When I studied for a year in Heidelberg at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, it wasn’t my teachers who taught me to speak German, it was the children in my life and also a septuagenarian. The teachers scared me. Combine dyslexia with I-can-write-and-read-German-but-I-can’t-speak-it-or-understand-it, and I was a mess in class. Walking down Plöckgasse to the main library to review, I studied the cobblestones and feared the next class session when I’d be called on to speak haltingly.
Meanwhile, the Buschbeck family took me in. Sophie Buschbeck was 79 to my 22. She was a widow. She lived on Mozartstrasse and loved music. She took me with her to the blind Gemüsefrau to buy vegetables, she took me on walks up and along scenic and historic Philosophenweg, she took me to church, she took me to visit shut-ins, including one famous former concert pianist who’d only play for Sophie, she took me to art museums, she invited me to a Christmas with a real tree and beeswax candles burning on it, and she had me clean her rugs and her toilet and wash her steps. And she cooked a roast chicken for me every Friday since “Americans like roast chicken.”
She went from Frau Buschbeck and the formal “Sie,” to asking me to call her Mutti and use the intimate “Du.” And her grandchildren said things to me like (except, in German): “You speak as if you have a hot potato in your mouth!” Which is apparently how my Southern accent elongated the crisp German syllables to their ears. And “We don’t say it like that!” Meanwhile, their parents kept telling me my German was “hervorragend!” “terrific!” When it wasn’t.
Her husband was a Lutheran minister in World War II and was five years in a Russian prison camp. She said that every day she asked God to send her “Mann”—her husband home, and one day she looked out from her balcony and saw an unrecognizable figure but with a gait she knew, a way of walking she went to embrace. Haggard, underweight, his face disheveled and marked with suffering.
“And,” she told me (also in German), “for every time I asked God to send him home to me, I now try to thank God as many times. Which is what you must do, Carmen. You must thank as often as you ask for something.”
So when I use German, after all those asks to “Please help me speak and hear/understand it,” I am thankful, every single time I use German in any way, I feel gratitude to Mutti Buschbeck and her family.
[I]ch möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. . . .
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
From Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Einen Jungen Dichter
I wish to ask you, as gently as I can, dear friend, please have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, and like books written in a very unknown language. . . .
Live the questions now.
From Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher