West

part II: Recklinghausen
The train ride over, about 4 ½ hours with two changes, was quite beautiful as everything was covered with a shimmering layer of frost. Maurice predicted it would have melted off by the time we got to Recklinghausen, but instead we were greeted with a fresh layer of snow. Maurice’s mother Susanne picked us up at the station and told us it hadn’t snowed at any other towns in the area, so it was clearly meant just to welcome us. I appreciated it, as it made the town look quite charming.

The area around the train station was composed mainly of new buildings, as everything old had been bombed out in WWII. In fact, the town has been settled since the middle ages, but the oldest thing still standing in this area was a concrete bunker, now converted into a gallery space called the “art bunker,” where Susanne told us a friend of hers had been born as bombs fell. From there it was just a five-minute drive home through a neighborhood of neat houses originally built for mine workers and middle-management. (Recklinghausen was a coal-mining town until recently.)

The house Maurice grew up in was one of these, built in 1956 but since renovated several times and consisting of two main living floors, an attic room and bathroom where we stayed, and a basement where laundry supplies, baskets of potatoes and apples, and Maurice’s teenage leftovers (guitars, books, and wood paneling he installed himself) might be found. The yard, however, was a fairyland of snow and ice – and a newly installed gate leading to the garage. Strangely, this had no wall around it, meaning it had no use other than a symbolic one. Apparently, Susanne and her boyfriend Helmut had disagreed over how it should be installed. He did it his way, which she found annoying, so she decided to protest by leaving it suspended in air.

I wanted to see the sights of Recklinghausen, but Maurice claimed not to know what they were. So we went to a bookstore and looked at a book about the sights of Recklinghausen. Thus prepared, Maurice showed me around town. There is a segment of the old medieval wall with one whole tower and half of another one, sliced vertically straight down the middle and therefore fitted with a wooden back. Next to it is an 18th-century manor house belonging to the now departed local nobility. There is a 17th-century stone church with an iron cannonball embedded in one wall, still visible 25 feet about the ground. There is a museum of religious iconography, mind-numbingly boring to locals but well-known among scholars. And there is a nice downtown area in classic German village style, its narrow streets closed to all vehicular traffic and lined with shops.

The center of this downtown area, just a 15-minute walk from the Mengel home, held another Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market) where at last we found the latkes we’d been searching for, although here they are called kartoffelpuffer or reibeplatzchen. The rest was a typical assortment of gift items, sausages, and Gluhwein, the mulled wine so welcome on a cold winter’s day. A two-storey Christmas tree marked one corner, and to add even more atmosphere, the trashcans were actually Santas holding sacks for you to drop your trash in (apparently their gifts had already all been delivered, so these Santas were on garbage duty).

We also found a little stage with a strange sort of performance in progress. Several apparently South American men wearing enormous North American Plains Indian headdresses were playing a variety of panpipes and cane flutes along with a recording of drippy, synthesizer-heavy music, all while singing in the classic meaningless vocables of “hey-yo.” You could buy their CDs for 15 euro. I found this show quite mystifying, as I had never seen the likes of it. But Maurice tells me it is the new fashion in world music at European street fairs. About ten years ago, all the guys who used to play pan-Andean music while wearing ponchos switched over to this new, flashier schlock. The Germans seemed to like it fine – especially after several glasses of Gluhwein and Eierlikor (egg nog).

After this, most of our time in Recklinghausen seemed to be spent eating and playing with computers. It was a relief to have internet at home again – Maurice felt we had finally reentered civilization, rather ironically for he who thinks of this small town as only barely civilized. In order to get in the Christmas spirit, though, we made Christmas cookies in the shapes of angels, stars, ducks, pigs, and the classic Christmas mushroom. Then I played Christmas carols on the piano (the only ones I recognized were Silent Night and O Tannenbaum, but I played the rest anyhow). After I stopped, the notoriously grumpy neighbor came over to complain about the noise. The grumpy neighbor’s grumpier father once called the police on the Mengels for daring to hire a piano tuner. I guess the son had enough of the Christmas spirit to refrain from getting the police involved, but felt compelled to keep up tradition in some form.

Here all things Christmas take place on the 24th. The day prior, we’d gone to a Christmas tree farm, still beautiful with its sprinkling of snow, where Maurice sawed down our tree of choice himself. On Christmas Eve we decorated it, opened our presents, and had a dinner made of fish caught by a less grumpy neighbor. Susanne was slated to sing in the church choir that night but had come down with the cold the rest of us had already had, so had to stay in bed instead. I wanted to hear the music anyway and see what this small-town German Christmas thing might be like, so Maurice and I bravely set out into the freezing streets for the 11:00 service.

