“Münster has a famous poet who comes from here, you know,” said Frau Herrmann.
“Annette von Droste-Hülshoff,” mumbled both daughters in unison, in the tone I use when I say dental X-rays.
Herr Herrmann took another corner like a Formula-Eins driver, and his wife let loose a guttural stream of invective I didn’t come close to understanding.
“Mein Gott, Mädchen!” he answered. (He’d called his wife “girl,” and I was pretty sure that was an insult.)
When the Herrmanns pulled their gleaming black Bey-Emm-Vay into their driveway and gave me the grand tour of my new digs, I did my best to play it cool—like, I’ve seen rich people before, obviously. But I hadn’t, really. Not up close. Not in their natural environs. The Herrmanns, for example, had a swimming pool in their basement, albeit a petite one. (Right next to the tanning bed, obviously.) They also had their own ballet studio down there, which, since I had listed “dance” as one of my Interesse on my application, was why I got placed with them at all. The basement also contained a sauna, an elaborate party room with a wet bar, and an entire autonomous one-bedroom apartment with its own entrance—residence of Christoph, and primary reason for my not seeing him for weeks. The main floor of the Herrmann house was somewhat less opulent, as was the top story, where the girls and I had our bedrooms. My little room was modest—dorm-sized, with a twin bed and a small skylight instead of a window—but it did have its own television, a luxury I had never before experienced. Despite my growing stack of flash cards and the magic of two entire weeks of immersion, I was still very much a beginner, so my German hindrances meant the dizzying array of channels was lost on me. As a result, I ended up watching many hours of VIVA (at the time Germany’s answer to MTV), due to its English-language videos. This primarily involved prolonged exposure to boy bands, which hadn’t yet experienced their renaissance Stateside. On my first night with the Herrmanns, Lisette commanded me to sleep as long as I wanted. I took her literally, stayed up half the night watching the tube, and then didn’t pad back downstairs until one the next afternoon.
“Oh, there you are!” said Frau Herrmann. “I thought you’d died.”
The next day, our group began language class in two unused classrooms of a high school near the Prinzipalmarkt, Münster’s main town square. It’s a beautiful plaza, all cobblestones and postcard-perfect triangular medieval façades, but one of the first things I learned about it was that it was fake. The original had been destroyed in the Second World War, and in its place the West Germans, in West German fashion, built an exact replica, down to the three alarming baskets that hang from the steeple of the central church, the originals of which once displayed the corpses of the Anabaptists who had briefly overtaken the region in the sixteenth century.
At school, Herr Neudorf’s first conversation assignment for us was to describe our host families to the best of our limited abilities. Since my rudimentary skills precluded tact, I simply proclaimed, “Sie sind reich” (“They’re rich”). I wondered if they were nouveaux-riche or old-money types. If it had been about two hundred years earlier, there would have been no question: either they’d have a nice von in their name to signify an aristocratic family, or they wouldn’t. And if they were aristocrats, even if I was cash-loaded and they were cash-poor, as a commoner I would have been considered a different and inferior species of person. In the eighteenth century, in fact, there was an entire genre of drama called the bürgerliches Trauerspiel, the “bourgeois tragedy,” which was usually about a common woman falling in love with a man from the nobility and getting pregnant, and the man attempting to avoid the ensuing disgrace of a Missheirat, or “mismarriage.” The “tragedy” part of the bourgeois tragedy was almost always death: of the infant, the woman, or both. One play from 1776 dispenses with all subtlety and is just called Die Kindermörderin (The Child-Murderess); it depicts a girl puncturing the skull of her newborn with a knitting needle. Back in the “bourgeois tragedy” days, in fact, infanticide was so common that authorities who suspected a girl of secretly bearing and then killing a baby had a method of force-milking her to prove she’d recently been pregnant. It was a fun time for all, I’m sure, and the Herrmanns’ tanning bed and Schwimmbad didn’t seem so bad in comparison. Still, even in the cosmopolitan nineties, it kind of did still feel as if we were different species.
