02/05/2024
BEEN THINKIN' ABOUT... THE KAISERHOF. Towering grain bins are dark silhouetted fortresses framing an equally dark prairie horizon beneath millions of crystal stars as the Illinois sky fades from deep indigo to sheer black. Polar winds whistle down the old main street on Friday night. Back in the '30s, this street would have been crowded on a night like this, but no more. Small farm towns are mostly shadows of their once-bustling past.
The last of the staid couples are sitting down to small tables draped in fine red as a livelier crowd at the bar in the room over begins to gather, the smell of schnitzel and beer wafting in the air. That December night, now so many years ago, was my first introduction to German food. More than that, the night was a strange crossroads of past, present and something more.
I'm proud of my Welsh ancestry — my first Gwinn family members having arrived in North Carolina in the early 1720s — but a good chunk of my family is Pennsylvania Dutch, early German settlers who sailed across the tempestuous Atlantic before Pennsylvania was a state. They brought their cuisine with them then, too, with roast meats and roast potatoes and gravies and noodles gracing the tables of farm families across the Midwest and into the Missouri River Valley as early as the 1830s.
During World War I, a manic hatred of all-things German developed, fueled by yellow journalism and that too-often human need to band into angry tribes. German families changed their names. Old World ways were banished to the past. In short order, American families with German ancestry across the Midwest and the Ozarks became as American as everyone else... and sometimes even more so. Twenty years later, those families patriotically send their sons to war in Europe to defeat the N***s and something strange happened in the process.
More than one young man wandering the bombed out streets of Berlin or Dresden would stumble upon place names echoing his own families'. War trophies brought back would be hung upon walls or placed in glass cases, old war ghosts yes, but the hatred of the past had somehow been exorcised. The Old World could be remembered again fondly, proudly, echoes of an earlier time and place, and something nostalgic, like Big Band music echoing faintly in the night.
The crowd at the bar is louder now, mostly men. Gary McCartney — farmer, bartender, restaurant owner, Irishman — is busily pouring drinks. We belly up to the bar, the first time I have ever done so and I find myself studying the antique beer steins standing next to the whiskey and cognac. One stein depicting Valkyries and an oak tree catches my eye.
My friend Chris is a Bradford native. The night deepens and the crowd at the bar thins. We close the place down after downing several too many shots of some kind of dark cherry liqueur. It pays to have friends in the right places and we stumble back to Chris' childhood house, an imposing white Victorian within walking distance. I remember nothing else until the next morning when we eat cereal and talk about Pink Floyd and the Beatles.
Today, Gary's Kaiserhof is long-closed and I've not been to Bradford in decades but the resonance remains, as does a now-ancestral spirit across the land. One Arkansas researcher recently concluded that German culture has long been lost in the Ozarks hills, ignoring the big clans of Catholic and Lutheran families with proud white churches and a penchant for heavy, traditional foods, chicken-fried steak strangely reminiscent of schnitzel, and thick, buttery desserts. No, the past is sometimes not as lost as we think, but rather hidden in plain sight just waiting to be remembered.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2023, 2024
