Partaaaaaaay

I went to the neighbour’s party on Saturday, though I tried not to. Anyone who knows me will also know that I regard big parties as a form of slow torture, rather like having your toes chewed off by anaemic rats, especially when I slightly know just one person there and everyone would be speaking a language in which I still lack confidence. I was actually dreading it for a few days beforehand, and wondering how I could get out of it without causing offence.

When Saturday came round I hoped that nobody would bother to knock on my door during the evening and force me out to ‘have a good time’ or to ‘relax’ or to ‘just chill out for once, what’s your problem, jeeez’. I was literally prepared to run a mile not to go to this party. In the end I ran ten miles, up to the Helfenstein and back, returning home at about seven in the evening. I took a shower and was about to make some dinner when Deric knocked on my door. Crap. “John, come on,” he said, “the party’s already started, there’s lots of food and beer, everyone’s waiting.”

“Do you want me to come right now?”

He stared at me as though I’d just asked the most absurd question imaginable. “Yes!”

Not having any genuine excuse to refuse - and I’d been trying to think of one for days - I went. And, as usual, it wasn’t so bad once I’d jumped in. The first hour or so I was oppressed by the usual misfit agony, but I kept myself busy by wandering from the food stall to the marquis to the beer stall and back again, drinking until I felt able to interact like a normal person. Then the hostess dragged me into to a gaggle of ‘young people’ (i.e. under 40), including two work colleagues of her daughter who also didn’t really know anyone else at the party, so we could all be misfits together, which was nice. I chatted with them for most of the evening.

Things started to wind down about 11pm - one disadvantage of having a party out in the country is that people have to drive home sober, I suppose. It seemed like a good opportunity to escape, but I was physically prevented by another friend of the daughter, who made me drink schnapps. Lots of schnapps. Then the dancing started, and became more ferocious the fewer people remained. The band were indeed playing out of a horse box - rock ‘n’ roll classics mostly, with painfully heavy German accents.

Things get blurry after that. The band packed up around midnight and were replaced by a CD player. I remember I was part of a nine-person conga line (which was 100% of the remaining guests), and when a waltz came on I tried to dance with the daughter’s friend, but my drink-addled brain couldn’t string more than two steps together. I thought it was hilarious. The daughter’s boyfriend came up to me afterwards, very drunk, and started assuring me that when I danced with a girl I liked I should look in her eyes, not at my own feet, which was very helpful of him.

Luckily I wasn’t quite drunk enough not to realise that he and the daughter were surreptitiously trying to hook me up with her friend. By then I was ready to leave anyway, since it was one o’clock and there was only a handful of people left milling about on the shadowy patio. “I think if you stay,” the boyfriend said, nodding across the patio to the friend, “you’ll stay here a long time.” Now in a German accent that sounded rather creepy, almost threatening, so I finally said my farewells, thanked the hosts and stumbled down the grassy verge home.

I spent all Sunday in bed. The whole day.

Waaaay too much schnapps.

Hanstein and Frau Holle

I spent the last couple of days exploring Meißner with a friend. This involved walking up lots of hills. One very cool place we visited was Burg Hanstein, a castle just across the border of Hesse with Thuringia.

In Ye Olden Days Hanstein was controlled by Raubritter, literally robber barons. Rather than keeping on top of the social pile through ideological propaganda and controlling the means of production and so on, they cut to the chase and went about ambushing and robbing anyone who wandered onto their land in a brutal but undeniably up-front fashion. They were basically extremely successful Robin Hoods without any of that ‘giving to the poor’ crap.

Could Robin Hood afford a place like this? Like hell he could.

The robber barons of Hanstein clearly did rather well for themselves at any rate. Their castle had fantastic views over a passing trade route, so they could basically wander down and rob the hell out of everybody whenever they felt like it, and then return home laden with booty and have a nice medieval banquet with roast pig and ale and wenches etc.

Luckily the robber baron didn't notice the two old people or he would have stolen their shoes and pension books

We also went to find Frau Holle, who lives in a pool up in the forests of Meißner. A couple of centuries ago the Brothers Grimm collected local folk tales about Frau Holle which probably evolved from old pagan traditions. One theory is that she was the wife of Wodan (Odin), but nobody really knows.

