Things and people do not simply appear, they appear as being the same, and it is in accordance with this sameness of appearing that we remember them.

—Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting

The Technik Museum

+49° 18' 45.84", +8° 26' 42.12"

Well, Henry was right—on the way out of Speyer, heading back to the A6 autobahn, you go right past the big Technik Museum. And if you've got a 3-year-old boy in the front passenger seat of your rented minivan (I still haven't figured out what the rules are over here—for all their scholarship, Bruno and Lambert profess complete ignorance of German child safety laws, and Bertha still hasn't said a word to anyone except her son), you really don't have a choice but to stop, especially when Conrad starts shouting "aereo! aereo!"

So here's the budget for this stop: Henry had given me 20 euros to take little Conrad to the Technik Museum. (I know, I know—it was really my money, and Henry was just giving me a kickback from the payment he had just extorted out of me, but the weird thing was, it felt like something else—like I had these special Imperial funds in my pocket.) But of course it turns out that kids under 5 get free admission to the museum, so even with the 7 euro ticket to the Imax, you might think I'd be ahead 13 euros, right? Hah! That would be because you forgot about the four adults in the Opel! Adult admission is 13 euros, plus the Imax tickets at 9 euros each, and nobody but yours truly made the slightest move to pay. (I'm beginning to understand what it means to go on vacation with two monks and a royal family.)

So basically we're talking 95 euros, of which 20 had been "given" me by Henry, so even if I accept the fiction of Henry's beneficence, and deduct the charges for my own tickets (I did enjoy myself), I'm still down 53 euros, plus the 200 (or should it be 180?—this feudal finance is getting confusing) that I had already given Henry.

Anyway, it's great museum, it even has an old Soviet Space Shuttle, which they floated up the Rhine. Really, that's how they got it there, on a barge.

The Song of Henry

In September 1992 a small publishing house in Vancouver released The Song of Henry: A Modern English Translation of the Heinrichlied, Germany's Forgotten National Epic. The book jacket described the The Song of Henry as "a vigorous, vibrant and bawdy account of the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, who beat back the pernicious influence of the Catholic Church and forged the kingdom that became modern Germany."

The English translation was credited to Roger McAllister, an appraiser of rare books based in Victoria, British Columbia, who had for many years built a profitable business on the image of a slightly distracted dandy. McAllister always wore a Savile Row suit, a yellow paisley bow tie, round horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and brightly coloured mismatched socks—even when exploring back rooms, basements, attics and barns. In 1992 he discovered that his look worked just as well on a book tour—down to the occasional smudge of dust on an otherwise perfectly pressed sleeve.

"No no, please no," he would insist, crossing his arms and slapping his shoulders, releasing tiny incongruous clouds of fine particulate matter, "I am not an author! I am only a translator—and a second-hand one that!"

In an introductory essay, McAllister described the discovery, transcription, and editorial restoration of a 19th century German translation, which in turn had been based on an eleventh century original—both of which were now, sadly, lost. McAllister also contributed an afterword, where he discussed the relevance of The Song of Henry to the sexual and religious politics of the late 20th century. Despite this stab at a contemporary angle, the publisher (who survived primarily on the vanity publication of memoirs and genealogies) predicted sales in the low-to-mid three figures—libraries mostly, and a handful of copies to those rare enthusiasts of the Investiture Controversy who can be found scattered among any literate population, even in western Canada. The publisher expected to take a loss, but he didn't mind: The Song of Henry was the sort of serious-looking book he needed to put out every so often to maintain the gravitas of his imprint. Besides, McAllister had agreed to subsidize any losses, under the table of course.

But McAllister proved the publisher wrong—profitably wrong. The initial run of 1,000 copies sold out after McAllister's first live interview—on the Global TV affiliate in Chilliwack—and a second run of 3,000 copies was gone by third week of October. Thanks to a rather innovative use of outsourcing—later to become a case study at the UBC Sauder School of Business—the publisher managed to have stacks of The Song of Henry on prominent display in the self-help sections of bookstores as far east as Toronto by mid-November. The Christmas season of 1992 proved to be something of windfall for everyone associated with The Song of Henry.

