Transients Plunged into Darkness

[Hans Natonek’s Bluebeard’s Last Love]

Each morning, I looked forward to hearing Tank Top’s colorful Vietnamese, but he’s gone for good. To express confusion, he’d say, “My dick and balls were everywhere.” From Liên the café’s owner I learnt Tank Top had become a regular just before me. Though a native of Vung Tau, Tank Top is also a transient. Tired of this audience, he has taken his act somewhere else.

Around 8:30 or so, a man from Adelaide would sit across the street, just outside the laptop shop. Liên brings him his coffee. Just as in Laos and Cambodia, café owners deliver coffee, by foot, bike or motorbike, to regular customers each morning.

The Aussie’s been married to a Vietnamese for 15 years. Every 14 months or so, he goes back, usually to see a sick relative or attend a funeral. His 60-year-old wife lost both parents when she was just one-year-old. They were in the NVA. Her dad died in Quảng Trị, just across the demilitarized zone. Since her home province of Hà Tĩnh was bombed so heavily, her grandparents decided it was best she be put in a Hanoi orphanage. Such a good student, she ended up studying in Moscow, where she stayed for 7 1/2 years.

“Sometimes he yells at me, so I say, ‘You’re a man, you cannot yell at me!’ He’d say, ‘I’m sorry, I was in a war.’ I’d tell him, ‘You were in a war for one year! I was in a war for 20 years!’” She laughed. Nothing cracks up a Vietnamese more than absurdity.

Even counting Vietnam’s war against China, she’s exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea.

“Even today, I cannot look at blood, brother. When I first had my period, I was terrified!”

Though she has visited Australia several times, she prefers Vietnam, “It’s very sad in Australia.”

Buồn, meaning sad, is used very liberally in Vietnamese. They’d say, “Come out for coffee to lessen your sadness.” Ra uống cà phê cho đỡ buồn. “So sad, I don’t know what to do.” Buồn quá, không biết làm gì. Sadness is even linked to laughter, buồn cười. Literally “sad laughter,” it just means “feeling like laughing.”

Tank Top’s son, Chí, used to drive me crazy with his loud video game. Addicted to virtual bullets and blood, he’s lost to this life. Now, there’s a new customer who casually assaults us all by watching the news, with the volume turned up, on his phone. “It’s a goal!” He never talks to anybody.

I just stopped to sneak a photo of that lottery ticket seller who rarely smiles. Only Henry I never did so, after his son William went down with the White Ship off Normandy. In a lovely Chinese blouse with its wickedly demure pankou, she emerged from a primordial or post apocalyptic darkness, to scatter my balls and dick across this timeless universe.

Christopher Isherwood, “I only knew that she was lovable in a way that no human could ever quite be, since, being a creature of art, she had been created out of pure love.” Must slip that in because we’re going to Berlin.

A month ago, a reader asked if I thought America’s degeneracy had already exceeded the Weimar Republic’s? Don’t shoot me if I’m wrong, but I said yes. Germany’s decadence a century ago was limited to its cities and affluent. More desperate poor means cheaper sex for the cash flushed. That’s why they love war and economic collapse. Having made billions, those near death must ejaculate on others’ humiliation.

After the 1905 Russian Revolution failed, Jews flooded into German cities. Seeing these blossom into depravity allowed Spengler to write The Decline of the West, published in 1918. Nude dancing became a huge attraction. In 2021, Laurence Senelick of Tufts University explained this liberation:

The factors that contributed to Nakttanz included reaction against the prudery of the Wilhelmine era and a discharge of tension amidst wartime depression and postwar anxiety. Certain progressive groups sponsored nudism as a healthy way of life; others vaunted voyeurism as a legitimate hobby of the modern city dweller. The performers themselves protested that a beautiful female torso was itself a work of art worthy of contemplation. And, finally, at a time when maimed war veterans were to be seen begging on every street corner and prostitution throve as an economic necessity, the body objectified was regarded as a fit (in both senses) medium of entertainment.

It’s too bad professor Senelick and his husband couldn’t have been there, but a better Weimar is already here. You, too, will get to dance naked for pennies.

