Indifferent Frauleins

BUCHAREST?The American journalists I know in Berlin just love the place. Why, for goodness' sakes? This ability of Berlin to win foreigners' affections has to be one of the great mysteries of globalization. Berlin resembles New York for pedestrian-friendliness (cross against a light and you die), Washington for the monotony of its architecture (it's uniformity punctuated by pomposity) and Houston for its general layout (it's eight times the size of Paris and you really need a car to cross it). And the faster globalism progresses, the more it looks like the downtown of any city in the Western farmlands. Bonn is nice, Munich is beautiful and Hamburg may be the most elegant city in northern Europe. I'm generally fond of Germany, but there has always been something about it that has rendered it a drag, and made me glad to leave, and I've never been able to put my finger on it.

But here is a guess: it's that the women in Germany are invisible. It's not that they are less welcome in public places, as in certain Islamic countries?or that they're self-effacing, as they are in the more macho Catholic ones. It's just that sometime in the past 25 years they've developed an outright indifference to personal appearance, and even cleanliness. You never see a German woman in a dress?never. America, too, went through a period, around 1974-1977, when the only people who wore dresses were prostitutes and assistant principals. But we came out of it. In Germany, you are more likely to see a man in a coat of mail than you are to see a woman in a dress. Trousers can be attractive on a woman, of course?but in Germany they're not. All the women seem to wear the same ensemble of baggy black jeans and lumpy burlap...what do you call them? They're not sweaters, not shirts. Just "tops." Professional women merely wear a lighter-weight drugget. The only people you see wearing similar getups in the United States are the men who come to your house to fix the sump pump.

Men are pretty slovenly in Germany, too, but less so relative to the worldwide standards of their gender. The result is the first Western society (in this generation, at least) in which the peacock model of gender relations applies: The males are more gussied up than the females. This country is, of course, the world capital of 59-year-old men with 200-dollar permanents. This may have something to do with Germany's declining population?a looming catastrophe for a society that has the most generous welfare state in the world, and in which a small number of young workers support a large number of old retirees.

Population decline has become a chic topic for the country's economists. (The Deformed Society, by the economist Meinhard Miegel, which paints the German economy as a kind of time bomb, was probably the most talked-about book of the last election campaign.) But population growth and contraction have their role in gender relations, too, as James Q. Wilson has recently pointed out. Men are on average three years older than the women they marry. So in a growing society, a man born in year X will have a disproportionately large pool of women born in the year X+3 to choose from. In these societies, women will make a disproportionate effort to attract a limited pool of men. In a shrinking society, a man born in year X has slim pickings from the women in year X+3. So in that case, it's the men who are disposed to pretty themselves up.

Get it? Societies in which women fuss about their appearance are rising ones. Societies in which men fuss about their appearance are declining ones. You could put it even more strongly and say that feminism is an a priori sign of cultural decline. But I won't say that. At least not now.

Here in Bucharest

I came to Romania a few days ago to talk to a delegation of journalists about freedom of the press, although you can never take anything for granted. The late Auberon Waugh's memoir Will This Do? mentions his having been invited to a small African country to give a lecture on breast feeding. A friend of a friend had told the ambassador that Waugh was one of England's most provocative speakers on the subject. It was only when Waugh arrived for the conference and received the introductory brochures that he realized the conference was not on breast feeding but press freedom. I'm not sure I believe it.

The day last summer when I agreed to attend this conference was a busy one for me. If it hadn't been I might have refused. "Oh, sure, I'll come," I said. "I'm going to be in Berlin anyway." It had slipped my mind for a moment where Romania was. I was thinking it'd be a 45-minute hop, like to Warsaw or Prague. If I got bored I could blow out and get back for dinner. Only yesterday when I was flying over the Balkans did it occur to me that it's way past Hungary and Serbia, three hours' flight into the Ottoman Empire.

The pleasantness of Bucharest comes as something of a shock. I basically expected Romania to be one of those countries where they force you to drink liquors with names like Szwprzyvla that make you fall down, and that's all there is to do. This may be because everything I knew about postwar Bucharest comes from Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December, which is not a work that exactly piques one's touristic interest. There are indeed entire streets here that have been given the Ceausescu treatment. Beautiful old Romanesque and Turkish monuments and churches and mosques were torn down to build mammoth apartment blocks of an ugliness that is impressive even for the Eastern Bloc. Contractors somehow perfected a technique here of stucco-izing concrete, which they were able to slather onto the front of buildings in such a way that, when it rains, the whole facade gets so damp and mildewy-looking that you can almost smell it; and when it's dry, the stuff slowly chips off in little scurfy triangles that dust the sidewalks. But about a third of the old buildings remain, which means the dictatorship that ruled after 1965 cannot have destroyed the city's architectural heritage any faster than, say, the Boston City Council did during the same period. One of the great myths of Cold War propaganda that I was unduly quick to swallow was that the buildings in the East Bloc were uglier than ours. They are extraordinarily ugly, I'll grant you that. But they're not uglier. Right now, I'm looking across the street at what is probably the most hideous building in town, but it has nothing on Boston's City Hall.

Even Tarom, the national airline, turns out to be quite nice; the thing I traveled on, at least, was a Boeing 737, the coffee was strong (if not Turkish, as one might have hoped) and the piping-hot hand towels they pass out seem to have real lemons squeezed into them. There were a few moments of premonitory dread back at Berlin Tegel, when I saw the tin-can planes from the other ex-Soviet-bloc nations taxiing across the tarmac. With their propellers way far out on the wings, or their funny, squared-off pilot's windows, they were certainly unique?not a quality prized by international air travelers. Of course it's safe! you can hear the stewardesses saying to petrified passengers on Air Slobovia back in the 1980s. The dictator's son designed it.