by Peter Millar
The original bar, founded by ‘Charles’ – presumably Karl – Mader in 1902 was called, with less than a native’s feel for the cadences of the English language, ‘The Comfort’. But the old black-and-white photographs that line the walls next to those of movie stars, show that the original was a regular contemporary American bar, rather than the kitsch temple to faux nostalgic Teutonism that Mader’s has since become. With its marquetry mosaics of Frederick the Great, a mediaeval knight and duellists lifted straight from The Student Prince musical, Mader’s sums up America’s 1950s need to re-sentimentalise its view of Germany.
Down the road there is a school named after one of Milwaukee’s most famous daughters: the future Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, whose Yiddish-speaking family fled her native Kiev and the Russian Empire, for the new world and chose the Germanic community in Milwaukee as the place they would most fit in. Her father became a carpenter and her mother ran a grocery store while little Golda attended the Fourth Street School now named after her. It is a pertinent reminder of how integrated Jews were in most German communities before the rise of Hitler’s crazed anti-Semitism. There were more than a few who had traumatically mixed feelings about what happened in the years 1933 to 1945, particularly the last four when many of them were called up to fight for their new country against the old one. The stigma of the First World War had no sooner been eradicated than here was Germany, the mother country – Fatherland, if you will – once again America’s deadly enemy.
Boys named Schmidt, Gruber and Hagenbauer joined up willingly in the US forces, even to the extent of deliberately mispronouncing their family names if they were called something like Wagner, to fight other boys with similar names, to whom they might even be distantly related. We can safely assume most of Milwaukee unquestionably wanted an American victory, certainly the Jewish population which lived still as integrated with the rest of the German community here as they had done before the rise of Hitler created a stigma and a segregation in the ‘old country’ that turned it into something they no longer recognised.
By the mid-1950s there was a need – obvious in the dated stereotypical decor of this place – to give Milwaukee’s Americans of German descent something to cling to of their recently discredited culture. There is nothing phoney about the menu, though – the beef for the Sauerbraten, it explains, has been marinated for 10 days, while the pork shank that Hardy so loved and I order up as much in his honour as to assuage my own hunger is indeed a perfectly done example of the classic Bavarian Haxe.
Even my waitress seems more in the cynical European mould than the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, tip-hungry American model, although I can’t help wondering if that’s perhaps because a middle-aged American woman doesn’t take naturally to the puffed-up bosom and constricted waist of a dirndl. She does, however, do the traditional American ‘server’ thing of telling me her name – Maria – and I detect a distinct if faint hint of an accent. Genuine or put on for the tourists, I wonder, and as German is a language I speak, having been a correspondent in Berlin and Munich, I enquire, as politely as possible, ‘Ob sie deutsch sprechen?’ Indeed she does. Almost like a native.
Almost. The odd fact is, she seems more disconcerted than delighted to be speaking her native tongue. She comes originally from Vienna, she tells me, but without the slightest trace of a sing-song Austrian drawl. It is as if her native language, which probably helped her get the job, has atrophied with lack of use. It might be a metaphor for the whole Mader’s experience: the service is excellent, the food good, the Spaten beer imported from Munich one of my favourites, and served as well here as it is there, but there is something just ever so slightly sad about the place, something lost or gone missing. Like someone who claims to be a devotee of classical music having only Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ on his hi-fi. Which just happens to be the background muzak in Maders.
The German heritage lingers here but modern America has mutated so much that today it is little more than skin deep. Sausage-skin deep. A few doors down from Mader’s, the Old German Beer House displays signs for Munich’s famous Hofbräu lager while across the road Ursinger’s Famous Sausage Emporium is painted in the unmistakable white and baby-blue colours of Bavaria’s state flag. Inside, shop assistants of fairly obviously non-Germanic origins – black and Hispanic – purvey Bratwurst and Knacker from spotless marble counters above which mosaic murals proclaim worthy American hygiene mottos such as ‘Gibt Fleisch und Wurst dem Verderben nicht Preis, Kühlt ein sie in Nordpols Berge von Eis’1 next to pictures of little Germanic gnomes doing just that: hauling their sausages and so on into caves of polar ice.
