Chapter 19: Ha-Noi

I barely remember arriving at our apartment, but I clearly remember the unwelcome sound of the alarm clock at 6 am.

“If we don’t cure your jet lag right here and now, you’ll struggle for weeks,” sang Elder Koblenz in his Swiss dialect. “I’ve broken in a few greenies,” he added confidently, “so you’d better believe I speak from experience.”

I groaned a reluctant acknowledgment.

“It’s your turn,” he said, throwing me a shovel and my trench coat, “but I’ll have to show you how to open the cellar the first time.”

My down featherbed seemed all too soft; it was certainly a contrast to the lumpy, straw-filled mattress. The previous night’s supply of coal had long since extinguished in the furnace, and the floor was literally freezing. From a hook near the front door, Elder Koblenz grabbed an oversize key ring that could well have come straight out of the dog’s mouth in a Disney pirate scene. We made our way down the creaking stairs, out into the courtyard, and through a trap door into the catacombs below, dragging along as many buckets as we could carry.

“Well, they sure didn’t teach us anything about this in the MTC,” I remarked as we shoveled the coal and heaved the heavy buckets back up the stairs. “How does this compare to boot camp?”

“Ha!” he replied, “This is nothing.”

I laughed, knowing that I had just summoned some superlative stories of the grueling tasks he had endured in Basic Training. He certainly obliged; back in the apartment we sat down in front of the furnace and waited for the radiant heat to emerge; eventually he interrupted his storytelling and looked at his watch.

“We’re late for morning study!” he exclaimed.

We gathered our study materials on the table and dove into the books, taking turns reading and then role-playing the various concerns we might face in teaching others about Mormonism. I am certainly not an actor, and I found the task to be quite awkward. After an hour of joint study I was relieved to have an hour of personal study to myself. After fighting heavy eyelids through the second half of my new routine, we finally headed out the door.

“Wait!” Elder Koblenz said, stopping dead in his tracks. “Do you have your Little White Bible?”

I had left my mission rule book back on the bookshelf. I shook my head.

“We have to choose one rule to read each morning before we head out the door.”

I started to roll my eyes, but caught myself halfway as I looked up at him and saw that he was dead serious.

“Go get your book,” he ordered.

I hesitated for a moment. “I don’t need it,” I said, “I’ve got them all memorized.”

“Oh really!” he replied, “Well go right ahead, then.”

“Chapter 3, point number 1,” I said resolutely, reciting the only rule I actually remembered verbatim from the book, “Sleep in the same room as your companion, but not in the same bed.”

As near as I could tell, Elder Koblenz actually cracked a smile at our standing joke from the MTC.

“At ease, Elder,” he said, and we broke ranks to march out the door. Maybe he had a sense of humor after all.

Our schedule was booked solid with teaching appointments, and we rushed around the city from one to the next. Our apartment above the Halle chapel was in a decrepit part of the Altstadt historical center. The chapel had been a lecture hall in a sixteenth-century university that had eventually evolved into the Karl Marx University, which ironically enough was a bastion of godless communism if there ever was one. The university buildings shared the skyline with a few towering cathedrals that been miraculously spared during allied bombing raids.

Halle Neustadt, or the “new city” of Halle, was the dream of Soviet planners gone wrong. Located just outside the old city walls, its poorly reinforced concrete apartment blocks stretched as far as the eye could see. I only had a few engineering classes under my belt, but I knew enough to realize that any seismic activity would level these structures in a heartbeat.

Each subdivided area had a grocery store, a school, a bus station, and a so-called park. Propaganda postcards idealized the blissful life here, but the people knew full well these were just facades of urban planning. Ha-Noi was its nickname; the contraction of “Halle-Neustadt” was a play on words, comparing it to its communist counterpart in the Far East.

