Washington, D.C. 24.10.2009: Luminous Turners and Fake Gelato

Steve had two meetings today near the National Gallery of Art, so after the meetings were finished, we walked to the museum. Didn’t have any particular objective in mind in going there. That is, there wasn’t a current exhibition that had particularly caught my eye.

If anything, I wanted to have another look at the Turner seascapes, which never tire the eye. And it occurred to me that I had never tried to find the few Winslow Homers that are at the National Museum. I don’t have a thing for Winslow Homer. But I realize as I age that I haven’t done as much to familiarize myself with American painters over the years as with European ones, so I wanted to fill in some of those gaps.

We found the Winslow Homers, and they were nice to look at. But what really caught my eye in the same series of rooms in which the Homers hang were Thomas Eakins’ paintings.

He hasn’t been on my radar screen, though now that I know a bit more about him, I realize he did the famous homoerotic “Swimming Hole” work that has appeared—I think—on some editions of Whitman’s poetry. In fact, Eakins and Whitman were friends, something I surely must have known already somewhere back in my mind, since I’ve read a number of Whitman biographies.

“Swimming Hole” isn’t in the National Gallery. But several other of his works there rang a bell for me—to be specific, a homoerotic bell. I’m not sure what it was in the sensibility and composition of these works that said “gay” to me, but something did, and I wasn’t surprised, as a result, to see in the Gallery bookstore a number of biographies of Eakins noting a debate about his sexual orientation. I bought one of these, William McFeely’s Portrait, and have begun reading it with great interest.

We did happen on the Judith Leyster exhibit, and I am glad to have seen it, though I can’t say I was bowled over by her work. It’s technically superb, but derivative in a way that most of the Dutch old masters seem to me—derivative, in particular, of Rembrandt and Vermeer, though Rembrandt was almost precisely Leyster’s contemporary and Vermeer somewhat younger than she was, so she can’t have been imitating their work.

That’s not precisely what I mean by “derivative.” What I mean is that when you’ve seen what Rembrandt and Vermeer excel at—the play of light and shadow in precisely drawn, evocative portraits of people posed in interior settings—any other painters of their time and place employing similar techniques seem less imposing. Worth looking at; technically astonishing. But not world-shaking in the way Vermeer and Rembrandt are.

Leyster reminded me, strangely enough, of some of her Spanish contemporaries—Velasquez in particular. I don’t believe there was any intersection of influence between her and Velasquez or other Spanish court painters of their period. But something about the way that they pose their subjects and then study the play of light on their countenances seems similar. Not surprising, I suppose, to find interplay of Spanish and Dutch cultural influences in this period, given the political ties between the two countries.

What will long remain in my mind, though, from this visit are Turner’s seascapes, with their luminous, gloriously transcendent blues. I will never grow weary of looking at them.

After our stroll through the American and British 19th-century galleries and the Leyster exhibition, Steve and I had coffee and gelato in the café below the museum. As we sat near the waterfall that cascades down outside a window there, it struck me how essential places like this are to the human spirit—how they ought to exist in every city.

Places to sit amidst and look at art in various media, to hear and watch the play of water and light, to have coffee and pastry, listen to music, talk, dream. Humane cities and towns build such spaces into their cultural landscapes as a matter of course, as essential needs of the human spirit.

I wish I could recommend the gelato that accompanied this restful, soul-building experience. It was horrific, though. Without my prompting him to comment on his raspberry-cherry choice, Steve exclaimed, after tasting a spoon, that it was totally artificial. As was my dulce de leche choice, with its cloying synthetic (and probably petroleum-based) rum flavoring.

Why, I have to wonder, do we Americans produce such monstrosities and then try bill them as “authentic” culinary compositions? Why try to pass off what is so screamingly fake as the real thing? Why do we not demand better—especially in our national capital, in a place people from many different cultures will be visiting in the expectation of having an iconic American experience?

I have to conclude that we don’t ask for better because we don’t know better. And because sham often attracts our attention more than the real thing does.

