It was their last address.

In 1943, Paula and Martin Wolff resided at 27 Sybelstrasse in Berlin Charlottenberg.


There are letters.

There are letters from that address.

There are letters to their children in America discussing steamships, visas, agents, payments, Cuba, South America – all in vain.

27 Sybelstrasse was Paula and Martin Wolff’s last address, but it wasn’t their home. They left their town north of Berlin because they were among the millions in 1943 who suddenly no longer had a home in their country. Berlin Charlottenberg was a way station. A hiding place, one presumes. A stopover on the way to someplace far worse.

And now our journey to Paula and Martin’s last address begins on Kurfurstendamm, the grand old boulevard that snakes like Marlene Dietrich’s smoke through the heart of Berlin. We gaze at its broad elegance from the corner of Joachimstrasse.

Later that day, we will visit a synagogue hidden in a courtyard on Joachimstrasse, guarded by police and an Israeli security official. We undergo his scrutiny before entering, and ask: After all they did, you guys still need a police guard? He could take a life with one hand while still eating hummus with the other, yet he gives that very ancient, very recognizable shrug of the shoulders. A million years of trouble live in that shrug, and all he says in answer to our question is: Muslims. But this will be later.

Now we are standing at the intersection of Joachimstrasse and Kurfurstendamm, The Scientologists have set up their table, aggressively and deceptively luring people into becoming Operating Thetans.

Surely, Paula and Martin strolled this corner of Kurfurstendamm back on some summer Saturday in 1943?

Surely, they walked past representatives of another psychotic cult with a penchant for violence toward imagined enemies.

But that thought is supplanted by another as we head west on Kurfurstendamm, and that thought is: Germany has risen. It has risen from the rubble of two tyrannies, one of its own devising, and joined the branded world. Where the glass of Kristallnacht once shattered onto the broad sidewalks of Kurfurstendamm, Starbucks now sells lattes. Addidas delivers high-end sporting gear. The Hugo Boss emporium could as well be lodged in the Time Warner Center. The BMW showroom could be in Great Neck, Long Island, except that these drivers understand the writing on the engine. Even Porsche Design is there, that strange alchemy of branding that translates ultra-high performance automotive engineering into pens, briefcases, key chains and sneakers. The Porsche Design sneakers cost 300 Euros, which would be a lot for sneakers even if the dollar weren’t absurdly weak.

Finally, turning right on Leibnizstrasse, we arrive at Sybelstrasse, two blocks to the north. The first thing clear is that Sybelstrasse has not joined the branded world. An eerie calm envelops a somnabulent middle class street. Nothing stirs except a man in a ponytail working on his car. Sybelstrasse seems unchanged from the days Paula and Martin walked here, desperately trying to re-write history. It has survived the ravages of time. It has survived the bombs of plucky young boys from Liverpool and Kansas, Manchester and Mississippi whose tiny silver planes laid so much of Berlin to waste.

We stare at Number 27. We stare at its numerology as if it were a code of the universe from which, with adequate attention, you could glean the secrets of creation. Then, secretless, we walk through a dark corridor into the courtyard. There are vines growing up the white stucco walls of the apartment block. There is a huddle of garbage cans, the inevitable bicycles, but also, surreally, a bench beside a tiny pond with golden koi swimming in it.

We sit on the bench and think about Paula and Martin. They probably didn’t live in the nice, terraced flats facing the street. They probably lived back here, in one of these flats five floors up, trudging up the ancient stairs of their last address until they disappeared in a manner we will never know, to a destiny we do. We sit on the bench, seventy years too late, with only the koi moving beside us.

And that was it.

Hardly a Holocaust story.

It doesn’t even qualify as a Berlin story.

Just a grandson and great-grandson visiting two people who aren’t there.

“The problem all began when we named the animals.”

That’s what the woman said to her friend, sitting next to me at  Elephant & Castle.

