In Ulm und um Ulm und um Ulm herum!

This past weekend, I went to Ulm to visit my grandmother's sister, Tante Irmgard. I was also going to meet my sorority sister and good friend Kathleen Fuchs there. It really is a small world: Kathleen, who has spent the semester studying in Spain, also has relatives (whom she had never met) in Ulm. We discovered the connection while we were at Vanderbilt at some point last year, and vowed to make the trip there together. And we did!

Here's an excerpt from my journal about the weekend:

23. Mai 2009
Ulm

"Today was completely surreal--I don't know how else to put it. I took the 7:46 train from Regensburg and arrived just before 11 am. Tante Irmgard and Onkel Gerhard met me at the train station, and we waited for Kathleen to arrive. Introductions were made and Tante Irmgard tirelessly attempted to use her English to communicate with Kathleen. It was pretty good--I was impressed. 

"We got home and Tante Irmgard cooked us lunch--Spätzle, chicken and mushrooms, and a deliciously fresh salad with the best dressing. Then we had vanilla ice cream with hot fruit compote (complete with red currants from her garden) on the balcony.

"Around 2:30 we went into the Altstadt. We climbed the Ulmer Munster (the tallest cathedral in the world)--all 768 steps up, and then of course down again. Then we went to a chocolate shop and bought a famous "Ulmerspatz" each to eat, and I bought some Bosch Wibele that I am currently savoring. We walked by Irmgard and Gerhard's old home on the Stadtmauer [Medieval city wall] and ran into Gerhard's older sister (the home's current resident) and her family having coffee in the garden.

"Later, we brought Kathleen to her relatives' house in Tomerdingen. We made plans for lunch with everyone tomorrow and then drove home.

"After a light dinner of bread, butter, and caprese salad, we sat out on the balcony and Irmgard showed me the letters they found locked and hidden within the framework of the house when they knocked out a wall a few years ago to renovate. The letters are from World War II, when my great-grandmother and father corresponded before Josef's death in 1943. The letters are very difficult for my aunt [Tante Irmgard] to read because Emilie [her mother] never mentioned Josef to her children--the topic was utterly taboo. I had a lot of trouble with the handwriting, but some letters were written with a typewriter, including the letter Irmgard's father wrote to Emilie's father, asking his permission to marry Emilie. It was eloquent and talked of love and fate."

The trip to Ulm was filled with moments that were utterly miraculous. Sitting on my great-aunt's balcony in a small town in Germany with Kathleen, catching up on life, was one such moment. Reading the letters was also incredible. I'm trying to convince Tante Irmgard of the importance of scanning the letters so that we have them on file should anything happen--the collection is enormous, and in the unlikely event of something happening to them, the loss would be devastating to my family. Besides, I would love to translate them someday. Who knows, maybe I'll even write a book...

When we went up to the attic to put the letters back, we found other treasures. Irmgard tried on a top hat we got out of a very old-looking hat box, and I saw the dollhouse my grandma's older sister used to play with when she was a child. I also found another collection of letters I will have to read someday: the letters my own grandmother wrote to Irmgard when she moved to the United States as a nineteen-year-old, engaged to my grandfather, a US soldier stationed there after the war. Who, as it turns out, owned the only white jaguar in the entire town of Ulm. I bet that caused quite a stir in its day...

This weekend, I was able to literally reach out and touch my family's past, and it left me aching to know more. Both Irmgard and Gerhard are filled with stories of life in Germany during the war, and are willing to share them with me. The letters beckon me back. There's no question about it: I have to go back to Ulm, soon. Falling asleep on the fold-out bed in the guest room Saturday night, I was ready to move in--move into the house my grandmother lived in as a girl, the house my own mother spent her summers in during her childhood. It's such a beautiful old house, and with so many memories. I've got to go back.