We’ve moved!

I managed to migrate the entire contents of this blog over to my new website, Licus Translation. My new posts (coming at a somewhat glacial speed lately, I admit) will be published there. Granted, it’s not as sunny and cheerful over there as it is here. Take a look around the new site, tell me what doesn’t work or where the typos are. 🙂

Another new piece of (old) news is that I have been working as a remote, in-house employee for a translation agency that specializes in equestrian sport and all things horse-related. In this position, I’ll be doing a bit of marketing work on social media sites like LinkedIn. “Just so ya know!”

This blog is moving!

Hopefully soon – as soon as I figure out what I am doing. I’ve created a new WordPress blog/website with the name Licus Translations (not yet public as of this writing). After I’ve got everything successfully migrated to the new site on its own dedicated blog page (cross your fingers), I’ll put up a final post here with directions to my new place. I’ll let you know when it’s ready!

In Via: Milestone, Via Claudia Augusta

It’s not an original, of course, but a replica, with historical information written in German. This milestone is placed next to the route of the Via Claudia Augusta, here an unassuming gravel road, where it crosses Bahnhofstrasse near Leeder, west of the Lech (The Bahn in question is the old rail line between Landsberg and Schongau, which is only used for special tourist trains a few times in the summer.)

Via Claudia Augusta
The Roman state road was built in 46/47 A.D. by Emperor Claudius and ran from Northern Italy through the provincial capital of Augsburg and [to] the Danube
To Augsburg: 34 miles

 

In Via: The Keltenschanze near Utting

Having read Zeitspringer’s recent post (in German) about the earthworks in Holzhausen near Fürstenfeldbruck, I felt inspired to tell him (and you) about a patch of farm country that has become one of our regular walking routes. It’s got beautiful scenery, crosses through fields and woods, often has lots of horses (from the stables at Achselschwang) and – to my enduring delight – features two  ancient landmarks: a section of the Roman road to Augsburg and a pre-Roman earthwork, known as a Keltenschanze or Viereckschanze (the red line and the red square in the image shown below, in a screenshot from the always interesting Bayerische Denkmal-Atlas).

I won’t suggest a specific circuit because the route we usually take starts at the parking area off of Landsberger Strasse, and may not be the best for visitors coming on foot or by bicycle. Those unfamiliar with the area using a combination of public transportation and their own two wheels might consider alighting at Geltendorf and riding through St. Ottilien, continuing south to Utting. One can also catch the Ammerseebahn at Geltendorf and take that train directly to Utting (but be aware that it’s a long uphill climb to the main road. Alighting in Schondorf and taking the cycle path along the main road will be easier on the legs, and probably no longer.) If you really want an adventure you could take the S8 regional rail line from Munich to Herrsching, cross the lake by padde steamer to Holzhausen or Utting, and then pedal from there.

There is a sign with information about the Roman road posted just south of Achselschwang, and one in front of the Keltenschanze.

Afterwards, pedal down to the water’s edge in Utting, where you’ll find a nice restaurant (visitors) near the boot landing as well as a lakeside beer garden (locals). From there it’s only about 100 meters uphill to the Utting rail station (or a boat ride back to Herrsching).

The PDF found here (in German) contains a good introductory description of the Roman road as it passes west of Utting.

Older posts on the Via Raetia and the Keltenschanze:

In Via: Raisting

Two Roads in Utting

The Antiquarian Life: Frau K

It is time to write about Frau König. (Kindly note that all names and places have been changed)

Several years ago my husband, a bookseller, got a telephone call from an elderly woman who lived in a nearby town. She was looking for someone to buy her small private library of books, and he had been recommended to her. This, in itself, is fairly normal in his line of work. In fact, the people who call him with such requests are 90% elderly women from the area. They are moving — often their husbands recently passed away, and they are downsizing to an apartment in the city or a senior residence, and it’s finally time to get rid of all those old books, but of course no one can bear the thought of throwing them out. This is where my husband comes in — in a profession that calls for him to be part antiques dealer, part funeral home director, he has an assuring and knowledgeable manner from which they infer that their old books will be respected and will “go to a good home”. Most everybody understands that it’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, because no one wants to hear explicitly that their beloved, worn-out 1980s bestseller paperback with the parts underlined in red pen is going straight into the Altpapier container.

