In the summer of 1973 my dad took all of us—my mom, my five siblings, my then-wife, and myself—on a three-week jaunt through Europe. We tossed our bags into a large van in Luxembourg, whipped into Paris for three days, sped to Munich for the beer halls and art museums, toured Mozart’s house in Salzburg, and then bounded across the Alps to Italy to visit Florence, Venice, and some of the hills where Dad had fought the Wehrmacht. It was one of those crazy trips where the art, museums, and magnificent buildings become so muddled you’ve forgotten half of what you’ve seen before you board the plane home. Instead, singular moments embed themselves indelibly in the memory: your mother’s terror driving through the Grimsel Pass, your sister’s shriek of delight when she found someone in Paris who could give us directions in English, your first encounter with French toilet paper.
Three days of that trip, however, remain with me, fresh and unblemished, beautiful and horrific, as if I had experienced them yesterday.
The Chiemsee is a large, fresh-water lake in Bavaria. The lake contains several islands, with the two largest being Herreninsel and Fraueninsel. Herreninsel was so-named because from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries the Benedictine Order inhabited a monastery on the island. Fraueninsel is still home to a convent, also dating from the eighth century and best known today for its klosterlikor and marzipan.
Before flying to Europe, my father joined an adult education German class at a local community college in Stuart, Florida. The teacher of this class was Hermione, who owned a house on the shores of the Chiemsee. Hermione had grown up on Herrenchiemsee: her father had operated the hotel a famous hotel on the island for many years, and after his retirement her brother assumed control of the hotel. Because several members of Dad’s German class were traveling to Germany that summer, Hermione invited them to join together for a reunion on the Chiemsee.
For those three days the Bavarian skies were cloudless and blue. Many of the houses and hotels sported window boxes of flowers, mostly pansies, and the lake sparkled in the sunlight. Think “The Sound of Music” with Julie Andrews singing “The hills are alive” and you’ll have a concrete image of our stay. The Alps were visible in the distance, and the weather, the beauty of the land, and the length of our stay made for a memorable visit.
Not that we weren’t busy. During those three days Hermione conducted a tour of Salzburg and arranged for tickets for us to explore Ludwig II’s Herrenchiemsee Palace, modeled on Versailles. She escorted us through Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, threw a banquet in our honor at her brother’s hotel, and arranged for us to attend a candle-light performance of Mozart in the palace, a concert to which we were driven in carriages. She showed us Fraueninsel and the convent, and told us how as a girl she had rowed to school there every day. Hermione was a dynamic woman in her mid-fifties, still beautiful, a sharp, strong guide who could walk the rest of us into the ground. I was twenty-five years younger and could easily have fallen in love with her.
Hermione, however, possessed one major flaw that soured my admiration. Hermione was—or at least once was—a Nazi.
Here are the connections:
After leaving Landau Prison in 1925, where the government had incarcerated him following his attempted putsch, Adolf Hitler acquired the habit of visiting Herrenchiemsee and staying in the hotel. Hermione told me several stories of those days. She remembered sitting in Hitler’s lap when she was a little girl. He was, she told me, a man who was kind to children and dogs. At Hitler’s invitation, she and her family attended his inauguration as chancellor of Germany in 1933. She believed Hitler was a competent leader but with wicked subordinates. Near the war’s end, a number of German soldiers sought refuge on the island, and several German officers committed suicide at the hotel. When the Americans arrived, Hermione swears the soldiers made her family and the staff line up while they stripped them of their valuables.
Unlike my parents and siblings, who had rooms in a nearby gasthaus, my wife and I stayed in Hermione’s home, so we got to know her a bit more intimately than others in my family. Her husband, Ted, much older than she, was an American, and Hermione spoke English reasonably well. She and Ted listened to US Armed Forces Radio. One early morning, when I was in my bedroom, the radio announcer must have mentioned something about the Holocaust, because I suddenly heard Hermione say angrily from the kitchen, “Yes, it’s true. We killed a few Jews. Won’t the world let us forget?”
You need to infuse a German accent into those words if you want to hear them as I did.
Strangest of all was this story. Hermione told me that some Jews supported Hitler before he became chancellor. Difficult to believe, perhaps, but if you Google “Jews who supported Hitler,” as I did when writing here, you’ll find one of those historical enigmas that always surprise. In truth, a number of Jews helped Hitler come to power and later served under him.