Kindersitze

49° 19' 11.11", +8° 26' 4.49"

While the rest of us are in the Imax at the Technik Museum, Lambert volunteers to do a little online research—on my laptop, of course, using the Museum's broadband. His research skills prove to be quite impressive—which makes me a lot less likely to doubt, for example, his account of the murder of Godfrey the Hunchback, which some historians have called sensational and melodramatic. Anyway, Lambert produces convincing evidence that German child safety laws are very strict indeed. Passengers younger than 12 years of age and less than 150 centimeters tall must be strapped into an EU-approved child restraint system. A kindersitz.

Although Bruno says that contemporary laws don't apply to Conrad—an opinion that wins him an admiring smile from Bertha—I decide that the risk is too great. If Conrad is going to ride in my minivan, he's going to use a car seat. An EU-approved kindersitz. No more questions. That's the way it's going to be.

Pretty soon I'm driving past the cathedral again, looking for a Neckermann's store that's supposed to be around here someplace where apparently they have a huge selection of kindersitze.

Guess who springs for a 129 euro Ferrari kindersitz?

The Vacant House

Without question, it was Roger McAllister's tireless publicity that sold The Song of Henry. In the months of October and November, 1992, he made at least 10 public appearances each week—early morning chats on small TV stations, late night interviews on the radio, readings in coffee shops, and book signings at struggling independent bookstores. Roger McAllister would always begin by telling the reporter, the anchorpersons, or the assembled book buyers the same story—the story of how he had discovered a manuscript in the attic of a modest little house—a house like hundreds of others in British Columbia.

In 1988, McAllister found his way to an unassuming address in the Fairfield neighborhood of Victoria, where, he had been told, there was a large collection of 19th century European books in the attic. Three middle-aged sisters met him on the porch. The sisters explained that this was their father's house, now vacant. The father had died a month before, after many years as a widower. His name was Jakob Josephson. One of the sisters produced a formidable set of keys, and opened the front door. McAllister followed the first sister into the living room, and the other two followed him. Looking around, McAllister assumed that the old man had been a professor, or maybe a rabbi. The room seemed to have recently been cleaned—every book removed from its shelf and dusted. It felt like a museum exhibition. No one sat down.

The house was so modest, McAllister would always be sure to tell his interlocutor, that he was shocked, later that week, when he realized his clients were the same Josephsons who had been so much in the news three years before, when they sold their family business, JKJ Graphics, to a Swedish conglomerate for $980 million (USD).

"There is something in the attic we want you to appraise," said the first sister.

"Well, not appraise exactly," said the second sister.

"Review... inventory... maybe catalog..." said the third sister.

"And then destroy," said the first sister.

At this point, McAllister would pause, and look at his interviewer, or his audience.

"Now I had never in my professional career been asked to destroy anything—I'd often recommended destruction, in the case of certain collections—snow globes, for instance, but people rarely took my advice. Needless to say, I was intrigued."

Bad Ideas on Vespas

+49° 19' 15.74", +8° 34' 8.40"

It"s "quiet time" here in the minivan, as we head south from Hockenheim on the A6 autobahn, and all the adults in the car—Bruno and Lambert and Bertha and myself—are being really, really careful, because Conrad just fell asleep, after crying it seemed like forever after getting strapped, for the first time, in his kindersitz. Who knows where Henry is. I figure he's commandeered that motorcycle, and he's riding around someplace. I keep an eye out for him in the rear-view mirror, but so far, nothing.

To be honest, this isn't exactly what I expected this journey would be like. So I find myself thinking about what I did expect.

