I went to Berlin on vacation a year ago. Because it was my first time in Europe I did all the typical touristy things, including indulging in the city’s numerous museums. I occasionally went high brow (i.e. giving devil horns at the Altar of Pergamon), but much of my time was spent at places that offered maximum thrills and minimum thought.

At some point I wound up at a sex museum. I was greeted first thing by a wall of plaster genitals, both male and female. While I was led to believe they all belonged to humans, I’m not entirely convinced. Surely no man could fit a ten inch member the width of a soda can into a normal pair of pants. But there it was pointing at me in the hall, along with several other startling configurations.

Berlin is unabashedly sexual. Ads for couples’ sex clubs were all over, porn played free on the hotel television, prostitution is legal and generally not frowned upon. The sex museum was no exception. I was embarrassed for half a second, until it occurred to me that I should probably abandon my puritan mores at the plaster dongs if I wanted to enjoy myself. From there I took it all in shamelessly, snapping pictures with abandon, laughing at slide shows, inspecting ancient sex toys.

My boyfriend and I came to a display that asked visitors to find the respective g-spots on mannequins representing either sex. The idea was you prodded the sweet spot on the mannequin’s body, then the thing would let loose with some prerecorded howls of pleasure. My boyfriend had the female mannequin wailing in seconds flat. I wandered over to her male counterpart.

“Male g-spot?” I asked myself aloud, before remembering where it was, or at least where it was rumored to have been.

This is not something I have a lot of experience with. Most American men don’t appreciate a finger in the bum. I remember a girl confiding in me that, after reading some ill-advised sex tips in a woman’s magazine, she tried this on her boyfriend. He commanded her to remove the offending digit and asked her to leave, even though it was in the middle of the night and they lived together.

While the female mannequin appeared multi orgasmic at the hands of my boyfriend, I could not find the male mannequin’s g-spot. It was just a smooth piece of plastic and the ins and outs of anything’s asshole, including my own, remain thankfully mysterious. But I finally found it. Boy, did I find it. The female mannequin was subdued in comparison, this thing went off like a land mine.

“OH YEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!” it echoed across the quiet floor, causing everyone in earshot to whirl around and find me knuckle deep in a mannequin’s asshole. For a moment they all just stared and my previous lax attitude vanished. I could see it now; dumb American girl gives mannequin ball-shattering orgasm, gets kicked out of Europe. Or so I thought until everyone in the place started cheering, including my boyfriend.

A group of British guys came over to congratulate me on my apparent sexual prowess, giving me high fives and patting me on the back as they did. One dude jokingly held his hand up to his ear and whispered, “Call me.” I was the hit of the sex museum, which is saying a lot for a place featuring a 3-foot golden dong.

I left my new friends and walked on to some other exhibit, still laughing about what happened. On the way I could hear the orgasmic moans of the male mannequin, now quaking at the behest of the British tourists. While many other awesome things happened in Germany, this remains my favorite. How many girls can brag that the made an inanimate object come on their summer vacation?

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This month I broke up with my partner of 5 years. I’m 24 so that’s almost a quarter of my life and nearly 100% of my drinking years. Proportionally speaking, it’s about the equivalent of your parents’ 20 year marriage just without the kids, a 401k and stale sex.  Spending your young adulthood in a relationship is an interesting thing. A time when most of us are faced with self-discovery, STDs and the real world, I was busy discovering ‘us’, pap smear exempt, and staying in watching The Real World on Thursday nights. If you start dating someone when you’re 20, you grow together like the trained fichus you marvel at in your shrink’s waiting room. Completely intertwined, you share everything: your close college friends, your memories of that year abroad and then there’s the clothes, the drugs, the drinks and the Missoni towels you spent any money you made from your first shitty job on. You become one, no one knew you solo. You even lose your name as you and your other half succumbed to the MaryKateandAshley effect. You start to look alike; you say the same stupid things and stories and realize that you can’t talk to anyone separately for fear of repeating yourselves.

