That was a frightful tale, and if the maids, for example, had to relieve themselves at night, they would never walk alone across the courtyard to the privy, especially during a full moon. It was clear that neither our mother nor Aunt Lene, both of whom had been nuns and had fled the convent, would be allowed to hear that story or there would be holy thunder brought down on the maids for their foolish chattering. I must confess that I, however, listened gladly to such eerie stories, even though in bed I would have to clutch my brother out of fear until I fell asleep.
Of course we were always looking forward to Christmas, because then the food was especially rich and bountiful. On the 24th of December, which was the end of the Advent fast, liver sausage and sauerkraut would be served, and conversation at the table as well as Father’s table talks, which were to become so famous later, would become very lively, because this was also one of his most beloved meals. Though sometimes my mother would have to admonish everyone when the conversation became too animated and the dinner neglected: “Why is it that you keep speaking without interruption and do not eat?” Tempers flared while the food got cold.
Since I collected all my mother’s recipes (which made my beloved wife’s work in the kitchen much easier), I can lay before you the recipe for sauerkraut.
In addition, you can serve bread in order to fill up the table companions before the proper meal. That will prevent them from finishing the sauerkraut and the sausage too quickly. Our mother often served the young hungry people a large bowl of millet gruel, which they had to eat first.
Sauerkraut: One needs liver sausage, cabbage, white wine and red wine, juniper berries, mustard, and salt. The heads of cabbage are cut into quarters and the core removed, but not too much so that the leaves do not fall apart.
In a large pot, place wood strips first and then small sticks over them so that a grill is created. Pour the white wine in, one and a half inches, almost as high as the grill. Then lay the cabbage quarters on the grill with the cut surfaces under. Cook for an hour, until the cabbage is tender. Take the cabbage out of the pot and cut into strips. Heat the red wine, and add salt, mustard, and juniper berries. Add the cabbage and mix. Put the sausage on top, and place over a small fire until the sausage is heated through.
In the past, when my father was a child, his family would observe a much stricter pre-Christmas fast, but at least they had the mouthwatering stollen fruitcake, and this brings to mind the following story.
Elector Ernst and his brother, Duke Albrecht of Saxony, complained in a letter to the pope about the suffering of the fast time before Christmas. They said there were in their cold lands no olive trees and also very little olive oil imported from the southern countries, which at any rate was too expensive for most of the people. So, with butter excluded for the fast time, there was only rapeseed oil with which to cook. And that was honestly good only as lamp oil or wagon wheel grease or for the production of soap, which, by the way, was already mentioned by the prophet Isaiah. However, rapeseed oil does not agree with their subjects. In short, they begged the pope to make an exception to the fast and allow butter to be used in the baking of the stollen.
And behold, the pope relented. It was Innocent VIII, who shamefully tolerated the prosecution of witches (in this, though, my father was not much better), and who before the papal election took to bribing numerous cardinals and who also was not adverse to simony. In the case of butter, however, he agreed that it would be an act of Christian charity to grant the exception. As a native Italian, he probably thought it was a sacrilege even to cook with anything other than olive oil or butter. His Christian charity, however, did not stop him from making the Saxons pay dearly for this papal butter bull in the form of a tax. The pope wrote: “As such, we are well disposed to accept your request and decree by Papal authority, by the power of this letter, that ye, your wives, sons, daughters, and all your obedient servants may freely and reasonably partake of butter instead of oil without incurring any penalty.”
From then on stollen was again delicious, especially if raisins had been baked into it. These delightful cakes had a thoroughly Christian character to us because when we ate them, the shape of the cake reminded us of the Christ child wrapped in swaddling clothes by his mother Mary. As one can see, before my father’s work for a new and reformed church took effect, there was this papal tax on each stollen, which was now abolished. Therefore I am of the opinion that the Reformation of the church was not without agreeable consequences, for instance, the tax exemption of the stollen.
With reason this cake, remindful of our Savior, is now called Christstollen, and if this comes from the great city of Dresden, it provides a special enjoyment. By this I do not mean to belittle the good city of Naumberg on the Saale River, where there is documentary evidence that a gift of Christstollen was given to Bishop Heinrich as early as AD 1329. Whether the bishop deserved this gorgeous pastry in God’s name is not mentioned.
We children, through Advent and Christmas, had a very intimate relationship with our dear Lord Jesus. All the frills and all the veneration of the saints of the old church were in Father’s new Evangelism greatly reduced, if not completely abolished. That greatly affected, for example, St. Nicholas, to whom the 6th of December is dedicated. As bishop of Myra in the eastern lands, he is said to have rescued an entire city from starvation by supplying them with many measures of wheat, which made him the patron saint of bakers. So the people have increasingly revered him, and he even became one of the fourteen Holy Helpers. By the time my father as a young boy attended the Cathedral School in Magdeburg, the Nicholas veneration had become widespread.
But my father preached: “There is no other mediator between God and men than Christ. Therefore, these saints’ days are pernicious because they did not only elevate the saints, but they denigrated Christ. We do not say you should not praise the saints, but we want to grant Christ his own right. We were in error when we did not allow Christ to be our Savior but only thought him to be our judge. And the saints would have to come and intercede for us. We have not preached against the saints but against those who have substituted them for Christ.”
