Hamburg 4.7.1998: Grumpy Jonah, Whales in Hot Pursuit

A good night’s rest, after several poor ones. I feel as if I’ve turned a corner inside, and am now homewards, whereas for much of the trip, I was leaving home.

A dream I had last night makes me feel this, though I don’t know why. In it, I was someplace—my neighborhood, but some version of many neighborhoods—where everyone had prepared skits for a neighborhood festival . . . .

+ + + + +

Dinner last night at Nestor and Ella B.’s. He’s a Filipino student at the Missionsakademie. They had also invited a friend of theirs, another Filipino, Nilo, who is here as a gay partner of a German, Thomas.

Talked much of gay issues. Nilo and Nestor say Hamburg has just enacted legislation to allow foreign partners of gays to reside in Germany. This is good for Hamburg, but will have to be respected elsewhere in Germany.

Nilo says the gay population of Hamburg is 10%, at least 200,000. They’re being courted by various political parties, most of which don’t keep promises to the gay community after being elected.

What’s fascinating is that Nestor, a Baptist pastor, arranged this dinner meeting, and is active in supporting the gay-lesbian cause. He and Nilo and Ella speak of the silence surrounding this issue in Germany, and of the discomfort gays and lesbians experience at the University of Hamburg. Some are instructed by teachers not to speak about their experiences.

Why all this for us, now—from life/God? Somehow, I don’t want the burden of this knowledge, and of any call that might be implied in it. I don’t know what to do with it—don’t see a way to use the knowledge that has been given to me. I just want peace and quiet . . . .

And it surely hasn’t escaped my notice that almost uniformly, all the faculty members I’ve met at the University and the Akademie are intently heterosexist and unwilling to discuss gay issues as issues of justice, when they are passionate about justice in general. It is, in fact, an oppressively heterosexist atmosphere at the university, dominated by married or partnered straight men and the kind of women who fit into their world.

Hamburg 25.6.1998: Barlach's Wiedersehen and Perfect White Teeth

Sitting in the office provided for me at Binderstrasse 22, in the pale light of a late-June morning in Hamburg, after two days of incessant rain. When we awoke this morning, slugs had invaded our apartment, having sought the open windows in the night.

As I think about Hamburg in conjunction with the essays of Richard Rodriguez I’m reading—about San Francisco—I think what a masculine city Hamburg is, in a very masculine country. Yesterday, we were at the city art museum: such a heavy, overweening, macho experience. Columns of black faux marble with brown ceilings, dark green walls. The art collection actively repulsive: heavy, badly displayed, not honored.

Perhaps I’m out of sorts, with a cold and touch of bronchitis since Ireland. The Barlach house was, by contrast, a wonderful oasis, reverent pieces in a reverent setting. The Christ and Thomas piece is beyond belief.

+ + + + +

7 P.M. A storm has suddenly blown up. The day turned sunny and warm at noontime, and after our commitments at the university were done around 5, Steve and I took the train back here to walk by the Elbe.

But almost as soon as we set off on the walk, it began to thunder and become dark, so now we’re back at the apartment listening to the rain and feeling at loose ends.

Disspirited. I feel pulled down by the cold, insufficient sleep, the stress of getting through this course.

Insubstantial. Nothing I say or do seems to make much sense, to promise any openings for the future.

And so much goes unsaid. Dare I to speak of the lust—the active lust—I feel for some of the German men I meet? That milk-freshness they seem to have even when debauched, those eyes of glass-blue, and, my God! the teeth! The perfect teeth. Do they even begin to know the response they elicit? Is the innocence a tease? Are they all as slow as Steve always is to give in to pleasure, to know his heart? Head knowledge must be kept from heart knowledge: a key motto of German life, which must make for some very split psyches.

Faulkner says the only point of literature is to tell the story of the heart. After Ireland, I keep mulling over—or is it fantasizing?—a novel about Mullinavat, New Orleans, Shubuta, Orion. The trick would be to avoid artifice and deceit . . . .

