We prepared for our week-long memorial tour of Germany in
true Spanish style by attending the Spanish Navy Ball the night before. Held on the Juan Carlos I, a Spanish aircraft
carrier, and lasting into the wee hours, we were not well-prepared (nor very
awake!) for the neat and orderly Motherland where everyone goes to bed by 9:00
pm.
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| Ready for a 3 am rendezvous |
Germany holds a special place in my heart. Having lived there when I was 16 for a year,
and again when I was 23, it feels intensely familiar…which amazes me. I spent only two years there, but landing in
the neat, orderly countryside of Memmingen and ordering at a bakery feels like
coming home. My German is still great
after a couple of days, and hearing it spoken is as easy as English for
me—unlike Spanish, which I still have to work at.
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| Deutschland, Deutschland... |
We drove straight to Stuttgart upon arrival, whisking
efficiently along on the Autobahn to the house I lived in when I was 16. Valerie Kral welcomed us with open arms, as
always (I being one of her American daughters), and walking into the upstairs
bedrooms where I lived 34 years ago smelled and felt exactly the same. But this time I had Tia and Sasha with me,
and reminisced about what it was like being 16 and living in a foreign country
without my family.
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| Me and my German (English!) mom |
The next day we spent walking through Stuttgart, a lovely
little city (home of Porsche and Mercedes!) tucked into a bowl-shaped valley. Completely leveled during World War II,
Stuttgarters rebuilt it stone by stone, down to the Altes und Neues Schloss
(the two castles) in the center of the city.
My mother Gabriele lived here, too, in 1946, a malnourished 9-year-old
without a mother living in a converted airplane hanger while my grandfather
helped design dual-purpose furniture (one of his many pursuits). Here began the connection between our family
and the Krals!
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| This is how I got to school every day |
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| Volker Kral (center) and my mom (on the right!), 1946 |
We ended up at the Waldorfschule, kids in hand, with me
carrying on about what it was like to be a student there: some standout
activities being spinning my own wool and then knitting a pillow covering,
batiking, and creating a table in the woodshop which still lives at the Kral’s
summer home. We arrived at my
cousin Tina’s house for dinner, which ended with violin and cello recitals by
her very talented children (Sasha was so impressed she has vowed to take up
cello).
Click here to see the 100-cello orchestra Olga is part of
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| My very talented (and beautiful to boot) second-cousin-once-removed-and-around-the-corner, Olga Siebeck |
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| The Waldorfschule Uhlandshöhe, where I went to school |
Next on the tour was the university city of Tübingen, where
I spent a year studying the German educational system. We traveled to the student dorms where I’d
spent lots of time drinking and wrecking the kitchen with my friend Janice; my
kids were unimpressed. We met my
cousin/daughter Sophie, who is considering attending the university there, and
rented a rowboat on the Neckar after a lovely lunch. I recalled how my mom had visited me here in
1986, speaking accent-less German but with a 12-year-old’s vocabulary, which is
when she immigrated and stopped speaking German as much as possible.
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| Boating on the Neckar |
Our base in southern Bavaria was Eichendorf, vacation home
of Familie Kral and also replete with many memories—I stayed there my first
summer in Germany, a memorable trip with Todd in 1986!, sailing on the
Starnberger See with Oliver (again with Todd), and my mom and I visited in
1994, to name a few. My Familie Kral has
always treated me as their own kid, and Valerie handed me the keys
yet again with her love.
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| Beautiful Eichendorf |
The next morning off we went to one of my most favorite
places in all Germany—the deep south of Bavaria, home of crazy King Ludwig and
his outrageous castles. I had fond
memories of riding the tram up the mountain with the Krals and hiking down to
Neuschwanstein, the model for Disneyland’s castle and Ludwig’s final project
before he got locked up in the insane asylum and then mysteriously
drowned. After touring nearby Hohenschwangau
(a mere kilometer away, but hey, this castle belonged to his parents and wasn’t
fancy enough for Ludwig), we took out a paddleboat and skinny-dipped into the
gorgeous lake that fronts both castles.
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| Bathing beauties |
That afternoon we rode the Tegelbergbahn up the mountain and
hiked down to Neuschwanstein in flip-flops, the locals watching with
disapproving frowns. The girls were
troupers despite the blisters, Neuschwanstein didn’t fail to delight us, and it
was just as beautiful—no, more beautiful—than I’d remembered, the steep drops
and stunning vistas causing more stops than needed.
