This I’m typing this in Strasbourg which looks to be fantastical; we just got here and I want to out and play and I am getting sooo behind on this blog and I want to catch up, so this will have less commentary than I had hoped.   

We are staying in Schifferstadt, a small suburban town in Rhineland-Palatinate. It has a population of about 20,000 and is so clean and orderly, so un-rundown, that I thought it must be a new suburb sprinkled with Disneyland-like buildings (to add character, perhaps). Maybe something like Walnut Creek or San Mateo in California with faux mission-style buildings, then I realized that the City Hall – shown above –  was built in 1558.

1558!  62 years before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, 397 years before the Plymouth City Hall was built (and I’ll bet the Schifferstadt City Hall is in better shape). Our hotel, shown below, was probably built about the same time – although the rooms are very modern – and the town is a mix of very old, semi-old and contemporary.  The closest big draw is Speyer that has a magnificent Romanesque Cathedral. It is, by far, the tallest Romanesque building I have ever seen and its simplicity is almost zen-like. Under the church are various tombs including a king’s tombs, called Kaisergräber, a name that Michele and I found particularly charming.  We visited the Maulbronn Monastery which was a Roman Catholic Cistercian Abbey but, when the local ruler became a Protestant, he nationalized the seminary and church. It is now liberal Lutheran (whatever that means). The original monks were sent from Bourgogne, France in 1156 and built the Romanesque Church but, by the end of the century, they changed the attached construction to a Gothic style (one of the first in Germany). The conversations about the change must have been interesting: “This is a very nice church but sort of old-fashioned. Back home, in Bourgogne,  we are now building in the Gothic style, takes less stone and looks better.” “But we have 50 years invested in this style.” “Yeah, sure,  if you want to be old-fashioned….”. The crucifix, by the way, is carved from one piece of stone (both Jesus and the cross are one piece).   We finished our last day in the old city of Besigheim which was founded in 1459.      

We are still in Schifferstadt with family, seeing the local sights and I will post a couple highlights later, but, for now, I want to post our trip to the Mercedes Museum in  Stuttgart. Stuttgart is theoretically about a one and half hour drive, but the main autobahn was shut down for an overpass removable and it took us about almost three hours each way (in a monsoon-like rain on the way back). It was well worth it. The Mercedes Museum is terrific, not just as an auto museum, but as a museum. The building is stellar –  designed by Caroline Bos and Ben van Berkel, co-founders of UNStudio, which, of course, is not a local company – so good that they have guided architectural tours as well as guided tours of the automobiles. Each floor has sample cars of an era, restored to a condition much better than the originals, and the floors are connected by ramps that have displays – displayetts, really, a picture with a short caption – that put the cars in context. The choice of what the curators used for context is fascinating. We start by taking an elevator up to the eighth floor to see the earliest cars and work our way down to the present.  

As Mercedes started producing cars, they hired new workers and instituted what they call Social Benefits, in 1906, the company set a work week of six nine and a half hour days with paid vacation for the senior employees,In 1920 Prohibition and was instituted in the US; 1925, Josephine Baker became a sensation; 1927, the Bauhaus school changes architecture; 1936, Jesse Owens changes the world at the Berlin Olympics; during the war years Mercedes hired “forced laborers” – what we would call slave labors – 10,000 of whom labored at the Mercedes Factory; 1941 and the gas chambers at Auschwitz were opened.  1945 and Europe is a ruin with millions of refugees and the “the training of the Germans in Democracy” starts; the Mercedes factory is totally destroyed and the company stays alive repairing Allied vehicles; in 1948, Germany gets its own currency; 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climb Everest; in the late 40s, the German Economic Miracle starts and with it, what the Germans call the Wonder Years – in which Germany began to feel less ostracized – with a German Fräulein becoming Miss Europe and the Mercedes Silver Arrows dominate racing of the 50s; and Elvis Presley is on Ed Sullivan.1962, Andy Warhol starts The Factory; Cassius Clay becomes the youngest Heavyweight Champion, and later becomes even more famous as Muhammad Ali; 1969 and Neil Armstrong steps on the moon; 1969, Woodstock; 1977, the German leftist terrorist group, The Red Army, kidnaps and then kills the President of Mercedes. 1982, Steven Spielberg makes ET; 1984, Acid Rain deforests much of Europe; 1985, Chernobyl melts down; 1989, the Berlin Wall falls; 1990, Nelson Mandela is released; early 1990s, the World Wide Web, and Globalization; then, The Globalization Process brought with it an increasing move towards individualization. Traditional ways of life were abandoned in favor of new and individual approaches to living – shaped by personal desires and dreams; 1995, Cristo and his wife, Jeanne Claude wrap Berlin’s Reichstag Building; and in 2002, 12 of the 15 States of the European Union agree to replace their National currencies with the Euro. Below the street cars were the race cars. We had come to see these race cars and we were rewarded with a display of pure race cars, racing sedans, and racing trucks on steroids. As we dropped down the next ramp, the context displays were replaced with displays of racing engines, displayed as if they were jewels, which, of course, they are (including a monstrous truck engine that Michel particularly liked). One of the extraordinary things about this museum, and there many, is that there were no barriers between the visitors and the cars. We could just reach out and fondle any car we wanted, nobody ever said”Don’t touch the cars”. We exited past some phenomenal race cars of the 30s and 50s and hurried home to watch France beat Croatia.         

