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.

Legacy

When I first published my memoir I’m not sure what I expected - I mostly felt a strong need to get my manuscript out into the world. I had done some research about potential market in writing my book proposal, so I suspected that the book would interest German-Americans, possibly other European immigrants.  What I didn’t expect was that the book itself would form a connection that I had mostly avoided during my time here.  It would connect with me with other people like myself - Germans who had migrated to the US since World War II.  Years ago, writing to an author involved digging out the publisher’s address and sending off a note in care of someone else - I always found that daunting to the point of impossibility.  Communication has become so much easier, and much more of a two-way street.

I love the emails I’ve gotten from readers all over the US who tell me their own immigration stories.  There are parallels and differences, but most of all I have become aware that I am not in any way alone.  I’ve received links to recipes for German hard rolls, the best online source for German deli items, and, most gratifying of all, deeply felt thanks for expressing shared feelings.

I’ve also been referred to several books I had missed.  I just finished a memoir by J. Elke Ertle titled Walled-In: A West Berlin Girl’s Journey to Freedom.  The thread of the story couldn’t be more different from mine, but I was impressed with the writing and the author’s ability to convey the atmosphere of living in West Berlin during the Cold War.  I also admired her successful use of geo-politics as a metaphor for her own family dynamics. Right now, I’m reading a book given to me by a friend after she finished mine.  It’s called On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood by Irmgard Hunt.  

As I’ve been talking to other German immigrants and reading these memoirs, I’ve been struck once again by the horrendous legacy of fear and insecurity Germans of the post-war generation inherited.  Not only the tremendous weight of processing the burden of the holocaust.  That’s the obvious issue.  What has come into focus for me is how difficult our grandparents’ lived were.  They grew up during World War I, with all the deprivations that implies, then suffered through the economically difficult times in the twenties.  And just when they finally began to prosper, Hitler dragged the country into another war. And then, for those stuck in East Germany, the struggle continued.   My Grandfather, Opa Gustav, was a perfect example.  His father was drafted at the beginning of World War I.  Gustav had to leave school at 14 to support the family in his father’s absence.  He became an apprentice to a fur merchant in Leipzig.  After the War, he and his father began to build a business manufacturing jewelry displays.  By 1933, the business was at last functioning well enough that Gustav could afford to take his family on their first vacation.  He struggled to keep his business alive during the Second World War and just managed to avoid the draft by converting to manufacturing weapons cases - this made his job necessary to the war effort.  He spent the rest of his life trying to keep the business going in the hostile environment of East Germany.  When I consider that legacy, I have two main reactions.  Is it any wonder that a part of me cannot trust in peace and prosperity?  And:  I am incredibly lucky to have made it to the age of 60 in peace time.  

Eating "German" in America

One dilemma I have every time I drive from St. Paul to Madison is lunch.  I am a picky eater.   I want my food home made from actual ingredients and I avoid cheese and wheat.  In St. Paul and Madison, I have a choice of locally owned restaurants that cook from scratch.  It’s the wilds of Wisconsin that appear to be a wasteland of national chains where everything contains unpronounceable hidden ingredients and is smothered in cheese.  I realize that eating industrial food once in a while isn’t going to kill me - that takes repeated daily exposure - but I keep trying to find a stopping point that provides some local charm.  We’ve tried Norske Nook, the Red Moose Grill in Black River Falls,  and a Coffee House in Menomonie. Last time we decided to stop at Germanhaus in Camp Douglas.  There are copious remnants of Wisconsin’s German past scattered about the countryside, and I’ve checked out their menus via smartphone.  Hamburgers and Beer Cheese Soup crowd onto the pages along with Bratwurst and the occasional Schnitzel. 

