I hope you enjoyed the little snapshots of life in another time and place that I’ve tried to share with you over the past several months. If you didn’t, I apologize for wasting your time. But sometimes it is educational to realize that we are not all that different from one another, no matter what our background, our religion or lack of it, our politics.
What was special about that particular time, apart from the fact that we were still alive after six years of total war, was the necessity to adjust, to make do with whatever was at hand to survive. It wasn’t so much every man for himself, because we were all in the same boat, it was the collective will to pick yourself up and go on. This was not a time to be faint of heart. True, there were many who gave up and if you did that, you were done for, because there was no safety net, no safe haven, no time out. Our money was useless, worth less than the paper it was printed on. The store shelves were empty. There were no government or social agencies to turn to for help. The only way to make it was to 1: live off the land; 2: barter for food and shelter, either your skills or your possessions, if you were lucky enough to have any left; to 3: work for the occupiers or to 4: steal, rob or kill. That was it.
In this kind of an environment, apart from the black marketers, the farmers were the best off, because they had food – eggs, butter, meat, potatoes, grain – for themselves and to trade. The roads and trains were jammed with people from the cities, schlepping whatever possession they had left, headed for the countryside to swap for the necessities of life. Farmers did not starve. Many a farmhouse sported fancy oriental carpets, grand pianos, rare paintings, expensive furniture, which people had bartered away for food. As long as you had something to trade, you lived.
And then there were the refugees from the East. They had nothing. Many didn’t even speak the language. They were not welcome. They were seen as annoying additional costs of the lost war. There was little solidarity with these outcasts of society among the locals, mainly due to the lack of food and the sorry state of the war-ravaged, bombed-out homes and apartments. Their presence stretched minimal resources to the breaking point. There was nowhere for them to live. The cities were bombed out and the countryside was jammed with the bombed-out residents of the cities.
By 1950, more than 8,000,000 Germans from the ethnically cleansed, lost provinces behind the Oder-Neisse line had flooded into war-ravaged West Germany, another 3.3 million into communist East Germany. In some villages, they accounted for a third of the population. Most arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They spoke dialects that sounded alien to the locals. Their cultural background was totally different from that of the natives. They came from urban centers like Danzig (Gdansk) and Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad) and Breslau (Wroclaw) and Tilsit (Sovietsk) and were dumped into farm villages, were their skills were useless. Most were Protestants and here they were tossed into totally Catholic hamlets and towns in southern Germany, where they were looked on as heretics. They upset what little equilibrium was left in towns and villages across the allied occupation zones. If you were a refugee, you were near the bottom of the food chain. You had to be resourceful, strong and tenacious. Many turned to the booming black market. Some traded their skills for food and shelter. Some thrived.
At the very bottom were the DPs – Displaced Persons. These were the survivors of Nazi concentration camps, forced laborers from every corner of Europe, the victims of the Nazi terror regime and those eastern Europeans who had sided with the Nazis during the war and were now stateless drifters. All sorts of people were roaming the countryside, some looking for help, some looking to help themselves to anything they could find. Some to seek revenge, to rape, to kill.
To survive you had to be strong. I’d like to introduce you to a couple of survivors I’ve known. The first was Abel Haselmann. He was vague about his past. He’d only say that he was from somewhere in the East. He spoke with a distinct Saxon accent. He was a runt of a man and a jack-of-all-trades. He had survived the war and the Nazis and had hot-footed it across the Iron Curtain in the summer of 1945 with only his shirt on his back, wandered into our village and decided to stay. At first, no one wanted to take him in, because he was Jewish and he refused to kowtow to the burghers. He went to the Americans, who ordered the village mayor to find room for him. He soon made himself indispensable.
If your electric coil for heating your beer was busted, you took it to Herr Haselmann to fix. If you are wondering why in the world you’d need to heat your beer, the reason for that bizarre custom was that in those days few practiced dental hygiene and most everyone’s teeth were in dire need of repair and couldn’t tolerate cold or hot. Everything had to be lukewarm – ergo the beer heater.
If your radio was on the fritz, your bicycle broken or a piece of jewelry needed fixing, Abel Haselmann was your man. He was an artist. He also believed that you never knew who might be sneaking up on you at any time and you always had to be prepared to make tracks fast. He never was without his identity papers and a wad of American cash in his pocket. He said that a person without a passport was like a corpse on leave. He never slept or so it seemed. No matter what time of night you passed his house, there always was a light on in his room. He liked to quote Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote: “To live without roots takes a stout heart.” Herr Haselmann definitely had one of those.
He once asked the headmaster of the elementary school in our village and my older brother’s future father-in-law and a true Nazi in his earlier incarnation, why it was that he felt the Germans were such a superior race, when in reality the Jews were much tougher, having endured and survived 2,000 years of persecution, pogroms and even the holocaust and were still here. He got no answer.
Abel Haselmann was a heavy smoker. Like everyone else in those days, he rolled his own. He always had a cigarette dangling from his lips, the smoke causing him to squint and his voice to rasp. His fingertips were burned black. He grew his own tobacco plants, his ”lovely Virginias”, he called them, in the garden behind his house. In those early years after the war, there was a luxury tax on tobacco plants. Once a month in the summer, the tax inspector from the county finance department would bicycle the eight kilometers up the valley from the county seat and go from house to house to look for tobacco plants and to collect taxes on them.
Herr Haselmann had an early warning system in place. The first kid who spotted the taxman pushing his bike up the road of the lower village and warned Herr Haselmann got five cigarettes. Cigarettes were better than cash. You could trade them for just about anything. With such ample warning, Herr Haselmann moved his potted tobacco plants into the back of the garden, behind a fence, where he raised bantam roosters. These roosters were fierce. If anyone, other than Herr Haselmann, came close to their coop, they would attack, hitting the fence at eye level with their talons extended. Herr Haselmann never paid tobacco taxes.
The second survivor I’d like you to meet was Hans Dressel. He was from Upper Silesia, in present-day Poland. He’d limped into our village in late 1945 and offered his expertise as a grave digger. He also suggested that he should handle the chores of town crier. Our town didn’t have either, so they hired him for room and board. Besides laboring in the town’s graveyard, his other job was to announce the weekly village council decisions, upcoming soccer matches, important meetings and happenings throughout the village.
Herr Dressel was well into his seventies and had been a day laborer all his life and was barely literate. He was, what you’d call today, developmentally challenged. He had great difficulties reading the weekly dispatches. He carried a large hand-bell to announce his presence and then he’d try to read his bulletin. No one understood him, but he was a hit with all the kids in the village, who followed his every step and taunted him mercilessly.
He was just a step above the village idiot and he was hung like a horse. His Johnson reached easily to his knees. You could see it swinging inside his pants when he walked. It was huge. The kids were fascinated and at the same time abhorred by it and egged him on to show them what he was hiding in his pants. When Herr Dressel got fed up with them, he’d whip it out and shake it at them and chase them, sending them screaming in all directions.
The town council threatened him numerous times with dismissal, but they needed a grave digger, a job no one wanted to do, and he needed the work, because he had no pension, never having worked at a steady job in his life. He had found a nook in village life, by becoming part of the village entertainment and except for some of the more substantial matrons in the village and the Lutheran minister, no one took Herr Dressel’s behavior too seriously.
The third of these survivors was the Catholic priest, the Herr Curatus, who lived across the yard from our house. This curate was a short and very sturdy man who always carried cotton balls in his ears. He had appeared one day in the late fall of 1944. He came from the Banat, a formerly German region in Rumania.
This curate loved to drink and eat and could cuss better than most and he could do it in several Slavic languages. He also loved to play cards and he mostly won. Every evening, around 6 o’clock he appeared at the Golden Rose pub, down the hill from our house, to play euchre – to augment the measly take from the collection plate, he said – and to drink beer until, so some asserted, the cotton balls in his ears lifted and started to float off. That was the signal that he had reached his quantum and he got up and stumbled back up the hill to his house. Sometimes he passed out before he made it up the steps to his front door and his housekeeper, an old maid, who had a room upstairs in his attic, had to drag him inside and put him to bed.
The women in the parish didn’t like him very much and called him an “Unflat.” Literally, that means filth in the local dialect. If he had particular bad luck at euchre, the curate would swear worse than a Turk, as the saying went in those days. “Crucifix sacrament, another mass in the ass!” was his favorite (translated) saying. But the men more than made up for the local women's disdain. All the Catholic men in the surrounding villages, who had something special on their conscience, went to him for confession. He roared and hissed like an old tiger in his confessional, but gave everyone his absolution. This was important in those days, because without dispensation you couldn’t get communion on Sunday morning and everyone knew right away that you were a hard core sinner and the women shunned you and discussed your case from one end of the county to the other. It was worse than a communicable disease.