Well, those are the words that pop into my head. What I think I mean, rather, is that’d have to avoid the artifice of the path well trod, of the conventional emigrant epic. That’s a tale that has been told, over and over. Where’s the heart in it?

Öhe 25.12.93: Weihnachtsmann and Klepper Hymns

At W. and K.’s cottage on the Baltic Sea. We drove here in the early afternoon. It’s about 2 hours north of Hamburg, east of Flensburg, at Öhe.

It’s lovely, a two-story yellow-brick house on an old farm. The houses are along a lane leading to the farmhouse, an imposing red-brick building of two or three stories, with wings almost like an English manor house. Past the farmhouse is the sea, which we saw only after night fell, as snow and rain whipped off the water.

Yesterday, we drove to W. and K.’s about 2:30 P.M. They had fixed Knödeln and Rotkohl and turkey, and we had a bit to eat, then drove to K.’s sister’s house, A. Her husband U. is an engineer with Electrolux, which in Germany is a manufacturer of industrial kitchens.

The house is very glitzy—white marble floors, a high-tech kitchen all polished marble and steel with an oven one cannot yet buy commercially, one that cooks faster than a microwave, cool white linen walls everywhere, with banks of windows and French doors, sparkling bathrooms with the best polished-steel fixtures, a huge wine cellar and play rooms for U. and his four-year old son P. (a workout room with elaborate sauna, a tool room, a room in which U. and P. have constructed a miniature steam engine!). As we passed the laundry room, U. said it was “his wife’s” washing room.

At first I was a bit uncomfortable. Tried to pet the family’s cocker spaniel Dinah, and K.’s father told me not to do so. Her father a small man with a set mouth and lines in his cheeks to accompany it, and blue eyes that seemed to stare and stare all night long. Her mother is a very pleasant stocky blond woman who laughs easily and gruffly, as K. does. Both were dentists, as is K. and as her sister A. is.

W.’s parents arrived a little later, she thin and gray-haired with a sympathetic, somewhat nervous face, her hair cut in an engaging boyish shingle, he taciturn and frail-seeming, with a face like something a puppet-carver would make—close-set (and deep-set) blue eyes, a long, thin nose. Then came W.’s sister H. late, as she had been the night of the children’s music performance. She told me at dinner the reason for her lateness was that she had felt sick at her stomach, had taken medicine, then lay down to rest and overslept.

K. told us in the car today that H. is unsettled; married in 1970 and divorced in ’71, then has been unable to get subsequent relationships to work and regrets that she will not have children of her own. W. and K. have left instructions that if they die, H. is to raise T. and A.

I like H. She clattered on in my ear at supper last night, talking re: fat farms she goes to, her compulsive eating, her increasing dissatisfaction with Weight Watchers (it now allows chocolate and ice cream: one taste leads to another). The older people looked as if they wanted her to shut up: Frau throws herself at American man, WWII revisited. The younger ones seemed to pity her and think she was shaming herself.

Shame’s a big force in the German psyche. One’s expected to get it right, and if one doesn’t, there’s not a lot of leeway granted.

But I liked H., as I’ve said, and found her public fragility endearing. I sensed that she’s lonely and unhappy. K. told us she fights constantly with the man with whom she lives. He was decidedly not there last night, and at one point U. said something to the effect that he wondered what her Freund would make of all her attention to me.

Heiligabend: after champagne toasts were drunk very formally, tea and coffee and kuchen and tortes were served. Then we retired to the living room, the candles on the Weihnachtsbaum were lit, and Weihnachtsmann knocked at the door. It was W. in a Santa suit (with face mask). P., the adorable little boy of U. and A., does not know that W. is Weihnachtsmann. W. does a really good job; speaks in a gruff voice as he interrogates everyone re: whether they’ve been good or bad. We all stood in a semi-circle in the foyer for W.’s appearance.

Then exchange of gifts. Everyone sits and opens presents that the giver brings around. K.’s mother gave us a homemade Eierlikör, H. a bottle of wine each, W. and K. a cup and saucer each, and A. and T. a box of marzipan each.

