The Future Holds Withdrawal

In my childhood I lived (among other grander places) in two small towns, one in Hungary (Sümeg) and one in Germany (Tirschenreuth). Both were deeply and unselfconsciously Catholic communities in which religious life was very much in the public square, the visible festivals were all religious, pilgrimages quite routine. The very environment was religious, you might say, and in each the most prominent structure was the centrally elevated church itself.

This sort of place certainly had huge influence on children—they could see, and couldn’t help seeing, large numbers of adult participating in the religious life in which children themselves were also being brought up and schooled. And my presumption is that it also influenced the aging, for whom the meaning of the lives they were completing was reaffirmed in a socially obvious way.

Both in Sümeg and in Tirschenreuth that life still continues dominantly—indeed with renewed energy. In Tirschenreuth, for instance, a miraculous event produced a series of pilgrimages beginning in 1719. These were later suppressed, in 1803, as Europe was forcibly secularized. But the pilgrimage came back and is, today, held on the 13th of every month. On a recent visit to Sümeg, my brother Baldy and Peggy (Baldy is my brother) and Tibor and Evelyn (Tibor is my cousin), witnessed an openly religious festival—and a pilgrimage—in Sümeg; the pilgrimage drew people from all over Europe.

The life in these places—which also host all the usual modern facilities, factories, and the like—is a remainder of an era when religious consciousness was the environment. The sea of faith was then, too, at the full. And, what with its persistence, it may expand again from settlements like that—places known as backward. But backward is also forward; just give it time.

In the land of the free and officially secular—where the public square may not even display the emblems of faith—the process is likely to take the form of a withdrawal rather than an expansion. I conclude this because, sooner or later, elements of the public will begin to recoil from a culture in which the First Amendment is interpreted as sanctioning violent computer games as “freedom of speech”—recently (2011) pronounced to be such by a 7:2 Supreme Court ruling in Brown, Governor of California et al. v. Entertainment Merchants Association et al. I have posted the text of the First Amendment in the last post to serve as a reference here. The Justices saw the legitimization of training youth in violence contained in those words?

What with the Newtown massacre and gun control to the fore, such matters are much in the news now, and we were entertained by news of a test in which we saw the pale image of a teenage boy playing such games—and taking (ridiculous) questionnaire tests afterwards to “measure” whether he felt more aggressive after slaughtering vividly rendered digital images of humans than he felt before. Watching such a story one truly feels extraordinary disgust; and to hear commentary in which such madness is taken seriously produces mirages of the future.

In these mirages I see communities withdrawing. The Amish, Mennonites, and Huetterites will soon have company. It will be barely noticeable at first, but it will be a genuine movement, and as it grows in numbers, it will eventually rule. No. These will not be utopian communities destined to fade away. They will be real. No amount of reform legislation will ever work, but voting with the feet will. It’s in the air. Something within us tells us to take up farming again. And in a handful of decades or so, the drain-away of fossil fuels will bring practical confirmation of the faint inner urges that rise as we contemplate the death of reason.

Old Gifts and New

Today the new brings the old. Quite some time ago my brother, Baldy, discovered that a book had been published about Tirschenreuth, the Bavarian town. It’s a modest place of around 9,000 inhabitants, but one of our important family locations. We lived there as a family as World War II came to an end. Multiple posts here hark back to that place. I’ve intended to mention that book here for a long time, but the means of showing it were lacking. Now a new gift, called the HP Photosmart 5510, provides the means. It is a printer, scanner, copier, and photo printer all rolled into one. Until now I’ve had to photograph books or their contents. Now I have a new tool. Herewith three images produced using Photosmart, beginning with the book itself.

The title of the book is Long Ago in Tirschenreuth. That word, Damals, does not have an actual English equivalent. A forced translation of it is There Once, that “once” not further amplified, but the word’s essence is remembrance. The author is Eberhard Polland, a writer, the publisher is Bücherhaus Rode, Maximilianplatz 38, 95643 Tirschenreuth, Germany. The book appeared in 2010.

An image of the market square (Maximilianplatz formally, but everybody called it Marktplatz) is a kind of signature for this town if the photo includes the town’s church, named Mariä Himmelfahrt (Mary’s Ascension).

The region is blessed with high quality clay deposits, and one of the oldest industries in the region, although not in Tirschenreuth itself any more, is porcelain. One of the producers of the finest high quality porcelain is Falkenpozellan GmbH located not far away in Bärnau on the Czech border. Well, Tirschenreuth was the first, and the factory was right in town—damals. The old ad reproduced in this book of remembrance says on top: “A nurturing place for German quality work.”

