When I was a young man, I lived in Germany twice. The
second time, which I’ve written about many times on ROT by now, was when I was stationed in West Berlin from 1971-74
while I was in the army. The first time, from 1962-67, my family lived in
the Federal Republic while my father was a foreign service officer there. I was still a teenager when I first went to
live along the Rhine River in central Germany.
Inspired by the young President Kennedy’s inaugural call to
“ask what you can do for your
country,” my dad applied to the U.S. Information Agency
(known overseas as the Information Service) in 1961. (Kennedy was 43 when he was sworn in; Dad was
42.) He was accepted in June 1962, and after
training in Washington, Dad was assigned as the Director of the Amerika Haus in
Koblenz, West Germany, in September.
(His official title was Information Center Director, Koblenz.) My
mother joined him in October, and my younger brother and I went over to live
and go to school the following summer.
USIA isn’t very well known at home, probably because it was
barred by law from operating within the U.S. and its territories. A little explanation is in order. Established in 1953 by President Dwight Eisenhower,
USIA was the agency responsible for what was called, somewhat euphemistically, public
diplomacy. For that, read
“propaganda”—principally of a cultural nature.
USIA, which was the parent agency for Radio Free Europe and Voice of
America, brought art and cultural events, lectures, and political and
historical information about the United States to countries all over the globe
through libraries and other facilities and tours by performers and speakers. (USIA published, for instance, a Russian-language
magazine, Amerika, in the Soviet
Union in exchange for the Soviets’ publishing an equivalent journal, The USSR, later called Soviet Life, in English in the
States. By all accounts, ours was very
popular there; I never saw theirs on a newsstand here.) The mission was to show the U.S. in the best
possible light and emphasize our founding principles and it was a major aspect
of my dad’s job to reach out to the leaders of the local society and the
ordinary Koblenzers to make America an accessible idea. For example, one of Dad’s frequent tasks was
to arrange visits by Koblenz officials, infrastructure managers, business
leaders, and such to U.S. cities of the approximate size or stature of Koblenz
to see how their American counterparts approached or solved problems. Remember, Germany’s democracy was in its
infancy in 1962: Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic,
had only taken office in 1949. At the time my dad joined the agency, his boss
was the renowned radio and TV newsman Edward R. Murrow (1908-65), who ran the
agency from 1961 until 1964; he was succeeded until 1965 by Carl Rowan
(1925-2000), another respected newspaperman, TV journalist, and commentator. (From the time Dad was transferred to the
embassy until his resignation, the agency’s director was Leonard Marks, 1916-2006, a communications lawyer.)
In Germany and Austria after World War II, USIA was a
significant asset in the de-Nazification effort and its programs became so
popular that when the U.S. government proposed eliminating them because their
mission had been completed, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany
stepped forward and offered to foot the bill for the libraries and offices as
long as the U.S. would supply directors to run them. From 1962 through 1965 (when he was
transferred to the embassy as Cultural Affairs Attaché), that was my dad in
Koblenz. Except for him, the entire
staff of the Amerika Haus was German. (The
explanation for the distinction between the USIA headquarters in Washington—at
1776 Pennsylvania Avenue propitiously—and the designation of the overseas
facilities as USIS is that the outposts abroad preexisted the formation of the
agency: they’d been programs of the World War II Office of War Information which changed names in
1945. USIS already having been
established abroad by 1953, the split identity of the agency and its overseas offices
remained.) In 1999, USIA and USIS ceased
to exist and their functions were folded into various divisions of the
Department of State.
(As a sidelight
to the agency’s name, my grandfather, who lived to see his son become a foreign
service officer, had a problem with Dad’s new job. Born in Eastern Europe in the late 19th
century, Grandpa Jack was a little confused by Dad’s employer. In many European cultures and languages, the
word for ‘information’ is also the word for ‘intelligence,’ so an “information
agency” was a security service. For
example, in West Germany, the Bundesnachrichtendienst was the equivalent of the
CIA. The name means ‘federal information
service’—or ‘federal intelligence service’; Nachrichten
is the German word for both ‘intelligence’ and ‘information,’ as well as ‘news.’ In Russian, the word svedenya has both meanings as well. Grandpa Jack, whose family spoke both German
and Russian among several other tongues, was convinced that his son was a spy
until the day he died in 1963, despite my father’s consistent—and honest—denials. I became
an intelligence agent; my dad was not one.
