Category Archives: Freinsheim and Palatinate history

The times are changing in Freinsheim. But it’s still an agricultural economy. On a dawn walk I visit a chestnut grove, kilometers of vineyards, a fruit tree and currant field.

After breakfast, I work with Angela on her plum trees. She has inherited an old orchard, which is now a bird preserve. The trees are old, so no longer produce much fruit. For organically maintaining her land, she is being given new trees to plant next spring. She has worked hard to remove the blackberry brambles–only one enormous bush remains at the back.

We work for an hour, and clear a square meter or two. Nearby, a bulldozer and dumptruck are regrading the landscape — it has been a project of the past several years in the area, to restructure the grape rows for easier machine harvesting. We are just calling it quits when the dumptruck driver walks over for a chat.

Angela talks to him about her plum field, about her bramble removal project that has taken all summer. He offers to have the bulldozer remove the last patch. I couldn’t stay, I had a lunch with Tante Inge to attend.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” Angela says to me later. “That whole blackberry patch, months of work, gone in five minutes.”

At Tante Inge’s house, Inge is making quince jelly. I score a jar, golden nectar of the gods.

It may be the ancient mountain forests, or the gray mists that sometimes hang low against the hills, but Germany is home to some fantastic fairy tales. In Marburg, where the Grimm Brothers studied at the University, there are plaques placed around town.
They published their collection of Children’s and Household Tales in 1812.

It is Angela’s youngest daughter Luzi, age 5, who clues me in to the potato sack trick for catching elwedritsches. I was explaining to her grandmother Barbel my moment of angst in the Wasgau forest by the Berwartstein Castle. Matthias and Dave and I had taken the wrong trail to a castle ruin. As we trudged along in the deep woods looking for the right path, Matthias began to warn of a potential hazard.

“If we are still out here in the evening,” he had said, “we must watch out for, what is the word? an animal, yes, an animal, I think, that bites on the skin and sucks the blood and becomes 5 or 6 times its normal size.”

Vampire bats came to mind.  Transylvania. I made a pretense of calm. “What is it, exactly,” I asked. “An insect, possibly? Or a spider?”

“Okay, right, I think maybe it is a spider.”

A short time later we found the trail and escaped before the curse of the bloodsucking spider. But Matthias’ description stayed with me. Was this real, or was Matthias pulling my leg?

So Luzi, Barbel and I are sitting around the table and I ask: “Is there an animal that bites on the skin and sucks blood and grows to 5 or 6 times its size?”

Frowns and much discussion ensue. She has to stop to explain to Luzi what I am asking. “I think Matthias was telling you a Fabel,” she says, laughing. Luzi wants to know what a Fabel (fable) is. Barbel answers Luzi, and suggests the creature might have been a Zecke. I leaf through the dictionary and there it is, so obvious. A Zecke is a tick.

But now Barbel and Luzi are going on about Fabels, about elwedritsches in the Palatinate. Apparently they are shy, and won’t come out unless you trick them into it.

On our way to Matthias’ house that evening, Luzi and her Grandmother stop in the cellar for potato sacks. Why? To trap the elwedritsches, of course.

I am drawn to the music of the nineteenth century. Schumann set much German poetry to music, and I was delighted to come across an old songbook collection at Wolf’s home in Berlin. Poems by Schiller, Heine, Goethe and others all collected here, including “Wanderlied.”

In Berlin I also encountered King Wilhelm I, formerly Prince Wilhelm, who came to Freinsheim to suppress the 1848 revolution. That was one cold dude.

Finally, I share the Swiss symbolist Arnold Boecklin’s painting called “Isle of the Dead” on view at the Berlin Bodemuseum. Wolf says this painting has been known to emerge in the imaginations of patients during psychoanalysis.

Sunday I visited two churches – the Church of my Ancestors, and the Church of German Soccer.

At ten in the morning, the Evangelical Protestant Church bells toll the hour to call Freinsheimers to service (church begins at 10:10). About 75 are in attendance. The Pfarrer’s talk on faith is delivered from a stone parapet, in a 250-year old building, the church of my ancestors for at least seven generations. Barbel and I sit together; across the aisle, I recognize Tante Gretel. Tante Inge comes up after the service to say hello. Choral music is offered by the Freinsheimer Gospel Choir.

Sunday afternoon, Hans Gunther drives us to Kaiserslautern. Dave buys a Kaiserslautern team scarf on the walk in.

As my cousin Angela and I stand in line for the WC, she observes: “This could be a sporting event in the States, no?”

It’s true: We could be in Seattle, or Cincinnati. Everyone is wearing their fan colors, on hats and shirts, but especially on scarves. The restroom line is so long we give up and go around the chain link fence to the rival Hannover side, where the line is almost non-existent.

In the arena, 40,000 fans make the stadium thunder with singing and stomping. Hannover wins 1-0.

Services over, we trudge for our buses and cars in the cold, wet night.