March 24, 2012
Frankfurt-Am-Main

I get to the Vienna train station an hour early to be sure that carrying my load I encounter no difficulties. I easily walk from the Konig von Ungarn to the Stephansdomplatz and take line U-3 on the U-Bahn to Westbahnhof, from where my train to Frankfurt will depart at 10:40 a.m. A few minutes after I arrive, the track, Number 6, is announced. I walk to the platform and sit next to a young woman with her three year old son. There is a red Vienna city commuter train waiting, and only until it leaves can another train come in. I ask the woman whether this is the platform for the train to Frankfurt, she says "Yes", and I sit down and wait.

The Vienna city train leaves and at about 10:00 a.m. a train comes into the station: I see a car marked First Class, Car Number 26 for seat Number 12 by the window. The young woman next to me says "This is the train", and I go towards Car Number 26 where I have a reservation. (All my travel on trains as far as the Spanish border is booked first class, as if you are over twenty-five, it is Eurail policy to sell only First Class tickets.)

I get on the train and quickly look for the section in the middle of the car where I can put my knapsack. I see a couple with lots of luggage has already commandeered a spot for a large suitcase, and has several more to place. I put my knapsack next to theirs then look around for my seat. Curiously, I can find no seat number twelve. I ask a conductor, who tells me to go into the next half of the car.

I waste a few minutes this way until someone asks to look at my ticket. It turns out that I am on the train to Budapest, which is two minutes from departing. With a cry, I hurtle back to where my backpack is, carrying my two smaller backpacks with me. In one motion, I am able to drag the knapsack off its shelf and throw it onto one of my shoulders, pushing myself down the aisle of the train car wailing like a banshee. Passengers bound for Budapest train get out of my way, and I make it to the door, but am so encumbered I cannot reach the green button that will open it. A kind Japanese passenger, seeing my distress, jumps up from his seat and goes to the door, presing the "Door open" button for me. I stagger out of the car, which leaves right after, and wonder what happened to the mother and son, who are no where to be seen.

Magdalena, an elfin woman in her fifties with closely-cropped white hair and piercing blue eyes, lives in Nuremberg. Over twenty years she ran a bathroom design business with her husband and raised two children, now at University. Two years ago she divorced her husband, but they remain friends. The burden of working together with her husband became too much, and she wanted to break free. She trained as a psychotherapist over the last two years and now offers therapy at her home in the countryside outside Nuremberg. She also offers the first floor of her house as a place where clients may, if they choose, spend time to get away from the cares that brought them for therapy in the first place.

I ask her what she thinks of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor and she makes a face. She has no interest in politics, thinks it all dirty, while perceiving that the future for the next generation of Germans will be difficult. She blames some of this on an inner selfishness that creates a desire for things that cannot be afforded except by credit. Fundamentally, this is about the inability of most people to live with themselves, something she helps her clients do, by getting them to see how they are at least partly responsible for their unhappiness. Once this responsibility is accepted, she believes, the clients can also make the changes that will make them happier.

I ask her about whether German families are as emotionally close at they seem to me to be, in comparison with those in the United States, whose members are often separated by considerable physical distance, if not psychological. She says that her parents' generation was indeed one of closely-knit families, but that the post-War Generation and their children are not. She sees the computer-driven artifacts of modernity --for example, the ubiquitous hand-held device, which is called a "handy" in the German-speaking world-- as contributing to the alienation.

We have this conversation on the train from Vienna to Nuremberg, where she leaves the train. The train is a robust confirmation of Germany's modernity. The train is swift, silent, well-equipped with every amenity, including the car I am sitting in, a perfect oasis for those who do not want to hear others talking to others in the car or on cell phones. It is not too different from traveling on AMTRAK in the United States, except everything has a contemporary sheen, which makes for a very comfortable traveling experience, as the countryside floats by, the flat green fields not too different from parts of the United States. The small houses and low-rise apartment buildings in the towns are not too different either, although the houses are white-walled and roofs are tiled with slate.

Frankfort is a modern city, with high rises befitting Germany's financial center. The subway is like New York's: crowded with a variety of passengers from a range of ethnic groups, and not especially clean. It gets me to my friend H.G.'s apartment, in a well-appointed high-rise district again, ethnically diverse. The white structures all feature large terraces and large picture windows. This is not a particularly affluent area, but it is near Frankfort center and well-served by public transportation.

The city is in the middle of a mayoral race runoff, with baby-faced Boris Rhein, the conservative Christian Democratic candidate, opposing Peter Feldman, the Social Democrat candidate. Rhein has the support of the popular outgoing Mayor, Petra Roth, who has been Mayor since 1995. Roth is credited with modernizing the airport, making the city bicycle-friendly, and supporting the growth of the Frankourt Stock Exchange, which last year made a bid to buy the New York Stock Exchange. (It was rebuffed.) Rhein is young --he turned forty in January-- and held the paradoxical title of "Minister of the Interior and Sport" in the state of Hesse-Darmstadt. Peter Feldman is a city councilman who has served Frankfurt for twenty-three years. Turnout was low during the first round, with only thirty-seven percent of eligible voters casting a ballot. If Rhein loses, it will also be viewed as a setback for Angela Merkel, like Rhein, a Christian Democrat. Notwithstanding the Chancellor's prestige, when she came to campaign for Rhein, she was greeted by a hail of boos.

