The rest of our boatmates flew out to Chicago and beyond this morning, but Mom and I stayed one more day. We've got a very important mission that she's been looking forward to for a long time -- visiting her ancestral homeland.
And by "ancestral homeland" I mean her mom's house.
After my grandmother left Germany in the mid-1950s, she never returned to the country where she was born and raised, and most of her children haven't either. She spent nearly 50 years living in the United States and raising her family, and it was just as much her home as Bavaria. But for us, it has always been a place of mystery. What was it like there? Where did she live? What did her family do? Thanks to a very friendly archivist named Thomas, we were about to have answers.
We boarded the train in Munich, and about two hours later, we arrived in Straubing, a tiny town with a population of about 45,000 people that sits on the narrow upper Danube in Bavaria. We had a good walk through the city and a pleasant lunch stop before visiting the Gäubodenmuseum, a museum of the history of the region's unique cultural identity. Over the centuries, the shifting of the Danube river has unearthed thousands of priceless and fascinating artifacts. Having visited the museum four years earlier, I was extremely impressed by the renovations and updates that had been made, including a massive expansion of the museum's collection and a much more modern and informative layout of the exhibits.
We had an appointment with the city archivist, with whom I'd been communicating via email in my shoddy German. He had promised me my grandmother's citizenship record, a record of every address she resided at and every job she held while living in Straubing. What we weren't expecting were the citizenship records for her mother, her grandparents, and my German-born aunt. Everything we could have wanted to know, laid out before us on a table in the public library. We could touch anything we wanted, write any notes we wanted, and stay as long as we wanted. It was like a door was opening into our family history. The only thing we didn't have was my grandmother's birth certificate, but a quick trip to the citizenship office and brief explanation of our interest got us the promise of an official copy of her birth certificate, in English and German, to be delivered by email in a few weeks.
German records prior to digitization were kept in a special High German calligraphy that is very difficult to read if you're not trained. Thomas didn't speak much English, but we had just enough German to get the general idea of what was going on. He translated the calligraphy for us and did his best to explain what the German words meant if we didn't know. When we balked at the particularly long and illegible word scrawled in the space for my great-grandmother's occupation during her teenage years, he kindly explained, "She is working in a bar. Yes, a bar is what it is called? Ok. She is not making the drinks and she is not making the food. She is only carrying the food. The food, is someone else making it, and she is taking it to the people, yes?"
Waiting tables as a teen is a tradition that spans nations and generations.
The citizenship records listed every address my grandmother had lived at in Straubing. Four years ago, I'd visited a house near the city center along the Danube where I knew my grandmother had lived, but we soon learned it was my great-great-grandmother's house, where my great-grandmother and infant grandmother had resided for a while. We found the address where my grandmother lived for most of her teenage and adult years, which is now, hilariously, a kung fu academy.
She would have gotten a kick out of that.
We spent the whole day mostly wandering the city, taking in the sites, imagining what it looked like in the 1940s. Did my grandmother sit in this coffee shop, visit this farmer's market, or relax on this bench? Did she walk down here by the river and go swimming with her sister? For most people, Straubing isn't much of a tourist destination, but for us it was a pilgrimage.
I can't even tell you how many miles I walked today (mostly because I have location services on my phone turned off to avoid international roaming charges). I'm sure it was at least ten. We just wanted to soak everything in, to find a way to internalize all of this information, because it feels like it's a part of us. Tonight we're going to be late in the hotel in Straubing, and tomorrow it's back on a train, a plane, and my sister's truck to get back home to America.