I recently talked to Dad about his memories of the time he went to the Munich Hofbräuhaus. I took notes, and here, I will write what he told me. I hope I’ve got all the facts and names straight.
This provides context and insight into the 1954 Hofbräuhaus am Platzl menu I posted pictures of earlier. I showed it to Dad (he’d given it to me a few years ago), and asked him to tell me about it. Apparently he’d been there around Christmas, since the menu was marked “Weihnachten 1954.”
And Dad said, “Yeah! We were there on Christmas Day! We had our evening dinner there (or maybe late afternoon).” He then told me all about this trip that he and about seven or eight other American students took over the Christmas break.
They were all studying at the University of Paris as part of the famous Sweet Briar Junior Year in France program. (Sweet Briar College is a historic women’s college in Virginia. The program is open to more than Sweet Briar College students, which is how Dad, a male University of Missouri student, could participate.) Most of the Sweet Briar students were from well-to-do families, while Dad, as you probably know if you read my blog, is the son of a barber and was born and raised in the same house as his German immigrant grandparents; he grew up in Jefferson City’s Germantown neighborhood among people who didn’t own cars, who scrimped and saved, made do with what they had, and who made their own sauerkraut.
So the reminiscences flowed. Dad said none in their group spoke German (though clearly, they got by okay; this was a group of American college students who had proven their ability to speak French). Most of them were “girls” (yeah, girls: this is Dad’s terminology; it would be weird for me to call them young women while relaying his story to you). So, one of the girls—Kay Ingersoll—had an older sister who had done the Junior Year in France thing a few years earlier, so she had made suggestions, and Kay and her friends had gotten the whole mini-trip lined up—the itinerary, the train tickets, the lodging, etc. All Dad and the other students had to do was bring their passports, be prepared to secure visas at the borders, and have spending money for meals and such.
Off They Went!
So, from Paris, they took the train to Strasbourg, and then crossed the border into Germany. They spent their first night in Heidelberg, where Dad remembered the weather was “dreary.” They then traveled through Stuttgart, which was dreary in a different way, since as a major manufacturing town, it had been demolished in World War II (remember, Dad was there in December 1954, less than a decade after the war ended). “We didn’t stop in Stuttgart.”
Munich
Then it was on to Munich! They arrived on Christmas Eve. They spent two nights and did a lot of sightseeing. Some of them, including my Dad, a Protestant, attended Christmas Eve Mass at the big, most famous cathedral in the heart of Munich—I guess this is the Frauenkirche, which dates clear back to 1468. Dad remembers it was crowded, and that everyone in there was wearing black. (Dad has always had an aversion to wearing black; it’s so dreary!) Dad and his friends were seated in the back of the cathedral.
One detail about that evening sticks out in his memory—the interior walls of the cathedral had just been painted, and they were glistening white. The place smelled like paint! Germany was busy repairing things after the war.
On Christmas Day, they walked around, seeing all they could see. Dad remembers visiting one of the big squares where Hitler had massed his troops. To Dad, who had grown up during World War II watching news reels and memorizing details of German and Japanese planes, this must have been impressive. Also, as the son of German immigrants, he must have always felt an odd conflict about the wars with Germany. He’s always explained that he and his family, as patriotic American citizens, never felt they were at war with the German people; they were fighting the Kaiser in World War I; they were fighting the Nazis in World War II. So to him, Germany represented a homeland that wasn’t particularly his (it was his grandparents’), while also the homeland of America’s recent enemies.
I was imagining Dad so far away from home on Christmas Day, and I asked Dad if he had ever made a pricey transcontinental phone call to his parents while he was in Europe. “Oh, no! Never once! I sent home plenty of postcards and letters.” He recalled one or two of the Sweet Briar girls phoning home once, but it was basically for emergency use.
The Hofbräuhaus Meal
Dad and his chums had their evening Christmas meal there. At THE Hofbräuhaus am Platzl. The HB mothership. He remembers it was crowded and noisy, but he’s not sure if the other people were mostly tourists, or locals, or both. In general on the trip, they didn’t see many tourists—whether European or from elsewhere—in Germany or the other countries they visited, either. Europeans didn’t have any money for traveling in 1954!
