Zierenberg, Germany
Dear Folks, It’s a Saturday morning and I’m sitting in the cozy study Hartmut and Rike (pronounced “Reeka”) Bossel have let me take over in their house. I’m looking out the window at sleet coming down on the bare branches of the apple and nut trees in the back yard. One mountain ash is laden with drooping clusters of red berries. On my desk is a vase of chrysanthemums — Rike wanted me to have flowers to look at.
We’ve just finished a breakfast of whole-grain rolls from the town bakery. Rike goes and gets them super fresh every Saturday morning.
Younger son Kendrick, age 21, is still sleeping. He’s an engineering student, currently doing a term of “practicum” in the machine shop of a Volkswagen factory in Kassel. He just brought home some beautiful metalwork he’s just finished, including a table vise that looks like highest-quality German precision manufacture. Kenny gets up early all week and sleeps in on weekends. In his spare time he goes to discos, plays badminton, designs and plays dungeons-and-dragons-type computer games, and makes things in the Bossels’ basement shop. His self-designed electronic bedroom contains the best computer and sound system in the house, including Christmas-tree lights that flick on and off as the music throbs. The equipment sits on a system of desks and shelves he carpentered himself.
Older son Derk, age 29, was here for breakfast too, though he lives with friends in an apartment in Kassel. He shows up here once a week or so. He’s beginning the thesis that will complete his studies for the Diplom Ingenieur degree, the crown upon the head of that well-trained wonder of the world, the German engineer. Derk is a gentle soul, who applies his engineering skills to the design of better bicycles and solar cars. A few years ago he won the European Tour de Sol, driving a solar car his team at Kassel designed.
The middle child, Karen, is in Berlin at university. She declared her feminine independence by going through an apprenticeship to become a metal-worker — also, in Germany, an amazingly disciplined training, which takes 3 years. Having worked as a welder for awhile, Karen decided to go back to school — in “environmental technics.” She’s into the Bohemian life of Berlin, which is the free-thinking, wild, do-your-own-thing city of Germany.
My own life here is blessedly quiet. I’m mostly writing, which is just what I wanted. I go into Kassel with Hartmut most weekdays and work at his research group. Hartmut and Rike are making things perfect for me, providing me with a beautiful home to stay in and almost no obligations. Hartmut and his group are experts in what I’m writing about, namely systems theory. Rike provides all the necessities of life. There couldn’t be a better set-up for getting a book done.
Hartmut and Rike are old, good friends. Dennis and I met Hartmut in our global modeling days. He was responsible for the energy sector of the second world model, the one directed by Mike Mesarovic at Case Western University and Eduard Pestel in Hannover, Germany. Now Hartmut is a professor at the University of Kassel, the head of a research group, and the author of some excellent books on modeling and on environmental science.
Hartmut and his group have made interesting models, for example, of air pollution damage in German forests, of the long-term development of the German agricultural system, of the effect of logging on Malaysian forests, of a CO2 emission reduction plan for South Korea. One person in his group is doing a cradle-to-grave accounting system for energy throughput and associated pollution flows in the German economy.
The Bossels, in various combinations, have stayed at our farm many times. Kenny and Basil played with each other all one summer, when both were puppies, so to speak. Hartmut and Dennis and I have conspired on numerous projects, including the Balaton Group, of which Hartmut is a founding member. Rike is a spinner, weaver, knitter, gardener, food-preserver, and cook, impressively skilled in all these dimensions. She’s teaching me to knit socks these days; I’m teaching her to make pumpkin pie; we’re learning together to play Mozart serenades for piano and Blockflöte (recorder).
The Bossel household is a great example of a comfortable but environmentally and socially responsible way of living. The house looks like every other newish house in Zierenberg, except for the solar collectors on the roof. Some of them heat water, the others are photo-voltaic — they feed power into the grid when the sun is shining. (You should see the double electric meters and the control system — beautiful German engineering — 80% paid for by the government in order to encourage solar development.) At night you can tell from the reflectivity of the windows that they’re heat-mirrors. There are compact fluorescent bulbs in nearly every fixture, of course. The place is snug, comfortable, efficient, unostentatious.
Hartmut drives a Nissan Sunny (35mpg) to work at this time of year, but in the summer he bikes in (it’s about 15 miles one-way). He’s thinking of switching to train commuting for the winter, though it’s expensive and not very convenient.