For example, this is kind of silly, but last night, after watching the DVD of Enrico IV by Luigi Pirandello, starring Marcello Mastroianni and freely adapted and directed by Marco Bellocchio (whom I had never heard of previously, although according to IMDB he has a long list of movies to his credit), I read a few pages of a book by Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for the New Yorker. (How's that for a non-sequitur?)

Wait a minute. It wasn't last night—it was two nights ago, if you count that foreshortened night of fitful half-sleep over the Atlantic. Well, it was the last time I slept in a bed. Anyway, as I put the book down and turned out the light, my mind filled with ideas about what might happen in my journey to Canossa—bad ideas. Total waste of time ideas. But what the heck, I thought these ideas, so I might as well share.

To wit: What if Elizabeth Peyton and John Currin showed up on motorcycles—maybe Vespa scooters—as part of Henry's retinue? At the time, as I was lying there in bed, waiting to get sleepy, I figured Henry would be riding with us in the minivan, so I imagined Elizabeth and John following behind us on their Vespas. But now that I know that Henry is making his own way to Canossa on a commandeered motorcycle, it all seems kind of prophetic—I can picture the three of them riding together—though it's hard to imagine Henry, on his BMW, throttling down enough for the Vespas to keep up.

But come on, these ideas are still really bad. Kind of ridiculous, really. I mean, I've made no effort whatsoever to contact either Elizabeth Peyton or John Currin—and to think Henry would contact them, maybe try to recruit them as courtiers or some shit like that—I mean, the nicest thing you could say about these ideas is that they are "implausible" or "unlikely." They aren't really expectations, or even aspirations. Maybe reveries. Sure, the reality of this journey is turning out, at the moment, to be a little more dull than I hoped, but these reveries don't constitute a valid comparison set. No way.

I wouldn't even be thinking about this now, if I had anybody to talk to here in the minivan. There was this big race track off to the left of the autobahn, and I tried to ask Lambert if that was the Hockenheimring I had seen a sign for, but I got all these outraged shhhh sounds from the wayback seat, so I shut up.

I do have to admit that Elizabeth Peyton might fit in with our group—sort of—Henry is her kind of guy, or at least I think he could be. I'll bet Elizabeth could spot the tortured androgyny that underlies Henry's impetuous self-assertiveness. Certainly his fractured childhood would appeal to her—imagine your pious but power-hungry father dying when you're only 6; your mother, sighing for a life of purity and simplicity, giving away chunks of your empire to avoid conflict; and you yourself, sitting there with a little crown on your little head, while ministeriales sign documents and proclamations in your name—and then, to top it off, to really screw you up, getting kidnapped by an archbishop at age 12 (how's that for clergy abuse!), giving your mom an excuse to run off to a convent. Not to mention getting engaged at age 5 and then being raised in the same castle as your future wife!

Then you come of age at 15 and try to make your mark on the world. To Elizabeth, I think Henry would be an 11th century Kurt Cobain, a fascinating, unstable stew of aggression and passivity, charisma and self-doubt, raw emotional honesty and political cunning. She'd love to paint him. Not only that, she has a thing for royals.

Now John Currin—he's more of a stretch. Frankly, he showed up on the Vespa, next to Elizabeth, just because he's usually paired with Peyton when people talk about hip new figurative painting. And certainly Elizabeth has more in common, stylistically, with the Middle Ages than John does—he's definitely a Renaissance guy—he's all about refulgent light and virtuoso technique, while Elizabeth is all about personality burning through the flat surfaces of the painting. But when I thought about it—and remember, I was thinking bad ideas as I lay there in bed, drifting off to sleep—there was one big area of commonality between John and Henry: Sex. Lots of it. Now I can't show you you all the images that ran through my mind, because right now my laptop is buried under Lambert's suitcase in the back of the minivan—and there's no way I'm going to risk waking up Conrad by asking one of Bruno to dig it out for me. But you can do your own web search for John Currin images.

