Braunschweig 21.7.1998: Limpid Maaren and Wood Sprites

Leaving Koblenz, 8 A.M., for Braunschweig yesterday, another drive to the Eifel—to Kelberg—for Steve to meet a man with information on the Schafer family. Then on to Dreis, where he bought a history of the village from the former bürgermeister.

Again, that beautiful landscape, where wheat was being harvested on a fine summer day, a hot one (30º). Part of its appeal is that, from a ridge, one can see so far—the rolling volcanic land, the little Maaren with their limpid water, and the fields. It’s also tame, a bit shaggier and poorer, than many of the farming areas of Germany, including the Bavarian Oberpfalz.

Which makes me wonder if the people here aren’t a good bit Celtic. I suppose I ask this because Herr M. and his wife—the former bürgermeister of Dreis—looked so Irish-Scottish to me: small, fine-boned, piercing blue eyes. They were sitting outside in folding chairs, and could just have easily been in the Ozarks or Texas, he with his cowboy shirt and jeans, she with her faded old print dress.

Their air, too, was Celtic—the open hospitality, the snap and spark of wit and laughter, the acerbic twist of tongue. Were the river valleys of the region Romanized and Germanized, while these high hinterlands with their poorer soil, lands which sheep still graze, and their solemn womblike little churches so different from the Baroque ones of Bavaria, left to the Celts?

After the Eifel trip, dinner beside the Rhine in Landstein. The food was gutbürgerlich, fulfilling three of Jup’s requirements for a good feed: gutbürgerlich, viel, und billig. We ate outside in a beer garden as we drank beer and listened to the raucous tables all around, full of Rhinelanders enjoying the fine summer evening beside the river, and guzzling beer and eating heartily of potatoes and pork. The gusto with which Germans tuck in—and celebrate—can be positively frightening.

Jup and Marian were very kind to us. We had wondered how much they knew about our relationship, and what they thought. On the Eifel tour, Marian asked what the church thinks of our living together. We told them about our experiences with our jobs, and they were furious. Turns out they have many gay friends, and feel very attracted to gay people.

A footnote to what I said re: Herr and Frau M. looking like an elderly Texas couple. What small-town Texas mayor would be able to produce a history of his community, spanning (and detailing) its history from its inception. Here, the Irish analogy works, but not the American ones. The interest in one’s tiny local area is as intense as in Ireland (and the small villages and sparse settlement again speak to me of Celtic origins).

Footnote to comment about the Eifel landscape: and those dark little forests scattered here and there, with their cool depths and whispers of ancient folk like and wood sprites . . . .

Over the Atlantic 10.1.94: And All Our Yesterdays Have Lighted

On the plane now. I hesitate to write anything. Just no get up and go.

It’s partly utter fatigue. But it’s more than fatigue, the bronchial and sinus infection I seem to have picked up from that horrible night in the Besigheim hotel. It’s the sad, inconsolable weight of things, in which tears are always to be found: Sunt lacrimae rerum.

As Proust knew (Partir, c’est mourir un peu), every ending partakes of death. And death is also judgment. No—hell—I can’t get my mind working these day. I know all I’ve written in the past few days is nonsensical, pretentious but incoherent, crap. What the hell is wrong with me?

There’s always that voice crying inside us, piteously: I want, I want, I want. Karl Rahner might call it the lure of the horizon, or Aquinas the voice of God within our nature reaching to completeness. Someone like Heidegger (or perhaps Sartre) might speak of the irresistible impulse of our need to find meaning in face of death, of the dissolution of our fated existences.

At one level, what I want is so clear, so material, even. These last few days, especially the two in Trier (and at M. and W.’s before that), I’ve realized how wonderful it would be to know a number of languages better than I do, as well as “average” Europeans know them. I had four years of Latin in high school and two in college, three years of Greek in college, three of French. I had to learn German to read in graduate school.

And yet I feel utterly tongue-tied when confronted with the necessity to use the languages I do know—to read Latin or Greek again, to speak French or German in more than rudimentary ways. I’d love to be more than rudimentarily informed about other cultures, art, music, books, history.

This crying out inside—I want, I want—makes me think of going back and studying languages on a regular basis, reading books in French and German, even polishing my Latin and Greek again.

But the voice within the voice, the want I can’t identify—such confusion, pain. Not turbulence, oddly enough, but a fatigue that so captivates my limbs, my will, that I live facing the snake charmer, and no other way. Holy damn—I cannot think or write! Not without resorting to those glib metaphors that mask as much as they disclose.

