October 13, 2005 – Munich in November

October 13, 2005 – Munich in November

It’s November 3rd 1990 at 9:15 AM on a Saturday morning. I’m outbound on American Airlines flight 278 in aisle seat 28C en route to Chicago Ohare, an intermediate stop before my final destination in Munich. Ohare is one of the great airports in this country in my opinion. Centrally located in the U.S., it also affords the perfect jumping off place for international flights over the pole to Europe or Asia. I was a card carrying member of AA’s Admiral’s Club and had become a regular visitor to the one located at the fork in the “Y” that Concourse H and K forms in Terminal 3. You enter the club through frosted glass sliding doors, take an elevator up one floor, and check into the reception desk on your right as you leave the foyer formed by the opposing banks of elevators each bank with two elevators. Weary travelers trailing wheeled black boxed shaped carry-ons, or like me, lugging a hanging soft-sided wardrobe folded in half and slung over my shoulder: two suits, jogging sweats, six dress shirts, six ties, dress shoes, and enough sox and underwear to last a full week. After displaying your club card you can stand in line to get seat assignments or make itinerary changes, or like me, already checked in with an assigned seat through my destination, hang up the garment bag and find a seat to rest the two hours before the next leg of my flight. We had landed at 3.34 PM Central Standard Time.

The dark wood paneled club is a collection of separate seating areas. Across from the reception desk on the left is the large luggage storeroom and beyond is a walkway that opens into a seating area after a short walk. On either side of the walkway are other seating areas that form an upside down “U” enclosing the hallway, reception area, and elevator banks. To the right are cubicles with computer and phone hookups: good place to check e-mails—back then we were all on CompuServe—and make phone calls. In front and to the left are seating areas separated by short dividers or low couches. At the bottom of the upside down “U” on the left is a bar. In front of that is a seating area surrounding a big screen television running CNN non-stop. I had a phone card back then and could speed dial the long distance number and key in my card number in no time. On a Saturday afternoon, the only call I made was to my wife IM to let her know I was enjoying the club’s amenities: “the flight was on time… Nothing unusual happened en route... I had the cereal choice for breakfast on board... It will be late at night when I land so I’ll call when you wake up on Sunday and tell you what Germany is like…xo xo.” I pass on CNN and a drink at the bar, choosing instead to finish the book I had begun on the plane. I forget the title of the book, though it was probably a Sara Paretsky, V.I. Warshawski novel—I was big into her back then.

It’s 5:45 PM and I’m strapped into seat 37H on American Airlines flight 110 outbound for Munich, a wide body DC10, the air conditioning blowing full blast as we push back from the gate and head out onto the taxiway. I can’t remember the number of times, I had been strapped into a plane on the taxiway of Ohare Airport. Each time I get the same feeling, expectation if I’m on an outbound flight, and anxiousness on inbound flights heading home. Today’s journey is new and I’m full of expectation. This will be my first time ever in Germany. My other European sojourns were to countries all around Deutschland. A part of me was coming home: my father’s father was a German immigrant, thus making me a quarter German. I had begun to study the language in an attempt to learn appropriate greetings and to be polite. Taking off into an evening sun, it wasn’t long before dinner service was completed and the cabin was darkened for the video entertainment, which I chose to ignore hoping to catch some sleep during the 10-hour flight.

At 10:00 AM, Sunday morning November 4, 1990, flight 110 touched down at the old Munich Airport at Messestadt-Riem on the eastern extreme of the Munich metropolitan area about 7 km from the city center, where I was staying. I’m in Munich to attend one of the largest electronics trade shows in Europe, Electronica. The four-day event fills the old Munich Trade Fair Center with several thousand exhibitors—from the great to the small—of everything electronic from all over the continent, each hoping to impress some of the over 100,000 who will attend the event this year. The Cleveland-based publishing company I work for has sent me to cover the conference along with two vice president JA and JZ as well as the sales manager and publisher for the magazine, JF and JU, respectively. I have the advantage of having our Munich-based bureau editor JG, who will help me spend my time effectively while here.

I take a cab to the Intercity Hotel at Bahnohofsplatz 2 in Munich City Center right at the Hauptbahnhof (main train station). The Intercity is your 3-star or less hotel that visitors like us who wait until the last minute to reserve get when a major event fills the city’s sleeping rooms. Originally, everyone was supposed to stay at this hotel thanks to our travel agent, who had no other options. However, I received a call from JG telling me that the Intercity was not a fit place for company executives. I asked JG if he could impose on his marketing communications contacts at Siemens to see if they may have a spare room at one of their hotels that could accommodate our two VPs from Cleveland. JG was able to acquire two rooms from Siemens at the five-start Penta Hotel (now part of the Marriott Renaissance Hotel Chain). They would not know that there had been a snafu. We simply gave them their hotel accommodations and they told the cab driver to take them there from the airport. Executives are like modern-day children; they seem to get everything they expect and complain when it’s not so. When they check in at the front desk, the clerk smiles politely and asks them in perfect English for their names and the length of their stay. I on the other hand have to use my atrocious German picked up from the Berlitz German Cassette Pack during October and the accompanying phrase book to go through the process. My clerk was non-committal and allowed me to make my best effort before she would question me first in German then in English that resembled my German. Thus we were able to get through the registration process and happily no one was behind me waiting to register.

