“You can call me Freddie,” he said. “Frau von der Haide called me ‘Fernando’ on the first day of class, and it sounded so nice in her accent I never wanted to correct her.” It was true; even the way she said Schlumpf (Smurf) sounded charming. (Die Schlümpfe, huge in Germany, was originally a Belgian cartoon, which in retrospect makes a tremendous amount of sense.)

Just then, another latecomer ambled in—a handsome Korean kid wearing a baseball cap that looked like it hadn’t been washed since the 1986 Mets won the World Series. Freddie turned to greet him. “What’s up, Justin?” he asked. “You ready for a valuable immersion experience in German language, history, literature, and culture?”

“I’m ready for a nap on the plane.”

That wasn’t a bad idea, of course—but who could indulge in such trivialities as sleep on her very first ride on a 747, where the towering blond flight attendants changed outfits in the middle of the night, and they served dinner and then breakfast, both of which were somewhat edible? If I napped, I might miss the free white wine, or a hot towel, or the end of Disclosure, the movie where Demi Moore sexually harasses Michael Douglas, which KLM Royal Dutch Airlines played in its uncensored entirety. By the time we disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, I felt like my teeth were growing hair, and due to sheer exhaustion I almost keeled over and fell out of my seat into the aisle of the much smaller plane that flew us from Amsterdam to Düsseldorf, but I could sleep for all of 1996. Now was the time to see if I could do some of that magic “immersion” and get myself fluent before the bus docked in Cologne, our first stop in the whirlwind two-week bus tour that was to serve as a general introduction to all things Teutonic.

I mean, I’d definitely been practicing my German. Or at any rate, I’d continued to be the best student in my German 101 class. Every test, quiz, and one-page “mini-essay” (about such prescient, intellectual topics as whether I owned a cassette player—I did!) had come back scrawled with As. There had never been a class-time exercise that I had not been able to master. So although I had never so much as read a single sentence of Goethe, Mann, or even the great unassailable Kafka in the original—nor had I ever had a single conversation with a German, other than the beloved and overly enunciative Frau von der Haide—as far as I was concerned, I was pretty much a native speaker, especially given that anything I didn’t already know I would acquire through magic.

This is not what happened. What happened is that I spent the next two weeks speaking very loud English on the bus and making a general Arsch out of myself on the few occasions I had to speak to an actual German. This wasn’t magic at all. It was, like, hard! The thing is, Frau von der Haide was still right. German’s not a categorically difficult language. (Really, check the five-point scale of difficult languages for native speakers of English. Spanish and French are ones; German ranks a two; the fives include Mandarin, Arabic, and Korean.) And yet, German’s ease comparative to Farsi and Uzbek (both fours) notwithstanding, the dulcet vernacular of Nietzsche and Wagner has the undeniable characteristic of sounding mean and nasty to the untrained ear, and of requiring a near-total grasp of some voluminous grammar conventions to communicate even simple concepts. This can make it seem hard when everyone around you is talking at Autobahn speed, and you have no idea what they’re saying, but it sounds like they might be ordering you to murder a kitten, immediately.

To say in German something as banal as “I live in the red house,” you have to use the dative case, which gives special endings to the words for “the” (das becomes dem) and “red” (rot becomes roten, unless you take away the “the,” in which case it becomes rotem, which in and of itself is enough to send most reasonable English-speakers screaming away, rot in the face). If you use the wrong word ending, the person you’re addressing may think that a red house lives in you, or that you are trying to be a red house, or that you are pondering both your own existence and that of red houses in general. At the very least, it will be abundantly clear that you are suffering from some sort of acute intellectual malady, one that can only be cured by your interlocutor switching into heavily accented, questionably ordered English (“Are you not meaning that you instead to school will go?”).

So instead of magic, this is what happened during my first week in Germany after one year’s worth of study, all of which took place in a heavily controlled environment, requiring only the regurgitation of a finite set of (TOTALLY USELESS) vocabulary words, recited on cue and only after substantial inner-monologue rehearsal, all with the context of less-apt classmates fucking it up spectacularly to make me look like a genius by comparison. The first time I attempted to utter a full sentence to an actual German in her actual native land was on the day our group landed in Düsseldorf and then drove to Cologne. I needed to inform the tiny-spectacled receptionist at the Cologne Youth Hostel—where the door handles looked like toilet flushes and the toilet flushes looked like door handles; where the first floor was actually the second floor and sixteen-year-olds could get beer at reception—that my fold-up bunk bed was stuck in its “up” position, and thus locked to the wall.

