Seelen

Long before baking bread became a popular pandemic activity, my darling husband would rise early on a Sunday morning and continue his quest to bake the perfect Seelen. He had varying success, until one June morning he produced spectacularly crusty Seelen. He posted the result on social media, prompting many to ask just what Seelen were. 

Seelen, literally "souls," are the bread found in the pocket of Swabia whence my darling husband originates. They are a staple of the German breakfast table, slathered in butter, bedecked with cold cuts, sometimes anointed with chocolate hazelnut spread. As one does. 

Alfred Jr.'s Seelen

As reactions to the photos of Seelen were still pouring in, darling husband was gathered with his family to share salty tears and Seelen with his family. For while he was baking, his father had begun slipping towards the other side. Alfred Hellstern Sr. passed the threshold in the wee hours of our morning, shortly after his son arrived in the Vaterland.

Seelen were originally small loaves placed on graves for All Soul's Day. But they're so good with fresh butter, it would be a waste to not share it with the living, and make it daily. 

This is where I admonish you to hold your family tight, and perhaps share a crusty loaf with those you love. Because all too soon, we must say goodbye.

The last farewell

Candles in the snow

It is Christmas Eve in Germany and the anticipation of the advent season approaches a fever pitch. There is a bustle of activity as last minute preparations are made--shopping had to be finished by noon, last-minute packages are still being wrapped and hidden from children, mothers are scurrying about everywhere, and children are banished from the living room while the tree is put up and decorated behind closed doors, to be revealed at the sound of the bell.

In my husband's childhood home in Ravensburg, there is a mix of the German and English all year long, but Christmas Eve is all German; after supper my late father-in-law would take a daughter or two to evening mass at the Liebfrauenkirche, knowing there would be the opening of gifts--the Bescherung--upon their return. 

Winters in Ravensburg are usually white, and the snow shovel and a tub of sand for the steep front steps are a quasi permanent fixture during the winter. As soon as the churchgoers head out, Mama digs into a box and pulls out a handful of candles. Right before their return, she tucks lit candles into the snow banks lining the steps and walkway leading to the front door. The warm glow welcomes them home on one of the darkest nights of the year.

Candles light their way home

Fraktur, Kurrent and Sütterlin, oh my!

This year, I reached an important milestone: when I renewed my membership in our national professional association for translators and interpreters, I qualified for the life membership category, which is reserved for people over a certain age threshold and with more than two decades as a member. It is fitting, as I am wrapping up a lifelong career as a professional translator that began with studying French in high school oh, so many years ago. 

Those studies led me to a year in France, which led to me meeting the German man who would become my husband, which led me to return to Europe to do graduate studies, which led me to learn the language of my future in-laws, and eventually to marry said fellow (bonus: today is our anniversary). What I did not know was that my esoteric studies in paleography of middle and old French (and the ensuing thesis) would be of use later, not in my career, but in my personal activities in family history. 

As someone who received stacks and diskettes of "completed" genealogies, the prospect of tracking down my husband's little known family roots appealed to me. There was only one catch: even though the German and French languages pose few problems, the handwriting did. 

Modern French handwriting is a well-known entity to me; the older scripts, while still characteristically loopy, demonstrate the roots of a fairly straight evolution and are readable, especially if you are familiar with the language. But German posed a real challenge: first came Fraktur--what we would call blackletter--for printed materials. To my chagrin, after I learned the alphabet, using a printed chart from the 1950s, I discovered there is now an online tool that can perform optical character recognition on it. But once I move up the tree in smaller villages, it became apparent that church books written in Sütterlin and the older Kurrentschrift (and many others) were simply not in my skill set. Heck, I still had trouble deciphering my father-in-law's letters to us from this millennium (which turned out to be a mix of the Sütterlin he learned as a child overlaid with the postwar deutsche Normalschrift). 

But the same techniques that served to help me decipher medieval French manuscripts were of use here: using known words (often set phrases) in the document to establish baseline characters; looking at each letter separately (covering surrounding letters with your thumbnails or slips of paper is helpful); drawing the pen strokes in the air to understand the motions of the scribe--which letters were they trying to form? People writing by hand often omit things, or the hills and valleys of 'm,' 'n,' and 'w' may not add up--especially in longer documents. People have been getting writer's cramp for centuries, it appears. 

I can now add Sütterlin and Kurrentschrift to my toolbox; as a bonus, I can now read my father-in-law's journals. So even as family researchers sometimes curse the scrawl of census-takers (and celebrate beautiful penmanship), I try to take a moment with these documents, and feel the motion of their pen, which tells you a great deal of their state of mind while writing these things down--not just for their own use, but for us, their future generations. 