It was a remark to send your index finger twirling up beside your head. Unless, of course, you stop for a second and venture out from the thimble of our knowledge  into the vast ocean of thought.

A name is what defines you. Define means to separate. To isolate. When you reside as an indistinct particle of an amorphous whole, a peaceful atom within the white quilted comforter of life, you don’t merit a name. But when you become a distinct entity, you are required to carry one at all times.

So the process of naming is a process of separating, but more profoundly, it is a process of objectifying. Named, you are maimed. Named, you migrate from  the subject of experience to an object in the flow of experience. There’s a rock, a staple gun and Fred. I’m just one of the things that showed up, said Fred.

So what did the lady mean, nibbling on her Elephant & Castle Caeser Salad? By naming the animals, the animals went from being manifestations of life, citizens of a nation different but no less worthy than our own, to being objects. That’s not a person with a long neck and spots over there. It is a giraffe. That isn’t a being with four legs. It’s a dog. As soon as you turn animals into objects — and even the word “animal” objectifies them — the floodgates open. You can dominate, eat, kill, control them. You can even stick small Spanish guys on them and place bets. They are objects, after all. They have names to prove it.

Which explains the vast tapestry of death called history. Start naming people…Jew-Arab-Fascist-Republican-accountant…and people become things, with all the lack of rights and respect things are entitled to. The rest is easy.

In the Hebrew tradition, naming the Ultimate Reality is frowned upon. Any name you give the Unnameable limits it, objectifies it, and thus diminishes it.

Ironically, the name most often given to the Ultimate is “The Name.” HASHEM, in Hebrew. SHEM is the Hebrew word for “name”, deriving from the word NESHAMAH, which means soul. So from the Kabbalistic perspective, your name is your soul, and thus carries overwhelming importance. To change your name is to change the DNA of your soul.

The difference ends up being what you name. Give name to your being and your life is exalted. Give name to your category, and it promotes your thingness.

What’s in a name? It depends on what part of you you’re naming.

He was a French Jewish Marxist in the aftermath of World War II, with a vision of utopian communities spread like seashells across the beaches of the world.

But reality has never been kind to the visions of Jewish Marxists, most notably Karl Marx himself.

So Gilbert Trigano’s vision of Paradise, which came to be known as Club Med, has endured a long and tortured history, not unlike God’s vision of Paradise.

It began on the island of Majorca, across the blue water from the smoking ruins of Europe, as a sanctuary for Holocaust survivors. It was a return to the idea of the Noble Savage: an antidote for civilization, as the tagline would eventually promise. A natural Paradise freed from money, clocks, commercialism and all the other impediments to a life of unfettered joy and sensuality, as expounded by visionaries from Rousseau to Hugh Hefner.

Club Med would be Paradise with a French twist. Food would be exquisite. Wine bottles bottomless. And rather than supervised by resort employees, the place would be a crazy summer camp for grownups, run by gentils organisateurs or GO’s. The wild, handsome bunch of counselors and sun-baked adonises famous most especially to a generation of single women in the 70’s and 80’s. This was to be not just a return to primal paradise. This was la vie fou, the crazy life, French-style: sun, sand, and sea mixed with clowns and circuses and costumed folderol and nutty group singalongs.

The payment, of course was luxury. And for a generation or two of young sensual travelers, summer camp with only nature’s amenities was fine. But people grow up, and demand comfort. And those who enjoy sex on the beach eventually have to cope with the results of sex on the beach.

So Club Med began to target families, the first of many marketing evolutions designed to counter-act a long, downward slide. The problem was inherent in the French soul of Club Med. They were very good at la vie fou. They were not so good at la vie commercial. Indifferent to basic customer service, and flabby in their expansion ambitions, they overbuilt with clubs stretching from Vietnam to Bulgaria to Tahiti, and the money losses flowing like wine. More efficient and disciplined “Anglo Saxon” marketers co-opted the concept, and began offering cheap, all-inclusive beach vacations. Club Med’s visionary DNA evaporated when fighting it out on the travel pages in price-off ads. They had become just another resort.

