The Curse of the Labrador Duck (21 page)

I then asked Reichholf about the museum’s holdings of Great Auks. At one time they had apparently owned two. When Errol Fuller wrote his magnum opus on Great Auks, he had encountered considerable difficulty getting much information out of this museum. Reichholf was able to confirm that the museum had only one specimen, and that the second specimen of song and legend was nowhere to be found. Although the remaining specimen wasn’t in the best
shape, they were keeping a close eye on it to make sure it didn’t get any worse. Reichholf had a meeting to dash off to, but his assistant took me to room M110, labeled
Magazin Ornithologie,
to see the Greak Auk. As I prepared to snap a couple of photographs, the assistant turned the bird so that its best side showed.

I wandered back to my hotel room for my second shower of the day. As I dried off, I considered my options for my remaining time in Munich. I could rest and prepare myself for the latter half of my German expedition, but that wouldn’t give me much to talk about when I got home. Alternatively, I could take the train into the heart of Munich, visit its official tourist sites, get really, really hot, and wear myself out. Given how tired I was from the day before, I favored a third option, bound to be a lot less strenuous, but still a bit of fun. My cab driver had told me the Schlosspark Nymphenburg was an incredibly beautiful park. It wasn’t too far from my hotel and it would give me the chance to see where the Labrador Duck had lived from the end of the war until being moved to its current home twenty years ago. Who would blame me for taking the third option? Surely Munich is just another European city, with a central core pretty much like any other.

But as I got closer and closer to the park, I also got closer and closer to the Obermenzig
Bahnhof
, and the train that would take me to the city center. An odd sort of guilt set in. The problem was that Munich was not just any other European city. People lived and worked and loved and procreated and died there, and were probably very proud of what they helped to create anew each day. And so, despite the smell of vomit at the train station entrance, I took the stairs to the platform.

Most visitors to central Munich walk east from the
Hauptbahnhof
along Bayerstrasse, but I found that by walking along Schützenstrasse instead I could see some much better architecture and miss Europe’s most extraordinary gambling facility, several beggars, and a Frankfurt-style live sex show theater. With this one exception, the region east of the Munich train station could not have been more different from the region east of the Frankfurt train station. Instead of prostitutes and drug addicts, I found a fountain that was so fabulously attractive that every stone seat around it was occupied by a least one bottom, with a small flock of people hovering, waiting for
their turn to sit. I passed through a huge stone arch and found an array of shops that included a McDonald’s, a Foot Locker, a Benetton’s, a Gap, a Vodafone outlet, and a Swatch store. Without being too jaded about retail opportunities, I did find some really odd ones, including a Salamander shoe store, Wormland men’s clothing shop, and Christ jewelry. I have visited a lot of great art museums, but I don’t recall seeing a painted image of the Son of God wearing a lot of bling.

I found my way to the very heart of the Old Town, the Marienplatz, with its central Mariensäule, a column topped by a golden Virgin Mary. Mary was carved in 1590 but didn’t find her way to the top of the column until 1638. It had something to do with Germany beating Sweden in a war. Toward the base of the column, protecting Mary from nasty things that might want to climb up, are four helmeted, winged, cherub warriors with spears and swords. The first is slaying a dragon, the second a lion, the third a serpent, and the fourth a chicken. Perhaps Mary was allergic to feathers.

From there I wandered over to St. Peterskirche and climbed to the viewing platform at the top of the Alte Peter. A lovely breeze helped with my latest bout of sweating, and also helped to drown out the wheezing of the less active component of the visitors who had climbed the 297 steps for the view. I counted seven clock towers, including the one I was in, and was charmed when they struck the hour in near-perfect unison.

The S-Bahn 2 line took me back north to the region near the museum and my hotel. Although in need of my third shower and a good lie-down, I heard a nagging little voice. It was telling me I had no right to leave Munich before I saw the Schloss Nymphenburg. The castle had begun life in comparative modesty as the villa of the Electress Adelaide of Savoy, but over the next century became grander and grander, and served as the summerhouse of the royal family. But, more importantly, von Leuchtenberg’s Labrador Duck had once lived there. And so, instead of turning right at the train station, I turned left and aimed for the park.

