From Wunstorf to Göttingen

and the First Summer Trips

1949 - 1955

Summer 1949 On foot to Southern Germany with Hermann and Helmut

When in 1949 Father was reinstituted as a Beamter-civil servant teaching at the agricultural school in Rodenberg we moved from Nordlohne to Kreuzriehe, a village between Haste and Bad Nenndorf near Hannover and went to the Hölty-Aufbauschule in Wunstorf - 40-min by bicycle from Kreuzriehe. For the first time we had an apartment to ourselves - primitive, no water no toilet, but also no irate landlord. - That summer I persuaded Helmut Barth and Hermann Müller, two former classmates from the Vechta Gymnasium to join me in a 4-week hike from Frankfurt, via Speyer and Karlsruhe through the Black Forrest and Back through Maulbronn, Heilbronn, Wimpfen, the Spessart to Gelnhausen. We walked, slept in barns and I cooked for the three of us - a special was thick Eierkuchen! This was my first "Sommerfahrt" from which derives my love for the monastery in Maulbronn, which I went back to during each of the following three years.

1949-1950 Gritta and the Abitur in Wunstorf

I remeber Wunstorf High School - the last of 7 schools I attended before going to Göttingen University - for two people Paul von Fragstein, a sharp, encyclopedig former Professor who taught us Germen and history in an unusually symbiotic fashion - I still use some of the insights into literature and philosophy he taught me - and Gritta Gewecke. There were two girls in my class Wera Blankenburg (see above left) was studious and unexciting and Gritta who was the intelligent daughter of an indudtrial chemist, had a very sharp tongue and was a true challenge. I fell in love with her, quite easily one of my larger mistakes, ut Gritta also had a very dear mother whom I may have been more in love with thanher daughter.... Frau Gewecke, taught me how to smoke cigatettes and appreciate strong filter coffee, she also played piano and we made music under her guidance untel 1:00 in the morning : Hartwig Fritze (violin), Gritta and I recorder: Händel and Corelli trios and an occasional Bach. Much of my liking of the Baroque music goes back to her. Unfortunately Gritta had also another admirer Host Pook - whose sex appeal and experience in such matters was decidedly larger than mine - the cause for much heartache. Gritta and my torturous attachement, complicated by my need to flee our tense situation at home, dragged on until 1954 when she got engaged to Dieter Gunkel to whom she is married. We are still in contact, and once in a while we congratulate each other that we did not get married.....

The much awaited and worked for Abitur (maturité) in 1950 was a huge disenchantement - I passed well enough (Physics and Chemistry: A, Latin, English, and Sport C) - but the expected liberation from the slavery of school never materialized, it was not followed by a great Euphoria I had expected. Everybody got legally drunk on the Ball that followed but me, who boiled in depressive jealousy having to watch Gritta in the arms of another classmate. Horst Pook did not graduate with us and has tracelessly vanished....

Throughout these years of emotional misery Brigitte remained my closest friend and confidant. Every two weeks we wrote each other - she now studied in Cologne - and in the summer of 1950 we bicycled together down the river Tauber to Stuppach, Creglingen, Dettwang, Rothenburg, and Dinkelsbühl and to my beloved Maulbronn. We had a tent but when this became too diffcult - her mother's raised finger followed us - we stayed in youth hostels. I cooked - she didn't know how to - and we saw all the beautiful places together. It was a bittersweet journey. After our return to Gelnhausen we pedaled to Wiesbaden, where, just returned from America, the paintings of the Berlin Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum were on exhibition, an overwhelming experience.