Further compounding the problem was that in the case of the Triganos, the apple fell far from the tree indeed. When Gilbert’s pudgy, laconic son Serge ascended to the reins of the empire, the downhill slide only intensified.

Serge and Club Med became a notorious nemesis to the advertising world, firing their agencies with the insouciance you flick used Gauloises to the gutter. Almost yearly, they would turn a half a dozen more agencies upside down, as ever new teams of desperate advertising people wooed the brand in crazed, uncompensated pitches. I was personally witness to more than one, eventually being on the winning side and having the opportunity to pen their new tagline, of which I am not especially proud: “Club Med. Life as it should be.” At these pitches, Serge Trigano would sit bored and distracted, puffing on a cigar and delivering for the thousandth time the French grimace of boredom and resignation, as if to say: “I have heard it all, and you are telling me nothing new.”

Eventually, the son of the visionary was tossed out on his derriere, and the head of Disney Paris was installed to bring a business rigor to the fading family empire.

Today, the Wall Street Journal reported Club Med losses of $31 million in the first half of this year alone. And a major investor, Bernard Tapie, is carrying on a public feud with Club Med’s chief executive, the son of former French Prime Minister Giscard d’Estaing.

Gilbert Trigano once said: “Deep within us all is a nostalgia for the lost community of our ancestors.”

The nostalgia remains.

It is a danceteria in the ruins of industrial civilization. A nightclub carved in an abandoned tunnel near the West Side highway and called, because we live in an era when iron has given way to irony, The Tunnel.

Once, in a haze of cigarette smoke, nightclub names evoked the exotic worlds of black and white movies: El Morocco. Copacabana. Latin Quarter. Eden Roc.

Now it is 1990, and a super-cool authenticity is found in the detritus of late capitalism: a colossal warehouse of sweat and electronica whose only nod to ancient nightclub glory is the VIP room.

In the VIP room, the A-list slithers in, in all three sexes. A VIP party is taking place, but not an important VIP party, because VIP parties go on in the VIP Room every day. The party is in honor of a half-sister of Liza named Lorna who sings too. Except Lorna is nowhere to be seen. Maybe she doesn’t exist. Or maybe she does, but tonight she is just an imaginary theme, an excuse to hold a VIP party.

At any rate, the A-list slitherers don’t care. They wear their virulent strain of fashion as proudly as they wear the virulent strain of boredom that infects such events, and has since, oh, Max’s Kansas City. They all know each other. They show up in the same circles, parties such as this in places such as this. Parties are the office they go to every afternoon when they wake up.

The lesson of the A-list slitherers is that they are simply functionaries. Flunkies in a marketplace of meanings. Extras in a living commercial for this night club.

The implied product of parties is happiness, but here in the VIP room of The Tunnel, the total quanta of happiness would not register on an electron microscope. What is taking place is commerce.

The Great Unwashed, whose money will soon be laundered, lays down cash at the door in exchange for a meaning: an experience of cool. The illusion of cool is created by the simple fact that an A-list exists and inhabits a VIP room they are not permitted to enter. Their own exclusion is the product guarantee of authenticity.

Meanwhile, up at the party, the exchange begins.

Lorna, the singing sister, couldn’t care less about the guests at her party, if she’s even there. She trades her slight frisson of fame for an infinitesimal boost to her career.

The slitherers couldn’t care less about Lorna, the singing sister. They trade their aura for a free place to conduct the business of being cool.

The owners of the nightclub couldn’t care less about the singing sister or the A-List. They trade some real estate and free drinks for a VIP room whose sole reason for existence is to create a class of people who won’t be allowed in.

I leave.

The bridge and tunnel crowd have begun assembling outside the Tunnel, lining up on a desolate street to entrust their destiny to a doorman. Some will not merit being admitted into a club that will then not admit them to the VIP room.