This sounds like a nightmare but the weird thing is, it wasn’t. Perhaps my relationship can fit into a dream classification of another sort–it was kind of like living in Never Never Land. When you enter the real world with someone else, something strange happens, you lose the fear of the unknown realities and you become very brave and even brazen with your actions. Like a child, all inhibitions fall aside.

I missed ‘my’ formative years, but facing the world as two also afforded me the ability to do things that I would’ve never done on my own. To be honest, that time we lived with LCD Soundsystem in their Laurel Canyon mansion or when we dropped everything and moved to Berlin for a year, both would’ve never happened if I were flying solo. The risk was too great for just one person, but being a twosome made it possible and never scary.

I admit, I’m left developmentally challenged. My future social and especially romantic exploits are severely compromised. I don’t even know how to have casual sex.

I have to reprogram my life from ‘we’ to ‘I’. It’s weird to think when I tell my kids about my early 20s, I probably will just ramble on about all the things I did even though it’s really all the things we did. But once that painful extraction begins there is simply no return.

So suddenly, the world around me seems a lot bigger. This is the double edged sword I’m getting at—now that I’m alone it’s a huge scary place out there, but I finally have room to stretch and breath in it. I’m beginning to realize that as a couple we made a perfect infusion but I think as my palate matures, I’m beginning to appreciate simplicity. We’ve or, uh, I’ve made that transition from jack and coke to whiskey on the rocks.

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This new music video from the Portland-based dream pop duo Mint Julep for their song “Aviary” is just mesmerizing. The directors play with the wigglegram or camera shift technique we see in a lot of gif animations, but give it a refreshingly different take by prolonging the effect across the span of a whole music video as well as running wigglegram against a regular film rate. Märkisches Viertel, a massive housing estate in Berlin, serves as the backdrop of the video and its plot revolves around three young girls adventuring from their homes, into the forest, to the edge of their town where they begin to try to wreak some kind of havoc. Only to return back home when the sun sets.

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Arrive in spring but expect nothing of the weather. Live in the nicest area possible—somewhere super trendy like Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg —because rent will only cost you 200 Euros a month anyway. Your room will be the size of a whole New York loft; your apartment will take up the whole floor of a building. If you want to live alone, get an apartment somewhere like Wedding or Neukölln—the rent will be the same for the whole place as it is for one room in Mitte, and it still doesn’t take any more than half an hour to get anywhere else in Berlin on the subway.

Learn how to pronounce the names of all the boroughs and metro stations. Ease into the language, realize it’s not so difficult and find that reading menus and street signs comes quite naturally. Embrace your newfound love for the German language but also revel in the fact that you can have a lively conversation with a German person—you speaking English while they speak German—and walk away not knowing exactly what happened but that it was lovely anyway.

Go to Humana, the 4-storey thrift store, and buy a whole new summer wardrobe for under 20 Euros. Buy a furry hat if you see one—you’ll need it for winter. Start visiting galleries and feel relieved that there are no lines or crowds, but that the art is just as good as anything in New York. Go to the Turkish markets and buy 8 chicken breasts for 5 Euros. Buy Turkish tea and fresh vegetables. Start feeling incredibly sane and relaxed.

Start partying as it gets warmer. Get to the club at 3am and don’t leave until midday the following day. Wonder how you’ll ever keep up with this sort of party lifestyle. Go to Berghain at least once. Get a bar job in an illegal club and start going to underground parties where the walls sweat and people like Dan Deacon play for free. Start to genuinely love electro music.

Now that it’s summer spend your weekends in the park. Go to the flea markets at Mauerpark. On your way get a coffee at Bonanza Coffee Heroes; when you get to the market get a freshly squeezed orange juice for 1 Euro. Meet your friends on the grass when the sun is high in the sky and start drinking beers. Have a picnic. When you’re a little bit tipsy chug an extra beer for good faith and do Bearpit karaoke in front of hundreds of people.