Summer 1950 with Brigitte

The Tauber Valley, Maulbronn, and the repatriateded paintings in Wiesbaden

1949 - 1956 at the University in Göttingen

In the Fall of 1949 after a gloriously successful, aural entrance examination in experimental physics I moved to Göttingen. Incongruously I rented a room with Alfons Kettner, the "elegant" snob of our Abiturklasse, who studied law. Our landlord who lived in the same apartment was a fiftyish, former FKK (Frei-Körper-Kultur, i.e. a nudist) Socialist. From the beginning our relationship was strained: no women visitors after 10 PM, no noise, no late nights - he watched over us. It was Alfons who in ther afternoons "entertained" his long-haired girlfriend Renate - we called her the "Sünderin" after a popular movie with Hildegard Knef.... On those days I had to stay at the library. However, the one who broke the camel's back was I not Alfons and Renate: I slit open the back of a framed picture of a naked youth that hung over my bed and stuck a more appropriate picture in front of it (probably a Madonna). We were asked not to return by the end of the Spring term. It suited me fine, in the Fall of 1950 Gerhard was to follow me in studying physics, and Alfons needed a "strurmfreies" apartment to devote himself to Renate.... This is when I found the beautiful room with balcony in Frau Phillips'apartment on Baurat-Gerber Strasse.

In 1949-1952 we used the university vacations - 2 month in the spring and 3 in the summer! - to "make money," I in a salt mine near Wunstorf, Gerhard in a copper smelter in Goslar a job he found through Marianne Daeg - whom I met in Göttingen in the Winter of 1949-50. Both jobs were very hard work and very little money. The arrangement with my father was, that we would earn our tuition and the money needed for our summer trips, the Göttingen living expenses (150 DM per month for the two of us) father paid. In 1952 after we returned from the financial fiasco in Italy we decided to change jobs, and in the Spring of 1953 we worked at the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg - which paid much better but the monotuous work on the assembly line was far more murderous than shoveling salt.... But we were determined to spend the Summer of 1953 in Greece.

Summer 1951 Exploring the Southern German Baroque

No one wanted to accompany me on a bicycle tour of Southern Germany, Brigitte had met Hans Heinrich and, thank God, her parents had sent Gritta to some tennis camp or sailing school - and I knew she was physically not up to pedalling for weeks - or sleeping in a tent.... I went alone, a hard decision, and discovered the Southern German Baroque, Lake Constance, the Algäu and Mittenwald, where Helmut Barth's parents had invited me to camp(!) behind a house they rented for their family vacation. I liked Helmut's parents' "culture" and elegance and they were very kind to me and took me on several unforgotten excursions: to the Schachenhaus, and a strenuous hike to the top of the Karwendel Spitze (there was no cable car in those years).

I fell in love with the Baroque churches and the rolling, man-made and human-sized landscape - the Birnau, Weingarten, the Wies, Diessen, the Bodensee (Lake Constance), Überlingen and Meersburg, the churches on the Island of Reichenau. On the other hand I found out that I did not share the Barths' euphoria of standing sweating and tired with mushy knees ontop the Wendelstein admiring uncountable peaks in the distance.... This feeling has not changed since, stone crags are admirable or threatening, but they elicit no desire in me to conquer them.

Göttingen offered much more than physics - at Harvard I later found out that I had learned preciously little at Göttingen University that I had not already known. More powerful than science was music. I had no money to buy tickets for symphony concerts or the fashionable soloists' performances, I also loved and knew Baroque music well, so while Barbara attended many performances of operas with her father in Braunschweig during those years, I listened to organ concerts, chamber music, Bach's oratoria and and masses. My diary lists two concerts a week - and many I still remember. Eventually I joined the venerable AOV (Academic Orchestra Society), or better Herr Fuchs, its boyish and spirited conductor allowed me to play my recorder or a flute - a rare wooden Boehm-flute I had bought from my first-earend money - as long as I would remain silent in critical places....

My parents had decided that Christine did not have to have a university education - my mother had none - and incidentally Barbara has none. This meant that she did not have to finish high school at the Abitur level, which is required for entering a university. This would be unthinkable in the US, but German high school (Oberschule or Gymnasium) lasts 2 years longer than US high school and the university is really the equivalent of US graduate school. There was also the financial aspect to be considered of studying at the university, three boys - for whom a doctorate had always been a foregone conclusion in my parents minds and ours.... Christine was sent to a vocational school for kindergarden teachers in Hildesheim, - something she has never forgiven my parents. After she obtained her Kindergärtnerin Diplom, she took a job as "governess" - acually as an aux-pair-girl with a family in Harpenden, north of London.

