Off to Ingolstadt

Dear grandchildren,

In April, 1946, when my father moved alone to Ingolstadt, Germany, just a year after WWII ended, he was just 17. He was alone in the world, with both parents dead and having just left his brother and sister in München. Thomas’ year in Ingolstadt will prove to be one of the most influential in his life.

To me, Dad was always absolutely and steadfastly dependable, organized, and methodical. In reading his memoir again - this time very closely, as I am editing it – I realize where these traits come from. Unlike you and me, Thomas had no one to depend on but himself. At an age when you and I plan fun high school graduation festivities and events, Thomas literally had to figure out his path forward, and he had to do this completely alone, with no support (emotional, financial, or otherwise) from anyone, anywhere. I always knew that I could fall back on my parents if and when I needed it. You will surely be able to do the same with your parents. But Thomas couldn’t depend on such a fortunate safety net. Can you imagine?!

With time, it became more and more obvious that the situation in the small apartment at Schulstraße 5 in Solln was untenable. It was extremely crowded, and soon Rainer and Renate would need room for the baby who was due to be born very soon. I was tired of Renate constantly mocking and belittling me, just as Rainer did, and Ulli couldn’t stand much more of Renate’s relentless bossiness.

One day, Ulli had not yet finished a task that Renate had ordered her to do after school, so Renate tried to punish Ulli by locking her in a broom closet, whereupon Ulli — sweet gentle Ulli! — turned around and slapped Renate in the face! I knew that things had deteriorated to a point that I had to get out – and soon.

(Sweet, gentle Ulli.)

With Rainer’s help, I began furiously looking for living opportunities and a Gymnasium (high school) out of town. We finally found both in Ingolstadt, about 50 miles away. I was gone a few days after Andreas was born. Within a year, Rainer and Renate were in divorce proceedings.

Ingolstadt, which lies right at the center of Bavaria between München and Nürnberg, is a thousand years old and one of the few cities in Germany that was virtually unscathed by the war. The Liebfrauenmünster cathedral dominates the town, towering over the densely-huddled houses like a hen over her chicks to make sure they don’t get into too much trouble — not an unintended effect, I'm sure.

Today, Ingolstadt is a major modern city, with industry, cultural events, museums, and a castle, plus several very good schools - all the things a modern city needs. But in 1946, it was a much smaller provincial town. As far as I could tell, Ingolstadt didn’t have much to offer other than a magnificent fifteenth-century cathedral and a “konvikt” – a catholic boarding school, where I was supposed to make my home for the next year or so, as ordered by both my legal guardian, my father’s business associate Konsul Rothe, and by Rainer. No kidding - I was supposed to make this place my home! Knowing some English, I knew that a place called a “konvikt” didn’t bode well for my freedom.

My hunch was right. Today, when I hear about monks in their cells, or nuns in the refectory, I think of that place. It was dark, dank, and forbidding, although it was now inhabited by kids. Most of the students who went to the Gymnasium (the high school just around the corner) lived there, and to keep me out of trouble, Rothe and Rainer decided that I should be a “convict” there too, but I refused. First, I wasn’t Catholic, and second, I just didn’t want to. No way. And I told the principal, who understood surprisingly well, I thought.

(The “konvikt” school today. It must have been renovated…)

“Come to think of it,” the principal said when I met with him, “There’s Herr Bürger, the piano teacher. The Lodging Office says he must take two students into his guest room. Why not go see him? I’m sure they’ll take good care of you. They live at Reiterstraße 4.”

Anything would be better than the Konvikt. Reiterstraße is a twenty-minute walk from town: go by the Frauenmünster, walk out through the gate of the old inner-city walls, by the outer fortifications, and beyond the cemetery. I got to know that walk quite well.

The Bürger’s house was a nice, friendly little place, the kind of single-family house not very common in Germany in those days. There was a small garden around it, with well-tended vegetable beds and some kitsch dwarf figurines. In the bright April sun, it looked quite inviting.

I rang the bell at the garden gate and immediately met my new best friend for the next seven months: he came lumbering out the front door, ahead of his master. He was a classic brown, white and black St. Bernard, not quite as massive as his very fluffy fur made him look. He wasn’t young anymore, probably beyond the brandy keg age, I thought.

“Sit down, Burschi,” said the man. I made friends with Burschi right then and there on the front steps, and decided that I wanted to live there, even before I had seen the room.

The room was nice enough, small but light. A table, two beds against bare walls, and a simple washstand. The walls were stenciled with flowers - a bit too feminine for me, but so what. The Municipal Lodging Office gave its blessing, and I moved in.

