It was the summer of 1967. Frankfurt was beautiful and warm and sunny, with clear light blue skies. Flying in, I could see the flat countryside below, a patchwork of golden fields alternating with forests, and a low ridge of mountains to the East, towards the nearby Polish border.
Mercedes Benz and English Ford taxis ran down narrow cobblestone streets, with exit lanes separated from the main lanes by a row of slightly elevated alternating black and white painted bricks. There were billboards advertising “Ernte” and other German cigarettes. Esso gas stations, tucked into street corners, displayed a Bengal tiger and the slogan also seen in America, “I have a tiger in the tank.” It sounded better in German, “Ich hab’ den tiger im tank.” Everyone seemed to use bicycles and pubic transportation. There were bicycle racks everywhere. The streets were full of streetcars and well dressed Germans in expensive fabrics.
At a stand-up sidewalk cafe outside the train terminal, I ordered a Knockwurst and a half liter of dark beer, which came in a glass mug. There were two kinds of sausages, bratwurst or knockwirst, which came on a white plate with a side dab of dark mustard and a small stick to spread it on the sausage. There was also a side of potato salad on the same plate, along with the wurst and mustard. The beer was a lot richer than its American counterpart. I had two beers, and felt a bit light headed.
I got all this, including the beer for a dollar and a quarter. That was partially due to the favorable exchange rate, four Marks to the Dollar.
While standing there eating, I saw that Europe was even better than I had expected it to be. It was so different.from the U.S. And, everything seemed so well designed with an aesthetic sense. I practiced eating continental style, as I watched the other diners, holding my fork face down in my left hand to spear and guide food to my mouth, while keeping the knife in my right hand to cut the food and guide it onto the upside down fork.
The air was full of the aroma of sausages and beer, mixed with the pungent smells of nature coming from nearby parks and gardens and trees lining the boulevards. The music, which you could occasionally hear on the streets, was light rock, English lyrics sung with German accents, and a touch of background accordion and an “um- pa-pa” beat. The catchy tunes were repeated over and over in cafes and on taxi radios, “Memories of Heidelberg are Memories of You” and “I’m Just a Puppet on a String.” While looking up at the tops of Medieval, beamed buildings and at Gothic spires, I could hear the “clank-clank” ring of the streetcar as it took off beside me, picking up speed with a winding sound on the tracks.
I left Frankfurt that afternoon on a dark green “fast train” which made only a few stops. It had white letters saying “DB” for Deutches Bundesbahn enclosed in a narrow white frame on the locomotive, and “Frankfurt-Hamburg” stenciled on the side of each car. The cars were divided into glassed-in compartments, each with two benches facing each other. I shared a compartment with a young German couple and a Turk going north as a “gastarbeiter” or guest worker, like me. I looked out the window, watching the fields roll by, then passing small towns with crossing barriers blocking traffic at rail crossings, the cars lined up and waiting, followed by train stations flashing by for a second with a roar, as we passed the buildings, “whoosh-whoosh-whoosh,” and then they were gone. I could see occasional church steeples, and country roads, lined on both sides by trees, paralleling the tracks and shooting off into the distance. As I got off the train at Verden/Aller late that afternoon, sixty miles south of Hamburg, the German couple in my compartment gave me the slang “Tchuss” farewell instead of “auf wiedersehen.” They wished me “viel gruss,” or a good stay in Germany. I was surprised that the family I was assigned to live with was not waiting at the station.
While waiting at the almost deserted station to give the family some time to show, I walked out of the waiting room to the platform near the the tracks. There were dark green wooden benches, the color of the trains, under a large round clock. Looking across the tracks, I could see part of the downtown area, with small shops and their neatly lettered logos, and cobble stoned streets, and a large Gothic cathedral in the distance. The signs on buildings indicated a barber salon, or “frisseur,” a flower shop, a cafe, and others I couldn’t’ t make out. The buildings were mainly red brick or stone, and gave the city an older, more traditional German appearance than that of Frankfurt. Even though Verden was small, about 30,000 inhabitants, it did not look provincial. There were red and white bordered posters and signs with horse motifs everywhere, saying “Reiterstadt Verden,” or “horse capital, Verden.”