As soon as I arrive in my room on the third or fourth floor of the hotel, I call JG who I invite to dinner Sunday evening suggesting he should bring his wife along. She wisely chooses not to come—IM demurs to these invitations as well complaining the conversation will be shoptalk all evening and she’s right of course. After the call, I crawl into my jogging sweats and take a 45-minute run hoping it will either let me sleep for a hour or two or keep me awake until my dinner with JG—he’s coming to the hotel and will ring my room when he arrives. JG is of my father’s generation. Their view of the world was shaped by the Great War and of the discipline that has demanded to wage it on both sides. My father served as an enlisted man ultimately reaching the rank of staff sergeant. Enlisted men lived in one world and officers in another. The former had the responsibility to direct the war, the latter simply carried out the direction. As magazine editor I was analogous to the staff sergeant in the Army. With no direct responsibility for generating income, my staff and I were overhead—SG&A in the vernacular of the finance world.

My first run in Munich was out the front door of the Intercity Hotel a right turn onto Bayerstrasse, which parallels one of the train tracks heading out of the Hauptbahnhof. The first part of the run is along a sidewalk that on a weekday would be crowded with shoppers for the 20th century storefronts—to distinguish them from those in the city center predating the 20th century—along the sidewalk. Three-quarters of a mile into the run, Bayerstrasse turns into Landsberger Strasse and the urban gives way to the suburban: car dealerships, light industry, a lumberyard—the smell of wood a welcome alternative to carbon monoxide. Just over two miles out I turn around and retrace my route. After getting a shower I feel purged of the travel karma, though my biological clock is still keeping California time. I forego lunch and instead begin a walking tour of the old city center which is located left of the hotel entrance on Bayerstrasse. You walk through an arched gate, the Karlstor (Karl’s gate), that resembles the Arc de Triomphe in shape, sans the ornate relief art, with each tower abutting buildings a couple of hundred years old on either side. In front of the Karlstor is the Karlsplatz, but often referred to as Stachus. Karlplatz is named for Elector Karl Theodor, who had the square laid out in 1791. It’s a expansive circular pedestrian area with large circular water fountain in the center with flattop rounded stones for seating. Being November it was brisk outside, but it didn’t deter anyone. Karlsplatz was teaming with tourist as I wandered about, the sound of German being accommpanied by French, English, and other languages as I walked among the crowd.

JG arrived at around 7:00 PM that evening and rang my room. He said he would meet me in the bar, where I found him ministering to a mug of draft beer. We had not seen each other in over eight years, when he had come to New York for an editors gathering when the magazine was owned by McGraw-Hill. I joined him at the bar and ordered a glass of red wine and we caught up on all the gossip about friends now retired or working part time, how the industry was doing in Germany, the politics affecting the country. We also caught up on magazine business that we had been discussing in e-mails. Finally, after we’d finished our drinks, he announced that we were going to a nice restaurant a short walk from the hotel. Jet lagged as I was, I managed to make it through dinner and several rounds of drinks before retiring for the night, JG promising to meet me in the morning at the hotel and from there we would go to the fairgrounds. Before we parted for the evening, JG asked if I would like to see Neuschwanstein Castle on Friday after the conference. I gladly accepted unaware that he meant Bavarian King Ludwig II famous “fairy tale” structure built between 1869 and 1886 that Americans know as the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle in Disneyland.

Munich has been in the business of hosting trade fairs for over 1000 yeas. In 1158, German King and Roman Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa) granted Henry the Lion, the founder of Munich, the right to mint coins as well as a charter to begin a market. Up until the 20th Century, fairs were held throughout the city. Then in 1908, Munich established a dedicated fairground at Theresienhoehe, just over a kilometer from the Haupfbahnhof, a matter of a few minutes by the U-Bahn that JG hauled me aboard early Monday morning. The underground was beginning to crowd with other early risers on their way to the fair. The grounds are huge comprising 47 hectares of land, with 25 to 30 individual exhibit halls, built around Bavariapark, a tree-filled rhombus shaped plot of green large enough to take some part of a half hour to walk all way round. Exhibit halls lock the park in on all sides save the entrance on the west—the longest side of the rhombus.

