Lori the red-nosed tourist

Whether or not you celebrate it, Germany is a wonderful place to spend Christmas. Every city and town in the country is decked out in lights and decorations, and the ambience alone is worth the trip.


We began our Christmastime visit in Wurzburg, where the city's outdoor Christmas market (Christkindlmart or Weihnachtsmarkt) was still operational on Christmas Day. Most cities' Christmas markets begin in late November and end before Christmas. There are exceptions, and you'll want to consult a Christmas market calendar when planning a holiday trip to Germany if an authentic Christmas market experience is on your travel wish list.

Wurzburg, the thousand-year-old capital of Germany's Lower Franconia region, is full of rich, Baroque architecture, a stunning hilltop fortress, and acres and acres of rolling vineyards.

But it wasn't the fine, oak-aged product of the region's wineries that we were sipping in Wurzburg. It was cheap red wine tarted up with spices like clove and cardamom and heated to a steamy temp that makes your insides glow. Indeed, the ubiquitous drink offered at every other stall in Wurzburg's Christmas market is called Gluhwein.


While the kids got cups of hot chocolate, Mike and I, like everyone else over the age of 15 or so, wandered around Wurzburg clutching Gluhwein in ceramic mugs painted with holiday motifs. You got to keep your mug, so we amassed quite a collection of these souvenirs of Wurzburg.
Christmas in Germany. It's not just the cold that gives your nose that Rudolph effect.

www.LoriHein.com

Liechtenstein: Rent Me

Once upon a time, when corporations had things like employees, customers, fat expense accounts and black bottom lines, and taking everybody and their spouses (or not -- up to you) on extravagant, self-celebratory bonding trips was the law of the land, a prince looked out from his hilltop castle and decreed that his little country should get in on some of that action.

And so it came to pass that Liechtenstein put itself up for rent. And so it remains.

If you have at least 450 people to entertain and $500 per head per day to entertain them with, you can rent this 16-mile-long, 4-mile wide principality wedged between Austria and Switzerland.

The go-to guys, if you're interested, are event marketers Xnet, whose Rent a Village program (they offer nine hamlets in Austria, Switzerland and Germany that you can temporarily overtake) becomes, in the case of Liechtenstein, "Rent a whole country."

Once you pay the rent, Xnet will take care of the details of your group's Alpine adventure and will also see to it that you can, if you're inclined and, presumably, pay extra, "rename streets and squares using names that have a connection with your company. Have your logo carved into the white snow of a mountain slope or introduce your own currency for the duration of your stay."

If you rent Liechtenstein, you do not get to move into Prince Hans-Adam II's castle (photo). You will be in regular hotels, and you'll only see the prince if he happens to drive by in his (I'm guessing) chauffered car.

Nor do the 35,000 permanent residents of Liechtenstein vacate to other nations when you arrive. They stay and go about their business, and you, whose flags, banners and logos flap from the lampposts that line their lanes, do your frolicing, skiing, hiking, biking, team-building, skydiving and bacchanaling around them. I do not know whether your company currency can be used in all establishments, or just those paid to play along for the length of your invasion.

Sound fun? I've been to Liechtenstein, for less than an hour, and it was all I could take.

We were in Switzerland, close to Liechtenstein's border, so we drove in one end and out the other, back into Switzerland.

Liechtenstein, despite its jaw-dropping natural beauty, gave me a mild case of the heebie-jeebies. It smothered me with its perfectness, and I couldn't wait to get back to the less-perfect-perfectness of Switzerland, a wild and crazy place by comparison.

The walls of mountains that surround Liechtenstein were, at first, awe-inspiring, but then they started to move in on our car, inducing claustrophia. We drove right under the royal castle, and I imagined the prince staring down at us, watching us move through his little country. I drove fast, looking for the exit.

There was nothing out of place in Liechtenstein, neither rock nor piece of paper nor shirttail nor blade of grass. The place was impeccable, pristine and unbearably plastic-feeling. The well-put together women strolling the sidewalks looked Stepford Wife-ish. I got the same feeling from Liechtenstein as I get from Angelina Jolie: I was creeped out.

I did like one thing about the perfect little principality: the pronunciation of its capital, Vaduz. It's va - DOOTS.