If one of his parishioners confessed to something which was too much even for him, he turned vulgar. “If you do that again, you dumb f…k, I’ll ban you from drinking beer for six months. Then you can swill water like your cows and you’ll end up with blue guts, you dumb ass!” he’d yell. An alcohol ban, according to his codex, was the worst punishment he could mete out and, to him, was much worse than eons of purgatory.
When the curate died, one of his parishioners, who had been threatened with frequent water cures, opined, that the Herr Curatus should be made a saint, since he’d performed the miracle of turning beer into water so many times.
We didn’t learn ‘til after his death that he wasn’t a priest at all. Apparently he had been a coachman in his earlier live in the Balkans and had decided to upgrade to a less arduous profession. All this came to light when his housekeeper went through his papers after his funeral. No one had questioned him, including his superiors. They were short of priests and he was ready to step in. He obviously knew his way around the Catholic rituals. The church after all was one of the pillars of rural society in those days and no one dared to question its decisions.
There is no limit to the imagination, when it comes to survival. You do what you have to do. I guess the closest you’d come in this country in comparing this spirit of survival is the hardships the early settlers here and elsewhere in North America had to overcome to survive. They had to live off the meager resources the land offered. They did not give up. They had stout hearts and iron wills.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
The Sisters Baerenklau
In previous exposés, I tried to introduce you to recycling cigarette butts and bath water and to give you some alternatives to the wasteful use of toilet paper. Today, I’d like you to meet the sisters Baerenklau, who were way ahead of their time when it came to recycling or reducing their carbon footprint, terms that didn’t enter our popular vocabulary until half a century later. They were experts in the art of substituting birch sap for those expensive and politically incorrect shampoos which take up so much shelf space in our stores today. And they were pros at creating gourmet meals out of animal innards.
The sisters Baerenklau, whose secrets I am about to reveal to you, lived on the third floor of our house, back in 1946, in the room to the right, as you stepped off the narrow wooden spiral staircase. There were three of them and they were refugees from Upper Silesia, now part of Poland. They told us that their father had been a game warden and forester, who’d been murdered by the Poles in the turbulent last days of the war. They also said that they’d been gang-raped by Russian soldiers as they tried to flee their father’s house and make their way west.
I know this will be viewed as extremely politically incorrect by some, but those Russkies must have been a pretty desperate bunch to go after the Baerenklau sisters. They were in their late 50’s and early 60’s and they were spinsters and very homely, ill-favored even. The youngest, Dora, was one burrito short of a combination plate, as Robin Williams used to say and she was very short and stout. She also had a large growth protruding from her left shoulder blade, which forced her head forward and twisted to the right. She looked like she was about to topple over unto her ear at any moment. She always pumped her elbows vigorously when she walked. She wore her sisters’ hand-me-downs, shortened to fit – sort of. Her two siblings, Rosa, the oldest, and Marta, on the other hand, were very tall, close to six feet, and extremely angular, almost scraggy.
Dora did all the work, constantly bossed around by her two sisters, who never lifted a finger to help. They always walked in lockstep when they went out together, Rosa and Marta in front, Dora behind. Dora only got to go out when they went shopping, because she had to lug their purchases in two nets slung crisscross, like a bandolier, over her shoulders. Otherwise the nets would have dragged on the ground. Dora did not talk. The other two never stopped talking. They were Lutherans and attended church every Sunday morning without fail, sitting in the front row with the older two singing loudly and off-key, while short Dora sat between them holding up the hymnal for them. She had to hold it over her head for her sisters to see properly. Dora did not sing. She did, however, pass wind quite frequently and loudly, much to the amusement of the confirmants, who also sat in the front row.
The sisters Baerenklau truly believed in the old adage “Waste not, want not.” Every spring, when the snow had melted and the first puss willows started to sprout, the sisters could be seen marching into the surrounding woods, searching for birch trees. They believed in the division of labor. When they found a suitable birch, Rosa would produce a small metal tap, about six inches long and sharpened on one end. She and Marta would hold it in place against the tree trunk and Dora would whack it into the tree with a mason’s hammer, which she carried on a rope around her waist. The older two would then step back and Dora, who had been schlepping a wooden pail, would move up and hold this receptacle under the tap and catch the birch sap dripping out of the pipe. It took a lot of birches to fill that bucket. They never came home without a full pail.
When they got home, they bottled this sap in old half-liter beer bottles and used it undiluted to wash their hair. They swore by this concoction and wouldn’t think of switching to something a bit more acceptable. They called it their Silesian shampoo. We called it Silesian “Jauche”, meaning liquid manure. The stuff made them smell odd, kind of musty and dank, like compost or wet rotting leaves. They always tried to get my mother to use it, but she steadfastly refused.
This reminds me of a story I read recently about someone, whose idea of recycling and conservation was to carefully clean their used paper towels by soaking them in their dish water, squeeze out the water and hang them up to dry on the clothesline in their back yard. The person crowed that she got an extra month out of each roll. Now that is an example of conservation truly worth imitating. The sisters Baerenklau certainly would have approved, but unfortunately paper towels were not the staple of civilization then that they have become since.
My father was a forester and during and after the war we pretty much lived off what he shot on his hunting excursions, usually venison or rabbit, occasionally wild boar. We lived off the land and managed pretty well, certainly a lot better than the vast majority of people in the bombed-out cities of Germany, who for the most part were starving and homeless.
The sisters Baerenklau were always after my father for deer entrails or the leftover innards of jackrabbits. There were persistent rumors making the rounds that dogs had mysteriously disappeared after the Baerenklau sisters had been seen high-stepping through the village. They were big fans of boiled cabbage and potatoes, which they served with wild game offal, like sliced heart, boiled spleen or steamed kidneys and tripe. Their room reeked of it. They were happiest when lung pie was the main course on their menu.
Here are the ingredients for lung pie, should you have the inclination to try some. You need the well-drained lungs of an adult deer or other substantial animal, carefully cleaned of all shotgun pellets, a pound of boiled barley, a sizeable dollop of uncooked badger suet or if that cannot be found in your larder, fresh deer lard, diced, three diced onions, thyme, coriander, ground mace and cayenne pepper. If you saved some of the deer’s blood, that would be a major bonus. You need about two liters.
The thing about badger fat is that it is said to have proven medicinal as well as culinary qualities, if you were to believe the Frauleins Baerenklau. They not only used it as shortening in preparing cakes and pies and, of course, as the main addition to lung pie, but also swore by it as a sure-fire remedy for the flu and other common ailments. If you came down with a fever, they’d tell you to slather the stuff on your chest, pack you into blankets and then make you sweat. If you had an open sore or a boil, a liberal helping of badger fat would draw out overnight whatever caused you discomfort. It seemed to work.
Next you mince the lungs into tiny pieces, add egg batter, and a bit of gelatin, beat and blend this mess with a whisk until almost liquid and foamy. Pour this concoction into a cast-iron pot, add the blood, the diced suet and onion, spices, salt and pepper to taste. Stir and mix everything thoroughly, cover and let it rise over low heat for at least two and half hours, chill until firm, then cut the lung pie into servings. Lung pie done to perfection should be firm and be able to stand on its own on your plate without too much seepage. This savory delicacy is best with boiled cabbage or steamed rutabagas and, of course, cooked potatoes, washed down by a large bottle of Bavarian beer.
In the next issue, I was going to talk about how wool socks, used properly, can deter trespassers, but my wife, Andree, dissuaded me. She feels that particular subject is not well suited for dissemination in a community publication. My ramblings on the recycling of beer steins must also await further research. Andree thinks this tale might induce some readers to indulge in violent behavior. Perhaps, I just shouldn’t run these stories by her first.
So instead I will try to explain how you can substitute and mix other readily available fluids to overcome a lack of alcoholic beverages in a time of need, how to use your neighbor’s chicken coop to add variety to an otherwise bland breakfast and how to make ersatz coffee from readily available stand-ins.
