Brussels to Cologne

The last time I was in Cologne, it was for less than an hour to change trains, boarding the City Night Line sleeper service to Copenhagen. On Saturday, I had most of the afternoon. With a few hours to spare before catching the train to Wuppertal, one thing I wanted to seek out in Cologne was Ernst Barlach's Der Schwebende. A literal translation is 'The Hovering' (as the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal is the hovering or floating train) but it's generally known as the Hovering Angel or simply Barlach's Angel; I had seen the Güstrow version of this sculpture in the recent British Museum exhibition Germany: Memories of a Nation. In Neil MacGregor's book to accompany the exhibition he details the remarkable survival of the Hovering Angel. Barlach's work was included in the Entartete Kunst exhibition and the original sculpture was destroyed. However, a cast had been hidden, but at the end of the war it could not be returned to Güstrow Cathedral, now in what would become East Germany. The surviving bronze cast was installed in the Antonite Church in Cologne. As a sign of cross-border friendship a new cast was made from the second Hovering Angel to be placed back in Güstrow Cathedral. This was the sculpture displayed in the British Museum. Barlach's experiences in the First World War made him a pacifist, but Der Schwebende is ambiguous as a memorial in terms of a position on the war itself, Barlach intended it to be approached by the viewer with "recollection and inner reflection". It represents muted grief with the features, appropriately, of Käthe Kollwitz, who lost a son at the start of the conflict. This lack of positioning made the sculpture suspect for the Nazis, beyond stylistic considerations: totalitarian regimes cannot stand ambiguity, as it allows for open interpretations. In Güstrow, the sculpture is suspended above the old font; in the Antonite Church Der Schwebende hangs above a slab which simply reads: 1914 - 1918/1933 - 1945.

Erasures

"A map is the most exciting thing in the world for me; when I see a map, I immediately feel restless, especially when it's of a country or a city where I've never been. I look at all the names and I want to know the things they refer to, the cities of a country, the streets of a city. When I look at a map, it turns into an allegory for the whole of life. The only thing that makes it bearable is to try to mark out a route, and follow it through the city or country. Stories do just that: they become your roads in a strange land, where but for them, you might go to thousands of places without ever arriving anywhere."

 'Impossible Stories', Wim Wenders, in The Logic of Images

In The American Friend, some shots of Jonathan Zimmerman's framing workshop show it to have a street sign on the wall above the placard "Gemülde/Rahmen". This can just be read as 'Kleiner Pinnas'. An online search found no street by this name in Hamburg. However, other shots in the film show the strreet which this joins, with the name 'Lange Strasse'. One feature of my research before leaving London was the availability of viewing maps online - and in some cases, using Google Street View when available, which it was in Wuppertal, but not Gelsenkirchen. On Google Maps, Lange Strasse is shown running parallel to a street named Pinnasberg, before turning to join it. There is an unnamed path - in grey - connecting the two before this turning. On Open Street Map this is shown as a footpath that cuts behind the houses from Lange Strasse to Pinnasberg. The street name where the framing workshop is clearly a diminutive derivative of Pinnasberg.

This part of Hamburg, St Pauli, has been transformed in the years since the film. The whole riverside and dock area has been subject to massive investment, and between St Pauli and the old centre of Hamburg is the huge Hafencity development, where islands of old warehouses have been replaced by modern offices and a new concert hall. Some of this investment has been spread along the dockside to St Pauli. In the film, shots of  the Zimmermans' apartment, and the shop, show large areas of open, undeveloped land, often functioning as car parks. There is some preparation of the foundations for a block in Lange Strasse, a detail in the background, showing the beginning of the process of filling in these gaps. Arriving in St Pauli, the building used in the film for the apartment is easy to find, on the bend of St Pauli Fischmarkt, despite being blocked on Street View (something I have found to be common in my searches for the various locations in German cities). However, the blurred panels appeared to be the right shape and size, and the satellite imagery looked as though, from the roof, it might be the same building, which it was. Since the film, all the vacant plots around the apartment building have been filled with new blocks, and there has been a new dock wall built separating the road from the dockside; in the film, the ground in front of the apartment leads uninterrupted onto the dockside.This wall has presumably been built for flood defence purposes, and there are road signs referring to flooding in the area. The road in front of the apartment is far busier than it is shown in the film. The buildings opposite the apartment with the graffiti are gone, and the view from the Zimmermans' apartment no longer has the sense of open space as it is shown to have in the film.