But the firm that sold ‘Northpole’ ice to the burghers of America’s most German city has since gone the way of most of the big brewers who built the beer industry here – Miller, Schlitz, Pabst – have, save for Miller, died away or moved elsewhere. Way down the far north end of 3rd Street, where it no longer claims to be ‘Old World’ the great nineteenth-century Gothic castle that was once Josef Schlitz’s Brewery, built in the pale yellow brick that gave Milwaukee its nickname of ‘The Cream City’, is either empty or in the process of conversion into loft apartments, or artisan workshops.
The departure of the big brewers ought to have left Milwaukee an empty husk of the place it used to be, as if the song were turned on its head. What made Milwaukee famous nearly made a loser out of the city when the big brewers moved away. There are parts of town where that impression is hard to avoid: great swathes of dereliction where hunks of what, had it remained, would no doubt be termed ‘historic’ downtown have been razed to the ground. Walking along Old World’s streets grim vistas suddenly open out of vast empty areas – tomorrow’s parking lots? – which would once have been vital inner city streetscape. At one point the sole structure surviving in a razed concrete expanse of maybe four acres is a four-storey building of little obvious exceptional architectural importance raised on jacks and then just left there, as if somebody forgot where they were meant to take it.
But things are not as bad as they might be – at least not yet. For one thing, Milwaukee has not wholly lost its heritage. Even with the decline of big brewing, beer remains an essential part of the city’s culture, thanks to a new breed of microbrewers. I’m on my way now, footsore, slogging along the waterfront to find one of them, a typical example of the new wave of American beer makers, reassuringly – in this city – called Jim Klisch.
Lakefront Brewery was started in 1987 in the building of a former electric power plant on the banks of the Milwaukee River by Jim and his brother Russel, enthusiastic home-brewers, who had seen the microbrewing phenomenon take off in Oregon and Washington states on the west coast and saw no reason why they shouldn’t emulate that success to bring craft beer-brewing back to Milwaukee.
‘It’s not as if brewing wasn’t in the family,’ Jim laughs over a glass of his frothing Cattail ale after a brief tour round their premises: ‘Our grandfather used to drive a truck for Schlitz.’ Cattail is designed to echo an English summer ale, though it is a little too carbonated to be exactly right. But from early tentative trials in the brewer’s art, the brothers produce five regular beers plus another five seasonals, including a ‘pumpkin’ ale for Hallowe’en, which is now just going into brew: a classically American fusion of traditions, in this case from Germany and Ireland.
‘Every one of our beers is produced according to the sixteenth-century German Reinheitsgebot,’ he says proudly, pronouncing the “purity law” correctly. ‘In other words, just water, hops and barley malt,’ unlike most of the big US brewers, including those in Milwaukee, and notably their one remaining big boy – Miller – who long ago found it was cheaper to add rice.
Despite their German-sounding name the Klisch family were originally from the western Ukraine, he tells me. The authentic spelling should be Kliscze, but Milwaukee germanised it. ‘Some of the cousins still spell it “Kliscz”, with a “zee”,’ he explains. It is a reminder of just how young a country America still i
s, how relatively recently – in European terms – whole families reinvented themselves in a new world.
Disconcerted by my initial downbeat reaction to the bits of central Milauwkee I’ve plodded through to reach his brewery, Jim gives me a few tips on bars to try out to ‘get a feel for the real place’. Most of them are located within walking distance – though that wouldn’t have occurred to him, on the other side of the river, scattered amid a neatly kept little neighbourhood of clapboard houses painted in shades from pale grey to dark green. Wolski’s Bar on Pulaski Street, just in case I needed any reminding that there is a healthy dose of Slav in amongst Milwaukee’s racial mix. With its green-painted weatherboards and red-painted shutters, Wolski’s could be just another gingerbread house in a district full of them: this is the sort of homespun district that inspired Disneyland’s Main Street USA; wooden family homes along leafy avenues with telephone lines strung between them. I sink a pint of Jim’s Cream City Ale amid friendly local folk come in for a drink after work, one of whom, a large bloke called Herb, about my age, in a checked shirt and jeans supping a pint of Jim’s ale at the bar, thinks I need to know a story about arguably Milwaukee’s most famous resident, whose name, he says with a twinkle in his eye, is Gertie, suitably delaying his punchline: ‘She’s a duck.’
