Hohenschwangau

Traveling with children has certain demands: Regular access to food and hygenic quarters, for example. Frequent visits to the bathroom--surprisingly unnecessary. Also, children seem to need a goal if they are going to walk for hours on hot dogs and ice cream alone. While all of these things mean traveling with children is more expensive, it has not meant that I no longer get to do my absolute favorite thing, which is to endlessly wander streets, because Stephanie realized that I don't care so much where I go as long as I go, and kids don't mind going as long as they decide where, and so we now travel well together.

One demand made of our European travels is close contact with castles. Ruined, palatial, restored--doesn't matter: driving through Austria and Germany, where every foothill has its own fortress, was satisfying traveling for the kids.

Our one-night detour into Germany was the apotheosis of such travel. Stephanie and the kids had worked for days on a 2000 piece puzzle of Schloß Hohenschwangau, which happened to face one of the world's most recognizable castles, the Neuschwanstein, popularized by Walt Disney through Sleeping Beauty's castle and then more ubiquitously by the Disney logo itself.

Both were richly decorated and preserved and furnished, but in the end, they preferred Schloß Hohenschwangau, because it seemed like a more comfortable place to live. Probably we would need a gardner.



So, Hohenschwangau Castle (above and below) was built by King Maximilian II of Bavaria in the 1830's on the site of what had been a fortress since at least the 12th century. It is imposing and beautiful beneath the mountains and above the Alpen lake, and inside, every room is decorated with a story, some of which can be seen here. The real star of the castle is Maximilian's son, Ludwig II, who spent so lavishly on his castles that he was declared unfit to rule: In 1886, an armed government commission arrived to depose Ludwig, but they were beaten back by a 47 year-old baroness and her umbrella.





On the other hill, of course, was one of Ludwig's biggest projects, the Neuschwanstein Castle. Though he never actually lived in this castle, it was clearly an intimate, fantastical dream, and remains so.

Like his father's hunting lodge across the valley, each room had a themed mural, in this case, devoted to operas by Richard Wagner. The rooms are over the top. There is even a hallway plastered to resemble a cave. If you want the tour yourself, Bavaria has thoughtfully provided this webtour so you don't have to get a teaching Fulbright and an autumn holiday and a car and a ticket (or you can just click Grotto and Conservatory if you want even less). Just remember, since you won't have the firsthand experience yourself, if you have to choose to live in one castle or the other, choose the other castle, as my children have done.

Remaining pictures attest to the beauty of the surrounding area, as well as that of my family.

Salzburg

Last week our family left for an extended holiday break, driving to Salzburg, Austria; Schangau, Germany; Prague, Czech Republic; Vienna, Austria and back.

We were sorry to miss All Saints Day in Barcs, but so excited to take advantage of our proximity to places we'd longed to visit for so long; and this turned out to be an outstanding time to drive towards the Alps, where the leaves were turning a brilliant red, and everywhere, against the rich, vibrant green of the foothills and the craggy tips of mountains were extraordinary reds and oranges and yellows. And the sun stayed out all week.

Our children surprised me once again for their stores of happiness in taxing conditions -- such as the backseat of a sedan for hours on end. So the five hour drive to Salzburg, which included one 20 kilometer stretch of one-lane road through forest near Kaposvár, was a lovely one.

We stayed in a comfortable Pension across the street from a Turkish bakery, walking everywhere from our room and back again. We visited Mozart's birthplace and apartments, a castle, the river, and mostly spent our time wandering through cobbled streets, gazing at apartments built into the cliffs and gnawing on pretzels, fantasizing about yet another life.

In Salzburg, as in most of our travels, we were served breakfast at the hotel and ate one other meal in a restaurant, snacking the rest of the day. On our second and last night, we had dinner in the Stiegl brewery, where Stephanie and I delighted in our beer and heavy meat and our kids ate gulash.

While the children were very excited to go to the castle, perhaps their favorite find in Salzburg was its playground, near the Mirabell palace gardens.

