Language as Vehicle and Vessel

 

Sunday late morning – still so much fog wafting, mystical and mysterious – engulfed in shades of grey. What will the future bring us? Where will it go? How will it look like? Unknown. Seeking anchor, I am reflecting on the last few days, my encounters with German and Jewish friends. All week, history has been visiting me, triggering vivid memories. Opening internal space, where I am free to roam. Vast time spans and continents interweave their landscapes as I am preparing my late breakfast. Come on a ride with me.

 

Surprisingly, I am in a really good mood. Splurging on a home-made espresso, a rare occasion these days. Getting out my old Bialetti stovetop Moka pot. The fresh coffee beans are called “Grounds for Innocence,” a blend by Bongo Roasting Company in Tennessee, created as a fundraiser for the Innocence Project. This organization has been fighting since 1992 to free the innocently incarcerated, prevent wrongful convictions, and reform the criminal justice sytem. Grinding the “innocent beans” with my old small Braun machine, I am transported back to my volunteer prison work and film Voices from Inside. How delightful when after 30 years, old tools are still working well. Pressing down on the lid, and voila, the noise of grinding. Upon lifting the lid, punchy Kaffeepulver aroma attacks my nostrils. Soon after the kitchen is filled with happy sound of the old-fashioned aluminum pot bubbling on the stove. Echter Kaffee was a luxury and rarity in war and postwar Germany, Ersatzkaffee die Regel. When in my twenties, I was a coffee addict. Now in old age, I drink “Dandy Blend” made from roasted barley, rye, dandelion, chicory and beet roots. In the old country, many young people are flocking to similar coffee alternatives.

 

Well, today happiness also arrives from being spoiled with several conversations with friends via Signal or my landline phone. They lift my spirit. Ingrid writes from New York, cleaning out her late brother’s flat, reading “Kairos” by Jenny Erpenbeck in the very good English translation. We muse about the old days in post-war Germany where newspaper was recycled as toilet paper. “Why have advertisement for it?” Ingrid smiles via text message. I had passed to her my copy of this acclaimed novel playing in the 80’s in East Germany. A reality she is not familiar with, growing up in America with a German mother and American born father of German parents. In childhood, Ingrid and her brother spent summers in München at her grandparents’ garden and house in Nymphenburg. Yes, back in the early seventies, many still used newspaper for wiping. In the book, like in real life, people wonder about Americans hording toilet paper rolls in their closets. Do you remember the beginning of the pandemic with stories about toilet paper raids? That made me shake with laughter and disbelief.

641 Garage Memorial Mural

LIVES STOLEN innocent but imprisoned few are freed and exonerated STOLEN LIVES

 

Each summer, our family being divided, we traveled across the military border from the West to the East for vacation. Der Westen und der Osten. Only West Germans who had relatives in the East were allowed to apply for a visa and make this treacherous transit. Being poor, my parents, saved up money to send or bring luxury items like real coffee and chocolate for uncle Peter’s family and the grandparents. Oma and Opa had a “Garden of Eden” with abundant vegetables, fruit trees and chicken. Ironically, there our small family felt “rich.” Most people in the affluent West decided to have no or little clue about their brothers’ and sisters’ situation, perhaps only two hundred miles away. (This refusal strikes me as painfully familiar now here in troubled America.) East Germans were locked in their land, they could only travel to bordering communist countries. And then only if they possessed rare money and connections which only state officials had. The Cold War created a war zone. This might be hard to imagine. People in Korea, Vietnam, Eritrea/Ethiopia, Sudan etc. are experiencing these realities. What does it mean to live for decades in a militarily enforced divided country and family? I never got to know another German family like ours, even though they existed plenty. Our small family, so different on many levels. Navigating as an outsider was the only way for me to imagine the world. It taught me minute observation and sensitivity. When arriving in San Francisco in December of 1981, racial segregation quickly became obvious to me. I had just turned 28 years old, and my very poor English, made me even more alert to the smallest cultural and social nuances.

