by Jaime Lowe
He explained that he got anxious in situations that he couldn’t control and with certain things that he couldn’t handle. “When my wife was giving birth there was something about the smell of the insides of her body that brought me back to when I was in Iraq and to those dead bodies and I could not handle it. I buried my face in her hair and just inhaled the smell of her shampoo until it was over.”
It turned out his mom was from Bad Kissingen and that his dad met her during World War II. He gave me some advice on what to do (soak in the waters). His eyes glowed as if I were about to visit heaven on earth. “It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.” We landed and parted ways. I took three trains to town—Bad Kissingen is located in Bavaria on the southeast edge of the Bavarian Rhön nature reserve. I walked a block toward my hotel and all my senses were struck. Bad Kissingen was like a Disney movie, hillsides covered in electric-green trees, birds tweeting the happiest tunes, and rainbow flower beds erupting every few feet. It was immaculately planned and laid out. I could feel the trees reaching over and talking to each other, sheltering the smaller woods. There was a perfect, lovely river flowing through town and paths that led to horse pastures and museums. Everything was lush and dewy and new and spring—tall trees with neon-green leaves were dying to unfurl further, reaching for insurmountable heights. I could see why this was a place of rehabilitation. Since its most glamorous days, the city has been recast as a holistic treatment center where health tourists travel to treat anything from diet issues to stress to athletic rehabilitation to internal organ cleansing. (This included a water specifically designed to help kidneys that I found particularly interesting—here, I could drink kidney cleanse water and lithium water.) It was also a place of rest and relaxation.
A local historian and retired government employee, Sigismund von Dobschütz (called Dobie by friends), had been in touch with my cousin and was involved in documenting and establishing markers or “stumbling stones” in front of homes and businesses owned by Jews who were killed or forced out of the region during World War II. Jews were officially banned from Bad Kissingen in 1934, but somehow and for some reason they stayed on much longer. I’ve heard refugees and residents of war-torn countries explain this all the time: Why would I leave my home? I have nowhere to go. The war will stop soon.
Dobie offered to meet me at my hotel and take me on a tour of Opa’s childhood, and of the town. I had the same feeling that I had when I was in Germany covering the Women’s World Cup—like it was a familiar place, one that I liked instantly, but that the country itself would constantly be apologizing to me. That I was a curiosity. Nonetheless, I loved this town immediately and Dobie greeted me warmly. He was somewhere between his late fifties and late sixties, it was hard to tell with an ever-present waft of cigarette smoke being carefully released. He figured living in Bad Kissingen was so calm and so health-centered that smoking a cigarette couldn’t be all that bad. He was practical like that. He had a timeline of where my family lived, what they did, how they left, and pictures of the property they were associated with, and he planned to take me to each place.
“Vell, are you ready?”
I don’t think I actually was ready. I had prepared for the beauty, the embrace of medicinal waters, thinking that my time in Bad Kissingen would be a calm way to approach my decision. A link to the historical use of healing waters. I joked with H that it was a way to do research while sitting in a spa and getting a massage. But thinking about Opa loving this place—the place he spent summers with his grandmother and great-aunt—and that he was forced to leave made me reconsider my visit. It wasn’t only about the waters; it wasn’t only about me. I read once about the migration routes of the monarch butterfly across the North American continent. A couple of years ago they were mapped in detail and researchers found that for monarchs to complete their full migration they had to make it north out of Mexico to southern Canada, then return and fly back to Mexico for the winter, and it took as many as five generations to complete one full migration. The butterflies instinctively knew the route and stopped at the same trees as previous generations, dying along the way, their offspring continuing the journey where previous generations left off, as if an internal compass led them in the right direction. I thought about Opa, about PTSD, and about the possibility of something the psychological community calls intergenerational trauma. I wondered if I am carrying the emotion my Oma and Opa could never express. I thought about how the Holocaust was such a prominent feature in my first episode and how dying by gas chamber was pretty much every Jewish kid’s worst nightmare since it was one that was real and drilled into our heads early. It was discussed in every grade of Hebrew school and regular school.
