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I never wanted to study German. Has anyone? An ignorant youth, I was forced to do it because of a plot by my college advisor and his buddies over in the German Department to put asses in German 101 seats. They told me French was full, which I now know was a lie.

Now I was at the halfway point in my Junior Year Abroad in Germany, more than ready to come home. The narrow-mindedness, obsessiveness, and bossiness evinced by nine-tenths of Germans was becoming vieux jeu.

At least I had made an American friend in Germany: Karen. I talk a lot; she talked a lot more. We preferred to speak our native American English. People assumed we were boy- and girlfriend, but we were both girlfriends. Her parents back home were German immigrants to the United States, so Karen had German relatives in Germany. So it was that we travelled to Cologne for the holiday break to stay with her Uncle Eintag and Aunt Kasamira in their tiny apartment.

Karen explained on the train ride that these two were Germany’s answer to Archie and Edith Bunker, but from the other side of World War II. The losing side. We laughed.

Tante (Aunt) Kassy (short for Kasamira) looked exactly as I imagined Karen, her niece, would look in 40 years. Her eyes rolled around kind of involuntarily while she talked, and she punctuated her rapid-fire, pitch-modulated German with “Ne? ne?” and “Hm, hm.” Karen told me that poor teenaged Tante Kassy had had to be dragged screaming and crying to the Deutsche Mädels, the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth. Karen had been told about this in confidence by her father, Tante Kassy’s brother. The dark years under Hitler were not talked about by people of that generation.

Arriving in the too-well-heated abode on the fourth floor of a post-war apartment building on the “newer” side of the Rhine, we were greeted with hugs from Kassy and a sizing-up glance from Eintag, who was reading a book called “How to Make Trains Run on Time.” He gave us a forced smile, then told us where we would sleep. Karen would sleep on a trundle bed at the foot of their bed. I would sleep on the big, sloppy tan-leather couch in the living room.

The relatives arrived for the traditional opening of gifts. It was Christmas Eve. It made Tante Kassy visibly uncomfortable that I used the “formal you” (“Sie”) when speaking to her and the other adult relatives. She clucked, “Alles ‘du,’ ne? Hm?” “Let’s all just use the familiar you, okay? Yeah? Hm?” Eintag barked the German equivalent of “Stifle!” Kassy winced at being interrupted yet again. Eintag strongly objected to her suggestion that we all be “du,” insisting we all stick to the formal you. Then he explained to us in his “You are dumb Americans” voice why it was so important to have both a formal and an informal “you” in any language. He talked for 20 minutes about this.

He interrupted everyone who opened their mouth to talk. It seemed there was nothing he didn’t think he knew. No subject he wouldn’t crinkle up his face and dissertate on, at page, then chapter, then book, then Encyclopedia Germannica (A-Z) length. On and on and on. Always they were arcane topics, such as “medieval coins and medallions.” Or boring, quotidian subjects like “household insects.” Never people, which could have been more interesting. I read once that when he was an art student Adolf Hitler made quite elaborate architectural and landscape drawings, but never included any people in his sketches. Hm.

Neither Eintag nor Tante Kassy spoke one word of English. I guess they didn’t teach it back in the late ’30s, when they were in school. Meanwhile we barely knew our prepositions in German, let alone the specialized vocabulary of railroad construction and operations.

This was linguistic immersion. Like being forcibly held under water. With a boot on your neck. Like false imprisonment: False immersion.

In English, using as much profanity as we wanted to because they couldn’t understand us, we plotted an early escape from Eintag’s apartment-sized dictatorship. A ride share — like hitchhiking, but it’s prearranged and you pay part of the gas — to Berlin and then on to Prague.

Kassy, who seemed to feel guilty about her complicity in Eintag’s regime of conversational totalitarianism, packed us a giant, truly absurd basket full of sandwiches and cookies for our voyage. Cookies fix everything. The three of us, Karen, Tante Kassy and I, then trudged mostly silently through the cold whipping winds across the quarter-mile-long Deutz Bridge.

We stood at the appointed place outside an office building for 10, 20, 30… then 40 minutes. Germans are never late. Where were our ride-share folks? It got dark, and colder. Finally Tante Kassy noticed a handwritten note taped to the window by where we were standing. Three deadly words: “Fahrt fällt aus.” Ride is cancelled. No further explanation.

Karen’s and my devastation was measurable in emotional tons, and Tante Kassy could not help but see it. Karen was almost in tears over our thwarted escape. “Well, we just have to make the best of it,” I muttered in English. Tante Kassy cocked her head, and just let out a couple of sad, disjointed “Ne”s and “Hm”s.

Aunt Kassy had given me a couple of small presents for Christmas: a deck of Skat cards (she thought that was how my name was spelled, and found that amusing; phonetically, they are the same!) and a Little Drummer Boy tree ornament from the Weihnachtsmarkt, but I hadn’t given her and Eintag anything. Callow, thoughtless kid that I was.

Then I thought of a Christmas present I could give to all of us. We entered the apartment and sure enough Eintag was standing there with a constipated look on his face. We all sat in the parlor by the Christmas tree and Kassy put the cookies and sandwiches on the coffee table and got us some beers for the expected long lecture by Eintag on the merits of train travel versus those of automobile travel.

The Tannenbaum had just emitted a cracking sound when I said, in my halting German: “Mr. Conductor”– that would be the way to address a former conductor for the German Railroad–“Will you tell us a story about your youth?”

Tante Kassy’s face dropped, because no one had invited Eintag to talk in decades, if ever. He just did it unbidden. For a moment all of the shame she felt for being married to this insufferable bore and bully melted away.

Karen gawked at me. Eintag’s animation was suspended, too. He peered at me through his bifocals.

He started in that condescending tone: “Well, German cities were much more beautiful in my youth. Nuremberg was really stellar…” and Eintag began to describe that city for us. I interrupted him: “Yes, but I want to hear about you. You! Not places or things.” I smiled sweetly. He looked annoyed and tried to continue his verbal travelogue of Nuremberg.

Again I interrupted. “Like, for instance, were you in any government-sponsored clubs or organizations?” Eintag closed his mouth. “You know, like, any training programs? To make you… into… what you are?”

Let’s just say it was a Silent Night after that.

That was 20 years ago. Both Tante Kassy and Eintag are still alive; because of a stroke, though, Eintag has difficulty speaking. Kassy gets to talk all she wants now. She loves to gossip good-naturedly. For years after our visit, she hounded Karen about “Skat” and whether he was Karen’s boyfriend. Finally Karen told her the truth, and she declared triumphantly, “Aha! I knew it! Ne? Hm?”

They both enjoy their grandchildren and their one great-grandchild, I hear. All of the grandkids speak fluent English, of course. By choice. That means they can tell secrets in front of Eintag and Kassy… but not vice versa.

Tags: Adolf Hitler, All in the Family, Archie Bunker, Christmas, Cologne, Deutsche Mädels, Deutz, Edith Bunker, Hitler Youth, Junior Year Abroad, Köln, Nazism, World War II