A haven in Hamburg
October 17, 2004 | 12:00am
A cold rain and a biting wind met my train in Hamburg, but thankfully, a lady with a warm smile from the Goethe Institut greeted me as well. Irene Wagner, a student of Latin American history and a mother of two, was going to be my guide to Germany’s second largest city. My German sojourn began in Munich in the south, then moved east to Berlin, and now it was ending in Hamburg to the northwest.
Like many other places in Germany, Hamburg was heavily bombed by the Allies during the War, and thus has been largely rebuilt; there was a special reason for destroying Hamburg – in its docks had arisen the great ship Bismarck (whose namesake came from Hamburg, and whose statue overlooks a park). Hamburg may not project the cheeriness of Munich nor the romance of Berlin, but it exudes a charm of its own, the kind of charm possessed by cities with one cheek facing the open sea. The River Elbe connects Hamburg to the North Sea, and this channel has turned Hamburg into one of the world’s premier ports, through which goods bound for Germany and Eastern Europe come in for distribution through Europe’s vast and well-developed rail network.
Not surprisingly, maritime traffic figures prominently in Hamburg’s economic and cultural life, with such familiar names as Hapag-Lloyd dominating the city’s skyline. Surprisingly – for those who typically don’t notice the obvious – much of this traffic involves Filipinos, who make up at least a fifth of all the world’s shipping crews.
It was no coincidence that my first appointment in Hamburg was with a group of Filipino sailors at the Seaman’s Mission on the waterfront – a well-appointed hostel for seafarers in between ships, for those newly arrived and those going home. In Alex, about 35, Tirso, about 30, and Michael, 21, we met the full range of experiences. Alex, the fortunate one, had spent the past 12 years aboard cruise ships, the last one being the Queen Mary, and was on his way home for his annual leave. Tirso had just returned from home leave and was waiting for his container ship, ruing the fact that after six years of marriage, he and his wife remained childless. Fresh-faced Michael had left Manila on the first plane ride of his life with P10 in his pocket, no winter clothes, and the dreadful foreknowledge that he had signed up to join a chemical ship reputed to burn up people’s lungs.
But Hamburg held much happier stories as well, as in the case of Diony Mandelbaum, who moved to Hamburg from Nueva Ecija in 1975, and now owns and manages the phenomenally successful Cro-Bag chain of croissant shops. Trained as an accountant in the Philippines, Diony started out as a nanny, and then as a dental assistant, before taking the plunge and joining a German couple in setting up Cro-Bag, eventually buying her partners out. "In our first year, we sold a million pieces. I was so surprised!" she told me over dinner, with Filipino scholar Bomen Guillermo and his wife Laarni. She still minds her shops in the train stations, keeping a lookout for the stray Pinoy, whom she pulls over for a chat and a gift of fresh breads.
The enterprising spirit is very much part of Hamburg, which boasts the highest per capita income in Germany – thanks largely to the presence of some very rich families and very large businesses. (An even more interesting factoid: Hamburg has the world’s largest cemetery.) Hamburg is not only Germany’s most important port, or hafen; it is also the country’s media center – the headquarters of such press icons as Der Spiegel, and over 7,000 advertising agencies – and a major hub for the aviation industry, which now employs far more people than the port itself.
One of those aviation giants is Lufthansa Technik, the world’s leading aircraft maintenance, repair and modification company (which also operates, with MacroAsia, Lufthansa Technik Philippines). The LT facility near Hamburg’s airport is a state-of-the-art complex of hangars, shops, and warehouses where Boeing 747s and Airbus 340s stand wingtip to wingtip for servicing. Like every boy for whom the coolest toy in the world was a silver jet, I stood in awe of the huge birds, racked up in various stages of dress and undress. Lufthansa Technik performs what very few outfits in the world can do – the so-called D-check, a thorough check-up and overhaul of the plane, which happens every 30,000 flight-hours (about six years) or so. Every year, about 500 jet engines and 100 planes are overhauled in Hamburg by LT, which employs almost 13,000 people for the job.
On the more creative side of things, LT also does a lot of business customizing planes (and I mean the big ones, not just Learjets or Cessnas) for private clients, who may be business tycoons, rock stars, or Arab sheiks. This may involve installing playrooms, bedrooms and even whirlpool baths, aside from custom paint jobs. Security regulations prevented us from coming near the planes being fitted out or taking pictures of any of them, but we saw enough to be mighty impressed – a bare 737, to begin with, already costs some 30 million euros (multiply that by 70 to get the peso value, if your calculator has enough zeroes), and "It costs even more than that to customize," said the LT PR person. (Comparatively, the bare 747 costs 160 million euros – a bit beyond the range of a salary loan, even for Winston Garcia.) Don’t like the cobalt blue they put on your 747, and want it lemon yellow instead? That’ll be just 200,000 euros for 350 kilos of paint, please.