No longer a secret code

Rock collection

We tend to think of stone as a material for the ages--buildings and statues from ancient civilizations that we see in museums and around the globe are still with us, sometimes in perfect condition, sometimes showing their age. But weather, wars, and the choice of stone itself have a direct bearing on longevity.

Coming from a family of genealogists means that cemeteries are nothing new to me. There's always at least one big shady tree that someone had the foresight to plant many decades ago, an area with newer graves--some with wooden markers pending the final stone--and the somewhat overgrown areas with the older, worn stones. But as an adult, I learned that this does not hold true everywhere.

When I first visited my father-in-law's home town in southern Germany back in the 1980s, I noticed a sign that pointed to the cemetery. Since it was a sunny day, we strolled over. I understand now why the place looked so well-tended, and am kicking myself for not taking a photograph of DH's grandfather's headstone. For this is a typical Catholic cemetery, where plots are rented for a period (usually 80 years); any remaining bones are exhumed and placed in a common ossuary. Which means that the stone I saw that fine day is no longer there. 

So what happens to the stones? It's not uncommon to see the vestiges of earlier houses in the stones of newer ones in Europe; I imagine that some headstones are repurposed as paving stones (face down), and others may be broken up for stone walls between fields and such. But every family has its historian, and some families keep the stones. And this was the case with cousin Pia.

During one of our visits to Betra last winter, we met up with another cousin, who walked the rows with us, and helped us photograph all the graves with the family name, telling us stories about the ones she knew personally. And then she took us to cousin Pia's house. Pia herself was under the weather, but pointed us to a shed in the back corner of her garden. There, leaned up against the shed were headstones from the 1960s that has been removed from the cemetery when their time expired.

Cousins in Pia's backyard

A chance meeting

It started as a routine business flight; after a long weekend of meetings, I grab an overpriced, TSA-approved snack in the airport and settle into my window seat, ready to enjoy a movie or book on the way home. I'm usually so spent after these weekends that I rarely do more than nod and smile at my seat mate(s), preferring the quietness of my noise-cancelling ear buds to chatting.

But this time was different: the middle seat was still empty, and just before the plane doors were to close, a long-haired man boarded the plane with a paper sack from the co-op where I shop at home. And he plopped down in the middle seat and flashed a friendly smile. As we took off, he reached in his paper bag, and pulled out hummus and chips, and offered some to me. I demurred, but had to ask him how he got the hummus past the TSA. He shrugged, but we struck up a conversation.

Turns out we were both in Chicago for work; I was fortunate to work inside during the bitterly cold January days, while he was supervising building houses. He was headed home to see his son, who was hoping to grow up to be a fireman. Funny thing, I said, so is my older boy, who is at college studying fire science. I tell him about the great fire explorer program close to where his son lives, we chat some more, and the conversation ebbs a bit. 

I pick up my tablet to open a book, and the splash screen is a picture my son sent me of the present I had given him for Christmas--a real fire helmet for his volunteer firefighting job. I had ordered in online to his specs, but had it delivered so had asked for a picture. So I turn to my seat mate, and say, see, here's the helmet I bought my son for Christmas. 

"No way!" he says. Confused, I ask what he means. He starts digging in his pockets and pulls out his passport. His surname is Hellstern, the same as my husband and son--whose name is emblazoned on the fire helmet. An extremely rare name, with its origins in the little town of Betra, where my father-in-law was born. And this is the first time I have met anyone outside of our immediate family who bears this name. 

I tell seatmate all this, and he is intrigued: he knows some of his family history back a generation or two, but we find no immediate connection. As the plane lands, we exchange emails, and I promise to share the Hellstern tree with him, and to find out how they are connected.

(As a funny aside, when I told this story to my husband on my return, his reaction was the same "no way!" that I had heard on the airplane.)

It takes a couple of years of research and exchanges, but the connection is made: he and my husband are eighth cousins; I send all of the family research on his branch to my former seatmate, and we add another name to the standing invitation list. A new cousin, who made a routine flight anything but routine.

A happy immigrant couple, three generations back from my seatmate

Potatoes and pen pals

In 1951 in postwar London, a young woman was working as a bookkeeper and decided to take a holiday in the fresh air. She and a girlfriend from the office chose to go to a student’s camp in Warehorne, Kent in September, 1951. They travelled by train from Victoria and were picked up by a lorry which took them to the camp. They arrived there on a Saturday morning, and were told that there were a group of German students already there. Indeed, these were the first Germans she had ever seen in real life.

On Monday morning, their group were taken to a farm to help a farmer harvest potatoes. On the field were big weighing machines which had a sack fixed to it. They had to fill the sack to one hundred weight, (CWT), and tie the top up and pull it away, and then put another sack on the hooks. They had two metal baskets to fill and it was hard work. Our young woman, Thelma, took Tuesday and Wednesday off because she had twisted her ankle, but was back at work on Thursday. Everyone--English, German, French, and African--got on well together and had a healthy holiday. 