The sisters Baerenklau, whose secrets I am about to reveal to you, lived on the third floor of our house, back in 1946, in the room to the right, as you stepped off the narrow wooden spiral staircase. There were three of them and they were refugees from Upper Silesia, now part of Poland. They told us that their father had been a game warden and forester, who’d been murdered by the Poles in the turbulent last days of the war. They also said that they’d been gang-raped by Russian soldiers as they tried to flee their father’s house and make their way west.
I know this will be viewed as extremely politically incorrect by some, but those Russkies must have been a pretty desperate bunch to go after the Baerenklau sisters. They were in their late 50’s and early 60’s and they were spinsters and very homely, ill-favored even. The youngest, Dora, was one burrito short of a combination plate, as Robin Williams used to say and she was very short and stout. She also had a large growth protruding from her left shoulder blade, which forced her head forward and twisted to the right. She looked like she was about to topple over unto her ear at any moment. She always pumped her elbows vigorously when she walked. She wore her sisters’ hand-me-downs, shortened to fit – sort of. Her two siblings, Rosa, the oldest, and Marta, on the other hand, were very tall, close to six feet, and extremely angular, almost scraggy.
Dora did all the work, constantly bossed around by her two sisters, who never lifted a finger to help. They always walked in lockstep when they went out together, Rosa and Marta in front, Dora behind. Dora only got to go out when they went shopping, because she had to lug their purchases in two nets slung crisscross, like a bandolier, over her shoulders. Otherwise the nets would have dragged on the ground. Dora did not talk. The other two never stopped talking. They were Lutherans and attended church every Sunday morning without fail, sitting in the front row with the older two singing loudly and off-key, while short Dora sat between them holding up the hymnal for them. She had to hold it over her head for her sisters to see properly. Dora did not sing. She did, however, pass wind quite frequently and loudly, much to the amusement of the confirmants, who also sat in the front row.
The sisters Baerenklau truly believed in the old adage “Waste not, want not.” Every spring, when the snow had melted and the first puss willows started to sprout, the sisters could be seen marching into the surrounding woods, searching for birch trees. They believed in the division of labor. When they found a suitable birch, Rosa would produce a small metal tap, about six inches long and sharpened on one end. She and Marta would hold it in place against the tree trunk and Dora would whack it into the tree with a mason’s hammer, which she carried on a rope around her waist. The older two would then step back and Dora, who had been schlepping a wooden pail, would move up and hold this receptacle under the tap and catch the birch sap dripping out of the pipe. It took a lot of birches to fill that bucket. They never came home without a full pail.
When they got home, they bottled this sap in old half-liter beer bottles and used it undiluted to wash their hair. They swore by this concoction and wouldn’t think of switching to something a bit more acceptable. They called it their Silesian shampoo. We called it Silesian “Jauche”, meaning liquid manure. The stuff made them smell odd, kind of musty and dank, like compost or wet rotting leaves. They always tried to get my mother to use it, but she steadfastly refused.
This reminds me of a story I read recently about someone, whose idea of recycling and conservation was to carefully clean their used paper towels by soaking them in their dish water, squeeze out the water and hang them up to dry on the clothesline in their back yard. The person crowed that she got an extra month out of each roll. Now that is an example of conservation truly worth imitating. The sisters Baerenklau certainly would have approved, but unfortunately paper towels were not the staple of civilization then that they have become since.
My father was a forester and during and after the war we pretty much lived off what he shot on his hunting excursions, usually venison or rabbit, occasionally wild boar. We lived off the land and managed pretty well, certainly a lot better than the vast majority of people in the bombed-out cities of Germany, who for the most part were starving and homeless.
The sisters Baerenklau were always after my father for deer entrails or the leftover innards of jackrabbits. There were persistent rumors making the rounds that dogs had mysteriously disappeared after the Baerenklau sisters had been seen high-stepping through the village. They were big fans of boiled cabbage and potatoes, which they served with wild game offal, like sliced heart, boiled spleen or steamed kidneys and tripe. Their room reeked of it. They were happiest when lung pie was the main course on their menu.
Here are the ingredients for lung pie, should you have the inclination to try some. You need the well-drained lungs of an adult deer or other substantial animal, carefully cleaned of all shotgun pellets, a pound of boiled barley, a sizeable dollop of uncooked badger suet or if that cannot be found in your larder, fresh deer lard, diced, three diced onions, thyme, coriander, ground mace and cayenne pepper. If you saved some of the deer’s blood, that would be a major bonus. You need about two liters.
The thing about badger fat is that it is said to have proven medicinal as well as culinary qualities, if you were to believe the Frauleins Baerenklau. They not only used it as shortening in preparing cakes and pies and, of course, as the main addition to lung pie, but also swore by it as a sure-fire remedy for the flu and other common ailments. If you came down with a fever, they’d tell you to slather the stuff on your chest, pack you into blankets and then make you sweat. If you had an open sore or a boil, a liberal helping of badger fat would draw out overnight whatever caused you discomfort. It seemed to work.
Next you mince the lungs into tiny pieces, add egg batter, and a bit of gelatin, beat and blend this mess with a whisk until almost liquid and foamy. Pour this concoction into a cast-iron pot, add the blood, the diced suet and onion, spices, salt and pepper to taste. Stir and mix everything thoroughly, cover and let it rise over low heat for at least two and half hours, chill until firm, then cut the lung pie into servings. Lung pie done to perfection should be firm and be able to stand on its own on your plate without too much seepage. This savory delicacy is best with boiled cabbage or steamed rutabagas and, of course, cooked potatoes, washed down by a large bottle of Bavarian beer.
In the next issue, I was going to talk about how wool socks, used properly, can deter trespassers, but my wife, Andree, dissuaded me. She feels that particular subject is not well suited for dissemination in a community publication. My ramblings on the recycling of beer steins must also await further research. Andree thinks this tale might induce some readers to indulge in violent behavior. Perhaps, I just shouldn’t run these stories by her first.
So instead I will try to explain how you can substitute and mix other readily available fluids to overcome a lack of alcoholic beverages in a time of need, how to use your neighbor’s chicken coop to add variety to an otherwise bland breakfast and how to make ersatz coffee from readily available stand-ins.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
At Grandma's House
I remember my grandmother on my father’s side, who lived to be 96 years old and who died in the late 1950’s, as a very tall and lean women, who always wore black or dark blue. My father told me that she had worn only dark colors since the day her oldest son, my uncle Willi, was killed in Russia in 1915. She had bright gray eyes, a large aquiline nose and a high forehead and wore her hair pulled tight into a bun at the back of her head. She did not suffer fools lightly and never set foot inside a church, even though she was a Lutheran and in that day and age and in that place everyone went to church on Sunday. If you didn’t, you were a hot topic of discussion among the upstanding ladies of the village. My grandmother didn’t care, she thought them all charlatans.
Her name was Karolina. We called her Oma. Among other things that may seem odd today, she believed that the bites of red ants could cure rheumatism and relieve the pain of sciatica. She was said to demonstrate that conviction by sitting bare-assed on a live anthill, with her wide black skirt spread demurely around herself. I never witnessed this spectacle personally, but my mother swore to me she saw it with her own eyes.
Her shelves and cupboards were full of all sorts of home remedies she concocted from various wildflowers and animal parts. There were always large green or brown bottles full of ants or arnica blossoms soaking and steeping in alcohol on the window sills. Mysterious small packages, wrapped in grease-stained brown oil paper, lay stacked in her larder. They were marked in precise German script that said badger, fox, goose, crow, rabbit, hedgehog and each was a remedy for a particular ailment. She did not own an icebox or a refrigerator. She prided herself in never in her life having sought the advice of a medical doctor, whom she called quacks and alchemists. Well, very few people consulted a doctor in those days in that place.
I dreaded going to her house, because her remedies stank to high heaven or stung like hell. You didn’t want to scrape your knees in her house or come down with a cold or an upset stomach. If you think iodine stings, you should try my grandmother’s arnica. Also called leopard’s bane, she kept the yellow daisy-like flowering heads in bottles with 45% alcohol to extract whatever it was that was supposed to be good for you. She’d pour this concoction over your wound and tut-tut your screams. You’d regret if for days afterwards. The alcohol-soaked ants were a remedy to ease muscle pains. She’d slather this gross-looking smelly gunk on her neck and shoulders and swore that it rejuvenated her and eased all pains. I never got to experience that ordeal. She believed that burning nettles were good for you, because they opened the pores of your skin. You should try that particular power cure sometime, if you feel adventurous.
