Goethe Slept Here (Not)

In June of this year I traveled through the countryside of Germany to small towns that do not show up on most maps. I was searching for the places my forebearers used to live and feeling grateful to my brother-in-law for the loan of his GPS navigation system, since I would have been utterly lost without it.

As far as I know all of my ancestors for three or four generations back arrived in the United States from Germany. My father's father came from Steinbach-Hallenberg, a beautiful village in a narrow valley of the state of Thuringia in the forests of central Germany. My mother's family came from the province of Mecklenburg, a land of small lakes and rolling fields near the Baltic Sea. My maternal great-grandfather was from the tiny village of Viezen, and my great-great-grandfather from Dargun, a town that produces one of the best beers I've ever tasted.

All of these towns lie in the Eastern part of Germany, and for much of my parents' adult lives were inaccessible to them because of two world wars and then the heavily guarded border that separated East Germany from the West. To my great regret, both my parents died without ever having the chance to see the homeland of their ancestors.

To reach these places I traveled extensively in what had been Eastern Germany, and saw first-hand what twenty years of investment has accomplished: here you find brand new stretches of autobahn, gleaming colorful town squares and Aldtstadts, and ongoing construction everywhere. But while Leipzig and Dresden and Berlin, and even smaller cities like Jena, have reaped the economic benefits of all this investment, the smaller towns have found the reintegration of the two Germanies to be a double-edged sword. Everywhere you see the care these towns have taken to restore their buildings and homes, but their inhabitants are largely from an older generation. Their children have mainly left for jobs in the West or in the larger cities of the East. I spent a poignant late afternoon in the town square of Schmalkalden. Despite its central role as the place where Protestant princes drew up articles with Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon to defend their rights, this historic town's central square was practically deserted.

Yet what I also found in small towns like Schmalkalden, Steinbach-Hallenberg, and Dargun was a warmth and eagerness to share information with an American like myself who was seeking her roots. An American tourist is a rare bird here. Yet more and more of us are coming back to these towns in search of our ancestry just as their own townspeople are rediscovering and celebrating their own history.

And small-town Germans, it turns out, have a wonderful sense of humor. As I was walking the streets of Steinbach-Hallenberg, down the very street where my own ancestors once lived from the 1600s to the end of the 19th-century, one of my cousins pointed out a sign on a house nearby. From street distance it read: “Hier wohnte Goethe” echoing the hundreds of placards you find everywhere in towns like Frankfurt, Leipzig, Strasbourg, Weimar and Jena that can rightly claim to have housed Germany's most famous poet. And yet, as my cousin pointed out laughing, if you stepped a little closer and glimpsed behind the fence, you could see the word at the bottom of the sign that not only denied its claim but also played off the maddening tendency of German grammar to leave the most important words for the end of sentences. “Hier wohnte Goethe...nie” or literally “Here lived Goethe (never).”

Towns like Steinbach-Hallenberg and Dargun know full well that they are not on the main intineraries of foreign tourists. They are not listed in Frommer's or the Michelin Guides. But that is precisely part of their charm. To reach them you drive on winding highways through forests or fields where wildflowers bloom on the sides of the road. You find a strawberry field and eat the most delicious fruit you've ever tasted straight from the field. You climb up a steep path to a ruined castle that locals visit on their daily walk. When you're having dinner at one of the family-run restaurants in town, you might hear the owner playing guitar or wonder what the children in the back room really think of a dubbed episode of The Simpsons. You can ask the hotel clerk where to find the local pastor so you can ask about church records, and have another guest tell you, “Of course I know him, he's a great guy (ein toller Mann)."

And what you will find more and more often are great sources of local history. In Steinbach-Hallenberg, the Museum of Metalwork shows you just how much hard work went into making the corkscrews, metal instruments and nails that were the main industry for centuries. In Dargun, where dairy farming and brewing beer are the main sources of income, a new small museum has opened documenting the historical farming and dairy practices of the region (Uns lütt Museum). Just behind this museum lie the ruins of a beautiful Cistercian abbey dating back to the 12th century as well as palace grounds and buildings that date back to the 17th-century when the monastery became the residence of the Dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Destroyed in the final days of World War II, it is about to undergo a massive restoration. Every summer the monastery and palace grounds host a festival of light with fireworks that shine on the nearby Kloster Lake.

Even if you don't have any specific reason to go quite as far off the beaten track as I did in seeking my family roots, I found plenty of small German towns that warrant the attention of the more adventurous tourist including Bamberg, with its grand cathedral, or Schwerin, which has an impressive Chambord-like castle that also escaped the devastation of World War II, or the highly under-touristed Schmalkalden, which was one of the most historically fascinating towns I visited. For anyone traveling Europe by car (and with GPS) taking a detour off the autobahn, autopiste, or other highway is well worth the time and effort. You never know what might lie around the bend, and taking the time to explore the unknown is more than half the fun of travel.

