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.  

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

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.  

Saying No to My Father

My father sits on the deck, and clears his throat.  His voice is barely audible, his words slurred.  He hasn’t said anything more than yes, no, or ok in weeks, lost in some nonverbal space the doctors call dementia.  I have to move closer.  He starts over.  “I need to make one more trip to Germany, and I want you to be my travel companion.”  My heart clenches.  We had this conversation a year ago.  At the time, Ron said immediately, “Impossible.” 

But I understand that yearning for home.  I researched all possible ways to make the trip, including checking into the logistics of getting handicapped hotel rooms and making an ocean crossing.  I discovered that it would be impossible to get travel health insurance for someone over 85 with a history of heart attacks. He’s prone to losing all sense of time and location, even at the Assisted Living, so I would have to share a room with him.  I wondered if he wanted to go home to die.  If that was it, I wanted it to be possible, but in the end, I was relieved when he stopped asking.

“We could fly to Boston, and stay a few days with your sister to recover, and then fly to Frankfurt. From there we could take the train to Gera.”  He’s thought it all through.  Travel planning was a constant all his life.  Even after he retired from his career in international sales, he lived for the next trip.  When he told me that he was done traveling six years ago, I think he expected he could just lie down and wait for the end. 

I listen to his whole plan.  When he is finished, I try to divert him by asking why he wants to go.
Remind him that he had decided he couldn’t fly to Europe anymore.  He really doesn’t have an answer.  At some point he says, “I don’t want to get sentimental about this.”  He never could talk about feelings. 

Instead, he says he wants to pay his respects to his companion Hannelore’s grave, and that he wants to see his childhood home once more.  I ask him if photographs would help.  If he would like to Skype with his sister.  He nods.  That might help.

Ten minutes later he starts over.  “I need to you to come with me to Germany one more time.”
I try several different approaches, but as the evening advances, and the June Minnesota sun begins its slow descent behind the trees, I realize that nothing short of “no” will work.  

For decades I carried anger against my father for not letting me return to Germany.  The memory of how trapped I felt as an adolescent still makes me choke.  But having to say “no, we cannot make another trip to Germany.  You have to stay here, now”  doesn’t give me the slightest satisfaction.  It only breaks my heart. 

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.