Exit 51

“Watch for Exit 51, Baden-Baden,” I say to Lambert. “We’re going to take B500 toward Iffezheim slash Paris.”

“Paris?” says Lambert. “But Paris and Baden-Baden are in opposite directions….”

This is ridiculous. Here we are, barreling down the A5 autobahn at 130 k, and I’m trying to teach a medieval monk how to use a GPS unit–while I’m driving. While I’m the one who’s fucking driving.

“No,” I say. “Exit 51 is near Baden-Baden, all the signs will say Baden-Baden, but the sign we’re looking for says Paris slash Iffezheim. I mean Iffezheim slash Paris.”

“Hmm,” Lambert says skeptically, leaning toward the dashboard to study the unit.

I know what he’s gonna say next. He’s gonna object that we aren’t going to either Iffezheim or Paris, so before he gets a chance I tell him:

“We’ll go right past Iffezheim, and we won’t get anywhere near Paris, but that’s the sign we’re looking for.”

“No need to condescend,” says Lambert. “Exit 51. It’s the quickest way to Strasbourg. I get it.”

“Right,” I say. “Sorry.”

I drive for a while in silence. The noise of the autobahn no longer puts me to sleep–its a different sound now. It almost seems that I can hear the land beneath us moaning.

I glance in the mirror–Bruno is staring out the window, Bertha seems to be looking at her phone, and what’s Conrad doing? Is that a PSP?

No one but me seems to hear the earth complaining, clay and sand, roots and rocks writhing under the concrete bonds. Even Lambert, in the seat beside me, seems in a perfectly good mood–he’s now taking his duties as navigator seriously–he opens a paper map, flapping and snapping, to compare it to the GPS. Maybe this is a good time to get to know him better. As a writer, a thinker.

“Look,” I say, “I’ve been meaning to ask you…”

“Go ahead…” he says, without lifting his nose from the map.

“Well,” I say, “It’s about your work… I’m not sure where to start…”

One thing about having a conversation while you’re driving–you don’t have to look at the other person. And without that eye contact, there seems to be no limit on the length of pauses. You pause when a Mercedes zips past your rented minivan, you pause when you pass a truck, you pause for entire minutes, for kilometers, for farms, for rivers, for ancient villages, for whatever tension builds up in your mind.

Eventually I manage to state my question to Lambert, and it goes something like this:

“Well, I guess I wanna ask what your thoughts are on, well…”

(pause)

“…you know, the role of narrative in history, story-telling, I mean, given the paucity…”

(pause)

“…the paucity of documentary evidence, of course you yourself are one of our greatest sources, for your period, and from what I’ve read, the parts that have been translated, I mean…”

(pause)

“…your annals, from the references I’ve seen, extended quotations, they seem to have a great narrative energy…”

(pause)

“…But…”

(pause)

.”..there’s always a tendency for any narrative, any story, to structure our understanding in terms, well, of stories we’ve heard before, pre-existing models…”

(pause)

“…you know, story templates as it were, casting this person as hero, this other one as villain, one side the good guys, one side the bad guys…”

(pause)

“… I mean, how would you say we should deal with the essential unknowability of the past… that is, of what we really want to know about the past, all the questions of subjectivity, personality, motivation…”

(pause)

“…I guess it comes down to what it was like to live back then…for example, we talk a lot today about identity, you’ve got your Palestinian identity, your gay identity, your Asian identity, which really only matters outside of Asia, your evangelical Christian identity, though its odd that people only really talk about identities on the left, but the same principle ought to apply to groups on the right, don’t you think?…”

(pause)

“…so what sort of identity did an unfree man have, a serf, some guy working out on the fields at the Abbey of Cluny? Or your abbey? Hersfeld? and what about that guy’s wife? Did that serf’s wife have anything that we would recognize as an inner life? I mean, I’ve gotta assume she did, because I’m a liberal 21st century guy and its part of my world view to recognize her as fully human as you or me, but if social structures constrain consciousness and the social structures were really, really constricting…”

(pause)

“…I guess what I really want to know is, how would you respond to one of those contemporary historians, I had professors like this in college, who renounce all attempts at narrative as a sentimental exercise, as if telling a good story is just satisfying the appetite of the crowd….”

(pause)

“…you know, somebody who thinks that the appetite for narrative, the human need for a good story… it’s like an appetite for sugar. And the historian’s job, whatever it is, it sure isn’t to feed people sugar…”

(pause)

“So. What do you think?”

Lambert takes a while to respond. The silence feels comfortable, relaxed, easy. I’m glad I took my time, tried to make myself clear. In the mirror, I see that Bruno is listening, though he’s pretending not to.

Finally Lambert says, “You missed it.”

“What?” I say.

“Exit 51,” he says. “Iffezheim slash Paris. About three kilometers ago You missed it.”