But Oma and Opa simply would not talk about it. Both were relatively lucky. Oma, age twenty-three, left Germany in 1937 with her younger brother Fred, sixteen. Opa, twenty-two, emigrated from Berlin around the same time. They all ended up in Chicago with a small assortment of uncles and cousins but little close family to speak of. They were fixed up through mutual friends who all belonged to a young Jewish association in Chicago. But once they moved to LA, to their mid-century middle-class dream house perched off Mulholland, the Holocaust was never mentioned again. I could talk about it at length with my great-great-aunt Paula, Opa’s aunt. She escaped from Berlin in late 1942. Disguised as a French woman, she lived in the brothel district of Brussels. The Gestapo raids made her feel unsafe enough that she would practice hiding on the roof as they rounded up neighbors. She ended up moving hours outside town to hide in the woods, collecting mushrooms. “Dressed like a peasant woman to avoid attention I went every day, in the morning and afternoon, to the woods to gather mushrooms . . . what I could not sell I dried. I eat mushrooms every day for lunch and for supper. For many hours every day I walk through the woods. I know every mushroom spot in the neighborhood. The peasants think I am a half-wit and the children laugh at me and call me names,” she wrote in her diary.
Eventually, she was forced to return to Brussels, where she stayed, again, in the brothel district—she learned that the original family that took her in had been carried off, “deported to Poland. How lucky I am that I left in time, forewarned by some kind of apprehension.” She wrote of Jews turning in other Jews, and the Gestapo extorting anyone uninvolved or unwilling to be part of the persecution. She survived and she hid until September 3, 1944, when the Allies crossed into Tournay. She wrote, “the Palais de Justice suddenly began to burn . . . when it began to burn the beautiful dome began to cave in, another picture rose in front of my eyes—the burning synagogues on the 10th of November 1938 Berlin. I began to cry as I had not cried for many years.” One week later the synagogues of Brussels were open after five years of war. Paula wrote, “Most of the people were crying, as there is probably hardly a Jew who has not lost some of his beloved ones.” As a kid, I remember visiting her with my dad in a Sherman Oaks Jewish retirement home. She would pinch my cheeks. She lived to be 100 and died the day after my Bat Mitzvah. She did not have a problem talking about the Holocaust or keeping it in the collective memory. As she got older her memories slipped in and out of German until she reverted back to her native tongue. But for Oma and Opa, the topic was off-limits. Now, seeing a piece of what Opa left behind, this botanical wonderland, I could understand how complicated it was. They were survivors, too. They moved on, they assimilated, and they looked forward rather than inward. Trauma is hard to face every day (especially if you don’t have to) but they may have been onto something—recent studies have shown that the mind is driven more toward the future than the past. It is what differentiates humans from animals, the ability to collectively plan for a future, that ability to fantasize. The brain is constantly rewriting and reshaping the past, using memories as an archive. Here, I could see both past and future. The butterflies flitted by and I felt what M. Gerard Fromm described as generational trauma, or “what human beings cannot contain of their experience—what has been traumatically o
verwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable—falls out of social discourse, but very often onto and into the next generation as an affective sensitivity or a chaotic urgency.” I did not feel it acutely and not in the exact way Fromm describes the condition, but there was something about a visual articulation of my Opa’s environment that communicated his trauma silently and deeply.
Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, spoke about generational trauma and slavery and the contemporary black experience in the fall of 2015. I saw him in a Q&A at MoMA talking about his project, a museum and memorial for lynching victims. He described it as an effort to mark every place a black or brown person had been strung up to die. He spoke of the importance of remembering trauma, visualizing it, and categorizing it for current and future generations to understand. He spoke of Germany as a role model, which was hard for me to hear until I saw the Stolperstein, or stepping-stones, a physical reminder of Nazi atrocities. It was just a square brass plaque with a deportation date but it was a grave reminder of what had happened. An acknowledgment at least.
