European cities make a bad first impression because they are introduced to you from a train window. You’ve left the floor-waxed placidity of the commercial airport and are now shuttling through the graffiti-drenched factory district, where the city’s commerce really transpires. This is where the fertilizer is processed, the paper fiber boiled. This is the seedy warehouse district, where the shaky get fixed and the lonely find a helping hand.
It's literally the wrong side of the tracks, at least according to the Michelin Guide. It's like entering a Broadway theater from the back, where all the wires and rigging and sleeping union stagehands fit together to create the spectacular illusion of an all-singing, all-dancing Russian ghetto on the other side. From the train tracks, you see the utilitarian rear of Tourist Town, with its mops and refuse stacked on molding balconies, its masses of cables and hanging laundry, like a peek into the fabled mechanized underground of Disney World, where Chip and Dale get their nuts refurbished. “So this is Paris,” says the jetlagged adventurer.
Or it could be Prague or Barcelona or downtown Ísafjörður. Those railways of the slum district can be a brutal dose of local color for the vacationing tourist. Particularly for the American tourist, whose idealized conception of Europe is based primarily on childhood viewings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). Of course I’m no different in viewing the EU through the anamorphic lens of Hollywood. The custodians of the Chiesa di San Barnaba may trumpet its Neoclassical stylings and Da Vinci artifacts, but to me it’s the place where Katherine Hepburn fell into the canal in Summertime (1955). Yes, yes, the splendors of the Vienna Succession Building are breathtaking, but show me the spot where Orson Welles climbed into the sewer in The Third Man (1949). For my money, Europe is about big Hollywood stars getting wet and filthy.
But soon enough the European city reveals the stage show we tourists bought our tickets to see. Get a few blocks away from the inevitable junkie huddle at the main station, and the old-world charm of a medieval town square enraptures the visitor. From here, cathedral by cathedral, the historical grandeur can work its magic, transporting Beaufort and Eileen into a mystical past they couldn’t imagine. Europe’s decaying ruins of antiquity - the churches, the colosseums, the hotel toilets - can be pretty heady for the US traveler, because we have trouble comprehending relics older than a ’58 Mustang. In America, the monuments we fight to preserve are Bob’s Big Boy and Archie Bunker’s armchair – hardly the sort of stuff Charlemagne would stomp Visigoths to obtain.*
Unlike in America, there is no shame in being seduced by European tourism. The gothic landmarks represent real historical achievement, and the attentive vacationer can expect to attain a little enlightenment about the Enlightenment. In the US, tourist destinations operate on the P.T. Barnum “egress” model, where twenty miles of splashy billboards for South of the Border eventually lead you to a convenience store with a few logo-stamped belt buckles and pecan logs. Like the Amway faithful, you learn to enjoy the experience of getting ripped off.
Historically speaking, European tourism has more there there. But thanks to the long tradition of ransackings and excommunications throughout the centuries, sometimes the record books have a few blank pages. I’ve grown to love the unfortunate tour guides burdened with having not enough information to work with. “We think this is the throne of Maximillian the Second, but it might have been a potato bin. This golden casket from 417 AD may contain John the Baptist’s mustache, or it may just be eunuch pubes. In 1983, the bathhouse was restored to its original condition…I guess.” I tip extra for these sad sacks.
Restoration is what this tourism industry is really all about. Consider the famed Cologne Cathedral, whose builders began its construction in 1248 and haven’t stopped building it since. The twenty-one-year-old Antiquities major currently charged with restoring St. Christopher’s granite kneecaps won’t finish the job in her lifetime, and some next-generation masochist will take up the task. But the saddest irony of the efforts to maintain the tourist trade is that these centuries-old relics would stand a much better chance of survival were it not for the Campbells of Woodland Creek, MO breathing all over them. Poor Pompeii was doing just fine buried under all that ancient ash. As soon as eager entrepreneurs dug it up and invited the general public to perform their Tik Tok dances all over it, the ruins began to rot. The sightseers change the condition of a landmark just by looking at it, like a bunch of bratwurst-stuffed Heisenbergs.
No wonder everyone hates tourists. I grew up in a tourist town, and I can tell you with certainty that all those museum guides, paddleboat renters, juggling accordionists, ice cream pushers, steak house hostesses, and hotel housekeepers grinning like chimps for your paltry handouts hate your fucking guts. You are numbskulled, loud, and hideously costumed. You ask moronic questions, make the same jokes the last idiot made, and complain like naptime toddlers at every inconvenience. It is a testament to humanity’s capacity for tolerance that centuries of European scholarship and careful cultivation of civilization’s masterworks carry on just so you thundering hordes can drip barbeque sauce on the Venus of Willendorf. You’re lucky they let you into Der Wienerschnitzel.
Now that I’m a resident of the EU, I’d love to say that I can join the locals in condemning your boorish touristness, but the sad truth is quite the opposite. In choosing to live among the crumbling cathedrals and artifacts of civilization’s triumphs, I have adopted “forever tourist” status. I am condemned to eternally gol-dern the basilicas and alterpieces of European legend like the mouth-breathing rube that I am. These building blocks of civilization, from the Romans to the Hapsburgs, bewilder me eternally. They will never feel like my own history, merely the images from my history books, in which I added ballpoint dicks and eyepatches to Renaissance masterworks to kill time in the eighth grade. For this Ugly American, the ugly don’t wash off so easy.
Ending my visit to the US earlier this year, I made my escape to the Atlanta airport via rental car, avoiding the backstage view of industrial clutter I might have enjoyed from the non-existent passenger train. Driving through the main street of a gentrified hipster village, among the tattoo emporiums and craft breweries, I found a classic antique mall, nestled in an aging retail space that might have been a True Value hardware store in the golden age. Here were the treasures of antiquity as I know them: Julie London LPs, patterned Pyrex bowls, Piel’s Beer trays, Edsel hood ornaments, Burma Shave boxes, and Philco televisions. Not the totems of my personal past, but of a lost civilization just outside my reach. Not relics of the Byzantine Era, but of a time still within living memory for American grandmas of a certain vintage. Kid’s stuff, epochally speaking. No Etruscan sarcophagi to be found at Aunt Betty’s Browse Barn. But those who know me can predict that, surrounded by the bakelite radios and starburst clocks of yesteryear, I was overcome with emotion, saying this final farewell to the archaeological museum of My People on my way back to the old country. Which is, weirdly, my new country.
I returned to my German neighborhood, with its blackening balconies and graffitied kiosks and hanging laundry, waving hello to my junkie neighbors like a real American spazz. I’m happy to be home, in Wuppertal, a city with deep historical meaning for me. This is where Willem Dafoe got exceptionally filthy in Antichrist (2008). We’re a pretty laid back community here. The building facades decay and the sidewalks crumble, and no one’s the least bit worried about restoring any of it.
A.H.
* Having gawked at Charlemagne’s treasures, I can tell you that all his conquering and pillaging resulted in the tackiest collection of garbage ever assembled. Nothing in there near as impressive as Fonzie’s jacket.
(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)
The American solution to historical antiquity that renders priceless parking space unusable, is to tear everything down BEFORE it gets old and save everybody the considerable bother of fixing it.