Three pavements forge together like jigsaw pieces. A smooth, dark asphalt road. A blocky, sand colored pedestrian walk. A dominant panel of square bricks. The bricks mark a transition from car to bike lane. German children sit in front baskets of long bicycles, rocked gently by the rolling bricks, disappearing as the path climbs upwards and curves left behind trees. The horizon opens up, revealing dark forested mountains beyond the brick path. The ridges dominate every building in Freiburg, save the Cathedral spire. A blue sign marks the road: Engelbergerstrasse. Three German words stuck together: Angel-mountain-street.
Around the bend, four lanes converge onto an industrial blue bridge. Looking south, away from Cathedral and the mountains, electric trains glide toward Switzerland. Wind sweeps across the tracks onto the faces of those passing the bridge. Few places rival the black forest and Bavarian plains in summer months. Gardens hang from windows above narrow stone streets. Clean water runs through stone gullies, reflecting the faces of locals enjoying fresh air. But in winter there is little sun and the forest darkens. Up above the tracks on the steel blue bridge, each ray of winter sun is a hopeful promise.
Across the bridge the bikes pedal fast into the new bend. Foot goers pocket their screens and anxiously hug the gray stone rim that marks their lane. Drifters are swiftly reprimanded. Today it is Javier who steps in the restricted zone.
Achtung! A bell clings in my face. The biker is past but his voice hangs in the air.
I smile at Javier and speak in our broken German:
“They almost earn their reputation huh? Not so easy with rules like you Spaniards”
“Hey man. It was not so obvious with all these signs.
Javier is from Pamplona. He grew up near the wheat colored, rolling hills and lush rivers of northern Spain. We both came to southern Germany wanting to learn the language. Meeting someone uninterested in English is relieving. Most international students speak English and all the ones that do want to show it off. But Javier’s English was worse than my German.
So on a morning without class we practiced German and sipped coffee from a bakery on our side of the bridge. You could walk right to the register off Angel-mountain-street and I visited often. Day one in town I ordered the first thing on the menu. There was no sleep on the plane over and there was no sleep the first night in my room. My head rang as I read out the request for caffeine: one cappuccino please. On day 2 I composed myself before blurting out in poor German: One
big coffee please, black? The request drew a look so I added a Berliner to the order. Eyebrows remained elevated. On day three the barista cut me off and gave me an Americano.
We take the turn down Sedanstraße and the sun disappears behind the Concert hall. Last night we saw the orchestra perform with the other international students. We walked over the bridge and up into the great stone pride of the city. I held my paper ticket up to a uniformed attendant. Germans cherish paper. It has been in vogue since the printing press. Argue with a German on the efficiency of the pdf and muddled eyes stare back at you.
The orchestra performed two pieces. The first was 20 minutes and had a singer. It was an opera piece. The audience was clearly impressed with her because they clapped for 10 whole minutes after she stopped singing. She was clapped back onto the stage three different times before someone gave her flowers and she went off for good.
The second piece was longer so the audience knew to clap longer, too. We clapped for 15 minutes so that the players had time to walk off the stage with all their equipment and then get back up onto the stage to hear the clapping better.
"My hands still hurt from all the clapping” I tell Javier. We pass cars in the alley now, American high tops and Spanish low cuts scrapping along the cement when I halt. The feeling in my hands is gone. The air cold. The street quiet.
Here lies the Stumbling Stone for Franz Anton Streit. Born 1879
The brass plate is raised slightly above the concrete. There are a hundred thousand stumbling stones planted across Germany, Poland, Austria, Belgium, and every other nation where the Nazi party reigned. It is the largest decentralized holocaust memorial. Franz Streit may have been one of the Jewish Freiburgers carried away the morning after Kristellnacht.
Gray uniforms with a pair of lightning bolts on the collar stormed into homes and shops, boots crunching broken glass. The SS packed 100 men into box cars that squeaked down the tracks, pushed out of the black forest onto rolling Bavarian hills, and rocked in the cold November night. The tracks ended in Dachau.
Javier and I gaze across the street, searching for where the Streit family might have lived. The bricks in that building look freshly red, too clean to have survived the bombing. We keep walking.
“I must say, there was a Spanish dictator who was friends with Hitler”
“Franco”
“Yes, Franco. He was bad. Because of him many Spaniards died.”
"Because him, many Americans die.” I point at the McDonalds.
Up ahead the street narrows where trolly lines pass under a clock tower. The clock sits in a brick frame three quarters up the structure. A dozen golden numerals decorate the emerald inner circle of the clock; the silver sage outer circle had its own golden set. Two clock-hands traverse the face, also gold. The corners of the tower are also brick, with stones placed perfectly on top of one another. Except the bricks stop suddenly just a few feet inward, as if a game of brick-bong
had been played up and down the middle of the tower. The vast space where the bricks were removed is smooth white stone.
