Traveling and Returning [by Tami Haaland]

Long ago, during the summer when I graduated from high school and turned eighteen, I went to Europe with the Montana Youth Choir. It was the usual month-long, fast-paced trip through eight or nine countries with buses and tour guides. We were endlessly in awe of the world and ourselves walking around in it, singing in places like Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It’s the sort of thing  many young people do every year, and for me, as with so many others, it was a lucky introduction to a larger world.

One unusual part of that trip was our passage through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Our choir directors warned us to keep our cameras out of sight and to be highly respectful when a guard would likely walk through our bus, a curious, almost smiling guard, as it turned out, who nevertheless carried a machine gun. I remember the barbed wire on top of the wall but what stuck with me most was a row of landmines and a row of red geraniums neatly spaced on the East Berlin side. When we drove into the city, it was as if the war ended yesterday. The buildings were ragged and pock marked in contrast to the sparkling newness of West Berlin.

When I was planning this trip, I thought I would go back to Berlin, go back to Paris, see as much as possible while I was in Germany  and maybe go to other countries as well. Last summer I went briefly to Stavanger, Norway for the first time, a three-day side trip from England, to see relatives and the family farm, purchased in 1799. It was a thrill, and I wanted so much to return, thought I might jet up there again for a day or two, the equivalent of my jetting over to Winchester for a couple of days.

Fortunately, before I left the U.S. I had a conversation with a friend who wisely advised me to go for immersion rather than making more whirlwind journeys, even to a place that feels like home. Or to places like Paris and Berlin which would also require more planning and more time.

When I went to Strasbourg the train would have arrived only two hours later in Paris, and I felt a bit of longing as I stepped off rather than continuing on. But the idea of immersion is what I tried to stick to, especially given teaching obligations and other events that began to fill my schedule. Outside of my brief episode in England, which was easy and familiar, I stayed mostly in southern Germany. Even in that decision, I felt the daily pull, which I have mentioned in previous posts, teeter tottering between walking into town or hopping on a train to someplace new. Ultimately, I’m pretty happy with the balance that governed my days.

On my last Sunday there, I took the train to Heidelberg and spent hours walking, first downtown, then up to the castle—a sort of elegant monstrosity built in stages. The place is huge and has some decidedly touristy attractions, like the largest wine keg in the world and a very interesting Apothecary Museum full of seventeenth-century remedies. If I am honest, what I liked most was the climb up to this castle which is situated on a small mountain. Walking quickly from the street below felt like walking in the mountains at home. The body likes this workout and the challenge of climbing. This walk and the steep climb to the Philosopherweg or Philosopher’s Way on the other side of the river were the best workouts of my 23 days in Europe. But of course there’s much more—The Philosopherweg was a haunt for Romantic poets Joseph Eichendorff and Friedrich Hölderlin who are commemorated there. Beyond that, it’s just a great place for faculty and students at the university to walk along the side of the mountain with the river below. Many generations have.followed this path.  

When I was still trying to find my way around in Heidelberg, I happened to take a side street to the river. Here, I came across the outline of the former synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht, November 10, 1938. There is a similar memorial near the train station in Ludwigsburg, where suitcases with the names of those who were deported sit inside the outline of the synagogue, and nearby is a screen with revolving images and biographies. Both of these memorials contain an altar where people place flowers, candles and bright stones. Train stations have memorials as well, lists of the people who were deported. When you ride the train in Germany, you know you may be traveling the same path that Holocaust victims were forced to travel. Part of the memorial at Dachau is a short railroad track and the platform where people would disembark before entering through the main gate. Only a few days into my visit, I went to Dachau, and I find myself mostly silent when thinking about it. Or rather, I don't think so much as feel great sadness. It’s hard to fathom such darkness, harder still to find words that explain what it is to be there.

Yet in my classroom and among colleagues at Ludwigsburg University there was open conversation about the past and the manifestation of neo-fascism and white supremacy in contemporary society. Since the focus of our seminar was Montana Literature, my students and I read and discussed chapters from James Welch’s Winter in the Blood and poems by Lois Red Elk, Mandy Smoker and Heather Cahoon. I showed them maps of tribal territories before and after Caucasian settlement. We also talked about how Hitler admired U.S. policies for Native people.

In England, a teacher told me that Britain is beginning to acknowledge what colonialism meant for the people who were colonized. In the U.S., only in recent years have memorials to slaves begun to emerge and there are few Native American memorials. Near where I grew up in the northern, rural part of Montana, the Marias (Baker) Massacre occurred in 1870, but it, like other massacres, is still not widely known or commemorated. 

In Germany there are daily reminders of the Holocaust: outlines of former synagogues, small gold squares in the sidewalk with the names of Jewish citizens who lived and worked there, lists of people who were deported. Major camps where the SS were trained or where millions of people were murdered have become world renowned memorials.

I think a lot about Jung’s description of the shadow—the side of individuals and societies that we may try to run from, our dark underside, but of course, no one can escape their shadow. Further, Jung says that if we don’t come to terms with it, then we risk being controlled by it, which brings me back to poetry. Poetry doesn’t cater to either-or fallacies or polarization or denial. Poetry will ask us to take a good look at the shadow and get comfortable with ambiguity. Poems ask us to look, and then look again.