Now with the Morning Star

By Thomas Kernan

Now with the Morning Star, first published in 1944, is a well-crafted account of life in Germany during World War II, beginning with life in a peaceful monastery. Soon, however, the Nazis arrive and one of the monks is arrested and subsequently interned in a camp. American author Thomas Kernan, himself a prisoner of the Germans, wrote the book in 1943-44 during his own internment in a camp near Stuttgart. The book portrays life under Nazi-ruled Germany as well as the monk’s struggle to survive.

As author Kernan states in the book’s introduction: “This book was written between November 1943 and March 1944, the last months of my internment at Baden-Baden in Germany. Thanks to the fact that I was repatriated with diplomatic immunity, I was able to bring the manuscript out of Germany with me, and home to America on the S.S. Gripsholm.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burtyrki Books
• Release date: Jan 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839742187

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© Burtyrki Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

Now with the Morning Star

THOMAS KERNAN

Now with the Morning Star was originally published in 1944 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

* * *

TO MARY M. KERNAN

for her birthday with deep affection

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Author’s Note 5

I 6

II 13

III 19

IV 26

V 32

VI 37

VII 42

VIII 48

IX 52

X 58

XI 64

XII 69

XIII 74

XIV 78

XV 82

XVI 86

XVII 90

XVIII 94

XIX 99

XX 103

XXI 107

XXII 112

XXIII 117

XXIV 122

XXV 128

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 131

Author’s Note

This book was written between November 1943 and March 1944, the last months of my internment at Baden-Baden in Germany. Thanks to the fact that I was repatriated with diplomatic immunity, I was able to bring the manuscript out of Germany with me, and home to America on the S.S. Gripsholm.

THOMAS KERNAN

New York, April 18, 1944

I

This is the center of the Schwarzwald, a land of forest and mountains, of dark red cliffs and narrow green valleys, of tiny hamlets with moss-covered roofs, of rain and of birds. Here in the twilight before dawn, a morning in the autumn of 1938, two trucks ground up one of the steep roads of the region, and jerked to a halt, gravel flying, at the gates of the ancient abbey of Maria-Morgenstern.

A young man in uniform jumped down from his seat beside the driver of the first truck, and a little swirl of morning mist mixed with the dust around his feet. He barked out an order, and the sixteen Storm Troopers on the benches of each truck tumbled out and formed a column of twos behind the second truck. They were tan-cheeked bully boys, fairly bursting from uniforms that were an ugly brown. They wore long-visored Alpine caps of the same brown, brilliant red armbands with the black haken-kreuz in a white circle, and every second man carried a blunt, ugly sub-machine gun.

A few more orders, in the voice of an angry frog, the voice of sergeants the world over, and the thirty-two men divided into little groups of two or four. They crouched around corners, and hugged the masonry, as if they feared an attack from the windows that showed neither light nor movement. A few passed through the ornate wrought-iron gates and entered a cobbled outer courtyard. The steel hobs of their boots echoed against grey walls where there was no other sound. Two men took their post before each of several doors that opened onto this court, one of each pair with his machine gun ready in his hand.

The sergeant crossed the courtyard to the principal entrance, a door painted dark red with huge wrought-iron hinges that spread their dragon tails over the wooden panels. Drops of night-dew stood like beads of perspiration on the surface of the black iron. The young sergeant tried the latch without knocking, but it was bolted. He disregarded the bell pull and the ancient knocker, to beat against the door with the butt of his revolver.

In a moment a tiny window opened in the wood at the height of a man’s face, and the white head of a very old man was seen behind a lattice of fine bars.

I am from the police. I want to see your abbot. Tell him to come here, the sergeant stated in a voice that he hoped was masterly. The white face seemed whiter. The waxy lips muttered something unintelligible and the little postern closed.

The sergeant turned his back to the entrance and looked around to see that his men were covering all the doors that led into the courtyard. They were there, all right, at ease but not off guard. The sergeant lit a cigarette and had taken a few puffs before he heard the rattle of chains and locks, and turned back to the dark red door.

It opened, and against the dark hall appeared a tall man, past middle age, clothed in a long black habit, a black scapular reaching down to his knees, and a black hooded cape. The face was round and ruddy, a gnarled South-German face such as Lucas Cranach so often painted. His right hand rose, in a nervous gesture, to a silver cross that hung from a black cord around his neck. The young sergeant had never seen a Catholic abbot before, and did not know quite what to expect. But he was somehow startled by the picture before him, this picture of the dignified old man, all in black against the black background, framed in the opening of the dark red doorway. It was still only half light, and the old man might have been the guardian of a treasure or of a tomb.

It was the abbot who broke the immeasurable moment of silence.

You wanted to see me?

I am from the Special Police, the sergeant answered. The Reich’s Attorney will be here in a little while. In the meantime, no one is to leave the buildings. I have put guards at all the doors.

What is this all about?

I don’t know. I only have my orders. No one must leave the buildings.

A short pause. Can the brothers go down to the stables to take care of the animals?

No, the Reich’s Attorney will be here soon. No one can leave until he gets here.

