Slate

Memory and Metaphor

Slate is a compressed shale, a fine-grained mudstone that has been subjected to great compressional force at moderate temperatures so that it has lost half its volume and the fine clay flakes that compose it are reoriented perpendicular to the compressional force, resulting in extensive parallel cleavage planes that allow slate to be readily cleaved into thin plates.  It is this easy cleavage that has made slate so useful to people for so long. In the first grade of school in Germany, I chalked my first letters on a writing slate framed in wood, one product of geology writing on another.  The association of writing, remembering and slate is so strong that we still slate appointments, and when we botch something and start over, we start with a clean slate.  Blackboards were originally made of slate, as were many memorial tombstones and an awful lot of roofing tiles (aka “slates”, or “Schindeln” in German).  Installing these slates was the job of slaters or Schindler, a trade that seems to have produced a lot of descendant Slaters and Schindlers.  

A slate shingle that had fallen off the side of the forester’s house in which we were quartered at the end of World War 2.

The Found Object of this essay is a slate shingle from the side of a house in Germany.  This shingle is one of billions that have shielded human dwellings from water and rot for many centuries.  There is nothing extraordinary about this shingle with its two rusted nails except that in my mind, it references memories of my personal and family history, and the history of the German development of the V2 rocket during the Second World War.  My father, Johann Tschinkel was an organic chemist who eventually came to work in the combustion and fuels laboratory of the V2 rocket project in Peenemünde on the Baltic Coast.  You can find more on this story on my YouTube channel.  In 1945 as the Russian front rolled ever closer to Peenemünde, the consensus among the scientists and technicians was that they emphatically did not want to fall into Russian hands.  Stories of Russian atrocities whirled everywhere in Germany.  The head of the V2 development, Wernher von Braun and his top men thus hatched a crazy plan to move the entire V2 research project to southern Germany, thus avoiding the Russians and putting the team into a position for possible surrender to the Americans.  That this move was carried out is testament to the amazing organizational skills of the team, for it required large numbers of (very scarce) vehicles and (even scarcer) fuel, dodging strafing and bombing by American fighters, and setting up a “research” facility in a slate quarry in the more-or-less non-strategic Thuringian Mountains. The quarry and its underground tunnels had been chosen because it had been an ongoing site of V2 engine testing and related projects since 1943.

As this caravan and trains wound southward, my father was granted a few days’ leave (he was in the Luftwaffe) to try to move his family (us) from what was obviously soon to be behind the Soviet lines to (relative) safety.  My mother had difficulty grasping the seriousness of the situation, but in the end, she packed a few suitcases, put our furniture in storage, and joined the move to the Thuringian Mountains where the families of the V2 scientists were housed in a cluster of different villages.  Our village was Brennersgrün where we were quartered with the wife of the local forester whose husband was off at war somewhere.

The forester’s house in which we were quartered in Brennersgrün as it appeared in 1945. The unidentified woman may have been the forester’s wife.

My memory of that time as a five-year-old is fragmentary, to say the least (come to think of it, most of my memory since then is too).  I recall sitting on suitcases waiting for trains, as well as a few vivid vignettes, but are they my own memories, or were they stories told by my mother, and thus not truly my own?  It’s hard to say. In the back yard was a giant, black iron pot big enough to hide in, an item this five-year-old found scary enough to remember.  My mother explained much later that it was used to boil laundry, but by the time she told me, nobody boiled laundry anymore, at least not in the USA. 

One day, great excitement as we were ordered to stay indoors, but peeking out through the curtains and beyond the picket fence, my brother and I saw American soldiers cautiously moving down the street, guns at ready, followed by tanks and trucks.  The same day, American soldiers occupied our downstairs rooms, and we were displaced to the very rustic attic apartment, of which I recall a jumble of vague scraps without details or clear images. But how could memories be otherwise?

