German Departures

Copyright © 2009 by D. C. Riechel

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-3621-4 (pbk)

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iUniverse rev. date: 4/14/2009

Contents

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For my beloved Shipmate,

Patricia Wuichet

Dû bist mîn, ich bin dîn…

I

At sunrise on the first of April 1928, an ordinary young man of eighteen years left his hometown, a village in the Thuringian hills of Germany, and went to Hamburg. It was a journey by train, northward and downward, from the central German highlands to the North German plain and the great seaport, where he was to stay with an uncle, his mother’s brother, perhaps for three weeks, perhaps longer, as long as it might take him to find work. What little money he had was not his, and his cardboard suitcase was light; some spare shirts were in it, some socks and underwear, and a few small books he had not wanted to part with. He was a bookish sort, and needed reading matter the way others needed tobacco. The only weight the young man carried was the weight of departure, the luggage of aggrieved memories and the decision he had honed against his unhappiness: somehow, he would go to sea—the sea: that age-old last recourse of the unemployed, the disinherited, the restless. For his part, Walter Waldsee—that was his name—had no clear view of himself inside or outside the approved or disapproved schemes of the world. His decision was entirely the inspiration of his reading; in other words, it was nothing new, in more ways than one, it was a landlubber’s dream at least as old as Robinson Crusoe. Waldsee had read Defoe’s world-famous novel in German translation and had found even the very first sentence a delight; it said that the name Crusoe had originally been Kreutznaer, for Robinson’s father was a German from Bremen who had settled in Hull and later moved to York, where Robinson was born. How wonderful! In Waldsee’s rambling thoughts that sentence had shimmered as a corroboration of his own ambition, just like Robinson and against all reason to go to sea. Yet to do so in 1928, in a commercial sailing ship (for that was Waldsee’s hope) was an enterprise aglow with a singular and more than personal eccentricity. Walter Waldsee’s seaward ambition was at bottom in perfect though unwitting romantic concord with a peculiarly German aberration. At a time when England and most other modern seafaring nations had abandoned sail in favor of steam, the Germans were still going to sea in wind-driven merchant vessels. They had perfected an ancient technology long after it had already been rendered obsolete by mechanical propulsion. Like the British, of course, and in successful competition with them, they were again launching steamships and superliners just as they had done before the war. But in the 1920s, only Germans were still building four-masted barks of steel and sailing them westward around Cape Horn, with coke and coal for the Chilean mines, and eastward again with nitrate. Walter Waldsee had read of the great ships of the Hamburg house of Laeisz, and of other windjammers still plying the oceans in the Australian wheat trade, and had cut out their photographs.

He had read too of Count Felix von Luckner, fabulous seaman, chivalrous buccaneer, and commander of the Seeadler, the last sailing ship ever to be engaged in war at sea. Only an historically discordant Germany could have dreamt against its own modernity in the midst of war and have ventured to harass the enemy with a three-masted vessel—while launching twenty-eight submarines. Felix Luckner had begun his improbable game with reality at the age of an oversized thirteen. Hot with an inexplicable desire to go to sea and become a naval officer, he ran away from the family estate in Saxony, assumed an alias, and sailed all seven seas for seven years in windjammers of every description. The boy became a man of mythic size and strength, an avatar of Germanic heroes, and he celebrated himself in his memoirs. His adventures began in the port of Hamburg, Walter Waldsee’s Sunday destination; he found a mentor there in an old salt who lived in St. Pauli, in the uppermost room of a dingy house in a grimy narrow street. A stuffed flying fish was suspended from the ceiling; on one wall hung the picture of a ship the old deepwater tar had painted on a piece of sailcloth; in a cage by the window sat a disheveled parrot he had brought from Brazil—it spoke only Portuguese, when it spoke at all, he said, for its memory was fading. Chinese curios, a clutter of souvenirs from long voyages, were arrayed atop a scarred bureau that stood squarely on its legs like a sailor on deck. The old salt showed Luckner how to outfit himself for the sea, with warm underclothing, oilskins, a sheath knife, a pipe and tobacco—and then he gave him his own trusty sea chest for his belongings, assuring him that it was watertight and would even float.

One of Luckner’s favorite stories was of a death-defying adventure in a South Atlantic storm; he was aloft, he said, and lost his grip and fell from the rigging ninety feet into the raging green seas. Flailing about to save himself, he caught hold of the foot of a great albatross that had swept low over his head, and held on with all his might against the bird’s brutal pecking and stabbing, until his shipmates could pluck him out.

Walter Waldsee also had pictures of the Seeadler, and of Count Luckner and his wife, a little blond woman who alongside her husband’s towering frame and massive neck seemed a mere plaything in furs. But such stories and images were not on Waldsee’s mind now. Seated on the polished wooden bench of the third-class coach he had boarded in Leinefelde, he gazed through the window at the landscape of his boyhood as it washed beyond his view. Leinefelde was a town in the stretch of country known as the Eichsfeld. For a good distance, the railroad paralleled the northward flow of the Leine, his native stream, past Heiligenstadt, the principal town of the Eichsfeld, and on through Göttingen, and Hannover. He loved the streams and rivers of his home, had sought them out on bicycle tours, and traced them on maps. He knew that if he followed the Leine farther, beyond Hannover, in a canoe, like the voyageurs and explorers in his schoolboy adventure stories, he would reach the sea not by way of Hamburg and the Elbe River, but by way of Germany’s second great port, Bremen, and the Weser River. All the waters of Waldsee’s landlocked world reached the sea, even the Wipper, the little brook that whipped and skipped outside his village. A mere trickle at its source, and a haven for geese, dragonflies, and frogs, it eventually swelled downstream to brawl through a steep rocky cut to the Unstrut; and the Unstrut, after collecting the Gera from the south, from the Thuringian Forest, met the meandering Saale to flow into the Elbe.

