Weimar Tales–Feb. 7-8

Goethe and Schiller chilling in front of the Weimar Concert Hall, which is decked out for the 100th Anniversary of the Constitution of the Weimar Republic.

Weimar is a lovely city about 80 kilometers outside of Leipzig in the Staat of Thuringia. Thuringia is known for their bratwurst, so I was pretty excited to go there. Weimar is known as the family home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the place where Friedrich Schiller eventually settled, and their presence made Weimar an intellectual hub for Germany during the German Enlightenment. Today, most American art enthusiasts know it primarily for its role early in the Bauhaus movement (if that’s the right wording for Bauhaus), and it is more generally known as the site of the writing of the Post WWI constitution that reframed Germany briefly as the Weimar Republic. I think I will most remember it for the city park that the river Ilm meanders through.

When we arrived, we headed for our lodging. When ACU made our booking, the normal hostel it used was full, as were most others, and the students were not disappointed to find we were in a boutique hotel for this one-night trip. The Carrolls were not disappointed to learn that their room was the spacious loft in the main building in the complex. While there, we uncovered the obvious–Weimar was celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the constitution of the Republic as well as of the Bauhaus. After checking in, I made a spectacular discovery at lunch. The café we settled on had a lunch special of soljanka, a Russian soup that had become popular in East Germany in the DDR years, and Lindsay Snyder, ACU’s Leipzig Program Director encouraged me to try it. It is beyond amazing, and should be on your list to try the next time you visit eastern Europe (note, I had chicken soljanka–and fish or mushroom versions are also common).

Wikipedia let me know this is chicken, pickled cucumber, cabbage, mushroom, potatoes, sour cream, dill, tomatoes, onions, olives, capers, allspice, and parsley. I’m letting you know it is to die for.

After soljanka, I had a granatsplitter, which translates unlovely-ly to schrapnel. It is the remnants of cookies and pies all congealed together with butter cream, cocoa, and sometimes rum, on a waffle base coated with chocolate to hold it together. Both of these dishes feel like they were invented by a cook looking to get rid of everything leftover in the kitchen, and both are amazing. For some reason, Laura and Molly were more interested in the decor.

Swings–in a restaurant! Inconceivable!

By the end of the day, the weather had taken a favorable turn. ACU fed the students in a traditional Thuringian restaurant (I had the meat sampler–shocking, I know), and yet somehow we made their day by stopping at the local Rewe and letting them get snacks for their early evening at the hotel. Many Haribo creatures, particularly bears, met their doom that evening.

Friday was a free day for everyone, and the Carrolls spent most of it wandering. We started in the town’s main cemetery, which contains both an active Russian Orthodox church and the remains of Goethe and Schiller. Here are images of the WW1 Memorial, the Church, and the Goethe memorial from the cemetery:

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  The World War I Memorial

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  The Russian Orthodox Church

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  A random, but lovely, family crypt

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  The Goethe family Crypt (Goethe is in the Ducal burial vault, as is Schiller)

Afterwards we headed to the largest city park (with a stop at an art supply store on the way). It is known for the Goethe gartenhaus, which we missed, but the park was still spectacular. Here are some of our highlights:

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  Entrance to a DDR cemetery from Weimar’s time as an East German city

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  The three amigas in front of a ruined chapel.

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  Molly looks for Shakespeare (the statue is covered in protective material for winter)

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  The Sorrows of cold Jane Anne. It’s a Goethe joke. Not a good one, but a Goethe joke nonetheless.

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  Grottos and ruins were all over the place

The city itself is lovely and friendly as well, though our time in it was limited. Here are a few of our highlights (we didn’t spend much time around the Bauhaus University):

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It may be worth noting that at the aforementioned art supply store I acquired some marbles. I note this because I may have been so enthusiastic about them our students now associate Weimar with “That’s where Bill’s marbles are from”. However, I was not the only enthusiastic Carroll in Weimar. Laura found a creperie in town, and for once, I wasn’t the food enthusiast of the family. Here are some pictures I was asked to take of our meal, and I will let you guess to which Carroll each belonged ( 1) egg, cheese and ham gallete, 2) nutella crepe, 3) onion soup, 4) pizza):

