The Prophet part 1

I was walking back from Zierenberg with a loaf of bread in one hand and two slices of rhubarb cake in the other when I saw him shuffling along the lane towards me. Not walking, but not quite running either - an awkward, clumsy, tottering kind of movement. As I came closer I saw he was young, perhaps in his twenties, and had Down's Syndrome. How did he come to be jogging along this quiet lane by himself in jeans and t-shirt?

He stopped when he reached me, grinned, uttered some gutteral noises with friendly urgency, but I could not make out his meaning. He pointed at me, at himself. I asked if he wanted the time. He shook his head. He pulled out his wallet and showed me it was empty. "Money?" I said. "I'm sorry, I can't give you any." He shook his head again, in disappointment or because I had failed to understand, then looked back the way he had come. A red car was creeping towards us. Without a word he took off, continuing his hectic half-run towards Zierenberg.

As the car reached me, the driver stuck his head through the window. "Did you speak to him?" he called.

"I tried," I said. "Can he speak at all?"

"Are you from England?" he said.

"Yes."

"On holiday?"

"I'm spending the summer in Friedrichsaue."

"Just a moment!" A tractor was approaching, and he pulled his car to the verge to let it pass. He climbed out to continue our chat, a slightly scruffy man of retirement age and average height. The young man with Down's Syndrome, it transpired, was running to lose some weight, and he was the social worker who cared for him. He peered down the road. "It's all right, he's waiting for me at the bottom."

He asked me why I was here. I told him I was a historian and his eyes widened. "Ah! Come and look at this." He went to the boot of his car and opened it. A pair of sheepdogs sat inside, panting happily in the heat. "Don't be frightened," he said, rummaging in a pile of boxes and books. He continued to address me in a mixture of pidgin German and pidgin English that proved to be more confusing than had he chosen one or the other. "You are a historian; you study the past. I study the future."

I looked at him quizzically, understanding his words but not quite his meaning. "Here," he made a cross with his hands, "Das hier ist heute. Today. Verstehst du? You study yesterday. I study the... Zukunft. Tomorrow. Prophezeiung. You understand?"

I was confused. You must appreciate that one rarely meets self-proclaimed prophets these days, at least not on quiet country roads in rural Hesse. I heard the unfamiliar word Prophezeiung and thought it might have something to do with profit, and that he was perhaps involved in future economic forecasts. Things became clearer when he pulled out a historical and archaeological encyclopaedia of the Bible. "Es ist alles da drin," he said, stabbing at the cover with his finger. "All in there."

I nodded carefully. So he was a prophet, but not affiliated to any church, nor a Jehovah's Witness. He insisted several times that he was a Wissenschaftler, a scientist. Everything came down to Pi, it seemed. This precious number contained the secrets of existence. We were destroying God's earth and the day of reckoning was near. "When I grew up here," he said, "you could walk through the countryside and see horses and cows, smell the flowers in the air. There were so many flowers!" He breathed in deep from the memories, eyes closed in a moment of private ecstacy. "But now - look; where are the horses, the cows? Gone."

I was tempted to point over his shoulder at a flock of sheep grazing contentedly on a nearby hillside, or mention that three horses lived in a paddock in Friedrichsaue not two hundred yards distant. But he was already moving on. "Chemicals have destroyed everything," he exclaimed. "They spray them everywhere. Before, we lived in harmony with nature. This, see this -" he pointed at a large pile of manure by the side of the road "- this is good. But it's so little. Everywhere else are chemicals, and they've destroyed nature, killed all the flowers."

By this time the young man, tired of waiting, had shuffled back up the lane and climbed into the car. The prophet had a fair point, I thought, and felt some sympathy for him. He pulled out a small Bible and showed me the Book of Revelation. "This is the key," he said. To illustrate the point he pulled a loaded keyring from his pocket. "Here, this is the key to a house, but the Bible is the key to here," pointing at his head. "You eat bread, don't you?" he continued. "Well, bread sustains the body, but that isn't enough. You need more. The Bible is bread for the soul." The arms trade, the drugs trade and the mafia were the forces of evil that were driving the world to destruction; the Vatican was complicit; the Arabs and Israelis would launch nuclear Armageddon and usher in the Day of Judgement.

