jürgen fauth’s muckworld

If you drive a couple of blocks down Konrad-Adenauer-Ring from where I was born, you come to what used to be the biggest American military hospital in Europe. It was here that in 1981, the diplomats that had been held hostage in Teheran made their first stop after they were released. Jimmy Carter, the first U.S. President I was ever aware of, came to Wiesbaden to meet them. My parents went down to witness the excitement and later reported that they had, in fact, seen the back of Jimmy Carter’s head.

It ain’t much, but it’s the best Jimmy Carter story I’ve got. Jonathan Demme’s documentary Man from Plains only mentions the Iranian hostage crisis in passing as we follow Carter on a 2006 tour promoting his controversial book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. More snapshot than full-blown portrait, the film is as much about the elder statesman’s ongoing struggle to bring peace to the Middle East as it is about the ways in which the American media deflects complex and controversial issues. For more, check David Hudson’s roundup of reviews.

Jimmy Carter Man from Plains. Jonathan Demme, 2007. ***

“The greatest festival in the world!” an old friend of mine enthused, without apparent irony. And who knows? Maybe he’s not entirely wrong: the Weinfest Wiesbaden, an annual gathering of Rheingau wineries on the Marktplatz, is known as “the world’s longest wine bar,” with over a thousand different kinds of wine and an average consumption of 250,000 bottles in ten days, primarily Riesling. If you go only every few years, it’s definitely a good time — although not without its risks.

• More photos on Flickr
• Previously on muckworld: Wiesbaden and the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme

A few pictures from the city I used to call home, the town where Priscilla met Elvis. More Wiesbaden facts:

• The thermal springs of Wiesbaden were first mentioned in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia in 121.
• By 1800, there were 2,239 inhabitants and twenty-three bath houses. Among visitors to the springs were Goethe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Wagner, and Johannes Brahms. In 1900, there were 86,100 inhabitants and 126,000 visitors. In those years there were more millionaires living in Wiesbaden than in any other city in Germany.
• The Wiesbaden synagogue was destroyed during Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938.
• Wiesbaden is home to the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation.
• Volker Schlöndorff and John McEnroe were born in Wiesbaden.
• Sting, Lionel Richie, and Luciano Pavarotti have performed on the Bowling Green in front of the Kurhaus.
• Wiesbaden’s coat of arms features three times as many fleurs-de-lys as New Orleans.
• More photos from previous trips.

Whenever the name of your travel destination includes the letters “B”, “A”, and “D” — be it Baden Baden, Marienbad, or Bad Karma — you should dispense with all welcome ceremonies, postpone unpacking, and head straight from customs to the nearest spa.

That, at least, is our tradition when we arrive in Wiesbaden. There is nothing to counteract jetlag like submerging yourself in the steaming hot sulfur waters of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme, a 1913 Wilhelminian spa decked out in Jugendstil tiles. You can drift from the cold pool to the Finnish sauna to the Irish-Roman steam bath, and nobody’s wearing towels like in the photo above. It’s one of our favorite places in the world, and the best way I know of to make yourself feel human again after the indignities of economy class travel.

Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme Wiesbaden: English / Deutsch / Wikipedia

Günther Fauth turns sixty today! I can’t be in Wiesbaden to celebrate, so I’ll have to send my love over the Internets. Here’s to the next six decades, Paps!

Because nothing says Frohe Weihnachten like a heap of year-old photos from the old country. See also: Commander König’s Horroradvent.

[tags]flickr, photos, slideshow, xmas, germany, wiesbaden, jochen[/tags]

Once upon a time in Wiesbaden, back in the dark days before VHS, a kid in my class came up with a business scheme involving this movie. He got hold of an abridged 8mm version of Once Upon a Time in the West (aka Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod), invited us over to watch it in his bedroom on a whirring projector, and then asked that we pitch in five Marks since buying movies was very expensive. The rub: the little scammer had only rented the film–apparently there used to be places that rented Super 8 movies through the mail. Later, he showed us a catalog and wanted to know what we wanted to see next (”Krieg der Sterne?”) But we all felt lied to and the butchered 45-minute version of Once Upon a Time in the West didn’t satisfy, so the scheme dissolved. Soon after, Jochen got the first Grundig Video 2000 recorder, Super 8 became a distant memory, and we watched and rewatched Once Upon a Time in America religiously.

At any rate. In all its unbutchered three-hour gory, Once Upon a Time in the West remains a shamlessly great epic, full of outrageous set pieces and carried along by the sweeping Morricone score. Marcy and I particularly enjoyed Claudia Cardinale’s character who, as the Voice quipped, puts the ho back into “Westward Ho!”

Once Upon a Time in the West. Sergio Leone, 1968. ****

[tags]wiesbaden, jochen, western, video 2000, super 8, sergio leone, film, 4 stars, charles bronson, henry fonda, claudia cardinale[/tags]

I’m done uploading pix from Berlin & Wiesbaden.