Some call hunting a vile blood sport and think it should be banned. I think that’s an ignorant argument, which shows that those opposed to hunting haven’t spent much time in the woods and they’ve probably never been hungry. I wonder, as they are chowing down on their New York sirloin, what they think happens in a slaughterhouse. Perhaps they should visit one sometimes, if they think hunting is barbaric.
Let’s get this straight, hunting is not a sport. If you want sport, try skeet or trap shooting. Hunting is about putting food on the table. If you can’t eat it, don’t shoot it, unless it’s a fox or coyote skulking around your chicken coop. Then, by all means, let ‘em have it. Hunting is pretty much the same the world over. The only major difference I’ve found is that there is a total absence of peasants in North America. I don’t know why this is so. I was brought up to believe that for a successful hunt, you needed peasants. And the peasants needed the money this job paid.
The closest thing to peasants I’ve seen here are migrant workers. But they never seem to be around when you need them. Maybe this is a matter of timing. Hunting season is usually in late fall and by then the itinerant workers have returned home. Maybe there’s a lack of trust and they’re not comfortable with a bunch of white guys blasting away at anything that moves in the bush. Or it may be a language problem, a lack of understanding. I’m stumped.
The job of the peasants was to push whatever game there was before them through the bush towards the hunters, by whistling and yelling and beating on trees with sticks. The hunters were posted on the edge of the woods blocking egress. The trick was to shoot the rabbits and stags and, sometimes, wild boar, without hitting the peasants. My father, who organized countless hunts in Germany over the years, never lost a peasant to gunfire or any other hunting mishap. In Germany, a hunting party consisted of hunters and peasants. The peasants got paid for this job and got to partake of the feast served on the evening of the hunt in the local pub, paid for by the hunters. You never had a hunting drive without peasants.
I tried to persuade my friends here to try this system of division of labor, but they felt it wouldn’t work here due to the total dearth of peasants and they also brought up the issue of liability. Peasants seem to be a European phenomenon and I never heard of a peasant suing. That was just not done.
Here, half the hunters act as pushers, while the other half blocks. Unlike in Europe, the pushers here carry guns and can blast away at game in the bush. This can lead to disoriented wildlife running in all directions rather than straight at the blockers and bullets flying everywhere. You have to be careful out there. To me that’s an inefficient use of manpower and it can be hazardous to your health.
During and after the war we pretty much lived off what we grew in our garden and what my father brought home from his hunting excursions. You have to keep in mind that our money was worthless and the store shelves were empty. If you wanted to eat, you had to go out and find food. Nevertheless, we lived fairly well. Our routine changed for a while after the end of the war, because Germans weren’t allowed to possess firearms. The Americans would shoot you on sight, if they caught you with a gun. This meant that my father couldn’t hunt anymore. My father went by the rules and if the rules prohibited him from hunting, so be it.
My older brother, Willi, had no such scruples. He was 19 and a veteran of three years of war. Starting in the summer of 1945, once he was back on his feet from his ordeal as a POW of the Americans, he went out every night to hunt – or to poach, if you want to put a fine point to his activities. He hunted at night, because it was safe, since the Americans didn’t come out after dark. They stayed in their barracks and waited for daylight, before they ventured out into the countryside. My brother supplied our house with meat, usually venison or rabbit, sometimes wild boar and the odd time a calf that he claimed was a stray that had crossed the border from the East. We lived within walking distance of the border between the American and Soviet zones of occupation.
The American occupiers also liked to hunt. Several army officers came to my father’s place in the fall of 1945 and asked him to organize a hunt for them. He, of course, didn’t have any choice in the matter. Their interpreter explained to him that accommodating the Americans could be advantageous for us. My father obliged. Organized hunting is much the same everywhere. There was lots of game, including deer, and the Americans shot a number of them or at least they thought they did. They were sure of it. Yet the downed deer could never be located.
