Part 3: the Maintal

A few corrections: the pastor at Altenhaßlau is neither retired nor was he on holiday, but has gone off to Prague for more study. I did *not* play the organ at Altenhaßlau, I am told, so I got ahead of my story on that one. Our capable guide in Langenselbold was Emilie Steinhauser; either she or her mother was born a Lerch (and therefore kin to our ancestress). And the woman who showed us the Kirchenbuch was Marie Elsasser. The church in Langenselbold was not destroyed by bombing -- there was little bomb damage in the town -- but its windows were blown out. I'm still confused as to just what church was where, and where the bell came from that is preserved in the parish hall we visited. Oh well.

I also made a mistake in the order of places as we visited them. It should have read thus:
4, 5, 2, 8, 7, 3/6, 1, 1b, 1a

Thanks to Laurel Miller and Don Lineback for keeping me straight.
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On Day 3, Friday 1 August, we awoke in the Hotel Columbus and were greeted with a sumptuous breakfast buffet (the Germans don't do your wussy "Continental breakfast" like the French do, but they offer cold cuts in profusion, and cheeses, and fruits and yogurts and cereals and eggs -- here they were scrambled, but usually they are boiled and served in an egg cup -- and juices and jams and breads). I sat with Heiko, the bus driver, to explain why I had unknowingly routed him through that scary arch in Gelnhausen. He did acknowledge that he had been a bit concerned.

Then we piled on to the bus and, to my surprise, we were driven only a kilometer or so to Seligenstadt, the main town to which Froschhausen, the location of our highway hotel, was attached. Then we were all urged off the bus and trotted through the streets of the town. It is undeniably a picturesque and interesting place, with connections to Charlemagne's biographer Einhard, who built an abbey here. But I had not known we were stopping here and was chomping at the bit to get to the ancestral villages.

In retrospect I'm glad Paul took us there, and I'm a little ashamed of my reaction, but while we were there I was muttering in resentment. I'm reminded of my travel dictum: there is no such thing as a totally uninteresting place (although Des Moines comes darn close).

This might also be the place for me to grouse about the standard guidebooks. I took with me only the Michelin Green Guide to Germany, and many times later wished I had taken the Blue Guides (one for West and one for the East, even after the reunification) instead, because so very much is left out of the Green Guide. But I note that neither of these guides, Green nor Blue, so much as mentions Seligenstadt, although it is shown on the wonderful but very hefty highway atlas of Germany I finally obtained as a "besonderes sehenswerter Ort," or a place especially worth seeing.

And that it is. Of course there's the whole topic of dependence on guidebooks at all, noting that most of the places we visited on the ancestral part of this trip are dismissed as of no particular interest whatsoever, but now my patient readers are probably as resentful of delay as I was that day.

At last we reboarded the bus, and Heiko snaked through the congestion of industrial Hanau to get to the Autobahn, and soon we were on the country lanes in the little stretch of land I have so often visited in my imagination -- the fertile wheatfields of the Wetterau, which had served as the breadbasket for the Roman Legions almost 2,000 years ago. We passed through picturesque Kilianstädten, now almost too fast for me, and I was wishing our ancestor Henrich had found a teaching position there instead of where he did. But we did arrive at 7: Schöneck-Oberdorfelden (which is now conjoined with Kilianstädten in the same parish) -- and I was a little disappointed. It seemed rather plain and pedestrian.

We've not yet been allowed access to the Oberdorfelden churchbook and have not yet located the archive where the microfilmed version is held (unless Laurel managed to squeeze it in since I last saw her). It is from the pre-1939 researches of a man named Denniston that we know Henrich Leimbach was here as schoolmaster from 1703 until the time of his death in 1716, at the age of 67; we still do not know where and when his wife Barbara died (it is not even impossible that she survived him to marry again).

But soon we were joined by the local historian, a wonderful woman who made the place come alive (and this is another name I've forgotten and must rely on Laurel and Don to restore to my memory). Were we also joined by the pastor? At least there was a man who was able to point out that indeed the marked stones in the foundation of the church were from the original church -- the present building dates from 1763, well after Henrich's death.