W. and K. gave her mother a wooden toilet seat, which she wants because the painted ones are so cold. W.’s father suggested she put it over her head to display it. Someone suggested she get a heated seat, and she said, Ach, nay! She didn’t want to cook herself, just to be warmer.

After presents, a meal of herring salad made by K.’s mother, containing chopped salami, boiled eggs, apple, pickle, onion, and yoghurt, in addition to the herring. Also a herring salad from W.’s mother, with sour cream, bay leaves, and juniper berries. And smoked salmon (an Irish pink salmon) with horseradish in cream. With this, bread, cheeses, and tea, coffee, and wine. Afterwards, a really good French red wine from U.’s cellar to drink with the last bits of cheese.

Then at 10:15 to Katharinenkirche in the Innenstadt, for the 11 P.M. Gottesdienst. We met the R.’s there, sat with them, including R.’s mother. The church was destroyed during the war, and rebuilt afterwards. I didn’t see a lot of it, as we simply walked down the aisle and sat; but it wasn’t really pretty inside. Too stark—white walls, no stained glass windows.

A good, though small, choir, and a sermon by Peter Cornehl of the University of Hamburg. The sermon preceded and followed by readings from Isaiah and Luke, with carols sung by both the choir and the Gemeinde.

The sermon, to the extent that I followed it, hit on the theme of darkness, the darkness that the light of Christ appears to illuminate. Peter Cornehl spoke of the darkness of poverty and political repression, referring specifically to the Nazi period in Germany and present resurgence of Nazism, the situation in Russia, sickness (he mentioned D. Sölle in particular). All this was interwoven with the story of Jochen Klepper, whose hymn Die Nacht ist vorgedrungen we sang. He was a poet whose wife was Jewish, a resister of the Nazis, whose hymns are now sung in churches.

After the sermon, a bidding prayer, in which the pastor of the church (in a big ruff) went to the high altar and prayed for the Somalians, Bosnians, South Africans, Latin Americans, homeless, etc. As we left the church, a collection was taken up for Bread for the World.

Then home, bed, and up at 10:30 to drive to W. and K.’s, where we had breakfast, packed, and came here. Along the autobahn north, not much to see, but on the country roads over, pretty rolling wet pastures with hawks hovering over them, and crows (Krainen in German, I learned) on fenceposts and telephone wires, prosperous villages of red-brick houses and vacation houses, with little farms right within the villages, green pastures, cows, chickens.

A particularly pretty village called Kappeln just as one approaches the coast, with an inlet of the Baltic called Schlei. (Is this related to our English word “slough”? When I was growing up, the waters that backed up from rivers near us were always called sloughs.) the village has a harbor with fishing boats, houses perched on a hill overlooking the Schlei, a clean Scandinavian look. In some ways, it reminded me of those little Scottish fishing villages one sees on the east coast of Cape Breton, rugged, but not made coarse by ruggedness.

Hamburg 17.12.93: Advent Wreaths and Ausländer Aus

Sitting in a café in Blankenese where we’ve just ordered coffee and torte. On the table an Advent wreath, which the waitress lit—three candles. A beautiful sonata on the piano, which I recognize but can’t name.

Outside, the wind is blowing briskly off the Elbe: I see a row of cedars bending over. But of course we know the wind is cold, because we just walked in, after having taken the Wandernweg from Nienstedt. The sun shines intermittently, then rain in between.

Yesterday, our presentation, which was actually at the University, not the Missionsakademie. It seemed to go well—students fairly attentive, and asking what we do to combat racism, whether there is an international neo-Nazi connection to the Ku Klux Klan, etc.: all those serious questions German students ask.

Then E. drove us to the Missionsakademie, where we immediately attended a Gottesdienst prior to a Christmas party. Barbara M. led the former, in the little chapel beneath the guesthouse. Very moving. Barbara M. had a Christmas story, most of which I got, because it was directed to the children (who had just had a Christmas party with presents). The gist was that the three kings could not identify Jesus, who had nothing to do with their gold and silver (or, in the case of one, with his intellectualism). But a child could: he saw the Niedrigkeit of the Christ child, his helplessness and dependence on others.

