Category Archives: Europe

by Joel | 4 February 2008 · 5:22 am

Calculating the Cigarette Value of Books

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 224-225:

The black market epitomized everything that Vichy disapproved of. It went with selfishness, materialism and indifference to the authority of the state. Denunciations under Vichy often concerned black-market matters, and were couched in interesting terms. Someone describing himself as ‘an average Frenchman who suffers from restrictions’ blamed the black market on Jews. In the south-east, black markets were often blamed on the Italians.

In practice, most Petainists used the black market. Sometimes Petainist officials were blatant practitioners: the Graeve family in Chinon trafficked wine at a time when both the son and daughter of the family held positions in the Vichy administration. Vichy bodies and local authorities often used unofficial channels in order to get food for their own employees. The Vichy government itself came to recognize that suppressing the black market entirely was not possible or desirable. A law of March 1942 regulating the black market specifically excluded transactions to cover personal needs, and a circular to prefects in the summer of 1942 talked of ‘struggle against all traffickers of the black market but complete freedom left for family supply’. Policemen turned a blind eye to small quantities of illicit goods. Even the Church, normally marked by intense moralism and asceticism, did not wholly condemn the black market. In December 1941 Cardinal Suhard stressed the need to obey the law but then distinguished disobedience from ‘the modest extra-legal transactions by which the extras judged necessary are procured and which are justified both by their small scale and the necessities of life’.

Black markets were not, in any case, wholly black. Transactions did not always involve strangers selling goods in a completely free market for cash, and they did not always involve people who thought of themselves as criminals. Money did not necessarily mean much during the occupation. At a time of rapid inflation, everyone preferred goods with a more tangible value. The coupons that gave particular companies the right to buy certain raw materials were traded, illegally. The barter that might normally have operated at village level became institutionalized. One firm advertised a swap of typewriters for bicycles. Cigarettes acquired particular importance, both because nicotine-starved smokers wanted them and because they provided a convenient unit of exchange. Both Micheline Bood, the Parisian schoolgirl, and Charles Rist took a touching interest in the cigarette value of books. A peasant boy in the Corrèze bought an hour of violin lessons for a pound of butter.

Sounds a bit like Romania during the 1980s, where the black market Cigarette Standard was Kents, for some reason I have never discovered. An unopened package of Kents was a serious offer, although some medical procedures might require a whole carton—or a bottle of imported Scotch.

UPDATE: During our year in Romania in 1983-84, I always kept a carton or two on hand in case the need arose. I only dispensed a full package on four occasions: two to the embassy driver who dealt with the customs officials when we first arrived (with lots of luggage); one to help friends book a room in a big, empty hotel in Brasov, where we attended a wedding; and one to a band of gypsies who serenaded my wife and me with naughty lyrics that I made an effort to translate in an otherwise empty venison restaurant in snowbound Poiana Brasov.

My wife also gave a carton of Kents to a neighbor lady who needed a medical procedure. (It may have been an illegal tubal ligation, or even an abortion, but we didn’t dare to ask. In a totalitarian society, it’s best not to.) Her obsessive homeopathic health-nut of a husband later brought the carton back and scolded us for encouraging the evil habit of smoking. So my wife later gave his wife a bottle of Scotch instead. I assume it went to a doctor without the husband finding out about it.

I kept one carton in reserve in case we had any trouble crossing the Bulgarian border by train on our final departure. After we had crossed without incident, I shocked a team of Romanian boys and their coaches who were on their way to a football match in Sofia by donating my carton of Kents to them. After they recovered, the coaches came back to our compartment to tell me they had never been so surprised in their lives. I told them that Romania had given me a surprise or two as well, and wished them luck in their match. They just nodded knowingly, thanked us again, and returned to their team.

