etnobofin

My antediluvian and well-thumbed copy of The Rough Guide to France once told me that Strasbourg was “the one city in eastern France worth a detour”. This week I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself a little with the place, joining the tourist hordes munching on ice-creams in the summer heat.

There’s a lot to like about the city – there are trams and numerous bicycle paths (bicycles rule Strasbourg far more than they do Oxford). And the architecture betrays a history far richer than most cities can claim: the whole of the mediaeval centre-ville is a registered UNESCO world heritage site.

Across the Ill towards the north, the city opens up from twisted old-town alleys into the broad vistas of the “German quarter”. Unlike other French cities, the monumental buildings here are not the result of Napoleonic or Republican fervour. Rather they are the Prussian puffery of the Kaiser in the period (1871-1918) when Strassburg was part of his German Reich. The resemblance to Berlin is deliberate and striking.

Of course today Strasbourg is generally happy to be a French city, but the Germanic influence is always present: bilingual streetsigns, a proliferation of Winstubs selling Meteor, flammekeuche and glasses of Gewürtztraminer and Edelzwicker.

If you arrive early in the morning at the market on Place Broglie, the old people and the stallholders still chatter in the local dialect of Elsaessisch. It’s like hearing whispers from another century.

I didn’t have time to run up to the European parliament district to visit Richard Roger’s European Court of Human Rights building. But Strasbourg is not resting on its architectural laurels: the city recently celebrated the arrival of the TGV line from Paris by encasing the old train station in a giant glass slug. It’s quite a striking renovation.

A brief Google search reveals much history of Strasbourg that remains to be explored: including an institutionalised anti-semitism that lasted in the city until the 1700s, a short-lived soviet government of 1918 (it lasted 11 days), and the the military legacy of Vauban (he was kind of like Halliburton or Lockheed-Martin for Louis XIV).

So much left to see and do here. I’ll have to come back sometime.

*”A short business trip to Strasbourg“, rendered in Elsaessisch. The Hochdeutsch transliteration would be “Eine kleine Geschäftsreise auf Strassburg” or in French “Un petit voyage d’affaires à Strasbourg“.

“England to me is my mother tongue / And what I did when I was young.“
W.H. Auden

“…J’ai souvent eu l’occasion de répondre, à ceux qui me posaient des questions sur mon origine, que mon pays c’est d’abord et avant tout l’enfance, puis, en second lieu, ma langue.“
Daniel Ducharme

Birmingham, 3rd January 2009

Dear Everyone I’ve Ever Met,

On New Year’s Eve, I was back in Oxford.  Stepping off the train into the cold grey afternoon was like breathing a sigh of relief.  Everything was once again familiar.  The Business School’s copper ziggurat , the low forest of bicycles arrayed outside the station (none of which seem to have moved since I left), the signs on the front of the buses lead towards familiar places… Abingdon, Wheatley, Temple Cowley.

Avoiding the streaming traffic and noise of Frideswide Square, I slipped through the churchyard of St Thomas the Martyr, with its gravestones and 12th century priest’s door, and turned into my old street.  Nothing’s changed much in three months, of course.

That night we played old-time jazz in the village pub in Cassington, and saw in 2009 with a New Orleans-style rendition of Auld Lang Syne.   The pub had good ales on tap, the village was built of Cotswold stone.  The local accents burred westwards as the night went on. Strangely, it felt like I was home.

Although, at the same time, I am not “home” at all.  I’m a New Zealander.  The place where I put my feet is an obscure south-east corner of the Hauraki Gulf, with its particular configuration of water, tides, rocks and islands.  NZ writer Emma Hart, blogging this weekend at Public Address, talked about her own turanga waewae – the highway south of Christchurch that is the “back-bone of my childhood” :

…it’s how a landscape should be. That’s where I feel I stand strong, with the sun on my face, the sea on my right hand, and the mountains on my left.

Our emotions and memories are so often bound up in landscape: places where significant things happened, places linked to people we love, or places where we return to gain strength. But our memories of those places are twisted.

As we remould our memories, adding new layers of meaning, it seems we quickly reach a point at which our image of a place no longer resembles its reality. What we are left with is language: words that attempt to evoke the importance of certain times and places.

Last year in May, I returned to wander around my old school, a place where so much growing up took place.  Suddenly, it seemed the school was strangely small, that it couldn’t live up to the significance I’d given it through repeated exercise of memory.