Go ahead, say it out loud, it's fun: "va - DOOTS, va - DOOTS, va - DOOTS." If you go to Forvo.com ("All the words in the world. Pronounced"), you can listen to Wolfgang Hofmeier ("male from Germany") say it .

Over and over and over, if you like.


www.LoriHein.com

The Ultimate (Naked) Christmas

I have a story in The Ultimate Christmas, published last month and now available in bookstores and online.

I counted on winning the editors' attention when I sent my story for consideration. A yuletide piece about folks gettin' naked stands out from the pack. In the finished anthology, my story appears in the "Christmas Outside the Box" section. I like that.


Christmas in Germany: The Naked Truth


Santa’s a cool guy, and if you ask him to bring your kids’ presents a few days early so you can fly to Europe and experience Christmas in Germany, he delivers. Three hours after Dana and Adam opened their gifts and marveled that Santa would make a special trip to Boston just for them, we were headed to the airport and our flight to Frankfurt.

Ah, what a Christmas! Eating cheese-fondued potatoes in Feuchtwangen and sugar-coated Schneeballen in Rothenburg. Sipping to-go mugs of hot Gluhwein while walking cobbled Dinkelsbuhl. Singing Stille Nacht in a great stone church, strolling outdoor Christmas markets, and browsing festive ornament shops in Heidelberg and Wiesbaden. And in Wurzburg, the first town on our itinerary, we experienced German spa life, which involves lots of dunking. And full frontal nudity.

Our Wurzburg hotel had a Schwimmbad, a swim and fitness center, and we couldn’t wait to drop our bags and get down there. As we signed in with the girl at the reception desk, I looked through the window behind her at the pool, a sumptuous haven with a waterfall and tropical plants, some dressed for the season in colored lights. Behind one of them stood a buck naked old man.

I turned to the kids and reminded them -- they’d been seeing topless women on Mediterranean beaches since they were toddlers -- that people do things differently in Europe: "You might see a bare body or two in the pool.”

My husband, Mike, had a cold and wasn’t swimming. He claimed a lounge chair and promptly fell asleep. The kids and I found the single dressing room, a unisex affair. That mildly discomfited me – whoa, men in here -- but you could have knocked me over with a Speedo when I realized that our three were the only bathing suits in the whole cedar-planked place. Oblivious to the preponderant nakedness, Adam climbed into his board shorts and Dana into her neon-pink suit adorned with 101 Dalmatians. Wary, but hopeful we’d simply stumbled into the locker room during a naturist group’s annual holiday get-together, I pulled on my suit and led the kids to the pool.

As the warm water and exercise got our juices flowing, our senses sharpened, and we all saw what we’d jumped into. Besides ours, there wasn’t a bathing suit – nary a bikini bottom – to be seen. Instead, body parts we’re unaccustomed to seeing in company, mixed or otherwise, greeted us from all directions – floating, spread across chaises lounges, poised above us on the pool deck.

Taking it in stride, we watched our fellow bathers do “the circuit.” They’d burst from the pool, then amble, flesh flapping, to sauna to steam to tanning bed to Frischluft, or fresh air, an outdoor concrete courtyard with paintings of palm trees, where people sat chatting in the 15-degree Fahrenheit outdoors in their Geburtstag suits. We caught the hang of the circuit and began to participate in the series of refreshing events. And that’s when we got into trouble.

One man had deputized himself as the pool police and had been watching our every clothed move. As we’d soon learn, we’d violated the shower-between-events protocol. The enforcer, sometimes nude and sometimes swathed in a red and white-striped robe that made him look like a giant terrycloth candy cane, reported us to the girl at the reception desk, and we were spoken to. After the dressing down, we gave up doing the circuit because all those mandatory showers, besides being wasteful, were way too much work.

So we swam some more, then went to cap off our visit in the sauna. And there waited the Schwimmbad sheriff. When we sat down, he got up and headed for the front desk. A minute later the pool girl tracked me down again and told me there had “been complaints" that we hadn’t sat on towels while in the sauna.

