Day 10: Stuttgart

We’d been in Europe for 10 days and hadn’t had even a whiff of high culture. No contemplative art or “important” architecture. That would have to be remedied. Stuttgart could knock that out in one swoop.

Stuttgart, as mentioned in an earlier post, was a location for horse breeding, back in the day. And with horses come carriages and wagons, so the town had more than its share of wagon crafters and engineers. Some of them decided to start to tinker with adding the new-fangled combustion engines to their horse carriages, and, voila! Daimler Benz is born. That same company one day hired a chief engineer named Porsche who, after a few years, thought that just maybe he could do better on this own. And there you go. Detroit has the Big Three, Stuttgart has just two, but their products are in demand the world over. Stuttgart became a very wealthy town after the war.

Eventually they decided they need to do what all newly wealthy persons and towns do, which is, buy yourself a little class. In the 1980’s, Stuttgart hired Sir Norman Foster to design their new art museum, and if you don’t know who he is, don’t worry, he’s an architect with a Sir in his name, that should tell you he’s important.

The museum – brown concrete, a combination of curves and right angles, with bold color accents, was probably a marvel when built. But modern architecture has the shelf life of a concert tee shirt: you love it when you first get it, but pretty soon you won’t be caught dead in it. Your best hope is that someday it will become vintage. That day may come, Stuttgart, just hang in there.

The art inside was indeed of the high variety. We stuck mostly with the modern section, and they had representation from all the greats – Picasso, Warhol, Dali, Duchamp, Rothko, all of ‘em and more, though it was noted by one of our group that it was not the best work from any of them. Well. That harkens back to a post on Germany I made before the trip, right? Germany has the second best of everything, but it has everything.

This museum also had the best work by a “second best” artist. Google “great modern artists” and in the scroll bar you won’t see his name – Max Beckmann – and this is really a shame. His aesthetic is a problem for the optimistic post-modern man, as he tends to make his characters cruel and grotesque, all of them. Hey, he called them like he saw them, and in the Weimar Republic he saw the dark blooms of debauchery and hatred. I found his sculpture of the struggling artist, nearly broken but still moving, to be arresting.

For lunch, I dragged the family for a 20 minute walk through the town to a well-reviewed little restaurant, the Brenner – more traditional German food, but with a twist or two, and well done. Look, Schnitzel will show up on every menu, the way every US restaurant has a hamburger (pro tip, if you don’t see one on a US menu, ask for it, it may be a secret off-menu item). They served us their take on an apple pie, and, appropriate for a car town, it was gone in 60 seconds.

This, btw, is one of my favorite parts of any Euro trip – the town walk. This was not a tourist spot: next to the museum is a fine arts school, a busy law firm, a library, and then decidedly pedestrian shops with decidedly normal patrons. Not a tourist café or trinket shop in sight. Back in Mitteltal, the hotel is staffed by women in local costume that could be, depending on the age and figure of the wearer, aggressively revealing. I doubt these folk dresses were designed in this fashion, or that they’re ever worn like this outside of work. But the Stuttgart walk? We saw normal, ugly people in, well, clothes.

The lunch was followed by my unfortunate incident in the parking garage of the art museum, and perhaps some of the unkind feelings I have about Sir Norman’s work stem from there. Regardless, the clock was ticking, and we had two choices for the afternoon. There was a Pig Museum, honest to goodness, on the outskirts of town. A museum celebrating the pig. How can you skip that? I don’t know, but we did, in order to get to the highly rated Mercedes Benz museum, though the boys would continue to ask about the pig museum well into France.

The Benz museum does not disappoint, and I’m not even a car guy. You start with a showroom of current for sale models in the bottom floor, all shiny and inviting. Once in the museum, you take a neat elevator (“elevator of the future” as my kids dubbed it) to the top floor, which starts the spiral down through time with the first car, and subsequent early Benz models (including a boat!)

A few things the museum does really well: One, you get brief historical snapshots as you circle down, which ties the cars on display to their eras really well. The story of the last 120 years is very much the story of the automobile, and not just in America.

Two, there are several hands-on installations for fidgety kids: Ours could punch an airbag , crank a turbocharger, or get behind the wheel of a tour bus. I will say that the “celebrity-owned” Mercedes section is lacking star-power. Even with Ringo Starr’s old Benz. There was the popemobile, for those who are into that.

Three, it has serious, gleaming, drool-inducing, wish list cars. Sleek and shiny, these aren’t historical curiosities, they’re vehicles you want in your garage pronto. Heck, if I had one, I’d hollow out our dining room and store it in there.

Sorry, but this reminds me of one of my favorite Cheers jokes, and I’ll use it as an excuse to show more car photos. Sam is forced to sell his beloved Corvette, and he has a questionnaire for a prospective buyer.

Sam: “You’re driving the ‘Vette, you want to stop for lunch, it’s a sunny day. Do you:

a.)    Give the car to a valet

b.)    Look for a shaded tree to park under

c.)    Find a covered garage”

The flustered buyer goes, “uhh…C. Yeah, definitely C.”

Says Sam: “Oh my gosh, it was a trick question! You don’t drive the ‘Vette around in full sunlight! Get out of here!”

Back to Mitteltal. We had a little more dirty laundry we needed to knock out, so off we went while the boys had dinner with the grandparents. Adjacent to the laundomat was a Döner stand – these are ubiquitous in Germany. They were non-existent there when I was a boy; or, at least, by Oma would not let us go near places where one may be. So I’ve always had a mild curiosity about them. Annemarie and I ordered two for lunch.

Turns out they’re just gyros. Or, more accurately, a Greek gyros (note that that’s singular, with the “s” – one gyros, two gyros, etc.) is a knock-off of the Turkish Döner (the name being related to the Indo-European word for “turn”). Not that you’d get any US Greeks to admit this, but Greeks also know a good thing when they see one. And since we have no Turkish restaurants in the US…well…

…anyway, before I launch into how there are but two suppliers in the US for gyro meat (i.e., they’re all the same), let me get back to Day 10. These were gyros, and you can tell why they’ve taken Germany by storm. I love German food, but the flavors are generally muted. German dishes shy away from heavy spices or sharp herbs. They’ll claim they don’t want to mask the flavor of the food  -- and yes, burying a white asparagus in an overpowering garlic sauce would be a crime – but at some point, the palate needs a jolt. The Döner, with its taziki style sauce, certainly does the trick. I imagine that’s also the reason why the Currywurst (sausage served with curry-spiced ketchup) is another hugely popular dish in Germany.

This was now all theoretical for us: tomorrow, we were off to France.