A Family Reunion in Steinbach-Hallenberg

On Saturday, June 20th I finally met my German cousins in Steinbach-Hallenberg. Separated by two World Wars, and the division of Germany into East and West until 1990, it has taken three generations for our families to reconnect, but the sense of kinship was palpable when I cross the main street of my ancestral hometown and shook hands with Rolf, Helmut, Werner, and Lothar Wahl.

Steinbach-Hallenberg is a small town nestled in a valley inside the Thuringen forest in Central Germany. In winter, it is a ski area, but in summer, it is host to many German hikers (or Wanderers). Its red roofs stand out in colorful contrast to the green hills surrounding it and many of the houses are covered with beautiful slate siding in intricate designs. The valley seemed quite narrow and deep as we entered it, and despite the fact the river running through it, die Hasel, is hardly bigger than a small stream, you often catch the sound water flowing by as small stone canals (literally “steinbach”) carry mountain runoff through the town.

Driving into Steinbach-Hallenberg sent a chill down my spine because I'd felt as if I were fulfilling not only a dream of my own but also of my father who died in 1978, long before reunification was even dreamed of. I had anticipated this meeting with much excitement and not a little trepidation. Would my cousins be as eager to meet me as I was to meet them? What would I learn about my family history? What would they want to know about the American side of the family? And most of all, would my recently resurrected German suffice to make conversation possible?

I need not have worried about the warmth of my welcome, and it was clear that Rolf Wahl had planned our visit with great care. First we toured the Metalwerksaftmuseum (Museum of Metalcraft) with Veronika Jung, the Museum's Director. This is one of the many new museums that are springing up in small German towns, as their inhabitants express their pride in their heritage by creating a place to document a way of life that is fast disappearing in more urban centers.

Inside the museum, Veronika began by greeting us in English, but she gave most of the tour quite slowly in clear German so that I could understand just about everything she told us. The museum is located in two houses, one of which was moved from another site with everything intact – the nail-making apparatus, all the tools, and a number of patents. The family (die Recknagel) had no children, and they wanted to give the remains of their business to the museum to preserve. It was impressive to see how much thought and energy had gone into a preservation process that required raising one of the buildings off its foundation and then moving it through small village streets to its new site.

For me this discovery of the tool-making history of Steinbach-Hallenberg generated a good deal of emotion.. In the museum I found the first tangible piece of evidence about my paternal great-grandfather, Peter Wilhelm Wahl who died in 1893 at the relatively young age of 52. I knew that his death had precipated his family's departure from Germany when his widow, Marie Bauerschmidt, decided to take her children, including my grandfather, Adolph, aged 8 and travel to America.

Peter Wilhelm had been a master locksmith, and museum has in its possession a book that recorded sales of special tools. So here I was actually holding history in my hand and seeing the page where Peter's name was written and the number of corkscrews he sold. I was almost moved to tears thinking what it would have meant to my father to be able to hold this document as well because I knew he had always longed to return to his homeland.

At the end of the tour we watched a smith make a corkscrew and then a hand-mail nail. It sounds like such a simple thing but it was back-breaking work when people in the town had to make thousands of nails a week just to survive. My cousins who are about about twenty to thirty years old than I am remembered seeing men who literally bent over from the effects of such hard labor, and Rolf emphasized that the nail-makers were the poorest of the townspeople and lived in the smallest houses, often with eight or ten children, all of whom helped out with the family trade.

Many of these hand-made nails were beautiful objects with different decorative heads on them for use in fine furniture. My father's autobiography mentions that a nail factory had closed down in Steinbach-Hallenberg in the years before Peter Wilhelm's death, but Veronika Jung told me that there were actually many nail and corkscrew factories in the area, almost all of them small family firms.
By the turn of the century, it was getting harder and harder to make a living from nail-making. A cigar factory opened up which used imported tobacco from Florida and Cuba and employed many women in the town, including Rolf's grandmother. Metalworking expanded to include production of many different kinds of tongs and other specialized metal implements.

Today in Steinbach-Hallenberg you can still see these small family enterprises, like the metal workshop whose very modern equipment is located in a house once owned by Rolf's great uncle. But it delighted me to see that in a small town where records of my ancestors as date back to the 16th century, the spirit of the family entrpreneur continues to reinvent itself. Just down the street from the metal workshop, Rolf pointed out to me a sign hanging on the house of another probably Karen Wahl, advertising not metalworking but IT services!

From Blogger Pictures