Suennermarten Again

I translate these songs with some difficulty, not having spoken or heard the language spoken since I was 9 years old. Sometimes I mull over a word and it comes to me hours later. At other times, it doesn't come to me until I say it out loud. Part of the problem is that I was never exposed to the written version of the language. I had tried unsuccessfully to find a dictionary, so I stopped off at Goethe Haus for help. They connected me with a dealer in rare German books in the Catskills, a Scot of all things. I am now anxiously awaiting delivery of the book.

I was chatting with the Goethe Haus people about Suennermarten and was amazed that they had never heard of it. I searched the Internet but the only referrences I found were in Frisia, although kaleidoscopejanis.de publishes some Suennermarten songs. I found some great articles in Wikipedia but regretfully for most people, they are all written in the Frisian language. Fortunately, I was able to comprehend them. I learned for example, that Frisian men, women and children consume an average of 2.5 kilos of tea per year. The article stated that this is 10 times as much tea as Germans consume. Interesting slip of the tongue, as Frisians are theoretically Germans.

There was an interesting article about Saterland. This is an area of solid land about 11 by 4 kilometers, that is completely surrounded by peat bogs. These bogs prevented contact with the surrounding Saxon population for 1000 years. Until the late 19th century, the only way to reach these people was by ship. These people settled this area after a great storm destroyed their homes by the North Sea. I wonder if that same storm caused Frisians to settle my area in Westphalia, bringing with them Suennermarten? My area was also heavily isolated by peat bogs, although not so extremely.

Suennermarten took place on November 11th every year. It was a time of feasting and marked the end of the agricultural year. Contracts with farm workers ended on that day and they were paid off. So  why did an agricultural festival bear the name of some weird Christian saint? Clearly the name was imposed on people when they were christianized (in most cases forcibly).  So what then would the old name of the festival have been? I believe that the festival that I celebrated as a child as Suennermarten was the old Yule festival. Yeah, I know that Yule supposedly takes place on December 25th.  Snorri Sturluson in his Heimskringla though states that Yule was moved up to December 25th by Olaf Trygvason, after he forcibly christianized the Norwegian population.  Snorri states that prior to that time, Yule was celebrated much earlier.  He said that Yule marked the end of the agricultural year when livestock that could not be kept alive through the Winter for lack of fodder were slaughtered. This was the occasion of great feasting and sounds very similar to aspects of the Suennermarten that I experienced.  Anyway, in the following are some more Suennermarten songs from the kaleidoscopejanis.de web site and my translations.

Kaleidoscopejanis states that in old times, the Kip Kap Koegel, the hollowed out Kuerbis with a lit candle inside, was carried by children from house to house as a lantern but that it has been replaced with a paper lantern on a pole with a candle inside. We partly followed the older custom but set the Kuerbis with a scary face carved into it with a lit candle out in the fields but walked from farm to farm with paper lanterns on poles.

Marie, Marie, mook op de Dör,
	Marie, Marie, mook op de Dör, Dor sünd'n paar arme Kinner vör, Giff jüm wat un loot jüm gahn, dat se ok noch wieder kaam, bet för Navers Döör, Navers Döör is ok nich wiet, Appel un Beern sünd ok al riep.

