Bad Boll 8.1.1998

I gave my paper yesterday. People have had nice things to say about it. Last night, a group asked if I have thought of writing a novel.

Before this, during Marjorie Suchocki’s plenary paper, I wrote a note to myself: “If I cannot tell my own story, then what story can I tell? And how can I tell my story if no way opens?”

In the past, I would have construed all this in terms of vocation/calling. Now that language seems empty to me, or, more precisely, the universe (imaginative? metaphysical?) to which it has reference no longer seems to exist for me.

Perhaps I’ve courted my story and danger for too long, not consciously, but just by the way I’ve lived. In such a life, clarity is not often available. And yet clarity’s what I most need now—neat mathematical clarity of the sort that places all the pieces in the puzzle, just so.

But have I foreclosed myself to such clarity precisely by that courting of mystery and danger? And how laughable to talk about my dull middle-aged life as one of mystery and danger. It certainly wouldn’t appear that way to many people. But to me, it does, from the inside. Mystery in the danger in the sense that I’ve never quite settled for . . . answers. And how desperately one needs . . . answers as one grows old.

Bad Boll 30.7.1998: Healing Springs and Living Wine

Evening of a rainy day spent in the Swabian Alb. I’m sitting at the open window looking out at the ridge line behind the academy at Bad Boll A moment ago still, unwilling mist was rising from a point in the trees, very appealing to the eye, suggesting the Ur-roots of German culture (I’m overusing that Ur word in this journal, aren’t I?). Now it’s almost, but not quite, obliterated by heavy rain. I imagine some presence there, rising from the mist.

On the windowsill a glass of Württemberger Riesling. I like to see how it catched the light that’s still strong despite the rain. Wine does look alive under such circumstances, as the oenophiles maintain. This wine—Stetterner Wartbühl—is not bad, perhaps just the way to celebrate such an ordinary, extraordinary, evening.

I’m enjoying the time alone after too much intense time with too many people. The rain, the guttering sound of it on all sides, the evening light, the now clearing skies, the wine: all make me content to be here, just here, at this window now.

Opening the bible, I turn to Luke 8, where Jesus casts out demons and heals the woman with the flow of blood. Lately, I keep coming to passages about healing. Why? I don’t feel much healed. To the contrary, I feel roiled with deep emotions, among with self-loathing and envy predominate, at academic conferences. It’s so easy for the macho-hetero sexist big boys, and they’re so oblivious to the torments they inflict, as they babble on about overcoming sexism and fostering inclusivity.

Is everything in this spot contrived to bring healing, this ancient Kurort? Do some places have a kind of “natural” healing virtue? A psychotherapist at the conference tells me there are ancient holy wells and springs under all the great cathedrals . . . .

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Moving to full night now. I’ve been lying in bed reading David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and watching the falling, rain-ridden and haunted light ring fascinating changes on the stucco walls of the two buildings to be glimpsed through the window.

One has cream-colored walls, the other yellow, though the point of it all is that, in this brief space of time, they’ve become so many different colors it’s hard to tell what either “really” is. A luminous yellow and gold, under the brown and red tile roofs they have; then a pink and a faded dusky tawny color. And now a rather ominous bleached white next to a nondescript brown, the windows of the buildings sullen sore eyes without sight, gazing vacantly into the distance.

With such light, such buildings, no wonder Central Europeans can so easily conjure up vampires.

Bad Boll 29.7.1998: Dark Mountains, Neat Villages

At Bad Boll now for the second day. We spent both days in Bubsheim, Steve’s Kuld Ur-village (at least, the village to which he’s traced his earliest roots—to the early 1600s—in the Schwäbische Alb just east of Rotweil.

An interesting area, different again from many we’ve been in. Very Swabian, I suppose, without knowing much about it. Bädecker says Swabians tend to farm part-time on small land holdings, while having other jobs. That seems to be borne out by all we’ve seen—no large farms, just orchards on the hillsides, and higher up (as at Bubsheim), what seem to be unfenced pastures. And in every village, small factories making clothes, metal parts of machines, etc.

So the people seem to bear out the notion that Swabians are hard-working, thrifty, etc. The villages exceedingly neat, physically pretty, but a bit drab in the human sense, with no shopping area. Bubsheim has no shops at all, in fact, and no restaurant, though it’s a large (and obviously more prosperous) village than many we’ve been in.

The lack of a shopping area—or any focus (the church is on the perimeter of the village)—gives the place a forlorn feel. One scarcely sees people anywhere, and at noon all’s eerily quiet, with shutters over windows.

