TOPICS My blog e-mail me | Other personal autobiography Summer in Germany age 16 |
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. |