A LIBERAL LETTING GO
I wanted to revisit Aschaffenburg and was shown all around the city by Bolko and Margit, but the main reason I wanted to come to Aschaffenburg was to be in the presence of two girls that I had liked so much 60 years ago and to find out what their lives had been like.
I was shown around Aschaffenburg where we saw the Bishop’s Castle, which was in ruins when I was here because of Allied bombing and now has been fully restored. In it is a city theater where every few days there is a play or opera performed by state supported companies.
Then I was taken to my old barracks, a yellow plastered forbidding building which is now a red sandstone beautiful building housing a science university.
And then we went on to the house that I had a room in and escaped the army to 60 years ago and it has also been completely remodeled with my room, the last on the right which had a door to the outside has become a large window.
I recognized almost nothing.
And then the next day we visited Margit’s house from top to bottom and the beautiful old village of Miltenberg on the Main river.
But this entry is not so much a description of what we saw or even the family von Wurzbach as it is an attempt to deal with an issue that is broader than the family van Wurzbach and me, it is an attempt to deal with the issue of liking people very much, and accepting them as they are without wanting them to change, while at the same time holding some opposite assumptions and values. It is an issue that I have with my Trump believing barber in Swannanoa whom I don’t know very well and with the family van Wurzbach in Aschaffenburg whom I care about very much.
When we said goodbye, vaccinated, liberal Bill and unvaccinated, conservative Dorothee, each certain that he/she was right and the other person was wrong or at least deluded about vaccinations and a number of other things, we hugged each other with genuine affection and acceptance and wanted to get together again. We really felt good in each other’s presence despite our ideological differences.
That is what I want to wonder about. I don’t want to reflect on who is right and who is wrong, I do want to reflect on how people who like each other can be fully accepting of each other and at the same time have some opposite values.
Sixty years were a lot to catch up on.
In that time 8 year old Dorothee married, had children, was divorced and married again. Her second husband, a farmer, died this last May of cancer, three days after Kathe died of cancer.
Margit married, had two children, and then her first husband died in an automobile accident. Her children were badly injured but survived. She married again to a very artistic man, a singer and a painter but a smoker who died of cancer of the throat seven years ago.
Each of their houses was filled with family paintings on the wall, but Margit’s house had become a multi level artist’s studio with a sewing room with sewing machines, a knitting room with a knitting machine, a piano room where she gave piano lessons,
a painting room with stretched canvases and paint brushes and paints, an organ where she practiced as a church organist and choir director and even a workbench from a grandfather where she did home repairs and a dental workbench from her time as an assistant to her first dentist husband. In the basement was a table for clients to stretch out on while she gave massages because she was a Reiki Master.
Margit and Bolko, her cousin, played Handel for me, she on the piano and he on the trumpet and also played
German Christmas carols. And then Margit played the piano as she sang, beautifully, Bolko’s favorite piece from Handel.
But another aspect of the house was the presence of family history which is very much alive for all of them. Bolko’S father and Jussy, the father of Margit and Dorothee, were brothers in a wealthy and powerful family in Slovenia where they were nobility. Through successful lawyer ancestors the family owned ten castles, or estates, in Slovenia which Jussy and Bolko’S father would inherit. But the Second World War turned their world upside down. All four brothers joined the German army, a betrayal Slovenian partisans wouldn’t forgive. Two brothers were killed in the war, including Harald, whose paintings of Slovenia were all through Margit’s house. Jussy was captured by the Russians and when he escaped and was recaptured was sent to hard labor in Siberia, only being released in 1959, four years after the war had ended. The family went from being German nobility in Slovenia to being impoverished exiles in Germany. The pain of this loss has carried over to the children. The reason that I found Dorothee on Facebook was that after two marriages she reverted to her original name, von Wurzbach, a sign of German nobility.
For two days I learned not only about what had happened in these sixty years since I had lived with them, but of the sixty years family history before that.
Dorothee also painted and had a beautiful voice. Her second husband had been a farmer and Dorothee until recently owned 80 cows and at one time owned a dozen horses and gave riding lessons.
Both have been buffetted by life since being little girls and have come through strong and determined.
And this was reflected in their politics. All three cousins are staunch conservatives and disdain socialism and the welfare state. They are anti vaccination, anti immigration, anti taxes and fiercely independent. All three had a factual basis for their beliefs and values which they got from somewhere as well as from each other, beliefs that for me seemed to be conspiracy theories and misinformation, but for them were as factual and objective as anything could be. For them I was the person who was being deluded by a malevlent government out of control. Angela Merkel, whom I admire, is anathema to them.
So what were we to do? We liked each other. I wanted to hear their whole story and came away with a thick book in German of the Ricci family from whom they were descended which I am going to try and read.
My experience has been to think all Trump supporters and most Republicans are wrong headed and stupid and with values based on delusion. But here were the German equivalent of Trump voters and I really liked them and felt affection and wanted to hear their stories and to accept them as they are.
So this really brought me up short. I was determined to stick to my guns and wear my mask to protect them and me. But I had to abandon this insistence on my values at the first tea party where to eat cake and drink coffee I had to abandon the mask. After being fully exposed, I found wearing a mask to be not only pointless but also an affront. I abandoned it for the whole visit, deciding that the risk was more than worth it. They insisted there was no risk at all.
As I heard what I thought were one conspiracy theory after another I was determined not to argue and didn’t. What I was searching for was a way to maintain the affection I felt for two very grown up little girls whom I really cared about while maintaining my own identity, my sense of what is right and wrong, fair and unfair. And what I realized is that love trumps identity, acceptance trumps being right or correct. Listening is more important that insisting. But it also left me feeling both uncertain and dislocated and puzzled about whether I was so right after all.
One thing that has helped me be more accepting is that I am no longer living in my liberal bubble where everyone has the same knee jerk liberal reaction. I daily get 30 emails from Democratic candidates urging me to fight the right, to stave off the onslaught of the infidels, the red threat. I erase them all without reading them. I have been living in places where none of that seems real or seems to matter. I look at American vitriolic politics from the outside and it doesn’t seem that urgent or important. And this is a great relief. Part of the reason I have been able to float along in Paros is because I have let go of American values and tensions and have opened myself up to the unknown.
The visit to Margit and Dorothee and Bolko is part of this letting go and opening up and I have had a marvelous time doing it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 