Sulzburg, part II

Before the National Socialists wiped it out, Sulzburg had a flourishing Jewish community. The first records of Jews in the town date to 1528. In 1546, the Margrave Ernst granted permission for the community to erect a synagogue. The city began expelling Jews in 1577 and it wasn't until 1716 that Jews appeared again in city records.

According to the city website's English .pdf, "In 1864, the Jewish community--with its 416 members--made up a third of the town’s population. In 1933, there were still about 100 Jews living in Sulzburg. They were 'abandoned without protection'--thus the inscription on the memorial stone at the Jewish cemetery of Sulzburg. The persecution they suffered under the Nazi regime led the greater part of them to leave Germany between 1933 and 1940. In October 1940, the remaining 27 Jews were deported to Gurs. According to recent reviews, at least 30 of those who lived here in 1933 perished in the internment camp of Gurs or were murdered in extermination camps."

On Kristallnacht--10 November 1938--Sulzburg's synagogue was desecrated but not completely destroyed. It was later variously used as library storage, a stall, and a factory. Acquired by the city in the 1970s, it was restored in the 1980s as a cultural monument and memorial. A notice near the synagogue states that it is "the only surviving synagogue in the neoclassical style of Friedrich Weinbrenner's architectural school in Baden-Wuerttemberg. Constructed in 1822 to replace a smaller prayer-room, it was the third synagogue built in the Grand Duchy of Baden."

Records of Sulzburg's Jewish cemetery date to the 16th century. The present gate quotes the Sabbath evening prayer: "Spread over us the shelter of Your peace." In addition to the many graves of people who lived long lives and died natural deaths, the cemetery has a memorial to honor "the Jews of Sulzburg and Staufen who were abandoned without protection and suffered death for their beliefs." Erected in 1970 "on the thirtieth anniversary of the destruction of the Jewish community," the memorial lists the names of those who perished in the Holocaust and quotes Daniel 12, verses 9 and 13: "Closed and sealed are the words in the continuum of time. Daniel, go your way until the end, and you shall rest and rise to a better fate." (Read the rest of Daniel 12 for some meaningful context.)

Sulzburg, part I

Emboldened by driving Elias to five days of soccer camp in Opfingen, I decided yesterday to brave a longer roadtrip. I picked out a hike from our little Badische Zeitung pocket guide--a hike with ruins, of course--and my boy and I headed south to Sulzburg, nestled in the next valley past Staufen.

We hiked up, up, up into the wooded hills with our pocket guide, GPS watch, and topo-map in hand. Much of the way, we found an abundance of trail signs guiding us toward the Ruinen Neuenfels--though equally often, we arrived at intersections where not one trail was marked. After three hours, we found a handpainted metal sign at the top of the ridge--"Ruinen Neuenfels, 10 Min. -->" --and shortly thereafter, the ruins loomed before us.

These particular ruins come with a gruesome tale. The Lords of Neuenfels, first documented in written records in 1307, held various titles and official positions in the region until the 1500s. The last Lord, Christoph von Neuenfels, fell into financial ruin and in 1538 sold all of his property except the Burg to the nearby town of Britzingen for 420 gold Gulden. Two years later, Lord Neuenfels, his wife, his daughter, two maids, and three servants were murdered in the middle of the night; their bodies were discovered three days later. Following the murders--never solved--the Burg remained unoccupied and began its collapse not long afterward.

Update 5 June 2024: I've been hiking near enough to Neuenfels to see it listed on trail signs, so I googled it this evening. Turns out the murder story is from a 1540 ballad and invented for melodramatic entertainment. In reality, Christoph moved to Freiburg, got married in 1547, and died in 1550; his widow survived him by 53 (!) years.

In memoriam

In Part II of Frau H.'s Altstadt tour, we learned that even if Freiburg doesn't have a Mendelssohnstr., there are some quiet memorials to the Jewish citizens killed in WWII.

Freiburg's old Synagogue, built in 1870, was burned and blasted down in a pogrom on November 10, 1938. Near its former site--now a plaza occupied by University buildings--stands a sign pointing toward Gurs, the concentraion camp in the French Pyrenees where approximately 350 of Freiburg's Jews, along with other Jews from Baden, Pfalz, and Saarland, were deported on October 22, 1940.

Distributed in various locations in Freiburg are other memorials: as of March, 2008, approximately 300 "Stolpersteine" (tripping stones) had been set into city sidewalks to remember Jewish residents who were deported and killed. This is part of a larger German project to remember the expulsion and execution of Jews, Gypsies, political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and victims of euthanasia during the Nazi regime (1933-1945). The stones in the photograph here, located at the intersection of Augustinergasse and Salzstrasse in the Altstadt, read: "Here lived Berthold Weil/Else Weil (nee Stern), born 1899/1909, deported 1940 Gurs, murdered 1942 Auschwitz."