 

Assemblies

Assemblies at Dráva Völgye Középiskola Somogyi TISZK Közép és Szakiskola

Last Wednesday I was asked to be a part of a skit for an induction of the freshmen classes that would last from 3:00 to 5:30, with skits, marches, songs, and contests at a level of noise that might put to shame our most spirited spirit assembly in Seattle. Numerous and deafeningly effective noise-makers did their part to honor the entering classes.

So began the first of two school assemblies from which I will draw the following contrasts.

Assembly one.

Perhaps because the school is divided by programs—Water Management, Forestry, Academy, Marketing and Drama—competition happens horizontally across age groups, which means older Forestry students are yelling their hearts out in support of younger Forestry students, whereas at Roosevelt Seniors use all of their size, scam, ritual and cool to make certain Freshmen know they are tiny nothings in comparison. Most of the noise in DVK’s assembly was meant to celebrate not jeer.

Second, much in Wednesday’s gathering would probably be suspect or outright forbidden in a Roosevelt assembly. Examples: One. Female teachers called on to sing and told to sing a sexy song to a male teacher. Two. A clothes gathering competition, during which a huge number of boys ended up shirtless. Three. Shoeless tug of war over soaped-up floor in the middle of the gym. Four. The Bouncing Spear. One partner holds a water balloon high in the air, while the other jumps up and down with hands and whittled spear tied behind the back trying to pierce the water balloon held between the steady hands of a partner.

And would all of Roosevelt attend an assembly after school for two and a half hours?

Assembly two.

The next morning, another assembly followed up immediately. Whereas the first was a rowdy costumed event, the second was a solemn uniformed event, honoring the Hungarian revolution of October 23, 1956, during which thousands were imprisoned and killed by the Soviet victors. Though the assembly wasn’t nearly as long as the first, I can’t think of a time when the entire student body of Roosevelt was as silent and proud. Drama students sang songs, enacted a play, danced, and though I understood almost nothing, I felt the anger and grief, which, while perhaps third millennium students feel little of the history, was preserved in a dignified poise, and I was absolutely moved. The assembly ended in a song every student knew, the Szózat, and it went right into my bones.

Postscript, Hungarian gatherings.

Is it typical for Hungarian soccer fans to throw fireballs onto the soccer pitch and for police in riot gear with dogs and tear-gas to empty an entire bank of bleachers, as occurred with visiting fans from Budapest, or for people to yell out Csokoládé! Go back to your tree, chocolate monkey! to the visiting Black players from Budapest, as was the case with some fans from Kaposvár?

What happened to the Jews?

I have already started to write about this before, but I have a growing occupation with what has happened to the Jews.

I knew from the beginning that I would be coming to Eastern Europe, where my own ancestry can be traced in jagged lines, and I knew I would be approaching borders of an historic ethnic cleansing my father had been warning me about since I was a little boy; but my sensitivity towards such things was so low. I was amused when Wendy sent me articles about the rise of anti-Semitism in parts of Hungary by way of the Jobbik party. When it's not funny, hyperawareness among the Jews has always been embarrassing to me.

What's more, too much of what's pronouncing itself Jewish these days is hateful, from Israel's vile loyalty oath to the more banal fears and hatreds and fatly entitled victimhoods.

My own relationship feels simple to me. I have pride in our intellectual tradition and a sort of distant respect for a ritualized, spiritual focus. I have a yearning for the melodic minor key chants I learned in those impactful years before high school, as well as a perverse sense of propriety about how a Jew should worship, ingrained in those same years -- no organs, no English, no bare heads -- a feeling contradicted by almost all of my brain. I don't believe in God, but even this belief is slack and apathetic. Despite these dull leanings, even the word, "identify," as in, do you identify yourself as a Jew, is too weak: Do I identify as Jewish? How could I not when my father was born to parents running for their cheap, Jewish lives? There's no ignoring the roots of a family tree clipped brutally bare to the trunk.

