New Orleans, En Route 4.3.1994: Golden Expectations Become Hamburg Drizzle

En route to New Orleans, in the plane somewhere over western Carolina or eastern Georgia. I’m to give a lecture tonight, a workshop tomorrow, then a much-needed vacation with Steve, who’s on break next week.

Taking off, I think of the Bahamas, the clear light there last summer, the dishabille of the baseball diamond we walked each evening, with its spiky tufts of tenacious tropical grass. I think of the wind atop Fox Hill, the mysterious scent of the frangipani, the owl that stared us down from the monastery’s unfinished bell tower.

Then I think of rainy, gloomy Hamburg, the two awful Chinese meals Steve and I had there in restaurants that smelled of urine, where the waiters preferred to speak English. I think of the musty inn we stayed at in Dreis in the Eifel, with its frightful furnishings like something from a Fred Flintstone set, skins nailed to interior walls, clashing violently with those nubby polyester bedclothes the 1960s called modern.

Displacement. That curious excitement of displacement I feel whenever I travel. The golden expectations that soon become Hamburg drizzle or Dreis furnishings. I’m not sure what to make of it. As I read James Merrill’s memoir, A Different Person, how he sought displacement in Europe as a young gay man, I wonder if it’s inherent in being gay. Totus mundus exilium est: yes, it’s the displacement of oppression and the doors it closes to “normalcy” and privilege; and it’s the displacement of being denied family—in traditional senses of the word.

But is it also that displacement of being . . . genderless, betwixt and between, not one nor the other, at least, in societal myths about a gay orientation? Is that why W.E.B. DuBois’s idea of double consciousness appeals so? Like blacks, gay people live that strange phenomenon.

I know there’s lots of power there, in not quite belonging: Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Jesus and the reign of God, St. Francis and his father, any woman you can name, practically. But I don’t know how to access that power. I want to belong and not belong, to have security and be free to critique.

I wait for . . . what? To have some vague sense of who I am, I reckon. Speaking, as I will tonight, in this vague floating space that is my life and identity now—it’s very anxiety-provoking, to put it mildly. I don’t float well; I’m not a very spiritually mature person.

+ + + + +

Leave taking is always hard for me. Sugar’s reproachful eyes through the gate, the tick of the clock in the still house and rust stains in the sink. But today, the purple buds of the Japanese magnolia, big and fat against a not too well matched blue sky. They’ll open while we’re away, as they did last year. This is a poem, if I could write it . . . .

Ӧhe 15.7.1998, Koblenz 17.7.1998: Changed Skies, Same Self

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare current (Horace).

Certainly true in my experience. Couldn’t be more miserably depressed, and I wonder why I’ve crossed the seas to find the same pit I find at home. At least that pit has comfortable niches and contours that have grown familiar to me. . . .

+ + + + +

17.7.1998: In Koblenz now. We drove here yesterday to spend several days with Jup and Marian F. A little walk around the old city last night, in the rain. Had wine/beer at a beer garden beside the Mosel, overlooking a statue to Kaiser Wilhelm. Then to a Chinese restaurant in the city run by Vietnamese neighbors of Jup and Marion.

Those Chinese menus in German are always mystifying. Everything sounds so . . . frank, not exotic, as Asian food ought to be, but described to death in graphic German carnivorous terms. And the food’s equally mystifying: nothing approximating American ideas of Chinese food. And certainly not Chinese food itself.

The soups are invariably turgid with something like cornstarch, and tomato-based. Hot dishes are described in ominous capitals as SCHARF!!, and simply aren’t. Garlic is unheard of. Nothing even smells Chinese; vegetables are a whisper of a garnish (and aren’t anywhere near something Oriental). Meat’s the name of the game.

I’m homesick, and beginning to pick, pick. Scenes of home keep flashing through my mind, and God! how I miss the dogs, and feel guilty at being away from them.

Koblenz seems to be a nice city, what we’ve seen of it, though both now and the first time I was here, it struck me as a bit grimy and industrial. Jup and Marian showed us where portions of one of the old churches, perhaps the Liebfraukirche, are having to be replaced, as pollution erodes the stonework. (Or did they mean only cleaned?)

