How We Were Chased out of Görlitz: Wes Anderson Meets Reality

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Warenhaus Görlitz / Lobby of the Grand Budapest Hotel in the film

I must admit that the idea of spending the weekend in Görlitz came up after watching the film, Grand Budapest Hotel, filmed in the south-eastern German town just 200 km south of Berlin. The foyer of the said hotel is the atrium of a department store, built in 1913. It is a survivor of two world wars, the rise and fall of the Nazis, Communist East Germany, and the recent years of economic crisis. In the film, the Grand Budapest is a whimsical and stylized hub of international personalities, art thieves, leaders of occupying armies, and the refuge of anti-fascists and illegal immigrants. In Görlitz, the department store is abandoned.

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Untermarkt, Görlitz

We decided to stay in the same hotel where Wes Anderson’s film crew set up shop, the elegant Hotel Börse, in the baroque money exchange on the main square. We could not believe how stunning this little town is: a jewel. Arriving late after-hours, because of a long delay in a traffic jam on the Autobahn, we were charmed as the hotel porter rolled up on his bike with the keys. He had not asked for a deposit of any kind, and we were touched by the small-town trust and kindness. With our car in the Untermarkt, surrounded by Renaissance houses, and cobbles, we felt, in our skinny jeans and the pulse of electronic music still on our radio, like we’d arrived from the wrong century.

Untermarkt Görlitz
Untermarkt Görlitz

For Görlitz is a place apart. After World War Two, Germany to the East of the Oder-Neisse rivers was given to Poland, with the resulting expulsion of up to 14 million Germans, or Vertriebene. Our group of Berliners found it difficult to adjust to the dialect, which we had never heard before. To me, it seemed slurred with wide vowels. We soon realized that we are in the largest town left in Germany where you can still hear the dialect of what is otherwise a vanished land. Görlitz is the last remaining large settlement of Silesia, since it is located west of the rivers, in Upper Lusatia. There is even a Silesian Museum here.

Spring in Görlitz
Spring in Görlitz

Not only is Görlitz (pop. 50 000) a cultural remainder, absorbed into Saxony, it is also one of Europe’s divided towns, and used to span both sides of the river. The bridges were blown up during World War Two, separating it from what became the Polish town of Zgorzelec (pop. 30 000) on the other side. It was only in 2003 that the old-town bridge was rebuilt. Since 2007, with the Schengen agreements, uncontrolled movement between the two sides resumed.

Holy Trinity Church, Görlitz
Holy Trinity Church, Görlitz

The town is deserted on a Friday night; we can hear our feet echo from the cobbles. We are overwhelmed by the age of the place. Görlitz was one of the few historic centres in Germany spared during the Second World War. The concentration of undamaged buildings is such a contrast to the either tawdry or too-perfected confections of reconstruction elsewhere. Here, time has warped the stairwells, softened the cobblestones, given an organic bent to the shape of the 16th-century houses. We enter the Obermarkt where we pass the open door of an old building, beyond which we see what looks like an exhibition space, with antiques, a workshop, tools, chairs in rows as if for a concert, and we decide to walk in.

Abandoned Factory, Görlitz
Abandoned Factory, Görlitz

There are voices from behind a curtain, partly open, and when we pull it back, the assembled company, crowded around an old wooden table in candlelight, to the heat of an ancient wood furnace, look at us curiously. I ask if it is a museum, and they reply that it is a private residence. We are self-conscious that we have trespassed, but we are very kindly asked to join them, and the owner shows us around what was once the old brewery, up the solid stone stairwell, and then on to the deteriorating floors above, where in places you can see down several stories, where the beams are exposed and the floors sagging. It reminds me of 90s spaces in Berlin that you simply can’t find anymore. Each step feels dangerous, so I stop where I am and strum up a conversation with a young man named Andreas who was at the table downstairs.

He has bright eyes and lives in a left-wing collective housing project on H…straße. There’s going to be a brunch on Sunday, then a flea market. ‘You should come’, he says. Then he describes how their home is regularly attacked by neo-Nazis who throw bottles at it, and beat up their lefty friends at city festivals or when they’re walking at night. On the Polish side of the river, he says, the residents have more initiative and more fun than on the German side, where there mentality is more closed and people stick to ‘their own plates’.

Squat, Görlitz
Squat, Görlitz. “Celebrate Decay!!!”

I know a little about these tensions, exploited by the extreme-right NPD party, who in 2005 were allowed to demonstrate in Görlitz’s town square, and in 2009 to put up anti-Polish signs directly on the border (‘Poland invasion stoppen’). The NPD enjoys the greatest popularity of anywhere in Germany in Saxony, having gained 8-12 seats in the regional parliament, and 5.6 to 9.2% of the vote in the last two elections, compared to 1.5% nationwide. In Görlitz, approx. 5% of the vote goes to the far right, feeding off almost 30% unemployment, although most people vote for the CDU or the former Communists, Die Linke.