My Photosmart is another and this time an American instance of quality workmanship. It speaks to my computer by wireless means; we’ve tried its prowess printing photographs, and, by golly, they look just like the photographs of old, brilliant colors, stiff little pieces of shiny paper. This gift came to me from a virtual person, ECDI, the acronym of our company name. We live in a mysterious world where invisible persons give valuable, tangible gifts. Thank you, ECDI; thank you, Baldy, for that book.

In Memoriam

German Wikipedia (link).

We get a German-language weekly, the Wochenpost, passed on by friends. A recent brief feature told me something I should’ve known, having lived in Bavaria, but in our youth we just absorb the old and worn and don’t think much about it. Life draws us on. Seems that in old, poor days Bavarians buried their dead on a board or plank. They called it the plank of the dead (Totenbrett). They wrapped the body in a sheet and tied it to a narrow board. They lowered the board into the grave or, untying the strings, let the body slide into the grave. When they saved the plank, the carpenter shaped and decorated it to make a marker erected either by the grave itself or in some other public place. They often carved some motto on the board—as later, also, onto grave markers made of stone. Here is a sample:

This Plank here says to Thee:

“What You are now were we,

What We are now you’ll be,

For all Eternity.”

As a boy in Tirschenreuth I saw those Dead-Planks standing here and there awesomely weathered, indeed almost black, in the cemetery where we used to go sleigh-riding in the winter. It had a little building, too, and, sometimes a dead person was laid out in there on a stone table. For this reason we always went and looked through the glass door. It was a strange sort of moment, always, but at that age we took it all in stride. Other days, those. We lived with death casually. It was a part of life.

The Body of Culture

I was born in Budapest and have lived in many places, but by the chance of war and the clock’s rotation the Bavarian town of Tirschenreuth became my home town. I lived there during crucially formative years (8 to 13); there is more on Tirschenreuth here on this blog. I show the photo featured on Wikipedia (link); everybody always uses the same view and for a good reason. It combines in one image the two places where in ancient times the collective life of humanity took place: the market and the church. I also show the city’s crest; at its founding it came under the sway of the Abbey of Waldsassen, and the abbot ruled. Tirschenreuth is a county seat and has a population just under 10,000. However tempting to continue—such are my feeling for this place—my subject today is the body, thus the institutional expression, of collective life. I begin with Tirschenreuth because there, in the period 1944-1949, I actually experienced what life in medieval times might have been like. The “body of culture” there was the church; it organized collective life and structured time.

I got to thinking yesterday about the three layers of personal and collective life: the physical, cultural, and the transcending. It occurred to me that the middle level in this triad has drastically changed since my childhood. At my birth in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, the market had its usual role—indeed in virtually every settlement of meaningful size there was a large market, either permanent or organized once or twice a week. The cultural level was decisively secular; in Hungary, which was roughly evenly divided between Catholic and Protestant regions, culture expressed itself in such institutions as theater, orchestra, opera and the intellectual life. Parents introduced their children to these realms with conscious effort. We were taken to concerts and the theater much as we were taken to church—and the experience was much the same one. The two lower layers were still unified, as it were. The topmost had already parted into at least three separate domains. The country wasn’t unified at the level of faith. Some were Catholics, some Protestant, and a minority (to which my maternal grandfather and Mother belonged) decidedly humanist. He was a Mason (in Europe that meant atheist). My Mother’s religion was High Art, a kind of amalgam of music and of literature.

The point that I would emphasize here is that culture still meant one thing, and something one acquired, couldn’t simply buy. The concept of pop culture hadn’t formed yet. My reflections yesterday yielded the notion that this middle layer has become transformed so that culture as we used to think of it has become a life-style choice, not a collective experience; it has been replaced by politics and pop culture—movies, TV, “music,” and increasingly social networking. Indeed the distinction between politics and pop culture has also begun to blur. Communications media have changed politics and merged it with entertainment; leaders have become pop stars. A single “body” has emerged in consequence and now represents culture—it organizes collective life and structures time: the media. That amalgamation of institutions is altogether dominated by commercial motives. It is itself being transformed from what used to be a print into a visual medium, signaled to us by the drastic decline in newspapers, inwardly (read content) as well as outwardly.

Having jotted down some notes, I went on to thin our Japanese Knotweed. My notes contained no reference to Tirschenreuth. But this morning, waking with some dread of what is to come today in the media, awareness of my home town was suddenly quite large and an addendum to my reflections present. It was that in Tirschenreuth, when we arrived there as refugees in 1944, an earlier order yet had still prevailed. This somewhat backward pocket of Catholicism in Bavaria still retained an order that Hungary had already left behind. Here everything still remained strongly rooted in the old time religion. I’ve always been very grateful for having had the experience. It helps me face the rising flood with equanimity.

