The rhythm of Muenster has finally begun to settle into a steady pace. Three weeks into this cultural exchange, my biological clock has adjusted to the 5 am sunrises and the 10 pm sunsets. As my other Rollins peers have already mentioned, it is strange knowing that our time in Muenster is almost at an end. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t have more interesting adventures before we depart for the Sunshine State. On Wednesday, we took a 30 minute train ride to the neighboring city of Osnabrück.
Charming and quaint, the town seems like a post-card. The buildings reflect the same old-German style as in Muenster’s altstadt, but the cobblestone streets are populated with more pedestrians than bicycles. It really is a beautiful city, and I wish I had more time to explore it. While we were there, we spent some time in the Felix Nussbaum Haus Museum. A German-Jewish painter famed for his surrealist style, was tragically killed at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. His paintings reflect a man struggling with the injustices of the time while still maintaining some of his natural humor.
One of my favorite Nussbaum paintings is a self-portrait in which Nussbaum sits in front of is Easel bare-chested and smoking a pipe, while on the table before him are small bottles of paint. Each bottle is labeled with a kind of emotion. On one side, there is a purple color for melancholy, and a sickly green labeled with a skull and cross bones. But positioned alone on the opposite side of the table, a small bottle labeled “humor” is filled with a clear, translucent liquid. To me, I think that was Nussbaum’s way of saying that there is humor in all of his paintings (and perhaps throughout life in the world) but it is often painted on in a color we cannot see, and only after the paint has dried and time has gone by do we finally see the joke. That one painting to me really helped me to understand Nussbaum as a person and as a painter. It was quite an extraordinary trip!
Afterwards, we ate a lovely kartoffelhaus (literally “potato house”) that had some of the best food I have ever eaten. And later (as has been a daily tradition among the students in Muenster) we all bought ice cream and wandered the streets. It just goes to show that there is so much to explore in Germany, and I need more time to explore it all! Until next time, tschüss!