Mahlzeit! Extracurriculars in the archives

A face I often make at 14th-century handwriting

It hardly seems possible that I've had barely over a week in the archives. I've learned how to pace myself to stay there (productively) the whole day, although learning how to regularly have productive evenings afterwards will take more work. I've also read what seems like a daunting quantity of fourteenth-century contracts, though these are contained in a slim bound volume. I've uncovered several unexpected themes that excite me (oral culture! legal process as ritual!) and several prospective tasks which are... less exciting. (Since no one's yet created a map or graphs to keep track of the smaller hospitals' territorial possessions, guess what I get to do?) As of today, I feel that I've also had a breakthrough in my social relationships with the other archive regulars. A word of explanation: as the testimony of other researchers makes clear, I have landed in an unusually friendly archive. The size of it contributes to this, I'm sure: there's only one table for all the researchers, and if there are three of us to a side, polite elbow- and-document-shifting is necessary. Greetings and farewells were nearly the only words (besides mild jokes about scribal handwriting around the table, and shared Mozart nerdery with a musicologist) I'd exchanged with most of my fellow-toilers. The affable Herr H. was an exception: in a shared Kaffeepause in the lobby, we discovered that we shared a passion for opera, and that I'm about the same age as his daughter. Since then he's taken to uttering small English phrases at me with extreme gravity at intervals, in addition to more genuinely casual German remarks. When he informed the Herr Professor who is his seat neighbor that I was working on Very Old Documents Indeed, the latter kindly offered to take a look at any bits of handwriting I might find especially difficult. But it was not until today that I discovered the shibboleth for more shared interactions.


Mahlzeit. Frankly, I didn't know this was still said in Germany. Sure, I'd encountered it in Katherine Mansfield's short stories, and in my father's tales of 1934 Berlin (long story,) but I thought the custom of greeting the people in a room before and after meals with it belonged exclusively to a vanished world. Not so. The most direct translation of Mahlzeit is "meal time!" but this fails to reflect that Mahl is a word no longer found much outside church (das Abendmahl = the Eucharist) and Wagner librettos. An approximation might be the English "repast." And once upon a time, it was customary to mark the beginning and ending of German meals with this polite greeting. Once upon a time... and in the Mainz archives. And in the German language, moral order and customary order (Sitten und Bräuche) often appear together. So today, as first to leave for lunch, I timidly said "Mahlzeit!" and received a gratifying chorus of "Mahlzeit!" from the table.  But it was when I returned that the real fun began. "Frau K.!" said Herr H. excitedly to the jovial lady who oversees us all from a broad desk, "Frau Barnhouse has learned how to say Mahlzeit! It conveys," he added to me, "such a feeling of collegiality." The Herr Professor nodded benevolently. "So," said Frau K., "now you're officially capable of getting around." When Frau K. left the room shortly thereafter on an official errand, Herr H. leaned conspiratorially over the table. "By the time she leaves here, Frau Barnhouse will also be fluent in Mainzer dialect, nicht wahr, Herr Professor?" The Herr Professor twinkled behind his spectacles. "You may have difficulty making a passing note this week," he informed me, shaking his head with mock gravity. "Today it has been so quiet--hardly any telephone calls!" We subsided into our respective projects after that, with only brief intermissions for remarks on the quirks of various centuries. ("Do they sign 'yours most obediently' or 'yours most subserviently?' " asked Herr H. about the Herr Professor's 18th-century letter-writers. " 'Yours most obediently subservient,' " answered the Herr Professor with a grimace. I'm feeling disproportionately pleased about having discovered such conversational potential as a result of a ceremonial greeting.