Since Christ has to be the center of the Christian message and the saints should not come between God and the people, a new role had to be assigned to St. Nicholas by the new church: together with the Christ Child, he was allowed to bring gifts to the children on Christmas and on St. Nicholas Day. But if the children had been disobedient or badly behaved or had been lazy at school, then there were to be no gifts but the cane. This St. Nicholas alone may brandish, because Christ said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” That Christ brandished a cane or carried a sack in which to stick the naughty children is not to be read in the scriptures.
But Christmas was first of all a joyful time, and our father’s sermons in the town church helped:
Today you will hear the story that happened tonight, which is reassuring and joyful. Because the angels in heaven are full of joy, which they impart to us and announce for everybody, though what happened does not concern them, but us. For the preaching of the angels goes: “I am telling you men, not us angels, because Christ was not born for our salvation.” The angels are already blessed and have been so from the very beginning. Therefore, we are meant, not they.
And now imagine how Mary, pregnant with the Christ Child and supported by Joseph, makes the toilsome journey to Bethlehem on an ass. How prudent of Joseph to provide his highly pregnant wife with a ride. Bethlehem lies to the south, like Schmiedeberg, Nazareth far to the north, like Brandenburg. It is a long journey, I believe between twenty and thirty miles.
At this point the people listened almost breathlessly, because from their own lives they could imagine such a journey.
Reader, you might ask me how I know my father’s sermons so well. First, on Christmas we naturally went to church, as always, especially if Father was preaching. And second, among the burghers, peasants, students, soldiers
, and visitors from other cities, there were always people who carefully transcribed all that was said and soon had it printed. The printers became rich, by the way; Father did not. Thus I have before me printed copies of my father’s sermons and so am able to include one of them here.
So, holding their breath, the congregation listened as my father told in detail how the wife of a poor carpenter, greatly pregnant with child and with swollen breasts, could find no help and no shelter. They trudged along in search of lodgings, pulling the ass as they plodded, when Mary’s waters broke and she went into labor. Now just imagine the anxiety of Joseph, unable to give his wife any assistance. Finally they were able to find a stable. Here the Mother of God, without a midwife or other help, had to bring the Child into the world. Perhaps Joseph with his carpenter’s knife cut the umbilical cord of the Christ Child, and with cold water—they had no fire, no stove, or anything to warm it with—washed the child and dried him off and laid him to his mother’s breast. And surely Joseph carried the afterbirth outside and buried it in a nearby field, as was the custom, so that nothing could harm the baby.
At this point a sigh of relief went through the crowd. People of course had heard the Christmas story many times, but through the emotional telling of my father, they experienced it anew. It can be understood that such an art of preaching extracts the money more easily out of the pockets of the listeners and that the collection for the community chest would grow. For out of these proceeds the poor of the city were provided, since the monasteries were no longer there to give them assistance. My father said that the turning to the Gospel and the conversion to Christianity must also reach into the purse, not as a prerequisite for the grace of God, but rather as a consequence.
Chapter 8
. . . must be begun here because otherwise chapter 7 would be too long. But, reader, do not despair; it will still be about how we celebrated Christmas.
God Almighty, what guests did we have! Giordano Bruno, the Italian scholar, who also taught in Wittenberg, where I met him in 1586, and who surely could not expect much good from the old church, with his views on the universe, the sky, the stars, and eternity, had related—not from his own experience, but from the tales of others, which I can confirm—how things proceeded in the Black Monastery: “All the world came to Wittenberg—Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Scottish, Poles, Balkanese—because here wisdom had built a house and provided a richly laid table for the meal. All in all, there must at times have been thirty or more people who had to be fed.”
I think Bruno meant the banquet in abstracto. But it is also true that our mother had many to look after and sometimes must have felt she was being pulled to pieces trying to provide everything. She’d say, “I must cut myself into seven pieces in order to be in seven places at the same time and manage seven different things. I must first be farming burgher, second a farmer, third a cook, fourth a milkmaid, fifth a gardener, sixth a winegrower, but seventh I am the doctorissa who for her famous husband has to be presentable and has to feed numerous guests all on a yearly salary of 200 guldens.”
When my father would descend from the little tower room, in which we children were sometimes allowed to play if we were not too loud, and settle himself at the head of the table under the curious and interested glances of the fellow diners, he thanked God for his blessings and cast an appreciative glance at his wife. Then she was able to forget her cares for a short while. Still, my mother found it hard to bear when he made remarks on the uselessness and vanity of all human activity, the grubbing of money, and at the same time took a hearty pleasure in the delicious foods and home-brewed beer and princely wines that had been donated to him, which, without the assistance of our mother, the Lord God would hardly have rained on us.
