I'm going to take this opportunity to present two stories I've been working on for some months. They are true stories that actually happened to Bev and me. (I don't write fiction.) They may remind you of stories you may have read about strangers meeting on a train or ship, together for a moment, but never to see each other again. They are stories about travel. Curiously, they both took place in northern Bavaria near or at what was at the time the East German border, which is significant to both stories. The time frame for both would have been in the 1970's or maybe early 1980's. Each of the two meetings lasted no more than a few minutes. Since the stories take place in Germany and are about Two Women, I've given that name to them in the form “Zwei Frauen”.

Prolog   People have always traveled for various reasons: business, family, pleasure. I only have to cite a well-known story dealing with No Room at the Inn, or the camel caravans crossing Central Asia. Travel is part of the human condition.

In the mid-1800's a new form of travel developed, but only for very wealthy people. People in Europe, and Americans going to Europe, did what was referred to as the Grand Tour. This involved spending perhaps two years travelling to the major historic and artistic sites. It became an essential part of one's education.

The Grand Tour itself is history, but only its style, not its content. In the 20th Century this sort of education became available to many people of more modest means. Indeed, Bev and I travelled on our own mini-Grand Tours for many years on the most modest of shoestrings. It is this sort of travel for content, for self-education and self-improvement that we have espoused over the years. Everyone learns from travel.

However, I'll add one caveat. It is possible to go to a place with knowledge Level 0 and improve your understanding to, say, Level 2. However, with the slightest of preparation, say, reading up on the place before you leave, you might start at Level 3 and your travel experience will bring you up to Level 5. What I mean is, if you haven't heard of the Eiffel Tower and are planning your first trip to Paris, although you will learn something on that trip in any case, better postpone the trip until you can pick up a guide and treat yourself to some background. You will be a more educated person for it. Compare these Zwei Frauen.

Weemer   We've gone to Berlin many times. Before we were married, Bev had an NDEA Scholarship for study in Germany, which included her being flown to Berlin. I've never entered the city that way. As students in Mainz we took the cheap route, a bus from Frankfurt through East Germany to West Berlin. We've gone through East Germany by train, and in the present story, by car. On this trip we were to cross the Iron Curtain from Bayern/Bavaria to Thüringen/Thuringia in the East. It was to be our first trip to a number of cities in the East, then on to Berlin, and we were looking forward to it. At the crossing, as we had found on our many crossings of the Iron Curtain, there would be delays.

I remember quite clearly Bev and me talking to this woman, standing outside some building. I didn't remember why there was this extra delay until I picked up by chance recently one of Bev's travel diaries, where she had noted that, since we were driving a car with West German plates, the East German authorities insisted that we buy a set of East German plates for the period of our stay in that area. I had totally forgotten that. So, therefore, we were waiting for licence plates to be exchanged during this conversation that may have lasted five minutes.

Ms Airhead was, I'm sorry to say, an American, maybe twenty-something. She was travelling with a group of friends that we didn't meet. She was, I would say, totally unprepared for a trip to Europe, let alone a crossing of the Iron Curtain. She was charming, but she was a tabula rasa, a blank slate.

We discussed our destinations. She and her friends had done this much preparation: the night before they had stopped in "a pub"--her words; I supposed she meant a Gasthaus--and had spoken to someone who knew some English where they should go in East Germany.

She proudly told us they were going to Weemer, which the man had told them was interesting and worth seeing. She said he also told them to go into the nearby forest to see some place "where bad things happened". So you see the sort of preparation she and her friends had for this trip.

I'm not sure just when the epiphany struck Bev and me. Maybe the light bulb went on during the short conversation, maybe after we had already crossed the border. Weemer, indeed.

The city of Weimar is one of the cultural capitals of Europe. In recent years it was actually given an international award, whose name escapes me, something like Cultural Capital of the Year. The name is pronounced VYE-mar; many English speakers also say WYE-mar. It is most definitely not Weemer.

Local royalty had enticed both Goethe and Schiller to come live in Weimar. Today the Schillerhaus can be visited, as well as Goethe's Gartenhaus. Going to Weimar without even having heard of these two authors (Goethe's Faust, Schiller's William Tell) is like going to Stratford-upon-Avon and on arrival, asking "Who's this guy Shakespeare"?

