Garden Love

Well. I haven't been posting so much. I've been distracted and driven to distraction by my volatile relationship with Himself. Volatile. That is the word. Ätherisch. Flüchtig. Launisch. Sprunghaft. Verdampfbar. Vergänglich. Unstetig. Unberechenbar. Volatil.

So. I will discuss the garden. I will post photos of it sometime. We hired Dietmar and his friend Bernhard to plow it up and rip those stubborn blackberry roots out of the sunny patch in front. They slowly drove a tractor from about 1948 to us, we could hear it coming from far away. It had a weathered teddy bear tied to the front grill. Most of the garden is in deep shade, the trees desperately need a trim. But the large patch alongside the fence is sunny most of the day. The fellows came and got to work and got the job done, beautifully. Dietmar is a true character who spent some time at sea and wears a cross, an anchor and heart pendants on his chest.

Then Michael and I combed over the chunks of earth left behind, removing roots. The earth is rich and unadulterated. It will nourish everything wonderfully well. I have met toads and frogs there. There may be a fox, too.

Then I had to lay out the garden plot. I wanted nothing in the garden that is at right angles, nothing rectangular. I went into a meditative state and began walking-the-eight on the land. I walked a series of interlocking figure eights on the plot, and tamped the earth down over and over with my feet. It is wonderful to walk there. The bees were happy with the shape of the garden. Me too.

We planted in squash, pumpkins, beans, peppers, tomatoes, marigolds, carrots, white radish, snapdragons (favorite flower of all, mine) bright orange monkey flower, corn, herbs, yarrow, heuchera, lady's mantle, onions, cucumber, sunflowers, lavender, nasturtium, and a couple more things now I forget. I would have loved to order and get a box of seeds from Seed Savers. But we could only use the basics that are available here, for now, since it all costs some money. Next year? Who knows?

Meanwhile, my bees were feeling the strange experience of being between bloomings. All the early summer, late spring things have stopped, and nothing more at present is in flower. This is a problem for them, keen to collect. Normally, the fruit is spaced out in blossoming during this time. Now, everything blooms at once, and all of a sudden, the fields of raps and everything else was already moving to fruit. The hives were full to dripping. I had to remove 25 kilos of honey two weeks ago. They didn't even mind. Bees conglomerated in the garden house, hanging in the windows, attracted by my foolishly-placed empty, honey-smelling frames. They eventually dispersed, but not before I became very excited, thinking I had attracted a lost swarm, and briefly believing myself to have magical, bee-attracting powers.

Now and again it rains. We had begun clearing the paths to the garden house, still chopping blackberry roots out, when he and I had another of our famous eruptions. They always post-date an event which has brought us closer together. This time, it was taking Argentinian tango lessons and beginning to love it. What happens is: I do something that he believes was wrong. If I don't agree and see the error of my ways, then all hell breaks loose, and we go through the drama of breaking up.

After plants have lived through a rough rainstorm, it actually makes them stronger and glossier and healthier, to have their leaves pelted to ribbons, if they had previously been in a state of stasis and dull soil. But everyone knows if storms happen over and over the plant loses its trust in being able to survive. It can't forever weather harsh storms. Eventually, it will die back.

We're not talking. But the garden is still growing. It is the garden we planted together, for our future. It is the garden that felt like a magical place when we found it. A mole has wended its way through the beds, linking the yarrow to the tiny carrot seeds. I walked the Eight there yesterday, along the paths. Right now, it makes me sad, waiting for rain. Waiting for the seeds to sprout.

She

A 40,000 year old, ca. four inch high ivory carving of a female form, found in far southwestern mountains in Germany in September 2008, thought to be the oldest known human representative figure yet found by archeologists, will be unveiled this week in Tübingen.

Archeologist Nicholas Conard hypothesizes that because this and other numerous ivory carvings, as well as the earliest musical instrument found come from the area known as the Schwaebisch Alps, that this could mean that the area gave birth to the first ever world “culture,” according to the late 19th and early 20th century definition of culture. To date, all other carvings from this early era are of animals.

Stunningly, in print the discoverers have continued to refer to the carving as a “Venus” figurine. Using the term “Venus” to describe all prehistoric female figures is a practice that has been forcefully discredited over the past forty years, for two main reasons. Venus as an artistic and literary reference was a Victorian-era euphemism for sexually provocative, thus irrelevantly codifying the sexual projections of the early scientists. Also, as a goddess of the Roman pantheon, Venus post-dates this prehistoric art work by several thousand years, making such a reference anachronistic. While the finders admitted they did not know for what purpose the piece was created, they did not fail to characterize the piece as “undoubtedly representing a fertility object,” which is perhaps the most unexamined and oft-repeated cliche in the entire history of archeology as a science. How the object can, without question, be labelled a so-called “fertility object,” without a single definition of the meaning or intent of fertility as an abstract concept to these people is a question that remains unanswered.