My tired brain, still operating on Eastern Standard Time, called up the best German it could muster, and I delivered a rough equivalent of, "You’re kidding! We’re wearing clothes! We’re the hygienic ones! Please tell peppermint-stick-robe-guy that, in the spirit of Christmas, he should keep his parts and his opinions to himself!” (I was pleased with this sudden burst of fluency. Evidently jet lag lets you speak in tongues.) The pool girl apologized and invited the kids to help themselves to a bowl of oranges at the reception counter.

We woke Mike, dreaming deeply in his chaise. He’d been oblivious to the naked people lounging and walking near him, and he’d missed the drama. Through it all he’d dozed, the most clothed person this pool had ever seen, his cold seeking cure behind long pants, a turtleneck shirt and a sweater.

But he was barefoot. "Where are your shoes?" I asked him.

"Over there. Some guy in a striped robe told me to take them off.”


www.LoriHein.com

Chagall blue

It's Marc Chagall's birthday.

During his nine decades, Chagall produced a prodigious, vibrant body of work. His paintings are marvelous, but I love his stained glass best, and I'm always delighted to come upon Chagall's glass in my travels.

I found his electric-cobalt blue in St. Stephen's Church in Mainz, Germany. Nine soaring Chagall panels send streams of blue light through the thousand-year-old structure.

And at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the most pleasing and accessible art museums I've visited, Chagall's America Windows turn an entire gallery into a great, blue embrace.

www.LoriHein.com

Losing your marbles: The Parthenon and beyond

Warning: Reading this post may make your brain explode. (If it doesn't, I guarantee you'll enjoy this post from 2005: "Has Charles Veley Been to the State of Chuuk?")

Athens' new Acropolis Museum, scheduled to fully open in September, has a rectangular, glass-walled gallery with a view of the nearby Parthenon. The old Acropolis museum, a narrow, cramped affair that managed, despite itself, to stun visitors with its rich collection of Greek antiquities, may, it's rumored, be turned into a coffee shop. The old museum's holdings, along with breathtaking artifacts from the Acropolis and other Greek sites, have been moved into the new venue.

Key among the new museum's exhibits will be the frieze that once adorned the Parthenon. A room was built to hold it. The rub, of course, is that Greece only owns a few pieces of the frieze.

Most of the pieces -- the marbles -- live in London in the British Museum, which bought them from the British government, which bought them from Thomas Bruce, the 7th earl of Elgin, who took them from the Acropolis in 1801 and shipped them off to England. Lord Elgin, serving as ambassador to Constantinople, had the sultan's permission to slice the frieze into pieces and remove it from then Ottoman-controlled Greece.

Greece would like the Elgin Marbles, which it calls the Parthenon Marbles, back, and the frieze gallery at the new museum is designed to be more than an artistic display; it's a plea for repatriation of priceless pieces of patrimony. The reconstructed frieze will consist of the few original pieces still in Greece's possession interspersed with reproductions of the pieces Elgin took. These lost marbles will be covered in netting, yielding, it's hoped, a powerful visual statement about the cultural crime Greece feels has been committed.

Should the British Museum give the Marbles back?

Loaded question leading to a web of loaded questions. Museums large and small, of all types, all over the world, have stuff that came from somewhere else. So...

If the British Museum gives the Marbles back, should other museums give stuff back, too?

Which museums should give stuff back? Some museums? All museums? Big museums? Small museums?

Which stuff should they give back? Big stuff? Small stuff? Some stuff? All stuff?

To whom should they give it back? To other museums? To countries? What if the countries aren't countries anymore? (Think Mesopotamia and Babylon.)

Should method of acquisition matter in the give-it-back-or-not determination? Museums acquire through purchase or donation, but how did whoever sold or donated get the piece in the first place? And what about absolute provenance -- how an object came to be removed from its true source? Removing outright theft, tomb-raiding, smuggling and other overtly illegal and illicit activity from the equation -- pieces thus acquired should clearly be returned -- what in a piece's bloodline -- from war, conquest and colonialism, to commerce and trade, to excavation and archaeology, both accidental and intentional, whether by amateur hacks or skilled scientists --should or might mark a piece for repatriation?

Should there be an international marble quid pro quo, a supervised global game of marble trading wherein museums -- or countries, universities, foundations, families...-- that get marbles back have to then return marbles they've held, sometimes for centuries, that came from somewhere else?