The ultimate wants—God? Love? Fulfillment? Self-acceptance? Peace with family? Clarity re: my vocation, the meaning of my life? I don’t know, don’t know how to name it, how even to begin to aim. I’m paralyzed.

An unshapen thought that haunted me in Trier, and yesterday as we revisited the little churches in Dockweiler and Dreis and saw the Maria Laach abbey church, is how so many generations of people who had to be diverse (and perhaps as mixed-up as I am) lived within the parameters of Catholic culture.

This is all so unclear: I guess what I’m trying to say is that I wonder how to make my peace with the church, to live in it in such a way that I draw strength and life from it without letting it destroy me. That, or how to leave, nake a clean break, move on to a new life.

Why even try? In part, because—the same tired old answer à la Chesterton, Belloc, etc.—Catholicism is an amazingly attractive religion. If . . . .

The tender sensuality of the mother of Jesus holding her dead son in the Maria Laach pieta; the heart-rending exposure of God’s pain in the statue of the father holding his crucified son in the Dockweiler church: no Christian tradition that truncates itself from the iconographic and liturgical traditions of early Christianity has the power to touch these depths. Not artistically, at least. Not liturgically. Such sensual (and simultaneously spiritual) depths.

The artistic heritage of the communions that have retained living connection to the earliest periods of Christianity—and even the doctrinal heritage, with all its contradictions and complexities—put one in touch with such symbolic transformative power, and one simply does not find power of that sort in some of the more recent Christian traditions.

In a city like Trier, one can’t help but be ineluctably aware of the continuity between European Catholic culture and the Graeco-Roman heritage. It’s everywhere, and perhaps not least in the way people stroll, stare, flirt, celebrate life. And that heritage contains strong gay currents. What else to make of the baths at Trier, the unabashed erections of satyrs in the stone carvings of the Rheinisches Museum?

But if . . . . If that heritage within Catholicism can be protected from the ravages of Enlightenment culture, particularly in the grotesque and bastardized way that culture impacts everyone today—via the American advertising industry with its attendant religious form, televangelism . . . .

And if that heritage can be rescued from the dreadfully—the astonishingly—short-sighted attempts of John Paul II and Ratzinger to freeze it, to puritanize it, to make it the willing servant of Enlightenment even as it believes itself to be critiquing Enlightenment!

All so intellectual. Back to the heart, to my heart. As I make such a move in my head, two things flash before me. One—for reasons I can’t explain—is an Epiphany procession I saw yesterday as we drove through a little Eifel village. Proud, happy children in white robes, gold crowns, black face.

Perhaps the attraction of that Augenblick is that I see in it how the heritage goes on. It’s lived, even if it may not be lived with all the self-conscious, ironic, defiant playfulness I would like it to muster. And where life is, there’s always the possibility of resistance and novel, unexpected adaptation.

The other flash is almost precisely an opposite one. It’s a feeling I have, one that has grown in me on this trip, of the rather sad sameness of human existence everywhere. The hideously ugly furnishings of Steve’s cousin’s house, his boorishness and grasping nature: these can apparently be found anywhere, in any suburb or village. There is no utopia, no pristine peasant/bohemian/intellectual utopia to which I can retire, or which can console me as I think of its existence, while I live in my own nightmare place.

What to do with these contradictory impulses? On the one hand, intellectual curiosity, desire to understand and experience, pushes and pushes me. On the other hand, I have such certainty that all my attempts to find the new will go the way of dusty death.

Is it possible to welcome the new, wherever it meets me, while living in the face of death? I don’t see any other option, if I’m not simply to give up, roll over, and die.

Steve says not to wait for some sign to come, for some miraculous savior, for some door to open. Wise words. But frankly, I often don’t know what else to do.

The Eifel, Kreis Daun 23.12.93: Counting Cousins (Not!) and Village Marketing

In the car, on the A1, about ½ hour south of Köln, driving back from Dreis to Hamburg. It’s about 10:45 A.M., and the first really clear, sunny day we’ve had—though the sky still has clouds. Flat, pretty farmland with rich, red-brown earth and church steeples in every direction. Actually looks like a lot of southern Minnesota. Catholic Germans imported the village-clustered-around-a-church pattern virtually intact.