Quite where Pi fitted into this I wasn't sure, though we stood there under the hot sun and spoke for half an hour or more. He said he was formerly an engineer, so he understood the importance of Pi to mathematics. He saw no reason why it should not be equally fundamental to the meaning of life itself. He handed me a clutch of glossy pamphlets with titles like 'The Forgotten Secret', 'Are You Ready for Day X?' and 'The Ten Commandments of God'.

"I promise I'll read them," I said.

"Don't read them," he urged. "You need to study them."

"All right." Then I ventured, shaking my head: "But I must say I'm sceptical."

I was surprised by his reaction. "Good!" he exclaimed. "That's good! I was sceptical too. But everything is in there."

The young man with Down's Syndrome had climbed from the passenger to the driver seat, and was hanging his head through the window, making weary noises. The old man seemed not to notice. I said I needed to be getting on home. As we parted, he told me where he lived - second house on the left as one enters Zierenberg - and invited me to pop in for a chat whenever I liked.

He drove away in one direction, I walked off in the other. He was right that one needed more than bread alone. But I had two slices of rhubarb cake as well.

A History of Zierenberg part 2

By the time World War One began, Zierenberg had 1500 residents. In all, 300 Zierenbergers were enlisted into the German army and 46 of them were killed between 1914 and 1918. The interwar years, of course, hardly helped lighten the mood. The Nazi Party first appeared on general election slips in 1928, when they won 15 whole votes in Zierenberg, against 283 and 161 for the two main parties. Two years later the Nazis won 57 Zierenberger votes; another two years after that, in 1932, they won 594. This was about 64% of the town's vote. In the country as a whole, the Nazis only won 30%. You do the math(s).

Hitler siezed power the following year, and the Zierenberg SA celebrated in style by parading about in uniforms, burning Weimar flags in the centre of town, hanging a swastika from the gables of the town hall and standing to attention while an orchestra played the Horst-Wessel song. All in all, things were getting a bit Nazi in Zierenberg.

He's here to help

Hederich's chapter on the years 1933-1939 is entitled 'The Deceptive Glamour of the Third Reich'. It makes for chilling reading how the rise of Nazism impacted on daily life even in a small town like this. Civil servants had to prove their Nazi sympathies, the local pastor's sermons were observed and his parishioners registered, all none-Nazi political parties and newspapers were shut down, independent societies and unions were 'synchronised' with the Nazi party line or else persecuted, the parish record office was swamped with requests for evidence of Aryan descent. All this happened within a few short months, remember.

The tightening grip of fascism was of course hidden within a velvet glove. All through 1933, as Hederich writes, came 'an endless series of glittering festivals and parades', each one glorifying the Nazi regime. On May Day 1933, a 4.5 ton 'Adolf Hitler Stone' was dragged by horses to the entrance of Friedrichsaue, just a few yards from where I now live (it appears to have been somehow removed since). In June an airship flew low over the town to the delight of its inhabitants. Very few resisted the collective hysteria. The November elections saw a 100% voter turnout, and 100% of the votes, all 1064 of them, officially went to Hitler. The local newspaper led with the headline: 'Zierenberg - the Adolf Hitler town.'

Zierenberg's town hall, minus swastika

The town's centuries-old Jewish population, of course, was not allowed to join in the fun, and was finally expelled after the destruction of the town's synagogue during Kristalnacht in 1938. Those who had not already left Germany fled to Kassel, staying there until their shipment to the death camps later in the war. Hundreds of Zierenberg's male population were called up to fight between 1939 and 1945, and like their eighteenth-century ancestors they fell more or less equally into three fates: death, wounding or capture. The nearby city of Kassel fell victim to Allied terror bombing in 1943, when the entire city centre, along with 10,000 of its inhabitants, was wiped out in a single raid. Zierenberg itself, too insignificant to bomb, was occupied by American forces at the end of the war.

Hederich memorably summarises the state of affairs in 1962:

Even now, more than 15 years after the end of the war, there is no final peace in Germany. The country is still torn into two, each part separated from the other by heavily guarded borders. The tensions between the superpowers lead to ever deeper divisions between the two German states and damage both urban and rural life. Many people are cut off from their relatives in another part of Germany; they are not even able to visit them for important family events; many are plagued by worry for loved ones who live across the not-too-distant border.