But back to our story. Frau König was planning to sell her apartment and move into a posh senior home on the other side of the lake. On the phone, she emphasized to my husband that she had some rather valuable books, and invited him to come to her house so that he could make an appraisal. When he got there, she sat him down in a chair and presented him with… three somewhat underwhelming and altogether worthless old books from the 1950s. He didn’t lie to her, but neither did he jump up and leave, and maybe she was just testing his reaction. She hinted at more treasures in her office downstairs. Frau König didn’t have a date set for the move, nor a seller for the apartment, but she must have felt that she had someone lined up to take her books. And so began a somewhat weird business relationship, where she would make lists of the books she was ready to part with, and my husband would drive over and pick them up, sometimes in little paper gift bags she’d had lying around. Virtually none of them had any worth to speak of, but somehow we felt that it wouldn’t be right to wave her off now. At some point, after a couple of years of this, I began to tag along, and she would make us mediocre coffee and chat about politics.

Unlike the other widows who were unloading their deceased husbands’ collections, Frau König had never married. She’d had what sounded like a pretty interesting career working for German embassies, though, which had her traveling to places like Russia and Ethiopia. She’d had connections with Africa and some mildly interesting art on the walls, and a lovely old grandfather clock (probably inherited). Her taste in books ran to travel literature and romance novels. She seemed lonely, although we couldn’t say for sure, as we weren’t that close. Our visits to Frau König were often preceded by a good measure of reluctance and eye-rolling, but often we’d both agree, in the car afterward, that we felt happy to have done a good deed, and that maybe we’d done ourselves a good deed in turn as well. It’s hard to explain.

When she finally had a moving date and the sale of her apartment taken care of, Frau König summoned us over to settle accounts regarding the price of the books. My husband had struggled for several months with a bad feeling about this, because he didn’t think she was going to be happy with his price, especially after that first “presentation” of her treasures. It turned out surprisingly well. She was taking a heavy old bookcase with her to the senior home, and the books that she wanted to keep with her were placed “just so” inside it. But she didn’t have anyone who could note their current order and put them back that way after the move. “That’s no problem” said my husband, while I whipped out my smartphone to photograph each shelf. In the end, she offered to settle our accounts that way – instead of payment of the books we had taken off her hands, we’d come to her new place and put her bookcases back in order. Thinking back on this, I am fairly sure she could have done this by herself. But we were happy to oblige (and relieved not to have to break the news to her about the low market value of her library).

I left for a visit to America just after that, and thought it would be nice to send a postcard congratulating Frau König on her new home. I include this just to show that we had started to become a bit fond of her, like an elderly neighbor who doesn’t get out that much any more. Plus she had moved to our side of the lake, so visiting was an actual option now and then.

My husband had arranged to see Frau König a few days after the big move (which happened while I was away). He found her in the lobby, asleep in an upholstered chair, so he quietly took a seat and waited for her to wake up. When she did, she didn’t recognize him. “And who are you?” she asked. But then her senses returned and she suggested a coffee in the residence’s cafe. She was distraught at the chaos in her apartment, she said; “everything is a mess!” He offered to help, but when they went to her apartment he was surprised to see everything in perfect order. She had even had her pictures hung on the walls. After chatting a little while longer, they agreed that we could come back when I returned from America, so that we would get her bookcase in order and maybe invite her out for a coffee. A week later my husband was at her old apartment, picking up a small sofa bed she had offered us. For some reason we had agreed, thinking it could serve as a day bed in the office. Honestly, I don’t know what we were thinking. Anyway, when he got there the new owners were already fully underway with renovation, and just wanted that pile of her stuff gone.

Three weeks later, after my return, there was no answer when he called her new telephone number. But we were busy, and just thought we’d try again later. You already know where this is heading.

The news arrived through an email from her nephew, Herr König, from up north in Bremen. Frau König had passed away in her sleep at the senior residence, just three days after my husband’s visit. She’d been in her new home for a mere nine days.

