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I shave my head for one simple reason: I'm losing my hair.
The only other option is the passive, pathetic
role of baldingness. As my plane touches down in Berlin,
I wonder if my own existential struggles and fashion adjustments
will get lost in the translation.
A young guy who's working for the literary conference I'm attending meets me at the airport and escorts me out to his beat-up old American car, and we listen to a tape of Cowboy und Country und Western music on the way in. It turns out I'm being put up in a writers' residence, tucked away in the small lakefront town of Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin. Wannsee is famous for its ducks and for having hosted the conference where the Final Solution was dreamt up (there's even a Final Solution museum). When I wander into town to change dollars into marks, the people walking around the lake and up and down the main strip eye me nervously. I wonder what it is: do they think I'm a neo-Nazi or know I'm a Jew? Which do good German citizens hate more? Do they blame Jews for the surge in Neo-Nazism, or are Jews out of season, replaced by Turks and Vietnamese? |