Nuremberg

Gruss Gott
and Servus!
When you hear those words, you know you have entered another region of Germany. I have spent the last week in Nuremberg and I am headed to a conference on fear in Stuttgart. I will be back here in Nuremberg next week for more work in the Protestant and municipal archives.

As I walk out of the main train station and find my way across the roads to one of the gates, I remember walking around here eight years ago with my friend Jo. As I kept walking, I quickly recalled what I had learned about the old city of Nuremberg, a "free" city in the Holy Roman Empire, the home of Albrecht Duerer, fabled markets and crafts.

I turned left and followed the wall down the Frauentor street until I found the hostel. Further down, this street is known for its red lights. People would later tell me that this area is one of the seedier parts of Nuremberg. The people at the front desk gave me a map and the password for the front door. They told me I was in the “wrong room”, meaning, I had a bed on the second floor in a six-person, mixed gender room. There I found Jenna lazing on her bed. She had just arrived a little before me. We went downstairs and found our way to the “common room”, which has a kitchen, dining area, computer station and lounge with almost all of the amenities.

At the front desk, “they” (I never got to know these people by name) told me that there were at least seventy beds and forty people in residence. As I would find out, most travelers get to Nuernberg on their way out. Every one is passing through. They had been on the road for several weeks, visiting several countries and bigger cities like Prag, Berlin, Vienna and Paris. Nuremberg sounds like a second thought for some. The kitchen serves as a room for recuperation, it seems. I can hear the life of the road in their voices, their feelings of exhaustion and hacking coughs from weeks of beer, cigarettes and living from one bed to the next.

With David Emory’s question still in the back of my mind about the people I meet, here are a few sketches of the people whom I have met at the “Lette ‘m sleep” hostel in the Frauentormauer 42.

My roommates:

Jenna was the first person whom I met in our six person room and the first to leave for home. She just finished college and decided to take a year off to figure out what to do with her life. She is from Toronto, Canada and has been traveling for several weeks across France, Holland and Germany. She is still young but very spiritual. She was interested in talking about Christianity with the Spanish-speaking boys following her around, but they did not seem as interested in that.

Tania arrived toward evening. She is from Ulm, Germany and is in Nuremberg for an eleven-day internship at a doctor’s office that specializes in alternative medical practices like massage therapy and reiki. Jenna and I decided to hang out with Tania in the smoke-filled kitchen. Tania ended up asking us when we were born for an astrological reading of our lives and futures, but I could not give an exact time. So Tania left me hanging, unable to tell me more precisely what she could see in her reading. However, she did get both Jenna and me to talk about our lives, where and when we were born (know the exact time of your birth?), our families and friends, our desires and our foibles.

Other people began hanging out that night in the kitchen too.

Sylvia is from Tapei, Taiwan. She is actually working at the hostel for two months doing odd jobs, but what she really wants to do is study English literature and drama and maybe go back into stage set design and lighting.

Julia is another young woman from Canada. She is a student at Simon Frazer University in Vancouver and also interested in traveling Europe on her own.

Michael and Mark walked in with thick southeastern English accents. They are from near Canterbury, on the last legs of their trip, low on money and looking for the next beer. They told us to check out the Matisse sketches at the nearby national museum. I noticed Michael keeping his own book of sketches of things he had scene. It looked like portraits of people. Mark was friendly, but tended to say less. As I would learn, Mark tended to stay out much later coming back in the middle of the night or early morning. He would slam the door when he came in, strip down to his underwear, take a swig from his water bottle and climb up into bed.

Margaret arrived yesterday. She is from Indiana (originally Connecticut) and a die hard Quaker. Margaret is a double major in German studies and chemistry. She has a sharp mind and likes to lay things right out on the table: her staunch pacifism, her analysis of US foreign policy, the comparisons of US and Germany cultures and feelings like freedom, security and nationalism. She likes to get right to the point and tells you what she likes and dislikes. Her mother studied journalism and philosophy. She describes her father as a clever man who runs a junkyard. Like several others here, she wanted to experience travel on her own and she hopes to conduct research for a pharmaceutical company some day.

