"Munich"

After six-plus fairly tedious hours, our flight finally landed in Frankfurt with a connection on to Munich where we would be joined by our technical crew from a company called Intertel, based in Basel, Switzerland but made up primarily of former BBC technicians. After a stretch of the legs and some duty-free shopping in the sprawling Frankfurt 'Flughafen', we flew on to Munich, or more correctly 'Munchen'.

I don't remember exactly what I'd expected, but Munich surprised me in several ways. Although I knew the city had suffered heavy damage from Allied bombing raids in World War II, less than twenty years later there was not a hint of damage to be seen. The city had been meticulously rebuilt and in 1964 was a striking mix of old and new, ultra-modern and medieval, and somehow it all worked.

The people were warm and friendly, the food (and those great Mosel wines) was wonderful and our hotel, The Excelsior, was clean, modern and comfortable in an almost Spartan way - except for the absolute luxury of eiderdown. But you could never entirely forget that this was where Hitler and the Nazi Party got its start, where they staged the 'Beer Hall Putsch' in an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic, where they built the first concentration camp just outside the city.

And Munich was the year-round home of "Europe's Largest Circus", Circus Krone. All the big European circuses had permanent headquarters where they would 'winter', Circus Krone in Munich, Circus Schumann in Copenhagen, Trolle-Rodin in Amsterdam. And in the summer months, they all sent out traveling tent shows that might visit as many as thirty cities between April and October. And there were dozens of smaller tent shows that toured the continent nine months of the year.

There are significant differences between the European and American approach to circus. Unlike the American three-ring emphasis on spectacle, European circus is one ring and with a greater focus on style and theatricality. In European circus, you quickly became aware of traditions and characters, especially among the clowns, that seemed missing in American circus. And you often felt the audiences treated it more as an art form than a mere entertainment. Although this was many years before Cirque de Soleil, the European circuses we videotaped in 1964 were far closer to that theatrical sensibility than to the American 'Big Top'.

We spent over a month in Munich, the physical set-up at Circus Krone as ideal as any we would encounter on the entire trip. We built three camera platforms for optimum coverage of the ring as well as overhead for the aerial acts, especially the 'high trapeze', and a fourth camera at ringside for close-up's and the pan to and from Don Ameche. By using the Marconi cameras favored by the BBC, their higher resolution gave our video, even after conversion to the U.S. standard, a better image quality than was usually seen on American television.

Audiences always love the clowns and the European clowns were among the best I've ever seen, often more acrobatic than their American counterparts. Risley acts (juggling people or objects with the feet) were always popular, but the highlight of any circus performance is the trapeze and the Holy Grail of trapeze is 'the triple', a triple somersault in midair. We were very fortunate to record a 'triple' at Circus Krone although I'm embarrassed to admit I've forgotten the name of the man who did it.

While in Munich, by an accident of timing, we were also able to videotape the Vienna Ice Revue's 25th Anniversary production, "Gluckstraume" (which loosely translates "dreams of luck") which was on tour and we would have otherwise missed by the time we got to Vienna. Ice shows too had a slightly different feel in Europe. American shows like "Ice Capades" and "Ice Follies" also put the emphasis on spectacle while the European shows placed greater emphasis on precision and performance. I'm not suggesting that the Europeans were better skaters, only that the quality of their skating was valued more highly than how many of them you could put on the ice.

It was in a taxi en route to the Bayernhalle in Munich to see the "Wiener Eisrevue" that I became the unofficial translator for the company. How I wished I'd been a better student in Mr. Parisi's German class! Yet I found myself speaking better German than most of my companions. Although I joked that I was always looking for store windows that said, "high school German spoken here", I somehow managed to make myself understood - a trick that would come in very handy by the time I got to Budapest.

We could usually get two or three one-hour programs out of one major circus, and still be able to 'bank' a few acts for compilation shows. But Circus Krone, with so many acts booked for two touring companies as well as their home venue, was a bonanza, easily enough for four shows plus at least two more from the Vienna Ice Revue. Our trip was off to an impressive start, but the next leg of our journey was an unknown to say the very least. No American television crew had "gone behind the Iron Curtain" and no one knew what to expect.

On our last weekend in Munich, I did something that some might have found out-of-character. I took a tour of a place just 16 kilometers outside of Munich, the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. In 1964, Dachau was exactly as the allies had found it when the camp was liberated in 1945. I looked at the horrific photos while standing on the very spots where they were taken. I saw the barracks, the showers, the ovens, all of it. (I was appalled that someone had recently carved a heart and initials on the wooden frame around one of the ovens.) Almost twenty years after the camp's liberation, the smell of death was still in the air.

Being neither German nor Jewish, I can't entirely explain why I felt the need to experience this piece of history firsthand, but I did.*

* An acquaintance of mine recently told me that he doesn't believe the holocaust ever happened. He also doesn't believe we ever landed on the moon. There is little point trying to change his mind. This first-person account is not for him, it is for you.


NEXT: "Behind the Iron Curtain"