Reue kostet nichts

As of today, I've had my last day at the archives. ("Have you brought a sheet to catch all the tears?" asked Herr H., and I very nearly did cry, everyone was so kind.) I've not announced my change of residence, though this is a legal prerequisite for moving away. The offices responsible for that are currently closed, due to unforeseen personnel changes, whatever those may be. A round of visits and calls sorted this. "I can never remember whether you have to announce yourself entering Germany or leaving it," said the woman at the offices, indicating the frequency of such moves in Bischofsheim. She also put me on to the official at the town hall who said cheerfully: "Why don't you just fax it after returning to the States? It's a long way away, of course, but faxes should reach us just the same." As of today, I've officially handed over my duties as choir treasurer, and have officially exmatriculated at the university. I've returned all my library books, and paid off all my overdue fees.

Breaking routines

"Where were you?" asked Herr H., my avuncular companion in archival work, in a pseudo-monitory stage whisper over our respective tomes. I laughed, unrepentant, and explained that I'd been in Oxford. "How nice!" said Herr H., "normally you never treat yourself." I added in more sober tones that my sojourn had been for an academic conference, primarily… but the joy in my first reply told the essential truth: Oxford is always a paradise to me, even and perhaps especially when it's providing me with academic work to do. I came home with two secondhand mystery novels, a new book of poems, two kinds of tea, and sweet memories from visits: dinner with a Fordham colleague in London; tea with a friend from study-abroad days; and two days spent in the dear company of another friend, picnicking, visiting a museum, cooking with Jobim and Sinatra on the stereo, and even punting. And I met other scholars of medieval medical history at the conference, had conversations about the frustrations and joys of Latin, exchanged article references and contact info with fellow graduate students, and got encouraging comments both on my paper and my dissertation project. And all in a city that looks like this…

Routines

It occurs to me that I've posted relatively little, in my almost-concluded time here, about the days which are relatively normal. Partly, this is because these are the days I don't take time to photograph. Mostly, though, it's because I spend much of my days inside the archive, where I have lovely chats, share mild academic humor, and look through vast quantities of medieval documents, the transcriptions of no-longer-extant medieval documents by 18th- and 19th-century antiquarians, and various obscure modern publications. It's not terribly photogenic, though it's often enjoyable. But here is one of my favorite everyday views: my bike parked in front of the 1912 building housing the archives and city library:

Kitchen conversation or absurdist play? Round 1

When my study-abroad pal Michelle visited in November, she said kitchen conversations with my landlord and his girlfriend were like a sitcom. When Micaela, who speaks more German, visited in January, she offered a corrective: indie comedy-drama (more awkward silences than a sitcom.) After this morning's interaction with the housemate-who-is-the-landlord's-girlfriend, I have another suggestion: symbolist theater.

Belated Budapest Blogpost

Arriving at Budapest Keleti

My trip to Budapest was already a month ago, undertaken with my mother and sister. And (obviously) I haven't written about it yet. It's not just that I don't feel I really got to know the city; it's that, more strongly than in any other place I've visited, I was acutely conscious of being an outsider in it. It trumpets its history everywhere, in architecture stately and extravagant, in statues of sentimental 19th-century curves and starkly aspiring Soviet lines. And in a city with a history as long, as complicated, as laden with conflict and oppression and resistance as that of Budapest, that made my historian's hairs stand on end; Shakespeare's fretful porcupine came to mind. This was all complicated by the fact that, as a tourist, I found myself thoroughly seduced. The city is beautiful, Buda on its fortified and palace-crowned hill, Pest spreading elegantly out on the edge of unending plains. Narrow lanes and elegant boulevards, the vast Danube, decaying apartment blocks and well-kept parks; all these I loved. And yet.

But where are the bodegas? An ode to NYC

I try not to indulge feelings of homesickness too much, but as the days lengthen (northern sun pouring in my window at 6) and my time here lengthens, I find myself more than usually missing New York. Or perhaps it's just the cumulative missing of things that's catching up with me. But as weekend festivals open up here, I miss being in a city where I have people to go to such things with. Here, brass bands are present (hooray) but marginalized by globalization in the form of American pop. I miss the street festivals with Sicilian and Calabrian standards mixing with jitterbug, and people dancing to them, or sitting back and chatting with their neighbors; the festivals with salsa and bachata and merengue pulsing joyously from enormous speakers. I love Bischofsheim's vegetable stand, but I miss the Arthur Avenue Covered Market, where I get to stop for a chat with Mr. Liberatore, the florist, and where the most gregarious of the Boiano brothers, who run the largest fruit-and-veg stall, showed me his knack for sautéing artichokes.