The countryside, by contrast, is beautiful—dark mountains in the distance, those large pastures, a cool breeze sweeping over all. But in winter, mustn’t it often be bleak—or have been, before travel could occur?

Braunschweig 26.7.1998: Fledermäuse and Moses

Feeling very out of sorts today, after two nights of too little sleep, with nightmares and anxieties.

What to say? A flea market in Braunschweig yesterday with Mareile, where Steve and I bought a small painted pottery pitcher for Mareile, of the sort she collects, and one for ourselves, along with a bowl from the Tyrol. Two days before, in Braunschweig, we had bought at an antique shop an art nouveau/Jugendstil trivet with a swan on a blue and yellow background, and silver edging. Also bought a set of those lace and embroidery edgings for cupboard shelves one finds in Germany, with little sayings worked into them.

Braunschweig 25.7.1998: Amber Skylights and Clacking Hedgehogs

To Braunschweig yesterday to see the Dom—again, since Mareile took us on a tour of it the first time, we were here. I wanted to see the famous Imervard crucifix again.

As cathedrals go, it’s . . . engaging? I don’t have a cathedral language, because, despite all my attempts to appreciate them, cathedrals still simply leave me cold. I can’t connect to this expression of medieval faith—to medieval faith insofar as it’s embodied in cathedrals. Nothing I experience as faith seems reflected in those high cold spaces glittering with jeweled glass, echoing with sound, commemorating noble men and women, but, nowhere, those built these palaces.

Even as art, I just don’t quite get them. It’s always as if I’m reading a language I’m supposed to know, but don’t quite.

What appealed to me in Braunschweig: the austere chalkstone, with its soft marl and muted lights; the clear windows in the walls—an innovation, but one to my taste, modifying the gloom of most cathedral interiors; and of course the crucifix.

Not quite sure why I like the latter. Perhaps because I’ve been told to marvel at it, I try to do so, without ever being sure what makes it marvelous. I like the austere, no-nonsense, Saxon way its massive height and breadth are displayed against a plain white wall. I like the face, which seems simultaneously rapt away to heaven and fully aware of all those who gaze on it, all those it lifts up to God in its act of obedience. And the flowing, highly stylized robes seem to me both to prefigure humanism, and—somehow—to reinforce the hieratic mystery of the crucifixion, as those flowing lines in Celtic iconography are said to bespeak the numinous power of the saint around whom they flow.

Mareile took us to sit in front of the crucifix for about 10 minutes, saying not a word—just the right way to do it. She has such class: that overworked and slightly ridiculous phrase out of a 1940s film is the only way I know how to describe it. I wasn’t at all surprised to find yesterday that she’d gone to a finishing school in England run by the Madames de Sacre Coeur. That erect carriage, the intelligent, ladylike piety, the cultivated air, say it all. Was it they who taught her to forgo escalators, to climb stairs without touching the banister, to shudder at the very idea of eating ice cream on the streets (which Steve and I boorishly did after the cathedral tour)?

Not at all a surprise, then, to hear that not only is her son T. married to an aristocrat; so is P. It’s actually the latter who married a von Buhlow. T.’s wife B. is a descendant of the Austrian royal family, of Elizabeth wife of Franz Joseph.

After hearing of these connections, I asked Maria last night how it happened that two of her brothers married aristocrats: do Mareille or Walter have noble blood? No, Maria said, we’ve just a very special family. It’s that special, aristocratic, quality in Mareile I’ve tried to describe—a natural aristocracy.

After the crucifix, a tour of the eerie crypt of the Dom, full of the coffins of dukes and duchesses of Braunschweig. Mareile took us into a passageway leading to the tombs of Henry the Lion and Matilda, built by Hitler when he sought to legitimize National Socialism by appealing to luridly romanticized notions of the German past.

The place was eerie to the extreme: all heavy black squares of rock glinting with feldspar, with black grouting. Vents here and here had crosses atop crosses, the bottom ones turned upside down. Over the tombs themselves, a skylight of amber seemed to flicker like fire, like an implacable fiery eye. I didn’t like the place, and wanted out immediately. My flesh crawled.

Mareile had told us on our last visit to the cathedral that Hitler had used it for mystic rituals designed to access the power of Henry. He was evidently disappointed when he opened the tomb and found Henry to be a small man, and not the giant Teuton of the master race in its Ur-days. A brochure in the crypt said that Hitler used the Henry myth to justify his Lebensraum policy in the Slavic lands, claiming that Henry had Christianized these, and hence it was fitting that a Reich founded on him should take these lands over.

