Munich, Diagnose Thyself

My neighborhood was invaded in late Spring by a fragment of a diaspora and life has been hell ever since. They’re down there now. Having a good time. Living it up. Hanging loose. Smoking. Watching their kids whip past the few remaining courtyard shrubs, a species steeped just one rung deeper in misery than the residents cowering in their apartments above, horror-stricken at what has happened.

And what has happened? Nothing too uncommon. Noisy neighbors moved in. Except they aren’t neighbors. It’s not a family. And they don’t live here. It’s a club for the members of a dispersed nationality who find themselves settled here in Munich, and it has acquired one of the building’s office slots that face the courtyard for its hub of activities. Its members come here now when they are ready to unwind and have fun. Those who want to reflect, contemplate, or be alone stay at home.

Of course, such a modest clubroom cannot begin to accommodate its thousand or so members, but does it matter? They have all of the courtyard to spill out into, and they do. Every time. No one comes to sit in that room. They are a bucolic folk with a heritage of outdoor markets, jaunts through pastures, long vigils in mountain passes, rustic hardships. The courtyard draws them as naturally as a swimming pool draws members of a swimming club. It’s the courtyard for which they chose that room, and it’s the courtyard they’ve been occupying ever since they made their official move to Karlshof May 29, a date I will not soon forget.

The celebration lasted three days, starting early afternoons and continuing until nearly midnight of those days, during which time men crowed and swaggered, bellowed and postured, hallooed to each other and clapped each other on the back, just as masters of the place would. Young ladies tittered and shrieked. Older women hustled about wearing looks of weary responsibility visibly leavened by their own measure of pride at having such an establishment to keep running efficiently.

As Sunday, the fourth morning of the long holiday weekend, broke and quietly advanced, the shaken residents remained wary. Only toward evening did we realize: they weren’t coming; their celebration was over; they were gone. In my own celebratory relief, I drank almost an entire bottle of red wine, something I’ve never done before, behavior which startled me as I held the bottle up to the light the following morning.

The respite was brief. Friday evening they were back for more rowdy merrymaking; back on Saturday to let their kids run riot; back on Sunday for more of both. And so it has been every weekend and every holiday ever since.

No one in the world is bothered by the dramatic change in our courtyard but the residents living here. The City of Munich is fine with it. Its zoning regulations consider clubs and businesses fungibles, if you will. If a building space was designated for a business, it is suitable for a club, an equation that has spelled ruin for this community.

The crux of the problem is a fine point thriving municipalities have long dismissed from consideration: status quo. A huge discrepancy between bedfellows exists in this case. The community settled around Karlshof is uncommonly peaceful for such a central location, something the residents prize. The level of noise produced by the club is not just conspicuous in this context, but cacophonous. Had the club moved into a street-front room, of which there are many along Karlstraße, its presence would be noticed by no one. In occupying a room facing a private courtyard sequestered from city traffic, the presence of its obstreperous members is noted even from the top fifth floor the moment they arrive; all domestic activity – quarrels and TV watching excluded – is disrupted for the duration of their stay, while their departure, signaled by that well-known social crescendo goodbyes plunge the language animal into, registers on residents with profound relief. The silence in their wake is inhaled like a balm. But we already know: they’ll be back tomorrow.

As the weeks advanced, the club’s lordly domination of the courtyard became ever more brazen. Members would set up a Ping-Pong table for an outdoor tournament. A private beer garden was put in place. Members lounged by the score on the low, curving peripheral courtyard steps, which resemble so unfortunately seats in Antiquity’s amphitheaters. They razzed each other, chortled, bellowed, argued for hours on end like the al fresco mountain types they were. However, eclipsing even this disturbance was the earsplitting commotion caused by their children. With each visit, the members brought their youngsters along to let them loose in the courtyard, and for the entire length of their stay the children raced around like rabid creatures, screaming, kicking balls, crashing against the windows of neighboring shops, pounding on the trees, pulling up the cobblestones, digging in the earth, and tearing through the shrubs with not a single gesture from one of the lounging parents ever raised to restrain them. For us fluttering in our stacked cages above, it was like getting caught in a shrapnel barrage with no margin for maneuver. And the barrage lasted for hours.

