Exchange Student Escapades

Summer semester of 1978 I was an exchange student in Germany (“West Germany” at that time). I lived with a local family just north of Lübeck in Ost-Holstein.

That summer was immeasurable in the growth, maturity, and perspective that has supported me ever since. Even now in my 60’s I recall that time with great fondness, but I regret that I didn’t learn to speak German as well as I could have. This was mostly my fault. My classmates, friends, and host brothers were excited to have a native English speaker to practice with. My “gymnasium” (high school) teachers were frustrated with me; they would wag their finger in my face and spout, “Deutsch sprechen!”.?I would defend myself and reply, “But he spoke English to me.” And then immediately backpedal and say, “Aber Er hat Englisch mit mir ge-spoken.” (My German sucked.)

Also I was not there for the entire year and I didn’t need the credit or the grades to transfer back to my high school in the U.S., so I didn’t earn a grade, didn’t have to take tests, or do any assignments/homework. I was just there to play (yee-haw!) which was another source of frustration to my teachers and a source of distraction to my classmates, and incentive to goof off with me. I received several invitations from my classmates for fun activities outside of school, although they probably should have spent more time with their school work and studies than entertaining the visiting screwball.

Linguistics Lesson

I was so bad that I would toss wads of paper at the trash can when the teacher turned her/his back or left the room. If it went in the trashcan I would say “two points”, or “missed” if it didn’t.?But eventually I got caught. Luckily for me, some of my silliness was tolerated and if I was going to misbehave I had to do it in German, which meant I had to learn to say trashcan, paper wad, and “two points” in German. That was easy, “Zwei Punkte”.?So I asked, “Wie sagt Man ‘missed’ auf Deutsch?”?My classmates told me they say the same thing, “missed”. I was befuddled but didn’t worry about it. There are several words that are similar in German;?Doktor (doctor), Haus (house), Automobil (automobile), etc. So okay, maybe `missed’ is also one of those similar words.

It was several months later, when I was hosting a German student, Boris, at my home in Texas that I heard him say “Mist!”.?I asked, “What did you say?” He repeated ‘Mist’.?I asked him what ‘Mist’ means. He said that yucky stuff on the floor of a barn. I asked, “You mean cow manure?” He nodded.?That’s when I realized that ‘Mist’ in German is the actual word for ‘bullshit’. Yep, a mild curse word. So when my paper wad missed the trashcan, everyone assumed I was cursing, much the same as we would say, “Oh crap!”.

Cultural Paradigms

My host family drove a Benz 220D.?My two host brothers and I rode in the back seat where we traded off riding the middle “hump” with less padding. ?So the first time I climbed in and sat by the door, I locked the door and buckled my seat belt. I was immediately questioned and corrected by Martin, my 16 yr old host brother; Why would an occupant inside the car lock the door? If there was an accident and I was injured or unconscious, the rescue workers could not open the door and get me out. I replied that if the door was not locked it might fly open during a crash. I was told that maybe American car doors would not be secure in a crash, but German car doors would never pop open during a crash. Ouch!; I got my first lesson that German engineering is far superior to American (or at least this is true when the discussion involves four Germans and one American).

I noticed that everyone always buckled their seat belts before starting the car, so I assumed this was law. I asked if the police would write tickets for not wearing seatbelts. (This was 1978, seat belt laws were fairly new in Texas and a focused effort for traffic cops and highway patrol.)?Again I got questioned and corrected; why would the police care if you had your seatbelt buckled??That is ridiculous for police to do that, they have far better things to do.

Later Martin explained that there was no law for wearing seatbelts but the automobile insurance companies didn’t have to pay for any human injuries in a car crash if the injured person(s) did not have a seatbelt buckled during the accident. Bing! The light went on. The people themselves have their own motivation and consequences, no need to burden law enforcement with non-value added duties.

East-West Barrier

My host family lived close to the East-West German border near Lübeck and Travemünde. At the time it seemed the ‘cold war’ was a stalemate, indefinitely, unless something triggered the “mutual assured destruction” of thermonuclear war. Who knew that this was only 12 years before the Berlin Wall was dismantled?

But for me there was a palpable ominous feeling when peering over the border of East Germany. My West German classmates had a great time telling a joke about the official name of East Germany which was "Deutsche Demokratische Republik" or DDR (which everyone knew was an extension of the U.S.S.R.).?When they told me this joke they all just laughed and laughed. A few days later someone else would tell me the same joke (although it wasn't a joke) and I would laugh each time I heard it. There was no need to spoil their fun with this, or their fun with the clueless "Ami" from redneck Texas.

My German host father didn’t say much and didn’t attempt to speak English (I was supposed to learn German), but my host mother Sonja knew English well enough (as good as her sons).?She helped Peter through several years of English homework, then Martin a few years later and Henning two years after that. Each of them studied English at least 3 years, so Sonja spent more time than any of them in her home-school English class.?

She told me that in the 1950's and 60's they would occasionally hear machine gun fire during the night and they would immediately go out in the dark or early morning to do whatever they could to help any survivors who had attempted to escape the DDR. Sometimes the freedom seekers were still alive when they made it through all the DDR’s border defenses to the West side.

Riding bikes with my host brothers that summer they took me all over Ost-Holstein, from Bad Schwartau up to Eutin, but mostly we went to the beach near Timmendorfer Strand. One day a classmate from my gymnasium, Boris, took me to Travemünde to go on board the Passat. This is a cool 4-masted sailing ship from more than a century ago and a museum at that time.?We also went past Travemünde, past the FKK beach, right up to the DDR border.?It looked woefully inadequate to me to be an international border; especially for its function in the demarcation of the two tangible and intangible worlds that existed on either side.?The wimpy little chain on short spindly posts seemed like it would be more appropriate to mark the waiting line in a bank lobby. It was nothing to prevent me from easily stepping over it, or simply yanking the chain off the dinky posts.

