Cultural pursuits on a quiet Bucharest sunday

Just as I maligned the city in my last post, Bucharest is now showing me a kinder face. Dental treatment has forced me to stay in the city for a few weeks – and the cooler temperatures have made this – and brisk morning walks - a bearable proposition. Yesterday was a glorious day for walking – overcast and, at 20 degrees, about 15 cooler than is normal for this time of year. And the palm-sized Fuji camera acquired during the Koln trip gives an additional incentive to walk. Building facades we had taken for granted during our normal walks from Piata Victoerei to Unirii acquired therefore a new perspective as we traversed the side streets – deserted as they are (apart from some early birds in the cafes) during these summer weekends.

I had wanted to get some snaps of the houses in the area bisected by Hristov Botev street to the north-east of the concrete fascism of the Unirii area - but light drizzle forced a readjustment and we found ourselves veering around just before our destination; and arriving in the small gallery under the Military Circle chatting to a young, untrained artist who is an active collector of Romanian painters and member of the Romanian art collectors’ association.
It was the last day of Mihai Sandilescu’s exhibition – with paintings with a strong sense of colour I don’t often find here. They reminded me of Matisse and the towering (but strangely neglected) figure who was Caillebotte.

Mihai recommended we visit the current exhibition at the Bucharest Municipality Museum which turned out to be a marvellous collection of paintings devoted to the Romanian House – temporarily lent by private owners (downstairs was another temporary exhibition – of less interesting works for sale at reasonable prices). I go some new names for the file in which I am making notes on Romanian realist painters of the past century – a file which now has about 60 names and 50 pages.
The visit gave me nine new names – Artachino, Constantin (1870-1954); Baesu, Aurel (1896-1928); Alper, Juan (1857-1901); Cismaru, Mihai (1943-2003); Catargi, George (1894-1963); Darascu, Nicolae (1883-1953); Ghiata, Dimitir (1888-1972); Ludeosanu Aurel Popp (1874-1960); and Popescu, Cicerone (1908-70). We were now more than 3 hours into our cultural walk which culminated in a quick visit to the second hand bookshop on Strada Ion Ghica – unearthing 2 good-looking current German guidebooks to Romania (for 5 euros each) and a pristine (and Romanian) edition of Umberto Eco’s stunning On Beauty (for 10 euros).
Then on to the Anthony Frost English bookshop where its manager gave me an illuminating insight into the current booktrade.

Suitably chastened and all the more determined to break my Amazon habit, I emerged with four books – Bucharest Tales (in the New Europe Writer series);Vassily Grossman’s A Writer at War; Friedrich Reck’s recently rediscovered and amazing journal from the Nazi period - Diary of a Man in Despair - which has the poetic power of a series of Georg Grosz paintings combined with some Brecht poems (and this from a scion of the German aristocracy) The book is also reviewed here.
The final book was one of their 45% off bargains – another in the delightfully-produced New York Review of books series The Gallery by John Horne Burns.

The painting and book visits and chats were so filling there simply wasn't an appetite left for the planned visit to the newly-opened Museum of Art Collections back nearer home at Calei Victorei......   

Romanian Diary 1958

A nice discovery in a Magheru Bvd bookshop – a book of black and white photographs of Romania in 1958 produced by a photographer Inge Morath of whom I had never heard – despite my affection for people such as  Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Capra and Robert Doisneau.

Morath was, by birth, an Austrian brought up in Germany; worked with many famous photographers and had the distinction of being married Arthur Miller in 1962 after his divorce from Marlyn Monroe. 

The book - Romanian Diary - was reprinted in 2010 and the subject of a local exhibition here

We went to the Matache market this morning - our first trip for some months. Some good stuff (cheese and herbs) on offer from individuals lining the approach road. And the stalls were groaning with good vegetables and fruit.
But just outside was a war zone - thanks to the senseless demolition being inflicted on the city by its evil mayor Oprescu.

Sarah in Romania has a good rant about his latest vandalism. And these are some pics of the area now that the old market building was demolished (illegally) earlier this year.

Among you, taking notes

I am not a fan of the city of Bucharest. I find it ugly, noisy, and dirty. I find it difficult to understand its fans – such as one PVE Wood whose idiosyncratic A Political Refugee from the global village is a highly readable blog I turn to frequently.

After 3 months’ absence, I noticed that even the bird-caws are aggressive – compared with Koln! But it is always a pleasure to visit its bookshops after a gap, particularly the two which are hidden at the far side of the National Gallery beside a very old small Kretzulescu church. 