Impressions: the store in Dreis, the one and only store, as far as I could see. We go into it after our walk round Dreis in the snow and rain in which we sketched and snapped pictures. It’s on the 421 highway, one long rectangular building with a rather dirty window occupying much of the roadside wall. In it that forlorn and dusty collection of odds and ends one finds in the store window of any village anywhere, lined up a bit with kitschy Christmas objects.

The shop owner, an officious woman of about 50 with short black hair and appraising gray eyes, pelts out a deep-throated, rather minatory Guten Morgen!, though it’s afternoon. Steve goes up to the cheese-and-meat counter at the back of the shop, behind which she stands chatting to a village woman, and asks for postcards. She comes out and shows him the rack of cards, disdainfully. He selects various views of Dreis, then goes to pay.

As he does so, the village woman walks out with her basket. I step aside in the narrow aisle and say Entschuldigung. She doesn’t look at or acknowledge me, as I’m stone and she cold water running past. In general, the women coming in and out (as several do while we’re in the shop) have the same cold, challenging air of the shop owner—as if they want to communicate that we outsiders needn’t feel superior to them, or attempt to impress them with our money, fine clothes, sophistication. Any disclosure of who we are must begin with us.

When Steve pays, he tells the shopwoman he’s a Dreiser by descent. She thaws, if only imperceptibly—enough to ask bold questions, such as where his family lived in the village, with whom we’re staying in Dreis, where we’re going, whether our friends in Hamburg are male or female. All in German, of course.

Another round, short woman with warmer brown eyes and a very heavy, almost freakish auburn mustache fringing a mouth full of bad teeth, comes up behind Steve and listens. She talks animatedly in that splashy, wet way people around here speak German. I understand only some of what she ways. Steve mentions the Sprünckers and Lambertys, and they say these are not Dreis families. They’re from Dockweiler and Hohelfels, villages only 1 and 2 kilometers away, which the Dreisers treat as if they’re other countries. This is an attitude we meet several times when we discuss Steve’s ancestral families: there’s a very precise sense of where each family is to be situated, and it corresponds to Steve’s records. The Lambertys were from Hohenfels.

Conversely, a family (e.g., the Schäfers) in any given village has a clearly delineated sense of who its kin are, a not very extended sense. In all the villages, families such as the Schäfers, Sprünckers, and Lambertys claim that there are separate, unrelated families of the same name in the village—which is hardly likely to be the case. In such small villages, it’s certainly highly unlikely that everyone of the same family name would not ultimately stem from the same common ancestor—especially when these names are not particularly common.

Discussion over, we turn to leave the store. A cross-eyed woman comes in as we go out. She appears to stare balefully, though this may be because her eyes can’t do anything else.

The Eifel, Kreis Daun 22.12.93: Fachwerk Houses and Lace Curtains

Snowy, nasty weather. We walked in Dreis and I drew, but that’s not easy to do, with the snow mixed with rain which smeared the ink. Also, my hands froze.

Over the church door, a beautiful angel’s head that Steve photographed, and which I ought to include in future pictures, and the date 1823.

Inside, a sweet gay man about 20 decorating the church with a younger boy for Heilig’ Abend. He spoke a bit of charming, heavily accented English. Was erecting the crèche—churches here don’t decorate at all for Christmas until the eve of Christmas.

On the reverse of this page, a drawing of the old Burg in the oldest section of Dreis. In some store, we saw a picture of it in a guidebook, and I stupidly did not note a date or information about it. It’s on the main road running through the town (421, Daun to Hillesheim) west of the church and the oldest buildings of the village.

It’s not in excellent repair, though not dilapidated, and there are things stacked around that seem to indicate it will be repaired. Has rather a forlorn air, as if whatever importance the village had, and which supported the castle’s existence, is long since vanished.

On the other side of this page, one of the few Fachwerk houses in Dreis, which is adjacent the Burg. The drawing is of the main side of the house, facing 421 west of the Burg. The house has a date. I didn’t record it, but Steve took a picture—was it 1728 or 1740?

As one goes on, a street called Ringstrasse comes up, and very old buildings are on the street—the old farmhouse with a picture of a man plowing painted on its side, old buildings of stacked stone, a barn through which the road runs.

I wish I could draw the neat, obviously handmade, lace—and tatting—work hanging in most windows.