On the Friday evening before the girls left to go home there was a dance and she danced with a blond, blue eyed young man who she had seen now and again to speak to during the week. He spoke very good English. The next morning the girls were packed and ready to leave, but Thelma wanted to take a photo with her Brown Box Camera of the girls they had met. Just as she took the picture, the blond man came and stood behind them--what we would call a photo bomb today. She then asked him whether he would like a copy of the photo and he said yes please and gave her his name (Alfred) and his home address. 

She had the photos printed and sent them to him. He was so pleased to get a photo which he liked of himself. At that time Alfred was 25 and our young woman, Thelma, was 17. It was nearing Christmas, and she sent Alfred a book of John Milton poems. He sent a parcel as well: his mother had baked German Christmas cookies. When she opened the parcel there were only crumbs but they were delicious. They wrote to one another now and again--both were busy, he at university and she was working long hours, making her own clothes and taking some evening classes.  

But they kept writing to each other. Their friendship deepened, and they managed the odd visit: he came to England and they camped out overnight and waited for the Queen's coronation procession. They continued to write, and their letters took a personal turn. Alfred's family invited her to visit their little village. It was her first trip abroad.

She went to Victoria station by bus, then by train to Dover and boarded a boat from there to Ostend. From there, she took the train to Stuttgart, and her Alfred came to pick her up. She was welcomed in Betra by his mother, father and sister and spent two weeks with them. Alfred took her to go see Lake Constance. They had a lovely day and returned back again in the evening. There were no lights on the walk up the hill back to his home and it was raining, but Alfred had an umbrella with him. However, his father did not know they had an umbrella and thought he would come and bring one. Alfred took the chance to steal a first kiss. Just at that moment Alfred’s father shone a flashlight on them! 

The visit went all too quickly and Thelma had to go home again. By now they realized that they wanted to stay together. It took several years of study and work, many letters, and a few visits, but in the summer of 1958, Alfred came to England, this time to marry Thelma and take her home to Germany. 

Yes, she baked the cake and made the dress herself!

Where are you taking us?

We've driven past it a hundred times on our way to pick up our daily bread. In the shadow of the baroque Basilica in Weissenau, it pokes out onto the sidewalk next to tree-lined grounds of the Heilanstalt--literally "healing place"--or sanatorium. 

But the grey bus didn't mean anything to us until we read the plaque nearby:

"The so-called “Euthanasia-Action” (Aktion T 4) of the National Socialists claimed about 200,000 mentally ill victims during World War II. They were considered 'not worthy of living.' At least 90,000 patients died of hunger or inadequate nourishment, or were murdered with drugs in state-run sanatoriums. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were murdered in gas chambers during the secret operation 'T4' in 1940/41. The mass murder was centrally organized at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin - thus the abbreviation 'T4.' Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Bernburg, Hartheim (near Linz), Sonnenstein, and Hadamar were the towns where the murders took place. Some of the staff of these killing institutions later worked in extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. There is hardly a region in Germany that was not affected by this organized mass murder. Mentally and physically handicapped people were the first victims of a systematic, well-organized annihilation plan directed against the ill and those regarded as “racially inferior” by the Nazi regime. The 'Monument of the Grey Busses' serves as a reminder of the transports of the patients to their deaths. Artists Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz designed the monument for the Weißenau Psychiatric Centre near Ravensburg in 2006. A bus based on the same model as the one that drove from the hospitals to the death centres in the years 1940 and 1941, in its original size and concrete form, commemorates the mass murder. 'Where are you taking us?' – The question of one of the patients -- is inscribed on the monument." 

Years before, after taking in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., we had entered the family surname in the database. One name popped: Lorenz Hellstern--in Weißenau. 

Lorenz was born August 26, 1878, in the village of Betra, the tenth and last child of Ambrose and Maria (née Maier) Hellstern. He was baptized at 3 days of age in the Catholic church there. Both his parents died before they turned 50; he had seven living siblings, so presumably the family cared for him. The next record found for him is in 1939, in the German Minority Census: he is a patient in the Heilanstalt Weissenau. The last mention of Lorenz is found is March 2, 1940 in a list of NS euthanasia victims in Grafenek. He was 62.

Language barrier

My mother was the family historian, and when she passed on, I inherited dozens of sepia-toned photographs. And then there were the "contemporary" albums of her family's new house with her 1955 BelAir in the carport, and dusty kids in keds camping in the Redwood forests of California. And the envelopes of odd-sized school pictures, because even back then you had to buy 24 wallet photos in order to get two 5x7s--one for each set of grandparents. 

