of mental disturbance.

In the case of the Swiss ski-jumper Walter Steiner in The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, Steiner seems an altogether tougher nut to crack. He’s a carpenter by trade and says he ski-jumps “just for kicks”. All the same, for someone who ski-jumps part-time for kicks, Steiner was a world champion. Steiner puzzles me. Perhaps he is just an adrenaline junkie. Perhaps he is just driven by that innate force that makes people desire to be a world champion. Steiner defies nature in the form of gravity. He defies it in the form of surviving horrific falls. In ski-jumping, he is stripped back to his primal basics. We see them, yet we cannot exactly define what they are.

Herzog seems to be in search of the deepest essential that defines us as human beings. Immersion in nature seems to be the best way to reveal this. Only by the obsessive pursuit of the transcendence of regular human function, it appears, can man achieve the true knowledge of himself. Is this perhaps the ecstatic truth he frequently speaks of in interviews? He is reluctant to define the term ecstatic truth. The closest he comes is in an interview in Time Out London magazine in which he states, “The term ‘ecstatic truth’ is searching for truth beyond the facts and much deeper than facts”

Few people, least of all Herzog himself seem to be able to define ecstatic truth, yet I think of it as the truths revealed when a person is pared back to their most basic- how a person reacts, how they behave, what is left of a person after surviving an ordeal.

How does this relate back to Herzog’s world view? There is a scene in My Best Fiend taken from footage shot in the jungle on the set of Fitzcarraldo, where Klaus Kinski rants at production manager Walter Saxer. Though Kinski’s raving is spectacular in itself, he is not the most interesting person in the scene. Herzog is. He stands, saying nothing, waiting for Kinski to burn himself out. Cutting back to the present, Herzog tells the story of how one of the Indians on set told him that they were very frightened by the row. Not of Kinski- but of Herzog. In their culture, the person who stays calm in a fight is the dangerous one, because any minute they feel the calm one might erupt into a frenzy. What’s remarkable is the fact that in all the footage of Herzog contained in My Best Fiend and Burden of Dreams, not a frame shows Herzog getting upset or angry. His steamboat gets beached, all manner of misfortune occurs on the set, yet all Herzog ever shows is, at most, mild discontent.

I’m inclined to wonder if this is Herzog pared back? Has the ordeal in the jungle stripped him back to his basic primal state? He seems little different to his ordinary state. He is a riddle. For me, the most fascinating character in My Best Fiend isn’t Kinski (who can be merely accepted as a raving maniac), but Herzog, a character of extraordinary self restraint. What has nature done to him? He speaks only of it in descriptive terms: “I don’t see it so much erotic I see it more full of obscenity. It’s just… and nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotic-al here, I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and… just rotting away”

Herzog sees the absolute horror of nature, but its beauty too: “Taking a close look at what’s around us there is some sort of a harmony, it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. But when I say this I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgement.”

This is comparable to his narration in the voice-over to Grizzly Man after Timothy Treadwell’s proclamation of the sadness of nature’s savagery upon discovering a dead bear cub and a dead fox. He says he disagrees with Treadwell. Herzog sees nature as a place full of “chaos, hostility and murder”.

Herzog, after his numerous jungle expeditions would have the utmost authority to make such a statement and this mirrors what he says about nature and the jungle in Burden of Dreams. Herzog is still an enigma though. Is this what he thinks about nature or what he feels? Does he express how he feels at all? Does the jungle penetrate Herzog or is he impenetrable? Perhaps Herzog is a man with nothing to pare back. Perhaps, as a maverick filmmaker, living a life utterly devoted to his art- a life of extremes, of bizarre feats, of great achievements, of a sort of asceticism, he is a man who has laid himself bare and doesn’t care who knows it.

Herzog’s personal asceticism is important in his filmmaking, and his documentary characters are often ascetics of one sort or another. He is fascinated by men who transcend societal norms and carve their own path. For this reason, I believe that My Best Fiend was not about Klaus Kinski. It was about Herzog. Kinski, though transcending societal norms in terms of being crazy, could arguably not have become the star he did without Herzog and without roles in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. In making My Best Fiend about himself, Herzog cleverly presents the illusion that the documentary is about Kinski. Whilst it is true that without Kinski, many of Herzog’s films would lack a certain visceral punch, the same can be said about the jungle or the Urubamba River or Fitzcarraldo’s steamboat. Herzog’s films frequently involve men immersed in nature. My Best Fiend is about a man immersed in the human nature of a madman. Kinski is just another obstacle to Herzog’s pursuit of art, just as say, the Pathet Lao or poisonous insects or malaria are an obstacle to Dieter Dengler’s pursuit of survival and freedom in Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

There is a distinct Nietzschean influence in Herzog’s work. Him and his characters, following their immersion in nature, like Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, emerge as enlightened beings- Ü bermensch, free from the rules of society, creating their own values and purpose. Zarathustra’s hermitage is a form of asceticism that pertains to Herzog. His monomaniacal dedication to the art of film takes on an almost religious conviction. Following several accidents on the set of Even Dwarves Started Small, he promised his cast that upon completion of shooting, he would jump into a cactus. He did. He promised Errol Morris that he would eat his shoe is Morris managed make his film Gates of Heaven. He did. He travelled to the jungle twice with Klaus Kinski to make Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. In spite of the hardship endured, Herzog kept working and still works to this day. His persistence in the face of such tribulations seems equivalent to Job’s refusal to renounce God in the Biblical Book of Job. Yet Herzog doesn’t seem to be a religious man in the conventional sense. He says: “I had a dramatic religious phase at the age of 14 and converted to Catholicism. Even though I am not a member of the Catholic church any longer, there seems to be something of a distant religious echo in some of my work.”

