Germany

I told Wally I wanted to go to Paris. Instead, he brought home tickets to Frankfurt. So my first European trip began in Germany.

If I made a list of places I wanted to visit, Germany would not even be on the list. I was a teenager during World War II, when the Germans were destroying Europe. My brain held pictures of bombed cities and piles of dead Jews in concentration camps. I did not want to go there.

In later years I traveled to many places. When I arrived at a place I read about, it never was exactly as I envisioned it. That first trip to Germany was a total surprise.

David and I spent several nights in Frankfurt, sightseeing in the city and venturing on day trips in the countryside, returning each evening for dinner with Karl. From studying history I knew that Germany had been torn by war after war since the original tribes clashed with the Romans. In World War II, British and American bombs (that’s us) destroyed all the German cities, leaving factories and houses as burned-out shells or piles of rubble. .

The big surprise in 1978 was I saw no evidence that there had ever been a war. Instead, I saw picturesque villages, with flower boxes at every window, each set against a backdrop of a castle on the hill, looking like pictures in a child’s book of fairy tales.

I remember little of Frankfurt. The cathedral had several big wooden altarpieces with panels filled with dozens of little figures telling Bible stories. On the table in a large “Last Supper” the little wooden fishes, apples, and loaves of bread, carved in high relief, were so real they looked like I could pick them off and carry them away in my oversize purse.

We went to Goethe’s house, which gave me an idea of how upper middle-class Germans lived in the 19th Century. Comfortable, but dark, with heavy furniture, carved with scrolls and lion paws for feet. I pictured a society of fat, complacent burghers. Probably another mental distortion.

David and I also visited a big hall with portraits of all the kings of Germany. The biggest portrait, on the end wall, was a 10-foot high man in Medieval dress labeled “Karl der Grosser”. After that, I couldn’t think of Charlemagne without associating him with a grocery store.

Yes, Germany was full of surprises. Frankfurt was only the beginning.
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