Nests of All Kinds

They rest, float, hang. They’re scraped, found, dug, hung. They’re formed of pebbles, sticks, living plants, horse-hair, reed, stalks, mud, anything at all. They are often reinforced, wedged between branches, carved out of living cactus plants, and suspended or glued using spider-silk. Most are hidden or carefully camouflaged; in some the bird seals itself in and is fed by its mate through a slit. Some are rudely appropriated from groundhogs—and some the most visible feature of the landscape as you look up—or of the urban skyline in a town, provided of course that its population tolerates birds. More on that in a moment. My subject is Avian Architecture, the title of a new book (June 2011) by Peter Goodfellow, just recently published by Princeton University Press. Brigitte saw a review of it intriguing enough so that we bought a copy then and there. It has given us great pleasure and we recommend it to anyone interested in the natural world—and as Sidney Lanier once put it, in the greatness of God:

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.
         Sidney Lanier, The Marshes of Glynn

Goodfellow is a retired English Teacher, birdwatcher, and author of other books on birds. Avian Architecture has wonderful pictures but is much more than a coffee-table book. First, it’s short, 160 pages. Then it is organized into twelve chapters—each one about one of the major categories of nests. Goodfellow divides his chapters into an introductory text with illustrations, a spread with “blueprints” that lay out the schematics of the nest-type under discussion. Next comes a spread on materials used and special features. Then follow case studies of different species, in all manner of environments, and how they deploy this type of nest. Fascinating stuff. And, indeed, one cannot help but wonder about the creation of such marvelous ways of hatching eggs and raising chicks.

We grew up in Europe in smaller towns and therefore grew up with stork nests. My first experience of one was in Tirschenreuth, in Germany, where a nest sat on top of Tirschenreuth’s famed church, Mariä Himmelfahrt (Mary’s Assumption). A stork nest was evidently continuously present on that church since the nineteenth century, although not always on the church’s roof. It now has its home on the roof of the vicarage, as shown in the photograph. You may have to click on the photo and then enlarge it to see the nest well. Sometimes humans participate in nest-building too. This particular stork’s nest has a steel platform installed there with some effort, using a fire-engine crane, in 2009, to give the storks (they arrive unfailingly in Spring) a better home.

To show another kind of highly visible nest, the picture on the left shows the suspended nests of the Crested Oropendolas. They are black birds, with blue eyes, yellow beaks, and have a long, vividly yellow tail. Goodfellow classifies such nests under the category of Hanging, Woven, and Stitched Nests and covers them in wondrous detail in Chapter Eight. The one I’m showing is a sub-category called the woven pendulous basket. It is three feet long and seven inches wide at the bottom. You will find a detailed blueprint in the book. The photograph I’m showing, however, comes courtesy of the Trinidad Birding website here.

Allerheiligen and Allerseelen

In Catholic tradition the somber month of November begins with two holidays of remembrance, All Saints’ Day today and All Souls’ Day tomorrow. For me these holidays will always be Allerheiligen and Allerseelen, the names in German meaning exactly the same as their English equivalents, but with the word “day” understood rather than spoken—in German because the fortunes of war deposited my nuclear family in west-central Bavaria in 1945, in the town of Tirschenreuth. We lived there for several years in a cultural setting that in all ways except the minor (such as automobiles and electric light) might as well have been medieval. This was—perhaps even remains—a devoutly Catholic region where the religious life, the celebration of its holidays, indeed the whole rhythm of life was directly and powerfully governed by the liturgical calendar. If you rendered All Saints’ Day into ordinary, shall I call it secular, German, it would be Der Tag Aller Heiligen. Linguistically obsessed long before I knew it, the conjunction of all and saints and then of all and souls struck me as interesting and memorable later on after I’d mastered the language. And these words, therefore, have a strange reverberation in my memories.

When I mentioned All Saints’ Day Saturday by way of explaining the “hallowed eve” that comes before this feast, I dated its establishment to the thirteenth century—another rather subjective gesture. The feast’s origins, of course, go way, way back in time. But “thirteen” pleases and always has—and one could argue that All Saints’ Day reached its full definition in the reign of Pope Urban IV (1261-64). This pope, whose father was a shoemaker and hence came from the people rather than from the nobility, defined this day to be a celebration not only of recognized and canonized saints but also of those individuals who died without these public acts but had achieved sainthood in the eyes of God. Nice touch, that, I think. With that All Saints’ reaches a kind of completion.

This feast, followed by All Souls’, reminds me that the remembering and honoring the ancestors is something deeply embedded in traditional culture, not simply in the Chinese. It pleases me that in our culture this remembrance reflects a kind of hierarchical structure. First we remember the highest among us, then all the rest of us, the departed who, together, somewhere invisibly, represent the Church Triumphant.

The image shown is by Fra Angelico and called Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven. It dates to 1428 or a little later. I have it from the German language Wikipedia here.