While looking around, I noticed to my left, at the far end of the platform, two stocky German boys bullying a thinner boy who was not wanting to fight. There didn’t seem to be any Germans around to intercede, but an elderly German man wearing a beret appeared, hurriedly walking his bicycle over. The older man said something in an ordering tone to the two, with an elder’s gruff authority. The two bullies then turned their attention to the elderly man, grabbing his bicycle from his grasp and throwing it to the ground. I could see the surprise in the face of the older man as he stepped back from the two and put his arm up in defense, but the larger youth punched the elder in the face, not too hard, but enough to cause him to stagger back and bend down at his knees to the ground, wiping his bleeding nose. Then the two turned and casually walked away, not saying a word, while he was searching on the ground for his glasses. He found his glasses, calmly picked up his bike, and he and the younger victim shook hands and walked off their separate ways. It was as if nothing had happened.
I had been unprepared for violence like that. The Germans seemed pretty rugged, and I wondered if the culture wasn’t a bit more primitive. I was shocked at the openness of it, and the fact that that the boy hit an elderly man with his fist. I had a hard time seeing this happening in America, and knew this first impression of Germany would last a long time.
After waiting a while at the station and failing in my attempt to use the pay phone, I caught a taxi to the smaller village where I was to work, about 20 miles away, along a two-lane, winding country road. The highway was narrow and the small European cars came fast around the curves and over the hills. We were passed by drivers flashing their front lights behind us to tell us they were coming by. The countryside was lush and the grass green and thick, and we went over rolling hills, with fields to the side separated by stone walls and hedges. There were woods as well in the uncleared stretches, and it was beginning to get a bit dark with a red glow of the very low setting sun behind them. I noticed the instruments lights of the taxi for the fist time.
When we got to the village, I discovered it was just an intersection of two country roads, with three or four farm houses clustered around it, plus a “gasthaus” or tavern on the intersection corner, and a couple of large storage barns nearby. Nearby, in the fading light, I could see another five or six large white farm houses beyond tilled fields. It appeared this was a small community of perhaps a dozen farm families, and Gasthaus bar and restaurant.
“Are all of these private farms, I asked, practicing my German?”
“Yes, but they share farm machinery and barns. Everybody works together in the fields of all during harvest, “ernte.” So that was what the cigarette ads meant.
“Do they keep their own profits?” I was thinking they might be a communal arrangement of some kind.
“Naturally.” The driver got out and asked at the gasthouse for the particular farm where I was to work, which, it turned out, was just next door.
When he got back in, I said “are they wealthy?”
“Who?”
“The farmers here.”
“Black on white,” the driver said, which meant clearly so. “Maybe not so rich,” he thought it over, “and times are hard for farming, but these are old farms and are valuable, and have pigs and horses, the best in Europe. See the new Mercedes” he added, referring to the car in the drive as we were pulling up to the farm house. “The car and the tractors are all diesel, and share the pump.” The driver rubbed his thumb across his upturned finger tips together, meaning a way to save money, pointing to a large elevated barrel in the drive, with pump handle and hose coming from one side, and meter on the other.
“Why is there a gasthouse in such an unpopulated area? Is there enough business?”
“There are lot of people here in the area, “in der nahe,” which meant fairly close, not in the whole county, but “in the close villages.”
My new German family, which was hosting me for the summer, and with whom I had corresponded twice, came out to the taxi to meet me enthusiastically. There was a mother and father of my parents’ generation, perhaps a bit older, and two adult children, a son and daughter in their late twenties or early thirties, I guessed.
That first night, I sat at the kitchen table with the family, and we tried to understand each other. I was surprised to discover that my two years of college German were not enough to get by well. The family spoke a German dialect, “Plattdeutsch,” which I could not make out. Fortunately, the son spoke high German and helped out.
Our conversation was interrupted by the alarm that one of the bulls had gotten loose in the stall with the cows, and we all ran out to drive him back into a separate stall with sticks, the women swatting from behind the fence, and the men going inside. Fortunately, the bull, who didn’t want to leave, was not aggressive. They laughed at my inexperience on a farm, and said, laughingly, one of my jobs would be to drive the bulls down the country roads from one pasture to another. They said we had better get to bed, since we have to be up at 4:30 to milk the cows.
My German family, it turned out, consisted of the father, short and rotund, in his mid 60s, who owned the farm and helped out, but had stepped aside to allow his son, Friedrich to run things on a day-to-day basis. This seemed unusual, but it later became clear that the parents had the final say on things. The mother and her daughter ran the kitchen and did the housework. There was a frail grandfather, “Opa,” who didn’t come out much.