My translatiom into English: Marie, Marie, Open up the Door Marie, Marie, open up the door, There stand a pair of poor children, Give them something and let them go, so that they can come back again, head for the neighbors door, the neighbors door is not far the apples and berries are all ripe. Matten, Matten, Kägel, Matten, Matten, Kägel, mit din vergüldten Flägel allns, wat vergülden is, de Appel un de Beern, ok all good, ok all good, smitt se man in'n Strohhoot.  Hallo, hallo, mak open de Döör dar staht 'n paar arme Schäpers vör, Geev se wat un lat se gahn, se mööt 't noch wiet na Köln gahn, Köln is de wietste Wegg, Van all de leven Gäst, de Gäver is de best. Martin, Martin Kaegel with your gilded wings everything that is gilded, the apples and the berries, are all good, are all good, toss some into my strawhat. Hello, hello, open up the door there stand a pair of poor shepherds, give them something and let them go, so that they can come back again, they still want to go to far away Koeln. Koeln is the farthest way, of all the beloved guests, the giver is the best. Vaandag is Sünner Marten   Vaandag is Sünner Marten De Kalver sünd so darten De Kojen hebben Horens, De Klocken hebben Torens   De Tuteru-tut De Sang is ut. Un de de Sang wat wieder kann, De sing vördann.   Spieker, Bohr un Knieptang is dat nich 'n mojen Sang? Ja - a. Nee- e.   Schippke van Marieken Lett sin Seils strieken, sett 't sin Seils up de Topp. Geevt mi wat in 'd Rummelpott. 'N Öörtje of 'n Appel.   Loot 't mi nich to lange stohn, Ik mutt noch 'n Huuske wieder gohn.   My English translation:   Today is Saint Martin   Today is Saint Martin The calves are darting The cows have horns The clocks have tones   Tooteroo-toot The song is out And the song comes back again And we sing it again   Plane, drill and pliers Is that not a good song? Yeah – ah Nay – ay     Ships from Mariken Set your sails to striking Set your sails up to the top Put something in my rummelpot A piece of an apple   Don’t let me stand so long To another house I must be gone Vaandag is Sünner Marten Vaandag is Sünner Marten De Kalver sünd so darten De Kojen hebben Horens, De Klocken hebben Torens De Tuteru-tut De Sang is ut. Un de de Sang wat wieder kann, De sing vördann. Spieker, Bohr un Knieptang is dat nich 'n mojen Sang? Ja - a.  Nee- e. Schippke van Marieken Lett sin Seils strieken, sett 't sin Seils up de Topp. Geevt mi wat in 'd Rummelpott. 'N Öörtje of 'n Appel. Loot 't mi nich to lange stohn, Ik mutt noch 'n Huuske wieder gohn.

Die Internationale

In memory of my grandfather whom I never met, Peter Bussar. Union organizer, socialist, admirer of Leon Trotski.  At the age of 6 he was pulled out of school to be put to work sewing mattresses in a factory. He educated himself and became Germany's first linotype operator. He set type for some of the major national newspapers and did his job proficiently except that that he had the unfortunate tendency of inserting typos when setting type for Hitler's speeches, making the speeches ludicrous ( or even more ludicrous).

With 44% of the American population believing that Jesus is going to come down in their lifetime to take them to heaven, with Muslims and other religious crazies destroying the fragile shell of civilization, Communists look better and better. Of course, Communism is merely another religious faith. Still, I feel that the Chinese Communist government is looking out for my interests when they suppress religious crazies like Falun Gong and the Tibetan Buddhist monks.

My mother would have given her father more than a few grey hairs, if he only had any hair. All her friends were joining the Bund Deutsche Maedel (the Hitler Youth for girls) and they were having ever so much fun.  He however refused to even consider signing the permission slip, permitting her to join. She then simply forged his signature and joined.

Prior to a subsequent Hitler Youth rally, she looked desperately for something pretty to pin on her uniform. She found nothing. She then searched through her father's personal belongings and found a pretty metal badge that she pinned on and rushed off to the rally. She was however intercepted by the local Nazi block warden who angrily marched her back to her house.  It appears that the pretty badge was a Communist Party membership badge. Had she been caught wearing it, it would probably have meant her father being sent to a concentration camp.

The reality of this rotten Nazi ideology though came home in 1937.  It was Kristallnacht. She was walking home when she saw an old family friend thrown through his second story window, to land on the sidewalk as a crumpled bleeding wreck. Horrified, she yelled at the jeering Nazi mob to help her get him to a hospital. No one did anything, so my mother, then a teenage girl, dragged him to the hospital herself. She said that she was suspicious and stayed on at the hospital until she was sure that he was being taken care of. 

This was a life changing event for her in many respects. She decided to become a nurse and won a scholarship to study nursing at the Kaiserswert Institute. She also embarked on a strange double life, saving people from death at the hands of the Nazis.  For example, when my parents first met, they walked past a column of slave laborers. One of the guards laid a slave's head open with the edge of a shovel and left him to die in a ditch. When the column passed, she made my father help cary the man to a barn, where she sewed him back together.  My father said that he was afraid that they would be caught and sent to a KZ (concentration camp). She though was not dissuaded and kept returning to take care of the man until his health returned.  We didn't realize the full extent of her activities until my father taped a full hour of her description of her activities a few years before she died.

M

The Market Economy, etc.