I agree with his statement that there seems to be traces of religion in his work. They do not, however, seem to be traces of any conventional religion. Herzog’s religion is film, plain and simple, and he suffers for that like some ascetic saint.

Herzog’s characters seem to emerge from nature with something more than enlightenment or a status as Ü bermensch. Dieter Dengler comes out of the jungle with his life, a hell of a story and the knowledge of himself as an incredibly tough man in addition to becoming a minor celebrity. Walter Steiner defies gravity itself, seeming to fly without wings like no man was ever meant to. He overshoots ramps and survives falls that appear as if they would kill a man. Steiner triumphs over nature becoming a world champion and a record breaker.

Perhaps though, the two characters in Herzog’s documentaries that sum up Herzog’s own world view, that man will come out of an exile in nature with more than just enlightenment, are the two filmmakers- Timothy Treadwell and Werner himself.

Treadwell was a failed actor. It is said in Grizzly Man that he was the second choice for the role of the bartender in Cheers which went to Woody Harrelson. To draw attention to himself, he invented a persona for himself as an Australian orphan from the outback, though, according to his friends, his accent was always highly suspect. He survived alcoholism and drug addiction before developing a fascination with bears. Devoting the rest of his life to them and by spending summers in Alaska he achieved what he could never achieve as an actor. Treadwell became well known throughout America as an educator and eccentric- the “Grizzly Man”. He said he went to Alaska to become one with the bears. In a sense he did become one with the bears, but his death made him infamous and though he emerged from nature as a small bunch of body parts, he had achieved the celebrity he had always wanted since his childhood. Herzog’s documentary certainly contributed to Treadwell’s infamy, but it also showed the other facets to his character that Treadwell wanted to display to the world. It shows his deep seated love of the bears and a measure of talent as a filmmaker. Without Treadwell’s death, there would be no film Grizzly Man and he wouldn’t have achieved such a level of recognition that he always seemed to crave.

If Treadwell achieved recognition and infamy following his emergence from the wilds, the same could be said for Herzog, as documented in My Best Fiend. He went into the Peruvian jungle with a crew of eight and Klaus Kinski and emerged with a masterpiece. Herzog’s earlier work, though interesting, is incomparable to Aguirre, a film of primal beauty. It marked the start of the Herzog-Kinski collaboration, one of the greatest director-actor partnerships in cinema.

My Best Fiend traces their relationship beyond Aguirre to Nosferatu and Woyzeck to Fitzcarraldo where once again, Herzog goes to the jungle with Kinski and produces a masterpiece. Herzog recreates his protagonist’s mad folly of pulling a ship over a mountain. His shoot is plagued by death, disaster and Kinski and yet again, he emerges with another masterwork. The jungle, this immersion in nature, seems to make Herzog thrive and like the characters in his documentaries, it strips him back to reveal his ecstatic truth, his extraordinary capability to remain graceful in the face of overbearing physical, financial and creative pressure, these moments of extraordinary lucidity and stoicism captured in Burden of Dreams and footage contained in My Best Fiend.

Most of Herzog’s characters possess some sort of obsession or career that sets them apart from the rest of humankind. For me, this is the extraordinary thing about My Best Fiend- it shows the principle archetype of all Herzog’s characters and documentary subjects- Werner Herzog himself.

Journeys in Germany: A Travelogue- Part 6

We had a long journey ahead of us heading from Munich to Berlin, but that train didn’t leave until six in the evening. We the best part of a day to kill and though we hadn’t seen beyond the train station, we had no real desire to see the city. After viewing the less reprehensible excesses of the Third Reich the previous day, we felt it only right to see for ourselves the site of some of their more infamous atrocities. We boarded a train for Dachau.

We were in the town within twenty minutes of leaving Munich and disembarked at Dachau station, boarding a bus for the camp. Dachau itself is a nice little town, albeit an unremarkable one. The streets are pleasant, trees are abundant and it was, altogether a charming little burg. We arrived at the camp in a quiet suburb. The entire expanse of the original concentration camp no longer survives but a large portion has been preserved as the “memorial site”. There, naturally, isn’t an admission fee.