The son, Friedrich, who would be my boss, looked to be in his early thirties. He had a fiancee in town. Friedrich was very Saxon looking. He was about 5’11”, with straw blond hair, and was of strong build, with broad back and veins showing on his almost Popeye-like muscled lower arms. He had a rather square face, lively blue gray eyes, and was handsome and Nordic looking, and spoke in clipped sentences. Like most Germans, he was confident, serious, and very bright.
The family also had a hired hand of long standing, Ernst, who had a bedroom upstairs above the barn. Ernst was about Friedrich’s age, but looked a bit worn and blue collar. He was tall and thin and blond also, but kept mostly to himself. Ernst was a hard worker and strong, and he, Friedrich, and the father all worked well together. There was no socializing among them after work. Talking to Ernst after work, I learned that he was a communist
I got along very well the family and tried hard. Friedrich was protective of me, not letting me do dangerous duties, which were many. He complimented me one day for the way I literally ran everywhere, from errand to errand, as they did. He joked with affection “you are a good worker, but bad farmer, “du bist a guter arbeiter, aber schlecter bauer.” I made a lot of mistakes, not knowing the difference between piles of hay and straw, and once running the tractor wheels over the stalks, instead of between the crops, ruining a strip of vegetables that had been planted. Friedrich was a bit strained that day, but didn’t make an issue of it.
I was gradually improving my language skills and becoming accustomed to hard labor. I enjoyed the feeling of farm work, of being out in the fields close to nature and weather, riding the tractor all alone, or taking care of the pigs, or grooming the show horses. I got used to getting up at 4:30 to milk the cows, then working the fields, and falling asleep at lunch for a nap like the others. I especially liked the mid-morning coffee break, or “coffee trinken,” in the fields, with the mother and daughter bringing out cold black coffee and fatty sausage sandwiches on dark rye bread. I enjoyed the dinners with boiled potatoes, thinly sliced prosciutto, and strudel for desert. I even enjoyed herding the bulls along the road from pasture to pasture, driving them with a stick. Neighboring farmers on tractors, in their German Feldsher uniform hats from the war, would see me in my surplus American khaki shirt, and we would wave at each other on the roads. The war was over, even though it was only twenty-two years behind.
The only problem was Friedrich’s father, who didn’t seem to particularly like me. I learned from Friedrich that the father had been in an American POW camp at the end of the war, which could explain it, since the war between the Americans and Germans in Europe had been bitter. But, why would he hire an American? Maybe Friedrich, rather than the parents, made the decision, based on the fact that he was now running the farm and had to make a profit. He provided room and board, and wages of 160 marks per month, or forty dollars, for which he got an additional hand.
The family never discussed politics. They seemed very traditional and insular, and didn’t seem to interested in what was going on in Bonn and elsewhere. Friedrich seemed more open and liberal than the parents.
“Friedrich, I asked one day while we were working, “what was it like here during the war?”
Friedrich said he had been young and couldn’t remember much, but he could recall that “you could see the fires of Hamburg at night after the terrible British bombing raids.” It was nice, I thought, for him to single out the British for me. “And,” Friedrich said, “the children from the big cities were evacuated to the countryside.” Perhaps, I suddenly realized, I had over-estimated Friedrich’s age. It sounded like he had been a small child then. Maybe he was now in his mid twenties, but looked and acted older. His serious manner suggested that Germans grew up faster, like my father’s generation in the U.S.
“I heard that in this part of Germany, even the youth of twelve to fourteen years had gone to the woods and put up a fierce armed resistance to the British Army as it moved in,” I said to Friedrich, having heard this from two British soldiers stationed in Verden.
“Not so,” Friedrich said. “It was youth brigades, military units, and not so young, maybe sixteen. They didn’t fight in the forests like partisans, but with regular army units in the cities and wherever.” I loved the last word, “irgendwo.” Something about the way Friedrich answered, however, averting his eyes, made me unsure of his answer.
“The people here,” Friedrich added, “were mainly exempt from the war because they were farmers and were needed to provide food.”
“Was your father treated badly as a POW?”
Friedrich thought carefully a second, realizing this was not an innocent question, but was potentially related to my relationship with his father. “No, treatment was normal,” Friedrich said thoughtfully, selecting his words carefully. “He was only a prisoner at the end, when the war was practically over.” He used the word “vorbei,” or “past.”
