Erntedankfest und das Wochenende

We had a grand Thanksgiving celebration here, transforming the student lounge of one of the student dorms into a festival hall. It was a daunting task, but the students all pitched in, baking a multitude of desserts and cooking side dishes (the turkey and vegetables were brought), while we transported much of our kitchen (silverware, plates, glasses, washing up supplies, serving bowls) as well as beverages galore and vegetarian stuffing and gravy across the city.When all was said and done, 28 people had a Thanksgiving dinner, with ages from 3 to the 80s, with American students, Austrian and Italian roommates, families, professors, and youth all mixed together. We had both sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie, both made from scratch, the sweet potatoes discovered at Thursday's outdoor farmer's market (you cannot buy sweet potatoes in stores here) and the pumpkin carefully cooked up (you cannot buy canned pumpkin here). There was more turkey than I've ever seen before, not carved into thin slices American style, but cut into big chunks with enormous turkey wings for those who like to eat with their hands. It was a most excellent extravaganza. We all had a good time, and we ate way too much good food. You can take Americans out of America, but you can't take the American out of Americans. Does that make sense?With Professor Roggenbauer in attendance, I couldn't help but think of the Erntedankfest we had 18 years ago. Roggenbauer took us to his hometown of Gmunden where we had a huge feast at a restaurant overlooking the Lake Gmunden. Although the make-up of the group was different (we were 36 students compared to today's nine), there were so many similarities.Homesickness sets in this time of year. The students miss their families very much. Whereas we sang songs back in 1990, this group danced together and played games. Both groups laughed and laughed throughout the night. I'm happy to say that there was a little more of 1990 in the group than just Roggenbauer and me. My old buddy Scott Davidson was there with his Austrian wife, Alex. Scott and lived a short bike ride away from one another all those years ago. Scott told tasteful, but amusing stories of our time in Salzburg, some of which I hadn't thought of in years.It was our plan from August to have two major program trips this semester, one in September when the students first arrive (Innsbruck) and one directly following Thanksgiving. Wien is a great city, one that Jenny and I had visited separately, but during the same season of the year: winter. Wien abounds with Christmas markets and there's one more spectacular than the rest: the one in front of the Rathaus, or city hall. There are more stands than you can shake a hot cup of Glühwein at (you wouldn't want to do that anyway), and there are even rides for the kiddies.We knew that the students, coming off one holiday, would like to experience a bit of the next holiday together. Many a Christmas present was shopped for in our two days there. And we also had time to visit the museum Haus der Musik, the Zoom Kindermuseum, and see the opera "Tosca" at the Wiener Staatsoper. During their free time, the students visited a number of interesting places such as Schloß Belvedere, the Sigmund Freud Museum, and a Gustav Klimt exhibit.


And some students just got lost for the day which is okay, too. There's nothing quite like popping in and out of European street cars and subways and just walking around in a new part of a new city. The moment things start getting old, you dip down into another subway station, ride for a couple of stops and end up in a different looking city.

Something I wanted to say but didn't during my Thanksgiving speech on Thursday (mostly because I like to avoid saying things that choke me up) was that although we were hosting so many Austrians at our Thanksgiving dinner, we were still THEIR guests. We are living in their country, their city, eating main dishes prepared by an Austrian caterer, eating desserts made with Austrians ingredients. Yes, living with people from a different culture can be a challenge, but I wanted to say that my experiences on the whole with Austrian people were mostly very positive, and I'm thankful for that.When I was a student here 18 years ago, I was poor. If it hadn't been for one family, the landlords of a friend of mine, I would've been one hungry kid that year. They constantly were telling me to come to lunch or dinner. My own landlady was also wonderful to me and my two American housemates. During the first Gulf War (1991), she invited us into her a warm living room every night to watch the news. When the war only lasted a month, we thought that that meant the end of the invites. But no, she basically told us to come in anytime after dinner and turn off the TV when we went to bed.I'm thankful for having a family to share Thanksgiving with and an extended family of students and people who have come to care for them. Someday the students will go home to Maine, New Hampshire, and Virginia and remember this Thanksgiving and Wien, I think, fondly.

