Last year my blog attracted the attention of German university professor Dr. Christian Fuhrer, who teaches and lives in Mannheim. He had seen a photo I’d posted of the Mannheim Officers Club and wanted to use it in a book he was writing Americans in Mannheim 1945-2011. We corresponded and I sent him a few more photos from a scrapbook my dad’s officers at the 521st Engineer Corps had put together for him when he was transferred to another assignment in Frankfurt.
According to a fairly recent Email, Dr. Fuhrer’s book will be out next year. He wrote to give his contributors an update on both the military activity and the progress on the book. I am posting the photo of a 1950s GI drawing Mannheim’s famous Wasserturm (water tower) that will be used for the front cover of the book.
Dr. Fuhrer was touched by the enthusiastic response from over 300 Americans, mostly former soldiers, to his project. He received over 2,500 photos and will use about 500. Because of all the response he got, his text grew to 100,000 words “about five times as much as originally intended,” he commented.
Mannheim as a military garrison has almost completely disappeared. When Dr. Fuhrer recently drove through Benjamin Franklin Village—where my parents lived for a year—he saw a huge sign “Commissary and Burger King still open,” but noted there were hardly any customers. The housing area will close by the end of September. The chapel and the elementary school closed a few months ago. Dr. Fuhrer noted that Coleman and Spinelli Barracks were still open for now.
I have many dear memories of the Mannheim and Heidelberg area. I met my husband (now ex) there, got officially married under German law in Mannheim-Kafertal, and lived there for a short while.
Nearby Heidelberg military facilities are also closing down and it will be accomplished by next summer. I lived in Patrick Henry Village in Heidelberg across from the Heidelberg Officers Club in 1964-65. I was the secretary for the manager of the Officers Club. It’s sad to think of that area as a ghost town.
Author Thomas Wolfe wrote the famous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. That title is particularly poignant to a military brat. Home changes all the time as your father transferred from one post or base to another. When you’ve lived in foreign countries, you may never go back, and if you do, there are no guarantees that all those various “homes” will be there.
What a switch to have American troops in Afghanistan now instead of Germany! Not a place for military families like Germany was.