From "The Church of John F. Kennedy"

Abstract

It was freezing winter north of Harper's Ferry. In Maryland, a large billboard invited you to leave the interstate and visit the nearby sacred Grotto of Lourdes, presumably the oldest in America. Assmann had already been to the original Lourdes in the Pyrenees, but because his interest in American Catholic sectarianism had recently been rekindled by reading Johannes Enzlberger's Catholische Geistlichkeit der deutschen Zunge in den Vereinigten Staaten (Milwaukee, 1892), he was briefly tempted to stop. However, he decided to drive on, just as he did a little later when he passed the bleak battlegrounds at Gettysburg. As the afternoon turned dusky, and threatening snow clouds gathered on the horizon, Wenzel still had a good seventy miles to go through Pennsylvania before he would finally cruise into the promised land of the mysterious Amish. The road on the left branched off to East Berlin, then another to Weigelstown; a right turn would take him to Hanover and Lake Marburg; between them was New Oxford, York, another Manchester, and finally Lancaster. Instead of turning left to Manheim, the Mannheim native kept to the right to turn onto Route 340 a few miles to the south. Rickety covered carriages, their fluorescent triangles lighting up in Assmann's headlights, rattled along in front of the dented Chevrolet; heavy horse teams pulled a variety of seemingly antedeluvian farm equipment into commodious barns on both sides of the road; the first candles were being lit in the windows of the large, well-painted, white farm houses. The German held his breath and, indeed, felt a little relieved when he met a long line of gasoline-powered vehicles in the snow-covered opposite lane, stuck behind a buggy just as he was. Hallelujah, he thought, slapping his steering wheel with the palm of his hand: within a few hours' drive from New York City he had come upon, if not exactly a blank spot on the map, then at any rate another black hole in the American Dream! Having decided to spend several days in the region of the socalled utopian communities, Wenzel Assmann turned between the villages of Bird-in-Hand and Intercourse (the sexual meaning was not lost on him) onto South Harvest Street toward the Orchard View Motel. The handsome inn was run by a family of lapsed Amish; that is, they were still regular Mennonites, permitted to have such intercourse with the world as managing a motel or even owning black automobiles as long as all the chrome parts, emblems of human vanity, were covered with black paint. It was just such a completely blackened Chevy Impala that was parked in the lot of the Orchard View Motel. To any regular movie fan it would have looked like the killer car in a John Carpenter film from the seventies, but the initiate recognized in the elegant design the expression of deeply felt old-German pietism. Good Night! Stauffer, the motel owner, said and shuffled back to his house; he was probably used to being in bed by eight o'clock. But Assmann, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, started unloading his car. An elderly couple from Manhattan occupied the room next to his; they were using the Christmas holidays to retrace their long-ago honeymoon trip that had taken them from the German part of Pennsylvania to the almost cosmic rumbling of Niagara Falls. Though they had chosen to stay at the out-of-the-way Orchard View Motel, they thought it was barely tolerable and certainly perverse of the Mennonite owner not to have television sets in the rooms. The second point the New Yorkers kept making, whenever Assmann carried another carton of books to his room, was that the USA was run and ruined by lawyers, an entirely plausible conspiracy theory that the German had often heard before. He, however, was not in the mood for either fluffy soap operas or solemn judicial decrees and therefore wished the Yankee couple Good Evening, got a sixpack of Yuengling from his trunk (Stauffer had already turned off his lights), and locked himself into his cell of a room. …