Worpswede

Ever since I read Adrienne Rich’s "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff" a few years ago I've been interested in the artist Paula Becker-Modersohn, so it seemed like a good idea to take the bus from Bremen out to Worpswede, the tiny artists’ colony where she lived for a while and is now buried.

Worpswede itself is quaint, filled with art galleries and little shops and many old women with colorful, expensive hats and embroidered cardigans. It felt kind of like a cross between Carmel-by-the-Sea and Bryn Mawr. It was fun to look around at the art and all the stores filled with pottery and garden sculptures, but I really wanted to see the “barren, melancholic landscape” that the guidebook described as follows, “Dramatic clouds and moody light over the Teufelsmoor (Devil’s Moor) peat bog and the 55m-tall Weyerberg sand dune at its heart provided the inspiration for Fritz Mackenson, Otto Modersohn [etc., etc.] the members of the original 1889 colony.”
It wasn’t raining too much, and I’m trying to write a novel, so I figured I could use all the dramatic, moody inspiration I could get. I think they call it Teufelsmoor for a reason; I assumed that a 55m-tall sand dune would not be hard to find. “You can’t miss it,” said the blind man (I'm not just being silly, he was actually blind.), who very kindly offered to help me interpret the map. “It’s about five minutes from here.” Two hours later, and I was still wandering around in the mud and taking pictures of things that might be an inspirational sand dune. Finally, I decided this was it:
But isn’t this much more dramatic and moody-looking?

I also stumbled across the entrance to hell, which, stupidly, was not marked on the map or mentioned in the guidebook. Lucky for me, no one was home; it was just an empty hut with a dark, bottomless hole inside:

Okay, so I’m exaggerating a little bit. It was a dark, bottomless hole with some kind of hot-water heater/ generator-contraption inside. But, good grief, I had to entertain myself somehow.