The piece is highly detailed and intricately carved, and its finders are happy and excited. Said Conard, “This piece radiates energy and is impressive.” As with many other prehistoric carvings which may have simultaneously represented women and deities, this carving focuses on her breasts and stylized pubic area, while her arms and legs are less detailed, and her head is missing. Because the piece was found compacted with material, 20 meters from the cave entrance, scientists believe her missing parts may yet be found.

With a shocking hubris, yet presumably because the carving shows an abstracted vulva, Conard’s colleague Paul Mellars stated that the figure’s “design bordered on modern pornography.” While modern pornography generally has the intention of raising sexual excitement in a passive viewer, the said figurine shows no perceivably provocative display associated with such. Mistaking a simply carved, unclothed, 40,000 year old female form with an external and conscious attempt to arouse him, Mellars makes the same misinterpretation his 19thc, pre-psychology predecessors made: he has projected his own contemporary sexual identification on a 40,000 year old culture whose expression of 21st century “pornography” can only be said to exist in fantasy.

Mellars’ stupid and prurient comment, then, printed in the journal Nature, repeated in Yahoo news and in countless regional newspapers, can only be assumed to have had the self-conscious intention of ensuring its publication and wide dissemination.

Where have all the Libraries Gone

Latest news from our local paper is that the yearly cost for library membership is rising 90%, from 10 euros per year to 19 euros per year. That's really quite a jump. It's sort of...obscene. I mean, normally a price hike occurs with regularity in the order of fifty cents or a euro at a time, perhaps yearly. Little tiny digs at a time are less painful and can be adapted to better than a massive gouge at once -- this is simply true.

The reason for the near-doubling of price is that since 2003 or so, the visitors using the library have gone up by 45%. One might also think that the late fees associated with books returned late have also gone up 45% or so, if a rate of paid fines can be plotted. But I'm no mathematician, or anything. Where does the money for late fees go?

I would think that increased use of a public entity would mean that the library then is ripe for more public funding. If it's being used more, then more of our tax money, collectively, should go to support it.

I don't know where all the tax money goes in this society. It would take a lifetime to figure it out, I believe. I notice that in town, the trees in the parks are trimmed yearly at great expense, especially when the trimming appears unnecessary and is done only to healthy trees. I notice that certain offices in the city building are filled with marginally busy employees serving trickles of customers. I have personally experienced getting a bill for the remainder of a service totalling less than 80 cents -- the postage, the paper, and the work done to write and send the bill would have added up to far more than the return (and could have been added economically to my next bill).

I know that the library is well used, and used well, and has well-trained, responsive employees. Many folks depend on it. The collection is as good as a small town can hope for, and is regularly beefed up with all that folks want to read. So, logically, it deserves a greater share of the pie.

Instead, its customers will be penalized and made to pay almost twice as much as they ever did. Their children still get to borrow for free, because the literacy of children is acknowledged to be so very important, even though the literacy of their parents, from whom they learn it in the first place, can still be pumped for cash. Unemployed folks still have to pay 7.50€ per year.

19€ per year isn't a huge amount of money. In a city, it might be a commuter's weekly allowance for coffee, but here, I feel it. And it just seems ass-backwards to penalize customers further, in an economic slow-down time (when are we going to called it a Depression?) when the libraries are one of the last great institutions of communal sharing. It irks me, and it makes me want to listen to Woody Guthrie records.

The main hall of the Denver Public Library.

2,382,672 things to check out. Library cards are issued for free.

I don't have a tidy way to wrap this up. I miss American libraries. Gawd, I can hardly think of their generous bounty without disbelieving myself, but it is so. I used to check out stacks of books, 16 high, anything and everything that I would ever want to buy. I could check out things on inter-library loan, for free, and have them shipped from Nebraska to read. I bought second had books at their sales for .50 and a dollar which later were found to be rare and pricey. (And now, mine.)

America might not be a terrific exponent of socialism, but frankly, nobody else has nailed it as well as Americans have for libraries--one of the best socialist ideas of all time.

Peeping from the Hut

Going through Germany by train I was immediately struck by the small gardens lining the tracks on the outskirts of cities and small towns. These community gardens are called "Schrebergartens" after the Leipzig doctor (Moritz Schreber) who fostered the drive to unify these small holdings into a regulated community club (verein) movement.

Small-holding gardens were originally provided in the early 1800's as way to counter poverty and malnutrition among the poor, begun by Carl of Hesse, in what was then still Denmark. By 1826, nineteen states already had spread the garden fever.

Bylaws were all set down last during the 1920's, and the goal of the gardening movement was to provide a place in nature for city dwellers, improve the nutrition and access to fresh food for families and the unemployed, help integrate immigrants, provide a play area for city kids, and generally improve the lives of everyone. They became an important feature of survival during the second world war, as well.
A little hut on a garden plot is called a "laube." Schrebergarten folks are known derisively as "laubenpieper." Hut whistlers.

I theorize that German society is so well oiled and smoothly running, every i is dotted and every t is crossed, that folks were occasionally need a place to escape to. A place where they won't be reminded by the neighbor that it's their turn to mop the apartment floor, that last Saturday they were parked in an inappropriate place, or any of the millions of ways that German folks (especially the older and bored variety) regulate each other's behavior.