(N.B. If I write any theological autobiography pieces, talk about how Gélin’s book on the poor of Yahweh deeply influenced me as I began to read theology.)

All this was the more touching, because it was addressed to a multiracial, multicultural audience, mostly people from cast-off countries.

After the reading, we read a litany, in which Barbara M. voiced the sentiments of common sense and power (war and poverty are ineradicable, the only hope is in heaven, etc.), and the audience responded by reading biblical passages about Christ which affirmed his this-worldly salvific import.

Then the party. We were seated at a table with Frau R., the cook (whom we had met last time), a student from Togo, a young German woman from Bochum who will be ordained and pastor a church, and S.W., a theology student from near Lübeck, who will be ordained.

The food was good, if unexciting—a pork roast stuffed with apricots and prunes, a pork tenderloin, a spanakopita, fish in innumerable salads and smoked, two kinds of cole slaw, and a Römmergrot and a chocolate mousse, with bread and cheese, of course.

The big surprise: at table, I mentioned Thomas Mann to S.W. (when I found he was from near Lübeck), Death in Venice, and he winked as he told me the book was a favorite of his. Then, when the young German woman told Steve the “Father” Christmas at the children’s party was a woman, Steve mentioned that this transgressed gender lines, and S.W. winked again.

Gradually S.W. and I found ourselves sitting side by side at the table and I admired his ring. He told me it’s a Ghanaian ring given to men who enter a certain “club” as they mature. It was given to him by a Ghanaian friend.

One thing led to another, as they say, and he offered to take us out to Café Gnosa in St. Georg, which we had wanted to see. I can’t say I loved it. I can count on my fingertips the number of times in my life I have been to a gay bar, so I have nothing really to judge the experience by. Maybe it was the hour or the season, but it seemed a bit dreary—a long, narrow, smoky place with two rooms and tables along the wall.

The waiter was very sweet, though, and we met a cabaret performer and his boyfriend, who were enchanting—or whatever is between nice and enchanting.

Then home, very late, and I slept hardly at all. At 10:30, E. took us to the Stafford café in Nienstedt Marktplatz, where we had been before, for a breakfast of bread (and bread and bread), eggs, sliced meat and cheese, jam, butter, and coffee.

He told us the future of the Missionsakademie is in doubt. As more and more Germans declare no church membership and the church thus loses the 9% tax they pay, there’s talk of financial crisis, compounded by the economic hardships they country faces, the debt the West has assumed from East Germany, and, in particular, the debt the Western church has assumed from the East. At bottom, though, it’s political, he believes, and the talk of cutting expenses by closing the Missionsakademie is really motivated (he believes) by resistance to the “frivolous” third-world concerns of the Akademie.

E. told us that the front door of the Missionsakademie has been sprayed with anti-foreign neo-Nazi slogans. He and others have told us that Bischöfin Maria Jespen of Hamburg is increasingly embattled, attacked by the Right for her socially critical stands.

And now back to Nienstedt and, I hope, to sleep before our evening lecture.

Hamburg 16.12.93: Christmas Merry-Go-Rounds and Ein Mischmasch

At my post again before the glass door. Rich metaphoric material there: how windows/glass doors invite us beyond, open onto new vistas. Whatever praying is, I seem to do it best before a window.

The weather cold and rainy again: K. last night called it Scheisswetter. I see now that some of the flowers on the balcony—the only plants still green—are miniature roses. They nod bravely in the wind today, buds nipped.

I awoke sick and drugged-feeling. Steve says jet-lag. I say that and more. Panicky day yesterday, first at lunch with W. at an Etruscan restaurant, where the waiter was rude with me for rejecting the tomato soup that accompanied the fettucine with tomato sauce. I chose straciatella instead, and he called the choice ein Mischmasch. I don’t handle these things well, and became so full of panic I ended the meal with diarrhea. Then, similar symptoms at a school Christmas concert we attended last night.