Shots of Kleiner Pinnas in the film show it sloping away from the dockside, a straight perspective view used to good effect when lit from behind with the low winter sun shining on the cobbles. Finding Lange Strasse located just a couple of blocks behind St Pauli Fischmarkt (in the film there is no sense how close these are), I discovered why Kleiner Pinnas has disappeared from the map. As best shown on Open Street Map, where once this small road connected Pinnasberg and Lange Strasse, the space behind this two rows of apartment blocks is now a communal garden with a footpath, not straight, but with a serpentine route from street to street and the incline has been changed, steeper at one end, more level in the middle, behind the houses. There is a children's play area and what appear to be mature trees, though these must be less than forty years old, making it a little difficult to picture it as it looks in the film. At the Lange Strasse end, there is a sunken garage and its ramp fills most of the width of where the street once was, with the footpath running up one side. However, although the street sign for Kleiner Pinnas has gone, and with it an erasing of the identity of this small thoroughfare, the building it was on, Jonathan's framing shop, is still there. It is now a beauty parlour of some kind.

After Jonathan's apartment and workshop, the other Hamburg locations of The American Friend are all easy to find, both in virtual terms and in Hamburg itself. The St Pauli Elbtunnel which Johnathan runs through to and from his doctor still functions as a crossing for the Elbe. I descended into it after six in the evening when the lifts which take the cars from street level to the tunnel stop running. The Dom funfair, shown in a brief scene, takes place at Christmas and Easter; it was just opening when I arrived - the lights of the distinctive sign above the gate came on while I was taking photographs. What doesn't show in the film, as the scene takes place after dark, is the giant bulk of the Heiligengeistfeld Flakturm, which dominates views of the funfair.

Finally, I took a long walk to see Ripley's villa on Elbchauseestrasse. From the balcony above the portico, this has commanding views over the Elbe, back towards the docks. This, the Säulenvilla, is in itself considered something of a local landmark, having an entry - and picture - on one of the information panels that feature around Hamburg. The description reads:

1817 von dem Baumeister Axel Bundsen fur den Hamburger-Russland-Kauffman und Reeder Wilhelm Brandt erichtes Landhaus, einer Villa auf der Krim nachempfunden.

The American Friend isn't mentioned.

Graffiti in The American Friend

Before the the opening credits of The American Friend are complete, the scene shifts from New York to Hamburg. “Ein film von Wim Wenders” appears on screen, superimposed on a shot of a building that is later revealed to be Jonathan Zimmerman’s apartment. This is surrounded by waste ground, with remnants of snow, and, too small to be clearly read in this scene, there is graffiti on the wall of an adjacent building. This graffiti is revealed in a shot much later in the film when Jonathan returns from committing a murder in Paris. It reads: “BRD=Polizeistaat!”.

In 'Impossible Stories' (1982), Wim Wenders describes his work of the 1970s into the early 80s as consisting of 'A-films' and 'B-films':

"In the first group (A) all the films are in black and white [...] In the other group (B) all the films are in colour, and they are based on published novels. The films in group A, on the other hand, are based without exception on ideas of mine - the word 'idea' is used very loosely to refer to dreams, daydreams and experiences of all kinds."

Wim Wenders, 'Impossible Stories', in The Logic of Images

Wenders states that, during this period, each film was a reaction against the previous film he had made: The American Friend is one such B-film, made after Im Lauf Den Zeit (a literal translation is "In the Course of Time"; it was released under the English title, Kings of the Road), the last film in the 'road movies trilogy' which began with Alice In The Cities, itself a reaction against Wenders' unhappy experiences with The Scarlet Letter. The American Friend was in fact based on an unpublished novel, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game: Wenders had wanted to use source material from Highsmith, but the rights of all her published work had been already sold at the time. In adapting the material, Wenders shifted much the important action from France to Hamburg in Germany.