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Filed under economics, France, Germany, Romania, war

by Joel | 3 February 2008 · 7:17 pm

Controlling Access to Food and Warmth

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 216-217:

Shortages created a new sort of society. German power depended partly on the ability to control access to food and warmth…. People gathered wherever they could conserve energy, keep warm and, perhaps, get food. Cinemas were popular, though young men who might attract unwelcome interest from the Germans increasingly avoided such places. Library membership doubled. Many people simply stayed at home: Colette said that the best way to survive the occupation was to ‘stay in bed’. Bourgeois Parisian families abandoned parts of their apartments to gather in a single heated room. Georges Simenon characteristically saw commercial possibilities opening up as people huddled together on cold, dark nights. He asked Gallimard to produce an advertisement that read: ‘This winter you will reread all the Simenons.’

Urban consumers, especially women and children, spent hours queuing. On 13 December 1940 Liliane Schroeder queued for twenty minutes to buy some Brussels sprouts and then for another half an hour to buy apiece of black pudding. In the provinces, people started queuing at three in the morning; in Paris, some concierges rented out places in their courtyards or doorways during the night-time curfew to those who wished to be the first to queue outside shops in the morning. It could be soul-destroying to wait for hours in the bitterly cold winters of 1940-41 and 1941-2 only to find that there was nothing left in the shop. In 1943 Marcel Ayme published a story entitled ‘En attendant’. It is set during ‘the war of 1939-1977’.

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Filed under energy, France, Germany, war

by Joel | 2 February 2008 · 9:44 am

French Attitudes Toward Their Boche Occupiers

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 131-132:

French people tended to think of a German rather than Nazi occupation. Nazism may have dictated overall German policy towards France and it obviously had a dramatic impact on the lives of some people in France, especially Jews, Communists and Resistance activists, but relatively few French people had much contact with specifically Nazi agencies. For most, the quintessential German was a middle-aged corporal in a non-combat unit rather than a Gestapo man. The French often thought about the occupation in terms devised to deal with the First World War. Anciens combattants, and especially men who had been prisoners of war in Germany, sometimes mediated between the Germans and the French. The term ‘boche’, which had come into use during the First World War, was used by French people, even those who supported Vichy or collaboration, to describe the occupiers. The fact that French people did not experience or appreciate the most radical aspects of Nazism does not, however, mean that their experience of the Germans was benign. ‘Boche’ may sound a rather twee term in retrospect, but the Germans repeatedly punished French people who used it. In Brittany, a typist hired by the Germans spent much of her time reading plays to be performed in village halls and crossing out the word ‘boche’.

Public memories of the occupation in France have tended to concentrate on spectacular acts of large-scale violence: the massacre of civilians at Oradour in 1944 or the deportation of Parisian Jews during the summer of 1942. Sometimes attention devoted to such incidents can give the impression that German behaviour towards French people who did not belong to particularly victimized groups was generally ‘correct’ or that French and Germans cohabited with relative amicability. It is true that there were occasions when French and Germans co-operated in the pursuit of simple mutual interest, but it is also true that even in relatively quiet periods the French often experienced the occupation as a time of low-level humiliation and the constant threat of violence.

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by Joel | 30 January 2008 · 10:22 pm

Not the Orient Express

On our first trip to Romania in 1983, we booked our reservations with an agency who knew what they were doing—Thomas Cook, I believe it was. We took the Orient Express from Paris to Bucharest. This time we bought our Eurail passes online and booked our reservations as we went along. Being well into middle age, we bought the First Class Saver passes (for groups of two or more people) good for 15 consecutive days of travel, which we planned for the first two weeks of January.

Our first mistake was buying the passes from eurail.com, which offers no help with reservations after the sale. Other rail pass vendors, like railpass.com or eurail-pass.com or raileurope.com, will book reservations for people who bought passes from them. Commercial travel agents are not very interested in Eurail pass bookings for just a fraction of the small reservation fee; and national railway systems, even within the EU, may work well with their immediate neighbors, but not with national systems farther down the line.

Romania is pretty far down the line from France. A helpful agent of the SNCF in Strasbourg booked us to Vienna (via Stuttgart and Munich), and gave us the timetable of an overnight train from Vienna to Bucharest, but could not reserve us a sleeping car. (The current Orient Express only runs between Strasbourg and Vienna.) The DB office in Munich had no problem booking us through to Bucharest. The DB certainly impressed us as the gold standard for train travel on both sides of the Atlantic, while Lufthansa similarly impressed us as the gold standard for air travel across the Atlantic, especially after they upgraded us to business class for our Xmas Day flight from Boston to Frankfurt (for no good reason, unless we looked like Herr Santa und Frau Klaus).

