An Ambush at Topanga Beach in Malibu Winter 1979

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February 1979, Susanne was admitted at Art Center in Pasadena...

 In her last year at high school Barbara, Susanne, and I had been trying to find a good photography school for Susanne. Barbara had even taken her around in Germany, but the requirements there were so complicated, that this idea was soon abandoned in favour of the California Institute of the Arts, where Kris Malkewicz taught film making. This place was so laid back that Susanne decided, it wasn't for her and began to look for something better on her own. Her teacher at Pali High suggested Art Center of Design, a very successful school of commercial arts in Pasadena. Susanne visited there and came back very high. It would be hard work and braving a stiff competition - it was also expensive. She would need to take some make-up courses in Santa Monica City College to qualify - and present a convincing portfolio. I told her that we would be delighted to send her there, but if she could not make it during the first year, I would take her out again.

... and Barbara escorted her first German tourists to Las Vegas (Apr 1- 11, 1979)

 Frustated by her unsuccessful search for a publisher of her German translations of American poetry and novels, Barbara looked for another challenge. Some extra money would be fine, but it was not the major driving force, she wanted something to do for her head. She found an ad wanting German-speaking tour-escorts and in January 1979 took a blitz course offered by one tour operator. After three weeks they put her on a flight to San Francisco and let her do a city tour for 30 people there. She worked hard in the days before this test - and passed it to everyone's satisfaction - except her own: she had been too nervous....

We decided that local LA city tours would be highly inefficient, she would feel that she had to do her house work on top of her tour work. I urged her to take only out-of-town tours - which, of course, would take her away for two or three weeks. I would have to take care of myself, Cornelius, and occasionally of Susanne's emergencies. There was also the question of jealousy - surrounded by men as she would be. I put that consideration aside, we trusted each other....

After extensive preparation for all events she possibly could encounter (heart attacks, bus break-downs, etc), she took-off with a big bus and thirty-five pax on her first tour to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon.

From now on our Summer and Fall vacations had to be draped around her tour schedule - but for her friends she would always make room. Sometimes I became jealous not of any specific person, but of all her tourists.....

One time she called me from her hotel in Hollywood - she always stayed with her groups until they had taken off at the airport. Would I come and watch a show her bus driver was going to put on. I loaded Cornelius into the car and drove to the place, where she introduced me to Tingri, a dark-skinned man with broad, laughing gestures from Samoa. Very genially, Tingri in turn introduced me to two of his sons. All wore Karate outfits - Cornelius, who had taken Karate for a while, whispered that they wrre "black belts".... Tingri went through a series of improbable feats like tearing an LA telephone book into two, or breaking a stack of bricks with one blow of his fist. The culmination was, as he first explained, that he hit his son on a particular spot on the neck, who would die and with another hit, he would reanimate him... The young man promptly collapsed on the flour and was thereafter revived. - I sat very close, and I am sure that this was exactly what happened.

Tingri, said Barbara later when she came home, owns a Karate chain, he is a millionaire. He also is a Mormon and a medical doctor. Together with his brothers he owns a big hospital in Hawaii. He drives tour buses as a kind of Sufi exercise. She smiled. "You have never come so close to losing me. Several years ago Tingri lost his Italian wife in a plane crash. He knocked on my door every single night...."

In that first year Barbara went on five tours - I spent a lot of time with Cornelius alone at home. Cornelius was now in Palisades High School. He had discovered Dungeons and Dragons which he played with two of his friends, and with me he played strategic WWII war-games which he researched and made himself.... He was quite a challenge. He also played clarinette and later oboe in Mr. Lish's student orchester at Pali High.

August 1- 23, 1979 Cornelius in Norway

On July 31 Cornelius and I flew to Germany. Cornelius had been invited by the Krauses, friends from the high-rise building we had lived in in Garching, to join them on their vacation in Southern Norway. Being without a woman I decided that I would meanwhile go to Mount Athos in Greece, the monks' republic on a peninsula in Northern Greece which women are not permitted to enter.

August 8-20, 1979 Rolf on Mount Athos, Greece

Click here for more pictures of Mount Athos.

We travel to Tibet and Ladakh to visit precipitously located Lamaseries, while we have very similar, even older monastries in our own backyard: Athos, the Holy Mountain of Orthodoxy on the eastern-most peninsula of the Chalkidike in Northern Greece. It is a jealously guarded autonomous monks republic that has ruled itself independently of Greece for 1200 years. Its charter goes back to a Byzantine Emperor of 935. The Greek army patrols its northern border to keep women and tourists out.