Frau Holle carrying a pillow through fake mist

Stories about her are scattered across northern Hesse and Thuringia though, so she must have been an important part of folklore for a long time. In the Grimm story she’s an old hag who lives in the underworld and for some reason is obsessed with tidiness, homekeeping and pillows - the original domestic goddess, if you will. There was a bit of fuss when the above statue of her was set up at Frau Holle Teich, because she’s portrayed as young and voluptuous instead of withered and frightening as she should be.

A few miles away there’s also a cave beneath a tall cliff which was called Hollenstein in a thirteenth-century charter. There are stories about how Frau Holle threw women who cheated on their husbands from the top of the cliff - the original agony aunt, if you will. The cave itself, tucked away at the bottom of the cliff, is very long, very dark and very cold. On a hot day, as you take the steps down to the opening and creep inside, you can feel the temperature drop by twenty degrees in as many vertical feet. The air in your lungs becomes icier with every breath. It’s a bit freaky. Inside the cave is a pond, which is presumably where Frau Holle actually lives. Her underworld realm can only be reached through water, you see.

Note the offering of flowers for Frau Holle (not from me, I don't think she even exists!)

Partaaaaaay planning committee

I had the privilege of witnessing the pen-and-paper preparations for a party that’s due to take place next weekend. It’s a stereotype that the Germans are good organisers, and in this instance the stereotype holds true. I would say that they’re planning it like a military campaign, but this is a cliché, and not very accurate: it was probably a lot better planned than most military campaigns.

The amount of drink to be purchased was calculated to the half litre per person, and noted down according to the number of crates to be bought (a typical crate carrying twelve bottles of 0.5 or 0.33cl). Discussion on the finer points of this matter lasted for about an hour. One planner noted that at least ten of her friends did not drink alcohol, so this had to be taken into account; she extrapolated from this number the proportion of the 80-100 guests who would not be drinking, which then had to be supplemented by those guests who would have to drive home.

This observation led into a further discussion of how many cars could be expected, and where they would park. The field below had plenty of space, but it might be wet, in which case it could not be used. They also considered what would happen in an emergency if people could not get out, and if the fire engine could not get in. Up to twenty cars could be parked on the main road up to the motorway underpass, and then perhaps up the track leading into the forest. It was decided that this was legal, or at least not illegal. Signs would have to be set up. At this point the daughter, exasperated with scribbling list after list of things to buy, said that her head was about to explode and gave up.

Eventually, after some debate on the practicalities of supplying electricity from the house to a sound system set up in the back of a horse-box (I’m not sure what that was about), with every i dotted and t crossed to mutual satisfaction, the party preparations could be put aside and genial conversation and anticipation of the party could formally begin.

The hostess-to-be leaned over to me. “And you will meet two blacks,” she said, thinking, perhaps, that this would be a novelty for someone from Britain. “One from Jamaica,” she continued. “But not typical Jamaican. He doesn’t listen to Reggae, doesn’t drink, except Guinness. Normally they only work until they have money, then they just stop. But he’s...” she sat up straight in a properly Germanic, approving manner, “disciplined.”

Deric - who, I should say after my last post about him, is not racist, but has what one might call a complex attitude towards the politics of post-colonial Africa - has been telling me about this Jamaican with great enthusiasm for the last week, ever since he mentioned the neighbour’s party. The first thing he said about the party, in fact, was that a Schwarz would be there, along with some Weiße refugees from Zimbabwe. The Jamaican, Carl, apparently spends three months every year training horses for a local family. Since he doesn’t speak German I’m sure I’ll get to hang out with him at the party, which should be interesting. Herr and Frau K are not invited because of some bad blood that is often alluded to but never explained. Another neighbour, a nightclub and casino owner from Kassel whose house is covered in steel shutters and surrounded by security lights in order to keep away the Croatian mafia, will not be in attendance either. Thankfully.

A full report on the party will follow next weekend, if I'm feeling up to it.

Urwald

Today I drove a bit north to Reinhardswald, a stretch of preserved forest tucked away in a corner of Hesse. It’s very popular for hiking and picnics, and there’s a famous hunting lodge called Sababurg which overlooks Europe’s oldest wildlife refuge. It’s home to bison, deer, wild horses, boar, wolves, otters and heaven knows what else.

Reinhardswald was where the Brothers Grimm collected most of their fairy tales. Little Red Riding Hood probably lived in the house down there.

