Riding the Iron Rooster

"When I am traveling I don't notice the food," this woman said. "But of course when I am in Paris I am very particular about what I eat and demand only the best."

That was all she ever said to me.

Even here in Germany I could tell that the French members of the tour were not extroverts. But that was fine. I was also keeping to myself, and it was agreeable not to be pestered with questions.

It was near the end of a long day. We passed Wuppertal, piled against a hillside—full of steep ugly tenements. There were slag heaps at Unna, and farther on at Hamm and Gütersloh, it seemed as though the Germans had succeeded in miniaturizing Indiana and putting it down here. The rain blackened Bielefeld, and I prayed for night to fall and simplify this landscape with darkness. Prosperity had disfigured Germany, and the whole country looked blighted with industrial civilization. Under the brown sky of Münsterland there were factories called Droop und Rein and Endler und Kumpf, which seemed like doom-laden names. The peculiar dreariness about this part of Germany was the absence of trees. The Germans identified with forests, but acid rain had killed half of them and the other half had been chopped down; the trees had been replaced with factory chimneys.

Earlier in the day, the people in the group had been talking like patients in a hospital. The travel had frightened and tired them. They dozed, and when they woke they asked each other questions. How did you sleep? How was the meal? What time is dinner? They began to describe the progress of their bowels. They reported on how they felt, and whether they were tired or hungry.

I watched closely for meaningful changes—women who begin to screech, men who stop shaving, or anyone who puts on a tracksuit.

At Helmstedt we crossed the border into East Germany. The train passed between a pair of barbed-wire fences, a passageway about as wide as a turnpike. Every few hundred yards there was a watchtower and bright lights and the silhouettes of soldiers standing sentry duty.

Beyond the border was a landscape of snow and mud—the spring mess in the slender trees of the postwar woods. What cities I could see seemed far drearier than any I had seen in West Germany, but the countryside was noticeably wilder and more wooded, with huddled farms and poorly lit roads. There were not many people visible, but those I saw here really did look like peasants.

We arrived at Zoo Station ("Hold on to your handbags, this place is full of drug addicts") in the dark. With its twinkling lights and the traffic, Berlin seemed romantic and lively to some members of the group—they regarded it as the last frontier of civilization. After this was Poland, then Russia, then Mongolia. Berlin was gaiety and sex, bookstores and fatsos. It looked richer than America.

But Berlin seemed to me a monstrosity and not much fun. It is such an odd specimen, such a special example of metropolitan schizophrenia, that its conceits and hypocrisies are fascinating. But it is also a fool's paradise, and it is hard to think of anyone living there for any length of time and remaining sane. It is an ancient city, and it was itself for 700 years; but under the Nazis it cracked, it stopped being a city and became a symbol, and then an idea, and after the war it was rethought and the idea reduced to an absurdity. It is still a bad idea and it is growing worse. Any sensible person has to find it a monumental illustration of stupidity, petulance and stubbornness. It would be laughable if it were not so pathetic, for as Nathanael West said, nothing is sadder than the truly monstrous.

Helmut Frielinghaus, a Düsseldorfer, was himself a visitor to the city. He said to me, "Do you want to see the most interesting place in Berlin?"

I said yes.

He took me to the "Ke De We," a huge department store that is known by its initials rather than its full name, Kauíhaus des Westens. What he wanted to show me were the floors devoted to food, and in particular the stalls and shops that retailed expensive and pretty delicacies.

'This is the new thing," Helmut said. 'The food culture. People are obsessional about it. You see? Two hundred kinds of cheese, forty kinds of coffee, twenty-eight sizes of sausage, and also food for vegetarians, food for health cranks, a whole shop selling fish eggs."

They were food boutiques, selling snob food, rare and indigestible items, all prettily arranged and beautifully wrapped. Pastries, fruit juice, ninety kinds of bread, a whole wall of tea caddies, every possible shape of pasta. At first glance it was not food at all, but specialist merchandise set out like expensive clothes. If there was such a thing as designer food, this was it. Perfect penile asparagus, each spear labeled, $20 a pound.