As our first day continued, we climbed the noisy concrete stairwells in the Neustadt and the creaking wooden stairways in the Altstadt. We sat down in one meager, carbon-copy apartment after another, and I struggled to understand the people with their thick, Saxon dialect; they, in turn, struggled to understand Elder Koblenz’s even thicker Schwiizerdütsch. A few of our hosts turned to me and asked, “What did he say?” and I slowly repeated what little I had managed to understand myself.

Some of the people we visited turned out to be more curious about America than Mormonism. Feelings toward Americans were definitely mixed here in the State of Saxony. The people of this particular part of the state had originally found themselves under Allied control after the Second World War. We were told about how the Saxons felt betrayed when the Allies traded their cities to the Russians for the little island of West Berlin. Wherever possible, we squeezed an introductory Church lesson into any lull in the political commentary and invited our hosts to the Sunday services.

After a few hours on the go that first day, we passed a service station. We still had plenty of petrol, but we were between appointments, so I asked Elder Koblenz if he could pull over so I could take a quick break.

“No toilet breaks!” he answered, “We just don’t have time.”

I laughed, but then he drove right past the station. “I thought you were just messing around,” I exclaimed, a bit perturbed.

“Listen, we don’t stop,” he said, “My commanding officer used to blow up at our whole platoon when a greenie would request to break ranks for a pit stop. ‘You’ll learn to hold it,’ he’d tell them.”

“You can’t be serious,” I replied.

“Well if the Swiss Army can do it, God’s Army can do it, too,” he retorted, “and even better!”

I wanted to make a snide remark back to him, but I couldn’t think of the German word for canteen. I wondered how much stronger he’d feel being out of commission with a bladder infection.

I said nothing, so he broke the silence to drill in his point even further. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he quipped, and then – in an apparent attempt to validate the quote by its association with his supersized hero from the other side of the Alps – he turned his head toward me and punctuated the remark with a nod. “Conan!” he added as a final emphasis.

“Nietzsche,” I mumbled to myself. It certainly wasn’t the first or last time I’d be hearing the stolen, overused quote. I pulled my planner out of my suit coat pocket and looked the rest of the day over, trying to identify the next possible opportunity to answer the call of nature.

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As the days passed by, we pulled twelve-hour shifts after morning study, and never once came back to the apartment for lunch or a rest stop. Even P-days, a missionary’s well-earned R&R time for “preparation,” were unheard of. Slowly, I became accustomed to this new life, stretched bladder and all.

A few months before I arrived, the Church had placed an advertisement in the Stern, a widespread German publication that just happened to be eponymous with the German Ensign at the time. The secular Stern’s circulation had exploded when the Wall came down, and the East Germans jumped at the chance to add a free book to their newly uncensored libraries. We had a box in the apartment with hundreds of clipped responses to the Church ad. Those addresses closest to our apartment had already been visited; the remaining deliveries were in the surrounding cities and villages.

One day a week was blocked out for out-of-town trips. On this day, we would take our box, map out a route, and travel around the countryside in the little Opel. Many of the areas we visited once held Church branches that had completely dissolved. Decimated by the ravages of war, the few members who hadn’t fled the bombs or the post-war hunger had eventually escaped to the West in the face of the tightening political noose, hoping to be free again to practice their religion.

One of these towns was Naumburg, an isolated enclave that lay an hour or two up the Saale River – where Hamp had spent his Christmas holidays in 1931. The branch had not managed to sustain itself financially during the Great Depression, however, and Hamp had been directed to close the area. The Church’s presence in Naumburg had faded away entirely; when Elder Koblenz and I drove into town, armed with three addresses and a box of blue books, our little one-day operation represented the first new hope for the Church in sixty years. We had dreams of finding a “golden” family who would build up a branch that would grow into a ward or even a stake – fresh from the MTC, every possibility seemed realistic to me. We drove past the towering cathedral in the town center; a line of people stood outside, winding their way around the building.

“Full house,” I said to Elder Koblenz, “with standing room only.”

“Looks like people are returning to the churches,” he said, nodding his head, “That’s a good sign.”