Jakob and Joseph

Jakob Josephson, the deceased occupant of the modest Fairfield house, had been born in 1896, in Munich, Bavaria, the youngest child—and only son—of Joseph Konrad Josephson, an atheist, anarchist, and fervent German nationalist, who, for most of his life, dismissed the anti-Semitism of his neighbors and comrades with a shrug. In the Munich book business Joseph Konrad Josephson called himself Konrad Joseph, which he thought sounded more German, and kept the Judaica in a back room, hidden away, as if it were pornography.

"Superstition!" he told his son. "I keep only it for your mother's sake."

In the early morning of November 9, 1923, after the Beer Hall Putsch had spilled into the streets of Munich, during those few foreshadowing hours when the young National Socialist German Workers' Party held control of the municipal government, Joseph Konrad Josephson ventured out into the street to barricade the windows of the Konrad Joseph Book Store. He was shoved from behind, knocked down, and kicked repeatedly by three young men, until Jakob chased them away.

"We know you're a Jew..." they said. "We know!"

"In one way, we were lucky," Jakob would later tell his daughters, "We learned the truth early on."

When Miriam Josephson Cohen heard Roger McAllister tell a version of this story on TV, she called her sister, Leah.

"Turn on your TV," said Miriam.

"Dorothy just called me," said Leah. "I'm already watching it."

Joseph Konrad Josephson's broken ribs began to heal, but his spirit did not. He had recognized the Jew-hating toughs who beat him: they were the sons of one of his closest friends, an organizer of the bricklayers union. "A good communist family," he muttered sadly to his son. Jakob Josephson also knew the young men—he remembered vividly how they they had treated the other children in the school yard.

"They're no good," he told his father. "They've always been rowdies. Brutes. Ordinary bullies."

But that was no consolation to Joseph Konrad Josephson, who each day dragged himself down to his desk in the bookstore, and sat there sullenly reading Schiller, ignoring the customers.

"He has no right!" said Miriam on the phone to her sister.

"Well, it's not actually... false..." said Leah.

"Hold on," said Miriam. "I've got another call..." She clicked a button on her handset. "Dorothy? Are you taping this?"

After the beating, Joseph Konrad Josephson never regained the vitality needed to run a small business, and it fell upon his son to keep the shop open. After several months, with his mother's support, Jakob made the heart-wrenching decision to close the bookstore and leave Munich. His mother had relatives in the Pacific Northwest, the sons and daughters of traders who had the followed the various gold rushes. From these distant cousins Joseph borrowed the passage, and brought the family to Canada: his mother, his father, his young pregnant wife. His four older sisters were already married—"Not to Christians," his father would proudly say, "but to Socialists!"—a distinction that did not matter to Jakob, who offered to bring them all with him. But his older sisters decided to remain in Munich. Neither they nor their children survived the coming decades.

"Did you tell him that?" said Miriam.

"Leah—she must have told him." said Dorothy.

"He never told me anything about his sisters..." said Miriam.

In leading the family to Canada, Jakob also led them back into observant Judaism, except of course, for his father, who never lost faith in the perfectibility of human society through human agency alone, even as his own engagement with the world around him grew more and more tenuous. During the long train journey across the plains, Joseph Konrad Josephson became disoriented. He forgot about the beating and the Beer Hall Putsch, and told the other passengers that he had been kidnapped by dwarves, and was being taken to the Andes Mountains, to work there as a slave in the silver mines, a life of endless subterranean work without pay, until his hands and feet would wither into claws and nothing would be left of him but a blind featherless underground bird, squawking in the depths of the earth. In more lucid moments, Joseph accused his son of being a capitalist, a monotheist, and a victim of constipation. Fortunately, no one else on the train, as it rolled from Saskatchewan into Alberta, could understand a word of German. Joseph Konrad Josephson died on May 12, 1925, one week after his first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, on the same day that Paul von Hindenburg became President of Germany.

"Well I didn't... tell him," said Leah. She and her sisters had gathered at Dorothy's house, to watch the tape of McAllister's interview. "He must have found it and read it."