 

Is it just me, or are most people these days realizing the glaring importance of time with family and friends? Sipping my espresso, it tastes as promised on its packaging: notes of honey, orange, milk chocolate and spices. A luxury drink for me. A happy time, despite an anomaly cold summer in coastal Northern California. I drink to the 29th birthday of my nephew Janis in Germany. This cool, windy, grey Sunday morning, memories of free and glorious Hochsommer. High summer, stirring in my bones. High spirits, in dark times. This year no travel to Europe for me, no drinking Kaffee with family – too dangerous upon re-entry into America. Sadness. Nostalgia for the old country.

Antonie in Ramona on Sunday mornings, not yet the new signs…

(In the 70’s, she and Dante were in the Peace Corps in Sevastopol in Ukraine)

 

Just as I am about to make Eierkuchen, my artist friend Antonie calls (click to see some of see her art). Yesterday she made Pfannkuchen (same thing: eggs, milk flour, Eier, Milch Mehl) for her 94-year-old Italian husband Dante and herself, with home-made apricot compote. She tells me of her new signs for the small weekly Sunday morning demonstrations in downtown Ramona which shea and friends have attended since January 20, 2025. We both grew up in Germany. Antonie was born in 1938 in Bavaria. 86-years old she is defiant, stubborn, perseverant, and enthusiastic. Marveling at my recent entry in Karinaland River, she recounts her mother offering her a sugar cube with Melissengeist when she was not well or pretended so (not wanting to do what her mother ordered her). Speaking German delights both of us. We laugh, and many times exclaim in exuberance: ganz toll. Language bonds us, verbindet uns hinweg über Grenzen. It connects across borders, histories, continents, tragedies, differences. Language as vehicle and vessel.

Newly installed brass remembrance stones – Stolpersteine – for Connie’s mother Lucy and family: “Here lived Lucie Rose, born 1915, escaped 1936, USA.”

Last Thursday, knocking at her door, Connie opens greeting me with: “Today is my mother’s 110th birthday.” And I blurt out: “And my Papa’s 100’s birthday!” I am bringing Brot und Butter, bread and sweet French butter to complement her delicious homemade lentil carrot soup – Suppe. We converse about her recent invitation and visit to Nienburg in Germany, where her late mother Lucy was honored. In 1936, she fled Germany at age 21 to New York. Her Jewish family was dispersed for years before reuniting in Hollywood, Los Angeles, where Connie grew up. But many members had been killed in the Holocaust. This Spring, I helped Connie with her 30 minutes memorial speech which she delivered beautifully in German(!) at the big festivities of the Gymnasium that her mother attended as the only Jewish student, and only girl. This gesture of honoring and remembrance moves me so much. Efforts of Reconciliation. Wiedergutmachung. For Connie’s promised ice cream, I pull out my jar of Ersatzkaffee (above mentioned “Dandy Blend”). With it I improvise something like an Eiskaffee. Connie has Lapsang Souchong tea. Wir geniessen die deutsche Sprache, sie übt und ich brauche es auch. We both truly savor speaking German, like her I need the practice. Unsere Wurzeln – our roots are interwoven, alive and well. Just as the lives of our late Jewish husbands, born two months apart, two professors playing chess with each other, and dying three months apart. Nine years ago. The ancestors look happily upon us, in this country of immigrants.

 

The next evening, celebrating­ at Fern and Sam’s – with Fern’s famous and delectable pistachio lemon cake – the final signing of my new living trust papers is finally done. After 9 months of research, meetings and work, the eagerly awaited bequeathing of Karinaland to BACLT, a non-profit community land trust in Berkeley that will make my home available for affordable housing upon my death. Never to be sold for profit, preserving the 641 Garage Memorial Mural and my approach to the land’s stewardship. “Giving the land back to the commons” one could say – for me it is a coming full circle, having grown up in a socialist family.

 

Thank you, Ingrid, Antonie, Connie, Fern & Sam, Renate (not mentioned here), for engaging in friendship with me, across generations, ethnicities, places. I am so grateful for this vessel of language and intimacy. What a week – the Ancestors insisting on intermingling, sharing memories, tragedies, accomplishments, dreams, delights. Journeys. Blessing us in these increasingly dark times. May we know true light.

Happy 100’s birthday, Papa

(July 24, 1925 – 2025)