We stopped to ask someone on the street for directions. Out of curiosity, I asked him what all the commotion at the church was all about.

“Kirchensteuer kicks in this week,” he answered, “so they’re all taking their names off the Church records.”

For years, the communist government had not allowed the Protestant or Catholic Churches to directly garnish wages. Under the new regime, however, the East German churches were now being allowed to implement the Kirchensteuer – or Church Tax – to automatically deduct “donations” from their members’ wages as was typically being done in West Germany. I stared at the line, bewildered. Sure enough, these people – who had retained their church membership through decades of communist persecution – were now leaving the churches in droves, citing a new form of capitalistic persecution.

We followed the directions and drove on through the historic city, passing Nietzsche’s house and even the school where he was educated. The line around the church was a bad omen, but we hoped for better results from our referrals. Our first two delivery attempts were a further reality check, however; we found only vacant apartments. Like many others who had first responded to the advertisement several months before, in the meantime these two individuals had apparently left the town’s skyrocketing unemployment to pursue new opportunities in the West.

Our last hope in Naumburg lay in a dismal little apartment under a stairwell. The lights didn’t work, and as we approached the door, I found it partially open.

“We’ve brought the book of scriptures you requested,” I said with a knock on the door.

A synthesized voice replied from inside the apartment. “Haven’t you heard?” it said, “God is dead.”

I was growing tired of the overused Nietzsche quote. If I had been quicker on my feet, I might have retorted with the famous bumper sticker line, “Nietzsche is dead… -God.” But the robot voice had startled me, and I just paused for a moment. Before I could think of a comeback, the voice said, “Come on in.”

I was shocked at the invitation, but I pushed the door open and peered inside. An overwhelming stench hit me and I had to take a step back to catch a breath of air before making my way inside the damp apartment. The only heat came from the neighbor’s walls, and the only light came from a small window in another room. I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to avoid some obstacles in my path. As it turned out, the man was bed-ridden, with makeshift bedpans, buckets of vomit, and bottles of vodka scattered around the room. I had to breathe through my sleeve to keep from vomiting myself. We handed him his book, though I wondered how he would ever be able to read it in this condition.

He started asking us some questions, and I slowly accustomed myself to the new, computerized voice box he held up to his tracheostomy. He apparently knew who we were and had been waiting for his chance to do battle with the religious forces threatening his country. We tried to explain a few tenets of Mormonism, but he had already heard all he was willing to listen to, so we thanked him for letting us in and made our way back to the car.

After this, our third strike in Naumburg, we resolved that we were “planting seeds” and left the town for another generation of missionaries to harvest. As we passed caravans of semi-trucks on the road back to Halle, it seemed ironic that the same new economy that had granted this particular fellow’s voice a second chance had also brought a more efficient supply chain that would further assist him in drinking himself to death. I wondered how much longer he would live and whether I would one day forget the smell and remember the man; Christ and his apostles didn’t let the stench of lepers keep them away, after all, and the Gospels speak only of healing and not the smell. This alcoholic’s peculiar aroma moved from our suits into the Corsa’s upholstery, though, ensuring that he and his odor were kept fresh in our minds until we finally scheduled a stop at the car wash and dry cleaners into our planners.

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Each week after making the rounds to our teaching appointments in Halle, we’d head back out into the countryside for our delivery runs. We methodically went through our stack of orders and marked off each area on a large wall map; during our outings, we’d travel through small villages, through farm towns, along muddy dirt roads or tractor trails. Wherever the postman could deliver a Stern, we could route a Book of Mormon.

I especially looked forward to these days in the country, but I seldom appreciated the historical significance of the places we explored at the time. We went to Dessau, for example, with its famous Bauhaus school that Hitler had closed for the “un-German” architecture it spawned. We went to Eisleben, the city of Martin Luther’s birth and death. We drove past the famous chapel doors in Wittenberg, where his 95 theses once hung as the opening volley of the Reformation. We visited Weissenfels, where the composer Telemann worked, and where Händel was first discovered playing the organ as a child.