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As for the title of the post, I am teaching a course on Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the Weimar Fairy Tales (or Weimar Tales) to our ACU students. You are probably familiar with Grimm’s Fairy Tales, compiled (and composed to some degree) by the Grimm Brothers in the 1800s. The Weimar Tales were written during the Weimar Republic. The three main political parties–the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the National Socialists–all felt leaning into fairy tales, a traditional and popular German genre, was an excellent way to introduce/indoctrinate youth into their values and prepare them to be active and partisan party members. The National Socialists didn’t write many, but leaned into Grimm’s and the few, like the Poison Mushroom (it’s vilely anti-semitic), that they composed. A group of artists, educators, and intellectuals, who saw what the Nazis were doing composed new fairy tales–the Weimar Tales–to offer a different set of values to lean into. My students find the emphasis on fairy tales as a political tool surprising, are horrified by the Nazis tales, but are also bothered by the clear attempts at indoctrination of children by all three parties since children don’t have a clear boundary between reality and imagination until a certain developmental point. The Carroll’s time in the city of Weimar was lovely, but it was hard to situate that experience with the concentration camp we knew was on a hilltop a few kilometers away.

Buchenwald–Feb. 7

The Carrolls left the ACU Villa the morning of February 7 with the students and headed to the train station to catch a train to Weimar. While it has been cold, it hasn’t been as bitterly cold as the weekend in Berlin. Once in Weimar, we dropped off our things at our hotel, picked up lunch, and gathered again to board the city bus to Buchenwald.

If you want to learn about the Holocaust, much has been written. I am not equipped to tell that story with the immensity of its tragedy. I will speak to what I learned at Buchenwald.

Buchenwald was a concentration camp. Concentration camps “concentrated” populations of undesirables. The first inmates at Buchenwald were political figures from the Social Democrats and Communists–the two parties that formed the greatest threat to the National Socialists (Nazis). Criminals and anti-socials (people on welfare) soon followed. Roma and Sinti also did. Jews eventually arrived as well. As the different groups arrived, they were given patches/icons to wear on their uniform to designate the group that caused them to be at Buchenwald, and the ranking system of those groups was made clear. People at concentration camps were assigned work details (the first group to arrive built the camp) at the munitions factory at the camp, in Weimar, and in other local cities. Buchenwald was not an extermination camp. 56,000 of the 250,000 interned at Buchenwald did die, but they most often did so from hunger, exposure or disease. Some were simply directly murdered. In particular, Russian POWs were the group most often targeted for extermination upon arrival at the camp. The crematorium eventually had to be altered to accommodate the number of dead–each of the multiple units redesigned to accommodate six bodies at once instead of one. As it became apparent the war was coming to an end, the Nazis did try to ship prisoners to extermination camps to eliminate evidence of what happened there, but they did not start soon enough, and many lived to see the liberation of the camp. I found it interesting that prisoners who had hidden stolen weapons actually liberated the camp hours before the Allies arrived and handed the camp over to the American forces who were first to enter.

The system designed to deploy prisoners as workers, as well as the smaller system designed to murder some of the prisoners, demonstrated significant forethought. The desire to create hierarchies within the system was fairly transparent–in the beginning criminals were given authority among the prisoners to assign work crews in order to humiliate Social Democrats and Communists (who were previously influential and often well-educated) but the work crews were less effective and their plans for distributing food led to too many starvation deaths among a group desired for labor. Still, Sinti, Roma, and Jews were put in worse barracks and treated far worse than the other groups. Buchenwald was a male concentration camp–all of the interned workers were male. Some females were interned there. A few were held there to apply pressure on known German resistance figures and released if their relative/s turned themselves in or joined the Nazi party. Some worked as nurses in one area of the camp. And some–almost always Sinti, Roma, or Jewish–were placed in a brothel. The Nazis were concerned that an all-male camp would result in increased homosexuality, and the prisoners highest on the hierarchy were allowed access to the brothel. Any pregnancies among the women in the brothel were aborted.

From the height of Buchenwald, which was much colder than Weimar, you can see several small towns around the camp as well as Weimar in the distance. They could also see Buchenwald; particularly, since spotlights were placed at regular intervals around the perimeter. Additionally, Buchenwald received deliveries from Weimar daily, the soldiers stationed there (who were young–I think most were first stationed there at 16 or 17) were encouraged to have their families visit them, and work crews left daily for Weimar and surrounding towns. This is important to remember because everyone the Americans interviewed in Weimar said they didn’t know about the camp, but the logistics would have made that nearly impossible.

