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.


The great but to that--the redemption of humanity--I contemplated in the Unterkirche of the Bürgersaalkirche in Munich. On the morning of Epiphany, with the glorious hymns and sonorous prayers of Mass sounding from above, I entered the quiet lower church, where the smiling Virgin and Child gaze on the tomb of Bl. Rupert Mayer. Father Mayer was the priest whom I like to refer to affectionately, and never, I hope, frivolously, as the one-legged Nazi-fighting Jesuit. He was more than that, of course: a courageous man of God who spent decades ministering to the people of Munich, a ministry which included finding people aid and jobs and homes in the terrible depression of the interwar years, as well as reviving lay confraternities and his official parish work, which he continued despite warnings, despite prohibitions in the late 30s. He sent postcards of spiritual encouragement from his imprisonment, and led the first All Saints' procession after the war, before suffering a stroke in the pulpit. Today, he is still regarded with deep affection. In the quiet warmth of the Unterkirche, a homeless woman slept soundly on one of the benches, facing the priest's grave. A gray-haired lady prayed standing at the back. While I sat there, an old man bundled against the cold lowered himself heavily into one of the other pews, and a woman in leopard print knelt long in contemplation. Leaving, I crossed paths with a white-haired woman who smiled and thanked me for holding the door. I had really looked forward to praying with Father Mayer in his city, but it turned out to be a lovely reminder of the community of believers, as well.

Munich's opera house!

In the two days between these profound experiences, Micaela and I had… more profound experiences! These were of a profane kind, though. We are both opera enthusiasts (which seems a mild term… devotees? fanatics?) so we managed to get two big operas into a four-day visit. First, we saw an almost-never-performed opera in Frankfurt, in a production by a fantastic director who would never in a million years get signed up by the conservative Met, so I was super-delighted. And then, thanks to Micaela's skilled scouting, we got to hear one of THE opera events of the season: one of Verdi's more rarely-performed works (Forza del Destino,) by another great director, with a cast that I'd been eating my heart out wanting to hear. Jonas Kaufmann is, in my opinion, one of the most talented tenors of his generation, and yet he has in some quarters the reputation of only being loved for his good looks (ahem.) It's a hard life. (A man several places down in standing room was telling his neighbor during the intermission that he's been traveling the world to hear Kaufmann sing for the past 7 years, and a woman on our other side found a way to get most of her body over the second-row railing in an attempt to glimpse him while he sang. Opera fanatics are my favorite fanatics.) In one of the other lead roles was Anja Harteros, a soprano whose excellence explains why we call them goddesses. Do you know how great it is to hear a singer pour out gorgeous, emotionally intense music without a flicker of audible strain, with moments where suddenly music and text you know become magically new? It is so great, dear readers. 

Now, of course, I am back in the archives, but believe it or not, I don't think of this as an anticlimax. This is just what I do, my vocation, measured out in steps and discoveries so small they don't often feel like progress. But I spent a few hours at the Darmstadt archive on my way home from Munich, and found a doctor making a contract with my nuns of St. Agnes. And today I went back to the archives of Mainz, to pore over a thorny bit of the cathedral chapter's records. I didn't get very far with transcription in the hours I spent there… but as I was putting my coat on, I had a sudden insight into why the handwriting was so bad, suddenly making my paleography training and months of experience as if for naught. These records must have been written as minutes! The scribe is sloppy because he's writing fast, taking down the most important points of what is actually going on in the meeting around him. This insight doesn't make it any easier to read, of course… but at least it's exciting.