Well I didn’t get to see much of this town because we arrived late after having driven across the country. We had dinner in a hotel, too bougie to relate to, and went to bed that evening.

The next morning we woke and took a walk through the Catholic festival happening in the city and went into the Starbucks we had been at the night before to find a place to stay for the night, our first glimpse back into America as seen through the culture of Germany, had breakfast, discussed dinner plans with my host family to take place sometime that evening in Berlin to celebrate our time together as well as my Mother’s Birthday.

After a short excursion for people watching in the old city center and we were on the road again reading Buck-Morss on Adorno out loud to each other and discussing. A long sort of interview and conversation recorded from that time in the car. More discussions of family and life, the choices we’ve made and how to look back on them. Slowly making our own history together that will be there for the future generations to listen to and learn from in a similar way that I have been working through the history provided to me in an unbroken, if a little reduced and choppy, line of story. All this in a town I have no recorded documents other than this, no photos other than my few memories slowly fading away, little life left in that history that is continually losing important artifacts.

Today we took a drive up the Rhine and back down the other side of the valley, collecting church and castle sightings along the way. Many stories and memories for my mother and many thoughts of bringing my partner Ellie along this path someday.

I don’t know the names of many of these little castles and towns we blew through driving with our little blue cruiser, but one place in particular we stopped was a ruin called Rheinfels Castle.

It has an interesting history that and was finally destroyed in 1794 by the French revolutionary army.

I put myself in the mindset of Ludwig Tieck’s “Der Runenberg” and found myself rounding corners expecting to find a woman with a foreboding gift for me, although I feel as though I have already received this gift from the dark mother of Germany and I am unsure what to do with it.

The castle was built to withstand an attach and so had fortifications to be completely independant of the surrounding land while having the ability to house a large portion of the population. The castle was home to a mason with access to their own stone mine, a blacksmith, an apothecary, gardens, a well, a massive cellar for food storage, a butchery, a bakery, and I can only assume they had a wizard somewhere in the mix. This is an example of the carpenters tools, one of the trades that were present when this castle was up and running.

A few church stops later and we arrived in the small town of Bcharach to find ourselves driving down alleyways just as wide as the car. The entire length of the city is maybe six city blocks. I’m excited to see what comes out of this little town tonight.

Another day another road. I am truly blessed to be out here on the road with my Mother. It has been hard enough to be traveling together working through our differences, but it has been fruitful in many ways because of this.

When we left the hotel the morning after my visit with Jochen I had hardly slept a couple hours. For whatever reason I can’t seem to get my sleep schedule on track. It is all over the place. Needless to say I was a bit tired and cranky. We made it to Lorch, a quaint little town on the Rhine river, and found our hotel down the main strip. Basically the only two lane road in the town. We had a great dinner at this little wine tasting restaurant run by a Czech family serving mainly German dishes. The food was simple and great.

We then wandered down to the poster street that fronts the town. Along the way I was struck at the way they make these slate roofs seem like scales. It’s as if you are walking through a hillside of dragons with their giant Mothers coiled at the pinnacle of these towns in castle form.

We found a little pub called The Troubadour and went inside to see where the locals congregate. The man running the place has played as a troubadour in the surrounding castles for thirty five years. There were so many instruments it was hard to even find a place to sit even though there were only four patrons in the place.

It was cozy and the owner was very welcoming. With a glass of dunkel beer and a glass of the house made dry Riesling we listened to this man play the piano very fluently and softly. His friends chided him at the bar for playing swanky songs. My theory was it was a ploy to woo my mother, the only woman in the bar. I only wished I had my partner there with me to sing songs and and woo the locals just the same. Many thoughts of the bar scene in Herzog’s “Heart of Glass” came to mind and I only wished I had my notes from the film as a companion to the experience.

We went home, got in bed, and got some dream stuffed sleep.

This morning we were off on a hike climbing the valley. Cue pictures.

This was the last possible moment on this trip that this could happen.

We flew down the autobahn today with our traveling routine now getting finely tuned and most things working in proper order. We came down to the city of Frankfurt, unable to see the Rhine as we would have liked, all in order to see the man who played the music that was a part of my fall quarter Of Blood & Beauty final project. This was a big part of why I wanted to come to Germany. This one moment to see a friend and to say thank you one more time for the beautiful music that has been like a North Star along these last three years apart.

I got a chance to tell him what the Camino meant for me and has continued to mean for me, what I have released and what I have tried to embody in transition away from that shedding of skin. It was such a joy to be able to relate back to him that I have continued to carry his music with me wherever I go and whenever there is a piano I play this song of his. He will continue to be a friend of my heart and soul looking forward.

Although our time was short it is a small miracle it happened at all because of our lack of communication, or disorganized communication, and our constantly missing each other when the moment came up. For instance, he wanted to surprise me by showing up in Berlin, but alas I was already three days on my trip to find my ancestral lands. Now he has come five hours from Berlin to be with me here and then on to Karlsruhe for a twelve hour workday tomorrow.

Again, as on the beach of Finesterre, we shared moments of deep conversation discussing a philosophy of how we appreciate being in the world. To experience the joys of the theory I have come to understand in my coursework through the lease of the practical reality we are a part of in all moments, both physical and cerebral. I was also able to share with him my own recording of the song entitled El Camino that he composed and I have since learnt on the piano. I shared with him of my own theoretical journey this year with my coursework and showed him the piece I made inspired by his music and our time on the beach. (as seen here in the image below) he told me to share with him the paper I have written alongside this work.

This is a photo of Camilio(another friend of Jochen’s that has been traveling with him), my Mother, and Jochen sitting on a ship bar on the river Main.