The locations in Hamburg around Jonathan's home and framing workshop show a city of empty spaces and isolated apartment blocks facing the Elbe and the docks opposite. A reasonable assumption to make is that this townscape is the result of bombing in the Second World War, not yet rebuilt, thirty years after the destruction. In another scene, as the Zimmermans drive away from the apartment building in their orange Volkswagen, we can see another slogan, on a building behind the first: “Mord an Holger Meins/Nieder mit der Klassenjustiz/Rote Hilfe”. A rough translation would be: “Holger Meins was murdered/Down with [bourgeois] class justice!/Red Aid”. Filmed at the end of 1976, The American Friend is contemporary with the long Stammheim trial of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrik Meinhof and Jan Carl Raspe, original members of the Rote Armee Fraktion, otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang; Holger Meins had died on hunger strike two years earlier. The 'Rote Hilfe' referred to is a left-wing support group that worked for the RAF prisoners, inspired by a Communist organisation of the same name from Weimar-era Germany. The presence of the graffiti adds to the film’s sense of moral decay as Jonathan acquiesces to the manipulations of Raoul and, unknowingly, Ripley. That Jonathan is seen walking past the first slogan “BRD=Polizeistaat!” (which translates as “BRD" - the Bundesrepublik or West Germany "=Police state”) when he returns from the murder in Paris feels like commentary: state murder and individual murder are equated in a sense of the cheapness of life, heightened by Jonathan's existential crisis. Raoul attempts to assuage Jonathan's conscience by calling the people to be murdered 'bad' men in simplistic terms. Such simplicity does bring to mind an abitrariness: Raoul and his associates have designated them 'bad men', and for that they need to die.

These slogans on the walls of Hamburg are presumably genuine: I have already written about Wenders' fidelity to his locations; but they are also deliberately included. Perhaps they are shown to be indicative of the area in which Jonathan and his family live, in the St Pauli district, just a short distance from the infamous Reeperbahn (in one early exchange, one of the first things that Jonathan says to Ripley, in English, is, "The Reeperbahn is not what it used to be", and one can hear the quotation marks as Jonathan says this). Hamburg in the film, despite being shown as a working port, appears in material terms to be depressed economically. Capital flows through the docks, barely adhering to the town itself. The post-war West German economic miracle has left it alone, or incomplete; meanwhile, this economic miracle appears to have been bought, in part, with a willing amnesia by large sections of German society in order to build a new state. This was one motivating factor for the Baader-Meinhof Gang's violent puncturing of this complacent West German prosperity, a prosperity that had to deal with the oil shocks of the 1970s by the time of The American Friend. Growing unease with the state's closeness to America at the time of the Vietnam war, and the presence of US army bases in Germany helped create the conditions for extreme left-wing reaction. Wim Wenders would not have been unaware of this:

"As part of the '68 generation, Wenders was drawn into politics at this time, at one time being arrested and charged for resisting arrest at a demonstration. However, although he was active in protesting against the Vietnam War, he was not able to shake his ambivalence towards America. He continued to attend screenings of his beloved Westerns every evening and thus never quite fitted into the anti-imperialistic milieu of his student sharehouse."

David Tacon, Great Directors: Wim Wenders

In many of his films, America and American culture feature far more prominently than those films of his contemporaries (notably Herzog and Fassbinder). This American culture fills a void left by the necessary idea, if not the actuality, of starting a new state from scratch after the war. It also fills a role similar to the absent fathers that recur in Wim Wenders' films. In Kings Of The Road, this is famously summed up as, "The Americans have colonised our subconscious". Wenders has always felt this as both a pull and a push, ambivalence and criticality side by side with a love for the surfaces of such a culture. In The American Friend this relationship is symbolically mirrored in the friendship - cautious, amoral, yet genuine and galvanising - that develops between the two men.