Imagine trucks and trains and ships and planes loaded with statues and stelae, paintings and pottery, sculpture and sarcophogi, crisscrossing the globe, the transported objects taking each others' places in cases and galleries and on shelves and pedestals. Eventually, if you imagine an endgame in which every item ever removed by any means from its original in situ state finds its way through this great marble trade back to where it was created, every museum in the world would end up being a homogeneous warehouse of stuff from just its own little corner of the world. To see gold and lapis Egyptian death masks, you'd have to go to Egypt. A peek at sublime Tang Dynasty terra cotta figurines would require a ticket to China. To ogle Aztec headdresses, you'd need to book a flight to Mexico. After returning pieces to the places they were born, institutions like the Louvre and the Met could consolidate their remaining holdings into a few rooms and rent out the rest of their space for other uses. Gaze at a Goya then head down the hall for a few strings at the Prado Bowladrome?

Who's got other people's marbles? Nearly everybody. (But not, it seems, the Egyptians or Greeks. Their marbles fit pretty justifiably into some aspect, phase, layer, race or period in their long, complex histories. They've got so many marbles of their own that they've never needed to take anyone else's.)

You can find other people's marbles all over the world.

One day a few years ago, Adam and I followed our guide to the summit of ancient Pergamum (Pergamom, Pergamon), a glorious citadel-ruin that rises above the modern city of Bergama, Turkey. We came to a large, pedestal-like structure shaded by a few hearty trees that grew in its empty center. "There's not much here now," said our guide of the stripped platform. "The great Altar of Zeus was here, but the Germans took it to Berlin." Indeed, the star attraction and raison d'etre of Berlin's Pergamom Museum is the massive Zeus Altar excavated by engineer Carl Humann during the building of a rail line and sent, in pieces, to Berlin, where it was reassembled.

If Germany gave the Zeus Altar back to Turkey, would Turkey consider giving some of the goodies it's been holding back to Egypt and other places? Istanbul's Archaeological Museum houses artifacts "discovered" in Cyprus, Palestine, the Arab world and ancient Mesopotamia. It has a collection of sarcophogi found at Sidon, in ancient Syria, and owns mosaic panels from Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar's Ishtar Gate. And, piercing the sky near the minarets of Istanbul's sublime Blue Mosque is a 16th-century BC Egyptian obelisk from the temple of Luxor that was appropriated and replanted by Byzantine emperor Theodosius in 390 AD. There are only 28 Egyptian obelisks left in the world -- only a few in Egypt. (New York has one, Italy has about a dozen...)

If the give-me-back-my-marbles game really took hold, Italy would be mighty busy. It would be on the receiving end of countless Roman, Etruscan and other treasures from museums and venues worldwide. And, it would have some items it might consider shipping back to their places of origin.

Even the Vatican has marbles. (I know, Vatican City is not politically Italy, but if you've ever stood in line in the hot sun to see the Sistine Chapel then, after contemplating the masterwork, sought relief at the gelato shop next door, which sits in Italy, the Vatican is in Rome.) The Vatican's Egyptian Museum holds items won by conquest: the Roman Empire was one heck of a far-reaching enterprise. But if conquest-gotten gains count in the you-should-really-return-this column, the Vatican might have to part with seals from Mesopotamia (we'd better shore up and secure the Baghdad Museum) and bas-reliefs from Assyria, which spans today's Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq.

And Venice has marbles. Those four bronze horses over the portal of the Basilica of San Marco? They once adorned an arch that the Romans built in Constantinople (today's Istanbul). And the Romans allegedly nabbed the equine arch decorations from Greece...

Should Greece get its frieze back from England?

I've lost more than a few marbles just thinking about it.

LoriHein.com

Get smart: Travel to college towns

Our first-born went off to college yesterday. We moved Adam into his dorm at one of Boston's biggest urban universities, and, while it was emotional, it was also exciting. The campus is in the heart of Boston, and Adam's world ballooned overnight from quiet, middle class suburb to a vibrant, diverse city that offers endless opportunities. When we drove away we knew he was in a good place.

Some of my favorite travel destinations have been cities with large universities. A big, busy, engaged student population makes a place pop, and everything -- shops, restaurants, streets, parks, architecture, cultural offerings, people watching -- is interesting, eclectic, electric. The atmosphere buzzes. I always pick a hotel near the university epicenter so I'm near the action.