Yet he also saw glimpses of progress in material life - cars, fridges, televisions, new construction work - and promises of prosperity to come. In the end his optimism won out: it took another 26 years, but unification finally arrived, the Cold War ended and those fragile signs of prosperity continued to grow. And while Neo-Nazism is relatively strong in this part of Germany, the underpass near Friedrichsaue is full of anti-Nazi Anarchist grafitti: Nazis out! Racism kills! Fascism never again, war never again! Down with right-wing youth clubs!

Zierenberg has probably never been a happier, safer or more comfortable place than it is now. Coming from England, where - remarkably by European standards - there has not been a single pitched land battle for more than three hundred years, it is easy to take the modern-day tranquility of somewhere like Zierenberg for granted. But now I can hardly help but feel that it has earned a little peace. At least for another generation or two...

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N.B. I've changed the settings so unregistered readers can also leave comments.

Summer solstice at the Helfenstein

I spent most of today looking for menhirs. That is, I spent a lot of time searching the internet and studying maps and books to identify Hessian standing stones or natural rock formations that might have continued to be the focus of pre-Christian religious activity until the conversion period. I found quite a few, too, mostly where I was hoping/expecting to find them.

On Thursday I dragged Carolyn, my first visitor, up to a huge basalt outcrop called the Helfenstein. I'm going to write more about it in due course, once I'm fairly confident that my theories about it aren't completely nuts. Here I'll just remark that I think it was a very special place when Boniface & Co. arrived in the eighth century.

It so happened that one website I visited reminded me that certain prehistoric stone structures were arranged with an eye to the heavens, designed to have some kind of relationship to the solstices. I thought of the Helfenstein high up above the Warme valley, and how it seemed to act as a focal point in the landscape, and then I thought how good it would be to go up there during the summer solstice and see what it was like.

Then I checked when the solstice was, and found that by sheer coincidence it was today. I checked the time; it was almost 9pm. Sunset was at 9:30. I did a quick calculation, grabbed my camera and car keys, and raced outside. Helfenstein is a few miles from Friedrichsaue, just close enough to reach in twenty minutes, including time to climb to the top.

As I raced across the grass towards the summit, the deepening sunset at my back, I passed a women leaning on a fence. "Beautiful, isn't it?" she said. I agreed, and said I was hoping to take a photo from the top. "Better hurry!" she exclaimed. At Helfenstein I greeted an elderly couple watching the west, two teenage boys clambering over the rocks and a dozen cattle grazing on the slopes. The summit itself, a mass of basalt that rises twisting from the earth like a nightmarish cathedral, was deserted.

Standing on the highest outcrop, I saw that the sun was sinking precisely behind the second highest. Is this significant? Well, no. It's a natural outcrop, so it must be a coincidence. But it was certainly very pretty.

"Worcester Sauce"?

Tradizionelle Rezeptur my arse

I am not convinced.

A History of Zierenberg part 1

A long lane runs from the lonely end of Friedrichsaue through farmland to Zierenberg, squatting contentedly above the river Warme. From a distance one can still see make out the core of the old medieval town, a cluster of steep eaves and chimneys huddled about the church spire, overlooked by rising peaks and forests on every side. Now houses spill over what remains of the town walls, market gardens tumble down the former embankments and up the opposite slopes creep the modern forces of prosperity: red-tiled roofs, gleaming cars, swimming pools and tidy little yards with swing sets and orchards.

"All this is new," Herr K said in a vaguely disapproving tone, waving his arm at the extra-mural estates as he and his wife and neighbour took me on a guided tour of the town. "Thirty years ago there was nothing there."

Zierenberg's present contentment has been well earned. On balance the town has not known much peace since its founding in the thirteenth century, what with the major medieval pastimes of being killed by war, famine or plague. When the historian Michael Hederich wrote a book on the town's history in 1962, he dedicated an entire chapter to 'the time of the great town fires, 1538-1707', because for these centuries the town was destroyed by fire - accidental or deliberate - more times than seems reasonable. The earliest records of the town are essentially a catalogue of destruction and reconstruction.

The Thirty Years War was especially unamusing: by 1639 a quarter of all married women in Zierenberg were widows, and in 1648, when the Swedish army was finally driven out of Hesse, two thirds of the town lay in ruins and it was surrounded by more than thirty abandoned farms. Unfortunately war was not the only cause of devastation. Following another fire just three days after Christmas 1651, the town council finally got on with supplying piped water from the many surrounding hills, not that it saved the town from being burned to the ground yet again in 1707.