Consequently, at bedtime my intestines groaned and couldn’t sleep. When I did finally fall asleep, I slept heavily until 10 this morning, awaking out of a dream of being chased by ruffians into a cleft in a rooftop, where there were dry leaves and spiderwebs.

Ah, well—the stuff of life: dreams. And mine, like my life, are fragmentary, truncated, disordered, and full of strife and pain.

With our late start yesterday, we saw little of the city. At around 11 (after we had argued foolishly for an hour), we took the UBahn to meet W. at the university. For an hour or so, we walked the streets, looking in shop windows, buying a bottle of cherry juice, because we’re so thirsty still from the arid plane air.

I feel drawn to the young folks I see on the streets and at the university—so serious and intense-seeming, with a self-containment that seems directed to politics and social criticism, rather than self-serving. But I always sense that the other side of that German intellectual abstraction and political passion is fanaticism, as if all the repressed and denied emotions of the unconscious are permitted to go with free rein into “high-minded” causes.

Went to a bathroom for students at the university that seemed somehow to typify German culture. It was white and sparkling, with all graffiti carefully (daily?) removed. But it smelled frankly of ordure. A condom machine was displayed very frankly, too, in the exit, with the word natürlich in its slogan—I thought, a play on “nature,” which sells everything today. It had a picture of a woman putting a banana in her mouth.

After the bathroom, W. After W. and the Etruscans, Steve and I headed in the cold wind, under glowing skies, across the Kennedybrücke to the Kunsthalle.

But as we arrived, we realized we wouldn’t have time to see it, since it was past 3 and we were expected back before 6:30. Also, it’s under construction (i.e., renovation) and not all open.

So we walked instead, thinking we were headed to St. Georg to see sights, but instead coming to a shopping area around Mönckebergstrasse. All was Christmasy and attractive as night fell. In a large department store, we saw a woman with a small dog on a leash. On the twisting streets, stands set up for Christmas, in rows following the curves of the little streets and alleys. The stands were tastefully decorated in that German way, with scenes of this and that—mostly Märchen-like. Most sold Christmas ornaments, but some had gifts—silk ties, scarves, candy made from herbs. And many were eating stands, with pretzels, wurst, praline almonds (“an old German receipt”), pita, shishkebab, pizza, or Getränke hot and cold. Germans eat and drink always and everywhere, and they were doing this duty manfully and womanfully this pre-Christmas evening.

Steve and I had unfortunately stopped at a mirrors-and-polished aluminum bistro before this, to have mineral water and non-alcoholic beer. It had none of the charm of the open-air stands, but appeared to be run by a very appealing gay couple.

One thing I liked very much in the “carnival” displays was a merry-go-round, which was decorated on top with ovals depicting scenes from German history and myth, and on bottom (inside the carousel), with what seemed to be faces of queens. It reminded me ot things we saw in Nienstedtermarktplatz last time we were here, at a fair there. Germans seem to excel at decorating carnival rides and carnival stands, and always in a 19th-century Romantic motif. I wonder why?

In one large department store, a stunning display of chocolates in every shape, size, and form—many in Christmas motifs, of course. W. says these go on sale after Christmas.

Another shop all cards, Christmas ornaments, art supplies, leather notebooks and binders. Clean, tasteful, and shop folks so helpful.

Then home, Abendbrot, and out to the school concert in which T. sang and A. played sax. It was in a Lutheran church packed chock full of parents and others, who talked boisterously until the concert began, and times between. A number of the songs sung were spirituals—“Oh Happy Day,” “Go Down, Moses”—and were sung with something approaching gusto and bodily enactment, if not wild gusto. It was actually rather charming to hear the German children sing the spirituals, with their prominent front-of-mouth L’s—“Let my people go”—and the way the Hamburgers seem to turn short I’s into short E’s—“He washed my sens away.”

And now to dress and prepare for the afternoon presentation at the Missionsakademie, and our transfer there.

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, 16.6.90: Altona Shopping and Organ Grinders

A long and not very satisfying day. After the long night, I had to be up early to address E. Kamphausen’s class—on the situation of African Americans after the end of Civil Rights. Not eventful, and I feel I did poorly. Felt quite ill on awaking and after the class.

