Speyer: First Passengers

I ease the Opel Zafira out of the Mannheim City Airport, and onto a few frontage roads--at least that's what I think "Landstraße" means. My directions tell me that very soon I'll be on A656 and then on A6, and I know that if it begins with an "A", it's an autobahn. And the smaller the number, the bigger the autobahn. There's something very odd about this minivan--it has a manual transmission. For an American, a stick shift in a fully equipped minivan seems like a detail from a crazy dream--it doesn't fit with the cognitive structure of the world as I know it--it's like a violation of some unarticulated but intuitively obvious Law of Automotive Categories. But hey, I guess that law doesn't apply in in Europe. Still, I can't help thinking of all the responsible authority figures of Germany, parents and coaches and bureaucrats and safety engineers, winding out those RPMs from third to fourth, from fourth to fifth, just like I'm doing, right now, as I hit cruising speed on the autobahn. Speyer's about 20 km to the south. Before I visit the cathedral, I need to swing past the train station (the efficient suburban station of Speyer Nord-West, bicycle parking: Ja, WC: Nein) where I've arranged to meet two medieval German writers, Lambert of Hersfeld and Bruno of Merseburg (also known as Bruno the Saxon). For most of the last millennium, Bruno and Lambert were trusted sources on Deutches Mittlealter (the Middle Ages in Germany), although their reputations took quite a beating during the 19th century, the heyday of German scientific historiography. As for me, given the choice of hanging out with a good story-teller or an impeccable philologist, I'll take the story-teller any day, even if I have to make occasional allowances for a partisan point of view. Although Bruno and Lambert are both, technically, "monks," they've warned me not to expect not to expect any hair shirts or hoods or traditional habits on this journey. In fact, when I hold up my "Bruno" sign, after the regional trolley drops off a dozen passengers, I'm approached by a typical German hiker-type: jeans, t-shirt, Adidas, and an immense, high quality, internal frame backpack. Bruno's about thirty, with a scruffy beard, and looks like he's been hosteling his way around Europe for a decade. Lambert arrives about a half-hour later, the lone passenger to disembark from the inter-city train. He's an older man, with a more formal style--umbrella, overcoat, a single leather suitcase. After I introduce them to each other--surprisingly, they've never met before, although they each claim, a little too warmly, to be great fans of the other's work--I load their luggage into the back of the Zafira, and we drive through city streets toward the spires of Dom zu Speyer.

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Next in Main Story:
Henry Fires Gregory
Next in the Blogger's Tale:
Speyer: Domgarten