(In a sidelight
to this sidelight, in 1968, five years after Grandpa Jack’s death, a small book
called Who’s Who in CIA was
published in East Berlin. It purported
to list agents of U.S. “secret services”—and my father’s name was
included. So were such prominent figures
as President Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Secretaries of
Defense Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
among others, so Dad was in illustrious company. Director of Central Intelligence Richard
Helms was listed, of course, but one name not included was the one CIA officer
at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn whom everyone knew.
I won’t reveal her name, though I presume she’s dead by now, so you’ll
just have to trust me that she’s missing from Who’s Who. But my father’s
name, along with his wartime service in the CIC—the army’s Counterintelligence
Corps, the precursor to Military Intelligence Branch, in which I served a
quarter of a century later—is duly inscribed.
Dad was an artillery officer and battery commander during the combat in
Europe, but when the occupation began in May 1945, he was detailed to the CIC
because he spoke German. It was a short
assignment because his unit was ordered to the Pacific Theater and Dad was at
sea with the artillery pieces and trucks when Japan surrendered in August. Back in Washington, which is where my parents
were again by 1968, it was all the rage to be listed in that little
red—wouldn’t you know it—book. It was a
mark of prestige on the cocktail circuit, so, of course, Dad went right out to
buy a copy; the book was conveniently available in both German and English
editions.)
Koblenz, then a small city of just 100,000 people (it hit
that milestone the year my family arrived), is in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz
(Rhineland-Palatinate), pretty much right smack in the middle of what was then West
Germany. ‘Koblenz’ (sometimes still
written ‘Coblenz,’ its pre-World War II spelling) is supposed to be a
corruption of Confluentes, the Latin name of the northern outpost of the
Roman empire that was there before the German town grew up. Located at
the confluence of Germany’s two greatest wine-producing rivers, the Rhine and
the Mosel, the city includes suburbs on both sides of the two rivers. Koblenz-Ehrenbreitstein, for instance, the
site of the ruin of a large, early-19th-century Prussian fortress (with origins
dating to the first century CE) and the birthplace of Beethoven’s mother (whose
house is preserved today as a museum containing the world’s largest family-owned Beethoven collection), is across
the Rhine along the eastern bank. On the
west bank, at the actual point where the two great rivers meet, is the
Deutsches Eck (German Corner), a triangular, paved plaza with an 1897 monument
to Kaiser Wilhelm I.
(Being situated on two such important riverbanks as it was
gave rise to a kind of split-personality society in Koblenz. When it came to wine, for instance, Koblenzers
were a lot like Jonathan Swift’s Little Endians and Big Endians: one was either
a Rheiner or a Moseler.
Most Weinstuben in Koblenz served either Rhine wine or Mosel, but
not both. If you walked into one and
ordered the wrong wine . . . well, it was a bit like a member of one street
gang crossing into the territory of a rival gang. Beer was generally a safe choice, however:
Koblenz provided excellent beer—Königsbacher, the ninth biggest brewery in the
country. In Germany, that’s going some!)
My brother and I would already be starting school when Dad’s
tour in Koblenz was going to start and my parents needed to sort things out
before we could all make the move permanently so the two of us boys stayed
stateside that school year (my sophomore year in high school, my brother’s eighth-grade
year). Mother stayed behind a month before joining Dad to see to things here and let Dad get things in order in Koblenz. At Christmas vacation in 1962, my brother and
I made our first trip to Europe. It was
also our first trip off the east coast of North America and only our second
outside the U.S.; our only other foreign visit was a family ski vacation to Ste.
Agathe, Quebec, when we were little boys.
When we arrived in Germany, our parents surprised us with a trip to
Paris for the holidays. I had expected we’d be staying around
Koblenz. First off, we had no car—there was a dockworkers’ strike in the
States, so nothing was being loaded onto ships that fall. Second—and for
much the same reason—my parents’ household stuff, including winter clothes,
hadn’t arrived in Germany. Staying put seemed like the only sensible
option. Third, the immediate
neighborhood, as you’ll see, is not without its own history or cultural
attractions. Now, Christmas Day is my
birthday—and this one was going to be my 16th. I was going to turn 16 in
Paris. I sure didn’t know anyone who did that. So we drove
half across Europe in a rented wreck of a Renault (or whatever it was—something
small and rickety) whose doors didn’t work right and whose heater didn’t work
at all. (Along with his puns about “Paris sights,” my about-to-be-14-year-old
brother kept looking at me and asking: “What do you know? You’re not even 16 yet.”)