Rike’s garden is about one-tenth the size of mine, and she keeps only two hens for eggs and has only about 10 fruit trees. But she provides an amazing amount of the household’s food. That’s partly because she produces so much, and partly because she wastes so little. The ethos here is one of “just enough.” The meals are healthy and unfancy and delicious and there is always exactly enough food. Things from clothes to cars to computers are bought only when needed, they are well cared for, they last a long time. It’s not a stingy atmosphere, just a judicious one. There’s mindfulness here, deliberation, care.
I need to sing a little hymn to Rike Bossel. In a period when some people consider “housewife” a less-than-respectable label, Rike demonstrates house-wifery as a profession and high service. She never seems hurried or stressed. All is order and serenity around her. Without fuss the meals are cooked, the clothes washed and ironed, the woodstove stoked, the cabbage turned to sauerkraut, the windows washed, the house cleaned. The quinces are made into jelly and the apples into applesauce. The socks get knitted. The accounts get done and the bills and taxes paid. The last vegetables get harvested from the garden.
In addition to all that, Rike reads books, counsels her kids, runs 6 miles every Sunday with Hartmut, teaches exercise classes twice a week (once at an old peoples’ home, once for her running club), and practices high-level neighborliness. She is on call to babysit for the grandchild of one neighbor, or go to tea with an 86-year-old friend, or hear someone’s troubles. She takes homemade jelly here and homegrown apples there. She knows what is going on in the community and volunteers when something needs to get done.
I enjoy watching Rike operate day by day, and I enjoy sharing Hartmut’s professional life, which is much like my own, including too many people asking him to do too many things (and he has trouble saying “no” often enough — sound familiar?). I’m noticing with interest a tension in me that comes from my identification with both their worlds. At home I try to be both Rike and Hartmut. Of course, that’s two lifetimes’ worth of obligations. I lack their acceptance, their willingness to embrace one reasonable and worthwhile role and do it well. Therefore I do things with a flustered un-mindfulness, because at work I’m thinking about home and at home I’m thinking about work.
So these two good people, living their own fine lives, expose a rift in mine. Well, I see nothing to do about that but to notice it and use it to calm down a bit. We all have to walk the path under our own feet.
Kassel is a medium-size city, and mostly new. It was bombed to smithereens during World War II, so most of its buildings date from the 1950s and 60s and are utilitarian and boring.
The university sprawls all over town, in some new buildings and some refurbished old ones (including a former locomotive factory, where Hartmut did one of his own engineering “practicums.”) The university was designed for 9,000 students and now serves over 17,000. It’s almost impossible to find an unoccupied lecture hall or seminar room. Most of the students are from this region of northern Hesse. They live in the city and come to the university by foot and bicycle and streetcar and bus.
This semester Hartmut is teaching 350 undergraduates a basic course in environmental science, plus 60 advanced engineering students in simulation modeling, plus 20 more in dynamic models in ecology. He and I also conduct a two-hour seminar every Monday on sustainable development. About 20 people come, mostly grad students and researchers from Hartmut’s own group, but others are drifting in, including a few professors from other departments, which was Hartmut’s hope. I’m having fun breaking the standards of what one does in a German university — we’re playing games and having visioning sessions and telling stories and doing brain-storming. The group is responsive and fun, once they get over the shock. After every session we show one video from the “Race to Save the Planet” series, which is also popular.
On the days I stay in Zierenberg I write until I give out, usually in mid-afternoon, and then I go for long walks. This is a wonderful place to walk! It’s a town of 4000 people, a twenty-minute drive outside Kassel, and it escaped bombing, so the town center is a classic, German village, 700 years old, clustered around a church with a tower that dominates the landscape.
There used to be a wall and a moat around the town. Now that space has been converted to a ring of charming, sloping gardens. Some are fenced off and filled with chickens or turkeys or geese or ducks or sheep — which make me homesick. All of them are shaded with fruit trees. Most are managed in the proper German way, neat as a pin, straight rows, not a weed in sight. Within the town the streets are narrow and the houses are the fairy-tale German kind with exposed beams and flower boxes at the windows. (This is literally fairy-tale country, the home of the Brothers Grimm.) There are two drugstores, a bakery, several food shops, a bank, a shoe store, a florist, some hardware and appliance sellers, an optician, the post office, the town hall, the church. In the church are the tablets with the names of the Zierenbergers who were killed fighting Napoleon in 1812, fighting the French again in 1870, etc., etc. A place with a 700-year history has memories of lots of fighting.