And her teas, which were supposed to be good for everything from the flu, bellyaches and constipation, tasted God awful. You could complain all you wanted; she made you drink the stuff regardless. She had tinctures to put on warts, lotions against hair loss, ointments for eczema, all manner of creams, salves, infusions and elixirs. They all had one thing in common. They looked, smelled and tasted vile and revolting.
She also strongly believed that walking barefoot in wet grass or submerging your feet in ice cold water for hours at a time was good for your circulation and improved your general health.
I remember one time I’d gone for an afternoon swim in one of my father’s eel ponds. Unbeknownst to me, some of the local farmers had used that pond to get rid of their dead and deceased animals to feed the eels. Anyway, a couple of days later my body was pretty much covered in open sores. Today you’d call that a severe staph infection. My grandmother took charge of my case. She taped poultices of badger and rabbit fat on those sores and in a couple of days they were gone. So maybe she knew what she was doing. The eels didn’t seem to be affected by the bacteria in the water. My father sold them to hotels and hospitals in the area and never got a complaint.
My grandmother’s house was a large two-story stone house. My grandfather had been a forester and game warden. He had build that house with money earned from his real job, for shooting roebucks, small members of the deer family, considered a nuisance by the farmers in the area. He received one gold mark for each deer shot from the owners of the land. He’d shot thousands over the years before the First World War. The house had cost him 4,000 gold marks to build in 1902. The locals considered him a man of substance. I never knew my grandfather. He passed on a year before I was born.
The house had a major downside. It stood right next to the neighbor’s pigsty. In the summer the stink was unbearable. The pigs also attracted huge armadas of flies. As you may or may not know, Germans don’t believe in window screens. They seem to interfere with the enjoyment of their view. Maybe they have adapted a more modern outlook these days, I don’t know.
I can remember my summer visits to my grandmother’s house, with all the windows open, the curtains and walls of all rooms darkened by year’s of my grandfather’s cigar and pipe smoke and speckled with fly shit, every ceiling adorned with five or six dangling, dark brown sticky fly traps and flies buzzing everywhere. My grandmother didn’t seem to notice. I couldn’t stand it there. When my mother moved into that house after my grandmother passed away, the first thing she did after the painters left was to install screens on all the windows. The locals thought she was crazy.
Her name was Karolina. We called her Oma. Among other things that may seem odd today, she believed that the bites of red ants could cure rheumatism and relieve the pain of sciatica. She was said to demonstrate that conviction by sitting bare-assed on a live anthill, with her wide black skirt spread demurely around herself. I never witnessed this spectacle personally, but my mother swore to me she saw it with her own eyes.
Her shelves and cupboards were full of all sorts of home remedies she concocted from various wildflowers and animal parts. There were always large green or brown bottles full of ants or arnica blossoms soaking and steeping in alcohol on the window sills. Mysterious small packages, wrapped in grease-stained brown oil paper, lay stacked in her larder. They were marked in precise German script that said badger, fox, goose, crow, rabbit, hedgehog and each was a remedy for a particular ailment. She did not own an icebox or a refrigerator. She prided herself in never in her life having sought the advice of a medical doctor, whom she called quacks and alchemists. Well, very few people consulted a doctor in those days in that place.
I dreaded going to her house, because her remedies stank to high heaven or stung like hell. You didn’t want to scrape your knees in her house or come down with a cold or an upset stomach. If you think iodine stings, you should try my grandmother’s arnica. Also called leopard’s bane, she kept the yellow daisy-like flowering heads in bottles with 45% alcohol to extract whatever it was that was supposed to be good for you. She’d pour this concoction over your wound and tut-tut your screams. You’d regret if for days afterwards. The alcohol-soaked ants were a remedy to ease muscle pains. She’d slather this gross-looking smelly gunk on her neck and shoulders and swore that it rejuvenated her and eased all pains. I never got to experience that ordeal. She believed that burning nettles were good for you, because they opened the pores of your skin. You should try that particular power cure sometime, if you feel adventurous.
And her teas, which were supposed to be good for everything from the flu, bellyaches and constipation, tasted God awful. You could complain all you wanted; she made you drink the stuff regardless. She had tinctures to put on warts, lotions against hair loss, ointments for eczema, all manner of creams, salves, infusions and elixirs. They all had one thing in common. They looked, smelled and tasted vile and revolting.
She also strongly believed that walking barefoot in wet grass or submerging your feet in ice cold water for hours at a time was good for your circulation and improved your general health.
I remember one time I’d gone for an afternoon swim in one of my father’s eel ponds. Unbeknownst to me, some of the local farmers had used that pond to get rid of their dead and deceased animals to feed the eels. Anyway, a couple of days later my body was pretty much covered in open sores. Today you’d call that a severe staph infection. My grandmother took charge of my case. She taped poultices of badger and rabbit fat on those sores and in a couple of days they were gone. So maybe she knew what she was doing. The eels didn’t seem to be affected by the bacteria in the water. My father sold them to hotels and hospitals in the area and never got a complaint.
My grandmother’s house was a large two-story stone house. My grandfather had been a forester and game warden. He had build that house with money earned from his real job, for shooting roebucks, small members of the deer family, considered a nuisance by the farmers in the area. He received one gold mark for each deer shot from the owners of the land. He’d shot thousands over the years before the First World War. The house had cost him 4,000 gold marks to build in 1902. The locals considered him a man of substance. I never knew my grandfather. He passed on a year before I was born.
The house had a major downside. It stood right next to the neighbor’s pigsty. In the summer the stink was unbearable. The pigs also attracted huge armadas of flies. As you may or may not know, Germans don’t believe in window screens. They seem to interfere with the enjoyment of their view. Maybe they have adapted a more modern outlook these days, I don’t know.
I can remember my summer visits to my grandmother’s house, with all the windows open, the curtains and walls of all rooms darkened by year’s of my grandfather’s cigar and pipe smoke and speckled with fly shit, every ceiling adorned with five or six dangling, dark brown sticky fly traps and flies buzzing everywhere. My grandmother didn’t seem to notice. I couldn’t stand it there. When my mother moved into that house after my grandmother passed away, the first thing she did after the painters left was to install screens on all the windows. The locals thought she was crazy.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Of Shared Baths And Frozen Crappers
In my last foray into recycling in the old days, I reminisced about the second life of cigarette butts. This time around, I want to reflect on how you can reduce your carbon footprint by re-using your bath water and address alternatives to toilet paper that were the norm in post-war Germany and which you might want to consider, should the need arise. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.
We lived in a house that had been built in 1349 and it showed its age. This was a massive three-story stone affair with walls six feet thick and one toilet that emptied unto the steep hill behind the house and down into the creek in the valley below. There was no septic tank, no drainage field, no formal sewage system at all. Over the centuries, the back wall had sprung deep cracks, some of them big enough for birds to nest in them. My parents and I shared this house with four refugee families. There were 15 people in all, including the three of us.
We occupied half of the second floor. Our bathroom was not a bathroom in the North American sense of the word. It lacked a toilet, only contained a washstand with running cold water and an old-fashioned claw-footed metal bathtub connected to a wood-heated hot water tank. This meant that if you wanted to take a hot bath, you had to lug up armloads of firewood from the shed in the yard downstairs, light and tend a wood fire underneath the tank to heat the water and wait for at least two hours for that water to be hot enough to use.
There was no shower. Showers were not a German thing then. Real men didn’t use deodorant. Most women didn’t either. Women also didn’t shave their armpits or their legs. B.O. also was not a bad thing. Everyone stank equally, which cancelled out the discomfort of objectionable smells. You simply didn’t realize that you reeked. I discovered this secret only when I stepped off the boat in Hoboken, New Jersey, and suddenly found myself isolated with my peculiar, and I‘d say, dank bouquet.
Naturally, baths were a luxury reserved for every other Saturday evening, whether you needed one or not. The first one in, usually my mother, had the luxury of clean hot water. My father came next, using the same slightly less-hot bath water and, finally, it was my turn in the by now lukewarm, twice pre-used, grey water. The refugees, who shared this house with us, did not have access to our bathroom. I don’t know where or whether they bathed.
You might want to consider this method of saving and reusing water in view of the rising cost of water and our recurring water shortages on Saturna. Try it. I can truly recommend it, if you’re not the squeamish type. It’s cozy. It brings the family closer together. It also creates an urgency to get on with it, before the water turns cold, with the result that you waste less soap. And, in case you’re worried about the effects on your general health, nobody came down with boils, suffered excessive hair loss or broke out in a debilitating rash.