Be upset when summer ends abruptly. Start having dinner parties and drinking lots of red wine. Read lots of books and watch lots of movies. When you go outside, wear absolutely everything you own. Refuse to leave the house during December and January; leave the house anyway. Realize that despite the paralyzing cold, Berlin is absolutely beautiful in the snow, in its way. Go to the Christmas markets and drink gluhwein.

Be overwhelmed by the history. Walk everywhere or get a bike and ride. Drink in the street. When you finish your drink put the empty can/bottle under the trashcan so the homeless can cash it in. Live cheaply. Live calmly. Live like you always dreamed you would. 

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Back in December I set up and supervised the post-apocalyptic oil drum fires at a movie screening on urban decay that the magazine where I was interning organized in an abandoned warehouse. As always happens at these kind of events, I found a certain girl there. She had oversized frames, rubber boots and a nondescript jacket that was obviously chosen with great care. My tall friend supplied the rum we needed to keep warm as the fires died out. As the girl got more drunk, she kept playing songs by Bonaparte (from Berlin, where else?) on her iPhone. That is how I got to know the song “Gigolo Vagabundo” by said band. Since then, I’m really trying to make it the soundtrack of my life.

This desire to live to the fullest under the postmodern condition, to live at the converging edge of time and space if you will, is why I’m now chilling on the balcony of the apartment where I’m renting a room in Munich, watching the sun set over the river Isar. It’s my fourth address so far this year. My official excuse to be here is that I’m doing a case study at a company for my BA thesis, but really I’m just trying hard to live the life of a 21st century nomad. It’s a fun life. I get to see things, meet people, think about stuff and experience lots of peculiar details that put different places and episodes in relation to each other.

Here in Munich it’s tricky though, because this city is so… functional, for lack of a better word. They even call it “Toy Town” because everything is so clean and runs so smoothly. Like, when I was in the English Garden the other day, thousands of people were chilling in the bleak spring sun. Nothing strange about that, but I got this feeling that they were all doing it with such an immense sense of purpose. Maybe you have no choice but to chill like that when unemployment is at 1 percent? Someone told me that, but it was after a few one liter pitchers at the Hofbräuhaus, so the figure is probably higher. The same dude, when sober, also told me about prostitution here. It is legalized and enjoys powerful police protection. The girls have to test themselves rigorously twice a month and if a customer asks for their test protocol they must present it. The final piece of the puzzle: the taxes imposed on this lucrative business add up to over 60 percent of the income.

The sex trade makes me think again of Amsterdam, where I lived last fall for my internship. Of course, the business there is much more in your face than in Munich. I stayed in the eastern the part of A*dam (Since Dutch is a ripoff of English, “ster” means star and can be conveniently replaced by the asterisk), which is officially named the Indian Ward. Not so many hookers around, but living there had another effect, relating to how places appear to merge. Living in the ethnically diverse East Amsterdam made me give up on supermarkets. I now get my groceries and veggies at the Turkish-ish neighborhood stores instead. They are way more consistent across countries, and often cheaper. Do I miss screaming ads in purple and orange offering me 3 for 2 vanilla, milky fudge, raspberry flavored yoghurt, now with an extra sting of strawberry cheesecake? Not really. Do I enjoy the surprise of finding out that my breakfast buns come baked with pockets of sour cheese? Yes, indeed.

Back to here and now on the balcony: I’m drinking my temporary flatmate’s bio-chai tonight, hypnotizing myself with Markus Haupt’s (from Leipzig, also famous for its street art) basslines and pondering this week’s investment decision: Is 13.40 euros a fair price for four hours in a German, meaning public, mixed and butt naked, jugend architecture style sauna from the year 1901? It probably is, objectively. Subjectively, are the Heidis (tall, sporty, yet curvy brunettes with a mysterious cream skin tone) I could peek at through the steam worth exposing myself to the Fritzs (short, round, mumbling men with hair in all the wrong places)? They are. I suspect the place will also be full of tourists and thus offer some cross-cultural ogling and comparison, which is always interesting. In addition, as a modest Euro-something-boy I don’t rate myself as someone other people would be too excited to look at, so the visit to the sauna is an easy win for me.

