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Vol. 1 No. 1 |
January 2002 |
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One is the loneliest
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By Earl Kemp
I WAS ALWAYS nagged by the suspicion that I was really of German descent, and afraid that I might even be a little Nazi. Only that was just about as valid as coming up with the thought that I might be a little queer. This was mostly because my parents had no idea where their ancestors might have come from, nor anything close to what might be my racial and ancestral birthright. Also I was aware that there were many people in the state of Arkansas with strong German roots and numerous towns actually named for German cities, places like Smackover, Stuttgart, and Hamburg, for instance.
Odd for a person born in 1929, but not odd for a person so divided as I. All during the '30s and up until Germany surrendered in 1945, I was secretly afraid that I was one of them. There was so much about them that I did admire, things I felt for sure we shared in common. Ich bin ein Berliner!
There was little awareness of "war" in my consciousness, and what there was was noticeably anti. It was the German ideal I felt I belonged to, and all those beautiful, healthy, dynamic blue-eyed blondes. Those incredible monuments and skyscraper buildings they were erecting all over the place. The class and style of Albert Speer.
I didn't know anything about those awful things they were doing all over Europe, those gas ovens, and things like that. It was nothing war-like that I admired or identified with in Germans.
I admired them for their exactness and their accomplishments in areas like optics, cameras, lenses, radio and sound transmission, kinky sex, S&M, etc. They were people who knew how to get certain jobs done and moved right in there and took over and put everything in its place where it should have been all along but wasn't. The people with the "know how." The Can Dos.
Exactly what I found when, many years later, I went to Viet Nam. I was so adamantly opposed to the things we were doing there, so anti-war, that the sight of jungle camouflage actually made me nauseous. Quite a feat holding all that intact while touring Viet Nam as the officially accredited foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Free Press, yet everywhere I looked I found within myself nothing but admiration for how we were accomplishing whatever we were accomplishing. That incredible ability to move right in there and take over, recognizing everything that needed to be done and doing it correctly the first time and just plain out moving. The power to accomplish. The people with the "know how." The Can Dos.
When I finally broke away from my roots and decided to live in Chicago, I moved right into the middle of the German section and felt very much at home, enjoying all the old treats I missed so much from my unknown past.
Then, years later, when I relocated to Guadalajara, I found myself once again surrounded by blue-eyed, blond-haired German-gene Mexicans, and a number of really good down home German middle-class fat-making beer-guzzling oompaah! restaurants.
In Germany in 1929 science fiction fan and space nut, Werner Von Braun, joined the German Rocket Society. He was already well underway with his private journey to the stars, and I was only birthing on Sol III; there was no way I could catch up.
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Werner Von Braun and some of his fellow Nazis at the launch site of his V-2 "Buzz Bombs," Peenemunde, 1943. |
Still and all...I was German secretly somehow inside. And a Berliner at that.
I had lived there many times, in my imagination. Somehow I felt I knew the city quite well...even intimately. I researched it enough, as I did everything I ever fell momentarily in love with, until it was all first-hand old-hat to me. I prowled the flickering, gritty, out-of-focus nighttime black-and-white Berlin streets of Fritz Lang, lurking with Peter Lorre and Nosferatu, lusting after sultry young Marlene Dietrich. Shuddering through The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I searched all kinds of archival records and old films and Deutsche Gramofon audio recordings. Seeking out obscure venues presenting old revivals of pre-war German culture...people like Kurt Weill, who became one of my ideals, and his friend and collaborator Bertolt Brecht.
They were the voice of pre-Nazi middle-class Germany, and just beginning to get into trouble because of it. (Before long, conditions would convince Weill to move to the USA for safety reasons alone, to say nothing about his career, but that's another story.) They were just on the fringes of the Jazz Age that resulted in the rampant eroticism of Berlin nightlife and everyone was singing their songs.
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There were all those wonderful tunes (&"oh, the shark has....") from The Three Penny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny ("I must have whiskey or die....") from previous years still ringing fresh in people's ears.
It was years later before Jim Morrison could make "Show Me the Way to the Next Whiskey Bar" a world-wide rock and roll sensation all over again.
This was Berlin 1929, the world of Kurt Weill stage-set like Cabaret only with a lot more sluts and sleazy bimbos in the cast. It was Mrs. Weill, Lotte Lenya, in bright orange hair, who helped make 1929 such a smashing success.
Happy End was the play, 1929's sensation that Weill and Brecht collaborated on, with its unforgettable "Bilbao Song" and poignantly delicate "Surabaya Johnny," especially as only Lotte Lenya could deliver it, that was filling the Berlin air, between goosestepping and heiling and doing some damned right incredibly awful things that were the lullaby music played on the occasion of my birth.
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Weill died in 1950, but his music and his legacy will live on forever. |
It has been my extreme good fortune, in my dreams and my adventures, to walk side by side with my friend Kurt, humming (I was never very good at singing) his songs, through many of his experiences and favorite dives of decadent Berlin, though I have never been there. Even when I had chances to go, I turned them down. I had already found so many favorite places in Germany I didn't have room for others, besides that Berlin was the city of my youth, and I had somehow outgrown it.