In the old counting house, now a Rhineland museum, in the old city, we watched a clock chime 6. The clock has eyes going back and forth (the pendulum), and as it chimes the hours, it sticks out its tongue, once for each hour. Very droll.

+ + + + +

9:30 P.M. Just back from a day’s trip to Luxembourg and Belgium. The horrible cold, wet weather of the past days continued until our return, when it began to clear at Trier. The weather, the scary autobahns, being cooped up with Steve and my own horrible self: all have me fit to be tied.

What can I say of Luxembourg? We just drove through, so any impressions would be very superficial.

The bit I saw was . . . nondescript, as the guidebooks say: neither French, German, nor Belgian, nor an identifiable mix of the three. Just itself, its unremarkable self.

Got lost trying to get around the city to head to Pétange, our destination, where Steve’s ancestors (Lommel) lived on the Belgian border. Stopped for help at a Rastplatz, and was quite an experience—a jumble of Germans, French, Luxembourgers, all eating with that eager vivacity of lunch at a European Rastplatz (well, vivacious because of the French; none of that dreamy self-absorption Germans bring to food eaten alone). Harrowing, the mob of people and the babble of languages I understood only in fragments.

Two young men even more harrowing. One had his hair tied up in a kind of horsetail thing young toughs now affect in Europe. Had a black shirt with a slogan denoting him as some kind of “Killah.” Some girl said something to him that he evidently didn’t like, and he replied with an animalistic growl and face, something about Luxembourgish. I took it he was speaking the Luxembourgish dialect and told her to lump it or leave it. The naked hostility of it was astonishing—nationalism reasserting itself via hooligan fascism, as the millennium approaches.

Then on to Pétange, which we reached sometime after noon. An unattractive, grimy little place with a forlorn, ill-used air. Granted, it was chilly for July, but not raining: even so, not a soul anywhere in sight.

We wanted to find the church secretary, the church itself being locked. We saw a man eyeing us from his doorway, the house next to the church. I asked him in French where the church office was. His wife was there. He spoke French to her, but somehow I could tell they spoke Luxembourgish instead of French as their mother tongue.

A sign at the parish office said it would be closed until 2:30, so Steve decided to drive on into Belgium to Hachy, where his cousin Robert Lommel lives, past Athus, the ancestral village. We passed Hachy, seeing no sign for it, and turned off at Habay.

There, went into the tourist stop restroom, and in English, a man said to me, “There’s no paper. Can you ask for some?” I dutifully did so, in French, and it appeared. How he knew I spoke English and could speak French is beyond me . . . .

At Hachy, found Robert Lommel, who told us the villages up to Hachy from the Luxembourg border were all Luxembourgish-speaking, and from there, French, but French is now prevailing. The whole area seemed a bit dreary—again, that not-quite-this-nor-that feeling. I thought of Rimbaud and his need to escape the nearby French Ardennes. I understood that need. All seemed so bourgeois, so Catholic in the narrowest sense. Signs at the tourist stop bar proclaimed in loud, endless letters that drunkenness and the moral corruption of youth wouldn’t be tolerated. (Nice for a change to understand the signs without effort, in both Luxembourg and Belgium.)

Then back, with a stop at Trier to shop for Marian and Jup’s birthday, and a dinner of vegetable soup and salad at Zum Domstein, where Steve and I ate a few years ago. I like Trier, with its French air (garlic bread—and bread!—with the soup and salad).

Beautiful drive in the Eifel, which I find so appealing. Those silent, dark hills with little villages and golden fields, and the Roman presence at Trier—they tell a tale of a very ancient history, one fundamental to what became Europe.

Over the Atlantic 10.1.94: And All Our Yesterdays Have Lighted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trier 8.1.94: Sugary Baroque Ceilings and Sun-Bathed Roman Gate

Night in Trier. The city is beautiful—more so, I think, because today we had the first dry day of our entire trip. It was cloudy, but at sunset the sun came beneath the clouds, and we saw the top of the Porta Nigra and the other landmarks—St. Peter’s fountain, the Three Kings’ House—bathed in gold light.