The bells of the cannonball-embedded church, our destination, were audible from quite some distance away, and no wonder! As we approached within a few blocks of the place we had to stop talking, as we could no longer understand each other. The huge bells’ minor thirds made a big and eerie in the night. We arrived just in time – only a few minutes after we took our seats with our candles in the back o f the church, they ceased ringing.

The church décor was pretty Spartan, in a Protestant way, but it was a nice, airy, white space inside, filled up in one end by a thirty-foot tree hung in white lights. I didn’t understand all that German sermonizing, but didn’t really need to, as it was the same stuff they always read in Protestant Christmas services in the US, too. I sung along with the German carols as if I knew them, with the help of the lyrics printed in our programs. The choir sounded good and we particularly enjoyed music played on the organ accompanied by flute. Still, I was glad it only lasted an hour. The quietly uplifting music was a nice end to the evening, but my German quotient had been reached for the day.

After a week in Recklinghausen, I was actually surprised at how much German I was able to understand, although I could still only respond in simple yes or no fashion most of the time. Still, with Maurice’s mom’s newly acquired English words – she’s taking a class in a nearby university – we did pretty well at communication. Maurice took charge of the more complicated translations, of course, such as instructions on how to use the washing machine.

We did make some small effort at getting out, looking around, and having a bit of exercises. On Christmas Day, all our presents opened and cookies already baked, we went to Die Haard, the comically named nearby forest. There was a dirt road lined with trees labeled in scientific and German names on one side, piles of cut logs on the others, along which we strolled for a couple of kilometers, until the sun was nearly down. At the crossroads where we eventually turned around stood a tall wooden cross in a stone base, near a statue of St Johannes Nepomuk (whoever that is) – these marked the point where the Germanic tribes held their court in medieval times.

On another day, we met with Maurice’s father. I had been very curious to see what would happen at this meeting – he recently married a Thai woman the same age as Maurice, who on their last get-together, read Thai beauty magazines throughout the whole dinner. We wondered if I could find anything to talk to her about, but we needn’t have worried – she declined to join us either for the afternoon tea and cakes we had at their home or at dinner afterwards. Actually, we had a nice time in spite of – or because of – this. And I was able to assuage Maurice’s fears that he was like his father. If anything, I think he’s the opposite of this polite yet extremely quiet and distant man.

On the way out to the village of Borken near the Netherlands border, we stopped to buy the cakes in town, directed by the well-mannered village punks with their spiked hair hanging out in front of the village bar. One bakery on the classic village square by the church was all that was open on these “dead days” between Christmas and New Year’s, and it was packed. We quietly consumed our purchases with Maurice’s father afterwards, and then took a quick “field trip” across the border to the Netherlands to buy gas. There’s no border control now that everything’s EU, and the Dutch charge less for gas taxes. Unfortunately it was already dark, so I couldn’t see and scenic views of Holland, but we did see an awful lot of Dutch on bikes.

Later, since I mentioned I’d hardly seen any German culture since arriving, and that we had a hard time finding German food in Berlin, Maurice’s father took us to a German restaurant. When we entered, salsa music was playing over the speaker system, and we were served by a Thai waitress. The menu did feature goose, duck, and wild boar, but it also had a number of vegetarian options. I guess it wasn’t quite what I expected from a German restaurant in a little village, although there was indeed plenty of beer on hand.

The next day’s field trip was to a more unusual monument in Recklinghausen. Hohe Mark is a tall hill just outside town, made entirely of rubble removed from the mine. It’s quite big and must have taken a century to pile up to its current height. The city got the idea of turning it into a kind of park, and construction is still in progress. Currently, some paths lead around the hill at various levels and aluminum staircases lead straight up through a couple of viewing platforms. The top offered a strange view, and looked a bit like a lunar landscape. The flat, triangular area was scattered with construction equipment. At one end was a large and perfectly round hole, while in the middle stood a temporary viewing tower. From the top you can see factory smoke stacks all around, which were lit up rather eerily at twilight.

We decided Berlin would offer more options for New Year’s revelry than little Recklinghausen, so made our train travel plans accordingly. On our last day in town we still had some more visits to pay. While at Maurice’s father’s dining room table a few days before, Maurice received a phone call with unhappy news: his dissertation advisor, who had been sick for some time, had passed away. All former advisees were naturally now feeling distressed. One of them, Patrick, was in the country only briefly before returning to his fieldwork in India, and he rode in to Recklinghausen to talk things over at lunch. After that, we went to see a high school friend, Lars, who had also played together with Maurice in the immortal Recklinghausen blues band, Mojo Turner.