MOTHERS AND MIRACLES
Deon Fourie arrives in a small German town as a tourist — and encounters his past
WE arrived late on a summery Sunday in the little town of Bad Frankenhausen in the German state of Thuringia.
The town is near Saxe-CoburgGotha, the home of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband. We had visited soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, searching for traces of my German grandfather’s family. However, Hermann and his brothers had left for South Africa in the mid-1880s and in this new Germany, change and renewal were the focus, not ancestor-hunting.
We found a neat room in the little Gasthaus zur Quelle, where somewhere a tenor was practising scales. A flyer in the foyer told us of a Mozart concert in the Unter Kirche that evening. But when asked where the church was, the waiter answered vaguely: “Oh, the other side of town, I don’t know.” Anyway, the concert was about to begin, so we sat down to supper, leaving for the next day a tour of the town, which had recently celebrated its millennium.
Our sole breakfast companion turned out to be the tenor we had heard the night before. He had performed at the Mozart concert — in the church facing the Gasthaus!
Bad Frankenhausen, named for its hot spa, has many tourist attractions. We chose historical sites, beginning on the Kyffhäuser Mountains north of the town. Towering over the town is a giant sandstone monument to the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa or “Red Beard”. Tradition has it that beneath the Kyffhäuser Mountains, Barbarossa, who drowned on his way to the Crusades, sleeps until Germany needs him.
Nearby, a sign led us into a forest glade, where a cosy restaurant stood beside a small enclosure covered in fragments of carved stone. The restaurateur said it was once a Jewish cemetery, destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.
We drank our coffee in silence and returned to town. There, we visited the town’s museum, photographed medieval buildings and tried to identify the school my mother had attended during the latter part of the Anglo-Boer War, when, for safety, her father sent his Boer wife and children to his parents.
On the church facing our hotel, we saw a banner advertising its 250th anniversary and an exhibition. Felicia said: “Let’s visit the church.” We wandered in and while Felicia looked at paintings, I walked the length of the nave.
As I looked at a stained-glass window, a voice asked whether I was looking for anything special. I turned to find a smiling young woman at my elbow. In halting school German, I said: “I think my mother sang here.”
As a 13-year-old, my mother, Jeannette, had joined the church choir and become a fairly accomplished soloist.
“And her family?” asked the woman. When I told her, she said: “Oh, I have a file about them.”
With visions of recent East Germany, I asked, “Why?”
She laughed. “As Church secretary, I am the archivist. While I fetch the file, have some coffee and bee-sting cake.”
Within 10 minutes, she was back with a brown file. The first sentences made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It was a tale my mother had often repeated about an ancestor who was in Frankenhausen during some war, she could not recall when, who was granted a portion of land and two stags as a reward for services.
I immediately realised that the ancestor was my mother’s greatgrandfather. From Posen in Prussia, he had arrived in 1813 with the Allied armies that defeated Napoleon at nearby Leipzig. Knowing Swedish and Russian, he had interpreted when terms were discussed by the victors, Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden.
The document went on to detail my great-great-grandfather’s establishing a linen business, his marriage and his family in Frankenhausen and continued to my grandfather’s generation. We struggled with the language but, sentence by sentence ,the story of my mother’s family unfolded.
In many years of travelling, I had been awed by the Houses of Parliament in London, by the Louvre, Napoleon’s tomb, the French Army Museum, the Victoria Falls … But nothing compares with that rainy afternoon in Frankenhausen, where I came face to face with my family history.
I came home with a photocopy of the entire file, assembled during the Communist times by the town’s archivist, who researched families there. But for him — and Felicia’s interest in the church — I would have been much the poorer.
I arrived as a tourist, but I left a part of me in Frankenhausen.
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