Like a Tourist

The first few times I returned to Germany I was at that awkward age when I believed I was extraordinarily visible.   Every move mattered.  I didn't want anyone to think I was no longer German, or worse, that I was trying to show off  with my new American manners.  I also still believed I would someday return, so it was crucial that I pick up all the latest slang and dress.  Over the years, that charade became impossible for me.  But I still tried hard not to look like a tourist.  This became less and less possible as I dragged around Europe with my husband - I can duck into a German department store, pick up a few pieces to transform my wardrobe and refuse to wear hiking shoes for sightseeing, but my Midwestern husband isn’t going to take off his Salomons or swap his Levis for German ‘Freizeithosen’.  Nor can he disguise the fact that he needs me to translate the menu.  And while Sophie is proud of her ability to manage in German,  we are still going to walking down the street discussing where to go next in English.  I’ve adapted to these changes, and most of the time, I’m comfortable bridging the cultural divide, but once in a while I get sucked into the “I can’t look like a tourist” vortex. So it was with some embarrassment that I told my cousin Sassi what Sophie and her boyfriend, Brian,  were most interested in seeing in München.  “They really want to go to a Biergarten,” I confessed.  We laughed about it, but Sassi was game.  She’s a relatively recent immigrant to Bavaria, and often squires her friends from Berlin around the city.  Apparently they, too, associate München with beer and pretzels.  On a beautiful sunny morning, we set out to take a series of busses and subways to the English Garden.  We sat at a communal bench in the sun, listening to a Bavarian oompah band, drinking beer,  and eating Würstchen.  I had a nice chat with the tourist from Iran sitting next to me.  Afterwards we went for a Sunday stroll through the gardens, and I thought I had survived the tourist ordeal.  The next day, it turned out I wasn’t done.  After Sophie completed her obligatory foray into German clothes shopping, she and Brian needed a bite to eat.  So off we went to the Hofbräuhaus.  Really?  Really.  I watched Sophie polish off a half liter of beer and a pork knuckle; Brian’s stomach was a bit touchy, so he opted for soup to go with his beer.  The food was better than I expected, and by the time we left I decided I was done pretending.  After all, even if I lived in Germany, I would still be a tourist in Bavaria.  

Sophie enjoying her Eisbein

Ruhpolding

As a child, I often heard my parents reminisce about their trip to Ruhpolding.  My mother always pronounced the word with a look of bliss on her face, so I came to associate this mythical place with pleasure.  When I got old enough to delve into the family collection of photo albums, I stumbled on a series of vacation shots, labeled Ruhpolding.  Both my parents looked very young, although they had outgrown the bony look of their earliest years.  One shot showed my father in hiking shorts, smoking a pipe in front of a romantic alpine vista, aiming a smoldering look at the camera.  Another featured my mother, her dimples flashing, holding a paper cone of cherries.  “We couldn’t really afford them,” my mother confided each time we encountered this image, “but I was pregnant with you and really wanted those cherries. They were delicious.”

I’ve been planning a trip to Austria in August - the goal was to spend some time in the mountains and in Vienna.  After studying flights and possible routes, I decided we’d fly into Munich and make a loop.  Sophie’s asked whether we could go see the Eagle’s Nest - Hitler’s mountain retreat in Southern Bavaria. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since she just finished a history course about daily life in Germany during the Nazi Era.  

Perhaps it’s her job to drag me to places I would avoid on my own.  Without her I would never have gone to Buchenwald.   I don’t want to close my eyes to that part of the past; it’s more that I’m afraid of getting stuck there.  Buchenwald brought cruelty alive in unexpected detailed ways that lodged in my heart and bubble up at unexpected moments.  For me, it was the path from the train to the barracks labeled Carachoweg ( which meant “ faster” path), where the guards harried the prisoners whose legs were weak from standing for hours wedged into cattle cars.  Their shouts echo in my imagination.  

I understand that the Eagle’s Nest is benign. It’s a lovely setting, with a great mountain view, that is said to have made Hitler dizzy, so that he only visited there a few times.   As I surveyed the map in search of a place close by to spend a few days, I spied Ruhpolding.  The town has a very user-friendly website that made it easy for me to reserve rooms.  Perhaps the site of my parents first vacation will provide balance and keep me from sliding too far into the past.  

