Dad's Travels in Europe, Christmas 1954

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.

Retro Menu: Hofbräuhaus am Platzl

Another retro menu! This one is not from a flea market—it’s from my dad! As you might know, my dad spent his junior year in college studying at the University of Paris, and naturally he did a lot of sight-seeing. One of the places he went was the famous Hofbräuhaus in Munich. I’ll tell you the story in my next post, but for now, I wanted to feature the menu.

Hofbrauhaus am Platzl Munich 1954 Menu

A very similar (almost identical!) menu is scanned and available online at the website of the New York Public Library. It’s from the same month as Dad’s (Christmas 1954), so I wonder if it had belonged to one of Dad’s fellow travelers, mostly students from Virginia’s Sweet Briar College. Hmm.

A few interesting things about this. First, although the beer hall was originally built in 1589 and remodeled extensively in 1897, it was almost completely destroyed in the bombings of World War II; only the historic beer hall itself survived. History indeed, even just in the twentieth century: It was here that Adolf Hitler had announced the goals of the Nazis at a huge gathering of a few thousand people in 1920, and the next year he was elected Führer of the Nazi Party. Yeah, right at this very beer hall. It took years to restore the building after WWII, and they didn’t get finished until 1958. So my dad was there when they were still repairing the place.

The artwork on the menu is remarkably good. Its artist, August Roeseler (1866–1934), was an accomplished character illustrator, especially when it came to depicting ordinary, middle-class folks, and dogs (he was nicknamed the “dachshund painter”), and his abilities were put to good use on this beer hall menu. The theme is obviously Gemütlichkeit!

The front cover shows all kinds of people cheerfully gathering at the HB bar for a stein of beer. It is as if the viewer is part of the crowd heading toward the bar. You can see the backs of the people ahead of you. The bartender is happily dispensing drinks. The people who are facing the viewer are super cheerful, because they’ve already secured a full stein and food for themselves! They’re heading off to their tables.

The man at the front left has a look of private, smug expectation, with his HB stein and its overflowing foam in one hand and a plate of food (a Grillhendl, or roast chicken?) in the other. He’s a heavy man, and he’s not young anymore, but he wears his hat at a rakish angle, and his eyes are crinkling as he grins beneath his big white mustache.

In the front right is a woman and man who look as if life is finally getting back the way it ought to be. The woman’s stein is as big as her head. Roeseler apparently did a lot of works with people in this pose, looking straight into the camera and smiling.

In 1954, Germans were looking for reasons to smile.

In the front middle, a boy—a child—drinks from a big stein, too. He looks something like Peter Pan with his green cap and its long, curling white feather. He’s dapper in his lederhosen, crisp shirt, and tie. When he finishes that big beer, he probably won’t look so crisp. It’s a good reminder that prohibitions against children drinking alcohol are a relatively modern concept.

In case you’re wondering, the current German drinking age varies with the situation and the type of alcohol. Beer and wine can be consumed in public places by fourteen-year-olds, if they’re accompanied by a “custodial person” such as a parent. At sixteen, beer and wine can be purchased and consumed on one’s own. But you can’t have distilled spirits (whiskey, etc.) in public until you turn eighteen. Note that German alcohol law pertains to public places. At home, childrens’ welfare, including what and how much they eat and drink, is the responsibility of their parents or guardians, who are held liable if something goes wrong.

Back to the menu. A couple of details that might be easily overlooked are in the top corners. In the upper right, the white and sky-blue ribbons (traditional colors of Bavaria) are tied decoratively around some good ol’ pretzels. On the left, black and orange ribbons suspend—well, what are they? They’re big white radishes! Munich’s traditional colors are yellow and black, so I’m not sure what the orange and black symbolize. The radishes are easier to learn about.

Radishes have long been considered part of the traditional Oktoberfest menu, along with weisswurst and other sausages, senf (mustard), pretzels, liver dumpling soup, pork shanks/pork knuckles, and so on. Thinly sliced, now often spiral-cut white radishes, Bierradi, or bier-rettich, sprinkled with salt and/or pepper is a traditional garnish/relish. Red radishes or white Asian daikon will also be fine, if you’re thinking of putting together your own Oktoberfest menu.

The back of the menu continues the theme of “people from all walks of life.” They’re parading toward the viewer, encircling the logo and name of the business, forming a colorful wreath of the German population. I wish I knew more about historic uniforms, costumes, and fashion, but clearly there are businessmen, a hikers, a few dandies, a burgermeister or two, and I’m pretty sure that’s a birdwatcher, with his binocular case around his neck, at the left. Males outnumber the females nineteen to five, and three out of the five women appear to be servers (so, sexism, duh).

