Going Dutch with German Writers (14): Gin, Tonic, Cucumber, Thomas Meinecke

Who?

Thomas Meinecke is a musician, DJ and writer. He lives in a Bavarian village and hosts the event Plattenspieler at Berlin’s HAU 2. His latest novel is Lookalikes and two of his books have been translated into English by Daniel Bowles: Tomboy and Pale Blue. I approached him at a reading from his book Analog, a collection of magazine columns about music, and asked if he’d like to go for a drink.

Where?

WAU, the bar/restaurant on the ground floor of HAU 2

What?

Thomas drinks red wine, I drink gin and tonic with cucumber and green tea.

What did we talk about?

Thomas is relaxed when we both arrive, which relaxes me too. He seems perfectly comfortable talking to a stranger, presumably through years of practice. I think we start with where we come from, respectively, and he tells me he’s from Hamburg but he loves Britain. His first time there was a summer as a paying guest with a family outside London at the age of thirteen in 1969, and he would take the train in via Croydon and spend whole days walking around the city. He wore out a pair of shoes over six weeks and when he got home his mother took them back to the shop and complained, and he got a new pair for free.

I ask was he one of those German kids who listened to BFBS, the British army radio station? A lot of music fans here have told me it was very influential for them. No, not so much, he says, but Hamburg was in the British sector of course and he’s always felt comfortable with British culture. There’s a tradition of strong relations to Britain in Hamburg, and later Thomas tells me he’s always felt grateful to the Allies for liberating Germany, reassured by their military presence here. It was an ambivalent feeling though, because the US was at war with Vietnam when he was young, for instance, and he knew those army bases weren’t just protecting Germany from fascism but launching missiles as well.

I prod Thomas a little about John Peel (the world’s most inspiring, influential and eclectic radio DJ), which was what I was trying to get at with my clumsy BFBS question. Out comes a tidal wave of anecdotes: his band F.S.K. was Peel’s favourite German band, some say, allegedly with the most Peel sessions after The Fall. That’s not true though, he says; they only did seven. Oh, only seven Peel sessions. I am awed. Thomas’s wife Michaela Melián, an artist, was living in London in 1984/85 and knew Peel liked the band, so she went to see him at the BBC. And Peel said, oh yes, it’d be great if F.S.K. could do a session for me, just give me your number so we can set it up. But Michaela was sleeping on people’s floors and didn’t have a phone number. So John Peel calls up his mother and checks with her, and then gives Michaela his mother’s spare door key.

Thomas’s wife stayed at John Peel’s mother’s house? Yes, she slept in John Peel’s childhood bedroom, and Peel, ever the gentleman, bedded down on the sofa when he was in town to record his radio show. His brother had split up with his wife and was living in the attic. And the mother’s lover, an actor, would swan around the house in a dressing gown. I am starstruck by proxy. It’s rather hard to find words for how amazing this anecdote is. Thomas tells me Peel was quite a private person and wouldn’t necessarily meet the musicians he asked for sessions, but they got on very well. When they went to a restaurant people came up and asked for autographs. Thomas Meinecke isn’t boasting; I think he’s just happy to have known John Peel and glad to be talking to someone who has an idea of what a pleasure that must have been.

Thomas is very enthusiastic about London: Maida Vale recording studios, 1980s Hackney and Dalston (very different to nowadays, of course). I am less enthusiastic about London because that’s where I’m from, so it’s my duty to be critical. He laughs, I think, because he feels the same about Hamburg. People ask him why on earth he moved to Munich (and then to a village outside the city) when he comes from such a great place. But he loves Munich – along with Barcelona, one of two cities in which anarchism was ever put into practice, in 1919, he tells me. I know that but I didn’t know about Barcelona. And Munich always has an SPD mayor, despite how conservative people think it is. He loves the city’s political history, and he loves the Munich disco tradition and the “mad kings of Bavaria”. He says it in English – he learned about them from the band The Mekons, in the northwest of England. The mad Ludwigs never waged a war; they were too busy with the arts and their castles. The man who would be king if the anarchists hadn’t kicked the royals out – he grins – is a little art collector with a poodle. He has lots of Kippenbergers and Polkes littering up his castle.