Washington, D.C. 23.10.09: Crabcakes and Ginkgos

In D.C. these days for a short trip. Steve has several business meetings and I’m tagging along. The first two days we were here were beautiful fall days, with crisp temperatures and lambent golden light unimpeded by humidity—a wonderful time of year to see the monumental architecture of the city, its wide, tree-lined avenues, and the brick townhouses of Georgetown. Since then, the weather has turned back to Indian summer and things are a bit overcast. Still, it’s nice to be here after the muggy heat of summer, which can make D.C. so intolerable, has broken. And such a treat to see the beautiful ginkgo trees that line so many D.C. streets as they turn bright yellow in the fall weather.

We’re staying at an unmemorable hotel in Arlington, the only place available after Steve had initially made arrangements in town and his first plans had to be changed due to schedule alterations in one of the foundations with which he’s meeting. We asked the first evening in town about nearby places to eat, and the lady at the hotel desk directed us to a French-Italian bistro behind the hotel.

But when we found it, we saw that it was beside a Vietnamese pho restaurant, and we went there instead, and were glad we did. The pho was wonderful, with its fragrant broth spiked with star anise and five spices. It came with a large plate of bean sprouts, lime, sliced jalapeños, and sprigs of basil. We couldn’t have had a supper more to our liking.

One of Steve’s meetings took us to Bethesda on our second day in the city. We drove up Wisconsin Ave. to get there, enjoying the sight of the shops of Georgetown and Tenley along the way, the sight of the national cathedral at the top of the hill as one climbs away from downtown. On our way back into the city, we stopped at the cathedral and visited its gift shop, where we found a new hedgehog for Mary.

Very nice woman staffing the shop that day. She told us she had worked there over 20 years, and is delighted with the change in the federal government in the last election. She also told us of a book recently translated from French to English, featuring a hedgehog—in its title, at least. I think by someone Burberry? Will have to look for it and tell Mary about it.

We also spent some time in a thrift shop on Wisconsin operated by some group called something like the Christ Child Society. Fascinating, if a bit pricey, junk, including lots of sets of old china, discarded oil paintings, many of them of the ilk that Landrum used to call “something one’s great-aunt might paint,” and lamps galore. The latter were being snapped up by a woman from Virginia, shopping with her reluctant and seemingly in-tow husband, who was apparently footing the bill for her purchases. As she said, they left the shop in darkness, since she was buying lamps that were in use to light the wares.

That evening, we once again ate near the hotel in Arlington, this time at a highly recommended New Mexican restaurant that was truly awful. Nary a green chile in sight. The food was mediocre Tex-Mex at best, and left my stomach roiling all night long. The manager-owner and waiter couldn’t have been nicer. But, clearly, this place has seen better days, or those who have reviewed it so highly don’t have a clue about authentic New Mexican cooking.

After that, a long, tedious day at the National Archives, made more tedious by the bewildering bureaucracy, which seems to have proliferated nonsensical regulations since our last visit. I had found references to a collection of documents about the history of the cemetery at Pittsburg Landing from 1866 to 1870 in a published history of the Shiloh Cemetery. Bill Russell and I think it’s possible—likely, even—that somewhere in the National Archives, there may be documents indicating how Dr. Wilson Bachelor got the appointment as physician in charge of the cemetery’s construction in 1867, and why he left in 1870. We also think those documents may contain some indication of his medical education and qualifications for the position.

I sent the document numbers for this collection to the National Archives in an email prior to our visit, and they confirmed that the documents were, indeed, in their D.C. holdings, and I could access them while in D.C. What they didn’t tell me—what I didn’t see anywhere at all on the very user-unfriendly, bureaucratically top-heavy website of the NARA—is that they now have a system whereby documents are pulled at only certain hours of the day.

We arrived right after the 11 A.M. pull and before the 1:30 one, which meant a long wait for our documents to begin arriving in the reading room after 2:30. And though some of the staff members who tried to help me fill out forms to request the material were well-meaning, not one was really knowledgeable about this collection, or even about how one goes about researching the early history of a national cemetery. All had that bureaucratic tendency to try to shuffle you to the next desk, to bark peremptory answers to questions that require thought and expertise if they're to be answered adequately.

It’s a shame that public research facilities like this are so often so badly inefficient and so hostile to the public they’re meant to serve. There is no overall guide anywhere—including in the NARA itself—to the extensive holdings of the National Archives. Finding materials is a hit-or-miss affair that requires the use of many tattered old typewritten indices that could easily be collated in one online collection, and updated and made comprehensive with new digitalized additions to these indices.