One of these Jewish families visited Herrenchiemsee when Hitler was in residence and became well acquainted with him. This family had an older teenage daughter, and Hermione related that she once had followed Hitler and the girl along a path through the woods of the island. Hitler held hands with the Jewish girl as they walked together, laughing and chatting. Later, he invited the girl’s family to his inauguration, which they duly attended.
I have always regretted my failure to record the name of that Jewish family. Hermione told me the name of the girl and her family, but I was young and too ignorant to put it in writing. Hermione’s gone now, of course, like some others in this narrative, but I would love to know the details of this story. Even then, her account of Hitler walking through a beautiful forest hand in hand with a Jewish girl revealed to me the vagaries and strangeness of history.
Here I should add one other unforgettable place I remember from that summer in Germany. This was our visit to Dachau, one of the first of the Nazi concentration camps. I have visited four or five places—Jamestown, Virginia; Roanoke, North Carolina, site of the Lost Colony; the desolate shores of the big island of Hawaii with their lonely petroglyphs; the battlefield at Antietam—whose history made them haunted ground. These are places where ghosts hover in the background.
Dachau was filled with such ghosts.
Now, I am going to risk upsetting some of my readers by informing you of a strong bias. I apologize ahead of time for my language.
I loathe totalitarian governments, including my own American government that for decades has snatched away more and more of the rights of its citizens.
I teach home-educated students various courses in history. When I am in the classroom referring to Communists, Fascists, Islamists, or anyone else who puts forward a political agenda based on blood, terror, and fear, I truly wish I could routinely label these movements as Communist Bastards, Fascist Bastards, Islamist Bastards, and so on. I wish I could say “Well, when the Communist Bastards were our allies during World War II…” or “When the Islamist Bastards took down the World Trade Center…”
Nazi Bastards had a slogan: Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz. “The common good supersedes the private good.” American Fascistic Bastards, all those on the Left and the Right who deign to tell the rest of us how to live, are proponents of the same slogan.
Allow me to offer another slogan, one by which the people of my country have lived by for 250 years: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Enough said.
And the objects featured in this chapter? While visiting the Chiemsee, I picked up a poster from a nearby medieval church famous for its frescoes. When we returned from that trip, my mother, who was good at this sort of thing, shellacked the small poster I’d bought to a stained board. On the back of the board she wrote her name and date, along with this inscription noting the church: “Dofrkirche von Urschalling Prien/Chiemsee.” The two small shot glasses feature the palace on Herrenchiemsee.
The picture for faith, the glasses for drinking. Good things. Symbols of freedom.
When I see these things, I remember my time with Hermione. I think, too, of that poor teenage girl, and whether she survived the horrors of the next twelve years, and what she later thought of the Nazi Bastard whose hand she had held in that forest on Herreninsel.
The Chiemsee is a large, fresh-water lake in Bavaria. The lake contains several islands, with the two largest being Herreninsel and Fraueninsel. Herreninsel was so-named because from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries the Benedictine Order inhabited a monastery on the island. Fraueninsel is still home to a convent, also dating from the eighth century and best known today for its klosterlikor and marzipan.
Before flying to Europe, my father joined an adult education German class at a local community college in Stuart, Florida. The teacher of this class was Hermione, who owned a house on the shores of the Chiemsee. Hermione had grown up on Herrenchiemsee: her father had operated the hotel a famous hotel on the island for many years, and after his retirement her brother assumed control of the hotel. Because several members of Dad’s German class were traveling to Germany that summer, Hermione invited them to join together for a reunion on the Chiemsee.
For those three days the Bavarian skies were cloudless and blue. Many of the houses and hotels sported window boxes of flowers, mostly pansies, and the lake sparkled in the sunlight. Think “The Sound of Music” with Julie Andrews singing “The hills are alive” and you’ll have a concrete image of our stay. The Alps were visible in the distance, and the weather, the beauty of the land, and the length of our stay made for a memorable visit.
Not that we weren’t busy. During those three days Hermione conducted a tour of Salzburg and arranged for tickets for us to explore Ludwig II’s Herrenchiemsee Palace, modeled on Versailles. She escorted us through Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, threw a banquet in our honor at her brother’s hotel, and arranged for us to attend a candle-light performance of Mozart in the palace, a concert to which we were driven in carriages. She showed us Fraueninsel and the convent, and told us how as a girl she had rowed to school there every day. Hermione was a dynamic woman in her mid-fifties, still beautiful, a sharp, strong guide who could walk the rest of us into the ground. I was twenty-five years younger and could easily have fallen in love with her.