Oh, now I just discovered that a bus transfer to Czech Republic with Greyhound wannabe Eurolines is on sale for 9 euros. Absinth-powered weekend in Prague with my friend the Italian womanizer who breeds wolf dogs? Reminds me of that one time in that one place. I better get packing.

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I first met Cathleen about two years ago, the summer after I came back from my study-abroad semester in Berlin. We were both volunteering for the Media Film Festival (MFF), a small affair organized by some amateur film enthusiasts and business owners who live in that region known as “the main line.” She was a student at Swarthmore College living in the area for the summer, and I was living with my parents in nearby Bryn Mawr until I could go back to Chicago to complete my final year there.

My duties included taking tickets and greeting filmmakers at the festival “headquarters,” which was a coffee and sandwich shop called “House of Joe.” Joe was on the board of directors for the festival and the principal source of capital, because apparently his place gets a lot of business from college students in the area. Joe really had no business being a film festival curator. Once when I was on duty he was looking at a submission for next year’s festival and he said dismissively, “this has some cool images but there’s no story.” I cringed a little at the thought of this plebeian making decisions that affect the careers of serious filmmakers. In truth, being a student of media, I felt like the whole thing was beneath me.

In the evenings after all the films were finished, I went out for drinks with other volunteers and the visiting filmmakers. Receiving free drinks was not beneath me, and I profited as much as I could. It was on one of these outings that I met Cathleen. She was talking with one of the visiting filmmakers who I had befriended, and I interrupted their conversation when I overheard her talking about studying abroad in Berlin. As it turns out, she studied there the semester before me and knew a lot of Americans whom I had met while I was there. My filmmaker friend gave me a look that seemed to say, ‘I was trying to bring it, but OK.’ He excused himself and went inside.

She persisted in speaking German with me, which was entertaining at first, but it began to grate at me because it doesn’t facilitate conversation to speak in a language that you’re not fluent in. “There are just some things that I can’t express in English, you know? But I find the words in German,” she said, in English.

“No, I don’t know, but whatever.”

She invited me to her place and I obliged. She lived with some white Buddhists – “the Zen house,” she called it, although she was not a Buddhist herself. She was one of those girls that likes yoga and has what I refer to as “the yoga poise” – you know the type: they’re cerebral, have good posture, are probably vegetarian or vegan, and are usually humorless. I had not yet formed an opinion of her. I thought she was cute and I did appreciate her forwardness, but there was something annoying about her, too.

We spoke about love and life and our time abroad. We were both in complicated long-distance relationships and we were feeling frustrated. I was flattered that she spoke so openly about her love life, and I wondered just what message she was trying to send me. Finally, I left, because I couldn’t see where it was going, and she was tired.

I went back to the bar because the party was still on, and my colleague asked what had happened. “She has a boyfriend,” I said. “Oh, damn, they all do,” she said. I appreciated her a lot when she said that, and we drank on into the night.

The following afternoon at the film festival headquarters I received a call from Cathleen. She invited me over again to watch a German film with her that night. Hm, I thought. This is encouraging. Again I obliged. The night played itself out not unlike the night before, except after a long, self-consciously deep conversation about love and life, we got on her bed to watch the movie on her laptop. Time passed, and I started snuggling with her. I paused the movie and planted one on her. I was feeling turmoil in my loins. We caressed each other. “I don’t feel comfortable with you kissing me,” she said. “I’m in a weird place,” she added, by way of excuse.

“OK,” I said.

We continued on as before minus the kissing. Then I planted another one on her and she was into it this time. After a while, she said “we have to stop now. I don’t think this is appropriate, considering our situations.”

“I agree,” I said.

“But I still want to hang out with you,” she implored. “We should keep watching German movies.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I will continue to make advances if I’m in this sort of situation.”

“That’s OK,” she said. “I know my limits and I like the way you snuggle.”