And speaking of the importance of water, let me acquaint you with a German invention with which you may not be familiar. This was at a time when there were few of the amenities we now take for granted and those that existed were rather basic. And yet, the idea of recycling and re-using was front and center, even under those dire circumstances.
One of the doorways off the hall on the second floor of our abode opened to the only washroom in the house. This was a tiny tiled space, maybe five feet square. It had a 12-foot ceiling and a tall, very narrow opaque-painted window. None of the windows in the house had storm windows. In the winter, the wind usually whistled right through, causing the curtains to ghost out into the room. It was freezing in there. This comfort station contained one of those truly German crappers, which sports a presentation shelf inside, so that you could inspect and admire your creation before flushing it down the drain. About seven feet above this contraption hung a white enameled metal cistern, which held about a gallon of water and a chain pulley. A pipe connected it to the toilet bowl below. You pulled the chain and the water would rush down through the pipe, hit your production – patiently waiting on its ledge – with full force, splatter everything against the inside front of the bowl and on down the chute and out the wall in back and down the hill. There was no water faucet or washbasin to wash your hands. Obviously, the back of the house was not a good place to be at any time, but especially not in the summer when it got hot and putrid back there.
If you wanted to use the toilet in winter, you’d better bring a large pot of boiling water to thaw out the ice in the cistern and pipes. Even then the process was iffy and the water could be slow making its way down the frozen pipes. Sometimes, on very cold days, you could pull all you wanted on the chain and nothing happened. I used to forget the hot water on purpose sometimes, just to listen to the pleas and, more likely, multi-lingual maledictions of the refugees, who were left to clean up the mess, if they didn’t want the bowl to overflow.
Keep in mind, the water had to be brought to a boil on the kitchen stove, before you could take it to the toilet. The refugees, other than Frau Smetma, who lived downstairs in the old feudal kitchen, did not have kitchen stoves, only electric cooking coils. In other words, going to the bathroom in our house in winter had to be, by necessity, a thoughtful and well-planned process, never spur of the moment. It required timing to avoid the queue outside the door.
The other thing about this john was that we’re talking about a time that was pre-toilet paper. Maybe there was toilet paper available elsewhere, but not in our village. There was no such thing as Charmin or soft 4-ply paper available in our stores. The tool of choice was the weekly newspaper, with each page meticulously cut into eight equal pieces, each about six inches square and stuck on a nail in the wall. You had to crumple it before use. I don’t get nostalgic about that, because newsprint is rough on your behind, it tears easy and the ink comes off. It also tends to smear and could be painful, even distressing, if God forbid, you suffered from piles or hemorrhoids. It also doesn’t clean very well.
Then there was the German hang-up about wastefulness. The use of multiple squares of paper was frowned upon as a waste of scarce resources. There was after all only one newspaper per week for the 15 people in the house. Our local broadsheet was a thin affair, sixteen pages at most or 128 squares for the paper spike per week. That meant 18 squares per day for 15 people. That also meant that you were pretty much restricted to at most one visit per day. How German is that! Not much room for error either. God help you, if you were afflicted by “the dreaded diarrhee,” as some of the refugees used to call it.
The refugees never contributed paper to the communal toilet. Their only involvement in this process, other than the actual use, was that the sisters Baerenklau, three spinsters who lived on the third floor, collected the paper from my father each Monday, read it and then cut it up into appropriate squares for spiking. They were also the ones who supervised the daily count of the spiked paper squares to make sure no one took more than their share for their ablutions – one per visit. They’d confront and berate the miscreant who didn’t stick to the prescribed number. That usually was me.
I did like the educational aspect of using newspapers on the crapper. I loved to read. Sometimes I got so engrossed in trying to read a particular story and piecing it back together from the squares spiked on the wall – they were never in the right sequence - that I forgot about the time and would be rudely interrupted by pounding on the door. This cozy arrangement led to line-ups and to sometimes-loud arguments that only ended when my father shouted from his office that if they didn’t shut up, he’d shoot them all.
Think about all the trees that could be saved and the impact that would have on global warming, if we forsook toilet paper and re-used the Times Colonist, for example. It would probably delay the catastrophe everyone is predicting by at least a year or two and give that particular newspaper a use it deserves. Food for thought. I’m hoping, though, that for hygienic reasons we’d be able to agree on more than one square per person per use.
In future issues, I will endeavor to teach you how to make shampoo out of undiluted birch sap, how to re-use paper towels, thus doubling their lifespan and how to use a wool sock to drive off trespassers. I plan also to let you in on the secret of how to raid your neighbor’s chicken coop, without getting fingered as the culprit, share a recipe for the use of deer innards in a gourmet meal and give you some well-tested pointers on ways to re-use a beer stein, once you emptied it of its contents.
We lived in a house that had been built in 1349 and it showed its age. This was a massive three-story stone affair with walls six feet thick and one toilet that emptied unto the steep hill behind the house and down into the creek in the valley below. There was no septic tank, no drainage field, no formal sewage system at all. Over the centuries, the back wall had sprung deep cracks, some of them big enough for birds to nest in them. My parents and I shared this house with four refugee families. There were 15 people in all, including the three of us.
We occupied half of the second floor. Our bathroom was not a bathroom in the North American sense of the word. It lacked a toilet, only contained a washstand with running cold water and an old-fashioned claw-footed metal bathtub connected to a wood-heated hot water tank. This meant that if you wanted to take a hot bath, you had to lug up armloads of firewood from the shed in the yard downstairs, light and tend a wood fire underneath the tank to heat the water and wait for at least two hours for that water to be hot enough to use.
There was no shower. Showers were not a German thing then. Real men didn’t use deodorant. Most women didn’t either. Women also didn’t shave their armpits or their legs. B.O. also was not a bad thing. Everyone stank equally, which cancelled out the discomfort of objectionable smells. You simply didn’t realize that you reeked. I discovered this secret only when I stepped off the boat in Hoboken, New Jersey, and suddenly found myself isolated with my peculiar, and I‘d say, dank bouquet.
Naturally, baths were a luxury reserved for every other Saturday evening, whether you needed one or not. The first one in, usually my mother, had the luxury of clean hot water. My father came next, using the same slightly less-hot bath water and, finally, it was my turn in the by now lukewarm, twice pre-used, grey water. The refugees, who shared this house with us, did not have access to our bathroom. I don’t know where or whether they bathed.
You might want to consider this method of saving and reusing water in view of the rising cost of water and our recurring water shortages on Saturna. Try it. I can truly recommend it, if you’re not the squeamish type. It’s cozy. It brings the family closer together. It also creates an urgency to get on with it, before the water turns cold, with the result that you waste less soap. And, in case you’re worried about the effects on your general health, nobody came down with boils, suffered excessive hair loss or broke out in a debilitating rash.
And speaking of the importance of water, let me acquaint you with a German invention with which you may not be familiar. This was at a time when there were few of the amenities we now take for granted and those that existed were rather basic. And yet, the idea of recycling and re-using was front and center, even under those dire circumstances.
One of the doorways off the hall on the second floor of our abode opened to the only washroom in the house. This was a tiny tiled space, maybe five feet square. It had a 12-foot ceiling and a tall, very narrow opaque-painted window. None of the windows in the house had storm windows. In the winter, the wind usually whistled right through, causing the curtains to ghost out into the room. It was freezing in there. This comfort station contained one of those truly German crappers, which sports a presentation shelf inside, so that you could inspect and admire your creation before flushing it down the drain. About seven feet above this contraption hung a white enameled metal cistern, which held about a gallon of water and a chain pulley. A pipe connected it to the toilet bowl below. You pulled the chain and the water would rush down through the pipe, hit your production – patiently waiting on its ledge – with full force, splatter everything against the inside front of the bowl and on down the chute and out the wall in back and down the hill. There was no water faucet or washbasin to wash your hands. Obviously, the back of the house was not a good place to be at any time, but especially not in the summer when it got hot and putrid back there.
If you wanted to use the toilet in winter, you’d better bring a large pot of boiling water to thaw out the ice in the cistern and pipes. Even then the process was iffy and the water could be slow making its way down the frozen pipes. Sometimes, on very cold days, you could pull all you wanted on the chain and nothing happened. I used to forget the hot water on purpose sometimes, just to listen to the pleas and, more likely, multi-lingual maledictions of the refugees, who were left to clean up the mess, if they didn’t want the bowl to overflow.
