While I could tell you I chose to study abroad for an academic year, first in Vienna, Austria and then in Freiburg, Germany, for the obvious reasons–the music, art, history, and culture of these respective cities, the honest answer is that I chose to study in both because of my dad. Vienna was one of his favorite cities in the world and I sort of fell in love with the German-language culture because of him. He was stationed in the army in Austria in the 50s (a trick of fate that he didn’t get sent to fight in the Korean War), and there cultivated his life-long love for the Germanic culture, with its history, classical music and opera, bratwurst and beer.
As a kid, I poured over my dad’s army photos, fascinated by pictures of my youthful, confident father and his army friends taking on Europe. These pictures showed my dad as a young man I never knew (my dad was grandpa-age by the time I was born) and a very interesting Europe that was in the process of rebuilding itself after the war. My dad never became fluent in German, but fifty years later he still studied his German books, teaching me such useful phrases as: Der Ball ist rot (“The ball is red”) and Schweinhund (A pretty bad insult that literally translates to “pig dog”).
As a kid, I poured over my dad’s army photos, fascinated by pictures of my youthful, confident father and his army friends taking on Europe. These pictures showed my dad as a young man I never knew (my dad was grandpa-age by the time I was born) and a very interesting Europe that was in the process of rebuilding itself after the war. My dad never became fluent in German, but fifty years later he still studied his German books, teaching me such useful phrases as: Der Ball ist rot (“The ball is red”) and Schweinhund (A pretty bad insult that literally translates to “pig dog”).
And so when my dad passed away during the spring of my senior year of high school, I returned to his army photos and felt this incredible urge, maybe even compulsion, to visit the places in the photographs. I didn’t start taking German, however, until the fall of my first year at Scripps and found myself drawn to German more than I had ever been to Spanish (which I had taken for three years in high school). I can attribute part of this interest to Scripps’ awesome German professors, but also to the language itself, which I liked, honestly, because I thought it sounded funny. And the fact that most people think it sounds ugly, as opposed to romantic languages like French, makes me like it even more. And so this is the path that has led me here–an eager student three weeks away from flying to Vienna for my first time ever in Europe. I’m curious to see if it holds the same magic for me that it did for my dad. I can’t wait.
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