The subjects taught at the Gymnasium were the same subjects I was used to. Always first: Religion. Everyone always gets an automatic A in Religion. Even I got one. Then there was German, Latin, Greek, English, Math, Physics, History, Geography.

I entered the Junior class at the end of April, when there were only ten weeks left in the school year, and of course I remained the new kid in class all spring. I had a hard time. I felt academically inferior to these kids, but on the other hand I considered myself superior to them as a person, having gathered a few knocks of life in the years leading up to my attendance. Unlike the improvised school in München, this was the real thing with 28 hours of classes a week, plus loads of mandatory homework. It was a peace-time schedule, peace-time expectations, and — the worst part — the same old, humorless, calcified boys’ peace-time prep-school teachers. The Classic Philologians were the worst. They must have been the model for Prévert’s poem “The Correct Way”:

A chaque kilomètre                                   At every mile marker

chaque anné                                             year after year

des vieilards au front borné                      the most narrow-minded geezers

indique aux enfants la route                     teach children the right way

d’un geste de ciment armé.                      with faces of reinforced concrete.

Now, as long as we are at Prévert, I loved this poem, mainly because it describes something I was not. I would have given anything if I could be this boy:

Il dit non avec la tête                                With his head he says no

mais il dit oui avec le cœur                      but with his heart he says yes

il dit oui à ce qu’il aime                             he says yes to those he loves

il dit non au professeur                            he says no to the teacher

il est debout                                             he’s at the blackboard

on le questionne                                      he’s being asked

et tout les problèmes sont posé               asked all those questions

soudain le fou rire le prend                      suddenly a crazy laugh grabs him

et il efface tout                                         and he erases everything

les chiffres et les mots                             the numbers and the words

les dates et les noms                               the dates and the names

les phrase et les pièges                           the phrases and the traps

et malgré les menace du maître              and in spite of the teacher’s threats

sous les hués des enfants prodiges        under the boos of the “good” kids

avec des craies de toutes les couleurs   with chalks of all colors

sur le tableau noir de malheur                 on the blackboard of misery

il dessine le visage du bonheur.              he draws a happy face.

I shouldn’t be so rough on the teachers. After all, they probably would have been very happy to retire, but only they could continue where teaching had ceased before the collapse. There just were no young teachers. The few that had chosen to teach antique languages before the war were either dead, wounded, or in captivity. Writing this now, I don’t even know whether a thought like that would ever have occurred to me at the time. Is that because I was too wrapped up in my own problems? Or was it just an accepted practice to be “down on teachers”? Or -- more likely -- was it because everyone knew that there was no point to even think about it, as nothing could be changed. We have a tendency to accept without thinking what general knowledge and common consciousness around us is, and we only actively consider what is controversial in our society at any given time. How critical should we be today of Washington or Jefferson because they kept slaves? “Everybody did it.”

There was one memorable exception: the young, smart, attractive German teacher – who was a woman! I guessed that she was probably a graduate student of German Literature before being drafted as hospital worker (or something like it) during the war. Somehow, I had caught her attention, and she, mine. I liked her teaching, and I was eager to learn and to please her.

Toward the end of the school year, she taught us some Middle High German. I already knew Walther von der Vogelweide and loved his poetry. To give that part of our language studies a fitting conclusion, she said, she just had to share a poem, written 500 years earlier, although it wasn’t in the textbook. She did it, she said, because it was her favorite, and after all, we were big boys now. For months, she taught from the teacher’s desk in front of the class. But I will never forget what happened on this day, She stood up, book in hand, and walked through the neat row of desks, right into the class, stopping at my desk, where she sat down on it, right smack in front of me, and began to read:

Under der linden                                       Under the linden tree

an der heide                                             by the heath

dâ unser zweier bette                               there was the bed of both of us

dâ muget ir vinden                                    where you could find

schône beide                                            flowers and grass,

gebrochen bluomen unde gras,               broken both —

vor dem walde in einem tal                      by the forest, in a valley,

tandaradei, tandaradei,                            tandaradei, tandaradei

schône sanc diu nahtegal.                       lovely sang the nightingale.

Wow — was she really reading that kind of poetry to us? What she did that day is something I had never, ever seen in all my school life: the teacher sat, facing the class sideways, on top of a student’s desk — MINE! Her figure - close enough to touch! Thinking about it, I can still feel my heart in my throat, my face on fire. She read on:

Ich kam gegangen                                    I came walking

zuo der ouwe:                                           to the glen:

dô was mîn friedel komen ê.                    my beloved was already there.

Dâ wart ich enpfangen,                            there he received me,

hêre frouwe! —                                        Holy Virgin! —

daz ich bin sælic iemer mê.                     so that I'm happy evermore.