Germans generally have two places they can escape to, to really cut loose and ignore some of the rules. One of these is: going on vacation. Here is where German folks can refuse to line up neatly for services, where they sing loudly at two in the morning in youth hostels, where they can snap their fingers and dominate waiters rudely -- where they can generally get away with behavior that would never do at home. Unfortunately, the boorish behavior of some German travellers has become somewhat legendary (although clearly nearly all peoples have worst-case-scenario reputations in some way when they escape overseas: the English are louts, the Americans want to buy everything, et cetera...) but Germans generally are not that way with each other, rather, they all stay on a short leash so nobody gets bitten.

And the other of these places to escape is the Schrebergarten. Theoretically, I say. Because actually most people have their gardens in a community club, a verein, and the rules and the oversight of the rules are extreme. You can only paint your house a certain color or it can be wood, the hedge can only be so high, no chickens are allowed, no hanging laundry, no music, and you must stay quiet during these hours, et cetera, et cetera. (All of it unpleasantly recalls the massively regulated new suburban developments in the USA...which are even more fascist.) And if you are not of a mind to follow the rules to the letter, there are neighbors to the back, forward, right and left of you to remind you. (Post 1968-folks, hippies and others, think of the schrebergarten folks as "spiessers," small-minded conformists.)

But when you look around at many schrebergardens, they show an individualism that is rarely seen among apartments and homes. Our home on the hill was white with brown roof tiles, like all the other houses on the street: white, boxy, plain. How I longed to paint it mustard yellow or lilac! There is often no way to tell what sort of person is inside the house, as they all look just the same, exactly as in the Pete Seeger song.



But the gardens are so different. Some are so neat, they may as well have been licked clean. Some are falling down, weed infested, with piles of plastic junk waiting to be used for harvest, chickens pecking about, others are dreams of perfect flower and vegetable beds, laid out in right angles. Some are really only for partying with the family weekends during the summer. Others contain caged dogs, insanely barking. Folks who wouldn't dream of having anything sloppy in their homes, let themselves go in their gardens.

Now I have a garden, too. But luckily, it is privately owned, and I don't have to pay attention to by-laws and nosy neighbors. I will post about it as things develop. Right now all that has developed is: intense scratches on my arms from removing blackberry brambles. The brambles are very defensive, and we all know the first step to war is defense. Therefore I find when I grasp them gently, they come along with less of a snarl. Sometimes in a garden you have to go in the opposite direction of what seems to be called for.

By the way, here is an excellent program on America's National Public Radio by the Kitchen Sisters, (Hidden Kitchens: how communities come together over food) about garden plots inside London, for you English speakers.

Small Garden Holding

It's very exciting...today Michael and I spoke to a woman who owns a garden here in Einbeck which has lain abandoned at least a decade. It's ownership is tied up in inheritance negotiations, but I can rent it from her for less than ten euros a month.

We went out there last weekend. It lies at a corner of private gardens, next to a field, and fronted by a river, with ducks. Something in my world turned on its axis as we waded and strolled across the piece of land. For one thing, it's somewhat large, triangular, rambling with overgrown blackberry brambles, mossy apple and cherry trees with mistletoe in them, clusters of snowdrops here and there, plus lots of scattered junk and garbage.

The energy of the land is lonely and out-of-sorts. At the back of the property, a small stone house beckoned. It is at least 100 years old and painted with green trim. It has two rooms and a work space out the back with a privy. The windows have been open for years, and neighbor cats have joyously pissed all around. Gosh--it needs work.

More later...

Can't say 'No' to the Coal Black Sweep

Someone knocked at the door today, and there was a Schornsteinfeger. A chimney sweep. When they come to the door, you have to let them in, it’s a law, and custom. They are usually good-looking young men, sometimes women, and they often drive a black bicycle. They wear all black uniforms, with a patch or two containing good luck sigils, and some of them wear black top hats. There aren’t that many these days who make the most of their folkloric reputation, but every now and again you see one who plays up the whole chimney sweep identity.

The broom, crossed flails and stars of this rubber stamp image for professional chimney sweeps has deeply magical associations.

Touching sweeps brings good luck. They keep the fires away from your house—mostly, now, because they check your heating system to make sure that it is working, not leaking any gas. Everything was in order. We will soon receive a bill for about 60 Euros, which we are required by law to pay. Even if we heated our house with beggar’s velvet and star dust, and could prove no incendiary devices of any kind were needed, we would have to let him in and would have to pay the bill. What extraordinary job security.

Our Schornsteinfeger was tall and thin, and perfectly blonde, with lovely blue eyes. His black uniform smelled of wood smoke, and his fingernails were smeared with black ashes. A skinny kid. Olivia came out of her room and we each touched his sleeve, laughing, for good luck. What a great job—you can’t be refused, and everyone wants to touch you. One would come to believe in your own power of good luck. The power to ward off fire.

