In 1939, Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, Karl Zuckmayer, intellectuals and pacifists, fled Nazi-occupied Europe and relocated to the United States. They lived in New York City and Los Angeles for a while but soon ended up in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Barnard, Vermont, where they raised small livestock and grew vegetables. The Farm in the Green Mountains, first published in Germany in 1968 and appearing in a new English addition by the New York Review of Books this year, is Alice’s memoir of that time period. Begun as letters to her in-laws in Europe and eventually developed into something like a travel book, it has the delightful capacity, much like traveling abroad and coming home again, of making the familiar seem strange and contingent.
Of holidays, Alice writes:
Three or four weeks later, on the last Thursday of the month of November, Thanksgiving in celebrated in memory of the first Thanksgiving, celebrated by the Pilgrim Fathers in 1623 after a terribly hard winter in their new colony. At that feast wild turkeys were eaten and in this way the turkey rose to the position of a ritual feast dish, something like the German Christmas goose or carp, or like lamb for Easter...
This is perhaps the most American of all the holidays, and at the same time in the deepest sense a thanksgiving of the immigrants that they have escaped safely from their homeland and have survived life in the wilderness.
Of the contingent and ambivalent status of domestic labor:
Naturally, wealthy Americans do have servants, but just the fact that a very small percentage of New York apartments have rooms for servants shows how small the number of live-in servants must be.
The normal situation for a city dweller is to have a woman, black or white, who comes in for a couple of hours two to three times a week.
The hourly wages are high, but there is seldom a personal relationship. In wartime, the connection was so loose that you never knew whether the help that had cleaned so cheerfully on Monday would not stay away on Thursday without notice or goodbye. On the other hand, you had no responsibility to them and could dismiss them at any time without giving a reason.
At the beginning I found it frightening when a girl suddenly packed up her things and departed forever with no real reason and after five years of service. Or when a family moved to another state and suddenly told their maid who had served them faithfully for years that she would no longer be needed. Slowly I began to realize that in America it was not a matter of obligations, as they existed in the better and worse sense in Europe, but of work, a “job” like any other that was done in the most practical and unemotional way possible.
In Vermont matters were even more difficult, and in wartime almost impossible.
By nature Vermonters make poor servants. They can decide of course to help someone, but you must not take this help for granted or as something to be bought. The wages they demand for their work are relatively low because that increases their sense of independence.
That last sentence in particular fits into something I’ve been mulling over lately, about how impoverished many American ideals of freedom and self-sufficiency are. So many of us want freedom from, not freedom to—we fight for the “right” to continue working under terrible conditions, to suffer and die early because of a lack of proper health care, to relate to each other without a sense of mutual obligation for a common well-being.
But I was especially struck by the following passage, in a chapter about the USDA, whose myriad of detailed resource guides Alice finds thoroughly astounding:
You have to picture the situation clearly. For centuries countless Europeans came from poor little fields and went into debt to set up farms in this immense land. They enacted a story like the sagas and old legends.
They had to fight their way through impenetrable forests and frightful dangers, endure heat, storms, and cold, live in caves or primitive log cabins and go through all the stage and tests of courage. If they didn’t perish on the way, they could succeed in amassing great fortunes.
However, these experiences and tests of courage changed the basic character of these Europeans and awoke in them an unquenchable desire for further wandering. As they hurried from place to place, the tests they had to endure turned into adventures. They became accustomed to a nomadic, unstable way of life. They believed that limitless profits could be taken out without returning anything. They farmed wastefully without thinking about it because they forgot that everything needed to be conserved and cared for, including the soil if it is going to produce harvests.
And so into the space of this waste and neglect sprang up the USDA, a shining new bureau that promised to counteract centuries of heedless and unsustainable practice with science! Alice writes to her congressman and receives free brochures on disinfection, farm budgeting, caring for milk goats, safely storing gasoline, sewing furniture slipcovers, and “Currants and gooseberries and their relationship to rust infection in white pines.” She sends in a soil sample from their vegetable garden and receives advice about which commercial fertilizers to purchase and in what amounts. For the animals she purchases: “chick feed, strengthening meal for growing chickens, laying meal, fattening meal, scratch feed, milk feed, ‘manna’ for calves, sheep and goat feed, and pig feed. Then there were ground oyster shells (mussel lime), which the laying hens ate to form strong eggshells, and gravel, which all the poultry needed for good digestion, and which varied from the finest to the coarsest according to their age ranges.”
Ever self-reflective, she puts to herself the question of
Why we didn’t make ourselves more comfortable, why we didn’t simply throw the chickens a little corn, leftovers, and potatoes, let them walk around on the manure and sleep in the goats’ shed. Why didn’t we feed, house, and treat them as they are treated in countless farmyards in Europe and still are on many small farms in America?
The question is not so easy to answer. It was probably because for us farming was not laden with custom and tradition. Our teachers were not our fathers and forefathers or farming neighbors, but the USDA, which rapidly put the results of its scientific experiments to practical uses and distributed these results in commonly understood terms. That meant, since we didn’t know the common practices, we had the will and the desire to jump into something quite new and unknown, and were caught up in the excitement of exploration, experimentation, and results.
This is such a concise and frank expression of what I often struggle to articulate about the high-input, so-called conventional methods of agriculture that are currently in vogue in much of the West. Glamorous, novel technical solutions are offered to ameliorate the damage caused by previous waste and neglect, but with no examination of the underlying attitudes that lead Americans to destroy everything they touch.
I love how Alice ties these farming practices into observations of the American character—wasteful, wandering, suspicious of social obligations, enamored of experimentation and independence—not with the motivation of denigrating or criticizing them but with great fondness. She counts herself and Karl among the American farmers who prefer technical innovation to community-based traditions, and is clear-sighted about the appeal of such an approach. It is indeed seductive to see yourself as the bold, self-sufficient innovator of the world. But how long can you keep it up?