Afterwards, as night began to fall, we drove across the Römerbrücke to the Mariasäule overlooking the city, and walked up to the statue to look down. A beautiful vista, with two crows calling to one another, one perched on the stars over Mary’s head, the other flying overhead and into the sunset, where a spire east of the city caught fire from the setting sun.

A cliché to say so, but one feels the density of history in a place like Trier. Roman ruins, the Roman artifacts in the Rheinisches Museum, the churches with their mishmash of Romanesque and Gothic and Baroque styles, the buildings from the 18th century to the present: all this in a living, vital city makes one aware of a continuity that Europeans must often take for granted, but that absolutely bamfoozles Americans.

What’s much in my thoughts is the question that always runs in my head, the question of what can be picked up from history. That Trier is a Catholic city, a Catholic culture, makes this all the more piquant, because that’s the context in which I’ve so often framed the question for myself.

One the one hand, there’s something undeniably appealing about the Gemütlichkeit of this Catholic city, especially after the weeks we’ve spent in earnest, gray, cold and wet Lutheran Germany. To see the people (who often look at least half French) strolling aimlessly in the market streets of the city is very appealing. North Germans seem to have more purpose about their movements, but the very purpose they convey restricts and narrows their culture.

And the attractive side of the city seems to have much to do with the Catholic past. If nothing else, one who grows up in a city with such pretty buildings—and the prettiness has a lot to do with Catholic piety, since statues and sculptures are everywhere—is assured of having an eye for beauty. It would be hard to build something monstrously ugly in a city in which the eye is trained (if only unconsciously) from youth on.

On the other hand, the ecclesial art and architecture themselves show the other side of the story. So much that was once living piety now shows itself to be merely ornamental, often grotesquely so—as, e.g., the statue of Mary on the side of the store that sells women’s furs.

And in any church one is immediately confronted with what can only be called the superfluity of much of the Catholic heritage—the sugar-coated Baroque ceilings, the pretentious tombs with their overdone inscriptions glorifying mighty and rich citizens, the plaque honoring a witch hunter affixed to the seminary wall. What have these to do with Catholic piety today? It’s no accident that many of the books we saw in the theology section of a bookstore in Trier today had to do with questions re: the future of the church, in light of its historical heritage.

I feel (even more than in other places we’ve visited) that I’m only skimming the surface as I say all this. At one moment today, as we stood outside the bookstore, I suddenly realized I would very much like to come back and live here awhile—to learn fluent German and polish my French, to travel, to write and produce art, to study a region like the Eifel intensively. Steve and I vowed we would do this, as we left the bookstore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eifel, Kreis Daun 21.12.93: Twitching Curtains and War Monuments

Morning. My second good night of sleep since we arrived in Germany. No nightmares last night, for the first time . . . .

My dreams have been fitful every night in Germany, dominated by images that wake me, mouth dry, heart pounding . . . . Dreams: the deep soul speaking, crying out for attention. In that deep, fertile, dark, pained, redemptive place, we anguish. We anguish at the realization of death, which comes so suddenly, and with our own complicity in many cases. I anguish at my inability to care adequately for those I love, let alone myself.

I also anguish at the pained life I’ve had to live because of homophobic violence—in high school no less than now. Perhaps being in a foreign country has enabled me to see how strong the line of continuity is. At home, I’m aware, but not in the stark way my dreams have shown it to me away from home.

I’m not sure what to do with that recognition. On the one hand, I could give up and cry about my victimization—and, if my mother’s behavior signals anything, it’s that there’s a family tendency to do just that. I fear this so deeply in my mother; I run from it in her, because it’s also in me.

But the dreams of last night (mercifully for readers, this excerpt deletes the details) disclose and point me towards another possibility, one I’ve been exploring for some years now. This is the possibility of picking up pieces and putting them together differently, especially pieces of the past.