Or rather was. Gertie shuffled off her mortal coil more than 60 years ago, but he’s right about me needing to know her story: it’s one of those little tales of bathos, poignancy and sentimentality that make you simultaneously feel proud – and embarrassed – for humanity. It’s what the Daily Mail would call – and probably did – a human interest story, which means it’s mostly about an animal. The most significant thing about Gertie’s story, however, is the date: April 1945, when the good burghers of Milwaukee were anticipating the day when they would be able to celebrate the return of their Hanses, Axels and Friedrichs from killing other Hanses, Axels and Friedrichs.
‘There was this duck, see,’ says Herb, leaning forward over his beer, ‘and it had made a nest on one of the rotting wooden pilings next to Wisconsin Avenue Bridge. Downtown. And it had laid eggs. Now some people tried to throw stones at her to get her to move on, and that got folks angry. So they set up a guard to protect her. Then just as the ducklings were hatched, the war ended, and there was a big victory parade planned down Wisconsin Avenue. But when they got to the bridge, they stopped all the bands playing and everybody marched as quiet as they could – on tippy-toe like – so as not to disturb those little ducks. Thing is, see, in times like that, that little mother duck bringing up her family in peace was like a symbol of the way people wanted the world to be again.’
At one stage, it appears, they even pumped in several million gallons of water from the lake to push back an oil slick approaching Gertie and her brood, while a local fireman became a celebrity when he set out in a rowing boat with a net to rescue one of the ducklings that had fallen into the water from the nest before it could swim properly. Personally I had always thought ducklings could swim automatically, but I am not going to argue with Herb’s story.
Eventually, he tells me, a safer solution for the proud mother and her young nestlings was found by Mr Gimbel, the owner of the town’s biggest department store, who opened up one of his show windows that faced the riverside and moved Gertie and brood in until they were all old enough to be released in the city park. It’s one of those stories that, as Herb says, needs its context to be understood. He’s also surprised that I haven’t heard of Mr Gimbel: ‘He was the owner of Gimbels, started right here in Milwaukee, went on to be the biggest department store chain in the USA, bigger than Macy’s. Gimbels was where they set that movie Miracle on 34th Street, and that recent load of rubbish that was supposed to be a remake or something, Elf.’ I leave him wondering at this European visitor’s ignorance, but that’s the thing about America, you learn something new here every day.2
The next thing I am about to learn is, surprisingly, that some of these small neighbourhood bars impose their own dress codes on customers. A bar on nearby Brady Street sports a notice over the door that strikes me as odd, but is my first indication of the subtle sartorial signals sent out in a society that pioneered ‘dress down Friday’ for office workers, and in general prides itself – outside the world of high fashion and big money – on an overwhelmingly casual attitude to clothing: ‘Caps to be worn straight or back. No excessively baggy clothing!’
Now, the bit about baggy clothing, I get. It has to do with ‘attitude’, with built-in inverted commas. In Britain we’re already familiar with the teen fashion that dictates young men should wear trousers that would fit a medium-sized and particularly well-hung hippopotamus, broad in the beam, enormously wide-legged and with a crotch hanging substantially below the normal human male’s knee level. Despite being no paragon of sartorial style myself, I am, I’m afraid, in sympathy with the view that says if someone dresses like an ape, there’s a fair chance they might act like one.
But the cap business throws me. The baseball cap may have become, after blue jeans, America’s most successful sartorial export but more than a few foreigners who have tried eventually realise that often it simply makes them look silly. The most famous case is former British Conservative Party leader William Hague who wore one throughout the 2001 general election campaign, and possibly as a direct result came a cropper among an electorate who thought that being bald did not excuse a broad-vowelled Yorkshire man wearing American teen headgear.
