Familie Meder

All you have to do to understand the Familie Meder is take one look at the wall of their dining room. There you will find a floor-to-ceiling wallpaper map of the World from The National Geographic Society. We spent a week with Alex, her boyfriend Jochen, and her parents Franz and Anne and at their home in Balzheim at the end of June.

We know Alex from our time in Wellesley, where she and Julie overlapped for a couple of years – Alex in the German department, Julie in Anthropology, and all of us desperate to escape the ‘burbs for the simple pleasures of a good pub. It was sad to see Alex leave at the end of the ’07 term, but we made definite plans to meet up in Germany soon. Thanks to Irmgard Connex and the WZB for helping make those plans come true.

We met Franz and Anne back in Wellesley, too, when they came to visit Alex. They’ve been retired the last fourteen years, and are about as good a model for how to enjoy life as I can think of. When we met them they were all set to begin a six-week RV trip across the North West, through Yellowstone & on up into British Columbia. I can still taste the chocolate cake Franz baked us for Anne’s birthday. I wish I had a slice right now.

The Meders have always had an RV. Their current model is quite luxurious, yet fuel-efficient as well. It had better be given how much they travel. We squeezed our visit in just before Franz and Anne left for a road trip though Poland, Lithuania, Lativa and Estonia. Alex gets the globe-trotting bug from her folks. In addition to her two years in Massachusetts, Alex has spent over half a year bicycling around South America, been back-and-forth to Australia three times, had stints in England, in France, Thailand… I could go on. I’m pretty sure the only continent she hasn’t been to yet is Antarctica – but it could be she just hasn’t gotten around to those stories with us yet.



I think our visit may have been a bit of an anomaly – yes, we had a day trip to Ulm, where we strolled along the Danube and climbed 768 steps and 142 meters to the top of the Munster, the tallest church in the world. And we also drove into Bavaria for a fog-shrouded pilgrimage to Neuschwannstein, the fairy-tale castle of Mad King Ludwig II and model for Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (Cinderella? Help me out fact-checkers.). But we spent most of the time lounging in the garden - reading, grilling, and chatting.

Franz is all a whirl of disheveled hair and exuberance. He is extremely sociable, to the point where Alex sometimes loses patience. “Papi. Papi. PAPI.” she scolded more than once as his voice rose over the other conversations. He has an extremely inquisitive mind. When he found that his job as a postal worker brought him in contact with a good number or Turks, he enrolled in a class to learn Turkish, a skill that served him well in work as well as family vacations to Istanbul and beyond. Same with his English. Most Germans of our generation speak better English than we do. For Franz, growing up in the German countryside in the 30s and early 40s, America was just some place on a map, and even England seemed unimportant. Now he and Anne have spent extended time in Hawaii and Australia under a house-exchange vacation plan, where I am sure he was as fearless and outgoing as ever.

Anne is the quiet one. The oldest of seven children, a charming smile and sparkling eyes hide her sharp wit – poor Alex was left to both defend herself and translate for us after a couple of her Mom’s clever barbs. Anne keeps Franz under control. She is the rock of the family. She is the one who drives the RV, since, as Alex puts it: “My dad drives like he talks.” Anne was my mother-in-absentia when I cam down with the flu towards the end of our visit.



One afternoon, after a long discussion ranging from solar energy technology to The Future of Children, Julie, Jochen and I napped in the garden while Alex and Anne drove to the neighboring village for some shopping. When they got back we picked fresh arugula from the garden and Alex combined it with ripe tomatoes and a chunk of basil-mozzarella for a mouth-watering version of her summer pasta. We set the table and suddenly realized no one had seen Franz since we’d concluded that kids today don’t know how good they had it, at least two or three hours earlier. “Papi, papi, PAPI,” Alex called. Anne searched the house from the basement to the attic, but no Franz. We were just about to sit down to eat without him, figuring he’d grown bored with the quiet and wandered over to the neighbors’, when he emerged from behind the hedgerow, hair all a-muss. “We looked for you everywhere, where were you?” we asked. “Yah, yah. I was asleep over there, behind the hedge.” While no one was watching, Franz had slipped on his noise-cancelling headphones and curled up for a nice long Mittag Schlaf, or afternoon sleep, in the shade. He laughed along with us, poured himself a glass of Wien Schole and sat down to lunch. And that is the way it is at the home of the Familie Meder.