I certainly don’t, because I didn’t go inside, animals are boring. Instead I went for a walk around the nearby Urwald, which is like a safari park for trees. Well, not really. Or if it was, it would be a safari park that only had two types of animal, in this case the animal equivalents of oak and beech.

I’m probably not really selling it very well, but it was cool. The Urwald is supposed to be a primeval forest, but that’s a bit of a misnomer; it’s actually just a forest that’s been left alone for a couple hundred years.

I was almost dying from hunger and I was wavering whether or not to enter, but I’m so glad I did. I’ve been walking around a lot of forests here which I assumed were more or less ‘natural’ in appearance, but none of them was like this. Even the most remote forests here are managed for logging, but a forest left purely to nature is something else.

First of all, the Urwald isn’t managed at all. When a tree collapses on a footpath, guys with chainsaws chop it up and push the pieces to the side, but that’s all. There’s a big sign at the entrance with a picture of a guy being squashed by a falling branch next to the sobering words ‘Enter at your own risk’. Without any human interference a forest turns into an enormous, slow-motion battle for survival, which of course is what it should be. As you walk through the forest you can almost see the saplings sprouting up wherever they can find an open patch of ground, the young trees grappling with their roots and branches for whatever air, sunlight and water they can get. Then you come into a glade and see an oak towering over you, four hundred years of twisting, victorious trunk, its arms thrown triumphantly in every direction, its roots sucking the ground beneath your feet dry.

A little farther on you find yourself another few hundred years in the future: there you see an ancient oak, its crown long fractured, now just a swollen body pushing food into monstrously thick branches too heavy to lift themselves to the sun. Younger saplings crowd ever closer, taking back the soil inch by inch, year by year, shading the broken old tree as it withers and crumbles at their feet.

And when it finally dies, after seven or eight centuries or more, nothing is left but a hollow tomb for fungi and moss, an opportune nest for those lightning-quick animals who live days like trees live years. What struck me most was the presence of so much death everywhere. Dead trees still standing, dead branches cluttered on the floor. With nobody to tidy the place up or take away the dead wood for fuel, it just lies there. But of course life springs from the dead forest floor to begin with.

Trees are cool, see. We just have to try to see things from their perspective...

Cowboys sind echt geil, ja!

I was round at my neighbour Deric’s place for dinner the other night. After chatting and drinking a few beers in his porch he suggested heading to the town’s annual Country & Western party. I’d heard that Germans had a weird fascination with the whole cowboy thing, so I could hardly turn down a chance to witness it at first hand. So Deric got into his finest Western togs, he lent me a cowboy hat (he has several) and a friend gave us a lift into town.

These are not cowboy hats

This one's for Alex - an original WWII Afrika Korps pith helmet!!!

The word ‘lift’ doesn’t quite describe the experience. The friend was apparently a bit tipsy, judging from the way she weaved across the road on the way to Zierenberg, her tatooed arms wrestling with the steering wheel like the horns of a stubborn bull. She reluctantly pulled on her seat belt at Deric’s command. In town, ignoring the signs for building works, she plunged down a street that was blocked at the other end, screeching to a halt when she saw the barriers across the torn-up tarmac. “Scheiße!” she spat, as though this was the last thing she’d expected. But, undeterred, she mounted the pavement and squeezed the car roughly through. We were almost there, thank heavens. By this point I was praying that we’d make it there alive. Of all the ways I might choose to die, being killed in a car accident on the way to a Country & Western party is not one of them. The roads near the party were chockablock with parked cars already, so she pulled into what looked like a private car park. “Can you do that?” asked Deric. “I can do anything I want,” she said. Anyway, having survived the journey I could now experience whatever awaited me at the other end.

Odd. That’s all I can say. A line dancing evening at an open air swimming pool in the middle of rural Germany. The band were actually incredibly good, but it was disconcerting to hear them getting the audience pumped in German one moment, and launching into a flawlessly accented imitation of John Denver or Lynyrd Skynyrd the next. To my ear, when they started singing they could’ve just stepped off a plane from Texas. It was incongruous.

