Pilgrimages

When I returned from Germany, a friend told me of the pilgrimages she makes, whenever possible, to view pages from the St. John’s Bible.  Back in the nineties, a calligrapher from Wales and the Benedictine Monks of St. John’s abbey in Minnesota began a project to create a new illuminated version of the Bible.  The result, my friend told me, is visually stunning.  Intense colors, bright gold and platinum leaf on vellum - she goes out of her way to view pages as they are exhibited around the country.  She goes also because in her early life, the Bible was central.

I suppose it should have been obvious to me that my frequent sojourns in Germany are pilgrimages as well.  This time, as I tried to plot a course between my father’s hometown of Gera and my own Krefeld, I realized I have traveled this path so frequently that I struggle to find new sights along the way.  I have gone as far north as Lüneburg and as far south as Ulm between the two points.  Our trip to Nördlingen and Trier via Speyer was a compromise route, but it was filled with history and art.  When I tell my cousin Ulrike about my travels through Germany, she marvels that I know the country much better than she does.  She’s a passionate traveler, but she is attracted to Thailand and Bali. For short trips, it’s the south of France.  

I know Germany far better than I would if I lived there.  If I had stayed, I would be drawn to more exotic places too.  Germany is an easy, comfortable trip for me.  I can slip on my alternate language and culture. In fact, I feel so secure, I don’t need to plan the trip in detail.  But something was different this time.  This was the first time I didn’t ache with longing to merge with the land.  It didn’t bother me that I have to struggle to express myself; that some words refuse to leave the deep storage of my brain without coaxing.  I even asked for help a few times.  Maybe something shifted with the publication of my book.  Germany will always be where I grew up, but it is no longer home.

But I am drawn back, over and over again, not because Germany is visually stunning, but because the sounds and sights connect me to a deeper past. The other reason is that it’s the only place where there are people that have known me, however distantly, all my life.

Here I am with my cousins Ulrike and Mareike.

So German

After two days of speaking German with relatives of various degrees of closeness, my mouth is starting to adapt and my brain is getting better at retrieving long lost words. I’m no longer mortified when I have to ask for help, but it still makes me feel awkward. Like I’m suddenly clumsy in a place that’s my strength. I’m never at a loss for words in my American life.

And then there’s the problem of what to say.  This morning, at breakfast, I found myself sitting across from two men in their sixties that are only vaguely related.  They were my cousin’s cousins on the side not related to me.  I knew them because they - like us - had escaped to West Germany and drifted out there, with no family to anchor them.  Whenever they drove past our town on their way to somewhere else ( I particularly remember a time they were setting off to camp in Holland in their VW camper) they stopped for coffee.  When I was 10, the younger one, Frieder,  was 16.  I adored him, because he was silly and willing to swing me around.  Apparently that’s still a basis for a relationship, because here we sit, the bleary morning after the festivities, stumbling through a conversation that seeks to bridge 50 years.  You can’t summarize, so you just try to pick up.  It turns out we both believe in organic food. 

The older one, Heiner, talks about a friend who wanted to enter a photography contest titled “ Typisch Deutsch”.  Typical German. His friend struggled to think of something positive that could be labeled that way.  Perhaps, Heiner, says, when you move away, you see the positive?  I counter with a story from the eighties during my days at the multinational corporation.  A consultant spent hours teaching us why the Japanese were  outperforming American companies.  My husband asked him why he only talked about the Japanese. Why not use the other successful economy, the German one, as a model.  The answer:  “The German model is based on competence. That would never work here.”   Heiner and Frieder look at each other and nod.  Then smile at me. True, they would never think of that.  

Are the Germans self-critical by nature? Or is their self-criticism the lingering consequence of two World Wars?