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.

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.

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...

Alien central

Speaking of Zierenberg, it turns out to be the centre of crop circle activity in Germany; a new one appeared just a few days ago. You can see it here.

www.ufoinfo.com also has this report from a few years back:

"Since 1998, the area around Zierenberg, near Kassel, has become Germany's crop circle hotspot. Each May 1 (Beltane), a new formation has been found each year in this vicinity."

"Eight days later," on Tuesday, May 8, 2000, "Klaus Listmann discovered a single circle of about 10 meters (33 feet) in diameter in a field of oilseed rape at Gut Rangen, again near Zierenberg."

German cerealogist Wolfgang Ring "reported that it was nearly impossible to enter the field without causing a track by walking through the one-meter high rape that had grown into each other, creating a non-walkable 'jungle.' Neverthless, the circle itself showed no entry tracks. Nor was it connected to any walkable path." (Vielen dank zum Andreas Mueller von International Crop Circle Archive for this report.)

Pagan gods, witches in gingerbread houses, now alien visitors... it's a wonder anyone ever leaves Hessia alive.

Preparations

Only two and a half weeks to go now. The car is ready, though the ferry isn't yet booked. My German is brushed up, or at least a little less scruffy than it was a month ago. The cottage is reserved and thanks to the marvels of Google Earth you can even see it on a satellite photo:

The cottage is in the hamlet in the middle of the picture, called Friedrichsaue; the small town at bottom right is Zierenberg. This next picture is looking from the hills on the far side of Zierenberg towards Friedrichsaue:

Incidentally, the two forested peaks in the centre of the horizon are Groß-Gudenberg and Klein-Gudenberg - Big and Little Wodan's Hill, Wodan being the ancient pagan god known to the Vikings as Odin.

I'll be spending a lot of time from June to September wandering around such hills with their weird pagan names. Hessia is chock full of springs, forests and peaks whose names recall an entire landscape of pre-Christian mythology that was otherwise wiped out by missionaries from the eighth century. It's my mission this summer to rediscover it...