BAll threads come together with Simone Keil in Ulm. Six times a year she leaves her twenty-first century life behind and transforms into a medieval cook. Then everything has to be right: from the coarsely woven traditional costume to the artistically looped linen headscarf. From the white apron shirt that she sewed from old patterns to the recipes. From the ingredients to the spices. Simone’s favorite dish is stuffed quail, a recipe from the “Nürnberger Küchenmeisterei”, a cookbook from the fifteenth century. After that she is often asked. Simone Keil calls it reenactment, revival. True to traditional sources, medieval life in a castle should be reconstructed as precisely as possible. She is passionate regarding it, as are her colleagues, whom she invites by e-mail in a very modern way. Your reward is a weekend at the castle.
Hardly any other place is as suitable for this project as Meersburg. Built impregnably on a sandstone cliff high above the shore, the view from the towers extends far beyond Lake Constance to the Alps. Under the narrow drawbridge that separates it from the old town and the baroque palace square, it descends more than twenty meters. In the Middle Ages, Black Forest miners are said to have dug the deep moat into the sandstone rock over the course of a few days in order to forestall a siege. As soon as you step through the castle gate, a meter-thick wall separates you from the city with its wine taverns and monastery courtyards, town houses and baroque palaces. All of a sudden it’s quiet, as if you’re stepping over the threshold into another time.
Only in the evening, when the last visitors have left the castle and the noise of modern times has died away, does the castle fall back into its own magic.
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Bild: picture-alliance
The plaster is grey, it smells a little musty. No multimedia installation, only hidden information signs guide you on a tour of the castle. A charcoal fire glows in a copper bowl in the gatehouse, a bearded guard in mail and open armor warms his hands. Battered black leather fire buckets hang from the sooty vaulted ceiling. Swords and lances lean once morest the castle wall. A boy examines a short sword in his hand. The gatekeeper hands him a sign. The child is disappointed at how light it is. That’s the right thing to do, the knight explains, soft wood is used for a shield. It is not there to let the sword bounce, but to intercept it. And with a determined swipe, he demonstrates what he means. The boy boldly raises his shield, the tip of the sword sticks trembling. Voila.
Am I stuck in a time machine?
I am drawn to the tower where Annette von Droste-Hülshoff spent the last years of her life. Out of the corner of my eye I notice a tailor. He doesn’t sit cross-legged on the table like the brave little tailor, but comfortably sits on a bulky stool, mending his linen. Damsels and squires hurry past me up the stairs on soft soles. In a bower, a woman sits spinning at a magnificent tiled stove. If her cheeks weren’t rosy under the hood, it might be the old witch from Sleeping Beauty. Luckily there is no torturer. The poor fellow, who has his head and hands wedged between the bars of the pillory, can easily be recognized as a modern-day resident by his hard rock T-shirt and grimaces for the camera of his laughing comrades.
In the tower where Annette von Droste-Hülshoff spent the last years of her life: the poet’s death room.
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Bild: picture-alliance
Everything is the same in Droste’s apartment. Your bed is made. The desk is by the window. The bookcases are filled with manuscripts as if the poet had just left. The view from the round tower over the lake is wide and light. A sense of happiness is palpable in the warm followingnoon light. Here Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was finally able to live her own life, far away from home and its conventions. “I live in the castle on the mountain, below me the blue lake, hear goblin dwarfs at night, eagles from above every day. And the gray ancestral pictures are my roommates, coat of arms and iron shields, sofa and clothes hooks for me”, the words of the poet ring in my ear as I descend a steep stairway from the tower dwelling. A gloomy vault opens behind the heavy oak door. And like in a dream, it suddenly smells of smoke. What’s going on here? It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark. A fire smolders on the forge, a giant in a leather apron turns his back on me and uses tongs to dip a red-hot iron into water so that it hisses. And now it got me too. Am I stuck in a time machine?