After Braunschweig, home for a pizza and pasta supper on the terrace with Maria, while Mareile attended a party—Steve’s birthday supper. A nice evening, ending with the coming of a hedgehog to the rhododendrons around the terrace. We heard it rustling and clacking against the leaves, and saw them moving. Finally we got up and peered in, and there it sat, very docile, watching us. Maria put out a bowl of milk for it, and I went to bed, to dream horrible nightmares.

Braunschweig 24.7.1998: Precious Purple, and Blue Angels

Yesterday a trip with Mareile to Wolfenbüttel, where she works in the Herzog August Bibliothek. We toured it in the late afternoon, as rain poured down outside. (People are beginning to complain bitterly of the rain, saying it has ruined gardens and crops.)

Library interesting, and Mareile a marvelous tour guide. I was particularly interested in a bible from Reichenau, a monastery in the Bodensee area that had a particular style of religious art, in which scenes were reduced to a symbolic essence. In the one we saw—the angel meeting the two Marys—Jesus’s resurrection was signified by his grave clothes rolled into a ball and left in the empty tomb.

On the facing page was an oval of gorgeous purple, leaning more to red than to blue, appearing like faded silk with ripples. Mareile explained that purple was, into the Middle Ages, a more expensive color than silver or gold, because it came only from a certain “snail” (squid?) of the Mediterranean, whose ink, on contact with air, turns this color.

She went on to say that because of the preciousness of purple, the Roman Emperors permitted no one else to wear it except themselves, the senators being allowed only a border of it on their robes. Mareile thinks this is why the Roman Catholic church uses a variant of the purple for cardinals’ robes.

All of which made me think of the color purple and its significance for gay life and culture. I had just told Mareile of Judy Grahn’s theory about the liminal significance of purple. She seemed interested.

More gorgeous and curious things in the library, including a 16th-century Portuguese navigational map for the journey around Africa and on to India, then we went on into Wolfenbüttel, where we stepped inside the hof of the schloss of the Duke of Braunschweig, and then visited the town. It has pleasing fachwerk houses in abundance, and seemed to have that air, not quite cheerful, but solid and serene, that one finds in these regions. The Saxon air?

After Wolfenbüttel, back here for abendbrot at friends’ of Mareile’s—Wolfgang and Anka. He’s a Braunschweig gardener, she Marile’s closest friend, her heart-and-soul friend, as Mareile describes her. Wolfgang showed us the garden, which is arranged to open into wheat fields by way of two pools, water gardens full of cattails and water flowers. There was also an interesting sculpture, two blue metal pieces about 10 feet long, mounted so that they moved like wings. Wolfgang refers to it as an angel.

We ate in a garden house with open sides, under an arbor of white wisteria that became very fragrant as night went on, in the cool damp air. Anka and Wolfgang’s daughter Katrina, who lives next door, joined us. She, too, is a gardener, and is taking over her father’s practice as he retires. She’s unmarried, has short hair, with an athletic body and a long, mannish stride, and an unnerving directness and unnerving frank gaze.

Anka and Wolfgang very pleasant: both humorous and quick to laugh, he a bit sly and merry, she slow and . . . well, Saxon . . . solid and serene. Abendbrot fairly ordinary, with salamis, cheeses, boiled eggs, a tuna salad with chopped onion and dressing, a salad of cottage cheese and chives, a paté adorned with sprigs of thyme from the garden, and the tomato, basil, and mozzarella salad that’s becoming ubiquitous with German upper crusty circles.

Is it that the Germans are simply unimaginative when it comes to food? Or do they like sameness, the reassurance of stability a predictable meal brings? On the one hand, there’s that admirable sociability the Germans insist on when eating and drinking. But on the other hand, there’s the appalling dullness of it all—the monochromatic food eaten over and over again, always in abundance, with a kind of dreamy self-absorption and much earnest talk. This hardly elevates mealtimes to occasions of wit, sparkle, and gustatory excitement. And perhaps that’s the point: everything in German life seems designed to mute, to order, to control, to assure that nothing unpredictable occurs.

Ah, well. Kind of these genial, cultured people to invite us to dinner, and a good time was had by all, followed by schnapps (plum) in Katrina’s garden, where two large pots of angel’s trumpet stand, not yet blooming. We picked up apples from the ground to make applesauce, and then visited the family’s sheep at a little pasture with more apple trees and lots of undergrowth. Then to Mascherode . . . .

(And the abendbrot wine redeemed the good if uninspired food: a white dry Muscat from the Tyrol, with a Tyrol red I didn’t try after I saw it poured. It had that weak color of German red wine, the color that promises insipidity. The white was very good, and served cooler than is usual in Germany, where many people seem to take cellar temperature for chilled.)