Keep in mind, the water had to be brought to a boil on the kitchen stove, before you could take it to the toilet. The refugees, other than Frau Smetma, who lived downstairs in the old feudal kitchen, did not have kitchen stoves, only electric cooking coils. In other words, going to the bathroom in our house in winter had to be, by necessity, a thoughtful and well-planned process, never spur of the moment. It required timing to avoid the queue outside the door.
The other thing about this john was that we’re talking about a time that was pre-toilet paper. Maybe there was toilet paper available elsewhere, but not in our village. There was no such thing as Charmin or soft 4-ply paper available in our stores. The tool of choice was the weekly newspaper, with each page meticulously cut into eight equal pieces, each about six inches square and stuck on a nail in the wall. You had to crumple it before use. I don’t get nostalgic about that, because newsprint is rough on your behind, it tears easy and the ink comes off. It also tends to smear and could be painful, even distressing, if God forbid, you suffered from piles or hemorrhoids. It also doesn’t clean very well.
Then there was the German hang-up about wastefulness. The use of multiple squares of paper was frowned upon as a waste of scarce resources. There was after all only one newspaper per week for the 15 people in the house. Our local broadsheet was a thin affair, sixteen pages at most or 128 squares for the paper spike per week. That meant 18 squares per day for 15 people. That also meant that you were pretty much restricted to at most one visit per day. How German is that! Not much room for error either. God help you, if you were afflicted by “the dreaded diarrhee,” as some of the refugees used to call it.
The refugees never contributed paper to the communal toilet. Their only involvement in this process, other than the actual use, was that the sisters Baerenklau, three spinsters who lived on the third floor, collected the paper from my father each Monday, read it and then cut it up into appropriate squares for spiking. They were also the ones who supervised the daily count of the spiked paper squares to make sure no one took more than their share for their ablutions – one per visit. They’d confront and berate the miscreant who didn’t stick to the prescribed number. That usually was me.
I did like the educational aspect of using newspapers on the crapper. I loved to read. Sometimes I got so engrossed in trying to read a particular story and piecing it back together from the squares spiked on the wall – they were never in the right sequence - that I forgot about the time and would be rudely interrupted by pounding on the door. This cozy arrangement led to line-ups and to sometimes-loud arguments that only ended when my father shouted from his office that if they didn’t shut up, he’d shoot them all.
Think about all the trees that could be saved and the impact that would have on global warming, if we forsook toilet paper and re-used the Times Colonist, for example. It would probably delay the catastrophe everyone is predicting by at least a year or two and give that particular newspaper a use it deserves. Food for thought. I’m hoping, though, that for hygienic reasons we’d be able to agree on more than one square per person per use.
In future issues, I will endeavor to teach you how to make shampoo out of undiluted birch sap, how to re-use paper towels, thus doubling their lifespan and how to use a wool sock to drive off trespassers. I plan also to let you in on the secret of how to raid your neighbor’s chicken coop, without getting fingered as the culprit, share a recipe for the use of deer innards in a gourmet meal and give you some well-tested pointers on ways to re-use a beer stein, once you emptied it of its contents.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Kilroy Was Here
Most six- or ten-year-olds in my day had heroes, mostly cartoon or comic book heroes like Spiderman or Superman. My hero was Kilroy. You may not remember Kilroy or even know who he was. Let me give you a quick primer. Kilroy was our liberator, who freed us from the yoke of the Nazis, after bombing the crap out of the place first, of course. Kilroy was our Simon Bolivar, our George Washington. He morphed into my Svengali, subtlely and unnoticeably, at first, but soon had me under his complete influence and sway.
There was nothing sinister in this conversion. I was a willing acolyte. I bought into his spiel with an open heart and without coercion. I loved the attention. My infatuation with Kilroy grew when I became a teenager. Jazz and rock’n’roll replaced Hershey bars and hot chocolate. Kilroy became Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Bill Haley, Chubby Checkers and, of course, Elvis Presley. I had all their singles. My father despaired over my playing be-bop and jitterbug and rock-a-billy. He called it “Neger-Musik” and couldn’t understand why his youngest son would possibly listen to something so foreign and unstructured and “un-deutsch.”
This is the story of my relationship with Kilroy. It opens in the year zero, the year the war and our old life ended and our new life began. The year of the apocalypse. 1945. This is the year in which I first betrayed the country of my birth for a couple of Hershey bars, a few sticks of chewing gum, some slices of white bread and a few mugs of hot chocolate. You might say that I was bought off cheap. I look at it as a kind of religious conversion, as one of Kilroy’s unmitigated success stories.
It begins when the American graffiti ‘Kilroy was here’ replaced the swastikas and Nazi slogans on the busted walls and toppled columns of German cities. The war was over and ‘Hitler kaput’, like the cities, the Jews and Germany (what the hell was that anyway?). Instead Kilroy came to teach us about chewing gum and baseball and jitterbug and jazz and Coca Cola and words like democracy and the pursuit of happiness, whatever that was. ‘Kilroy was here’ were three words as splendid to us as those famous three words from the French revolution, on which Kilroy lectured us. Kilroy de-nazified us, re-educated us, became our best friend. All this, while I slept on red sheets, from which my mother had cut and burned the white circle with the four times broken black cross.
Here’s how Kilroy achieved this feat. Every week on Wednesday, the U.S. Military Government dispatched a ¾ ton truck with two soldiers to our village, whose job it was to re-educate us kids. To teach us about democracy, the triumph of good over evil, how bad the Nazis were.
Their plan was simple. They set up a movie projector and screen in our classroom and showed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons and U.S. newsreels. The cartoons were in black and white and in English and we couldn’t understand a word, but they were still pretty funny. The best part was that if we watched the cartoons, we received a mug of hot chocolate and a bun. We loved that hot chocolate. It tasted delicious. We had never tasted chocolate before. And white bread was something we’d never seen before either. It was exotic. White bread and chocolate was what America was all about to us. And sometimes, when we clapped really loud at the end of the show, the Americans would give us Hershey bars and chewing gum. They had to explain to us that you didn’t eat gum or we would have swallowed it whole. We all wanted to go to America and drink hot chocolate and eat white bread and chew gum every day, all day. For me it was an epiphany.
Let me put into perspective why those Hershey bars were such a big deal. During the war and the first three or four years after, not even Christmas was an occasion for special gifts. Typical Christmas presents for me and, I imagine, for most kids in that part of the world, were a handful of Filberts or walnuts, a bag of apples and, after the war, perhaps an orange (singular). There were no toys, no candy, nothing as exotic as chocolate. And we looked forward to those gifts. They were a big deal. We were happy with what we got, because the alternative was nothing.
Most of the kids I grew up with received no gifts at all. If they were lucky, they had a Christmas tree, with real candles, by the way. Birthdays were not celebrated – no birthday gifts. To receive a chocolate bar was a memorable occasion. To receive it from foreigners, who we’d been told were bloody killers of women and children, who were savages, whom we were told to fear and hate, was quite extraordinary.
It wasn’t that our bread tasted bad. It was just that it was made with rye flour, which sometimes was mixed with wood fiber (speak: sawdust) to stretch it. It came in six-pound round loaves, which my mother baked every other Saturday in the communal bread oven. Before I knew about white bread, I thought my mother’s bread tasted pretty good. But once I discovered Kilroy’s buns, it was all over for me with the rye bread. Rye bread was heavy and dark and it sat in your belly like a rock and made you feel stuffed. Since butter was hard to come by, I used to spread the cooled thick scum from boiled whole milk on a slice of rye bread to make it go down easier and to take the taste of sawdust away. Sometimes, for a special treat, my mother let me spread a little brown sugar on top of the scum. This scum tasted pretty good on rye, but it couldn’t compete with the flavor of those buns. You didn’t need anything with them, no milk scum, no sugar. They were soft and tasty. The hot chocolate was a bonus. Of course, you had to be there for the head count prior to the showing of the cartoons. If you missed that, no hot chocolate, no white bun.
We didn’t care about their rationale behind their gifts. We were happy. This is how Kilroy first corrupted us. From then on, we believed America and Americans were number one and our true friends. The misery of our past as forgotten, replaced by our longing for the next Wednesday morning.
Kilroy did such a terrific selling job that he coaxed me to live in his land of milk and honey and Hershey bars and Disneyland. Kilroy’s land became mine. He shared his magnificent home with me. He made me his brother. My past disappeared, replaced by the American dream, Camelot, the Promised Land. Kilroy offered me freedom and safety, a place in the sun. Kilroy and I became one and the same. Bound together by identical hopes and goals. Kilroy came to represent the white knight in shining armor, who rode forth to slay the wicked dragons of, first, fascism and then bolshevism. Kilroy’s hard work had paid off, at least for this ignorant kraut.
