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.