There’s a sense now of being burdened by the clutter of places that make up a personal history. Like a refrigerator covered with so many postcards that you can’t tell its a fridge any more.  There’s pictures of dining tables in Basel, a view of Lake Taupo from my grandfather’s house, a snapshot of desert in Arizona, a place near Queenstown called Paradise, snow-covered ridges in the Vosges, cloisters in Oxford.

Is there a point at which our spiritual scrapbook gets too full? Is it possible to cherish all these places and yet still keep adding more pivot points to your life?  Can we stretch our roots too far?

In just over two weeks, I leave the UK to live in France.  Once again uprooted, pushing onwards into a new place.  It’s exciting. But at the same time, there is a little voice asking if it is time to settle down.  I’ve still got a whole bunch of old postcards to sort out.  At the same time, I’m still writing new ones.

Hope everything is going well in your parts of the world!

Lots of love from,
Richard xoxo

(Sorry, if this post comes across as self-regarding waffle, that’s because it probably is.)

mercredi, le 1 novembre 2000

Dear J

«Curiouser and curiouser» said Alice as she went further down the rabbit hole. I was leaving the apartment for a few days (staying in Mulhouse and Basel, from which I have just returned), and I found a letter from NZ in my letterbox: a letter from the family, some newspaper articles and YOUR CARD were enclosed. Thus you can probably imagine the circuitous route your letter took to get to me: in a plane for over 12 hours to get to NZ from America, only to be sent onwards for another 24 hours in a plane from Auckland to Europe (at least it had some clippings from The New Zealand Herald to talk to during the journey). Then it went through the slippery and unreliable hands of «La Poste» before arriving in a far-flung corner of Alsace for me to read with delight. AND I have your new address. I also notice that it was an Anne Geddes card (was this deliberate or not?). And also thankyou for the photo, which I can add to my special people display I have constructed on top of my bookcase/ laundry cupboard/ resource storage unit. (It’s a very large series of cupboards and drawers in my dining room and there seems to be all sorts of things in it.)

You say in your card, and I quote «aujourd’hui alors la France est dans ma tête». France on the brain, is it? Consider yourself lucky: how do you think I feel? (Given that I’m actually HERE right now).

I am imagining that you will have received the letter that I sent care of your parents by now. If you haven’t, then ask whether something from France has arrived for you in C.P. scribbled by a confused kiwi. It explains sort of how I ended up here and a little bit about what I have been up to. The first month has raced by SO fast. I’m still getting used to the idea of teaching kids and still have a couple of things to do to complete all my arrival duties (apparently I have a Social Security number now, but the school hasn’t told me what it is.) No major problems and everyone continues to be very friendly and I have eaten far too much choucroute and raclette. I haven’t been able to weigh myself, but I am convinced that I have put on weight (if you can imagine that…).

I have spent a few days «on holiday» in Basel because it’s les vacances de Toussaint this week…. it was really good to get out of T. for a little while: it’s a small place and there is not a terrible lot to do here when you have holidays. I spent Friday night in Mulhouse with the host family of my NZ friend S, whom I visited in 1999 after my stay in Grenoble… That night I went out with J (S’s host sister, who has spent a year in NZ) and her boyfriend and some of their friends to a concert in central Mulhouse: the main band was Strasbourgeois, a group called «Weeper’s Circus»- a mix of medieaval, celtic styles, Brel/Brassens-influenced chanson and little «coups de théâtre» which were very funny. Lyrics went way over my head but it was lots of fun anyway.

Also great to go out with some people roughly my own age (rather than 30something French profs, who are very cool too, but not the same) and learn some slang- however even then they were very much an undergrad (first and second year) student bunch, and it’s amazing what a year outside the undergrad environment plus a JOB can do to your attitude. They would talk about what their friends are up to, I would talk about the pupils in my English classes. It wasn’t the language that made me feel slightly out of place, rather the age difference between them and me (they’re 20 and I’m 22. Or am I just old before my time?)

On Saturday morning I took the train to Basel to spend some time with Mum’s old boss, E-D and his wife A. My visit coincided with the visit of their daughter K and her two daughters, H and Kl (5 and 3 respectively), the ones who live in Lille. The linguistic combinations were quite frightening sometimes. The dinner table is a mixture of German and English (mostly English when I am there). BUT K and H and Kl speak French with one another (although 5 year-old H a can understand German and speak it a little). E-D and A cannot speak French, so they speak German with the grandchildren, and the grandchildren reply in French (which either I or K translated into English when appropriate). I spoke English with E-D and A, (of course) and a mixture of French and English with K and French with the children. One night I read them a story in German, which H and Kl did not understand, but we talked about the pictures in French.

