Der fliegende Holyländer

If you are ever on the Rhine during tourist season, you will encounter what I did: the ship called the MS Heinrich Heine.

It was for work, my Rhine boat cruise. And it was not on the MS HH. With students who were seeing the Rheintal for the first time and so I didn’t want to spoil it for them because it is, after all, a startlingly beautiful place. After the fifth or sixth time on the same cruise itinerary, I can tell you there’s an air of self-satire that takes over when you go on these things. Still, despite all ironic stances you use to armor yourself against a potentially kitschy ride, you will be convinced (against your better judgment) to sing the Loreley song with the happy Chinese tourists at the moment when the eponymous cliff passes by and the boat’s loudspeakers blare the song over the droning hum of the boat’s engine. The Chinese sitting around you will somehow know how to time their alcoholic drinks on the 10 AM cruise so that they will be buzzed just enough to sing with great enthusiasm, right on cue, because their tour guide gave them transliterated copies of the lyrics. Then, like clockwork, they hop off the boat near Pfalzgrafenstein, the castle that is shaped like a ship and sits stubbornly in the middle of the river, despite commonplace, biannual Jahrhundertfluten. And at the end of every Rhine boat cruise, as I step off the gang plank, the same sentence forces itself into my brain: That was a supposedly fun thing that I will never do again. David Foster Wallace to the rescue.

I don’t really know what goes on in the MS Heinrich Heine.  It looked fancier than my ride as I looked wistfully out the porthole window of my boat cruise experience. So I dreamt of a prospectus of the cruise ship itinerary, contained below. Oh, and I renamed it, too. Der fliegende Holyländer.  The MS Fliegender Holyländer

Description:

The journey starts with one night in an old University of Bonn jail cell with an actor playing a drunken, youthful Karl Marx who got you both stuck in there overnight for threatening the peace because he told someone you threatened him to a duel.

You will pass by the Loreley and sing nothing.

The ship will visit Düsseldorf for a night, at which point you say to yourself, “Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, dass ich in Düsseldorf bin?” And then you will leave to go to Köln because there’s more to do there, even if the city is broke.

At some point, the boat will make a sharp turn to the left, and then to the right, and then back to the left.

Unplanned, long trips to the North Sea and Poland are possible.

The boat will make its way into France for the rest of your life, but you will continue to speak/not speak German on board.

You will have an imaginary, winter’s journey back into Germany.

Periodically, under the cover of night, the boat will go to Hamburg to visit relatives, even though the cruise ship company does not have the right to travel there because there is a warrant out for your arrest.  In the case of police capture, passengers will be armed with some unpublished satirical anti-Prussian pamphlets to send abroad for publication in order to get international sympathy for our plight.

The relaxing, quiet nights on board will allow you to read your most recent poetry to your wife for her feedback in your cabin. Unfortunately, your wife will be illiterate and will not speak German, so you will have to read every single word to her because she can’t read those words herself AND translate them at the same time. In the end, your work will be censored by the Prussians anyway.

Finally, your boat will be permanently moored in Bacherach, because you can’t finish your fragmentary piece about the Rabbi there.

Israel will never really know what to do with your legacy, because you converted.

We welcome you on board!