Before I found out I was going to live in Germany and go to
an international school, I had been studying Latin, of all things. (I
actually thought I was going to be a classicist and study Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew. Naïveté, anyone?) When I found out my folks’ plans, I took one
year of American high school French that last year in the States and tried to
learn some German from one of those “teach-yourself” books. In neither case
was I particularly successful, but I got a slight taste of modern, living
languages. As soon as we crossed the frontier into France, however, my
mother turned to me and said, “You’re taking French. Talk to these
people.” I’d had one semester of American high school French by this
time, mind you—but when we stopped for gas, it was up to me to get the tank
filled. I wince now at what I remember saying.
Needless to say, the trip was life-changing
nonetheless. Paris was freezing—an unheard-of cold-snap, and even
dustings of snow. Dad had nothing warmer than a trench coat. The
car’s windows didn’t always roll back up once they were down. But we saw
Paris. (My dad would say, in an expression that became watchwords on the
many trips we’d take in the ensuing years: “Getting lost just means we see a
part of the city we’d never see otherwise.”)
France is still a Catholic country, for all its official
anti-clericalism, so it’s pretty much closed on the 25th. But Versailles
is open (Christmas is not a government holiday), so I had my birthday at the
palace. We had lunch at a little bistro near the palace, and instead of a
birthday cake with candles . . . we had flaming crêpes Suzette for
desert. Boy, did I have a 16th birthday!
The summer after that school year, my brother and I came to
Germany to live. We sailed across on the
SS America—it’s last crossing, as it
happened—and my Grandpa Harry joined us as a surprise for his daughter and
son-in-law. (My brother and I didn’t
know he was coming along until he didn’t get off the ship when the visitors
were told to disembark. It was too
late to warn my folks, so they only found out when they met the boat in
Bremerhaven.) My dad was real smart: he
found Hannelore, a young German woman who had studied at the University of
Miami, and hired her to tutor my brother and me over the summer. After
each German lesson at home—we had one every day during which we spoke only
German (even our textbook had no English in it)—I’d go off and try out my
German by doing errands—mine, or sometimes my mom’s. I had a ball and I
learned German fast. By the time I got
to school in Switzerland the next fall, I was fluent enough in German to get
placed in the third-year class, even though I’d had no German in school
before. More than that, though, I had actually learned to speak it—not
just read it out of a book and translate. It was the most fun I’d had
since I first discovered Latin in eighth grade—and this was better because I
could talk to people. I don’t think anyone gets “fluent” in Latin—except,
maybe, Catholic seminarians.
My younger brother and I went to school in Switzerland
starting in the fall of 1963. My brother
stayed only for his freshman year and then returned to the States for school,
but I spent my last two years of high school in Switzerland and graduated from
the International School of Geneva (École Internationale de Genève, or
Écolint). I spent my junior year at the Collège du Léman in
Versoix-Geneva. (Lac Léman is the French name for Lake Geneva.
Versoix, a tiny town about a half hour from Geneva, has the distinction of
being the hometown of Josephine Boisdechene, 1827-75, the first bearded lady
exhibited by P. T. Barnum—as Mme. Fortune Clofullia, “The Bearded Lady of
Geneva.” Some claim to fame, huh?)
French took me a little longer to learn because I didn’t
have the advantage of a private tutor. But I did have some help along the
way. Koblenz had been part of the French occupation zone after World War
II so there was still a small contingent of French troops there, even
after France withdrew its military from NATO in 1966. One French
family—Pierre Humilien, the military doctor; his wife, Ninon; their son, Marc,
who was my age; and daughter, Marion, my brother’s age—was especially outgoing,
a great rarity among the French, who usually tend to keep to themselves.
Marc, Marion, and I became great friends and hung out like teens do—except we
all spoke different languages. Little by little, though, I learned enough
French to get by—as long as we could toss in a few English and German words and
phrases. (Franglais, the “native” tongue of Swiss international school
kids like me, became our lingua franca—with the addition of a dollop of
German.) By the time I finished my first
year in Versoix—our classes were in English, but everything else was in
French—I was pretty fluent in French, too. (I still have very vivid
recollections of the first time I dreamed in French, during my second year in
Switzerland. I awoke in the morning and,
though I didn’t remember the dream itself, I remembered that it was all in
French—and I sprouted a huge grin.
Later, in college, when I got drunk, I spoke only French. Or so people told me afterwards.)
