Marburg

Marburg is beautiful. It’s a small university town in central Germany largely untouched by the bombings of WWII because it had no industry to speak of. Much of the Old City has been untouched for centuries and maintains its medieval style: winding cobblestone streets, not-quite-square homes with exposed beams, lots of windows with flower boxes, and so on; atop one of the many hills sits what else but a medieval castle! The most beautiful structures are the massive medieval churches, the oldest of which, the Church of Saint Elizabeth, was completed in the 1200s and was responsible for sustaining the city by means of bringing foreign pilgrims through the centuries before the founding of the university.

I’m here to spend six weeks doing German language study, but Marburg is also rather special for someone studying religion. The Philipps-Marburg Universität, where I’m studying, was the first Protestant university, founded in 1527. It was also home to Rudolf Bultmann, perhaps the most important New Testament scholar of the mid-20th century and doctoral advisor of Helmut Koester, one of my own professors at Harvard.

It’s hard to believe I’ve been here for ten days already. Much of our time has been handling various bureaucratic matters. As far as my swiftness in picking up the language, I'm actually finding it not nearly as challenging as last years study in Middlebury in Vermont. I'm certain this is largely due to being able to speak English, which was completely forbidden last summer. I also have less riding on my performance here, since I already have the grant. The other Fulbright grantees are an interesting mix of personalities though the subject areas are a bit homogeneous; quite a lot of people in hard sciences, only a few in social sciences or humanities. Overall everyone is very friendly and I’m having a wonderful time getting acclimated to German society with them.