Part 6: The Vale of Thuringia

On Monday, 4 August, the Leinbach group had a long travel day ahead, so we had to get up very early. We crossed what had been the border with East Germany at Phillipsthal (former West Germany) -Vacha (former East Germany) -- but we were still in Leimbach territory. There are records of von Leimbachs having lived at Vacha, and perhaps even more intriguing, there are records in the "Wiedertäuferakte" -- the proceedings of actions taken against Anabaptists -- of at least one couple from near Vacha named Leimbach who were accused and convicted of being Anabaptists, back in about 1534. It is tempting to stray into the unusual history of Anabaptism in this region, but I'll have to restrain myself.

I had been told to expect a drastic difference in the countryside after crossing the border, but what I noticed instead was a vigorous enterprise of renovation and restoration. Our early morning goal was to be the town of Leimbach just west of Bad Salzungen, where there is a house that is called the "Schloss," which the town fathers connect to the von Leimbach family who founded the town (Gertrud's name comes up here as well).

Laurel had made a preliminary visit to the "Schloss" and was very dismissive of its pretensions to the name. Betty Wester had visited it years before, prior to the Wende, when it was in disrepair, and the photos she took did seem to me to indicate that it had been somewhat fortified, although it was admittedly quite small. When Laurel visited, it had been repaired to the point where any old structures were not visible, and the historic marker only claimed a date in the 18th century, long after any von Leimbachs might have been around. At any event it was in a part of town that was not accessible to our bus, and we didn't have time to stop and walk to it. We did stop by the highway sign naming the town, and those so inclined busily photographed it.

Then we drove through and beside the Thüringer Wald, on toward Eisenach, site of the Wartburg Castle and a place full of associations: St. Elisabeth of Hungary had lived there after her marriage, remember? And Martin Luther (disguised as "Junker Jörg") came there and translated the Bible and threw his inkwell at the devil. And Wagner set his opera Tannhäuser there -- complete with a main character named Elisabeth. King Ludwig II of Bavaria was so struck by the Wartburg that he used it as the model for his own extravagant 19th-century fantasy castle at Neuschwanstein.

The town itself was the birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach, who was baptized in its St. George's Church. And this was also the place where Jay and I would send the group on its way, while we would follow our own itinerary from now on. After we had toured the Wartburg (definitely "worth a special trip," as Michelin would put it), Heiko drove us to a plaza in the middle of town that was conveniently near the Bach Museum -- the home of J. S.'s father Ambrose and possibly his birthplace, although that is not documented. He parked the bus in the plaza, which was also conveniently beside the Am Bachhaus Hotel, where Jay and I had booked a room for the next two nights.
We checked in to the hotel, then joined the group for the appointed tour of the Bach Museum, which included performances on an array of early keyboard instruments by a member of the staff. Paul Leinbach from Florida was selected to operate the bellows for the small organ that was the last of the instruments to be demonstrated, and did it very well. There were some mildly embarrassing incidents here too, but I won't go into those.

David and Tess Lineback were also planning to leave the group at Eisenach, and we decided to stay with the bus while it took them to the train station. Good thing! When Heiko was trying to find their bags, David's main suitcase could not be found! I opened the one we had thought was his -- and discovered that it was mine instead! (Samsonite can be so confusing.) Heiko, already anxious because the day threatened to extend beyond the amount of time he was allowed to drive, pointed out the taxis waiting in front of the Bahnhof, and I hailed one and took my suitcase back to the Am Bachhaus, had the driver wait until I could retrieve David's, and then went back to the station.

By that time the bus had of course left, so that was the rather unceremonious end of our time with the Leinbach Family Tour. We stayed with David and Tess at the station until their (delayed, which turned out to be lucky) train to Frankfurt arrived, and then walked back to the hotel. (In fact I never did find out whether the train they got on eventually was really the right one.)