What happened was that my father had instructed my brother and me to find whatever the Americans shot and spirit it away, so it would end up later on our table. This could get hairy sometimes, what with bullets whizzing about and the necessity to remain invisible. It helped that the Americans were leery of crawling around the bush. They saw crazed Nazis behind every tree. We were pretty good at this job. We hid the game under water, in fox and badger dens, in old tree stands. Even my father’s dogs couldn’t find them, but that’s not saying much, because those dogs only listened to my father. The Americans were vexed. They couldn’t understand what was happening with their downed game. Maybe they knew what was going on, but they couldn’t prove anything. They just kept coming back and trying. We gave them an “A” for effort.
Finally, after several weeks of this, their interpreter suggested that their success rate might improve, if the Germans had weapons and were allowed to hunt with them. Of course that was highly illegal at the time, but the interpreter, who had been a police constable and was a friend of my father’s, assured them that my father was trustworthy and wouldn’t rat them out to the MPs. Their desire to bag a stag prevailed. The next time they came, they showed up with boxes full of food, real coffee, chocolate and American cigarettes, all goodies we hadn’t seen in years and more valuable than cash. They also brought Army-issue M-1 carbines for my father and his friends and invited them to hunt along with them. My father wasn’t too impressed by a carbine, but it had a 30-round magazine to compensate for its lack of accuracy. He gave them credit for trying. As of that day, the Americans’ hunting success improved dramatically. No more missing deer.
Besides the hunting, they liked the hunting customs and the parties that followed in the evening, where hunters and peasants would get together in the local pub for ragout of rabbit with dumplings, washed down with lots of beer. The Americans always picked up the tab. Until my father’s changed status from observer to participant, the ragout for the Americans consisted of what we called “Dach-hasen,” literally roof rabbits – cats. Everyone was in on the joke, except, of course, the Americans. They loved it all, nevertheless. This continued until my father was allowed to carry a rifle and to hunt again. After that, the local cats were once again safe from persecution and it was rabbits for everyone.
The Americans were impressed with the German hunting traditions, like the bugle calls before and after the hunt, the green hunting uniforms and hats with their whipping stag beards, the discipline of the shooters and the pushers and the camaraderie at post-hunt get-togethers. Keep in mind that this all happened at a time when fraternization with Germans was strictly forbidden by order of General Eisenhower. These guys were taking major chances. They continued to come to our house for years to hunt. One of them, a colonel in Military Intelligence – an oxymoron, if ever there is one, I later found out – became my friend and later sponsored my move to the U.S. He thought I had potential and I was too impressed to question his motives.
.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
On the Sour Taste of Fear and the Sweet Smell of Death
If you ask someone whether they’ve ever felt fear and they say they have never been afraid, you know right away that you’re either dealing with a liar or a psychopath. Fear is one of those primal emotions that grips you at your core. There is nothing shameful in being fearful. In fact, it is healthy to feel fear, because it clears your mind of everything nonessential and forces you to focus on solving the problem at hand. Fear is something you can taste and smell. It’s the dank smell of cold sweat and mold and shit. It loiters on your tongue and creeps into your nose. There’s nothing else like it. I have known fear. What stands out in my mind is the time in my life when fear was the gourmet flavor of the day. You never forget. Let me give you three examples of what I’m talking about.
When I was six years old, American fighter pilots occasionally used us kids for target practice with their planes, if they caught us out in the open on our way home from school. In the early spring of 1945, Field Marshal Kesselring, the commander of what was left of the German Army West, had his headquarters in a special train in the valley below our house. He used the adjacent railroad tunnel to hide from Allied planes. The planes came in low over the hills from the west, hoping to surprise that train out in the open. They never did catch him. To compensate for their lack of success in doing the field marshal, they’d open up on us with their 20mm on-board cannons. It probably was a game for them to terrorize children. Maybe they thought they were ridding the world of little Nazis. Maybe that’s how they calmed their conscience, if they had one.
For us it was sheer terror. We dove into the ditch and dug our faces into the muck and willed ourselves to be invisible. You don’t know what terror is until you had a P-51 Mustang strafe you from up close. The sudden explosive roar of the 12-cylinder Merlin engines as the planes swooped down on us, the rattle of the machine guns and board cannons, the whine and thumps of the bullets churning up the road next to us and ricocheting over our heads, the clatter of shell casings raining down around us, the stench of cordite, the stink of shit, all froze us in place in utter panic. Every time this happened, we knew we were dead. We just waited for the inevitable. Yet we lived. But the terror we experienced stayed with us to this day. I can still taste it. It scarred us.