Dachau was the first concentration camp built by the Nazis in 1933, fifty one days after Hitler took power. This was not a place of genocide. It was originally a camp for political prisoners and enemies of the Reich, but later grew to include gays, gypsies, religious figures and common criminals among the thousands imprisoned there. In the early days, Dachau was a strong psychological weapon to crush dissent in Germany. “Dear God, make me dumb, so I may not to Dachau come,” was a little rhyme that became popular in 1935 highlighting how effective the camp had become in instilling the fear of dissent in Germans. Despite be of a small scale compared to the extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka, Dachau is where the murder machine was perfected. Over 30,000 people are believed to have died in Dachau, mostly from typhus and starvation.

Steve and I bought an audio guide but quickly discarded it when we realised that, with the sheer volume of information, we’d have been there until nightfall had we listened to everything.

We set off towards the main body of the camp. A section of railway track had been unearthed outside the main camp gate. Contrary to popular belief, this is not where prisoner trains terminated. This was a little industrial tramway for the pre-existing munitions factory beside the camp. Most of the prisoners in Dachau were forced to walk the two and a half miles from the main station to the camp. Others though, were brought in by train. A siding had been constructed in 1915 from Dachau station to the munitions factory and it was used, albeit quite infrequently to transport prisoners.

It was on this siding that the US 45^th Infantry Division discovered the “death train”. As the war was drawing to a close, the Nazis tried to move as many concentration camp inmates to Dachau as, unlike many of the other camps, it was not yet liberated. In early April, 1945, a train left Buchenwald concentration camp headed for Dachau with hundreds of prisoners in thirty open-top freight cars. Due to the fact that they were travelling through a war zone with bombed out railways and lengthy detours, it took them three weeks to get to Dachau, a distance of just 220 miles. By the time they got there, most of them were dead. Their bodies were riddled with the bullets from the American aircraft that had strafed the train.

Finding the “death train” and seeing the piles and piles of rotting corpses and malnourished, barely living prisoners, the US troops, disgusted and traumatised, rounded up present members of the SS and opened fire on them with machine guns. They had already surrendered.

We went through the wrought iron gate with the immortal and chilling “Arbeit Macht Frei” forming part of the metalwork. The gate at Dachau was the first to host the phrase with the one in Auschwitz coming later. We stepped onto the parade ground where prisoners stood for roll calls, often for hours on end in the blistering heat and freezing cold.

The parade ground is surrounded by stylised artist’s interpretations of the gallows where transgressors of the camp’s penal code were publicly hanged. We walked through some of the old buildings with a crippling sense of disgust and wonderment, every step taken a further descent into the mire of history.

The barracks buildings where the prisoners slept on hard wooden beds amidst lice and disease- where they bathed, where they shat, where they were dragged out to be executed, where the Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited to work in the crematoria burning the bodies of their fellow inmates. It was all rather a lot to process.

I won’t go into every detail of Dachau’s appalling history because there are very many fine books on the subject, all worth a read. Dachau probably has one of the most well documented histories out of any of the camps, as there was less attempt at any cover-up as the war came to a close. It benefits from having been on the right side of the Iron Curtain too, so western historians have had longer to study and explore its history.

We walked down the poplar avenue past the foundations of all the old barracks buildings, down towards the memorial churches that had been built on the site in the ‘60s. Down past the watchtowers, the formerly electrified fences, down towards the woods, across the little stream with small fish in it. We crossed the bridge and headed over to a decidedly peaceful area, like a stately, country garden with fine trees and pretty flowers.

A building rose up, picturesque and redbrick. Only the chimney gave it away. The crematorium. We stepped inside the gas chamber. It was a small room with low ceilings, drains on the floor and vents in the ceiling. Outside, a sign proclaimed “Brausebad” or “showers”. I was at least somewhat relieved to discover that the general consensus is that nobody was ever executed in the gas chamber in Dachau, though there is some debate on this.

Dachau was one of the strongholds of Nazi human experimentation. Here, experiments were conducted on inmates to determine how the human body reacted at high altitudes in an attempt to improve the survivability of ejecting fighter pilots. Prisoners were placed in a low pressure chamber designed to simulate conditions at 66,000 feet. Further experiments were carried out by making inmates drink only seawater for days on end, infecting them with malaria and immersing them in vats of freezing water until hypothermia and death ensued. Those that survived were killed in an attempt to determine why they survived and the others didn’t.

The crematorium was possibly the most horrific of all the sights I saw- the brick ovens with the biers for placing the bodies in, sometimes six at a time. We walked around the garden, past the “Never Forget” memorials which made my eyes start to prickle. I struggle to think how anyone could forget after a visit to Dachau. I can’t even imagine the repulsion after seeing one of the extermination camps in Poland. A stone plaque read “Execution Range with Blood Ditch”. There are still bullets visible in the wall.

We were quiet after leaving Dachau. We’d seen so much misery that we couldn’t help but think about it. It was a sombre mood.

We took a train back to Munich and hopped on a subway out to the BMW museum. I wanted to pick up a gift for my father. They hadn’t got what I wanted, but the building was impressive. I got to sit in one of the new 3 Series convertibles. I can’t say I was impressed. I had to smile at the museum employee jumping into the little Isetta bubble car and driving it through the building. It was a cute little thing.