For Walter Waldsee, the decision to follow those waters to the sea was a triumph of imagination over necessity. He had to leave home, that was the harsh ineluctable reality, the bitter fact of life. Still, he need not have chosen a path toward the alien hard labor of a seaman’s life. Even a young man from school adept at very little besides conjugating ancient verbs could find in neighboring Thuringian and Saxon towns employment by which he could earn his keep without risking a tumble from wild heights into the beak of an albatross or the jaws of a shark. But he believed, or had read, that to find out who he was and what he could become, he needed to depart from everything familiar, and could imagine no stranger world for his self-discovery than an ocean. Perhaps he even might change his name. That was a notion from an early reverie, a bit of seaweed left by the ebb of boyhood. But the feeling still lingered that the name he had been given together with the surname he had inherited somehow did not mean him.Walter had been his grandfather’s, his mother’s father’s name. Waldsee probably derived in the dark backward and abysm of time from the name of a place, from some See in a Wald, a lake in the woods. Walter Waldsee could not say where his people had come from, for the family did not cultivate a sense of heritage or togetherness, quite the contrary. And of late the name had fallen into some disrepair. The Waldsee village grocery had failed, and Walter’s father was once again on the road as a traveling salesman—he had done it before. Success and failure came and went in August Waldsee’s life like the tides and phases of the moon. He was constant only in self-contradiction. August Waldsee was a short, wiry man, but his wit gave him height. Bow-legged, with a Chaplinesque mustache, he played the ladies’ man and the rogue; he was resourceful, and at ease with all sorts of people, high and low. His sly eyes were constantly hunting, ogling, alert; they were the lights of an inventive intelligence searching for a commensurate purpose and occupation. In some way a young man is usually propelled toward his choices, his fair landfalls or his shipwrecks, by his father. The sea was as remote from August Waldsee’s thoughts and mercantile speculations as the breadfruit trees on a Pacific isle, but there was about him the dust of countless roads and desires, a restlessness which infused the veins of his son’s imagination with a sensual, yearning energy.

Walter had few early memories of his father, for the itinerant salesman was seldom long at home, but latterly he had become captious, scornful, jealous. Yet, in characteristic self-contradiction, he had started his son in Gymnasium in Heiligenstadt. He had been prompted to it by the village priest and the school teacher, who had good opinions of Walter’s promise as a student. Possibly he had also seen some sort of advantage in it for himself, some enhancement of his worth. But as soon as Walter began to demonstrate a talent for languages, his father ridiculed his efforts as a pointless extravagance. Latin and Greek, he said, were even more useless than kitchen swill, which at least could benefit the pigs. "Does my bread taste any better when I know that the Latin word for it is panis? And what can you do with your few bits of English?" August Waldsee’s business failure was the advertised justification for removing his son from Heiligenstadt, but for the both of them the act had about it the force of a shove off the chair and kick out the door.

The young Waldsee could not fathom his father’s bouts of ill temper, the failures in business, the duplicity, the philandering on the road, the bold combinations of calculation and recklessness, the gall—Gall conquers all! was one of the man’s mottos. Above all, Walter could not fathom his father’s abuse of his mother. In turn, August Waldsee saw in his son’s manner, especially in his protectiveness toward his mother, an assertion of moral and intellectual superiority, and despised it. The elder Waldsee’s contempt for his son was as elemental as his egoism, but not as constant. There were times when he raged in sudden anger, flailing his arms about him, breaking glassware. He had struck his son more than once. Yet he was a curiously permissive rather than a tyrannical parent, if perhaps only in the sense that out of preoccupation with himself he didn’t care a damn what his son did, and he was usually inclined to indulge his daughters, of whom there were three. The oldest was Waltraut, a year and some months younger than Walter. She was a slim girl, fair-haired like her mother, attractive, though utterly unlike her mother in temperament: she was all too often a tedious, moody presence. She coddled herself with narcissistic self-importance, was given to preening and whining, and to extravagant sensitivity while lacking any sensitivity to others. She escaped whatever obligations and occasions that struck her as unpleasant by feeling poorly, really quite unwell. Hilda, the middle daughter, two years younger than Waltraut, was more like her father in stature and complexion, short, dark-haired; and she was manipulative, bossy, meddlesome, and had developed her not inconsiderable conspiratorial skills well before puberty. The youngest daughter, Augusta, named after her father, was at the time of her brother’s departure for Hamburg just entering adolescence and enlarging her talent for laziness. Weak-willed, she followed her sisters in everything while occasionally arousing their jealousy because she was her father’s pet—when it pleased him to entertain a pet—and had a cleverly naïve way of amusing him.

But August Waldsee’s moods were unpredictable. Good household weather was not to be trusted. Once, after a long afternoon in the tavern, he was standing at a sideboard, cutting chunks of bread and erratic slices of cervelat, when he turned suddenly, red-eyed from liquor, and thrust a kitchen knife at his son-- no mere paring knife, but a thing some twenty-two or twenty-four centimeters long, a formidable tool even for a sausage. In the perverse clarity of shock, Walter saw bits of white fat and traces of dark red meat sticking to the blade, saw the greasy wooden haft. August! his mother had shrieked, What are you doing!

Even when sober—and he was no drunkard—he was susceptible to violence. And he was a risk-taker. Early in the war he had saved himself from duty on the Belgian front by jumping barefoot off a chair into broken glass and managing to explain the bleeding injuries as a plausible accident. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori was in his furious judgment the sentiment of blithering idiots. He was sent home to serve in a regional army depot, where as a successful pilferer he kept his family well provided with butter and sausages. Later, as the grocer, he in effect pilfered from his own profits by putting on his table the food that was meant for sale. German though he was, he was a disobedient, subversive, scoffing spirit, whether under Kaiser, President, Führer, or Commissar—he spent the last two decades of his life under communist rule. His hapless country had been renamed the Russian Zone of Occupation, and then declared a Democratic Republic, but he always referred to it as the East Zone, where the mice go on crutches.

