Wiesbaden 6.5.05: Bloody Mary Mix and Memories of War

At the Hauptstadarchiv for Hessen in Wiesbaden. It’s one of those almost frighteningly efficient modern buildings Germans create, all muted lights (what do you call them? They’re dangerous to put into lamps at home, since they cause fires) and gray, brown, black fixtures and furniture.

Outside, through huge slats on an external window covering that can be adjusted according to the light, a slice of Hessen: starlings hopping and pecking in a daisy-sprinkled lawn. As I watch them, I think of the ways that bring us where we are: how complex, inextricable, and unpredictable they are. I’m not sure I’d ever have come to Germany.

But Wolfram contacted Gregory B., who put him in touch with me. One door open, totally unanticipated—and seminars in Hamburg and travel money to interview Dorothe Sölle.

And then Steve and his ancestry: it has brought us repeatedly to places like this, where even an ardent tourist might never choose to go. And where, I suspect, my uncle once walked.

But what did he see? Rubble, human suffering, a people who were the Enemy and whose tongue he could not speak, but who touched his heart nonetheless—as they did the heart of his half-brother Carl.

I feel horrible today, dizzy and nauseous. We ate late yesterday afternoon at a little restaurant pub—Beck’s?—at what was called, if I remember, the Bäckerei spring, a hot spring. Sat at an outside table just across from a tap flowing with hot water from the spring.

We both had asparagus with melted butter, ham (raw for Steve), and new potatoes—three slices of rolled ham, four asparagus, and three potatoes with a little cup of butter. Things did not taste fresh. The first slice of ham was like one on the outside of a package left open in the refrigerator.

I awoke, stomach rolling, with nausea and dizziness several times in the night. It was still with me when I finally got up.

Breakfast did not help. Poor-quality stuff for American tastes—all eye appeal and no taste appeal. It’s hard to get bad bread in Germany, but they’d managed. Cold, clotted scrambled eggs, bloody Mary mix disguised as tomato juice (one does not want cayenne and Worcestershire sauce on a rolling stomach), and bitter, barely potable coffee.

No supper for me unless I’m over this! Well, perhaps a fruit ice :-) . . . .

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Sun now shining through the little aperture created by the shutter thing. Wind blowing through the trees and hedge that divide the archive lawn from a building next door.

As I see the sparkling, fluttering leaves, the daisies, dandelion seed globes, and plantain spikes studding the lawn, I think, even in the war, there must have been days when the sun shone in May, and all seemed beautiful. What did people feel, I wonder, as May came, and the war decimated the country, disrupted its life, brought unimaginable suffering (along with shame and guilt)?

An amazing bird arrives to strut among the daisies as I wrote this—a large black bird, but with white ovals above its wings, and a white lower body—as if it’s wearing a very elegant tux, though black where white should be and vice versa. The black and white of human existence, May giving way to December and December to May.

Shannon, 4.7.90: In the End Is the Beginning

Waiting in Shannon airport for our flight to be called. Horribly smoky—in fact, think I’ll wait till I’m on the plane to write more.

Over the Atlantic now, noon Atlanta time, having just eaten wretched airline food. Why this trip?—that’s the refrain that keeps going through my head. Have hesitated all day to write at all because I feel so full of gloom, shrouded or swathed in a cloud of it. But just now a thought struck me that seems to point a way.

On the one hand, so much was wrong about the trip. Wrong in its very conception—hurtling across the sea to fall here and there, flit about à l’Américain, seeing nothing but one’s own miserable self all around. The tourist American. Justifiably despised, scorned, ridiculed by all the world.

How did it happen that I fell into this trap? Most of all, being hooked into traveling with people who are not congenial to me and who are as ignorant as the day is long? Trying to see and do everything and thus nothing. The one dominant emotion I feel about it all is frustration—a tired frustration at only skimming the surface. I’ve traveled in a culture-bubble—and one reinforced by my own emotional state—and have hardly met a resident of the countries in which I’ve traveled.

