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Other personal autobiography
Summer in Germany
age 16


My diary (83 pages, PDF, 71mb)




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Through a program run by American Field Service, I apent a transformative summer of 1958 traveling to Germany and living with a family in Nurnberg and Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  

I will record more about events surrounding this trip.  (A few years back, I looked at Bernal Diaz's account of Hernando de Cortez's assault on the Aztecs.  Diaz was writing 50 years after the events, and I thought, "This must be full of inaccuracies caused by faded memories."  I will be writing about my German summer 54 years afterwards, and some of those memories seem so vivid...)

For now, I offer a link to the diary I kept that summer.  54 years later, I'm reluctant to read it lest I be embarrassed by my youth.

Note that I was in Bavaria 13 years after the end of WWII.  This fact, as I recall, prompted a good deal of ciriticism of my parents for letting me go.  I experienced no anti-semitism.

I wrote weekly articles published in the Atlantic City Press.  I'll see if I can find them on-line.

I also wrote the following three letters to my parents.  (When I glance at them, I'm struck with the upbeat intensity and mental searching of my 16-year-old self, and I'm struck with how cynical and pessimistic I became over the intervening years.)  I don't know why I didn't date these letters, though the dates amd chronological sequence are probably possible to figure out, especially with reference to the diary.  I have a vagure memory of having borrowed a small portable typewriter to bring on the trip..(I had recently taken typing, which continues to this day to seem like my most valuable high school course.)

When I get around to reading these materials, I'll be interested to see the state of my written English at age 16.









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