In the great German beer hall, the eight or nine American college students were all seated together on one long table—close together, in the time-honored beer hall fashion.
“What did you get?”
“We all had beer!” Dad couldn’t remember what food they’d ordered. He said none of them could read the menu. I asked if they might have had goose. But goose might’ve been kind of expensive for their student pocketbooks, so maybe it was something else. Dad thinks they probably all ordered the same thing.
Another thing that stuck in Dad’s mind: one of the fellows in his group, Steve Schneider, got a charley horse in his leg! He abruptly jumped up and hollered in pain. Dad had never heard of a charley horse before (really Dad, really?), but he learned about it then. The sudden commotion made an impression on him. Steve had almost upset the dishes on the table as he sprang up in his agony!
Continuing the Trip
The day after Christmas, they hopped on the train and traveled to Salzburg, where the weather was still dreary. Dad remembers taking the tour of Mozart’s house and marveling at how little and narrow it seemed; “how’d they get a piano in there?” Dad also saw several of the places that would later be made famous in the movie The Sound of Music.
After Salzburg, they continued on the train to cross the first range of the Alps and spent two nights in Innsbruck.
Dad remembers taking the funicular (short cable railway) up the north side of the mountain; there were (and still are) two stages to get to the top. Dad described it as a tourist place; there were twenty or thirty people up there, walking around in the snow fields. Dad said he wasn’t prepared for it. He was wearing cheap black leather shoes he’d bought in Paris. The final trail to the top was less than 500 feet, and there was a wire cable to hold.
At the Kitzbühel, another summit in the Tyrol, Dad remembered the spectacular view on that sunny day: Standing in Austria, he could see Germany to the north and Italy to the south.
The Trip Continues
Dad remembered that the meals were always good. “They served us lots of bread! Good French loaves, or whatever. We put it in our pockets, the girls put it in their purses . . . and the waiters kept bringing it!”
He also remembered traveling west through the panhandle of Austria (the Tirol) and through Lichtenstein (they didn’t get off the train there) and to Switzerland. Dad said the customs agents at the border into Switzerland were really persnickety, taking their time to read everyone’s passports and visas.
The next stops were at Lucerne and Interlaken, in the Swiss Alps, where they did more sightseeing. In Lucerne, they saw the famous Kapellbrücke covered bridge with numerous paintings inside it, and the Löwendenkmal, or dying lion sculpture.
They took the special cog train that climbed the steep slope of the Grindelwald, where they went on real, bona fide horse-drawn sleigh rides, with jingle bells and everything, about four people at a time, through the mountain village.
Back at Interlaken, it was New Year’s Eve, and Dad and the other students, looking off a porch at their hotel, looked and listened for signs of celebrations, but there were none. Finally, at midnight, a waiter or the manager brought them each a glass of champagne.
Bern and Return
The group split up. Some of the richer students continued their tour by visiting friends or family in Europe, while Dad and the rest ended with one night in Bern. There was not much to do, since they left that night from the Bahnhof train station and took and all-night train to Paris. Around midnight, at the last stop in Switzerland/at customs at the French border, the travelers tried to ditch their Swiss francs so they wouldn’t have to exchange it for a fee in France.
There were hawkers on the platform who took advantage of the opportunity of travelers wanting to use up their Swiss money. They walked under the train windows and sold oranges to the travelers. Yes, even in the middle of the night. So Dad and his friends bought all these oranges, the train pulled out of the station, and they continued “rumbling around” through the night. “We must’ve gone through Dijon.”
At some point on the journey home, they finally opened the oranges and discovered they were red inside! They’d never seen such a thing. They didn’t want to arrive back in Paris and be sick, so . . . they threw the perfectly good, beautiful blood oranges out the windows, aiming for trees and what-not. “What fools we were!” Ah, hindsight.
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