"Found what?" said Miriam.

"A college paper I wrote," said Leah.

"You wrote a college paper about this?" said Miriam.

"I know it was a bad idea. I got a C-minus. The professor wasn't interested in personal narratives."

"Now don't be silly!" said Dorothy, "I remember that! It was the best paper of the year! And it was published in the Jewish Center newsletter. Father was so proud."

"You were very young and gullible," said Leah. "Father's the one who got it published. To make me feel better."

"I don't remember any of this at all," said Miriam.

In Victoria, Jakob wanted to start another bookstore, but first he needed work, any work. He took every job his cousins offered him, often several at once. He learned the business of hotels, the business of lumber and hardware, the business of dry goods, the business of printing. After five years, Jakob had paid off his debts. He bought a small printing shop from a cousin who could no longer afford to keep his employees—this was 1930, and the Depression was deepening. For years, Jakob ran the shop by himself, until his daughters were old enough to help him. Later, his sons-in-law joined him. With admirable industry, aided by a few well-timed strategic decisions, the extended Josephson family built the tiny print shop into JKJ Graphics, the largest, fastest, and most efficient producer of four-color mail-order catalogues in Canada. In 1985 Jakob, the majority shareholder, approved the sale of JKJ Graphics to the Swedish conglomerate. His competency in making that decision would later be the subject of many lawsuits among his quarreling descendents.

Two years later he died, at the age of 91. He never moved from the modest house in Fairfield, which he bought in 1934, when the print shop first turned a profit.

"Well, Father never wanted to start another bookstore," said Leah. "But otherwise... what he's saying is true... mostly. What can we do?"

"It just sounds so horrible," said Miriam, "coming from that Irishman's mouth."

"McAllister's not Irish," said Leah. "Scottish maybe. Or is he English, from Manchester?"

"He's not anything," said Dorothy. "When it suits him, he's a fisherman's son from the Maritimes, or he has oil money, from Edmonton, or he grew up in a diplomatic family in Botswana. It's all bullshit. Especially the parts that happen to be true."

"How do you know so much?" said Miriam.

Dorothy shrugged. "I slept with him," she said. "That fucking pervert."

At the time, her sisters refrained from asking what Dorothy meant by that last remark.

Patricius

+53° 21' 4.59", -2° 17' 0.09"

So yesterday—or was it this morning?—I was sitting in the airport bar in Manchester, (layover #2 on my bargain itinerary, O'Hare—Newark—Manchester—Hamburg—Mannheim), having a cocktail so I'd be sure to sleep on the connecting flight to Hamburg—at that point I really, really needed an hour or two of unconsciousness, and I figured I could start pounding coffee once I landed in continental Europe—and anyway I started talking to this couple, it turned out they were from the Czech Republic and they asked me where I was going and I told them I was a blogger and I was flying to Mannheim so I could recapitulate or re-enact or re-something the Gang Nach Canossa, the Walk to Canossa, and the amazing thing is, this couple sorta knew what I was talking about.

I mean they knew the phrase, in German and in English, and they knew it had something to do with church and state, and they knew that snow was involved, and Bismarck, and a king named Henry and a pope named Gregory, although they were kinda mixed up about which Henry and which Gregory. It turned out that they had seen the American cable telenovela about Bertha of Savoy (dubbed into Czech, wouldn't that be wild!) and the two of them had had this running argument for like two years about whether the show was historical fiction or a totally off-the-wall fantasy—these were intelligent people, this Czech couple, he was an engineer and she was a lawyer, or maybe the other way around—but, still, I was really impressed that they made that distinction, that they could actually argue about the difference between a story that's based in fact but takes liberties and a story that refers to our memories of other stories in order to create its own mythic reality. They actually said things like that, in the airport bar.

