December fourth. Three years ago on this day I started going out with Michelle. This year as our anniversary fell in the middle of a working week, we weren’t able to see each other, but the following weekend I made my now routine trip north to Hamburg. The actual trip was now becoming mundane, I know the train times, I know where I like to sit in the car, but coming back was going to be something a little different. This would likely be my last trip to Hamburg. Michelle’s traineeship would finish in a couple of weeks and then she’d be flying back to Toronto. We weren’t planning anything over the top, we were going to make dinner at home, ironically a luxury for us since we so often find ourselves eating out of a can or just eating out. This evening though, we were going to take in a bit of German culture. Or at least that’s what we had been promised. Some of Michelle’s friends in Hamburg were organizing a ‘Feuerzangenbowle’ party. Feuerzangenbowle is both the name of a drink, and a classic movie that people watch around the holidays. Neither I nor Michelle really knew what to expect, all that they told us was that it was a real classic.
They were showing the movie in one of the big lecture halls at the university. It turns out it’s a bit of a cult classic, they told me it was a little like the Rocky Horror Picture Show because people bring along stuff to the movie and occasionally dress up. Nobody was in costume this time, but half the audience had brought along flash lights and big alarm clocks. We asked why, but everyone just kept telling us to wait and see. As we sat down amongst the other 300 hundred people, a guy dressed as Santa, and a girl dressed as an angel came out with microphones and started throwing out Christmas candies and cookies into the crowd. They yelled a few things in German, and it stupidly occurred to me that yes, of course this movie was going to be in German, and plus it was made half a century ago so the sound quality wouldn’t be tip top. This last paragraph from a review of the movie I read afterwards just about sums it up. “…most of the humour would not travel well at all, especially the clever use of accents and dialects is virtually untranslatable; a non-native speaker, even somebody with a fair knowledge of German would miss most of it when watching the original.” (read the review) Yeah, it was pretty tough going.
The movie was made in 1944 and is about a retired doctor who decides to get the school boy experience he missed as a boy. The significance of the alarms clocks became semi-clear early on, there’s a scene where the main character is woken up by his clock, has trouble turning it off and drops it into a jug of water. Everybody in the theatre whipped out their clocks at this point and set them off. Still, it was never a recurring joke or anything, it was just that once. I still don’t quite get it. The same thing with the flashlights. The kids in the story are joking around in class, one is trying to answer questions about geography. As the teacher asks the questions, the protagonist reflects sunlight off his watch at a map on the wall behind the teacher to show him the answers. At this point the theatre comes alive with points of light as the audience also points out the answers with their flashlights. Again, it’s a one time gag. Maybe I’ll understand it next time.
The reason the movie is named after a drink, is because it is actually a story told to a group of friends over a big bowl of feuerzangenbowle. After the movie we decided to play along to that aspect of the story as well. The group of us headed over to the AIESEC office where a couple of people had gathered all of the necessary ingredients. A little bit like Gluhwein (read story) feuerzangenbowle is a hot spiced wine. The big selling point is that the drink is actually prepared in front of whoever is going to be drinking it. You bring a large vessel onto the centre of the table and heat the wine. A large cone of sugar about six inches high is placed on a grill over the warming wine, and rum is poured over the sugar. You then light the rum on fire and it melts the sugar into the wine stewing wine below. More rum is gradually and continually added until the sugar has melted away, and then the drink is served piping hot. Perfect for a cold December day. Although, aside from that I never saw what the connection was between the movie and the holidays. I guess some traditions are simply meant to be learned, and enjoyed, not understood.