Countless other historical events had transpired in each of these places; but it wasn’t just ancient history we encountered. Future history was being made as well. During our frequent visits to a tiny town called Merseburg, for example, little could we have known that a geeky teenager there named Yawed, enthralled with the new influx of technology, would someday revolutionize the world by founding You-Tube.

Windows in even the remotest villages began to glow with brand new television and computer screens, but modernizing the buildings themselves would prove to be a much lengthier process. It seemed a shame that these amazingly historic places had fallen into such a state of disrepair, but the deterioration itself invoked an enduring sense of time. Some of the dilapidated villages we visited seemed completely isolated from the winds of change – not just from the fall of the Wall, but from every change of the past century.

On one occasion, we knocked on the door of a marvelous, Gothic building in a tiny town that might as well have been knocked back in time a hundred years or more.

“We’ve brought the book you ordered,” I said when the door opened.

“No thanks,” came the reply, “I joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses last week.”

The slam of the door shocked me. I called through the closed door. “Do you still want your book?” I asked.

“I’ve heard enough about you from our elders,” his muffled voice answered, “Your people stood by while Witnesses died in the concentration camps.”

It unfortunately wasn’t a charge I could easily refute. “So…”

“So take your book to hell with you!” he shouted emphatically.

I was infuriated but saw no point in a rebuttal. “How did they beat us here?” I asked Elder Koblenz as we made our way back to Halle. The race was on, and I began to take up his fervor. There wasn’t a second to lose, and a military-style operation actually seemed appropriately relevant.

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Our one time to relax came each Sunday evening when we’d call President Walter Peters, our mission president in Dresden, from the home of the only Church members in town with a telephone. I’d write a quick letter home while Elder Koblenz checked in with President Peters. Because the East German toilet paper was as stiff and rough as sandpaper, on a few occasions I actually wrote letters home on the toilet paper to demonstrate the discomfort (and possibly translate any achieved sympathy into care packages). If they had just airlifted in rolls of Charmin during the communist era, I thought, the revolution might have happened earlier. Had the populace been armed with soft, imported TP, the regime’s propaganda-meisters never could have kept them in the dark about the supposedly deplorable conditions in the West.

On one of these evenings, our host family brought me a little transistor radio. Hartmut Schulze, the Leipzig stake president from the tiny nearby town of Bernburg, was being interviewed. Church members weren’t used to having much publicity, let alone positive publicity, so the interview created quite a buzz among them. The radio host asked him question after question about the Church’s background and doctrine. I was impressed with the answers and particularly touched by the story of his conversion to the Church as a fatherless child in the hungry, post-war years.

Although his father had been felled by an American bullet, he expressed his gratitude toward the stateside Saints who had assembled Büchsen on welfare farms and in bishop’s storehouses, shipping them off to a vanquished enemy. Hearing the struggles that he and his fellow Büchsen Mormonen faced under an oppressive regime made me feel at the same time fortunate and naïve. The days we were facing – though long – were tackled in a heated automobile. No spies followed us; no laws targeted us. We really did have it easy.

Armed with this newfound perspective, the work began to feel more like a privilege than a forced military march. The temperature kept dropping with the approaching Winter Solstice, and soon our coal furnace began to lose its battle with the drafty air; having heard the stories of winter church meetings in a bombed out chapel with no roof at all, however, I didn’t actually mind the cold so much. Though I never acclimatized to the sulfur in the air, I did eventually become accustomed to the cold mornings around the stove, the language with all its dialects, the long days without a break, and every other aspect of life as a missionary. Though each day seemed to last a week, eventually one day began to blend into another, and the weeks passed by like days.

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The December days were at their shortest, and it was usually dark by the time we returned from our appointments and approached the familiar glow revealing the factories on the outskirts of Halle. An eerie glow radiated through the dense smog around the factories, and I wanted to hold my breath anytime we got too close.