I see them as related to the Coal Black Smith. Smiths were magical and dangerous because they could raise and tend fire hot enough to form the most important tools, and this gave them a devilishly powerful reputation—just for having the guts to play with fire like the gods. These entities exist not only in the Spirit World, but also as archetypes which ignite subconscious rememberings in us.

I see these ancient archetypes as having splintered into various forms in the early modern era, as city life transformed entire societies in middle Europe. Often, the domestication of these archetypes meant that over time they lost their threatening powers, but remained potent subconscious reminders. For example, witches were initially wise women, containing both good and bad powers. Their reputation became exclusively evil, as framed by the church. But the storyteller aspect of their wisdom needed to be retained, and found expression in images of Mother Goose. (I will write about her in posts to come.)

The oldest origins of sweeps places them symbolically as walkers-between-worlds, because they used to enter the chimneys physically, and were most often children. Chimneys are where fire lives; they are dangerous places, and narrow, but cleaning them out in the days of daily use was vital for avoiding fires that could destroy entire closely packed 13—17th Century towns within a twenty four hour period. There are many postcards featuring cherub-faced sweeps from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (usually sent as good luck charms at the New Year) but their work was some of the most dangerous that children were then pressed in to doing.

The ladders they carried in the past also had a magical, liminal meaning.

The chimney has always been a portal between the worlds. Chimneys in old houses often contain spells and charms in the form of pet skeletons, or shoes, or flasks hidden between their bricks or under their foundations. Apparently these communications were placed there in that portal to purposely step over the line between our world and the world beyond. Santa Claus travels down the chimney from his magical world to ours. The greedy wolf foolishly used it to try to enter the pigs’ brick house safety zone and was burnt to death. Old time witches were taught to fly up the chimney to go on their midnight shamanic rambles.

My first shamanic teacher taught me to do the same. He said: you have to leave the house without leaving your house—how are you going to get out? When I chose the chimney, he twinkled at me.

Bowl of May

It’s been a long, cold winter, and I’m starting to have that itch for spring. I can always tell when spring is approaching here, a couple of things become apparent. One of course is the scent of freshness in the air, snowdrops in the park, a slight greening of the underbrush. The other recalls the fertility festivals of old. Suddenly one day in spring there are dozens of posters in town, advertising for the “Erotik Messe” in Göttingen.

This is a consumer’s convention for erotic products and services, apparently. I have not been to one, because I'm above that sort of thing (hee!). They seem slightly slanted toward the male pleasures. But the ads for them show that one can get a spirally black tattoo on the sacrum (called “ass antlers,” here) or purchase a dancing pole. There must be exhibitions of “dancing” and scanty costumes, as well. I can only think that they are the logical modern merging of consumer culture with the very old rising of the sap, increase of sexual energy that occurs in spring—with a whole lot more fetishism these days than the natural arousal of the land spirits. Even so, it's interesting how some things never change. In North America, we call it "spring fever."

Of course we know that the Celts were all over Europe, not only in the British Isles, although it always seems tidier to think of them that way, when you are North American. But there were significant amounts of Celts in what is now Austria, Switzerland, and central and southern Germany. And they did in fact celebrate Beltane here, although I don’t know what they individually called it. And when they wandered into the forest, the most commonly seen plant they encountered was the sweet woodruff (Asperula odorata/Galium odoratum), an emerald green shade-lover which carpets the forest floor about 6 to 12 inches high with clusters of 6 to 7 hardy leaves.

Here it is called: Waldmeister, or Master or Boss of the Forest. It also has many other folk names, including: Gliedkraut (phallus herb), Herzfreund (heart’s friend), Leberkraut (liver herb), Maiblume (May flower), Maichrut/Maikraut (May herb), Mösch (?), Teekraut (tea herb), Waldmutterkraut (forest mother herb), Waldtee (forest tea), Wohlriechendes (good-smelling) Labkraut (?), and das blühende Kraut (the blooming herb).

Waldmeister is used in modern treats to this day. Especially in puddings, cakes, candy, popsicles, ice cream, and as flavoring for sodas. It has a very fresh, mellow/tangy vanilla-lime-grass/hay flavor, but is unlike anything I had tasted before, before I tasted it. It is super refreshing and tasty.

The Celts/Druids had merged with the plant in shamanic journeys to speak with the gods for who knows how long. It was enjoyed as an aphrodisiac, but in large doses can cause hallucinations, which is exactly the point of all entheogens. Early on, Benedictine monks were recording their use of waldmeister for infections, insomnia, cramping, blood thinning, migraines/pain and heart problems, but the monk Wandalbertus was the first to write down in 854 A.D. that it was delicious drink when wine was poured over it.

Because the active ingredient is Cumarin, which has a slightly euphoric and enlivening effect, waldmeister is used to get over “early spring tiredness” (frühjahrsmüdigkeit), one of those seemingly hypochondriacal German complaints (which I initially scoffed at), that nonetheless seems to hit people in late winter/early spring, when we find it hard to get out of bed, and feel sluggish during the long, wet, gray days.

Dr. Oetker's "Götter Speise" is waldmeister-flavored jello whose name translates to "Snack of the Gods," hinting at waldmeister's heathen origins.

