Yesterday and Today

Yesterday and Today May 27, 2015

 

Yesterday was largely a family history day.

 

My wife’s great great grandfather was born and raised in the principality of Schaumburg-Lippe, to the west of the city of Hannover, so we went to visit the former residence of the prince (who still bears that title, even within the Federal Republic of Germany, but who has moved his capital to Bückeberg — which we had to figure out yesterday, too late visit it).

 

Burg Schaumburg
Schaumburg Fortress sits on a hill overlooking the Weser River Valley, which also runs through Hameln.
(Click to enlarge.)

 

To get there, we drove through a lot of forest and farmland, as well as the small city of Hameln, which (rather curiously, unless you understand the allusion) bills itself, on its “Willkommen” signs along the road, as “Die Rattenfängerstadt” — the “Rat Catcher City.”  In other words, this is the town made famous in the story of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”  Hameln is clearly visible from the Schaumburg Fortress.

 

Schloss Rodenberg um 1591
A 1591 drawing of Rodenberg Castle by Johannes Krabbe
(Click to enlarge.)

 

Then we went over the hill to Rodenberg, also in Schaumburg, where my wife’s great great grandfather married her great great grandmother and, alas, died in his forties of “stone mason’s consumption,” presumably caused by breathing too much rock dust.

 

His orphaned son, my wife’s great grandfather, worked as a farm laborer and then apprenticed as a tailor, living for a time in Berlin and then coming back west to Hannover.  We had an actual address there, on Pfahlstrasse, but, unfortunately, though some older structures still exist on the street, his building — where my wife’s grandfather, whom I knew, spent his first seven and a half years — has disappeared.  The area is now, and probably was then, a high density residential neighborhood, with shops on the ground floors of the buildings.  We noticed a shoe repair place right across the street from where he would have been, and an alteration-tailor’s shop just across and down on the corner.

 

He had married a young woman from Prussia, and she encountered missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints there in Hannover.  For five years, he wouldn’t permit her to be baptized, but he relented late in 1901 and was himself baptized in 1903.  They emigrated to America in 1906, she and the children coming six months after him aboard the still relatively new S.S. Arabic, the sinking of which by a German U-boat in 1915 would cause a significant diplomatic rift between Germany and the United States, which hadn’t yet entered World War I.

 

We weren’t nearly as well prepared with family information as we would like to have been, but visiting these areas really helped clarify some questions and indicate some areas where work is needed.

 

Die Domkirche Berlins
Der Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral)
(Click to enlarge. Click again to enlarge further.)

 

The first part of today, by contrast, was devoted largely to visiting the interesting Berlin Cathedral, which was built under Kaiser Wilhelm II and completed in 1905.  It’s aggressively both Protestant and “imperial” (kaiserlich) and was plainly intended to send both religious and political messages.  One of the highlights for me was unexpectedly getting to near my single favorite piece of organ music, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D-minor, played on the Cathedral’s 7000-pipe instrument.” while we were in the Predigtkirche or “preaching church.”

 

It was sobering, too, to visit the crypt, seeing the tombs of such luminaries as Frederick William — popularly known as “the Great Elector” — and seeing, also, how many small children, even among the royals, died.

 

Ishtar Gate
The outer (and smaller!) Ishtar Gate from Nebuchadnezzar’s early sixth-century B.C. Babylon
(Click to enlarge. Click again to enlarge further.)
Photo by Radomir Vrbovsky

 

Then we walked over to the Museumsinsel, the Museum Island, and spent until closing time in the marvelous Pergamon Museum.  The Ishtar Gate was magnificent enough, but there were also other materials from Babylon, the walls from Mshatta, the fantastic Aleppo Room, and much more besides.  The Pergamon has a superb Islamic collection.

 

Well, I’m running out of steam, so I’ll close.

 

A good day.  I even ended it with Berlin-style Currywurst.  On the legendary street Unter den Linden, no less.

 

Posted from Berlin, Germany

 

 


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