Berlin Scholars is a Yahoo Group for North Americans visiting or living in Berlin, Germany. I joined May 2007. Through it I found a gorgeous four-room apartment that cost less than one room in a Brooklyn ghetto. Berlin Scholars posts will often concern sublets, restaurants, bicycle shops, yoga studios, package shipping, etc. And because list members are supposed to be in Berlin for “serious research and artistic activity” – not just cheap rents and all-night MDMA parties (some clubs have half-mile entrance lines at 7 a.m.) – occasional posts deal with lectures, libraries, museums.

Below I’ve pasted a Berlin Scholars exchange from earlier this week. It explains why you’ll rarely, perhaps never, see an electric clothes dryer in German cities.

Can someone please enlighten me as to why apartments have washing machines but still no dryers? I thought by 2010, Europeans would have decided to give in and get a dryer, especially since they are now so readily available. How do you dry your clothes when you have a few kids and many loads? Am I ignorant for asking this question? Or maybe too American?

Thanks! Courtney

***

Most Germans consider electric dryers umweltverachtend, since they accomplish a task that can also be achieved through the combination of time + air.  Of course, much of German society was originally based on the assumption that all women are stay-at-home moms with plenty of time to hang up each little sock on a line or laundry rack (which is also why it was not until well into the 1990s that it became legally possible for supermarkets to remain open past 6:30 p.m.); things are changing, but a passionate commitment to the environment even at the expense of human convenience remains.  Germans (even families) wash their clothes one load at a time and then set the laundry to dry on racks somewhere in the apartment.

Susan

Umweltverachtend = Environmentally contemptible.

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Three things about Willow Smith: She whips her hair back and forth, she has super famous parents and she’s the coolest nine year-old we know. At Willow’s age, we were playing in the sandbox and trying not to pee our pants. We wondered how she became so evolved and avoided this pesky thing called a childhood so we  went straight to the source to find out. And when the source refused to talk to us, we just made something up.

Thought Catalog: Hey Willow, What’s up?

Willow Smith: Who is this? My nanny just handed me the phone and said that you had candy and a big water slide.  Is that true? Can I go play on your waterslide? Ours is under construction.

TC: I’m a journalist, honeypie. We’re here to talk to you about “Whip My Hair.”

WS: Oh, that stupid song I made? I didn’t even wanna make it.

TC: What do you mean?

WS: Well, it all started because I really wanted to go over to my friend Jocelyn’s house because she just got a new Wii. I love Wii, I get like super high scores. Everyone knows I’m really good at it. Anyways, my mom told me, “No, Willow. You can’t go to Jocelyn’s until you go in the studio with Daddy and record this song.” And so I had to do it. And then I went to Jocelyn’s and we played Wii and her mom made us pizza. It was kind of gross pizza.

TC: You like pizza usually though?

WS: Duh. I love pizza. Are you kidding me? It’s so freaking good.

TC: Lets talk about the music video. Pretty crazy stuff, right? Whose idea was that?

WS: Some big director guy. I don’t know. It was pretty fun though because I just sucked on Pixi Stix the whole time. Pixi Stix are crazy. Have you had them before?

TC: Sure.

WS: This one time, I paid my friend Alexandra 20 bucks to snort some and she did! She started crying afterwards though and then I felt bad.

TC: Well, that sucks.

WS: Yeah. After that, she switched schools because her parents were getting a divorce and they had to move. That sucked too.

TC: Yikes. So Willow, you’ve been in some of your parents’ movies too. How does it feel to have such crazy famous parents?

WS: I don’t know. It’s good I guess because we’re super rich and a lot of people are poor. My dad can also introduce me to some awesome people and that’s cool.

TC: People like Muhammad Ali and Nelson Mandela?

WS:  Who? No, Miley Cyrus and like, the twins from The Suite Life. They are so cute.

TC: You know what’s cute? Your style. Where do you get your inspirations?

WS: Hold on a second. (CALLS TO JADA PINKETT) Mom! Where do I get my, um, style inspiration from?

Jada Pinkett-Smith: Berlin art scene, sweetie.