Hermione, however, possessed one major flaw that soured my admiration. Hermione was—or at least once was—a Nazi.
Here are the connections:
After leaving Landau Prison in 1925, where the government had incarcerated him following his attempted putsch, Adolf Hitler acquired the habit of visiting Herrenchiemsee and staying in the hotel. Hermione told me several stories of those days. She remembered sitting in Hitler’s lap when she was a little girl. He was, she told me, a man who was kind to children and dogs. At Hitler’s invitation, she and her family attended his inauguration as chancellor of Germany in 1933. She believed Hitler was a competent leader but with wicked subordinates. Near the war’s end, a number of German soldiers sought refuge on the island, and several German officers committed suicide at the hotel. When the Americans arrived, Hermione swears the soldiers made her family and the staff line up while they stripped them of their valuables.
Unlike my parents and siblings, who had rooms in a nearby gasthaus, my wife and I stayed in Hermione’s home, so we got to know her a bit more intimately than others in my family. Her husband, Ted, much older than she, was an American, and Hermione spoke English reasonably well. She and Ted listened to US Armed Forces Radio. One early morning, when I was in my bedroom, the radio announcer must have mentioned something about the Holocaust, because I suddenly heard Hermione say angrily from the kitchen, “Yes, it’s true. We killed a few Jews. Won’t the world let us forget?”
You need to infuse a German accent into those words if you want to hear them as I did.
Strangest of all was this story. Hermione told me that some Jews supported Hitler before he became chancellor. Difficult to believe, perhaps, but if you Google “Jews who supported Hitler,” as I did when writing here, you’ll find one of those historical enigmas that always surprise. In truth, a number of Jews helped Hitler come to power and later served under him.
One of these Jewish families visited Herrenchiemsee when Hitler was in residence and became well acquainted with him. This family had an older teenage daughter, and Hermione related that she once had followed Hitler and the girl along a path through the woods of the island. Hitler held hands with the Jewish girl as they walked together, laughing and chatting. Later, he invited the girl’s family to his inauguration, which they duly attended.
I have always regretted my failure to record the name of that Jewish family. Hermione told me the name of the girl and her family, but I was young and too ignorant to put it in writing. Hermione’s gone now, of course, like some others in this narrative, but I would love to know the details of this story. Even then, her account of Hitler walking through a beautiful forest hand in hand with a Jewish girl revealed to me the vagaries and strangeness of history.
Here I should add one other unforgettable place I remember from that summer in Germany. This was our visit to Dachau, one of the first of the Nazi concentration camps. I have visited four or five places—Jamestown, Virginia; Roanoke, North Carolina, site of the Lost Colony; the desolate shores of the big island of Hawaii with their lonely petroglyphs; the battlefield at Antietam—whose history made them haunted ground. These are places where ghosts hover in the background.
Dachau was filled with such ghosts.
Now, I am going to risk upsetting some of my readers by informing you of a strong bias. I apologize ahead of time for my language.
I loathe totalitarian governments, including my own American government that for decades has snatched away more and more of the rights of its citizens.
I teach home-educated students various courses in history. When I am in the classroom referring to Communists, Fascists, Islamists, or anyone else who puts forward a political agenda based on blood, terror, and fear, I truly wish I could routinely label these movements as Communist Bastards, Fascist Bastards, Islamist Bastards, and so on. I wish I could say “Well, when the Communist Bastards were our allies during World War II…” or “When the Islamist Bastards took down the World Trade Center…”
Nazi Bastards had a slogan: Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz. “The common good supersedes the private good.” American Fascistic Bastards, all those on the Left and the Right who deign to tell the rest of us how to live, are proponents of the same slogan.
Allow me to offer another slogan, one by which the people of my country have lived by for 250 years: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Enough said.
And the objects featured in this chapter? While visiting the Chiemsee, I picked up a poster from a nearby medieval church famous for its frescoes. When we returned from that trip, my mother, who was good at this sort of thing, shellacked the small poster I’d bought to a stained board. On the back of the board she wrote her name and date, along with this inscription noting the church: “Dofrkirche von Urschalling Prien/Chiemsee.” The two small shot glasses feature the palace on Herrenchiemsee.
The picture for faith, the glasses for drinking. Good things. Symbols of freedom.
When I see these things, I remember my time with Hermione. I think, too, of that poor teenage girl, and whether she survived the horrors of the next twelve years, and what she later thought of the Nazi Bastard whose hand she had held in that forest on Herreninsel.
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