It’s this sheer magnitude and level of industry that still sets Germany apart from much of the rest of the developed world. Leave the cell phones to Scandinavia, the iPods to America and the DVD players to Taiwan – where both heft and surgical precision count, Germany still knows what to do, and does it best. I saw this at the Port of Hamburg, which is undergoing a major redevelopment to extend its already formidable capacity; I saw it at Lufthansa Technik; but most pleasantly, I saw it on a side trip to one of my personal meccas – the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, about two hours east of Hamburg via Hanover.
Standing on the very spot it occupied before the war and still retaining some scars from the bombing runs that nearly leveled it, the VW plant is the world’s largest carmaking facility, covering a land area, its PR person emphasized, "as large as Gibraltar, with a roofed area as large as Monaco." Here, 160 presses, each of them producing 7,000 tons of pressure per square inch, turn 2,500 tons of steel daily into VW body parts, which are also painted, assembled, and finished onsite in an operation that involves a total of 50,000 employees. As impressive as the employment figure is, it belies the fact that many of VW’s operations are highly if not completely automated; on our plant tour, taken on a specially designed VW Touran, we were followed part of the way by an R2D2-like robot delivering spare parts.
Visitors less interested in the wonders of carmaking can spend time in Germany’s version of an automotive Disneyland – Autostadt or "Auto City," which stands right next to the plant and features a plenitude of pavilions and exhibits designed to excite even the least mechanically inclined grandmother or blissfully ignorant toddler. A museum of vintage cars – including VW Beetle prototypes I’d only seen in the books and 16-cylinder behemoths I sped down University Avenue within my dreams – completed my Wolfsburg treat. I left Wolfsburg with a souvenir key fob and a special ashtray from the same mammoth Hilo press that may have produced my Beetle, but many other visitors leave with more; a special arrangement allows VW buyers to pick up their car in Wolfsburg after enjoying themselves in Autostadt. I’ll pick up that Phaeton the next time around, thank you.
We had taken the famous high-speed Inter City Express (ICE) train from Hamburg to Wolfsburg and back. The trains themselves were clean and sleek, as to be expected; but against all my expectations – and those, more to the point, of the German commuter – they were late by 10 to 15 minutes three of the four times I took them, causing us to miss connections. "It’s a systemic problem," I was told, with the same undercurrent of pessimism and uncertainty I’d detected in my other conversations with Germans. There seems to be a gnawing awareness of the possibility that Germany is losing its industrial and economic edge to the competition, and that its people (or some of them, anyway) were paying too much for the continuing costs of reunification. I told them about Manila’s horrendous traffic, and the kind of tribulations we Third Worlders have to endure every waking day. (I didn’t even begin telling them about having to listen to April Boy in a sweaty cab.) "But of course," they said laughing, "we can also forget how privileged we are!"
Against the uncertainties of the future, the past seems always more reassuring, and it was here in spades, as well, in such museums as Hamburg’s Museum for Art and Crafts, where a breathtaking Art Nouveau collection once again provided, as art usually does, another compelling argument against the barbarism of war.
Sailors aren’t our only export to Hamburg. Craving rice after a week of potatoes, I persuaded my guide to go Spanish, and we had a great paella in one of Hamburg’s many international restaurants, washed down with – what else – San Miguel beer, which Irene and the rest of Europe knew as a Spanish brand (nothing in the bottle said "Filipinas"), despite my ardent protestations and my (even more incredible, in hindsight) claims of personally knowing the owner. I calmed down only when it was reasonably suggested to me that San Miguel stood to sell more bottles in Europe as a familiar Spanish brand than an obscure Filipino one. Oh well – prosit!
Left with a free morning on my last day in Germany, we took an unscheduled detour by train to the shores of the Baltic Sea in Luebeck. Although they’ve sunk into the soil over the past several centuries, the conical medieval towers at the gates of Luebeck still retain a grandeur that is every child’s fantasy of the courtly past. In one medieval courtyard, a local version of Oktoberfest had been set up in a tent, where a band was playing a distinctly un-Germanic song, Achy Breaky Heart. On the cobblestoned streets, I met a marmalade tomcat, who reminded me intensely of my own Chippy, sick and being hand-fed by Beng at home. From a curio shop, I bought Beng a vial of lavender oil, which leaked out in my pocket, and I went home in a scarf of lavender fumes.