I never did figure out how they got their money. When I asked what the dad did for a living, the girls said a word I’d never heard (and don’t remember), and then defined it by explaining: “He helps people with [something something] money [something],” which I took to mean that he was an accountant. Alas, despite all of my As and my flash cards and my Freshman Achievement Award, I did not understand upward of 90 percent of what went on in that house at any given time. Is the mother angry about something, or is that just the way Germans talk? Is she talking about me? (The mother’s job, incidentally, was a word I knew: Hausfrau.) At any rate, soon after my arrival, some sort of calamity whose exact nature I never figured out befell Herr Herrmann’s workplace. Robbery? Flood? Fire? Once again, it was described using a word I didn’t know and I was too ashamed to ask about. But whatever happened, the Herrmanns were distraught about the irreplaceable valuables that had been lost, and this, along with Herr Herrmann’s odd private antique money collection, led me to believe that perhaps he was not an accountant, but some sort of top-level numismatist.
Either way, his line of money-related work resulted in enough money for him that he could reward himself with a well-deserved dip in his very own pool whenever he liked. I discovered this in the least-comfortable way possible, when, one Sunday afternoon, I tiptoed down the basement stairs to visit the ballet studio and sensed that I wasn’t alone. A quick peek to my left confirmed this suspicion and seared into my retinas the indelible image of Herr Herrmann’s bronzed and bare rear end, as he plunged into his hard-earned pool in the nude (the state in which he obviously also used the Solarium). I thanked every possible deity that the splash covered up the sound of my pointe shoes clattering to the floor, then grabbed them as fast as I could and scuttled back up the stairs.
“Is Papa still swimming?” asked Lisette as I surfaced, wondering if she could see on my face that I’d just seen her father’s naked butt cheeks wobbling as he sprang into the water. I managed to creak out a ja before hustling back upstairs to the safety of my pocket-sized prudish enclave, whereupon I cleared a path through the discarded garments on the floor and looked briefly at the tiny, yellow German Reclam paperback edition of Kafka short stories I’d recently bought. Despite the seven-point type and Kafka’s hundred-mark vocabulary, I now understood the entire first two sentences of “Das Urteil,” which I supposed pitiful non-German-speakers such as not myself would still call “The Judgment” in their monolingual ignorance. This was an excellent development—but that story had a naked dad in it, too, so it made for a poor distraction.
Heart still pulsing in my temples, I flopped onto the bed and watched a video by the British boy group Take That for the seven hundredth time to calm myself. The squat lead singer, Gary, was promising me that whatever he said or did, he didn’t mean it. He just wanted me back for good. Christ, Gary, I thought, you should know what you did. But these boy bands, they never stopped being huge in Germany, even as America rejected them for Pearl Jam and the like. “We don’t understand the words to any of the English songs,” Lisette had explained to me. “But we like them anyhow.” I suppose that would explain the gem that played directly after “Back for Good,” a truly obscene American song about cunnilingus called “Lick It” that no German understood, bless them. Then, as “Common People” by Pulp came on (which I had the good sense to recognize as one of the best songs of that or any decade), I heard someone futzing around outside my room and held my breath. Frau Herrmann, back to do her Sauberkeitspolizei, her cleanliness policing.