The group's destination that evening was Herrnhut, almost at the Polish border, and while this has considerable Moravian interest (Count Zinzendorf himself, I believe, is buried there, and of course he had established the place as a refuge for his followers from across the border), I could not bear to bypass all those incredible Thuringian and Saxon cities that have fascinated me for so long: Eisenach, Erfurt, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden -- and even at that we had to skip places like Gotha, Jena, and Naumburg. So that's why I elected to go our own way for the rest of the trip.

We had purchased German Rail passes that allow unlimited travel for 10 days in a 30-day period, and we used up every one of those days from then on. A travel strategy I have developed that works well for us is to avoid the costly hotels in the largest cities by staying in an interesting but smaller and cheaper city nearby, and then using rail passes to visit the multi-star destinations. For instance, the last time we were in Europe (a long two decades ago) we stayed in Rouen, an absolutely fascinating city in its own right, but took the train to see Paris, the City of Lights, by night.

Here my plan was to stay in Eisenach -- and it turns out that Bill Clinton also was intrigued by the tiny Am Bachhaus Hotel, at least pictures of his stay there are prominently displayed -- and use it as the base to visit Erfurt, then to go on to Weimar as a base for Leipzig, and finally to Pirna as a base for Dresden.

The one set of drawbacks to this plan, for this trip, turned out to be the lack of some important facilities, such as laundromats and internet cafes. If someone here would like to invest in the former East Germany, I suggest the opening of laundromats in the smaller tourist towns might be quite successful! Internet cafes are of course not a great money-making proposition, and Eisenach turned out to have two of them, but later on, especially in Weimar, their absence was an inconvenience. I did manage to empty the accumulation of spam from my inbox in Eisenach but did not have time actually to send any e-mail, while the one internet cafe in Pirna was not at all conducive to concentration -- hot, as was all of Germany these two weeks, but also noisy with a bunch of guys in their 20s playing games with each other.

But I digress. There are, of course, lots of ghosts in Germany, and for all the serene beauty of the landscape and the engrossing complexity of the civilized centers, they can't be avoided. In the first installment of this report, about Gelnhausen, I forgot to mention that on our way back to the hotel from our walking tour of the town we passed by the Jewish cemetery. This one is large, and I would suppose the records of its graves would provide a lot of important information for Jewish genealogists, but it also made one stop and think.

In Eisenach, one of the sights that gives one pause is the 1939 statue of Bach in the vestibule of the Georgenkirche. The Blue Guide, quite accurately, describes it as "fearsome" and a typical example of Nazi art. I had remembered that description, even though I stupidly left the Blue Guide at home, so I did want to see it. And one really must wonder what on earth impelled the monstrous need, for one relatively small group of egregiously brutal people, to strip all vestiges of sensitivity and empathy and gentleness from everything that is beautiful.

The Vale of Thuringia is one of those remarkably Arcadian landscapes whose beauty almost seems to offend the puritanical and the authoritarian, such that they have to tame it into ugliness. So it was not bad enough that the Nazis imprinted one particular kind of barren grotesquerie on to its aesthetics, but then the Stalinists and their pedestrian successors had to come along and spread a heedless industrial pollution over what was left -- heedless of anything except the crassest material "needs" of the human animal, and thereby killing the human soul itself.

I've been thinking so much, since our return, about villages, and the difference between them and cities. Both have great virtues, it seems to me, especially when the villages are so organically connected to their soil as are those in the Rohrbachtal and elsewhere in Oberhessen, and when the cities are such efficient generators of aesthetic and intellectual quality as they are in the Vale of Thuringia. So I'm likely to wander off into these quasi-philosophical musings without warning over the remaining reports of this trip -- once again, let me know if you've had enough.
Weimar especially will bring forth more thoughts about the bipolarity of German history, so be warned. But tomorrow, there is a respite: Erfurt -- the home, among its other virtues, of the serene Meister Eckhart, whose spirit still seems to permeate this remarkable city.

[composed on Mon, 25 Aug 2003 21:14:44 -0400]