Oskar Straube
Beethovenstr. 66
D-7530 Pforzheim-Eutingen
This is now our official postal address. It makes forwarding much easier.
7.7.76
My dear Americans! If this joke, no longer entirely new to me, is still as fitting as ever — then it is.
What a great joy it was when, at the beginning of May, a letter from you arrived in the letterbox. Of course, I wanted to reply right away, and then at the very least I wanted to have it ready in time to serve as a birthday letter — but as you can see, it didn't quite work out that way. Still, after all these years of endless interruptions, I'm glad that a better, more regular contact between us is developing. I used to write a great deal, and maintained correspondence with Memel war comrades out of friendship — but in later years it reversed: the daily demands of life took over, and that is the curse of bad habits… Once a stretch of time has passed, you no longer know where you left off, and if a letter was supposed to have "hands and feet," it had to be a very detailed one — and for that you needed time and leisure, which one simply doesn't have. So I've earned myself the sad reputation of a lazy correspondent, and I've lost many a contact along the way, which is a shame. A brother remains a brother, especially since more than just family ties bound us in the past — I mean very concretely the everyday connection when you were still living together at home — and that bond cannot be entirely lost, even through years of silence; it always remains revivable. But with war acquaintances, once you were half a year behind on writing, the good fellow was simply nowhere to be found anymore.
You mention that I once said I wrote to "the one and the other," and you ask who "the other" is. Well, the others are former female colleagues with whom I had and still have only collegial contact. Your imagination has little basis here for going off into wild speculation. It's simply about fellow human beings who interest me, and if some of them happen to be female and even present a partially pleasant appearance and have in their whole manner that gentle quality which we consider feminine — that is no obstacle to staying in touch with these contemporaries. No, really no obstacle at all.
By the way, contact with colleagues — male and female — is at the same time no contact with Bremen. It was always clear to me that Bremen would only be a small episode for me. And that shows itself very clearly with the whole family: we have become thoroughly Bremeners to an unlikely degree. For the children it's quite clear — they were all four born in Bremen, they greatly enjoyed spending their early years in Farge between meadows with cows, horses, and sheep, on the great river where ships from all over the world sailed past, where you could swim and paddle yourself, where you could also sail, where there were your own fruit trees and everyone had their own vegetable patch. And then all four of them went to school in the city at age 13, and later they came to know the marsh and the Wümme meadows, the dykes, the forests, the lush meadows with the old willow trees, which sometimes gave a ghostly appearance, had walked and cycled through. So for them, Bremen is a city that can hold its own against very many cities — at times even against Stuttgart, and against Pforzheim there's no comparison at all — in terms of history and appearance, its architecture including its rural outer districts and its surrounding landscape with their discreet and yet so captivating charms, it is simply home. And for us older ones, you have to also take time and consider its substance. Dette has lived more than half her life in Bremen — 29 years — and I haven't lived anywhere else as long; in Libau it was only 17 years. And then there was the personal life — it began with starting a family and lasted until retirement age. You could say: everything before was more or less a run-up, and in Bremen my truly personal life began. And most people who are close to us in a similar way — like relatives — live in Bremen. I felt this again very strongly when I was in Bremen for a week just after Whitsun. There we have no worries about accommodation; it's almost like coming home.
And yet, for me the true essence of home is still a beach with a 180° view all the way to the horizon over water. The Weser, after which I am also homesick, was only a small substitute for the sea. And that's why we like to plan our holiday trips so that we also get to a large body of water. This year we had doubts about going on holiday right after Easter — we weren't sure if it would already be summery in Brittany in April/May — so we made a different trip. We travelled in the footsteps of the Cathars into the Eastern Pyrenees, where they found their last refuge and met their end at the hands of the Inquisition.
First we visited the small town of Albi, after which the Cathars in France were called Albigensians. There stands an enormous Romanesque cathedral with a certain resemblance to the one in Worms. Its special character comes from the fact that it has semicircular projections on all sides, looking like stuck-on round towers that only go up to the roofline. On one side a Gothic portal was added, and inside the church has been entirely remodelled in the Baroque style. What makes the building so impressive, beyond its unique floor plan, is its immense height.
We then visited the ruins of Montségur Castle, where the Cathars lived for a long time. This castle was built according to astronomical principles. Then came the castle ruin of Quéribus, where the last Cathars were walled in by the Inquisitors — a very peculiar structure on a sharp rocky peak; from a distance you can't imagine how people got up there without climbing equipment. We also visited a cave along the banks of the Ariège where the Cathars were walled in alive inside limestone rock. This cave system is 25 km long and has 3 exits, with the whole system being about 1.5 km deep. We were only about 1.5 km in — at times you had to stretch your arms out and bend down, and then you'd arrive in domes of an estimated 100 metres or more in height and diameter, then climb tall stairs and push into other passages with narrow stretches and large halls. We also visited a grotto where prehistoric animal drawings can be found, and another grotto with a unique quality in terms of crystal formation — aside from the usual stalactites it has Aragonite in metre-sized formations in the most fantastical shapes.