The Inter City Express is a fine looking train, sleek and white and built for speed. Flat out you’ll be doing 186mph. I expected the train to pick up the pace not far outside Munich, but by Nuremburg, we were still just trundling along not even hitting 100. We passed through Ingolstadt, hundreds of brand new Audis stacked up on trains. We were still just pootling along. The loud, obnoxious old woman opposite us made it impossible to sleep. It was going to be a truly terrible journey.

Halfway through Germany, we got hungry so we went to the dining car. It was empty. We said we’d go all out and eat what we wanted. How often were we going to be in a dining car, snaking through the forests and valleys of the Harz Mountains, past rivers and small towns, a gorgeous waitress tending to our every need? The dumplings were fine. The cake was finer. And the tea? It must have been the finest cup of tea in all of Germany. Sure it wasn’t as good as my tea at home, but all things considered, it was a pretty decent effort. I was ecstatically happy- good food, good scenery, good company and I felt like Cary Grant in North By Northwest. When you’ve nowhere to go or nothing to do, a two hour dinner makes an awful lot of sense.

After the hours had passed, we went back to our seats. The old woman was gone. We drifted through the night, talking, listening to Bach, passing through Leipzig and finally steaming into Berlin around midnight. The station there is humongous. We took a taxi to the hostel- an altogether more agreeable affair than the one in Munich and we slept a quiet, peaceful night in fluffy, cool, single beds. We were going to enjoy Berlin.

You’re welcome Hollywood…

Here’s a completely insane idea for a film I discovered written in one of my notebooks. I’ve no recollection of writing it. Judging by it, I must have been very, very drunk when I did write it.

• Mick, a cameraman, goes to the dentist. Acquires “foreign accent syndrome” making him sound like James Mason.
• Gets overheard by John Boorman in Ardmore bar.
• Boorman working on Kubrick biopic.
• Gets Mick into ADR booth to fix Mason dialogue.
• Meets Amy Adams.
• Amy is in the midst of a breakup.
• Mick consoles her and Amy loves his accent. They hit it off.
• Amy’s boyfriend comes to claim her back.
• Mick protects her and a fight ensues.
• Fencing?
• Mick gains fame after punching out Amy’s boyfriend.
• Mick loses accent.
• Downfall.
• Back to old job- ends up better off thanks to minor fame and having worked with Boorman.

If you’re reading this Scott Rudin, send me a PM and we’ll talk.

Journeys in Germany: A Travelogue- Part 5

We were getting used to this hostel bullshit, though it was still as horrific as ever. We hadn’t seen anything regarding the Nazis yet and I still wanted to see more of the Alps so we decided to head down to Berchtesgaden where the High Command had their retreats and summer houses in Obersalzberg, a settlement on the side of the mountain overlooking the town.

After a meagre station breakfast, we hopped on the train for Freilassing, a town right on the German side of the Austrian border. It was raining as we left Munich- cold drizzle, like back in Ireland. The view from the top deck of the train was nice, rolling through countryside, along the sides of the Chiemsee, a large lake with several islands, one of which houses the Herrenchiemsee, another one of Ludwig II’s palace complexes. This was an attempted copy of the Palace of Versailles, bigger than Neuschwanstein and in today’s money would have cost approximately $125 million to construct. Sadly for Ludwig, he only stayed a few days in the castle in 1885, dying the following year. When he died, all construction work on all his castles and palaces was stopped and the buildings were opened to the public. It’s a real shame that few of these building were ever completed, though they probably would have bankrupt Bavaria.

We arrived in Freilassing and boarded a waiting train for Berchtesgaden and took off into the valleys. The train snaked through the most gorgeous scenery I’d ever laid eyes on- tall trees, fast-flowing rivers, high mountains, cattle grazing on small pastures ringed with woodland, stopping in quaint little towns collecting old women going shopping in the next dorf. The line to Berchtesgaden was really splendid as we twisted through the valley of the river.

After an hour or so of heaven, we arrived in Berchtesgaden station, a huge building built by the Third Reich in 1937. The station here was designed to impress the foreign dignitaries that Hitler hosted in Obersalzberg and he himself used to arrive here on his special train named Amerika always in a blaze of flagwaving and tootling.

It was very warm when we got off the train with blue skies and a noon sun, in stark contrast to the Munich which we’d left. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as yesterday, so immediately upon leaving the station, we went and found an hotel where we could get a cup of tea. We crossed the clearest, bluest river I’ve ever seen and found this empty hotel where there didn’t seem to be a soul about. We wandered into the dining room, completely empty and pleasantly cool, stuffed animal heads on the walls and we rattled some chairs around in the hope that someone would come out to us. Eventually a very fine Mädchen (most Mädchens in Germany are very fine) came out to us and soon brought the tea, which was Earl Grey without milk. What kind of savages are these people? First off, Earl Grey is bloody horrible. Secondly, what kind of obtuse onanist drinks tea without milk? The Germans really have no understanding of a good cup of tea. The Earl Grey without milk was revolting, but it did the job and warded off my headaches. I tipped the pretty waitress and we left.

