I think we did conquer the jetlag, finally! We slept well and only woke up very briefly during the night, then “slept in” by our standards (8:30 am!) and felt no urge to nap. So I finally feel well rested. We had another quiet day but successfully worked two nice long walks in despite the fact that we had multiple bands of thunderstorms with impressive downpours moving through. After the first of these cleared out, we took a morning birding stroll through and around the botanical garden and finally spotted a couple of elusive birds that our Merlin birding app kept claiming we could hear: the fabulously named Common Chiffchaff (I already mentioned that this is an equally fabulous “Zilpzalp” in German) and a Eurasian Blackcap (“Mönchsgrasmücke”). More accommodating in showing themselves were the ubiquitous European robins, who are about half the size of an American robin (unrelated, I think). It will be a disappointment to some and a great relief to others that we won’t post many bird pictures–Mark did not want to carry the larger, heavier lens with him that is required for good pictures of small birds! But here is ONE robin captured with my cellphone:
After our walk, the second storm, and some lovely lunch Imke fixed for us all, I took off on my own. I should probably explain that I have a mission of sorts this summer: Wherever we are, I want to explore what has been done to make people aware of the history of European Jews and of the Holocaust, partly because of my work with the letters of a family that fled to Lincoln, NE, in 1936, in whose hometown I’ll be able to do some research next week. While these letters have no connection to Osnabrück at all, I also knew I had many gaps in what I knew about the Jewish community here, and that the city has made quite an effort in the past 20 years or so to educate its citizens about this history.
With this mission in mind, I headed to the nearby Nussbaum-Museum, a small but exquisite museum focusing on a Jewish painter from Osnabrück who lived in Belgium his wife when the Nazis began to occupy it, went into hiding and was ratted out just before Brussels was liberated and murdered in Auschwitz. His late paintings, which make the horror of the years in Belgium a theme, are very powerful, as is their setting, an ultramodern “no exit” building designed by Daniel Libeskind to reflect the way in which Nussbaum was cornered and had not way out. I had seen the exhibit before, but some of the paintings are traded against others (only 45 are on view at a time, but the collection contains 200). The Libeskind building connects to a museum dedicated to city history, which has also been significantly updated since I was last there, and where, in addition to listening to a quick architectural history audio tour of Osnabrück, I found a temporary exhibit on the short-lived Jewish community that lived here in the late middle ages (1260-1430) before they were kicked out of the city all the way until the 19th century! The small group of Jewish families that settled here at that later time (and some of whose graves I saw at the Jewish cemetery last year) were almost all deported during the Nazi era, as a memorial marker at the site of the synagogue that was burned down in 1938 points out.
All of this connects to the museum complex’s third space, the “Villa Schlicke” next door, which during the Nazi era housed the local party headquarters and was known as “the brown house” because of that. It now features an interactive display of local and national history, including about Hans Calmeyer, a German bureaucrat from Osnabrück who saved several thousand Jews in Holland from being deported (although there were many he did not and/or could not save). The exhibit is called “Democracy Counts” and asks visitors pretty pointedly what they think they would have done in various scenarios–which seems quite timely. I am impressed with Osnabrück as a city for taking its responsibility to remind people of the Nazi past and to ask them to think about this past in terms of guarding human rights and democratic principles today.
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I spent about 2 1/2 hours exploring and could have spent more time, but Imke and Mark came to meet me for a change of pace and space. Together we went to our favorite gelateria AGAIN, since Imke wasn’t with us yesterday. They really do make the BEST gelato around here, and we were all in our happy place.
We took a roundabout way home since it was still nice out (although quite humid), and after dropping Imke off, Mark and I kept going for a little bit longer, to the campus of Osnabrück’s technical university that’s near here. It was very quiet, although it should be the middle of the semester here–but maybe students don’t work on campus on Sunday? We got home just before the third (and obviously last) band of showers, and spent the remainder of the evening indoors working on our computers.