Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht

At Christmas, my sisters and I

learned to sing carols in German:

Grandpa would give us a quarter

apiece for performing, though

only Carol could carry a tune.

After the start of the War

Father forbade us to practice,

and when Grandpa asked for his songs

we told him they weren't allowed.

You are German, he shouted. Sing!

Singt, mein kinder, für mich!

We stood mute, unhappy, ashamed,

between father and son locking eyes

while the U-boats were nosing the currents

and propellers coughed in the skies

like angels clearing their throats.

"Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht" by Peter Meinke, from Liquid Paper: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

This poem appeared on Garison Keilor’s “The Writer’s Almanac” a brief daily radio program that is transcribed and emailed to me. There is a truly painful emotion displayed here between the immigrant German Grandpa and the first generation born in this country son. How that generation tried to erase its roots, especially when it was tied to the enemy as in the World Wars. I suspect it is no different with newer waves of immigrants.

There is a saying, however, that touches on the other relationship in the poem. The second generation tries to remember what the first generation tried to forget. Yeah, I get that.

I am frequently aware of my German roots. I am curious about where we come from. I am curious about the family I never knew. There are only a few people still alive who knew my Father’s grandparents. There are a good deal more who knew my mother’s grandparents–including me. I knew my great-grandma Angner even though she couldn’t speak English, and I as a toddler could do no more than count in German.

I sometimes wonder how much a people’s ancestral culture shapes them. I remember an experiment we did in college. We took tests to discover whether we were left brained (the rational part of the brain if a person is right handed) or right brained (the emotional-imaginative part of the brain.) Curiously, all three of the most left-brained people were of German descent.

Am I the way I am at least partly because of my ancestry? We weren’t overtly German in the sense of having German flags around the house or portraits of Bismark although I did have portraits of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. That was because they were great composers who happened to be German. (Or were they great composers because they were German?) And yet, there was an awareness that we were of German background. There were certain traits among us–hard work, thrift, suspicion of outsiders–that might have had cultural roots. But maybe not.

Enough musing about imponderables.

Although it’s a little late, Happy New Year to everyone.

May the Lord bless you on your journey through this new year and beyond, and may he welcome you at your final arriving.

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