Ms Airhead would therefore not be inspired by the famous statue of Goethe and Schiller shaking hands, located in front of the German National Theater. She also might know little about the significance of the Weimarer Republik having been declared from this Deutsches Nationaltheater after World War I, the first attempt at democracy in Germany ever. Berlin was too contentious and too political after the war; Weimar was chosen as the site to declare the Republic because of its status as a cultural heart of the country.

All this would have gone over the heads of Miss Airhead and her companions. Or, at least they would have risen from knowledge Level 0 to maybe 2, but with a little preparation, they could have added considerably to their education.

But the story gets worse.

I wonder what these people would have made of the following fact, and what preparation they might have had for it, if any: the place up in the forest "where bad things happened" was the Memorial at the Site of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

I don't want to go into the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the National Socialists other than to say this. Beverly and I visited the memorials at Auschwitz/Birkenau, now in Poland; Buchenwald, then in East Germany, Bergen-Belsen (where Anne Frank died), and Dachau, a suburb of Munich, both in West Germany. There are of course others, but after paying respectful tribute at a number of Memorials, the mind numbs, and you decide you don't have to see them all. I will say that it was extra upsetting at the time (certainly since remedied) that in Poland and East Germany, the communist authorities had used the memorials and adjacent museums for propaganda purposes, by making prominent mention of how many communists had also been killed there.

But this is an adjunct to the Weemer story, so I want to add this about Buchenwald specifically, in the hope that it adds to the reader's knowledge, outlook, and education.

There are to my mind three things to mention about Buchenwald beyond the others. The ultra-rightists would presumably have wanted to put in a positive light German culture, language, and life even beyond normal bounds, yet I would say they did just the opposite when they planned Buchenwald. Beyond the crimes against humanity, they denigrated more than ever German culture, language, and life.

German Culture The crimes against humanity were perpetrated in concentration camps at various locations, almost always named after the nearby town. Bergen-Belsen is located between two towns by those names, I've already said that Dachau is a suburb of Munich. (Dachau is traditionally a resort town. Just imagine living with the knowledge that the world associates the name with the Memorial Site at its edge).

As an additional affront to German Culture, they built a concentration camp outside of Weimar, of all places. Maybe it was because they, in the 1930's, wanted to slap the face of German democracy of a decade earlier. Who knows, but maybe in deference to Goethe and Schiller, they didn't dare name it Weimar Concentration Camp, but came up exceptionally with a different name.

German Language Let's look at that name. To do so subjectively, you have to, with difficulty, put aside the thought of what it represents. You also have to put aside any residual prejudice against the language.

I'm no expert on trees, but there's such a thing as box trees, which in German are Buchen. A forest is a Wald. A preliminary translation of the name would be Box-tree Forest, but that's a bit awkward. On the example that names based on oak or maple forests would be Oakwood or Maplewood, an accurate translation of Buchenwald would be Boxwood. That is a beautiful name, one you might find on the name of a suburban housing development. To use such an attractive name as was done is an insult to the language. Imagine being told you're going to Boxwood Concentration Camp.

German Life It is difficult for outsiders to realize the extent that The Forest is a part of German (and Austrian) psyche. I'll try to elaborate.

Putting aside French fairy tales like Cinderella and Danish ones like the Ugly Duckling (Hans Christian Anderson), the majority of fairy tales in Western Culture are German, specifically as collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm from regional folk tales in the mid-1800's. I will use one as an example. You may think of others.

It is no coincidence that Little Red Riding Hood sets off to her Grandmother's house (an image of safety) by walking through the forest (an image of lyric tranquility). It is therefore even more jolting that the wolf interferes in these peaceful worlds. It should be no surprise, however, that she and the Grossmutter are saved by the Woodman (Waldmann), who brings peace back to the Wald.

How about Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald? Strauss's musical images in "Tales from the Vienna Woods" are peaceful and serene.