But the ray of hope. If I ask myself what impression from the trip has been lasting, what points in a utopian direction, it was a few isolated experiences in Hamburg. Above all, the evening I spent in conversation with theologians from all around the world. That night lit something in me—a feeling of humble joy that I am somehow present within the upper room of a new Pentecost, thinking and praying and acting with others around the world who hear the call to continue faith and work for justice; and a desire to spend some time in Hamburg studying. This seems a “real” projection of my future because a) I never would have thought it, b) several people urged me to do it, and c) the thought brings great hope.

What brought all this to mind again now was a stray recollection of Dorothee Sölle’s lecture. Had one asked me at the time what I got from it, I would have said nothing. I was tired; I don’t speak German well. But the recollection of it is tinged with much brighter colors: serious students engaged in serious listening and dialogue—a roomful of intent faces as the bright but waning light of evening poured through the tall windows of the lecture hall. I really do want to go back.

Because the future is the not yet that we can probe only in fantasy, all else I can say now is only postscript to the already, and a sorry postscript at that. I am really very tired of analyzing/critiquing/complaining. Want to shut that book and begin a new and better one. Criticism and hope. Was it on this trip I dreamt Tad D. critiqued my solidarity book as not adequately Christian because too pain-sans-hope-centered? If so, then the trip itself is prodding forth some necessary and painfully healing recognitions.

Life is journey. This trip has been a journey within a journey, a parenthetical but not extrinsic experience of that journey. In that sense, pilgrimage and moment of grace. At the crudest level, grace because a privilege few people have in life.

What I think I’m beginning to see in this pilgrimage is that the journey is dreadfully difficult, fraught with dangers and monsters unforeseen—the old maps of Europe that show all the terra and mare incognita west of Europe as inhabited by sea monsters. We struggle against principalities and powers, and in every age these forces, monsters, have new shapes. The Hydra myth speaks to us today.

Among the monsters I see are my own pettiness and hopelessness, and perhaps above all the woeful way I cling to my wounds and expect to be consoled, when I must bear them inconsolable. I also look at K. and A. and wonder despairingly if one simply lives one’s life and dies, having trudged the same old treadmill to the end. Above all, what they say to me and I fear the most is that one becomes trapped in ugly relationships and the personae they create. I write re: how I sometimes feel loathing towards Steve. What I loathe perhaps more is what I am in relationship to him—a coiled spring, always expecting yet another outrageous blow, ready to strike back. I want no more of this.

But pilgrimage is also what Patrick Leigh Fermor calls a time of gifts. I’m not sure why I find myself unable to see the gifts. I suspect that a lot of it has to do with being always disappointed and (as I perceived it) misunderstood as a child (exhibit those wounds again!). What I really need (why am I using that word over and over—really?) is to let go, stop all the scheming and let be—what will be. This not as a fatalistic resignation but as hopeful expectation.

Ultimately, all journeys are deathward. Even when we tango hardest, we do the danse macabre. Grinning death capers with us and woos us to his arms. This need not be a grotesque recognition. What it ought to tell us, and oh I know how preachy it sounds, and how far I am from really (again!) believing it—what it ought to tell us is the stark, liberating truth of our human condition. Without our help He doth us make—we are creatures called and loved incredibly into being by a God whose mirthful way for us is beyond our ken. And I affirm this in the face of the outrageous suffering of so many in our world, not wishing to diminish or gloss over or falsely apotheosize that suffering in any way.

In face of death: life either has meaning or it does not. If not, it seems well-nigh intolerable to go on. If it does, then one must live lifewards simultaneously that one lives deathwards. What this means I confess I don’t have the faintest idea. But I think and hope (really!) that I can begin trying.

This may sound absurd, but I have an almost fetishistic sense that much that has happened in my life has been revelatory in the raw and primitive way that Rudolph Otto writes about. Hell—I’m fancying it up. What I mean to say is that things have happened to me and still do, and I have great trouble welcoming them. I also feel over-privileged and guilty—just leave lil ole me alone and I’ll be good and quiet and won’t get any more hard blows (because I deeply suspect the bitter must come with the sweet).

I know that I need to cultivate these things, or an attitude of receptiveness to them. I need to think, to dream dreams and caress them to higher polish in my waking state, to write and publish. I need to take time—“time, my chiefest enemy,” I said in a puerile poem I wrote as a pre-teen. The insight behind this only grows stronger—too little time, too much to do. Why do I think this? Here’s area for some soul-searching work.