The sign on Buchenwald’s gate says “To each his own”, which means “everyone has their place”. It reminded the prisoners Buchenwald was the place they deserved, and the Nazis were in their rightful place. I could go on much longer, but I won’t. With brief commentary, here are most of the images I took from Buchenwald. It felt wrong to document the place through images–perhaps a picture is worth a thousand words, but images can’t capture the scope of the wrong of this place.

The prison gate, from the inside. In contrast, Auschwitz’s notorious “Work Will Set You Free” faced prisoners as they entered the camp.

The memorial to all of those who lived through or died at Buchenwald, listing their nationalities or ethnicities. This outdoor plaque is always warmed to 98.6 degrees to remind observers that all human life is sacred.

All of the original barracks housing prisoners have been destroyed. In their footprints, any group can place a plaque memorializing those housed in the various blocs. Here are two stones side by side–one commemorates Allied (including USAAF) prisoners of war housed there while the other commemorates those imprisoned for homosexuality (their uniforms bore pink triangles–status was designated by icons).

On the perimeter of the camp, Ethan Lewis found a small bunker. Based on the orientation of the entrance and exit, I am guessing this provided foot access under a fence.

The interior of the small bunker. There was a small (guard?) room that would have been situated on the camp side of the fence with a chimney.

I don’t know how to end this post. In our discussions with the students, they were surprised survivors came back to the camp each year to mark the day of liberation and surviving the camp. My feelings while at the camp were overwhelming. As I think about the student’s surprise, I conjecture that coming back is an act of defiance, saying “I am still here”. At this moment, I have to content myself with knowing that I remember this happened and with the fact that Buchenwald as memorial means that no one can still say “I didn’t know what was happening there”.

Görlitz–A Dreamy, Medieval Town

We arrived in Görlitz in the evening, so our first venture into the city was at night, and to this American’s eyes, the lamps gave the city a magical glow.

In the week after Berlin, we got back to classes, but our first three-day weekend for travel was at the end of the this week. In the middle, I had lunch with one of our students, who is the son of one of my best friends. We left Wednesday’s German class, took the tram to the stop closest to city center on our line, and walked to La Grotta Pizzeria. It was fantastic.

Onions, pepperoni (hot peppers), red peppers, and salami-pikant (hot salami, not pepperoni, but as close as it gets here). Oh yeah, and this is Kyle.

So, this is where I paid my first “I don’t know German well” tax. Kyle and I loved the pizza, and were pretty happy about it even at 11,90 euro. Until we paid attention to the little sign on the table.

Mid-day special: basic margherita pizza with two toppings of your choice for 5,90 euro.

So, Kyle and I could have shared a pizza–we both took home half of ours that day–and both of us eaten for 5,90 total. Live and learn. In fact, we did. We came back with everybody the next week, and a lot of students still hit La Grotta regularly. The oven is wood fired, and every ingredient is fresh.

Laura had been planning on Görlitz for our first trip away for awhile. We had both agreed after visiting Germany in 2014 that our long weekend trips should be spent in Germany. Germany is only half the size of Texas, but even so, each region is quite distinct and the cultures (and cuisine!) vary a lot between them. Like Leipzig, Görlitz, is in the Sachsen state, but it is considered Lusatian. It is in the eastern-most area of Germany, and you can just walk across the bridge over the river Neisse to Zgorzelec in Poland (which we certainly did!).

There are around 60,000 people in Görlitz, but it has been a prosperous town for a long time. The first written record of it’s status dates back to 1002, when it was part of the Polish empire. As boundaries shifted, it’s been part of a lot of empires and countries. Since Germany’s founding in 1871, it has been part of a German state, and was in East Germany during the years when Germany was split after WWII. A lot of the buildings the town is now famous for were built between 1200-1680. The town suffered less damage in the World War than many others, but the ornate houses were unsurprisingly ignored during the Soviet years (as they clearly denoted the wealth of merchants in a capitalist economy). After Die Wende (1989) when the wall fell, an anonymous donor started giving the city in 1995 500,000 Euro a year to renovate the house fronts and restore the city’s vibrant colors. If you have seen The Book Thief, Inglorious Basterds, or The Grand Budapest Hotel, you have seen scenes shot in Görlitz. It’s hard to do the scope of the city justice, but here are some of the buildings that I was struck by while we were there.