WS:  (BACK ON PHONE) Um, the Berlin art scene. (CALLS TO JADA PINKETT AGAIN) What else?

JPS: Basquiat!

WS: Who is that? Ugh. (BACK ON PHONE) Um, Boss-Key-Aught,

TC: Were you just asking your mom for the answers?

WS: (GIGGLES UNCONTROLABLY) No! I gotta go, Mr. Interview Man. I’m going to go ride our dolphin in our pool.

TC: You have a real dolphin?

WS: Duh. (DIALTONE)

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The avalanche of memoirs from aristocrats on the other side of the water continues – the Duchess of Devonshire’s Wait for Me!, Lady Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go. . .now Viscount Norwich’s Trying to Please.  Of the three, he is the only one you could safely invite to your next dinner party – and be guaranteed that he would be a charming mixer:  witty, down-to-earth, open, without hauteur or attitude – a thoroughly good sort likely to stay and help clear things, if need be.

Norwich’s mother, Lady Diana Manners

John Julius Cooper, 2d Viscount Norwich, was born in 1929 to a famous couple:  his father, Duff Cooper, had distinguished himself in World War I then gone on to a career in politics and diplomacy; his mother, Lady Diana Manners, brought up as daughter to the 8^th Duke of Rutland, was a much-celebrated beauty and actress.  It was an unlikely, but successful, pairing: a penniless war hero and an aristocratic deb; in pre-paparazzi days, their wedding such a crush of onlookers that “a body of mounted policemen had to be detailed to control the crowds outside,” Norwich writes.

Norwich as a child

His early years centered on a nanny whom he adored, John Julius was educated at London day schools (the first, called “Miss Betty’s” sounds like a house of ill repute), then dispatched to another school in Canada for safety’s sake during World War II, then back to England for Eton, Navy service, and Oxford (where Isaiah Berlin was his tutor), then into the Foreign Office.  He held posts in Belgrade, Beirut and Geneva before deciding the life just wasn’t for him.  He resigned in 1964 and became a writer of bestselling books, establishing himself as the English-speaking world’s authority on Byzantium and Venice.  Well-known for some thirty television documentaries on a wide range of subjects (The Fall of Constantinople, Napoleon’s Hundred Days, The Treasure Houses of Britain)  and for his four-year stint as host of the hugely successful radio panel game My Word, Norwich, at the age of eighty, cuts a dashing figure and is a quickly-recognised man-about-town.

And so, after a couple of dozen books, Norwich published his autobiography, Trying to Please in Britain in 2008.  Axios Press, based in Mount Jackson, VA, acquired the American rights and have recently issued a handsome edition here.

Norwich is a born storyteller with a narrative gift and very considerable charm.  It may just be that his own beloved nanny told him what Nancy Mitford’s told her before pushing her into a room full of people:  “Remember, you are the least important person in that room.”  Norwich never makes himself the center of the story:  other people figure larger in the landscape, whether his parents, his wife and children, or his friends.  He is clearly someone whose friendship others value highly and he returns their loyalty and dedication.

As the son of parents near the centre of things and as a man who has made his own eminent way in the worlds of diplomacy, media and the arts, Norwich knows a good deal about twentieth-century arts and cultural life, particularly in Britain and Italy.  It seems he’s been nearly everywhere and met everyone – Churchill, de Gaulle, Bill Paley, Stavros Niarchos, Laurence Olivier, and the usual suspects from the Royal Family, the Queen Mother and Her Majesty herself (but not Princess Margaret?  What a shame!)  His accounts of two visits to the Vatican – one with his mother to meet Pius XII, the other with the Duke of Norfolk to represent the Queen at the coronation of Paul VI – offer glimpses behind the scenes of Vatican protocol and British diplomatic pageantry.