The Eifel, Kreis Daun 20.12.1993: Gothic Churches and Bitte Ein Bit

A long and profitable day. Got up around 8:30, the earliest we’ve been able to arise in Germany so far, and had an enormous breakfast, which comes with the room, and makes it a bargain—40 DM/night for each of us. It consisted of yoghurt (made from cream!), mine hazelnut and Steve’s raspberry, an omelet with bacon and green onion, slices of raw and cured ham, a cheese similar to Camembert, bread, waffles, jam, coffee. Even my teeth feel coated with fat: I worry about my cholesterol intake in Germany. All is cream, butter, cheese, meat. The food has been generally okay, never scintillating, but never bad, either.

After breakfast, we drove to Dockweiler, about a mile from Dreis. Stopped at a bakery to ask how to find the parish priest, and the owner very kindly offered to call him for us. It turned out the priest was to arrive at 10:30—a half hour after we arrived.

The man took us to the priest’s secretary’s house, and then the priest (Pastor Florin) arrived almost immediately. He brought us to the rectory, which is now unused, since he serves 7 or 8 parishes and lives in Kirchweiler, another of Steve’s ancestral villages.

They brought out the parish records, and we went through the Familienbuch, which arranges births, deaths, and marriages in family groups. We traced Steve’s family back to ca. 1720 in Dreis, Dockweiler, and Hohenfels/Kirchweiler.

There was a sadness re: the rectory, an unused feeling. It was dark and closed. Makes me wonder re: the wisdom of Pope JPII’s backwards perspective. Catholicism has thriven here since the 740s, but today all seems dispirited—too few priests, too many churches to fill, and a village life that is no longer cohesive, centripetal, centered on the church. The future is not in the past, even if it is in organic continuity with the past.

After the rectory, the church, built ca. 1100, or I should say founded then. It was hard to tell whether the present church dates at all from then. It was a dark and rainy day, and we couldn’t see well inside.

From what I could see, the interior is a rather simple Gothic, with a high alter having a cross of a drooping tree to which Jesus is fixed, with John and Mary on either side. To the right of the alter, on the wall, is a very striking wood carving that looks to be ca. 1300-1400, of the Father holding his dead Son in his arms.

Otherwise (with the exception of nice but not imposing stained-glass windows and pretty angels’ heads “holding up” the wooden ceiling beams), the furnishings and liturgical art are 19th- or 20th-century, and not very fortunate—a back side chapel to the Sacred Heart, icons of the Holy Family, a horrible banner on the altar.

There seems to be a Franciscan influence hereabouts. The bakery owner told us of a Dr. Schneider, a Franciscan from this area, who is a clarissimus in Rome. (Schneider is one of Steve’s ancestral lines. And what the heck is a clarissimus?) And he (bakery owner, who never told us his name) had a brother who was a Franciscan.

The outside of the Dockweiler church, which is dedicated to St. Lawrence, is pretty, especially against the fields and hilltops of the Eifel. The cemetery is a puzzle—no early graves, even 19th-century ones (why not?), and an ugly, dark, embarrassing monument to those from the parish who died in WWI and II, which we found replicated at the Kirchweiler church. On both, we found Steve’s family names—Schäfer, Sprüncker, Lamberty, Schneider, Meyer).

After Dockweiler, drove ca. 1 P.M. to Daun, where we did banking and went to a Schneider bookshop we had seen the previous night. The owner (I supposed her to be) does very attractive watercolors of the region. We chose one of a church seen across a lake that has the sun reflected in it.

She denied kinship with Steve, as Germans seem quick to do when it comes to names shared even in small villages: they seem to restrict kinship to recent relatives, those who can be easily traced. But she was nice, a vivacious 65 or so, spry with short gray hair worn in a straight fringe cut around her head. There was also a nice woman in the shop of around the same age who spoke a bit of English and had visited Florida last year. We find hardly anyone—not even the parish priest—who speaks more than a few words of English here.

Is this region isolated? Did Nazis thrive more here as a result? There was a really scary young skinhead in the hotel bar last night. I kept waking in the night thinking he was in the room. Something re: these villages—the animal skins on the walls, the Gemütlichkeit itself, the old men drinking bitterly in bars—tells me there’s a shadow side, one that lends itself to fanaticism like Nazism.

After Schneider’s, we had coffee at a very cozy bakery, where I had a streusel cake with raspberries and (of course) whipped cream, and Steve an apple strudel.

