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The Butcher of Hannover

Halloween is approaching. Today I unpacked our Dracula nutcracker and hung the trusty orange skeleton on the living room door. It seems appropriate, then, to tell you the story of the Butcher of Hannover. His name was Fritz Haarman, and he was one of the worst serial killers of all time - right here in quiet little Hannover.

Warning: This is a gruesome story. If you can't make it through an episode of Dexter, you should not read on.

Haarman enlisted in the army as a young man but was discharged for his mental instability. Soon after getting a job at a cigar factory, he was arrested for molesting children and committed to a mental hospital, but he managed to escape and flee to Switzerland. He enlisted in the military again under an alias, but was again discharged for medical reasons. Haarman tried working again but seemed to adjust better to life as a thief and a con-man in Hannover.

After serving four years in prison for theft and fraud, Haarman was released in 1918 at the end of World War 1. All of Germany was struggling, and many young men came from the country to Hannover in search of work. Haarman would seek out teenage job-seekers, runaways and vagrants. He lured them back to his apartment with a promise of food and a place to stay. After seducing them, he killed his victims by biting through their throats (yes, with his teeth). He then dismembered their bodies and dumped the bones in the Leine River that runs right through the middle of town.

During this time Haarman met Hans Grans, who became his romantic partner as well as his partner in crime. Grans would help Haarman choose some of his victims, and later sold their clothing on the black market. Though it hasn't been proven, Grans is also believed to have sold the victims' flesh as pork.

In 1924, children playing along the Leine found a human skull. Another turned up a few weeks later. Police dragged the river and found over 500 human bones, belonging to at least 22 different people. They suspected Haarman and got him to confess after finding blood-stained walls and victims' belongings in his apartment. After a two week trial, he was convicted and sentenced to death by beheading. His head was kept for scientific study and is now preserved in a jar at the medical school in Goettingen. Grans served 12 years in jail and lived in Hannover until his death in 1980.

It's a creepy story, and a true one. Haarman, who lived before there was a term for 'serial killer', was called a werewolf, a vampire and the Butcher of Hannover. He makes Dexter seem tame, and might have you thinking twice before you take another bite of pork.

A castle, sugar, stalkers

When I write a whole post about water, I realize that I am running low on inspiration. Brian and I leave for a week in Ireland on Wednesday, so I promise you more interesting stories soon. But for now, I will tell you a little about what we saw on yesterday's bike ride.

1. Old woman in motorized wheelchair scooter by the side of the road, under an apple tree. A young boy (either her grandson or some poor passerby too polite to say no) climbing up an apple tree and trying to knock down the apples with the handle of the woman's umbrella. It seemed like there must have been an easier way to do this...

2. Schloss Marienburg in Fall. This is the castle built by George V, the last king of Hannover for his wife Marie. Construction started in 1858 but they only spent a year there before the Prussians came and the royal family fled to Austria. I wrote about it in this post when we first saw this castle in May. Now, with the leaves changing colors, we rode all the way up the hill (perhaps the only hill in the state of Niedersachsen) to the castle and had a look around.

3. Sugar processing plant below the castle. The funny thing about living in Europe is that there may be a Claire's Boutique in the ground floor of a 16th century half-timbered house (saw that in Celle), and there is a sugar processing plant with the best possible views of the Marienburg castle. Sugar beets are grown all over northern Germany and here's one of the places where they turn into sugar. The beets are sliced and soaked in hot water to get the juice out. Then the juice is boiled down so that the water evaporates and sugar crystals are left behind. Leftover pulp from the beets is ground into pellets for animal feed.