Funny that, in the middle of the horrific life I’ve been leading at Belmont Abbey, I think of pulling out a new fortune—red—and find old, rusted kitchen utensils as I do so. My intuition tells me this points to the need to retrieve pre-grad school aspects of my relationship with Steve.

That includes spirituality, a strong sense of calling and vocation. This trip needs to be (all trips need to be; life needs to be) pilgrimage.

+ + + + +

9 P.M. I feel I ought to write a bit more in this journal. But lazy, so don’t know what exactly to write. And the day was in some aspects a replication of the previous ones—to Daun, Kirchweiler, Hohenfels.

Went to Daun in hopes of finding land records, but reached a dead end in the city records office. A not-too-helpful young man told us that no land records prior to 1900 exist anywhere in Germany. Preposterous. Went then to the Stadtarchiv, and they sent us back where we’d been.

Then to Hohenfels, which turns out to be a pretty little village, unspoilt, beside a stream not far from Kirchweiler.

Someone (who? I can’t recall now) had suggested we speak to a Frau Christina Lamberty there, and after we saw the church (i.e., Kapelle), which is not old—1894—we found her house.

Turned out she was the wife of a still living Herr J. Lamberty, who believes he must be a cousin of Steve’s. They invited us in. They lived in one of those old interconnected house-farms arrangements one sees in these villages. A woman had told us to look for the gelbisches Haus, and gelbisch it was. Very neat. Firewood stacked in trim piles inside the old barn attached at a right angle to the house. A push broom tipped properly against the barn wall, broom part on the floor.

The Lambertys invited us in. A couple perhaps in their 70s, she large and with that red skin giving way to wrinkles one sees on German women of her age. Good skin, not thin and tissue-like in the English way (my people), enlivened by a lifetime of cream, Wurst, Käse. Clear blue eyes that might once have been shrewd, but are now good-humored. Ready to laugh, to talk heartily.

Herr Lamberty dark-eyed with a square face, sparse hair, heavy brows from which his eyes peer out underneath. He in a sweater, she in that dark blue work apron worn over a dress sprigged with small flowers that is the omnipresent costume of German Hausfraus hereabouts.

We sat at their table. Dining table would be an exaggeration, but it was in a room off the kitchen. The room was small and square with an old, not prepossessing, Last Supper scene on the wall, and other pictures of the same ilk, though secular.

Both Herr and Frau Lamberty talked incessantly and simultaneously. The made no concession to our feeble German—appeared to accede to it, then forget it, in their old-folks’ haste to talk.

I was nearer Frau Lamberty and was treated to an often incomprehensible monologue in an accent impermeable to me, about American soldiers and cold weather, and (I think) how the family fed them cheese and sausage. Then a story about homesick nuns and how they had to be sent food from home, and how their shoes and feet were sooo kleine. All this in a maddening gabble that almost approached English, but just hovered maddeningly out of reach. As if I were listening to some pre-English Germanic ancestor sitting by a fire babbling toothlessly. I understood—almost, not quite—but I did understand.

After that, we drove a bit here and there, then back to Dreis for a walk through the village as night fell and snow whipped wildly over the hilltop west of the village.

A very old Burg on the west side of town (pictured above). Around it, what clearly are the oldest remaining buildings in the village—a cluster of farm and house buildings, some with very old stone outbuildings, one marked Bauernhof.

Past this, a high hill that overlooks a valley of pretty farmland. The hill is wooded, and may be kept that way to catch the wind, which is notoriously fierce in the Eifel, and it was fierce tonight, and fiercely cold. It drove the snow at a slant parallel to the ground.

Village life: in some ways, this is what the Enlightenment was opposed to, its encumbrances, its mute churches overlooking everything, its order and restrictions and millennially old unwritten rules.

And I can see why the Enlightenment wanted to move this immovable mass to something, to anything. I never thought I’d be won over to saying this, but there’s an incredible stupidity about village life. Of course, that stupidity is stupidity as measured against Enlightenment (“civilized”) norms. It’s the stupidity of doing things this way over and over and never asking why. It’s the stupidity of assuming that religion is just a series of rituals to hallow life’s significant moments, to give them an otherworldly respectability. It’s the stupidity of assuming there are no other options.