August Waldsee was an inveterate exploiter of people and situations. In the chaotic wake of the war he adventured in the black market, in partnership with the village policeman. August Waldsee got himself a horse and wagon, and roamed as far as Göttingen and Kassel, south to Erfurt, and east to Halle, with stocks of cigars and cigarettes, brandy, bolts of fabric, and whatever else yielded a profit. With an old brown homburg cocked on his head, he looked both dapper and threadbare, and like a Berlin cabby was always ready for repartee. Walter remembered how he had once heard his father shouting in the kitchen, but to his surprise nothing had been amiss. The man was sitting at the kitchen table, in high amusement, twirling a glass of brandy in his hands, and describing to his wife an encounter he had had in town with his partner, the policeman. I pass him in the wagon, I greet him, he greets me, and what do you think? He gives me a fine for having an invalid tag on the wagon. The gall! I went to him and told him, what the hell did you do that for? I thought we were partners! Sure we are, he says, but listen, Waldsee, duty is duty! He savored the punch-line: Duty is duty!—for he was himself well acquainted with the perverse gratification afforded by the sly besting of a friend. How could it have been possible, his son often wondered, that such a man had succeeded in wooing and winning his mother, the tall, blond woman, Walter’s secret ally?

Now with an aborted education, Walter Waldsee had learned no craft or trade, no art or artifice, and after the train had passed through Heiligenstadt, he began to feel forlorn. The train paused at every station, for it was only a local, and it was a Sunday morning. In Heiligenstadt church bells had been ringing, but the cobblestone streets had still been empty. Walter had not been able to glimpse his school buildings, but he had seen the slender Gothic spire of St. Martin’s in the soft air, and the twin towers of the Church of Our Lady above the steep, red tile roofs. Then the locomotive had sneezed itself into its rhythms once more and stirred in Walter the memory of his mother’s rhymes for the children. And what does the engine say? ‘Cook-lentils, cook-ladle, cook-lentils, cook-ladle,’ faster and faster, with wide open eyes.

In the Church of Our Lady was a statue of such alluring grace and loveliness that Walter Waldsee, when he first discovered it, was surprised by an embarrassingly sensual excitement. The statue was an early Gothic Madonna, sculpted perhaps around 1200. The handmaid of the Lord, blessed among women, stood on a pedestal, the tips of her shoes just visible under the rich folds of her cloak, which was draped in a low, ample sling on her right side, so that her slender waist and a slender arm were revealed in a dress molded to her soft form. Her neck was bare, and her long hair was brushed back and around to her left shoulder, showing just the tip of an earlobe. She stood slightly arched back in counterbalance to the child she held high and upright, lightly, almost playfully, presenting him, not herself. And the babe rested his right hand on her shoulder for support, but so gently that it appeared at the same time as a gesture: This is my mother. And then there was her amazing smile, the delicate beginning of a smile that was serene, introspective, as though following the shadow of a cloud passing across the blue sky of her soul. She looked neither at the child she gave to the world nor at the world, but at an inner fulfillment that no biblical angel could have revealed to her but that was hers as the mystery of her radiant beauty. Walter Waldsee visited her on his solitary strolls through Heiligenstadt as often as he visited the bookshop and in his reveries became fond of addressing her in the words of a poem by the twelfth-century Thuringian knight Heinrich von Morungen:

Diu mînes herzen ein wunne und ein krôn ist

Von allen frouwen diech noch hân gesên,

Schône unde schône unde schône aller schônist

Ist sie, mîn frouwe….

She who is my heart’s joy and crown,

Of all women I have ever seen,

She is beautiful, more beautiful, the most beautiful,

My lady….

But Morungen’s My Lady, as Waldsee well knew, was not the Ma Donna of heaven but an exquisitely earthly daughter of Eve—Morungen’s inspiration had sprung from Ovid and the Provençal troubadours, and his verses conjured up photographed images Waldsee had seen in art studies: a sandstone statue of Eve by Riemenschneider, Eve of the apple breasts, standing in expectant stillness while an adoring serpent caressed her right leg; or better, and intentionally titillating: a Venus by Cranach, deliciously nude, with small round breasts, round pouting belly and the merest shadow of pubic hair veiled—yet not veiled—by a shimmering film of fabric as insubstantial as an aroma.

There was something else about Morungen that fascinated Waldsee: the knight had traveled far, according to legend, as far as India! Waldsee had visited the ruins of the ancestral Morungen castle north of Sangerhausen, on the southern edge of the Harz Mountains. And now, in departing, he saw again in his mind’s eye the classroom in Heiligenstadt where he had learned to read medieval German and had first discovered such adventures of the imagination.

Heiligenstadt. He had been happy there, boarding in the school, away from home, and yet not far. His teacher, Dr. Jaeger, had expressed his regret at the departure of so promising a student, had shaken his hand, wished him luck, and given him a copy of a philological study he had written and published in Heiligenstadt three years before. Heiligenstadt, the name itself, was one of the schoolboy Waldsee’s earliest linguistic delights, a first instance of the pleasures to be found in the ways of words and in the meanings of names. He had recited the story to his mother. Every name was a story, Dr. Jaeger had said. According to legend Heiligenstadt, town of Saints, or Holy Place, was founded in the seventh century by the Merovingian king Dagobert. Afflicted with leprosy, Dagobert delegated his rule to his son, so that he could journey eastward, with wife and servants, in quest of a cure. (A remarkable father, with confidence in his son.) One day, while hunting, Dagobert came across a beautiful meadow lush with flowers and enchanting aromas. Wearied, he lay down in the grass and fell fast asleep. Upon awakening, he discovered that one of his hands, damp with dew, and his forehead, which his hand had touched, were purified of the disease. The king was stunned, amazed, and returned to his wife, who urged him to go back to that same spot in the meadow and lie down naked in the grass, which he did. Dagobert arose completely cured. Verily, he cried, either holy men sleep in this ground or the place itself is holy! I decree that this blessed spot shall henceforth be called Holy! It was the parochial version of a timeless myth: the discovery of that holy stead, that sacred spring, or isle of bliss, where all afflictions and dangers vanished.

