A visit to the original Radtsdorf

(Note: You can click on any of the photos and maps to see the enlarged version.)

After writing Adlerhof, Joy and I made a trip to see the Pfalz and my grandfather Otto's home village Rulzheim.
While I was perfectly at ease with the idea that reality would not match what my imagination had created, I don't think I was quite prepared for the wide difference.
First, Rulzheim lies in the ancient alluvial plain of the Rhine River. I have not seen flat like this since my first wife and I visited western Oklahoma in '79. This is flat enough you can make ad hoc billiard tables by drilling six holes in the ground and tossing out strips of foam rubber.
Intellectually, I knew that, but it was still a bit of a shock.
And it's modern and clean. Dear God, is it clean!!!! As a friend of my said looking at the photos with us later, "You never know when you might have to do brain surgery right there in the street gutter."









So it was all the more painful that the old Haas hof itself was the only point of disorder or dirt in town so far as we could see. It has been painted in colors one associates with old circus trains, the wagons hauling the camels and lions, say. As you can see, the facade has not been washed in a long time. The rest of the village house facades looked like they'd been washed and re painted yesterday. The old Haas hof is inhabited by a mentally ill Turk with obsessive compulsive collection habits and a deeply paranoid bent. He was on the edge of violence when he saw my wife, Joy, standing on the sidewalk across the street taking photos. He thought she was from German social services come to haul him away because she had a camera and an official looking leather satchel.


The other shock was how utterly featureless and boring the modern day Gasthof zur Rose is. It is directly across the street from the Haas hof. I have seen blank theater screens with more architectural interest.
The single day of our visit was an official holiday. The Pfalz is very Roman Catholic, so Pentecost (the Monday after Easter) is a holiday. Aside from the mad Turk, we saw only an old lady in a wheelchair and an old lady in a small park where we left the car.
We wandered the village square completely alone, viewing the two war memorials with their horrifyingly long lists of the dead in both wars (hundreds of young men in both wars, not counting three times as many wounded --- this from a village of about 4000). Yes, there were Haases listed, including a Josef Haas, and distant cousins I recognized from my mother in law's genealogy.
We went into the local church, St. Maritius--it faces the village square and its back bordered what was once the local Jewish synagogue. The church is large and lovely by American standards and completely unremarkable by German ones.







The synagogue was destroyed in 1938 and left as a ruin until efforts by the Catholic Church started to clear things up and restore it to use now as a local arts gallery and cultural center. There are no Jews left in Rulzheim.

On our drive through the Pfalz Forest the next day, we passed through the small village of Eschbach which lies about as far west of Landau as Rulzheim lies east. Eschbach is smaller and conforms more to the village of Radtsdorf depicted in Adlerhof. It lies on the same flat plain as Rulzheim, but the mountains and forest rise up quite suddenly behind it. I include 3 screen shots of the Google Earth map of the area as of late 2007. Note the mountains and Pflaz Forest rise up west of Landau in the map


A general map of the area around Landau. Note Ludwigshaven to the north east. Mannheim is a stand in for the medium city of Walsenburg in Adlerhof. The yellow line is the French border, though German is spoken a good twenty miles or more beyond it. Heidelberg is about 30 miles northeast of Landau.


A map of the 6 to 8 miles between Landau and Rulzheim. Even in an aerial map like this you can see it is all flat farm land. The Rhine River is just off the map to the east.