4. Bike stalker. We have stalked in the past, but yesterday we were being followed by a lost cyclist. I guess he wasn't trying to be too sneaky, since he wore neon yellow. He was probably just lost. Toward the end of the ride he caught up to me and asked (in German) if we were going toward Hannover. I said yes, and then, in a surge of self-confidence, didn't stop there. I told him that the Maschsee (Hannover's big lake) was to the right. It was actually to the right then the left and we were taking a back-road way to get there. What I should have done was just told him to follow us, because we lost him a few minutes later. He may still be riding around looking for Hannover or maybe he stumbled across the naked lake and decided to stay. I felt a little bad about that - not the naked lake part but the not inviting him to come along. Sometimes when my brain is focused on operating in German, all common sense I may have had once disappears...

5. Solitary naked man on the shores of the naked lake (no photo for this one). It was a chilly day to bare it all.

That's the report from yesterday. It's also proof that not having anything to write about does not keep me from writing.

Bicycle harvest

It's harvest time in Hannover.
One of the things that I like about living here is how easy it is to get out of town on the bike. It takes all of ten minutes to get from our urban apartment to farmland. I didn't grow up on a farm, or anywhere near one, but I am learning a little by riding past them and alongside Brian, who is a closet agriculture nerd.  As a geography teacher it's part of his job to understand how and where things are grown. As people who eat, we should all know more about it too. Around the Hannover region, farms are growing lettuce, potatoes, celery, corn, canola, wheat and, of course, the sugar beet. This kind of variety is lacking in many parts in the U.S., where soy and corn take over and other produce comes from farther away.
Here are some photos we took on the road:

pumpkins

Lettuce and cabbage

Sugar beets

This is the time of year that tractors are pulling the crops out of the ground and putting them in huge piles until someone comes with another machine to gather them up and take them off to be sold. There are much more technical terms for all of these things but I don't know what they are.
During this process, there are a few odd vegetables that roll away. So when I found some potatoes lying on the bike path last week, I couldn't just let them go to waste. I picked a couple up, put them in my pockets, and rode off. We ate them a few days later.

Yesterday, I saw a whole row of pear trees that had dropped their fruits by the side of the road. I rescued three to let them ripen on my kitchen counter. I am not a thief, really. I shop at the farmers market every week and buy local stuff at the supermarket too. But when a potato is lying there, vulnerable to passing traffic, someone has to rescue it.

The jersey has three little pockets. They are filled with three little pears.

I do not have a farm. I don't even have a backyard anymore. But if I want to know what's in season or how tall the corn is getting, I don't need to travel far to find out. Now I just need pockets that are big enough to take home a stray pumpkin.

Happy Einheit.

Yesterday was the Tag der Deutschen Einheit, the holiday commemorating when East and West Germany were reunited in 1990. Hannover celebrated by... sleeping in. There was nothing going on here, so we tried making our own fun at Andrew and Katja's garden. Unfortunately, Andrew, Katja and baby Juno were home sick. So our friend John mowed the grass, I yanked out some dead zucchini plants, and Brian made the fire. We celebrated the only way we know how to celebrate a national holiday - with grilled meat and several beers.

Happy sort-of birthday to you Germany, in your latest political configuration. You're all right.

Oktoberfest, dirndls and pride

Its Oktoberfest time in Germany. There is the big, crazy, internationals festival in Munich, and then there's the one in Hannover. Much like our beloved city, it's not so big, but it is cozy, easy to navigate, and fun with the right people around. At Oktoberfest you can eat fair food - we had candied almonds, but you can also get crepes, sausages (of course), pizza and Schmalzkuchen, which is like little squares of funnel cake. You can ride the rides, play carnival games, and visit the beer tents. I went with my friend Ulla last Saturday and we tried almost all of it, including bumper cars (called auto-scooters in German):

The beer tent featured an oom-pa band playing oom-pa music beside some Bavarian flags in front of a huge mural of Hannover's famous Rathaus. They were serving beer of course, but it was Hannover's Gilde rather than a Bavarian brew. It was a bit of an identity crisis in there. That didn't stop people from having a good time, though. There were even a couple of tables of people dressed in lederhosen and dirndls. 