Our initial shock and genuine sadness were cut short by our encounter with the nephew, who had contacted us because he thought we might like to take those remaining books and the bookcase as well, as the apartment had to be cleared out in two weeks. Herr König, the executor to her estate, turned out to be a decent model for a Sackville-Baggins. We met him in his aunt’s nearly empty apartment, where he immediately starting complaining about the trouble and the timing of both her move and her demise, and then he complained pointedly about his aunt, despite our having just having shared warm and friendly stories of having gotten to know her. He suggested we could pick out what books we like, because “the recycling container is right at the end of the hall” and the rest could be carted there. My husband set aside a small pile of books, which seemed to irritate the nephew. In short, he expected money, and the fewer books we were taking, the less money he could expect. He also requested an offer for the bookcase, and when I gave him one (quite low, as we had not understood his intentions earlier, and had thought we were doing him a favor by helping to empty the apartment), he suppressed a laugh and replied that he’d just as soon have it taken to the dump. “Then you should do that”, my husband tersely interjected, and then he took the high road (and I love him for doing this) and explained to Herr König the value the various items he had set aside (“this may be something, in any event, don’t throw it out”) after which we wished him luck and departed – empty handed but utterly relieved. Back outside, we looked at each other and exhaled. “No wonder she seldom mentioned her relatives.”

Rest in peace, Frau K. I am sorry you couldn’t enjoy more of your new life, but I’m glad we had a small part in it.

 

May 5th, 1988

The postcard arrived in his mailbox on the 4th.

This was it. It was now happening. The last few years might have been like a dream, but the months leading up to this moment had been like the day of a storm, when the clouds are gathering and the air pressure has dropped, and you know something’s brewing, and you welcome it but at the same time it makes you nervous. There had been massive preparation involved leading up to this moment. And here it was, the postcard.

He knew in the back of his mind that, under what one in the West might call “normal circumstances”, it wouldn’t have been a sure thing that he and she would stay together. It wasn’t a sure thing as it was, but they were in love, and there was so much riding on the decision now that there really wasn’t room for second thoughts. The decision had been made and they were sticking to it. They’d met a couple of years before, back when she had come to his hometown to visit a mutual friend, and sparks had flown from the start. He not being allowed to leave the country, they met regularly in Prague. They spoke for hours on the phone, knowing full well that the Stasi was listening. Eventually they decided that the only way they could be together would be to marry, so they got all their paperwork in order, including the application for permission to emigrate for personal reasons. This last point had required some careful thought – he would have done anything to leave the GDR and emigrate to the West, but this could jeopardize a relative’s chances to be accepted to university or be promoted at work. The state tended to hold things like that against your family if you demonstrated your desire to leave*. They determined that there was no immediate danger to anyone’s career. They arranged a modest wedding and reception. He did most of the planning, as it had to take place there in East Germany. Her parents came over, as did several of her friends. His friends were there. His parents refused to come. Afterwards she drove her car back over the border, packed with more of his things. And then the waiting began.

When the postcard came, informing someone that he or she was now permitted to leave the country forever,  you then had to quickly collect the relevant papers at the relevant government authorities in order to receive an official exit visa which was only good for 24 hours.  He’d already sorted his belongings in anticipation of its arrival, assigning everything he couldn’t take with him – record collection, furniture, housewares. When his postcard arrived, he called round and let his friends know, and they convened that evening for one last night of drinking, smoking, and reminiscing together.
It felt permanent, and sad. He wanted nothing more than to get out and experience life in a free country, but it was painful to look at his friends and wonder if he would ever see them again. He was leaving 27 years of his life behind, locked away forever behind an iron curtain.

A few of his closest friends stayed through the night, and crashed at his place in sleeping bags. The next morning, bags packed, he was accompanied to the train station, where they all said their last goodbyes. There were tears. He promised he would write. What a feeling it was, the finality of it, as the train pulled away from the station. He was leaving his country and the only home he’d ever known, and even though he’d hated it and couldn’t wait to get out, it still came with a measure of unease. What would happen to him now? Would he even make it out? The border police were not above playing games with those bearing exit visas, if they were feeling ornery.

There were three older women in the train compartment with him. Two looked past retirement age – retirees had more freedom to travel in the West, since the GDR half-hoped they’d leave permanently and would have to stop drawing on their pensions. The third probably had a temporary travel permit. No one spoke. This train served as a normal regional train with stops along the way, people getting on and off until the last town before the border.

Gutenfürst, the fortified GDR border station. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

There, at the border station, the train was stopped and the customs officials summoned him to alight and join them for questioning in their administrative building. They made him unpack all his baggage and identify everything while the train sat in the station. They searched all his things, examined his customs forms, asked him questions. After an hour, they were satisfied and allowed him to board again, and then the police came through to see everyone’s travel papers. The train moved again. He stood in the aisle outside his compartment, smoking cigarette after cigarette and watching the land roll by. They passed through the death strip, something he had naturally never seen before with his own eyes, and recognized it as the furthermost boundary of his entire world until that moment.  Beyond that point, the other passengers suddenly became cheerful and more talkative. A member of the Bavarian border police appeared – Grüss Gott, where are you traveling to? Ah, Munich? You’re moving to be with your wife? Very nice. He had never heard someone in uniform speak to him in such a friendly manner. The atmosphere inside the compartment turned palpably lighter. He was in the West. He was out.