After that, we went (all of us) to Altona and shopped a few hours along a new shopping mall, at one of the main S-Bahn stops. At a flea market under an overpass, I bought a little German doll for Kate for 5 DM. Last night, Wolfram W. had given me a little stuffed giraffe that T. wanted K. to have, so now she has two such toys.

Then we bought Apfelkorn, Kirschwasser, and some postcards, and had lunch at a Chinese restaurant in the shopping mall: chicken and almonds, beef and bok choy, Nasi goring, tea.

Impressions: Altona is becoming a non-German, international area. Many Turks and Portuguese, and Turkish, Italian, etc., restaurants. Even the cheese shops I saw, which had Dutch names, saying that they carried Turkish specialities.

On the one hand, these Mediterranean folks seem to bring something vibrant to the phlegmatic Germans, and especially to their food. On the other hand, they seem less tolerant, and one Portuguese woman threw a cup at Steve’s and my feet, which Steve appeared to attribute to homophobia. In fact, there appeared to be a good number of gay men in the mall—a fact one would attribute to the rapidly changing neighborhood.

The class: the German students look washed out and ill-kempt, the foreign ones not so. But the Germans are obviously well-read and thoughtful.

The restaurant: very tall Chinese who spoke English well. They turned out to be from Hong Kong. Most striking about the food was the sheer flavor of the meat—the sheer natural flavor even without sauce.

In front of the entrance to the Altona S-Bahn station is a huge statue—cast bronze?—of a man holding a fish. We made a picture.

After Altona, we returned and had coffee and Mohnkuchen and Kirschkucken, which we had bought at Altona. Then Kathleen and Abner rested while Steve and I walked to the botanical garden, fighting fiercely all the way over this and that silly thing.

The gardens were not arresting, at least not at this time of year. There was a restful Japanese garden with water and a pagoda, a sort of simulated Louisiana swamp with cypress trees and Spanish moss and a rose garden, inter alia. The rose garden was nicest of all, very odiferous. The most fragrant roses were planted at the front, among them a climbing red Aimable rouge, a white Königin von Dänemark, and a Rosa bourbonia called Great Western—a pale red with full round blossoms that was exceedingly fragrant.

After the gardens, we walked through the Jenisch park where there’s a late 18th-century neoclassical house on a hill—imposing but not stunning. As we walked, I kept thinking of Thomas Mann, of his world-weariness and wondered if this reflected a kind of North German sense that life is, after all, full of struggle and pain. The overcast day elicited these thoughts, the faded blue eyes and washed-out expressions of the people we passed. Who remembers the war, I wondered?

We walked on along the Elbchausee to the Nienstedter church, a half-timbered 18th-century church at which the social elite hold their weddings. Behind this was a pretty thatched farmhouse with an attached building that had pots of geraniums and lace curtains in the windows—some sort of parish house.

Across the place was a pub marked C. Schepel, on the corner of Hasselmanstrasse and Ninestedtner Marktplatz. This was beautiful on the outside, dingy and smoky and rather drab within. Except it did have a frieze mural, much faded, with the dates 1848-98. This had a saying: “Wer nicht liebt und trinkt und singt, er nie zu wahre Freude bringt. Prosit!”

The bartender was a nice middle-aged man who understood English well enough. We drank Alsterwasser, a sort of shandy, and ate a pretzel. Then we walked back via Nienstedter Marktplatz, and discovered this is where we’ve been shopping and going for afternoon coffee. This is where the fair was set up, and this evening it was in full swing.

So we went and got Kathleen and Abner and walked back to the fair. We ate Thüringer sausages, currywurst, and Schinkenwurst, then a plate of delicious mushrooms fried in butter. I took pictures of a puppet theater from Lübeck, and of the top of the carousel. Earlier in the day, at Altona, we saw an organ grinder, a sweet little old man accompanied by a woman with a can, and took a picture.