Inherited Memory

I was barely eleven, waiting for the tram with my friend Ulli.  Someone walked up behind me, reaching over my satchel.  Intense pain sizzled from a spot on the back of neck.  I jerked around.  Torsten grinned, as he tossed his cigarette butt to the ground.  I registered the sprouting facial hair on his chin - he was in my class but had been held back at least twice.  Ulli screamed at him, but I just clenched my jaws.  My only goal to not react, not give him the satisfaction of seeing the pain he’d caused.  Ulli kept yelling at him as she pulled me toward the slowing tram.  Then she turned to me: “Why didn’t you say anything?”  

Over the years I often wondered why my automatic response is not fight or flight, but freeze.   Was it the repeated border crossings when I was still an infant - watching my mother pretending to be meek while the guards treated her like she was subhuman?  Or does it go farther back?  

Last year, I came across this article:  Memories pass between generations. Recent work in the field of epigenetics shows that genes can be altered by trauma and those altered genes modify the behavior in offspring.

It felt like a revelation and confirmation.  Memory transmitted between generations.  Perhaps now I could stop blaming myself for shutting down like a frightened rabbit whenever anyone in uniform challenged me.  Maybe my fears and anxieties aren’t a defect of character, as I’ve always believed.  

Shortly after “Dreaming in German” was published, I received an email from Michael Reddy, a healer, coach and shaman.  He had come across the book on Amazon and wanted to know if it  might be useful in his work with family constellation therapy.  Here’s an excerpt: “I’'m wondering if you know about family constellations--which came out of Germany originally?  Individual trauma, if it is serious enough affects the families of ancestors as well as the individual, can lodge in the higher level family system (or family soul), where it stays until some descendent lives out something similar.  It's like the unresolved in the family soul resurfaces.  This is a chance to heal it, but few people understand that.  Family constellations are a tool for revealing and clearing these kinds of systemic traumas.  The US is the laggard in this kind of work, while it is growing very quickly around the world.”

We traded pdf’s of our books. His is titled Health, Happiness, and Family Constellations - How Ancestors, Family Systems, and Hidden Loyalties Shape Your Life - and What You Can Do About It. I found it fascinating reading.  Bert Hellinger, who developed this work, was born in Germany in 1925, the same year as my father.  He served in the German Army, became a prisoner of war ( though in Belgium, not the US). After the war, he became a Catholic Priest and spent 16 years as a missionary living with the Zulu in South Africa. The connection with ancestors ( a central feature in Zulu beliefs) is critical to family constellations theory.  Hellinger is not without his flaws, yet the central ideas of family constellations therapy resonated with me.  The basic premise, as I understand it, is that people experiencing trauma are frequently in survival mode and cannot process their experience, so they shut down and keep functioning.  This leaves their unresolved trauma for their children and grandchildren to resolve or relive.

My Father (front and center) as a POW

Letters from the Past

My father was a letter writer.   Sometime during every weekend, he would disappear into his study, sit down behind his large blonde wood desk ( one of the few pieces of furniture that made the move from Germany), and insert sheets of personalized stationery into his portable olive green Olivetti.  The keys began to clatter at a jerky pace.  My father had never taken a typing course, rather he hunted and pecked, but rapidly since he had lots of practice.  He didn’t handwrite his letters because his handwriting was famously illegible.  The letters went home.  To his mother in Gera, who would pass them around to his siblings that remained there, and to his sister Marianne who lived in West Germany.  

I rarely got a letter from my father.  One of the letters I do have is one he sent when I first began writing.  My original concept for the book was less personal and more historical.  I wanted to tell the story of recent German history through my grandparents’ and parents’ biographies.  One reason this letter is precious is that in recent years, my father lost his verbal skills to the degree that I couldn’t remember them.  The letter brings his manners of speech back vividly, and also illustrates a thing or two about his character.  I had asked him to describe an encounter he’d had with an SS recruiter.

