By coincidence last week, I stumbled on to a movie and a book where trains play a prominent role in the storyline. They even share an educational component:
Wim Wenders, The American Friend. Wenders directed this 1977 German-French film starring Dennis Hopper and a young Bruno Ganz the late, great actor who portrayed Adolf Hitler in “Downfall”, but is currently well known for all those Hitler memes.
"The American Friend" is set in Hamburg and Paris, and Ganz plays a dying man who is recruited indirectly by Hopper to be an assassin. Ganz carries out his first assignment in the Paris subway system and then with assistance from Hopper, he tosses a couple of men off the train while traveling from Munich to Hamburg. Later after the deed, Hopper poses a math problem to Ganz over beers, “If you throw a gangster out of train going eighty miles an hour, and then you throw a second one, (and you know the distance between the two discarded bodies), how much time passes between the two events if the train doesn’t change speeds?”
W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. The German-born Sebald (1994-2001) is one of my favorite writers over the past few years. Sebald often includes trains and train stations in his narratives. Black and white photographs – like they came out of an old family album – are always part of a Sebald book. One of the chapters entitled “Paul Bereyter” is about a retired schoolteacher who ends his life on a December night in 1984 by laying down on a curve of the railroad track. (Shown here)
The narrator is one of Bereyter’s students and he recalls how much “railways had always meant a great deal to him (Bereyter) – perhaps he felt they (railways) were headed for death. Timetables and directories, all the logistics of railways, had at times become an obsession with him…I thought of the stations, tracks, goods, depots and signal boxes that Paul had so often drawn on the blackboard and which we had to copy into our exercise books as carefully as we could.”
Readers of Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire can appreciate how these two works might have appealed to me. The main character of D & O works in “mass transit counter-intelligence” and writes in the form of a “personal journal of case narratives which he hopes to eventually turn into a television script.” However, the similarities end there, as I am no Wim Wenders or W.G. Sebald. The last sentence sounds like a possible book blurb.