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Görlitz involved a lot of walking, so we needed as much refreshment as possible. Breakfast looked like this:

Laura with coffee. Jane Anne with cake. My hot chocolate barely made the picture.

While snacks around lunch occasionally looked like this:

Sometimes, Jesus saves in ways you don’t expect. This Pfandkuchen and meringue are from the Jesus bakerei. I didn’t have the heart to tell them Jesus was a carpenter. Particularly since this may have been the best bakery we have eaten at, yet.

Our first dinner was at The Three-Legged Dog. The schnitzel there was amazing, as were the other traditional German dishes we had. The girls were a little concerned about certain elements of the decor.

Maybe the weasel looking over her shoulder is why Molly didn’t like the local variant on Cordon Bleu.

The next day, we ate lunch in Poland. We had no idea what the US equivalent of Polish currency was, but like the meal the previous night, we had decided just to try things and eat well since the restaurant was nice. Since the restaurant was in a cellar, there also was no cell service to save us. Both girls started with a pot of tea, and as a family we enjoyed olives and breads as appetizers. Laura got pierogi, I had a variation on schnitzel, Jane Anne had a potato and egg variation on rosti, and Molly went with a cheese and olive plate. After dessert, we had spent nearly around a hundred Plotzy, but the meal was good enough that we were ok with a splurge. Once we were out of the restaurant with cell service, we discovered we spent $24. I felt like I had made up for my pizza mistake earlier in the week.

Sturdily constructed, and entirely cell signal-proof restaurant in Poland.

See–I was in Poland, too!

One of our favorite afternoons was spent wandering to and through the old city cemetery. The image of the house on a bridge in the gallery above is from our trip there (the house is the executioner’s house, and he was required to live out of the city due to the violent nature of his job–somehow on the city wall counted as out of the city). The next gallery is from the cemetery and the exterior of the old church (we didn’t get to go in–as with several sites in Görlitz, they close for the winter season and open around April 6).

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I think one of the reasons we liked Görlitz so much were that there were so many little flourishes of artistry in common, grand, and surprising places. Here is a catch-all gallery with several of the ones that stood out.

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Görlitz was the last weekend of January/first weekend of February. On February 7, we went to Weimar with the students. Weimar is lovely and the hometown of the famous philosopher/poet Goethe, but we were taking the students to visit Buchenwald, which is just outside Weimar. I will post about that soon. Tschüss!

Berlin with our Students (1/25-1/27)

The students who are studying abroad with us this semester left Abilene on Wednesday, January 16 around 2 p.m. After a bus ride to DFW Airport, a flight to London Heathrow, a five-hour layover, a flight to Berlin, and a chartered bus to ACU’s Villa in Leipzig, they joined us at 10:30 on January 17th. We promptly fed them and sent them to bed (and despite the excitement of being in Germany, most immediately gave in to sleep after a long day of travel). The first few days involved orientation meetings to the semester and orientation walks around the city. In my last blog post (which I am aware was some time ago), I mentioned that a couple joined Jane Anne and me for a foray to a Leipzig Red Bull soccer match on their first Saturday night here. The next morning we all went to the Leipzig English church, which is one of the few services conducted in English in the city (all of the students are starting to take German, so no one is quite ready to participate in a service in German). Sunday evenings at nine, we have a devotional service that only includes the ACU group here–the Carrolls, the students, and Lindsay Snyder, the program director for ACU’s Leipzig site. The normal class schedule started on Monday.

Our first group excursion was to Berlin. Berlin is an obvious choice–it is the capital of Germany, it is close to Leipzig (around two hours by train), and in its recent history (the fall of Nazi Germany, East Berlin, West Berlin, the Wall, the airlift, the Cold War, Die Wende, re-unification) you have a microcosm of the change the entire nation has experienced within just the past three generations. On our four hour walking tour (in brutally cold weather), our tour guide pointed out that the number of construction cranes and the amount of scaffolding that you see through the city is a visual reminder of the perpetual change the city has faced in the past few decades.

This is the Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom). Located on Museum Island, it is in the heart of Berlin. Though severely damaged by bombing in World War II, this scaffolding is for cleaning purposes–notice the small dome on the right is black–the “white” stone on most of the face represents cleaning efforts.

