When Bad means Good

Bad Windsheim is the name of a small town in Frankonia. In spite of its name, it's not a bad town at all. Bad is the German word for Bath, or swimming pool, or health spa. Bad Windsheim has all three, but a specially nice spa, consisting of five salt baths of various temperatures and salt concentrations (one of which is salt-saturated), various types of saunas, and a wellness area for different types of massages, skin treatments, saline inhalation, etc. You can even bathe in milk and wine. Different types of gardens are scattered through, and all of this is in a nice park.

Bad Windsheim hasn't grown much over the centuries. In 742 the Frankish King (Pippin) provided for 26 new churches in East Frankonia for the new Bishopric of Würzburg. One of the 26 was St. Martin in Bad Windsheim.

But it is big enough to have a little train station. When we arrived at the train station, we were ready for lunch. Although we had never been there before, we knew that we could find something in the center of town, and that if we walked straight out from the station, the center of town would be straight ahead, as usual. We also knew that it would be near the church steeple in the distance. We passed lots of nice half-timbered houses, and noticed that the cross streets had very descriptive names, like Lords alley, Bowl market, Jews little courtyard, Rector's little alley, hospital alley, butchers alley, wine market, etc. We got near to the church steeple, and we knew that we must be close the Market Square, the center of every town.

What was not expected was the huge statue of a knight just outside of the church. (Kathy is seen next to statue of the knight, and comes up to his ankle.) It is a monument next to the cemetery dedicated to soldiers who died in battle. The statue is of Roland, the archetype of Frankish soldiers, who fought mythical battles for his king Charlemagne. (Charlemagne was a Frank, not a Frenchman, by the way.)



We found some typical Frankish cuisine in a place on a square called the Wine Market. Because it was Sunday, there were many families in the restaurant. Stores are closed on Sundays, and so Sundays are Family Day. Strollers were everywhere.

After lunch, we walked back to the Market Square. We were surprised to see several glass windows elevated above the pavement in the square. Looking through one of the windows we saw two skeletons! Back in 2000, the town wanted to build an underground parking lot, but shortly after starting excavation, they found remains of the first settlement. Construction on the parking lot was canceled, and the site became an archaeological dig. Today, the Market Square is restored to its pre-2000 state, except for a few windows in the ground that you can look through to see the remains of the archaeological find. You can also enter the find through some steps off the Square. We took the tour, which included some interesting artifacts of flat glass (discarded in the latrine), gold, semi-precious stones, building remains including the old town well, and 24 skeletons from the first Christian burials. Around 800 AD, the Germans were Christianized and so buried their dead near the church, which, being in the center of town was near the town well. The latrine in the center of town was also near enough to the well that the townspeople acquired many illness, which they attributed to "bad air." The rich find of flat glass testifies to the wealth of the town in medieval times. Usually glass was melted down and reused - it was never thrown out! Medieval flat glass is the type you see in stained glass church windows and was also used in cloisters. The manufacturing process was very time consuming because the glass was first mouth-blown into a cylindrical shape which then had to be carefully cut off the blower's pipe, and then cut down one side and pressed with various tools into a flat sheet. The significance of this large glass find is that after the painstaking manufacturing process, the glass should have been used, or remelted to make more glass. Instead, it was just dumped in the latrine, indicating that the town was at the time so wealthy that the merchants could afford to just make more flat glass.

We were the only ones on the tour, so afterwards we chatted with the guide. He invited us back some day, and suggested that we bring visitors. Out of curiosity, I asked him where he would guess we were from. We only spoke German, so he didn't hear us speak English. He guessed Australia. I don't know if his guess is based on solely on our accent when speaking German, or if it has something to do with an assumption that Americans don't speak German. I consider the second possibility highly likely, because nobody under similar circumstances has ever guessed that we are Americans (although English, French and Irish are also common guesses).

We continued our tour of the town, and stopped in the town museum. The half-timbered house at the left contains the town museum. There we saw a special exhibit on glass blowing and the flat glass find under the Market square, as well as exhibits from the permanent collection on town-related artifacts.

We will have to return this summer in order to visit the Freiland Museum, which is an open-air museum that recreates farm life in the middle ages. We'll have to return sooner in order to try the Bad ... I mean Baths.

America - Melting Pot, or Watered-Down Stew?

At Richard's firm, AREVA, where I recently had a temporary job, the colleague I worked with had some interesting thoughts on the US culture as he experienced it over several visits. He said he found that the US had no distinctive culture. Everywhere one goes in Germany, he said, the culture is identifiably German. But in the US, there is a lack of a identifiable unique culture. The ethnic groups are, he said, only half-ethnic; that is, as I interpret his remark, their culture is in great part watered down by the dominating American uniformity. Taking his remarks as typically frank German observations, which are not meant as insults, I in part agreed with him. I said that I have a feeling that many Americans are seeking their ethnic roots (me included). They want to have an identifiable, unique culture that ties them to their ancestors. They want to know what their ancestors ate, how they played and cooked, and what they did in their spare time, where they came from and what they looked like. What was the culture that they left behind when they emigrated from Europe or Asia, or were forced from Africa?

I countered his observations by saying that the many ethnic groups have enriched our society. My examples came from the entertainment world. I pointed to Billy Crystal and Ben Stiller's father Jerry Stiller, who are inheritors of the Borscht Belt comedy tradition, from the resorts in the Catskills. The Black Entertainment Television Network, the TV shows featuring Hispanics , like the George Lopez show, and the series on PBS with James Edward Olmos about the Latino family, all present the differences between groups that enrich our culture. He then asked if I thought that the ethnic groups were growing apart as they were able to reinforce their identities in this way. My response was, far from it! The hip-hop and rap music of predominantly black artists is overwhelmingly popular with white teenagers in the affluent suburbs.

He mentioned that he had encountered the concern that the Spanish speakers would overwhelm the English-speaking culture as more immigration from Hispanic countries came in. Projections might show that people with Spanish as a mother tongue might eventually be in the majority, but it seems that the only people who speak Spanish and no English at all are the uneducated poor. The Irish immigrants, also poor and uneducated, came over by the hundreds of thousands in the mid-1800's and were feared for their catholicism/"Popery." Signs went up in the windows of businesses, "No Irish need apply." Now we have the Kennedys, and Ronald Reagan, as Richard's colleague pointed out, the Rockefellers, etc.