All the shops are small. There are supermarkets and shopping malls and even McDonalds in Germany, but mainly in the cities. I get to remember here what life was like, in a world with fewer mega-firms and more economic diversity and equity.
The houses are clustered. Even new ones like the Bossels’ are tightly zoned around the edges of the old town. So the surrounding countryside is open and a walkers’ paradise. The landscape is rolling and studded with small mountains, much like New Hampshire. If I feel like climbing, I hike up into the beech forests on the mountains. If I feel like staying more or less on the level, I can go for miles on the paths through the fields.
The fields are over-fertilized. The forests are slowly dying from air pollution and acid rain (two-thirds of the trees of Germany are sick). But the country is still beautiful. Especially now that the leaves are gone, the environmental damage is not very visible. The walkers can believe that they are living in a peaceful, sustainable, rural world.
The paths go everywhere in the borders between the fields; they are used by tractors and walkers. The Germans are great walkers, especially the older ones. I’ve never been out in any weather when I haven’t seen other walkers. Most people eat too much here and smoke too much and breath terrible air, but they seem to make up for a lot of those abuses by walking.
The fields are spring-green at this time of year with winter wheat and cover crops of mustard. There are larger flocks of sheep outside of town, and cows and horses. Zierenburg was founded in 1293, when the much older settlements came together behind walls for self-protection. The Goths have been fighting the Romans around here, the Hessians have been fighting the Saxons, for millenia. On every hill is the ruin of a watch-tower; on nearly every mountain is the ruin of a fort or castle. It makes for interesting walking.
This has been such a bumper year for fruit in North Germany that everyone is sick of harvesting it. Everywhere I walk, I find apples still dangling from branches, and trees that are solid blue with plums. The plums have frozen a few times by now; they’re sweet as candy and just a bit fermented. They taste like plum brandy. I fill my pockets with apples on each trip and bring them home to Rike, who receives them graciously, even though her basement is full of apples she raised herself. We’re making a lot of apple cobbler and apple muffins and apple torte and applesauce.
I munch as I walk, leaving a trail of pits behind me, and thinking of one of my favorite German poems.
Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer Lord: it is time. Great was the
war sehr gross. summer’s feast.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Now lay upon the sun-dials your
Sonnenuhren, shadow
und auf den Fluren lass die And on the meadows have the winds
Winde los. released.
Befiehl den letzten Früchten Command the last of fruits to round
voll zu sein; their shapes;
gieb ihnen noch zwei Grant two more days of south for
südlichere Tage, vines to carry,
drange sie zur Vollendung hin To their perfection thrust them on,
jage and harry
die letzte Süsse in den The final sweetness into heavy
schweren Wein. grapes.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut Who has not built his house, will
sich keines mehr. not start now.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es Who now is by himself will long be
lange bleiben, so.
wird wachen, lesen, lange Be wakeful, read, write lengthy
Briefe schreiben letter, go
und wird in den Alleen hin In vague disquiet pacing up
und her and down
unruhig wandern, Denuded lanes,
wenn die Blätter treiben. with leaves adrift below.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Walter Arndt, a professor in the Dartmouth German department.)
My German is atrocious, but I can be minimally polite to people, and I can understand the general drift of the TV news. The morning after the election I got up at 3 and watched until 6:30 when Bill Clinton gave his acceptance speech. Hartmut and Rike don’t have satellite or cable (just as I don’t at home), so I have to listen to the news in German, which is good practice. The words I am learning are indicative of preoccupations over here: Asylrecht (refugee policy), Strafsteuer (the “punishment tariff” the US has put on imported European wine), Randaliere (people who throw eggs and make a disturbance when the Bundeskanzler is trying to make a speech about German unity). My favorite new word describes what happened when the Randaliere whistled so loud that the Bundeskanzler couldn’t be heard — he was ausgepfiffed (whistled down)!
Germany is suffering from the same depression as the rest of the world, and in addition has just adopted a Third World nation in the form of the 16 million people of East Germany, and is also one of the main destinations of displaced Yugoslavs and disaffected Romanians and ambitious Turks. So under its placid and wealthy surface it is a place in turmoil, which you see in the news in the pictures of the skinheads attacking the foreigners in Rostock. That, of course, is the extremist edge. Most Germans are horrified by that behavior. But they are having an understandably hot debate about how many of the world’s unfortunates they can be responsible for.
Sigh. As the world gets more crowded and desperate, that is going to be the running debate in the world’s rich parts.