Mentioning Weimar artists recently, I forgot George Grosz. This statement of his captures that era, “My drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket... I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty.”

As a teenager, I lucked into some Max Beckmann in Saint Louis. In Paris decades later, I caught his retrospective at Centre Pompidou. His combination of cruelty, sadness and elegance is unmatched. Otto Dix, “I had the feeling that there was a dimension of reality that had not been dealt with in art: the dimension of ugliness.” And, “I’m not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I’ve seen is beautiful.” Beckmann painted horror and ugliness most beautifully.

In the celebratory Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (2000), there’s this horrific passage about the lustmord connoisseur, Fritz Haarman:

For meat-starved Hannoverians, Haarmann was heaven-sent. He peddled the boy-flesh as fresh pork and sold it at cut-rate prices. When neighbors complained about the smells emanating from Haarmann’s apartment and the overall spooky atmosphere—boys going in but not out—the Hannover police, of course, ignored their pleas; Haarmann was one of their own. But over a six-year period, too many young men were last seen at the Hannover Bahnhof under the watchful care of Fritz Haarmann. Also Haarmann had an overly generous habit of giving away the victims’ recognizable clothing to his lowbrow friends. Frantic relatives practically fainted when they saw their missing sons’ overcoats, caps, and homemade cravats on the bodies of complete strangers.

Haarman’s coup de grace was a firm bite through the throat. Before his execution, Haarman gleefully said he couldn’t wait to hear blood gushing from his severed neck as his head bounces on the ground. What a poet!

Armies of starving youths arrived then loitered around train stations. Girls sold themselves to eat. More than 1,500 were photographed naked, often in sadomasochistic poses, by a creepy middle-aged watch maker, Fritz Ulbrich. With two accomplices, one finally killed him.

George Grosz, “The times were certainly out of joint. All moral restraints seemed to have melted away. A flood of vice, pornography and prostitution swept the entire country.”

Much more enlightened a century later, professor Senelick celebrates from Massachusetts:

Weimar Berlin boasted the most conspicuous and lively homosexual subculture in Europe. (I use ‘homosexual’ advisedly since that was the standard term at the time, whereas ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ are anachronistic). In 1919 Dr Magnus Hirschfeld founded an Institute for Sexual Science, intending to study sexual variation and to militate against §175, the legal statute condemning sex between men […] Male prostitution was as blatant as the female variety. (The rumor ran that if one asked a policeman to direct one to a brothel, he would inquire which sex one would prefer).

Jewish Friedrich Hollaender had his goy wife sing:

I am so completely vice-ridden,
So crazily avid for fun!
I’ve tried all the thrills that are hidden,
There’s nothing new under the sun.

Of course, Jews were mavericks of gender fluidity. Marcellus Schiffer penned “Maskulinum/Femininum.” Harry “Hambo” Heyman was a fabulous crossdressing clown who survived Terezín death camp. In Berlin, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science. Keshet online remembers in 2024:

On Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we face increased antisemitism and continued attacks on LGBTQ+ rights today, we draw strength from our ancestors, those who survived as well as those we lost. That list includes Magnus Hirschfeld—a gay Jewish doctor who innovated gender-affirming care in Germany in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, whose work was destroyed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

Everything is ticked off.

From that glorious miasma, Hitler emerged. What will rise from the American swamp? Perhaps nothing but self destructive rage, snarkiness and increasingly farcical idiocy. It’s way past buồn cười.

I finish this piece at 9AM in Cóc Cóc Coffee. Already, I’ve walked at least two miles barefoot. Each does what he must to cure himself. My soles’ nerve endings rejoiced. On the way here, I saw a masked woman kiss her daughter outside an elementary school. Had either seen me carrying my leather sandals, I’d have been deemed insane. At least we’re not living through a Weimar, a century ago or today.

[Max Beckmann’s Night, 1919]

[Franz Fieldler’s “Narre Tod, Mein Spielgesell” (“Fool Death, My Playmate”), circa 1925]

[Olga Desmond’s ‘Sword Dance’ in 1908]

[Valeska Gert in 1919]