Common practice in Catholicism at the time was that if they couldn’t pay, they were threatened with excommunication or denied the sacraments they needed to save their souls. Whatever they may have privately felt about the Roman Catholic Church, they wouldn’t dare speak out. But then, a German monk named Martin Luther challenged the papal practice of selling indulgences. Luther believed that forgiveness was for God to decide, and buying an indulgence would not absolve people from punishment or ensure their salvation.
Martin Luther became synonymous with the Protestant Reformation—the protesters against Catholicism. Protestants stripped Christianity down to its essentials. The Bible, not the pope, reigned supreme. All who believed in Christ were “priests.” Clergy could even marry. At age forty-one, Martin Luther himself married a nun, a woman he had helped smuggle out of a convent in a herring barrel. While irrelevant to Luther’s religious beliefs, a nun in a herring barrel is always worth mentioning.
The religious schism in the seventeenth century between Catholics and Lutherans culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, a war that splattered the blood of one-fifth of all Germans—millions of souls—into the soil. Until World War II, it was one of the longest and worst catastrophes in European history.
Ultimately, my mother’s German ancestors remained Catholic, while my father’s sided with Evangelical Lutheranism. It wasn’t either family’s decision. Each village was obliged to accept whatever religion the local lord chose. Some villages went back and forth between Catholicism and Lutheranism for centuries.
In the 1840s, both my mother’s Catholic family and my father’s Lutheran one uprooted themselves and pressed westward across the ocean to America, escaping internal revolts, high taxes, and crop failures in their farming villages.
They replanted themselves in the wooded, rolling hills of southern Indiana, where their seeds of every kind took root. Though transplants, they never forgot their homeland, nor did they leave behind their traditions, their mother tongue, or their prejudices. In the Midwest of the 1950s, when my mother, a Catholic, fell in love with my father, a Lutheran, it was practically considered a mixed marriage.
My mother, Viola, was born into a staunchly Catholic family, the eldest of seven children. She grew up on the family farm on Schnellville Road in Jasper, Indiana. She was raised on chicken dumplings, lard sandwiches, sauerkraut, turnip kraut and sausages, frog legs and turtle soup. My mother hunted squirrels, set rabbit traps, and caught frogs that she skinned and butchered and then fried in flour, salt, and pepper for supper. She wore dresses that her mother sewed out of feed sacks. When manufacturers realized their sacks were being used for clothing, they deliberately designed them with flowers and pretty colors. Like everyone else in the county, my mother went to first grade in 1939 speaking German and very little English. She finished eighth grade, but after that, there was no school bus to pick her up on her country road. For high school, she rode into town with her dad at six in the morning when he went to work and stayed with her aunt Victoria for an hour and a half until it was time to walk another half hour to school. My grandfather picked her up after school, but more often than not he stopped at the Sunset Tavern to drink. She’d either have to wait in the car until he was finished or go into the bar to get him.
After a few months of this schedule, she quit school and cleaned houses for five dollars a day. She also worked in a cannery peeling tomatoes for a nickel a bucket. The highlight of those days was piling into a car with one of the boys from the cannery and going out for a Coke, equal in cost to one bucket of tomatoes. In the summer, she picked strawberries for five cents a quart.
At one point, she considered becoming a nun: for a girl with no possibility of getting a higher education, the nunnery represented security. “It would have been an easier life,” she said. “No babysitting or housekeeping or working in the field.”
Despite the threatening letters that many of their neighbors received during World War I, and the understandably negative public opinion about Germany after both world wars, my family and the entire county was German and proud of it. Whether it was sentimentality or nostalgia for a lost world that they’d idealized, or pure, sheer stubbornness, the people of Dubois County held on to their German language, not to mention their German work ethic, thriftiness, stoicism, and tendency to sweep everything under the carpet. For over fifty years they ignored the sexual abuse of young boys by a revered priest, Monsignor Othmar Schroeder, the founding pastor of the Holy Family parish in Jasper, who served from 1947 until 1975. The scandal was exposed nationally in The New York Times in 2007. My mother said that had any of the boys told their parents, they would have been beaten for saying such a thing about a priest. At the same time, these German-Americans cherished their deeply rooted suspicion-bordering-on-hatred of anyone not white, Christian, and heterosexual.
Years later, my mother recalled her uncle Lawrence getting very drunk and going outside at night and shouting up at the sky, “Hi-ho, Hitler!”
“You mean ‘Heil Hitler’?” I suggested.
“Maybe it was.” She suddenly realized what she hadn’t understood as a child. Her fun-loving uncle was a Nazi sympathizer.
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On my father’s side, after World War I ended and my paternal grand-father Ed had finished his army service, he met my grandmother Helene in Hamburg. They could not have been more different. My grandfather had only been able to attend school through sixth grade before leaving to work on the farm, while my grandmother finished high school in Hamburg, regularly attended the opera, and her sister Margaret was a ballerina touring Europe. Ultimately, my grandmother decided that whatever life in the United States offered, it had to be better than remaining in postwar Germany, where hyperinflation rendered millions of marks worthless. By the end of 1923, a loaf of bread in the Weimar Republic cost, literally, a billion marks.
In March 1924, after getting married in Germany, these grandparents arrived in Haysville, Indiana, to dirt roads without streetlamps and men who spat chewing tobacco toward a bucket in the kitchen but often missed. There, just a few miles north of my hometown of Jasper, my father was born in a three-room log cabin that had belonged to his great-grandfather, Johann Conrad Himsel.
When World War II broke out, my great-aunt Margaret fled Germany with her Jewish husband, Walter. The Nazis had come to their apartment building to take Walter, and they escaped to the roof. My grandparents put up the farm as collateral and sponsored them to come to the United States. They lived on the farm for almost a year before relocating to Boston. Walter died before I was born, and my father recalled him fondly as a good man. Because I never knew him, I didn’t give him much thought until years later when I began to understand what the Holocaust had been, and how people like Walter were considered “other.”
At eighteen, my father was drafted to serve in World War II. He was in an engineering unit, building bridges for the Allies and blowing up enemy bridges from Belgium to Luxembourg to France to Germany. In a small box, my grandmother kept the letters he wrote home. Throughout the summer and fall of 1944, while he was in basic training in Texas, he followed the hunting and planting season from a distance.
He wrote:
How does the corn look by now? . . . So Robert and dad went fishing and didn’t even get a bite. I think they started fishing too late. They should have fished in June already. . . . Have you got a good clover stand in the wheat field? . . . I guess squirrel season closes today. It won’t be long and the rabbit season will open again. . . . I suppose by now it should be pretty cold up in Indiana and I guess old cottontail rabbit is getting hell about now.
On November 6, 1944, he wrote:
Here in England as you know everything is black out and you have to feel your way around. If censorship would not prevent us from writing certain things, then I could write you a plenty, but as it is now we cannot