Entering the park from the north side, I wandered along a path through a lovely deciduous forest. A good spot to cycle, and an even better place to run, it was probably a great place to canoodle with people you shouldn’t be canoodling with. Just when I had had about
enough of the forest, I came out into a magnificent garden in the style of an eighteenth-century English estate, with wide lawns, a fountain in full spray, and a pond full of giant carp and covered with coots, ducks, geese, and swans, bordered by statues of all the coolest Greek gods. All of this was just the view from the east side of the palace. Once I passed through a portal to the west side, the scope of the whole affair was revealed. There was another majestic fountain and more waterfowl, swimming in grand canals. The castle had two additional wings that were so far apart, each had its own clock tower.

The north wing held the Museum Mensch und Natur, the public display portion of the Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns. I was on the verge of admitting that I had seen all of the natural history museums I could handle, but parted with
2.50 for another experience. This should be stop number two on the tour of museums by the tightwads in Mainz. The displays were interactive at every turn. There was an abundance of spinning models and flashing lights, with handles to turn and buttons to push. On that Friday afternoon, the children on hand were lapping it all up. If the folks in Mainz modeled their museum after this one, children would see the visit as the highlight of the school year. Even though there wasn’t a single word of English, I usually got the point. I was particularly touched by a display on thylacines. Beside the stuffed beast was a television screen showing black-and-white movie footage of the last-ever thylacine, a captive, pacing back and forth in its cage. It looked so horribly lonely, and so horribly sad, that I turned away in shame at its extinction.

It was time for my next city and my next duck.

W
HEN THE THERMOMETER
is clinging tenaciously to the mid-90s, I can see the appeal of eating outdoors, as could many Berliners on an early Saturday evening. The sidewalks around my hotel were crammed with dining opportunities, and after scanning about twenty posted menus, I settled on a place that served me an eggplant and mushroom dish in coconut milk sauce. Several passers-by called out,
“Bon appétit!”
to which I responded,
“Merci beaucoup!”

I knew Berlin’s (take a deep breath!) Museum für Naturkunde, Zentralinstitut der Humboldt-Universität, Institut für Systematische
Zoologie to be home to one of the most beautiful Labrador Duck specimens, but while dining, my mind was not fully occupied by thoughts of ducks. I couldn’t help but reflect on what a truly astonishing city Berlin is. In Europe, it seems that even the smallest communities can trace their histories back to the cooling of the Earth’s crust. In contrast, Berlin wasn’t even established until the thirteenth century, and then only as a small fishing village. It plodded along for two centuries without much fanfare until the Holy Roman Emperor instructed the House of Hohenzollern to give it a boost. Italian artists moved in and coffee sales soared. Rats moved in and bubonic plague struck three times in twenty-six years. As if that were not enough, the Thirty Years’ War left only 6,000 survivors. Keen to get its numbers back up, Berlin invited foreigners to settle, including wealthy Jewish immigrants from Austria and Huguenots fleeing France, tripling the city’s population in just forty years. The city became the capital of Brandenburg-Prussia in the eighteenth century, amid general cheering and celebration. Canals were dug, castles built, fortified walls erected, and lime trees planted. After all the fanfare, the city had the living daylights kicked out of it by Napoléon a century later.

After the Emperor’s defeat at Waterloo, Berlin got revved up all over again, with the construction of railways and the establishment of Humboldt Universität. Then there were hunger riots. And a war with Denmark. And a war with Austria. And a war with France. When the German Empire was proclaimed in 1871, Berlin was installed as its capital. Being named capital of a country with expansionist goals seems to me to be similar to having a target painted on your back. World War I was not a party, resulting in famine and strikes, but that wasn’t a patch on World War II. Its citizens faced food shortages, British air raids, and general death and devastation. The war just wouldn’t go Berlin’s way. At the tail end of World War II, 1.5 million Russian soldiers came to town, and they weren’t in a festive mood. Berlin became the bull’s-eye during the ensuing Cold War that simmered between the United States and the USSR. The Berlin Blockade of 1948 didn’t help. Nor did the Berlin Wall, constructed in 1961. Reunification of East and West Berlin wasn’t cheap, leaving the city today with a debt in the tens of millions of euros. Berlin just
seems to be the sort of place that should have folded the tent flaps a very long time ago.