To return to the Hamburg time of gifts, and bring this account of a journey to a close: one of the insights I garnered from this experience is that I do after all belong to a community—a community of scholars. Living in the U.S. robs one of the sight to see this. Even academic life in America ultimately succumbs to the functionalism that seems native and endemic to the culture. In Germany/Europe at large (I suspect), the intellectual constitutes a clan. One with its guild—responsibilities and code of etiquette, but also one with its privileges, and among those time.

I now see what my utopian fantasy leads toward—an idyll in Europe to have more time. Time to read, study, talk, and write. Time to explore and foster my connectedness to the theological enterprise now catching up so many people around the world.

Lord of the unknown face and the faces known in every nation, guide my steps to you. Open those doors you want opened, close that should be shut. Turn my face toward you as I journey step to step towards that bright day in which I shall be ready to behold you face to face.

Independence Day 1990

Hamburg, 13.6.90: Innocents Abroad and Restroom Follies

Some impressions from yesterday: Abendbrot with Dorothee Sölle’s family reminded me of Steve’s family, in a way. They sit quietly at table, as if each is abstracted into his or her own world. And yet they talk and laugh—but the overall impression that of a wall around each head, each heart. Something in me resists and rages against such opacity in people. I could not be German, if this is part of what being German means.

At Dorothee Sölle’s lecture, things began on an almost raucous note. She started speaking even as people milled about here and there, but eventually everything was quiet—again, off in each head. Then in the question section, only three people from the large audience asked questions. The “clapping” what that each bet on his or her desk with knuckles.

Coffee: we ordered cappuccino for coffee yesterday afternoon, and received a cup of cappuccino qwith a good dollop of schlag. This in north Germany . . . . And that following a lunch dessert of strawberries in whipped cream . . . .

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In the morning, we went to the university subway stop to meet Wolfram W. When we located it, she demanded that we stand outside. Then she came running out: “There’s a man in there and he got up when I went in. Then, legs crossed scissors-style: “I have to go.” Back in, then out again: “He wants fifty francs!”

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9 P.M. A long and trying day, but peaceful now, as I listen to a blackbird sing in the shrubs outside my window. It rained and/or was overcast much of the day, but cleared up around 7:30 P.M., and is now gorgeous. Nice to have an evening to rest and recuperate. We’ve been pushing it, and I feel the effects.

After we met Wolfram W. this morning, we went at his recommendation to an Italian (Etruscan) restaurant for lunch. Had tomato soup, salad, and lasagna . . . .

After lunch, shopped along the arteries of streets around the central university campus. Bought things to eat for the evening, a dark bread called (we think) Munsterländer, a German brie, an English cheddar with herbs in it, a Swiss Emmentaler, and a Jahrlsberg. With this, four kinds of cherries, nectarines, cherry juice, and wine. A veritable feast.

Steve bought a pair of Birkenstock sandals, and I had my hair cut. Our attempts at speaking German painful, but we manage, and people are on the whole very gracious and encouraging. I find the people both attractive and off-putting. There is obviously a Northern reserve—I catch people looking as if they want to stare, but won’t let themselves. On the city transit trains, people sit quietly with dispassionate expressions on their faces. No one talks to anyone else . . . .

Taking the train into town gave me a different perspective on the class structure of the city. The neighborhood in which we’re staying is obviously swanky, whereas many we passed on the train consisted of old and ill-kempt high-rises. And the people who got on at these stops were often obviously of a different class from those on which I’ve been basing my impressions. A number of young men had long, scraggly hair and looked washed out as if on drugs.

Why am I writing all these silly things? The frustration, I think, of getting any reliable angle on a city when you’re just passing through and insulated by ignorance of the culture and (relatively) of the language. I don’t want to travel as the typical American tourist, but it’s hard not to. I fantasize that without Kathleen and Abner, it would be easier to melt and blend, to be at home in this setting.

Hamburg, 12.6.90: Purple Rhododendrons and Crouching Lions

This is the day arranged for my meeting with Dorothee Sölle. I feel (9:30 A.M.) very washed out, not vibrant for such a meeting.

