Lessons Learned from Love, Beer and Brawling

I was 16 when I fell in love for the first time. Her name was Lorelei Kuehn. She and her family lived in a huge apartment in the Plassenburg, the medieval fortress overlooking my high school in Kulmbach, in the northeastern corner of Bavaria. Her father was a portrait painter and a bomb victim from Berlin and a died-in-the-wool Nazi. All his kids had Germanic names that started with the letter L. Her brothers’ names were Lohengrin, Leberecht and Liebhart. Lorelei was blond and she was hot. I was besotted with her. She flirted with everyone. I couldn’t really compete with some of my classmates. Most came from well-to-do families and they were city kids. I was a country bumpkin who was only a mediocre student and on top of that I had broken the code by asking uncomfortable questions about the recent past and my teachers’ involvement with the Nazis. Many had been ardent believers and had a difficult time reconciling current realities with their past. Questions about recent history were not welcome. In short, I was not one of the gang.

Lorelei allowed me to become her personal bag wallah. She let me carry her books from the Lyceum, the girls’ high school across town next to the city park, through the center of the old city with its cobblestone streets and ancient framework houses and up the steep approach road to the castle. I am sure all the other kids in my class were snickering about me behind my back. I never got past first base with her. I was too innocent and timid. I didn’t believe all the dirt my friend, Helmut, told me about her. My infatuation with her lasted a year, before I grew tired of her. She told me I was not advancement material. Her ambition was to become a translator in the Foreign Office in Bonn. She obviously had plans for bigger and better things. I don’t know whether she ever reached her goal. I lost track of her.

The result of my unrequited crush on Lorelei was that I shut myself off from further pain and stayed away from girls for the duration. I shut down emotionally or, rather, I channeled my feelings into aggressive behavior. Here I was, 17 years old, a frustrated virgin, determined not to get hurt again by opening up to another person. Not a very bright decision, but 17-year-olds are not known for thinking things through. At least not this one. In case you’re wondering, I did not lose my virginity until I was 21 years old and that momentous event took place in a cathouse in Phenix City, Alabama. More on that at some other time.

To compensate, I developed a taste for beer, basically because that’s all I could afford at the time, and for brawling. Keep in mind that in that part of the country beer was considered one of the basic food groups, part of the grain family. After all, it was made from barley or wheat. You’ll find it in the lunch buckets of most workers for consumption in the office or on the work site or in the factory in Bavaria. It is normal.

In those days, a bottle of beer cost the equivalent of two bits. But one of my classmates was the scion of the Reichel brewing family, who owned one of the four major breweries in Kulmbach, which called itself the "Beer Capital of the World." Through him we gained access to what was called “green” beer, beer that hadn’t fully fermented and thus had not been inventoried yet. This brew was quite turbid and had bits of all sorts of matter floating in it. It also had a tendency to clean out your system. We didn’t care. We called this condition “der schnelle Fritz” – the speedy Fritz. The refugees among us called it “der flotte Otto” – the nimble Otto. Fritz, Otto – the result was the same.

Sometimes when I was flush with cash, I invested in a bottle of “Kulminator Eis Bock”, a strong local beer with a 13% alcohol content. It came in a short stubby brown bottle and had an almost cloyingly sweet taste. One bottle was all you needed to put you out of your misery.

Fridays after school was beer day, when we’d meet Karl Reichel behind his brewery and he’d let us have however many bottles we could handle. There usually were five or six of us. I remember riding my bike home after those sessions, a 15 km trip, and being so out of it that I crashed into the ditch and passed out, waking up soaking wet and freezing in the dark. The offshoot of those occasions was that my mother, who always waited up for me, berated me when I got home and threatened to slap me about severely.

If I didn’t fall off my bike on the road home, I usually was able to get the booze out of my system by the time I reached my house. The road, a two-lane highway, was fairly level for the first 13 klicks, but the last two were a real bugger. The two-lane road turned into a gravel country lane and became steep and twisty. You had to stand on your pedals the whole way. This was in the days when 3-speed bikes were the latest. They gave you a real workout. Getting off and pushing the bike was not an option. It was a sign of weakness and all the kids’d be on your case.

Sometimes I took the train for the first 12 km and rode my bike the last stretch from the depot up the mountain to my house. In winter I skied down the mountain to the railroad station in the morning and back up in the afternoon. It made for strong legs and healthy lungs.

To make matters worse, I joined a fraternity, R.A.V. Absolvia, were the raison d’être was the consumption of large quantities of beer, which had to be drunk standing up, from a tall five-liter glass boot without spilling a drop while the rest of the gang sang Latin student drinking songs. "Gaudeamus igitur juvenes dum sumus" (let us rejoice therefore while we are young) was our favorite. You had to hold the glass boot with the toe down or it would create an air bubble when you reached the foot and your face would be sloshed in beer. After a couple of these, it was hard to tell whether the boot pointed up or down. The older members of the group, the “Philisters,” were university students and, even though it was outlawed, some of them secretly practiced dueling with sabers. It was a sign of esteem and honor to sport a dueling scar. Fortunately, I never advanced up the ranks that far.