Will you wait inside?

No. I will wait here.

To such finality there seemed no answer, and the door swung to silently. Where the gnarled face and the black-robed figure had been, were only the dark red door, and the sprawling black iron hinges. Rapidly there was a little more light and warmth in the air, and the dew that had gathered on the iron began to flow down the painted wood unevenly, like tears.

The young sergeant ground out the light of his cigarette against the wall, and put the unsmoked half in his jacket pocket. He then proceeded to a round of the doorways in the great courtyard, trying each locked door. Each pair of troopers snapped to attention as he approached them, and relaxed as he passed on. He went out to the clearing where the trucks were parked, and looked up and down the outside walls. He could see two of his men at a postern halfway down the west wall and two more at the angle, several hundred yards away, where the wall turned around an orchard and dipped down into the valley. He decided that it was too far to make a round of the exterior of the enclosure.

Finally the sun rose above the rim of the long low mountain ranges and was struggling through the mists and cloud wreaths that lift every morning of the year from the damp valleys of the Black Forest. The young sergeant wished that the Reich’s Attorney would come, for he was hungry. He and his men had left their barracks in Feldburg at four o’clock that morning. They had eaten the frugal German breakfast of burnt-barley coffee, bread and margarine, before leaving, but that was no sustenance for young men on a two-hour drive in the cold air of the mountains. He took a piece of black bread from his campaign sack on the truck floor, and while munching it took his first good look at the famous abbey.

For, although he was a Prussian and no believer, he had heard of Maria-Morgenstern...what schoolboy had not? Here, he knew, was one of the oldest centers of culture, one of the earliest cradles of civilization in Germany.

Even the rewritten history textbooks of today did not quite deny the role of the monasteries that sprang up in South Germany in the sixth century, in the twilight of the dark ages. The Franks and the Burgundians had crossed the Rhine and installed themselves in Gaul. Allemanni, Suevi, and Saxons had moved from central Europe to settle east of the Rhine. All these peoples were hardy, treacherous, and completely savage. But after a while, Christian monks began to wander among them, some of them coming northward from Lérins or Monte Cassino, others from Hibernia, an island far beyond the sunset. From Hibernia came Saint Columban and a little group of disciples. They built a monastery at Luxeuil, in the lands of the Burgundian queen Brunhild. The disciples of Columban would leave Luxeuil from time to time, to go out alone into the thick forests to the east and north. They arrived unobtrusively in the valleys, they lived as hermits, they built stone chapels with their own hands. They gathered other pupils around them. In a land where no one could read, and even the meaning of the ancient runes was lost forever, these men who not only could read, but could even write, who healed the sick and showed how to grow corn, to temper metals and to tend the grapevine" were viewed as half priest and half magician. But mostly because they were kind and helpful men, they remained among the people, and legends grew up about them.

Such a one was Saint Desle, who came from Hibernia as a companion of Columban, and eventually wandered into the forested ranges north of the Alps and east of the Rhine. His hermitage upon a mountain spur known as Eberstein grew with the centuries into a monastery that acquired lands and power and became an abbey, lord of its valley, independent within its little state, and occupying a seat in the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire. Its wines brought good prices in the markets of Stuttgart and Basel; the manuscripts from its scriptorium were marvels of enameled beauty. The abbey itself bought rare palimpsests and jeweled coffers with wholly improbable relics in the markets of Venice and Constantinople.

This much the young Prussian knew, but not the sequence of the story. He did not know that, its work of civilization done, and too far removed from great cities to become a university, Eberstein risked growing idle and useless when a great reform swept the religious world in the twelfth century. At the abbey in the French forest of Citeaux, a new vow of poverty was added to the old ones of chastity and obedience. Yet a fourth rule, the rule of silence, was inspired by the writings of the hermits of the Egyptian desert, whose haunted beauty had never ceased to obsess the monks of the West.

So the abbey of Eberstein was reformed in the twelfth century along Cistercian lines, the lines of the common observance, and to signal so great a change, it adopted a patron and a new name. It became the abbey of Maria-Morgenstern, to honor the Virgin Mary, the Star of the Morning. Since, it had never ceased to prosper, upon the richness of its fields and forests and the hard manual labor required of its monks by the Rule.

Some of the buildings go back to the Middle Ages. The church, especially, is built upon a Romanesque crypt, and its apse and choir carry the early rounded arch. But the nave, a century younger, is a marvel of Gothic vaulting, and the tall thin spire, designed by Master Erwin of Steinbach, flings up its sharp cry to the clouds that are always drifting northward from the Alps.