But creating government institutions that serve the public has hardly been the objective of recent federal administrations, has it? And when you visit a place like NARA now, you see the end result. Many of our central government institutions now function at a level about comparable to that of developing nations.

That evening, back to the pho restaurant, since we had enjoyed it so much two nights previous. This time, I tried their chicken option, knowing that pho is traditionally beef, but wondering if the chicken might be seasoned differently. It wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t so tasty as the thin slices of beef. It was dry, roasted chicken sliced and added to the broth of the beef pho—but wonderful at that. It’s a treat to have the kind of good, home-style Vietnamese food we remember from New Orleans and from our Vietnamese friends in Little Rock in the 1970s. It’s impossible to find at the Vietnamese restaurants in Little Rock now, which cut corners and cater to middle American tastes.

Before the pho supper, we browsed a bit in a little Italian deli near the hotel, and found it marvelous. Bought hefty chunks of good parmesan and pecorino at prices we don’t see at home, as well as two panfortes, one to eat now and one to give as a Christmas gift, a box of torrone, a bottle of San Giovesi red wine, and a sandwich of mixed Italian meats, cheeses, and salads. We split the latter as a midnight snack later in the evening, with a glass of the San Giovesi.

Yesterday, another meeting up in the Chevy Chase area, after which we drove to Annapolis for several hours in the Maryland Hall of Records. I had a specific record I wanted to find—rather, a series of specific records, with one citation of a particular document in the series. I was looking for any and all estate records of Thomas Hodgkin, who died in Charles or Prince George Co., Maryland, in 1756.

My previous visits to this research facility have been hair-tearing ones. This was slightly better, due to the kind help of a noted Maryland historical-genealogical researcher, who was staffing the research desk at the archives when we visited. He helped me a bit to steer my way through the maze of finding aids and bewildering designations by which Maryland files its documents. As he noted, one of the complexities of Maryland research in the colonial period is that documents were often filed simultaneously (or indiscriminately) at both the county and the state level.

He also pointed out the good work that he and others have done to survey all that seems to be known of some of these early colonial families. Even so, that “all” often overlooks key tidbits in the documents, if one can locate the original documents and read them carefully.

For instance, I found the inventory of Thomas Hodgkin’s estate compiled in Prince George Co. in 1756 signed by two of his children, both of whom noted beside their signature that they were children of the deceased. These two children—Philip and Lucy—appear in no published works about this family that I’ve seen. And this is an important lead, since the name of the son Philip seems to connect Thomas Hodgkin to the Philip Hoskins who died in Maryland in 1716, and who was part of the same kinship network to which Thomas Hodgkin’s family connects—the Brookes, Dents, Hansons, Contees, and so forth.

After several hours of work in the Hall of Records, made more exasperating by some of the officious and rude young men assisting the noted Maryland genealogist, we decided to drive across to the Eastern Shore to look for a restaurant we’d read about on Kent Island, at the Narrows. The restaurant is called the Narrows.

We got there around 3: 30 and were surprised to find we weren’t the only folks having a late lunch or early supper—a lupper?—beside Chesapeake Bay. The restaurant was wonderful—unpretentious but elegant, with an old-fashioned porch across the back where one can sit right on the water.

We had crabcakes with a side of garlic mashed potatoes and another of cole slaw, and found them wonderful—full of big pieces of what the restaurant advertises to be local blue crab meat, barely held together with mayonnaise, and lightly sautéed on both sides. It was a heavenly meal, with good bread and butter and real, well-brewed ice tea.

I don’t know if I’ve ever driven to the Maryland coast at this time of year. It was interesting to do so yesterday. I particularly enjoyed seeing how the state uses wild native plants, as one nears the coast, to line the roadside. I’m not sure of the identity of all of these plants, but I recognize them as native plants that often grow in old fields and that either flower or go to seed in the fall.

One is a bit like life-everlasting, with pearly, slightly translucent, nacreous small flowers in big bunches at the top of tall stems. The other is a native grass like broomsedge, which turns a handsome shade of gold-brown this time of year. I saw this planted along a dark brick wall lining the road as we got near the coast, a striking combination of colors.