Then to the Verbandgemeinde, where Steve found the civil report of his emigrant ancestors’ marriage, as well as a typed copy of some record having to do with their emigration. It states that the son of Johann Schäfer and Anna Maria Lamberty—Johann Wilhelm—could not leave Germany till he had completed his military service, a fact that corresponds to Steve’s family stories. His family tradition is, in fact, that the family left Germany because they did not want their sons serving in the Prussian army, and that the son Wilhelm came after finishing his service, joining the family in Minnesota. The woman here was especially nice—gave Steve photocopies for free.

Then drove to Kirchweiler as it grew dark. We knocked about in the cemetery, but could not get into the church. It was locked.

Then back to Daun in the rain. The drive along all the roads is really pretty. High hilltops in the distance, topped with mist; green fields (even in winter) with a few sheep; little villages nestled in valleys or on hilltops, with attractive little white churches with domed spires.

The villages have narrow winding streets and old, whitewashed buildings right on the street. But to me, they feel claustrophobic. Could one be gay, even intellectually curious, in them?

In Daun, as night fell, we had supper. It was early, and so they opened the restaurant (shortly after 5) for us. I had fried plaice with salad and potato croquettes and a glass of dry white wine, Steve a deer goulash with noodles and apple compote and a Bitburger beer. Gut geschmekt.

The Eifel, Kreis Daun 19.12.93: Animal Skins and Village Scenes

We’re now in Dreis (Steve’s tiny Schafer ancestral village in the Vulcaneifel), having driven here today from Hamburg. Since I last wrote in this journal, we’ve given our lecture at the Akademie (really, an evening seminar), and been to Wohltorf for dinner at R. and C.’s.

The former: uneventful, really. I felt uninspired. There were a Brazilian Calvinist, a Brazilian and Filipino Baptist, two Korean Presbyterians, a Lutheran who was (I think) from Argentina, a student from Togo who was (I think) Methodist, an Indian who was (I believe) Anglican, and two Africans I never quite placed—one, I believe, has finished his dissertation, the other belonged to one of the Pentecostal movements in Zimbabwe or Tanzania or South Africa.

Steve talked about AAR, especially about lectures on feminism and the place of gay scholars we had both heard at AAR. I talked about American Catholicism. There seemed to be a dismissive attitude re: the gay subject. All the people were church pastors except one of the Koreans, who was a deaconness married to the other Korean, and the Zimbabwean, who is a prophet. The Koreans seemed the most receptive, the Brazilian Baptist pastor, a black man, the least. He and several others were odiously testosteronish. In fact, the whole thing reeked of male dominance.

There were a number of questions afterwards re: where the group might go if it visited the U.S., and then all was mercifully over.

Because I slept poorly that night, as I often happens when I have run the gauntlet of a lecture, we got up late, in time only to go to the Nienstedt Marktplatz for coffee, then it was time to catch the train to Wohltorf. Lo and behold, S.W. was on the train, at least part of the way to the Hauptbahnhof, so we got to talk.

The trip out east to Wohltorf, which is actually only 20 kilometers from the former East German border, was interesting. We passed through several working-class suburbs with dreary shanty-like houses and little gardens of cabbage and cauliflower, beside the train tracks.

Then we came to a very posh village with fine houses and a sparkling shopping, are, and then to Wohltorf, which is an old village with a more middle-class lifestyle.

R. and C.’s son C., who must be about 14 now, met us at the station. He’s a very likable boy, one who hulks beside and over you as he talks in that utterly serious, utterly guileless way German children can have. He told us the village was an old one with a pre-Christian burial ground, and he spoke of the typical red-brick construction of houses as we passed them.

About the evening, what can I say? R. and C. were simply angelic. Soon after we arrived, they took us and W. and K., who had driven out earlier, on a long walk through the woods, the Sachsenwald near their house. The weather was awful (Was für hässlich Wetter, my Berlitz book teaches me to say), and we met places where we practically had to wade through mud and water, but I enjoyed the walk.

It was cool and misty, the forest full of pine, birch, and oak. Rudi told me the paths are marked and set aside as public walking paths. I saw signs explaining what some trees were, and there were numerous somber and healthy north Germans out hiking—young and old alike—on them.

On the hike, W. told us Dorothee Sölle was taken quite ill the day before, and is in the hospital with edema of the lungs and a very high fever. We had hoped to see her, and he was going to call. This was quite a shock. How fragile and short life is.