While on a professional trip to Germany in 1996, I decided on a whim to rent a car to find the village that had been our brief home during this tumultuous time.  I don’t know what I expected from a visit to a place I had been 50 years previously, and I don’t remember giving it much deeper thought.  Why does anyone revisit the places of their past, places where no relatives remain, and that bear no trace of their own lives?  Do they subconsciously hope to jostle lost memories, to read dim chalk marks on the slate of their minds that will fill the blanks in the narratives of their lives? However vague and unverbalized my motivation, by making this visit, I learned a whole lot about a place, a time, and an era through which I had passed so long ago, and of which I had so few and such uncertain memories.

A roadmap (remember those?) and a rented VW Golf took me to the slate mining region of Thuringia and the village of Brennersgrün. In its vicinity lay several other villages and towns I remembered from my father’s stories. True to its name, the village had a large Grün, that is, a meadow, but I saw little evidence of Brenner (charcoal makers).  I guess the market for charcoal was not what it used to be, and most people were cooking on less messy modern fuels.

Had I looked at a pre-reunification map of Germany, I would have seen that Brennersgrün had been part of eastern Germany before the fall of the Soviet world. More surprising was that the village was less than a kilometer from the old border, something I discovered as I wandered a road leading west from the village.  There it was, a guardhouse from the old border and the old border itself, with concrete pavers to allow tanks and other vehicles to travel on patrol.  My cousin Peter had made a risky escape by “night and fog” somewhere across this border in the 60’s. The land mines and fences were gone, and dandelions sprouted between the pavers.  In the sleepy village atmosphere, it was hard to imagine the tension and danger of that time and place.

The border between East and West Germany as it appeared in 1996.

My quest had been two-fold: to find the forester’s house through whose curtains we had watched the arrival of American soldiers in the final days of WW2, and to find the slate quarry that had been the final site of V2 “research”.  The first was easy, and a query or two in the village led me to the outskirts of the village, where I recognized the house from a photo I had brought with me. Would I have recognized it without the photo? Was the photo my actual memory? Very likely, for photos have largely replaced my real memories. How could a vague, undetailed and oft-revised memory compete with the crisp, unchanging exactitude of a photo?

The forester’s house as it appeared during my visit in 1996. Trees and bushes had grown a lot in 50 years.

The house was in good condition but unoccupied, probably because reunification had led to the collapse of the regional economy in slate and forest products, so I wandered freely around the house. The giant iron pot was gone, so did it exist only in my imagination? Probably not, or if it did, it had also lived in my mother’s imagination. I picked up a shingle that had fallen from side of the house as a memento to add to my Found Objects collection (see first image above).  If the shingle bore my memories, the writing had mostly faded. In the fifty years since our departure from the village in US Army trucks, trees and bushes had grown to all but hide the house, and although there was still a picket fence, it seemed flimsier than the one in my photo.  And who was the dour woman in my old photo?  Was she the forester’s wife, our landlady? Perhaps, but there was no one of whom I could ask this question.

My second quest was not so simple.  Finding the slate quarry near Lehesten wasn’t very difficult, it having once been Europe’s largest slate quarry, but getting access meant convincing the caretaker that I was not one of the “troublemakers of the press.” Because the quarry had been the site of parts of the V2 development, there had been several media articles that had ruffled feathers of the local populace, including the caretaker.  But he finally accepted that my interest was purely personal because my father had taken part in the final days of the V2 and that I would not write any negative articles.  He let me explore on my own.  Unlike in the USA, there was no release form to sign in case I fell off a ledge or got hit on the head by falling slate.

The slate quarry near Lehesten, Germany that had been the site of V2 engine tests in the closing days of WW2. Most vestiges of the test stands and tunnels were demolished by the Russians in 1945.