Finally, outsiders have to be unaware of the extent that Germans go hiking through the woods, perhaps a whole family on a Sunday, often on well-maintained paths kept up by foresters. When Beverly and I, and Rita, lived in Mainz that year, in the suburb of Gonsenheim (Mainz-Gonsenheim), we rented rooms at Lennebergstrasse 20. A few blocks down Lenneberg Street to the left began the Lennebergwald. On at least a couple of occasions we would go for a walk through the Lenneberg Forest on a weekend, as did so many locals, perhaps ending up at the Lennebergschenke, a restaurant in the woods, for Sunday dinner.

Now: Buchenwald, as an extra affront, was located in the middle of a forest just a half-hour northwest of Weimar.

On that first trip to Weimar, Beverly and I did visit the Memorial. My mind's eye (that notorious liar, but accurate here) shows me an image of us walking uphill on the left side of a road through the forest. I believe behind us was the parking lot where we had left the car, and I know up ahead around that bend to the right is the Memorial, but where we are walking I see greenery and sunlight. There is total and absolute silence in the Wald, except for our own footsteps. It is a perfect lyric image. And then we heard a sound, twice. I can still hear it.

For the first time in our lives (and so far, the one and only time) we heard in the Wald that quintissential image of tranquility, the cuckoo. Remember, it is for good reason that Central Europe is the home of the cuckoo clock.

This short walk through the forest provided a visual and audio image to last a lifetime, and it has.

But I also know what lay ahead around the bend.

Bamberger Reiter   Bamberg is a city in northern Bavaria with a nice cathedral. But there are lots of places like that. The reason people come to Bamberg is to see a statue in the cathedral called the Bamberger Reiter. Although the name is sometimes translated as the Bamberg Horseman, I prefer to call it the Bamberg Rider, since it's closer to the original.

My mind's eye remembers it this way. It's a large statue of a young man on horseback, maybe 3/4 size (remember, it's indoors). It's unusual that it's in the cathedral, since it's totally secular and has no religious theme whatsoever. The young man is good-looking and is in medieval dress, as I recall including some sort of headdress. Both he and the horse are looking somewhat to the viewer's left. The statue is famous for the serene look on the young man's face. I recall it up high, with the horse's hooves at eye level, or higher. It is brightly illuminated in the dark cathedral. It's considered a masterpiece of Gothic art.

Bev and I had made our way to Bamberg to see the Reiter, and had left the cathedral and had walked back maybe four blocks. There was a woman standing at an intersection at the curb, having just crossed the street. I remember the image so clearly--she was standing on the southwest corner of the intersection. She seemed tense and upset, and as we walked by, asked us where the Bamberger Reiter was.

We told her it was maybe four blocks back in the direction we had just come in. She stared down the street and stood there, frozen. Then she did take a moment to explain her predicament.

These were the years where the East German government had relented, I believe because payments had been made by West Germany, to allow compassionate visits of East Germans to West Germany, say for a death or an illness. She explained that she was from East Germany and was headed to somewhere in West Germany. She didn't mention cities or the reason for the visit. Her train coming over the border stopped in Bamberg, where she was supposed to change trains. She had limited time between trains, I don't know how much.

Her whole life long she had wanted to see the Bamberger Reiter, especially since she really didn’t live so far away by distance. She even had a picture of the statue hanging on her wall at home. I don't know where the station was or how far she had walked already, but the additional four blocks were causing her to worry. She didn't know what to do. Obviously, she told us all this very quickly.

I do not have a resolution to this story. There was absolutely no way we could help her out of her poignant predicament, so we regretfully left her and went on our way.

This is something like the story of The Lady or the Tiger, where you have to decide for yourself which door the man opened. Did she play it safe, turn around and go back to the station and be sure of her train connection? Did she hurry down to the Reiter for a very quick look? If so, did she still catch her train? We'll never know. We can just hope that, whatever she did, since the border opened within the next decade or so, she was able to afford the trip once again to either see the Reiter for the first time, or otherwise, to see it again more at her leisure.

Epilog   I'll leave the epilog up to the reader. So, on the theme of "being prepared for a travel experience", what's your take on these Zwei Frauen?