Claire Gebben

Genealogical data is a good leaping off point, but as I work on a novel-length account of my ancestor Michael Harm, I often get caught in a realm between fact and fiction, where the line between them blurs, and where the real can seem the most unreal of all.

Facts about my great-great grandfather Michael Harm exist in city, county and church records, in ship’s registers and in primary source letters he wrote in the 19th century. Birth, marriage, travel, and death, plus a few stories thrown in to give me clues. But the true substance of Michael Harm’s life exists within the “human context”*, the web of relationships of the people around him, who defined who he was and whose lives he influenced in turn. (FYI, I picked up this concept of “the human context” from Stevick’s Theory of the Novel.)

How do I reconstruct this web? If there ever were maps to the treasure, they have long since disappeared. I do count myself extremely lucky to have some letters from the mid-nineteenth century, letters that mention names such as the Reibolds who have a Weinbergsgarten in Freinsheim to this day. The name Pihrmann also appears in the letters — as I bought apples from a street vendor under the Pihrmann sign, I wondered about the man before me. Were his ancestor and my greatgreatgrandfather friends over 150 years ago? It seems unreal, but also quite plausible.

In an article by Freinsheim historian Otto Klamm: “Freinsheimers wanderten nach Uebersee aus: Zumeist gingen sie ohne die Genehmigung der Obrigkeit,” (“Freinsheimers emigrated overseas: Mostly they went without permission of the authorities”) I came across a familiar name: the family of Michael Hoehn, who departed Freinsheim for the U.S. in 1858. Herr Hoehn was “accompanied by his wife and five children. A son of 21 years, another of 17, daughters ages 23 and 15 years, and … a little daughter of three years.”

Michael Hoehn is a familiar name because in my research I’ve learned a Michael Hoehn and my greatgreatgrandfather traveled to Freinsheim together in 1893. Michael Hoehn wrote an account of their journey, in a letter he sent to the family when the two of them had arrived back in Cleveland. Because Michael Harm and Michael Hoehn appeared to be the same age, both with young children, I assume the Michael Hoehn who wrote the letter must be one of the two sons mentioned above. I further imagine these two sons, who as Klamm writes, left “without permission of the authorities,” were avoiding conscription in the military. In those days many young men of the Rhineland-Palatinate emigrated rather than face conscription in the armed forces of the Bavarians.

Otto Klamm closes his article about these emigrants as follows: “Their fates are long gone, only mentioned in our list as numbers. And yet these were once caring, troubled and hopeful people. I wonder if the descendants of today remember the plight of their forefathers?” If Otto Klamm were alive today, I would be glad to tell him: the answer is YES.

Since starting this thesis project, I’ve been blown away by German folk music.

At the Bad Duerkheim Wurstmarkt last September, I followed my ears to live music I heard playing in one of the tents.

“Don’t go in there!” my German cousin Matthias warned.

“Why not? Isn’t this the real Germany?”

Inside the tent, an oompah band was playing, complete with accordion, brass, and woodwinds. The barmaids wore short flouncy skirts, their breasts spilling from low-cut blouses as they leaned low to serve the customers. On stage, a man led people in song, shirtless, wagging his hips and waving his arms in the air. In the mostly gray-haired crowd, people swayed and sang and waved their arms in the air, too.

“There are so many other great music choices,” Matthias yelled, clearly embarrassed.

He was right. Though I couldn’t understand most of the words, the songs and the singers seemed silly and burlesque. Nothing like what I’d been coming across in my research, nothing like what had captivated me about the 19th century folk music. We didn’t stay long enough for a wine spritzer.

When I visited Wolf in Berlin, I found a book on his shelves of folk songs set to music by Schumann. I particularly love this Wanderlied. (text and translation at the link provided)

In honor of the December season, some beautiful Christmas songs are of German origin, too, like “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” and “Silent Night.” I can still hear my grandmother singing to me in German: “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht …”

Last August at a seminar on Whidbey Island, Timothy Egan, Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award winner (for The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl) gave a terrific talk on non-fiction writing. One of his points was to try to include a “killer fact” in our article writing–as in, readers learn plenty of facts in non-fiction writing, but a “killer fact” blows our minds.

When I visited the Rhineland-Palatinate, during an evening with the Museum Society in Bad Duerkheim, I heard a killer fact: From 1618-1818, the people of the Rhineland-Palatinate endured 20 wars. That’s right, 200 years of Catholics v. Protestants, dukes vs. kings, Louis XIV of France ransacking and burning through the Palatinate in 1689, Napoleon laying siege beginning in 1803 (Napoleon even set a new calendar, starting at the year 1).

Another killer fact: Indonesian volcanic eruptions in the 1815 and 1883 heavily influenced European climate. More volcanoes have erupted in 2010, rekindling interest in the climatology of the nineteenth century. Hmm. Volcanic history repeating itself?