Sara Firman writes:
Several summers ago [in 2001], I traveled from America to a unique spa resort in Bad Sulza (Salt Baths), Germany, a town made famous by its natural brine springs. The visit was a significant part of a longer journey of synchronicity and change that brought me to Missouri. On a beautiful piece of land along a creek, I had been co-creating with my then-husband a modest spa retreat that was inspired in spirit by our experiences in Germany. Both these green and land-bound places - one in Europe, the other in America - have watery histories with some interesting parallels. The Toskana Therme spa in Bad Sulza was completed in 1999 and remains an unmatched original in an otherwise increasingly generic proliferation of destination spas around the world. It has a fascinating history: one that American spa entrepreneurs might pay some attention to. Perhaps some of the connections I make here will illustrate why.
Few people know that Missouri has one of the largest concentrations of springs in the world, and some saline ones. In the eighteenth century, settlements grew up near salt springs. The early pioneers would evaporate the salt-laden water, yielding the crystalline form for use. Salt had been extracted from springs in the area of Germany we visited ever since the middle ages however. In Bad Sulza, you can walk in the huge wooden open-air inhalatorium that was once used for salt extraction. The walls are made of brushwood and have a wet sheen because of the salt water that trickles over them, gradually increasing the concentration of the mineral. Demand for this food seasoning was high until cheaper rock salt came on the market. In Missouri too, new methods of brine evaporation and better inland transportation soon made salt cheaper to buy than to manufacture.
Workers in the German salt industry knew the worth of the salt-water springs for bad backs and other health problems, and by the nineteenth century public bathhouses brought an income from salt once more. Similarly, in Missouri, as the salt works declined in importance before the Civil War, entrepreneurs set their sights on the resort value of the mineral springs. Eighty-three mineral water localities were reported in the state, many of which had either a hotel, spa, or bottling facility. Most of these no longer exist, and Missouri is not known as a spa destination. The revival of interest in spas in Germany was dampened by recent healthcare reform that meant that spa visits would not be covered by heath insurance plans. However, the spa at Bad Sulza, initiated by the social-entrepreneurial spirit of Marion Schneider and her husband Klaus Bohm, demonstrates that a new approach can reinvigorate appreciation of this resource.
The dream of most German immigrants to America (almost seven million people over the years), who left their homeland from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, was debt-free ownership of a farm in a landscape that reminded them of home - like Missouri. My ex-husband's part-German heritage, his craftman's skills, and our longing for the countryside and a more independent life, were revisited in our settling in that midwest state to pioneer a revival of spa retreat. The connecting element in this story is water, and it's messages run deep for me. In the works of Missouri poet, T. S. Eliot, water often appeared. He wrote these well-known lines: 'We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time'. The poem continues with a watery theme:
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived not far from Bad Sulza at Weimar in the eighteenth century would have understood exactly what T.S.Eliot, a continent and a century away, was trying to say. Goethe felt that many people did not know how to study the world around them, how to really 'see' into the nature of things. He also understood that water was the mystery at the center of it all. Here is one of his poems celebrating this:
How blossomingly I rejoice! All hail to the new!
All is born of water and upheld by water too!
Transpierced thus am I by beauty and by truth!
Oh great ocean, grant us thine eternal truth!
For wouldst thou not send clouds, nor bounteous streams endow,
Nor perfect the currents, nor rivers here and there bestow,
Then where would mountains be and what of plains and world?
For thou alone it is that keeps this freshest life unfurled
A cultural rebirth occurred in Europe from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, known as the Renaissance. It was based on the rediscovery of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, both civilizations that appreciated the value of bathing in natural healing waters. During the Renaissance, the New World (America) was discovered. Goethe - an outstandingly versatile person - was perhaps the last true Renaissance Man. As a Privy Councillor at the Duke of Weimar's court, he helped oversee major mining, road-building and irrigation projects. He also painted, directed plays, carried out research in anatomy, botany and optics, and found time to produce masterpieces in every literary genre. Our visit to his homeland indicated that his legacy lives on in terms of an astonishing talent for using highly technical skills to create sensitive art that has both meaning and purpose. German people still have the craftsmanship that many brought with them to America, and they are applying it in creative new ways.