This church, with the covered cloister that joins it to the outer buildings, forms the western side of a great square, the inner courtyard of the abbey, in the center of which is a well. Three long low buildings form the three other sides, and around the entire square runs the cloister, with a hundred vaulted arches. The refectory, the chapter hall, the library and the monks’ cells give onto it. The pillars and capitals of this long colonnade vary with the century in which the buildings were erected, but the general impression is uniform, a harmony in a low grey key. The group of buildings neatly covers the top of the low mountain once known as Eberstein, which had been terraced out to receive it. But the entire southern slope of the mountain, up to the very windows of the monks’ cells, is covered with the famous stone-terraced vineyards of Kloster Maria-Morgenstern, whose pale straw-colored wine still travels, as in ancient days, to the markets of Stuttgart and Basel, and indeed far beyond. At the foot of the vineyard, some hundreds of feet below, are the farm buildings of the abbey, the pastures for the cows, the fields for potatoes and vegetables. A little stream flows by the noble stone barns and wine houses, and is dammed to give power to a mill where timber is cut and meal is ground. Beyond the pastures, the opposite mountain rises with hay meadows half way up its flanks, and above the hay meadows the fir trees sweep up to the granite outcrop that forms the summit. All this is the land of Maria-Morgenstern, and all the mountains for miles around. Only one road, approaching from the west, connects the abbey with the outer world.

The young sergeant of the Sturm Abteilung knew all these things vaguely, but he was still on the outer, western wall of the abbey, and had not yet penetrated to the peaceful inner cloister, nor more than glimpsed the vineyards sloping down to the mill. He was even vaguer in his knowledge of the life behind these walls. He knew that his captain had told him to time carefully his arrival at the abbey at six o’clock, for then all the monks would be at Mass. He grimaced at the thought of these men self-condemned to chastity and silence. He doubted, in fact, that they were either silent or chaste.

For he had never been at Maria-Morgenstern in the still morning hour—at three o’clock—when the church bell rang its first toll of the day, and was answered by the owls in the pines of the surrounding mountains. He had never seen the glimmer of little lights here and there as the monks rose from their narrow beds and dressed in haste because of the cold, to come down to the church for the singing of the matins. He had never entered the church door, pausing in wonder at the soaring beauty of the vaults caressed by candlelight, as a sacristan touches a flame to six high tapers, and adjusts a little pyramid of lights before a statue, older than America, of Mary, Star of the Morning.

The figures of the monks move silently into the church and take their places in the rows of stalls along the sides of the choir. They are dressed entirely in black, and black cowls conceal their faces. Their hands, even, are invisible, folded inside the sleeves of their robes. On a few, who walk slowly, long white beards trail down over the breast of the black habit. At times there have been as many as two hundred monks at Maria-Morgenstern. In recent years the number has been a little less than a hundred, who begin their day in this blackness before dawn, mumbling the Pater Noster in low tones when the abbot has come to take his place. Then a young priest, lighted by two monks carrying candles, goes over to the lectern and intones in plain chant the first music of the matins. His voice rises along the delicate slope of the notes:

"Jam cum stella matutina

Ad precandum surgimus,

Stellam oculis sequentes

Partum quae notat Virginis."

The matins continue through their sequence of psalms, hymns, and antiphons, and at four o’clock the monks move out into the cloister. They have spoken the praises of God now with the morning star. They will not speak except in prayer through the livelong day, save for the abbot, and the porter, and the Father Minister, who directs the work of the community. Until five they wash themselves and clean their rooms. At five-thirty they return to the church for the singing of the principal Mass of the day, always a high Mass at Maria-Morgenstern, with chasubles and copes that drip with gold embroidery, and chalices that are encrusted with precious stones. At six-thirty they breakfast in the refectory, around long bare oak tables, waxed and polished by a hundred years of care. The breakfast consists of a piece of black bread, hot milk, and an infusion of burnt barley.

After breakfast begins the manual work of the day, for the Cistercian rule of labor is as typical as the rule of silence. Every monk must work at least six hours in the fields. With long leather or burlap aprons, their cassocks tucked up to their knees, the monks of Maria-Morgenstern go out in all weathers, to spade around the vines, to prune or sulphate them, to plow the fields, to rebuild retaining walls, to cut the hay, or farther up on the mountain-sides to log the great trees that have come to their prime, or to reforest in the areas that have been cleared. No hired laborer ever enters the lands of the abbey.

Their lunch is as frugal as their breakfast. A stew of vegetables, sometimes eggs and cheese, black bread and beer, but never meat. For the forty days of Lent there are never eggs or cheese, but only vegetables and bread. In the afternoon, either there is more work in the fields, or the blacksmith goes to his forge, the mason to his wall, the vintners to their vats. The upkeep of the abbey and its farms and vineyards is all in the hands of those brothers who are artisans and craftsmen. No plow, no wagon, or harness or shoe is ever bought, but is made by some member of the community. And in its making, the rule of silence still prevails. The brother dairyman can discuss the making of a new byre with the brother carpenter without saying a word, with only the gesture of his eyes and the inflection of his hands.

At six o’clock in the evening vespers are celebrated in the church with all the color of sunset in the vestments and the vessels. Supper is bread and milk, at seven o’clock. There is an hour for meditation or reading, and then at eight o’clock everyone is in bed, for at three in the morning, after only seven hours’ rest, the day will begin again.

Tens of thousands of nights and days had passed thus in the unchanging rhythm of the Cistercian rule. Generation after generation of monks spent here their long and silent lives, ignorant of what rumors passed in the outside world or what towers were built in the