Home is where your story begins
- on the wall in "my" room in Bad Langensalza
The Diakonie in Ebeleben was a great place to stay, a mini-apartment with everything I needed, and some things I didn't need - such as a fully equipped kitchen, when I had no ingredients to cook! (That's always when you find the best kitchens!) And a skylight, without a shade, which meant I was up early. I made tea, ate dried apricots and studied German while waiting, as I had instructions to drop off the key, and my donation, when the centre's administrative offices opened at eight.
I finally set off and, coming out of the town, I encountered something I had never seen before: a drive-in bakery! In the United States I saw drive-through banks, dry cleaners and, of course, fast-food joints, but never a drive-through bakery. Luckily this one had a door for human beings too, so I went in and had some breakfast. I bought a sandwich to take with me for lunch, and briefly toyed with the idea of ordering a healthy breakfast in the form of a hard-boiled egg and cucumber sandwich, then went ahead and ordered a slice of chocolate cake instead. 😄
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| Drive-through bakery |
A dirt road brought me to the pretty little village of Rockstedt, then turned into a straight road made up of reinforced concrete slabs measuring about 1 metre x 3 metres, with another row of slabs laid vertically along the side to widen the road to four metres. I speculated whether these roads, of which I have seen a few in eastern Germany, were originally constructed for military use - though we are nowhere near the former border, here. This theory was supported when I came to a wider area, for manœuvring, with a cross-road in which the concrete slabs were laid in parallel lines, with a gap in the middle: I saw these on the eastern side of the former Inner German Border, where an information board reported that they were laid for tanks.
The tank road, if that's what it was, brought me to Abstbessingen, also very quiet; many Germans take the day off and have a long weekend after Ascension Day (which always falls on a Thursday, as it is the fortieth day after Easter Sunday).
A dirt road took me back out into the fields; after some time I turned right along a grassy track beside a stream or irrigation channel, which took me to the village of Allmenhausen.
The Via Romea Germanica goes around the edge of the village and back into the fields; so did I, stopping only to drink some water and take off a layer of clothing. The day was getting warm, and I "summerised" myself by taking off my long-sleeved top and applying sunscreen to my arms.
I crossed more fields, and then a forest, walking through a strip that had been cleared of trees, but not of long grass and mud! Back out on the other side, I followed a farm track downhill into the village of Blankenburg. Right at the entrance to the village was a playground with covered benches, where I sat down to eat a delicious camembert sandwich from the drive-through bakery in Ebeleben. I liked Blankenburg; it had a good feel about it. And it had enough consideration for pilgrims to put up a sign telling us how much further to Rome!
The road through the wind park came out quite suddenly into the houses of Kirchheilingen. I had been intending to take a look around the village, but along came a bus headed for Bad Langensalza, where I had a place to stay... so I hurried over to the bus stop and climbed aboard. The rather sporty driver took me to Bad Langensalza at a speed I am no longer accustomed to travelling - even though he went the long way around, stopping in at a couple of villages along the way.
A funny thing about walking is that you experience a country as a single dimension, along a more or less straight line. And when you look at the map with your route marked on it - whether it's a paper map or an electronic one - all the towns along your route look super-important, while all the other places off to the sides appear irrelevant. So that it seems surprising that the bus doesn't take the same route as you are walking. Or that Stade, a town of great importance in relation to the Via Romea Germanica - which begins in Stade - is actually just a small town, and many people in Germany don't even know where it is!
So the bus zigzagged its way through two dimensions, passing through various irrelevant villages en route to Bad Langensalza. (Other people must have agreed that they were irrelevant, because nobody got on or off the bus there!)
When I got off the bus, I hardly had time to get my bearings before a man came over walking a bicycle and waving. It was Jörg, my host, and he gave my backpack its first ever bicycle ride on the way from the bus stop to his house!
Jörg made me a cup of tea and let me use the washing machine; I even emptied out my backpack and gave it a rinse in the bathtub 😅. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon writing up this account and relaxing, wrapped in the few things that hadn't been washed and hung out to dry! 😄
In the evening, Jörg made dinner and then gave me a tour of the little museum downstairs, dedicated to preserving the stories of ordinary people, particularly around the time of the Second World War.
Haus der Spuren
Haus der Spuren is many things. On the ground floor is a museum which, in its director's words, explores human lives during times of war, fear, loss and lamentation, as seen in German-American encounters between 1933 and 1948. Through letters, diaries, artwork, etc. from these times, the museum seeks clues about how these people's experiences altered their lives, and subsequently our own.
Projects include not only the in-house museum but two travelling museums: the History-mobile in Germany and the Bus-eum in America, operated by the sister museum TRACES Center for History and Culture in the American Midwest.
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| The History-mobile is currently resting after having toured France and Spain |
In the museum are photographs, letters, artefacts and stories of local families,of Jewish and black Germans, of Germans held as prisoners of war in the American Midwest and, vice versa, of American prisoners of war in Germany.
The mission of the non-profit association TRACES-Spuren e.V. is to bring together people with different cultural origins and views, to "respectfully and expectantly exchange experiences and points of view" with the goal of building empathy and find consensus for a better world. This goal is pursued through multicultural encounters held in the museum and through the involvement of volunteers and trainees from all over the world. The house hosts Workaway volunteers and interns, as well as Ukrainian refugees, so it is normally a very busy place, but at the present moment it's just me, Jörg and Orissia, a young Ukrainian woman living in the downstairs flat.
So how did I get here?
Museum director Dr. Michael Luick-Thrams is, like me, a member of Servas - Travelling for Peace. I wrote to him before leaving Italy, and he replied that he was in Brazil working on his next book, but he put me on touch with Dr. Jörg Seiler, the historian and theologian who lives on the first floor, who kindly agreed to host me. So for two nights I have all of Michael's top-floor flat to myself, and eat my meals with Jörg downstairs!
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