I broke out in a cold sweat despite the day’s heavy, almost tropical warmth (air-conditioning, or Klimaanlage, is dismissed by most Germans as an indiscriminate typhus factory). I shuffled down the stairs and repeated in my head, over and over, the most accurate description of my situation that I could muster: Mein Bett ist geschlossen, a sentence that literally means “my bed is closed,” but whose erroneous use of “is,” rather than the (INCOMPREHENSIBLE) German passive voice, conveys a more permanent, existential, perhaps sensual state, rather than the bed’s actual state of being temporarily lodged vertically; and, furthermore, whose use of “my” conveys one’s permanent, actually owned bed, rather than one’s transient accommodations in a youth hostel. A more accurate rendering of the state of affairs would have been Das Bett in Zimmer 405 geht nicht auf (“The bed in room 405 won’t open”), which at the time I could not have come up with if I’d had two months. So, “my bed is closed” would have to do, and I repeated it over and again in my head, in Frau von der Haide’s effortless, melodic accent: Mein Bett ist geschlossen, Mein Bett ist geschlossen, Mein Bett ist geschlossen.

I tiptoed to the front desk, where the back of the receptionist’s spiky blond head was currently turned to me as she made a harried intercom announcement in fluent French, for the benefit of the chain-smoking Francophone schoolchildren currently sharing the hostel with us.

The word for excuse me in German, Entschuldigung (literally, “apology”), is long and difficult enough that a native speaker can tell from its first syllable just what kind of rube she is dealing with—especially given that there exists some sort of physiological conspiracy in my throat in which it knows, instinctively, that I’m attempting to communicate in a foreign tongue and thus at the exact moment I attempt a word, fills with phlegm. So, despite—or perhaps because of—my intense staircase journey of rehearsal, what first came out to the German receptionist was ENTSCHBLURGHUNK, followed by a coughing fit. (It did get her attention, and so was a successful utterance according to today’s more progressive language-pedagogy approaches.) Throat half-cleared, I then managed to eke out Mein Bett ist geschlossen, heavily Americanized and utterly without context, which resulted in the first of what would, in my life, be hundreds—thousands—of quizzical German what in the ever-loving fuck just happened here looks.

Unlike the Germans I’d meet who would immediately and sanctimoniously switch to English without prompting, however, this receptionist was patient—knowing, as she did, that my group was at least trying, unlike those degenerate French enfants. So she nodded with increasing amounts of comprehension as I sputtered out the word Wand (“wall”) and then made what I hoped was the universal hand gesture for verticality; she then managed to extract my room number and informed me that her colleague would be right on it. And, bless her spiky little soul, she did this all based on my effectively proclaiming to her, unprompted, that the bed I owned back at home was shut like a door.

So, while it was possible to be understood in German even if I didn’t speak it well, not everyone was patient enough to allow that to happen. This is understandable, given that rather than a week’s worth of magic, it takes years of protracted study and immersion to develop what the Germans Germanically call Sprachgefühl, or a “feeling” for what “belongs” to a certain linguistic situation—such as when a bed is actually yours, rather than simply located in a room in which you’re staying. What’s more, two seconds spent thinking about whether that bed is in motion toward the wall or stationary against it (and thus whether to use the dative case), and your conversation partner has (patient hostel receptionists aside) already gotten bored and started yelling at you for buttering your bread incorrectly.

Once the receptionist’s colleague had been dispatched to unlock my bed, I resisted the urge to collapse into it and instead embarked on a series of wholly banal activities that, given that they were banal things happening in Germany, took on monumental significance: I boarded my first S-Bahn, short for Schnellbahn, or “fast train,” the commuter rail that links the bucolic towns that surround almost every major German city with the center. (The Jugendgästehaus Köln was located, as most youth hostels are, far from anywhere anyone could get up to any sort of good trouble.) I learned the hard way that the doors of a German train do not open automatically at every stop; rather, you have to push the giant flashing button, one that says, coincidentally, PUSH HERE TO GET OUT. (Even in thwarting me, the Germans were unassailably efficient.)