I may have been scandalized by Herr Herrmann’s adoption of the universally accepted German preference for Freikörperkultur, or nudism (literally “free body culture”), but that was nothing compared to Frau Herrmann’s terror at how I kept my room. Despite being well off, the Herrmanns did not employ a housekeeper, and instead every Herrmann was a fanatic and constant cleaner-upper. The Herrmann daughters’ rooms—suites, rather—were spotless at all times. Whereas for me, one of the most joyous aspects of moving out of my parents’ house at the age of seventeen had been breaking free of the constant bellyaching of Sharon Schuman, Ph.D., in regards to the state of my own quarters, in which a few square inches of floor were visible on a good day. I had reveled in my college dorm’s dearth of neatness policing, so much so that even when my habit of leaving bags of Top Ramen on the floor resulted in an influx of loud, MSG-sated mice, I simply—to the horror of my neat roommate—picked up the half-empty, gnawed-apart packages, threw them away, and shrugged. I tried my best to be considerate about common spaces, but I was an adult, goddammit, and my adult autonomy would be expressed through squalor. Given that I was unable to articulate this philosophical stance to my hosts, the state of my tiny bedroom became a constant source of tension between Frau Herrmann and myself.
On my seventh day of school, I came home to find that the dirty clothes in my room had been washed, dried, and folded; the bed had been made (the “correct” way, with the duvet folded sideways); even my Aschenbachian collection of eyeliners and hair dye had been arranged on a vanity tray in an orderly fashion. When I came back downstairs to get a glass of water—straight from the tap, which prompted a gasp and “Aber das ist ungesund!” (“That’s unhealthy!”) from Gisela—Frau Herrmann looked up from scrubbing the kitchen counter and said: “I hope you don’t mind that I straightened up your room. It was a little bit messy in there.”
“Nein,” I said. “Oder … ja. Nein, kein Problem? Ja, es ist OK?”
I can’t even do passive-aggressiveness in English, so this was not going to end well. And anyway, instead of taking the hint and cleaning up my act, I took her entry into a room in her own house as a gross violation of my personal space, my Lebensraum, my habitat, the little closet-sized cushion of sovereignty I needed around myself for just a few hours every day, in order to feel safe. Of course I wasn’t about to say that to the Herrmanns—and definitely not with the word Lebensraum, which, like the word Arier (Aryan) or the last names Himmler and Goebbels, had been co-opted by the Nazis enough to taint them during everyday usage (many Germans with those surnames, not to mention You-Know-Who’s, changed them after the war). In the case of Lebensraum—once a rather harmless word popular in the natural and social sciences—Germans started using it around the turn of the twentieth century to describe the way they “needed” to “settle” (i.e., colonize and oppress) some of the surrounding countries in order to “survive” (I’m not sure they knew what that word meant). During the Third Reich, the Nazis invoked the term to justify the annexation of everything they could get their Sieg Heil–ing little paws on, so as to possess enough agricultural riches to create a pastoral idyll for the Übermenschen (another word, courtesy of Nietzsche, that can’t be used without invoking Nazis). Since I possessed neither the chutzpah nor the linguistic facility to discuss the nuances of Lebensraum with Frau Herrmann, I made the other logical choice: I smiled and nodded at her all day long, but started referring to her in my artisanal homemade travel journal as die Drachenfrau (a literal and inappropriate translation of “the Dragon Lady”). And then, rather than be subjected to more mild criticism, I proceeded to shut the entire Herrmann family out, to treat their house like a really inconveniently located hotel. I stopped going home for lunch, or Mittagessen (literally, “midday-food”) which is traditionally Germans’ biggest meal, and which would have been my primary venue for linguistic immersion, a.k.a. magic. I didn’t think I would be missing much, really, since from what I could tell it mostly involved Frau Herrmann immersing potatoes in béchamel sauce and frowning at me while everyone else enjoyed a nice Wurst and I went at the potatoes one-handed with fork only, barbarian that I was. (I’m sure Kelly ate the “correct” way, two-handedly, with a deftly brandished knife and fork.)