When I was growing up. my family didn’t much talk about the Holocaust and I have since learned that, at the time, almost nobody did. Out of shame, I think. On the Jewish side, shame that they let the catastrophe – Shoah – happen to them (although, of course, they really didn’t). On the German’s side, shame that they had let themselves become such monsters (although, of course, not all of them were). On everybody’s else’s side, shame that they were passive bystanders (although, of course, in the end, they weren’t). However for much of Michele’s long lost, just found, family – collectively known as The Cousins – the Shoah was the center of their lives.

When I wrote this, in 2013 after a Cousin’s Reunion at Tahoe, “the Shoah was the center of their lives” was more theoretical than felt. But, now, in Germany, in the company of people whose grandparents were deported and murdered solely because they were Jewish, it is shattering to walk into a recently excavated Jewish Temple, and read the dispassionate, explanatory, signs of the constant Jewish persecution – 3 May 1096, Pogrom by Crusaders; February 1195, Pogrom against Jews for unsolved murder of Christian girl; from roughly 1250, increasing financial burdens; 15th Century, decline of the Community as a consequence of repeated expulsions…starting in 1933, the National Socialists, using force and terror, began to exclude the Jews from public life; the synagogue the community had built in 1837 was destroyed in the Pogrom of 1938; And finally, in a combined action of the heads of the NSDAP administration districts of Baden and Saar-Palatinate, the history of the Jewish Community came to an end on October 22/23, 1940 with the deportation of 51 Jewish men, women, and children. Only 15 of the deportees survived the Nazi terror.  

Last night, after our day trip to Speyer to see a truly magnificent Romanesque Cathedral and the aforementioned synagogue, we had dinner in the backyard of the home of Michele’s German Cousins. It was a lovely, warm, night, with children running around, laughing, giggling, while the adults drank wine and French whiskey, talking about the day and the past. Walking to the Cousin’s, just around the corner from their home, I saw my first Stolperstein or “stumbling stone which – which according to Wikipedia, aims to commemorate individuals at exactly the last place of residency—or, sometimes, work—which was freely chosen by the person before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror – and the Holocaust seemed tangible, more relatable, more real, rather than dim history. 

We started our drive to Schifferstadt, Germany,  and The Cousins, on back roads but our trusty Citroën took our request, to stay off of freeways and take the scenic route, a little too seriously and we were directed to one lane rural roads. Before we got to Germany, we switched to the Autoroute which morphed into an identical looking Autobahn with less fanfare than driving from Arkansas to Tennessee. We knew we were getting close to Germany, however, when the exit directions were still in French but the exit locations were all for German towns; sort of like à côté sortie Saarbrücken. Driving on back roads in way more interesting than blasting down a highway, dodging trucks (although it was fun passing a long chain of identical trucks, marked AMG Petronis, which we assumed was the Mercedes F1 Team on their way to The Hockenheimring Grand Prix next weekend). One nice thing about the Autobahn is that there are rest stops although they are not as nice as the Rest Stops in Texas which still leads in The Best Rest Stop category.