From day one, residents had been reluctant to complain about the club, handicapped by a weird and painful dissonance. Those I spoke to proclaimed repeatedly that they were tolerant, that they considered themselves to be international, that they did not want to say anything against any fragment of a diaspora, which they knew had suffered such hardships already. But by far the residents’ greatest inhibition was appearing to have anything against children. It wasn’t just that the idea was abhorrent to them; they seemed fearful of being caught crouching in a sinister angle on the wrong side of the spectrum. To avoid that, they grit their teeth when club members gathered or, as time went on, simply vacated their apartments for the duration of the loudest disturbances: Friday evenings and Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Teeth-gritting tolerance notwithstanding, the children’s barrages soon brought things to a head and residents erupted. However, any worries about their complaints reflecting poorly on their characters proved groundless. Their complaints didn’t even register on club members. The children continued to play as loudly as before, as often, and for as long as their parents chose to visit, as if nothing had ever been said, as if, as time went on, the same insistent complaint had not been raised dozens of times.

So far from making any attempt to restrain their children, club members radiated satisfaction at the transformation of courtyard into playground and soccer field for the little ones. The reason for their satisfaction was readily apparent to me: Far from trying or even wishing to honor residents’ requests to keep the children quiet, it was the express intention of the mothers in particular to keep the kids outside burning up as much energy as possible for as long possible, late into the night if that’s how long they happened to stay: the children would be that much quieter when they finally got them home, and that meant welcome, probably overdue, relief for the mothers. As an extra bonus, they could appease their children during the week with promises of more untrammeled play in that sequestered courtyard in just a few days’ time. For that relief, any sacrifice of community peace was pocketed with insouciance.

On the very first afternoon, when the full dimensions of the nightmare were not yet discovered and I had not yet gauged the depth of my adversary’s hide, I hurried down, penetrated the raucous scores rapidly gathering, approached the open clubroom door, and asked the first person I saw if I could speak to whoever was in charge, as if anyone could be in charge of chaos. But lo and behold, someone was in charge, because the person left without a word and within a minute a woman walked toward me with self-conscious purpose, followed by a small retinue of supporters. This resulted in my having to field objections, challenges, and arguments from seven or eight people the moment I expressed my request that they please consider the people who lived in the building and be quieter. Each rebuffed my request with equally vigorous, equally jejune rhetoric. “We live here now.” “We’re the owners.” “We can set up chairs out here if we want to.” (That one surprised me; I hadn’t mentioned the chairs set up some distance away on which a gathering of members sat drinking beer.) In response to my remark that the children were much too loud, a highly impassioned mother sounded off three times running: “Children are the future!” and so readily that it gave me the impression she had imbibed the slogan raw during a recent seminar for young mothers in defense of children making noise. The most disturbing remark of all, however, came from another young mother: “You live in the middle of the city. You can’t expect it to be quiet.” “But I don’t live in the middle of the city,” I replied. “I live in the center of a private courtyard, where it used to be very quiet.” “When was that?” she returned rather snidely. “Seventy years ago?” “The building didn’t exist then,” I informed her, managing to maintain a rather stilted equanimity.

One man, more determined than the rest, more direct, his sullen laser gaze a little deadly, pushed his way through the flurried mothers and addressed me with an edge in his voice, “You’ve had trouble with noise in this courtyard before.” He seemed to be accusing me. “Yes,” I admitted. “It’s been a problem.” “With the homeless,” he said. “Yes,” I repeated. “It’s been a problem.” “And you couldn’t do anything about that.” I was about to answer that we were working on it, but he withdrew, his argument stated and concluded. Of what I was to be convinced, I was not sure, but I felt it was an ominous beginning.

And so began a fractured, unprofitable exchange that continued for three weeks – my asking them to tone it down and their ever more impatient, frenzied rebuttals: “You can’t keep children quiet. The German law even says so.” Which was true. My response being: “That’s why we have specially designated playgrounds for children. This is not one of them. Your children are not allowed to play here because they are so loud. It disturbs everyone.” My remark was rewarded with the familiar, slightly hysterical: “Children are the future.”

