In Germany for Nexus Con, Part 1

Originally published December 7, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1464

Back in the 1930s, there was a small shoe store in the heart of Berlin, run by a soft-spoken, unprepossessing Jew named Martin David. He had a wife, Hela, and a small boy named Gunter. The political situation had been deteriorating in Germany, and there were concerned noises from members of the Jewish populace, but there was a general belief that everything would calm down. How bad, it was figured, could it get?

And then one night a brick was hurled through Martin David’s store window, and the shouts of “Dirty Jews!” were heard from outside. Martin looked at the broken glass, at the brick with the word “Juden” etched upon it, lying upon the floor like a still-steaming animal dropping, and then he turned to his wife and said, “Start packing, get everything together. Sell what you don’t need. We’re leaving.”

All the neighbors told them they were crazy. That they were overreacting. That things would go back to the way they were. The Davids, despite the nay-sayers, left anyway.

All the neighbors died in concentration camps.

Knowing my family history as I do, I always felt a degree of antipathy in contemplating Germany. When the Berlin Wall fell, I was one of those who said, “Germany is united… which is a good thing… I guess… except… maybe it’s not.” The only time I had actually been to Germany was when I was changing planes in Frankfurt. The airport security guards acted like Nazis in the one place where such behavior goes beyond “Well, they’re just doing their jobs” and actually carries a frightening subtext, and every time I’d hear “Achtung!” barked over an airport loudspeaker, I’d feel a chill of racial memory creeping about my spine.

So with all that baggage, why in the name of God did I agree to go to Berlin for a Star Trek convention called Nexus Con? Specifically, in this case, Nexus Resurrection since they were bringing the convention back “from the dead.” Well, maybe it was precisely because of that baggage. Maybe it was because they’d pay for two tickets and Gwen was really interested in going. And maybe it was for the simplest reason of all: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Our plane was an hour and a quarter late departing JFK, caught up in a security nightmare when one airline wasn’t following proper check-in procedures and got caught by government inspectors. If there’s ever been a stronger argument for governmentizing security, this is it, and let’s hope that the GOP gets its head out of its butt and realizes that. “I’m sure the pilot will be able to make up the time in the air,” said the woman at the ticket counter, apparently thinking I had “sucker” tattooed on my forehead. In point of fact, the pilot lost time and we got in an hour and a half late, blowing our connection so that we wound up in Berlin four hours later than we’d intended. This caused a deficit in bumming-around-stores time that we never made up (which was depressing since there was a whole Steiff store that looked really great but was locked up whenever we were around.)

Our main guide was a fellow named Christian, who was on tenterhooks the entire weekend since his wife was pregnant and due just about any time. Also aiding and abetting him was a gentleman named Carsten. Both of them kept apologizing for the quality of their English, which was astounding to me considering the way they said it: “We must apologize for speaking English so poorly.” That sentence alone required better English skills than are possessed by many Americans. If nothing else, they didn’t work the word “like” into every other sentence when stuck for something to say.

And it turned out that the site of my grandfather’s former shoestore was—of all things—exactly one block away from the hotel in which they’d put us up. As soon as we’d settled in, we walked the block and just stood on the site, staring at what existed there now: A movie theater called the Paris Cinema which ran German dubbed versions of French films. I was standing on a spot that my father had doubtless played on as a child, looking at a location where a store owner had been chased out of his home by people desperately looking to blame the Jews for their lot in life.

I wasn’t sure how I felt.

A press conference was scheduled for 5:30 PM that evening. I was there along with Garrick Hagon (“Biggs Darklighter” from Star Wars), Mark Allen Shepherd from Deep Space 9, Peter Williams from Stargate SG-1, and physicist and astronomer Inge Heyer. Fortunately I was awake, having managed to catch up on sleep that afternoon. Unfortunately, I needn’t have been; they asked no questions. I didn’t even see notepads or tape recorders, which are the usual armaments of reporters. The other guests and I came to the realization that this was, in fact, the fan press, armed only with cameras and quizzical expressions. If nothing else, I figured the first question we’d get would be about 9/11, because if you’re in Germany and you’re facing a handful of Americans waiting for questions, this would seem the natural think to ask about. Nope. After five minutes of asking, in futility, for questions, we simply started talking to one another as if we were on a panel. Being experienced convention hands, we just chatted it up. At one point I asked Hagon whether he knew in advance that his big scene with Luke was cut from the final print from Star Wars. We talked about that for a short time, and then I turned to the press and said, “Which of you knows what scene I’m referring to?” One person raised his hand. The remaining thirty just sat there. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “So the rest of you have no idea what we’re talking about?” They shook their heads. “For God’s sake, this is supposed to be a press conference! If you don’t know, ask! That’s the point!” Finally someone asked us a question… about the World Trade Center. Wow. Didn’t see that coming.

I had my first stage appearance in front of a German audience that evening. I asked if anyone had any questions. Nothing. Figuring, in the best traditions of Cool Hand Luke, that we had a failure to communicate, I said, “A show of hands: Who here understands what I’m saying?” Immediately ninety percent of the audience raised its hand. So that wasn’t it.

“Well, I’ll tell you, whatever you know of English has got to be better than my command of German,” I assured them. Don’t get me wrong: I heard German spoken all the time around the house when I was a kid. My parents were multilingual, plus my paternal grandparents moved here shortly after I was born. The thing was, my folks would speak in German when they wanted to talk in my presence without letting me know what they were saying. Whenever I’d start to pick up words or phrases, they’d switch to Hebrew to shake me off. Or French. It’s the one thing that annoys me about my childhood: If they’d taken pains to teach me instead of using language as a means of isolating me, I’d likely be able to speak, at the very least, German and Hebrew. Instead I only know English and fragments of high school French.

I told the audience about my personal connection to Berlin, about how my father was born in Germany. They seemed politely interested. But there were still no questions. So I began regaling them with assorted Trek-related anecdotes. A number of them were things I said before at other conventions, but this was an entirely new audience. Fresh meat. Obviously they understood what I was saying because they laughed in all the right places. And then, while I was chatting, two guys in the audience started arguing about something. They weren’t next to each other, but separated by several rows, and their voices got louder and louder. I had no idea what the hëll was going on, but it was incredibly disruptive, and naturally I had no clue what had upset them.

And suddenly, out of my mouth leaped, “Was ist los?!” (“What’s the matter?!”) pronounced in a dámņëd good approximation of a conversational German accent that I didn’t even know was embedded in my cerebral cortex. It stopped the conversation cold and everyone who had been attracted by the guys turned back and looked at me in astonishment.

I was clearly as surprised as they were. I said, “Oh. I guess I do remember some German after all. It’s probably because of all the times when I was little that I’d hear my father say to my grandmother, ‘Was is los, Mutter?” (“Mutter” being “Mother”).

The place erupted in laughter. It was the biggest reaction I’d gotten yet. I was told later that “Was is los, Mutter?” is probably the single most commonly spoken phrase in Germany, because German mothers are always upset about something or other. By the time the audience settled down, the guys had apparently forgotten what they were arguing about, and people even started asking me things about my work.

So overall my first Q&A went just fine. Then I went downstairs to the restaurant where Gwen had gone on ahead to get dinner…

…and there I encountered the most frightening thing I had ever seen. A vision ripped from the deepest sources of my nightmares. Yes, that’s right: Line dancing Germans.

Next time.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc.,, PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)