Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 02:00:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: nathaniel finley
Subject: from Heidelberg, the river Neckar, and beyond (somewhere out in the beta galaxy, I think)...

Hello Everyone,
Greetings from the lovely basement of the University of Heidelberg. The walls are sandstone down here, and there is a locked cast iron gate beside me that must lead down into the torture chambers where they used to put students on the rack for having missed the day's history lecture, or something like that. But it is all locked up, and one wonders what kind of secret worlds are being hidden away. Why is it that locked doors always seem to inspire the most suspicious curiosity?

My apologies to those of you who did not receive the first e-mail. I hope that the kinks are worked out of the mailing list by now, but my special apologies to my father, even though it's no use apologizing to him in this message because he is still not on the list. I need that e-mail address, sis!

Thanks to those of you expressing concern over my safety, and you will be relieved to know that I have found a family here to stay with for the next couple of weeks that I am in town. The Germans around here seem to be truly interested in the States, and are especially friendly to Americans (the US type) who are trying to learn German. One guy asked me the other day what I was doing here and when I informed him that I was studying German history he very sincerely asked me what the heck for? But even still, he appreciated my attempts at the language. This area of Germany has the largest US military population outside of the States, and I guess that a lot of those guys don't bother to learn the language, so many Germans think that Americans (the Stars and Stripes variety) are too good for a foreign language. Isn't that the case, though? I mean, why learn a foreign language when we are successfully colonizing the languages of the rest of the world? If everyone is learning English, then why do we need to speak German, or Chinese, or Arabic? Besides, I guess the people who aren't learning English are not worth talking to anyway...what have they got to teach us?

OK, I'll stop with the rhetoric. The truth is that US Americans have been in this area since late 1944, when they promised to leave Heidelberg standing (and not bomb it to smithereens like they did Dresden) if the people would surrender. This was done because Eisenhower fell in love with Heidelberg and wanted to use it as his base in Occupied Germany, so by mid 1945 all of the fancy houses had been taken over by American GI's (the baseball watching, Oscar Meyer Wiener eating Americans) and their families (well, maybe the families joined them later, but that's a different story). The point is, that unlike much of the rest of Germany, Heidelberg is very similar today as it was a hundred years ago, except for the traffic and stop lights, etc.

And it is a beautiful city. The French conquered it in the early 17th century and destroyed much of the architecture, rebuilding it in Baroque style. However, they left the foundations standing, so many of the buildings have these old stone walls at eye level that are kind of ugly and beaten up, but when you look up it is all intricate architecture with spires and steeples and corner windows and buttresses, etc. It's as if, here in the lower realms, we are truly living in a world of dirt and squallor, where meanness and the vulgarity of life are written on all of the walls that close us in. But when we look to the heavens, we are able to transcend that vision of drudgery with a brief peak into the city of God. No wonder Eisenhower went out of his way to save this place.

Heidelberg has other appealing features as well, not least of which is the general magical atmosphere floating in the air. There is a spirituality that seems to imminate from the mountains surrounding the city, on the tops of which can be found sites such as Heiligenberg, where religions have built temples and altars for thousands of years. Perhaps you don't believe that certain geographical locations can hold immense spiritual power, but Heiligenberg is one physical spot that is a strong argument in favor of that idea. There is a path, called the Philosophers Way, that leads up to the top. Imagine ancient Druids and other Celtic or Teutonic spiritualists climbing up its winding trail to the councils that would meet at the top. It is called the Philosophers Way because it is said that Schiller and Goethe found some of their most profound inspiration while walking along its rocky cliffs. Picture a Roman mystical society building a community of worship to one of the lesser know deities of their pantheon of Gods. One can visit the ruins of secret monasteries where Christian mystics spent their lives doing whatever it is that monks do. In the 19th century, a revival of pantheism (worship of Nature?), brought many young Germans to the spot, leading to the Nazi assimilation of it into their own religious activities (ok, pseudo-religious activities, to please the more historically critical of the bunch who would argue that Nazism was not a religion). That's the kind of atmosphere Heidelberg has--a long tradition of culture and religion that gives the city a certain sophistication and richness that is really quite relaxing. And think, I haven't yet told you anything of the political history here! But the castle and the royalty's significance in the history of the Holy Roman Empire can wait until another day...

Alas, I fear that I may be too long winded for some of my readers, especially those who are interested primarily in the professional development of my historical analysis. So, here is the last item on the agenda for this report. The family that I am staying with is one very interesting bunch of people. As some of you know, I am researching the counter-culture of West Germany during the 60's and 70's, and this family is exactly the bunch of people that are of interest to me. The father, to begin with the easier one to explain, is a retired US military special operations sergeant major (that's an e-9). One could easily say that he was one of the top ranking enlisted soldiers in the Army in Europe during his day, which just happened to be the late 70's and early 80's. His job, in other words, was to keep the West German anti-us-imperialist student organizations (such as the RAF, or the Baader-Meinhof group) from blowing up the Army and the visiting US officials. Quite a job in those days, because these radical left-wing student groups were very well organized and had very dependable and complex undergrounds. Heidelberg was one of the cities where this kind of terrorist activity was most prevalent, and they succeeded in killing military family members, soldiers, officers, and other US citizens that were occupying Germany in the name of capitalism and freedom. So this guy is every night telling me stories of supped-up car chases and James Bond spy tactics and complicated stake outs like the one that nabbed the head explosives agent of the RAF in 76 or 77.

Juxtaposed to him is his wife, a German, who was born in 1944 here in Heidelberg, who has what she calls a Nazi name, whose brother was one of the radical students at the University here. Her parents were, like many others in this area, Hitler supporters, and she has grown up with that hanging in the family atmosphere like so much bad breath. I can't say much more about her at the moment because I haven't had the chance to talk with her much about it, but her name, which is Irmagard, certainly excites a certain curiosity. It has a kind of magical connotation to it, as the Guardian of some ancient traditions, and her sister's name refers to the old celtic runic traditions. This is why she says they are Nazi names, because they hearken back to the Nazi pseudo-religion.
he has children's books (my specialty--even though I'm only a beginner at it) that belonged to her Grandfather, as well as books from the Nazi days on up through the 80's.

So, I could go on to tell you about my first night here with the family, how they had a birthday party with about 50 German guests, and how I got to practice my German on them all until I got sick of saying where I was from, what I was doing here, why I was interested in German history. Luckily, by around 3 o'clock in the morning, those of us who were left understood each other well enough to go on to other topics of conversation, such as how the Earth is being ruled by shape-shifting reptiles who come from the lower fifth dimension and feed on human babies. Their queen mother is Queen Elizabeth of GBr, or maybe it was Prince Charles--I couldn't keep the German genders straight by that hour of the morning. We finally ended that fascinating, if not a little disturbing, introduction into German Conversation when the ex-Green Beret Sergeant Major came down and asked us all very politely to shut up. Yes, I could tell you all of that and much more, about German regard for laws (nill), about German opinions of America (the land of the free and the home of the brave type), and about the insanely devious swimming trip we took not two days ago in which 15 fish and 3 turtles were caught bare handedly by the largest Man I have ever seen. But that probably wouldn't interest you all much anyway. So for now, Nathaniel Finley reporting live (still), and in technicolor, just above and a little to the left of the underground. Peace in the Middle East.