Together Again

I didn't pay much attention to my mother's reunion with her 3 sisters - I didn't really grasp the significance at the time. After having survived WWII the sisters were all living together in Stuttgart when my mom met my father. And he stole her away - took her to another continent against all of their objections... And now she was back where she belonged - the 4 sisters - together again for the first time in 14 years.

Vesti (Margarete - the 2nd youngest after my mom) had a PhD in mathematics and was the dean of a girl's boarding school a block away from her house. She was also the "benevolent dictator" of the family. She sacrificed all personal pleasures and comforts to take care of relatives. She supported the sisters who lived with her as well as sending money to the relatives who had remained in Hungary and Romania. She made all the decisions and pulled all the strings - she always "knew best". And we were now completely dependent on her for everything.

By the time we arrived in Germany my sister and I had already been enrolled in "Gymnasiums": Starting around the 6th grade Germans students with high academic potential are transferred to Gymnasiums - very rigorous college prep schools. Attending the "right" Gymnasium was an absolute prerequisite for getting into a decent college...
My sister was enrolled at St. Adelheid (all girls - Vesti was the dean) and I started at Erzbischofliches Gymnasium (all boys - now Kardinal-Frings Gymnasium). We were each given bicycles to get around and Vesti had already picked out our friends. Mine were Gerd, Helmut and Walter. None of them could really speak English - that led to some strange but not particularly interesting events.

BTW - One of the first things I noticed is that Germans (at least in the upper Rhine region) are exceedingly uptight. I guess when your population has been that tightly packed for that many centuries avoiding getting on each other's nerves becomes a priority. And Americans (as it turns out) are exceedingly good at getting on German's nerves :-) It wasn't just because of the "bombing the crap out of them" in WWII thing - it didn't take too long before I started noticing it myself:
Germans are very quiet in public... Americans aren't... If you were in a restaurant and there was a American present you immediately knew it. Once I was in a hotel lobby and there was a American woman prattling on about how much her poodle was enjoying Europe. I remember that loud, shrill voice saying "Imagine! Fifi in Paris!!!" I wanted to strangle her :-)
Another time I was walking down the street wearing lederhosen (yes - German kids actually wore those back in the 1960s) minding my own business when some American tourists grabbed me to pose for some pictures. They were having such a good time I didn't have the heart to tell them I was from Philadelphia - I just responded "Wie bitte????" to everything they said :-) But I digress...

Those first few weeks at school were quite disorienting. Some of the teachers were aware I didn't speak German - some weren't. The English teacher kept correcting my pronunciation - I apparently had no aptitude for that language. And riding a bicycle to and from school was rather terrifying. The roads tended to be narrow - there was an incident where my right elbow was brushing a wall while a passing truck was brushing my left elbow. (No blood, no foul?)
I used to imagine that the whole thing was a joke. Like everyone really spoke English - they were just making up "German" on the fly - and only when I was around. And sooner or later somebody was going to slip up and they'd yell "April Fool!!" :-)

The surrounding area did have a lot of interesting attractions though, like Beethoven's birthplace - the Cologne cathedral and the Remagen bridge. And we lived about 10 miles from Drachenfels - where Siegfried (i.e. Siegfried/Brunhilde - Ring of the Nibelung) killed the dragon and bathed in it's blood.

So the first few months were difficult but entertaining... And that's where I'll leave off for now...