No, I didn’t dance. I was too busy being impressed by all the people who were. Being German, they take their line dancing very seriously in Zierenberg: everyone knew the moves, and there were thirty or forty people up there dancing at a time. The best part was how relaxed everything was. It’s a small town, so everyone knew everyone else, beer flowed at £1.50 a pint (more or less), adults drank and danced while kids ran about jumping in and out of the pool. It felt like a big family party. But with cowboy hats.

Weidelsburg

Yesterday, after three weeks and five chapters of intense redrafting, I emerged blinking into the sunlight and resolved to get in the car and go somewhere. Anywhere. I decided to go to Weidelsburg, the biggest medieval castle hereabouts.

I didn't take this photo

From the car park it’s a long, steep climb through a spooky forest. The castle is in ruins, overgrown with grass and brambles, hauntingly isolated up on top of the hill.

I like it when old places are left in this state - tended to a little so it doesn’t fall on your head, but not prettified or tidied up.

This sculpture is about an old legend of the Weidelsburg:

Once upon a time (i.e. 1448) the noble Reinhard von Dalwigk was besieged in the castle by the Landgrave of Hessia. As the situation worsened, Reinhard’s wife beseeched the Landgrave to allow the wives and daughters of the soldiers to leave the castle in safety, taking their most precious possessions with them. The Landgrave agreed, but said that the women could take only what they could carry. So Reinhard’s wife led the other women out of the castle, carrying her husband on her back. In your face, Landgrave of Hessia!

On the way back home I stopped at another hill called Schützeberg, the site of one of Boniface’s first missionary churches. Now it’s just a lot of grass- and cow poo-covered rubble and I had to trespass over a barbed wire fence to get to it, but it was worth it just to stand on the actual spot where Boniface actually baptised actual people.

I’ve just finished reading a couple of Doris Lessing’s books, the most depressing writer of all time with the possible exception of Thomas Hardy. The Grass is Singing, her first book, is about a young couple struggling on their farm in 1940s Rhodesia. Despite having a rather cheery title that could belong to a children’s book about a magical forest grove in the land of talking gumdrops, the novel actually describes a dreary and relentless descent into poverty, madness and death. Her future dystopian drama Memoirs of a Survivor, on the other hand, starts from poverty, madness and death and goes downhill from there. I'm now reading The Fifth Child, which I would not recommend to anyone who is having or ever wants to have a baby (be warned, Plum!).

Gaulskopf

I’m really excited at the moment. I’m so excited I might punch myself in the face.

One of the things I’ve tried to do in my research is to capture something of the human experience of Boniface’s mission in Hessia - the uncertainty, the fear, the drama of travelling through dark forests in an attempt (as the missionaries saw it) to bring the light of Christ to a people caught in the snare of Satan. From reconstructing the course of the 30-year mission from fragmentary historical and archaeological sources, I’ve found one of the most terribly and tragic events to have been in 752, when Boniface wrote a letter to the Pope reporting that a massive Saxon attack had destroyed more than thirty of his churches and chapels.

This...

Boniface was an old man by this time, well into seventies - he would die just two years later - but, like an old trooper, he set about personally directing the rebuilding efforts. During my research I’ve tried to work out roughly where all this happened from a variety of circumstantial sources, and I reckoned I had a decent idea. What would have been really nice, though, was some solid archaeological evidence to back it up. Something like the remains of a burned-down church, say, perhaps with a couple of executed Christians next to it, right in the middle of the Hessian-Saxon borderlands. But this seemed pretty unlikely; I’ve tried in vain to tie the historical and archaeological sources closely together for years. And no-one has ever found any archaeological evidence for one of Boniface’s churches, even when we know exactly where to look.

and this...

Then today I came across an article about an excavation that had taken place during the 90s on Gaulskopf, a Saxon hillfort right in the middle of the Hessian-Saxon borderlands. During the excavation, the postholes of a wooden building had been discovered: it was about 11 metres long and 5 metres wide, arranged precisely east-west, with the west end divided from the main part of the hall by a wooden screen. In the opinion of the excavator, it was quite clearly an eighth-century church. You have to understand that this is unheard of. I’ve been dreaming of something like this for the past five years. Sad I know, but true. I was excited.

plus this...

But it gets better... at least for us. The excavation revealed the presence of burned wood, demonstrating that the building had been destroyed by fire. So an early church that had been burned to the ground, exactly as Boniface described in his letter to the Pope. And it gets better yet. Immediately north of the building were three graves, two men and one woman, arranged east-west in Christian fashion. They were all missing their heads. One of the men had sword cuts to his right arm that showed he had attempted to shield himself from sword blows.