Kuster mich? wol tûsentstundt:               Did he kiss me? A thousand times!

tandaradei! tandaradei!                            tandaradei, tandaradei

Seht wie rôt mir ist der munt.                   see how red my mouth is!

Daz er bî mir læge,                                  That he lay with me,

wessez iemen                                          if anyone knew it

(nu enwelle got!) sô schamt ich mich.     (God forbid!) I would be ashamed.

Wes er mit mir pflæge                             What he did with me

niemer niemen                                        nobody will ever know that

bevinde daz, wan er unt ich                    except he and I

und ein kleinez vogellîn,                         and a tiny little bird,

tandaradei, tandaradei,                           tandaradei, tandaradei

daz mac wol getriuwe sîn.                       who should keep our secret.

From that day on, did I have a huge secret crush on her? Tan-dara-dei!!

Something else happened during those days that was almost as exciting. My uncles William and Edgar, my father's brothers, wrote from Hollywood: “Come to America, the sooner the better!” Now THAT was something to look forward to! We didn't have a good grasp of what America was really like; we were only sure of a few things: there was no hunger, and no cold winter. Instead of destroyed cities there was wide-open spaces, both physically and, more importantly, mentally. In America, there would be no more of this German narrow-mindedness, and no fear that someday Germans would come after us again, maybe not like the Nazis, but in some new form. According to William and Edgar, few things were forbidden in America, and people were happy, not depressed and suffering like here.

I said YES to that idea with all my heart.

Wait! What is this?! Both William and Edgar emigrated to America – and were already here in 1946?! How do we not know this story? I know that there’s a story behind Edgar’s emigration to America – he came via France and Africa – but how and when did William come to America, and how and when did he return to Germany (where he died in 1966)? I know that he was in advertising, and that he learned a great deal about advertising in New York City (during the Mad Men years?), but what’s the back story? And if Thomas’ brothers were already in the US, why didn’t my parents use them as representatives when they emigrated in 1953? So many questions… and so few opportunities to find answers!

“All my heart,” indeed. My heart was becoming more and more available. As the spring of 1946 turned into a warm summer, Nora’s letters turned colder and colder. At first I thought she was simply as wrapped up in school as she claimed. In the East Zone, she said, they had to work so much harder than we did. She was falling victim to the Communist propaganda, heating up even at that early stage in the "cold war": things were done "right" in the East and "wrong" in the West. Unlike us, in the decadent West, they were working for the bright new Communist Society of Progress. She gave her demanding school work as the reason why her letters became rarer and shorter, and wondered, she wrote, if she really deserved my love and trust. Soon, she started writing about the big society parties her parents took her to, about the hours she spent sunning herself on the balcony, and about the bad grades she got because she was "too lazy.” Sometimes she would send me dried flowers she had picked from the garden of our destroyed place in Chemnitz. At the end of each letter, she would put a sentence about still being “mine,” about longing for me, and so on. At first, I was blind to her increasing coldness, not wanting to believe it, and I began to cajole her, finally lecturing her in my best schoolmaster’s style. Her letters became even more sobering. She gradually started seeing more of her old (and much older) friend Kurt Bienert, a school friend of Rainer’s.

I think I was simply too young for her and her hormones, and too far away. Besides, she wanted to convert to Catholicism, and was taking lectures about the sin she had committed. "The priest", she wrote, "can forgive that only if the woman is ready to do all she can to free herself from the man." She was doing all she could. Her father, in his intellectual Communism, became a big shot in the health system of East Germany, drove around in his big BMW with the red government banner when the rest of East Germans had to live in a Third World economy. "Mummi", now on the Berlin City Council, made sure that daughter Nora was stylishly dressed and made up. But that didn't keep Nora from joining the FDJ, the Communist Youth Organization. She wrote: “I believe we young people, who consider ourselves as the intelligentsia of Germany, must cooperate in the rebuilding of the New Germany. I think Mummi will agree with my step, and Dad for sure. They both are doing the same thing, anyway.” Reading her letters today I am embarrassed how blind I was, how selectively I read them, and how, in my romantic naiveté, I believed her continued assurances. The confused duplicity of conversion to Catholicism and new Communist membership as being akin to her assurances of faithfulness to me and innocent times with Kurt. I just didn't see it.

By the time I wrote to her about our plans to go to America, she wrote that oh well, then we’ll just have to go our separate ways, because she wasn’t going to the West — if anything, she would go to Russia, her new big love. What little correspondence there was after that faded away into trivia. She slipped from my thought and from my life.

Nora was married two years later to someone with a Russian name, and eventually had four children. I have no idea if she ever made it to Catholicism or to Russia. In 1990, when I sent her my story The Longest year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer — which, after all, was partly her story — she thanked me with all the warmth of Moscow in February.