Instead of interacting with actual Germans, the ostensible purpose of this expensive study-abroad program, I hung out on the Prinzipalmarkt every day with Freddie, Anneke, Layla, and Justin, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and coffee. Outside of our strictly delineated German study sessions (during which we admittedly studied pretty hard), we spoke mostly English with each other, and usually had our lunch picnic style in the vicinity of the corpse-baskets, which then bled into hours of “hanging out” at Der bunte Vogel (The Colorful Bird), a pub where we honed our beer-ordering skills and pilfered the colorful cardboard coasters as souvenirs. Anneke downed gargantuan ice-cream sundaes every afternoon and still managed to keep her comely, translucent-skinned bod (obviously something to do with the Dutch metabolism); Layla insisted we all crush our soda cans and hand them to her, so that she could add them to the recycling station at her host family’s house; Justin seemed to survive entirely on Guinness; and Freddie often brought his clarinet to school so that he could half-busk and half-practice in the park on nice days. I was sure this counted as cultural immersion somehow. I mean, Anneke was Dutch, for fuck’s sake, and since we were less than a hundred kilometers from the Netherlands in a town where everyone and his dog had a bicycle, she was pretty much a Münster native.
I could afford to while away my days in this decadent fashion because for lunch, it cost me less than a dollar to procure a Käsebrötchen (a roll with cheese baked into the top of it) and a warm can of Schwip Schwap, a mixture of cola and orange soda that sounds like it would be vile but is actually delicious. Indeed, I scarcely even noticed the fact that I was missing out on a good 90 percent of what Germans consider acceptable food, so enamored was I of the grocery store and Bäckerei, purveyor of something the Germans referred to with a cognate I knew—Brot—but which relegated everything I had heretofore defined as “bread” to the status of aggressive glue. Germans’ Brot has about as much in common with American bread as the Hubble telescope has with squinting really hard at what you think is Orion. Our bread is so paltry in comparison that Germans call it Toasts, because they know the only way to camouflage its glutinous mediocrity is to char it beyond recognition. I was duly enamored with everything the bakery had on offer, from my daily Käsebrötchen to the dense, tender whole-grain bread, in constant supply at the Herrmanns’, which I would slather in Nutella for my midmorning “break snack” at school, a German tradition I’d adopted with aplomb.
It was, however, in my failure to adopt other important German cultural mores with similar enthusiasm that my real conflict with the Herrmanns soon emerged. In my defense, much of my failure was rooted not in malice, but in my propensity to smile and nod when spoken to, in all situations—with, perhaps, a wider smile and a more enthusiastic nod for conversations in which my comprehension ranged in the single-digit percentage. It is possible, then, that I was technically told that local land-line calls in Germany are charged by the minute, before I got in the habit of gabbing in English with my friends every night. I’m sure Herr Herrmann watched the time click by and counted it off in antique Nazi Reichsmarks (which he collected and kept in a binder, and showed me one day when he found out I was selectively Jewish). As did he, I’m sure, every time I showered—which, unlike Germans, with their far more reasonable twice-weekly bathing schedules, I did every single morning, oftentimes to such extravagant lengths that I would disrupt the girls’ routines and make them late. (I’m sure Kelly was so naturally floral that she did not need to Bath & Body Works raspberry-cassis-exfoliate to keep herself fresh, and just emerged every morning from her immaculately kept room looking dewy and smelling like fucking gardenias.)
Again, all of this was an accident. How was I to know that a phone call to Herr Schmidt two houses away cost damn near as much as one to my parents in Oregon? How was I to know that ten minutes of hot running water cost almost as much as the down payment on one of those sleek black Beemers in the driveway? Just because they told me? That would have involved actually admitting that I did not understand what was going on in the house, which would have meant admitting that I didn’t speak German very well, which was in stark contrast to how I was doing in my now-intermediate classes, in which I was still the tippy-top student, which was supposed to count for something. Granted, I had one class where all we did was learn idioms and vernacular phrases—from a book written in 1969, effectively rendering our conversational speech dangerously close to Wild-and-Crazy-Guy levels of cultural soundness. To this day I have never found the occasion to say Ich hab’ mein Schäfchen ins Trockene gebracht, which literally means “I’ve brought my sheep in from the rain.”
So I smiled and nodded at things I did not understand:
“Do you [verb preposition noun article preposition article article] Amsterdam [endless compound noun] dirty [verb verb verb]?”