I had noticed Amadeo earlier in the day sitting in the corner of the lounge. He overheard me that night talking about my research from that day at the city archives and wanted to know more. He is much older than the rest of us and hails from New York City. He worked at the World Trade Center for over ten years and is interested in how Germans have responded to war. He pointed out an interesting comparison: building the new Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan and reconstructing Nuremberg after the Second World War. He mentioned that he has been traveling all his life. He made a trip one and a half times around the world when he was my age. He expressed an empty sense about New York since 9/11 and I concurred. We quickly found common ground in Beth Israel Medical center in lower Manhattan. His children and I were born around the same time there when my mother worked there as a young doctor fresh from the Philippines. It is a small world in some ways, we said. It is. It is. Amadeo loves visiting museums and cultural sites. He is making his first trip into former East Germany. He is on his way to Weimar to visit Goethe and Schiller’s old haunts before his final stop in Dresden. I told him to stop in Erfurt since it is on the way and only ten minutes from Weimar.

Nahiro is one of the more interesting characters I met. I saw him later on the second night waiting around in the kitchen and lounge. We started talking with him over coffee and tea. His father was born in Bamberg (also in Franconia and not far from Nuremberg). His mother is from Venezuela where Nahiro grew up for most of his life. When he was eleven, he lived for several years in his father’s home town. His German grandfather became an important figure in his life there. His grandfather was a shoemaker in Bamberg and received severe head injuries and trauma in the Second World War.

Nahiro was also interested in what I studied. He wanted to know what I thought about the Jews and whether or not it was possible that they were “guilty” themselves. Most people, he noted while looking around the room, would be very upset to hear such a question. I was a bit shocked. He recalled another recent case from German television about one German writer who wants people to also remember the good side of the Third Reich. He recalled his grandfather’s stories about Jews and wanted to know what I thought. His grandfather's tales did not sound good, but he never offered me anything concrete. He asked me, “Do Jews control the world?” and he claimed to not know much about this history. So I told him in packaged lecture form what I know about the history of Jews in Germany, the waves of anti-Semitism over a long period of time, centered around things like the plagues and Christian celebrations (particularly Easter), claims of poisoned wells and ritual murder, the history of emancipation from above at the beginning of the 19th century, the history of assimilation and the construction of the pseudo-scientific racial paradigm of Aryan and Jew. I also told him that his question reminds me of the one hundred year old propaganda piece, The 300 Wise Men of Zion and who knows, how many older conspiracies (I also made a mental note of his grandfather's profession; craftsmen and small business owners in this region were known for their anti-Semitism and their eventual support of Nazism). I pointed out that historians believe that particular story to be a Russian construction. When I hear such things, I suggested to him that such a story about a people or a person often has a malicious intention behind it. I was struck by how much this idea of a powerful group stuck in his mind and concerned about this old myth's staying power. There was no doubt, we concurred, that the “MAN” is made up of many different groups of elites, crossing ethnic and racial lines. There is no doubt, he added, that what the Nazis did was wrong or what Isreal does in its current politics is another question. Such questions and discussions some times make it hard to see what is really going on and how people think. How do these old ghosts still haunt us?

Nahiro told me he was in Nuremberg for an appointment. He had to check in with his Moroccan contacts late that evening about tomorrow morning’s sale of unsold shoes from the Adidas warehouse down the block. He helps the Moroccans sell them around the world. We talked about the current dictatorship in Venezuela and we talked about the emergence of the image of the Muslim as a terrorist. We compared economic and social development in Germany. It is not hard to see, given the way things stand between currencies like the pound, euro, the Canadian dollar and our own. From Nahiro’s view, the US economy has been “abgewirtschaftet”, as if we have really wrecked it through our thinking it is every one for his or her own sake. He likes what the Germans are doing with their economy and what he calls a social form of policy making. He also likes the European Union’s chances for becoming mighty again. I told him I could not view the US so monolithically and cited interesting developments in different regions. He had to get going and promised to see me in the morning, but he is gone now too and I never got to come back to some of those things he brought up.

In the archives I met many nice and helpful people. One in particular stands out. At the city archive, the archivists directed me to a man typing away in the corner of the little glass-walled reading room. Matthias Braun looks a bit older. I could see it in his eyes. He grew up in Nuremberg his whole life and is writing his dissertation at one of the local universities on an important figure in the local Nazi movement in the 1920 named Liebel. Matthias went over all of the available literature with me and pulled out title after title from his computer. He was interested in my project and what I have been finding in the records of Nuremberg’s individuals, its pastors, rabbis, politicians, children, businessmen, lawyers, First World War veterans, etc. I will see him on my return trip in a week and have more to say about much of my work.