She was waiting for him on the platform when the train pulled into Munich. It happened to be her thirtieth birthday, and so she’d made reservations at a nice restaurant in town. He still remembers everything about that day. It was a beautiful spring evening, the sun was shining, and he was riding through his wonderful new city in the passenger seat of his new wife’s Citroen. He was indescribably happy, with a feeling that his future – their future – fanned out before him, seemingly without limit. Hinterm Horizont geht’s weiter. They would travel. They would start a family. There was no way to know that within two years they would split up, that the Wall would come down, that his old country would cease to exist, that he’d start a new career  – after it was clear that his East German diploma, from the best of universities, was somehow suspect – and that neither the career change nor the divorce would be his last.

 

 

*From Wikipedia’s entry on crossing the inner German border: “The process of applying for an exit permit was deliberately intended to be slow, demeaning and frustrating, with a low chance of success. Applicants were pushed to the margins of society. They were demoted or sacked from their jobs, excluded from universities and subjected to ostracism. If the applicants were parents, they could face the threat of having their children taken into state custody on the grounds that they were unfit to bring up children. The heavily politicised East German law code was used to punish those who continued to apply for emigration despite repeated rejections. Those who repeatedly submitted emigration applications faced charges of “impeding … the state and social activity”. If they sought assistance from contacts in the West, such as relatives or West German state bodies, they were guilty of “illegal contact” or “traitorous information transfer or activities as an agent.” Criticising the political system was a crime of “public disparagement”. Over 10,000 applicants were arrested by the Stasi between the 1970s and 1989 on such charges.“

Rilke’s Ammersee flirtation

The “Künstlerhaus Gasteiger” in Holzhausen, near Utting. This is not the villa Rilke wanted to rent (that house may have burned down in the 1960s). Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Between 1914 and 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke was involved romantically with the (married) painter Lou Albert-Lasard. In 1915 he found himself somewhat stranded in Munich, waiting to learn whether he would be drafted into the Austrian Army. While there he was consoled by another married Lou, his former lover and life-long good friend Lou Andreas-Salomé (who had a number of other admirers during her lifetime, including Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud). Andreas-Salomé helped him look for a country home to rent on the western shore of the Ammersee. The lake’s western shore and more specifically Holzhausen have long been popular with artists.

Andreas-Salomé: “Yesterday after a bit of an odyssey I rode with Rainer to Holzhausen on the Ammersee so that he could see a small villa owned by Professor Erler. A beautiful, tranquil lakeside park, a charmingly furnished little house seemed to us the clear choice. He’s only uncertain because he would have to commit for the summer months. I think the solitude in nature will do him immense good.”

Image from the Ammersee Kurier

Rilke: “…it is likely that next week I will move into a very small house on the Ammersee, with a housekeeper (whom I am still looking for) and my books. So that I won’t have to speak nor hear and, in a way, be faceless. … the city has become quite unbearable to me”.

“The little house has been taken away from me (when I had just decided this morning), since the Erlers now want to rent out their other, larger villa, not the small one down on the lake!”

“The Erlers”, one assumes, were the brothers Fritz and Erich Erler, both artists, or one of them with spouse. I can’t say which one might have been the professor to whom Andreas-Salomé refers.

Image from Municipality of Utting website

Quotes from “Mich gelüstet’s nach Idylle” by Karen Eva Noetzel (in German).

St. Ulrich’s Chapel & Healing Spring

Just outside the village of Eresing, near the Ammersee, there is a small chapel and a fountain house where people would come wash themselves devoutly, especially the eyes. This spring is said to have healing powers, is dedicated to St. Ulrich of Augsburg, the patron saint of the diocese, who once allegedly rested here and caused the spring to flow forth. This is supposed to have occurred immediately after Ulrich’s returning from the Battle of Lechfeld (TL;DR version: FC Holy Roman Empire versus visiting Hungary, the Germans won.) Interestingly, the road near the fountain house and the chapel is also the old Roman road known today as the Via Raetia – so it’s possible that the spring was already known during Bavaria’s Roman period, and that travellers drew water from it. I have heard it suggested – although without evidence proffered – that it may have been a holy spring for the Romans as well. The gentleman in the video posted below (warning: it’s in “Boarisch“) claims that this spring’s water is soft, in contrast to the hard water found everywhere else in the area (and I can attest to that, out tap water is quite hard), and so locals fill up jugs of the stuff to brew their coffee with it.

