The Catholic Writers Guild

November 15. I am writing from Frankfurt, Germany.

My wife and I spent the weekend in Paris with our Brazilian goddaughter, her French husband, and their two children. A wonderful time with a wonderful family.

From there, we came to Germany. I have not been here for over fifty years, and it is a completely foreign country to me. Being part of the European Union, I had expected that Germany would have multi-lingual signage as they do in Portugal, Spain, and even France. But signs here are almost exclusively in German – a language I don’t understand – and I feel disoriented.

But we find our hotel – a charming, small hotel overlooking the river. We walk out into the streets of the “old town.” It is not really old: except for the cathedral, the entire old part of the city was destroyed during World War II and has been built with modern structures in an old style.

St. Bartholomew Cathedral is awe-inspiring — high Gothic arches and giant windows. It has some of the most beautiful painted wood carvings we have seen. We are in time for noon mass; we don’t understand the words but (as with masses worldwide) the rhythms and motions are the same and bring us closer to God, and the Eucharist brings us to Christ.

Afterward, we stroll out onto the old town streets – mostly pedestrian – still feeling the strangeness of foreigners. Suddenly my wife stops and points: in front of us is a museum dedicated to Der Struwwelpeter.

My mother was entirely of German descent, mostly Bavarian, the fun-loving, largely Catholic part of Germany. Her family was Lutheran, but a story came down through the generations. Her great-great-grandfather moved into a home in Bavaria that belonged to a Catholic family and had a statue of Mary in the front yard. Because her great-great grandfather’s family was Lutheran, the neighbors expected him to remove the statue. Instead, he had it cleaned and newly painted and became friends with his Catholic neighbors.

My mother’s parents, who were second cousins, were completely bilingual. They spoke German at home until my mother’s elder sister went to kindergarten (this was in Chicago) and had difficulty understanding English. So my grandparents switched to speaking English and, by the time my mother came along four years later, spoke almost no German. My mother never really learned the language.
But she did learn bits of German songs and poetry. And among them was Der Struwwelpeter.

Der Struwwelpeter, an illustrated collection of cautionary rhymes, is a truly awful book. Written in 1844 by Dr. Heinrich Hoffman, a physician, and psychiatrist, for his own three-year-old son, it tells about the terrible things that happen to children who do what they shouldn’t do. It was intended as comic exaggeration; it was grim as the Grimm brothers, playing much the role, I suspect, that horror movies now do — making a safe world scary. It became tremendously popular, translated into some 114 languages (and 80 different German dialects). Today, I’m sure, it would be highly disapproved by right-thinking people. My mother, who was one of the most charming, good-hearted people I have ever met, loved it.

What she loved about it was the silly exaggeration of the situations, the ridiculous drawings, and most of all, the sounds. One of her favorites was about Paulinchen, a little girl who played with matches. Her cats warn her to stop:

Miau! Mio! Miau! Mio!
Wirf’s weg! Sonst brennst du lichterloh!

But to no avail. Poor Paulinchen burns up, and the final scene shows the cats, streams of water flowing from their eyes, forming a stream around the ashes.

Terrible stuff. But I can still hear my mother’s rich, laughing voice saying Miau Mio. And I realize that with her is where I started to learn my love of sounds; with her, I got a picture into a different world, with her, I linked to my family’s past. Maybe it’s not so foreign after all.

All Rights Reserved, Arthur Powers 2022.

Arthur Powers

Arthur Powers went to Brazil in 1969 as a Peace Corps Volunteer and lived there for over thirty years. He & his wife spent seven years in the Amazon as Franciscan lay missioners. They now live in Raleigh, where Arthur is a deacon. Arthur, a co-founder of CWG, is author of two collections of short stories set in Brazil, two volumes of poetry, and The Book of Jotham.