The narrative of the audience with Pius XII details a formal, indeed theatrical, experience:

We were led through a whole series of splendid rooms, each of which seemed to be inhabited by people of a different century:  from a nineteenth-century one full of elderly gentlemen in frock coats we would pass directly into what appeared to be the main reception room at Elsinore, with men looking exactly like Hamlet in black doublet and hose and clinking swords; then into a room full of Swiss Guards in their red, blue and yellow Michelangelo uniforms.  All the time the tension seemed to mount:  the whole process was theatrical in the extreme. . .we entered into the Holy Presence. . .we made our reverences. . .There followed a long silence.  The conversation, we had been assured, would be in English, in which the Holy Father was naturally fluent; this proved, however, to be something of an exaggeration.  My mother and I had to make the going, the Pope reacting favorably or unfavorably as required:  the favorable reaction was “very fine, very fine,” the unfavorable “very difficult, very difficult.”

The audience with Paul VI reveals a different pontiff, to be sure:

The protocol was nowhere nearly as elaborate as it had been when my mother and I had our audience with Pius XII; still, it was impressive.  In I went, made my carefully rehearsed reverences and received a blessing—accompanied, to my surprise, by a small leather case.  The Pope explained.  He had already given the Duke a commemorative medal bearing his portrait struck in gold; he wished me to have a silver one, but unfortunately the silver ones were not yet ready.  Mine would be sent as soon as possible (it was) but meanwhile he would like me to have something to take with me now.  ”And so,” he said, “I give you this silver medal of my predecessor, Pope John.  And believe me, that’s so much better.” I could see that he meant it, and felt the tears come into my eyes.  They do so again as I write these words.

Norwich today

For all the people who figure in this memoir, and for all his self-effacing humor, Norwich makes the most lasting impression, especially when he writes of his family.  What he treasures most – even beyond the magnificent decaying pile of his beloved Venice (the salvation and preservation of which he gives himself to with gusto and characteristic dedication) is that family –  his wife, his children, his grandchildren.  But maybe most of all his mother; he writes of her death with dignity and poignant affection: 

You can’t imagine what it’s like,’ she said to me one day, ‘lying here staring at the same bit of wallpaper all day, with nothing to look forward to.’  The words haunted me; they still do.  On June 17, 1986, I went to see her in the evening as usual and found her in moderately good spirits.  At eight the next morning. . .she was dead. . .We buried her at Belvoir [family castle], next to my father.  I walk or drive past her house almost every day—never without a pang.

John Julius Cooper, 2d Viscount Norwich, is an elegant grandee of taste and refinement, a man of no pretense and good cheer, someone who has lived a rare and good life and has the grace to acknowledge it without vengeance or reprisal.  Trying to Please is splendid testimony to that life as well as good reading for a chilly autumn afternoon.

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The Dada movement of the early twentieth century has deep ties to the world of childhood. Its name, though it may have been chosen at random (the leading origin story involves a knife being plunged indiscriminately amid the pages of a French-German dictionary), means “hobbyhorse,” a child’s toy that is an amalgamation of a stick and a horse’s head. Both parts of the toy are rough approximations of the real object—a riding horse—they are meant to represent and this relationship is activated by imagination. The same might be said of the works created under Dada’s banner. A synthesis of various media, concepts, and styles, the movement’s visual art and poetry deconstructed the elements of sound, language, form, color, and movement and stitched them back together in new ways to create objects and texts that followed the laws of child’s play—that is, laws by which any meaning is possible and none is required. This rejection of adult-world conformity in favor of youthful nonsense offered a means of circumventing the strict and serious rules that govern thought, language, and meaning. “I wish to blur the firm boundaries which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve,” declared Hannah Höch, the Berlin movement’s only woman artist and an originator of photomontage. Even artmaking itself was decidedly unsophisticated. Tristan Tzara’s “How to Make a Dadaist Poem” (1920)—which includes the directives “Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently.”—resembles the instructions of a child’s rainy-day activity.