I soon realized that I was picking up very near-perfect
accents in both French and German. (A lady sitting next to me on a plane
in the Soviet Union told me the same thing about my Russian accent. She may just have been flattering me,
however.) I was good at picking up
slang, too, so as long as some grammar point or vocabulary word didn’t trip me
up, I could often pass for native—just from some other region of whichever country
I was in at the time. I even got to the
point where I could switch among the three languages pretty facilely one right
after another without getting too mixed up. On one little jaunt Marc Humilien
and I took, we rode a bus up the Rhine to one of the many riverside towns with
a castle ruin—Burg Rheinfels at Sankt Goar, I think. I’d been there before with my parents, but
Marc hadn’t been so we decided to take a guided tour. There wasn’t a French- or English-speaking
guide available right then, so we took the German-language tour and I
translated for Marc. (My German was
better than his by this time, and my French was better than his English.) Another couple in our group was American, so
I began translating for them, too—German to French for Marc; German to English
for the Amis. (Ami was the colloquial German term for ‘American.’ Unlike some other well-known sobriquets, such
as Gringo, it isn’t a derogatory name, but one of friendship and
endearment.) Everyone was amazed, though
I was a little too occupied to realize what I was doing at the moment. (I was also inserting some of the stories and
details from the guide who had taken my family around the ruin into my
rendition of what the current guide was saying, augmenting her spiel.) The German guide thought I was German—though
probably not from the Rhineland, and the American couple apparently did,
too. “My,” the lady exclaimed, “you
speak English so well!” When I explained
that that was probably because I was American, like them, I don’t think they
entirely believed me. On another
occasion, when I was at school and was downtown in Geneva one afternoon, I
found myself in front of the American Express where an obviously American
couple seemed to be lost. I asked if I
could help them, and I gave them directions to their destination. Because I seemed to know this foreign city so
well—which I did by this time—this couple also figured I was a native: they
wouldn’t believe I was American, either.
(I never tried to fool anyone, but I did glow inside with an intense
feeling of pride when this kind of thing happened.) After a while, I could even translate from
French into German and vice versa without having to go through English
first. I knew that was an accomplishment. The key, of course, was
that in both cases, I was actually living in the language a lot of the
time. (Something I never got to do with
Russian.) Mostly, though, I was
just having the time of my life.
(Two sidebars about language and tour guides. The latter first: My family went on a trip to
Austria one spring, visiting Vienna and Salzburg, and then taking a ski break
in the little village of Kitzbühel. In
Vienna, we took a city tour as we often did to get the lay of a new city. We arrived at the departure point for the
tour, a large plaza with many sightseeing busses loading all around, and Dad
went to one guide and asked where the English-language bus was located. Dad spoke in German, of course, which he did
quite well by this time—he grew up speaking German with his immigrant
grandmother who never learned English—so the guide told him he didn’t need an
English-language tour. “Sie sprechen Deutsch genau wie Schiller!”
she insisted—“You speak German just like Schiller.” The Viennese, of course, were famed for their
. . . ummm, shall we say Schmalz?
(In the years I lived in Europe—actually both stints—I
personally knew only one person who was truly tri-lingual. In school, of course, I had many bilingual
schoolmates and a number who, like me, could speak three or even more
languages, but not all with equal fluency, but the only person I knew who spoke
French, English, and German all equally well was the daughter of Dad’s boss in
the consulate. Her folks had been a
career foreign service couple and she’d been born in Paris and lived many years
in Germany with them. She was a little
younger than I and had started this life many years earlier than I had. But in Koblenz was a young Canadian couple,
part of a small international business community I’ll speak of in a bit. They were Anglo-Canadians, but they’d met
while students at the Sorbonne, so they spoke French. They had two small children, a boy and a
girl, just school age. The parents spoke
both French and English at home and the children were going to the local school
in Koblenz where they spoke German of course.
At their young ages, they picked up the languages fast and spoke all
three, often at random and in succession, with equal fluency. I never met these kids, but my parents did,
and one of the cutest stories they told was when one of the children would come
to their father and hold up some object.
“What’s the word for this, Daddy?” the child would ask. “In what language?” the dad replied. After a pause and a moment of confusion, the
kid would answer, “In the language we’re speaking!”)