Father would notice her resentment and quickly use words of praise in an attempt to make amends, since he realized that he himself had learned nothing about managing a household. And he actually had no facility with numbers. At the grammar school in Mansfeld, where you were made to wear a donkey collar as a punishment for speaking a German word, they saw no need to teach figures. How weak he was in numeracy is shown by the thank-you letter to Abbot Friedrich at Nuremberg, who had made a present to him of a clock: “Such a horologium is very convenient for me, but I would have to learn from the mathematics in order to get to know the nature and function of a clock. I have never seen the likes of one, have never given such a thing a thought, because the mathematics I do not understand.”
He also felt the management of the household must be subject to the rule of the woman and said, “The wife can certainly make a man rich, but not the man the wife. The saved penny is better than the earned. So to be careful with the money is the best income.”
It remains a mystery to me even now how my mother, raised from a very young age in a convent, could handle the daunting task of running this household. Her task was not made easier by the care for a learned, famous, complex, and often darkly melancholy man. Added to this was the never-ending construction work; the overseeing of the craftsmen; the bearing and raising of her children; the responsibility for all the farm animals, such as pigs—the swineherd included—horses, cows, goats, and poultry of every sort; the overseeing of servants; the tending of newly acquired gardens (at the Saumarkt and the Eichenpfuhl with beehives and hops); the purchase of building materials, if possible at tolerable prices; and hundreds of other things kept her busy. Father said, “Out of this rotten cloister my Katharina is making a paradise on this dark earth.”
He did not make her life any easier when he tried to battle his melancholy through hasty and excessive eating and drinking, which then led again to physical discomfort. One time Johannes, our eldest brother, when he found Mother in the kitchen weeping because of her growing concerns, tried to comfort her by giving her her Christmas present early, a limewood angel figure. In tears, she smiled at him and was again in better spirits.
We children looked at Christmastime differently from our father and, in turn, from our mother, who, together with the maids and servants and helpful Aunt Lene, literally had her hands full with all the great Christmas preparations.
When time came to go shopping at the Christmas market, we children eagerly attended. The Christmas market in our town had taken place since AD 1468, and one could purchase whatever one’s heart desired so long as one had sufficient pfennigs and groschens. Father, for his part, expressed no praise for the Wittenberg market: “Our market is shit, and it is also expensive.”
We children found it pleasantly noisy and full of color, and the drovers from the entire principality, from Pomerania and Poland, the bakers and blacksmiths, plumbers, coopers, horse traders, barbers, lithotomists and tooth pullers and faith healers, the hatters and hoodmakers, the saddlers and bag makers, the shoemakers and leather belt makers, the tailors, the chandlers, and the wood carvers all offered their wares and handiwork with shouting and yelling. Delicious smells came from the town hall cookshop, where we never ate, though, since Mother was careful with money and said that food at home tasted better and was also cheaper.
There were also cripples to see, and people with mouths purposely cut from ear to ear when they were children still in diapers to confer to them a permanent grin, then allowed to heal; others were given flattened noses that the parents had caused by binding small slats of wood across their babies’ faces and so could exhibit them for money.
And then wondrously attired women sat in a tent, their eyebrows coal black and their lips painted red as blood, and clothes worn so that one could see their breasts, sometimes even their nipples, although there was no infant suckling there. Our mother pulled us very quickly past those tents. If we were accompanied by students boarding in the Black Monastery or Father’s famuli, then would she become loud and urge us to hurry, because they attempted to pass the open tent flap as slowly as possible. Our maids, carrying the purchases in their baskets, would blush and giggle and then walk past quickly.
The tent of the beautif
ul women stood not far from the stand of an old woman who peddled eggs. Because of the cold, she had her wares in a basket covered top and bottom with straw. But Mother never bought eggs from her. The maids whispered among themselves that she was a witch and laid the eggs herself.
Also, she was said to be a maker of weather and hail, and if she stared at you cross-eyed, then you had to take heed of your garden and fields. Also, the maids called her the flower witch, because even in the middle of winter she was said to have flowers to peddle. Nobody had seen them, but the rumors went around. It was also said that she would soon be hauled before the town council of Wittenberg, submitted to a torturesome interrogation, and brought to trial. A wonder that she did not leave the city. But perhaps she was not aware of any wickedness and did not know what the people were whispering.
We children would gladly stop for a storyteller or a bookreader, and we especially liked to hear the story from the book A Diverting Tale of Till Ulenspiegel, Born on the Land near Brunswick, and How He Spent His Life. The listeners laughed and exulted when they heard how the sly fool got the best of the duke of Celle. The duke forbids Ulenspiegel to step anywhere on his land. Therefore, Till loads a cart with earth from outside the duchy, sits on top of it, and with loud crows of laughter takes the cart in front of the duke’s castle, where the duke cannot punish him because he has set no foot upon the duke’s land. And even at his funeral, Ulenspiegel gives the duke no rest. He slips from the hands of the bearers and ends upright in the grave. And thus they buried him at last.
Mother purchased presents for many people, for friends, for our servants, for the godchildren of my parents—so many that Father himself could not recall all the names—for us children, naturally, which we were at times sixteen in number in the household. This was accomplished while we were not there, while the servants and maids were allowed to look for something themselves.
Shadows of My Father Page 7
