Two weeks in Germany: a diary. Part 1: Gelnhausen

Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 11:16:00 -0400


(I was going to call this "Diary of German Heat," but I was afraid that would sound like porn spam.)

On the 29th of July, 2003, Jay and I flew to JFK, where we found Singapore Airlines and eventually a growing cluster of people named things like Lineback, Linebaugh, and even Leinbach. By the time we all got together at last, over there on the other side, there were 47 of us travelling by bus through the ancestral countryside.

Jay and I joined the group on our second day in Germany and stayed with it for about 5 days, then we took off on our own on a train trip through some of the cities of Thuringia and Saxony I have so long wanted to see: Eisenach, Erfurt, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden -- and we finally did make it to the exclamation point of the whole trip: Prague!

My plan here, which may not come to complete fruition, is to reconstruct the trip in my head, day by day, in the hope that most of you will find something of interest buried somewhere in the narrative. If you don't care a hoot about genealogy, maybe you will like landscape, or cityscape, or fatheaded observations on politics and society, or just the travails of travel. If you know right away that you will be bored bored bored, or otherwise annoyed to receive such stuff, let me know and I will promptly take your name off the distribution. If at any time you want out, do the same.

Someday I would like to download all the hundreds of digital photos I took and select a few of them to put up on a web page. Ideally I would key them to the narrative itself, but my geek skills aren't up to that yet, and if I wait to acquire them I won't be able to remember whether this quaint vista or that travel misfortune was located in Langenselbold, Middle Wallop, or Grand Island Nebraska.
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Day One: We call on Frederick Barbarossa in Gelnhausen
The tour group landed in Frankfurt on Wed., 30 July, and clambered onto a waiting bus to go off to Heidelberg. Because Jay and I had done Heidelberg before (and found ourselves looking in vain for things to do on our third day), we went on to Gelnhausen, right across the River Kinzig from Altenhaßlau where the tour was going the next day.

I had found an attractive-sounding hotel right next to the ruins of Barbarossa's castle, called the Burg-Mühle. It turned out to be everything I hoped: charming, comfortable, historic -- maybe just a tad on the kitsch side (scads of geraniums in the flower boxes, and a new addition with half-timbered or fachwerk construction that tried to look as old as the rest), but enjoyably so. The original part was actually the mill serving the old imperial castle, and the millwheel is still in place -- safely tucked behind a glass window next to the restaurant.

Getting to Gelnhausen by train introduced me to the special perils of the Frankfurt-am-Main Regional train system. There are signs purporting to give "Fahrgastinformation," or passenger information -- but these are composed of a huge labyrinth of multi-colored spaghetti and lots of incomprehensible numbers. Then there are tables of departures -- but if you don't know the time your train departs to your desired destination, you have to go down hundreds of entries to dig it out. It took several trips to a disdainful human to find out which hour I should be looking under to find the time and track number for the train to Gelnhausen.

It was a relief to learn that only Frankfurt is so badly served. Other train stations we used in later days offered a handy book of City Connections, alphabetized by city; in Frankfurt the equivalent booklet was useless -- but I suppose that if every city you could get a train to from Frankfurt were shown, the result would be more like the Manhattan phone book in heft. Anyway, at last we did arrive in Gelnhausen and got settled in.

But that was after the kitchen had closed for the afternoon. However, the pleasant proprietor asked the equally pleasant cook/waiter if there was something that could be done for me (Jay was not hungry), and he immediately offered Spiegelei mit Schinken -- eggs sunny-side up with ham. I explained that I was sort of a vegetarian, and gebratene Kartoffeln were swiftly substituted for the ham, and I was happy. The potatoes were exceptionally good, and the "mirror eggs" were beautiful and tasty, and when I responded "Limonata" to the waiter's offer of a drink, he brought me exactly what I was asking for: that particularly refreshing Italian soda. I mention this because ever after when I asked for Limonata in German restaurants, especially those in the former DDR, I got either a blank stare or an offer of Sprite instead. Which is not the same thing at all. Another plus for the Burg-Mühle.