Light always shifts slightly or dramatically as one nears a seacoast. The shift is less dramatic in the mid-Atlantic states, where colors are more muted everywhere than in more tropical areas, and where the interplay of light and dark is more temperate.

Still, it’s there, and it lures the eye. And the heart.

Braunschweig and Frankfurt, Germany 13.7.09: Fernet-Branca and Baroque Chapels

A full day yesterday, Sunday. It began with Mass at Mareille’s church, the Dominican church, which we attended to be polite—though Mareille asked if we wanted to go with her and would have been content with our demurral.

Because the acoustics are so bad in the church, neither Steve nor I could hear or understand much, which is, all things considered, not always a bad thing in churches. What I could hear struck me as far more thoughtful and intelligent than what one routinely hears in American churches. The priest quoted St. Benedict and St. Gregory the great in a homily about Jesus’s sending forth the apostles two by two.

Then back to Mareille’s house for a lunch of mozzarella and tomatoes with basil, and a rest of several hours before we drove to Liebenburg to visit Mareille’s brother Peter, who had invited us for the evening. He lives in a retirement house provided by the diocese at the foot of what was once the schloss of the Bishop of Limburg.

Mareille’s friend Franz Josef drove us. We had met him at church—a very nice man who grew up in East Prussia and was expelled from there with his family as a boy after the war. They walked for days over the ice, rucksacks on their backs, to reach the German border.

We had met Peter some 15 years ago when he was pastor in Goslar, and liked him. Seeing him again was a great gift. He was warm, animated, an embarrassingly gracious host.

Mareille had cooked a casserole for the evening meal, and when we got that and a basket of Peter’s laundry she had washed and ironed attended to, we sat outside for coffee. The house in which Peter lives is something like a mountain chalet, a single room with the bedroom upstairs off a small staircase in the middle of the room below, which is a large living room with a small kitchen partitioned off from the living area.

Windows are everywhere, especially on the wall overlooking the patio, which in turn overlooks the Harz Mountains in the distance—a splendid view.

As we prepared for coffee, Peter bustled around, bringing out cookies and sweets, bottles of marillenschnapps and of elderberry juice he makes from the elderberries that grow all around the house in what Peter calls his garden—i.e., in the woods.

There was a long discussion about why Mareille had decided not to bring kuchen, which reminded me of how much Germans consider afternoon coffee a formal meal, with its own rules, one of which, Franz Josef kept insisting, is kuchen. To make up for the lack of it, Peter produced a bar of marzipan made in a Benedictine cloister at Chiemsee, and proceeded to divide it up with his Swiss army knife. It was the most wonderful marzipan I’ve ever had, far superior to Lübeck marzipan, sweet and grainy, and intensely almond-tasting.

After coffee—again, typical German fashion—a walk to work off the sweets and prepare for supper. Peter took us up the hill to what remains of the old burg the bishop of Limburg built here in the high middle ages, as the Braunschweig Herzog repeatedly attacked his lands.

From there, we climbed yet higher to the schloss and visited its magnificent Baroque chapel, one of the best examples of Baroque in north Germany, according to Peter. A student of the Asam brothers painted its altar and ceiling murals of the Annunciation and the life of St. Clement. They’re masterful and beautiful, the blue of Mary’s cloak echoed in the sky across the ceiling.

Peter explained the murals in great detail, commenting on how the Annunciation shows Mary engaging Adam and Eve, who stand beneath her, the snake on whose head Mary stands writhing around them, the tree of life and angel guarding paradise over their shoulders. As he noted, the mural is a profound theological commentary on the Annunciation.

The St. Clement story was harder to follow—literally so, because the chapel is small and the ceiling high, and it was very difficult for me to crick my neck at any angle that allowed me to see directly overhead. This cycle of painted stories from the golden legend of Clement that circulated through Europe in the middle ages is one the Limburg bishop wanted as the chapel ceiling because he himself was named Clemens August, and the scenes slyly support his resistance as a bishop to the power of the Kaiser.

After the chapel, more climbing through the woods to a medieval watchtower atop the hill over the burg and schloss, from which soldiers guarding the area could look in the direction of Limburg and send signals for reinforcement if attacks came. We climbed the stairs inside to the top and looked out over the plain checkered with gold and green fields and ringed by the blue mountains—a beautiful sight.