The quarry was not active and much of it was filled with unsteady piles of slate rubble.  By comparing the quarry with images I had with me, I located where the last V2 engine test stand had been, but it and most of the underground tunnels had been obliterated by Russian demolition crews.  In the silence of my imagination, the quarry shook with the deafening roar of the final V2 test as it consumed huge amounts of alcohol and liquid oxygen, and I felt the pointlessness of these last efforts.  The Americans were already within striking distance, the war was obviously lost, the collapse of Germany was only weeks away, and a few hundred engineers and technicians were testing a contraption that was supposed to keep the disaster of German defeat at bay.  The strangeness and confusion of human endeavors and motivations were tangible on that day in that quarry. 

In his account of those final weeks of the war, my father had mentioned that the quarry was still active and that it was worked by prisoners.  Had the prisoners built the test stands before the arrival of the V2 technicians?  I had never thought to ask, but during my visit, I realized that even in the final days of the V2 program there were several connections with the concentration camp slave labor system. And there it was--- a modest sign in front of a slate-covered barn that had been the concentration camp Laura, a subsidiary camp of Buchenwald.  It had housed over 600 prisoners to work the quarry, and yes, to work in V2 engine development, and many died in the process.  Had my father been unaware or was this memory erased from his slate?

This slate-covered barn was part of the concentration camp Laura, and had housed more than 600 prisoners who worked in the nearby quarry and V2 test facilities.

After leaving the quarry, I drove through several nearby villages, including the town of Lehesten.  Slate had been the heart, soul and livelihood of the area, and slaters must have been a dime a dozen. Every building from private houses to churches was sheathed in slate, and every one of them attested to the artfulness and skill of the slaters.  A slate museum demonstrated how slate was mined, split, smoothed, shaped, and perforated. There were pictures of the quarry in its heyday, not idled as I saw it. Recent images from the web show that it has filled with water since my visit.

Most buildings in Lehesten and other villages were sheathed in slate, much of which exhibited the skill and artfulness of the local slaters.

The quarry in its heyday in the 1930s. It is now filled with water and the site of a slate-quarrying museum. The inscription in the lower left reads, “Oertels Slateworks, the largest in Europe.”

Slate is the thread (if slate can be a thread) uniting these experiences, a story-telling device, but also a real material with a long association with people.  Like memory, it is a material that can be inscribed, and from which inscriptions can be erased. Unlike photographs in which a flash of light is permanently inscribed in silver on paper, real memories are like lines and smudges on slate, hard to read, easily erased and easily misremembered. In our times, we fool ourselves into mistaking photographs for actual memories, but one is a physical object and the other is a completely mysterious activity of a brain, with no resemblance to a picture.

Slate offers a better metaphor for memories. No doubt I inscribed my first chalkboard in first grade, and no doubt I wiped it clean when told to do so. The slate blackboards in the biology lecture hall in college, where much of the chalk Dr. Caspari used to explain basic biology inevitably ended as smudges on his suit.  How much of what he inscribed and then erased can I recall? Because I am a biologist, I know most of his stories, but I cannot distinguish my memories of those lectures from the many other times I heard these stories during my career.

Slate figures again in graduate school in the steeply raked lecture hall in the Old Chemistry Building with its enormous, counter weighted slate blackboards that seemed designed for the large space needed for teaching synthetic organic chemistry.  Most of the chemistry that Dr. Cason chalked on that slate has disappeared from my memory as it disappeared from those blackboards under the damp sponge that he wielded after each board was filled. The superb acoustics of the hall meant that I can still hear the style, accent and tone of these lectures in my mind, but the content is mostly gone, much like Old Chemistry itself was demolished and replaced with inferior but modern “equivalents” with poor acoustics. 

Slate appears again in my memories during my postdoctoral time in Ithaca, New York where waterfalls spill over slate ledges and fossil trilobites can be found by splitting pieces of slate in quarries and roadside cuts, trilobites whose lives were permanently inscribed in slate, waiting to be revealed again by my hand. 

There is no slate where I live in Florida, indeed, there is not even a rock to throw at annoying dogs, nothing but sand and clay. Large areas of the slate of my memory have been wiped clean with a damp sponge but there are others that, though smudged and faint, are still barely legible.