Non-liturgical observances of a national holiday

One of the curious-to-me things about Germany is that, while census-tallied identification with Christianity is much lower than in the U.S., major liturgical holidays remain red-letter days on the calendar. For those of you who aren't high-churchy or medievalists, Ascension Day was this past Thursday, so I sought out some pleasantly open-air, heathenish way of observing it. And so (along with groups of mostly middle-aged Germans) I decided to take this all-archives-closed opportunity to fulfill a long-cherished ambition: taking a long bike ride along the Rhine. This plan was nearly scuppered before it started, as my hastily-packed pullover slipped down into the bike gears (!) and stopped the back wheel in its tracks. I angrily schlepped the thing into the bike compartment of the regional train I was bound for, received the sympathy of fellow-cyclists, and received gratefully the offer of a pair of scissors from another woman's kit. With the help of that scissors, and the helpful kibitzing of the rest of the cyclists, I had the thing in working order again just as we reached Bingen. Several had opined that, even if I got the fabric free, I wouldn't be able to fix the gears because of their age, but: 'Kann nicht' geht nicht; I was not going to be done out of my excursion. A park guard who saw me cautiously testing the gears volunteered a reassuring confirmation that everything looked secure, and a very welcome opportunity to wash my grease-covered hands. And so… I was off!

This crane, in Bingen, dates to the 18th century… but as early as the 15th, Mainz's cathedral chapter controlled one here.

This region has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. For fairly obvious reasons, as well as less obvious ones. Look at those vineyards!

And castles! (Burg Pfalzgrafenstein on the island, and, I think, Burg Katz.) This barge was called the Stella Maris.

The Loreley! Although the Gipfel des Berges was obviously not doing any sparkling in this weather, I sang at it ceremonially.

By this point in the journey, I was feeling that my exertions deserved some photographing of mile-markers. 

This charming house...

It's a truism that seeing a place through someone else's eyes can help you see it more clearly. But I found this proved again last month. It helps that the refreshing vision belonged to one of my dearest friends, whose perspective I value in any case. (Left: a stop on our Easter Sunday stroll.) We had a lovely almost-two-weeks exploring the Rheinland and beyond. I was honored and touched to be the recipient of a visit, delighted to serve as semi-cicciarone. On our first day, as we stood in the rose garden, she said "I'd like to take a picture of this charming house!" I craned my neck, gazing up and down the street. "Which charming house?" "This one. The one you live in." Oh. I'm guilty of more often seeing its lack of lightbulbs, or cobweb-collecting corners, than its charm. But I was chastened and encouraged simultaneously, and was inspired to taking the following photos while on walks through Bischofsheim in subsequent days. It may be only a Schlafdorf, but it is, after all, my Schlafdorf.

Aber Unwissen schützt vor Strafe nicht...

I've had a lovely month, but an unusually busy and varied one, with one conference, two visits, and several concerts. All of this deserves to be blogged about. And it might be! But what's keeping me up right now (after a long day of travel and archival work) is what I'm going to write about. Today I rose early and got myself on a series of trains to Würzburg, to look at more of the Mainz-relevant holdings there. I spent a productive day in the archives, and then headed home, armed with end-of-day bakery-special-priced pretzels for dinner. And my evening lassitude was interrupted by the Schaffner. The ritual of displaying my Semesterticket regional train pass along with my German photo ID did not meet with the collector's approval. "That's no good," he said; "you can buy a ticket, or you can get off." I queried, with genuine surprise and some defensiveness, this judgment. I had looked up the information on the card online; Würzburg was on the map as an Übergangsgebiet. No, this was not good enough, and I should be grateful he wasn't fining me 40€. I bit my tongue, deeming it more prudent not to mention that I had traveled this line with this ticket before, and that several of his colleagues--including one no later ago than that morning!--had seen my trustingly, confidently displayed ticket and ID, and had passed on, without so much as a "Next time, young lady…" warning. Eventually, after some further conversation determining my route and destination, I was issued a ticket, which I paid for not quite meekly. "And next time," said the Schaffner, "you might look up the information on what ticket you need before you board, if you please." This was too much. "But I did look it up!" I protested. "And I thought Würzburg was…" "That's as may be," he replied, "but ignorance doesn't protect from punishment."