Boris explained to me that even though the little chain was placed at the actual border, the communist side built their tall chain link border fence several hundred meters to the east and kept this strip of land, between their big fence and the actual border, devoid of all vegetation. We could see their tall border fence across the denuded land. It had towers every few hundred meters along the length of it with mounted machine guns so they had several hundred meters of clear land to shoot at any freedom seekers before they made it to the actual West border.?The north terminus of the big fence was extended with buoys as far as we could see out into the Baltic Sea. Of course the sea coast and swaths of barren land, on both sides of the fence I was told, were mined and electrified as well. After this explanation, my host mother’s stories of helping the survivors filled in the gaps of my understanding.?Oftentimes the East freedom seekers were relatives or acquaintances of those on the West side who either nursed them back to health or buried them.

International Language

Sonja’s parents lived there in the house with us.?Amazingly they both survived WWII only 33 years earlier. But Sonja lost all of her uncles and grandfathers on both sides of her family. And my host father, Hans Heinrich, lost his father, both grandfathers, and all his uncles, which was pretty normal for most families.

Their home in Ratekau village had been in Sonja’s family for several generations and they farmed the land behind their house. In 1978 the family still had a garden area about one acre and we ate several things from the garden every day. Recently, I can see from Google satellite images, their backyard acreage has become much smaller as other homes had been built in the garden area that Martin, Henning and I had to keep weeded that summer.

My host grandparents were quite elderly and overly nice to me. Every day after school they had a huge chocolate bar for us three boys to split up and eat. They told me stories (with Sonja translating) about the 1920’s and 30’s. Of course Martin and Henning had heard these same stories MANY times before, but they were good sports to listen to the stories again for my benefit. The only story I remember now is about the inflation (that I learned about later in a world history course). They said they had to use a wheelbarrow to take enough money to by eggs and bread in the town market. When they added a room onto their house they could not afford wallpaper, but they shellacked the paper money on the wall instead because it was cheaper. ?I don’t know if these were true stories or they repeated urban legends but it doesn’t matter. I’m sure those were tough times.

They apologized that they couldn’t speak to me in English. They explained that before WWII the international language was French which they both spoke quite well. But since 1945 the most useful international language has become English which they missed out on learning.

John Wayne spoke perfect German

During that summer a German tv station had a John Wayne week, a Jerry Lewis week, an Elvis Presley Week, and other special weeks when they showed American movies. We did not have a tv at my home in Texas. My dad didn’t like tv’s; it was aptly labeled an Idiot Box.?For the short time periods we did have a tv, they were an evil presence that prevented us kids from doing our homework or chores or reading or learning or doing anything productive; Yep, it turned us into idiots. Each time we had a tv it would mysteriously break after a week or so and we had to give it away or throw it away. So this was a real treat for me. I got to watch American movies on tv! (and no homework to boot!).

Of course the American movies (on German tv) were dubbed with the most excellent skill by voice actors. I had previously seen some foreign chop-saki and Godzilla movies that had been dubbed where the audio track and the actors mouths were not in synch. But the audio track and John Wayne’s mouth were spot on; For. Every. Syllable. I was mesmerized. And Jerry Lewis also spoke perfect German, and so did Elvis. And Elvis was able to smoothly switch back and forth to English when he sang one of his hit songs. Even when he spoke German, Jerry Lewis still had that annoying high-pitched tone in his voice. And John Wayne still had that familiar cowboy drawl even though his words were German. ?Of course there were no English sub-titles, but I enjoyed the movies anyway.

Last Hurrah

A neighbor and classmate from my Texas High school, Paul, was also an exchange student at the same time. His host family lived in Hamburg, about 45 miles from Lübeck. When our time was up we arranged for me to ride the train to Hamburg a day early and stay one night with his host family before flying out of Hamburg airport back to the States the next day.

Paul’s family lived in the big city; very different from my experience. They didn’t ride bikes or walk to places around town. Paul and I got one-day passes for the trains and busses in Hamburg.?He knew all the routes by heart. Paul took me all over `his city’, just the two of us, hopping bus after bus. ?We stopped at McDonald’s to eat a hamburger in Hamburg. Like my experience, Paul didn’t learn much German either, so we didn’t understand what the girl told us when we placed our order for hamburgers.?We asked her to say it again (“Bitte, noch ein mal?”) and the man behind us in line told us in accented but perfect English, “She said it will take a little while.”

I found that most Germans speak at least two “foreign” languages. Most of my classmates had studied other languages besides English, and there were a dozen to choose from in each school, not just French and Spanish like schools in Texas (at that time). When one of my classmates found out that I was from Texas and claimed to know some Spanish, he called my bluff and spoke to me in Spanish. I was surprised that he knew Spanish far better than I did, and he taught me some palabras that I should have already known. Huetie was only 16 years old and was already trilingual (German, English, & Spanish).

As the day wore on, Paul became more and more hysterical, running around like a crazy person. I had a difficult time keeping up with him. He was going the wrong way on escalators, jumping over turnstiles, taking shortcuts thru public transit stations where it was marked, “Eintritt Verboten”, and other ridiculous behavior. We got a lot of disapproving looks from the conservative and orderly German folks. I finally stopped and forced him to come back to re-group. I told him he’s acting stupid and this is not acceptable especially in straight-laced German culture.?He grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Hey! Who is going to tell your parents?!?”?I guess he had a point.

Ciao for now,

??- Arlen.