In America, however, it’s a different thing even for older men, especially when many of them are passionate baseball fans. People wearing it back to front is another matter, apart from the immediate impression that they’ve got their heads screwed on the wrong way round. Perhaps in the southern states, the reversed peak functions as a sunshade for the neck, like the flap dangling from a French Foreign Legionary’s képi. A sort of ‘baseball beau geste’. Whatever I may think, as the sign outside this particular pub makes clear, wearing your baseball cap backwards is now so common as to be almost orthodox.
The only remaining sign of rebellion, therefore, it would appear, is to wear it sideways. Partly an evolution from the original northwest Seattle-specific ‘grunge’ fashion – which as I was to discover is as inspired as much by the weather as anything else – and partly an independent development among young east coast black kids, the sideways cap, in combination with the low-slung baggy trousers, and often matched with ski-jacket style top inflated to Michelin man proportions, mark the wearer out as the sort of person bar-keepers in Brady Street, Milwaukee – and elsewhere, I was to learn – do not want in their bar.
That is not to say they aren’t broad-minded folk around here though. Sitting over a pale ale at the bar, I open a copy of a magazine I have come across before and not really paid any attention to: the Onion. A free weekly, the Onion purports to be over 150 years old and says it acquired its name because it was the only word its German immigrant founder Hermann Ulysses Zwiebel knew in English (‘Zwiebel’ is German for ‘onion’). Happily this is not the average standard of its wit or it would only confirm that British stereotype of ‘the German sense of humour’.
The Onion’s Milwaukee-German roots are genuine enough, though it goes back to just 1988 when it was founded by two students at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. Surprised by its own success, it has since gone national and has its HQ in Manhattan. But if surnames are anything to go by, the editorial team retains a fairly strong Germanic genetic element, including ‘Schneider, Guterman, Dickkers, Reiss, Loew, Kornfeld, Klein, Stern and Ganz.’
With all due acknowledgement to the Onion, therefore, I offer a small sample from a much longer piece by Bonnie Nordstrum entitled ‘I’m in an Open Relationship with The Lord’, a scrumptious fusion of religious infatuation and the adolescent crush.
It all started when I was 16 and asked Jesus to enter my heart. It was incredible. He filled me up with His love. I’d never been redeemed before but with Jesus it felt so right… For a while we were
communing via the sacraments several times a week! And every night we spent what seemed like hours in long mutually satisfying sessions of prayer.
Soon the honeymoon period ended, however. Whenever I spoke to Him, He seemed distracted and distant… Daily devotionals felt like we were just going through the motions. A few months later I made a potentially disastrous discovery: I found out I wasn’t the only one He was sanctifying!… The next Sunday I followed [Sally] to an unfamiliar church on the edge of town and just sat in my car for a while in disbelief. I finally walked up to the front door but before I could open it, I heard the unmistakable sounds of ecstatic praise coming from inside… I’d caught Sally red-handed making a joyful noise unto my own special Lord.
I decided there and then to start experimenting outside the boundaries of traditional monotheistic worship… The Lord my God is a jealous God, and He didn’t like the idea at first. He made it very clear that I should take no other God before Him, but he never mentioned anything about taking one after Him.
Not just funny, but clever. That’s the thing about America, every time you start to get stuck on a stereotype, along comes its opposite. For every Lion King or Bambi there is a Simpsons, for every TV evangelist an episode of South Park. In a country where for a political candidate to say he or she was an atheist would be the kiss of death, and ‘church’ is still perceived as the pillar of most communities, the Onion’s Bonnie Nordstrum had made me cry: Halleluja! Pennies from heaven.
It was early next morning that I was due to make my own pilgrimage to a place many Americans – and more than a few Britons – regard as a holy site. Especially if they are Hell’s Angels. The Harley Davidson factory at Wauwatosa, The problem turns out to be that although Wauwatosa is billed as a ‘suburb’ of Milwaukee, they mean suburb in the American sense: the plant is 14 miles out of the centre of town. I’m not even a motorbike fan, but I have a friend who is – and keeps a Harley Davidson in his living room to the less than avid delight of his long-suffering wife – and I’d promised him that I’d at least get ‘the lousy T-shirt’.