Yet holy places too have come to grief. The Parthenon was blasted, and according to legend it was in the Eichsfeld where the Christian missionary to the pagan Germans, the famed Boniface, felled their sacred oak. True believers have always believed in weaponry, and so did the archbishops from Mainz who governed Heiligenstadt. The holy place and place of the holy was surrounded by walls, moats, and fortified gates, and was obliged to defend itself more than once against unholy assaults. Walter Waldsee had read of the notorious fifteenth-century knight, Werner von Hanstein, who had attacked with great force and had stolen a thousand cattle, horses, asses, and geese, and captured twelve citizens as hostages. Heiligenstadt had allied itself then with neighboring towns to take its revenge by laying siege to the robber knight’s castle, but to no avail, despite their righteousness. At first the bombardment had succeeded: the wooden roofs of Hanstein Castle were smashed and set ablaze, but the knight, seeing his peril, ordered the dozen hostages to be tied down to the remaining roofs. The besiegers recognized them and broke off their cannonade; without gunpowder there was no way to take the castle, the ruins of which Walter Waldsee had once visited alone on an unforgettable summer bicycle tour. The view from those old stones, situated on a height overlooking the Werra valley, some fourteen kilometers west of Heiligenstadt, had been breathtaking and had transported the boy’s romantic soul back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, of knights and damsels and bold exploits with sword and lance.

Through the train windows the river flashed behind the trees. Memories, roofs, telegraph poles, words and trees, glanced and glittered in the rattling glass of the train window. In the luggage net above Walter’s head was his new cardboard suitcase with ends reinforced in light-brown leather. In it, under the shirts and underwear, were a map of Thuringia for bicycling tours; Dr. Jaeger’s slender volume, My Dialect; an Illustrated Flora of the Eichsfeld; a thin, gray book of folksongs called Johnny Guitar; a pocket-size Hohner harmonica; a school anthology of poems and prose selections; a commonplace book, cheaply bound in cardboard, with blank pages for treasured words; and a book in English Walter had discovered the day before his departure, Ocean Steamships. There was also a photograph of his mother. The suitcase was from her, likewise some money she had stealthily saved for him. She had been alarmed for his health and safety, but given the inevitability of his departure, could not deny his needs nor discourage his dreams. He was, after all, on the threshold of manhood, and her brother in Hamburg had assured her of his readiness to offer guidance and counsel, and that had been a palpable measure of comfort.

Walter’s eyes burned when he thought of her, and he turned his face to the receding hills lest the other three or four passengers in the coach noticed his misery. She had been the private auditor and companion of his awakenings and first discoveries. Roswitha Waldsee herself had never traveled beyond the Eichsfeld, the region of her birth, and to her son she was the genius loci of its wooded hills and valleys. Walter had even learned in school that the rock beneath his mother’s feet, beneath the soil of her garden, and the tilled fields and the tree roots, was old beyond imagining. Where she walked to feed the pig and the goat, and her chickens and geese, fish once had swum, bizarre armored forms, amid corals, mollusks, cephalopods, and crustaceans, whose substance became the sediment of a warm, shallow sea four-hundred million years ago. The limestone plateaus and shell sandstone beds of the Eichsfeld formed with the foothills of the Harz the northern borderland of an open, broad expanse known as the Thuringian basin, bounded to the south by the mountains of the Thuringian Forest.

Who could now have told the age of this sea-born land beneath the shy early greens, the pale blues, the emergent points and patches of fresh yellows, on a new Sunday morning in April? Walter Waldsee had come to know the flora of the Eichsfeld already as a child beside his mother, who was versed in all the simple languages of nature. She had shown him larkspur, gentian and hellebore, rampion, spurge, and sour dock. She had shown him how to suck the sweetness out of clover blossoms, blow a musical note out of a grass stem, and identify wild onion, leek, lamb’s lettuce, cress, and thyme. She knew where bilberries grew, blackberries, strawberries, red currants; together, along a bramble-bordered grassy path, they gathered raspberries, cupping the sun-warmed sweet caps in one hand, and with the other popping them one by one into their mouths. There were poppies too, daisies, buttercups, and wild roses. And there was chestnut and willow, hazelnut, sorrel and birch. How many miles had his mother walked from village to village, on how many paths and roads? How many bouquets of wild flowers had she brought home for the kitchen table, and greens for her salads?

And how many people before her had walked upon this ground? The Eichsfeld had been well trodden since the Stone Age, and had been a gateway for migrating, wandering or warring peoples ever since the melt of the glaciers. The Celts had once owned the land, had mined and traded its salt. Then had come the Germanic tribes Walter Waldsee had read of in his Tacitus. Among the people who wandered into his native valleys during the time of the disintegration of Roman power had been the Angles, the very same tribe that joined the Saxons in conquering the land they named England. Walter Waldsee was enchanted with that morsel of historical knowledge; the enthusiastic youth saw in it a confirmation of his choice of English as his first foreign language, and even a bond of kinship, no matter how remote. Wasn’t it possible that there was a dram, if only the smallest dram, of Anglian blood in his veins?

As for the name Eichsfeld, it first appeared in a written record in the ninth century as Eichesfelden, and then as Aikesfeld. Its origin was uncertain. Quite possibly it derived from an earlier river name, Eichisa, for the upper course of the Unstrut. Farmer Ackermann, for whom Walter had done a few paid chores, said the land was named the Eichsfeld on account of ancient stands of oak, now of course vastly diminished, but a grand thing to imagine. It was also possible that the name came down from a man named Eico, or Aiko, who had been the first to till the land in Carolingian times, the first farmer. Hence Eico’s Field. Walter had told his mother that too. And with mischievous eyes, she had tucked away what she had heard. One evening, as they were returning from the garden together, she sprinkled grass and clover into his hair and called him Eico.

Once, in the sixth century, there had even been a Thuringian kingdom, extending from the Harz to the Danube, but little was known of it beyond the report of its devastating defeat by the Franks at Burgscheidungen, on the Unstrut, in the year 531. The first known king of the Thuringians had been called Bessinus, a man adept at forging alliances. He married off his daughter Radegunde to the Langobard king Wacho, and saw his son Herminafrid married to one Amalaberga, niece of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, and the daughter of Theodoric’s sister Amalafrida and the Vandal king Thrasamund. But these sonorous, operatic names and legendary figures could not help the Thuringians withstand the eastward drive of the Franks, the tribe of old King Dagobert.