To the demise of my lungs, Halle was located right between Leuna and Buna, two massive chemical plants that had been expanded after the Second World War to support the Soviet regime with ammonia and other supplies. A white powder clung to the tile roofs of the surrounding buildings. I still to this day haven’t figured out that powder’s composition, but if my eventual death results from lung cancer or radiation poisoning someday, there’s a good chance of a connection to the gift I received from Leuna and Buna’s double-dose. (Gift, incidentally, is the German word for poison!)

The scene around the factories was like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie where the whole earth has turned into nothing but contorting pipes, glowing refinery fires, endless smokestacks and blazing flood lights. This industrial hub had a darker side as well. Like its namesake adjacent to Auschwitz, Buna had employed slave labor during the Second World War. Leuna likewise capitalized on the war effort, but went further by producing some of the first runs of ammonia for the infamous Farben/Ford Industries – processes that were eventually refined to generate the infamous agent Zyklon B.

With the reunification in progress, compliance with even the loosest environmental regulations would have been entirely cost prohibitive, and the West was pressuring local governments to shut down the plants. As a result, batches of 30,000 employees at a time were getting pink slips. Frustrated workers lost their livelihood, and many of them – particularly the older employees – stood absolutely no chance of receiving gainful employment elsewhere. The situation seemed very similar to the unemployment rates my grandfather wrote about during the depression years.

The scene wasn’t all dismal, however: Christmas was actually quite a treat in Händelstadt Halle, literally the “Händel City of Halle,” as its official nickname goes. Every morning we’d pass right by the Händelhaus, the actual house in which Händel was born. It was the first Christmas for a unified Germany, and there was an ambient spirit of hope in the air. One morning we walked across the central market place; the Christmas market was in full swing, but the booths were still boarded up at this early hour. When we passed the open doors of the Marktkirche cathedral, we heard the strains of Händel’s Messiah and stepped inside the back of the chapel.

We found a choir rehearsing for a Christmas concert, accompanied by a full symphony. Until that point, I had only heard the famous chorus within the limitations of a recording; in this setting, however, the air was filled with all the nuances and subtle changes in sound that you can only pick up in person, with each voice and each instrument coming from a different direction; the air seemed to move around us, not just pulsating from the sound waves, but actually having been set into motion from the breath of the vocalists and the organ’s bellows. The harmonies resonated inside the acoustic surroundings, with the statues, the stained glass, the altar, and even the pews producing their own overtones in response. It seemed to be as close as one might get to imagining how choirs of angels would sound. It was a surreal experience, representing not just something musical, but at the same time peace, beauty, humility, and all that is good in humanity.

We couldn’t stay long, since we still had a schedule to keep; when we exited the cathedral, though, I spotted an old man who stood frozen under the arched doorway. He had tears in his eyes. “Beautiful, isn’t it,” I said to him as we passed.

“Bavarian?” he asked, having discerned remnants of a dialect from my childhood days on a Bavarian farm.

“American,” I replied. He gave me a confused look, and I tried to think of a way to quickly summarize my father’s overseas assignment as an Airbus contractor. We were running late, so I opted for brevity. “Long story,” I said, offering him my hand, “but it’s nice to meet you.”

When I shook his hand I immediately felt the absence of several fingers. He saw me look down at his hand and answered my questioning look before I could answer his.

“Left them on the battlefield,” he explained, sparking a brief conversation about his life as a soldier. He had dreamed of this opportunity for forty years, he said: the moment where he could go about his worship unobstructed by the authorities.

“If only my dear wife had lived a few weeks longer, she could have witnessed it for herself,” he lamented. As it turned out, he had led his Seventh-Day Adventist congregation through the same trying situations I had heard from the Latter-Day Saints. Up to that point I hadn’t really considered the extent to which other Christian sects had likewise suffered. I asked him if he’d like to discuss things further with us, but Elder Koblenz turned to me and whispered that we didn’t have time for any more appointments. I handed the man an invitation to our sacrament service and bade him adieu.

