Searching for Roots at the Devil's Hammer--Part I

I'd lived in Leizpig for a year already when my grandfather took me into his office one Christmas in Indiana.  "Here, you can have this," he told me, and handed me an old book.  An incredibly old book, by American standards--the Dienstbotenbuch of one of my ancestors.  It later led me to a tiny village in Upper Franconia, now the Protestant northeastern region of Bavaria.

May 29, 2009

The Fichtelgebirge

In the soft lavender light of sundown, even the sterile white windmills look stately against the sky, with cloud-spots casting a glowing pink over the silvery rolling green wheat fields and meadows brushed with a whisper of yellow blossoms, dotted with lupins and daisies.  We're crossing the Brücke der deutschen Einheit, (Bridge of German Unity) the Inner-deutschen Grenze (Inner-German Border) between Thuringia and Bavaria, where even the gas stations with their searingly bright signs give an undeserved impression of nobility, plotted solidly between the ubiquitous forests: tall, dark, densely green, spindly-thin trunks filtering the sunset, accented with the occasional heart-breakingly elegant birch.

The sky darkens to purple-grey over the Fichtelgebirge (literally "Spruce Mountains"), rolling hills topped with bristly green pine ridges.  It's here in the homeland of many of my ancestors, and certainly the close vincinity of where one of them was born and lived, that I begin to understand what "American freedom" means and has meant.  The Bavarian countryside is self-consciously picturesque, an intentional geography of modulated interaction between human and land--this as viewed from the Autobahn that Hitler built.  This land, densely inhabited for thousands of years, is still lush and bountiful, the forests thick and vibrant, shocks of trees scattered generously between the crops.  The windmills turn slowly and silently alongside the road and on the horizon.  

Seidwitz

I take note, for the thousanth time, of the utter difference in residential planning here: the middle-class family still has a duplex with a tiny, but elegant front garden, the houses are clustered tightly together.  Homes are crammed within 'city' limits, no matter how small the community.  They don't dribble out into the outskirts and scatter themselves among the trees, or stand lonesome on the edge of the wheat fields.  Aside from the feudal village culture of days gone by and the much-cited protection from dangerous outsiders that surrounded and threatened their borders, what kind of legislative, regulatory, and bureaucratic measures has it taken to maintain this landscape into the present day?  

An American thinks: I want my house and my yard and my driveway and--maybe even these days--my farm, and I deserve to build them whereever I please.  My beautiful wife and my wholesome kids deserve it, and once we build it we've earned the right to do what we please with it, too.  And the cities swell and spill into the outskirts, small towns are loosely planned and trail off into ugly grids of featureless farmland, and everywhere fields and forests give way to McMansions of various shapes and sizes.  But liberating from this almost stifling, preened and overwatched manipulations of the European building bureaucrats--who, in all their years of collective wisdom, might know what they're doing.