On the 1983 Orient Express, we stayed in the same Wagon-Lit compartment both nights (between France and Germany and between Hungary and Romania), but we noticed a degradation in quality at each change of dining car. We enjoyed an excellent German breakfast in a spotless dining car as we passed through Bavaria the first morning. That evening we enjoyed a pleasant dinner in a clean Hungarian dining car as we headed for Budapest. The dingy Romanian dining car at breakfast was full of smokers drinking ersatzkaffee and plum brandy.

Crossing the Hungarian border at Hegyeshalom around sunset the night before was memorable, but not nearly as traumatic as our wee-hour awakening at Curtici on the Romanian border, where we were asked to open our luggage and tell the officials if we had any bibles, dynamite, or typewriters—a dangerously subversive trinity. The only bright spot was that it was my first real chance to use Romanian since finishing Army language school in 1970.

This year our trauma—and long-awaited dormant language revival—began much earlier, as we tried to find car 419 in the train awaiting us across the platform when we arrived at Wien Westbahnhof. We found car 420, then backtracked to 418, then 417, then forward again, then even farther back to—lo and behold—car 419. This was but the first indication that our train was not the Orient Express, but the Dacia Express (D 345). The second, third, and fourth indications were that the car attendant spoke Romanian, that he had to evict a hopeful squatter from our 2-berth compartment, and that the car was labeled vagon de dormit as well as wagon-lit and carrozza letto.

When I went looking for a dining car after the train got underway, I noticed that several of the outside doors were chained shut, and that chains also hung at the ready from doors separating first and second class. I quickly retreated to our compartment, where the car attendant soon stopped by to explain that we should use the extra deadbolt lock to keep out the regular midnight burglars that plagued the border area between Hungary and Romania, and that we were to make sure that anyone who knocked on the door was a real border control official before opening up. Fortunately, the door had a peephole, and we had enough snacks and drinking water to last until our arrival.

The Romanian border crossing was far more pleasant this time around, though still at an ungodly hour. When I responded in Romanian, the customs official asked where I learned it. I said I learned it in the US Army the first time around, then revived it later during a year a the University of Bucharest. He suggested that perhaps I had been a democracy activist. I protested that I had never done anything very useful with the language.

In the early hours before dawn we could see the highway from our train window. We saw a good bit of truck traffic and well-lit gas stations at regular intervals—quite a change from the Romania we remembered—but the Transylvanian countryside looked a lot bleaker after sunrise, with poorly built, poorly heated houses in silent, sleepy, snow-covered towns with many abandoned factories between the occasional clusters of plants newly built by foreign investors and fed by much more robust powerlines than we saw in the rest of the countryside. (Further observations about changes we noticed will have to wait for another blogpost.)

For our return trip from Bucharest to Vienna on Saturday, we boarded the same overnight train (D 346) after stocking up on food and drink at a grocery store in the station. And we got the same lecture about securing our compartment door overnight, this time from a new car attendant with a new trick that employed a coat hanger. He also explained that the teams of burglars only infested the train between Curtici, where it stopped for Romanian customs, and Békéscsaba, the first station on the Hungarian side of the border.

We survived the border crossing unmolested, but also unmoved. We arrived about 2 a.m. and spent most of 3 hours at a standstill, far more than the time required for the Romanian and Hungarian passport control. We finally got underway about the time we should have been arriving at Budapest Keleti, where we had missed the train that was supposed to pull our cars to Vienna. Instead of pulling in to the platform, we spent two hours waiting at a siding, periodically trundling to and fro in front of Budapest’s new Arena Plaza.

Our car attendant hibernated while the Keleti station loudspeaker blared forth long announcements, only in Hungarian, to otherwise empty platforms. I couldn’t find a Hungarian speaker among the Romanian passengers to translate. So I finally walked up the tracks to the engine and asked the driver if he spoke Romanian, German, or English. He spoke just enough German to tell me that we would not be leaving until after 9 a.m., about the time we had been scheduled to arrive at Vienna and make our connection back to Strasbourg. The engine had had some kind of trouble.