Old cities, new archives: Frankfurt

For the sake of being thorough in my tracking down of leper hospitals possibly "reformed" by the Mainz archbishops, I decided to spend a day in Frankfurt's municipal archives. A number of relevant charters have been published (thanks, 19th-century Germans!) but there are also several legal cases and, tantalizingly, letters concerning leprosy diagnosis that haven't been. As I discovered, Frankfurt's institute for city history is located in the former Carmelite cloister (makes a change from the castles preferred by Bavarians.) Fortunately, given my terrible sense of direction, it's very close to the metropolis's opera house… to which, obviously, I know the way. Typically for central Frankfurt, it's sandwiched incongruously between office buildings. The institute holds a museum space as well as the archives, so I approached the main entrance in some uncertainty, more than half expecting to be shown around to a side door. However, I was welcomed warmly by the woman on the desk, shown where to sign in, given a locker key, and told where to put my things: "second door on the left in the cloister walk, and then the reading room is up in the dormitorium." I thanked her, and went through into the cloister walk… and my jaw actually dropped.

In which I try not to fluster archivists

I know, I know, these posts are like London busses. But I had a (mis)adventurous day in Wiesbaden on Monday that just demands to be chronicled. The Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, despite its sonorous name and importance, is tucked up behind a middle school and an Asian grocery west of the central train station, the direction none of the tourists go. The first time I visited its premises, I stopped numerous people for directions, all of whom were a bit confused by the question. The journey was easier on the second time, though; I admired the 19th-century villas I passed, and even knew which side streets to take to avoid pedaling up steep hills. I gave my name at the reception, fed a carefully kept 1 euro piece into one of the lockers in the subterranean space where the coffee automat lives, and headed to the reading room. It was once there that the comical adventures started.

New archives, new cities: Würzburg

I spent the last two days in Würzburg! Two sunny days in this north Bavarian city made a refreshing change to my routine. Most of these sunny days were spent in the archives, of course, which I'd been needing to check out. The Würzburg branch of the Bavarian State Archives lives in several of the 320 rooms of the Baroque residence built by the prince-archbishop from 1720 onwards. (Video of this extraordinary place here; photos are not allowed inside.) Now, be not deceived: the archives are in a rear courtyard in a side wing; the barred windows suggest that the rooms were previously service rooms. But the space is nevertheless impressively spacious, and on Friday morning, I got the reading room to myself, with early morning light streaming through the windows, and the enormous palace gardens waking up on the other side.

Dealing with the head archivist was a bit of an adventure, not only because of his Bavarian accent. I was obliquely critiqued for not showing up on the first day I'd planned to show up; I explained that this was due to my misunderstanding the fact that my "May I view the following manuscripts?"e-mail had received a reply reading "Please send us your postal address so that we can send you information." Apparently this is merely a legal formality, and I was expected. I apologized humbly and repeatedly, and was initiated into Würzburg's organizational system for its Mainz holdings. Not everything was digitalized, I was told; that takes time. It turned out that this meant searching through a variety of typewritten Findbücher (incomplete, the head archivist told me; but everything takes time…) and an impressively large collection of handwritten slips dating to the 1930s, when the charters from Mainz had last been catalogued. Fortunately, the medieval scribes of the codices belonging to the "books from Mainz with various contents" collection had made tables of contents. Is there a patron saint of such scribes? A day devoted to praying fervently for their souls? I think there should be.

Another nice surprise was running into acquaintances. As I was getting a mid-afternoon apple from my locker, a voice behind me said: "So, Mainz is not enough for you?" and I turned to find none other than the amiable Herr Professor who wrestles with 18th-century officialdom and its handwriting. We chatted over our apples before returning to our respective tasks. On the second day (when the Herr Professor had returned to Mainz) the vaguely-familiar man at the desk behind me said "We know each other from Mainz, don't we?" and I placed him as the musicologist responsible for the recent transcription of a Don Giovanni adaptation written for one of Mainz's archbishops shortly after the opera's premiere. These are small encounters… but I mention them because I've missed this sort of companionable chat, the sense of having a routine where one is likely to encounter those with similar interests. In New York, of course, the place where I have such encounters is the opera… but archives are nice places to have them too. Without further rambling, though: photos! Würzburg's archive closes at noon on Friday, so I spent several hours of a pleasantly sunny afternoon exploring the Residence gardens and the city before catching a train back to Mainz.