On the rural landscape of Bad Sulza a spaceship has landed in the form of Toskana Therme, and it is not out of place. The ultramodern architecture of the spa could just as well be compared to the microscopic details of a form sculpted by nature. It all depends on how you choose to see things. Goethe believed that a human being, making full use of all the senses, is the most exact physical measuring apparatus possible. I'm sure he would thoroughly approve of the way in which the sanatorium he once suggested be built at Bad Sulza has evolved into a multisensory experiment in both the social and medical arenas. I also expect that the skilled people who created and now manage this innovative spa would agree that all this amazing technology is nothing without the human instrument of reception, our bodies. The place exemplifies Goethe's view that humans need an approach to rediscovering nature that is stimulating intellectually and satisfying emotionally and spiritually.
Natural lye water, warmed to body temperature, is used to fill seven pristine pools under a huge, vaulted canopy that lets in light and affords beautiful views of the countryside surrounding the Therme. Part of the complex is a silvery flask-shaped building with a stained-glass top called the Liquid Sound Temple. Most of the pools feature the special audiovisual technology, invented by media-artist Mickey Remann, that enables sound and colored light to play through the water. The darkened atmosphere of the 'temple' gives it a hallowed, meditative feel. Buoyed up by the salty water, you find elderly people floating along to hip music, youths grooving on classics, people transformed into whales and dolphins by sound recordings. All these magical sound and light effects are piped into the space through a computerized system that can be controlled by just one operator. Everyone comes together in a sensorially unifying experience made possible by a unique application of the medium of water.
Bad Sulza, which has a population of less than 4000 people, is half way between Frankfurt and Berlin in Thuringia. An old region re-created just before the unification of Germany in 1990, Thuringia occupies the southwestern portion of former East Germany. Old buildings, untouched by ugly modernization, are now ripe for restoration and there are still craftsmen with the skills to do it. We admired them on the streets of Bad Sulza, special tool belts strapped around their sturdy hips, fitting modern but perfectly matched thermal windows into ancient yet still solid stone walls. The southern landscape includes the rounded hills of the Thuringian Forest and a fertile agricultural basin whose eastward-flowing streams are tributaries of the Saale River. Orchards and vineyards cover the slopes overlooking the Ilm River which links Bad Sulza with Goethe's cultured city of Weimar. Listz spent his summers in this city; Schiller's legacy is honored there; Martin Luther preached and Johanne Sebastian Bach played in the Town Church of Weimar. There is a sense of being part of a great watershed of history wherever you go in this region.
After the political reunification, many industrial sites along the Ilm River were shut down and modern waste-water treatment plants rapidly led to regeneration of the aquatic ecosystem - a walk along the river's wooded banks is a pleasure. Goethean studies of water carried forward by the German hydrologist Theodor Schwenk inspired the current European movement that is demonstrating why a blindly utilitarian view of this element has caused many of the environmental and health problems we have today. The damaging straightening of Europe's great meandering rivers and the thoughtless pollution of it's vital waters have had effects that can no longer be ignored. American watersheds are hardly a step behind. At the end of October in 2003, Hannover hosted an international seminar entitled 'Water is Life - towards the sustainable prevention of global conflict'. Just like the Toskana Therme project, these seminars were launched at Expo 2000. In the Ozarks bioregion, the National Water Center has for two decades cultivated and articulated a clean water practice based upon appropriate technology and personal responsibility. Spa culture has a responsibility to play its part in all this I believe.
The workshop that attracted us to the Therme was described as an 'experiential journey', and it seemed to bring together so many of the interests we had been developing until then. Entitled 'Dreams and Rituals in Healing Waters', it proposed to use the idyllic surroundings and spa waters to evoke personal and collective dreams of transformation and healing. It was not until I began, two years later, to research this article that I realized just how appropriate Bad Sulza is for such explorations, and how profoundly my visit influenced my thoughts now. Goethe felt that, throughout any investigation, you should maintain continuous experiential contact with the object studied and avoid abstract intellectualization. I had hardly been out of the water since starting my training in aquatic bodywork. At the workshop, we would be studying water and its influence on human consciousness by immersing ourselves in it - even sleeping and dreaming in it. We could walk beside the River Ilm in the wooded Kurparc (Health Park) that links the resort to the small town, heading towards coffee and poppyseed cake, while we reflected on our experiences.