As we walked out, others were walking in. In contrast to the line-up for the fiscal exodus, this time they were entering for more positive reasons; the familiar music had the power to touch hearts and draw the people off the streets. As the upcoming concert date got closer, it seemed Händel’s music had stimulated a new pride in this piece of their history; people began to flock not just to the concert halls but to the renovated museum exhibits that had been added to the Händelhaus as well.

Just down the street, in striking contrast to the Händelhaus, was the house of another famous German from Halle, Richard Heydrich. There was no music as we would pass by this house, just loud shouts and chants. Heydrich himself came from a line of composers and musicians, but he put his creative skills to another use: as the architect of the Nazi concentration camp system. That ought to be enough to earn him universal disdain, but as the choirs were singing praises to God at the Händelhaus, neo-Nazis were gathering en force at the Heydrich House. It was hard to fathom that people could adopt extermination as their rallying cause, and at Christmas-time to boot! But that was just what happened; it got so bad one day that the police had to step in. Eventually they even had to move Heydrich’s nearby grave because it was becoming such a popular gathering place for neo-Nazis. Halle had produced the personification of worship right along with the personification of absolute evil, all within a few blocks of each other. The dichotomy was readily apparent: The newly acquired freedom to worship allowed both the wheat and the tares to flourish.

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One day Halle’s entire market place was filled with protesters; anti-war demonstrators had been growing steadily more vocal with news of an escalating conflict in Kuwait, and I was afraid the clash had reached the boiling point. Hamp had run into a riot on this very square sixty years earlier as labor united under a new political banner. That one – stirred up in part by deported American communists attempting to make strides overseas – had nearly erupted into a massacre, and took a madman arriving on the scene to mobilize and eventually polarize the unguided masses. As it turned out, though, this gathering had absolutely nothing to do with international politics and everything to do with the domestic pocketbook. It had only been six months since the Währungsunion – the adoption of a unified currency – but these were angry shouts already demanding a return to the old ways. Like Aaron in the desert, an old man with a megaphone stood at a podium, trying to sell the people the idea that better times were coming if they’d just be patient. I picked up a flyer off the ground and discovered that the speaker was Willy Brandt, the former Federal Chancellor and Lord Mayor of Berlin.

Just a few weeks before, Herbie had mailed me a copy of a newspaper photo showing Hamp and Willy Brandt in a handshake during the height of the Cold War. Mayor Brandt had awarded Hamp with a Berlin Bell – a token of the City’s appreciation for his efforts in fostering German-American relations. Would he still remember my grandfather? With Elder Koblenz close behind, I started pushing my way through the throng with the full intention of walking right up to the podium when the speech was finished. I’m unsure now how I expected that to unfold, but in any case it was of no use; we were already late for an appointment, and the crowd was too tight to even get anywhere near the bodyguards. I’d have to convert the Chancellor another day.

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As a new year dawned, another kind of referral began to arrive. Though most East Germans found themselves in dire financial straits in the early years of the reunification, some had managed to capitalize on newfangled opportunities. These lucky few took their first trips to the United States in fulfillment of lifelong dreams that had seemed impossible just a year before. For many of them, the American West was the destination of choice. Despite having never traveled to the American West himself, Saxony’s most famous author, Karl May had written one Western adventure after another, enthralling German readers with his Native American heroes.

Armed with this lore and having longed for so many years to see the untamed wilderness of Winnetou’s Wild West, East German travelers to America made a special point to visit the lands that might have served as a setting for these novels – lands that just happened to be centered around Salt Lake City. Entire tour buses of East Germans would descend on Temple Square; guided by American missionaries, these tourists would fill out a card, check the box to get a free book about the American Indians, and expect to find one in their mailbox upon their arrival home. What they did not expect, particularly in the remote villages, was to have a duo of American missionaries show up at their doorstep. Flabbergasted, they’d sometimes ask us to come in and have a seat, thinking we had just traveled 5,000 miles to hand-deliver their book.