We all return downstairs, sitting around the wood stove, with the shadows flickering about the roof beams and iron implements, and I am again struck by how this scene could be from the 19th century or from the beginning of the last century. It’s only when one of the local visitors around the table makes a casual anti-Semitic comment that we decide it’s time for us to leave and go to bed.

Görlitz
Görlitz

In the morning, we wander again around town, and visit the magnificent 1913 department store, with its glass atrium, used as the hotel lobby in Wes Anderson’s film; it can only be observed, strangely, through a glass door inside a generic Drogerie, decked with bath products, that now occupies the old foyer.  The nearby 13th-century Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Holy Trinity) church, has a late Gothic altarpiece, high painted vault, and choir stalls with bold inscriptions.

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Peterskirche, Görlitz

But it is St. Peter’s church, the Peterskirche, with its Romanesque doorway, adorned with spooky gargoyles hiding beneath the branches of its arch, luminous 15th-century gothic interior, and organ spangled with suns (1703), that forces me to stop, and simply sit in a pew, and just look up. What a beautiful place.

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Peterskirche, Görlitz

We then slip over to the Polish side, amazed by how easily, and uncontrolledly, one can simply walk between two countries, suddenly aware of the remarkable achievement of European integration. We drink cold Polish lager, and eat hearty pierogies, along the Neisse river looking across to the old German town rising from the opposite bank. Polish Zgorzelec was never the centre of the pre-war old town, and still feels peripheral, with its breezy avenues and Soviet-style blocks hidden behind the waterfront. We buy some Zubrowka vodka in the supermarket for cheap (the brand is the inspiration for Wes Anderson’s republic, its capital in Görlitz) and head back across the river for our disco nap.

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Polish lager, Zgorzelec

You might think we were optimistic to think there is a disco in Görlitz, but there was one, and we will get to that. As the sun went down, we headed back to the Polish side of the river for more grub, and found the atmosphere, after dark, remarkably changed. At the Polish restaurant we laugh loudly around the table in German, order salads, but are then told, around 9:30pm on a Saturday night, with the restaurant still almost full, that the kitchen is now closed. When we pay, we experience a cold shoulder that sets us all speculating as we wander down the riverbank. We enter an underground bar near the bridge, where there’s a long table full of middle-aged German men chugging cheap bear and barking rudely at the lovely waitresses. The drunkards seem like they are going later to a Polish bordello just down the road. The testosterone levels have us scurry back across the river.

Peterskirche, Görlitz
Peterskirche, Görlitz

On the main square, we enter yet another bar, where there’s a long table, unoccupied except for two seats at one end. We ask if can sit down, and a gruff thug tells us, ‘no’. Another voice says, ‘We’ve heard too much English in here’, and we leave quickly to avoid what feels like an escalating situation.

Later that night, we find ourselves in a nightclub, I think the only such establishment in Görlitz. To the thumping trash electronica, young women sway barefoot on the slippery dance floor covered with broken bottles, guarded by their hulking men, with their buzz-cuts, white t-shirts, jeans and black boots. We dance, huddled in a group, as the whole club gives us a wide berth, observing us curiously, with a clear edge of hostility. In the men’s room, I stumble across the beginning of a fight: one man accusing the other of having taken a peek at his penis at the urinal. When I return to the dance floor, we decide it’s safer to walk back to the hotel all together.

Nightclub Görlitz
Nightclub Görlitz

Between these unsettling nocturnal experiences, we end up in a basement bar on the Untermarkt, which was more welcoming, with good electronic music. The locals, yes, stood around the bar, silently, and curiously, watching us stiffly as we danced wildly the whole time, but eventually one of the local men approached us and tentatively began dancing himself. He looked relieved when we asked him if he was from Görlitz.

Holy Trinity Church, Görlitz
Holy Trinity Church, Görlitz

‘Yes, I’m from here! And I’m so happy to see people with some energy arrive, people who don’t care what people think if they want to dance: it’s an event to have you here. And here I’m quoting, because all of us were quite aware of the danger of approaching Görlitz with metropolitan snobbery. We did our best, I think, to try to appreciate the place and relativise its Lutheran inhibitions, or Communist-era mentalities that discourage people from sticking out and bringing trouble to themselves. Our friend continued, ‘You know, it’s really exciting for me to speak English. I lived in Australia for eight months. Sometimes you see people on the street who look like they are from somewhere else, maybe working on a film. You can tell by the way they are dressed. And you hope that they might speak English’. His girlfriend joins us, and, when we tell her we are from Berlin, remarks that she has not been there in twelve years.