The Humanitas bookshop had another mouth-watering title from the great series on old Romanian buildings being produced by the Igloo architectural group - Campulung Muscel – sketches for an architectural monograph. Campulung is a small gem we always try to visit on our way up to the mountain house – when, that is, we take the longer route via Tirgovishte (also worth a visit). It has an amazing number of vernacular villas from its time as a haven for artists and the Bucharest bourgeoisie - and was, during Ceaucescu times, a place of exile for those out of favour.....

But the great finds were in the Anthony Frost English bookshop next door. 

A signed copy of Timeless and Transitory – 20th century relations between Romania and the English-speaking world (2012) by Ernest Latham is an intriguing and highly readable collection of essays by an American specialist in Romania who worked in the 1980s as a cultural attaché in the Bucharest American Consulate. His historian's take on the country can be seen on a series of short videos

Naomi Mitchison is, for us Scots, a name to conjure with. A very independent-minded lady born in 1897, she published her first (of 80 odd!) book in the 1920s and lived from the late 1930s in Carradale House on the edge of a small village on the beautiful Kintyre peninsula behind the peaks of the island of Arran. Among you taking notes – the wartime diaries of Naomi Mitchison 1939-1945 ed Dorothy Sheridan (1985) are the diaries she kept at the behest of Mass Observation, a volunteer body which encouraged people to record in diaries the life around them. I was born only a sea-gull’s flight away from Mitchison’s home in Carradale as she was writing her notes on everyday life in wartime Scotland and will read her book through my parents’ eyes and ears. She died, after an extraordinarily full life, in 1999. She is one of a generation whose ilk we shall not see again!! In a future post I shall pay tribute to women of her generation from both the UK and Germany......

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath ed Karen Kukil (2000) are 700 powerful pages packed with poetic freshness which encourage me to get hold of her poetry.

My final find was "Windy Arbours - Collected Criticism" (2005) by an Irish American writer Aidan Higgins I had never heard of. It's a collection of short book reviews written in a language one can only call poetic. 

The delight of the Anthony Frost bookshop (apart from its music and the coffees which occasionally come your way) is that you could only find titles like that there. Books which celebrate the past......

A hymn to the Carpathian meadows

Back in Bucharest - and straining to get into the mountains. A wonderful hymn to the area in the current National Geographic

these valleys in the Carpathian Mountains in the centre of Romania contain one of the great treasures of the cultivated world: some of the richest and most botanically diverse hay meadows in Europe. You can find up to 50 different species of grass and flowers growing there in a single square yard of meadow, and even more within reach as you sit down among them. This flowery miracle is maintained not by nature but by nature worked with the human hand. The richness is there only because a meadow stays a meadow if it is mown every summer. Abandoned, it will be filled with scrub in three to five years. As it is, for the moment anyway, Transylvania is a world made beautiful by symbiosis. All day long the smell of the meadows gradually thickens, and as the sun drops, the honey-sharp smell of the butterfly orchids, night scented, pollinated by moths, comes seeping out of the hillsides. Go for a walk, and you’ll find the flowers crowding around your feet. Practically no chemical sprays and no artificial fertilizers—too expensive and distrusted by these poor, small-scale farmers—mean the hillsides are purple with meadow salvia and pink with sainfoin.

The photo is one you will find in a marvellous album The colour of Hay. But an even greater treat is the occasional blog Carpathian Sheep Walk by Caroline Juler, author (amongst other things) of the delightful Blue Guide  Romania which I referred to in in a blog about good books about Romania some time ago.
If its photographs you are after, have a look at these great pics of the countryside in the Maramures area further north.

getting to know the Germans

Last year I dared to recommend “getting to know the Bulgarians through their painters” (of the last 100 years) and to produce a small book about it. Now I've had the idea of trying to understand the Germans through their literature of the past 50 years. I’ve been gripped by a book I picked up a couple of days ago (for 1.5 euros) called Light Years – a short history of German literature from 1945 to the present, available, sadly, only in German. It’s very far from being your normal, dry listing of worthy books – but rather a series of short and very human vignettes by Volker Weidermann (of the FAZ) of German writers as they struggled to make a living in post-war Germany. I’m almost half way through – and already feel I have made a lot of new friends. 

As I’ve mentioned already in this series of postings I’ve been doing in the past 2 months from Koln (20 so far), anglo-saxons wanting to read about European countries are well served with countries such as France, Italy and Spain but starved when it comes to Germany. There is no contemporary John Ardagh writing – despite the best efforts of Simon Winder and Peter Watson. Of course there’s no apparent market for such books – apart, perhaps, from those taking short-trips to Berlin for stag parties! But Germany is so vast, diverse and culturally rich that it definitely deserves far more books devoted to it than the dreadful choice currently available eg Spring Time for Germany - a little better, admittedly, than the stuff which Roger Boyes has been inflicting on the British public. Watson's "German Genius" or Winder's "Germania" are not the easiest of reads.
I see that there is a "very short introduction" to German Literature available on the Amazon site - it will be interesting to read it - and compare with the Weidermann text.