Another attraction in the area is the city of Carcassonne. The Cité, the old town with its kilometre-wide extent, has high walls and towers with arrow slits, gates with drawbridges, and a double ring of fortifications — I believe Carcassonne is the most elaborate fortress that ever existed in the Middle Ages, a stronghold of the Visigoths, but also besieged and conquered as early as the 5th century, later fought over many times and also besieged, but always wonderfully restored — it has served as a romantic film backdrop again and again, and apparently would make a perfect setting for jousting tournaments. The Albigensians even used it as their temporary capital and so on. At one point we also drove to the Mediterranean coast and bathed. The water was still a little cool but already bearable. And in between we drove into the mountains and roamed around. Within an hour you could experience all four seasons — passes still blocked by snow, trees with sparse leaves, then blossoming lilac, then summer with scattered early spring flowers, then fully blossoming trees.
These days we saw a film on TV — "Einmal Danzig und zurück" ("Once to Danzig and Back") — which awakened in us the desire to travel there. Poland is very open to German tourists. You can travel by ship to Danzig or to Stettin, or you can also bypass the DDR by going through Czechoslovakia — though that would need to be explored. Perhaps you can also drive through Czechoslovakia. In any case it would give me great pleasure to see Stettin again, and Posen and Leslau, and when you're already there, Warsaw is also worth a trip, as is Kraków, Thorn, and Danzig.
But the next trip I'm planning is to Greece, and specifically in September. I tell myself: 1) When old Tito is no longer in charge, who knows whether as a German you can still travel through Yugoslavia without a visa and hassle; 2) Greece is increasingly becoming a tourist magnet — meaning the beaches are getting more and more built up with concrete — tourist silos — 3) at all attractive spots there is an increasingly large crowd milling about; 4) people are getting more and more commercial, and the warm-hearted hospitality of unspoiled peoples is fading; and 5) I happen to be flush right now, which doesn't suit me at all — I had 5 correct numbers on the lottery and won DM 4,000. With that I was able to plug a hole of just over 1,000 Marks that had built up in April due to accumulated expenses, I could reach into the pocket for both students, and there's still something left for the trip — not much, but it would suit me not at all if there were nothing.
The weather in Europe is currently playing havoc. Since the beginning of June we've had not a drop of rain, the meadows are grey, the grain not fully grown but already yellowing and dry. Daily temperatures of 30°C, and in Bremen it's no different. Farmers are slaughtering their livestock because there's no hay, sugar beets, potatoes, and maize are shrivelling in the fields without fruit. And in Moscow on one of these days the temperature was 8° above zero and for weeks there has been no blue sky, and the harvest is ruined by rain. The riddle for me is: what will September be like in Greece?
Who is Sylvia Sydney? I've heard the name somewhere but can't picture anything concrete.
One could almost envy you your record collection directly — we currently have no functioning record players, and something good is not exactly cheap, so Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and all the rest sit silent in the cupboard, and we are also dabbling in buying records — but more on that in due course.
When we were sitting together as a family, I came to talk about something from the "good old days," and Martin said he'd like some biographical notes from me for his birthday so he could read in black and white, so to speak, where I come from, what I used to be, what I have become, and who I am now. So I actually set to work, got information from the organist Karl Straube and from the great-grandfather who told it, because he apparently was so influential that he wanted to send his son to school and beat him for it — and from that, old Luckschen said at my birth:
"Oh, now my little Schönchen must serve!"
And I got as far as 33 pages, far enough that I was able to establish that I could start at the engineering school in Stettin. Then the birthday arrived and I wrote underneath: To be continued. I had a great deal of fun with it, and even made some of it up myself. Now comes the harder part — while with the ancestors you only list facts, and in childhood only small experiences come along, now more thoughts come than memories, the facts can now be looked up in the history books, but what one has personally experienced as a thinking adult, and how — that is somewhat more nuanced. But a literary work it will never be. I hope to finish the rest and give it to him at Christmas.
14.7.76 — So far I had got, and now that one sentence no longer holds true. We have a very decent record player. In Bremen they say:
"De Düwel schiet jümmer up'n groten Bulken"
— the devil always sh*ts on the biggest pile — and so alongside the DM 4,000 lottery win came a tax refund from the tax office of DM 3,000, which also doesn't quite fit — but we quickly decided to buy a record player for more than DM 1,000, and now we're listening to Haydn and Sibelius and so on again. If we'd waited much longer, we'd have had to settle into what I call the "normal state" — the state where you have no Mark left over for such luxuries. But some astrologer has apparently said I will yet become rich. From my side, this prediction may slowly begin to fulfil itself — though I take the view: anyone who has no other worries than money worries shouldn't complain, and I'd rather have to overdraw my account every month than be ill (or have illness in the family) or have to give up some beautiful things. But dealing with the whims of fate is not always straightforward — sometimes fortune smiles broadly, and I can plan my Greece trip quite generously.
Now I want to bring this letter to a sudden end, otherwise it meets the fate of so many started-but-never-finished letters, and there must be something left to tell next time.
In handwriting:
"Alsdann die bestmöglichen Grüsse von uns allen an Euch alle —"
"And so the very best greetings from all of us to all of you —"
Dein Kleiner
"Your little one"