I’d never ridden on a cable car and it seemed a far more interesting way to make the ascent to Obersalzberg than by bus. Steve and I walked by the clear, rapid river towards the outskirts of town. Unless you knew about this cable car, you’d never find it, as it was so far from the centre of town. On the way out, we passed the end of the Berchtesgaden rail yard and the entrance to a tunnel, inside which, after the war, Allied soldiers discovered a train filled with Hermann Goering’s looted artworks.

The cable car was a quaint old thing and, sharing the cabin with a ten year old German boy, we glided up the mountain, passing pastures and Alpine chalets, whirring through pine forests. At the midpoint of the journey, we docked and switched to another car which took us further up the mountain and soon, we were slap bang in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.

We had come to Obersalzberg to see several remnants of the Nazi regime in addition to the scenery. Let me make it clear- I am not and never will be a supporter of or a sympathiser to the Nazis. They are among the most vile creatures to ever walk the earth and they deserved to burn. I am, however, fascinated by them- fascinated by their aesthetics, their methods and their ideology. We should be fascinated by them. These are the people that orchestrated an industrialised genocide in most of the nations across Europe. They killed over six million people in the quest for their racial ideals and over twenty million more in their pursuit of world domination with the invasion of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The most frightening thing about it was that Germany was supposed to be the most civilised and sophisticated country in the world. The Nazis were not monsters. They were people that looked just like you and me. It scares me that such a capacity for evil is present in humans. Unless we are fascinated by the Nazis, we will not be compelled to study and understand them and if we do not understand them and we do not study their methods and means, then how can we prevent it from ever happening again? It would be wrong to come to Germany and not seek out the remnants of what these people left behind, whether those things be concentration camps or something more trivial like a collection of summer villas.

The first thing I wanted to see was the ruins of the Berghof, Hitler’s retreat. In the 1927, Hitler started renting a small farmhouse. Later, he bought the house with the royalties from Mein Kampf and added various parts onto it, so by the time he was finished, it was quite a fine abode. This was the Berghof, the place where Hitler lived. The RAF bombed Obersalzberg in 1945, for fear that the Nazis would retreat there and into tunnel complexes in the mountains. The Berghof sustained heavy damage. After the war, it had been occupied by the Allies, whom, in 1952, blew the place to smithereens lest it become a shrine. The Americans planted trees around the ruins, which gradually smothered the place until it became a pile of rubble lost in the woods, to be found only by people who knew where to look.

Hitler had first come to Obersalzberg in the 20s and loved the place. The Berghof became the focal point of the Obersalzberg complex, which was run by Martin Bormann and grew to include an SS barracks, a kindergarten, summer houses for most of the High Command. The Nazis were forced to bring in a garrison of SS troops to guard the place from the hordes that came to see the likes of Hitler, Goering and Bormann the way people today flock to Beverly Hills to see movie stars. The growth of the Obersalzberg complex was largely due to the fact that it now needed to station hundreds of SS soldiers and their families. This was hell for the people already living in Obersalzberg who had their land and property seized in the name of excluding visitors (now they knew how Poland felt). Hitler’s elderly neighbour, Josef Rasp was pictured shaking hands with Adolf in propaganda photos designed to showcase him as a pleasant, good natured neighbour. Shortly after, Rasp had his property seized by Bormann and was forced to leave the area he’d lived in and farmed all his life (now he knew how France felt). The Nazis were really lousy neighbours.

We walked from the cable car along the road towards Obersalzberg. The road was not busy and wound along through forests with an occasional break in the trees so we could see the valleys and rivers below us. We knew where we wanted to go. The Hotel zum Türken is the closest landmark to the ruins of the Berghof and if we could find that, we could find the ruins. I wanted some souvenir of the place- a brick perhaps and I was determined to find it.

After a mile, we came to a roundabout. I knew it was some kind of Obersalzberg visitor’s centre and I also knew that the Hotel zum Türken lay just beyond that. We continued along the road and came to nothing. We’d reached another small village that was clearly not what we were looking for. I asked an old man for directions to the hotel. He told me that it was back from whence I came. We headed back.

We were at the visitor’s centre and found another promising path so we took it. It led us down a road past, what looked like the Hotel zum Türken, but wasn’t. I was getting confused. The map told me that the Türken, lay just beyond the Intercontinental Hotel, yet I saw no sign of it. I later learned that the buildings we thought might have been the Türken were in fact, SS lodgings.

We wandered into the woods and came upon a massive concrete structure, clearly totalitarian in style. I figured it was a fort of some kind- a bomb shelter perhaps. I recently discovered the building to be a giant coal bunker built to hold 3500 tons of coal to supply the Obersalzberg complex. The retreating Nazis set the Koksbunker on fire in early May 1945 and the building burned until October.