The graffiti in The American Friend is doubly echoed in Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979). The slogan “Free Astrid Proll” is prominently seen on a wall in London which the camera from inside the moving car tracks as it passes, while David Bowie's 'Always Crashing In The Same Car' plays as the protagonist drives out of London. Astrid Proll had been a RAF member hiding out in London at the time, discovered and arrested pending extradition. Undoubtably a knowing nod from Chris Petit, funding from Wim Wenders' production company, black and white cinematography from Martin Schäfer (Kings of the Road, The State of Things), and the presence of Lisa Kreuzer as a woman searching for her missing daughter - Alice - all conspire to make this the most German of British road movies. As in The American Friend, the use of graffiti here functions in very similar terms of presenting a background of moral decay, emphasised in the dead brother's involvement in smuggling pornography. In references throughout Radio On, Britain's post-war relationship with Germany is seen as an exchange in both directions: the former occupiers (the UK still had thousands of troops in Germany at the time) do not remain untouched by the experience. This is highlighted by the soundtrack: Kraftwerk (and Lene Lovich) sit with Berlin-era Bowie, opening with the English-German hybrid version of "Heroes"/"Helden".

As Bowie, so the Beatles: both recorded German versions of their songs for the continental market. In a seemingly throwaway line, Ripley says he's "bringing the Beatles back to Hamburg" - still technically possible at the time of the film. Referring to the group having cut their teeth playing there little more than a decade before, this boast sums up Ripley's charismatic arrogance and sense of possibility; "The Reeperbahn is not what it was", suggests a wry rueful acknowledgment of the diminution of the liberties tourists, often American and English (and male), used to enjoy. The area around St Pauli, the docks and the Fischmarkt today displays much more graffiti than in the film, while the landscape has been filled in with many new buildings and apartment blocks, yet today's graffiti is essentially individualistic, apolitical in the main, and in its spraycan style, it represents another aspect of culture imported from America.

Improvisations

In discussing his approaches to what he has termed his A- and B-films in 'Impossible Stories', Wim Wenders has written that the 'A-films' were largely improvised, in comparison to the 'B-films', which were tightly scripted. This sequence of alternating A and B-films essentially ended with The State of Things in 1982. It began with Alice In The Cities. The first section of the film, in America, followed a script, but once Alice and Philip return to Europe, scenes in the film as the characters search for Alice's grandmother's house were increasingly improvised and determined in part by the contingency of the locations which the production found. Alice In The Cities was followed by The Wrong Move, scripted by Peter Handke, and based on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In reaction to The Wrong Move, the third of the 'road movies trilogy', Kings Of The Road, returned to an improvisational method. Wenders has written that this was partly inspired by visiting old cinemas in towns close to the border between East and West Germany. As the small crew moved from one location to another, Wenders would write up a scenario for the actors to improvise around the next day inspired by where they found themselves.

This spirit of improvisation suits travelling by road. On the railways, with tickets purchased in advance for reasons of economy, and hotels to be met, this is rather more difficult. I had given myself a day in Wuppertal, and had a late afternoon ICE train to Hamburg. The stay at the hotel in Wuppertal included free use of the VRR integrated local transport system - including the Schwebebahn, the reason I had come to Wuppertal. Having visited the Gardasee Eiscafe in the morning, I contemplated going to Gelsenkirchen to look for the house that used to be Alice's grandmothers' (used to be in a double sense: in the film, Alice's grandmother has moved, "A Italian woman lives there now", thus negating a closed resolution to the film). Gelsenkirchen is within the VRR area, but an hour away from Wuppertal. I looked at the possibility of travelling there from Vohwinkel (the last stop on the Schwebebahn, where the scene I described in 'The Phantom Ride' is shot); Vohwinkel S-Bahn station is a short walk away.

There was not enough time to get to Gelsenkirchen, find the house, and return to Wuppertal to collect my luggage, and catch my train to Hamburg. However, I knew that Gelsenkirchen was in the general direction of travel. Picking up my rucksack from the hotel, I went to the Reisezentrum at Wuppertal Hauptbahnhof, located in a temporary building due to the vast rebuilding work at Doppersburg. It was possible: my hotel ticket would get me to Gelsenkirchen for no extra charge, and I could have an hour and a half there before I would need to take a connecting train from Gelsenkirchen to Münster, where I could join the Hamburg train that I was booked on; the ticket to Münster was a mere €11.60.

