The Graffiti

How did they even get up there?

           I try to look past the graffiti to the beauty of the nineteenth-century building underneath, but it’s really difficult when that graffiti is a drawing of an ejaculating penis.  Graffiti is just something I don’t understand about Germany.  In the US, you only see graffiti in places where fifteen year olds try to buy alcohol because they accidentally made themselves twenty on their fake IDs.  Here in Germany, there’s graffiti all over the place.  It’s on grocery stores in nice neighborhoods.  It’s on gracious apartment buildings.  It’s on hospitals.  Nobody cleans it up, and nobody seems to notice it.

I live in a quiet, family-oriented neighborhood, but the aforementioned ejaculating penis graffito greets me on my way to the subway.  There are many graffiti penises around town, many just as large, and many ejaculating with great gusto.  What makes my local penis so special is that it is spray painted on the lovely, and surely expensive, marble porte-cochère of a building that houses the offices of a hundred year old charitable trust.  I have lived down the street from this penis for several months, and nobody has made an attempt to power scrub it into a faint penis memory.

My favorite :)

This is not to say that the Germans are slovenly, they certainly are not.  Public parks are beautifully maintained, the streets are free of litter, and pot holes are fixed in under thirty seconds.  All this cleanliness makes the presence of the graffiti all the more perplexing.  Some of it is very funny, though.  Today I saw some graffiti that read, “Bambi ♥’s Goethe.”  Now that was pretty funny.  Near where I used to live, a yellow building sports a wedge of Swiss cheese with the words “Money to eat, and cheese for all!”  (Translated from the original German)  That was more cracked out than funny, but it struck me as something vaguely worthwhile.

Looking out my living room window, I can see the letters POS! on the adjacent building.  I really want to sneak out in the middle of the night and clean it off, but I worry I might end up having to explain myself to a confused German policeman or landlord.  I don’t know if I will really be able to express the sentiment, “AHHHHHHH  - - -   I don’t care if this is a nice street – this POS! crap is making me feel like I live in a 1980s New York City subway car such as the one depicted in the opening scene of My Dinner with Andre!  It must go away now!” adequately in German. 

This is actually a lovely apartment building in a nice neighborhood

             So I continue on my daily walk past the jubilant male member, every day visually reminded that I am in Germany and not in America.  Not only is there a graffiti penis, but it’s uncircumcised.