We knew the Berghof was very close by. We saw it on the map. We were no more than 200 yards from it, yet we could see no way to get to it. It was getting late. If we spent more time looking for it, then we’d be late for the second thing we came to see and hence, would miss the last train from Berchtesgaden back to the main line. It was time to move on.

The second thing we had come to see in Obersalzberg was the Eagle’s Nest, a house, built by Bormann on top of the Kehlstein mountain, 2700ft above the rest of the Obersalzberg complex where Hitler could spend time and entertain guests. The construction of the Eagle’s Nest was a mammoth task.

The building started in 1938 and took 13 months to complete. The road from Obersalzberg to the Eagle’s Nest is an engineering marvel. The road is four miles long, climbs 2600ft and has only one hairpin turn. They were complete bastards, but you’ve got to say one thing for the Nazis- they were pretty damn good at roads.

To get to the Eagle’s Nest, Steve and I were forced to dish out fifteen euro for the bus to the top- it was either that or walk for four hours. They really had us over a barrel. Reluctantly, we paid the fare and boarded the bus to the top.

The Eagle’s Nest or Kehlsteinhaus, though an RAF target, escaped destruction due to the fact it was a tiny house perched atop a mountain. Hitting it from a Lancaster bomber under heavy flak would be roughly equivalent to standing on the roof of your house, trying to piss into a shot glass on the lawn. It only survived the nationwide purge of Nazi buildings in the early ‘50s due to the fact that the Bavarian government saw its potential as a tourist attraction.

The bus wound its way up the road, passing through tunnels and along sheer cliffs, climbing higher and higher. We reached a car park below the Kehlsteinhaus which was still high above us. We were ushered into a tunnel, lined with bricks, with a large, ornate portal. The tunnel was cool in contrast to outside. We walked along and soon we were in a chamber with a vaulted roof, waiting on the great brass elevator to take us the 407ft up to the house. Built by the Otis company, the lift is all shiny and looks like something from the Titanic or from a fin-de-siécle Parisian hotel. Photography is verboten, presumably because the reflective nature of the plished brass would enable you to take a photo of some chick’s tits without her realising it. We crowded in and it swept us up to the house.

We had a poke around the house and the mountaintop. There’s not much to tell about the house itself. The most interesting feature has to the Italian red-marble fireplace given to Hitler as a 50^th birthday present by Mussolini. The house was Bormann’s 50^th birthday present to the Führer. Hitler wasn’t especially impressed by the house and didn’t spend all that much time there. He much preferred his Berghof. His fear of heights, the elevator and the dangers of lightning may have turned him off the Kehlsteinhaus and he didn’t visit very often, using it only to entertain foreign dignitaries.

It was late afternoon and we were hungry, so we said we’d have dinner at the Kehlsteinhaus restaurant. We took a table on the terrace and ordered. A man in a Tyrolean costume brought out a large plate of wurst and sauerkraut for me. Here we were, sitting on a deck in the place where Hitler probably once stood. The views from the terrace are superb. On one side, we had the Kö nigsee, a very pretty lake and favourite nudie bathing spot for Eva Braun. On another side, we had high Alps, forests, valleys, Sound of Music meadows. We could see right down into Austrian, the city of Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace quite visible. It was as scenic as hell. Eating in a place like this surely ranks as one of my all-time dining experiences. The food, though appetising was nothing on the setting. We were over 6000ft above sea-level, dining on an Alp in our shirtsleeves. It’s the stuff that memories are made of.

We took the bus back down to Obersalzberg and realised we had twenty minutes to get back to the cable car, over a mile away. The final run of the day is at 5.30 and now, it was 5.15. If we missed that cable car, we’d miss the last train out of Berchtesgaden. Taking off in a march that the Nazis themselves would have been proud of we powered along the road, barely talking to conserve our breaths. We were nearly there and time was tight. The cable-car building was visible! We ran the last 200 yards, shouting at the woman on the door to let us through, bursting in the gates, leaping into the cable car as it was about to take off.

We flew down the mountain, drenched in sweat all over. I was losing weight in Germany. All the walking was really getting to me. My trousers felt much looser now than when we left. I was stepping on the ankles of my jeans. We got back to Berchtesgaden and took the last train back.

That evening in Munich, we were tired, but decided to go for a few drinks at the bar. We sat down and tried to avert our eyes as Bruce and Kylie, our Aussie nemeses made out beside the pool table. It was obscene the way she writhed against him. It made us miss our own women. It also made me want to hit Bruce with a pool cue and bend his girlfriend over the table. Some Danish guys sat down beside us and we got talking. A few of them left, leaving us with one who seemed a little dim, though his English was good. They were travelling through Munich from Copenhagen, down through Austria and Croatia to Greece, then back up through Italy and Germany again. He seemed like a pleasant sort and was puzzled to learn that most people in Ireland thought U2 were shite and that Bono was a plonker. I admit, it was nice talking to him. This is what hostels are supposed to be about- meeting fellow pilgrims, shared experiences, a common solidarity. Oh fuck it, give me a hotel any day.