After the planes disappeared over the hills, we picked ourselves up out of the dirt, beat the dust out of our clothes, picked the mud out of our hair, laughed and pretended that we had not been scared shitless and we collected spent 20mm shell casings to bring home as souvenirs.
In the previous year, in September of 1944, my mother and I were visiting my grandparents and my aunt in Schweinfurt, home of the famous ball-bearing plants, which were an essential cog in Hitler’s war machine. Their output insured that the Tiger tanks kept rolling and the Messerschmitts continued flying. They also ensured that Schweinfurt was the repeated main bombing target of the Allies. My mother and I got caught in a daylight bombing raid and had to seek shelter in a high-rise air-raid bunker near my grandmother’s house. The shelter was jammed with frightened people and when the bombs started dropping and exploding all around outside, the building, hit by the bombs’ pressure waves, started swaying back and forth and clouds of mortar and cement dust rained down on us, together with the odd chunk of concrete. Women and children were screaming and crying and moaning. The lights flickered off and on.
My mother and I found a seat on a bench along a wall and my mother made me crawl under the bench. She cowered over me and prayed. Someone kept babbling on about the fact that the shelter was perfectly safe, what with the concrete being six feet thick and steel-reinforced to withstand the pressure waves and the bombs could only penetrate if two hit exactly the same spot, one after the other, from the same angle. The asshole was trying to work out the odds of that happening when the inferno outside subsided.
We were lucky, because in some of those terror raids the firestorm got so intense that it sucked the oxygen right out of these sanctuaries and everyone in those shelters asphyxiated.
When we got outside after the all clear, the city was in flames. You could hear the roar of the fires. The odd dog was barking out of sight somewhere. There were no voices. The bells of the ambulances and fire engines – they didn’t have sirens then – sounded in the distance. The incendiary bombs had set off a firestorm that had gutted the insides of most of the buildings and melted the asphalt in the streets. The carbonated remains of people, some seemingly in full stride, who had not made it to shelter and had got stuck in the burning tar, stood here and there in the street like apocalyptic groupings, caught trying to flee from the heavenly onslaught.
They had shrunk to maybe four to four and a half feet in height with their arms raised to chest level and bent like a boxer advancing in the ring. They looked like charred pieces of wood, with their bloated innards spilled out, blood red and exposed. Their guts had boiled and popped out through what used to be their skin.
What I remember most, though, is the smell. It was almost like a taste on your tongue, a sweet, sickly perfume wafting along the burning streets. I had no idea what it was then. The answer came to me years later in the humid jungles of Vietnam – the sweet smell of the decomposing dead. It is always with me. That day, 329 American B-17 Flying Fortresses, escorted by 338 P-51 Mustang fighters had tried to wipe out the ball-bearing plants and the railroad yards again. They had missed their target. It was the heaviest raid on Schweinfurt of the war.
The city itself was another matter. The city center, with its medieval framework buildings was pretty much flattened and what remained standing after the high explosive bombs got through with it was burned to the ground in the firestorms caused by the phosphor bombs which always concluded an Allied air-raid. The idea behind this sequence was the high explosive bombs and air-mines would destroy the roofs of buildings giving the phosphor bombs access to the flammable insides of the buildings. This plan worked extremely well, except with the ball-bearing plants. Their production pretty much survived unscathed.
Another time, in the summer of 1944, my mother and I were in Hilders, a town of about 1,000 inhabitants about two hours walk from our house on the road to Fulda, to visit our dentist. I had a terrible toothache. I was in the dentist chair and trying to explain to him which tooth was hurting, when the air-raid sirens went off. Everyone was supposed to rush off to his or her assigned air-raid shelter, but I was in so much pain and the dentist was in a hurry and couldn’t tell which tooth needed attention. He decided to pull all four of my upper front teeth at once, sure that the culprit was among them. He pulled them with a pair of pliers and it hurt worse than my erstwhile toothache. There were no painkillers. I bled like stuck pig.
