I don’t remember all that much about the language classes. I can picture the teacher, however. Volkbert. Tall. Slender. Big glasses. Effeminate. Positive. Enthusiastic. A solid educator. The other students were from various European countries. Frankly, I didn’t pay much attention to them. I was focused on learning German.
Wait, there was Jean-Pierre from Switzerland. Fun guy. And funny. French speaking. He had his car in Blauberuen. He took me to his home for a weekend. Blaubeuren is in southern Germany. Just about a three-hour car ride from there to Zurich.
I don’t remember much. Nice family. And he was a pilot. Some kind of small plane. Cessna or something. He took me up. Not a good idea. For the rest of the visit I was woozy, stomachache, thought I needed to throw up. Maybe I did. Can’t remember. The air threw us all over the place. At least that’s what it felt like to me. Jean-Pierre was smiling the whole time, talking.
Towards the end of my stay in Blaubeuren I took a train to Munich. My brother Tim was one year older than me and one year ahead of me at Georgetown. He dated a girl back then. Ingrid. Her father was from Georgia in the U.S. An American diplomat, he was stationed in Bonn at the time. His wife, Ingrid’s mother, was German born. Coblenz, then Marburg. They had met as students at the University of Georgia. The mother was an exchange student.
Ingrid’s older sister was in Munich. Colleen. Married to a German guy and with a small son. I had met them at the end of May during graduation weekend at Georgetown. Blaubeuren. Munich. What a difference. Very exciting for me. I remember three things.
First, getting an ungarische Suppe on the Marienplatz. Center of town. Where the big Rathaus is. City Hall. Suppe is soup. Ungarisch is Hungarian. Beef stew. Spicy. Hot. With a classic German white roll, a Brötchen. Literally little bread or more precisely little loaf of bread. I’ll never forget how great that Suppe tasted. I still order when I can, whereever I am.
I had a good visit with Colleen, her husband, and little boy. I got to their place in Schwabing, an upscale section of Munich, a little early. To kill the time I ducked into a nearby Gaststätte. Kind of like the one in Ulm. You wanna guess what I did once inside?
Yup. Sat down at a booth with a few of the locals. Men. Same deal as in Ulm. They were drinking those long-ass beers. Weizenbier. I ordered one, too. Then another. Here’s the difference to Ulm, though. I had had a few weeks of German under my belt. Was able to embarass myself at a bit of a higher level language-wise. Another difference. These guys were speaking Bayrisch, Bavarian German. Or perhaps Hochdeutsch, High German, with Bavarian accents. Either way, I struggled. Did not deter me, though.
Funny, what remains in your memory. Volker taught us how to write letters in German. The form. The style. What stuck with me until today. Germans avoid using the personal pronoun I. That’s right. Germans are taught not to write or to say I too much.
There is a German figure of speech that goes something like this: Der Esel nennt sich immer zuerst. The donkey always calls (or names) itself first. The message? Don’t put yourself first. Don’t make everything about you. Don’t make yourself the center of attention. Is anyone reading this surprised that that would stick in the mind of an American? Some forty-five years later.
I caught the flu towards the end of the ten-week language class. It hit me hard. Days in bed. Face all puffy. I felt horrible. Somehow I managed to keep up a bit with the classwork, and to pass the final example. I got my Zertifikat Deutsch als Fremdsprache. Certificate German as a Foreign Language. Ok, I could speak some German. Not sure how well. But, I could get around. Read the signs. Order food. Converse with the locals in a very basic way. And, I had a fairly good handle on the grammar. More on that when I get to West Berlin seven years later.
That was it for Blaubeuren. I recall that the whole thing costed $1,100. My stepfather had paid for it. I just checked out the Goethe Institut website: 2-3 weeks, 75 sessions, 1,149 Euros. It’s a first-class institution. With a great history. Doing great work. To help folks learn a great language. Which opens the door to getting to know a great people. The German people.