Walter was not the only student in Heiligenstadt enamored of the heroic Thuringian past. One of his classmates, a frail, bespectacled lad, Teutschlein by name, had been so captivated by these distant, romantic events that he set about writing a Thuringian epic. Teutschlein’s father was a small-town policeman and perfect Wagnerite who called his patrol dog Senta and dreamt of avenging Germany’s defeat in 1918. But the hothouse nationalism of the home atmosphere did not avail the son’s literary efforts; the results were even more wretched than the boy’s immaturity and ignorance would have led one to expect, even after Dr. Jaeger solemnly suggested that he abandon his imitation of Nibelungenlied-rhymes and switch to prose, the mode, after all, (he added by way of encouragement) of the great Icelandic sagas. Teutschlein’s classmates, always quick to mockery, were affected somehow by the teacher’s apparently serious expressions, and so extended the would-be bard a measure of unspoken respect. This in turn, though only for a time, spared Teutschlein some grief on the playing field, where his nearsighted clumsiness usually invited hearty abuse. Teutschlein eventually became a schoolteacher, and, just like his father, the Wagnerian policeman, a true believer in the new Empire declared in 1933.

But empires will tumble and mountains crumble, and the last German empire inspired no epic poetry among the sane. And ever since the sixth-century disaster on the banks of the Unstrut, the political genius of Thuringia had not been unity, but fragmentation, an absurdly repeated slicing and dicing of miniature duchies with the result that the historical region of Thuringia evaporated into a mere idea. By the end of the war in which August Waldsee served as a pilferer in uniform, and until the designation of Thuringia as an entity of the new republic in 1919, there had not been a German territory by that name for more than a hundred years. Only the name Thuringian Forest survived. Perhaps it was for these reasons that an adolescent’s ambition to write a Thuringian epic could have stirred the indulgence of an otherwise sober teacher in Heiligenstadt. As a pedagogue Dr. Jaeger was not alone in a patriotic idealism that harmonized perfectly with professional zeal. He saw in the study of language a means to the pursuit of national happiness. In the preface to My Dialect (1925), he had expressed the hope that the knowledge of Eichsfeldian would augment the love of our homeland, would preserve all that is plain and simple, down-to-earth, and of the people, and inspire new research in every field that reveals the homeland to us! Earth was his favorite image: dialects, Dr. Jaeger said, were earthy. Studying them was an excellent means toward creating understanding between German and German and to tying more firmly the bonds of unity! For a man like Dr. Jaeger there was no discerning the fateful affinity between such romanticism and the increasingly noisy blood-and-soil racial ideology of the day except from the rubble of mortified retrospection. He thought of himself as unpolitical, and cared not at all for shooting, despite his name, which meant hunter. In his mind, his little philological treatise was pure science. Meanwhile, his ardent pupil Walter Waldsee did not pause over patriotic sentiments, nor, if truth be told, did he cultivate his native dialect, which he heard only in his mother’s songs and sayings, and in her words to the animals when she called them to feed.

Past Göttingen the train still kept along the riverrun, but now beyond the familiar hills and through heath and flatlands. The two ancient routes that crossed in Walter Waldsee’s native valleys, the old road from the Netherlands eastward to Leipzig, and the medieval Hanseatic way southward to Nürnberg, were behind him now, as were all the roads he had toured by bicycle to Weimar, Jena, Erfurt, Gotha, and Eisenach, with the fabled Wartburg Castle above it. Like a pilgrim in his own land, Walter had once even visited Thuringia’s magic mountain, the Kyffhäusser, in whose core the Emperor Barbarossa slept. But his favorite routes were rural, the gravel roads and wistful, narrow lanes under birch trees, soothing to the spirit, undulant, beckoning.

Travelers in the Eichsfeld passed fields where crosses of wood or stone were planted on a hillock or in a corner fenced by bushes or posts. There were also wayside images of the Virgin, on low pedestals freshened with little vases of cut flowers; and there were Stations of the Cross—for the Eichsfeld was Catholic. There were grottos dedicated to the Virgin, and wayside shrines of crude stone and with simple wrought-iron gates defining the boundaries of the sacred precinct. The statues under the old trees, the grottos and shrines, were always tended by someone, the snow swept away, the grass trimmed, the gravel raked, and simple flowers offered as prayers.

Walter Waldsee would sometimes stop at a wayside shrine, if no one else was there, and no one in sight on the road. He had come to some doubts about the teachings of the church. Questions hovered and circled like hawks high over a field. It was the first real case in his mental life of the unease caused by thinking. Doubt disturbed the comfortable arrangement of the childhood catechism, honed his superstitious nature, and at the same time, held the appeal of risk, the adventure of mutiny, for he was still, if unwillingly, his father’s son, and his father revered nothing. August Waldsee took Mephistophelian pleasure in mocking the priests and their lives of sacerdotal ease, their alleged celibacy, their theological fictions of heaven and hell, and would watch his son’s face for the effects of his sarcasm. But Walter wore an alert though vacant mask and like his mother kept silent. Meanwhile he had found sustenance in a word he had heard from a Jesuit who in speaking to a gathering of youth had mentioned a recently published book called The Agony of Christianity. Its Spanish author had written that a faith that did not continually doubt was a dead faith. Had not Christ himself cried out in agony: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Here was a thought, the Jesuit had said, that merited cautious consideration. Walter had admired the churchman’s seeming intellectual generosity. The father-forsaken son felt in need of a buttress to uphold his own wavering faith. Some years later, that philosophy of Christian doubt suffered papal condemnation in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Had Walter learned of it then, it would not have mattered to him, for he had always reserved for himself the right to read whatever beckoned to his spirit, and was in any case (in this too like his father) averse to the politics of prohibition. Had he read Unamuno himself, he might have made a pencil mark in the margin beside the sentence: what united a man most with himself, what made the intimate unity of our lives, was our inner discord. Discord had sent him seaward, and discord, he found, was the prevailing sound of the inner and outer world.

