Villa Osouf 1925
The young man on the right in this photo is my father at age 20, playing chess with his friend Gustav Lamb in a suburb of Paris in the year 1925. On the back of the photo he wrote (in German): Mein Freund Gustav und ich beim Schachspiel in BoisColombes Read More ...
Waiting for Lindbergh, 1927
On May 21, 1927, my father was in the crowd of more than 100,000 people who gathered at this airfield near Paris to await the arrival of Charles Lindbergh at the end of his transatlantic solo flight, the first one ever. So that’s why I decided to take a not-terribly-nice Read More ...
German Emigration Center
Bremerhaven, as the name implies, is the harbor city belonging to the city of Bremen, which is 50 km upstream on the Weser River. Over a period of 150 years, an estimated 7.2 million emigrants sailed from the various wharves of Bremerhaven to begin a new life in the New Read More ...
Welcome to the 1930s
Boulogne-Billancourt is the largest suburb of Paris, which makes it the second largest city in the Île-de-France, after Paris itself. Although I am not a big fan of 1930s architecture, I must admit that Boulogne-Billancourt (pronunciation here) has an unusually high concentration of public and private buildings from that decade. Read More ...
Travel by way of Cherbourg in 1931
My recent visit to Cherbourg, France, has reminded me of a minor mystery in my family’s past, namely my father’s eleven-week trip to Europe in 1931. He was 26 at the time, single, living in Chicago and working for a wholesale costume jewelry company called Morris, Mann & Reilly Inc. Read More ...
Phuoc Vinh 1964
Phước Vĩnh in 1964 was the capital of Phước Thành (“Happiness”) province and the headquarters of something called the PBT Special Zone, which started a few miles north of Saigon and extended all the way to the Cambodian border, a distance of eighty to a hundred miles depending on which Read More ...
Mitterrand and the Panthéon
Every time I ride past the Panthéon in Paris I am reminded of a man I met in Berkeley, California when I was living there in 1967. I was working at that time as News Director of a non-commercial radio station. In the mornings I always walked to work, and one Read More ...
The ten thousand nine hundred and fifty ninth day
This is a story about my thirtieth birthday that I wrote a few years later. Copyright © 1975 by Remington Review, Inc. As a young man I don’t think I ever once explicitly wondered what I would be doing on my 30th birthday. Which is just as well because if Read More ...
The Old Opera in Frankfurt
When I first moved to Frankfurt in 1970 we lived in a fourth-floor apartment not far from the city center. From our bathroom window we could see the ruins of the old opera house (Alte Oper) with trees growing out of the upper floors. The trees were quite tall by Read More ...
Rostock 1989
It wasn’t planned that way, but my first visit to Rostock came at a major turning point in recent German history. I arrived there on 14 November 1989, just five days after the opening of the Berlin Wall and four days after the opening of the heavily fortified fence, wall Read More ...
Künzelsau
Künzelsau is a town of 14,925 people located 92 km northeast of Stuttgart and 123 km west of Nürnberg. The name Künzelsau means Cunzilio’s (Conrad’s) meadow — not his sow, as I used to think before I realized where the syllables should be divided. Actually, I wasn’t the only one who Read More ...
Prince Regent Theater in Munich
Bavaria at the turn of the 20th century was a kingdom within an empire. The king, Otto I, was insane, so he was kept locked up in a castle behind high walls while the kingdom was run by his uncle, Prince Regent Luitpold (1824-1912). During the twenty-six years of his Read More ...