Kloschwitz, Beesenstadt, Hochharz National Park near Hasselfelde, June 15

By Eric

In the morning, after I made pancakes for breakfast, we said good bye to Willy and promised to send a card from America. He was really into getting a card.

We rode about 5 km south up the Saale river valley before turning west and climbing an incredibly steep 18% grade hill. The weather was clear. The road was surrounded by wheat fields.

We stopped at the little town of Beesenstadt for some groceries. Among the pasta, tuna, and cream of mushroom soup, we also bought a liter of REAL milk, not the UHT milk we usually drink. We sat on the ground in front of the store and drank it. The real milk tasted great.

I went to the back of the store to return the bottle for the 30 pfennig and when I returned Joan was talking to an older woman. We see old women on bicycles all the time. This woman's bike was typical of they ride. Three speed transmission in the rear hub, wide handlebars, a big basket on the front, a sturdy woman's frame, a generator, and front and tail lights. We took a picture of her bike and I complimented her on it as best I could in German. I wanted to say, "Very sensible bike, well designed." Instead I just said, in German, "very good bicycle."

This was the right thing to say. She replied proudly, something to the effect, "made in the former DDR."

We asked her the way to the next town and she said to just follow her. She led us out on another extremely bumpy cobblestone road about 400 meters to her house. She pointed ahead to the next town but asked, "would you like some soup?"

We accepted (again, it took us a few minutes to figure out that she was inviting us) and she led us into her garden, laid out a mat, and suggested we sleep for a while until she had the soup ready. We felt like little animals she had taken in off the road.

We didn't sleep. We had only gotten out of bed a couple hours before. But we enjoy the garden. It was odd shaped, shaded by a couple trees, and had various flower beds mixed in. It was perfectly laid out. It was primarily enjoyed by Brigitte's six cats.

After a while Brigitte brought out two bowls of "light" soup. It had a little sausage, a few beans, some sort of dumpling, and just about everything in it. It was great. (JOAN: as we ate from our bowls, I saw the cats eating from theirs, and it occured to me that we were just like her cats).

Brigitte didn't join us until we had finished. Then we talked. Brigitte looks a little like my mother, except that she looks frail and sad. She was a retired teacher. She had taught German, Russian, aesthetics and the history of "building."

About east and west Germany she said, "It is not simple. People in the east," she pointed to her head, "think different and," she put her hand over her heart, "feel different. It will take a generation."

Then she added in no particular context, "We are 'einfach volk'" (simple folk).

"Before it was safe. Everyone worked. Now many young people go to the west to find jobs," she said (and I'm doing my best to paraphrase our understanding of her German).

Joan said, "Sie vergessen?" Joan was trying to say, "they leave?" but actually she asked, "They forget?" and Brigitte answered, "Ja."

Brigitte said East Germans earn 80 percent of what West Germans earn. "A few years ago it was 60 percent." Would it ever be equal? Maybe "in 10 years," Brigitte said.

We asked if we could take her picture. "Moment. The cats are hungry." So we waited while she fed the cats.

After we took some photos, she invited us to sleep in her garden (JOAN: which sort of reinforced my feeling that we were like her cats). She didn't want us to leave, but we had only gone nine km and it was coming on 2 p.m. As we left, she told us to send our friends to visit.

Talking to Brigitte, I was reminded of what Torsten (one of the E. German guys we met in Prague) said about his mother, whom he helps to support. "She worked 45 years and she's proud. She doesn't want help. But her pension is too small."

I had thought that the main cause of Ostalgie (from the German world Nostalgie, or nostalgia) was the unacceptably high unemployment in the east of Germany. Twenty percent is very high and would definitely prompt any group of people to desire a big change. In most countries capitalism doesn't result in such high unemployment but don't tell that to the East Germans.

But there seems to be more to it the Ostalgie. Before 1989 families were much closer, much tighter. They didn't have much else except each other. Now, just like in other western countries, people are moving around, having fewer children later in life, families are spread out. Meanwhile, the people who are retired now must have spent their life around family and reasonably expected that when they got old, they too would have company. But they don't. You could rewrite "A Fiddler on the Roof" to take place in East Germany in the late 1980s.

After Brigitte's we rode pretty hard, though we had daylight until well after 9 p.m. We stopped for a banana split; went around a particularly irritating detour that took us over a big hill; stopped at one of Germany's great delis for meat and cheese.

We entered the Hochharz National Park which was hilly and forested and pretty in evening light. We ended up spending the night of our third wedding anniversary camped in a field of pine tree saplings.

Next: Germany Chapter 8 - Winter in June

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