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| Not recommended for flip-flops |
We also discovered the Rodelbahn. Open only in summer, and only on nice days
(rain closes them, and Germany is rainy!), it’s a bit of a hunt to find these
wild alpine slides. The best one was the
Bad Tolz Sommerrodelbahn, a looooooonnnnnggggg alpine slide that you can
accelerate to dangerous levels (or even fly off the track, if that’s your
thing).
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| Push forward to accelerate!! |
After the Schlösse and the Rodelbahn, we headed for the
house I stayed at when I first arrived in Germany 34 years ago. My mom sent me—barely 16—off to a foreign
country where I didn’t speak the language, with two huge suitcases, a phone
number, and instructions to “get on the train to Rosenheim if no one meets you
at the airport” (which no one did). And
so I changed money and made my way from Frankfurt airport (huge!) to the
Frankfurt main train terminal, to München when I had to change trains yet
again, to Rosenheim, where the most difficult part was figuring out the phone
system to call Mamu, an old (89 years old!) artist friend of the family. I lived at Mamu’s house for three weeks while
waiting for Familie Kral to get back from their vacation, wandering the lush
Bavarian countryside and eating up all of Mamu’s delicious milk chocolate.
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| Me at Mamu's with a farmer friend, 1980 |
Her house sits across the street from a large set of
farmhouses and barns (the major occupation in the Bavarian countryside) and
across the driveway from an old Kinderheim (orphanage). My grandfather knew Mamu’s son
professionally, and when he was searching for a place for his motherless
children in the post-war confusion, Mamu agreed to step in. My grandfather, a 1920’s race pilot and a
German rocket scientist (I am not kidding!) became the handyman at the
orphanage, and his children became either inmates or workers.
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| Robert Lusser, race pilot, rocket scientist, handyman, inventor |
When we arrived in Friesing, Mamu’s granddaughter, Flori,
just happened to be staying at Mamu’s house, which is now their vacation home. We sat outside in the warm sunshine
surrounded by Mamu’s sculptures, and I read from my mom’s memoir. Although we were sitting in the most
beautiful part of Germany imaginable, my mom remembered the lice and scabies and
hunger that tormented her. She
remembered the loneliness, and the enormity of the surrounding mountains, and
the sleeplessness from all those little orphans crying, and the smell of pee
from the night buckets, but mostly she remembered the itching and scratching
until her skin bled and became infected.
“That was interesting…” said Flori’s husband, “…most people remember how
great it was to be here.” But they
understood.
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| What's not to love about the Bavarian Alps? |
The climax of our trip was my first-ever visit to the
Stöttnerhof, the farmhouse where my grandmother was killed, and the church and
grave where she was buried in the nearby town of Bernau. The church was easiest to find (directions to
the Stöttnerhof were something like, “Go out of town towards the mountains and
watch for the hill to rise, then look for the set of houses on the left…”) and
we found my grandmother’s grave quickly, a well-tended but weathered stone with
blooming flowers surrounding it. Tia and
Sasha watered them, and we visited the simple church.
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| Hildegard Fichter Lusser, 1903-1945 |
We also found the Stöttnerhof following the directions of an
older gentleman, also tending a grave, who happened to know all about the
bombing that killed my grandmother. The
Stöttnerhof is now a set of vacation cottages within a small working dairy
farm, complete with trout ponds, Shetland ponies, and geese. Gabi, the farmer’s wife, and Alois the farmer
took a fair portion of their morning to show us around, including the 20+ bomb
craters that are still visible (two of them created the trout ponds). There is a lovely memorial commemorating the
complete destruction of the farmhouse (which of course has also been completely rebuilt by the tüchtig Germans) and my grandmother’s death.
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| The farmhouse where my grandparents both honeymooned and met with great doom |
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| If you look closely you can see the airplane, the farmhouse on fire--and my grandmother, dead in the foreground. |
We ended our vacation with an afternoon in München, looking
for my favorite church (never did find it) and listening to the most amazing
street show of Bach’s organ concertos played on—accordians! I was fascinated.
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| Baroque churches--my favorite |
Click here to hear and see the "organ" concerto.
Then we headed back to Eichendorf to enjoy
our last two days (despite the mosquitoes, which were voracious due to the
springtime floods) and swim in the Starnbergersee once again. Germany, you hold a piece of my history—and
my heart.