“Naturally, there was disappointment over the losing,” he added after a pause, “and some unhappiness over the bombing. But, all that is past, and people no longer feel anger.” Friedrich said something general about war, or “krieg,” grimaced, and made a gesture with his hand like brushing it away. Friedrich seemed to be what was called the “good German,” part of of the younger generation with different attitudes. The older Germans of his parents generation, were often unrepentant so far as I could tell. They had no interest in me.
The family and I generally avoided discussing the war. Once, however, Friedrich, Ernst, and a neighbor’s son started talking with me about World War II songs as we were fixing a gate together. I initiated this, jokingly, starting with “don’t sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me…” and “this is the army Mr. Jones, no private rooms and telephones…” The German songs, I quickly discovered, despite their laughing about them, were a bit more malicious, “an American, little American, lands in the army and gets a ‘springer-bomber’ that he brings over with him. Let him come, let him fall, let him be destroyed with all the others…..” I could, for the first time, envision the anger of a German fighter pilot relentlessly firing at a B-17.
Ernst also sang these war songs, which was interesting, since he was still a communist, from the GDR, and theoretically should have had a distaste for German fascism. He, too, sang the songs, a bit too enthusiastically. Ernst returned home to the “East Zone,” near Leipzig, once a year during his vacation from the farm. I asked how he got home to his family, through the border, and he wouldn’t say, just that there were ways, places, to get in. To me, it was strange that the family would hire a communist as farm hand. Ernst just indicated that “they were all Germans.”
After a while, I started noticing “reunification” signs along the highways near Verden, Soltau, Celle, Viselsholde, and Luneburg, and other small towns on the Luneburg Heide, displaying a map of Germany divided into occupation zones by color. The signs said “five parts, never!”
Living abroad for the first time, I had lots of new experiences, more in one day than I would have in the U.S. in a whole summer. It was an awakening. I would bicycle into Verden on Saturday mornings to go to the British forces “Toc-H” library, looking at magazines and books, then walk around the town, bicycling back in the evenings, occasionally dodging cars coming from behind with the blinkers on, riding into the ditch. These were, nonetheless, idyllic rides in the evening and night. There was nothing to fear except the cars, and the ride was peaceful, under the bright moon and amid the forests, smelling the humid smell of the grass and woods and fields. I would talk to the cows and horses along the fence as I passed. I was on the great northern European plain, and it was beautiful.
On weekends, Friedrich and his father took me to local shooting festivals, or “schutzenfest.” The Germans wore green felt jackets with their shooting medals displayed on the lapels. Or, we went to Luneburg, to horse shows. I joined the “landjugend,” or local 4-H club for farm kids, going to parties at their houses on weekends, plus trips to the North Sea and Harz mountains. Looking down from the Harz, I could see two villages on either side of a double strip of fence and watch towers, the border between East and West as it stretched across Germany, going over the hills north and out of sight. I could see people on the far side working fields and vehicles moving in the towns and people walking normally the streets. It was like looking at ant colonies in another world.
In early July, another American college student, another “gastarbeiter,” named Gene, arrived to work on the farm next to mine. When we could get away on Sundays, we took trains to Hanover and Bremen, walking the streets all day, and returning late. These cities were much like Frankfurt, but Hamburg, on the other hand, was more Baltic and different. The nights were darker and colder, it had a northern feeling, even in the summer. The city was elegant, and seemed somehow English. There were sailing regattas, and finely dressed people sitting in sharp cafes and living in elegant Hansa homes, which looked Tudor, with manicured lawns reaching to the Alster. One felt separate from the rest of Germany which was far to the south. There were ships going to eastern Baltic ports.
Where I really wanted to be, however, was London. That’s where Ellen was, living for the summer. We had gone to different colleges after high school, where she had met someone else and we had broken up. I wanted her back, and sent her a postcard from the farm, which I dropped off in Verden, hoping to get a response. I thought about going to London, even if only to see her on the street, even if she didn’t see me. I told myself that I just needed to see her again. The crossing point to England, Bremerhaven on the North Sea, was not far away.
One day on the farm, I noticed a letter with Ellen’s handwriting sitting on the mantel, and the mother said “you have a letter from England.” They knew it was from a girl from the handwriting . But, we never opened mail until after we had completed dinner, so I had to wait. After dinner I took the card to my room. Ellen said she was transferring to university in England, and the tone was casual and suggested friendship, giving her phone and address. There was no encouragement. I tried to put her out of my mind.