Austria doesn't know how to make cheap

We've all done it. You buy some mass-produced cake and ice cream because it's less expensive than getting something at the bakery and Jann's Sweetshop. You go home, eat it all, then wonder why you just did that. I mean, it wasn't that good, was it.

What's amazing in Austria, though, is that you can buy store-bought cake, like Guglhupf, and ice cream for not too much money, take it home, and convince yourself with the first bite that you brought home top-shelf desserts! Austria just doesn't know how to do things cheaply.

You see it everywhere you turn. I often comment on doors. I know, you probably don't comment on doors. But in the U.S., we have a lot of hollow doors. I don't know if there's a technical term for it. But they're hollow. Hollow is cheap, both in the quality and in the price. However, it's hard to find a door that isn't made of solid, heavy wood that you know must have cost a lot of money.

That goes for floors and stairs, too. There aren't a whole lot of squeaky floors and stairs here because everything is made of solid wood or rock or tile.

Lastly, food in restaurants is in a different league. Very little is not hand-made on the premises. Maybe a kids meal will have fish sticks or something like that, but everything else is freshly prepared. You'll notice this especially with Schnitzel, or breaded pork or turkey cutlets. Every time one is ordered, you can hear the cook in the kitchen tenderizing it with a hammer.

Bang, bang, bang--yep another Schnitzel was just ordered. I remember taking a Pennington group to a restaurant and they thought all the banging in the kitchen meant it was under construction.

Eines Tages im Jahre 1945

One day in 1945, the Americans started bombing Regensburg, Germany. The train station was the main target, but WWII didn't see much precision bombing. Instead, aggressors would simply try to saturate an area, hoping to hit a target.

Josef Roggenbauer (right) was a 16-year-old Austrian soldier in the German army. Austria had been annexed by Germany in 1938. Desperate for more manpower, Germany drafted in the final years of the war both middle teens as well as old men in both Germany and Austria.

Josef Roggenbauer had no way of knowing that he'd later earn a doctorate in economics and then become a German professor at the University of Maine, and one day, my German professor. On that day, he only knew that the bombs were starting to fall and that he had no interest in sticking around at the train station where he’d been detailed to unload wagons.

He had extended family in Kumpfmühl, a district of Regensburg south of the train station. He stopped loading wagons and started to run. He knew that his family would have headed to a bomb shelter beneath the basement of their apartment house in Kumpfmühl. The whole neighborhood headed to Happelhaus, a book publisher, because a bomb shelter had been built underneath the building to accommodate the neighborhood.

Another Joseph (different spelling!), Joseph Kraus, was the Hausmeister or handy man of Happelhaus. It was his job to make sure that the bomb shelter was ready for use. He’d served in the German army himself but had been discharged in 1942 for medical reasons. When the alarm sounded, he whisked his wife and nine-year-old daughter into the shelter to assure them a spot because he knew that the shelter would fill up quickly.

When Josef Roggenbauer finally arrived, the shelter was indeed packed. The nine-year-old girl was wary of him. In the last bombing raid, a visibly injured German soldier had told her as he closed his eyes not to worry, that he just needed to sleep. He never woke up.

This time, though, there was nothing wrong with this soldier other than being full of fright and wondering probably why a 16-year-old had to worry about fighting wars. The girl kept her distance nonetheless.

The war ended a month later. The day was recalled from time to time by the girl as she became a teenager and then a woman, later a mother. The young soldier too later said that he often remembered the day as perhaps the most harrowing of his life.

Over 40 years later, a German professor and a mother sat at the same table, by birth an Austrian and German respectively, but since the early 1960s both American citizens. Their conversation led to family and their former lives as Europeans. As soon as Regensburg was mentioned, the pieces started to fall into place. They knew the streets, the same people, and the Happelhaus whose Hausmeister whisked his daughter off to the shelter that day.