Walter had also learned in Heiligenstadt that if it had not been for the Jesuits, the Catholic Church in the Eichsfeld nearly would have vanished as completely as the sixth-century Thuringian kingdom of Bessinus, or the kingdom of his Gothic ally, Theodoric. There had been a Thuringian copper miner named Hans Luther, a hard man, as unforgiving as a stone, whose son, Martin, learned to terrorize himself with his own fearful vision of God the Father. And his piety proved incendiary. The bitter travail and poverty of the German peasants was the tinder, and the fire came in the form of Luther’s word: freedom. But it was misunderstood, for it was not of this world, and when the peasants rebelled, Luther raged against them: You impudent, coarse asses—May thunder strike you dead! And the murderous and rapacious hordes, as Luther called them, were struck dead, but not before there was shattered glass and toppled masonry, blood and screams in the Eichsfeld as elsewhere in Germany. In Thuringia the hot-eyed zealots behind Thomas Münzer strove to create a communist kingdom of God on earth in the town of Mühlhausen, and under the emblem of a hammer streamed out against the armies that were sent to destroy them. Thuringia, land of watch towers and castles, mighty fortresses, was thus transformed by the Thuringian-born Luther’s discordant soul. The Eichsfeld became Lutheran.

The Jesuits pioneered the Catholic renewal and regained the lost sixteenth-century souls of the Eichsfeld through a re-invention of medieval piety. Religion was once again experienced as a high drama, with Palm Sunday processions, and Shrovetide plays on the market square. Students and townsfolk performed The Prodigal Son, Magdalen the Penitent, The Conversion of St. Augustine, The Seven Deadly Sins, and Eichsfeld in Bondage. And here were the origins of the grottos to the Virgin and the wayside shrines.

Yet all the Christian centuries since the felling of the Donar oak could not purge the Eichsfeld of its folklore. The faithful repeatedly needed to be called to their faith, and Walter Waldsee too once felt it his duty to go and hear the sermons of a Franciscan monk known for his thundering oratory. The man was a formidable figure, and knew how to make an entrance. He was every inch the actor, bare feet shod in sandals, a full dark beard of gray and black, and a basso voice. On one evening his theme had been the sin of superstition, to which women were apparently more susceptible than men, since all his examples were taken from the ways of Eve. He spoke of a girl working in her kitchen, hands in the dishwater. And your apron strings come loose, he mocked, and you think, ‘Ah, my sweetheart is thinking of me!’ No, you silly slattern, tie your apron tight! The men in the pews hid their grins behind cupped hands, and ignored their own superstitions. In a later year, at a reminiscent time, Walter Waldsee concluded that there was no holy water to wash away the belief in luck, good luck and bad, or the strategies to assure the one and avert the other, on land or sea. It seemed that every kind of work created its own folklore, and as Walter eventually discovered, seamen were among the most superstitious of all mortals.

In his own way, Walter Waldsee observed two forms of piety, the Catholic and the pre-Christian, the Germanic, which Christianity had decried and debased as superstition with the felling of the sacred oak. This habit of mind was his mother’s. She did not know the history of her faith but she lived it as though she were the reincarnation of medieval caritas. Roswitha Waldsee was a tall, slender woman, with serious gray eyes, and long blond hair woven into a single braid. Calm and deliberate in all her movements, she was an unfailing comfort to children and animals, to birds with broken wings, little people with hurts, neighbors with woes. Her piety embraced all life, and her daily attendance at morning mass was as natural as was her devotion to Thuringian folklore. To her, animals had souls, and personal names, and they, before anyone, had heralded the birth of Christ; she proved it to the children with a little barnyard recital: The cock would crow: "Ki-Ki-Christus ist geboren! and the cow would moo: Wo denn? and the lamb would baa: In Bäh-Bäh-Bethlehem!" It was she who always played St. Nikolaus for the children, and she played him instinctively as a figure as much from the depth of the woods as from the church calendar. To her, elves, gnomes, and sprites were as real as saints, their mythic mischief as true and meaningful as the mass. She dwelt in symbolic ritual, and needed no texts.

But what she practiced in unreflecting innocence, her son eventually found difficult to sustain. As he grew older, religion began to fail him in answers to his questions, and now and then the erosion of his faith alarmed him. He attended mass nevertheless, in great measure because it was the last repeatable experience left to him of the Thuringian home he had lost. But he did not care to admit that therein lay the significance of religion for him, that he was taking it literally, in the sense his admired teacher, Dr. Jaeger, had once explained: religion, Latin re-ligare, meant a binding back. And Walter Waldsee was bound back, not to his catechism, but to Heiligenstadt, to Our Lady, to his mother. He was in his mid-thirties and in New York when his mother died in the first year of the Russian occupation of the Eichsfeld, and of all Thuringia. He had been sent a photograph of her: she was sitting in a crumpled white gown, staring with expressionless eyes, a thin, frail, frightened, distraught creature, with her long gray hair still in the familiar single braid down her back.

Compared to the spiritual quandary of Walter Waldsee’s later life, the doubts that arose in his youthful studies were no more than part of the entertainments of serious reading. The New Testament was a problem, and he tended to avoid it. Whenever he turned to the Old, it was out of literary curiosity, a schoolroom-acquired piety for the ancestry and fame of stories: The Creation and the Flood, Samson, Ruth, David and Goliath, Bathsheba, Job and Jonah. And then he was surprised by sensuality in the Song of Songs, and by the discovery of a voice so very like one he had heard in his anthology of Minnesang, the voice of an enraptured poet gazing upon the beauty of a reclining nude: Ah, you are beautiful, my love, ah, you are beautiful…, your lips are like a thread of scarlet, your two breasts are like two fawns…,you are altogether beautiful, my love, and there is no blemish in you. That sounded strikingly like Morungen, the Thuringian knight and romantic voyager, who also beheld a vision of recumbent loveliness: Alas, will I ever see her beautiful body again gleam through the night whiter yet than snow? My eyes were deceived, I thought it was the bright moon shining.