... equals this.

In my thesis I wrote about the attack of 752, and about how the monks and priests had probably managed to escape to the south when the pagans came - we know this, because in 751 Boniface wrote to the pope asking for permission to recall his missionaries if they were under threat. ‘Boniface’s missionaries had probably escaped,’ I wrote last year, ‘but one wonders how the invaders treated the ordinary Christians left behind.’

I wasn’t actually expecting us ever to get an answer to that question, but now we may have. I wanted to find the ‘human experience’ of the mission, and this has become an image of Boniface’s missionaries returning to Gaulskopf after the pagan attack of 752, picking through the charred remains of their chapel, and coming across the headless bodies of their former parishioners.

Laar di daar

I spent last week redrafting two chapters of the book, with luck for the better. They were two easy chapters though, introduction and historiography, which mostly involved cutting and pasting, and the tedious business of editing footnotes and compiling a new bibliography. When I was 16 I wrote a short story set in Hell, where eternal punishment consisted of performing the calculations for every physical interaction that will ever occur in the entire universe. Were I to write that story now, I think I’d replace the maths with academic footnotes.

To celebrate Mission Accomplished on Saturday, I went for a longish walk down a nearby valley. As usual I got myself lost in the woods, although this time it was worth it because I accidentally stumbled across a mysterious collection of earthworks, half-buried beneath a shadowy, crunching sea of dead leaves, that don’t appear on the OS maps, and they kept me distracted for a while.

The main reason I wanted to walk down the valley was to reach an odd little place called Laar, which is supposed to be the setting for a play about Boniface I wrote earlier this year, which, for want of something else to do, I started to redraft this weekend. I was expecting to find a village, but it turned out to be one long, dead-end road flanked by decaying farm buildings, a crumbling mill house and a modest stately home. I walked up the lonely street and saw not a soul. It had the feel of a ghost town. Even the name, Laar, doesn’t have any personality to it. From what I know of toponymics, Laar just means ‘place’. “So, where are you from?” “A place.” “Oh. That’s nice. Anything interesting there?” “Not really. There’s a road. That’s about it.” “Oh.”

The brights lights of Laar

Perhaps this is a good thing. It means that the location is more malleable to the imagination. Anything goes. If I want to set some fictional adventures of Boniface there, why not?

A mill with a good stream

The Devil's Crown part 3: Helfenstein

So far we’ve established that Hasungen may have been the site of an early Christian hermitage, founded on top of a hill where pagans used to gather on the summer solstice in order to do pagan things. Indeed, a stream that flows from the foot of Hasungen is still known as Teufelsborn, ‘Devil’s Spring’, and one mile to the north is another stream called Heiligenbach, ‘Holy Beck’, perhaps so named because early baptisms took place there.

Across the valley from Hasungen is a combe called Heilerbachtal, which we’ve already visited. The most exciting thing, however, is at the head of the combe: Helfenstein, a massive basalt formation that looks as though it was frozen while erupting out of the grassy peak.

To give some idea of scale, the bowl-shaped rise is about 250 metres across and 50 metres high. When you’re standing at the top of the combe, Helfenstein simply siezes your senses and draws you towards it. Only when you reach it do you realise how tall and steep it is; it takes a good five minutes of clambering to reach the top.

The best way to approach is from the north-west side (1). You follow a winding track up the slope, picking through the rough grass and vegetation, to a cluster of horn-like extrusions (2). By this point you’re already out of breath, taking care not to slip on the increasingly rocky ground, and it’s all you can do to crane your neck up to look at the looming sentinels as you climb between their shadows.

Once near the top, you pass by the side of the central extrusion and head towards the tallest and most distant (3). This was the focus of Bronze Age rituals, and in later medieval times was used as a fortified lookout post. There’s no evidence of conversion-period activity here, but then we wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be, since religious rituals in exposed natural settings often leave no archaeological traces.

This final outcrop is one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been. You can see here how large it is - if you look closely you can make out a tiny Carolyn standing bottom right. The weirdest thing, though, is believing that it’s an entirely natural feature. It just looks... freaky.