I especially love European college towns because they often boast centuries-old universities with rich histories. The schools often sit in the city's ancient quarter or occupy dramatic settings atop hills or beside wide, tree-lined rivers.

The photos above show a few of my favorite university cities: from top to bottom, Oxford, England; Heidelberg, Germany; Coimbra, Portugal.

Next time you travel, add a university town to your itinerary. Smart move.


LoriHein.com

Swimming in Wurzburg: The naked truth

We landed in Frankfurt, Germany and drove to the Dorint Hotel in Wurzburg, where I’d made reservations. This was an off-season trip, and I’d booked the Dorint because it had an indoor pool. For every hour of cold weather sightseeing they’d give us, we’d give the kids at least as many of swimming and lounging around. This strategy’s worked for us around the world.

We checked into the Dorint and made our way to the Schwimmbad. As we collected towels from the girl at the spa’s reception desk and snack bar, I peered through a window at the pool, a sumptuous haven with a waterfall and grotto-like area with fake caves and swirling water.

And, I saw a buck naked old man.

I turned to the kids and reminded them (they’d been seeing bare-breasted babes on Mediterranean beaches since they were toddlers) that people do things differently in Europe. "You might see a bare body or two in the pool," I warned.

Talk about your understatements.

It wasn’t until the kids and I had emerged from the locker room – there was only one, unisex – and had been splashing around for a few minutes that I realized we were the only people in the whole place with any clothes on. (Mike, who had a cold, wasn’t swimming. He laid claim to a lounge chair and went to sleep.)

I speak mediocre German and knew the "kleide" part of "Umkleide" on the sign above the locker room door meant "clothes." But what I thought was a dressing room was really an undressing room. We used the space to change into bathing suits. Everyone else used it to change into nothing. While we suited up, they disrobed.

Adam, Dana and I hopped into the pool, and the warm water and exercise began immediately coaxing the jet lag from our bodies. Our senses sharpened, and we took stock of the scene around us.

Butts, boobs and genitals greeted us from all directions – submarine, floating on the water’s surface, spread across chaises on the pool deck. Some bathers did the circuit, bursting out of the pool, then flapping around as they ambled from sauna to steam to tanning bed to Frischluft, literally "fresh air," a walled-in outdoor terrace (with paintings of palm trees) where people sat chatting in the 20-degree Fahrenheit great outdoors in their Geburtstag suits.

The kids and I caught the hang of this circuit of events and started to participate (cloaked as we were in our bathing suits, which felt like suits of armor but which, under no circumstances, were coming off). And that’s when we got into trouble.

Evidently, you ’re supposed to shower between each "event." The spa-parcours etiquette goes: pool-shower-sauna-shower-steam-shower-tan-shower-outdoors-shower-pool-shower... A man with a red-striped robe that he alternately put on and took off had deputized himself as the pool police and had been watching our every clothed move. He reported us to the dainty girl at the reception desk, and we were spoken to. We ceased and desisted from doing the circuit because all those mandatory showers, besides being wasteful, were way too much work.

So we swam some more, rinsed off in the shower, then went into the sauna. The Schwimmbad policeman was in there. He didn’t like us, we didn’t like him. As soon as we sat down, he left. Crucial informant work to do?

The pool girl tracked me down and told me there had been "complaints" that we hadn’t sat on towels while in the sauna. My jet-lagged brain called up the best German it could muster, and I shrieked the rough equivalent of "You ‘ve got to be kidding! We’re in this hot space with naked people who are exposing their privates to surfaces all over this spa. We’re wearing clothes, so the way I see it, we’re the hygenic ones, keeping our naughty bits to ourselves. We're hermetically sealed. Please tell the old guy with the red-striped robe that I paid a hundred bucks a room to be here and I’d appreciate his keeping his parts and his opinions to himself."

I was wired. Jet lag lets you speak in tongues.

The pool girl laughed. "Totally OK," she said. "Don’t worry about anything." I laughed back, told her we’d learned our lesson and that we’d perform better – albeit clothed – tomorrow.