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Next in Main Story:
Matilda Hears a Nasty Rumor
Next in the Blogger’s Tale:
Europa Brücke

Kindersitze

While the rest of us are in the Imax at the Technik Museum, Lambert volunteers to do a little online research–on my laptop, of course, using the Museum’s broadband. His research skills prove to be quite impressive–which makes me a lot less likely to doubt, for example, his account of the murder of Godfrey the Hunchback, which some historians have called sensational and melodramatic. Anyway, Lambert produces convincing evidence that German child safety laws are very strict indeed. Although Bruno says that contemporary laws don’t apply to Conrad–an opinion that wins him an admiring smile from Bertha–I decide that the risk is too great. If Conrad’s going to ride in my minivan, he’s going to use a car seat. An EU approved car seat. No more questions. That’s the way it’s going to be.

Pretty soon I’m driving past the cathedral again, looking for a Neckermanns store that’s supposed to be around here someplace.

Guess who springs for a 129 euro Ferrari kindersitz?

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Next in Main Story:
Bertha Begs Empress Agnes to See Her Excummunicated Son
Next in the Blogger’s Tale:
Bad Ideas on Vespas

Speyer: First Passengers

I ease the Opel Zafira out of the Mannheim City Airport, and onto a few frontage roads–at least that’s what I think “Landstraße” means. My directions tell me that very soon I’ll be on A656 and then on A6, and I know that if it begins with an “A”, it’s an autobahn. And the smaller the number, the bigger the autobahn.

There’s something very odd about this minivan–it has a manual transmission. For an American, a stick shift in a fully equipped minivan seems like a detail from a crazy dream–it doesn’t fit with the cognitive structure of the world as I know it–it’s like a violation of some unarticulated but intuitively obvious Law of Automotive Categories. But hey, I guess that law doesn’t apply in in Europe. Still, I can’t help thinking of all the responsible authority figures of Germany, parents and coaches and bureaucrats and safety engineers, winding out those RPMs from third to fourth, from fourth to fifth, just like I’m doing, right now, as I hit cruising speed on the autobahn.

Speyer’s about 20 km to the south. Before I visit the cathedral, I need to swing past the train station (the efficient suburban station of Speyer Nord-West, bicycle parking: Ja, WC: Nein) where I’ve arranged to meet two medieval German writers, Lambert of Hersfeld and Bruno of Merseburg (also known as Bruno the Saxon).

For most of the last millennium, Bruno and Lambert were trusted sources on Deutches Mittlealter (the Middle Ages in Germany), although their reputations took quite a beating during the 19th century, the heyday of German scientific historiography. As for me, given the choice of hanging out with a good story-teller or an impeccable philologist, I’ll take the story-teller any day, even if I have to make occasional allowances for a partisan point of view.

Although Bruno and Lambert are both, technically, “monks,” they’ve warned me not to expect not to expect any hair shirts or hoods or traditional habits on this journey. In fact, when I hold up my “Bruno” sign, after the regional trolley drops off a dozen passengers, I’m approached by a typical German hiker-type: jeans, t-shirt, Adidas, and an immense, high quality, internal frame backpack. Bruno’s about thirty, with a scruffy beard, and looks like he’s been hosteling his way around Europe for a decade.

Lambert arrives about a half-hour later, the lone passenger to disembark from the inter-city train. He’s an older man, with a more formal style–umbrella, overcoat, a single leather suitcase. After I introduce them to each other–surprisingly, they’ve never met before, although they each claim, a little too warmly, to be great fans of the other’s work–I load their luggage into the back of the Zafira, and we drive through city streets toward the spires of Dom zu Speyer.

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Next in Main Story:
Henry Fires Gregory
Next in the Blogger’s Tale:
Speyer: Domgarten

The Rental Car

First thing I’ll do, I’ll pick up the rental car at the Mannheim City Airport.

I’ve got an Opel Zafira waiting for me, a minivan. I’ve never seen one in the U.S.–I don’t think they sell them here–but I’ve checked it out on YouTube. Pretty nice.

I won’t visit Mannheim at all, because I’ll be heading straight to the nearby medieval town of Speyer. Actually Speyer is older than medieval , it goes way back–it’s an old border town between the Romans and the barbarians. The main attraction now, just as it was in December 1076, is the Romanesque cathedral, Dom zu Speyer. The cathedral is old now, almost a thousand years old, but back then it was less than 50, still unfinished, a baby as cathedrals go, a sprawling, soaring raw new symbol of the holiness, the Romanness, and the imperium of the Holy Roman Emperor.

There, in the town of Speyer, my passengers will be waiting for me.

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Next in Main Story:
In Nomine Domine
Next in the Blogger’s Tale:
Speyer: First Passengers