Siegs Tor

[John Winter]

Today was very uneventful, Munich has emptied because August really is a holiday month for the Germans.  Unlike the UK, most Germans are off in August and heading off to the beach, which might mean Spain, Italy or Greece.  I walked through the university district, asking at shops and restaurants if anyone wanted to buy my sketches, there was only one definite expression of interest.  I walked into a gallery and there was an old German woman, the owner, a man and an aggressive and large dog which I initially had to fight off because it was clearly interested in biting my testacles off which it had mistaken for a large cat or a rabbit.  The old woman couldn?t speak English or German.  I handed her my web site address, ?we don?t need it?she replied.  The Germans are very loathe to buy from passing tradesmen, even to look at their work, but the Italians, Spanish and Greeks are much more open to this kind of approach.  Most things operate through networks, friends, contacts in Ge!
 rmany and
 their society has quite a cold, authoritarian, unfriendly atmosphere about it.  I really felt like telling the old German woman to stick it up her ringpiece, I really did, and then giving the dog a kick in the head but then I remembered decorum and left.  She was like a forgettable piece of National Socialist art, her dog lolling on the carpet, a strangers testacles lodged in its putrid maw, the man playing a game of pocket billiards as I struggled for my next piece of bread.  The scene, a cartoon from the fetid imagination of Georg Gro? or a singspiel from the pen of Bert Brecht.
Then (after this intermittent bout of S & M) I went to a cafe nr the Siegs Tor (Victory Gate, enscribed upon it, ?for the Bavarian army?, the Bavarian army that imploded somewhere nr Calais, circa 1944 or at the Battle of the Bulge) and made sketches, first of the Tor (victory in a chariot drawn by lions, what a biting irony.  The great ticker tape Triumphal March off the end of the pier.) and then of the fountain across the Stra?e.  I thought to sell my sketch of the Tor, I sold another sketch of the Brandenburg Tor in Berlin.  After some causal enquiries, I left and caught the U - Bahn to Goetheplatz.
 
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