This unabashed enthusiasm for all things American dimmed only when Kilroy strapped himself into his B-52, loaded it with napalm and disappeared into the setting sun to write ‘Kilroy was here’ on the broken walls of pagodas and the ruins of other ancient cities.
This really tested our friendship and for several years I was adrift. I felt betrayed. Then I realized that there is no such thing as Camelot, that my American dream was no more than that, a dream, a veneer that hid some ugly truths. I understood that America was really no different from Europe. Only the context was different. It was a bit of a rude awakening for me. But I came to terms with my disappointment. I decided that I had to look out for myself and couldn’t afford to mope around. I had to concentrate on getting ahead with my own life and forget about the fake ideals Kilroy had imbued in me all those years ago. I guess I had graduated from the enthusiasm for and wonderment about the America of my youth to the reality of life on the ground, with all its pimples and boils. Our friendship fizzled.
There was nothing sinister in this conversion. I was a willing acolyte. I bought into his spiel with an open heart and without coercion. I loved the attention. My infatuation with Kilroy grew when I became a teenager. Jazz and rock’n’roll replaced Hershey bars and hot chocolate. Kilroy became Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Bill Haley, Chubby Checkers and, of course, Elvis Presley. I had all their singles. My father despaired over my playing be-bop and jitterbug and rock-a-billy. He called it “Neger-Musik” and couldn’t understand why his youngest son would possibly listen to something so foreign and unstructured and “un-deutsch.”
This is the story of my relationship with Kilroy. It opens in the year zero, the year the war and our old life ended and our new life began. The year of the apocalypse. 1945. This is the year in which I first betrayed the country of my birth for a couple of Hershey bars, a few sticks of chewing gum, some slices of white bread and a few mugs of hot chocolate. You might say that I was bought off cheap. I look at it as a kind of religious conversion, as one of Kilroy’s unmitigated success stories.
It begins when the American graffiti ‘Kilroy was here’ replaced the swastikas and Nazi slogans on the busted walls and toppled columns of German cities. The war was over and ‘Hitler kaput’, like the cities, the Jews and Germany (what the hell was that anyway?). Instead Kilroy came to teach us about chewing gum and baseball and jitterbug and jazz and Coca Cola and words like democracy and the pursuit of happiness, whatever that was. ‘Kilroy was here’ were three words as splendid to us as those famous three words from the French revolution, on which Kilroy lectured us. Kilroy de-nazified us, re-educated us, became our best friend. All this, while I slept on red sheets, from which my mother had cut and burned the white circle with the four times broken black cross.
Here’s how Kilroy achieved this feat. Every week on Wednesday, the U.S. Military Government dispatched a ¾ ton truck with two soldiers to our village, whose job it was to re-educate us kids. To teach us about democracy, the triumph of good over evil, how bad the Nazis were.
Their plan was simple. They set up a movie projector and screen in our classroom and showed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons and U.S. newsreels. The cartoons were in black and white and in English and we couldn’t understand a word, but they were still pretty funny. The best part was that if we watched the cartoons, we received a mug of hot chocolate and a bun. We loved that hot chocolate. It tasted delicious. We had never tasted chocolate before. And white bread was something we’d never seen before either. It was exotic. White bread and chocolate was what America was all about to us. And sometimes, when we clapped really loud at the end of the show, the Americans would give us Hershey bars and chewing gum. They had to explain to us that you didn’t eat gum or we would have swallowed it whole. We all wanted to go to America and drink hot chocolate and eat white bread and chew gum every day, all day. For me it was an epiphany.
Let me put into perspective why those Hershey bars were such a big deal. During the war and the first three or four years after, not even Christmas was an occasion for special gifts. Typical Christmas presents for me and, I imagine, for most kids in that part of the world, were a handful of Filberts or walnuts, a bag of apples and, after the war, perhaps an orange (singular). There were no toys, no candy, nothing as exotic as chocolate. And we looked forward to those gifts. They were a big deal. We were happy with what we got, because the alternative was nothing.
Most of the kids I grew up with received no gifts at all. If they were lucky, they had a Christmas tree, with real candles, by the way. Birthdays were not celebrated – no birthday gifts. To receive a chocolate bar was a memorable occasion. To receive it from foreigners, who we’d been told were bloody killers of women and children, who were savages, whom we were told to fear and hate, was quite extraordinary.
It wasn’t that our bread tasted bad. It was just that it was made with rye flour, which sometimes was mixed with wood fiber (speak: sawdust) to stretch it. It came in six-pound round loaves, which my mother baked every other Saturday in the communal bread oven. Before I knew about white bread, I thought my mother’s bread tasted pretty good. But once I discovered Kilroy’s buns, it was all over for me with the rye bread. Rye bread was heavy and dark and it sat in your belly like a rock and made you feel stuffed. Since butter was hard to come by, I used to spread the cooled thick scum from boiled whole milk on a slice of rye bread to make it go down easier and to take the taste of sawdust away. Sometimes, for a special treat, my mother let me spread a little brown sugar on top of the scum. This scum tasted pretty good on rye, but it couldn’t compete with the flavor of those buns. You didn’t need anything with them, no milk scum, no sugar. They were soft and tasty. The hot chocolate was a bonus. Of course, you had to be there for the head count prior to the showing of the cartoons. If you missed that, no hot chocolate, no white bun.
We didn’t care about their rationale behind their gifts. We were happy. This is how Kilroy first corrupted us. From then on, we believed America and Americans were number one and our true friends. The misery of our past as forgotten, replaced by our longing for the next Wednesday morning.
Kilroy did such a terrific selling job that he coaxed me to live in his land of milk and honey and Hershey bars and Disneyland. Kilroy’s land became mine. He shared his magnificent home with me. He made me his brother. My past disappeared, replaced by the American dream, Camelot, the Promised Land. Kilroy offered me freedom and safety, a place in the sun. Kilroy and I became one and the same. Bound together by identical hopes and goals. Kilroy came to represent the white knight in shining armor, who rode forth to slay the wicked dragons of, first, fascism and then bolshevism. Kilroy’s hard work had paid off, at least for this ignorant kraut.
This unabashed enthusiasm for all things American dimmed only when Kilroy strapped himself into his B-52, loaded it with napalm and disappeared into the setting sun to write ‘Kilroy was here’ on the broken walls of pagodas and the ruins of other ancient cities.
This really tested our friendship and for several years I was adrift. I felt betrayed. Then I realized that there is no such thing as Camelot, that my American dream was no more than that, a dream, a veneer that hid some ugly truths. I understood that America was really no different from Europe. Only the context was different. It was a bit of a rude awakening for me. But I came to terms with my disappointment. I decided that I had to look out for myself and couldn’t afford to mope around. I had to concentrate on getting ahead with my own life and forget about the fake ideals Kilroy had imbued in me all those years ago. I guess I had graduated from the enthusiasm for and wonderment about the America of my youth to the reality of life on the ground, with all its pimples and boils. Our friendship fizzled.
Friday, June 6, 2008
On The Necessities Of Life
Enough about exotic foods, lack of sanitation and filthy habits. You must think that I spent my childhood in the gutter. Perhaps I did, when viewed from these enlightened shores. Today I want to show you that when you’re thirsty, or more correctly, when that demon rum has got you in his grip, necessity becomes the mother of invention. On Saturna, this problem is easily solved. You simply go to the General Store and you stock up on your favorite libation. I, however, have been in places for prolonged periods of time where there was no liquor store or any kind of a store, for that matter. If the urge for a stiff shot of something strong grabbed you by the throat there, you had to make do with what was at hand. This was in the military and if any of you have ever served in Uncle Sam’s army, you know that there are some things you will never be short of, like time, ammunition, gasoline, food, Coca Cola. Liquor, however, was not one of them.
Some of my buddies were convinced that if you strained gasoline through the charcoal of your gas mask filter, it took out most of the toxic ingredients like lead and the red coloring agent added to military gasoline to identify and differentiate it from the civilian version and some of the other unhealthy petroleum by-products you find in gasoline. If you mixed two parts of this charcoal-filtered gas with five parts of Coca Cola and added a dash of pepper, you had a concoction that would give you a pretty good jolt, as did butane, when filtered and mixed with Coca Cola. Some preferred sniffing formaldehyde. I favored charcoal-filtered Aqua Velva and Brut, which also went well with Coke. Of course, our gas masks were useless after that without the filter, but we didn’t think we’d ever need them for protection. Today, I’m surprised no one died from drinking this lethal soup, but, on the other hand, there were plenty of other causes in that place that could send you home in a body bag.