And then back for dinner, for Mareille’s casserole of pork cutlets in a cream sauce with green peppers and spring onions. Peter insisted on pouring more wine even if we drank a few sips, so I quickly learned to guard my glass and sip very slowly. He had already pressed glasses of sherry on us before the meal began, and I had not even finished that preprandial before my wine glass magically overflowed with a crisp, cool, dry white wine perfect for a muggy summer evening.

We ate outside and talked and talked into the evening, about many things—about Obama and his importance to the whole world, about the war years, and Mareille and Peter’s memories of the American and British soldiers who came to Braunschweig, about names and the significance of names, and on and on. As we talked, Peter poured more marillenschnapps and glasses of Fernet-Branca, which I was delighted to taste, since I had just read James Hamilton-Paterson’s hilarious novel Cooking with Fernet-Branca, and had no experience on which to hang my imagination as I read its disgusting recipes for dishes full of the bitter digestive.

All this, as we ate on the patio, Mozart playing on a c.d. player inside, rain falling, Peter unrolling a canopy to cover the table as Mareille and Franz Josef wondered if we should eat inside, saying, “Yes, we can!” as he unrolled the canopy.

And then gifts: he insisted on pressing gifts on each of us as we left. For Steve, a huge 18th-century key from one of his many collections of antique nails, keys, curious rocks, and fossils; for Christoph, his choice of a fossil from a bowl full of them; and for me, a beeswax pilgrim’s candle from Jerusalem.

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Now in Frankfurt, where we drove today to spend a day before we return on the 15th. We’re sitting on the shady side of Leipzigerstrasse on a hot, dry summer day, sipping apple schorle (me) and beer (Steve). Have been looking in shop windows and enjoying the fresh air and chance to stretch our legs.

I keep thinking of a word Mareille taught us: pfiffig, if I heard it right, which is equivalent to verschmitzt, and is, so Mareille said, halfway between lustig and geistig. Franz Josef actually used the word pfiffig yesterday, and I asked him to clarify. He said it meant “clever.”

The distinction—the sharp distinction—between geistig and lustig escapes me, frankly, so I have no way of guessing the middle point between them. It strikes me as amusing that a people so careful about displaying exuberant emotion should have such a precise linguistic calibration of degrees of enthusiasm, though, admittedly, these are degrees of intellectual sharpness.

But in a way, that’s not surprising, is it? The two go hand in hand, perhaps: emotional reserve and careful verbal calculation of degrees of spiritedness.

Braunschweig, Germany 12.7.09: Apple Trees in Church, Shopping Malls in Manor Houses

The flea market yesterday: in addition to booths selling defunct dolls and pictures of decrepit Victorian (what’s the German equivalent to that term, I wonder?) ancestors, there were food vendors—Turkish (as always), Indian, Dutch (fried doughnuts), seafood and sandwiches made from fish from the North Sea, pea soup, and so forth. It was a pleasant morning, picking among the alluring detritus, much of it different from what one might find in an American flea market, smelling the alluring (and sometimes disgusting) smells from the food vendors, all in a circle outside that looked like some sort of race track.

In the afternoon, Mareille took us and her grandson Christoph, who arrived at 3 on the train from Münster, to an old schloss in the inner city, which was destroyed along with everything else in the bombing of World War II. It’s in a grand neo-classical style, with Ionic columns and imposing civic statuary.

Only the outside has been restored. Inside is a shopping mall that was teeming with people on a rainy, cold Saturday afternoon. Amazing, the extent to which Germans seem mad for American culture. The mall could have been anywhere USA, with its Toys R Us and Starbucks. Racks and racks of clothes in each clothing store, with English slogans inscribed on all the shirts.

Then on to the Dom to see the beautiful old Imervard crucifix. There we found a surprise, an exhibit of garden plants—inside the cathedral—known to have been in the garden of Kaiser Otto IV.

Everything was done with typical German thoroughness, and was astonishing. Down the far aisles of either side of the church, apple trees—real ones—with fallen apples in the grass beneath them, grapes and vines and wine-making accountrements, gardens of herbs and flowers, squares of vegetables, implements for cutting cabbage into kraut, potted orange trees, displays of spices.