Humiliation, desperation, crushing prices and decibels are the payment. The truth embedded in the proposition? Same as it was on the leopard-striped banquettes of El Morocco: Enchantment.

In 1968, the established culture packaged and neutered a revolutionary movement known as Hippies. HAIR opened in lower Manhattan, and long-haired freaks were transported off the squalid streets and mattress-clogged floors of the East Village and onto the stage of the Public Theater, singing and dancing.   He who would blunt the ferocity of a social movement would turn it into a Broadway musical.

So, HAIR was a subversive cultural movement tamed into art. But, at the same time, it was a tame art form transformed into explosive art.  Broadway musical theater had never seen the crazy spontaneity of a Happening break the fourth wall of a theater. It had never sung and danced its way through a story without a “book” or logical story line. It had never filled a stage with explosions of four-letter words, unclothed bodies, hallucinations and anti-government slogans. Sociology was tamed, but art was energized.

Now we are forty years on, in the time of another unpopular war, and HAIR has been revived.  And it offers to one-hundred-dollars-a-ticket audiences all the revolutionary fervor of an American Idol show. Meaning, it is an act of cultural karaoke. Breaking fourth walls, sex talk and hints of nudity shock no more. The virulent anti-government rhetoric of the Viet Nam era and any semblance of flag abuse have been carefully scrubbed from the script to guarantee that. And The Hippie, once a walking, talking, drugged-out mockery of bourgeois values, is now a cliché suitable for costume parties, along with pirates and Elvis.

“Look, Maude, look at these wild hippies in the Hirschfeld Theater jumping into the audience and shaking their long hair. Look at the three seconds of nudity. Look at those cute anti-war signs. Look at the hallucinations. Isn’t it cute and zesty?”

HAIR wasn’t cute and zesty when it shattered theatrical convention in 1968.  Hippies weren’t cute and zesty when Rado and Ragni turned them into singing dancing clichés in their iconic show.

Of course, what hippies mostly did while conducting their revolution was smoke cigarettes, take drugs, have sex and listen to records. So maybe permanent enshrinement in Broadway theaters was the least unhealthy fate awaiting them.

Give me a head with hair? Please, take it.

He is the head of General Motors.

He is leading America into “a new economic order, where the bonds of scarcity have been broken, and America is rolling in two-toned splendor to an all- time crest of prosperity.”

This was 1955. Harlow Curtice was head of General Motors and Time magazine’s Man of the Year. The magazine was ebullient. Soon, it gushed, Americans will need to spend “comparatively little time earning a living.”

Well, it is today, and many people actually are “spending comparatively little time earning a living,” But not from the “crest of prosperity” that was promised.

The “two-toned” splendor” of General Motors turned out to be a planned obsolescence in which cars were designed to conveniently break down in three years. It turned out to be a fight to the death against energy standards, a full-scale assault on safety standards, and the destruction of mass transit and trains. It turned out to be about a trillion lousy cars hot off the assembly lines of Michigan.

General Motors went financially bankrupt this week, following a half a century of just about every other kind of bankruptcy. Time magazine isn’t doing too well, either.

The acerbic, brilliant and clearly emotionally-stunted media provocateur, Christopher Hitchens, detonated a little cultural suicide bomb recently. He wrote an essay entitled: “Why women aren’t funny.”

Now, he went off the rails when responding to the obvious response to such a statement. Namely, that there are, well, funny women around — including professional comedians. He answered, in effect: sure, there are, but they’re lesbians (he actually employed a different term) and Jews. Uh, case closed.

But the sturm und drang that inevitably accompanies such incendiary pronouncements, or the incendiary pronouncements would never be pronounced, cloud an interesting truth at the heart of the argument. An evolutionary truth.

The fact is, men are egregiously unattractive when compared to women. And it is only by some ingenious sleight of evolutionary hand that women aren’t compelled  en masse to become gay.