The dentist jammed a wad of gauze into my mouth and we were off to the air-raid shelter, which was a culvert under the railroad tracks open at both ends, the bottom covered in filth and slime and jammed with terrified women and children and old men. My mother and I and the goddamn ogre of a dentist cowered against the damp stonewalls of the underpass. I was scared to death, listening to the moans and sobs and whimpers of the crowd around me. We strained to hear the sound of the approaching bombers, willing the bombs to drop elsewhere, wipe out some other neighborhood, kill someone other than us. My fear was mixed with hate. I hated the Americans because they had deprived me of my moment of glory with their untimely attack, my place at the center of attention, of my starring role as the recipient of pity, of being a bloody hero, who had withstood the barbaric assault of the dentist. Instead I was just one scared child among many, my own pain just another detail, surrounded by the dank smell of fear emanating from the packed crowd around me.
But, as it transpired, we were lucky. It turned out to be a false alarm. The American bombers spared us. Instead a group of 18 B-24 Liberators had wiped out the synthetic rubber plant and the marshalling yards in Fulda. My mouth hurt like hell for hours and I ended up with a huge gap in my front teeth, a junior version of Bobby Clark without his choppers. Luckily they were baby teeth and the gap filled again, eventually.
One consequence of the terror that bracketed my childhood and the fact that I had escaped unscathed was that I began to believe that I was on borrowed time, that the bogeyman would catch up with me sooner or later. It also sharpened my sense of smell and taste. Above all, it made me extremely cautious. It probably saved my life later in another hell.
When I was six years old, American fighter pilots occasionally used us kids for target practice with their planes, if they caught us out in the open on our way home from school. In the early spring of 1945, Field Marshal Kesselring, the commander of what was left of the German Army West, had his headquarters in a special train in the valley below our house. He used the adjacent railroad tunnel to hide from Allied planes. The planes came in low over the hills from the west, hoping to surprise that train out in the open. They never did catch him. To compensate for their lack of success in doing the field marshal, they’d open up on us with their 20mm on-board cannons. It probably was a game for them to terrorize children. Maybe they thought they were ridding the world of little Nazis. Maybe that’s how they calmed their conscience, if they had one.
For us it was sheer terror. We dove into the ditch and dug our faces into the muck and willed ourselves to be invisible. You don’t know what terror is until you had a P-51 Mustang strafe you from up close. The sudden explosive roar of the 12-cylinder Merlin engines as the planes swooped down on us, the rattle of the machine guns and board cannons, the whine and thumps of the bullets churning up the road next to us and ricocheting over our heads, the clatter of shell casings raining down around us, the stench of cordite, the stink of shit, all froze us in place in utter panic. Every time this happened, we knew we were dead. We just waited for the inevitable. Yet we lived. But the terror we experienced stayed with us to this day. I can still taste it. It scarred us.
After the planes disappeared over the hills, we picked ourselves up out of the dirt, beat the dust out of our clothes, picked the mud out of our hair, laughed and pretended that we had not been scared shitless and we collected spent 20mm shell casings to bring home as souvenirs.
In the previous year, in September of 1944, my mother and I were visiting my grandparents and my aunt in Schweinfurt, home of the famous ball-bearing plants, which were an essential cog in Hitler’s war machine. Their output insured that the Tiger tanks kept rolling and the Messerschmitts continued flying. They also ensured that Schweinfurt was the repeated main bombing target of the Allies. My mother and I got caught in a daylight bombing raid and had to seek shelter in a high-rise air-raid bunker near my grandmother’s house. The shelter was jammed with frightened people and when the bombs started dropping and exploding all around outside, the building, hit by the bombs’ pressure waves, started swaying back and forth and clouds of mortar and cement dust rained down on us, together with the odd chunk of concrete. Women and children were screaming and crying and moaning. The lights flickered off and on.
My mother and I found a seat on a bench along a wall and my mother made me crawl under the bench. She cowered over me and prayed. Someone kept babbling on about the fact that the shelter was perfectly safe, what with the concrete being six feet thick and steel-reinforced to withstand the pressure waves and the bombs could only penetrate if two hit exactly the same spot, one after the other, from the same angle. The asshole was trying to work out the odds of that happening when the inferno outside subsided.