I didn't know what a dirndl was before I moved here. It's that traditional dress that the St Pauli Girl wears: laced up the front, apron and puffy sleeved white blouse showing variable levels of cleavage. It's the traditional dress of Bavaria and the Alpine regions, and a must-have if you are going to the Munich Oktoberfest.

I have no frame of reference for the dirndls. There's really no traditional American dress. The closest we come is the traditional clothing of our immigrant ancestors. And since my family has ancestors from a lot of different places, there's no easy answer. What would I wear? A square dancing outfit? A cowgirl costume? The dirty homespun dresses of immigrants who just spent weeks on a boat to escape the poverty of their homelands? That's not very festive.

Of course, if you are an American Indian it's a different story. Your traditional dress is so famous that the Germans use it as the theme for some kind of a log ride at Oktoberfest. I'm sure you are proud of them for that.

Note the totem poles and the Indians holding guns.

Dirndls, however, are cool. At least they are starting to be cool again. I read a New York Times article stating that one major dirndl distributor's sales have increased 750% in the last ten years. It seems that their popularity reflects how much national pride the Germans are feeling at that moment in history. They were popular in the early 20th century among Bavaria's wealthy ladies, then came back into style as the Third Reich asserted Germany's national identity. Hostesses at the 1972 Olympics in Munich wore blue ones, and they were popular again during Germany's World Cup in 2006. So why now? Why would dirndls become fashionable again? Maybe it's the Euro crisis and the feeling that Germany is bailing out all the other countries in Europe. Maybe it's globalization in general - American movies, Japanese cars and the idea that the "made in Germany" slogan doesn't carry the weight that it used to. Maybe it's because incomes in Germany are pretty high and people can afford them. A nice dirndl costs around 200 euros, without the blouse. Of course, there are the cheaper, costume party variety for around 50 euros. They are definitely made in China.

So while the rustic Alpine women used to dress like this:

 

The girls at Oktoberfest are probably dressed more like this:

 

Of course, that happens in the south of Germany, where they really like to have a good time. Here in the north, we only sort of like to have a good time. So whether you show up wearing a dirndl or not, you can still drive the bumper cars.

Beer

What do purity, the middle ages, hallucinogens and foam have in common? The correct answer is beer.

This is part three of the posts about beverages, and it's time to talk about beer. Germans drink more beer than anyone in the world other than the Czechs.

But walk into a bar and ask for a Belgian ale or an IPA or, heaven forbid, a light beer, and you'll get a blank stare that has nothing to do with your poor German language skills.

German beer is consistently good and it's no mistake. They have a law about it, or used to. The Reinheitsgebot, or Beer Purity Law, was first enacted in Bavaria in 1516. It stipulated that the only ingredients that could go into beer were water, hops and barley. After yeast was discovered, it became the fourth legal ingredient. In the 1500s, people were putting herbs, fruits, roots and other stuff into beer to increase their profits. Sometimes the herbs and such were toxic, and sometimes they were even hallucinogenic.

The Reinheitsgebot was meant to protect the consumer and it even set a standard price for beer. The law survived the creation of the German state and was the oldest food-quality regulation in the world until it was repealed in 1987. Even though the purity law has been replaced by standard EU regulations, many brewers in Germany still abide by it.

So when you show up at the bar in Germany, you have two choices in beer: Pils or Weizen. Pils is 'normal' beer, and Weizen is wheat beer. If it's a really fancy place they might also have bottled beer, which is also a Pils or a Weizen. Your beer is not complete unless has a nice foamy head on it. While an American bartender may tilt the glass to keep the bubbles at a minimum, the Germans pour it on in. Your German word for the day is Schaum, which means foam.

It's a good time to write about beer, since Oktoberfest is happening now, both in Munich and, to a lesser extent, in Hannover. More on that later. Here is a picture of Ulla and I drinking beers in the tent at Oktoberfest. The bartender laughed at us for ordering beers that were so small. He did not skimp on the foam.