Had German breakfast here at the academy of bread and jams, cheese, coffee. The day is bright and sunny, only a touch cool. We plan to walk some now . . . .

Writing this at lecture by Dorothee Sölle at the University of Hamburg. The lecture is about the suffering servant of Isaiah. Since it’s in German, I understand only some of it.

We have just come from having Abendbrot at her house: dark and light bread, several cheeses, Schinken, Leberkäse, radishes, cornichons, tomatoes, wine, and peaches. At the small table in the kitchen, a simple plank table with benches and chairs, were Dorothee Sölle, her husband Fulbert Stefensky, and what I assume were two daughters and a son, with some Bolivian grandchildren, Joanna and Carlos.

Prior to Abendbrot, we spent an hour and a half discussing my Singing in a Strange Land manuscript. Dorothee Sölle thought that the ms. does a good job of telling the stories of the marginal, but is weak in the area of social analysis. Using Holland and Henriot’s pastoral circle, she pointed out that in her judgment, the stories move too quickly from telling the tale to theological reflection, bypassing analysis of the factors that create the situation in which the narrators find themselves.

We talked about ways to deal with this problem. Wolfram W. made two excellent suggestions: 1) the characters ought to be presented as gifted, not merely pitiable objects of charity; 2) I should interview some “real people” like those depicted, and incorporate their words in the narratives.

We discussed all this on an upstairs patio in the late afternoon sun. It was very pleasant, even (when dark clouds didn’t cover the sun) hot. Around the patio were various plants—the geraniums that are omnipresent in Hamburg, what looked like pots of not-yet-blooming oleanders, grape vines. There was also a stone lion on a board across a corner of the railing.

One of the things that strikes me so much as we walk around Hamburg is how artistic Germans are. Even ordinary objects are imbued with grace, or have their hidden grace brought out, by the simple but effective ways in which they’re arranged. Old wooden wheelbarrows filled with pots of geraniums, begonias, etc. Wooden barrels are half cut off and filled with flowers. Shop windows are artfully arranged.

At a house and garden shop we stopped at this morning, for example, lentils were strewn around pottery, kitchenware, china—all arranged to catch the eye and bring out the color and form. And all is spotlessly clean; the stereotypes about German industry and cleanliness seem to have much truth. A cleaning woman cleans our rooms thoroughly each morning, and I saw another woman out sweeping the walkway in front of the Akademie early. Every toilet in the Akademie has a bottle of cleanser and a brush next to it.

Another striking thing is the lace curtains one sees in many of the spotless windows. These often have a windowbox of geraniums beneath them, a vase of flowers, a candle, or a wreath of some sort inside the window.

In the morning, after breakfast, we shopped at a market street nearby the Akademie. There were fruit shops, delicatessens, two bakeries, shoe shops, the house and garden shop, etc. All were so inviting we wanted to stop in each. The fruit in the fruit shop is so beautiful one wants to buy it all—flats of large but not plastic-looking strawberries, cherries, raspberries, luscious apricots. And the house and garden shop was full of well-made kitchen items, tools, china, etc.

We visited one of the bakeries and bought almond crescents and almond-topped pastry and brown bread. At a deli we bought cherries, orange juice, and mineral water.

After dinner, Steve and I walked to Blankenese. We went up one of the little streets, in reality a set of stairs forming a narrow alleyway between houses. The town is so beautiful—tile-and-straw-roofed houses painted white, lace curtains, interesting brass ornaments on the houses. A Wäscherei, for instance, shows a washerwoman and a pot of wash on a pole outside the house.

And the gardens: roses of every color, blooming lushly. Delphiniums, daisies—all “arranged” to look natural; nothing marching in rows. One house was framed by purple rhododendrons and other pink and purple flowers, with a red climbing rose and daisies.

N.B. Must remember to send a copy of my social gospel and feminism articles to Wolfram W. and Dorothee S.

In our discussion, Dorothee Sölle pointed out that many of the prayers I have chosen foster a spirituality of God over-against or above us. I need to survey these prayers and weed out those that foster such a view.