But of all the boxes of sepia corseted women, mustached gentlemen, and posed children, my favorite is a blurry film snapshot taken by a cousin at our wedding reception. My father, who spoke no German, is deep in discussion (about ankles? Argyle socks?) with my husband's Aunt Elfriede, who spoke no English. He was a Navy guy who grew up riding cable cars in San Francisco; she was a farmer's wife in a village in Swabia. And yet they are clearly connecting. When I asked each of them what they had found to talk about, they deflected. Dad said something about not needing language to understand each other. 

They are both on the other side of the rainbow bridge, and perhaps now, free of any language barrier, she and my father can continue the conversation. 

Thank you card

The story begins in a cheesy faux lodge-pole hotel room in Iowa's Quad Cities. We had just arrived and had flopped on the bed to plan our next few days. We knew we wanted to go to the local cemetery and "meet" some folks with DH's surname. Once connected to our complimentary wifi, I got a notification that someone had left me a message on Ancestry. Indeed, it was a user name that I recognized from my digging into the local dead folks, and she was offering information! DH immediately parsed the user name and did a bit of sleuthing on the book of face, and we surmised they were in the same town where we had just landed. 

I took a chance, and reached out--yes, indeed, they were local. And yes, they knew the graves we were seeking, since they are family. We met at the cemetery the next day, and they led us to the family plot as well as sharing stories about their visit to the family village--the same one DH's father was born in. We chuckled at the physical resemblances of our related husbands, and our grey-haired genealogical geekiness. We ended up spending most of the day together, eating lunch, telling stories, having ice cream, telling stories, etc. We have kept in touch, sharing information, parsing old German handwriting, and sharing our trees. 

So it was only natural that when we ventured to the Midwest last fall, we should visit. They opened up their (new!) home to us, shared their grandkids (yes, we tested first!) and even helped right a fallen stone from my side of the family. Because of course we were visiting a cemetery together.

I have a myriad of excuses for not sending a timely thank you card for their hospitality, so when we headed to Betra this December, I decided I must find a postcard of the town and send it. But none such card was to be found in the village. However, in the unsorted box of photos and ephemera from Tante's house (more on that treasure trove later) was a bunch of stationery, including a postcard of our little village from many years ago. 

It's headed to Iowa now as a thank you.

 

Cold leads

I am as cold as I have ever been before, but even our sons agree, this was an afternoon well spent. 

We set out early to head to the town in Southern Germany where my research indicates all Hellsterns originate. There was a dusting of snow, so we all layered up with longies and everything we had that might protect us from the cold. 

We arranged to meet up with a motley crew of history and genealogy buffs, and the oldest Hellstern in the village, who lives with her son on the edge of the village. 

It is snowing hard on the Autobahn, to the point that we can’t always drive on bare pavement. But Germans are efficient, and plows and salting trucks are out in force, even on a Sunday. There's even a little plow on the sidewalk.

Today's car game is to look for businesses with their surname, and we don’t have to wait long: it’s on the side of a snowplow that makes it possible for us to get into the village. We park in the town square, and meet up with our history buff, and together we walk the kids up to the old, now empty home where their Opa and Tante lived. We know it will soon be sold by the last son (who has no children), so we take lots of pictures and talk about when they got to drive the tractor and climb the cherry tree and stuff their faces with their Tante's warm Hefezopf. 

Cousin Ursula arrives with her husband in tow, and produces a 1970s orange vintage thermos casserole with lovely ham and cheese pastries still warm from her oven. Reinvigorated by the warm snack, we head to the latest cousin we have connected with, who lives with his elderly mother. We hope she can help identify some old pictures.

We arrive, and after explaining that we cannot come in (we are vaccinated, boosted and tested, but we are also traveling), they invite us to the back yard terrace, which overlooks the (currently snowy) rolling fields. Soon, someone brings out a table so we can look at notes and sketch a tree to figure out how we are related. The elder takes a while to figure it out (too many people with the same name!) but we eventually realize we are all related, except for our resident historian, though we decide he is probably a distant cousin—we just need to do more research.

Cousin Ursula ducks back to her car, and emerges with the orange casserole, and a huge cake (Käsecreme with meringue). At which point our new cousin's wife organizes chairs, and scurries around and produces plates, cups, and thermoses of steaming coffee and tea.

Yet another cousin joins us, and helps reduce the amount of cake, the new cousin’s son sticks his head out, and the conversation restarts as we tell him how he is related to everyone. Many jokes about the American "uncle" and tons of pictures.

We were thinking we might visit a nearby castle, but it is clear that is for another (warmer) day. The ham and cheese pockets are gone, there is one fat slice of cake left, and most of us cannot feel our toes. It is time to take one last group photo and say our goodbyes. 

It will take a few hours to warm up completely, and even more hours to research my copious notes, but we have laid a foundation for further collaboration—emails are already flying and scans of sepia images are filling our inboxes.