The little book I’m writing is coming along well. I should come home with a finished first draft, which will need editing and polishing, but I do editing and polishing a lot more efficiently than I do first-drafting. Its working title is Thinking in Systems. It’s meant to be an introduction to systems theory for people who are uncomfortable with system theory and computers and scientific jargon. I hope it will be useful for schools as well as for the general public.
Basically it’s a compilation of stuff I’ve written many times before in scattered pieces, some from my textbook, some from various articles and columns. But I’ve never put it together before, and I’ve never put together a set of little models to demonstrate all the systems principles. We intend there to be a computer disk and workbook available for those who want it, to accompany the book.
So I’m modeling as I write, using the computer language STELLA, and that’s really fun. I haven’t fooled around with models in any concentrated way for years. They are all simple, just the classic teaching models of the field — bathtubs and bank accounts, populations and predator-prey systems, inventories and capital growth, renewable and nonrenewable resources. But they still surprise me sometimes, those little nonlinear tricksters!
November 19, 1992, Somewhere near Karlsruhe
I’m doing everything on my Powerbook — models, text, and pasting model output into text. So I’m self-sufficient. I can just scoop up my briefcase and carry my book-in-progress or my this-week’s column with me to Kassel, to Zierenberg, or, as at the moment, onto a German train. I’m on my way to Zurich, to a steering committee meeting for the Balaton Group. It’s a six-hour train ride, just about enough to exhaust my current battery and my spare one, which I can recharge at Joan’s house.
Once a week I zap my column (and once a month this newsletter) over the e-mail to Diana at Dartmouth. Lothar Rausch, the computer jock in Hartmut’s group, taught me how to use STUFFIT and BINHEX to make documents instantly sendable, fully formatted. It even works for STELLA models, so I can send the models I’m developing and the book text as it evolves to Diana, who is in charge of creating the workbook.
The e-mail is saving my life here. I get about a dozen messages a day, from Joan in Zurich, from Bert or Anupam in Holland, from John Peet in New Zealand, from Carlos in Costa Rica, from Johan Strumpfer in South Africa, from Dennis in Durham or Betty in Cornish or Diana in Hanover. All instantly transmitted, no paper, just computer to computer. What a wonder! Modern technology is such a complex mixture of wonderful and terrible! If only we could have the sense to distinguish between the two!
I love the e-mail, but it was also distinctly heart-warming to get a real paper letter from Sylvia with Heather’s kindergarten picture and the news of the farm. (Don hasn’t yet got his deer, the new chicken palace is nearly ready for the chickens, Basil misses me, Sylvia’s first book is nearly finished, it’s an unusually cold and rainy fall.)
November 22, 1992, Somewhere near Basel
Now I’m on another train going north again, exhausted as always after Balaton meetings. Hartmut is sitting opposite me writing a letter — back-to-back Powerbooks! Bert de Vries our Dutch colleague is in another car. He’s coming with us to visit Hartmut’s group and to give a lecture at the university tomorrow. In a few weeks we’ll go to the Netherlands to visit Bert’s group at the Dutch government’s research center on the environment and public health.
I should bring this long letter to a close, though I could go on for another 20 pages with ideas and impressions from my Balaton friends, who assembled here from Costa Rica, Thailand, India, Hungary, and Denmark as well as all over Europe. We’ve planned next year’s annual meeting on the topic of international trade and the environment. We’ve come up with good ideas for furthering the various teaching tools and projects we’re mutually involved in. We’ve talked about how to expand the group, how to make it more effective, how to help each other more in our work.
We’ve made and eaten simple meals at Joan’s house, with candlelight and good wine. Above all, we’ve restored and encouraged each other in the way good friends do when they come together, even for a short time.
And we’ve worn each other out. You never want to miss a moment of time with Balaton people. So you stay up too late and get up too early and talk too fast. It’s not sustainable. A collapse always follows, and I feel mine coming on any minute. I’m going to close my screen down and sleep on the train, because tomorrow, of course, Bert and Hartmut and I have a lot to do together.
The good news about the end of Balaton meetings is that they never really end. The web of interactions among us gets thicker all the time — that’s why I’m in Germany in the first place, why I was in South Africa, why Bert’s coming tomorrow, why we’re going to Holland soon, and why I’m going back to Joan’s to spend Christmas week. And so on. The work never stops. But it’s a privilege and a pleasure to do it with such extraordinarily good (in every sense of the word) people!
Love, Dana