Görlitz
Görlitz

 

We were actually surprised to hear how many young people we met (the few, since Görlitz is a retirement hub) have never been to Berlin, or had only been there on shopping trips with their parents as children. Görlitz is not easily reached from the capital. From Berlin, you cannot arrive directly by autobahn, but via a secondary road branching from the small city of Cottbus in Brandenburg through the depopulate plains. Trains (3 hours) from the capital also require a number of changes, usually through Cottbus.

Now, upstairs, I chat with the bar owner in the doorway, as he smokes on the main square. He lived in Berlin for a year, and wanted to open a place here that reminded him of being somewhere else. ‘Except I wanted to be here, I am from here. I know every stone of this town’. He tells me, ‘Berlin is too big’.

Neisse River
Neisse River

I ask him whether he goes to the Polish side, and he replies, ‘No, maybe just for a drink or something cheap to eat. It’s a shame, but we Germans aren’t welcome there. You know, it’s a border mentality’. Our friend downstairs later explains how he was always told, from a young age, that it is dangerous on the Polish side, not to go there, because they will steal your wallet or your car. He repeats those words, ‘it’s a shame’. But, no, he never goes there.

In the morning, the sun finally comes streaming through our windows, we sit out under the glorious facades of the main square eating a good brunch and feeling happy. We bring round the car to pick up our luggage, and leave it where the hotel suggested, in a legal parking space on the main square, near the café. We load up our things, and then one of us wants quickly to visit a shop that sells a dizzying array of mustards. We decide to go and come back in five minutes. We lock the car and have walked 100m when a woman, about 40–years old, whom I noticed also sitting outside at the café, comes running after us to tell us off, that we simply can’t park in the main square all day while we visit the city.

Main Square, Görlitz
Main Square, Görlitz

‘I know you are from Berlin’, she says, emotionally, ‘But here in Görlitz, we have some Bewusstsein [conscience]’.

We are all too shocked to know how to reply. Shit, are they going to chase us out of here with pitchforks? It’s only when we get back in the car, and are on our way, that my Wessie Berliner friend, sitting next to me, shakes her head, disconsolate, saying that she’s ‘never felt so rejected’.

What’s wrong with us? Were we disrespectful? Did we dance too much? Were we too loud? Too conspicuous? Did we have too much fun? Another friend in the back pipes up singing, ‘It’s a small world after all’, and we all join in and try to laugh.

The street sign indicates that we have left the city limits, Görlitz with a bar through it, and she puts her foot to the accelerator.

Entrance to the Grand Budapest Hotel, through the Drogerie
Entrance to the Grand Budapest Hotel, through the Drogerie

 

Joseph Pearson

Joseph Pearson (1975) is writer based in Berlin. Born in Canada, he was educated at Cambridge University, UK, where he received his doctorate in history in 2001. Since 2008, he has written The Needle, which has become one of Berlin's most popular blogs. His portrait of the German capital, Berlin, for Reaktion Press was published in 2017. He is also the essayist and blogger of the Schaubühne Theatre, one of Berlin's best known state-funded institutions. His writing has appeared widely in the press, literary and academic journals, and has been translated into Italian, German, French, and Arabic. Having taught at Columbia University in New York City, he lectures in Berlin at New York University Berlin (since 2012) and the Barenboim-Said Academy.

14 thoughts on “How We Were Chased out of Görlitz: Wes Anderson Meets Reality

  • 23/04/2014 at 03:28
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    I quite enjoyed the story. Thanks very much for posting it. Happy travels!

  • 23/04/2014 at 20:39
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    Thanks for sharing your impressions! Where are you guys from originally? I actually grew up in a village close to Görlitz and I can absolutely understand the impression you got. The region can be very hard to access on a social level. People don’t accept outsiders easily, especially if they come from a city, and especially if they are from Berlin! It’s a shame, as the guy you quoted put it, but it is what it is. Once you go and live there for a while, people will warm up a bit more to ousiders. But I had a friend whose parents had moved to that region 25 years ago, and they were still considered the “newcomers”. The economic situation is quite depressing, and many young people leave. Those who can’t afford to move stay. People are very stingy in spending money on culture, too. They rarely go out for dinner, or to see a movie or a theater play. Being solitary or sticking to one’s own families and relatives is typical. Better to have a BBQ in your backyard or Schrebergarten with some close friends than go to a public place where you’d have to be social. It’s a very different attitude and way of life than, say, in Munich. But people are genuine and kind, and once you’ve become friends with them, you’ll stay friends for a lifetime. There is also a certain East German nostalgia going on – something about feeling left behind by the world and economic developments. If you’re living in this remote place, you feel that even Dresden is already another world. Görlitz also draws from this beautiful old history, but it doesn’t have enough people to fill the old haunts with new life. It’s an “enchanted old ruin”, as Zero Mustafa’s line about the Grand Budapest Hotel goes. Even though the city’s architecture has been restored and many things have come back to life, it still needs people to fill it with activity. Hopefully, one day they will come back! Until then, it will just stay what it is – a vision from a beautiful past with an uncertain future.

