Perhaps my favorite places in Germany are the woods and the forests.  Most of the time we drive through them, but on occasion, we walk along paths on our way to a castle, or other remote historical site.  33% of Germany’s land area is forested with more than 90 billion trees–Spruce, Pine, Beech, Oak and Birch.  Fall is especially spectacular.

When I’m in the woods, I feel such great peace.  I love the sounds of the wind in the trees overhead and I love how the damp carpet of fallen leaves absorb the sound of my  footsteps.  I always want to linger in these woods, hearing the rustle of leaves, smelling the earthy decay of fallen branches, feeling the hug of the trees around me.  It all fills my soul.

Right now, I am reading a wonderful graphic (self-illustrated) memoir by a German immigrant, Nora Krug (b. 1977).

Wikipedia:  Nora Krug is a German–American author and illustrator. Her graphic memoir Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the 2019 Schubart-Literaturpreis, and the 2019 Evangelischer Buchpreis.

I loved how she describes German forests:

From the notebook of a homesick emigre
Things German No. 2 der Wald

A woodpecker; an abandoned hunting stand; fingers of light; vertical silence.  The forest makes me feel calm and protected unlike any other place.  It’s is the “forests in their silence” that have kept old fairy tales alive, the Grimm Brothers once claimed.  Their German Dictionary, begun in 1838, lists over a thousand nouns and adjectives containing the world WALD.

My favorite ones are WALDEINSAMKEIT (forest-solitude), WALDFINSTERNIS (forsest-obscurity), and WALDUMRAUSCHT (surrounded-by-a-rustling-forest). In 1852 the German Jewish author Berthold Auerbach stated that “French should be spoken at the salon, and German in the forest.”  During the 1936 Olympic Games, gold-medal winners were presented with a seedling of a German oak, a symbol for steadfastness.  Several of these so-called HITLER OAKS still stand in the United States today.  In 1938, the Reich’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels considered barring Jews from “German forests.”  As part of the postwar reparations, the French and British military ordered the massive harvesting of German forests.  In 1983, the term WALDSTERBEN (forest die-off) was included in the German thesaurus for the first time.  A wave of existential angst washed over the country.

I am loving this insightful and thoughtful personal history/memoir of a German in America who is reckoning with her past.  Her thoughts are not so far from my own.