In a small way, Weidermann's book reminds me of the magnum opus of Clive James – "Cultural Amnesia" - which gave us a few pages apiece on European writers of the last century (most neglected) and was indeed tempted to alert him to Weidermann’s book - not least because of this profile. 

I've been one of James' camp followers for some 40 years and cannot imagine a world without him (see his website!!). I find him one of the world's best wordsmiths and renaissance men! One of the very few people I would like to spend some hours with. I was, first, captivated by his songs with Pete Atkin (the 1970s?); amused with his TV commentaries (written and TV); seduced by his autobiographies; and then stunned with his massive "Cultural Amnesia"

Model Germany?

Germany has, at the moment, the reputation of an invincible powerhouse - although it was some 15 years ago seen to be somewhat sluggish. I have referred in recent posts to the various critiques which have surfaced in the past few years. Last week's Der Spiegel had a large feature on the decline of public investment - and the deterioration in public infrastructure.

This theme is picked up again in a publication by the European Council for Foreign Relations, entitled  - a German Model for Europe? which 

examines the reasons for the success of the German economy during the last decade. In particular, it describes the elements of the Agenda 2010 – essentially a set of labour market reforms implemented by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 2003 onwards – and explores their contribution to Germany’s macroeconomic performance. It points out some problematic elements of Germany’s economic performance during the last decade and concludes that Germany’s economic success is a product of a combination of nominal wage restraint, supported by labour market reforms which have brought down the reservation wage and put downward pressure on wages, and severe spending restraints on public investment as well as on research and development and education. On the whole, this cannot serve as a blueprint for Europe.

Burning and ....Celebration of Books

My local branch of the Thalia bookstore chain was offering remaindered books yesterday in the huge Rhein Centre Mall just minutes from the house I’m renting in the delightful Bahnstrasse whose quiet street goes back 100 years. I emerged clutching 4 books for 10 euros – all of them real finds. First Umberto Eco’s stunning 450 page On Ugliness (although my version was in German, Scribd gives me the full version here in English!!) which immediately goes into the short list I have of “beautiful books” (others include The History of Reading; The Embarrassment of Riches; and Bean Eaters and Bread Soup.

It was 80 years ago (10 May 1933) that the infamous “burning of the books” took place in Nazi Germany – an event which is still marked today. Volker Weidermann is a German literary critic who has published The Book of Burned Books which was my second purchase. The website I love German books noted 3 years ago that it -

provides portraits of every writer on a list compiled by the librarian Wolfgang Herrmann who drew up his list of books by 131 writers of “un-German spirit” for removal from public libraries. It was the student organisation Deutsche Studentenschaft that organised the book burnings around Germany, using the list to select the titles. The writers in question were communists, Jews, anti-militarists and feminists – in a few cases all of the above. The book burning had different consequences for many of them. There were those who went into exile, many of them dying far from home, those who resorted to “inner emigration” of varying degrees of hypocrisy – and some who adapted to the regime, openly writing propaganda for the Nazis. Many of them are still household names in a certain kind of household today, while others died in poverty and obscurity. Plenty of names would be familiar to English readers: Klaus Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. And Weidermann gives us some quirky details on these writers, such as the letters exchanged between Zweig and Roth and Heinrich Mann’s fading optimism in the USA.

And one man – Georg Salzmann – started in the 1970s to collect specimens of these books from flea markets and antiquarian bookshops, amassing a collection of 12,000 which he donated in 2009 to the University of Augsburg. I admire such obsessions!

My third book is actually a comic – the first I have ever bought (in any language). Der Bewegte man (I thought it meant the “aroused man”) appeared in 1987 was probably one of Germany’s first gay comic strips. The author - Ralf Konig - reminds me of Claire Bretecher and is now the country’s most famous “bande desseinist”. I won’t make the obvious comment about the meaning of “bander” in French!  

My final bargain was a collection of short essays What do we want? by one Ingo Schulze who turns out to have interesting views about contemporary events, for example in this issue of Der Freitag which is a worthy German weekly. 

It seems appropriate to end with this link to a marvellous table listing about 150 novels in the German language which Guardian readers recommended for a World Literature Tour, The equivalent French list is here.