So, the point is not that women aren’t funny. The point is that they don’t need to be. To fulfill their role in the biological imperative, that is, be attractive, all they need to do is show up. It’s wonderful that they do much else. But they don’t need to do much else.

Men, on the other hand, are driven by necessity to become funny. It is often said comedians are insecure, unattractive people who develop wit to compensate for other lacks. Well, men as a species are insecure, unattractive people who must develop wit to compensate for other lacks.

Humor is clearly a form of sexual play, and what is laughter if not an orgasm in the mind? A laugh is a short, surprising, violent overthrow of the stasis and status quo, a momentary release from order and structure.

“But he made me laugh.” It is a common phrase uttered by women about men otherwise deficient. And a statement never, ever employed by men when speaking about women.

So women aren’t funny, or at least they don’t need to be.

Dorothy Parker

But then along comes Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a Martini,
Two at the very most.
Three, I’m under the table.
Four I’m under my host.

The Native American died twice, first by genocide and then by brandcide.

Pontiac is gone. The sinking ship of General Motors threw the old Indian overboard, just weeks after their own Captain Ahab sailed off the deck and disappeared into the briny deep.

The noble savage who represented a purity corrupted by the Puritans was once a proud hood ornament. He cut through wind on America’s back roads and all up and down Eisenhower’s Interstate. On the 1951 Pontiac Chieftan, he actually lit up.

But the Indian was already gone from the hood when Pontiac reached its glory days. DeLorean’s team squeezed an oversized V8 into an undersized car, stole a name from Ferrari and turned Gran Turismo Omologato into GTO, and a rocket for the nuclear family was born.

The muscle car was the last time an emanation from Detroit actually reached the imagination. Wide track, dual exhaust, triple carburetor, it drank gas stations under the table and spoke of a brawny, horse-powered America until a failure of vision and a succession of government mandates sent the muscle car into muscle memory.

Pontiac meant excitement after that. But it was a Pontiac kind of excitement, which meant driving a hundred miles an hour through the trailer park.

There was not much brand left to die, when it finally died.

A brand is a story. Sometimes the brand ends and the story is over, and sometimes the story ends and the brand is over.

As poet Muriel Rukeyser said: “The universe is composed of stories, not atoms.”

Or as Ronny and the Daytonas sang: “C’mon and turn it on, wind it up, blow it out, GTO.”

Where else could flabby white guys in their forties be considered supreme athletes?

Golf is either a sport, a game, boredom framed in green, or as close to religion as it gets for secular guys with bad fashion sense.

We do know golf is the official pastime of the White Anglo-Saxon Ascendancy. Ironically, it is now dominated, as is America, by a semi-black man of near superhuman talents.

A New Age guru once spoke of golf. He said life is a game and in order to have a game, something has to be more important than something else. A golf course is just a field. So in order to create a game, you have say that mound is more important than this mound. Now, you could throw the ball over there, or simply walk over and drop it, but that wouldn’t be fun. So you hit the ball to the mound with a stick, because that’s fun. Except the guy who has the most fun loses.

Anyway, this is a column about meanings, not birdies, bogies and paunches. So I go for the idea of golf as a re-enactment of the primordial archetype of hunting. A group of men go off together into the woods of a beautiful morning. There is camaraderie and healthy masculine competition. The women have been happily and safely left behind in the cave (or split-level). The men carry their clubs on their backs and venture out with a single-minded fervor to hunt the prey. The clubs are gleaming metal (or forged from space-age composites) and the prey is nothing but a series of holes with flags sticking out. But the archetype holds. Men wouldn’t devote so much time, energy, money and vanished family time chasing a white ball unless an archetype was involved.

I have always found golf annoyingly hard. After all, there is so much world and so little hole.

Apparently, Mark Twain agreed. He called the sport — or game — of golf: “A good walk spoiled.”