Once home, we had tea with wonderful cherry-and-chocolate cake, and an apple cape with whipped cream on the side. R. and C. have a lovely house with a living room opening onto a terrace. This wall is almost all windows, and the house is painted white inside and furnished in school Scandinavian colors with sisal carpeting, undyed. It’s restful to the eye, and must be lovely in summer.

(Forgot to say that on our walk we went into the 16th-century Wohltorf castle, built of red brick and also cool and sparse inside—a look R. says north Germans prefer, in contrast to the Baroque look in which all is displayed, in south Germany. The castle was lovely, with whitewashed walls inside, wide oaken windowsills, mullioned windows, beams with various designs—all in muted colors—overhead. The floor in the kitchen area was, of course, tile, red squares glazed. Upstairs, it was of massive oaken planks. There was a very attractive 17th-century hutch in the first room we entered. The sign said it was from Lübeck, and was of mixed birch and oak. The front had fruit and visages carved here and there on it.)

After tea, we sat and talked as the children (both of the W. and the R. family) played for us on an electric organ and piano. Then R. got out his sax and he and C. (piano) played a few jazz numbers, till R. did not play to C.’s satisfaction and the performance was over.

Then we exchanged presents. The R.’s seemed pleased with ours, for which I was grateful. They gave us a knapsack full—a videotape of a performance of Russian music, a Brahms requiem on c.d., a Dresdner stolen, and packages of Lübeck marzipan.

As we sat, R. brought out a wonderful champagne and we had a toast, then we toured the house. C. Showed me his collection of Steiff animals, which he said are “so sweet”—as was his accent when he said it. He encouraged me to buy one—a real German gift, he said.

We also toured C.’s train set in the basement—very elaborate, with recently constructed mountains and plans for a village, and R.’s wine cellar—also elaborate.

Then dinner. A mixed salad of red and yellow peppers, red cabbage, corn, lettuce, garlic, and dill, followed by potatoes au gratin, rice, lamb bourguignon. The meal was accompanied by a really good red Bordeaux. After chocolate mousse (prepared by R.), we had espresso and candies (wonderful kirsch batons from the Lindt people, and chocolate mints), and Willemsbirne. Then R. poured burgundy, and it was time to float/slide back to the train.

I enjoyed the evening and the warmth of both families tremendously, but I also felt very bad at points—head about to explode, nauseated, the whole gamut. After I got home, was in misery with stomach upset from the combination of social anxiety that so often plagues me at any gathering, and from having eaten and drunk too much.

Steve got us up today at 8 and we were off by 9 on the A1 to Köln and then south. I slept till almost noon. Weather awful. Rain all the way, except for one patch of clearing near Köln.

The region just north of Köln very industrial, then one begins to see little villages clustered around church steeples in pretty, flat farmland. After Köln, the Hohe Eifel—almost, but not quite, mountainous, houses all whitewashed.

We stopped in Arhütte and had a meal about 2 in the afternoon—not particularly impressive, but not bad either: Schweinebraten, boiled potatoes, mixed peas and carrots in a sauce, salad, and a Kölsch-type beer.

Then to Dreis. All these villages have a very old feel to them. They nestle up into hills and down into valleys, and have narrow winding streets dominated by church towers.

The people seemed different, though whether the difference from Hamburg is a city-country one, a Protestant-Catholic one, or a regional one, I’m not sure. Probably a mix of all, but they look different, broader faces, darker hair, and a more Low Countries and less Scandinavian look. They also talk in a more drawly, up-and-down way, less clipped and with more sh-sound to their words.

Steve has already discovered that Sprünckers, Schäfers, and Lambertys—his ancestral lines—are to be found here in Dreis, in Dockweiler, and Hohenfels.

We’ve rented a room in a little Gasthof-restaurant in Dreis, the Stube Vulcan. It’s not immaculate, but not really dirty, either, though I can’t say I like the smoke from the pub downstairs. There’s a hide tacked on the wall outside our room—some small animal—as there were stuffed squirrels, pheasants, foxes, and martens in the place we ate.

Since our rooms weren’t ready when we arrived, we drove to Daun and had tea and cake at a café there as night fell—or dark, rather. Daun seemed very pretty—a stone in its center says Daun, 1250 Jahre. People were walking even in the rain and driving wind. Shops beautiful—will see them tomorrow. And now to the b and b and, I hope, to bed.