For one thing, the way the volcanic rock formed and cooled several million years ago has resulted in a flight of ‘steps’ that lead you up the northern side to the very top. Here’s a close-up of the steps:

Quite bizarre. Not only that, but the steps lead towards a large platform at the top which has its own natural ‘altar’, an alcove protected on three sides by sloping rocks, with the fourth, open side looking directly towards - of all places - Heilerbachtal, Wichtelkirche and Hasungen.

In order to test whether this ‘altar’ would have been suitable for, say, human sacrifices, Carolyn and I did a little test.

Thanks to Carolyn for the photo!

Result. But what does all this mean for Boniface? There’s no direct evidence that Helfenstein was ever visited in the eighth century. I can only fall back on supposition and circumstance: Hasungen appears to have been important at the time, in part surely because of its unique solstice relationship with Helfenstein. The combe below Helfenstein has a stream called Heilerbach, ‘Healing Beck’, along with the Wichtelkirche, which I suggested derived its name from ‘Holy Valley’. All this points towards Helfenstein’s special status in the landscape.

Finally, if Helfenstein was some kind of ritual site in the conversion period, it chills me to think what the Anglo-Saxon missionaries would have made of it. They had no concept of geology or any understanding of the natural processes which could create something like this. They must have looked at Helfenstein and assumed that someone or something had created it; when they saw those great columns twisting out of the earth, the huge flight of steps leading up to the altar, they may have seen not a natural curiosity, but a monstrous, perverted imitation of church architecture - a nightmarish temple wrought by the hands of Satan to his own glory: the Devil’s Crown.

The Devil's Crown part 2: Hasungen

Across the valley from the Wichtelkirche is a plateau-topped hill called Hasungen. In the early eleventh century, a monk called Heimerad, having been kicked out of the monastery of Hersfeld after a squabble with the abbot, came wandering north through Hessia. He visited a place called Kirchberg, where he somehow got himself accused of breaking into the church and committing 'sacrileges' within it, and was expelled. Then he went to a place called Kirchditmold, where he managed to annoy the local priest so profoundly that he was chased away by dogs.

Why everyone hated the hapless Heimerad so much is a mystery. In any case, he eventually ended up on D) Hasungen, where he lived as a hermit for a few years. After his death, he was proclaimed a saint and a monastery was founded on the site.

This account, written about 1085, is the earliest mention of a Christian presence on Hasungen. One must always read hagiography through a very critical lens, however, and it seemed strange to me that Heimerad should choose this particular hill at random. He came from Hersfeld in southern Hessia, which was itself originally founded under Boniface's personal direction as a hermitage. I suspect that Heimerad came to Hasungen deliberately because there was already a hermitage there known to the monks of Hersfeld, and this hermitage may have dated back 250 years to the conversion period.

The Warme valley - the curving white line shows the 'arms' of Heilerbach combe, which faces towards D) Hasungen

This is a 250-year wide leap of faith, true, but the landing is cushioned somewhat by the two stream names near the hill: A) Heiligenbach and B) Teufelsborn, 'holy beck' and 'devil's spring' respectively. Such names were most likely coined during the conversion period, when pagan rituals at springs were still going on, and there were missionaries about who were able to 'demonise' them.

In the Vita Bonifatii, a biography of Boniface written a few years after his death, the author writes how some Hessians "continued to offer sacrifices, secretly or openly, at groves and springs" even after they were baptised. In a letter dating from 738, the pope himself wrote an open letter to the Hessians in which he urged them not to return to "the sacrifices to the dead or prophecies at groves and fountains... which used to happen within your borders."

Typical pagan nonsense

Teufelsborn may have been one such spring that the missionaries successfully associated with devil worship. Heiligenbach, then, just under a mile to the north, was perhaps the site of early baptisms.

But what of Hasungen itself? I was talking to Herr K one evening and he happened to mention that every summer solstice the flat top of Hasungen attracted 'funny people' who went there to watch the sun rise. The dawn sun, it seems, rises precisely between the rocks of Helfenstein. My jaw dropped when he said this. My earlier hunch about Helfenstein and the solstice had been right - but it was dawn, not dusk, that was important, and Helfenstein was the place to look at rather than the place to be - I had gone to the wrong place at the wrong time!

