From Tanzbödeli

It’s been a busy May in Mainz. Luckily, I managed to find a calendar last month at a bargain bookstore; I hadn’t anticipated not being able to find one in April, but most stores were already stocking their 2008 lines. (The early bird, I suppose, gets the worm.) What this means, though, is that I have a very cramped schedule smiling down at me from under a glossy photograph of tulips. I did the math today. For the month of May, I’ll have less than a week at home without visitors.

I’m not complaining, mind you. I was in Paris for four days at the very beginning of the month, visiting a friend from Middlebury and meeting up with my aunt, who accompanied my uncle to France on business. The timing was perfect. While Kristen was in class, my aunt and I saw the sights: the Eiffel Tour, Notre Dame, Montmartre. We walked all over the city, but spent a good deal of time sitting in lovely Parisian parks, enjoying the sunshine and people watching. And in the evenings, I caught up with Kristen. In one of the highlights of my visit, we took the Metro to the Paris Expo and spent a few hours exploring what seemed like an endless series of exposition halls. A pathetically tiny bit of my high school French came back to me, but for the most part, I answered anyone who spoke to me in German. It’s hard to throw that language switch.

The Paris expedition was wonderful, but what was perhaps most exciting was the sensation of returning home. I made the return trip with an old high school friend who is studying in Angers, France; we met up in Paris and then spent the six-hour train ride chatting away happily. But when our train passed into German-speaking territory, and my friends from Deutsche Bahn came over the overhead announcement system, I breathed a little sigh of relief. High school French aside, I felt like a veil was being lifted. My German may be halting and poorly accented and painfully inadequate — particularly at the university level here — but it is still something.

Language skills (or lack thereof) aside, the trip to Paris was my first real trip away from Mainz since I settled down here at the beginning of April. It wasn’t until I left that I realized how much I like my town. I like knowing my way around. I like doing my shopping at the farmer’s market and then cooking for myself at home. And as much as the parade of visitors has been (at some level) exhausting, I like showing off where I live — the cathedral, the Marc Chagall windows at Stephanskirche, our now regular evening destionations at the Alex Café or the Eisgrubbräu brewery.

But I set off from home again this last weekend, leaving on Wednesday by train for the Swiss Alps. Beth, one of my very dearest friends in the world, visited me for a week and a half this month; it was her first trip to Europe. We poked around Germany for a bit — Mainz, lovely little Marburg, the Rhine town of Bacharach — but we planned a more extravagant reunion with another high school friend, the aforementioned Angers resident, in Switzerland. Beth and I hopped on a train early Wednesday, took a break to see Freiburg over lunch, and hit Interlaken around dinnertime.

Interlaken proved more than a little kitschy — picture Swiss Army knives galore, high prices, the adventure-sport, fraternity boy set. But we met up with our friend Kaitlin and then set off the next morning for Gimmelwald, a tiny town of 130 residents high in the Alps. A train, an hour-long hike through the Lauterbrunnen valley, and a quick cable car ride later, we found ourselves at our “home” for the next two and a half days — the Mountain Hostel in Gimmelwald. We stayed in a quaint little chalet with thirty or so other hikers, and woke up every morning to what I can only describe as perhaps the most wonderful view in the world.

We spent the next two days hiking our little hearts out. What more could a couple of displaced Washingtonians wish for? (Beth in particular, the most mountain-crazed of us all, was giddy.) We hiked to the Kilchbalm glacier on our first day in Gimmelwald, stopping frequently to admire the views, catch our breath, and gorge ourselves on Alpine cheese — the pattern of the weekend, we would soon discover.

On Friday, after our first night in Gimmelwald, we consulted a few other travelers and then set off for Shark’s Fin, or Tanzbödeli, a high plateau perched in the middle of our bowl of mountains. It was a grueling three-hour hike — we descended from Gimmelwald to the river we’d followed the day before to the glacier, and then climbed (straight up, if I say so myself) over 700 meters to the base of a huge rock formation. The clouds burned off during the last hour or so of our ascent, and the view at the top — high above the tree line, and from a field of the palest, loveliest Alpine grass — was breathtaking. Schilthorn, the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Jungfrau all towered over us, close enough almost to touch, and Gimmelwald was a wink in the far away distance below.