It was wonderful to find a garden inside a stony, cold cathedral that would otherwise be empty. And it brought people into a “sacred” space they might otherwise avoid, precisely because it is stony and empty, like almost any other cathedral anywhere in the world.

A garden in the church: the very fact that the idea is so astonishing is in itself astonishing. Perhaps every church ought to have wild or cultivated spaces inside for nature, and walls permeable to the natural and human world around the church.

Braunschweig, Germany 11.7.09: Riots of Roses and Bunzlau Jugs

In Braunschweig at Mareile’s. Always such a great pleasure to be here. She doesn’t appear to age or to change.

When we arrived and came through the gate, she came running down the garden path and kissed us, then ushered us inside and sat us very formally at the table she uses for reading and writing letters beside large windows overlooking the garden.

We sat, the three of us, in a semicircle around the table, as she talked to us as if we had parted only yesterday—though we realized as we talked that it’s been a whole decade since we were last here.

On the table, wild white sweetpeas she had picked for us on a walk in the woods, in a Bunzlau jug, and on the dining table, another Bunzlau jug of rose-colored white sweetpeas. Our bedroom has a vase of very sweet-smelling pink roses from her garden.

The garden is, as in the past, a wonder to behold, a riot of roses, foxgloves, peonies, sweet William, hydrangeas, hollyhocks, poppies, and many other flowers in a flowing, artfully arranged “wild” style, an English style à la Gertrude Jekyll.

Somehow Mareille creates all around herself a unique space, a civilized, contemplative one, in which one may talk with equanimity about roses and wild sweetpeas, Charlemagne, Benedict’s new encyclical, Bunzlau pottery, and Obama. A European space, highly cultured without being self-conscious or snobbish, and a space grounded in deep, authentic, non-showy piety.

I find it exceptionally restful, being here. Even listening to and speaking German continuously doesn’t strain me. I find myself hearing and understanding almost every single word, where in other settings, especially when I’m tired or strained, I sometimes get only the gist without understanding some words.

Her intense, searching, but always warm blue eyes remain young, and I was not surprised to see her, at the age of 73, spring up the stairs like a young mountain doe when she showed us our room.

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And now today just back from a weekend flea market, where we found 4 or 5 nice small watercolors for a euro or two each, and a brand-new Steiff hedgehog for Mary at a very good price. An enjoyable morning, followed by herb tea from herbs Walter’s aunt in Austria gathers in the wild verges of her yard. Last night, we had ham she still cures and smokes herself, as she approaches 100.

And I keep thinking about what I wrote yesterday re: the difference between north and south Germans, and how I need to balance those observations with a note about how what sometimes seems to be the phlegmatic nature of people in the north is often restful and serene when compared with the hectic air in the south. There’s a way in which north Germans leave each other and strangers along—in a good, non-obtruding, way—while south Germans seem to command social interaction. All those good mornings and guten Appetits are not merely social pleasantries. They’re also command performances, demanding that one respond in kind.

Cloppenburg, Lower Saxony, Germany 10.7.09: Sharecroppers and Saying Thanks

Yesterday to Vechta to the diocesan archives, where we did research on Steve’s ancestors, with the helpful Mr. M. along. Steve was able to confirm his own discoveries from microfilmed copies of the church books, though I believe the diocesan copies have information the ones he had used didn’t. He can now trace his Rolfes and Endemann ancestors back to around 1700, and with more work, may push the lines a bit further back.

I helped by reading through local histories and taking notes. It’s clear from the church records (and the histories confirm this) that the Rolfes family were in Werwe already by the 1600s and the Endemanns in Ehren by the same period.

An old Endemann farmhouse dating to the late 1600s or early 1700s is still occupied in Ehren, and it is beside that house that the small prayer chapel I wrote about yesterday stands.

The story that unfolded as I did research seems to be as follows: into the early modern period, villages in this area held land in common between the villages, for agricultural use. By the early modern period, a push occurred similar to the abolition of common land in England, and the land was marked: i.e., boundaries of ownership were marked.