We were lucky, because in some of those terror raids the firestorm got so intense that it sucked the oxygen right out of these sanctuaries and everyone in those shelters asphyxiated.
When we got outside after the all clear, the city was in flames. You could hear the roar of the fires. The odd dog was barking out of sight somewhere. There were no voices. The bells of the ambulances and fire engines – they didn’t have sirens then – sounded in the distance. The incendiary bombs had set off a firestorm that had gutted the insides of most of the buildings and melted the asphalt in the streets. The carbonated remains of people, some seemingly in full stride, who had not made it to shelter and had got stuck in the burning tar, stood here and there in the street like apocalyptic groupings, caught trying to flee from the heavenly onslaught.
They had shrunk to maybe four to four and a half feet in height with their arms raised to chest level and bent like a boxer advancing in the ring. They looked like charred pieces of wood, with their bloated innards spilled out, blood red and exposed. Their guts had boiled and popped out through what used to be their skin.
What I remember most, though, is the smell. It was almost like a taste on your tongue, a sweet, sickly perfume wafting along the burning streets. I had no idea what it was then. The answer came to me years later in the humid jungles of Vietnam – the sweet smell of the decomposing dead. It is always with me. That day, 329 American B-17 Flying Fortresses, escorted by 338 P-51 Mustang fighters had tried to wipe out the ball-bearing plants and the railroad yards again. They had missed their target. It was the heaviest raid on Schweinfurt of the war.
The city itself was another matter. The city center, with its medieval framework buildings was pretty much flattened and what remained standing after the high explosive bombs got through with it was burned to the ground in the firestorms caused by the phosphor bombs which always concluded an Allied air-raid. The idea behind this sequence was the high explosive bombs and air-mines would destroy the roofs of buildings giving the phosphor bombs access to the flammable insides of the buildings. This plan worked extremely well, except with the ball-bearing plants. Their production pretty much survived unscathed.
Another time, in the summer of 1944, my mother and I were in Hilders, a town of about 1,000 inhabitants about two hours walk from our house on the road to Fulda, to visit our dentist. I had a terrible toothache. I was in the dentist chair and trying to explain to him which tooth was hurting, when the air-raid sirens went off. Everyone was supposed to rush off to his or her assigned air-raid shelter, but I was in so much pain and the dentist was in a hurry and couldn’t tell which tooth needed attention. He decided to pull all four of my upper front teeth at once, sure that the culprit was among them. He pulled them with a pair of pliers and it hurt worse than my erstwhile toothache. There were no painkillers. I bled like stuck pig.
The dentist jammed a wad of gauze into my mouth and we were off to the air-raid shelter, which was a culvert under the railroad tracks open at both ends, the bottom covered in filth and slime and jammed with terrified women and children and old men. My mother and I and the goddamn ogre of a dentist cowered against the damp stonewalls of the underpass. I was scared to death, listening to the moans and sobs and whimpers of the crowd around me. We strained to hear the sound of the approaching bombers, willing the bombs to drop elsewhere, wipe out some other neighborhood, kill someone other than us. My fear was mixed with hate. I hated the Americans because they had deprived me of my moment of glory with their untimely attack, my place at the center of attention, of my starring role as the recipient of pity, of being a bloody hero, who had withstood the barbaric assault of the dentist. Instead I was just one scared child among many, my own pain just another detail, surrounded by the dank smell of fear emanating from the packed crowd around me.
But, as it transpired, we were lucky. It turned out to be a false alarm. The American bombers spared us. Instead a group of 18 B-24 Liberators had wiped out the synthetic rubber plant and the marshalling yards in Fulda. My mouth hurt like hell for hours and I ended up with a huge gap in my front teeth, a junior version of Bobby Clark without his choppers. Luckily they were baby teeth and the gap filled again, eventually.
One consequence of the terror that bracketed my childhood and the fact that I had escaped unscathed was that I began to believe that I was on borrowed time, that the bogeyman would catch up with me sooner or later. It also sharpened my sense of smell and taste. Above all, it made me extremely cautious. It probably saved my life later in another hell.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
What Is It With Women Who Never Wear Skirts?
