Washington, DC. End of May 1981. Graduation weekend at Georgetown University. I was twenty-two years old. I can’t remember who was in the conversation. Someone must have asked me what my plans were. I’m sure that I didn’t have much of a response, because I didn’t have any plans.
That’s when my mother turned to me and said: “Why don’t you go to Germany?” I can’t remember my response, but she continued on. “You really enjoyed your two-semester course in German history. Your foreign language here has been German. And we’re of Irish and German heritage.”
My mother then added: “Anita Kroll is going to Innsbruck, Austria summer to take intensive German courses. Why don’t you do something like that?”
I cannot remember my response. I knew that Anita was an undergraduate student at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia, like Georgetown a Jesuit university, and that she was majoring in German. Her mother, Francine (known as Frankie), a close friend of my mother, was first generation American, and spoke fluent German.
My mother was not one to give life advice. My father had died at the age of forty-four in November of 1974. My mother had remarried three years later. She raised six of us children. It was simply not how she parented. My mother, father, family, those are topics for another day.
In any case, I found the idea intriguing. I had, indeed, taken a two-semester Germany history course my senior year at Georgetown. And I had really enjoyed it. I simply could not get enough of it, the history of the German people.
As for the German language, well, that was a different story. I worked hard at German, but couldn’t quite get a handle on it. The grammar I found complex and difficult. Perhaps not having any kind of direct, experiential interaction with the language, meaning contact with the German people, made learning difficult. Who knows?
This was all forty-four years ago, so I am trying to piece back together how the story unfolded. I must have made the decision rather quickly, however, because I recall filling out the Goethe Institut application while still at Georgetown, in the office of my Uncle Otto. He was a professor of Theology at Georgetown, a Jesuit priest, and the youngest sibling of my mother. Or maybe when I was visiting Georgetown mid-summer I filled out the application.
Funny how our memory works. I recall formulating the sentence in the application: “Ich muß mich das Gesicht rasieren.” I have to shave my face. Wait, could that have been the case? Yes, there was an essay part of the application, but why in the world would anyone write something like that?
The Goethe Institut was the premier language and cultural institution of then West Germany. They had a presence in all sorts of countries around the world. And they had many language institutes in Germany, in most of the major cities, and in more than a handful of beautiful small towns.
I was hoping to get accepted. As my preferred locations I had checked off Freiburg im Breisgau and Chiemsee, a location with a huge lake south of Munich not far from the Bavarian Alps. I got neither. Instead I was accepted to Blaubeuren, a tiny town in the Swabian Alb, a short train-ride from Ulm, which is an hour’s drive southeast of Stuttgart.
I spent that summer at home in suburban Philadelphia. The ten-week intensive language course would begin at the end of September. I worked a roofing job, stayed in excellent physical shape, and simply enjoyed myself.
The roofing job was great. Industrial roofing, not residential. Lankenau Hospital just outside of Philadelphia. We started at 6:30 in the morning and knocked off at 3:30 in the afternoon. I was an unskilled helper doing the grunt work: lifting, carrying, shoving, pushing, filling. Very physical. Lots of fresh air. The work kept me in great shape. My mother always had all sorts of fresh fruits and vegetables in the house. Six foot three and a half inches tall and about one hundred and seventy-five pounds and feeling great.
I even took up a challenge from my older sister, Thea. She had been reading about nutrition, including about the negative aspects of processed sugar. Back then (since then and still today) I had a sweet tooth, eine Schwäche für Süßes, as the Germans would say, a weakness for sweets (süßer Zahn, sweet tooth, they don’t say).
The challenge? Go the entire summer without sweets: candy, cake, ice cream, etc. I thought: “Ok, I can try that. I can control myself. I like a challenge.” Not sure how well I did. I do remember, however, fighting the urge to stop off at a 7-11 store on my drive back home each day. And I do recall what a Heshey’s chocolate bar tasted like after weeks of not having one, namely not all that great. Same for ice cream. Cake? I can’t remember.
I do recall, however, many a time sitting in the dining room at home, at the big table, with a large map of Europe spread out in front of me, in shorts and a t-shirt, with an empty backpack on my back. The thing was not well-designed, overly bulky, with metal bars on the outside to provide structure and stability.
I would sit there looking at that map for an hour or longer or who knows how long? A kind of timelessness. Quiet. Excited. Focused. With Germany in the middle of the map. Wondering. Wandering. Imagining. Starting from the north heading south. Hamburg. Bremen. Hannover. Then along the Rhine. Düsseldorf. Cologne. Bonn. Coblenz. Mainz. Then over to Frankfurt. Down to Mannheim, onto Stuttgart. Then swinging east. Augsburg. Munich. Then curving up to the north. Nuremberg.
All the while noting the many small towns along the way, in between those well-known German cities, trying to pronounce their names. Münster. Wetzlar. Bad Kreuznach. Worms. Heidelberg. Tübingen. Bad Tölz. Regensburg. Bamberg. Würzburg. Marburg. Göttingen. And then, of course, there was Berlin, more precisely West-Berlin (or as the Germans called it Berlin-West), in the middle of East Germany, cut off from the rest of West Germany.
I am a Christian, a Roman Catholic, greatly influenced by the Jesuits. I sit here at my desk in Bonn, on the first day of September in the year 2025, looking back as a sixty-six year old man, and can hardly fathom the great life I have been given, the great fortune.
Back then, forty-four years ago, I was sitting in a comfortable Philadelphia suburban home, having just been graduated from Georgetown University, anticipating going to Europe, to one of its greatest countries, with one of its greatest peoples, to learn their language, to get to know them as a people, their history, their culture.