There was a brief reprise in the late 1960s. Cabaret was running on Broadway again for the umpteenth time. Naturally I wanted to see it and I was in New York City on an expense account so to hell with it, buy me a close-up scalper seat.
It came time for the performance to begin, but nothing was happening. The audience somehow became aware that there was a delay and they began rumbling and shifting in their seats uncomfortably.
"We are sorry to inform you that the star (whose name I have long since forgotten) has become suddenly ill and can not perform tonight," he said, to a growing swell of annoyance and discontent.
"...in her place," he continued, as if he couldn't even hear the angry audience, "we are happy to announce that we have arranged for Lotte Lenya to perform the part that was originally written for her by her husband. If you will be patient for just a few minutes more, the show will begin. Thank you...."
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At center stage the curtain flaps opened and a man with a hand-held mike stepped in front of the audience. |
There was resounding applause at the sudden knowledge that we were lucky enough to be sitting in on a miracle performance by a miracle performer interpreting the work of a miracle music maker.
When I took on the crown of the King of Pornography my first charge to myself was to become the world's foremost authority on what sex really was as interpreted by the most people. Toward that charge, my first task was an around-the-world tour of sin cities.
At last I was going to exercise my secret German inherent closetness.
I personally selected those sin cities going only on their reputations as world-class sex providers and the only suitable German spot turned out to be Hamburg...and what a glorious mistake that was.
Hamburg, Arkansas is the county seat of Ashley County, the place of my birth. Somehow it secretly fit into my secret Germanness, only not. It was certainly a determining factor in picking Hamburg as the site of my first visit to Germany. It is a notorious major port city (somehow sailors are strongly identified with whores and indiscriminate fornication) plus possessor of the St. Pauli girl and the infamous Reeperbahn red light district.
So here I am, the King of Pornography, finally making it to what I had long felt was my ancestral home where...surely of all places in the world...I would feel most at ease. And I was going to tour some really hot places in one of the world's foremost bordellos.
Finally it became time for me to begin my task...to first-hand tour the establishments and rate them as to quality and class and price and flavor and anything else I could think up as I went along and made the rules up by ear.
A taxi driver eagerly took me right to the St. Pauli district where all the hookers and whorehouses were, and cruised around it a bit giving me an overview before letting me out somewhere about mid-way along the line of street shills hawking out their wares and the delights to be found once you enter the doorway being held open for you....
The first place I entered was a bit smaller than I had expected, for such a garish front and verbal promise of erotic delights. In fact it looked a great deal more like a neighborhood cocktail lounge on ladies night than anything else...and a bad night at that.
I was shown to a booth and almost immediately a charming young girl who thought she could speak some English sat down beside me and went into "pity me" routine No. 6.
"I haven't been earning any money at all," she told me, as if I was interested, "and they're going to fire me for sure. I need this job very much...."
"Sorry," I said, "I can't help you out. I'm not buying right now, just looking."
"Well then," she said, "could you please at least buy me a cup of coffee? That's all I ask of you...."
"Well, okay," I said, a bit reluctantly.
She looked up and waved a finger at the maitre d', who surely doubled somewhere as a wrestler or a gorilla. As if on a signal and with a loud drum-roll, with arms and aprons a flutter, a waiter instantaneously appeared at the table and simultaneously popped the cork of a bottle of champagne that in California could have been passed off for $3.98 to someone who didn't know any better. Two champagne saucers, filled with the bubbly, were placed before us with a flourish.
I didn't drink a drop of it. I was so pissed at the ripoff...$50 USA for the bottle...that I paid the bill (I knew the real reason Gorilla was on staff) and left immediately.
Out on the street, looking around, I was struck by the sameness, somehow, with what I was looking at and what I knew so well back in Tijuana and realized without a moment's hesitation that there was no way in hell Hamburg could ever catch up with a real sin city.
As if a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, the feeling that I was inherently German that I had caressed and secretly fondled for so many years, evaporated in a flash. I never once even subconsciously reverted back to it again.
The taste of Hamburg was so unpleasant, in fact, that I cut my visit there short and moved on to Stuttgart and Benz and all those wonderful animals in the zoo.
It was in a museum basement (unfortunately not one of those Albert Speer erections) archive in Stuttgart where I found my first racial identity clue. I was busily researching "Kemp" when an elderly bearded man who spoke perfect English turned to me and said, "You're going about it all wrong, you know?"
"Kemp isn't a German name, it's Dutch. You need to check records in the Netherlands."
"Oh," I said, suavely. "Thank you very much...."
And when I left Germany far behind I moved on toward Paradise...also known to the cognizant as Amsterdam...where I might find some long-lost Kemps to claim me as a relative, and never once looked back at dank, depressing, mildew-shrouded Hamburg.
*In memory of my good friend Dirk Schnee, his science fiction
world and his Frankfurt. Dated October 2000.
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