I’ve been following the political debates and sound bytes from south of the border and I’m struck by the fact that I have never seen Hillary Clinton wear anything but pants. This gives me pause. Don’t get me wrong, I think a suit can look flattering on a woman, as long as she is fairly slim. But, if you are short with a fat ass it looks awful. I’m thinking, what is she trying to hide? Is she afraid to wear a skirt, because she is bow-legged, knock-kneed or pigeon-toed? Is it varicose veins? Flabby thighs? Too skinny? Does she want to be seen as macho? In charge? To circumscribe Tony Soprano, I gotta say, short people with big butts simply don’t look good in pants, like they’re trying to be a grown-up, but instead they look like a dork. So what’s the deal here?
My guess is, they had a focus group on what her image should be and they decided on pants. Not that that should matter when deciding who’s going to answer that all important 3:00 am phone call.
And what’s the matter with a skirt. Margaret Thatcher didn’t have a problem with a skirt, or a purse, for that matter, and she kicked plenty of butt. Ditto for Golda Meir. But then Hillary is about image, not substance. She isn’t in their league.
And another thing, what’s this with the photo-op slugging back shots of rye? Canadian rye, no less. And here she is berating NAFTA. My guess is the message is: “Look at me, I’m just like you.” Would drinking rye wearing a dress send a mixed message? Would it make her seem less one of the boys? Not that she would ever be mistaken for one of the boys. Is she going to light up a cigar next? I hope it’s not a Cohiba. Her wearing the pants in the Clinton household didn’t stop old Bill from dunking his cigar into places no real smoker would ever think of sticking his stogy. She couldn’t control the big Bubbah, how can we expect her to control those conspiring Republicans, never mind terrorists.
It's a good thing she lost.
My guess is, they had a focus group on what her image should be and they decided on pants. Not that that should matter when deciding who’s going to answer that all important 3:00 am phone call.
And what’s the matter with a skirt. Margaret Thatcher didn’t have a problem with a skirt, or a purse, for that matter, and she kicked plenty of butt. Ditto for Golda Meir. But then Hillary is about image, not substance. She isn’t in their league.
And another thing, what’s this with the photo-op slugging back shots of rye? Canadian rye, no less. And here she is berating NAFTA. My guess is the message is: “Look at me, I’m just like you.” Would drinking rye wearing a dress send a mixed message? Would it make her seem less one of the boys? Not that she would ever be mistaken for one of the boys. Is she going to light up a cigar next? I hope it’s not a Cohiba. Her wearing the pants in the Clinton household didn’t stop old Bill from dunking his cigar into places no real smoker would ever think of sticking his stogy. She couldn’t control the big Bubbah, how can we expect her to control those conspiring Republicans, never mind terrorists.
It's a good thing she lost.
Monday, July 7, 2008
On Hunting Badgers
I don’t know how they hunt badgers in your neck of the woods or whether they do at all, but where I come from badger hunting was big. There are basically three ways to bag a badger. One, you can use dynamite, two, you can dig them out and three, you can use dogs to dislodge them from their den. Badgers, like foxes, were considered a nuisance, because they raided people’s chicken coops. They were hunted indiscriminately, partly because there was a price on their head. If I remember right, I believe it was 10 marks in those days, roughly 2 dollars. And partly, because their pelt made a very attractive throw rug with its white V-shaped stripe down the sides.
I believe my father mostly hunted badgers, because my grandmother and my mother, for that matter, swore by the alleged curative properties of badger fat, which they applied liberally in poultices to boils, open sores or to your chest to draw out the fever, if you were laid low with the flu. My mother also used badger fat as shortening in her cakes and pies.