Braunschweig 23.7.1998: Inge's Rescue and Little Red

More Mareile stories. It seems that after the war she and her family were hungry. They had prayed for the Americans, father than the Russians, to liberate them. When the troops came, they instructed families to pull down their black-out shades as the troops came through Königslutter. Mareile peeked out of the corner of a shade and saw black soldiers in a truck—the first black people she had ever seen. Later, she and her brothers went to the barracks and begged for food, saying, “I have hunger.” When her mother found out they’d begged, she was furious. The black soldiers called Mareile “little red.” She liked their friendliness.

Care packages of food and clothes came from America. Mareile’s family were virtually the only Catholics in town who weren’t refugees from the east. The priest refused to give them food and clothes, reserving these for refugees. Because the family were truly hungry, Mareile’s mother begged. At this, the priest said they could have a package, if the mother came by night so no one would see her. It was full of glorious food, things unattainable in Germany: raisins, white flour, chocolate (Mareile claps her hands and her eyes dance as she tells this).

There were no shoes to be bought. If one bartered an item of one’s own at some exchange center, one could obtain shoes, etc. All Mareile had to barter was her doll. She did so, for shoes. Each day she’d go to the shop to visit Inge, looking for her in the display window. One day, Inge was gone. That Christmas, Mareile received her as a gift. A friend of her mother’s had bought her, to keep for Mareile. Mareile still has Inge—as Maria says, “Inge still lives.”

Because the family’s house had been bombed (in one night, 20,000 people died in Braunschweig), all their clothes were destroyed. When Mareile’s father returned from the war, he had nothing to wear. A neighbor’s husband had been in the SS. She gave one of his uniforms of black wool to Mareile’s father: the best material in der Welt, Mareile says. Her mother turned the uniform inside out, and it became a new suit for the father, with tailoring. Mareile received a new coat from a care package, all gray wool and too small. Her mother sewed brown fabric onto the sleeves and hem, to lengthen the coat. Mareile wore it for years—ganz schick!

Mareile’s father was a judge in Braunschweig. As Hitler rose to power, the father didn’t want to serve a state ruled by Hitler. He moved the family to Königslutter, resigning his job. People told him he was crazy to forfeit his career.

And more on yesterday: after the tour of Königslutter, Mareile drove us back to Mascherode by way of the Elmwald, from which the chalky stone for the Königslutter cathedral was mined. She told us that after the war, people would forage for mushrooms and fireweood in the forest. She and Walter spent many days hiking there.

It is a beautiful forest, with a mix of conifers and deciduous trees. After we passed through it, we entered very attractive farmland, with rolling hills of cattle and horses—something like Virginia. In the flatter land near Braunschweig, as one descends from the mountains in which the Elmwald is found, sugar beets and grain grow, along with asparagus. Mareile tells us that this sandy and peaty soil is the most fertile in Germany. Here great-grandfather came here in the 19th century, from Thuringia, to seek work in the Braunschweig factories. Catholic families in southern Germany migrated in this period, as the many children overtaxed the farms, causing the land to be divided and divided again. Unlike the Protestant proletariat, though, the Catholic workers avoided some dehumanizing aspects of industrialization, Mariele thinks, since the church kept community and spiritual life alive for them.

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Like so much about the war in Europe, what Belmont Abbey did just ever quite make sense. If I tell myself they abused so many people because they were financially insecure, then I remember the wealth the monks have. If I say they persecuted people, then I have to ask how the rest of the faculty stood by passively as this was done. No answer is ever sufficient, just as with attempts to explain or understand what went on in Germany from 1920 to 1945.

Is it better, then, to live in the questions, than to have the answers? Am I nobler and deeper for being perplexed? Or is my refusal to forget, to settle for life-as-it-is, a sign of some dis-ease, some craving for a security life never affords anyone, inside myself?

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Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (London: Vintage, 1997):

“Much of it must have been ornament, people making strange little alliances in their heads between things they had heard or read about, seeking to assert themselves in those endless conversations, implying they were in the know, there was much else they could tell but . . . ." (pp. 182-3).

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Mareile again: We didn’t know what was happening to the Jews. We knew they’d been sent away, yes, but often one by one, so no one noticed. My parents said that it only began to be clear to them, what was happening, shortly before the war.

Then, after the war, our school was forced to watch films showing in detail what had been done. I cried and cried. After that, whenever I had any pain, I told myself, It can’t be as bad as what the Jews suffered. When I had dental work done, I didn’t have an anaesthetic, because no pain I experienced could be as bad as theirs.