The offshoot of my frequent encounters with beer was not always oblivion. More times then not I got into fights and usually got my butt kicked. I’d come home with bloody knuckles and bruises and gashes on my face and torn clothes. And my mother would berate me.

Saturday night was usually fight night in the beer halls my friends and I frequented. The slightest perceived insult or affront could result in a wild melee with chairs and beer steins flying and blood and vomit everywhere. The favorite trick was to smash your stein on the table’s edge, so it broke from the handle and to start whaling away. This ceramic or glass handle was our version of a knuckleduster. It was very effective and persuasive. Drinking and brawling went hand in glove. That’s what you did in a small town for entertainment. Everyone participated, including the ladies. No one ever got injured seriously. I think my mother enjoyed applying her iodine tinctures and tonics to my cuts and bruises, listening to my howls.

I had joined the local soccer club, which played in the lowest level of the county league and game day, Sunday, was the highlight of the town’s social scene. The day usually started with church services at 10, followed by a gathering of the players, their families and followers at the Goldene Rose pub. Fortified by several liters of beer each, this mob then moved to the soccer pitch. By game time at 2 o’clock, the home crowd and the visitors, who had invigorated themselves at the town’s other pub, “zur Linde”- to the Lime Tree – were in fine form, with insults flying and the odd scuffle breaking out.

Visitors never showed their faces at the Goldene Rose. That was the rule. Even though they came from nearby villages, they were considered foreigners, to be distrusted. You had to keep an eye on them. It didn’t matter which side won the game. Whatever the outcome, it was the poor referee’s fault. The fans of the losing side would chase him with sticks, walking canes and umbrellas, rocks, anything that was handy to zur Linde, where he had to change into his civvies and where his moped was parked. Sometimes he’d have to lay low for hours before it was safe for him to mount his moped and head home.

After one particularly galling loss of the home team, the three Braunersreuter brothers, all star players on our team, and some of their friends waylaid the referee on his way home, beat the hell out of him and tossed him into the creek that paralleled the road, for good measure. He filed charges and half the town had to appear in court as witnesses against the Braunersreuters, but all the witnesses turned out to have been blind, no one had seen anything and the charges were dismissed. The league, however, declared our home field off limits and we had to play all our games away for a year. We lost every match. One of the reasons was that the opposing teams and their fans didn’t have to worry about retaliation when they visited our village. But we kept score and when the suspension was finally lifted, it was payback time with a vengeance, but not on the soccer pitch. We didn’t want to get suspended again

It was a tradition that on the evening of the game there was a dance at the zur Linde for players and fans of both teams. These Sunday night dances were considered neutral territory. Disputes were settled outside. As long as none of the foreigners, that is the visitors from the next village over, tried to make out with any of the local girls, things remained fairly civilized.

The dance following the first game after the lifting of the home-field suspension made the front page of the local weekly newspaper, the Stadtsteinacher Nachrichten. The visiting team that Sunday was the F.C. Tannenwirtshaus, a village about three miles up the road. Most of the inhabitants of this town were either named Turbanisch or Buss and were the descendants of gypsies who were force-settled there after the Napoleonic Wars. They were basically tinkers, poachers and fruit and vegetable traders, whose gaily-painted trucks could be seen all over northeastern Bavaria buying and selling local produce.

One of the visiting players, a fellow named Bartl (short for Bartholomew) Buss, worked for my father as custodian of his fish farm, located in Tannenwirtshaus. He had learned somehow that there was going to be trouble after the game. He instructed his teammates and fans to bring ax handles and to hide them behind the zur Linde for use that evening.

The Braunersreuters expected nothing less and had directed their youngest brother, Albin, who at 15 was so short that he could easily have passed for a midget, to hide in the bushes behind the pub to keep an eye on the guests’ activities and to report back to the Goldene Rose with his findings. Needless to say, the home side appropriated the ax handles while the visitors were dancing inside. Everyone waited in the shadows outside for the show to begin. When all was set, Guenther Schwappacher, the mayor’s son, tossed two stink bombs onto the dance floor, emptying the hall in no time. We set upon the hapless dancers with our borrowed ax handles and beat the crap out of them. Several ended up in the hospital with broken bones and other lesser injuries.

The upshot was a major trial with 43 defendants from both villages and with jail sentences and fines handed out to the combatants. This time there were plenty of witnesses pointing the finger at each other. Revenge was sworn. It was the beginning of a vendetta that lasted for years, maybe not as deadly as those in Sicily or the Balkans, but certainly as deeply felt.

I learned a valuable lesson from this incident, several actually. One, never step into harm’s way sloshed, two, always have a solid exit strategy and three, you got to have deniability, in case there are repercussions. It’s not enough to have a sound plan of attack; you also need a way out, if things go sour, to stay below the horizon in the aftermath and you need an alibi. And you need a clear mind to see what’s going on around you. I didn’t have any of the above in the incident following the opening of the soccer season. I was arrested along with everybody else and it was only my father’s standing and influence, which got me out of this mess. He was not very happy with me. My mother, of course, berated me to no end.

The other lessons I came away with from this incident were never to trust somebody else to look out for your best interests and it’s best not to have any partners, who can later rat you out to save their own skin. Of course, the downside of this is that you can’t blame anybody else for your blunders.