Badger dens can have as many as ten or fifteen exits and the dens can be more than six feet deep. If you use dynamite to dislodge a badger from its den, it’s best to proceed with some caution. The idea is to get the stick of dynamite as close to the center of the den as possible, before setting it off. There are two ways of doing this. One is to make sure you have a long fuse and to push the stick as deep as possible down one of the badgers’ tunnels before lighting it, the other is to dig down from the top in the center of the den as far as you can go and then set off the charge. And then you’ve got to dig to get down to the center of the den and retrieve the bits and pieces that are left. This is a labor-intensive way of getting at the badgers, unless the badger had the good sense to dig his den in sandy soil. Obviously, you only use dynamite if dogs are unavailable for one reason or another. Otherwise, this method does not make much sense, because dynamite tends to scatter stuff everywhere and you have to hit the deck to avoid the flying debris.
The most efficient and the preferred way to hunt badgers is with dogs. To hunt badgers with dogs you need dachshunds. They are unbelievable. I’m not talking about the cute pets you see waddling around today. My father loved to hunt badgers and foxes. And he used dachshunds, which were bred for this task. They were usually rough hairs, named “Purzl” or “Waldi” and they never seemed to last very long. They were ferocious. I’ve seen them drag a badger nearly twice their size out if its lair. Once they had their teeth into something, they would never let go or at least not until my father told them to let go. They only listened to him. They also were pretty sneaky. In our house, if a visitor entered, they’d greet him or her – they did not discriminate - with wagging tails, but the minute you turned your back to them, they’d have you by the ankles and only my father could get them to let go. You can see how this created problems for us at times. People didn’t want to visit, if they knew my father was away without his dogs.
A badger, “Dachs” in German, is much larger than a dachshund. Badgers are also pretty wily and they are fierce when cornered or attacked. Their lairs are deep, some six to ten feet with many exits. The way you hunted them with dogs was you blocked all but two of the exit tunnels with fire, usually burning grass and leaves, so that the smoke drifted down into the passage. The dogs – you needed at least two - would go down one smoke-free shaft and my father would post himself near the remaining unblocked burrow entrance with his shotgun. The dogs worked as a team. One would attack from the front, the other would try to sneak around the back. Between them, they always got the upper hand. My job was to lie face down over the center of the den, listen to the sounds of the combatants below and point out the direction of the progression of the battle. Normally the badger would try to escape through the unblocked smoke-free exit, chased by the dogs. You had to be careful not to shoot the dogs. You also had to hope that you’d found and plugged all the badger den’s exits. If you missed one, you were out of luck. Badgers move surprisingly swift for an animal that looks so deceivingly placid.
My father was very good at badger hunting. He never missed his shot, never hit any of his dogs or me, for that matter. I felt nervous sometimes lying on top of the center of the den during these hunts, because the badgers didn’t always launch themselves straight out of their lair. Sometimes they turned and came straight at you. This made it obligatory to roll out of the way fast. I wasn’t so much worried about getting shot, but of getting bit by a crazed badger, a very unpleasant and disagreeable thought.
Sometimes the dogs would drag their prey out backwards. If that happened, my father didn’t interfere but let the dogs do their thing. Some of the badger’s tunnels were traps and led nowhere. Sometimes they’d get a dog into one of those fake shafts and with their powerful hind legs try to bury it in there alive. Those passages were hard to locate from above. You listened to the dogs’ barks and tried to dig down to rescue it. If you couldn’t locate it, the dog would suffocate. That happened occasionally.
If jamming a stick of dynamite down a badger hole seems a bit risky to you or if you don’t want to jeopardize your dogs unnecessarily in a badger den, you could, of course, post yourself near a chicken coop and wait for the badger to come. This, however, is an iffy proposition, since you don’t know their schedule and, of course, they are nocturnal in their food-gathering habits and you depend on moonlight for visibility. You could waste hours waiting for them to make an appearance or cloud cover could make the raiders invisible or you could nod off and miss them altogether. The other downside to this method of badger hunting is that you have to discharge your shotgun in close proximity to the chickens as well as houses and out-buildings and there was the distinct possibility of collateral damage.
I believe my father mostly hunted badgers, because my grandmother and my mother, for that matter, swore by the alleged curative properties of badger fat, which they applied liberally in poultices to boils, open sores or to your chest to draw out the fever, if you were laid low with the flu. My mother also used badger fat as shortening in her cakes and pies.
