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.

Neanderthal

When I was 11, we went on a field trip to the Neanderthal.   It was a hot summer day, and our teacher intended to tire us out with a wholesome hike through the woods before taking us to the museum.  I remember two things:  dragging myself through the woods, thirsty and sweating, each of my limbs heavy with what I now suspect was the onset of hormone surges and a tiny white museum that was dull as dust.  So when my cousin Ike suggested the Neanderthal for our  traditional Sunday afternoon excursion, I was not expecting much.  Even after her husband, Bernie, informed me that the museum had been remodeled twice since I was there in 1965.  

I was blown away.  The museum had not only tripled in size, its displays had grown both awesome and awe-inspiring.  Now that we know Neanderthals mixed with Homo Sapiens ( Ron has just had his DNA tested through the National Geographic Genome Project - here’s the link in case you haven’t heard of it - and found out he has 3% Neanderthal DNA), they seem less like monsters and more like distant relatives.  Displays remind us of the time scale of human development and how rapid the shifts have been since humans settled down.  I loved a large suspended box with holes cut into the bottom that invited us to stick our heads up into the dark.  Once there, I was surrounded by shifting projections of cave paintings, punctuated by occasional images of camp fires.  Then there was a series of identical squares, each representing different dates from prehistory to the present.  Each square had individual figures proportional to population.  The Ice Age one had three people on it, and they stayed pretty sparse until the current one which had them packed in and hanging off the edge. 

Another lesson was political history - the shift from egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, to settled societies that grow more hierarchical as they grow more complex, and the idea that contemporary democracies are experiments trying to reintroduce egalitarian elements.  When I read 1491,  I first learned that Europeans,  used to rigid hierarchy, were amazed by the relatively egalitarian Native Americans they encountered, and took that paradigm shift home to serve as the germ of democracy.  Zing. Connection made.

After all that mental stimulation, we had to restore ourselves the traditional German Sunday afternoon way.  Coffee and cake at the restaurant next door. Mit Sahne - with whipped cream, of course.  The sun even cooperated.

What do you know?

I got completely absorbed in the pre-historic section of the Trier Landesmuseum yesterday, so much so that I was over saturated by the time we got to the Roman section. A shame, because I could tell it was stunning.  Afterwards, Ron and I sat in the museum cafe, having our Apfelkuchen.  (I almost never eat sweets in Minnesota, but being in Germany makes me revert.)  I mentioned to Ron that I  have been fascinated by pre-historic cultures, especially the Celts, since I was young.  He said he wished he’d been exposed to such things as a child.  Not sure if I just come from a really nerdy family. Probably.  My grandfather used to give me historical novels for my birthday.

Still.  I don’t know if it’s just that growing up in Europe you’re surrounded by evidence of history everywhere, or if it’s something different about what’s considered “education.” Maybe when Europeans left Europe and went to America, they wanted to lose that old culture. But why aren’t we teaching our kids how the Ojibway lived off the land?  Kids love that stuff. I suppose we’d have to take the Ojibway culture seriously if we did. And that would cause complications.

One of the revelations I had in the last few years was that my husband, who grew up Catholic, knew nothing about the reformation.  Martin Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, the Diet of Worms, the Augsburg Confession - all news to him.  He knew nothing about Johann Tetzel peddling indulgences and how that led to Luther posting his 95 Theses on the Wittenberg church door.  Makes sense, now that I think about it.  Why should the Catholic Church teach its children anything other than Luther = bad.   

So how does what we are taught shape us?  Once in a while I try to imagine what it would be like to be an illiterate woman living in some rural part of the world, cut off from all but what I can see.  It’s impossible.

In the meantime, Catholic Churches are still the most awesome places to meditate.

Rich and Poor

On Monday we visited the “Fuggerei” in Augsburg.  Jakob Fugger was one of the first international corporate bankers way back in the 1500’s, back when Christians still worried about whether charging interest was usury.  He grew very wealthy, and worried whether this might become a problem in the afterlife.  With a small sliver of his fortune, he decided to build a settlement of houses for poor Catholics.  ( The Catholic part was important because he lived in Martin Luther’s times and didn’t want to encourage the enemy.)  The rent was fixed at 1 Rhenish guilder per year - I don’t know how they calculate the conversion, but this year the rent is 88 cents in Euros.  Residents have to be of good character and pray for Jakob Fugger’s soul three times a day, though apparently nobody checks up on the prayers.  It’s the oldest subsidized housing in the world.

The Fuggerei is a pretty orderly place - grids of streets, the first place in Augsburg that employed house numbers.  One of the units is a museum, so you can see how the residents lived when it was first built.  What caught my attention was this piece of information:  Fugger was motivated to build the housing because during the boom years of the early 1500’s  the divide between the rich and poor was growing ever wider, and skilled craftsmen, as well as daily laborers were plunged into poverty as prices rose and wages fell.  Each home, though small, has it’s own entrance, and there are small gardens. Fugger wanted to be sure that the residents be treated with dignity and would have privacy.  

Today, while walking through the Roman Museum in Trier,  I learned that here too, people became suddenly impoverished through economic shifts they could not control, although here the cause was the disintegration of the Roman Empire.  These ebbs and flows have been going on throughout recorded history. I wonder why we can’t keep that in mind and work to deal with it, instead of blaming the victims?

Hope

Everywhere we go in Germany we see signs of hope.  I know windmills and solar panels are considered ugly by some. They spoil the view.  They're not aesthetically pleasing.  What could be more pleasing than knowing that more and more electricity is being generated without nuclear power? Without as much pollution?  I'm impressed. Seeing what happened at Fukushima and deciding to follow through on the logical consequences.  No handwringing that solar and wind can't possibly replace all the traditional power we need or insisting they're too expensive.  Adding windmills and solar panels one step at a time.  Ron thinks it's time for a wind generator at our house.

In the meantime, I try not to think about the increasing size of cars we see on the Autobahn, or the new shopping centers sprouting up in fields.  For today, I will focus on the positive.

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?   

Snow in April

A few months ago, my cousin Uli announced his 60th birthday party via group cousin email.  I love that I get this flood of detailed news in German - all my cousins are now on the copy list, and most of the time I just listen in.  I hear who is going to be able to be in Gera for my aunt Bärbel's birthday, and get a sense of the inside jokes I've been missing.  Constant references to my cousin Saskia's blue couch, the one she likes to melt into after a long day of conference organizing, make me wonder just what backstory I've missed.  I don't ask.  Partly because, despite my best efforts, my written German feels stiff and awkward, like a special party dress that's been hanging in the closet so long that it won't move with my body when I finally do wear it.

But this party....  well, I'm going to be turning sixty this year, and I won't be having one of those monumental German family birthday parties. They take place at restaurants, in special party rooms, and begin in the afternoon with cake and coffee.  In the Poser family tradition, coffee is followed by speeches and poems written by the relatives for the occasion. There might be a serenade by 10 year-olds performed on the recorder. A special skit to celebrate the group gift.  After a suitable amount of mingling, dinner is served.  Then there's music, dancing and usually some amount of drinking, though that's more of a social lubricant than the focus.  The success of a Poser event is measured by how late the guests finally trickle home.  Never before midnight. After all, even my grandmother Hedwig's ninetieth lasted until 1 am.

The only way I was going to get to a sixtieth birthday party this year was to join Uli at his.  So here I am, jet-lagged, in the village of Etzdorf, a few kilometers from Gera on April 3rd, with snow outside my window.  To be fair, it's unseasonably cold.  It should be 10 degrees warmer and probably raining.

This morning it hit me.  Since I left Germany in 1966, this has been a country of summers for me.  I have only seen the parts I want to see.