Helau! Carneval in Mainz

Meenzer Fassenacht, as it's known in the local dialect, is a really big deal around here. It was 3 weeks ago that Steffi, a fellow alto, asked if I was "inzwischen Fassenachterin geworden." From the beginning of February onwards, members of the Carnevalsvereine were active in the streets, with brass ensembles (natürlich) and "Zugplakettcher," little tokens sold to finance the annual parade. Endlich war es dann soweit… for the week leading up to Ash Wednesday, madness was loose in the city; at all times of day, men, women, and children could be seen in costume; bunting and colored paper and silly hats were everywhere. On Monday and Tuesday, the archives and city library were entirely closed! And because I could only answer "So, are you planning to see the parade?" with a stammered "Um… maybe… I probably should…" my choir director took pity on me and practically ordered me to join his parade-going posse. So, gathering my courage in both hands, I headed out (after finishing a conference paper draft in the early morning hours.) I reminded myself that my devoting an entire day to dressing up, admiring a parade, and subsisting largely on punch and popcorn is a textbook example of carnivalesque inversion. Photographic evidence below:

High points

I spent this past Friday and Saturday at an academic workgroup meeting: a slightly less formal version of a conference, plus an organizational meeting. And although I find writing grant applications where I create an autobiographical narrative artificially culminating in a particular academic experience rather irritating, I have to say that a weekend of discussing medieval religious women in a castle more or less fulfills the wildest dreams of my 17-year-old self about Being A Medievalist. (Parenthetical realization: I appear to have spent almost a decade of my life so far training to Be A Medievalist. I might feel mildly panicky about this, if I weren't still on a high from spending a weekend discussing medieval religious women. In a castle.)

Looking back from above the village

Further (mis)adventures in the archives

I conceived the ambitious plan of finishing out this week (before spending the weekend at an academic workshop about religious women; yay!) by visiting the archives of Aschaffenburg, and seeing if their legal and medical texts from the region had any helpful marginalia or, at the very least, enough indications of provenance to allow me to cite them. I was led by a published catalog of manuscripts, but encountered confusion when I reached the internet site which lumped the Stifts- and Stadtbibliotheken together, and where the only e-mail address I could find was for the Stadtsarchiv. Still, I e-mailed them the evening before my visit. This wasn't listed as mandatory on the site, so I thought of it as a courteous, as well as a convenient gesture (and this approach had worked for me in Speyer and elsewhere.) Here, my optimism proved to be unfounded. After stopping by the Stadtbibliothek and finding it was not what I wanted, I followed the directions of the helpful young woman there to the Stadtsarchiv, which was located in a 16th-century episcopal residence:

Research montage? updates from the archives

Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt 

The new archive director of Darmstadt is a mysterious man; he is unseen, but the effects of his presence are felt. "He is of a more restrictive nature," said one of the other archivists, explaining why I could not look at original charters anymore (unless specially requested for the sake of seals or legibility) but should instead use the available microfiches. Now, I of course feel very strongly about the desirability of preserving medieval charters. In the interests of this high purpose, I forego the pleasure of (delicately and with scrupulously clean hands and always on a padded support covered in linen) handling them myself… not entirely without repining. On the bright side, this does put the microfiche section of How To Use A Library lessons I had in middle school to good use. My "home base" of Mainz's municipal archive has also putting me at the microfilm reader (in the tiny room also containing the printer and the coffee machine) to look at charters. I have successfully begged for exceptions to the rule there, though. Perhaps a memo went out telling German archivists that more strictness should be their new year's resolution. I still find widely varying policies. Some archives (Darmstadt, Würzburg) only bring out documents twice a day; others will get materials for you whenever you need them. In Mainz, it's been policy for years not to allow photographs; elsewhere, archivists have taken initiative in offering that I can photograph things! [Side note: if I take photos on my phone, I can turn said photos into a PDF and then export the PDF into the software program that I use to take notes on my computer. Who needs flying cars?]