The unlovely attempts at exchange ended with my third visit to the club in as many intensely disturbing weekends. At this visit, the laser-gazed man broke through the inconsequential bevy of protesting mothers to address me curtly once again, but with a sinister message. “Don’t come around here with your complaints any more,” he warned me. “Whether you like it or not, don’t come telling us. We don’t want to see you again. You’re bothering us.” I did leave in good time, aware that I had spoken to them for the last time. The man had not frightened me; I would have rather snarled and lunged, but who would have been hauled away then? However, I know a threat when I hear one, and if he ever chances to address me in such a tone with such an ultimatum again, I will report him to the police. But it was clear to me that the exchanges were only doing me damage without affecting the club members in the slightest. Worse, another visit might give a face to the enemy, so to speak, and I did not want to attach this miserable misfortune to a face or person. I had been caught in the fury of a fatality that had mired us residents like a mudslide; it would be a mistake and only an added personal affliction to develop, however unwillingly or involuntarily, a vendetta against any individual in that group, for example, the guy with the laser gaze.

I stopped all contact with them after that and directed my energy towards informing my landlord of the urgency to do something about the situation (many letters); getting advice from my consultant at the tenant association (several meetings); finding out to what degree club activities could be legally subdued to a level tolerable for residents (fruitless Web searches); discovering what the heck was in that room to sustain members and children for whole days outside (a visit to a Facebook page with dozens of hair-raising photos displaying all the evidence: the bar with the dozens of bottles those happy members drank from when they did choose to go inside; the kitchen completely equipped for preparing and serving full meals; the hired help fitted up with the mandatory plastic glove as they posed cutting limes wedges for tipping into drinks; egad, weave them tents and the members would move in).

A special meeting of the landlords has been convoked, but repeatedly postponed, and from it I expect little anyway. The infringement to be addressed has been consistently misplaced. The monotonous lamentation of the tenants continues to be that the whole thing is hopeless because German law has proclaimed that nothing can be done about the noise children make. But the issue is not the noise the children make; it is whether the children are to be permitted to make that noise in a privately-owned courtyard. According to the tenant association, the answer to that is no. If our representatives are not in full grip of that understanding, we will fail, but not on my account. I have written numerous letters to correct their focus, yet the lamentation continues, tipping me off that consciousness has not been raised and that our prosecution on that point is likely to misfire.

The second critical point is whether club members are allowed to use the courtyard at all if, by doing so, they disturb the other tenants. Again, the answer is no. The city’s zoning description for our area clearly states: “Areas of mixed use are to serve as home for residents and as a location for businesses insofar as those businesses do not fundamentally disturb the living quality in the area.” But that edict reduces us to wrangling about what “fundamentally disturbs” means, which is where we are now. And we all know, whoever makes the disturbance does not consider it a disturbance.

By this time, we are well aware that no compromise is possible because the club cannot compromise. It has neither the organizational sophistication nor the authority to regulate the behavior of its members. It cannot accede to residents’ demands, declaring they infringe on the rights of its club members. And club members themselves dismiss out of hand any direct requests to subdue their behavior or restrain their children.

But we are also well aware that the club is harshly incompatible with the community into which it has moved. The club cannot function without causing immediate and acute distress to all other occupants, who are not served in the slightest by the club’s activities.

For these reasons, I believe the only fair solution to the problem is to ask the club, which is fully portable – it could do what it is doing to the full satisfaction of its members in innumerable locations – to move. It must find itself a location compatible with its purposes, into rooms sizeable enough to accommodate its members, in an area where the surrounding shops and malls and businesses can absorb their activities imperviously. Karlshof is not that spot.

However, we are also well aware that is not going to happen.

Urban landscapes are mutable. This won’t be the last undulation our little Munich courtyard undergoes. Today, the comfort of a community composed of residents at home in 70 apartments is being sacrificed to the interests of a club, and residents who don’t like it will move. One day for some reason the club will have to go, maybe when they tear the building down. It’s a terrible building, constructed of poor cement, leaky joints, gutters just wide enough for nesting pigeons, thirty-year-old insulation, drafty windows, too few electric sockets per living unit, grubby stairwells, central ventilation that shuts down at night letting stale cigarette smoke from who knows where seep into my apartment, at any rate. But you get used to a place. How you get used to a place.