My father had just graduated from boarding school, had enlisted in the German army and was at home in Gera waiting to be called up. The year was 1943.  He wrote in German, and I’ve translated this as well as I am able.  

“One day, I was summoned to the Police where those guys had made themselves at home. At that point in time, lots of rumors where already floating around that the SS who considered themselves elite troops and expected to acquire only the best, were having greater and greater difficulties filling their ranks and were using all possible methods of pressure to recruit sufficient “volunteers.”  One story had it that they enlisted young women for their interviews who accused unwilling candidates of cowardice and tried to appeal to their honor, working every possible patriotic register that governments, and not just dictatorships, use when they require people for something that’s not so very popular.  With this knowledge, I sat across from this blonde, highly decorated SS officer, and was looking forward to the game that would develop.  I let him go on for quite a while trying to work all angles in the full knowledge that I would be able to confront him in the end with the reality that the competition already had me in their pocket, which he would finally have to indignantly accept, but not without lecturing me harshly for wasting his time.  Those were the pleasures of the little people during this segment of German history.”

My father (in his German army uniform) with his Dad

Eulogy for my Father

I suppose it’s only natural that we try to summarize a person after they are gone. 

I could make a list of things about my father:

He loved to travel
He loved his family 
He loved his work
He loved good food
He loved parties
He loved to be a host
He loved classical music
He loved harmonious space and light
He loved a good political discussion
He loved to read

So many of the things he loved slipped away from him in the last five years.  If time strips us down to our essence, and sometimes I believe it does, then he was radiant love.  At the end, unless he was too tired, which was more and more of the time, he beamed at those he cared about, his entire face lighting up with pleasure. He became a very sensitive receptive soul.

When I was a child, I believed that my parents’ generation must have been different from me, somehow more courageous and less sensitive, to have survived the chaos, fear, and hunger of the thirties and forties.  It would have been too heartbreaking to imagine them as capable of pain as I was. I couldn’t admit to myself how terrified they must have been until I saw that sensitive human being emerge as age stripped away all the defenses. When my father told stories from those times, he hid behind an ironic, slightly humorous story telling style that had me fooled until almost the end.

When my father first moved to Minnesota, it became quickly obvious that he wasn’t able to make new friends, that he would be completely reliant on Ron and me for his emotional life.  It felt like a huge weight.  It was a big responsibility, and I won’t pretend there weren’t days and weeks when I wanted to run away from it. At the same time, I am glad for the time we had with him in our care.

Here are some of the gifts I received during these last years:  

My father had very definite musical tastes - he’d made these so clear over the years, that I didn’t feel comfortable imposing my own more wide-ranging ones on him, even when he no longer had the energy to protest.  Add to that the fact that one sure way to bring him pleasure was to take him to a piano concert.  My father’s presence renewed and broadened my appreciation for classical music and that has enriched my life.

As my father lost the will and energy to talk,  he taught me the importance of being present, nonverbally.  Our family was extremely verbal - we talked for the sheer pleasure of turning an elegant phrase or showing off complex vocabulary. The only way to get some quiet was to hide behind a book; that was a sacred act and anyone reading could only be disturbed if truly necessary.  As it became harder for my father to talk I struggled to keep the conversation going, at first.  I strained to fill the airspace and fished for topics that could provoke a response.  The first time I decided to just be quiet was on a car ride.  I had picked my father up at dusk to take him to my house for dinner.  I said nothing.  After about five minutes, my father said:  “Look at the moon. It’s beautiful.”   I’m grateful that my father reminded me to look at he moon.

My father loved sitting in the sun.  It was one of his last remaining reliable pleasures.  Over the last few years, I’ve spent hours sitting in the sun, listening to the birds, watching the leaves sway in the breeze.  I’m grateful for that.

The best present I received came one day while he was recovering from a broken leg and had to stay at a nursing home.  It was September, the sun was still warm, and every afternoon, I wheeled him out into the flower garden where we sat for about an hour.  One day, he said, looking away into the flowers: “I know that moving you from Germany to South Carolina was hard on you.”  It sounds so simple.  But it healed me.