But it has gotten to the point where I have seen the week’s third wave of travelers come through. I don’t know their names, but I hear their stories around the table in the lounge while I make my dinner. There is an Australian girl whom the other guys deem an elder at the age of 22. There is an English kid with a Mohawk and American soldier on leave from Iraq. They are all gathered around him, asking questions, and he is showing them his home made video collections, talking about war and the Iraqis. He misses his friends back in Iraq and he says he is one of the few in his outfit who really want to be over there. He says he wants to get back into the fight. A curly headed kid enters the room with a guitar and another group has landed on their last legs.

One last set of notes on Nuremberg:

Before I left for Stuttgart an older gentleman came to stay with us in the “wrong room”. He coughed all night and snored keeping Tania and me from sleeping. In the morning I was leaving. I let him know that the train engineers were striking again. I found out that he is from Mexico City and traveling around doing a little “business”. I helped him set up his laptop for wireless and told him about my dissertation. Then wished him safe journeys and made my way to the station to try and catch a train to Stuttgart. When I returned on Sunday, Tania told me that she had a talk with him. She told him that his sleeping habits disturbed her. He apologized. Later on, she noticed that some of her toiletries were missing and she suspected “Opa” (grandfather) as she called him.

Finally, I met a man on my way back through Nuremberg. After I had finished talking with him, I felt like I found myself standing in front of a similar self. Last night in the kitchen I met Stephan Guenther from Quebec. He had bought this huge piece of salmon for four Euros and he was preparing it for dinner while Sylvia and I looked on. He worked as an engineer for about five years at a hydroelectric power station. He was just a few steps away from the house with the white picket fence, as he put it, when he decided that after millions of years of evolution sitting in front of a computer at a desk everyday could not be the final goal for him or anyone else. So he quit his job and drove his car west across the United States. When that car broke down on the highway leading into Denver with his cousin along for the ride, he knew that he had reached one of those moments of trial, citing Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology. Stephan felt like he had found himself at a moment of trial like that first stage of ancient “heroes”. Having passed those trials, Stephen asserted, we are capable of anything. Not surprisingly, he has been reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in his travels.

Since that US trip, Stephen packed his things and took his bike across the Atlantic. He has been traveling all over Germany by bike for the past few months, but now that the weather has turned colder, Nuremberg is probably his last stop before heading back to Canada. He began to realize that it was time to return when he found himself in a cold downpour in northern Bavaria. As it began to snow, he took shelter at a little peasant shrine to the Blessed Virgin Maria and awoke in the morning to an older woman asking him if he was ok. He also mentioned that when he reached Nuremberg and walked around the former Nazi Party Grounds and “DokuCenter”, he felt like he had reached the end of this adventure in his life and the beginning of something new.

Guenther’s thoughts on Germany are also interesting. He wanted to know why so many people are fascinated with Germany and I offered my own opinions about our fascination with the history, the war and even more narrowly, Nazi technologies, the SS, power, violence and fear. Guenther has been to Europe before and traveled through Italy and France. He thought about Germany, but he found excuses for not going. Finally, he decided that he needed to travel through Germany to make peace with his father and his own life. When Stephan was young, his father recalled his own teenage years to his son. He was born in part of the Second German Reich. He told his son about being pushed out of what became Polish territory after the Second World War into East Germany, then West Germany, and eventually Quebec. Beyond those memories though, his father never went much further. His father is part of the “Vertriebene” generation, those that were pushed from their homes in the wake of Nazi racial war in Eastern and Central Europe. His father is also part of that "silent" generation of German parents (see a newly released book related to this subject by Sabine Bode, Die deutsche Krankheit - German Angst). Stephen mentioned that his father and aunts never said much, but he was aware that they communicated a tremendous amount through their non-verbals. Stephen also became very aware of the feeling of difference growing up in Quebec. He just did things differently or noticed other children doing things in very similar ways that were different from his own. He believes that this is the result of the cultural imprint that his father and aunts gave him as a young person and that this is carried over into the third generation, as Stephen claims to see its mark in the behavior of his nephew. It was while traveling through Germany that Guenther felt that he was similar to Germans in terms of cultural traits and behavior. He recognizes plants that his aunt used to tend back home in Quebec (but cannot find anywhere else in Canada) and he thinks he understands why his nephew picks black berries that most people pass over for blueberries or strawberries. After a week of traveling, though, he felt alone here. He even went to the movies that lonely night in Dresden and chose the film Du bist nicht allein (“You are not alone”). Perhaps ironically, the German language remains a barrier to this part of Stephan’s life. He feels like he has found part of his psychological mirror in this place, but he is also ready to return to that other home in his life. Before he left, he told me to go back to the Philippines someday. He feels that there is another important part of me to revisit and see in a new light.