If you know Baltimore, then you know my parents. Here’s how they fit the Charm City paradigm: They met in the first grade at St. Bernardine Catholic School, walked down the aisle 17 years later and raised four kids in a close-knit cluster of kin and lifelong friends.
My father, with an eye on the future, worked as a commercial and industrial real estate broker, while my mother looked to the past as a tour director with the Maryland Historical Society. In their retirement, they wanted to go to a place where they had never been, but one that had shaped their lives from afar: Germany.
This ailment or that surgery had slowed my father down, and last year, his 73rd, he gave up his Grady-White boat and announced a golden-anniversary wish: to take his bride down the Danube, letting someone else captain the ship. The ship his bride chose was the Katharina von Bora, a river barge operated by the Peter Deilmann line, and the course she chose was down the Elbe instead. I was deployed as their occasionally mutinous deckhand, tagging along for a two-week mid-May journey from Potsdam to Prague and ushering them to airport gates, ship docks and front desks.
Three days in Berlin was the starting point, and our package deal included a guided tour: an airless, joyless double-decker-bus ride. But at least we came away with a sense of the city from the Reichstag to the Olympiastadion. I could see a reserve in my parents’ faces when they saw that ominous stadium where Jesse Owens broke the sprinters’ ribbon and the color barrier. The year of his feat — 1936 — was the year of their birth, and the World at War imagery loomed darkly over their Pleasantville-flagstone-rowhouse childhood. For decades, they have read three newspapers a day and know well how the world has changed; still, the sports arena built to reflect Nazi supremacy, even a venue now merrily populated with weekend roller-bladers, did not earn their automatic all-good approval.
We had heard how West Berlin’s comforts are worth rediscovering after the past two decades of hype about East Berlin’s punky edge. And locals love their KaDeWe, the mammoth century-old department store whose upper floors amount to an eye-popping smorgasbord of local delicacies, arrayed in a crowded showcase that reminded us of Baltimore’s Lexington Market, only on a grander scale. There’s also a winter garden seating level that we somehow navigated after examining lots of very white food: veal brats, runny cheeses, pickled herring. We plopped down at a booth for a belly-stretcher of a lunch — Allo, cream sauce! — that got our Augustus Gloop appetites going.
As we walked it off — it seemed we were always walking off a meal in Berlin — a bushy-tailed fox dashed out of the shrubs in the Tiergarten’s leafy acreage and crossed our path not far from the gilded Victoria statue where I’d watched Barack Obama address a crowd of 200,000 the year before. My folks started unpacking memories of how Berlin had once been a dreaded place, and not only in their childhood.
In 1961, my parents were just getting started with a newborn daughter, a new mortgage and newlywed contentment. And then the Berlin airlift intervened. Because ROTC had paid his college tuition, Dad was called up and dispatched to North Augusta, S.C., for Army training. If a war broke out, he was told, he would be in the second wave of troops sent to the cut-up urban danger zone. My mother decamped to her folks’ place, and while my dad was in marksmanship training, she sent a messenger to find him in a tent and let him know that she was pregnant. Bundle of joy No. 2, in what was otherwise their “very worst year.”
Once Dad had completed his Army duty, he trained himself in real estate, and clearly Berlin has learned a few things about that particular enterprise. As we ambled from museum to museum, he marveled at all the development: Between the Unter der Linden and Checkpoint Charlie, in the former East Berlin, there’s even a Bugatti dealership. Our hotel faced the Potsdamer Platz and some fascinating commemorative markers where the Wall had once stood. Every night we walked past a glass-and-steel wedge that housed Deutsche Bank, the German financial behemoth that snatched up Baltimore’s old-world Alex. Brown investment bank years ago, which led to some reductions in our family lucre. “I think I paid for that,” Dad said, walking past the tower.
A folksy accordionist greeted us in Potsdam, where we boarded the barge flotilla (only two, really, with a few dozen cabins in each). My parents and others like them choose these tours for the convenience: a single unpacking, an onboard doctor, borders crossed with ease. Eldercare meets opulence.
There was no one else my age on the cruise, which was fine by me: I felt a little like Steve Guttenberg in “Cocoon.” Creature comforts were in abundance: The chefs were extremely talented, and somehow, though I had not eaten that much since the last time I traveled with my parents, I was always hungry for the next multi-course meal. Brats for breakfast! Pike and roe for starters, veal and root vegetables for the main. Strudel for dessert, with homemade cinnamon ice cream. Then, should the caloric catatonia subside, the server would foist an afternoon snack: Pilseners and pretzels!