Where the trolley passes under the tower, two arches are carved out for clearance. Freiburg’s city authority did not allow the steel golden arches of American suburbia, but someone figured brick arches worked too.
Javier and I pass under the left arch, catching glimpses of the ordering screens. European regulations make the burgers even tastier in German fast food shops. Determined for a traditional German experience, Javier and I stay on our mission for authentic local cuisine.
As the street widens again we pass another row of boxy houses with pitched roofs. Red wooden beams shoot up the corners and blue windows line each level. Each piece of siding cut differently, a beautiful mosaic only human hands could procure. The ground floor is a traditional stone foundation with modern window panels and revolving doors. It is leased by an H&M.
“You must know how I mean.” Javier’s eyes fall away when I catch them with my own.
“Yes. It is unpleasant to think about.”
My hands search the inside of my collar for comfort. I pull the silver chain around my neck, letting it rub my skin, until my fingers catch the clasp. Nothing hangs from the braided metal. No cross. No star. No meaning. I tuck it back into my shirt and keep walking.
The sun leaks out into the open square now. Before us stands an army of cheeses, fruits, wines, and sausages. Javier and I exchange grins. In the long shadow of the church we find our winning establishment and purchase a white cheese infused bratwurst, housed in a bun not three quarters the size of the sausage. I forget the word for onion and embarrass myself.
Biting into the wurst, the cheese pops up out of the meat and scalds my cheek. I swear and feel my skin burning.
“At least you have sworn just now in German. That means you really in German think. I go get...” Javier trails off forgetting the word for napkin so I motion approval. As he walks back towards the sausage cart, a plane passes overhead. Its trail comes from the wooded mountains behind the cathedral. The bombers had come that way, too.
The British used 361 Lancaster planes with 3000 odd bombs to eliminate Freiburg from the war. The town was not exactly participating when the generals in London called it in. But the war was total and I imagine they were running out of unbombed towns in November 1944. Luckily for the planes, the air raid sirens in Freiburg did not sound.
The night the planes came, little Heidi Putscheider woke her father to tell him of the 361 planes. With no sirens to reinforce her claim, she sounded silly. Heidi woke her father again. 361 Rolls Royce Merlin engines droned over the black forest.
Heidi’s father sprang out of bed. He scrambled to place paper birth certificates, paper passports, and paper money under the fireproof box. Heidi was already outside, carried swiftly by her mother. The engines sounded closer now. Heidi clutched her rucksack as her mother opened the cellar doors. They descended.
The planes aimed for the railway tracks. Navigational technology was limited and the British youth tasked with dropping the bombs relied on visual cues to find their target. During the air raid of Dresden, forty Boeing-17 Flying Fortresses unknowingly found themselves 120 kilometers off target. A storm had sent them south east to Prague. Like Dresden, a river runs through Prague so the American airmen dropped a few thousand pounds of bombs on the sleeping Czech capital. Early in the war, the Nazis dropped bombs on Freiburg thinking it was a French town. Cities look quite similar from that high up.
The cellar doors burst open and Heidi’s father descends with her siblings.
360 British bombers circled and flew back over the short mountains. The Altstadt burned. A few thousand people burned (the British say two and the Germans say three). 75 soldiers burned, justly I suppose. The library burned. The synagogue across from the library burned 6 years earlier on Kristallnacht but a bomb likely fell on the ashes. The last jewish Freiburger was long since deported so no jews burned that night. Heidi’s family survived. The fireproof box and the
protected papers burned in the apartment. The church on my side of the bridge burned. But the baroque stone cathedral stood unscathed.
A few children thought about school but there was no more school. The last of Freiburg’s teachers carried their belongings into the mountains that morning. They were not alone. Looking back on the town from the final openings of the forest, the untouched spire stood out hopefully above the broken streets and charred cellars.
I look up at the spire. A sea of rage boils in my chest. What were they thinking? Did they look back on a piece of Gothic art and believe it was saved? Did they believe that God let two or three thousand people burn in their beds and turn to goop in their cellars? Did they believe he let the church on my side of the bridge burn? Did they know he watched the Nazis burn millions?
Javier had found napkins and was walking back.
“Ay whats wrong it don’t hurt so bad”
"It's not the cheese”, I pause. “And you promised me we would speak German, why are we in English right now”
“Just trying to cheer you up. At least we found the food.”
“Yes, we did.”
The sun is out again. Air flows into my nose and fills my lungs. In my head I see the outline of a woman, standing before the cathedral, facing the mountains on a broken street. Columns of people carry their lives into the forest but the woman stays. She stays with little Heidi; she stays with the charred papers, the ruined houses, the crumbled library, the burnt synagogue, the broken glass.