Siegfried Poser  January 23, 1925 - February 19, 2014

Oil

Many times a day I hear the trains rumbling by my studio - the old Northrup King Building  is hard on the railway line. I see either black tank cars carrying oil from North Dakota or the big open cars that used to mean grain, but now hold sand mined in Wisconsin and Minnesota, headed for the fracking fields.  Lucky for me, my house is a little further from the tracks, because the trains run all night long.  Depending on the wind direction, I can hear a soft mournful lowing or a low roar as the trains approach the crossing about a mile away.  I read in the paper that the unfortunates whose houses are closer have been complaining that they can no longer sleep or have guests over because of the increased train noise.  I feel lucky that I’m not that close, at least at night.  I try not to calculate what an exploding oil car would do to me as I work just across the parking lot.  But then I think about what the constant traffic means.  

My memory tells me that even before the oil companies discovered fracking, we had more than enough fossil fuel reserves left to nudge earth’s climate into killing us off.  I used to think that we needed to curb global warming to “save the earth.”  It wasn’t until recently that I realized the earth will outlive us.  We are such a temporary blip that if you start taking the long view, you realize that the destruction the earth will unleash on us if we don’t change our ways will be a self-correction, a shaking off of the foolish mammals who didn’t appreciate the delicate conditions that allowed them to flourish.  I picture the earth shaking us off like a dog shaking off fleas.  And just like the last few times there were mass extinctions, some other form of life will hang on and flourish as conditions shift to a new normal.  We - like the dinosaurs before us - won’t be around to see it.  Unless we get smart and leave most of that oil in the ground.

It's easy to get paralyzed in the face of this overwhelming insanity.  If, like me, you want to find your way out of despair, I recommend   reading Joanna Macy's book "Active Hope."  

Editing Memoir

When my writers' group read the first draft of my memoir, one of them said: “There are so many places in here where you describe feeling tense and anxious, but nothing really bad ever happens.” She looked confused.  I think that was the first time I realized that I am more anxious than normal people.  I had spent years trying to understand why my toes curled to grip the floor while I was brushing my teeth before work in the morning.  I knew it was odd.  My first response to that observation was the obvious one: Every time I noticed it, I forced my toes to unfold.  Whenever I noticed my neck stiffen and my trapezius muscles quivering, I took deep breaths and  yelled at myself to relax.  I chastised myself for shaking with nerves before confronting my boss about an unjust performance appraisal; I tried not to admit that I had to write scripts so I could force myself to call strangers on the phone.  At least I was no longer afraid to pump my own gas at unfamiliar filling stations.  

After my writing group meeting, I pored over the manuscript and tried to guess which of my anxiety episodes would seem warranted to others, and which I needed to edit out.  The border crossing fear seemed reasonable - I left that.  I left a touch of my old phone anxiety, though I cut back to just one episode.  Even relatively normal people got nervous about driving through New York City, so I allowed my jaw to clench.  But most of my hyped up ways of interacting with the world fell to my red pen.  Anxiety was not the subject of this memoir.  I shoved it into the background, so it wouldn’t take over the narrative.

Over the years, I’ve grown less anxious.  Not accidentally.  I’ve had to work hard at it.  The first and most effective antidote I stumbled onto while I was in graduate school.  Hatha Yoga. The seventies kind - slow, carried out in a dim room, with a generous dose of corpse pose at the end.  I hadn’t known that my body was capable of letting go.  It never really had before. Well, maybe after sex, or after a long run, but never for long.  I loved that feeling of melting into the floor.  Loved it so much, that I didn’t have to force myself to practice most days.  I no longer practice in that form, but since my late twenties, I’ve always had a daily practice. Some combination of meditation and movement.  For the last five years, it’s been daily Qi Gong and mindfulness meditation, with a dash of gyrokinesis or yoga thrown in.  

None of this means that I no longer tense up.  I never know when I’ll find myself carried off by an irrational bout.  Sometimes it hits when I travel, though that’s not a predictable trigger.  Whenever it does, I see my mother, pacing alongside the track at the Krefeld railroad station, lips pressed tight, clutching tickets.  And my daughter, fingers curled tight around the steering wheel, seat pulled up as far as it will go.  I wish I could edit the anxiety out of their lives as well.