Each night built its own peppy polka momentum, and whenever things started getting a little Lawrence Welk, I retreated to my cabin. My folks, however, got into the routine: dressing for dinner, feasting on adventurously elegant meals and settling into the lounge as the crew did some amiable bilingual balladeering. Away from their unruly charge (I am the youngest of four), they could have a little cheek-to-cheek time on the dance floor. The roster featured real musicians — and one night, a ribald chanteuse — and the repertoire ran the Germanic gamut. It wasn’t all “Roll Out the Barrel,” nor did they bring it down with Wagnerian dirges. Instead it was oompah with oomph. Maybe the performances could have used a little Weimar Republic loucheness, but Sally Bowles had her time and place.
I had planned to start each day with a morning run in a new burg, waving at villagers living amid Christmas-creche quaintness. But marmalade on black bread beckoned. After breakfast, when we climbed back onto the top deck, spring breezes sent airborne seedlings drifting by as in a dream sequence: Cue the puffballs! A British woman called out whenever she espied a lark or a stork. From the yellow-striped deck chairs, I studied the Germans among us; they seemed mostly florid and hardy, and I kept my eye on a showy fraulein who favored animal prints and platinum feathering; nursing a Riesling during a deckside card game, she sported a folded paper sun guard on her nose that looked like a beak. Only my father could arguably sprechen Sie Deutsch, which had dwindled to some spirited Sgt. Schultz-inflected utterances of “Was ist das?” That got him by in stilted cross-cultural conversations with an Austrian couple who knew some English, as did some smiley Guten Morgens to anyone vaguely Teutonic.
Wittenberg was the first excursion, with an up-close look at the cathedral door where Martin Luther gave the Vatican his what-for. Despite my mother’s protestations, I tried to make a break from the churchy itinerary to see the Bauhaus headquarters at Dessau, only a 20-minute ride away. I asked for the crew’s help in getting a taxi to check out the modern-design mecca, but to no avail. The request went up the chain of command, but no one had ever heard of the place or entertained a request from a passenger to help them find it. They explained that a solo excursion would have major dangers — they would leave without me if I wasn’t back in time; they could not ensure my safety — and I started feeling like Westerners did when communists tracked their every move in East Germany.
I complied and submitted to a lot of filing on and off buses, and at each destination, a local guide gave a spiel on the attractions that was fed into radio-linked earpieces that corrected for hearing impairments and allowed wanderers to check out a plaque that just needed reading.
Any barge cruise has its lulls: In terms of civic wonder, you get what the river gives. In adorable Meissen, a town with red-tiled roofs and a fabled porcelain factory, we saw vitrines stocked with figurines in rococo romps: a wolf dressed like Mozart at the piano! A monkey in a white wig conducting! Then there was Magdeburg, with its middling historical milestones and so-so socialist plainness.
We talked about news from home with other Americans, especially a spry lot who rotated around tables near our designated dining-room spot. These Elderhostel voyagers had their own day trips, their own guides and their own room rates. They kept the peace by not sharing how little they were paying — outsmarted again! — and by speaking in hushed asides about the Holocaust sites our German guides never included.
The New Germany is obviously still recovering from the Old Germany, and my parents were sympathetic when one of their new shipboard friends, a Virginia woman with a son in journalism, explained how her German heritage had complicated her assimilation as an American mom. By contrast, they leaned in to hear about the horrors of Terezin, a concentration camp just over the Czech border, as described by a Jewish grandmother on the Elderhostel tour who happened to be from Baltimore.
The colossal losses obviously linger, and a visitor from a victorious superpower can’t help being humbled when docking in Dresden. Better minds than mine have explained the city’s cultural worth and its strategic insignificance when U.S. airmen reduced centuries-old edifices to rubble. It was a loss for more than just the Germans. The city is finally enjoying a new heyday, with cobblestoned splendor and something-for-everyone commerce: Australian pub next to tapas bar next to restaurant serving South African fare.
Our favorite guide billed Dresden as a turnaround town, a place of high-tech prowess and gleaming robotic factories. The birth rate and in-migration are up, he said, adding, “We are very happy about that positive tendency.” On a self-guided stroll, I passed the Frauenkirche, rebuilt from rescued stones painstakingly configured with new ones. Inside, the visiting Vienna Philharmonic was regaling the crowd. Someone had left the main doors open, so anyone could sense Dresden’s resumed rhythms.