I shall drink it again.

Thomas doesn’t care for Berlin. It’s too much for him, this “new Germany” with its big government and big projects. He wouldn’t want to live here because then he’d be part of that Berlin, another name for it to show off with. Berlin is a boastful place, I say, although that’s one of the things I like about it, that megalomaniac architecture. When I first came here the buildings were more diverse, though, and it’s a shame that’s changed. London is much more architecturally mixed, Thomas points out with an exclamation mark. But only because they’d rather mend everything fifty times over, add a veneer over layers and layers of crumbling dirt, I counter. He likes just that, though – that crazy bookshop, was it Foyles, on Charing Cross Road, where they just kept on adding bits. It was. And there were these record shops selling “hot jazz”, run by mad geezers wearing berets. I don’t know what hot jazz is but it doesn’t matter, he tells me; they were characters straight out of Monty Python. Or the other way around, I suggest – maybe the Pythons took their inspiration from real life. But still, I can’t possibly prefer London to Berlin, it’s out of the question.

We get a new round of drinks. The nice Bavarian barman is pleased I want another one. My drink is new on their menu: gin and tonic with a shaving of lemon peel and two slices of cucumber, and a classy Eilles cold-infused green teabag, which I have to take out after four minutes and deposit on a saucer. It is the single most delicious thing I’ve tasted in a long time, and it comes in a very large wine glass and looks delightfully pretty too, with a faint green tinge. The gin is that lovely The Duke, made in Munich. And the green tea makes me all perky and wide-awake. I shall drink it again.

We talk about Thomas’s writing, and Pale Blue in particular. He’s not interested in plot; the books just stop when the deadline approaches. But in Pale Blue there is a stopping point, I say: when George Bush (Sr.) is elected. Oh, that was just coincidence; he just puts in whatever’s going on in the world while he’s writing. He was annoyed with Mariah Carey, who features quite heavily in the novel, because she had a big breakdown but not until after the book was finished. How selfish of her. His computer is surrounded by theory books, and he makes his characters read them and reflect on them. But he makes up the characters? Well, they’re not really characters, he says, are they? I’m a little disappointed – I took a great liking to Tillmann with his African dress.

Does he read other contemporary writers? I get a feeling a lot of authors don’t. No, not enough. He’s afraid their writing might rub off on his, especially because of the way he works, so he’d rather have Flaubert rub off on him. That’s interesting because it’s the opposite for me. When I translate I want the writing to rub off on me; I do a lot of extra reading to try and absorb the style and have it in a mental reservoir to tap into. In a good way, translating is a derivative activity – what’s the German word for that? We can’t think of one except “ableitend”, which is ugly and clumsy. Thomas isn’t one of those language purists who insist on never using English. When he talks about music, a lot of the adjectives he uses are English – perhaps because a lot of the music he plays, especially House, comes from the English-speaking world and those words seem to fit better.

He’s said in the past that his writing is akin to DJing – taking pre-recorded material and mixing it together. I’m not so sure about the comparison, but if we have to apply it I’d like to say he works the way John Peel did; bringing things in from eclectic sources, seeking out the extraordinary and joining the dots between artefacts that might not automatically go together. Thomas seems happy with that idea. It must have been so difficult for his translator to reproduce all that research – oh yes, but Daniel was great. He even contacted Judith Butler to get hold of the original of an article that was only published in German translation. Thomas really enjoyed reading the translation – it was like there was a layer of varnish over it. When he reads his own work he sees the edges curling up between the appropriated passages, but in English he didn’t find them so obvious. But Daniel Bowles doesn’t get rid of the Germanness of his sentences; he’s keen to leave them as they are. I agree this suits the book very well indeed, although I don’t think it’s a strategy that works with every style of writing.