Villages reveal how unthinking that stupidity is, how based not on reflection but on sheer inertia, when they are confronted with the pressures of late 20th-century media. Village folks succumb so readily, so easily, to these lures, never seeing how antithetical the false-brick front over the old plastered wall is to the cultural heritage of the village.

All I have to compare with these three days in an Eifel Catholic village is the afternoon in Wohltorf, which is an old village now annexed to Hamburg. The former has affinities to Irish villages in which I’ve spent time, with winding streets and houses right on the road, but even more in the sort of general dreariness of everything. Not that there’s not great beauty in both types of villages—their settings on running streams and against mountains, the lace curtains in windows.

It’s just that their very authenticity, their unselfreflectiveness, the tastelessness of the way they jumble styles and ornaments, is unappealing. Real village life smells of sties. It has balefully staring idiots and old people who seem forgotten by the youth who have fled them. People peer from behind curtains; hands twitch lace aside as one passes. One is as likely to see a vase of plastic flowers in a window as a pot of geraniums, a twisted aluminum deer ornamenting a plastic wall as a faded mural.

Not so Wohltorf. There, all’s immaculate, preserved, and artificial in an entirely different way. The 17th-century Schloss is impeccably restored, presided over by a woman of taste with a silk blouse and discreet handmade silver jewelry and a beautiful dachshund. In the Schloss, Baroque concerts are given regularly by string quartets. Exhibits are mounted of the work of Hamburg artists—pen-and-ink drawings of Jewish-looking women weeping as ships sail away, polished brass candlesticks of fantastical design.

At this point in my life, after years in which I would have fanatically defended the Eifel Catholic village, I see that I would far rather live in Wohltorf. Even with its maddening bourgeois pretensions. Here, the church is like a miasma over everything. There, it’s a discreet presence off to the side.

And those war monuments! Everywhere in Germany, we find, almost every single church we visit has a dark, heavy monument to the dead of the two world wars. In Dreis, the monument is beside the church, and commemorates village soldiers from 1870 to the second war. I understand the human need to remember one’s dead. What bothers me so much is the ease with which that need seems, in these villages, to coalesce with church life, when so many justifiable critical questions have been raised about the church’s silent (and sometimes active) complicity in the Nazi atrocities.

True, we have our monuments to the Confederate dead, and we bedeck them with flowers. But, at least, they are in the courthouse square and not cheek-by-jowl with the churches that upheld slavery . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oberpfalz, Kreis Waldmünchen, 21.12.1999: Winter Gardens and Blue Hills of Bohemia

*In Bavaria, at Steve’s cousins’ in the Oberpfalz. I’m sitting in a room they call the Wintergartenzimmer, off the kitchen at the back of the house. It has windows on two sides, floor to ceiling, and on the side that joins the kitchen, a beautiful corner stove for heat. This has a marble or perhaps faux marble top, resting on a stone base that forms the top of the stove. The stone is graven. A similar stone is beneath the stove.

The room has a tile floor of light tan, and white walls. In the middle is a table with an old-seeming sewing machine for its base. I feel quite sure Hermann S. built the room. He’s amazingly talented. He paints, gilds and repaints church statues, works in wood.

It’s a simple room, but so esthetically pleasing. Atop the stove are two ebony statues, I think of Masai people, since there is a similar statue upstairs that Hermann tells us comes from the Masai people. One the wall over my shoulder is a statue of St. George killing the dragon. The saint has a brightly colored cape, and the base on which the statue sits is gilded—Hermann S.’s own work. The Bavarians don’t leave their saints in church; they bring them home.

Over the table is a light fixture made from what appears to be an old oxen yoke, of darkened wood and leather with iron studs. The door to the room is plain wood, but ornamented with a carved scroll beneath the window. Outside, as I look at the peach-colored stucco walls of the house, I see that Hermann S. has painted scrolls of gray, yellow, and brown above and below the window—the Bavarian sensibility, to ornament.