Unfortunately, improvisation only gets one so far. Although I had printed a map showing a section of Gelsenkirchen from the station to the road where the house was (at least in the film; but again, Wenders has a particular fidelity to his locations, so there is no reason to believe this one is any different). In the film, they ask a passing driver, and he gives a name that appears in the subtitles as "Erdbrückenstrasse": with no such address in Gelsenkirchen, Erdbrüggenstrasse seemed a near-enough homophone. This I was unable to research any further online: Gelsenkirchen is untouched by Google StreetView. My map didn't have a scale on it, but I thought that the distance might be walked in half an hour. As in Wuppertal that morning, it was raining. I soon realised that the scale was deceptive and it would take me longer than anticipated. On one of the main roads, I took a look at a bus stop. There was a bus listed with the direction of Erdbrüggenstrasse. However, being a Sunday, there were only two buses an hour, and I had missed one by ten minutes, meaning the next was due in twenty minutes, at ten past four. My train to Münster was at 16:53. At this point I did realise that I would be unable to bring this improvised journey to its goal. I walked another few streets in the direction of Erdbrüggenstrasse; when I had emerged from Gelsenkirchen station, the town centre seemed completely unlike the semi-rural setting that Alice's grandmother's house appears to be surrounded by in the film. By the time I had walked for just over half an hour, the character of the streets had changed. I reached Bulmker Park, where the roads around it had modest villas behind hedges and screens of trees. At the far side was a footpath leading North, alongside a plot of typical German summer houses. Here I stopped, pausing in the park, with bare dripping trees and two young men smoking in a shelter overlooking the small lake. I turned around, and walked back to Gelsenkirchen station.

Cafe Umberto

I first read Joseph Conrad’s story 'Il Conde' (The Count) when I was around fourteen, in a volume called Four Tales (which I can see in my mind as a maroon cloth-bound book, with cancelled library stamps), in turn the four stories in this book came from a slightly larger collection A Set Of Six; the stand out story of Four Tales is clearly 'The Duel'. Given most other things I was drawing then, I would have thought that I should have been more attracted to the Napoleonic protagonists of 'The Duel', but for some reason 'Il Conde' was the one that prompted me to make a drawing inspired by it (I also missed the homosexual subtext in the central encounter of the narrative). I recall making a large pencil drawing of what I imagined the Cafe Umberto from the story might have been like. This was probably inspired by some memories of Czechoslovakia, my most recent experience of the continent but also, I think, Gatwick Airport, where I had made drawings in the early hours of the morning while waiting for our plane. I finally got to Naples in 2004, but don’t remember even thinking about 'Il Conde' - or the drawing - when I was there. I realise that my drawing was based on the brief description in the text:

“The monumental arch of the Galleria Umberto faced him at the top of a noble flight of stairs. He climbed these without loss of time, and directed his steps towards the Cafe Umberto. All the tables outside were occupied by a lot of people who were drinking. But as he wanted something to eat, he went inside into the cafe, which is divided into aisles by square pillars set all round with long looking-glasses. The Count sat down on a red plush bench against one of these pillars, waiting for his risotto. And his mind reverted to his abominable adventure.”

Joseph Conrad, Il Conde

This was supplemented with my ideas, gathered from television and film, of what such a space might look like in the early 20th century ('Il Conde' was first published in 1908, although as much as I can remember what my drawing of Cafe Umberto looked like, it had more of a feel of the 1920s or 30s). The drawing did have the pillars with mirrors, crowded by the chairs and tables, all done with a box of pencils I had recently been given, ranging from 4H to 9B. I used this range for carefully shading in the drawing, a method quite given up on later, the idea that one might need more than one weight of pencil in a rendering. The original drawing is long lost, probably destroyed like similar juvenilia of the time, and if found would only be a disappointment. A drawing from the Cafe Apropos in Copenhagen will have to stand in for the Umberto.