Brian Melican finds erudite humour in a book by German comedian and former tour guide Tilman Birr…
A few weeks back, I came across a review of a book called On se left you see se Siegessäule: Erlebnisse eines Stadtbilderkärers whose title intrigued me enough to procure it.
As an Englishman who has learnt German, just the moniker on its own was enough to bring a wry smile to my face: read in German, the title gives you the typical accent of a German trying (and failing) to master that peculiarly tricky English dental fricative, the “th” sound: i.e. “On ze left, you see ze Ziegessoile.”
In the book, poetry-slammer, on-stage voice-artist, and general entertainer Tilman Birr gives a lightly fictionalised account of a post-student-days-summer spent working as a tour guide on the Berlin Spree River boats – and if you read good German, this informative comedy tale is well worth a read.
Birr’s narrator (who, we have every reason to believe, is Birr himself) recounts the perils, pitfalls, and pleasures of that job we’ve all asked ourselves countless questions about. Depending on the guide, I usually ending up wondering either “How can you say the same thing to 10 groups of people every day and still make it sound fresh” or, conversely, “Just when did your will to live finally limp out of your body and get lodged in the microphone?”
Birr gives us the other perspective: but this isn’t just a diatribe against tourists, who of course with their bumbags and stupid questions always make an inviting comedy target. Birr’s sharp wit is directed against everyone, including his former colleagues with their typical Berlin chips on their shoulders, and his former friends as they move out of their carefree twenties and into their death-by-office thirties.
In fact, Birr is the perfect satirist: an outsider with very little sympathy for anyone, including himself and his own kind. Born in the West, he hates the arrogance and lack of self-awareness of the self-satisfied professional classes there – especially in their incarnation as tourists – but Berlin’s stereotypical stock of gruff-but-chirpy, cheeky-chappy types who can’t answer even the simplest question without some kind of quip get on his nerves too.