Whether you drink it with alcohol or not, it can cause morning headaches (hangover, which translates to “Tomcat” in German: a “Kater”) and in very high doses it can lead to dizziness, vomiting and breathing problems. (So, don’t go there.)

Nevertheless its euphoric effects and deliciousness are what keep people making Maibowles (Bowls of May) every year. In April or May, before the plant blossoms in tiny white flowers, cut a few bunches (for greatest power and affect: gathering in a spiritually aroused and grateful state, shamanically merging with the plant).

The plant is most aromatic before it has begun to bloom. However, if you use blown woodruff, then cut the flowers off before adding to the punch. The longer you wait after cutting, the more flavor leaves the plant, so add as quickly to the wine or juice as possible. You’ll need:

2 large handfuls of sweet woodruff/waldmeister
a scant cup (200g) sugar (or half as much honey, or to taste)
juice of two lemons
3 bottles of reisling, mosel or rhine wine (not dry)
1 bottle of sparkling wine, prosecco or champagne
(4 bottles of white grape juice would do for the alcohol-free version)
Any of these: strawberry leaves, red or black currant leaves, thinly sliced oranges or strawberries, edible flowers, raspberry blossoms (good luck finding in May), violet blossoms, young yarrow leaves, and cinquefoil/potentilla blossoms.

You might slightly macerate the leaves and blossoms in the punch bowl with a pestle, add the sugar, and then directly pour the liquids over. Let stand overnight, at room temperature. In the morning, keep it cool until its time to drink it. Traditionally, it is served in a large tureen called a "Bowle" with matching glasses or mugs.

Of course, this recipe is just custom-made for enchanting, because not only can the plants be ritually collected or collected in a shamanic state, but they can also be physically enchanted and worked in a state of poetic resonance as they are handled, with the appropriate intentions of waxing life force, virility, and desire. Prost!

Post-Move More

AAaaaannnddD: here are the final pictures of the apartment you will see.
This is the upstairs.

There's one corner where I will do art--the orange cabinets are pretty stuffed with materials already. Can't. Find. Anything.

We've put the extra books on the beams, which are charming until you've bonked your head on them four five times--but there's a reasonably quick learning curve with that.



To the left is the wall that once had the Island Scene on it, remarkable for its inability to make us feel transported to the Caribbean. Stuart wanted to keep it. I remember having a similar affection for photo-wallpaper when I was a child in the seventies. I wallpapered it red, instead.
You can see the living room now at the bottom of this blog.

Under the camel painting are the stairs that lead up here.

So, that's our new place. Any questions?

Bedrooms in the New Apartment

Here is my much smaller bedroom. It is damson plum-colored, with curtains that combine English Arts and Crafts with Carnaby Street. I love these curtains. They shield my view to the parking lot below.

Interesting fact: there are Digimon stickers half-scraped off on the back of the door.

What you can barely see is a collection of chip-carved wooden objects from Friesland. The images are amazing on these pieces and go way back: basically they are sacred geometry in wood. Still done up to the mid-20th Century in northwestern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, and undergoing a comeback among carving-hobbyists.

I'm sorry to have exposed the Girl for the creature she truly is, but at least she is in good company. I mean: the mess. Actually, the photo is so dark that The Mess cannot really be discerned. The romantic disarray of the bed could have actually been planned. The window wall is painted 'Moroccan Mint.'

What appears to be a random grouping of papers, garbage, school bags, rumpled beds and abandoned clothing is actually a complicated code that is understood only by groups of related boys who attempt to territorialize their surroundings. Scientists are only now piecing together the subtleties of this little-understood method of mark-making...

The New Joint

Here are some photos of our new apartment, where everything begins fresh.

Here is the view as we walk--or rather, squeeze--in. Mostly stairs and books. The pink kitchen beckons from beyond with the scent of cherry-fennel soup. The tower of paint buckets means that in Germany, where it is difficult to throw anything away, we must wait for a magic moment for these to disappear.

Yes, I wanted the kitchen pink. I love this pink kitchen, and also the pot rack over my head made from and iron door grill, which makes me feel like a gourmet cook. The upturned plate on the cooktop conceals a huge crack which occured during the move. The potholders are honeycombed hexagons--love them. I might have to re-think the cheap green throw rug.

What was great was: how Michael helped me hang up almost everything, drilling like a wild man, for days on end. No more waiting eight months between each home improvement!

More later...

The Heinz Ehrhardt Effect

February 20th would have been the 100th birthday of Heinz Ehrhardt, one of Germany’s most beloved post-war comics, a wirtschaftswunder’s everyman with an extraordinary facility with wordplay to which other comics can only hope to aspire. I admit some of the wordplay is lost on me, but his loveable character isn’t. He is the uncle you wish you’d always had: kind, naive, a certain and stable center of tender good intentions in an ever-faster world. Apparently in real life he was a bit of a workaholic, dying early in the 1970’s of a heart attack, beloved by his four children, who didn’t get enough time with him. Ehrhardt and Loriot are Germany’s greatest comedic influences—both legendary, here.

