Last night, Mark, Imke, and I arrived in Leinefelde-Worbis in the Eichsfeld region of Germany (a tiny Catholic enclave wedged between the mostly protestant Harz region in the north and the mostly Protestant Thuringian Forest region in the South), and found our way to the nondescript but spacious vacation rental close to the train station in this combination of two small towns and a bunch of surrounding villages (until 2004 there was a Leinefelde and a Worbis and said villages, all separately administrated). I was too tired to write about it then, but Mark and I gathered our last bit of energy after a 10-mile day and grabbed some groceries at a huge grocery store, and some pizza, and after dinner we just wrapped up for the night. We slept like the proverbial logs, and I woke up to the beautiful raking light of the rising sun at 6 am. We are here for the weekend because we are visiting relatives of mine in one of those nearby incorporated villages, Beuren, less than 2 miles (3.6 km) from here, with perhaps 1,000 inhabitants.
A little background info: Beuren is the mostly Catholic Eichsfeld village where my Oma, Theodora Schaum née Huke, was from. She had 7 siblings, 6 brothers and a sister, and although she later lived and got married in Eschwege (about 26 km / 18 miles southwest, in the state of Hessia), she lived in Beuren in the 1940s with her only child, my father Elmar. He was born in 1940, and she moved back home sometime after her husband was first drafted to be a soldier in WWII. She stayed after he went missing in the battle of Stalingrad in 1942/43, living with her oldest brother Hermann and his wife Anni, who had gotten married in 1938 and had their four kids in 1941, 1942, 1944 and 1949, in the family home in the Teichstrasse (Pond St.). Another member of the household was Dora’s sister Tinchen (Christina Niejodek née Huke), with her daughter Eva-Maria, who was born roughly around the same time as my dad. Never admitting that her husband Heinrich could be dead rather than a POW in Russia, Dora and her beloved baby Elmar lived with the other two families in Beuren until the end of his elementary school years. Only after fourth grade, in ca. 1950, she moved back to Eschwege with him. This meant that although he grew up as the single child of a single mother, he spent his first decade with a passel of other children his own age and younger, who all saw each other as siblings and (presumably) got into trouble together. My dad mostly told stories about herding geese and then cows to help out, and singled out his cousin Eva-Maria as his favorite at the time. In the years after they moved away, the border between what was then the “Soviet sector” and the “American sector” that separated Beuren from Eschwege became more and more difficult to cross legally, even for family members, and eventually the Iron Curtain came down and the Huke siblings that had moved West (four of them, three brothers in Hamburg and Dora in Eschwege) and the ones that had stayed in the East (the other three brothers and Tinchen) could no longer see each other.
But in the 1980s, during the “thaw” of Cold War relations under Breshnev, Westerners could come visit family with the proper paperwork (and mandatory exchange of Western currency to the benefit of the GDR), and my parents began to go visit their respective relatives in the East (my mom also had a branch, but that’s a story for another day). Two or three times, my sister Judith and I (starting maybe when we were about 9 and 14, respectively) came along. Each time, we visited everywhere where we had family, making our way by car from one family to the next, seeing endless numbers of cousins and cousins once removed, sitting down for endless rounds of coffee and cake, lunches and dinners, until we were good and stir-crazy and our dad, who loved kids and also got a little restless, took whatever kids were available on little hiking adventures or at least to a playground. Beuren was always by far our favorite stop. Not only was it a charming small town, seemingly untouched by time, and so small that it was impossible to get lost and we were basically allowed everywhere. We also had same-age second cousins, who were the daughters of my dad’s cousin Friedwald and his wife Irmgard and who became fast friends and, for years to come, penpals across the border between the two Germanys: Kathrin, the youngest, was Judith’s age; Evelyn and Birgit, only a couple of years apart, were just below and above me. We played and talked to them endlessly and kept in touch for many years, although this is now down to a trickle of holiday cards. But even after reunification and after I emigrated to the US (all around the same time in 1991), I visited a few times–once in 1991 (on the same trip that took Bruce and me to Quedlinburg), perhaps another time in the 1990s, and then in 2009, to visit Beuren with Kati and Kai when we spent the year in Germany. But I hadn’t been back since then, and when I mentioned that I was thinking of showing Mark Beuren, Imke was immediately on board to come along. Even though my mom and dad divorced in the mid-1990s, the Beuren side family was always very dear to her, and just as I had been joined at the hip with Evelyn and especially Birgit, she had become very good friends with Irmgard, their mother. Irmgard lost her husband Friedwald last fall, and has some health struggles herself (since she and my mom are in their 80s, not a total surprise), and neither wants to travel on their own anymore. But for Imke, traveling here with us meant a reunion that they were both very excited about.