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In another amusing chain of events, religion – previously a forbidden school subject – had suddenly become a required subject, and the schools found themselves with a dearth of teachers. As missionaries, we were legally authorized ministers, and we carried government-sanctioned certificates to prove it. In this capacity, we volunteered to be teachers. Oddly enough, some of the secondary schools thus found themselves offering world religions as a subject – taught by Mormon missionaries!

There was definitely a buzz about, and people were hungry for the new knowledge at their disposal. While there was some spiritual curiosity, we were approached by many people with a purely academic interest. One late afternoon, for example, we ran to an appointment that had been requested by a university official. We arrived to find ourselves meeting with the head of Karl Marx University’s philosophy department. He apparently wanted to become better educated on the mysteries of Mormonism. As we tried to explain each tenet of our faith, he struck each down with fundamental arguments against theism in general. He was incredibly adept in the art of debate, and after two hours of defense against his buffeting attacks, I was absolutely worn out. It wasn’t the type of discussion we typically engaged in, but this was a high-level official who would be explaining Mormonism to his own students, so we really wanted him to have a proper understanding of Mormon history and doctrine. By the end, though, he had me as close to questioning God’s existence as I’ve ever come, and as we left his office, I became acutely aware of the insanity of what we were trying to do.

Among people of other faiths – even those steeped in long-standing tradition – you may unfold some doctrinal issue that sheds light on their previous understanding of the Bible or their own holy scripture. You may even convince them that mistranslations have skewed their previous understanding of God’s interactions with mankind, or that a boy’s vision – in another century and another hemisphere – offers a new facet that can provide a missing piece in their spiritual puzzle; that is a hard enough sell. But to engage those who are convinced that all of religion is a farce? To discuss doctrinal details when the whole concept is discounted or denied? It is a superhuman task when there is no foundation at all to build upon. I, for one, could not see in this setting how any argument could ever possibly achieve lasting results. What were we thinking? This professor sat on his throne and pitied our naivety; and he was absolutely convincing. This country was full of atheists – millions of people who had been raised from birth to ridicule religion. I found myself vulnerable and defenseless – completely stumped. I walked away with my head hung low and my tail between my legs.

My growing doubts surrounding our chances for success, however, made it even more surprising when each passing Sunday – with neighboring church bells ringing – a student, a truck driver, or even an entire family would dress in white and meet us at the town’s Roman baths. The congregation’s hymns, underscoring the baptismal ceremony while echoing off the dozens of tiled arches, seemed amplified by a deeper presence. The new converts were washed clean and began a new life; given the people’s background and entirely secular education, it made no sense at all, but the people were coming to Christ nonetheless.

We could see the church towers from our apartment window, and I sometimes went to the window to stare out over the old city when I heard the bells ringing. Halle’s sky was gray, even on a cloudless day, and as the months went by I managed to forget that a clear sky could ever actually be blue.

Interspersed with the medieval shapes on the skyline, communist artifacts – statues of raised fists and other monstrosities – stood strong as their fate was debated. Should they be demolished out of disdain or be preserved and maintained for their historical value? The pervading public sentiment was in favor of a complete renewal, and these icons were torn down one by one without opposition

Most of Halle’s buildings were colorless, with years of soot built up on their walls. Every so often, though, I would catch a painting crew at work; in their wake I would sometimes find colorful, pastel houses on one side of the street – standing in shear contrast to the colorlessly drab structures on the other side. The transformation was slow, but steady nonetheless. A new environment was in the making – not just in the buildings but also within the people themselves. East Germany and its people were coming to life, and it seemed a unique privilege to be there as a witness; the scenes left behind by the colorizing crews justified every bit of optimism Hamp had expressed through decades of tireless efforts during decades of tense conflict.

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