Friday night in Zierenberg, 1640

The weary Zierenbergers had barely got the town back on its feet before the Seven Years War broke out in 1756, which again saw armies marching to and fro beneath its walls. The whole region was occupied and abandoned by the hostile French no fewer than four times. Zierenberg itself was recaptured in 1759 by British forces in a dramatic night assault that caught the French entirely by surprise: final score 705 to 13. The tenacious French were back in 1760, 1761 and 1762, each time plundering the area, although one suspects that the pickings were rather thin the fourth time round.

Peace came again, bringing with it the high taxes necessary for reconstruction, refortification and the Landgrave Wilhelm IX's ostentatious residence in Kassel.

Unnecessary

This last endeavour in particular proved so costly that the Landgrave could only pay for it by conscripting 17,000 men, including citizens of Zierenberg, and selling them to the British as mercenaries - the (in)famous Hessian soldiers of the American Revolution.

A typical Hessian scene

According to tradition, one third of the Hessian mercenaries were killed, one third settled in America and one third came home: in good time, in fact, to see Napoleon occupy the region. In 1809 local citizens joined a general Hessian revolt against the occupiers, but since they were mostly armed with hayforks and harsh language, they did not fare all that well, and spent a few weeks hiding in the forests of Gudenberg before they were captured and punished by Napoleon's brother Jerome, the newly installed King of Westfalen, who was by all accounts a bit of a wanker.

Friedrichsaue

Last week I finished with the excavation in York, leaving my undergraduate team, the house and the cat in the incapable hands of Alex. I'm not worried about Cleo, as she knows how to keep Alex in his place.

I cn red latin plz LOL

I left York on Thursday evening and reached Hull without a hitch, except when my GPS tried to send me into a field, which was technically my fault. The ferry was full of Yorkshire scooter nuts, bikers returning from the Manx TT and lots of people determined to get very drunk. We arrived next morning in a blue-skied Rotterdam and the top decks were crowded with people feasting their eyes on its beauty.

Rotterdam cathedral

There followed 250 miles of driving into central Germany. Once I got used to driving on the right hand side and reached the German border I put the famed awesomeness of the Autobahn to the test. It turns out that the Autobahn is indeed awesome. In fact it should be renamed the AWESOMEBAHN.

Even in my dinky little Peugeot 106, which has a 50cc engine or something, it was great fun cruising at 90 mph in the slow lane with BMWs and Mercs still screaming past like Valkyries. Thanks to the Awesomebahn I reached my destination two hours ahead of schedule.

The place I'm staying is the ground floor flat of a house owned by a certain Herr and Frau K in the 10-house metropolis of Friedrichsaue. They have a huge garden, a pond, two dogs and lots of bees.

Herr K said I'd brought the fine weather with me from England (ho ho). It was a bright, breezy day, with a sky full of light and shadow. Once my hosts had showed me around the place, I took my camera and went for a wander along farm tracks towards Zierenberg, the nearest town.

On the Saturday, Herr and Frau K and their neighbour took me on a tour of Zierenberg and its environs. It's a local type of place where everyone seems to know everyone else - especially so in the case of Herr K, who's a teacher at the local primary school.

Anyway, this is the real reason I've come here. Friedrichsaue lies at the foot of these twin peaks, called Großer and Kleiner Gudenberg - Great and Small Wodan's Hill. The names suggest that they were somehow connected to the Germanic god Wodan before St Boniface came and stirred up a hornets' nest in the eighth century by telling everyone to become Christian.

I climbed up the Gudenbergs on Sunday, wandering from the paths and spending about four hours getting happily lost and found again in the dense woodland. At the very peak of Großer Gudenberg, which is never visited except by deer, are the ruins of an old medieval fortress - a huge double rampart surrounding what looked like the remains of a motte built on a natural outcrop, all of it smothered by trees and fern. No path, no signs, nothing at all to suggest that any human has ventured to the summit for centuries - at any rate, I didn't see another living soul the whole time I was up there.

There are lots of similar sites scattered around Hessia. Some of them are linked to old folk tales that root them deep in a half-imagined pagan past; many survive in name only and are virtually forgotten. Over the next three months I'll be writing a book about them, and giving regular status updates here...