The figure of St. Ulrich in the fountain house dates from the 15th century. In the 17th century the Court Margrave of Eresingen, Franz von Füll, subsidized the construction of the fountain house, the red marble basin, and the Ulrich chapel with hermitage.

A story of changing times

Once upon a time, there was a miller who lived in a small town. This miller was quite successful, and had expanded his business into a large commercial bakery. There had always been a mill by the river — in fact, the town’s chronicle listed there having been one first mentioned in written records in 1398. Imagine that; before Christopher Columbus had even been born, there had been a mill operating on this river, which flows from the mountains and into the Elbe, and then to the North Sea.

The miller wasn’t really a miller by this point; he was factory owner, a capitalist. He had a spacious, somewhat opulent mansion built on his property, situated on what was actually an island, as the water from the river courses around both sides of it. When he grew old and died, his son carried on with the business. This son was the adventurous type of businessman – he went bankrupt several times, but always dusted himself off and got back to some new scheme. When he grew old, his son took over the business. The new owner married a local girl, a saddle maker’s daughter, and had a daughter of his own.

He was called up to war, but lived through it and returned home. By that time parts of the bread factory had been destroyed by bombs, and the country had undergone considerable change. In fact, it wasn’t even the same country as it had been before the war – this was now the “Russian zone”, and shortly afterwards a new country was established, and the government insisted that no single family needed a mansion all to themselves. So the owner moved his family into a few rooms in the house, and other people began to take over other parts of it for themselves.
His daughter grew up and married a veterinarian in the hill country, 3 hours away. They had two sons, who enjoyed visiting their grandparents and playing with the neighbor children in the mansion’s expansive orchards and courtyards, where they would set up a tent under a chestnut tree. You would think that the children would have enjoyed playing by the river, but the river was polluted, and had an unpleasant smell. No one wanted to swim in it, although the boys’ mother recalled doing so as a child, which astonished them, as they couldn’t imagine that it had ever been clean, not knowing it any other way.
The owner’s wife fell ill and died, and the old widower married a somewhat younger spinster, the daughter of acquaintances who was happy to have a husband, even a frail one. When he died, she stayed on in the apartment but eventually began hoarding as the house began to fall into disrepair.

One year the grandsons, now young men, were sent to clean out some of the junk in the old villa. They found piles of C.A.R.E. packages in the house, Christmas shipments from relatives in the West. Their contents – soap, coffee, chocolate – had been unwrapped, dutifully admired, and put back in the boxes for safekeeping, until they were decades past their use dates. The two brothers laughed and shook their heads at this unintended waste, and tried to throw them out, but the old widow kept running out to the trash container and bringing things back inside.
Well, time passed. The Wall which divided the country in two fell a few years later, and the old widow passed away. No one in the family had any reason to visit that town anymore, as those relatives were all gone. The family tried to sell the decaying property, hoping that a speculator from the West might pay good money for prime riverfront land, but no one was interested and eventually it was bought by a developer, who tore down the old factory to make room for low-cost apartments, but saved the chimney and the old villa. Maybe he ran out of money before he could get around to the villa.

One of the grandsons, now in middle age, was passing through the area with his wife, and decided to swing by and see the old homestead, that expanse of small town property which, his grandmother used to tell him and his brother, would be theirs someday. It filled him with memories and emotions: happy memories of childhood summers spent there, sadness in seeing the old place in such a state of ruin. There is a new developer who, two years ago, said he wanted to build apartments there and save the old original facade. Maybe he will, someday.

Seeking Fortunatus

After posting my most recent entry I began to look more seriously for the “Vita S. Martini” by Venantius Fortunatus in translation. It hasn’t brought much to light. I cannot read medieval Latin, but there is an Italian translation available in book form, which might be my only option. There is also a German version available but which costs an arm and a leg (and really, I don’t want to spend that much on a hobby). There are plenty of English-language academic papers about aspects of the text, but I don’t believe that an English translation exists. If any buffs of early medieval literature can prove me wrong, please have at it, as I would love to know!