Footloose and fancy free

Several times on this blog, I have highlighted the nomadic life I have lived for the past 22 years – with least 20 addresses during that period. Although my project life has been quiet for the past 3 years, I still commute between 3-4 locations and have been on the lookout for an urban base which I could really call home. In 2010 I explored the idea of a house in Brittany but realised that I did not need another rural retreat but rather an urban base for winter. Living in Koln these past 2 months has made the idea of a German base one worth further study. Notwithstanding the sourness of a lot of German journalistic comment at the moment, their transport systems; greenery; civilised behaviour and general costs make this a very attractive place to live.

I’ve been looking (casually) at the housing market during my present 2 month stay in Koln – the internet and also the VOX television programme called “Mieten, kaufen, wohnen” allow me to get a good sense of what the market is like. Furnished rented accommodation is not easy to find – I’m paying 8 times here what I pay in Sofia for my central flat – which, unlike food, petrol and communal services, is about the right relationship given incomes in Bulgaria. And there are signs of stress – the free copy of Der Spiegel which I was given this week as part of a special offer has a story about the extent of decay in the country’s infrastructure which I had not expected to read in a German paper.

And another story tells of an apparent shortage of housing accommodation which, on closer examination, is not quite what it seems -

Long lines stretch out in front of apartments in Munich, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Frankfurt during house showings. Desperate apartment hunters are even starting Facebook campaigns, writing chain emails or posting ads on streetlights: "A small family is looking for a home in this area! Please give us a chance!"
Politicians are starting to react. Hamburg has proposed housing students and trainees on ships. In Berlin, Federal Minister of Transport, Building and Urban Development Peter Ramsauer of the conservative Christian Democrats plans to convert vacant military barracks into dorms and is urging the city to be imaginative. Meanwhile, Peer Steinbrück, the centre-left Social Democrats' candidate for the Chancellery, is promoting subsidized housing during his campaign. Even the ever-hesitant chancellor, Angela Merkel, suddenly seems to feel inclined to put an end to rising rents.
Merkel even surprised many in her own party with her campaign pledge a few weeks back to cap price increases on properties coming up for re-rental to 10 per cent of average rents in the area. But when the Green Party, which has been touting the issue for two years, tried to push a similar initiative through parliament on Friday, Merkel's coalition parties rejected it. The chancellor appears keen to chalk up a victory on the popular issue in her next term in office.
 A Run on Fashionable Areas
The overall impression is that Germany's big cities are facing a housing shortage as bad as the one caused by Word War II. But experts, real estate associations, German renter groups and municipal building companies convey a different message: There is no general housing shortage in Germany. Instead, there is a massive run on certain fashionable areas in popular cities, which inflates prices. Too many people want to live in the same neighborhoods and yet they are surprised that prices for apartments are increasing.
 Comparisons to Hong Kong
"A much greater number of people today exclusively focus on the hip districts in spite of prices. So rents continue to rise and the search for apartments is growing increasingly harder," says Axel Gedaschko, president of the Federal Association of Housing and Real Estate Associations (GdW). That's the reason why many people get the impression that the housing shortage in large German cities has grown to dimensions comparable to Hong Kong.
Often it's only two or three subway stops that make all the difference. According to an analysis by Internet portal Immobilienscout24.de, which runs classified ads for rentals and property for sale, five times more inquiries are made for apartments in Cologne's city center compared to the district of Bilderstöckchen -- which isn't much further out.

"It makes my blood boil," says the manager of one property management company is responsible for around 4,000 apartments. "Those who claim that there are no affordable living spaces in all of Cologne and in other big cities are lying," he insists.
The average rent excluding heat and utilities in Cologne has risen by 9 percent. But dramatic increases in price have only occurred in re-rentals in some popular neighbourhoods. He says the hikes in price are also a result of the government encouraging homeowners to conduct renovations to make homes more energy efficient -- costs that are in part then passed on to the renter.
He also places some blame on today's generation of renters, who he says make it easier for property owners to raise rents on a regular basis. "Today's renter tends to be unsettled," Pass says. He points to singles as an example. At first they're satisfied with 50 square meters (538 square feet), but after they receive their first pay raise, they move into a 70-square-meter apartment. That gives apartment owners the perfect opportunity to turn the screws: They have no problems whatsoever increasing the rent when the re-rent the old apartment to a new tenant.
Already today, around 50 percent of the people residing in large cities are living alone, in some cases occupying living space that would be suitable for up to three people. Something urgently needs to be done for families with low incomes.

If true, that's an amazing statistic - 50% of people living alone in large German cities. I feel we need more flexibility. Take my case - I want to buy somewhere - but only for use during the winter. The place I'm currently renting (upper floor of an old house) would be ideal - but the market doesn't cater for such eccentricities...... 

Coincidentally, The Guardian has today a story about developments in the English market for rented accommodation