‘Wir Haben Wegener Gefunden. Tod Im Eis.’
Alfred Wegener theorized continental drift
long before anyone had means to prove it.
Ships mapping the ocean floors with sonar
would later discover the tectonic plates.
You can visually slide the continent Africa
into the Americas like completing a puzzle,
not to mention ancestral plants and animals
common to the long-divorced continents.
Ever intrepid, Wegener was later found
frozen in the Greenland Ice Cap. His
discoverers would then write that—
“We have found Wegener dead in the ice.”
It had more punch in the original German:
“Wir haben Wegener gefunden. Tod im Eis.”
Fellow geologists got their come-uppance
for dissing Wegener. Now we live in fear his
plates might rub each other the wrong way.
Read More Poems From the New York Almanack HERE.
Love this Ed!
Plattsburgh, NY, Sonntag, den 23. Oktober 2022. WOW! Wart-a-mal! Getting old(er) can have its rewards. We often complain of forgetting, but, WAIT! – there’s more: remembering, recalling. … now in broader, deeper context. As an American 18/19 year-old working in Augsburg, Germany, 1962-63; a native co-worker (Heinrich Schramm) would often engage us during morning Kaffee-Pause, with his latest readings on Germany’s own geologist Alfred Wegener. Thanks for the memory-jog, Ed Z!
Thanks, Bob! and Richard! Write on . . . Ed
Hi Richard, you no doubt know far more about this than I do, but I found the sound of the German in this poem title irresistible! My last name, in German, mean “gear maker” aka “iron tooth” or “teeth”. When we took our sons to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. as young teens at most, they were put off by finding their name on many labels—until they caught on to the occupational character of those names—and theirs! Cheers, Ed
Thanks, Ed, but WAIT! There’s more: Earlier (1957) in my ArmyBratLife, the family lived On-Post at the Dachau Concentration Camp site. At age 13, it was a coming-of-age experience for a Catholic boy from Brooklyn. I recall that one of the surviving restored prisoner barracks had become a chapel for the remaining residents. By then they were mostly Displaced Persons, stateless, working for UncleSam. The Catholic Chaplain was a Dominican Priest who had survived … and always greeted worshippers at Mass with a bear hug and the exclamation Laudetur Iesus Christus! You could not but believe … even more deeply.
So you grew up in a German concentration camp? That should get you bonus points in some “guess-what?” genres! If you spin it correctly . . . Cheers, Ed