On the way home from school, I once passed a pair of men working on a wooden contraption making rope.  These spinneret like things twisted skeins of rope in one direction while the all the skeins together were twisted together in the opposite direction.  You may ask why they did not simply go to a mall and buy the rope? There was simply no place to buy such things just as there were no places to buy ready made clothing, canned goods or most other things. Eventually they would come but not while I was little.

Likewise, I would see men replacing broken spokes in wooden wagon wheels. You had to first remove the steel rim and then replace the broken parts. The rim would then be heated to expand it, placed around the rim again, and cooled with buckets of water to shrink-fit it.

I remember my first experience with toilet paper. Newspapers were most commonly used in the outhouses but as the market economy began to penetrate our remote area, toilet paper made a sudden appearance. It took me a while to figure out how to use it, and that was with a certain amount of trepidation.  This toilet paper was the crudest stuff imaginable, amply saturated with sizable wooden splinters. You can imagine how carefully I used that stuff on that rather delicate portion of my anatomy. Sometimes things that are heralded as great advances are not such great advances at all.

While I saw some usage of chemical nitrogen fertilizers in the fields (broadcast by hand), the fertilizing mainstay remained good old Mist and Jauche. Mist is straw from the barn, mixed with smelly animal shit.  This was piled up in huge piles in the barnyard and then spread out in the fields and plowed under. Jauche is liquid manure. This was pumped into what looked like the mother of all beer kegs.  This giant barrel took up the entire lenght of a wagon.  You would then hitch your horse to the wagon, open the stopcock and haul the wagon back and forth across the fields, gushing manure all over the place. And the smell of these? Well, I will just leave that to your imagination.

My British Occupation Zone ID

Irminsul

Not far from my home was the Irminsul. This was the center of the Saxon religion and was destroyed by Charlemagne. This, after a 30 year war by the Franks against the Saxons, lead by our great chieftain, Widukind, or Wittekind. There is a story that Widukind entered the camp of the Franks in disguise,hoping to spy out the enemy. However, he was discovered and brought in front of Charlemagne. Charlemagne though so admired Widukind's bravery that he let him go.  I just have the faintest memory of a song about the Irminsul. Possibly sung by my friend's grandmother while at her spinning wheel, or maybe just in a movie. I sometimes wonder if my friend's family were the last surviving Saxon pagans? I don't remember any sort of religious rituals at all in their house. However, they would have had to keep a very low profile to survive at the hands of the meek and gentle Christians. After the grandmother died though, observance of some of the unique local festivals seemedto drop off.

Windmill Back Home

Windmill in Wehe. First the sails were taken down and a diesel engine was substituted. Then it was abandoned for years. Finally the sails were restored to turn it into a tourist attraction.  I however knew it when was a genuine working windmill used to grind the local grain and the sole motive power was from the sails.

Moin Moin

A common greeting not only in Low Saxon speaking areas but in areas that were formerly dominated by the Hanseatic League. It literally means Good good.  Originally though it was a part of a greeting where you wished someone a Moien Dag, a good day. After a long time though, the Dag was dropped and the moin was doubled to become today's Moin Moin.

I thought I was going to be done with these reflections on life in the Saxonlands a long time ago but things keep comming up that I had failed to mention previously. In this sense it is rather like the peat bogs. For example, you would think, wouldn't you, that after a season of digging peat that the bogs would revert to vast expanses of open water? Not so. This is only a temporary condition. After the removal of the top layer of peat, the loss of weight causes the peat underneath to slowly push up so that by the time it comes to dig peat again, the bog looks like an unending expanse of land, like peat had never been dug out here before. Now, I could have mentioned this before but it seemed so obvious. On reflection it occurred to me that very probably no one reading this has ever dug peat out of a bog before. Then too, I was afraid that everyone reading this would fall asleep reading a long dissertation on peat bogs.  Perhaps they are falling asleep reading my accounts anyway.  I just don't know.

In regard to the three wheeled trucks that I previously mentioned, the end of the war found Germany with the greatest concentration of ace fighter pilots in the world. For some reason or other, the allies did not want these men to continue to ply their trade. There were thus a huge number of decommissioned fighters that no one had any use for.  Some shrewd cookie then thought to use the front wheel assembly to build a three wheeled truck. An added advantage was the fact that German tax law taxed motor vehicles by the number of wheels. These trucks could be built unbelievably cheaply because turning the steering wheel turned the whole motor assembly. No drive shaft, differential or any of that nonsense.