“Vell, let’s get going,” Dobie said, with the same German efficiency and enthusiasm that I remembered emanating from Oma and Opa. I pictured them in their hiking boots and their walking sticks, ready to conquer the Matterhorn or Yosemite paths or the fire trail down the road from their house. Our first stop was a hotel that Rosamunde Löwinsky (Opa’s grandmother) ran during summers from 1915 until 1920, when Opa was a toddler. She did not own this building. The building was nondescript and peacock blue and now called Bayerischer Hof, located on Maxstrasse 4. I tried to feel my lineage, but I did not. It just seemed quaint and occupied by others. It was as if someone had painted over my family’s history and occupied it entirely. In later years, between 1921 and 1932, Rosamunde bought and ran with the help of her daughter Else (Opa’s aunt) Hotel Löwinsky. (Rosamunde’s son, Erich, my Opa’s dad, tragically and ironically died fighting for the Germans in World War I, as did many Jews who put national identity ahead of religious identity.) The main building was gone, but a parking lot remained with lime-green leaves sprouting between rusted iron gates and cement brick pathways leading to rugged woods. The trees were tall and swaying; this space felt more like a Lowe spot. I could sense that a young Walter Lowe might have been here, hiking through this. This place was further off the beaten path, a few blocks from the small town center. It was shrouded in growth and green, trees and birds, and wild flowers in bloom. I could picture Opa’s boots, worn from climbing trees and rushing past these woods. Maybe that play and exploration could only happen after he helped Rosamunde with the guests and Else with making the beds. My Opa’s tranquility, I could feel it here. The overgrown parking lot functions now as a second parking lot for what was the Fürstenhof sanatorium and is currently being renovated to become a medical spa hotel. After Rosamunde and Else sold Hotel Löwinsky in 1932, half the buildings were demolished; the other half were demolished in 1960, surviving longer than most of the area Jews.
DINING ROOM IN BAYERISCHER HOF.
Dobie explained in great detail Else’s path. After selling the hotel, Else and Rosamunde lived in an apartment in town until Rosamunde’s death in late 1940. A year later Else, single and fifty-eight years old, moved into the house of the Jewish merchant Samuel Hofmann in September 1941. Dobie handed me archived photos of the buildings, showed me the apartments, drove me around to understand where my family had been and where they had been forced to go. After only eight months in the Untere Marktstrasse, Else Löwinsky was instructed by the Nazis to sell her property. She had to do it within a week and was sent to Würzburg on May 20, 1942, for “short-term evacuation.” She lived in a retirement home and stayed there for four months, until September 23, 1942, when she was sent on the Nuremberg Transport and “was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto as number 283.” She was forced to conduct a “home purchase contract” for accommodation and care in the ghetto. The Nazis took her remaining possessions. Else had 375 Reichsmarks left.
Dobie tracked down Else’s death certificate from the Theresienstadt ghetto. She died on October 12, 1942, at 5:10 p.m. As the only relative in the ghetto, Else’s aunt, Martha Gerson from Berlin, was called. The cause of death was listed as a heart defect. But Dobie found a letter from June 27, 1946, from one of the survivors from Theresienstadt, Emilie Schloss, who also came from Bad Kissingen. She said simply: “Fraulein Löwinsky took possession of herself.” Else, like many others, committed suicide. It was hard not to look at the buildings, the properties, the places she had been and be struck with sadness. I wanted to cry. But Dobie was so gracious and on track and helpful; no need to deal with a sobbing American coming to terms with genocide. I wondered if Else suffered from mental illness before the war or because of it. War, it seemed, was a collective mental illness. We are never not at war—with each other or with ourselves.
In 2014, Dr. Anna Fels wrote an op-ed titled “Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?” for the New York Times. And sometimes I think, yes, we should. There would be less aggression, suicide, and a calmer state of mind. Some experts have heralded lithium as the next fluoride, especially after scientists found that suicide rates were lower in areas where the drinking water had higher concentrations of the element. In the October 4, 1971, issue of the New York Times Magazine, a feature was published called “The Texas Tranquilizer,” in which University of Texas biochemist Earl B. Dawson claimed that El Paso had lower rates of suicide and crime and fewer admissions to mental hospitals than Dallas because their water supply was heavily laced with lithium. For centuries travelers have soaked in the Chianti Hot Springs outside of Marfa, Texas. Within the past few years, the lithium-in-the-water question was raised again. And again, the response was severe—augmenting the water supply amounts to mind control, Brave New World tendencies, and human modification. More recently, a researcher from the Medical University of Vienna, Dr. Gerhard Schrauzer, also conducted a survey that looked at twenty-seven counties in Texas over a decade and found a consistent inverse relationship between lithium levels in water and suicide, violent crime, and rape. A century ago society was more open-minded about soaking in the waters and taking them in; it was even considered in fashion.