My mother (left) had no way of knowing, of course, that that young soldier she was wary of would someday figure so heavily in her son’s life, turning him on to the native language of his mother and grandparents, leading him on a year-long adventure to Salzburg in 1990 that would turn into four years and forever change his life.

Josef Roggenbauer retired in 1991 six months after we returned from Salzburg. Today, he and his lovely wife Lore (standing) live in Salzburg on Sinnhubstraße overlooking the Untersberg. He just turned 80 last week. In 2003 as well as 2006, the Pennington students I brought to Salzburg had a chance to meet him. Next Thursday, he’ll be one of 26 of us who’ll celebrate Thanksgiving, and I’m looking forward to introducing him to yet another set of students.

Untersbergblick!

I've written here about mountains before, how much I like them. Did I mention that I had an Untersbergblick at my previous two apartments? "Apartment" is a loose term here--as a student and as a staff member at the boarding school, I inhabited rooms. BUT each room had the "Blick," a view of the Untersberg. I won't go into details. Just know that there's not much like waking up and seeing the Untersberg outside your window.

I was a bit sad that our apartment, although we have a Gaisbergblick (see previous post), had no Untersberg.

Not until autumn fell.

The other day, Jenny looked outside our balcony window and said matter-of-factly, "I can see the Untersberg." Now I didn't believe her. For two months, I'd occasionally lamented (mostly jokingly) the fact that we couldn't see the Untersberg from our apartment, not even a reflection in the huge windows of the insurance building across the major road. So I told her that that wasn't funny.

"I'm serious, I see it!"

So I looked, having quickly prepared myself for some let-down. But there it was, the summit! Yes, just the summit, but it's the Untersberg! A tip of a tree had been blocking our view. But it's leaves are gone leaving thin branches. When it's a clear day, I can even see the cable car and the hut on top of the mountain. The hills are indeed alive, right from our very balcony! Thank you, tree--perhaps you'd like to meet my friend, Mr. Chainsaw?

Ein wichtiger Besuch

Writer George Santayana once said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Since scholars place the quote's publishing date around 1905, it's clear that Santayana didn't have the Holocaust on his mind. However, the quote is nonetheless relevant when speaking about the importance of Holocaust memorials. I visited Dachau many years ago and Santayana's words appeared on a large sign at the end of the exhibit; it may still be there.

In 1990, my resident director took my study abroad group to Mauthausen Concentration Camp. This past Friday, I did the same with my group. Similar to my visit to Sachsenhausen outside Berlin with The Pennington School in 2007, I really felt like there is no lecture, museum, or video that can drive home the lesson as much as a visit to a camp. This takes nothing away from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

Mauthausen, near Linz, was a forced labor camp built primarily by Dachau prisoners and funded in large part by the pilfered money of German-speaking Jewish citizens. The exhibit areas are done (artifacts, documents, art work), but they have intentionally left the actual holding and treatment areas untouched. Shower rooms, a dissecting table, cells, toilets, refrigeration rooms for bodies, ovens--everything looks like it has sat 60 years. Tiles, floors, and windows are cracked, pipes rusted out. You feel uncomfortable the moment you step in and that's appropriate.
My kids took it all in--they were great! There were two separate Italian school groups visiting, and each group was so different. One was enthralled, taking photos of every corner, of every remnant. The other group was bored, cold, biding their time. I was once again proud of my Pennington group from two years ago because as much as they wanted to have fun on our Berlin/Prague trip, they saw the importance of such a visit from the first mention of the excursion.

I've visited four camps: Dachau, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt (outside Prague), and Sachsenhausen. They're all different but no one is less important than the others. If you ever venture to Europe, devote at least a half-day to such a visit!

Amazing!

No, I'm not talking about the American League pennant race of 1967 or the '69 Mets or even the '08 Phillies.

If you're a fan of the show Lost, you'll know that everything happens for a reason. There was a reason why I needed to go out this afternoon to the post office and apothecary....well, first and foremost, it was because I had to mail a letter and then pick up some medicine.

BUT there was another reason. As I peddled my bike back from the my errands, a white car full of people crossed the small intersection in front of me. I noticed right away from the stop-start-stop motion of the car that they were lost. I also noticed that the front passenger was carrying a HUGE television camera.