　

P.S. The source of much of the background information is from the most excellent www.thirdreichinruins.com, a treasure of a website.

Journeys in Germany: A Travelogue- Part 4

We were glad to get out of the hostel that morning. We didn’t want to wake the foreigners so we crept around the room, gathering our things and sneaking out. We wanted breakfast, but the buffet seemed packed, so we said we’d buy our breakfast at the station. We feasted on giant poppy-seed pretzels and apple slices and, expense be damned, I drank freshly squeezed orange juice from a kiosk. We had the bones of a good breakfast, minus the tea obviously.

We boarded a train bound for Füssen, right in the bottom southwest corner of Bavaria. Some American girls boarded. An English woman. We waited for the train to depart. Three minutes to departure and our train to Fü ssen showed no sign of preparing to depart. The Americans asked me if I knew what was going on. I didn’t. Suddenly, the Englishwoman shouted,

“We’re on the wrong train! It’s on the other platform. This train leaves an hour later!”

We gathered our things in a panic and jumped off the train, rushing to the other platform. The doors were closing. We ran down the platform. A conductor appeared at the window of the train.

“NEIN!” he shouted. I stopped. The American girls sprinted after the train as it began to depart.

“We want to go to Füssen!” they shouted. The conductor shouted back,

“NEXT TRAIN!”. The girls kept running, trying to catch up and leap aboard when the conductor started screaming. “NO! NO, I SAY!”

The girls stumbled to a halt as the train passed the end of the platform. Silently, I began to laugh. And then my laughter grew louder. Steve looked at me.

“What?” he asked.

“NO! NO, I SAY!”

He began to laugh. Little did we know, the train conductor, straight out of a World War II movie, had unwittingly provided the catchphrase for the trip. An hour and a bit later, we were steaming southwest from Munich. The countryside wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exactly inspiring. Yet two hours later, we were travelling through the heart of everything I imagined when I pictured Bavaria- lush meadows, cows with bells, wooden houses, looming Alps. In 1964, this picturesque area was invaded by a film crew shooting a little known flick called The Great Escape. That infamous scene where Steve McQueen (or rather stunt rider Bud Ekins), tries to jump the barbed wire fence into Switzerland, was shot around here as was a large portion of the rest of the picture. No wonder this place looked so familiar- I’d seen it all before.

Füssen was the end of the line and it seemed to be a lovely little town, nestled at the foot of towering mountains, basking in stone-splitting sunshine. You might well ask why we’d come to Fü ssen. Well, as our bus plodded from the station up into the hills, the answer rose up above, baroque and brilliant in the sun. We were visiting the great castle of Neuschwanstein.

 

King Ludwig II was rich, insane and boy, did he love castles. Obsessed with the operas of Richard Wagner, he sought to construct an historical palace as far away from Munich as possible where he could live out his medieval fantasies and host opera recitals.

When Ludwig’s grandfather died in 1868, Ludwig became wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, and immediately started work on his castle at Hohenschwangau. Ludwig’s faux-medieval palace is, architecturally speaking, an anachronistic mess, switching here and there from Gothic to Romanesque to European Historicism, yet in all this mishmash emerges something startlingly beautiful and astonishingly impressive.

The great white castle started to rise on top of the mountain overlooking Füssen. Towers went up. Hundreds of tons of marble, sandstone, bricks and wood. Millions and millions of Marks were poured into the project. In 1883, Wagner died, never having seen the castle. By 1884, the castle was still unfinished though Ludwig moved in.

 

In 1886, tired of Ludwig’s irrationality and spiralling debts and the fear that he‘d financially ruin the entire state, the Bavarian parliament ordered that Ludwig be deposed. When the party came around with the writ of his deposition, Ludwig had them arrested.

In June, 1886, Ludwig went walking by a lake with his doctor. They never returned. Ludwig and his doctor were found dead on the lakeshore in highly mysterious circumstances. Ludwig’s body showed no sign of any violence, yet Dr. Gudden had been strangled. His death remains highly suspicious. Many people had reason to want Ludwig dead (he was almost bankrupting the treasury), yet the autopsy reports do not suggest that he was murdered.

At the time of his death, Neuschwanstein was not yet completed and indeed never would be. Despite how impressive it looks, only parts of the castle were ever finished and those chambers can be visited today.

A friend of mine had visited Neuschwanstein some years previously and had made the walk from the base of the hill up to the castle, a distance of about a mile, in about forty minutes. Being a competitive sort, I was determined to get up the hill faster than her if it damn well killed me. I had done hills. I’d conquered Heidelberg and Neuschwanstein was going to be no different despite the blazing sun and Alpine terrain.

We hiked up through the pine-smelling woods, passing other fat, slow tourists, dodging the horseshit left on the road by the horse-drawn carriages, thinking of how cruel it is to make horses pull lazy people up such steep hills in such hot weather. My head was pounding. I hadn’t had my tea that morning and the withdrawal symptoms were kicking with a vengeance. We struggled on, legs aching from the pace, gripped by summit fever and a monomaniacal desire to reach the castle.