Badger dens can have as many as ten or fifteen exits and the dens can be more than six feet deep. If you use dynamite to dislodge a badger from its den, it’s best to proceed with some caution. The idea is to get the stick of dynamite as close to the center of the den as possible, before setting it off. There are two ways of doing this. One is to make sure you have a long fuse and to push the stick as deep as possible down one of the badgers’ tunnels before lighting it, the other is to dig down from the top in the center of the den as far as you can go and then set off the charge. And then you’ve got to dig to get down to the center of the den and retrieve the bits and pieces that are left. This is a labor-intensive way of getting at the badgers, unless the badger had the good sense to dig his den in sandy soil. Obviously, you only use dynamite if dogs are unavailable for one reason or another. Otherwise, this method does not make much sense, because dynamite tends to scatter stuff everywhere and you have to hit the deck to avoid the flying debris.
The most efficient and the preferred way to hunt badgers is with dogs. To hunt badgers with dogs you need dachshunds. They are unbelievable. I’m not talking about the cute pets you see waddling around today. My father loved to hunt badgers and foxes. And he used dachshunds, which were bred for this task. They were usually rough hairs, named “Purzl” or “Waldi” and they never seemed to last very long. They were ferocious. I’ve seen them drag a badger nearly twice their size out if its lair. Once they had their teeth into something, they would never let go or at least not until my father told them to let go. They only listened to him. They also were pretty sneaky. In our house, if a visitor entered, they’d greet him or her – they did not discriminate - with wagging tails, but the minute you turned your back to them, they’d have you by the ankles and only my father could get them to let go. You can see how this created problems for us at times. People didn’t want to visit, if they knew my father was away without his dogs.
A badger, “Dachs” in German, is much larger than a dachshund. Badgers are also pretty wily and they are fierce when cornered or attacked. Their lairs are deep, some six to ten feet with many exits. The way you hunted them with dogs was you blocked all but two of the exit tunnels with fire, usually burning grass and leaves, so that the smoke drifted down into the passage. The dogs – you needed at least two - would go down one smoke-free shaft and my father would post himself near the remaining unblocked burrow entrance with his shotgun. The dogs worked as a team. One would attack from the front, the other would try to sneak around the back. Between them, they always got the upper hand. My job was to lie face down over the center of the den, listen to the sounds of the combatants below and point out the direction of the progression of the battle. Normally the badger would try to escape through the unblocked smoke-free exit, chased by the dogs. You had to be careful not to shoot the dogs. You also had to hope that you’d found and plugged all the badger den’s exits. If you missed one, you were out of luck. Badgers move surprisingly swift for an animal that looks so deceivingly placid.
My father was very good at badger hunting. He never missed his shot, never hit any of his dogs or me, for that matter. I felt nervous sometimes lying on top of the center of the den during these hunts, because the badgers didn’t always launch themselves straight out of their lair. Sometimes they turned and came straight at you. This made it obligatory to roll out of the way fast. I wasn’t so much worried about getting shot, but of getting bit by a crazed badger, a very unpleasant and disagreeable thought.
Sometimes the dogs would drag their prey out backwards. If that happened, my father didn’t interfere but let the dogs do their thing. Some of the badger’s tunnels were traps and led nowhere. Sometimes they’d get a dog into one of those fake shafts and with their powerful hind legs try to bury it in there alive. Those passages were hard to locate from above. You listened to the dogs’ barks and tried to dig down to rescue it. If you couldn’t locate it, the dog would suffocate. That happened occasionally.
If jamming a stick of dynamite down a badger hole seems a bit risky to you or if you don’t want to jeopardize your dogs unnecessarily in a badger den, you could, of course, post yourself near a chicken coop and wait for the badger to come. This, however, is an iffy proposition, since you don’t know their schedule and, of course, they are nocturnal in their food-gathering habits and you depend on moonlight for visibility. You could waste hours waiting for them to make an appearance or cloud cover could make the raiders invisible or you could nod off and miss them altogether. The other downside to this method of badger hunting is that you have to discharge your shotgun in close proximity to the chickens as well as houses and out-buildings and there was the distinct possibility of collateral damage.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
On Stout Hearts
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.
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 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.
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