As German as apple cake

There's an urban legend that says Eskimos have dozens of words for "snow." Those of us in warmer climes are happy to believe that the density, texture, frequency, and fierceness of snow are so relevant to all aspects of daily life in the arctic that the locals must need a vocabulary that distinguishes snow varieties. Thus the legend propagates, even though it's inaccurate.

I have long been puzzled that there aren't more German words to distinguish different kinds of cakes, as the delectable 4 p.m. carb is pivotal to daily life in Germany. However, the many-words-for-snow story dispels the linguistic fallacy that different manifestations of things demand different words.

German has two words that answer the call of cake duty: Kuchen and Torte. Kuchen covers cakes and pies--"cake" involving no more than one layer of any individual kind of dough. Kuchen might be apples or cherries with sour cream custard in a tart crust (flour, butter, sugar, egg, baking powder); or a thin layer of tart crust under a layer of sponge cake, covered with a layer of fresh raspberries and gelatin; or a light cheesecake with apricots and marzipan spritzes on top.

In a conceptual leap that's beyond my American ability to understand, Kuchen also includes a range of both sweet and salty yeast dough concoctions, including Pflaumenkuchen (sugared plums on yeast dough), Zwiebelkuchen (onion sour-cream custard on yeast dough), and the generic Flammkuchen, which is kind of like a Badisch pizza.

Kuchen welcomes pie under its large umbrella because Germans don't do pie, don't recognize pie as an independent genre, and therefore call it cake.

Torte covers the concepts of tortes and tarts. Tortes generally involve multiple layers of one kind of cake, separated with cream or fruit filling--except when a Torte is a tart. A small Torte gets a diminutive rendering, as in Obsttoertchen (fruit tartlet). Because German tarts often include a layer of sponge cake, if an Obsttoertchen is big enough, it can be a Kuchen rather than a Torte.

I am able to report all of this after years of extensive first-hand experience. Fortunately, you don't have to know what something is called as long as you can point to it through a display window.

Knall! Bang! The Black Screen of Death

I'm blogging from Stefan's laptop this evening, as mine has been kissed by the black screen of death. My noble husband has rescued the several hundred photographs I've taken since June, and is now attempting to restore the Windows Vista operating system (a.k.a. "this piece of crap").

I'm still in yesterday's confession mode, so I'll mention that I tossed my copy of Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch aside several hundred pages ago, almost as soon as Elias finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but I'm back on the bandwagon again, I swear. Today I purchased Harry Potter und der Orden des Phoenix at the Thalia bookstore in the Altstadt. The book's first linguistic lesson (which I should have learned from the previous book, but better late than never) is that the German word "Knall" pales next to the English word "bang." "Bang" is delightfully onomatopœic: the explosive B moves with shocking abruptness into the vowel a before the word fades into the velar nasal ng. "Bang" ranks right up there with other one-syllable classics such as "pow," "bam," and "biff." Stefan claims "Knall" is onomatopœic too: "kh'-nnahlllll," he demonstrates, sounding more like a purring cat than a gunshot. "Well, it's explosive for us anyway," he shrugs, speaking on behalf of His People.

This evening we met up with the friendly and knowledgable Frau H. for Part II of her Altstadt tour. Alas, Altstadt anecdotes and other observations must wait until my laptop emerges from the dark side.

Confession

After weeks of resisting, I finally succumbed to temptation and snitched three grapes from the vines on the Tuniberg on my run/walk today. Two purple, one green-yellow. I know it was stealing, and officially, I won't do it again, even if other people are doing it too. (For the record, all three grapes were mighty tasty.)

In organ news...

The Catholic church on the corner, St. Urban, is kindly allowing me practice on their 1936 three-manual electropneumatic organ on Thursday mornings. In theory, I have a generous amount of time twice a week at St. Petrus Canisius, but have only been able to practice there once in the past month, due to various secretarial summer vacation schedules and our trip to Copenhagen. This morning, I attended my third service at the only Lutheran (vs. Evangelisch) church in Freiburg--conveniently located in the neighborhood--and met the regular organist, who had been gone the other two Sundays for Sommerferien. As soon as I told her I was an organist, she said "oh, would you like to play or practice here sometimes? It would be great to have more people using this instrument!," for which I am immensely grateful.

As I am usually at a loss for words trying to describe being a Jewish church organist in the states, I won't even attempt to describe being one in Germany.