Let me take this opportunity to thank Mr. Henning Hansen, third secretary of the German Embassy in Manila, and the Goethe Institut in Germany for arranging that visit and for ensuring that everything ran smoothly, as far as could humanly be helped. I could swear that when God invented planning and touring, he had Germans in mind, and so he invented them as well the very next second. Vielen Dank!
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
Like many other places in Germany, Hamburg was heavily bombed by the Allies during the War, and thus has been largely rebuilt; there was a special reason for destroying Hamburg – in its docks had arisen the great ship Bismarck (whose namesake came from Hamburg, and whose statue overlooks a park). Hamburg may not project the cheeriness of Munich nor the romance of Berlin, but it exudes a charm of its own, the kind of charm possessed by cities with one cheek facing the open sea. The River Elbe connects Hamburg to the North Sea, and this channel has turned Hamburg into one of the world’s premier ports, through which goods bound for Germany and Eastern Europe come in for distribution through Europe’s vast and well-developed rail network.
Not surprisingly, maritime traffic figures prominently in Hamburg’s economic and cultural life, with such familiar names as Hapag-Lloyd dominating the city’s skyline. Surprisingly – for those who typically don’t notice the obvious – much of this traffic involves Filipinos, who make up at least a fifth of all the world’s shipping crews.
It was no coincidence that my first appointment in Hamburg was with a group of Filipino sailors at the Seaman’s Mission on the waterfront – a well-appointed hostel for seafarers in between ships, for those newly arrived and those going home. In Alex, about 35, Tirso, about 30, and Michael, 21, we met the full range of experiences. Alex, the fortunate one, had spent the past 12 years aboard cruise ships, the last one being the Queen Mary, and was on his way home for his annual leave. Tirso had just returned from home leave and was waiting for his container ship, ruing the fact that after six years of marriage, he and his wife remained childless. Fresh-faced Michael had left Manila on the first plane ride of his life with P10 in his pocket, no winter clothes, and the dreadful foreknowledge that he had signed up to join a chemical ship reputed to burn up people’s lungs.
But Hamburg held much happier stories as well, as in the case of Diony Mandelbaum, who moved to Hamburg from Nueva Ecija in 1975, and now owns and manages the phenomenally successful Cro-Bag chain of croissant shops. Trained as an accountant in the Philippines, Diony started out as a nanny, and then as a dental assistant, before taking the plunge and joining a German couple in setting up Cro-Bag, eventually buying her partners out. "In our first year, we sold a million pieces. I was so surprised!" she told me over dinner, with Filipino scholar Bomen Guillermo and his wife Laarni. She still minds her shops in the train stations, keeping a lookout for the stray Pinoy, whom she pulls over for a chat and a gift of fresh breads.
The enterprising spirit is very much part of Hamburg, which boasts the highest per capita income in Germany – thanks largely to the presence of some very rich families and very large businesses. (An even more interesting factoid: Hamburg has the world’s largest cemetery.) Hamburg is not only Germany’s most important port, or hafen; it is also the country’s media center – the headquarters of such press icons as Der Spiegel, and over 7,000 advertising agencies – and a major hub for the aviation industry, which now employs far more people than the port itself.
One of those aviation giants is Lufthansa Technik, the world’s leading aircraft maintenance, repair and modification company (which also operates, with MacroAsia, Lufthansa Technik Philippines). The LT facility near Hamburg’s airport is a state-of-the-art complex of hangars, shops, and warehouses where Boeing 747s and Airbus 340s stand wingtip to wingtip for servicing. Like every boy for whom the coolest toy in the world was a silver jet, I stood in awe of the huge birds, racked up in various stages of dress and undress. Lufthansa Technik performs what very few outfits in the world can do – the so-called D-check, a thorough check-up and overhaul of the plane, which happens every 30,000 flight-hours (about six years) or so. Every year, about 500 jet engines and 100 planes are overhauled in Hamburg by LT, which employs almost 13,000 people for the job.
On the more creative side of things, LT also does a lot of business customizing planes (and I mean the big ones, not just Learjets or Cessnas) for private clients, who may be business tycoons, rock stars, or Arab sheiks. This may involve installing playrooms, bedrooms and even whirlpool baths, aside from custom paint jobs. Security regulations prevented us from coming near the planes being fitted out or taking pictures of any of them, but we saw enough to be mighty impressed – a bare 737, to begin with, already costs some 30 million euros (multiply that by 70 to get the peso value, if your calculator has enough zeroes), and "It costs even more than that to customize," said the LT PR person. (Comparatively, the bare 747 costs 160 million euros – a bit beyond the range of a salary loan, even for Winston Garcia.) Don’t like the cobalt blue they put on your 747, and want it lemon yellow instead? That’ll be just 200,000 euros for 350 kilos of paint, please.