I cannot capture what this has meant to me in words and if I could I would share with you his music. (You can find it for yourself on Spotify or Soundcloud under the name Jochen Bredel) I gave him a gift I brought for him, my final cedar smudge made with Ellery Sloane-Barton on the hills overlooking Olympia and the mountains surrounding it. What a treasure this is to be on this road. Buen Camino!

About forty minutes drive north of Düsseldorf there is a small town called Mülheim. This town has no significance to me other than it houses two of our friends from our walk on the Camino de Santiago. It has been three years since any of us have seen each other with very little communication between. Their house sits on a little alleyway down a side street facing into a little wild area. It is wonderfully modern rustic that David and Lisa both helped in constructing with David’s father who lives on the floor bellow them.

This is where things start to get interesting. When we came into the driveway there were a couple men working on gutting a car and an older couple working in the garden, my first thought was, “it’s so nice to see people casually working outside on such a beautiful day just getting something done together.” We poked our heads into the door marked Effelsberg. Before we could even announce our arrival the old woman from the Eden came up to us asking my Mother if she was Lois, to which I thought, “oh, how nice of David and Lisa to tell their neighbors we were to arrive today.” Turns out this kind woman is David’s Mother and the man is his Father. Later we also realized that one of the men working on the car, who lives in another part of the housing complex, is David’s brother who lives with his sister in law and their three children. David’s sister and his other brother live here as well. They call this Mehrgeneration, a concept I know is popular in Spain and I’m sure other countries, but David claims is very unusual in Germany. Multiple generations under one roof. It seems to work out very nicely. They see each other when they choose and otherwise have entirely separate spaces. Lisa’s parents live only a few minutes drive away as well. It seems like a fantastical set up. Something I think many Americans might romanticize, but here, in actuality it seems to work quite smoothly.

It is a pleasure to see David and Lisa again and to hear about how their lives are going and what they are up to these days. We went on a bike ride through the valley to a town called Essen/Werden where we had a drink and then went out to Düsseldorf to see watch the Dortmond-Beyern Füßball game and watch the fireworks at the Japanese festival. The ride was beautiful, the beer refreshing, the city of Düsseldorf was uncomfortably crowded, the game disappointing, but the fireworks were some of the best I’ve ever seen. All in all it was an eventful day with many things packed into it.

Today David provided a wonderful breakfast, we started on some laundry, and have been practicing a few songs to play at his congregation later this evening. It has been an interesting way to get a look into the lives of Germans that have been living in the area of my ancestors for quite a few generations. David says at least his grandfather’s parents and maybe even theirs. There is something sad about my disconnection to that ability to be so close to my history, walking down the same streets my ancestors did many generations back, and yet I know that my history has just gone through a different path. I am just now trying to discover this way of living imbedded in my history in similar way to this and this gives me encouragement that maybe it is possible to come in contact with some of these things just by being here. In this way I can only be grateful for this loss I am experiencing in the face of those who still have that connection even if unintentionally so.

As I have written few pieces on the subject and had a few conversations discussing this trip already so I will try to keep this short. We made it from Oldenburg, by way of non-Autobahn road systems, to three towns my ancestors (as reported by Ben Sieve, of the nine Sieve siblings including my grandfather Paul Sieve, in a letter to my Grandmother Sally) came from.

The first we visited was Lohne marked most distinctly by the central Church named St. Gertrud Kirche, it also has the only museum of the three devoted to the industrial history of it and the surrounding towns.

In this museum I spoke the most German I have this entire trip! The conversation was a series of small questions about the museum, an explanation of why I can understand but not speak the language, and the in training Polish woman getting help from her coworkers to give us directions to the park nearby. The park was filled with the sent of rhododendrons, lorrels, dark violet tulips, and the faint wisp of aging lilac flowers caught on the breeze.

The second and smallest of the three is called Brockdorf and is associated with my maternal Great- Grandmother Caroline Kohorst who was born and raised by her family until the age of twelve in a small farm on the southern end of town. We didn’t even stop to breathe the air of this little place as it only took us a matter of a couple minutes to drive through the now suburban developments that comprise it.

Dinklage was the third and final town we stopped in only to have a brief talk with a man in the Rathaus t ask about a place to eat, if there were any museums, and to hear his odd anecdote of a family with the Sieve name that moved out of what was a sizable farm, and is now a housing development, to the state of Minnesota. It seemed as though we had just made it out of Lohne before a rain cloud hit and made it to Dinklage just after. By the time we finished our meal at the Burg Hotel, backed against a beautiful forest, the rain was coming back as a light drizzle that refreshed our journey for the two hour windy trip to Münster. We have only been in the hotel in this town, but I am already excited to see the extent to which the history is still present here.

This museum was as perfectly disturbing as the stories we’ve read by Kafka. It was so well done that from the first moment of climbing the stairs it was overwhelming and I was given a sense of vertigo. All black walls line a black staircase with an image of a wavering cityscape behind a red filter shown on the wall at the top. As I walked up I was enveloped in a red glowing cloud of image and an increasingly greater, single toned soundscape that felt as though it was coming off this red glow. I felt as though I was walking into a pool of stagnant air that reeked of the mind of someone entirely estranged from reality and yet in some backwards perverse way it was a reality just like any other. It was both particularly unusual and somehow familiar simultaneously. The whole experience from here on was slightly nauseating locked in a sort of vertigo I couldn’t shake.

Even though every step of the way was done in such a hurry this was one of my favorite outings from our visit to the Czech Republic. We got a chance to step into many small temples of Jewish faith that had extensive historical significance in this part of Prague. The “Old New Synagogue,”

a synagogue no longer in use except as a museum,

a synagogue being used as a list of names from those who perished in the holocaust from the Czech Republic,

and the graveyard filled with innumerable Jews from Prague.

It amazing to visit these places in one district in a small old town of a particularly condensed city. Lucky to have gotten this tour.