Tirschenreuth: One of Our Cradles

In the fall of 1944 the chance of war deposited our family in a small Bavarian town called Tirschenreuth. We lived there for five years, formative years for me. I was eight on my arrival and thirteen on departure. I look back to that time as a great grace, gift, or sheer luck. Tirschenreuth gave me direct experience, in the twentieth century, of what it might have been like to live in an earlier and much more religious era of Europe. The following excerpt from a family memoir will convey the feel of the place. The account is historical, but it really felt like that still in my day.

In 1692 Tirschenreuth was just a little village under the rule of the great Cistercian Abbey of Waldsassen to the north. That year the typhus struck Tirschenreuth. People called it the “searing fever.” The mother and sister of one Johann Zottmeyer fell ill. He was a shoemaker. He prayed to the Sorrowful Mother to heal his family and promised that if they recovered, he would fashion an image of Mary for her veneration. Untreated typhus kills 10 to 60 percent of those infected. Zottmeyer’s sister and mother survived. He then engaged the artist Adam Beer to make an image of Mary for him out of white clay. White clay, kaolin, is common in the region and is the source of Tirschenreuth’s famous china. Zottmeyer hung this image near the church in a grove of lindens. In 1714 a lens grinder named Georg Sandinger was traveling south from Eger. He stopped on his way. He had drunk some bad water before departure and gotten quite sick by the time he reached Tirschenreuth. He lay down under the linden trees; he thought that he was dying. He glimpsed Mary’s image up in the tree beneath which he had come to rest.

(Wonderfully mediaeval this story. The Age of Enlightenment had begun, but Tirschenreuth has always been behind the times—like me.)

Sandinger now prayed for relief. Instantly, it seemed, he felt fine again. In gratitude he fashioned a roofed frame for Mary’s image. Three years later a journeyman whose left side had been lamed by stroke was instantly healed when, awkwardly, he climbed the linden tree and lit candles placed on the little ledge Sandinger had made to frame the image. These stories spread. By 1719, pilgrimages began to arrive in Tirschenreuth and grew huge as scores of healing stories spread across the land. People came from as far as Hungary. The Cistercians in Waldsassen took notice. A group came south and organized this phenomenon into an annual event.

The pilgrimage was suppressed in 1803 at the culmination of a period of secularization carried out by absolute monarchs in Europe. The Abbey of Waldsassen was dissolved and lost all of its holdings.

We didn’t know, living in Tirschenreuth after the war, that the place had been something akin to Fatima once—and would be so again, if still only on a tiny scale. The pilgrimage was authorized again in the 1970s. Today a monthly pilgrimage takes place in Tirschenreuth on the 13th of every month. There is now a Legion of Honor of our Dear Lady of Tirschenreuth, and those who make the pilgrimage three times are named its knights. Tirschenreuth is getting ready for the coming dark age now preparing all around us…

In a way we experienced an echo of those times. Several annual religious festivals in Tirschenreuth preempted all other activities. Every spring the parish staged a so-called Mission at the main church on the square. Afternoon and evening sermons followed high masses in the morning. Vast throngs attended these emotional events. There was the organ, the choir, and the voice crying for repentance from the golden pulpit of a cavernous dark church. An Easter celebration caused the streets to deck out in flowery booths, and floats passed the watching crowds. In autumn we attended the Harvest Festival (das Erntedankfest). Christmas was always also rather splendid.

My sister reached the age of first communion while we were there. She received it in that magnificent church with many dozens of young girls all wearing splendid white dresses that had taken quite some labor to obtain and fit. The whole family this time, all of us together, sat dressed in our very best and watched her proudly as she made her way toward the altar. I think each girl carried a lit candle. There were boys there too, of course, but we only had eyes for our daughter and sister.

I was confirmed in that church.

In those days the church was dark, almost gloomy. Old, forbidding, but mysterious. It was a dark and mysterious time—and the preachers at the annual Mission had a ready audience. Years later, in the 1970s (but unaware that pilgrimages had resumed), Brigitte and I once—on a visit to Europe to attend a conference—entered that church mid-morning on some weekday. Eight women sat in a single pew toward the front and recited a litany in rhythmic, cheerful voices. I could barely believe my eyes. The church had been restored to its original baroque splendor. It was all bright and yellow and pink and gold and red and the blue of the sky. The statues were milky white. The marble had been cleaned so that it shone and showed off the fine graining of its native stone.

* * *

Throughout my earlier childhood, we had moved with such frequency all over Hungary—my father having been an officer in the Army—that no place left any deep impression, only a few sharp highlights. For this reason for me, and my sister Susie (our little brother was too small to have experienced this quite so sharply) Tirschenreuth became, oddly, our home town, one of the cradles of the Ghulfs.