The school building where Henrich no doubt lived has also been replaced by a much newer building, but on the same site. What almost certainly did exist during his lifetime is the symbol of the village: the marvelous bake oven, where all the housewives of the village used to bring their bread to be baked so as to avoid setting their own houses on fire. You can actually see a picture of this wonderful structure, with the church in the background and the school to the left, at this site (scroll down to "Teil 3: Oberdorfelden").

The column on the right is the history of Oberdorfelden, and the picture is a few paragraphs down from the beginning. The structure in front of the oven is of course quite recent, but some such structure no doubt did exist and serve to keep the newly baked bread out of the rain.

We walked throughout the tiny village and were told, among other things, the story of how it surrendered to the Americans at the end of World War II -- the details of which I have forgotten, but it did involve a very real danger that the departing German soldiers might have done irreparable damage to the place before they finally did leave.

But for us it was now time for lunch, which we were scheduled to be served in 3/6. Maintal-Hochstadt. It only took a few minutes to drive there -- and I have long imagined how Henrich and his family might often have been visited from Hochstadt by Johannes and his family, and vice versa, just by walking across the fields.
The historic center of Hochstadt has been beautifully preserved. The ancient wall is almost intact all the way around the egg-shaped medieval nucleus, which is bisected by the cobbled Hauptstrasse, now a pedestrian street that runs from the Untertor to the Obertor -- the old town gates.

We were greeted at the restaurant Zum Neuen Bau ("the new building") by the equivalent of the mayor of Stadt Maintal, by the pastor of the church, the curator of the museum, and the librarian. The mayor (in jacket, shirt, and tie -- the only such costume I had seen on the whole trip so far) gave a short speech and apologized that he had to leave for another engagement.

I gave the librarian the postcards of the Goshen Carnegie Library I had been saving for more than a year after Laurel told me she likes to collect pictures of old libraries, and we became great friends. I had tried hard, just before leaving, to get postcards of Widener Library and of the Boston Public Library, but all I could get was an aerial view of Harvard Yard showing Widener as a conspicuous bulk in its midst -- nothing of Boston Public at all. But it turned out that (1) she had actually spent a bit of time at Harvard and in Widener, and (2) had her own picture of Boston Public prominently displayed on the wall of her own library! She proudly showed it to me later.

After lunch we were given a very special treat indeed: about 20 ladies of a certain age who formed a local folk-dance group performed for us! Half of them were dressed in fuchsia tops and flowered skirts; the other half in white shirts and black trousers, and they spun each other in various combinations in most spirited fashion.For their final number they co-opted some people from our bus to join them (not me, I assure you), and this whole experience was a delightful high point of the whole trip.

Then the museum curator -- another lost name -- took us to the church and around the town, and here it was that I did get to play the organ -- not the same organ, but definitely in the same church where my 5xgreat-grandfather had been the organist 300 years ago. The schoolhouse where he had lived with his family for 20 years has been replaced by a newer building, but it was still a thrill to walk the same cobbles he must often have walked in the course of his duties. A schoolmaster, we were told, was required not only to teach the children, but to play the organ and perform other duties. In exchange he was allowed to live in the schoolhouse and have access to a plot of land where he could grow his own food; he also received prescribed quantities of various food items from the parents of his pupils.

Among the interesting aspects of Hochstadt (which is one of those places utterly ignored by the guidebooks) are some of the towers in the city wall: there is a Hexenturm, where the witches were kept, and a Narrenturm, or "Fools' Tower," where the insane were kept. There are no window openings in the latter until one gets quite high up.

A disconcerting item at the church is a plaque showing the twin girls who were born conjoined at the crotch, back in 1642. One died after 10 hours and one after 24, but they were such a curiosity that people came from miles around to see their bodies. The plaque depicting them designates the length of life for each of the twins, as taken from an old book. Hochstadt is a very interesting place, but it got very hot that afternoon, and finally we all succumbed to the temptation of an air-conditioned bus and said a grateful and reluctant farewell to our tireless guide, the museum curator.

We returned to the Columbus Hotel, again with no dinner at hand. This time I did manage to pick up food of sorts at the Shell Mini-Mart in preference to being driven into town -- I had translation work to do for the next day. We needed to leave at the ungodly hour of 7:30, because we had about two hours' drive to Gerterode, where the bake-oven was being cranked up in our honor. And so to bed -- the heat began to be the persistent and pervasive theme of this trip.

[composed on Tue, 19 Aug 2003 01:26:05 -0400]