So, this morning after breakfast, Evelyn (my second cousin) picked us up and drove us the five minutes back to Beuren, where we had a joyful reunion at Teichstrasse. Evelyn still lives in Beuren, right next door to her mom’s home and is now a teacher and temporarily a principal at the Leinefelde high school. Her daughter and grandchild live downstairs and help take care of Irmgard next door. My mother and Irmgard began their day with a long hug, followed by a days’ worth of catching up, and we kept weaving in and out and around their day. We sat in the living room for a bit, I showed Mark the back yard with its little bridge across brook-size Leine (which flows from here to Göttingen, where we took that picture yesterday, and then on to Hanover) to the play space where Evelyn’s grandson can ramble around, complete with fire pit, tree house, and a small unheated pool, and where Evelyn’s daughter keeps her very well-behaved giant shepherd-husky mix dogs. Then we had a lovely lunch of chicken soup with asparagus that Irmgard had prepared, and around noon then went off on a short hike with Evelyn and her significant other, Jörg, to the nearby castle of Scharfenstein, which went fast in spite of a pretty steep incline.
Again, fond memories: of clambering up there, my dad with a horde of us kids, and rambling around, probably having some ice cream or a piece of cake at the café which was up at the top even during East German times. Now, there is restaurant, a wedding venue, a whiskey distillery which can sometimes be toured, and in the winter, these funny little ski lift gondolas revamped to have enclosed dinner tables outdoors for a fondue experience. But of course we had come up there for the view, and it did not disappoint. We could see the Brocken in the Harz mountains in the far distance, and the gorgeous verdant rolling hills and woods of the Eichsfeld right below us, dotted with villages and small towns with their hallmark red-tile roofs. This area of the country does not attract a lot of tourists (nothing dramatic about it, I suppose) but I love it so much. The round trip was just under two hours, but we added a little loop through the village, by the Catholic church at the center, and through the small cemetery where we visited the grave of Evelyn’s father, who just passed last October, and of her sister Birgit, who died in her 20s of a rare cancer, and whose grave will soon have to be removed (eingeebnet), because the standard lease of a modern cemetery lot is only 30 years (some exceptions apply, but I think it is very costly to own a family lot now). This also means that there are no grave markers for the previous generation (Evelyn’s grandparents Anni und Hermann).
Even though we had had fancy coffee (chai latte for me, actually) and a SMALL piece of cake at Scharfenstein cafe, once we got down to Beuren again and rejoined Imke and Irmgard, we had coffee and a fabulous rhubarb meringue cake she had baked for us, out on their patio. But my patience for sitting around (and Mark’s for using the translation app in his ear) ran short and we ran off for a while. We walked to the edge of the village, where an old monastery now functions as a senior living facility, and into the open fields in a big loop around half of the village, and came back out at the river Leine, which is only a brook here. Then we were ready for more socializing, and had a lovely barbecue meal with freshly picked salad (Jörg and Evelyn, who have traveled to the US multiple times, kept apologizing for it being only German barbecue but it was fabulous, including traditional regional sausages that were very yummy. We sat and talked and listened to Imke and Irmgard joyfully reminiscing until almost 9 pm, before Evelyn took us back home to our quarters for the night. What a lovely day!