Looking from D) Hasungen to F) Helfenstein, the line shows where the solstice sun rises

A couple of mornings later, since it was only a week or so past the equinox, I rose early, drove out to Hasungen and climbed to the top to watch the sunrise. Unfortunately it was too foggy to see anything.

Not the most impressive sunrise ever

I've risen early two or three times since, but each time the weather has defeated me, and by now the alignment of the dawn sun and Helfenstein has probably been lost. But here's a photo I stole from the internet which shows what I missed:

The solstice sunrise smack bang on top of Helfenstein!

The combination of early Christian hermitage, sacred place-names and this astronomical phenomenon all point towards Hasungen being a focus of intense pagan activity somehow connected to the solstice. Early missionaries had a choice when they came across a cult site. They could either divert the people elsewhere, or they could elbow in and take over the place itself.

Here I think we see both tactics. First, there was a sacred spring below the hill that might have been used year-round by locals and travellers seeking to win the favour of the gods. The missionaries rebranded this spring 'Teufelsborn' and pointed people towards another nearby stream which they used for baptisms, and which consequently became known as 'Heiligenbach'.

Second, there was the hill of Hasungen. This was not so simple: diverting the people elsewhere would do no good, since they might still be drawn to the hill at the solstice - even Boniface could not change the fact that Hasungen offered a unique viewing platform for this astronomical event. So the logical tactic was to appropriate the hill itself, thereby controlling access to it. If the pagans couldn't get up onto the hill, they couldn't perform their rituals. Instead it became the site of a Christian hermitage, a place for solitary monks to retreat, fast, pray and enter into personal combat with the devil - and what better place to do it than here, kneeling on the soft grass of the summit, looking across the valley to the embracing arms of Heilerbachtal, the Wichtelkirche and Helfenstein?

Looking north-east from Hasungen, across the Warme valley is the combe which has Helfenstein at its head (you can see the horn-like outcrops at the centre)

Yet Hasungen was just an outpost of Satan, a place where his deluded followers sacrificed to demons. The early hermits had not conquered the devil, but forced themselves into his direct line of sight when the solistice sun rose, menacing and red, from the crags of Helfenstein. Helfenstein was the real seat of the devil, and it will be the next stop on this tour.

The Devil's Crown part 1: Wichtelkirche

A couple of weeks ago I made a last-minute evening dash to a place called Helfenstein in the hope of finding some meaningful relationship between the natural rock formations and the solstice sunset that might strengthen my outlandish theory that this was a very special place when Boniface came to convert Hessia. No luck that day, but I was in for a surprise. But here's my theory.

This is part of the Warme valley, whose river flows from south to north. At this point it is joined by three streams with curious names: A) Heiligenbach ('holy beck'); B) Teufelsborn ('devil's spring'); C) Heilerbach ('healing beck').

Individual names might be random, but when you have a cluster of them like this, you know something is going on. Heilerbach runs from F) Helfenstein, the massive rock formation I visited on the solstice, past the foot of E) Wichtelkirche, a weird spire-like basalt extrusion that thrusts up some 25 metres from the valley floor.

The Wichtelkirche, 'gnome church', is what first poked me in the eye when I was poring over maps of the area about a year ago. There's a lovely old fairytale about how a gnome king (Wichtelkönig) built a church on this spot to impress a local shepherdess into marrying him. But when she jilted him at the altar, there was a tremendous clap of thunder and the church turned into solid black rock. Hence it is known as the Wichtelkirche.

Now, I'm not saying this story is necessarily wrong, but I had another idea that 'Wichtel' here doesn't actually mean 'gnome', but comes from the Old High German wih-tal, which means 'sacred valley'. Logically enough, the huge spire-like rock became known as the wih-tal-kirihe, 'sacred valley church', but over time wih-tal was confused with the word Wichtel, which, by sheer coincidence, means 'gnome'. Thus the story of the gnome king was born.

The Wichtelkirche has a kind of natural platform near the top where someone actually built a tiny wooden castle in the olden days (long since vanished). But you can still climb up, as I did with Carolyn, and enjoy the fine views over the Warme valley.

I would put money on the theory that this platform was once used for some kind of pagan-type activity. I would do so even if the only evidence were the rock itself, its name and the 'healing beck' that flows directly beneath it. But since coming here I've learned an awful lot more, and now I can see that the Wichtelkirche is only one part of a much bigger picture...

