Mary, the woman Jesus would have called Mutti, if he had been German-speaking, was born, we are told, without original sin. You have to believe that at pain of excommunication if you’re going to be Roman Catholic, since it’s an actual doctrine, with a name: the Immaculate Conception. Now many people get this wrong. They think “immaculate” (sex being dirty) conception has to do with the fact that Mary gave birth to Jesus without having done the deed first. None of that dirty stuff, semen, which is the mechanism by which original sin is passed from generation to generation, was passed between her and Joe. Not till later on, at a time not revealed in the bible, but by the fact that Jesus had at least one brother and probably other siblings as well.
But Immaculate Conception, a doctrine proclaimed as recently as 1854, has nothing to do with Jesus’ birth. Pope Pius IX came up with the brilliant idea of declaring himself infallible back about then, when it came to laying out doctrines “ex cathedra” (i.e., from his papal chair, i.e., when he was actually at work and not sipping slivovitz whilst reposing at Castel Gondolfo with some of his fellow cardinals, who voted to make him infallible.
My own mother, whose birthday was 106 years ago today, was not born free from original sin, if I am to follow that line of thinking. She was born to a couple of highly fallible youngsters, one of whom was a twenty-year-old country-girl named Bertha, in a small town in Lower Saxony called Celle, about twenty-five miles north of Hannover and 75 miles south of Hamburg. And in an institution we don’t have in this country: a hospital for midwifery. To this day, if I am not mistaken, Germany still holds midwives in higher regard in the medical profession than we do here in the U.S.
Good thing, too. My mother came out at barely two pounds, I’m told, and the fact that I’m here today typing these lines is no doubt due to the fact that midwives in Germany had the backing of a decent German medical institution, and my mother did not have to be born immaculately in a stable among horses and goats. Or Heidschnucken.
Celle is the gateway to a wonderful area in North Germany known as the Lüneburg Heath (Lüneburger
Being born puny, my mother suffered lots of childhood maladies. At one point she was taken to a shepherd on the heath. He pulled out one of her hairs, analyzed it, and apparently cured what ailed her. Everybody with any knowledge of that event is long gone, so the questions that pop into my mind now as an adult with new questions about my origins with every passing day, must remain unanswered. What a pity children are not born with a natural inclination to question their elders while there is still time.
1915 was right plunk in the middle of the First World War. Bertha brought my mother home to live with her parents while Karl, her husband, was off at the front. I never got the whole story, because we didn’t burden children with tales of character weakness of their parents when I was small, but somehow Karl never came home. He was reputed at one point to have run off with a French mistress, but that is of no significance. What is, is the fact that they divorced and Karl went on to marry again and produce two boys, Kurt and Willi.
I met Willi and have discussed the fact elsewhere that he became a fairly illustrious trainer of dressage horses. However bitter the divorce might have been, my grandmother still had contact with Karl, and urged me to meet my Uncle Willi in 1961, while I was studying in Munich. Willi had four children. One of them, Katharina, still runs his stables in Warendorf, and another, Daniela, and I have become fast friends.
One of the advantages of living long is that you can see how very arbitrary your life’s path is. Bertha gave her daughter to her sister to raise. That sister, Johanne, and her husband, Paul, adopted her and brought her to Torrington, Connecticut, apparently with the assistance of a people-mover from Bertha’s mother’s side of the family. Clara married my father, who gave me both a Canadian (Nova Scotian) identity and, by dint of my Connecticut birth, a New England one as well. We were working-class folk, but not of the peasant class who lived their entire lives in one village. I was in Japan when my mother died and stopped off in California to get a suit for the funeral before completing my journey half-way around the world to say good-bye.
I lived many more years apart from my mother, in California, in Japan, and in a Germany which she never got to know. I met a brother she never met, I speak a standard German she never spoke that well (she was raised speaking Low German), and I moved out of the house when I was eighteen, never to return except for very short visits over the years.
For many of those years I felt a great sad distance from my mother. Now that I have outlived her by two decades, my mind wanders often to the science fiction notion of returning across time and getting to know her. I know many sixty-year-olds. They strike me as still young, yet amply old enough to learn from. How much I would enjoy getting to know my mother as an adult, probing her childhood memories for details I failed to collect growing up.
I saw my Grandmother (Großmutter - Bertha) cry only twice. Once was when I was leaving for Europe at the age of twenty. “Don’t cry,” I said to her, “I’ll be back in a year.” “I’m not crying because you’re leaving,” she responded. “I’m crying because of what’s going to happen to you.” She explained to me that she had spent her life in Germany homesick for her family in Connecticut, or in Connecticut homesick for her family in Germany.
The other time I saw her cry she told me she missed her mother. I thought she had a screw loose; her mother had died fifty years before.
But now I understand.
