CNF: Snow Globe of Returning
by Alexandria Peary
My mother from Pforzheim joins a Facebook group about the Pforzheim dialect and is told that she’s not echt Deutsch, not a real Pforzheimer anymore, is corrected, feels insulted and hurt. And so, she says Gell, Alla hopp, Dess find ich glasse, sag dess nochemol! Baggewaddsch. * My mother, born in the gateway city to the Black Forest, at the security gate at the Frankfurt airport, tells the Customs officer it’s her first time on German ground since 1964. It’s 2023. Inside the plexiglass booth, the guard in his twenties, unsmiling, “Then you should have never left your country.” * My mother, daughter, and I search Pforzheim for a restaurant serving bratwurst. For a slice of Black Forest cake with cream, for a real pretzel. * It was brave of me. * It was brave of my fifteen-year-old daughter to join us. * It was brave of my mother to return to the place that hurt her as a girl, though her body hurt so badly she couldn’t walk two city blocks by trip’s end, looking at buildings that didn’t fall from the sky that night in 1945. * It was hard on my mother to stay in an Airbnb with cockroaches dropping from the ceiling and a window falling out of a wall, cabinets sticky, and a freezer of stale food. I bought her a tote bag covered in dialect, Gell, Alla hopp, Dess find ich glasse, sag dess nochemol! as an apology. In the souvenir shop selling tote bags, a shelf of snow globes but not snow globes of the city’s destruction on February 23, 1945. *
Somewhere I know there’s a snow globe with my grandmother picking up rubble for a bowl of soup. I keep looking for her. * My mother who cleaned house every day throughout my childhood––lemon Pledge, Windex, shag carpet, bathroom sinks––owns a robot vacuum that steers around the legs of furniture. * My mother, seventy-nine, bikes twice a day with her boyfriend in Tennessee, who is seventeen years younger, gell. Seventeen was her age when she left for the United States, so he was born the year she emigrated. * She texts updates of her virtual tours on her Strava bike through Prague, the Alps, and places in her homeland she’ll probably never see. She speedwalks on virtual sidewalks in Panama City Beach, Florida (where she has been) but also Mittenberg, Germany; Florianópolis, Brazil; Vansbro, Sweden; Gemünden to Hammelburg; and Innsbruck. (I have a yellowed photo of her Wehrmacht father stationed in Innsbruck at the start of that war.) * * * * Somewhere there’s a snow globe with my grandfather in a tattered uniform in a door to a cellar, what is he doing?, so I keep looking for him.
*
Now at night I am preparing for my solo visit to Pforzheim, so I am reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a library book, and on the television, watch a series about Hitler narrated by William Shirer, long dead, his voice generated by A.I.
Alexandria Peary served as 2019-2024 New Hampshire Poet Laureate and was a 2024-2025 Fulbright Scholar in Germany. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the New England Review, Southern Humanities Review, Brick, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. Her books include Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak (poetry) and Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing (prose).
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Snow Globe of Returning”? “Snow Globe of Returning” is part of a series of snow globes about my relationship to my mother’s birthplace. I am in the middle of processing what it has been like all my life to not know 50% of my family. (There’s a somewhat clunky academic term for this sensation: “lost intergenerational identity.”) My relationship to Germany has been “at a Slant,” to borrow Emily Dickinson because of the amount of unsaid information and the number of unknown people. In the summer of 2019, I suddenly realized, chewing on a drinking straw outside a kebab shop in Pforzheim, a city my husband and children I seemingly casually decided to visit, what happened in Pforzheim. An unconscious city was made conscious in my mind. In the summer of 2021, I navigated stressful international pandemic travel restrictions to return for seventeen days by myself. In the summer of 2023, what felt like a miracle occurred when I convinced my mother to return to Pforzheim, a place she last saw in 1972, and reunited her with her brothers (my uncles), sisters-in-law, and childhood best friend. Then in 2024-2025, another miracle happened when I was able to spend multiple months in Pforzheim on a Fulbright researching the city-hall rhetoric of 1933-1950 in Pforzheim, and I engaged in very strange detective work. In “Snow Globe of Returning,” I am sitting with the 2023 confusion I felt after returning to Germany with my mother (and teenage daughter), knowing my future connections with Germany would probably be done without my mother.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
06/10 • Grace Keir
06/15 • Alexandria Peary
06/22 • Kel Rocha
06/29 • Chao Wang
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