Lately I saw the film that he made in Einbeck in ca. 1957, (Vater, Mutter und Neun Kinder) which was finished in studios that then existed in Göttingen. It is filmed outside and presumably inside the oldest town drugstore (Apotheke) in the market square, (I have myself bought mosquito repellant there, it is next to our pediatrician) with other scenes taking place on the lake near Northeim.

In it, Heinz is the father of nine, and is concerned with getting several late-teenage children married off. There are charming scenes of small town, idealized German life and but one reference to the difficult times after the war. One daughter apparently enjoys dancing with her own brother a bit too much, which we find out is understandable and healthy when the mother informs her she is not really their daughter, but rather the child of best-friends who died in Hannover during the war—she had been adopted! Everything’s cool with Klaus!

The ever-loveable Heinz good-naturedly surrounded by his adoring daughters in Vater, Mutter und Neun Kinder

There is a subplot which has Heinz sweating it out that he might have had a tipsy and amnesiac indiscretion with the trophy-wife of a local bigshot—but his sensible wife straightens everything out just in time for their 25th wedding anniversary. The actress who plays her is a perfect foil to his bumbling and innocence—more than a bit sharp and earthier than he.

This film was quite influential in its day. The family sings and makes music together (Ehrhardt’s first love was the piano, and he always sings in films), and I can see it may have had an influence on The Sound of Music from 1965. Also, there is a scene where one daughter and her French boyfriend fall into the lake — he offers her his soaking handkerchief with which to dry off, just like Roger does in 101 Dalmatians of 1967, although I must say, to less effect.

The film is a true feel-good movie, but has just enough touches of real life to relieve the sweetness: one son drinks too much champagne at the party and barfs, and one ambitious daughter’s report in the local newspaper unleashes the central misunderstanding, while the two youngest kids have to go without duck at Sunday dinner (and told to lie that they don’t like it!) in order to politely fill the stomach of an unexpected guest. I really liked it more than I thought I might. I can definitely see how it has the same effect for Germans as It’s a Wonderful Life has one me: tears of joy at every year’s viewing.

All in a lather

A particular motif that runs through advertisements, thrillers, and reportage in German culture is that of the woman, alone, showering. Always, the woman is naked under running water, enjoying this private bit of sensuality, unaware that she is being watched. The woman never responds to the viewer who is privy to seeing her at a most vulnerable and private moment.

I’ve seen it on billboards advertising shower equipment. It’s there in vacation reportage detailing ‘what to do’ in Mallorca — presumably having a shower is central to the experience. In any household and clothing catalog like OTTO the bath units will be decorated with a nude woman showing us how they are to be used. I saw it used once thoroughly gratuitously on the old series of Derrick, one of the first detective shows in Germany. Here, a woman had just come home from work and needed to shower (which we saw) before the detectives even showed up at her place to question her. Showering? Had nothing to do with the crime.

(It took me about 5.7 seconds to find this Diana image on a search for German bath products)

Showering-woman is so repeatedly referenced, that nobody questions it. It’s like the sari-wettened-by-rain or the sunset-dance-with-windblown-scarves sequences in every Bollywood film, or the unvanquishable hero theme in American films, featuring a man of super-human strength and remarkable moral integrity — which recalls the early legends of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill...it is an inextricable part of the cultural imagination.

Clearly, the ‘showering woman’ motif goes at least as far back as the Greek myth of Diana being watched by Actaeon. The popularity of this motif as an attention-grabber isn’t only about nudity. It is about the tension of seeing something we have not been invited to see, that maybe we are not developed enough to see. It is brave to open our eyes and challenge what we are accustomed to, and thereby gain knowledge; it is human to be curious. They call it voyeurism, which makes it seem diagnosable and weird. Seeing what is normally hidden and private alters our perception. To watch and take the risk of both being caught and being transformed by what we see – is a human desire. Curiosity is a desire in us to evolve.

The theme in art history is well-established. This painting from the 18th century is by Francois Boucher and is a fleshy excuse to see Diana nekkid.

In the myth, Diana the huntress lives alone, thoroughly independent in the forest, using her own superior skills as huntress to remain separate from society and men. She has determined to kill any man who invades her territory, or attempts to view her in her natural state. Diana also appears as a deer, so of course hunters seek her perpetually...but don’t always know who is Diana and who is just a deer—a goddess is expert at shapeshifting.

This fountain from Schloss Schönbrunn pleasure gardens in Salzburg, Austria shows Actaeon before the dogs get to him.

Actaeon is a hunter who watches Diana as she is dressing or bathing under a waterfall in the forest. He is riveted, and seeks to become her mate. Because he may be as good a hunter as she, he stands a chance. But he has seen her, exposed, without being invited. It’s not just that she’s naked and has a great body. In her nakedness, she is in a state of absolute unity with All of Nature, and this is a mind-splitting, soul-exploding revelation. He has seen her embody this merging, the stunning beauty of it, and cannot survive in the same form to tell the tale. His being able to see her at all means that he is extraordinarily skilled, and his vision of nature transforms him so that he both becomes as a god, and as an animal – her male counterpart. She turns him into a stag – he becomes merged, too – and his own hunting dogs bring him down.

