Kidnapping Catholic Boys
“The Church was hated,” insisted one innkeeper with an amateur interest in local history. We were cozily ensconced in his Michelin-rated restaurant in a 16th century building. “They were rich, and lordly. The people were forced to tithe to them.”
Did the people felt any kinder towards the Hessian government?
“Ach, they weren’t any better. You know those Hessian soldiers who fought in the American Revolutionary War?” he asked. “The ones who George Washington’s troops murdered in their sleep on Christmas Eve after crossing the Delaware?
“They were Rheingau farm boys, and they were forced off these vineyards – sold like cattle for money --to the British by the local princes to fight in their bloody wars in America. They never had a chance, those poor bastards. The lucky ones ran away from the Redcoats. They deserted, found work and wives and became Americans.”
And the Church didn’t raise its voice in protest against this outrage?
“The government was Protestant,” he shrugged. “Very easy to sell the Catholics’ sons to the Protestant British. And what could the Church do, anyway? Pray?”
An Unknown Past
Why are the local Germans so ignorant of their own history?
“Because we are only taught about the 20th century,” the innkeeper explained, shaking his head. “The terrible years. The hunger. World War I. The Nazi terror. World War II. The bombings. The death. And then the rebuilding, the great accomplishments of the generations after the War.
"We learn almost nothing of the years before the 20th century. It is as if it never existed. Though, as you see, we live in the middle of it, surrounded by the physical evidence of a past that we barely know anything about.
“We think we are so smart, we Germans. But we are ignorant of who we are.”
Germany’s best kept Catholic secret is the country's own Catholic history. And therein lies, perhaps, the greatest mystery of all to modern Germans.
And that is the question of who they actually are.
REGINA | 71