When we were ready to leave, we woke Mike, dreaming deeply in his chaise. He’d missed all the drama. For well over an hour, he’d slept, surrounded by nude people whose personal parts sneaked and peeked from terrycloth robes or swung unabashedly through air and water. And through it all Mike had dozed, the most clothed person the Dorint pool had ever seen, his cold seeking cure behind long pants, a turtleneck shirt and a sweater.

But he was barefoot. "Where are your shoes?" I asked him. "Over there. Some guy in a red-striped robe told me to take them off."


www.LoriHein.com

Night and Dachau

I was surprised to see Elie Wiesel’s Night on a recent Boston Globe "Local bestsellers" list. The 1958 memoir of Wiesel, who survived four Nazi death camps including Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was the #2 nonfiction paperback.

Why the renewed interest in Night, the spare masterpiece that recounts a young Elie Wiesel’s horrific journey through the Holocaust? I didn’t know why people in large numbers were again reaching for this work by the Nobel Peace Prize winner who said that "...to remain silent and indifferent" in the face of hatred, racism and genocide "is the greatest sin of all...," but I was glad to see it on the list.

In this age of life-cheapening videos and graphically violent games and the spoken word porn and depravity of gangsta rap, I was heartened to see that some considerable number of us were spending time with something important, something that holds a mirror up to our humanity and our inhumanity and dares us to walk away without fighting when we see hatred in any of its forms.

From Night:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in
camp, which has turned my life into one long
night, seven times cursed and seven times
sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never
shall I forget the little faces of the children,
whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of
smoke beneath a silent blue sky.Never shall I forget those flames which
consumed my faith forever.Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence
which deprived me, for all eternity, of the
desire to live. Never shall I forget those
moments which murdered my God and my
soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never
shall I forget these things, even if I am
condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never

With two mouse clicks, I discovered that Oprah was behind Night’s new chart-topping status. I should have guessed. While I’m quite tired of Oprah, I applaud her for advancing a book that every person should read.

I first read Night after visiting Dachau.

The concentration camp where 30,000 died is a short S-Bahn ride from downtown Munich. From the Dachau station, you walk past tidy suburban blocks of kempt houses and apartments with square front yards until you arrive at the wrought iron fence you’ve seen in photos and films.

"ARBEIT MACHT FREI" it taunts in chilling, black letters above the gate cut into the fence. Your heart cracks and your gut heaves and your breath clogs in your chest because you know you’re looking at the gate of hell.

I took no photographs of Dachau. The thought of shooting pictures in and of this place bothered my conscience. Like most visitors around me, I walked through Dachau in pained silence. Head bowed, eyes tear-blurred. Barracks with plank bunks stacked floor to ceiling; gas chamber disguised as communal shower with a welcoming, happy note above the entrance door and fingernail scratches on the walls; crematorium with brick ovens crafted in a hideous, benign design, as if built to bake bread.

Spending some part of one’s journeys at places like Dachau where men have reduced themselves to soulless murderers and their fellow human beings to dust is, like reading Night, difficult but important. For man to be his best, he must recognize himself at his worst.

While I took no pictures at Dachau, people like Philip Greenspun have. Unrecorded atrocity is a cry God hears but man can’t learn from. Greenspun’s Dachau photo essay is at photo.net. The Web page also contains comments from scores of Dachau visitors.

Christmas in old, quiet places

There’s something deeply calming about spending Christmas week in an old European town whose cobbles and cathedrals have seen Christmases since the Middle Ages.

The swirl of white lights in the leaded window of an ornament shop in a walled city on Germany's Romantic Road; quiet candles casting a yellow glow inside a crumbling Portuguese church that sits on the sea; the slow, deliberate movement of two dozen Catalans celebrating the holiday by dancing their solemn sardana, arms linked, in front of La Seu, Barcelona's soaring Gothic cathedral.

In an ancient place, on a hushed winter afternoon or evening, such sights both stir and settle the soul. The simplest things often touch us most deeply.

In Tarragona, Spain (above), the unadorned, potted evergreens that sat along the narrow pedestrian passage leading to the cathedral were, there and then in that quiet alley half-hidden from the sun, the most beautiful Christmas trees I’d ever seen.