Even so, even with a father born into and during the Holocaust to parents haunted for the rest of their lives, Jewishness has played little part in my functional thoughts. I was unconflicted marrying Stephanie, and unconflicted again with children who don't know a Jewish God.

Coming to a country once allied with Nazi Germany only gave me a kitschy merriment, like Kent in his determination to be in Transylvania on the night of Halloween. 

My relationship to history, in short, was the typical ironic stance most Americans my age bear.

The first synogogue I saw in Hungary, in Pécs, was bigger and grander than anything I'd ever seen in America -- despite the fact that the United States has the biggest Jewish population in the world.

The second synagogue I saw, if only from the outside, was bigger and grander than the first. This one is in Budapest.

By the time I saw the third synagogue, and it was incredibly big and grand (in Szeged this time), I had already seen pictures of the former synagogue in our tiny little town of Barcs.

Then we went to Serbia and visited a random town, and it too had a monstrously big and grand cathedral of a synagogue, falling to ruin.

It made me start to think: What happened to all the Jews?

Back in Barcs, I started thinking more about this question. But thinking is the wrong word: I started feeling more about this question. 

What happened to all the Jews?

I knew about a synagogue in our town; I knew our school's forestry dorms were located in a villa that once belonged to a Jew. I knew that somewhere there was a Jewish cemetery too, and I was curious to see it. There were Jews in Barcs!

The cemetery, only one street over from my own, is walled and locked, and I'd seen it on a previous run; but I wasn't sure this was it until I peered over the locked gate and saw Hebrew engraved on every stone.

The graveyard was long and full, and the gravestones, many of them, didn't look that old; but the most recent among them dated to the 1930's, like Adolf Stern below, and the markers went back at least 100 years.

The stones were crowded, proud, demonstrative of a real and thriving community; the grass looked as though it had been tended to, and the markers were preserved as well as in any cemetery; and just on the other side of the wall lay the rest of the town dead. 


There really was a Jewish community in Barcs, a good one, one that in some sense is still side by side with the rest of Barcs. Where did the Jews go?


I know what happened in 1944. It's the same thing that happened all over Europe, and the same thing that happened in my grandparents' homes and villages, the same thing that's been happening since my father started showing me pictures as a boy, the same thing I've been reading about in books, seeing in movies, hearing in stories: It's the thing that happened far away. To someone else.


But now I am seeing these graves and there are no Jews anywhere I've met, and it starts to seem like a town mystery, a great village secret: What happened to the Jews?


I told Tibor about this, and about how when I made a joke about doing a Nazi tour visiting palatial offices and death camps, how Sophie was totally ready to do it, and Tibor asked me if I had visited the Barcs castle yet, and then he told me about the Kremsier-kastély. It was owned by a very successful Jewish family, though one could see only its ruins today. Tibor told me if I travelled down a particular street, I would see the spirits factory as well as the mansion. Kremsier was the richest man in Barcs, owning the biggest mill in the country.


I had seen an image of impressive ruins on Wikipedia when I first heard about going to Barcs, but once here I'd never found them. In any event, there was no way this could be the same place, because the picture I had seen looked like a castle in ruins for centuries; but the place Tibor described was in its glory only half a century ago, until the the Kremsiers fled and left old man Kremsier to kill himself when the Germans occupied Barcs in 1944.


Here is what is left. The day I visited was Wuthering Heights. See the contrast in pictures a week later when I returned with Stephanie. You will also see in pictures the beauty and dream-like quality to a house taken over by the earth, and also signs of history, including floor tiles verifying the building's youth, and graffiti giving dark overtones to vandals. Go through the pictures, which I provide here without further comment.

There is nothing ironic or kitschy about history, when it looms empty and harrowing and broken, and its traces are everywhere about you. We are in Europe now, and the past is never so past.


Last Monday I went to find the Barcs synagogue. I heard it was a furniture store for a while, but now it too lies empty.


It turns out I'd seen this place nearly every day--half a block from my turn to the school, right there at my turn to the pool. It would be a little hard to identify were it not for the distinctive tiling of the house at its right.