An order was given in 1806 by the Herzog of Oldenburg to divide land and establish clear boundary lines in the various marks of the parish of Löningen, to which Ehren and Evenkamp belonged. We met Herr M.’s mother, who’s 86 yesterday. She grew up in Ehren and told us her family had to walk to the parish church in Löningen each Sunday, several miles and a hard job when snow was on the ground.

When the land was marked, the farmers began to have great power in the marks, and those living on the farms and working for the farmers—Heuermänner and their families—were reduced to a kind of servitude, though they were often the brothers and other close relatives of the farmer. Many of these Heuermann families had previously owned land, but as their families grew and one branch held the family hof, other lines fell to Heuermann status.

For their services, farmers gave the Heuermann family a small, poor house, a bit of land, and a few farm animals. The Heuermann and his family were required to work on the farmer’s land several days a week, and were on call for the farmer at any time.

As a result, the children of such families often could not attend school. The only way they could earn money was to hire out as servants, or to work in shops and factories.

Living conditions were harsh. Evening meals consisted normally of buttermilk and bread, and the main meal might add to that potatoes, vegetables from the Heuermann’s garden, and beans. One worked simply to obtain the wherewithal to live, to eat. There was no future, no way out of the system.

As a result, a mass exodus of these folks in this region began in the 1840s. They headed to American knowing they could buy land and become farmers there.

And Steve’s Gerhard Wilhelm Rolfes was among them. The marriage record of his parents in 1806 notes that they married at the Rolfes Heuerhaus in Werwe, where a list of farmers in 1700 shows them with a farm. The father of Gerhard Wilhelm, Gerd. Meinrad, reported to government officials in the 1830s that something had to be done to address the needs of those in the area, which were growing acute.

The ship’s list for Gerhard Wilhelm lists him as a tailor, and for several decades on the federal census, his occupation is given as tailor, though the same censuses make it clear he was farming, as well. And finally the census shows him as a farmer.

He had clearly left as a young unmarried man of a Heuermann’s family, who had taken up the trade of tailoring to provide money as he labored on the farm. The promise to have his own farm lured him to America, and there, he realized his dream.

I don’t understand all the ins and outs of it, but it seems the church did not have the same strong hand of ownership in this region that it had in south Germany, perhaps because this is a small Catholic island in a Protestant sea. And that allowed farmers to develop strong economic and political power.

You don’t see in this area the big abbeys that dominate Catholic life (and which once controlled economic life) in places like the Eifel or along the German-Swiss border. What you do see is large, imposing farm places with large, comfortable farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings, dispersed on the land between small villages—very much like the pattern of the American Midwest, to which so many people went from here.

Steve said today that it’s curious that towns in the Midwest which are the size of ones here have so little culture and so little sense of history. But it occurs to me, Whose culture and whose history? When those pouring into an area were Norwegian and German and Polish, how to choose?

And when the Germans were themselves Badish and Bohemian and Prussian and from every region of Germany, with different dialects, religious views, and cultures, which to pick as dominant? So much of the American experiment has been about negotiating difference and learning to live together. That hasn’t left time and energy to build a common culture or cultural artifacts expressing that shared consensus.

Dreary here, the past two days. It has rained each day we’ve been in the north, and is raining heavily now as I (try to) write this while we drive to Braunschweig. Miserably cold and windy, too, so much so that folks in Cloppenburg were wearing winter coats today.

I wonder if this kind of weather is part of what makes people so gloomy seeming here, so reserved and frigid and sometimes downright oafish. Herr M. scolded Steve yesterday when Steve thanked him for his generous assistance, saying one thanks is enough and the difference between Germans and Americans is we thank and thank again.

Well, why not? One should express thanks, and it seems to me merely civilized to do so each time thanks are due.

Nor is this stolid reserve characteristic of all of Germany. Everywhere we ate in the Black Forest region, anyone passing our table would smile, say good day or evening, and wish us a hearty appetite.

Here, they just pass, gloom on their faces. It’s unattractive. And the food reflects the anal-retentive manners—horrible beyond belief.

People in north Germany say the friendliness and hospitality in the south are put-on, as insincere as our friendliness and hospitality in the American South. And that may well be true, and as an outsider, I may just not see through it all.