“[nod].”
“Did you [verb verb] with the [either two nouns or a compound noun] in the [noun] by the [noun]?”
“[nod].”
And in this way, I accidentally ran up a massive tab on this unsuspecting family—in possession of such a spectacular abode probably due to their frugality—all while openly resenting what I took more and more to be their intractable, unapologetic Aryanness. I wasted their money, I messed up their rooms, I scoffed at their food—and aside from a few amused family viewings of Die Simpsons dubbed (episodes I knew by heart, so had no trouble following), I scarcely spent two minutes partaking in the hospitality they had specifically signed up to give. And yet, all of this would have been easily dismissed as quirk, had I not also—once again without intent—maybe put their house and all of its trappings in some eensy weensy danger of being robbed.
It all started because Freddie’s host family left town, and he invited Anneke, Layla, Justin, and me to come hang out at his house. I still don’t know why a bunch of adults of legal drinking age, in a welcoming, inexpensive city with innumerable parks, fountains, cobblestoned pedestrian squares, and reasonably priced purveyors of Eiskaffee (which is not iced coffee, but the far better coffee with a giant scoop of ice cream), felt the need to go “hang out” at some random German house in the suburbs, but there’s no accounting for the caprices of youth. Getting to Freddie’s required me to transfer buses, and it was either in the confusion of the transfer process (again, the “why” of this is lost on me, as German bus timetables and maps are unsurprisingly well-organized), or the distraction of riding with my friends rather than my Walkman and Pulp Fiction soundtrack, that my Stash Sacks purse, made of 100 percent hemp, disappeared from my possession.
Was it stolen? Did I just up and lose it? I don’t know—but I do know that it wasn’t until I was halfway up Freddie’s walkway that I even noticed it was gone, and that I only ended up getting to “hang out” at his house for forty-five minutes anyway, because then this happened:
A leathery, middle-aged German woman wearing a visor stormed into the house without knocking and began unleashing a diatribe as she grabbed the nearest window shade, which was up, and yanked it down—with an amount of violence that would have been right at home at Dachau, come to think of it. “[something something something] not [preposition verb verb verb] every day!!!” she screamed. Layla was the only one in our group who could even begin to understand her, and attempted to defend Freddie against whatever window-dressing-related transgression he’d committed: “He didn’t [something something noun preposition verb verb]!” The woman just glared at us and then stomped back out the door.
“Who the fuck was that?” I asked.
“The neighbor,” said Freddie, and took a fortifying swig from his room-temperature mineral water.
“What did you do?” asked Justin, as he removed his putrid baseball cap and gave his head a rub.
“I have no idea,” Freddie said. “I have got to stop smiling and nodding when my host-mom says shit to me.”
“I’m guessing it had something to do with the windows,” said Justin.
“No kidding. I think you guys should probably take off.”
I no longer had my bus pass, nor any currency or identification, but I could ride the bus anyway, because much of German public transportation operates on the honor system. Riders who already have passes are actually encouraged to board a bus by its rear doors to minimize traffic, and a plainclothes ticket agent (or Kontrolleur) will pop up at random intervals to check passengers’ passes and fine offenders (called, uncomfortably, Schwarzfahrer, or “black riders”). So for a treacherous forty-five minutes, I “rode black” back to the Herrmanns’, where I was to face their wrath. (Let’s just say that Kelly somehow managed to live an entire month in their midst and not lose anything important or jeopardize their very hearth and home, like some sort of magic goddamned sorceress.)
“Wie war’s?” asked Frau Herrmann, as I scuttled into the kitchen. (How was it?)
I answered, in my best German, “Nicht so gut. My purse is getting stolen gotten on top of the bus.”
She set down her tiny glass of room-temperature mineral water in alarm. “Und dein Schlüssel?” She wanted to know if my house key was in there.
“Ja,” I answered mournfully.