On Wunderwaldstrasse (Wonderworld Street) in Bad Sulza, the Hotel an der Therme and the nearby Toskana Therme offer a setting in which it is indeed possible to feel wonder and renewal of spirit. Goethe's famous play 'Faust' was about a legendary sixteenth-century magician and practitioner of alchemy, who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for youth, knowledge, and power. There are so many places in the world where we can now see this human failing in action. But, in Bad Sulza, the developers of the Therme have somehow managed to bring together local and global perspectives, medical and artistic innovations, in a way of sharing both natural and human abundance. The American organizer of the workshop we attended, Professor Jonathan Paul DeVierville says, 'Water is to the Body as Dreams are to the Soul' and 'Dreams are to the Individual as Myths are to Culture'. I have come to believe that the creative expression of water dreams, such as the project at Bad Sulza, offers some hope for the future.
Theodor Schwenk proposed that the essence of water's movement is found in the tension between the linear tug of gravity and water's inherent tendency to draw itself into a sphere. Perhaps, by analogy, this has something to teach us about the need for a balance between linear and cyclical ways of thinking about things. Schwenk demonstrated that water reconciles this tension in three ways: the meander, the wave, and the vortex. He believed that this gave water an expressive potential that straightened rivers, stagnant pools and piped supplies have lost. Mathematically you can treat a circle as a collection of infinitesimal straight lines. However, as any dancer knows, this does not mean that the expressive potential of a circle is identical to that of a straight line. At the Therme, a form of aquatic massage called Aquawellness is offered that embodies this potential - you experience the fullness of water as you are passively moved through it.
Musia Heike Bus, the German workshop organizer, is an outstanding practitioner of this aquatic work and heads the center for Aquawellness at Toskana Therme. My ex-husband and I practiced a similar form, which we called WaterJourneys, based on the training in Watsu (water shiatsu) we undertook in the United States. We believed that aquatic bodywork offers a powerful way to access the intelligence of water, and one that is unique to our time since there are no known records of it in past healing modalities. Like the women who developed Aquawellness, we found that its effectiveness goes beyond technique and depends on the ability of the giver and the willingness of the receiver to be open to the mysteries and messages of water, the substance of dreams. I saw in the people who built Toskana Therme, in its managers, and in those who conduct aquatic therapy there, an appreciation of the importance of bringing both technical and intuitive understanding to bear upon the creation of a place of truly holistic healing.
The human body is over seventy percent water and salty water at that, so it is no wonder that people are drawn to this element whether ocean or pool. After visiting Bad Sulza, a town that was until recently severely repressed, but has been revived and brought together around an original spa concept, I began to see that there is more to spa culture than meets the eye. The growing spa industry in America and in Europe, represents not only another consumer market; it reveals a pressing need for world citizens to join together in a time-honored tradition of cleansing transgressions and restoring values. The Asclepian dream spas of ancient Greece, where people would go for stays of several months, were concerned with the health of the whole culture as revealed through the individual. The Romans saw the spa as a place for both play and politics, as a civic service. The Native American Indians would gather at natural hot springs for their tribal powwows. Now it is time for the global spa.
Such places, which I call 'vision spas', have great potential as venues for exploring alternative and positive futures, as well as for relaxing and revitalizing. The Ozarks are known for their natural beauty but also for the punishing legacy of lawless pioneering days and the Civil War. Just as I was delighted to see East German grannies floating in the Liquid Sound Temple, I was touched by Ozarkian interest in our venture. Whether in the Ozarks or the Tuscany of the East (as the region around Bad Sulza is now described), water takes center stage in a future of hope. The example of social-economic-health revival set by Toskana Therme could be taken up by many places in the world, including Missouri and the Ozark bioregion, if people are willing to apply the fullness of their energy and ingenuity to finding ways to enhance and not work against nature. Goethe's ideas will enjoy a revival as more and more people become disillusioned with a materialistic and unnatural way of life.
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This work by Sara Firman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