I walked down my first certifiably old street (“Julius Caesar twod on these cobblestones!” said Herr Neudorf). I saw my first Gothic cathedral close up—the staggering Kölner Dom, which took over six hundred years to build, measures 134,000 square feet, and was pretty much the only part of Cologne left standing after the Allied bombing. I saw my first German street signs (the font, bold and sans-serif, was so precise!), my first German traffic light (so stern! No wonder Germans don’t jaywalk), my first German trees (so erect!), my first German German people, from a safe distance away (please don’t say anything to me, please please please). And, most important of all, I sat my corduroy-clad ass on a splintering wooden seat in my very first German Biergarten, and ordered and consumed my very first legal beer. Frau von der Haide had explained to us that every region in Germany has a local specialty, and Cologne’s is the Kölsch, which Herr Neudorf took great pains to tell us was klein, aber stark (“small, but strong”). I didn’t see why we needed a warning—just because I hadn’t slept in thirty hours and was too chickenshit to order any food, and those teeny tiny “strong” beers cost two deutsche marks each, which, I couldn’t help but notice, was actually less than it cost to buy a thimble-sized glass of room-temperature mineral water. Halfway through my second Kölsch, I chanced a look up at the sky and almost fell backward off the bench.

“Vorsicht, Webecca!” said Herr Neudorf. “Klein, aber stark.”

“The stars here!” I said. “They’re brighter than they are at home. I swear they are.”

“Aber auf Deutsch, Webecca!”

“Die … Sterne? Hier?”

“Ja…”

“Sind … um, SEHR, uh, stark. Starker. Stärker?”

“Gut! Aber das ist das Bier, Webecca. Das Bier. The beer is stwong as well!”

My inaugural entry into my artisanal travel journal that night, in overly careful penmanship that matched the affected prose:

25.05.95 [I’d already adopted the German backward dating system.]

Köln.

This room is small and odd, but adequate. I am rooming with Anneke, who is a delight as always. I do believe the two of us will be great friends. Also befriended Freddie, the earnest Peruvian guy with the goatee from the other side of the room in v.d.H class, and Justin, who was supposed to graduate this year and is doing some experiment where he doesn’t wash his hair for a month. Ordered beer in German; did passable job. May take a few more weeks before I am fluent, though.

Freddie had to pee and so he went into a bar called Zippys, which turned out to have a clientele consisting only of gay men over 60. Köln is center of German gay culture, and Freddie could have gotten a lot of free drinks, but he didn’t want to give anyone the wrong impression because he is straight; already making moves on this very cute tiny little girl from another college who speaks way better German than all of us; didn’t get her name.

Tonight I saw the Dom. Latticework spires against the darkening sky, lit up green. Bats flying around. Understand, finally, why some people believe in God.

What I didn’t commit to posterity was that so moved by the Dom’s sheer immensity and intricacy had I been that I laid out fifty pfennigs for a votive candle—which, like the other thousands of Catholic pilgrims who come there to marvel and pray, I was supposed to light for someone, but which instead I slipped into my backpack as a very cheap souvenir, unsure whether that counted as a mortal or venial sin.

And then, religious contraband stowed safely in my JanSport, I was off on a two-week crisscrossing expedition through the Federal Republic, employing what all ethnographers would agree is the best form of cultural immersion: fourteen days sequestered on a tour bus with a bunch of other Anglophones, taking heavily curated tours of churches and museums, given either in English or in halting, gesticulation-heavy beginner’s German. The first two weeks in a new country are normally when you get out all of your most significant cross-cultural faux pas, which then either devolve into permanent faction or resolve themselves in mutual enrichment and understanding. There is, however, little opportunity for culture clash when the new culture can’t puncture the rarefied bubble of American eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds with similar interests, who dip in and out of tourist attractions at predictable intervals and never go anywhere without each other. Here’s a baroque monastery! Here’s another one! Put on these special slippers so you don’t blemish the five-hundred-year-old floorboards! This is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich! Martin Luther preached a sermon here! These two castles built on opposite sides of the Rhine were occupied by warring brothers who shot at each other all day long! The bus tour was beautiful, and exciting, and provided a tremendous amount of enrichment, by which (as Dave Barry would say) I mean beer. But it also felt like watching 3-D television.