***

When I told someone that I was going to Frankfurt in between Vienna and Rostock, the reaction was unenthusiastic: if anyone knows anything about Frankfurt, it is that it has one of the biggest airports in Europe, and the largest in Germany. No one speaks of the city as a cultural capital: it does not have an underground art scene like Berlin, and it does not have the beautiful buildings Munich does: its historic Gothic buildings were heavily bombed during the Second World War. It developed on one bank of the Main River, with Sachsenhausen, its sister-city, on the other.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the author of the poem "Faust" on which all later works are based, was born in Frankfurt-am-Main. He also wrote a famous novel in letters --"The Sorrows of Young Werther"-- which ends with the eponymous hero's suicide. It created a sensation across Europe, heralding the ascendancy of German Romanticism. On the strength of the fame of "Werther", Goethe was invited to Weimar by its ruler, Grand Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, whose chief adviser he became, having trained as a lawyer before he took up literature. He is one of the giants of world literature and his productive life a repudiation of the idea that genius always has elements of pathology. One of the largest squares in Frankfurt center is Goetheplatz, where a large statue of the city's favorite son harkens back to when Frankfurt was the duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt.

However, to sum up Frankfurt this way would be to miss the larger perspective: Frankfurt is the financial capital of Germany, and as such, in the midst of the crisis over the European Union's future and the fate of the Euro, it may be the most powerful city in Europe. It is home to the Germany's Federal Reserve, the Bundesbank, and of the European Central Bank ("ECB"). Formerly a Frenchman, Jean-Claude Trichet ran it, and now an Italian, Mario Draghi does. Its headquarters, in Theaterplatz, next to the Willy Brandt underground subway stop (named after a Cold War Chancellor of Germany), are at present in an elegant brownstone on the square: it will soon move to a new building on the east side of the city.

For the moment, though, the ECB stands on Theaterplatz, with a giant curved "E" --meant to represent the Euro currency that was ushered in by the Treaty of Maastricht--dominating the space. Until recently, that is, when an encampment of "Occupy Frankfurt" (kindred with "Occupy Wall Street" and other expressions of anti-globalization and capitalism), took up residence. Walking over to the "Schauspiel" --a hall used for public debate on topics of the day, a young protester approaches me, speaking German too rapidly for me to understand, and handing me a leaflet protesting the "noise pollution" created by the expansion of the airport Mayor Roth supported. I explain that I am an American, I speak little German, but thank him for his speech. I notice that he has shaved off his eyebrows and replaced them with finely drawn, rather attractive, tiny tatoos of stars, a bit of personal adornment that makes an individual statement, although what it is, I cannot say.

The announcement for an upcoming meeting at the Schauspiel advertises that a discussion will take place on the topic of the present state of the German-French relationship. Daniel Cohn-Bendit --a French-born German politician once known as "Danny the Red" for his leftist political views, now a member of the Green Party-- will speak; along with Pascale Hugues, a French journalist who lives in Berlin; and, not least, Volker Schlondorff, the filmmaker of "The Tin Drum", and part of the New German Cinema of the 1960s, with Werner Maria Fassbender, Wim Wenders and Warner Herzog.

From its origins as the European Coal and Steel Community, then the European Union dreamed of by its architect, Jean Monnet, France and Germany were the linchpins of the European Union, and its most powerful members. France and Germany worked together on projects: Airbus, the aeronautics giant, and American Boeing's greatest rival, is a French-German consortium. Germany and France made financial policy for the Union's other members, while not stricly following the rules themselves. For example, when, in the nineties, the percentage of France's debt relative to its gross national product grew larger than the Union's stated rules permitted, Germany looked the other way, while insisting that other member states trim their budgets to comply with the spending limits.

That there is discord between the two countries is not merely a matter of the lack of chemistry between France's president Nicholas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Faced with Greece's near default on its sovereign debt obligations in early March, it was only ECB chariman Mario Draghi's creation of a borrowing facility that would give European banks the funds to maintain liquidity for three years at a one percent interest rate that staved off a Greek bankruptcy and perhaps that of the Euro.

France's banks are the largest holders of Greek debt, and France's economy in this election year (the first round is a few weeks away, on April 22) is not rebounding. Germany, meanwhile, continues to produce goods and services the world wants to buy, although its economy, too, is slower. With twenty-seven countries now part of the Euro, and one of them, Poland, attempting to position itself as a new partner of Germany, France thinks it is no longer the factor it was in German policy considerations. The title of the Schauspiel public meeting, taken from a scandalous French song written by, Serge Gainsbourg, sums up the change in what was once the essential relationship between what were the two most powerful countries in the European Union: "Je t'Aime ...Moi Non Plus"

Which means, "I Love You...Me Neither".