Conversation between H, future employee of the Spanish Inquisition, and Myself. (to understand this conversation, you must understand that H’s family have a holiday house in a tiny village in Burgundy called Lagette):

H: As-tu des enfants?
M: Non, je n’en ai pas.
H: Pourquoi?
M: Parce que je suis pas marié
H: Tu habites donc avec ta maman?
M: Non, j’habite tout seul dans un apartement
H: T’aimes habiter tout seul?
M: Pas vraiment, mais ça va pour l’instant.
H: Tu habites à Lille?
M: Non, j’habite en Alsace. Mais moi, je viens de la Nouvelle-Zélande.
H: La, la, la Nou… la Noubelle-Zéladaire, c’est près de Lille?
M: Non, c’est l’autre bout du monde de Lille. Ecoute, si tu creusais un trou dans ton jardin chez toi et tu continuais à creuser pour des jours et des jours, on arrivera en Nouvelle-Zélande. Donc c’est très très très loin de Lille.
H: Quand nous avons les vacances à Lagette, nous roulons pendant CINQ HEURES dans la bagnole de Papa. La Noubi Zilée, c’est près de Lagette?
M: (tout à fait lessivé par la logique circulaire de l’Inspecteur H) Oui, la Nouvelle-Zélande est près de Lagette. Mais maintenant c’est l’heure de dodo, quoi?

To be continued

Weepers Circus – Le Pas de Renard – En Suivant le Renard
From L’Ombre et la Demoiselle [Buy]

Travel is back on the mind again. I’ve recently found a file of writing (letters to friends, odd essays and emails) from the time I was living in France five years ago, and thought it would be interesting to post some of them here. For each piece, I’ll choose a piece of music that either reflects the theme of the writing, or relates to a particular time or place of significance during my time travelling.

The author of these passages was a little younger than he is now, and you can detect a few wishful stereotypes in some of the descriptions of Europe and its inhabitants! But I hope that his wide-eyed enthusiasm for foreign places is still apparent. If this project seems self-indulgent and uninteresting, I apologise in advance. Please come back again when I’m finished.

Bullet Holes
February 2001

There are bullet holes in the church down the road from my apartment. While the damage seems innocuous to the casual glance, my curiosity moved me to ask a friend who is a native of this small Alsatian town, and, Beh ouais, the inch-wide craters were indeed caused during fighting in late 1944.

Before I arrived here, Alsace for me was synonymous with War. In school history lessons back in New Zealand, Alsace and Lorraine were names to be conjugated alongside such terms as Versailles, Lebensraum and reparations. Somewhere I had also picked up a few ideas about Riesling, half-timbered houses and choucroute. But I still expected evidence of occupation, resistance and collaboration to be writ large across the Alsatian landscape, a clear message for posterity.

Alsace is a region whose history has been shaped in the fulcrum of fires from outside. Squeezed between the Rhine and the undulating bulk of the Vosges, Alsace is conveniently stretched like a ragged band-aid over the centre of Western Europe- a strip 80 kilometres wide between the rival ambitions of Germany and France.

Following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, this French territory was ceded to Germany. The protracted massacre of the First World War resulted in the return of French sovereignty, before Alsace was reoccupied by Hitler, and integrated into the Third Reich. Alsace has often been no more than a geopolitical symbol strident political ideologies of Paris and Berlin.

The evidence of war is certainly there, but when I set out in search of Alsace’s past, it did not reveal itself easily.

Understandably, Alsatians seem to want to put their violent heritage behind them. For instance, there is no institution devoted to displaying relics of wartime Alsace. In other parts of France, perhaps in regions less directly involved in the fighting, there are thoughful and generally honest war museums (inevitably dubbed Musées de la Résistance), of which those in Grenoble and Besançon are both worth visits.

The evidence of violence, suppression and deportation is instead spread thinly across the province. There are war memorials which, while ubiquitous, make only a modest claim for your attention. In bookshops and libraries I have flicked through diaries, memoires and history books which recount the experience of war from the point of ordinary Alsatians. Near Saverne, the remains of Le Struthof concentration camp are reminders of the only Nazi death camp built on French soil. Dirty plaques on railway stations remind the commuters rushing through the rain of the embarkation points for uncounted thousands who never returned.

It is perhaps the people themselves, both young and old, who best emblemise the passage of Alsace from battlefield to industrial powerhouse at the crossing point of a united Europe.