Sometimes we would get a peek of Germanness if we were staying far enough in the boonies to opt for a Gasthof (inn) instead of a youth hostel—the strange “double” beds that were made of two singles pushed together, with their massive feather pillows and their duvets folded down the middle instead of spread out; the showers next to the beds and toilets in the hallway; the staggering breakfast spreads of rolls, cheeses, cold cuts, and mounds of butter; the squat, unsmiling ladies who would walk around the table asking Möchten Sie Kaffee oder Tee? (Kaffee. My answer was always Kaffee; it, like the beer in Cologne, was small but potent.)

But no matter where we went, the specifics of the tour-bus culture meant that just about the only conversations I had with Germans were the brief, rehearsed Mein-Bett-ist-geschlossen–type exchanges that took place at restaurants and bars. The only way to go off-script was to tether myself to one of the German heritage speakers (people with German parents or grandparents) in the group, who spoke with the sort of idiosyncratic conversational fluency that came from speaking a language at home but never taking classes in it. Our group’s most charismatic heritage speaker was a Bavarian kid named Henrik, who, about one week in, taught me, Freddie, and Anneke how to say eine Flasche Weißwein zum Mitnehmen, or “one bottle of white wine to go,” which the proprietor of a quiet pub was all too happy to grant each of us, one at a time, even so much as uncorking them so that we could take them into an empty town square and down them under the low summer sky, giggling into the night, surrounded by empty bakeries and butchers in half-timbered houses that looked like the Seven Dwarfs’ vacation homes.

“You guys,” I said, two-thirds of my Flasche deep. “You guys. You guys. What if the white wine in this village is infected with some deadly disease, and that’s why the guy at the Kneipe sold us each a bottle for three marks fifty? And everybody knows it but the tourists? And then all the tourists will start keeling over, and there will be a really good-looking kid at our next hostel, and I’ll fall in love with him but never say anything to him, and then I’ll die of the wine disease, and I wear too much makeup and my hair looks ridiculous?”

“Well, your hair does look ridiculous,” said Freddie. “I’ve been meaning to tell you since the airport. I liked it a lot better before.”

“Tadzio,” I said.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Schuman?” said Henrik. “That doesn’t even—whoa, Katze, dude!” A stray cat skittered across the cobblestones and ducked behind one of the fake-looking adorable buildings.

“Rebecca really likes Death in Venice,” explained Freddie.

“Venice?” said Henrik.

“Tadzio!” I cried, and took another swig of wine. Nobody understood me. Nobody would ever understand me, really. It was the most poetic loneliness. If only I’d had someone to share it with.

The cat yowled. Awash with longing—general longing, random pangs of specific longing for the early days of Dylan Gellner, and also for the affections of a person I hadn’t met yet, somebody who would want to talk about Death in Venice at two in the morning in a tiny German village whose name I didn’t know, over cheap German white wine consumed directly from the bottle in the out-of-doors—I grabbed one of Freddie’s cigarettes. I lit it and took a massive pull of burnt filter fumes before I noticed I’d put it in my mouth backward. “Tadzio!”

The next morning, I almost missed the bus, and as I scrambled on, hair askew, green of face, pores reeking of vinegar, Herr Neudorf turned the tour-guide microphone up to its highest setting.

“OH, WEBECCAAAAAAAA,” he said, as I attempted to open my window as wide as it would go and stick my head out like a dog. “I SEE YOU! I CALL YOUR MUZZAH! I CALL HER WIGHT NOW! Now, meine Damen und Herren, today we’re going to see a wonderful old town that dates back to the Mittelalter, Rothenburg ob der Tauber. We go to a special medieval torture museum, where we see devices invented to torture women who were too loud! Speaking of which—Webecca, the things I will tell your muzzah!”

