And now in Berlin

This evening we said good-bye to our Dutch driver, John. Auf Wiedersehen! Tschuss! He’s been great: flexible, good-humored, an excellent driver. We marveled at the corners he turned and how he skillfully maneuvered the bus into tight spaces. When traffic jams were reported, he spent his break using a paper map to find a better way.

He made a funny joke. I’m not sure it translates well, but I’ll give it a try. In Bavaria, in southern Germany, the common greeting is ‘Gruss Gott!’ (Greet God). Trying to be authentic, I boarded the bus on our Munich morning with a sunny “Gruss Gott!” He replied, “I’m not going that far today.” Confused, I asked him if I’d used the wrong greeting for the area. No, he replied, it’s something we say: we aren't planning to go all the way to heaven today. Dutch dry humor.

It’s been cold all day and then rainy as we entered Berlin. We’ll stay here two nights and fly back to Boston Thursday morning. It’s been a wonderful experience, but we’re both ready to be at home in our own bed.

I’ve fallen in love, again, with Germany and the German language. It’s the land of my heritage: my dad’s mother’s parents spoke German and were born in Prussia. My mom’s mother, Lola Marie Bader, came from German stock as well. Because of that, I chose to study German in junior and senior high school and continued in college, reading Goethe and Schiller.

After Cologne, we stayed at medieval Bacharach, on the Rhine, and toured Rothenburg, another medieval town. Then we rode to Bavaria and toured King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein Castle, Oktoberfest in Munich (it's so much more than beer), and Nuremberg.

Then we drove into the former East Germany. Having studied German and Germany in the 1970s, when Germany was divided by the Iron Curtain, I never expected to visit this part of the world. Erfurt, a beautiful, modern city with a medieval old town that wasn’t bombed during World War II, is where Martin Luther became a priest and later a monk and professor at the university. In Wartenburg castle, we saw the room where he hid out and translated the New Testament into the modern German language he crafted.

Today we visited Dresden, which has risen from the ashes of the February 13, 1945, fire-bombing, introduced to my generation by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five.

I’d love to visit Germany again. I could stay in many of these places for longer to enjoy their beauty and explore their history. But I won’t say ‘sicher’. When I was 16 years old, as I prepared to go back home after my summer in Germany, my German mother said she hoped I’d return to Germany and visit them. I enthusiastically said, "Sicher!" “Was meinst du, sicher?” (What do you mean by certainly?)

She explained that she had already had a heart attack (she was about 35 years old) and that nothing was certain in life. It was sobering. A few years later, I learned that she had died. “Was meinst du, sicher?”

Yes, indeed.