Frankfort

After spending just a few days at home, I was off to Germany, where I flew into Munich, and then took a train the next morning to visit friends in Frankfort. And what better way to visit Germany, and in this case, on a day trip outside Frankfort, Bavaria. And if one goes to Bavaria, then one must, of course, stop and have a beer or two. The picture above shows my friends Nadja, Thomas, and Kirsten, trying some of the beer we stopped to buy in Aschaffenburg on our way to Lohr. You may remember Thomas and Kirsten from their visit to Sicily almost a year ago. The beer store was incredible, with a wonderful local beer named Faust (fist), which has as a slogan: World wide, tell no one; Regionally, drink quietly; At home, drink the best. I think that may be a way to keep the beer high quality for the small local breweries that are all over the region. The other favorite beer, in terms of name, was Hey Land beer, which is a play on Heiland, which means savior, and their slogan is: 'Give us this day our daily beer.' The one person who could not make this trip with us was Nadja's husband, Ralph. Poor Ralph had to teach on the day of this trip. He teaches at a local college that is designed to help workers further their education.

When we got to Lohr, we stopped at the Spessart Museum, which had wonderful exhibits regarding the preindustrial and industrial history of the area. Lohr had been the largest manufactury of bell clappers, and they were basically hand made by the artisans in the town. They also had major wood working projects, and the museum carefully traces the evolution of the work from artisanal production, when each craftsperson was responsible for a piece from start to finish, to the first manufacturies, where the products were made by teams, with specific job skills, but still mostly hand made, to the full industrial production model, where there was not the individual ownership of production that one sees in the earlier models.

The logo of the museum was a medieval woodsman, and most likely a poacher. Nadja had done a lot of research on the lives and culture of the woodsmen in the area, and was full of interesting information. They were in many ways the downtrodden, who could not longer stay in the feudal system, and so went to live in the woods. It was an interesting, yet very hard life for them. One thing that she mentioned that I found interesting (and many things she mentioned were indeed interesting) was the fact that it was the first sort of German society in which Jews were treated freely as equals.

The museum included examples of the local pottery, glass making, ship building, metal working, and wooden tool making. It was a wonderful museum, and talked a lot about the work of the individual workers, rather than about the later industrial model. Bell clappers were made in Lohr as recently as the 1980's.

There was a high wind warning all over Germany during this day trip, and the radio and television announcers were telling everyone 'Don't go into the woods today.' It seemed a funny announcement, until I later spent a Saturday on a Volksmarch through a wooded area. It seems a popular thing to do in Germany on the weekend. At any rate, we did go into the woods, and found a tiny hamlet where deer are raised, and there was a small, beautiful church, locked up so we could not go inside. It looked like it could have been almost a hermitage, and the town, with a population well under 100, I think, if you do not count the deer, nestled in old growth forest, reminded me of some of the small towns in the Adirondack mountains of New York.

We later drove through the woods some more, seeing many downed branches, as well as places the woodsmen had been harvesting trees, and ended up and a wonderful small guest house restaurant for dinner.

One night in Frankfort, the five of us got together at a wonderful apfelweinwirtschaft which is a restaurant where the specialty is their own apfelwien, which is apple wine. They have a huge pitcher of apple wine at the bar, and use it to fill liter pitchers of apple wine to bring to the tables. The food was wonderful, the apple wine was great (far better than apple cider, or hard apple cider, in my opinion) and the waiter, who had been mentioned in the guide books as particularly friendly, was very grumpy. When asked for something, he would look at you and say: 'Wait your turn. I have work to do.'

Nadja and Kirsten work putting out a paper representing some of the thinking of the political left in Germany, and it was in the offices of the paper that I got this shot of them holding up likenesses of Chairman Mao and Mr. Bin Laden. Oh my.

It was a wonderful visit. I am so lucky that it was Nadja that I asked to translate an announcement at the Stuttgart train station a year ago when I was on my way to visit friends in Mannheim, and that we were able to sit together on the train and talk about Marxism in the US, and other political things, and that she then sent Kirsten and Thomas to stay with me for a few nights, and now I have met Ralph. What a great group of people. What a fun visit. They help me count my lucky stars.