And yet, despite all of this, Berlin is home to 3.3 million people—greater than the combined populations of Mauritius, Fiji, Luxembourg, and Cyprus. The city has twenty-eight palaces and more than eighty museums. It is one of Europe’s great cultural centers. In a feature article,
Time
magazine proclaimed that Europe needs a strong Germany, and Germany needs a strong Berlin.

All of this left me feeling afloat. I had to wait one full day before I could examine the Labrador Duck, and in that time I wanted to be able to come up with something insightful to say about Berlin. There must be a small army of scholars who spend their whole professional lives considering the history and future of Berlin, and even they must mess it up once in a while. Surely it would be folly to think that I could encapsulate even the smallest corner of Berlin in the time at my disposal.

And so, over my second lager and the last bits of dinner, I set myself a more modest task. Most great cities have one or two enduring images, good or bad, that conjure up that community in the minds of people everywhere. Think of the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the British Houses of Parliament, and the fault line under San Francisco. Enduring images do not have to be specific buildings or structures, as evidenced by Mardi Gras and the Latin Quarter, or the Tiananmen Square protests. With a free Sunday, I set myself the task of finding something that would serve as my enduring image of Berlin. When I think about Berlin, fifty years hence, I want a single image to come to me as I sit in my rocking chair at the Old Boys’ Home.

I
STARTED VERY
early on Sunday morning, and walked south from my hotel room to the Fernsehturm, a gigantic telecommunications tower. At precisely 365 meters, it is the second-tallest freestanding structure in Europe. It has an observation platform at 203 meters, and a revolving café for those who feel that coffee tastes better when spinning. Some locals apparently call the structure
Telespargel
, a stalk of asparagus. If a few thick cables were added near the top, it would look almost exactly like a giant bacteria-consuming virus,
impaled one-third of the way along a giant spike. It was too early in the morning to be admitted to the tower, and so it failed as my enduring image of Berlin.

If the Fernsehturm were to fall over, it would probably hit the Marienkirche. The house of worship is full of really neat things like a carved altar from 1510, a baptismal font supported by black dragons, an alabaster pulpit, and a Gothic wall fresco called
Totentanz, The Dance of Death.
Regrettably, I didn’t get to see any of these things. Being a Sunday morning with scheduled services, it would be a few hours before it would be open to visits by non-worshipers. From the outside, the church was pretty enough, I suppose. Perhaps a bit austere for my taste. For me, the best thing about the church was the flock of tits all over the brickwork, each looking for a meal.

The Neptunbrunnen is a beautiful fountain inspired by fountains in Rome and Versailles. Neptune is held aloft on an open clam shell by hybrid horse-men with duck feet instead of hands. Neptune is held above a serpent, a crocodile, a seal, and an octopus with seven legs. A septopus, I suppose. The fountain is probably even better when it is turned on. Dry, I didn’t think it could serve as my enduring image.

Crossing to Museum Island, I was drawn to the Berliner
Dom
. Whatever points the church loses for architectural simplicity, it makes up for in tenacity, having been rebuilt after severe bomb damage in the war. As parishioners filed in, I sat on a park bench across from the main entrance, listening to beautiful voices singing God’s praises, as they wafted over the roar of four idling tour buses parked just down the street. Most of the men arriving to join in prayer were dressed in black or gray, but many of the women had chosen bright, cheery outfits, which seemed suitable for celebrating God’s gift of life on a bright, cheery Sunday morning. At 9:37, the
Dom
’s bells began to peal. Something told me that this wasn’t a typical Sunday-morning Mass. Perhaps it was the flock of police officers. Perhaps it was the television crew setting up on the sidewalk. The cheesy part of me hoped that I was going to see a celebrity wedding. At 9:47 the bells ceased and I turned away.