Hamburg, 15.6.90: Pineapple Sauerkraut and New Pentecost

I’m actually writing this on the 15th, because the 14th was a long and full day. I slept till 11 A.M., and at 12:30, Wolfram picked us up for dinner at his house. Prior to that, Steve and I walked for coffee at the nearby konditorei, and had a kännchen each with kirschkuchen.

En route to Wolfram W.’s, we got to see (by car) sections of Hamburg we have not seen. Around the Altona S-bahn stop, where there are supposed to be interesting shops, were lots of Turks, Turkish and Portuguese restaurants.

Wolfram W. stopped at what looked like a gas station but actually apparently collects bottles for recycling and sells cases of mineral water and beer. I don’t know if this is state-run or not. He returned case upon case of bottles and bought a case of water and of beer.

His apartment and family are lovely. His wife, K., had made a marvelous meal of sauerkraut with pineapple, kässeler rippchen, wursts, and potatoes. With these she served 3 mustards—a krautersenf, a sweet Bavarian mustard, and an ordinary one. Dessert was strawberries and vanilla ice cream.

The children A. (10) and T. (11) were charming. T. speaks English well; A. has not yet studied it in school. They were, as with most German children, almost frighteningly well-behaved. During dinner, the phone rang and A. answered. It was the press, for W.—a call he was expecting. A. told the caller he was occupied. When she returned to table, W. exploded (relatively so) because she had made this decision on her own. T. chided her as well.

A. sat quietly, mutely, expressionless. What goes on inside a German child in a scene such as this? Children in my family would at least have tried to talk back and defend themselves. Do German children not feel the urge to do this, or shame at being publicly chastised? If so, where does that emotion go? K. did seem protective.

The apartment: several rooms with large windows (on the 3rd—us, 4th) floor overlooking a green central yard full of trees. All is painted white to catch the light, which was sparse yesterday as the day was overcast. A study had an imposing bookcase of bottom drawers and top glass, shelves, an interesting mid-19th century American photograph of a Dane in a mahogany frame, two oak writing tables with dropped lids, and a large oaken chest from England, 17th-century. There was a vase of dried flowers and a pot of some daisy that is of the chrysanthemum family. The fixture was a Tiffany-like shade.

In the entryway was a large armoire, very plain but striking, of what may have been maple. The transom of the entrance door was covered by a paper on which had been stamped in large colored letters, “Für A. und T. zum Taufe.”

The study connected via a doorway with pocket doors to a sort of parlor with leather chairs which adjoined the dining room. On the dining room wall was a series of black and white shots of K. holding T. as a baby.

After dinner, we returned to the Akademie and Steve and I walked to the nearby Hirschpark. Beautiful green walks around a central enclosure of deer, with rabbits, peacocks, ducks; a laneway of lindens and another of massive banks of rhododendrons; striking views of the Elbe, some overlooking thatched-roof houses.

The evening: unexpected grace. I met the group to whom I was to lecture at 7:30, and it turned out to be international: Rev. P., a Presbyterian minister in Korea; Senhor P., a Brazilian Mennonite interested in American Mennonite responses to civil religion; Rev. S., a Hamburg Lutheran minister concerned with feminist issues and constructing a post-patriarchal christology; J.-M. E., a Sorbonne-educated Camerounian priest and author of several books; another African theologian; a German theology student; a woman from Köln who is in residence here for a year; an American philosopher-theologian, F.G., who teaches theology here; and several others whom I don’t recall well.

I lectured briefly on the social gospel, structural sin, the American South, and hope of approximating the kingdom of God in history. Then there was a multilingual and lively discussion (Rev. P., and Senhor P. spoke German but not English); some things had to be put into French for the Camerounian. I felt—and I say this without undue sentimentality—as if I were at a new Pentecost. What was striking was the way in which the Spirit assembles those of many tongues and cultures and theological concerns, but who share a common vision of a church in service to the reign of God. Erhard K. summed up very nicely what I felt by speaking of an international community of friends.

Afterwards, both W.W. and F.G. lauded my lecture and expressed an interest in bringing Steve and me to Hamburg for a semester or year.

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 . . . .

+ + + + +

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!”

+ + + + +

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.