We finally made it into Wien Westbahnhof around noon on a sleepy Sunday. When we informed the solitary, unsympathetic clerk at the ÖBB travel desk that our train from Bucharest had missed its connection, she was not at all surprised. She said we would have to contact the DB, which sold us the reservations, to get any refund, and she gave us the choice of spending the next 20 hours changing trains and waiting in various German stations at ungodly hours, or boarding the real Orient Express for another overnight trip into Strasbourg. We chose the latter.

How many people would resent having to spend 8 hours in Vienna on a Sunday? Well, we did. Almost every shop and restaurant on Mariahilfer Straße was closed. We wanted to treat ourselves to a nice long lunch, but nothing was open. The Russian Vladimir restaurant was closed until five, but we finally found a Greek restaurant, Mythos, run by an Egyptian couple with a cute 2-year-old boy who came around to our table to play with his retractable tape measure, whose housing functioned as a self-propelled vehicle. Thank goodness, once again, for the Mediterranean work ethic in Northern climes.

The rest of the way back was uneventful. Service on the Orient Express was excellent, door locks were unnecessary, and our couchette mate was an Algerian man who spoke no German, but decent English and much better French than I did. It was nice to get back to Strasbourg, even though we had a rather long wait in Karlsruhe, to be unhooked from the cars headed for Amsterdam, and again in Kehl, to be hauled across the Rhine from Germany to France.

I would love to make another trip to Romania, but not by overnight train.

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Filed under France, Germany, Hungary, Romania, travel

by Joel | 27 January 2008 · 9:45 pm

How the Caged Historian Wrote

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), p. 205:

Books were written in captivity. Fernand Braudel’s thesis on The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II (which was to revolutionize historiography when it was published) was written in Oflag XIIB in Mayence and then at Oflag XC at Lübeck. Braudel sent chapters, handwritten in school exercise books, to his supervisor Lucien Febvre in Paris. It is interesting to speculate on how captivity marked this work. Was Braudel’s approach influenced by the access to German history books, brought to him from the town library by a sympathetic German guard? Was it the chance to escape from academic routines that turned Braudel away from what had previously been orthodox historical writing? Was Braudel’s determinism and emphasis on the longue durée characteristic of one who was leading a life of enforced passivity controlled by inscrutable forces? Does the vividness with which the material richness of the Mediterranean is evoked owe something to the deprivations of a German winter?

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by Joel | 24 January 2008 · 5:06 pm

Faking Flemish to Freedom, 1941

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 192-193:

The complexity of the mechanisms by which men were released [from German captivity], and the extent to which those mechanisms could be manipulated, was illustrated by the release of Flamands in February 1941. In extending the definition of Flamands to those from northern France who spoke Flemish, the Germans created a new category that did not bear any relation to prisoners’ existing bureaucratic status. Men had to prove that they spoke Flemish by appearing in front of a ‘linguistic commission’, which contained a Belgian civilian (presumably one who was politically sympathetic to the Germans) and a German officer. This opened opportunities for enterprising prisoners. Jean Legros, a French speaker from Belgium, was able to learn enough Flemish to pass the test. His brother, who spoke no Flemish, came into the room immediately after him and Legros got his release simply by saying, ‘That is my brother.’ Legros also gave language lessons to prisoners from northern France who hoped to secure their release in the same way. At the other extreme was a Flemish-speaking prisoner from northern France in a work Kommando of Stalag XVIIB in Austria. The prisoner in question was illiterate and spoke poor French. It is easy to see why he had not been repatriated. Isolated in a work Kommando and unable to read circulars or to understand much of what his comrades said, he probably had no means of knowing about the possibility of repatriation.

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by Joel | 23 January 2008 · 9:30 pm

Credits for German Reunification

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 57-59:

For all the discontinuities of West German policy since 1949, one can but admire the grand continuity in which all chancellors from Adenauer to Kohl, all foreign ministers, all federal governments over forty years, now this way, now that, now in the West, now in the East, pursued the cause of German liberation.