It snowed last night and during the previous day, perhaps for days before here. The snow must be about 10 inches deep, but the temperatures are just above freezing, so the snow is packing slowly. Rain is predicted for Wednesday—the 23rd. It so, I hope it washes the ice and snow off the roads, so that a trip to Weissensulz will be possible. Getting here yesterday afternoon was a bit tricky. Dark had begun to fall as we left the autobahn and started our trek through the Oberpfälzisch hills and villages. Several times, the care went into skids when we tried to stop and turn. Steve’s expertise pulled us out.

Very peaceful hear, the snow overlaying everything, the stove purring efficiently in the corner. But quiet for the visitor. I feel in my bones that if I lived here, I’d soon find it very unquiet. There is, almost literally, nothing to do, not even a shop or a bakery. The young leave, as they leave the Eifel. For those whose families have long been established, as the S.’s have, it’s home, and Hermann S.’s house shows that one can make a life here, a pleasant one. Still, a sadness hangs over the place, the sense that a way of life is soon to pass, as the young go to Rötz or father afield to Regensburg, and the parents nurture the village—for whom?

The sadness of any passing. What were those lines I thought of yesterday, as drove, one of those many blockbuster opening sentences I devise, never to complete the story they begin? “Being Irish, they enjoyed reciting the names of things, especially things that have passed from the earth. My grandmother used to recite the names of apples she knew in her youth, which were no more: Yates, Mollie’s Delicious, the Cullasaja, and on and on, a formidable litany. And when she’d take me to her attic to explore the contents of trunks up there—her mother’s, Kate Ryan the immigrant, her brother John’s, who died at her house, her mother-in-law’s—there would be lessons in forgotten quilt patterns, the Double Wedding Ring, Geese A-Flyin’, Broken Dishes. Many of the unquilted tops in her mother’s trunk she had pieced along with Grandma Kate. To see them was to remember a whole history now goine, since each quilt top incorporated pieces taken from the clothes of family members no longer alive—the black silk dresses of Kate herself, who was perpetually in mourning for a lost child, the bright sprigged gingham of little Lizzie who died as a girl, or the blue denim workpants of Tommy, who had fallen dead hoeing cotton one hot summer day.”

Frau S. comes and goes as I write, a stricken look on her face. Unlike her husband, who’s solid and very relaxed, she flits nervously here and there. Even in Germany, I’ve never seen a house so immaculate. When we were here at Fronleichnam, she was preparing her yard for the procession by pouncing like a bird on infinitesimal pieces of detritus in the grass, as we men sat talking in the evening air.

There’s something fierce in the busyness, the cleanliness of German woman, something I wouldn’t want to encounter in an enemy. Even as I write, she’s moving purposefully across the snow-covered driveway with a pail in her hand, talking to a neighbor all the while, poised as if to run back inside to complete her chores. She has an apron on, of course, that blue work apron that seems standard for so many village women.

What she tells me when she flits in and out, I’m never entirely sure. She speaks broad Bavarian, rapid-fire, in a guttural, forceful tone. She’s brought a carafe of tea, and is telling me how to line up the red dot with the opening. And now she has bottles of mineral water, lemonade, and homemade apple juice. I think she’s saying—yes, I do understand this clearly—that the apple juice is cold from the cellar, and I shouldn’t drink it cold for fear of harm to my throat.

They eat only bio food. No white sugar or flour, only whole grain and brown sugar from Africa. Breakfast this morning was a very delicious muesli with grated apples and grains. Dinner last night was wonderful—a fresh trout fried in butter with almonds (truite almandine), served with parsley potatoes and salad—a really good salad of onion, bell pepper, lettuce, and tomato, with a simple vinaigrette. The dressing was the first non-sweet, non mayonnaise or cream dressing I’ve had on this trip to Germany.

*This posting resumes a travel narrative whose last installment was posted on this blog on 12 May. Now that I've re-located my misplaced travel journal, I can complete the saga of this particular trip to Germany.