By Rick Kaempfer
Many Chicagoans are mourning the loss of our landmark German restaurant The Berghoff, which is closing its doors for good on February 28th. For those of us who were brought up in the German community in Chicago, this loss is felt on a much deeper level. Coming on the heels of the closing of “Zum Deutschen Eck,” “Hans Bavarian Lodge,” “Schulien’s,” “Metro Club,” “The Heidelberger Fass,” “The Golden Ox,” and others, a little bit of our history is dying along with it. This is a town that was built on the backs of its German immigrants.
The last wave of German immigrants arrived in Chicago after the war in the late 40s, through the end of the 50s. I was born in 1963. People my age and slightly younger were the last generation of Germans in Chicago to be brought up by off-the-boat German immigrants. I don’t mean to make that sound as if we were brought up by wolves or something (more like Wolfgang’s), but it is a rather unique experience that is difficult to understand if you haven’t experienced it personally.
On the surface Germans seem to be a relatively humorless and harsh people; reticent to show emotion. This is a shameful stereotype. If you had entered any of our German homes using traditional old-school German techniques, you would have seen happy bouncing children playing a game called “Hoppe Hoppe Reiter.” This is a cute game that recreates the thrill of riding a horse. A parent bounces the child on his or her knee while reciting a little German children’s poem. It doesn’t rhyme in English, but you can get the idea of its playfulness from the translation.
Bouncing, bouncing rider,
When you fall you scream,
Fall in a ditch,
You’ll get pecked (or eaten) by crows,
Fall in a swamp,
And you’ll....uh, oh, you’re falling now!
(Parent pretends to make child fall)
This is German learning. The lesson is clear: if you fall off your horse, something terrible will happen to you. It’s much more effective than saying: “Be Careful, Wolfgang.”
It’s a perfect example of why I get so upset when people imply Germans don’t have any emotions. Nonsense. Are you telling me that “terror” isn’t an emotion? We have that instilled in us at a very early age.Pick up a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales sometime. Would you like to read the story of the boy who doesn’t trim his fingernails and then pokes his eyes out by mistake? No? Maybe I can interest you in the story about the boy who keeps his nose in the air when he walks outside and doesn’t see he is about to walk into a lake. This is valuable learning we’re talking about here: German-learning. Ask me how often I let my fingernails get too long. Never. How many times have I walked into lake because I wasn’t watching where I was walking? Not once.
What if the end of our German community brings an end to such common sense advice? It’s something to consider as a German landmark like “The Berghoff” closes its doors.
Let me give you another example of what we may lose. My grandparents gave me a comic book called “Max und Moritz” when I was a very young boy. This particular issue was a heartwarming tale of two bad boys who snuck into a mill to play—-even though they were warned not to do it. You want a happy ending? There are no happy endings for boys who don’t behave. Max and Moritz were crushed to death and ground up into tiny little pieces. That’s a lesson that stays with you a very long time. I’ve never stepped foot in a mill.
I could go on and on because there are hundreds of tales like this, each dispensing practical advice and life skills. The stories I’ve mentioned here just happen to be the ones that haunt me in my sleep. There are many others I managed to overcome. The one thing that German stories all have in common, however, is a moral. It’s usually some variation of “do what we say or something horrible will happen to you,” but at least there’s a message there. A perfect example of this is the most famous German tale of all time, “Hansel & Gretel.”
To summarize briefly, a little boy (Hansel) and his little sister (Gretel) were left in the woods to starve to death by their kindly father and evil stepmother. Hansel, however, brings a piece of rye bread, and leaves crumbs so that he can find his way home. Alas, birds eat the crumbs and the boy and girl are hopelessly lost. Luckily, they come across a house made out of candy. Unluckily, it’s the home of a cannibal witch who takes them prisoner, fattens them up, and is preparing to cook them. The clever children push her into the fire and kill her before she can complete her plan. When they finally make their way home, they are delighted to discover that their evil stepmother is dead too.
The moral of this story? Um...I think the cannibal witch symbolizes the evil stepmother, which symbolizes the...um...
OK, so not every story has a moral. But this one has become extra special to me nonetheless, because my father actually re-created it for me when I was a boy. I was four years old at the time and my little sister was three. This was 1967, a time when most of these great German restaurants in Chicago were still thriving. Anyway, my sister and I must have been behaving very badly, because my dad said he was going to drive us out to the woods and leave us there like Hansel & Gretel. He gave each us a piece of rye bread (I’m not kidding about this, by the way), put us in the car, and off we went. I don’t remember much of the car ride except total terrified silence.
Moments later we arrived at a convenience store. Dad ran inside, picked up a pack of smokes, and then turned the car back toward home. It wasn’t until I saw him smile that I knew we were going to survive the night. In retrospect, I think I figured out his motive. He probably realized that the original “Hansel & Gretel” didn’t have a moral, so he created one: Act up again and you’ll get the real “Hansel & Gretel” treatment. That’s German ingenuity right there.
What if that kind of ingenuity is being shuttered along with the doors of The Berghoff? It’s the sort of thing that I can’t think about for too long, because I get pretty emotional. I don’t even want to think about what will happen to this gritty town if we suddenly get soft. Without German restaurants, we’re taking that chance.I’m finding out the hard way where this trend can lead us. I have three sons of my own now, and since my wife isn’t German, we’re not bringing them up using traditional German methods. I’ve already paid a heavy price for that. My mother smuggled my middle son to an Oktoberfest against our wishes a few years ago. He was a plump German-looking boy, and she thought he would look cute in lederhosen. By the time I sniffed out what she had done, I was too late. I arrived at the German restaurant to see my 3-year-old sitting at a table with a bunch of old-school Germans.
He had the saddest look on his face. When I went to comfort him, he looked up at me and said; “Dad, I don’t want to be a jingle boy.”
See? It’s already starting.
Do you really want to live in a city where a little boy can’t feel comfortable in lederhosen?
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