Historians will argue whether Adenauer’s integration into the West or Brandt’s Ostpolitik contributed more to the success of the past year. There is much to be said for the claim that the East Central European year of wonders, 1989, was a late triumph of Adenauer’s “magnet theory”—the idea that the attraction of a free and prosperous West Germany embedded in a free and prosperous Western Europe would sooner or later draw the unfree and impoverished East Germany irresistibly toward it. But could the magnet have exerted its full attractive force if the blocking Iron Curtain had not first been drawn back by the Ostpolitik, which Willy Brandt launched in the late 1960s? And it was not Bonn’s Western but rather its Eastern ties—above all, those to Moscow—that directly permitted the transformation of an East German movement for freedom into an all-German state of unity.

Yet this East German rising for freedom was not contemplated in Bonn’s policy toward East Germany. Those in the GDR who contributed most to Germany’s peaceful October revolution—the tiny minority of human- and civil-rights campaigners—had benefited least from the Federal Republic’s governmental policy toward the GDR. Bonn politicians now ritually celebrate the “peaceful revolution.” Two years ago [= 1988], most of those same politicians would have described it as “dangerous destabilization.” Yes, it was a “dangerous destabilization” that made German unification possible. Without the brave minority that faced down armed police on the streets of Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin, the ultimate goal of Bonn’s policy would never have been achieved—Gorbachev or no Gorbachev….

The pioneers of social emancipation and democratization in the GDR were then overtaken rapidly by those who wanted to have done with the GDR altogether. By this time, the two parallel sets of negotiations for unification—the “internal” ones, between the two German states (“1+1”), and the “external” ones, between the two German states and the four post-1945 occupying powers (“2+4”)—were already underway.

To describe these seven hectic months of intricate negotiation would require not an essay but a compendium. The 31 August treaty on unification between the two German states is a book in itself—243 pages of small print in the official government bulletin. Formally, they were “1+1” and “2+4” negotiations. In practice, they were “1+1/4” and “1+1+1” negotiations. The first and last freely elected East Berlin government was not an equal partner in the German–German talks. The Bonn government basically set the terms of the internal unification, its officials drafting treaties that bore a remarkable resemblance to the finished product. Many East German politicians and intellectuals in both halves of Germany were understandably miffed by this procedure. “Anschluss,” said some. Yet was it not for this that the majority of the people had voted in March? And, despite widespread economic distress, the majority expressed its basic satisfaction with the result, on 14 October [1990], in the first elections for the five reconstituted Lander of the former GDR. Chancellor Kohl’s CDU was the overall winner everywhere except in Brandenburg (where the Social Democrats’ leader is a prominent Protestant churchman} and secured more than 45 percent of the vote in Saxony and Thuringia.

The external negotiation was basically between the Federal Republic, the Soviet Union, and the United States, in that order. The Bonn government makes no secret of the fact that it was the United States, rather than France or Britain, that was its crucial Western supporter in the whole process. Washington was not just self-evidently more important in talks with Moscow but also more unreservedly supportive than London or Paris—a fact that has done some damage to the Franco-German “axis.” Yet the central negotiation was that between Bonn and Moscow. In Moscow in February, Chancellor Kohl secured Gorbachev’s assent to unification in one state. In Stavropol in July, he secured Gorbachev’s assent to the full sovereignty of the united state, including its membership in NATO—although a NATO redefined by the “London Declaration” a few days before. Soviet troops would leave Germany by 1994.

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by Joel | 22 January 2008 · 6:20 pm

East Germany, 1990: “No experiments!”

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), p. 16:

In [East Germany] at large, it seems to me, the real motto of the campaign—though no one, to my knowledge, actually used it—was Adenauer’s slogan from the 1950s: “No Experiments!” They had experienced enough experiments to last several lifetimes: Hitler’s experiments, Stalin’s experiments, Ulbricht’s and Honecker’s. They’d had quite enough of being guinea pigs. There were certainly aspects of West German life and attitudes about which they had reservations. But so far as the economic, political, and legal system was concerned, West Germany’s was the best one going. Arguably, it was the best system Germany had ever had. Now they wanted to have it as fast as possible: first the deutsche mark of course, but not just the deutsche mark, also the free press, the rule of law, local self-government, and federal democracy. In many ways, their priorities also recalled those of the 1950s in West Germany—starting with the passionate drive to rebuild for private happiness from the ruins. Understandably, the enthusiasm was greatest among the young, while the middle-aged were more worried about their abilities to adapt, and the old were concerned about the conversion rate and the values of their pensions. Indeed, the old might remark wearily, like the grandmother in Edgar Reitz’s film Heimat, “Yet another new era!”