Blackfacing. I'm not sure why I raised the subject.

Somehow we get on to D.H. Lawrence. He married a German woman and they had a house near where Thomas lives now. As did Helen and Franz Hessel, and lots of early twentieth-century Bohemians. The less famous Weber brother; others I’ve forgotten now. They practiced free love, and Thomas loves having that map in his head of where Lawrence lived, and where the Hessels lived out the real-life version of Jules et Jim; passing the house on the train, that historical layer made visible. I am not a Lawrence fan – he hated his female characters. But Thomas protests: Hélène Cixous has rediscovered him for feminism – the first literary description of a female orgasm, and he hated his male characters just as much. I must be looking skeptical, because he tells me all sorts of people are being earmarked as proto-feminists now, even Nietzsche. But why must the first feminist have been a man? He laughs.

Blackfacing. I’m not sure now why I raised the subject but we’re both against it; no surprises there. On the debate on changing offensive words in children’s books, we disagree. I’m in favour because I’d like my child to have the same reading experiences as I did, but without the racism. I tell a story about having to give up on reading aloud Frances Hodgson Burnett’s otherwise excellent The Secret Garden because of the horrible colonialist attitudes in it. And I’d rather my child could have enjoyed it, without me feeling the need to skip bits or make up nonsense about “brown boys” à la Kristina Schröder. Thomas says we should just consign all those books to the rubbish bin of history, let them go out of print. But it’s such a loss! I talk about the remake of the Famous Five stories, an all-new version featuring the original characters’ kids, with all the adventure but none of the racism and sexism. Thomas doesn’t know, or maybe doesn’t remember, these Enid Blyton stories, but he’s skeptical. It sounds like a marketing ploy to him. It probably is, I concede, but it works on me. Thomas plays with the idea of reclaiming the gollywog, speaking of Enid Blyton – it sounds a tiny bit outlandish to me.

I think we’re getting a little silly. A short diversion to the beginnings of pop culture: Baudelaire and Benjamin and the flaneurs writing about the masses of people they saw around them in the streets and passages of the city. I promise myself to read Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk. We talk about where I live and Thomas recommends a record shop. I’ve never been in there but I’ve seen Maxim Biller coming out. We have a brief Maxim Biller appreciation session: so fabulously grumpy, but Thomas sometimes feels guilty about being in a good mood around him. Thomas Meinecke is a fundamentally optimistic person, I suspect. A Kulturoptimist, which makes him fun to be around. We have a quick bitch about how every man in Germany (apart from Thomas Meinecke) has a beard nowadays. I find it difficult because I can’t tell how old they are, and Thomas finds it hard because there’s no clear code: a beard could mean anything now, from Taliban to irony. But he’s pleased about one thing – now that even effeminate gay men have beards, they are effectively gendered as feminine in some cases. The Damenbart! The nice Bavarian barman, who prompted the subject, is in no way effeminate. Thomas makes the last in of a series of bad puns: Bart-ender. Ouch.

We split the bill and I am told I’m to come by when he’s next in town, maybe for the next Plattenspieler night. Now that everyone’s moved to Berlin, Thomas can’t possibly get in touch with people individually, so it’s up to us Berliners to come along and impose ourselves on him when he’s here. I’ll know because that’s what he uses Facebook for. We both love Facebook; for me it’s like an anti-loneliness machine. He’s worried because he’s nearly reached the 5000-friends mark on Facebook (I had no idea this was possible) and then they make your friends into fans and you can’t see what they’re up to. So he kicks out five misogynists and anti-Semites every day to make up for it. We say our goodbyes, which takes a while because the eminently likeable WAU is full of people he knows, and he walks me to the station. He says he’s not drunk and I say I am and he says no one could possibly tell, and I chuckle outside in the mild night. What a delightful evening. German kisses on cheeks to finish off.

Hangover?

A weird no-pain tiredness with definite grogginess around the eyes. Bearable.