The action, or the hunt, at Schloss Schönbrunn gardens begins with a thorough and unexpected soaking of all the Dianas seated at this table. In the early 1800's, this meant that muslin dresses would have become see-through. The garden follows a mythic story line in which pleasure and erotic play are highlighted by themes in classical myth. Lovers in this setting become the hunters or the hunted. The Diana/Actaeon myth is prominent in the garden design and features.

(Since Actaeon brought dogs to help him dominate nature during the hunt means that he is later destroyed by his own bit of ‘overkill.’ Diana doesn’t need dogs to be the best hunter. There is a message here: we will be brought down by our own attempts to undermine the sacred law, the perfection with which everything works in nature. We succeed when we merge with nature, when we commune-icate. When we force it and try to get the upper hand, our own vanity will rip out our throats.)

The hunting cult in middle Europe was perhaps the single greatest focus of non-religious imagination in the modern era (post 1500). The effect this motif had on art, architecture, and design cannot be underestimated; it was omnipresent – even though, or perhaps because it belonged to the elite, to landowners.

This strange dual-sided festival mask from 18th Century Austria turns the myth on its head. One side shows a benign and friendly deer, the other side shows a horny deer with sharp teeth. Clearly this is no majestic Bambi.

The mid-20th Century magister Robert Cochrane suggested in private letters that this motif must be studied in order to understand traditional witchcraft at all. He hinted that the roebuck-in-the-thicket, the hiding stag of the forest, is tantamount to the hidden wisdom at the heart of nature itself, and that the hunter’s sacred task of capturing the deer was a metaphor for the human’s sacred task of attaining this wisdom.

At right is a hunter's dish from Bavaria which features a stag being trailed by a very small dog. The stag carries in its mouth a sort of golden fruit, and its heart is prominent. The hunted stag motif appears abundantly on household objects.

In our time many are ashamed of hunting because it causes pain to animals, so it is difficult to understand that in the past, sacred-hunters understood that a deer will never be brought down, can not be captured, without its spiritual consent...that the deer is in no way an insensible victim of its fate, but rather that deer play a sacred and willing role in a human’s attempt to merge with the earth—no matter how they struggle to survive the hunt.

To imagine that an animal would spiritually conspire to sacrifice itself so that we people can evolve means that we have to give up the perception that death is bad. We would see everything as interrelated, abandon our attachment to conflict and competition as the central rules of life – and rather know that everything (the universe, God) is on our side to help us attain wisdom. As we attain this wisdom, we find our most evolved state is to be on the side of nature.

Paint it Charles-Bronson Brown

I have a theory that Germans became conditioned to continual renovation after 1945 or so. Before then I believe they could quite happily live with old things around them, making use of old latches and squeaky shutters, iron door handles and layers of wallpaper. But after so many buildings were destroyed during bombings, the entire sides of houses caved-in and exposed embarassingly for the entire world to see, like underpants on a clothesline...I think that with all the new construction and renewal of the 1950’s it became untenable for every generation afterwards to live with shabby things. Shabby and old is immediately regarded with disgust as being dirty and unsound.

In the English speaking world, shabby and old are equal to comfortable and homey, and sometimes: eccentric and creative and devil-may-care. “Shabby chic” trends come and go in America by the decade. Even in a Modern and Streamlined and Minimalist decade Americans like to create ironic counterpoints by decorating with old and peeling milkmaid stools, chunks of blasted plaster covered with Bollywood posters, chipped and cracked pastel pottery assembled into a visually delicious displays. In the west, where I spent most of my American life, everything is so new and in a state of continual transformation, that we are actually starved for shabbiness, for history we can touch.

A friend of mine in America had bought a tiny home built in the 1930’s in a trendy part of town. The kitchen had last been updated during the Nixon administration, and the cupboards were tortuously dark, Charles Bronson-brown and the counters were so chipped and peeling it looked like someone was trying to make guacamole from the original avocado (before avocado was cool again) and its effect on the mind was hallucinatory, like a dream involving a broken-down car and some guy from the Rockford Files. But this friend and her husband were both professionals, newly capable of buying whatever they wanted. She made excuses for the kitchen, but its hideousness was actually a matter of pride to her. Her hesitancy-to-renovate proved to us how little she cared about being in style, how unpretentious she was.

In the American west, this attitude: that you are above such things, that you’re tough enough to live with adversity, you shrug it off, that you’re not some effete who sniffs at the stylistically unacceptable—this ability to live with scruffiness is admired. Its the same with the Australians: they call this ‘dagginess,’ a not-okayness (from the word for the turds hanging off a sheep’s backend: DAG) and its an ironically cool quality of deliberately going against the grain, being out of step with the trends. It is one of the ingredients in “coolness.”