This is unique, I suppose — this very human desire of ours to attain prominence, to stand at a great height and survey the world below and above, to feel both small and large at the same time. In the Alps, at the altitude of some 2000 meters, I felt my lungs more acutely; I felt my hips, my haunches. But mostly you feel the expansion and contraction of something I cannot quite express. The world is so old — stone and fragile grass, the crow buckling in the wind even this high, buckling, and the fin of a great, gray shark cutting up into the sky. Tanzbödeli — the “li,” I assume, a diminutive in that indecipherable Swiss German — means “the little dance floor.”

Curiously, when you make this ascent in the company of very old friends, it is the contraction you feel most of all. For all of the geographic expanse, for all of the long-stretching rail between Mainz and Interlaken, for all of the space hovering between my home here and my home in Washington and my home, my transient home, in the hills of Vermont — for all of this, we come somehow together in a bowl of mountains. We sleep on bunks that run together without breaking. We bicker in the grocery store. And then we coax one another up onto a high and windy plateau.

Kaitlin is home to Angers, and Beth is zurück to the United States, and Alex is visiting friends in Berlin. The majority of the German students have cleared out for Pentecost. This time yesterday I was descending from Gimmelwald in the pendulum of a cable car. (Does one contract, now, or expand?) It is strange, after all of this, to be home in Mainz again; the return journey this time around felt a little different than my coming-home after Paris. No Alpine air; just a brush of dark clouds on the horizon, menacing enough to keep me from the bicycle ride along the Rhine I’d planned. (We came home yesterday, late, to a terrific thunderstorm; the very ordinary walls of my dormitory were welcome. We listened to the rain and cooked spaghetti.)

For now, the parade of visitors is abating a bit. There is so much I want to write about — my experience with Swiss German (an indecipherable dialect for many Germans, let alone me), my trip last week to Weimar with the Middlebury program. A few notes, before I forget otherwise:

I will brag here for just a minute about my first oral presentation for class — I couldn’t tell you how well or poorly it went — the adrenaline having skewed any perspective about performance or the passage of time — but it’s finished. I downed a quick glass of wine before class to calm my nerves, and then delivered a fifteen-minute presentation on a nature poem by Goethe. The professor even smiled a bit — an anomaly with regards to most professors here. Bravo, Katie, bravo.

I was in Weimar last weekend. Saw Goethe’s house. Visited a sub-par Bauhaus museum. Enjoyed a good bit of sunshine. I also visited Buchenwald, a concentration camp just a few kilometers from one of Germany’s great capitals of culture. It was my first, and I found that I did not know how to react. The program coordinator here in Mainz went with us, and told us a story about her father, who was in the Hitler Youth when he was a child. They’ve only left a few buildings intact at Buchenwald; most of the others have been reduced to their foundations, with shards from the rubble strewn over the

While I was wandering through an exhibit of art created by prisoners at the camp, though, I was startled (and appalled) to realize that three tattooed men with shaved heads, all wearing camouflage and offensive t-shirts, strutted through the building. This, at least, dredged up a reaction from me: fear, yes, but mostly disgust, and the overwhelming, inappropriate desire for confrontation. I knew immediately what I was seeing; in the former West, where unemployment is lower and the economy is generally stronger, we don’t see many (if any) neo-Nazis, but Weimar falls in the former East. I can only assume they were neo-Nazis; I may be wrong, but I got home, Googled for more information about neo-Nazis and concentration camps, and discovered this.

Next year is pressing in upon me. I am taking the helm at the newspaper; I am swimming in a mess of thesis ideas (and non-ideas); there is the promise of a late-summer retreat to the Vermont mountains. And there is so much I want to write about!

Am I silly to ask if this is this contracting or expanding?