At the bottom, at the front of the two lines, are two boys; one is apparently a baker’s delivery boy, with his basket of bread hooked around one arm while he holds his enormous stein up to his face with both hands. The other boy, who looks incredibly young, wears a robe and holds his stein up: prosit! I wonder if the style of robe has some meaning, with its big golden cross on the front, formed by the robe’s lining and sash. Maybe someone who reads this will shed some light on it.

Finally, at the very bottom, is a whimsical dachshund—the artist’s signature touch—carrying several links of sausage. All together now: “Awwwwwww!”

As for the rest of the menu, I’ll just provide the images. I’m loading them as large files, so you can click on them and see them better.

There’s not much I can say about them, as my German’s nothing to write home (or anywhere else) about.

Do note, however, that the top of the first column on the second page, there’s a box under the heading “Spezialitäten von Heute”: Weihnachten 1954. That dates this menu at Christmas 1954. Also, at the bottom of the first column on the first page, there’s a box that reads: “Für die Feiertage und Sylvester: Die prima Weißwurst, jede Menge auch außer Haus erhältlich!”—an advertisement for the holiday season, including New Year’s Eve, that they have plenty of white sausage (weisswurst) that (I believe they are saying) is available for carryout, as well.

So much food, and so much food for thought. I hope you enjoy looking at, and pondring, this old menu as much as I have.

Retro Menu: The Italian Room, Partenkirchner Hof Hotel

Look, another retro menu that I bought at a flea market, er, antique mall! I got it for a dollar, and what a find it is!

It’s for a restaurant called The Italian Room, at the Partenkirchner Hof Hotel, in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, Germany. It’s a resort town offering skiing in Germany’s highest alpine peak, the Zugspitze. The town was famous as the home of the 1936 Winter Olympics, where Alpine skiing made its first appearance as an Olympic sport. . . . Then the Nazis took over the hotel . . . and then the American Army monopolized after the war.

The Italian Room, which dates to the American Army’s use of the hotel, is long gone. I think this menu dates to about 1950. The Partenkirchner hotel was a “leave and rest center” for the US Army. The last line of the front of the menu reads “USAREUR Leave and Rest Center”; USAREUR means “US Army in Europe.” (Now, it’s the USAREUR-AF, since the US Army Africa was combined with it in 2020.)

The hotel is still there, having gone back into private ownership in 1959. It’s now called Reindls Partenkirchner Hof. It looks like an amazing place. You can read about its history here.

While you’re online looking at stuff, here’s another hotel in the area that has a similar history; its website has a more thorough description of postwar American presence in the area. Indeed, the different hotels in the Garmisch area served different cuisines; one offered a “Chuck Wagon Steak House,” another had a “Pagoda Room,” another had a “Hawaiian Room.” These and other cuisines moved around among different hotels.

And here’s a big long, scrolly-scrolly page of memorabilia about the US Army in Garmisch.

Anyway, I’m just sharing this menu. Remember that you can click on my blog pictures to make them bigger.

I think it’s interesting that they were offering Italian food at the literal peak of the Bavarian Alps. Perhaps this was supposed to offer American soldiers a break from the wursts, schnitzels, kartoffel, spätzle, and kraut.

I’m also amused by the artwork on the front, depicting stereotypical scenes of sunny Italia—all those lusty, rustic, romantic Italians playing guitars, dancing with tambourines, and drinking wine from a wineskin. Mamma mia!

The inside of the menu is preprinted with a color field guide to pasta shapes, so you don’t have to embarrass yourself by not knowing your mezzanelli from your bucatini, or your ragitone from your denti-delegante. You had the choice of pasta, then you could decide to have it with tomato sauce, meat sauce, meat balls, or fresh sausage. Saturdays and Sundays, the specials were lasagne and ravioli. They also served pizza, which you could customize with toppings.

I often think about how American soldiers, returning from Europe, brought back with them a love of Eye-talian and other then-exotic cuisines. Back in America, they were likely to say, Yeah, let’s go out for a pizza pie!

The “Chef’s Specials” were typed (using carbon papers; this was before photocopiers, of course) and stapled to the more permanent menu.

I’ll let you read the rest of the menu via pictures. It’s a really interesting mix of what apparently was truly fine food prepared by people who knew what they were doing, and dishes like “Cheeseburger,” “Fried Chicken,” “T-bone Steak,” and “Bacon Lettuce Tomato” sandwich—stuff familiar at any American diner.

Whenever I find something like this at a flea market, er, antique mall, I pretty much figure that it was left over from someone’s military mementos. Someone had served in Europe, as part of the USAREUS, then probably passed away, and his (yeah, probably a “his”) family or survivors jettisoned the stuff. I find it fascinating. I hope you do, too.