I don’t know why, because it is totally unrelated, but this talk about liquor makes me hungry for the taste of raw eggs. When I was a child, our next-door neighbor on the right was a farmer named Birkenbach. Herr Birkenbach had been in the Nazi’s bad books, because in 1944 he had plowed his fields on May Day, a high Nazi holiday, on which no one was allowed to work and the faithful were expected to goose-step, wave the flag, sing patriotic songs and listen to some Nazi bigwig’s lies. Herr Birkenbach had to pay a hefty fine and he was marked as an enemy of the people. Only the fact that four of his sons were fighting in Russia saved him from being sent to a concentration camp. The Birkenbach’s was a sizeable dairy farm. Their youngest son, Richard, was a year older than I and we were best friends.
Richard taught me how to eat eggs raw. We’d sneak into their chicken coop, liberate a couple of eggs, pierce one end with a needle and suck out the innards. They didn’t taste as bad as it sounds, as long as they weren’t fertilized. To fool his mother, we scattered the broken shells outside the coop and tossed bits of fox or badger hair from my father’s hunting trophies about, so it looked like a fox or badger had had a go at the chickens.
My mother regularly bought fresh eggs and milk from them, that is, until Herr Birkenbach’s May Day problems. After that, they refused to sell to us and Richard was no longer allowed to play with me, because they thought my father had denounced them.
The reason they believed that is that we were not locals. And more importantly, we were Protestants, Lutherans to be exact, and everyone else was Catholic. The villagers thought of us as heretics. My friend Richard confided to me once that their priest had told them that Lutherans were apostates and beset by the devil and that we grew horns and had a forked penis. Richard didn’t believe the line about the horns. He’d obviously checked me out and found none, but insisted on seeing my penis to make sure it wasn’t forked.
Anyone who wasn’t from there was a foreigner and to be mistrusted. So it must have been the foreigners who denounced Herr Birkenbach. They told my mother that there was no more milk for her. This meant that for the last year of the war, we had to buy what passed for milk in the store with ration cards. I remember it well. It was thin and looked blue and tasted like shit.
It was January 1945, before someone in the local Nazi Party office, who saw the end nearing and wanted to cover his ass, told Herr Birkenbach who really had denounced him. My father accepted his apologies. My mother and I never talked to them again.
However, the Birkenbach’s chicken coop became a source of non-rationed food for us after the end of the war. For most people, 4:30 in the morning, that hour before dawn, is a time when the mind is far from its sharpest, when reflexes are slowest, the brain idles in neutral and when the world is at its bleakest. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been at my peak early in the morning. The hour before dawn is a very significant hour. People say that more folks die and more babies start the last stage of their journey into this world at that particular hour than at any other. It’s the witching hour. It’s the best time for an ambush, for a raid.
Most mornings, just before daybreak, I would sneak next door to the Birkenbach’s farm, into their hay barn, lift a loose board and squeeze into the adjacent chicken coop. The chickens, of course, would go berserk. You had to be quick, grab three or four eggs, strew some bits of carnivore hair about and get the hell out before one of the Birkenbachs, usually the missus, showed up to catch the thief. My father’s fox and badger pelts began to look pretty ratty. They never caught me. They did complain to my father about the foxes and badgers that regularly seemed to raid their chicken coop and asked him to shoot them. He told them that he was not allowed to carry a gun by order of the allied military government and couldn’t help them.
We ate eggs for breakfast and no one asked me to explain the origin of those eggs. My father had misgivings and I once overheard him talking to my mother about it and asking her where she got eggs almost every day, since he knew she was not on speaking terms with the Birkenbachs. My mother told him to enjoy his breakfast and not to worry, that God was providing.
Some of my buddies were convinced that if you strained gasoline through the charcoal of your gas mask filter, it took out most of the toxic ingredients like lead and the red coloring agent added to military gasoline to identify and differentiate it from the civilian version and some of the other unhealthy petroleum by-products you find in gasoline. If you mixed two parts of this charcoal-filtered gas with five parts of Coca Cola and added a dash of pepper, you had a concoction that would give you a pretty good jolt, as did butane, when filtered and mixed with Coca Cola. Some preferred sniffing formaldehyde. I favored charcoal-filtered Aqua Velva and Brut, which also went well with Coke. Of course, our gas masks were useless after that without the filter, but we didn’t think we’d ever need them for protection. Today, I’m surprised no one died from drinking this lethal soup, but, on the other hand, there were plenty of other causes in that place that could send you home in a body bag.
I don’t know why, because it is totally unrelated, but this talk about liquor makes me hungry for the taste of raw eggs. When I was a child, our next-door neighbor on the right was a farmer named Birkenbach. Herr Birkenbach had been in the Nazi’s bad books, because in 1944 he had plowed his fields on May Day, a high Nazi holiday, on which no one was allowed to work and the faithful were expected to goose-step, wave the flag, sing patriotic songs and listen to some Nazi bigwig’s lies. Herr Birkenbach had to pay a hefty fine and he was marked as an enemy of the people. Only the fact that four of his sons were fighting in Russia saved him from being sent to a concentration camp. The Birkenbach’s was a sizeable dairy farm. Their youngest son, Richard, was a year older than I and we were best friends.
Richard taught me how to eat eggs raw. We’d sneak into their chicken coop, liberate a couple of eggs, pierce one end with a needle and suck out the innards. They didn’t taste as bad as it sounds, as long as they weren’t fertilized. To fool his mother, we scattered the broken shells outside the coop and tossed bits of fox or badger hair from my father’s hunting trophies about, so it looked like a fox or badger had had a go at the chickens.
My mother regularly bought fresh eggs and milk from them, that is, until Herr Birkenbach’s May Day problems. After that, they refused to sell to us and Richard was no longer allowed to play with me, because they thought my father had denounced them.
The reason they believed that is that we were not locals. And more importantly, we were Protestants, Lutherans to be exact, and everyone else was Catholic. The villagers thought of us as heretics. My friend Richard confided to me once that their priest had told them that Lutherans were apostates and beset by the devil and that we grew horns and had a forked penis. Richard didn’t believe the line about the horns. He’d obviously checked me out and found none, but insisted on seeing my penis to make sure it wasn’t forked.
Anyone who wasn’t from there was a foreigner and to be mistrusted. So it must have been the foreigners who denounced Herr Birkenbach. They told my mother that there was no more milk for her. This meant that for the last year of the war, we had to buy what passed for milk in the store with ration cards. I remember it well. It was thin and looked blue and tasted like shit.
It was January 1945, before someone in the local Nazi Party office, who saw the end nearing and wanted to cover his ass, told Herr Birkenbach who really had denounced him. My father accepted his apologies. My mother and I never talked to them again.
However, the Birkenbach’s chicken coop became a source of non-rationed food for us after the end of the war. For most people, 4:30 in the morning, that hour before dawn, is a time when the mind is far from its sharpest, when reflexes are slowest, the brain idles in neutral and when the world is at its bleakest. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been at my peak early in the morning. The hour before dawn is a very significant hour. People say that more folks die and more babies start the last stage of their journey into this world at that particular hour than at any other. It’s the witching hour. It’s the best time for an ambush, for a raid.
Most mornings, just before daybreak, I would sneak next door to the Birkenbach’s farm, into their hay barn, lift a loose board and squeeze into the adjacent chicken coop. The chickens, of course, would go berserk. You had to be quick, grab three or four eggs, strew some bits of carnivore hair about and get the hell out before one of the Birkenbachs, usually the missus, showed up to catch the thief. My father’s fox and badger pelts began to look pretty ratty. They never caught me. They did complain to my father about the foxes and badgers that regularly seemed to raid their chicken coop and asked him to shoot them. He told them that he was not allowed to carry a gun by order of the allied military government and couldn’t help them.
We ate eggs for breakfast and no one asked me to explain the origin of those eggs. My father had misgivings and I once overheard him talking to my mother about it and asking her where she got eggs almost every day, since he knew she was not on speaking terms with the Birkenbachs. My mother told him to enjoy his breakfast and not to worry, that God was providing.
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