On the farm, relations with Friedrich’s father had gradually gone from bad to worse. He was increasingly put out that I had no farm experience, and valued being a good farmer more than being a good worker. He would shake his head at my mistakes and walk away, while Friedrich would take me around the shoulder and show me the right way. The father knew high German of course, but still refused, unlike Friedrich, to use it. By August, the father had developed the habit of making jokes at my expense. One night at the “gasthouse,” the father got drunk and started pointing to me across the room, making loud derogatory jokes to his friends, who were also laughing. He called me to the table to say something rude that I didn’t understand. I objected to the father’s behavior, bringing the split into the open. The father got furious that his employee talked back, and Friedrich interceded on the my side, and took me over to his table, apologizing for his father.
My standing with the family had begun to deteriorate. I imagined they resented my association with Gene, and our trips together on weekends, when I could have been doing extra work around the farm. Seeing the end of summer approaching, I was also interested in seeing a bit more of Germany in the few remaining weekends I had available, rather than chipping in around the farm on Saturday.
Things came to an end in early August, the first week of harvest, when the father and I got into a spat in the barn over the issue whether i could leave his employment a couple of weeks early, in late August, to see Europe. The father was naturally angered that I would even consider leaving early, before harvest was complete, and stomped his feet, calling me a “short shit,” or “kurzscheisse,” even though I towered over him. The father even used clear, high German. I was probably looking for an excuse to leave, tired of working for practically nothing, and wanting to see more of Europe before my flight home. I quit right there, packed, and took off with my suitcase down the road to the gasthouse where I called a taxi. In the driveway before I left, things had calmed down a bit, and I said goodbye to the family, including the mother and daughter. The father stayed in the house. Friedrich had sided with his father, but he and I had a cordial farewell.
I went on to tour Western Europe, with backpack and sleeping bag, hitchhiking, riding trains, and sleeping at the sides of roads and in doorways like the multitude of other American students in Europe that summer. I started by going back to Hamburg, where I stayed in the youth hostel near the Rapperbahn, rising to the sound of a loudspeaker saying “aufsteigen,” and helping with the kitchen work. From there I took a train to Berlin, then hitchhiked back to Munich through the East German corridor, which was technically illegal. I took the train to Innusbruck and on to Switzerland, where I spent my twentieth birthday rowing on Lake Zurich. I somehow made it to Florence, staying in the youth hostel, which was a large villa, and then hitchhiked through Mount Blanc into France and into the Low Countries, and arriving back in Cologne, staying with German students, feeling back home. My German had improved a lot during three weeks of travel, and I was reading german authors, albeit slowly with English-German dictionary in hand.
In my travels, I seemed to be gravitating towards Germans, which showed that the farm experience had not hurt my love of Germany. Maybe it had something to do with Friedrich’s decency and the fact that my grandmother was of German descent. Maybe it was the German culture and rich intellectual history that I admired. I particularly liked the German girls, but never seemed to get anywhere with them.
While traveling and talking to German students at the University of Cologne and other young Germans on the road, I discovered some interesting facts about my small part of Germany. I learned that the area of forests and marshes between the Weser and Elbe rivers, including the Luneburg Heide where my farm was located, was the site of the fiercest battles between the Roman legions and “barbarian” Germanic tribes, and the one area where the tribes couldn’t be conquered. I also learned that, during the Middle Ages, the area where I worked had also been the headquarters of the longstanding Saxon revolt against the Frankish Kingdom. Charlemagne had finally ended the revolt, killing four thousand captured Saxon insurgents over four days, beheading over one thousand per day on the trunk of their sacred tree in their sacred grove, near Verden.
On a visit to the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich, I was in for a bigger surprise, seeing a map of the Holocaust which showed the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp was located near the farm where I had lived, near Soltau. I was surprised on learning that I had been working near Belsen and no one on the farm had said a thing.
It was time to return to the U.S.
On my way out of Europe that summer, I had ticketed the “through train” from Hamburg to Frankfurt. I had gone to Hamburg, planning to make a side trip to nearby Bremerhaven, where I could catch the ferry to England, but had turned around and returned to Hamburg instead.
At the Hamburg rail station, waiting for my train to Frankfurt and home, I picked up a copy of “Die Zeit” newspaper. Settling into my compartment on the train, I asked the porter passing in the hallway for a sandwich and dark beer. As the train headed south, I put down my paper, and looked out at Verden and the surrounding countryside as we passed by. I regretted the fact that I had not stayed on the farm through harvest. But, my mind was on Ellen.
lecocqblog 