Because Koblenz was just a small city, without a major U.S.
military installation or diplomatic post, we lived, as foreign service families
say, “on the economy.” We had German neighbors, shopped in German stores,
ate in German restaurants, hired German repairmen and service people, used the
German busses, went to German movie theaters (which often played American
movies, of course—dubbed or with subtitles), and so on. As an offshoot of
Dad’s work, he and Mom met or entertained at home most of the prominent
citizens, their wives (this was still a male-dominated society—as were we in
the early ’60s), and their children, most of whom were around my brother’s and
my ages. (The Baby Boom, it seems, had a
European branch.) There were no other civilian American officials in
Koblenz—for all intents and purposes, Dad was the U.S. ambassador as far as
Koblenzers were concerned—but it had several things that compensated for that
situation. The town was the seat of an
international court of reparations (for suits over property seized by the Nazis
during the Third Reich) and, what with the judges and their staffs, there was a
small international community around it.
Koblenz’s central location, pleasant climate, and West Germany’s
on-going Wirtschaftswunder (economic
miracle) also attracted foreign businesses to set up offices, as I hinted
earlier, so even though there were no other U.S. diplomats in town, there were
American business people and their families (more kids), as well as Canadian,
British, and several others, along with the French military. (Koblenz was the HQ of the
Bundeswehr‘s Third Army Corps as well, so there were two U.S. liaison
officers stationed there, one for the air force and the other for the army.) All of these folks, including some of the
French, formed a little international community along with the Koblenzers. Since many of the children were teens, we
formed a sort of loose gang of boys and girls who got together or hung out in
small groups.
That international court of reparations I mentioned had, I
believe, five judges, each from a different country, including, for example,
Italy, Sweden, and the U.S. I think the nationalities
of the judges changed on a rotating basis periodically, but while we were in
Koblenz, Dad got quite chummy with the Italian justice. He was a young man, about Dad’s age, and he
had the same haircut Dad had! That was
significant, because Dad’s hair was relatively short when we arrived, in the
American style rather than the longer style worn by most European men, and the
Italian judge had found a place where he could get his hair cut the way he
liked it and Dad had been having difficulty finding a good barber for his
American hairstyle. That began the
friendship, but it was cemented when the judge challenged Dad to a pizza-making
competition. I think there’d been a
debate one evening during dinner over who had the better pizza, the United
States or Italy. (Ten years earlier, you
couldn’t get a pizza in Italy outside of Naples where it was invented. The ubiquitous pizza parlor was an American
development.) So the challenge was
on—and the men had to make their pizzas themselves, no help from wives or
neighbors. Then there’d be a party at
someone’s house and the guests from the little international group would
declare the winner. Believe it or not,
my father won—but he’d cheated. He’d
started with a frozen pizza from the commissary which he’d “doctored” to make
it “home-made.” No one really cared, of
course, because by then a lot of liquor and wine had been consumed and no one’s
taste buds were particularly discerning anymore. (There was another big meal on another
occasion—I think it may have been at the Humiliens’ apartment in the French
compound—for which all the men were the cooks and each one contributed one part
of the meal. I forget what my father
made—he wasn’t much of a cook; he was better at eating—but the dinner was a
great success, I understand. These
weren’t occasions when the younger generation was invited—we all made ourselves
scarce and did our own thing.)
The international court’s job was to make determinations
over claims by former business owners for the return of family businesses
seized by the Nazis. Needless to say, most of these were Jewish families;
some other groups got similar treatment, but the largest number by far were
Jews. Many families returned to reclaim the businesses and though some
turned around and sold them and left the country again, quite a few stayed and
ran the businesses again. There was a small, but stalwart Jewish
community again in Germany by this time and when we were in Koblenz, we knew a
family—I think it was the next generation actually—who got their business, a
sock factory, back and stayed to run it. Most
Jews who had survived the Holocaust and the war had left Germany during the
conflict or right afterwards and many just couldn’t adjust to new countries,
usually Israel or the U.S. When we were
living in Koblenz, the tiny Jewish community there couldn’t even manage a
rabbi. My parents went to
one of the community’s services—it was in the home of one of the members—and
the rabbi presiding was from Israel. He was the son of one of the members
and had been born in Koblenz or nearby, but the family left for Israel after
the war. His parents returned in the late ’50s or so, and he came back
now and then to visit, and would officiate at bar mitzvah, weddings, brises,
and Sabbath services when he was in town. This was a common situation in
those days.
[I have to leave off here
temporarily because my reminiscences have simply run away with me. This was such an extraordinary time in my
life—I wonder if anyone else agrees—that I found it hard to stop
remembering. I’ll stop for now and pick
up the rest of my recollections of a not-so-misspent youth in a few days. Please come back to ROT next week for the rest of my memoir.]
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