One needs two separate visas - one from the civil and one from the ecclesiastical authorities in Thessaloniki, to board a small boat from Ouranopolis, where they confiscate one's passport, to Daphni, the Athonite harbor. An escorted minibus takes one up the hill to Kariyes the "capital-village." At the office of the Holy Synod in Kariyes a monk returns one's passport and hand-writes a "Diamonitirion," a pilgrims letter. He mumbles "diakosias drakhme" and looks away. One puts the 200 drakhme at one end of the table and is handed the document which entitles the pilgrim to a free bed and supper - no breakfast, no lunch - at all monasteries on Athos... Looking back after I got up, I see the monk sweep the money into a leather pouch.... Another monk inspects the length of ones hair. He escorts a long-haired German student of theology into the basement - from where the guy emerges shocked. The mok had put a pot on his head and cut the overhanging, golden locks off... My beard becomes the source of many suspicious questions during the days that follow: "Are you a member of the clergy?" - All Greek Papades and monks may never shave their beards - "a real nuicance when we eat our soup," they sigh to the foreigner. And God forbid that you belong to the Papists or cross yourself from left to right the way they do. In the 13-th century the Latin Crusaders ransacked the mountain and massacred the monks - it was never forgotten, as if it had had happened 40 years ago. No, no being German is ok here, they never violated the Mountain. And being a follower of Luther lights up the Papades eyes - "he also was against the Latin Pope, wasn't he?"

 I set out on foot from Kariye towards Iviron, the Georgian monastery where one of my Georgian friends (Wachtang Djobadze) had spent many months working in the library. Iviron is an idiorhythmic establishment, where you a man can retire as monk on his own money and live in an "apartment" by himself - or as it often happens with a young acolyte.... The Idiorhythmic monasteries are rich and stingy and Iviron is known to be the stingiest on Athos. A watery soup and a piece of bread is all we are served for supper. Next morning I leave before sunrise down the east coast. My next over-night stop is Karakallou, a Koinovion - a monastic community. Here I get a wonderful vegetarian meal that even includes a carafe of red wine.... You can read the story of these adventures in my Athos diary. From Meghistis Lavra, the oldest foundation, I struggled 1000 meters up, discounting all warnings of physical danger and robbers, and hiked around the steep southern escarpment of the mountain - the lonely and magnificent Eremos (desert) - and finally along a string of beautiful monasteries on the west coast of the peninsula.

A violent thunderstorm drove me to seek shelter at Panteleimon, the Russian monastery, where I was given a bleak cell to myself. In the small hours of that night I woke up from a terrifying dreamof my father's dying. Next morning I wrenched an ankle on the stony path to Xenophontes. Not being able to shed my vision, I decided that my time was up and took the next boat back to Ouranopolis. It took me four days by bus and train through the Kosovo and Yugoslavia to reach Gelnhausen..

The Great Fire in October 1979

There were the clouds of black smoke again! Directly behind Pacific Palisades. One could see them from Aerospace. I raced home. Fire engines blocked Sunset and Temescal Canyon Rd, a helicopter had landed behind Pali High. And the flames were just coming across the mountain ridge behind our house. It had never been so close before. The wind from the hill became fierce. With a roar like big jet engines the fire raced downhill. Cornelius and I climbed on our roof and tried to water it down. Ashes and glowing embers were raining on us. Susanne was paralysed by fear. I sent her to load the tent, sleeping bags, and all our camping gear into the car and drive it into the dead end of Albright St. Barbara was in the kitchen cooking a transportable meal for us.

As the fire came closer it burned through the chapparal on the other side of Temescal Canyon. A house - whose owners, the Holbergs, were in Germany - exploded in a shower of sparks. The heat on the roof became unbearable. And then the shingles of the Barnabas' house below us caught fire. Together with Herb Crew, our other next-door neigbor we dragged a ladder to the Barnaba house. The fire had already burned a 6-foot hole into the shingles. While we doused the flames on their roof Barbara and Susanne evacuated the confusedly babbling Mrs Barnaba and her husband in his befuddled tails and hat. I had to call his reluctant son in law and shout at him to come and pick up the old couple. Barely had we pushed them into the son-in-law's car, the Maestro got out again and ran into the house to rescue his precious music. When he reappeared he carried a hastily collected bundle of sheet music and his plaster busts of Verdi and Beethoven.....

 Because of this frantic effort we had not noticed that the wind had suddenly died. I remember vividly how I became aware of the crackling of the burning trees at the bottom of the canyon below. A complete calm settled on us. The danger had passed - in the very last minute..... We sat down to dinner. The fire crackled all night.

December 9 - 23, 1979 Barbara in Tübingen

 Worried about her father's rapidly failing health Barbara flew to Tübingen again in December. It was to be her last visit with her beloved father.

1980

Father Lattmann's vital energies deteriorated rapidly. Marga had to consign him to the Tropenheim in Tübingen. He died on April 24, 1980. Barbara was not there. Barbara and Susanne visited Tübingen a year later.

September 24 - November 22, 1980

Barbara, Rolf, and Cornelius in Georgia

Click here for lots of additional pictures of Georgia and of Russia

Merab invited me to spend a year teaching in Tbilisi, a technical and financial impossibility.

Tbilisi and Georgia 1980

Erevan and Armenia November 1980

Tamriko and Jeffrey in Los Angeles

A few weeks after our return, Merab sent us a young Georgian friend Tamriko Japaridze and her husband Jeffrey Carr-Harris. Jeffrey held a scholarship in anthropology at UCLA. He had spent several years in Tbilisi and spoke fluently Georgian. They adopted us as their Ersatz-parents. Our often stormy relationship with Tamriko lasted to this very day. On my 2001-visit to Tbilisi I stayed her house.