The driver pulled down the window and asked a young Austrian man for directions. I recognized right away that the driver spoke American English, so being the helpful American I am, I pulled around the front of the car to see if I could help. The Austrian man was fishing for his English vocabulary. Both the front and rear driver's side windows were down. A young man was driving, what I guess was his wife or girlfriend was behind him.

"How do you get to Schloss Hellbrunn?" the man asked me. He and the woman were frazzled, amazingly desperate! And they were covered in what looked like an amazing amount blood, guts, and pumpkin rot. But it all looked fake. Plus they had tons of make-up on.

I explained that they needed to turn back onto the major road they had just left, Alpenstraße, and head straight down until they passed underneath and underpass. Then they should take the very next right which would lead them down a wooded country lane.

By the time I had finished my first sentence, out of the car from the front and back passenger seats raced the camera man and the boom (sound) man, and they were both on me. I was good. Amazingly enough, I didn't look into the camera! I put a foot on my peddle to push off and ride away when the boom man caught my eye. He shook his head quickly as if to say, "Don't race off!"

The camera man turned off his camera and the boom man, an American, explained to the Austrian and me that we had to sign a release or this footage couldn't be used.

While we signed the paperwork, the woman in the backseat swore. They were in an amazing rush! The boom man turned to her and said, "Look, I told you. If you ask people questions, we have to do this. If you don't like it, don't ask for help."

"What kind of show is this?" I asked.
"A travel show," he replied.
"What channel?" I asked.
"I'm not sure," he said. Amazing, if that were true!
"What's the show called?" I asked.
Then he (sort of) came clean. He said, "I can only tell you that it's a pretty popular one!"

Off into the car they went. I wave and they raced off.

So this was some sort of race! Amazing, I thought, that I was caught in the middle of it.

I swore myself to secrecy--this was big stuff--I couldn't tell people about this! In two minutes I was home and spilling my guts to Jenny. Then one of my students came over 15 minutes later to pick up some soup, and I was telling her before she even sat down.

After my student left, Jenny suggested we head to Hellbrunn (only 5 minutes from our apartment) to see what we could see. There's a huge playground there and we promised Nikolas he could play there a bit (he said 40 minutes, and we said about 10--hey, it was getting dark!).

When we got to Hellbrunn, I noticed not one, but three cars that looked like the one I'd seen earlier. They each had numbers in the back window. The highest number I saw was 11.

When we tried to enter the castle grounds, we were immediately forced to make a U-Turn by a staff member. "Das Schloss ist zu wegen Dreharbeit." Closed due to filming...hmmm.

Just then, another white car pulled into the parking lot. A different set of people but with camera and boom men. They held each other's hands and headed right past us through a different door than the main entrance. I wanted to tell them that the path they were taking was a Detour, but I figured it wasn't my place.

In fact, a staff member came up to us a short time later and asked us in German if we'd said anything to the couple. "Nein," we answered. Dang, can't we be friendly?

Jenny decided to take Nikolas down that path to see where the couple was headed. I waited in case more white cars appeared in the parking lot. None did, and soon Jenny was back to tell me that she's seen "things." Well, I wanted to see things, too, so off I went along the path. The pathway was heavily wooded so it was even darker. Up ahead I could see huge lights, the kind you see on film sets. But there was a Roadblock between lights and me: a gate and a staff member. I spoke to the staff member for a moment. I asked him if they were filming an advertisement (playing dumb I was) and he spilled his guts. And while he spilled, I looked through the gate and saw "things."

Fast Forward to me catching up with Jenny and Nikolas in the park. We saw bobbing through the trees what looked like a TV camera light. Two women were running together. One was hobbling. The other said, "I'm going ahead a bit," and the other countered with, "OK, go ahead." Off into the park they went, clueless as the day was long.

Satisfied with the afternoon's excitement, we headed home and made a Pit Stop at Rossbräu, a local restaurant. No one recognized me from TV and I didn't tell anyone who I was.