I was deliberately avoiding cranes in my photos; here are a few that snuck through.

Traveling as a group has been a lot of fun, even on very cold days. The Carrolls might be a little spoiled–our only experience with hostels is when we travel with our group. Here Lindsay preps our students for our walking tour of Berlin in the hostel lobby. It was 24 F and windy, so yes, they are very bundled.

What is now Germany has only been a nation since 1871, though the history of the people in this place runs back over 2,000 years. In the world history classes I took in an American high school, the time on Germany focused on its role in World War I and World War II. We visited lots of sites on our walking tour, but I am going to focus on a couple that deal with Germany wrestling with the history of the wars. The first is the Neue Wache. In England and in the US, there are many memorials across the countries commemorating those who fought and served in the World Wars. I have seen many in Germany from World War I, but as a country that was administered primarily by Russia and the US after World War II, there wasn’t a lot of thought given to honoring those who fought for Nazi Germany. Since 1931, the Neue Wache, a former guardhouse, has served as a war memorial. It has been re-dedicated multiple times, but after re-unification, it was re-dedicated as “the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the victims of war and dictatorship”. Its central art installation is a statue of a mother holding her dead son. As such, it is as much an anti-war piece as it is a war memorial. But it negotiates the difficult space of honoring the sacrifice of fallen German soldiers while acknowledging the deaths caused by those soldiers should also be acknowledged. Plus, it acknowledges the deaths caused by fascist and soviet dictators that weren’t war deaths. The sculptor of the statue is
Käthe Kollwitz, and, tangentially, the ACU Villa is on Käthe-Kollwitz-Straße in Leipzig.

I don’t have a picture of the parking lot above where Hitler’s bunker was located, but all that is there is a small sign acknowledging its location; there were fears that any type of memorial building or plaque there could serve as a sort of rallying spot for neo-nazis. I mention this deliberately because paired with the Neue Mache, it shows how complicated wrestling with the past can be in Germany, as does the last site I want to focus on.

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The Holocaust memorial in Berlin is also controversial. Not because most Germans think it shouldn’t be memorialized, but because the memorial is so abstract people sometimes wonder if it is appropriate. The memorial is several thousand stella, or rectangular stones of various height, laid out in a grid. In the cold weather we visited it in, it was very somber. In summer, however, tourists often hop from stella to stella (which is actually forbidden), and children play, hiding amidst the stones some of which are more than eight or ten feet tall (the ground is like a bowl beneath the grid so you don’t notice the increasing height from the perimeter). The artist claims the design is deliberately controversial to invite conversation about a history that isn’t talked about. Others claim it is simply inappropriate for the memorial to the Holocaust to be able to be interpreted as playful. For me, it just emphasizes the difficulty of negotiating an imperfect history. The arguments over Confederate monuments certainly came to mind for me. I do appreciate the nuance of the Neue Mache, a nuance that I believe recognizes not only the lingering guilt over Nazi Germany, but that even the best of men in war create victims by doing their duty.

Saturday was a free day for everyone. The Carrolls started their day with frühstück, breakfast, at Chipps, in the embassy district. Being the healthy person I am, I had salad with mine.

See how healthy I am?

We spent the day wandering the city (you may notice in the pictures, I really like ornate doors). Laura’s itinerary included visiting the DDR Museum, Nikolai church and the surrounding area, and then the English section of the Dussman bookstore. We ate our evening meal at Nanoosh (where I had my first translation fail–somehow I missed that some version of cold fish would be in my wrap!). The girls loved the DDR Museum and its exhibits on life in East Germany. Nikolai church was amazing–it was rebuilt after being destroyed in World War II, and it no longer functions as a church. It preserves, restores and houses pieces from other destroyed churches that have not been rebuilt. It is lovely. And it had a cupcake shop next door. I found the perfect card for Laura at the bookstore (and each of us picked up a book), and we finished the evening at a Chocolate shop that had recreated the Brandenburg Gate in chocolate. I will let you judge how accurate they were.

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On Sunday, we visited the German Historical Museum, went to the Holocaust Museum (which is located underground, below the Holocaust memorial, and is as emotional as you can imagine), passed by the Reichstag, and then headed back to Leipzig for another week of classes. For the Carrolls, the next weekend would be in Görlitz.

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