Germanhaus advertises its heritage in old German script and looks like an Alpine chalet mated with a cinderblock diner.  As I step inside, the mix shifts to 50’s German restaurant melded with rural supper club.  Red vinyl upholstered chairs surround formica tables,  elaborate wood and wrought-iron lamps hanging from acoustic ceiling tile illuminate Bavarian castles and villages lovingly rendered on sheetrock.  Painted scrolled woodwork completes the look.   It’s a bicultural mid 20th century fairy tale.  I order a bratwurst with red cabbage.  The wurst itself is first class.  Some local butcher is faithfully following his great-grandfather’s recipe. The waitress tells us it’s served with horseradish sauce instead of mustard, because the restaurant owner is from Frankfurt.   It comes with a toasted hot dog bun, and a tiny dish of canned red cabbage.  My husband orders the BLT.  I may come back, but next time I’ll skip the cabbage.  Maybe they make their own potato salad.

When I go to my favorite Japanese Restaurant in the Twin Cities, the place is half full of Japanese students.  At dim sum at the Yang-tze, I can barely hear myself talk, because there’s nothing quite so lively as a room full of Chinese chatting with friends.  I used to wonder whether the food at these restaurants seems as limited and out of date as what I find at German restaurants.  I suppose it’s because the big wave of German immigration occurred in the late 1800’s and most of them came from southern Germany, but the food is relentlessly old-fashioned and Bavarian.  The Black Forest in Minneapolis has updated their menu to include some fifties favorites ( Hawaii Toast!), but other than that it’s traditional.  Glockenspiel, Gasthof zur Gemütlichkeit, and Gasthof Bavarian Hunter - with the exception of a signature dish or two, they could trade menus.  

During the eighties, the owners of the Black Forest opened a daring contemporary German restaurant called Lorelei.  It fizzled after only a few months.  I ate there only once during it’s brief existence.   I clearly remember the white walls, the selection of wines, and the tasty trout.  I don’t know whether the restaurant failed because Minnesota wasn’t ready for the concept. Perhaps there were business reasons.  

I still haven’t quite identified the source of my discomfort with German heritage as it’s celebrated in the US.  I cringe when it’s primarily about beer and lederhosen, dirndls and pretzels distorted through 100 years of assimilation.  When I first moved to the US, people would tell me “I’m German.”  How exciting.  I was so starved for a chat in my own language.  But I quickly learned that “I’m German” meant one of their grandparents had come from Germany, and that their German vocabulary consisted of “Auf Wiedersehen” and “Wienerschnitzel”, usually memorized from The Sound of Music.  When I stray into a German restaurant, I have the same sense of “too bad, I thought I was close.”

Home Movies

“We convert your old video and movies to DVD!”  I drive past this sign at least once a month, but this time it grabs my attention.  Hurry, I think, before that pile of VHS tapes ( and even worse, the 8 mm tapes that I never got around to editing and transferring) become so obsolete they’ll be trash.   So I drag myself down to the basement where the library of videos has found a home.  

It’s not a new problem.  My Opa Gustav was what we now call an “early adopter.”  If there was a new appliance or gadget, he got one of the early models.  Sometime in the thirties, he acquired an 8 mm movie camera.  We inherited it in the fifties - made of cold, black metal, so heavy I could barely hold it up.  When I was a child, I could rarely persuade him to dust off the portable screen and set up the equally heavy and ancient projector.  Fleeting images flickered into view:  my mother on a swing, a glimpse of her sweeping the courtyard. When this snippet jerked into view my mother whispered to me that when she was young,  her sister would shriek: “ Look at her, she’s a lefty!”  every time.    As an only child, I flinched at the obvious intent to injure.  Opa also owned two purchased cartoons, each about 5 minutes long, one of Mickey Mouse and the other of Donald Duck. His possession of these American imports hinted at a time before the War,   before Western decadence was censored by the Communist Party.   I have no idea what happened to these precious strips of celluloid.  They probably went out with the garbage when the medium changed to 16mm.

Sometime in the 80’s my father had his reels of movies (8 and 16mm) transformed to video.  It was this set of three VHS tapes, titled “Poser Family Memories”  that I first dug out and took over to my father’s.  At this age, he is often withdrawn and shows little reaction to anything.  The movies got his attention.  His eyes focused, and as the images slid by, he began to supply names and places.  