There was a recurring theme of hidden treasures in our tours: the artwork smuggled out of wartime Dresden into the nearby castle in Moritzburg, or the valuables stashed under the mountain fortress called Koenigstein, where “high-value” Allied POWs were also warehoused as human shields. Our favorite hidden treasure was a natural one: the sandstone formations of the Bastei. The tourist value of these towers — rocks arrayed as if in stacked cylinders — is not well known outside Saxony, but the sight of them was both unusual and comforting: grays and greens, round but tall, stark but lush. The Bastei can’t claim the hugeness of the Grand Canyon or Glacier National Park, but you can’t resist a gasp.
If Dresden was demolished, Prague was spared, and when we docked in the Czech capital, our final destination, the barge crew threw the passengers a thank-you to-do, punctuated by a fireworks display. The city still has a Cold War chill despite the abated hardships. The local faces were less gentle, and the garb more garish, and we were all wondering whether this wasn’t a little bit of a letdown after the woodsy vibe and chiming porcelain carillons of the rural churches we’d visited.
Honestly, we were a little cultured out, and just when we were getting a grip on Germany, we had new monarchies and currencies to learn. Despite all the regal offerings we checked out in the Czech capital, our minds drifted toward more pedestrian fare. My mother was developing a barometer for civic health based on how much graffiti was visible, while Dad was fixated on industrial machinery: on the locks for river navigation, the blades of a wind farm. An admission: We had been coddled by our barge crew and grew a little cranky without them. We didn’t love our culturally insensitive Prague tour guide and then we got into a weird tip dispute at our heretofore favorite tavern. (That guide had actually warned us about that place.)
But my mother did find serenity when we scurried around the Old Town to find the Church of Our Lady Victorious. It was a relief for her to see the Infant of Prague, a statue with enormous significance for the girls she’d known growing up — among others in the icon’s 450-year history — because it’s said that the Infant answers fertility prayers. As my mom dropped coins into a box, I cracked that in its gilded recess, the Infant looked like a Madame Alexander doll and the church was the original niche marketer.
“Now who’s culturally insensitive?” my mother retorted. She had a point. And one should not cast aspersions on any fertility-related prayers of one’s mother.
My parents know the lives of the saints as surely as they know that their youngest is not one. And we reached some communion, agreeing that one can spout irreverence only after some schooling in reverence, which was shored up in all the awe-inspiring Central European sites we saw. There was nothing in my novena-reciting Catholic education that taught an adult how to spend two entire weeks with his parents. But here’s a resulting lesson, based on one humbling, bumbling experience: It’s easy when they still love being around each other after half a century.
CRUISE OPTIONS
The Peter Deilmann river cruises have, sadly, been discontinued, but one other carrier follows similar routes.
Viking River Cruises, 800-304-9616, . 10-day Elbe cruise from Berlin to Prague, plus a stop in Dessau. Packages start at $2,000.
ONSHORE LODGING
Berlin Marriott, Inge-Beisheim-Platz 1, Berlin, 011-49-30-220-000, . The chain bills itself as a “no surprises” option for Americans, and we found this property to be reliable and clean, with some easy choices for a get-you-goin’ breakfast. Rates in May start at about $184.
InterContinental Praha, Parizska 30, 011-420-296-631-111, . Cold War architecture on the outside, but warmth and comfort on the inside. A supremely able concierge staff had good guidance for all tastes. Rates in May start at about $218.
ONSHORE DINING
Paris Bar, Kantstrasse 152, Berlin; 011-49-30-313-80-52. This French bistro is an art lover’s hangout and a gallery in itself, with fellow guests the works of art. I liked the Dover sole. Entrees from about $19.
Cartouche, Bilkova 14, Prague; 011-420-224-819-597, cartouche.cz. This lower-level hideaway has a dungeon vibe — blazing fireplaces, dripping candles — but the food is hearty and the lighting good. Entrees from about $16.
U Modre Kachnicky (Blue Duckling), Nebovidska 6, Mala Strana, Prague; 011-420-257-320-308, umodrekachnicky.cz. One of many haute Czech options, tasty, inventive and close to the Old Town Square. Lots of duck, of course, as well as wild game and Czech specialties. Entrees from about $25.