Walter Waldsee made no attempt to interpret the seductiveness of a poetry of desire that spoke of my lady and Our Lady in caressingly similar terms of ardor, in a luscious confusion of sex and religion. He merely loved it as the expression of his longing, and of his own dream of ideal fulfillment. Walter Waldsee left no girl behind him. He had kissed farmer Ackermann’s daughter once; he could have kissed her twice.

The drumming glide of steel wheels over merging tracks opened his vision outward to an unfamiliar Germany far north of the Eichsfeld, to heathland sliding by, clusters of gorse and juniper, stretches of brushwood, plowed fields, stands of fir, the weathered brick of old market towns, and out of his gazing rose the full salt flood of loneliness.

II

If you come on a Sunday, Uncle Berthold had written, we can meet you at the station. The we was diplomatic. Aunt Annaliese was not a hospitable sort. She dwelt in discontent, and kept a constantly revised and updated catalog of other people’s faults. Naturally she had no good opinion of her husband’s relatives, but she pitied Walter’s mother, and in the lukewarmth of such regard for a less favored creature, she would condescend to welcome the nephew, whom she might be able to enlighten with one or two of her many should’s and ought-to’s she kept ready for the world in her apron pockets. Walter’s mother never spoke an uncharitable word about another mortal, but Walter himself never found a reason to alter his earliest impression that of all the relatives he had met, Aunt Annaliese was the least likable. And yet she was the wife of the truly likable Uncle Berthold. It was a connubial mystery, and not dissimilar to the mystery of his own parents: that just those two, of all the possible pairings, Thuringian, German, and European, were necessary to produce just him, was beyond any comprehension. He had promised himself more than once that he would never be like his father. At his age and in his predicament, it was difficult for him to recognize let alone concede that as much as he was his mother’s son he was also in some ways bound to be like his father. He preferred to flee enlightenment about that likeness, particularly in those moments when he suddenly heard his father in the sound of his own voice, or saw his father in one of his own unpremeditated, rash responses. Meanwhile he was fond of inscribing the fly leaf of favorite books with the Delphic maxim: know thyself—though the path to himself was as obscure to him as the far side of the moon.

Chin in hand, elbow on the sill, he gazed out the window at the unfolding landscape. A white wing flashed. Suddenly there were gulls. A watery surface blinked in the sunshine between structures, and now the train was slowing, and here was the bridge across the Elbe, and there was the vast canopy of the station, its high, smokestained, overarching glass obscuring the pale-blue April-afternoon sky and deflecting smells and sounds of steam, of oiled hot steel, of voices, calls, announcements, shutting doors, wheels, whistles.

Uncle Berthold stood alone by the platform gate. He was a pale, large-boned man. Beneath his hat were thin strands of hair so fair as to appear nearly colorless. His eyes were kind. He was in insurance, Walter had been told, marine insurance. He looked as though he had never been young, but had been born to caution and circumspection. How was the trip? And how is your mother? He ushered his nephew forward, into the halls, past the kiosks. Faint aromas of food wafted from somewhere, glasses clinked. Annaliese is home making our coffee. Then Walter learned that his uncle had a car. We’ll have time for a short tour, a quick look at the waterfront. Uncle Berthold seemed to smile with his eyes. "We can drive across the Lombardsbrücke and then circle down to the Overseas Landing Stage. The Cap Arcona is in. Walter had read about that ship. The newspapers had written grandly and proudly about her at the time of her launching last year, and again upon her maiden voyage to the La Plata ports in November of 1927. Walter had cut out the photograph of her, the largest, fastest vessel of the Hamburg-South America Line. This was a giddy beginning for him. He had also never ridden in a car before, knew nothing about automobiles, and could not have said what kind it was. It was black, and as Uncle Berthold explained, not his. They followed the Glockengiesserwall past the art museum and suddenly were crossing the bridge. Walter could see sails to his right, white commas on a sheet of bright blue; a small steamboat drew its triangular mark upon the watery sheen. Our two lakes, the Inner Alster on your left, and there, the Outer Alster, as you see, with its elegant shoreline." But then buildings slid by, gray and brown and red, and on Walter’s side, swatches of early green, of trees and grass. Then his uncle turned left and steered riverward over canals and through what seemed to his nephew a bewildering maze of streets and avenues. Then Uncle Berthold began to speak, as men are wont to do, about his work.

The company provides a car for the senior brokers. Clients need to be taken here and there, we need to inspect cargoes and vessels, and the car saves time.

"Are you insuring the Cap Arcona?"

No. We aren’t insurers, we are brokers. But she’s a strikingly beautiful ship. I thought you might like to see her. Walter felt an immediate need to express his gratitude, and hit upon showing an interest in his uncle’s vocation. He had heard of fire insurance, insurance against crop damage, practical arrangements that seemed as irrelevant to his immediate years as the purchase of a cemetery plot. But Hamburg was a new world.

How does that work, then? Insuring a ship?

Well, you are a shipowner, or a merchant, or a banker with investments in a ship or a shipment. You want protection against financial loss at sea, loss of earnings or profits, as well as loss of property. You come to us. We prepare a memorandum describing all the facts of the risk. You may want to insure against all sorts of perils of the sea: fire, damage from accidents in loading, from shifting cargo; a boiler bursts, or there is negligence. Or cargo is jettisoned for some reason, storm; or there is theft or piracy.

There are still pirates?

Uncle Berthold was amused at Walter’s boyish tone of surprise, its implicit visions of fierce beards and black eye-patches, emblems of skull and bones, crossed sabres, buried treasures. Oh yes, in some quarters of the globe, like the South China Sea, a continuing menace. I’ve read that in the United States the prohibition of alcohol has inspired piracy along the coasts and on the Great Lakes, all for whisky, and for wine and champagne shipped to Canada from European ports, or from the Caribbean. And lately we seem to have pirates on the Elbe. Cargoes have been stolen. Just yesterday a shipment of lumber, battens, boards, staves, and the like, and a load of fish from Norway, mostly salmon. On that account some wag of a journalist invented the headline: ‘The Victual Brethren Return.’

What did he mean by that?