The Germans know this, too. All the most admired people or at least celebrities do exactly as they like: they wear scruffy photographer’s vests like the actor Götz Georg, they insult people shockingly like the fertility-clown Dieter Bohlen, they chain smoke into advanced age despite all the warnings like Helmut Schmidt. German coolness is made up of moving to your own drumbeat, too, but its also made of keeping things in order, completing the necessities of life on time and efficiently, even when it doesn’t show. When you can do both, baby: you’re a superstar.

The Road to RENOvation

We were lucky when we moved in here that the former occupant had left the place as a pigsty, because that way, we could be taking it over in an unrenovated condition, and when we move out, I won’t have to paint everything white again. Oh good, because I am not a person who can live with white walls. However, an unrenovated condition means that some things may never be fixed. Ah, well. It means that I have faded Digimon stickers on the back of my bedroom door and my overhead ceiling wires have given up the ghost. Plus, we’ve been scraping a flaccid-looking beach scene-photo wallpaper off one living room wall, and repainting window alcoves that were cheddar cheese yellow. Seriously.

I try to explain to German friends, who are so fond of renovating, that the word “renovation” is not an old one. In the mid-20th century, one of the only places Americans could get a quick and easy divorce was in Reno, Nevada. People of means would take a two week vacation there at a dude ranch, drink Tom Collinses, wait for their papers to come through, and end up legally divorced, ready for the train back home. When you returned from your trip, folks would ask you where you’d been, and the standard comeback was: “I’ve been RENO-vated!” They’d been made a-new.

Actually, the Germans may as well have invented renovation, so they don’t tend to believe this actually-true bit of linguistic history. A friend of mine decided that they absolutely had to renovate their kitchen. She seemed quite put out by it. It would be a total drag and whirlwind of time and money, but it was necessary - they could not put up with it as it was. The kitchen was tiny and squeaky clean, there were many mugs hanging about, everything was exposed as it often is in European kitchens, but it didn’t seem out-of-date or gross.

Well, she was talking about the wallpaper. The white wallpaper was about seven or eight years old, and it absolutely had to be changed. When I visited again two months later, she asked me what I thought of the kitchen. At first I laughed because I assumed she had put off the renovation for the future, and this was an impulse with which I could thoroughly empathize. No, really, what do you think? Looking around, I could discern no difference. They had moved everything out of that tiny kitchen, every hook, every mug, a massive stand of cookbooks, and replaced the white wallpaper with similar white wallpaper, and then put everything back exactly as it was before. It had taken one chaotic weekend. The kitchen had barely changed at all, but presumably it felt better about itself. This is called: renovation.

In America, renovation is knocking out walls and adding entire stories after you’ve lived in a place half-happily, half-dissatisfied for years on end, intending one day to redo the place. Having many Big Plans that you intend to One Day Accomplish means you can always keep them just out of reach like The Other Side of Pook’s Green Hills. One attempts to keep a yin-yang balance between “I can live with it” and advanced self-disgust, before any commitment-to-change occurs.

When you finally take the plunge, you have taken a step into spending a great deal of sweat and marital harmony mustering and taming rebellious or lazy or over-booked construction workers. If you go to all the trouble, one thing is absolutely certain: you and everyone you know must without a doubt be able to see the difference at the end. The change, in fact, should be stunning. Otherwise, you would have. to be. crazy.

Finding the Thread

Whenever somebody forgets what they were going to say, in German they say: "Ich habe die Faden verloren"...I've lost the thread. Anyone who sews knows how frustrating this can be. I had just until recently seemed to lose the thread of my life. I was living in a huge, cold house across from the windy forest with my three children after my husband and I decided not to live together anymore. We had come here five years ago, seeking European adventure, and also unconsciously, trying to escape an increasing sense of losing the thread of our marriage.

I don't feel like talking about the past, because it now feels as if my life is newly begun again. I will probably fill in the missing threads in posts to come. However, in the past two weeks, we--my daughter and two sons, my ex-husband and my friend Michael--moved everything we have, all twenty years of accrued married and family life, everything we needed, thought we needed, and couldn't let go of, into this small apartment.

It is in an undistinguished building along the main artery in the town, and it lies directly behind a mattress store. I have to tell people that's where I live: behind the mattress store. Believe me, I'd rather tell them that I live next to the waterfall, down a forest glade at the end of the abandoned 18th century stone quarry overgrown with ivy and moss. But, there it is.

The apartment itself is fine. It is about two levels up in a cavernous and echoey building refurbished who knows when, probably the 1980's, with a glass door outfitted with blue plastic pulls, meant to loosen anyday now, so they too must be replaced. Germans seem to leave the bone structure of their buildings intact, thankfully, while they continually change and alter the doors, the windows, the stairs--in fact, everything inside, with a regularity that is, to me, alarming. It just about destroys the character of the interiors, ultimately, as most of the new materials are plastic and in short order they wobble and squeak, and break down.

When you walk in, there is a lovely shining wood staircase leading to the upper floor, underneath the roof. Big, blocky wooden beams hold the roof above our heads, and the walls are partially slanted. There are seven small windows which let in an amazing amount of light. The windows are by Velux, and they are absolutely expensive in America, but just rather nice, here.