Gerhard and I lived quite peacefully together - too peacefully maybe. I came up with the ideas and fantasies for us, made the plans and the financial calculations, took photos, and wrote all letters, and he simply joined me and helped by "making" his share of money. Our common trips were sufficiently strenuous that their stress would have broken up any other friendship. In all those years (1950-56) we lived together I remember only one serious shouting match, when Gerhard lost his temper in Athens in 1953. He was sick (tonsillitis), and I escaped with Janet Abrams on an outing to Kaisariani for the day. He screamed at me when I came back late that night, I had neglected him....

Summer 1952 in Italy with Gerhard

The summer trip to Italy on bicycles was well planned in all details, I knew exactly what I wanted to see and where to go - but I optimistically underestimated the costs and the physical stamina required. - I will describe this tour separately using my old, still extant diaries and photos. Only our excursion to Greece left a deeper and more permanent impression on my mind than the Italian adventure. And both still provide the pictures in my mind that I evoque when I am ill or depressed. - Remarkably, Gerhard had no such memories to hold onto when he died....

Summer 1953 in Greece with Gerhard

 From Italy we brought back the delirious fantasy to go to Greece in the summer of 53. This dream was like a very powerful hallucination. The Italian experience at autostop had convinced me that this was the way to go. Yugoslavia was effectivewly closed to tourists in 52/53, we would have to hitchhike south through Italy and take a boat from Brindisi to Athens. Giorgios Stathakopoulos, a Greek student whom I had picked up in front of the university library one rainy winter day became our source of information. There would not be much hitchhiking in Greece, the roads were bad and there were only a few private cars, but one could walk. After much deliberation we decided to leave the tent at home and sleep under the stars - something one could not have done in Italy. Still we were lucky it rained only twice in Greece in September-October 1953. We now also owned a real camera and invested in some 12 rolls of Agfa-color slide-film. A few have survived including some black-and-white photos - mostly pictures of Greek temples, sculptures and landscape.

Our Last Abode in Göttingen: Schillerstr 49

Our Room on Schillerstr. A small map of Paris and a larger one of Greece (which had been our only map hiking through Greece!), and enlarged photographs decorate the wall above our "samovar" and a water amphora from Greece.

 I cannot remember why we moved to Schillerstrasse in 1953, probably simply to avoid having to pay Frau Phillips rent during the 3 summer months. Frau Küchemann on Schillerstr was nice too, but she had the annoying habit, whenever one of our many Indian friends had used the communal toilet she would come running with detergent and a brush and scrubb the toilet.... She also had a son, a well-known gasdynamicists from the Prandtl Institute in Göttingen whom the Britisch had deported to Farnborough with his entire family in 1946. In 1954 I started working on my Diplom thesis at the Prandtl Institute. The famous founder of scientific gasdynamics had died a year earlier and the institute had been divided between two, once upon a time famous pioneers in that field Prof. Betz and Prof. Tolmien, men of the classical school of aerodynamics who were well beyond their prime - too old to be suitable for England. Gerhard eventually worked for T. until the man had a massive nervous breakdown and vanished in some looney-bin....

In Spring 1954 I briefly visited my sister Christine in Harpenden, England - and Janet Abrams in Cambridge - and found Christine overweight, bare of any intiative, and unhappy. Mrs. Fletcher, the woman whose children she cared for, took me aside and urged me to find another place for her elsewhere. Which I did a few month later....

Gerhard's and my last trip together was to Turkey to visit Bonnie and Tilda Ilel in Istanbul.

 Yugoslavia, Turkey and Greece 

Summer 1954 with Gerhard

Turkey seemed the perfectly natural next destination. It now had become possible to travel through Yugoslavia. With incredible luck we were picked up south of Salzburg by Herrn Hackl, a Bavarian high-school teacher, who in his summer vacations did a "little import-export" in Turkey and the Levant. He was as perplexed as we when I told him that we were on our way to Istanbul - he was going there too! Two days later he dropped us in Belgrad because he intended to take the train. But our destiny was that we should continue together. We met him exasperated at the counter of Wagon-Lits in Belgrad, there were no beds in the sleeping cars to Istanbul available. After he had scratched his head for a while uttering curses, I offered to share the expenses with him, and we set out together that night on the longest and worst drive in Europe: 5 days on impossibly bad dirt tracks - and one day in Saloniki, where Herr Hackl disappeared with a lonely woman from Munich whom he had got to know at his hotel....