Rothenburg ob der Tauber is indeed an old-fashioned walled town, with old-German signage and old-German houses and old-German winding narrow lanes—which are accordingly crammed with modern-day international tourists with not an actual German in sight. It’s arguably the least authentic of all Germany’s “authentic” old-German attractions: in fact, a good 70 percent of the historical sites I shuffled through in my hungover haze were replicas, which Herr Neudorf pronounced weplica, erected out of the war’s rubble, which he pronounced wubble. But it was there, of all places, that I had my first true encounter with German culture.

My white-wine-to-go hangover had just begun to abate when the group sat down to dinner at a rustic pub in a small village near Rothenburg. As an adornment to my beer, I—a vegetarian since the age of ten, much to the Schumans’ annoyance—was brought the vegetarische Speise on offer: broccoli with melted cheese, on top of which had been sprinkled a generous portion of cubed ham. I was ready to remove each speck manually; growing up in an uncooperative carnivorous family, you embrace the pick-it-off method. But Layla—that was the tiny beautiful girl’s name, the one from another college that Freddie had the hots for—in addition to being tiny and beautiful and good at German, was also a stricter Vegetarierin, and she was adamant: “Es gibt aber Fleisch darauf!” (“But there’s meat on it!”)

To which the astonished waitress replied: “Das ist doch kein Fleisch—das ist Schinken!” For emphasis, she repeated it in English: “Theht’s not meat—it’s hehm. Hehm!”

After a week of castles and churches, after a year of adjective endings and Thomas Mann, my first real and substantive German cultural learning experience was the discovery that until a unit of meat reaches a certain size, it counts as parsley.

That size, by the way, is the size of a Wurst, which in 1995 I described as “a cardiac-infarction-provoking mixture of gristle, innocent baby cows and the last place a hog’s food visits before it leaves his body,” thus making me loads of new friends on the bus. (I couldn’t say anything besides Ich bin vegetarisch in German, which means “I am suitable for a vegetarian to eat.”) The “actual meat” on offer for the normal people in the Münster group that night was Knackwurst, which gets its name (“cracking”) because it swells during cooking, and then when you bite into it, it “cracks” and spooges sausage-juice all over you, which I guess is supposed to be a positive? I tried not to watch the carnage—and also tried not to be consumed with Aschenbachian longing for my dearly departed broccoli with cheese—as I tucked into the plate of mushy spaghetti and ketchup I was brought after Layla cowed the waitress. I was lucky, though—we were in Bavaria, and if our hosts had wanted to treat us to something really special, they would have made Weißwurst, or “white sausage,” which is made from veal and fatty bacon, and so perishable that, so the saying goes, such a treat shouldn’t live to hear the church bells ring at noon.

As the tour bus continued its zigzag through the Fatherland and Herr Neudorf continued in his threats to call my muzzah, I realized that, in the words of Goethe’s Faust, from the play Faust (which I had not yet read, being an eighteen-year-old idiot interested only in Kafka and, very recently, Thomas Mann), two souls dwelled in my decidedly unvoluptuous breast.

Part of me drank in every difference, every drop of German history, which seemed equally majestic and abhorrent (I finally figured out how to use that word). That part of me enjoyed the ache of solitude as I looked out the window at the verdant landscape whizzing by, protected from a country full of strangers by a bus full of strangers. I was having, I insisted to myself, a transformative experience, changing into a grown-up thanks to a much-needed change in perspective brought on by the hundreds of years of history around me (at a safe distance, natürlich). The other part felt monstrous in my alienation—stuffed so far down into myself that nobody could reach me there, regarding the world, as Kafka wrote, with the gaze of an animal, trapped inside my own disgusting shell of otherness. The alienation was twofold: both from the language, which had the gall not to be immediately and magically understandable, and from the new American friends who shared this experience with me and yet didn’t understand the profundity of my deepest soul the way they should have after two weeks drinking beer together.

It was a good thing, then, that I was so excellent at German by the time I stumbled off the bus and into the perplexed non-embrace of my new host family, the Herrmanns, because I had no trouble using my powerful arsenal of language to express the many nuances of my inner Sturm und Drang. Wait, no: I was functionally illiterate, perpetually confused and resentful—and I imagine even all of that would have been akzeptierbar, had I not also committed the unforgivable misdeed of losing track of select personal belongings.