LoriHein.com

Finks and other ancestors

October brings Oktoberfest, but it also brings German-American Day, “a great opportunity,” according to German Life magazine, “to take a moment and celebrate your German heritage."

I have English ancestors on my mother’s side, German on my dad’s, and there are some interesting cats on both. One of my British forebears was a young deckhand on the HMS Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar. His boss, Admiral Horatio Nelson, fell to a French sniper’s bullet on October 21, 1805, the battle’s first day, but my ancestor survived and went on to beget a line of Cornwall tin miners. They migrated to Pittsburgh, mined coal, and begat more Navy men, including my grandfather, Steele Pille. At 16, underage but eager to join the service, he assumed a new birthdate and a new name and served his country as Harry Doubleday.

We visited Germany recently (Wurzburg, above) to give the kids some perspective on their Bavarian roots, planted in the Black Forest, the Schwarzwald. My dad’s mother was born in the spa town of Baden-Baden. (“So good they named it twice,” says the city’s official website. “The place with the license to thrill.”) With its thermal baths and opulent casino, Baden-Baden has long been a magnet for the elite and privileged. European royals and nobles, Napoleon’s family, literary luminaries like Tolstoy, Twain and Hugo all played here.

My family, the Finks (a name that appears on the “Most Wanted Ancestors” list of the Black Forest Genealogy Site), weren’t members of the upper class. My great grandmother did go to the casino every day – to clean it. She was a maid.

The Finks emigrated to America, entering at Ellis Island and settling in Brooklyn. There, one of my great-aunts, Evelyn Fink, met and married George Fink. Can you imagine having the chance to use marriage to escape the name Fink only to have a Fink steal your heart?

One of my German ancestors was a real fink. During Hitler’s rise to power, he embraced National Socialism and wore his political and racist fervor on his sleeve and flew the party’s flag from a pole fixed to the front of his brick tenement house. His neighbors were not amused.

He worked in a Manhattan high-rise. One day, he fell down an elevator shaft and was killed. “Accident” was the official report. As far as we know, it’s the only murder in the family.

Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht

The last time I'd sung all the verses of "Silent Night" in German was in college, when I toted my guitar across campus to my German professor's house. She'd invited her advanced students -- I was masquerading as one -- for hot chocolate and Christmas Stollen, and I hoped a reasonable rendition of "Stille Nacht" might net me an extra point or two on my semester grade.

Fast forward to Christmas Eve, years later, to Wurzburg, Germany's 950-year-old St. Kilian Cathedral. Mike, Adam, Dana and I stood in the great stone church, our breath hanging in the chill air. Yellow candlelight, soft strains of "Stille Nacht," and the fellowship of the hundreds gathered within St. Kilian's soaring Romanesque walls warmed us.

The service ended, and we spilled into the snow-dusted street and fell in with families heading down Domstrasse to the old bridge that crosses the Main. Across the river, the Festung Marienberg crowned a vineyard-studded hill. The nude vines reached upward; thin, dark hands clasped in prayer. The fortress was lit with golden floodlights, and it floated above Wurzburg like a Christmas star.


This Christmas, we pray for peace, our prayers more urgent than in recent past years. We pray for and we thank our troops in Iraq and their families. Whatever our feelings about this war, know that, to a man, we support you. Your courage and conviction, and your sense of duty and loyalty fill us with pride. God bless, and come home soon.

A German Christmas

December in Germany is magic. Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, there is no more wonderful place to revel in the wonder of the season. Germans bring the holiday out in the open, with colorful Christmas Markets (Christkindlsmaerkte; Weihnachtsmaerkte) in cities and towns around the country; ancient, cobbled pedestrian areas lined with strings of soft, white lights and decorated evergreens; shop windows bursting with gugels and kugels and kuchen; rosy-cheeked citizens sharing mugs of steaming Gluhwein at outdoor cafes.

Drive the Romantic Road (Romantische Strasse) from Wurzburg to Fussen, stopping at Rothenburg, Dinkelsbuhl and Nordlingen, where churches and cathedrals tower above city walls that embrace the medieval towns like a good, strong hug.

December days are short here. But when the sun disappears, the magic intensifies. The colored lights glow brighter, and the Gluhwein goes down sweeter. Pack your parka and your mittens, and get out there.