DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I love restaurants, but going out to eat in Germany is not much fun. Besides the fact that everything on the menu used to have four legs and hair, the air inside restaurants in noxious with cigarette smoke.

In California, smoking in public is nearly outlawed. I have lived here for so long that I can’t stand to be around cigarettes any more. When people smoke, my eyes dry out like old granola. It is nearly as unpleasant as having one’s brain fitted for custom earplugs — but that is a story for another time.

Swimming through the blue cloud of acrid smoke that forms within minutes of any social gathering, I have to blink repeatedly, squint, and hold my hands over my bleeding red eyes, just to maintain vision through the film forming on my contacts. I’d done so much of this during my stay in Germany that my wife’s uncle, upon greeting me on New Year’s Eve, performed a sort of exaggerated squint, clenching the top half of his face together as he shook my hand. I thought this parody of my suffering was really insensitive, until I saw him do it when he greeted someone else — and then I saw his brother do it too! I guess they were also feeling distress from the smoke (even though they were making some of it).

Cigarettes are an integral part of German food culture. They enable a diner to algebraically scale any meal into 2n+1 courses. For example, at this New Year’s Eve party, I had a three-course meal, while most everyone else in the room enjoyed seven (cigarette, appetizer, cigarette, soup, cigarette, entree, cigarette). And while I had only one dessert, everyone else had three (cigarette, mousse, cigarette).

Relief came suddenly at midnight when the room emptied of bodies, and in the wake of the exodus, smoke. I was shocked to think everyone had bailed on the evening so quickly, as if all their BMWs and Audis were about to turn into whatever passes for seasonal gourds over there… and then I realized that no one had left; they’d simply gone outside to attempt to set the Earth on fire.

And so I discovered that the Germans’ preoccupation with cigarettes is only in part due to a national addiction to nicotine. I think the more general issue is a fascination with combustion, for this crowd of well-dressed revelers descended on the parking lot like schoolkids to light firecrackers, roman candles, and rockets of all kinds. They had missiles, fountains, mortars, and scary whizzing things that shot sparks in the air, into the garden, and at the spectators. Several of these went under cars in the parking lot — I was afraid they’d generate a bigger bang than anyone expected. I stepped away from the window at this point.

The next morning, sidewalks all over town looked like a war zone. I blew off a lot of fireworks as a child, but I have never seen anything like this — every square foot of sidewalk was littered with soggy cardboard, plastic fins and nosecones, red tissue paper, and burn marks. For a country that is generally cleaner and better maintained than America, this was incongruous and a bit disturbing. I did not see a clean patch of pavement anywhere on January 1st. I was told that Germans had spent 300 million Deutschmarks (about $150 million US) on fireworks for the day.