In the center of Bad Kissingen is a fully gorgeous, multiwinged, ornate palace with an old wing completed in the early 1800s and a new wing finished in 1913 in the neo-baroque style of architecture. The early buildings of Bad Kissingen were commissioned in the 1820s and 1830s and became known worldwide after the Bavarian king’s first visit in 1833. The aristocracy and the bourgeoisie followed, along with artists, writers, and musicians. H. J. Heinz of the ketchup dynasty (a known hypochondriac) and George Bernard Shaw took to the waters. Czars and emperors under assumed names came to truly relax. In 1877, Otto von Bismarck said: “I owe my health to a loving God and the healing waters of Bad Kissingen.” Bad Kissingen was just one of many spa towns in Europe and the United States at the turn of the century. In an October issue of the Lancet from 1894, a doctor examined the effects of lithium-rich waters in the Welsh region of Llangammarch, concluding that the water was certainly therapeutic, if not curative for a variety of illnesses. At the turn of the century therapeutic waters were all the rage.
The town now is still considered a central place for the elderly and the infirm. You cannot walk down a street without seeing a walker or an arm brace or someone in recovery from one surgery or another. Bad Kissingen has seventeen hospitals, sanatoriums, and rehabs and about 250,000 guests per year. When I was there, the gardens surrounding the main buildings were carefully planted in rainbow eruptions of petals in different patterns, each area more manicured and colorful than the next—murals and figures from Greek and Roman mythology lined the gardens. There were long halls for walking, an instrumental action in drinking the waters. To provide a soundtrack for the scene, Bad Kissingen features twice daily orchestra recitals—at ten a.m. and four p.m. They play on stage for an audience that I could imagine Oma a
nd Opa sitting in; the orchestra holds the Guinness world record for most performances per year. The stage rotates so that in summer they play outdoors to audiences in the garden.
Dobie took me to the drinking waters (there are both drinking and soaking waters in Bad Kissingen). There were bartender-esque figures behind long sinks, mixing formulas of the different waters in small clear glasses. I took the waters from the Rakoczy spring and the Pandur, the two springs with the highest lithium content. The mineral water mixologist sloshed the liquids back and forth between two cups and handed me one cup, which I drank. It tasted metallic, soapy, salty, and a little tinny. I walked off my medicinal waters to aid in their flow within my body and felt nothing in particular beyond what my lithium was already doing to me. The amount in the water was minuscule compared with my medical dose. Still, I wanted to taste the more subtle version. And the next day I was planning to soak. Lithium, inside and out.
I planned to go to the new state-of-the-art theme park–esque therme KissSalis. I had heard about German spas and was bracing myself for an all-nude experience with proud misshapen pasty bodies. The nudity didn’t really bother me—it was more the double helplessness of being naked and not knowing the language. (I had been to a nude beach once in Jersey with a bunch of swingers, and the funniest part was the casual nature of it all. One dude walked around with a plate of crudités offering vegetables. “Baby carrot?” he kept asking earnestly. “No, thank you.”) I knew there were strict rules regarding German spas and what if I did something wrong? I did online research and there seemed to be a consensus that most facilities are coed naked. There was a mineral water pool in the basement of my hotel. A perfect place to practice, plus it was where the hotel stashed free apples. I changed into nothing and dipped into the empty pool, feeling vibed out by the whole thing. I chickened out and grabbed a towel. As I left, two elderly couples in bathing suits descended on the pool. Close call. Not nude in the hotel. Noted.