"STARS on Tour" proclaimed the luxury coach which became our ersatz home from the moment we arrived in Germany to take part in the Tour of Irish Writers and Musicians organised by the Arts Council's Ireland and its Diaspora Committee. This was no ordinary animal of a coach, with a lounge, beds, microwave, television and various refreshments at our disposal. Brian Leyden, Rosita Boland, Emer Martin, Alan Titley, Bernard McLaverty and I settled into out journey: around the reunified bundesrepublik, to read from our work in five cities.
Accompanying us were three cool dude musicians - Declan Masterson, Breanndan O Beaglaoich and Paul McGrattan, as well as a guardian angel roadie, Michael Cropp.
After leaving our hotel each morning the coach hummed to life. Silent Stefan, the driver stalwart behind the wheel was mercurial and manic at night when we checked out the action in the quarters of Cologne Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Munich and Frankfurt.
Every gig began with a slow air from Breanndan, then a few reels from Paul and he. Some among us made last minute adjustments to our own texts to extracts from novels, or selected poems.
Different Responses
Audience moods and responses differed from place to place. Fifteen minutes before we opened on the first night in Cologne, about six people had turned up. We nearly panicked. Then we did pac. But they came. Streaming in punctually on the hour, they came and clapped and wanted more. From then on, we learned into the experience. Hamburg here we come.
Hamburg's extraordinary wealth is immediately striking, the dipping and rearing of cranes and haulage machinery, the sense of a city consolidated on 19th century merchant diligence. The mood of the Reeperbahn at night was relatively benign in comparison to Frankfurt's Kaiserstrasse where the heroin addicts shoot up in the open, into toes, or any spare patch of flesh. On one particular offshoot of the Reeperbahn the prostitutes, backed by male "guards" at the barricaded entrance, discourage women tourists with a potful of urine or the sting of a lit cigarette.
Berlin without boundaries was bizarre yet thrilling. The eastern section is looped above ground level with blue and pink pipe's draining water from acres and acres of building sites. I took a bus ride past the Siegesaule or "Gold Else" with her kilo of gold leaf (to commemorate the Franco Prussian wars), moved down the autumn boulevards to "the other side". No Checkpoint Charlie. No Friedrichstrasse eingang. No more goose stepping uniformed boys at various points along Unter Den Linden. Smooth roads run where the infamous wall once stood. Hardly any Trabanes pollute the air. Near the Brandenburgr Tor I bought a paperweight piece of "wall" from a Turkish hawker. Is it real?" I asked. "My god," the woman laughed, "there was enough of it!"
Grumbling about the cost of supporting the reconstruction of the debilitated eastern societies of Saxony, Brandenburg and Pomerania seems a national hobby. Yet where did West Germans think the money would come from? Chancellor Helmut Kohl's most obvious resource was bound to be the taxpayer. Meanwhile, the international cult of yobbism ensures some persistent racist antagonisms. In the foyer of one hotel, we watched as a group of unobtrusive easterners were goaded by a countryman from Westphalia.
Jewel Of Grandeur
The one city everyone wanted to see was Dresden, once a jewel of grandeur and cultural aspiration, destroyed by Allied forces at the tail end of the second World War for the sole purpose of, maximising Germany's humiliation. It has quietly adjusted to new material vigour. Our hotel was like any good hotel and the restaurants fairly fizzed with activity. One of our venues, the marvellously outfitted 600 seater Theater Juge Generation, showed some of the former East German state's priorities (especially when one considers the big deal it is to fund Irish theatres). Dresden's architectural pride is still the opera house, and anything baroque either restored or miraculously overlooked during the bombings. We saw them at night, lit against a black sky
Our second last reading took place in Munich's Black Box Gasteigkulturzentrum. The large Bavarian audience was enthusiastic and casual. Next day, the Oktoberfest was in full swing. Would we be able to visit Dachau, see the city and hit the Oktoberfest as well? In the end we split up. I wandered the popular screened length of Leopoldstrasse, lunched in the bell clamouring Marienplatz, then revisited some old Schwabing haunts from over 20 years ago. Munich is a busy, nosey, yet glamorous city, full of both countrified faces and chic women, confident in its prosperity, sure of its unravaged architectural beauty, and of the landscape beyond the city. Unlike so many drab tracts of eastern Germany it is varied and undulating.
Slow Airs
Travelling with musicians was a bonus. Emer Martin remarked once that she'd like to be reincarnated as a musician, because of the more immediate passage to feeling which it allows in comparison to language. In the end, we knew the slow airs and the reels inside out, could anticipate every flicker of Declan Masterson's face as he played The Fox Chase before an entranced audience on the uileann pipes.
Between readings, we talked more than we ever talk at home. If the days were long the nights were longer still. Somewhere in Hamburg a hungover man is probably wondering what happened his blue crutch. And we hope that Patrick McCabe didn't try to meet us at one of Berlin's transvestite cabarets, because the glamour guys wouldn't do a show for just 10 people. We spouted jokes and anecdotes, we talked about books and drivel, brilliantly, idiotically; we were on the loose with writers' and musicians, dreams, even the tarnished ones, watching dispassionately as Germany deals with her own dreams. They are still being born.