Walking is an activity that needs little conscious effort and, therefore, enables the mind to wander off in all sorts of directions. And some of these directions involve the walker's mind freely dipping in and out of the past, the present, his/her senses and related associations. The first time I went walking in the Fuerstenlager, near Bensheim, I immediately felt comfortable. There was a sense of the familiar, almost as though the landscape was carrying images already present in my consciousness. It was, therefore, no huge surprise to later learn that the "park" had been laid out in the late 18th century in the English style. This had been the last thing on my mind as I was walking, but I felt this English association as, perhaps, the comfort of belonging.
This "Englishness" was reinforced a little later when I sat down to enjoy "English tea" in the café shown on the right in pic 1 where the sunshades are. Sandwiches were brought on a 3-tier stand, and the waiter - in the German fashion - gave a lecturette on the tea itself, how long it should draw and how it should be consumed!
Continuing my walk, I arrived at the Kirchberghaeuschen. This building was erected in the middle of the 19th century in a classical style
and is now, essentially, a beer garden with extensive views over the Rhine plain towards the Weinberge (vineyards) on the hills 20Km away. The Kirchberghaeuschen is shown in pic 2 below.
As nice as the beer garden is, I was itching to visit the Gedenkstein (memorial stone). I had seen the small sign indicating its presence sometime before and I set off to find it. A trail, overgrown and narrow, took me deep into the woods. Eventually, I found it. The stone rose tooth-like from the ground and it was set at a crazy angle as though held up to the sky by some invisible thread. The stone was inscribed, in old-German script, with 12 names.
It appeared that 3 days before US troops arrived in Bensheim on 27 March 1945, 12 German and non-German male and female prisoners were shot by the Gestapo. All of these people are just names now, but I see no reason not to include the ex-presence of the otherwise forgotten people now haunting this spot. Among the victims were 3 US paratroopers - W. H. Forman, R. T. McDonald, and Ray F. Hermann. The other victims were Rosa Bertram, Erich Salomon and Walter Hangen from nearby Worms, Lina Bechstein from Kriegsheim, Gretel Maraldo from Offenbach am Main, Jakob Gramlich from Bonsweiher, 2 Frenchmen Eugene Dumas and Lothaire Delaunay, and the Dutchman Frederik Roolker. There were 3 other unidentified victims. Here below is a pic of the memorial stone.
The moral of this piece is simply that should you find yourself stuck at a desk and utterly unable to snatch the next bright idea, go out and see if walking can get your creativity moving. Just sitting there will not help much. And maybe you might come across a stone like this one on the left. And you might find yourself asking questions like: Who were these people? What were they doing here? What happened to the perpetrators? Do the families of these "names" know where they are? It was an object like this - a grave of a German soldier - that inspired me to spend years writing the novel, The Schoenbuch Forest. Published in 2011, it remains my best seller! What binds the memorial stone near Bensheim and the grave in the Schoenbuch Forest is that both were found while walking in the memory of the forest.
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