Uncle Berthold braked at a corner, and waited for a bus to cross the intersection. "Ah well, the Victual Brethren, the stuff of legend, fourteenth, fifteenth century, the noble outlaws who robbed the rich and fed the poor. They were also called the Likedeeler, the Like-Dealers."

Walter laughed in recognition of the name. The Like-Dealers, of course! Klaus Störtebeker!

He was one of the leaders. Executed right here in Hamburg, along with forty or more others, at a place across the river, in 1401. They chopped off his head and stuck it on a spike as a lesson to the world. The Hanseatic merchants did not deal gently with pirates. The Like-Dealers called themselves the ‘Friends of God and Enemies of the Whole World’! But that was mere bluster, a flying unde a false flag, a trick of the pirate’s trade. Störtebeker was only one of dozens of sea-rover chieftains in the Baltic and North Seas, and they fought among themselves, too.

But the Like-Dealers, they shared and shared alike, and with the poor?

That’s the legend of a later time. What they shared and shared alike was simply booty, in the ancient manner of thieves. There was no single ideal, social or political, that united them, no loyalties.

How then, Walter wondered, had they come to be called Victual Brethren? That seems to have the ring of a social ideal.

You are right. That’s the appeal of the legend. We look for that, don’t we, in an unjust world, we look for a sustaining brotherhood to feed us with hope when there is not hope, and to overthrow the tyrannical fathers.

Walter Waldsee was astonished. Who was this man, his uncle, this writer of marine insurance? The silence in the car seemed devoted to the business of steering, turning a corner. Then Uncle Berthold returned to his theme.

"Legend has it that the fratres victualium got their name as a result of their involvement in the power struggle between Mecklenburg and Denmark—the duke of Mecklenburg at the time was also the king of Sweden. Mecklenburg had enlisted the help of the sea rovers in its campaign, used them as privateers, giving them letters of marque—but that’s the language of a later age. When Queen Margaret of Denmark—a Norwegian, remarkable woman—when she defeated the Mecklenburg forces, Stockholm was cut off. It was the pirates who brought provisions to the fortress by sea—the victualers. That’s the legend. But the pirates had the name ‘victualers’ even before all that happened, because they fed themselves, not others—they weren’t paid or supplied by anyone, but lived off pirated victuals."

So later generations, people who didn’t know the actual story, were seduced by the name—into the legend.

What’s in a name? Sometimes poetry, sometimes mischief. Look there! A church tower came into view above the roofs, behind the roofs. St Michael’s. You must climb up there. The tower is 132 meters high. Best view of the city. The uncle then fell silent again, and Walter suddenly felt at a loss for words until he remembered, much to his relief, that they had been speaking of his uncle’s work.

You were saying that you prepare a memorandum for someone who wants insurance. What happens then, with that memorandum?

We submit it to an insurance underwriter, on behalf of the client. We look for the best insurance market for him, the best rates. The underwriter may agree to cover the entire risk or only a percentage of it. So the risk can be divided among a number of insurers. There’s the river. Uncle Berthold navigated through narrow streets, sunlight and afternoon shadow, into a broad alley and onto an open concrete area with a railing that stretched like a horizon line against the Elbe. Uncle and nephew placed their palms upon the balustrade and leaned into the air, reverently. The Cap Arcona filled the eye, enormous. A white hull stripe from bow to stern and through the length of A deck gave the illusion of greater height to the entire white superstructure and sharpened as well its contrast with the sleek black body defined beneath it. The three white funnels, each with a wide red band at the top, were subtly raked aft, as were the foremast with its crow’s nest and loading booms, and the main mast with its antennas and flags. A large door had been slid back in the upper, sternward part of the hull, revealing a passageway. A waist-high chain served as the only fence against the outside empty space, and behind it stood a figure in white, wearing an apron and a towel over one shoulder. With one hand on the chain, with the other he raised a smoking cigarette to his lips. Evidently there was a galley on that deck. The ship was being provisioned; thuds, squeals and hums vibrated in the air from the ramps and the landing stage. It was an image at once of luxury and work, of grand ballroom and scullery.

She has steam turbines and twin screws, does twenty knots. She will be in Rio in twelve days, and in Buenos Aires three days later. She was built right here, you know, in this harbor. Blohm & Voss. Uncle Berthold gestured across the river, to steel structures, dinosaurian cranes and derricks looming through the smoke of passing tugs. They are now building a superliner for the North German Lloyd. Then he nudged Walter’s elbow and directed his gaze across the river and farther up, to a crowded area in the haze of structures and masts. Look there, do you see those four masts in a row? Walter could not quite distinguish them from the surrounding vertical lines. "It’s a sailing ship, the Parma, a Cape Horner, and still working. Hamburg, you know, is the last of the European sailing-ship ports. And the Parma there is the last word in sailing vessels. Steel hull, steel masts, wire rigging."

That I would like to see!

I know a man who sailed in her, by chance an Englishman. Perhaps I can arrange a meeting. He’s living in a seaman’s boarding house in St. Pauli. You speak English, I hear?

Well, I’ve studied it in school, and spoke it only in the classroom.

A seaman is the right sort of Englishman to begin with; he’s heard all the world’s accents.

Walter had no words to keep pace with the onrush of impressions. There again was the famous landmark, St. Michael’s, close now. His uncle was choosing his return route through the Old Town, past the Stock Exchange, and the City Hall, with its clock tower and expansive Renaissance pomp. The city stretched and yawned in the waning Sunday afternoon light.

Aunt Annaliese turned from her ensemble of coffee cups as uncle and nephew entered the sitting room alcove. Ah, the Sunday’s child, she said, extending a limp hand. Her face was thin, narrow, pointed.

I wish it were so, but I was born on a Friday. I’ve been lucky at least with the weather. Mother told me this morning, when angels travel, the skies are blue.

It’s the first of April. Maybe a fool’s luck?

Uncle Berthold took Walter’s suitcase and invited him back to a small room in the rear of the apartment, which would serve as his bedroom. There was a single narrow window overlooking the courtyard three stories below. An old sofa in a faded dark green and red