One early morning after driving all night Herr Hackl gave us some money for the train into town and dropped us at the beach of the Sea of Marmara near the hotel in a suburb of Istanbul where he intended to stay. We never heard of him again.

Istanbul was overwhelming, the dirt, the heat, bloated dead sheep floating in the Golden Horn, the noise, the language, Gypsies, prostitues, and urchins of all colors following us around, haggling for a melon in the market, trying to find a place to stay - Bonnie was a little taken aback when I called, he did not invite us.

Click here for a few more pictures of Istanbul

Turkey did not become the same visual high as Greece had been. We spent three weeks in Istanbul, saw Bonnie and Tilda several times and slept on a gymnastics pad in an empty classrooms of the German High School - as in Rome in 52 the unfriendly people at the German Embassy had no better suggestion.... We knew little about Islam, and the great mosques of Istanbul had to wait until 1990 to be truly discovered on a second visit with Barbara.

For a week Gerhard and I were invited by the Turkish Army to an officers' summer camp on Mt. Ulu Dag above Bursa. Many of the officers spoke German. There we met Yülmaz a fascinating itinerant story-teller, who said many things without words and sang songs which I still remember. In search of Greece we travelled by bus to Izmir. But preciously little remains of the Greek presence in Turkey. The Greeks in Istanbul were afraid to publicly speak their mother tongue. We visited the ruins of Ephesos and then found a semi-legal boat to Khios - the owner of which was a Greek, of course. One week we stayed again with Nonda on Poros and three weeks we walked and hitch-hiked via Delphi, Epiros, and Central Greece to the Yugoslavian border near Florina. It had become October, and it rained. Sleeping outside had become too wet and cold. We were forced to take buses and sleep in the cheapest "hotels" we could find: Bitoja, Skopje, Nis, Pec, Titograd, Dubrovnic.... where we began to run out of money. After buying the cheapest tickets for the boat to Riyeka we had a few Marks left for the train across the Austrian border and half a bread - the other half the baker gave Gerhard for free....

The most consequential happening of this Turkish summer was probably that we met a German girl .... Gisela Gross from Göttingen ! - who worked at the German hospital in Istanbul. She gave us the idea of "selling" our unhappy sister to a Turkish family as a governess.... Gisela introduced us to Frau Ruff, the wife of a German businessman who had lived in Istanbul since the thirties. Frau Ruff was the "mother" to a whole flock of German aux-pairs. I was very suspicious, but when we met her I decided that she was a reliable, honest, and good-hearted woman. Even the Embassy had only good words about her.... In January 55 Christine and Gisela took the Orient Express from Göttingen to Istanbul setting a chain of events and adventures into motion that changed Christine's life forever. Her story is not for me to tell, suffice to say, that she met Derek Hogan there, an English teacher at the British High School in Istanbul, got married to him at Frau Ruff's house, and is still married to Derek and now lives in Perth, Western Australia....

During the fall of 53 a group of Fulbright students from the US appeared in Göttingen, a wild and unorthodox bunch. One of them, Arthur Kuckes, a physicist from MIT became our close friend. With him I hecked out a plan to go to the Far East. "You will never make enough money in your salt mine," said Art, "you should come to America, and then we will set out together for Asia,". In the far distance loomed my childhood dream to see Tibet. The preparations for that plan became the preoccupation of the next two years. Eventually Art, who in 54/55 had moved to the Ecole Superieur in Paris, persuaded his father to guarantee my emigration visa - without it I would have been unable to work in the US. My Diplom thesis now took up all my time, I was only able to escape for three weeks in the summer to southern France.

Summer 1955 Southern France alone

In February 1956 Herr Bodnarescu, a Hungarian friend, bought me a ticket to the Faschings Ball at the Nansenhaus - the International Student House in Göttingen - where he introduced me to the "Unknown Woman." She would not divulge her name, and I learned it only a day later, but on that evening I knew with complete certainty that I would marry her....   (This picture was taken in Cambridge two years later.)