So anyway, they thought I was some kind of expert, and they asked me to tell them what really happened on the Walk to Canossa. Of course I slithered out of that one, but I gave them my spiel, the same story I told my co-workers back in Waukegan when I requested a month off:

Well, I said, when we talk about Gang nach Canossa, the Walk to Canossa, l'umiliazione di Canossa, we're really talking about an image—a king kneeling in the snow, outside a lonely castle, begging forgiveness from a Pope. Now to understand that image, you've gotta understand all the games that the pope and the king were playing—and to understand those games, you've really have to go back a generation, to an earlier Henry and an earlier Gregory.

That's right. To understand what was going on in 1076 and 1077, you've gotta go to the year 1046, when Henry III, King of the Romans—that means a king of the Germans who hasn't yet been anointed as Holy Roman Emperor—came down to Italy to clean up a mess. And Rome was a total mess. In 1046 there were three popes, and all three of them had sordid back stories—even Gregory VI, the supposed reform pope, had actually purchased the papacy from one of the other popes, a guy who wanted to get married, but then the chick dumped him (I think actually said "chick"—the Czechs were really into the American vernacular, and my cocktail was surprisingly strong) so the first pope decided he wanted to keep his old job, and meanwhile the other guy, etc... etc...

It was bad, the whole situation, disgusting even, so Henry III deposed all three of them and picked a new pope, his own personal confessor in fact, a fellow German, who took the name Clement II and promptly christened Henry as Holy Roman Emperor and for good measure gave him the title of Patricius, which basically meant he had the right to appoint popes. This was a big deal to Henry, for while it was obvious to everyone that he had the power to appoint popes, Henry III was as devout as he was power-hungry, and he wanted the right.

The Czech couple seemed to find this stuff fascinating. At least, they bought me another drink.

The Chest of "Nazi" Papers

In the attic of the Fairfield house, the three sisters showed Roger McAllister several chests and boxes, apparently the remnants of Joseph Konrad Josephson's Munich bookstore. The youngest sister explained that these boxes—and one chest in particular—had developed a whispered reputation, among the younger generations of the Josephson family, as "Grandpa Joseph's Nazi papers."

"Nazi...." McAllister would repeat the word in a solemn stage whisper, shaking his head. "Certainly, Konrad Joseph had friends... he had correspondents, colleagues, comrades who later did in fact become... "

Here McAllister would trail off in sadness and dismay. After a moment he would recover, and with new energy proclaim to all listeners that Joseph Konrad Josephson himself had never and could never have been a Nazi—and not simply because he was a Jew, McAllister would say, his voice rising, but because "he was an idealist, like Wagner, and idealism, however deluded, should never be a source of shame."

Often at this point his interviewer would lean back thoughtfully, allowing the moment of passion to dissipate.

McAllister would then relate how he had found the old books in that attic fascinating, absolutely fascinating, but unfortunately, in his professional opinion, they possessed more historical interest than market value. So he had arranged a donation to the German Studies Department of a Lutheran college in Nebraska, which proved to be a wise tax strategy for those members of Jakob's family who had settled in the United States—here McAllister would offer his apologies for "mentioning the U.S. Tax Code in polite company." As the laughter subsided, McAllister would reveal that it was these same cousins, the "American Josephsons," who had later brought a lawsuit against him (a matter he could not discuss, on the advice of his attorney) and quickly resume his story:

There in the attic, before McAllister could touch a thing, the three daughters had insisted on two conditions: first, that he destroy the contents of the chest, and second—

McAllister had stopped the daughters right there:

"You do not hire an appraiser to be a garbageman," he told them. "You know that I will read and study everything in that chest. I will take detailed notes."

The eldest daughter thought for a long moment and eventually said "Yes. We know." Her sisters nodded in agreement. "You may keep your notes," the second sister said. "But eventually," the third sister insisted, "you must destroy everything you find in this attic."

McAllister reluctantly agreed, and asked about the other condition.

The sisters looked at each other. Finally the youngest spoke up.