It’s this sheer magnitude and level of industry that still sets Germany apart from much of the rest of the developed world. Leave the cell phones to Scandinavia, the iPods to America and the DVD players to Taiwan – where both heft and surgical precision count, Germany still knows what to do, and does it best. I saw this at the Port of Hamburg, which is undergoing a major redevelopment to extend its already formidable capacity; I saw it at Lufthansa Technik; but most pleasantly, I saw it on a side trip to one of my personal meccas – the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, about two hours east of Hamburg via Hanover.
Standing on the very spot it occupied before the war and still retaining some scars from the bombing runs that nearly leveled it, the VW plant is the world’s largest carmaking facility, covering a land area, its PR person emphasized, "as large as Gibraltar, with a roofed area as large as Monaco." Here, 160 presses, each of them producing 7,000 tons of pressure per square inch, turn 2,500 tons of steel daily into VW body parts, which are also painted, assembled, and finished onsite in an operation that involves a total of 50,000 employees. As impressive as the employment figure is, it belies the fact that many of VW’s operations are highly if not completely automated; on our plant tour, taken on a specially designed VW Touran, we were followed part of the way by an R2D2-like robot delivering spare parts.
Visitors less interested in the wonders of carmaking can spend time in Germany’s version of an automotive Disneyland – Autostadt or "Auto City," which stands right next to the plant and features a plenitude of pavilions and exhibits designed to excite even the least mechanically inclined grandmother or blissfully ignorant toddler. A museum of vintage cars – including VW Beetle prototypes I’d only seen in the books and 16-cylinder behemoths I sped down University Avenue within my dreams – completed my Wolfsburg treat. I left Wolfsburg with a souvenir key fob and a special ashtray from the same mammoth Hilo press that may have produced my Beetle, but many other visitors leave with more; a special arrangement allows VW buyers to pick up their car in Wolfsburg after enjoying themselves in Autostadt. I’ll pick up that Phaeton the next time around, thank you.
We had taken the famous high-speed Inter City Express (ICE) train from Hamburg to Wolfsburg and back. The trains themselves were clean and sleek, as to be expected; but against all my expectations – and those, more to the point, of the German commuter – they were late by 10 to 15 minutes three of the four times I took them, causing us to miss connections. "It’s a systemic problem," I was told, with the same undercurrent of pessimism and uncertainty I’d detected in my other conversations with Germans. There seems to be a gnawing awareness of the possibility that Germany is losing its industrial and economic edge to the competition, and that its people (or some of them, anyway) were paying too much for the continuing costs of reunification. I told them about Manila’s horrendous traffic, and the kind of tribulations we Third Worlders have to endure every waking day. (I didn’t even begin telling them about having to listen to April Boy in a sweaty cab.) "But of course," they said laughing, "we can also forget how privileged we are!"
Against the uncertainties of the future, the past seems always more reassuring, and it was here in spades, as well, in such museums as Hamburg’s Museum for Art and Crafts, where a breathtaking Art Nouveau collection once again provided, as art usually does, another compelling argument against the barbarism of war.
Sailors aren’t our only export to Hamburg. Craving rice after a week of potatoes, I persuaded my guide to go Spanish, and we had a great paella in one of Hamburg’s many international restaurants, washed down with – what else – San Miguel beer, which Irene and the rest of Europe knew as a Spanish brand (nothing in the bottle said "Filipinas"), despite my ardent protestations and my (even more incredible, in hindsight) claims of personally knowing the owner. I calmed down only when it was reasonably suggested to me that San Miguel stood to sell more bottles in Europe as a familiar Spanish brand than an obscure Filipino one. Oh well – prosit!
Left with a free morning on my last day in Germany, we took an unscheduled detour by train to the shores of the Baltic Sea in Luebeck. Although they’ve sunk into the soil over the past several centuries, the conical medieval towers at the gates of Luebeck still retain a grandeur that is every child’s fantasy of the courtly past. In one medieval courtyard, a local version of Oktoberfest had been set up in a tent, where a band was playing a distinctly un-Germanic song, Achy Breaky Heart. On the cobblestoned streets, I met a marmalade tomcat, who reminded me intensely of my own Chippy, sick and being hand-fed by Beng at home. From a curio shop, I bought Beng a vial of lavender oil, which leaked out in my pocket, and I went home in a scarf of lavender fumes.
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