    • 31/05/2017 at 19:14
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      Very true. Very nicely written. Your lines describe to mentality over there very well. I also grew up in a little village near Goerlitz (Kodersorf) and can truly say that you nailed it. I mean, I almost love everything about the area I grew up in, but the challenge will be to bring the beauty to life. I pretty much struggle with the really tighten family circles in order to get access to social interactions. Well, I have family over there but it might be pretty challenging if you don’t. The interaction with the polish part of the city seems to be getting better and better over time at least with people of younger age.

  • 24/04/2014 at 22:42
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    Idiots you can find everywhere. But even in Goerlitz they are only a small minority. You were unlucky enough to get in touch with them. But you should not allow them to dominate your impressions of an otherwise so eenjoyable weekend trip to this lovely place. Give Goerlitz a second chance and come again! We will help you forget this unpleasant encounter.

  • 05/05/2014 at 15:58
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    […] Always loved crossing that bridge into another world albeit darker and more mysterious. Had high hopes for the other side. Time to revisit the Oberlausitz and maybe even watch that film.

  • 08/05/2014 at 12:00
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    For those who are more curious than afraid to visit Görlitz, you are welcome to join vagabond´s trip to the east on may 24-25. We will travel in a small group and with french musicians from Berlin who will give a concert at the opening of the exhibition Zukunftsvisionen in a former mental home in Görlitz.
    Details and registration of fb:
    https://www.facebook.com/events/1386311391610284/
    or by mail: silvia@vagabond-berlin.com

  • 13/05/2014 at 16:28
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    I’m very sorry that those things was happened. I live in Goerlitz since one year, before I was 2 years in Berlin and 7 years in Stuttgart. for me it is also hard to live here, with all that disillusioned people and so much hate against foreigners. BUT there are also many intelligent, open minded people like me. and a lot of them try to change something. maybe we should think about to create an “welcome young creative people from all over the world” group, to show all the nice places and integrate visitors much better. and I’m really looking forward to improve my English, it hurts so much that I don’t need it anymore to help lost tourists, like in Berlin.

  • 09/01/2015 at 11:07
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    Great article. I was in Görlitz two summers ago, at the end of a tour of the Harz, Thuringia and Saxony, and it was the high point in a circuit of breathtakingly beautiful places. I’ve just seen the famous film (shame about the ‘plot’ – and lack of believable characters), whose star was clearly Görlitz/Oberlausitz itself – deep in snow! Must get back there for further delving. I arrived by train (from Dresden), and had just hours to take in what was clearly the most unspoilt town in the whole of Germany, perhaps Europe. From the Heiliges Grab Kapelle to the amazing star-vaults in the Peterskirche, not to mention hundreds of gorgeous Renaissance town houses, I found myself in architecture heaven. It’s just as well there are a couple of transport obstacles (from Dresden it was a piece of cake): as long as effort is involved, only those who deserve it can feast their eyes on this pearl of Upper Lusatia – and of a vanished Mitteleuropa.

  • 10/11/2015 at 23:23
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    Great article. I would really like to go there, as I am always after the perfect mitteleuropean town, but I am a bit scared now…

  • 03/02/2016 at 18:55
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    I remember squicky stairwell in Grand Budapest Hotel building, I have only good memories about that place. Each year, on our way to visit my great grandpa, me and my mom spent a day in Goerlitz (mostly shopping : 》). Beautiful town, love it. But the tension between Poles and Germans was always there, I could feel it even as a small girl in early 90’s.

  • 09/02/2016 at 11:40
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    Thanks for the article. Just nitpicking on your German: “Bewussstsein” would mean ‘consciousness’, rather than ‘conscience’, which would be ‘Gewissen’. More probably, the woman said “Selbstbewusssein”, which is best translated as ‘pride’.

  • 08/07/2017 at 03:02
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    This was a lot of fun to read. I lived in Görlitz for several weeks in 2001, when I was selected to participate in an artist exchange program. There were three of us and we lived near the train station. Our studios were located just south of the great church of Sts. Peter and Paul, so we walked through both the Obermarkt and the Untermarket every day. Lovely.

    Our experience with the people of the city was congenial (we being considered semi-celebrities) but initially these Germans were formal, slightly distant. Once we all knew each other by name it was different: being invited to people’s homes for dinner, etc.

    My favorite church was the Holy Trinity near the Obermarkt. Its mysterious interior was obviously centuries old. The decorative treatment of walls and ceiling was like no church I’d ever studied in Italy or France. If I ever returned to Görlitz I would surely document the church for future inspirations.
    Even in 2001 Görlitz had a wonderful inventory of public art. On walks around town I noticed quite a few and they were all expertly fabricated. (One would not expect anything less from a German artist.)

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