"If you discover anything that shows our grandfather to be a Nazi collaborator, not only will you destroy it, but you will never mention it to a living soul,"she said.

"Not even us," said the middle sister.

"Especially not us," said the eldest sister.

Then McAllister would proudly announce that he had kept both promises. On the night when the first review copies of The Song of Henry were traveling, by overnight courier, to the critics, he had shredded every piece of paper that he had found in the attic. Then he had chopped the chest itself into kindling and burned it all in an industrial furnace.

And as for the second condition, that was easy: there were no secrets to keep, nothing to hide. The papers had showed that Joseph Konrad Josephson had hated the Nazis as much as he loved Germany.

At this point an astute reporter, or a dyspeptic member of the audience, might challenge McAllister: how could anyone believe that a man like him would destroy anything of value? And wasn't it possible that he was keeping his second promise right now: by lying to protect the name of a very rich family?

McAllister would respond with broad smile: "Well it seems then that I am either keeping a promise or telling the truth! One way or another, I must be honest man!"

Hildebrand

+53° 21' 4.59", -2° 17' 0.09"

So there I am, or there I was—yesterday, or early this morning, whenever—anyway, I'm in the Manchester Airport bar, on a long layover, talking to this Czech couple about how this whole Walk to Canossa thing got started, and I'm really on a roll, I mean, for the first time, I'm actually making this story work—which is great, because when I try to explain the history to people back in Waukegan, I usually get these blank stares.

So the Czech couple buy me a another cocktail, and I start to tell them what the world was like in 1050, which is when Henry IV was born. In 1050 his Dad, that would be Henry III, is at the peak of his powers—he had gone down to Rome, fired three popes, picked his own pope, I mean things looked really good for the Holy Roman Emperor at that point—the Catholic Church under control, and all the German princes were pretty well-behaved as well, even the Saxons. But of course, there was a reaction brewing. Henry III's big year in 1046, his display of imperial prerogative, had really pissed off a lot of people in Italy—by people, I mean priests and monks and bishops, not ordinary people—and all these pissed-off clergy, including all the backers of the now-deposed Pope Gregory VI, well they organized themselves into a reform movement.

Now some of these reformers were true believers, real purists, hard-core sex-negative fanatics like St. Peter Damian, who genuinely wanted to clean up the church, wipe it down with bleach, if you know what I mean, but there was one reformer, an ambitious young monk named Hildebrand, who saw the reform movement as a political opportunity. This Hildebrand told everyone he was a blacksmith's son from a small town, who had risen from his humble origins through brilliance and hard work to become a protege of Gregory VI. Some people say he wasn't a blacksmith's son at all, but Gregory's nephew, part of the same rich Roman family. According to this version, Hildebrand made up the blacksmith story after he saw how his uncle got bounced out of the pope job for acting too rich, too entitled, just too damn obvious when he tried to buy the papacy. Or maybe Hildebrand actually was a smart hard-working poor kid. It's possible.

Anyway, Hildebrand goes into exile when Henry III fires Gregory VI, and a few years later he turns up again as the toughest ecclesiastical operative in Rome. He's the stage manager, the behind-the-scenes guy who basically runs the town. Sure he's a reformer, but he's not some kind of starry-eyed idealist. Put it this way: Hildebrand was the kind of reformer they know all about in Chicago. He would have fit right in.

As soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn't have mentioned Chicago. When you're from Waukegan, people just cannot understand the difference. Pretty soon the conversation is totally off track, and the Czech couple are asking me about Oprah, and Al Capone, and Michael Jordan, like they're personal friends of mine. I tried to bring up Rahm Emmanuel, as a way of getting back to Hildebrand, but the Czech couple had never heard of him. Then I tried to explain how Hildebrand pushed through the rule change that gave the College of Cardinals the right to pick the Pope, but they started talking to each other in Czech, so I dropped it.

Anyway, the cocktails did their job: I slept like a baby on the flight to Hamburg.