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by Joel | 22 January 2008 · 5:45 am

The Vichy Milice

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 124-125:

Vichy was a neutral government and, except for some confrontations in Algeria, Madagascar and Syria, regular members of the French army did not fight against the Allies during the Second World War. However, some at Vichy did sponsor new agencies, the members of which came to fight alongside the Germans. Some at Vichy also sponsored increasingly vigorous forms of policing, directed especially against the Resistance….

In January 1943 Laval entrusted Darnand with the creation of another body, the Milice. The most important elements of the Milice were the militarized francs gardes, some of which were paid professionals. The Milice marked yet another step away from the Légion, in which Darnand had originated. The Milice, unlike the Legion, explicitly excluded Jews from membership and its members were younger than the legionnaires, having an average age of thirty against the Legion’s average age of fifty. The Milice also drew its recruits from cities to a greater extent than the Legion—the countryside was becoming a dangerous place for anyone likely to be a Resistance target.

The Milice became more and more closely associated with the Germans. Darnand himself was commissioned into the SS in August 1943, and in November of that year the Germans began to give the Milice weapons. This association, however, never meant that Darnand entirely abandoned his anti-German nationalism, and even just before joining the SS he seems to have talked about the possibility of supporting the Free French.

There were about 35,000 miliciens by the liberation, of whom around a quarter were in the francs gardes. Some miliciens, such as Henry Charbonneau or Christian de la Maziere, were upper-class young men driven by anti-Communism and the search for adventure. Increasingly, however, recruits to the Milice had more obviously material motives. Many were young, urban and poor. Some wished to secure exemption from labour service in Germany. Others were attracted by the relatively high salaries paid to full-time miliciens (a member of the francs gardes could earn 2,500 francs per month, at a time when a factory worker earned 1,300 francs) or by the opportunities for pillage. Quite large numbers of miliciens were regarded as suffering from mental instability.

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by Joel | 21 January 2008 · 2:17 pm

Pfalzgrafenweiler, Ancestral Truckstop

On the last Sunday in 2007, the Outliers made a ~~pilgrimage~~ desultory excursion to Pfalzgrafenweiler, in Baden-Württemberg, whence Mrs. Outlier’s paternal ancestors emigrated via Odessa to Russia (now Ukraine) around 1800, then later to the Dakotas around 1890. This devoutly religious and devoutly rural line can be traced back to Pfalzgrafenweiler from as early as the 1500s.

Pfalzgrafenweiler itself goes back at least to Count Palatine (= Pfalzgraf) Hugo II of Tübingen, whose Pfalzgrafenburg there was stormed and razed by a Welf (= Guelph) Duke (= Herzog) of Bavaria in the 12th century. There is also a Herzogweiler within the Weiler Wald portion of the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), which is now a getaway spot for the lumpen as well as the grafen.

Weiler can nowadays be translated ‘hamlet’, something smaller than a Dorf ‘village’, and there are many such placenames stretching far out along both sides of the Rhine, from Basel to Cologne. The equivalent in Alsace and Lorraine is usually spelled -willer (as in Bischwiller, Dettwiller, Ingwiller) or -viller (as in Abreschviller, Guntzviller, Hartzviller). The Alemannisch equivalent is -wiiler. Although related to villa, ville, and village, the term is an early Germanic borrowing from Romance wilare or villare, indicating farmsteads attached to a villa, not the villa itself.