After a much-needed rest following the flight and the train ride, we were ready to see the town. Gelnhausen is definitely worth a trip, in my opinion, and should be better-known as a destination. Frederick Barbarossa, in case you're wondering, was the member of the Hohenstaufen family who was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1152 -- interesting that the dynasty is known as the "Staufers," but I rather doubt the Mennonite and otherwise PennsyDutch Stauffers many of us know are descended from them. But don't rule it out altogether just yet either -- stay tuned for further speculation on any connection between the medieval von Leimbach knightly family and the Leinbachs who included my mother! Barbarossa is Italian for red beard, and it was apparently an accurate description of this man.

But he did build an important seat here at Gelnhausen and designated it an imperial city. As our host pointed out, there was a time in the middle Ages when what is now the great sprawl of Frankfurt was of decidedly less importance than Gelnhausen.

Unfortunately we never actually got inside the castle ruins themselves; closing time of 4 p.m. came before we had emerged onto the streets, and opening time of 10 a.m. conflicted with our need to be ready to be picked up by the bus before 11 the next day. But we did walk all around the walls, and it is a place I hope to go back to.

When we started on our walk, I had to put away my digital camera because it began to rain. Little did we realize that those were the last welcome drops of moisture, and the last clouded skies, we would see in two weeks of blistering heat and blazing sunshine!

From the hotel and castle into the town proper there is a round-arched gate. Through it runs the street I had suggested to our tour guide that the bus might take to reach our hotel, and I gazed at it with considerable concern, wishing I could call the guide and suggest an alternate route. But I watched FedEx trucks and UPS trucks (mostly Mercedes!) and ambulances and armored cars roar through it with more room to spare than looked possible, so I just decided to trust the driver to make it through when the time came.

We walked and walked -- Gelnhausen climbs a hill up the bluffs of the Kinzigtal, and halfway up is a spectacular Romanesque church, the Marienkirche. Again it was closed by the time we got there, but from the outside the Romanesque features of its tall towers were stunningly beautiful. It was interesting to me that this majestic structure is the Protestant church of the town, while the relatively modest Peterskirche is the Catholic church. The Peterskirche also has similar Romanesque features.

We walked into a beautiful square, which I noticed was called the Untenmarkt. Wherever there is an "unten" something, that almost always means there is an "ober" companion somewhere, so we kept walking up the hill, and indeed found the Obermarkt, which turns out to be the civic center of the town.

Each square was distinctive in its own right, and that alerted me to watch for what turned out to be, for me, a highlight of this trip, town-planning-wise: the wonderful, imaginative public spaces in every place. I remembered the "Courthouse Square" in Goshen as a feeble stab at such a place -- in reality it is nothing more than the intersection of the two widest streets, Main and Lincoln, and the ordinary city block on which the Courthouse sits, just another identical element of the grid plan.

These German squares, in every village and town, have visual delights and surprises at every angle, and it was finally in Erfurt where the pleasures and amenities and breathing space they all offer climaxed with one vast public gathering place after another -- all bustling with life.

But that's getting ahead of my story. I don't know why so few American cities have managed to produce such effective spaces. We returned to the hotel for a pleasant dinner, watching the waterwheel turn, arose for a bounteous breakfast buffet, and packed our bags to take out to the street, waiting for the bus.

Finally the bus appeared on the other side of the arched gate. It gingerly approached, then stopped. I wanted to signal the driver that from where I stood he had skillfully placed himself precisely in the center of the opening, offering nearly a foot of clearance in all directions -- but finally he moved the bus slowly forward and found a place to pull off to the side, to load our bags.

Later the driver, Heiko, a tall, 29-year-old, fiercely blond, skinny guy with earring and tattoo, told me that he has antennae attached to his roof (which I later observed to be true), and he heard them go "ping."

Then he was able to lower the bus, and all was well. Heiko turned out to be a fantastic driver, maneuvering his monster vehicle around some lanes and corners that would challenge many a Beetle driver.

I had been a bit anxious about how Jay might fit in with the Leinbach clan, but I needn't have worried. He was enveloped by them warmly, and responded in kind.
Next installment: Altenhaßlau, just a kilometer away across the river, where my 6xgreat-grandfather Henrich was schoolmaster from about 1691 to 1701, and his son Johannes, the one who immigrated to this country, got married in 1700 and served as church organist.