Deric

I first met Deric at Herr K's BBQ. He's in his late sixties, tall, ruddy-faced, with a cheerful and open manner that becomes more cheerful and open the drunker he gets. The first thing I noticed about him was his hat, an Afrika Korps-style tan field cap. During the raccoon discussion he told us about his gun, which he claimed was illegal, then corrected himself that the gun itself wasn't illegal, just the ammunition he had for it. At this point Herr K told me that he himself was the community representative, a kind of mini-mayor of Friedrichsaue, and another of the guests present was the local policeman. The policeman looked over and just shrugged. Clearly they are used to Deric's eccentric, vaguely militaristic inclinations.

They also seem used to his open racism. Now, I rarely meet racists, especially such amiable racists as Deric. My conversation with him slipped into racism so gently that I didn't even realise I was in a particularly racist pit until Herr K lifted me out.

This is how it happened. Deric asked me where I'd excavated outside the UK. I said Ireland and Mexico. He said how he wanted to visit Yucatan, and went on to describe his favourite holiday places, which included various places in South America and also Victoria Falls in Rhodesia, "or Zimbabwe as it's called now". We agreed that Zimbabwe was in a poor state thanks to Mugabe. Nothing racist so far, note: even The Guardian would concur there. Then he started talking about his relatives in South Africa, and how funny Afrikaans sounded to his Niederdeutsch ear. Then he mentioned his surprise that 'the blacks' in South Africa also spoke Afrikaans. Still not necessarily racist. But then he said that South Africa was also in a poor state, and that this always happened when the blacks took over.

This is the point where Herr K stepped in. He said, "Just so you know, these are just Deric's opinions, not mine. He's rather racist. I have nothing to do with these opinions."

Deric laughed and, unperturbed, cheerfully went on to talk about the deficiencies of die Schwartzen the same way he had half-joked about shooting the raccoons that broke into his yard.

"Really, how many blacks have you met?" demanded Herr K.

"I've met lots," said Deric. His mouth sank for a moment, and he shook his head. "But I must say I was disappointed."

Deric, like most unrepentant racists, has decided to dig his heels deeper into the sand against the social tide. He holds on to his racism in all its stubborn inconsistency. At times it blurred into simple xenophobia, the kind of casual distrust of foreigners and immigrants that has more to do with culture and language than race. When Herr K accused him of hating Turks, for instance, Deric vehemently denied it, saying that he loved visiting Turkey.

"But you don't like it when Turks come over here," Herr K said.

Well, of course; that was another matter entirely. Deric then brought up the problems Italy has with illegal immigration from North Africa. "You don't like them just because they're black," said Herr K.

"No, they're Arabs."

"They come from Niger too."

There followed a surreal exchange whereby Deric tried to prove that his was a particularly democratic form of xenophobia, in that he hated all non-Europeans equally, not just blacks. Yet the blacks were the object of his true racism. I've met bigots, anti-Semites and xenophobes before; but before Deric I'd never bodily encountered this peculiar, old-school colonial attitude towards race - not angry, flag-waving, skinhead BNP-style racism, but a kind of pedestrian belief that Apartheid was the most natural and logical form of social organisation in South Africa, that white rule was the best thing ever to happen to the black and brown races, and that sub-Saharan peoples never have, and never will, achieve anything of note in human history.

This was the very same attitude I'd seen portrayed in the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Doris Lessing. It is unthinking, seductive, rooted more in a perverse form of embattled paternalism than in fear or hatred, though it verges readily towards open frustration when permitted - the frustration, perhaps, of a father who has finally disowned his errant child. It is not a political ideology, but a world-view; an amoral acknowledgement of the 'natural' order of things which happened to put the white man at the top. It is, in short, the mentality that ruled the age of European colonialism, and has still not died out.

I'm suprised I didn't realise even sooner that Deric, who lives a quiet rural life with his Afrika Korps field cap, illegal rifle and collection of pith helmets, is basically a Boer frontiersman lost in space and time, as though he fell asleep in the veld fifty years ago and woke up here. And yet he was open-minded and progressive when we spoke about religion, saying that he was agnostic and always respected the beliefs of others. What's more, he was genuinely funny, charming and affable, and I'm sure that, were I black, he would have behaved just the same - he just wouldn't want me marrying his daughter...