What struck me was not just the magic of seeing my younger self and a parade of people who exist only in memory.  As a memoir writer, what intrigued me was that I couldn’t remember most of these events.  When you head out with your camera, you record happy moments. Vacations, holidays, visitors.  Most of the time, you are not stealthy, so your subjects put on a show.  They smile, they wave, they put extra effort into enjoying being alive.  If we didn’t have home movies, most of these moments would evaporate.

Real memory records the mundane, the daily trivia, the odd detail.  The color of a longed-for bicycle, the light illuminating the living room rug, a dog seen daily on the way to kindergarten, the numerous complex hooks and eyes on my grandmother’s corset.  Or the dramatic.  Getting caught in a lie and punished.  The squealing tires from a crashing motorcycle just around the corner.  The look of surprised agony in my mother’s face when she told me about being teased for being left-handed.

But here’s the painful thrill of watching my mother unpack a picnic lunch for my six-year-old self, secure in some Bavarian meadow, South Carolina a distant place on some half-remembered map.  There I am, 16, lithe and perfect, but hunching my shoulders to protect my insecure heart.  And again, at 30, confident and sleek with new love.  My father, at forty, a few pounds overweight, with impossible dark hair.  With a shock, I  spot a once beloved dress that I haven’t thought about in years. 

What do these celluloid, soon to be digital, snippets mean?  Once watched, some of them enter the realm of memory as hand-me-downs - we remember seeing the movie of a fugitive event.  But they don’t have the texture of those moments deeply recorded in our cells.  You can’t smell your mother’s perfume, the way you can when you close your eyes and reconstruct a moment on the way to the airport to pick up your father. 

Which is real?  

The Power of Silence

Once every summer, we drive 4 and a half hours north to find silence.  This morning, I woke up to sunshine leaking past the curtains.  I walked down to the dock on Flour Lake.  When I am in the city, this is the place I imagine when instructed to go to a favorite restorative spot in my mind.  This dock, these gently lapping waves, the line of pines reflected in the water, the white, billowing clouds. An eagle circling over the trees to my right. Today, I settled on the dock cross-legged, drank in the beloved view, and closed my eyes. 

At first, I heard nothing.  My city battered ears felt dull and muffled.  I breathed in,  letting the taste of cool water and pine linger in the back of my throat. A spot of sun burning on my left cheek.  Gradually, as my ears settled into the quiet, I began to hear.  A single car passing on the access road a mile away.  Birds chirping. A bluejay’s squawk.  The slight movement of leaves in the breeze.  And then, the mad cackling of a pair of loons, calling to each other, over and over on Hungry Jack Lake - the next lake over in the lacy pattern of scattered water that makes up the Boundary Waters. 

I feel my edges dissolve.  This is it. I am home on this precious planet Earth.

Who's Got Soul?

A few days ago, the afternoon DJ on the Current played an Al Green song.  To my surprise I found myself singing along.  When I  got to my studio I plugged in my iPhone, booted up Pandora and set up 70’s soul as a new station.  All afternoon, I left it on, as I slip cast elements for a new sculpture.  It took a few hours - I go into a creative trance when I work, so I’m not consciously paying attention - before I realized that I knew all of this music.  During the 70’s,  I didn’t think I  listened to it.  Didn’t listen to it consciously at least.  I never bought a single Soul record.  Because in South Carolina, Soul was the music played at high school dances, the background on the radio, drifting across bars in Myrtle Beach, wafting from frat houses on summer afternoons.  It was the music favored by white cheerleaders and crew-cut boys in chinos and alligator shirts, and it was everything I was trying to avoid.  

I listened to Cream and the Stones and later Acid Rock and early Heavy Metal.  I played Led Zeppelin II until I had not only memorized the words to every song,  I could sing them in order.  I banded together with all the long-haired outsiders marooned in Clemson  - a small community even in the early seventies.  We’d wander past the frat houses late on a Saturday night, certain we were superior to those drunken boys risking their lives balancing on window ledges in their liquor haze.  To the strains of the Supremes and the Temptations.  