This past week contained a journey to a new archive, this time in Worms. Worms' claims to fame, historically speaking, are its prominence in the Nibelungenlied, and the fact that Martin Luther made himself a public and obstinate heretic there in 1521 ("Hier stehe ich…") On Wednesday, my day was mostly spent looking at the account books of the city's leper hospital, but there was a two-hour lunch break in which I had nothing to do but eat a sandwich. I spent the rest of it biking around to look at churches. So, without further ado, Worms:

Nun ist die Welt so trübe...

I had a grand plan for this Saturday afternoon: to descend on the costume sale of Wiesbaden's opera house and carry off a costume (if affordable) that would enable me to spend the Carneval season as Cherubino or one of his cousins of the operatic repertoire. This should have been a straightforward proceeding. There is no bus that goes directly into central Wiesbaden from the large bus stop nearest to Mainz's archives, but I was undeterred; I decided to take a bus part of the way into the city outskirts, and simply follow the train tracks into the center from there. (I decided that waiting 20 whole minutes for a train would be silly. Ha.) Following the train tracks turned out to be easier said than done, and I set a personal record for getting lost, making three different complete loops. I did ask directions twice… and ended up cycling in circles both times. Almost three hours later, I arrived at my destination just as the costume sale was ending, and cycled back to Wiesbaden's central train station. Now, if I had only memorized Schubert's Winterreise, I could have sung it through on my way in belated observance of his birthday. As I hadn't, I just sang fragments of it as seemed apt, addressing several crows as "Wunderliches Tier!" etc. The following photos are otherwise all I have to show for my journey.

New archives, new cities: the academic tourist

Domplatz, Speyer

I'm approaching the halfway point of my time here (eek!) and am busily reconnoitering regional archives in order to make my midterm report for the Fulbright commission sound as impressive as possible. This week, this mission took me to the city of Speyer. Speyer flourished under imperial patronage in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; remarkably, enough of the old town survives that streets, neighborhoods, and monastic precincts from that period are still marked with plaques. At least so far, the charm of being able to trace via street names the medieval layout of weavers and tailors, butchers and bakers, has not palled for me. Speyer's medieval Jewish neighborhood, unusually large and central, also retains its outlines; I'd hoped to visit some of the archaeological remains too, but the city map I picked up during the archive's lunch break turned out not to be quite up to date with its "winter hours" listings. Walking back to the archive, I found myself in the Salzgasse where the leper hospital owned property in the fifteenth century. The narrow street was only about two blocks long, so I could guess: did the lepers own their house where the wine bar stands? The Thai restaurant? The hideous concrete municipal buildings?

Work and play (or vice versa)

Frohes neues Jahr! In Germany, you can wish anyone a happy new year as long as you haven't seen them in the new year yet, a custom which I find charming. Coupled with the custom of wishing everyone "a good slide into the new year" in the last days of the old one, it pretty effectively makes the entire Christmas season a festive-feeling one. I saw in the new year by going dancing with a friend from church, and watching the fireworks over the Rhine (pictured left, taken by someone looking towards Mainz from the other riverbank.) Not a bad way to start! In an attempt to balance out this rank frivolity, I've so far submitted an abstract to a prestigious conference on medical history, and submitted a book review for publication. I spent this past weekend, however, wrapped up in Still More Frivolity, with a friend who stopped over on her way to do research of her own in Vienna. Many of our pleasant catch-up chats were held on trains, as we junketed around this corner of the Rhineland. This included me getting to Frankfurt's famous Museum Mile for the first time (oops!) where we saw Goethe's house, and admired the considerable collection of the Städel Museum. It had been a long time since I spent several hours in the company of visual art (the luxury of popping into museums is one of the things I miss about NYC) and I loved it. Auden was right about the old masters' insights into suffering. One of the pieces which grabbed me most strongly was a retable depicting Christ bearing the cross. The configuration of figures was familiar from the Stations; what struck me with the violence of originality was a man in the crowd sticking out his tongue, not even ridiculing Christ himself, but the Virgin Mary, who, following, already stunned with grief, leaning on St. John, might not even have been aware of the man's cheap, mean gesture.