Trade fairs all resemble one another with exhibit booths from the sublime 10-by-10-foot cube—the standard exhibit element permitted in the halls—to the ridiculously large—an elaborate storefront with conference rooms and exhibits upstairs and downstairs enclosing refreshment areas serving beer, wine, soft drinks and all manner of foods. Some of the booths feature attractive women all hawking the wares of the vendor she’s representing. Others offer elaborate giveaways for taking time to listen to a marketing pitch. No matter what language is being spoken, the message is the same, “buy my wares!” The secret of a great conference’s success—Electronica is certainly one of the greats—is to provide sufficient rationale for companies to pay for its employees to travel to the conference to see what might be available to purchase—from plastic knobs to million-dollar pieces of production equipment.

Editors at these events are there to search out the latest product offerings while having a good time at the expense of the exhibiting companies. JG and I had a full calendar jumping from an interview in one hospitality suite to another. The appointments began at 8:00 AM and were every hour on the hour with a two hour break for lunch, ending at 6:00 PM. The evenings we were invited but not obliged to attend parties at Munich’s many posh hotels. JG begged off an evening of entertaining to spend a quiet evening at home with his family. I didn’t blame him. My Monday evening would be in the service of the magazine’s sales manager. He had been trying to get a meeting with the VP of Marketing Communications, CV, at a large European semiconductor company, who I had a relationship with. During a meeting earlier, I asked CV if he would be the magazine’s guest for dinner at the Terrassen restaurant in the Konigshof Hotel. He asked if he could bring his director of marcom, MP whom I also knew and I said of course she was invited as well as anyone else he wished to bring along.

The sales manager JF was well please to have both these advertising buyers to himself for the evening. I warned him that the reason they accepted our invitation was that I promised we wouldn’t discuss any advertising business. JF accepted the condition, taking the opportunity to build a relationship. It was a great evening with JF being the gracious host asking first about the company’s business, how the market was looking for next year, as well as the long term outlook for the industry in general. The answers to his questions were the bleak story I had already heard of an industry in recession with no immediate sign of a recovery. After we had had our fill of dismal business news, we began exchanging stories of families and the upcoming holidays. CV and MP are both Italian and I had known them for several years. Based near Milan with another office near Geneva, they both spend too much time on planes between these two offices as well as the company’s many far flung facilities in the U.S., Japan, and Asia. The official language of the company is English to accommodate all the many different operations, but the Italian CEO, a legend in the Industry, speaks English, French, his native Italian, as well as German—a renaissance man in many ways—as do many of the other corporate executives.

There is an interesting dynamic occurring between the four of us at the table over dinner, largely because in the past, it wasn’t the done thing to have editor and sales manager speaking with a potential magazine advertiser at the same time. Publisher and editor were acceptable since the publisher would not ask for business in the presence of an editor. It would be awkward for the customer since a refusal might diminish him in the eyes of the editor who impartiality would be affected. Though I assured both of them that no business would be discussed, I suspect both still felt awkward and reserved with JF in case the conversation would drift into the realm of future advertising possibility. It was a turning point for me as well. I had become that concerned about the future of the magazine, which was suffering dreadfully from a marked decline in advertising support, and its ability to maintain the already diminished staff we had still working. We had already had one major round of layoffs. I felt I could compromise my editorial integrity in the mind of our guests a bit if it might result in improving the magazine’s prospect for survival.

JF and I had a more dinners over the two remaining days of the conference. All were similar in nature to the one we had with CV and MP. Everyone was in the same boat, an industry in recession and dramatic reduction in spending on advertising. Such cutbacks had less impact on immediate business in contrast to something such as spending lavishly to attend Electronica. The logic was hard to refute since a single order from a major customer that resulted from participation in the exhibition would easily justify the cost.

By Friday, I was happy to be rid of my duties as Judas goat and both depressed at having to assume the role and disappointed that the sacrifice appeared to have been for naught. I was very happy to see JG pull up in his Volkswagen hatchback as I waited in front of the Intercity Hotel eager to be away from the hustle and bustle of Munich. It was close to 10:00 AM when we began the 128-kilometer drive (nearly 100 miles) south west to Neuschwanstein Castle. As soon as we got near, I recognized the structure as would just about any other American, an immediately recognizable icon. The lush green, forested mountains surrounding the structure gave it a reality that the Anaheim imitation could not conjure—yet both were attempts to bring a fantasy to life. King Ludwig II was trying to bring the world of Wagner’s opera into being; Walt Disney the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale.

The visit to Neuschwanstein Castle was the appropriate ending to a week of 12- to 15-hour days filled with continuous stimulation, with little time to concentrate on any one thought for more than a moment at a time. Following the tour through the castle—a small group as we were well into the off season and it was cold outside—I was able to see inside King Ludwig’s imagination. He left a clear picture of it in stone. The castle had survived its creator and continues to be preserved by the countless numbers of visitors who, like me, come to marvel and contribute to its upkeep and maintenance. I envied Ludwig his creation. It had become part of the human psyche.

JG and I had early dinner that evening at a restaurant near my hotel in Munich after the drive back. I thanked him, turned in early, and got up early Saturday for the flight back home, through Chicago arriving back in San Jose early evening.