NSome of my New York friends and acquaintances wanted to accompany me to the Steuben Parade. Most didn’t know what it was, and those who did stayed away from her just because of that knowledge. Too American. Too much Germanism. I was drawn there for exactly that reason. Until the pandemic, it took place once a year since 1957, always on the third Saturday in September, always on Fifth Avenue, right next to Central Park, between 68th and 86th Streets, Sauerkraut Boulevard. German butcher shops, restaurants and taverns were once located there – hence the name. Some of them, like Heidelberg or the butchers Schaller & Weber, still exist today, but further east on 2nd Avenue. The move is named after Freiherr Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian general who supported George Washington, who later became the first President, in the American War of Independence.
When I got off the subway, the moving vans were already waiting in a side street to be called. There were police officers on every corner. Some wore black, red and gold plastic flower necklaces, as if Hawaii were a German colony. All wagons were the same length and width, and all were pulled by pick-up trucks. Some were clad in light blue and white rhombuses, others decorated in the colors of the city of Cologne, with a coat of arms, a triumvirate and an advertising sign: “Forest Pork Store”. In between, firefighters, members of rifle clubs and traditional costume clubs and families, mothers and daughters in dirndls, fathers and sons in lederhosen and checked shirts. The German consul walked past me in a dark suit, and as I followed him inconspicuously, thinking that the parade would start with him in the lead, I heard a woman next to me say that throwing camels is forbidden: “You have to hand that to them.” She spoke to her team, a group of people who all wore the same grey-blue T-shirts with the New York skyline and windows lit up in the colors of Germany.