We did it. Thirty minutes. Good going. The castle was impressive, looming white and tall in front of us. Yet, the most gorgeous thing was the view from the top of the hill. We thought we could see all of Bavaria- the lakes, the lowlands, the tiny churches in the distance. The smaller castle of Hohenschwangau stood across the valley on another hill beside a lake. Beside us was the Pollat Gorge, a deep cut in the rock with a white-water river at the bottom and a waterfall at its head. A frail bridge, the Marienbrü cke hung wedged between the gorge walls. I could see why Ludwig had been drawn here to escape the real world. This was the stuff of fantasy.

We were hungry so we walked halfway back down the hill to a restaurant where buxom waitresses served meat in traditional German costumes. It was as kitsch as hell, but Bavaria is where kitsch comes from, so it was entirely apt. We had currywurst, a hot pork sausage smothered in spicy ketchup. We had learned about currywurst from old Mrs. Gleeson and it was one of the few food items, aside from Kaffee und Kuchen that we learned how to order. The history of Currywurst is an interesting one. It was invented in Berlin in 1949 by Herta Heuwer who had managed to obtain Worcester Sauce, curry powder and ketchup from occupying British soldiers. She mixed these with other spices, poured them over a sausage and began selling them at her food stand from where they took off to become a dish known all over Germany.

I won’t say I was disgusted by the currywurst- far from it, but it was a highly unusual taste was not quite to my parched, hot and headache suffering persuasion and it set my mouth aflame which was most unwelcome. At last, I ordered a cup of tea- Earl Grey, but still, tea. I hadn’t yet had a decent cup in Germany and this was no better than any of the previous ones. Still, after a while, it did soothe my throbbing head along with some early cake, not quite late enough to be Kaffee und Kuchen, but close enough.

We had bought tickets for a tour of the castle, but our tour wasn’t due to leave until four thirty so we said we’d take a stroll over to the Marienbrücke to take some pictures of the castle (the Marienbrücke is from where most of the shots you’ll see of Neuschwanstein are taken).

We wandered along paths through the woods, rising and falling, twisting and turning, until we heard this strange music. Amidst the trees, stood a man dressed in Bavarian costume playing an old musical instrument.

“Do you know what that is?” Steve asked.

“Why, it’s a hurdy-gurdy!” I said.

Indeed, before us stood a man in costume playing a hurdy-gurdy. There was a surrealism about it, like something from a Herzog film and we stood mesmerized watching the man twiddle his instrument. It was hypnotic- the droning strings, the sound like bagpipes crossed with a violin. We gave him some money and walked on.

Climbing through more woods, we reached the Marienbrücke, perched vertiginously over the gorge, suspended high over the river. The bridge afforded us the quintessential view of Neuschwanstein, the image of a million picture postcards. It really hammered home how precarious a position on which the castle was built. It’s quite amazing it doesn’t fall down the cliff.

We returned to the castle for the tour at four. The opulence of Neuschwanstein’s interior is possibly a testament to Ludwig’s insistence on living in a dream. It’s also a practical example of the Bavarian treasury’s fears that Ludwig’s castle building would bankrupt the state. It really does seem like a 19^th Century interpretation of a medieval romance. The murals and frescos, great chandeliers, mosaics and decorative wood are in fact, as tacky as hell. If a footballer built a house with an interior like this, we’d consider it shockingly vulgar. The interior of Neuschwanstein is shockingly vulgar, but it sure is impressive and, bearing in mind Ludwig’s boyish fantasies, it’s endearing too. It’s like what would result if a ten year old were asked to create a dream home. The secret passageway in Ludwig’s bedroom is fun and the grotto through which we passed was a wondrous tunnel carved using the power of dreams. Towards the end of the Neuschwanstein tour, I began to think of the odd parallels between Ludwig II and Michael Jackson. Neuschwanstein was Ludwig’s Neverland Ranch, a place where boyhood dreams were kept alive by money and endless imagination. Like Ludwig, Jackson too died prematurely in the company of his doctor. Both of them were just two lost little boys.

We stood on the balcony of the castle, hanging out over the cliff in the warm evening and I was quite in awe of the place. Amidst the mountains and waterfall and trees stood the most magnificent temple to man’s folly, this great castle in the air, one of the starkest monuments to his boundless capacity for beautiful daydreams. Surely Walt Disney realised this when he immortalised Neuschwanstein as the Sleeping Beauty castle.

It was time to head back to Munich.

Munich was hell when we got back. We could hear a thunderstorm brewing. We didn’t know where to eat so we hit a little pizzeria in the heart of the red-light district, just a street away from the hostel. In Germany, the area around the main train station is always the red light district. And not even my usual prurient urges made me like the place.

We went back to the hostel and lay in our beds and listened to the rain slapping against the pavement outside, soaking the people outside (we could hear them screaming). It was another long, restless night.