Runfast

In his recent history of children’s literature, Seth Lehrer traces the exuberant absurdity in the work of authors such as Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss back, by way of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, to the Dadaists and the Russian avant-garde. Yet, unlike their Soviet contemporaries, the Dadaists produced only a small handful of illustrated books explicitly for children. Between 1924 and 1925, artists Kurt Schwitters and Käthe Steinitz collaborated on three experimental children’s books—Hahnepeter (Peter the Rooster), Die Märchen vom Paradies (The Fairy Tales of Paradise), and Die Scheuche (The Scarecrow)—all of which depended heavily on typographic design, particularly the last, which, with the aid of De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg, transformed its characters into typographic forms. (Schwitters also authored a number of other fairy tales, which were collected and published last year as Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales.)

One other illustrated children’s book that came out of the Dada group wasn’t actually created until after World War II. Höch put together her Bilderbuch, or picture book, a photomontaged zoological garden accompanied by a series of sly, silly poems, in 1945. Unfortunately, Bilderbuch wouldn’t be published in its entirety until 1985, six years after Höch’s death, and then only in a limited edition of 200. Now, Berlin publishing house the Green Box has rescued this unique volume from out-of-print obscurity with a lovely facsimile edition that reproduces the poems in English translation (courtesy of Berlin-based scholar Brian Currid).

Picture Book contains nineteen horizontal spreads, each of which features one poem and a corresponding collage. The photographs from which Höch, Dr. Frankenstein–like, sourced her image-parts are mostly in black and white. But in each composition, she added brightly colored paper fibers, whose airy strands resemble feathers—appropriate not only for the many birds that populate the book, but also for the extraterrestrial flora and fauna that exist alongside them and Höch’s other chimeric creatures, who are festooned with tinted tufts. The picture illustrating the poem “Gentlebread” is almost Disney-worthy: its rainbow-hued palette enfolds a deer-like creature, delicate head bowed, who is attended by a coterie of winged friends.

The hybrid animals are every bit the hobbyhorse—syntheses of diverse objects that, united as a single image, receive new life in the reader’s imagination. In one case, Höch uses only slightly trimmed photographs of Komondor dogs, whose long coats resemble the white, twisted cords of a mop. Their appellation, Longfringes, mimics their alien, ropy appearance, but in the context of the book, the animals become something else altogether. The transformation  is aided by Höch’s brief nursery rhymes; some offer light morals, others are gently subversive, but all elicit a delightful naivete.

Unsatisfeedle

Flailing his arms about, quite a sight,

He had wanted the black dress
But God gave him the white.
So with his sourpuss
he lives out his life.

He nurtures the eccentricity

it’s the wrong one — explicitly.

Brushflurlet

Words and images are everywhere joined in tomfoolery. Most of the poems’ characters have collaged names: Unsatisfeedle, the Runfast (and her 1,000 runfastlets), Shellkeglet, the Brushflurlet, the Snipplensnapplewings. In “Meyer I,” Höch tweaks rumor and aquarium so that they rhyme; the resulting rumourium and aquorium share consonants and vowels, each becoming a hybrid of the other. The image on the facing page likewise adopts a quirky syntactic fusion, in which something is not quite right: Roughly half of a cat’s face, open-mouthed, is cut to look like an angel fish, swimming among jade-green plant life on his way, the poem announces, “to the office.” The story of the Tailchamois begets a kind of nonsense: “With their long tails / they sweep away the snow and rime / while on their mountain climbs. / For they want the winter / to toddle off a sprinter.”

Of his fellow Dadaists, Hans Arp once asserted, “We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly.” None of Höch’s creatures can be said to follow the dictates of nature, though sometimes they beget a world that appears to be a topsy-turvy version of our own. In the image accompaniment to “The Runfast,” the titular creature, an insect with a human eye and blue-purple tufts of fur, skitters under what look like a group of flowers with starburst-shaped blooms but are in fact the trunks and shadows of palm trees turned upside down. The irrationality in Picture Book isn’t the chaotic, anarchist brand that defines much Dada art, but rather an innocent version, eschewing machine aesthetics for an organic sort. Höch’s children’s book also doesn’t offend the sensibilities, a primary aim of the movement, but it does unleash them—and perhaps that is the more radical of the two.