On Saturday, we had made a trip across the Rhine to the Deutsche Bahn (DB) travel desk in Kehl to find out how to get there and buy tickets. (We had not yet initiated our 15-day Eurail Passes.) Despite being just over the border from Strasbourg, France, the DB rep forced his customers to deal with him only in German or English. I chose English after watching the poor Francophone ahead of me struggle along in German no better than mine.

Pfalzgrafenweiler is a bit off the trunklines of public transport. We had to make four transfers to get there. We took the Strasbourg city tram from Langstross/Grand’Rue to the southwest terminus at Aristide Briand, then the old city bus across the river to Kehl. There we caught a tiny Ortenau S-Bahn (OSB) shuttle south over flat farmland to Offenburg, where we caught another tiny OSB shuttle up the scenic hillsides of the Schwarzwald to Freudenstadt, where we hopped a shuttle bus to our final destination. (The DB ticket was good for the bus, too.)

The Kehl to Offenburg leg reminded us a bit of the JR Ryomo line we used to take between Oyama and Ashikaga along the foothills north of Tokyo, while the Offenburg to Freudenstadt leg reminded us more of the scenic Keikoku line running up the upper Watarase River gorge from Kiryu toward Nikko.

Along the way to Freudenstadt (‘Happyville’), the train passed a number of stations whose names ended in -ach (not -bach ‘brook’, but related), meaning ‘watercourse’ and ultimately cognate with Latin acqua: Biberach ‘Beaver Run’, Steinach ‘Stone Run’, Haslach ‘Hare Run’, Hausach ‘House Run’, Wolfach ‘Wolf Run’, Schiltach ‘Shield Run’—but, alas, no Bullach. In the local Alemannisch dialects, the final consonant is lost and the vowel reduced, thus: Biebere, Steine, Hasle, Huuse, Wolfe.

The even more common placenames suffixed with -heim (in High German) suffer a similar fate in Ortenau Alemannisch, where Griesheim = Griese, Meißenheim = Mißne, Ringsheim = Ringse/Rinse; and in Alsatian, where Blotzheim = Blotza, Merxheim = Märxa, Sentheim = Santa. You can see why Baden-Württembergers claim Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch. ‘We can handle everything. Except High German.’

Freudenstadt is roughly comparable in size to Aberdeen, SD, but is even sleepier on a Sunday. The tiny railway station is on the edge of town and lacks even a public toilet. When I followed the arrows on a wall map, I ended up at a port-a-potty in an isolated (and unheated) area nearly 100m from the station. (At least I didn’t have it as bad as Santa did in Pfalzgrafenweiler, where he had to bathe outdoors.) To its credit, Freudenstadt station had a gift shop full of snacks, souvenirs, magazines, travel info about far corners of the globe, and a very impressive collection of cigars for sale in a specially humidified room.

We had left my brother’s house in Strasbourg a little before 9 a.m. The bus dropped us at the Pfalzgrafenweiler Rathaus at 2 p.m., just as the town went into its deepest Sunday siesta. The local pizza delivery shop had finished its last run. Even the local kebap shop had closed.

We walked the silent, empty streets meandering uphill toward the highway, where we found EverRast, a combination truck stop, restaurant, and internet café that was just about the only happening place in town on a Sunday afternoon. We ordered German-style salad plates and sampled the local Alpirsbacher Klosterbräu. The friendly waitress looked African American and switched easily between English and German.

It was already getting dark by 4 p.m. as we meandered back toward the bus stop for the 5 p.m. bus. We had just enough time to snap a few more photos, then stop in at Thome’s Schwanen hotel and restaurant, which was just opening for the Sunday dinner crowd. We asked the gracious hostess for a telephone book and snapped a photo of the handful of listings for Mrs. Outlier’s family name. Most of the telephone numbers had only 4 digits.

It was too dark to enjoy the beautiful scenery on the way back, but we had just enough layover time in Offenburg to explore a few of its cold, empty streets. The only warm, bright spot near the station was the Turkish-run Imbiss Stube. Thank goodness for the Mediterranean work ethic. We ordered hot lentil soups and hot spiked teas. The menu offered not just kebap, pizza, and pide, but also Seele (calzone), which (misleadingly or not) belatedly made the connection for me between Italian calzone and Romanian încălţăminte ‘footwear’.

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