As I trimmed excess clay, an image from a spend-the-night party circa 1969 popped into my head.  Three of my classmates - well-behaved 15 year-old white girls whose parents had deep roots in the South - sitting on the floor, deep in the night, playing a new record.  Who was it?  Otis Redding? Lou Rawls?  One was holding the album cover - I remember a sexy black man portrayed on a white background -  cradling it in her freckled arms, gushing over the music, the voice, ultimately the man.  The other two looking on enthralled.  

The memory is crisp. I must have retained this image because of my confusion.  The girls were clearly crushing on this man the way I thrilled to the bad boys of Rock. I couldn’t square what I saw with the rules of racial politics I’d pieced together by painstaking observation.  What I saw sensed was lush and sticky, forbidden.    There, in the studio, 45 years later, I got it.  In the South of 1969, no other music could touch the level of danger and rebellion of Soul.

Living My Father's Past

Last Sunday, we picked up my father, loaded up the wheelchair and headed out to Como Park for an outdoor concert. The evening was humid but cooling off slightly and I was thrilled to find the usually packed parking lot offering up a single handicapped spot right near the Pavilion. I pulled out the handicapped sticker issued to me under Dr. Lagalwar’s signature ( he had them issue me one that’s good until 2017 - makes me shudder a little to imagine doing this four years from now),  slipped it on my rear view mirror and, after a bit of maneuvering, we rolled in the direction of the trombones that were already in full swing.  And Swing it was. 

As we settled in, I scanned the audience.  There were a few stray families with toddlers, but mostly I saw a lot of permed white curls.  For most of the audience “Sentimental Journey” was an adolescent memory.  I’ve been to enough of these concerts in the last few years that I was pleased to find Stan Bann’s Big Bone Band unusually skillful.  I relaxed in the summer breeze and found myself thinking about this phenomenon of reliving your parent’s past.  

My father has no tolerance for music that doesn’t meet certain parameters:  it has to be classical ( and then preferably Beethoven or the Romantic Composers) or it has to be pre-50’s Jazz or Swing.  All my life this has been such a definite rule, that I automatically switch my car radio to the Classical Station (or pop in a Louis Armstrong CD) when I’m picking him up at the Assisted Living.  Since I drive him somewhere at least twice a week, this is having an impact on my musical experience. 

When he first moved to Minnesota, we tried taking him to a few plays, but it became clear that his dementia made it hard for him to follow the action.  Music, on the other hand, held his attention.  I’ve gone to a lot of concerts in the past four years that would not have made my high priority list.  Chamber music, piano concertos, swing and jazz - some days I’m grateful for new discoveries, and other days I feel like I’m being abducted into his world.

More complex was the period - mostly over now - when he wanted to relive World War II.  I thought I had dealt with the German past exhaustively when I was in my thirties.  Back then, I plowed through everything in the library pursuing the question that bothered me most:  Was there something inherent in the German character that predisposed us to genocide?  I was relieved to find that the answer seemed to be “no”, although it did seem that Germans were more organized than Turks or Cambodians.  Just how organized, I didn’t realize until my father’s insatiable need to relive the Third Reich led me to find copies of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and some truly horrifying German documentaries that drew on SS documentary photography and even some film.  

Most revealing was the night we watched a movie called After the Fall. It’s fiction, based on memoir, and set in an elite Nazi boarding school similar to the one my father attended.  I switched on the movie for him, and then settled in to file his tax documents.  I soon lost track of my folders.  The brutality of the movie - the discipline imposed in order to make brave Aryan men out of boys - shocked me.  My father stared at the screen, rapt.  The stories my father told of his time at the NAPOLA in Köslin told of friendships with other boys, occasional pranks, a crush on one of the teacher’s daughters.  I leaned toward him during a break in the action and asked: “Was it really this bad?”  He tore his eyes from the screen and nodded toward me. “There were days.”

I had a sudden vision of my father - a sensitive boy who loved to play the piano and caper around the house pretending to be someone else, raised by a father who resisted corporal punishment - hundreds of miles from home exposed to this harsh environment.  A place where feelings were weakness and survival meant acquiring a tough exterior.  No wonder he didn’t take my mother’s and my homesickness seriously.  It was only a feeling.