Still, was Quentin Crisp (or was it Wilde?) wrong when he said that the lie is the foundation of all polite society? What do we have to oil the wheels and make the engine run smoothly, if we can’t smile and pretend?

Cloppenburg, Lower Saxony, Germany 9.7.09: Green Lanes and Prayer Chapels

Not much to report the last two days that would be of interest to anyone reading a travelogue. The 7th, Jochen and Regina had invited family over—Iris E. and her sister from Boston, and Jochen’s brother Lothar and his wife.

From mid-afternoon, we sat outside in the garden drinking champagne and talking a polyglot mix of English, German, and Badish—the latter mostly incomprehensible to me. I realize as I listen that the tendency to clip the final consonant off words like Garten runs through the whole dialect, and the indefinite article becomes something that sounds like d’ to my ear, regardless of gender or case, so that die Strasse becomes d’ Straush.

And Baden-Baden is, amusingly, Bade-Bade. But a long evening of listening to people talk animatedly in a language I only partly understand is tiresome in the extreme, despite the little nuggets of linguistic recognition that might occasionally enliven it.

As rain approached, we moved inside, and carafes of red and white wine appeared, along with bowls of peanuts and corn chips followed by sausage, cheese, and smoked fish. Then began the real Badish gabfest, with story after story, flailing hands, leers and winks, uproarious laughter. People in this part of Germany don’t fit the stereotype of the reserved, cool German at all.

I understood little, except one funny story Jochen told about someone he knows, who went into a shop and wanted to speak “good” German so he wouldn’t be dismissed as a country oaf.

He wanted a Tüte, which people around Jöhlingen apparently call a' (literally: a sound like “uh” for ein/eine) Guk. But since Badish often substitutes g for c and he wanted to be hyper-correct, he corrected the word to Cuk and threw in the final –e for good measure. He asked for a’ Cuke.

Regina told a story about Fronleichnam, when the town gathers at the church square at the end of the procession and sings, “Grosser Gott, wir loben Dich.” At a previous Fronleichnam event, near her were two people from the village known to be simple.

People call the man by some Italian song he’s famous for belting out at any gathering whatsoever—Volare Cantare, or something like that. The woman has large breasts and smiles to beat the band, always.

As the hymn began, Volare grabbed his companion’s breasts with one hand, raised the other to wave, and then launched into his Italian song. And as Jochen said later, these stories are told affectionately. Characters are a part of village life, and when they leave, there’s a hole in the heart of the community.

And then yesterday, a long, tiring drive by the autobahn through Frankfurt and on to Dortmund and Osnabrück. Steve had made a 3 P.M. appointment with a Herr M., a local historian, at the hotel in Cloppenburg, and we were afraid we’d be late, which added to the stress of the trip.

We arrived about 15 minutes late and found Herr M. waiting outside the hotel in his car, and he then gave us a driving tour of the area in which Steve’s ancestors lived—Augustenfeld, Evenkamp, and Werwe.

Beautiful Saxon countryside with restful-looking brick houses and barns, the occasional fachwerk and thatched-roof structure, fields of corn, wheat, and asparagus, and pastures with cows and horses.

The country lanes are deeper and greener, less sunnier and open, than in Baden. And people are, of course, less sunny and open—on the surface, at least—more reserved and cautious about smiling or saying hello.

This is a rare Catholic area in a Protestant region, and the church in Löningen, which formerly served the entire area, is an interesting mix of south German baroque and north German restraint—a mix I liked, since the baroque motifs don’t run wild and become simply silly-looking, as they sometimes do, and there’s space left in the church for silence, emptiness, contemplation.

In front of the main altar at the end of the aisle is a huge bible of handmade paper with beautiful modern illustrations, hand-drawn by someone local, to illustrate each page. One page is turned each day. The presence of this large, open bible at the foot of the altar is yet another reminder that Catholics in this region co-exist with Protestants, and have learned from the tradition of their evangelical brothers and sisters.

Also, out in the country—perhaps at Evenkamp—Herr M. took us to a little brick prayer chapel. It was beautiful inside, with old oak beams, a brick floor, two simple handmade wooden stools, and a crucifix. A place to sit and pray as one goes about the business of the day . . . . It was apparently built by someone with one of Steve’s family names, Endemann.