When I ride public transit or just walk the streets in Munich or Frankfurt these days, I often get the feeling I could be in New York or London, San Francisco or Dublin, because sometimes I hear
more English than German. And the accents range from deep Southern through Brooklynese to Texas drawl, from Cockney to Yorkshire.
Tourists? No. Germans practicing their English or trying to be “up-to-date”? Also no. They can’t be U.S. military, for all G.I.s left Munich bases in early 1994, and by the end of the year
American army presence in and around Frankfurt will also be down to practically zero.
All those native English speakers are Americans, Canadians, Britons, Irish, Australians, and New Zealanders who live and work in Germany. And their numbers are staggering.
According to the German Federal Bureau of Statistics there are 107,000 American and 112,000 British-Irish citizens in the country. Combined they make up one of the largest linguistic groups
of resident foreigners. Americans in Munich number around 20,000 and in the Frankfurt area approximately 13,000.
What do they all do? Most of them work, and their professions range from building laborers (a field that attracts many British and Irish because wages in Germany are much higher than at
home) to chief executives of blue-chip companies, from innkeepers and hair stylists to opera singers, ballet directors, and symphony conductors (American Lorin Maazel succeeded Britain’s Sir Colin Davis as chief
conductor of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation orchestra last year and two leading German ballet companies-Frankfurt and Hamburg-are headed by Americans: William Forsythe and John Neumeier). There are
professors and school teachers, accountants and business consultants, computer scientists and clinical psychologists, artists and architects, bankers and brokers, not to mention journalists and writers, a number
of whom are frequent and regular contributors to this magazine.
Some are fairly recent arrivals, perhaps still groping with learning German and how to live and work here, especially the Americans who, unlike the British and Irish, whose countries are
members of the European Union, need labor permits; but most have been residents for 10 to 30 years or even longer.
Some came because of German spouses, many more because they were assigned by Anglo-American corporations (Frankfurt is Germany’s financial center and Munich abounds with high-tech
companies), sensed professional opportunities, or just wanted to experience German culture and became so involved that they stayed.
It’s actually not all that new. The American presence in Munich goes back more than 200 years to Massachusetts-born Benjamin Thompson a.k.a. Count Rumford, a pro-British Tory who fled to
England after the Battle of Bunker Hill, served King George III as Undersecretary of the Colonies, drifted to the continent in 1783, and then spent 16 years in the service of Bavaria’s duke and elector Karl
Theodor as supreme army commander and minister of war and interior affairs. This “first American in Munich” was also a famous scientist, inventor and social reformer whom Franklin D. Roosevelt once equated with
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as “one of the three greatest minds America ever produced.” It was Benjamin Thompson who started Munich’s Englischer Garten, the world’s first and still largest municipal
public park. For that he is duly honored in town with two monuments and a street named for him.
The Anglo-Americans are a diversified lot. Consider just a few of them in my Munich circle of friends and acquaintances.
There are Americans Leo and Cathy Stodolsky. He’s a theoretical physicist and director of the Max Planck Society’s Werner Heisenberg Institute of Physics; she’s a history lecturer at Munich
University.
Jim Walker from Virginia is a computer scientist who has his own software and information-technology consulting business.
Felicity Lamb, an English woman, is a voice coach and speech therapist who teaches and treats mainly German clients.
Chicagoan David Bennett is an established painter whose works are in many public and private collections in the U.S. and Germany.
Honolulu-born Mike Maples runs a small German gasthaus.
Californian Peter Pearce is an actor who teaches the Lee Strasberg “Method” at a Munich drama school.
What these Anglo-American communities have in common is a vibrant social and cultural life that spills over to and attracts Germans.
The Munich community has two monthly English-language city-type magazines-“Munich Found” and “Eyes & Ears”-both published and edited by and for Anglo-American residents, brimming with
local ads and what’s-doing-in-town information. Their combined circulation is 20,000. In Frankfurt there’s the monthly “Main City.” Both cities have English-language bookshops, owned and operated by
Anglo-Americans. To cater to the needs of parents and their kids there are several big international schools (Munich’s MIS, nearly 30 years old, has an enrollment of about 800) where English is the language of
instruction, nearly all teachers are Anglo-Americans, and where youngsters can graduate with either an international baccalaureate, American high school diploma, or obtain their British A-levels.
Anglo-American clubs and groups abound. Besides American Chambers of Commerce and German-American Business clubs that are open to U.S. citizens and Germans working for American companies in
either Frankfurt or Munich, there are British groups like Frankfurt’s “64 Club” (founded in 1964), whose members are British and Commonwealth nationals, and in Frankfurt there’s even an Irish-German Business
Association, which last March initiated Germans to the rites of St. Patrick’s Day.
In Munich there’s something for just about everybody, ranging from an English-language chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous to one of Toastmasters International. There are branches of the
American Association of University Women, Democrats and also Republicans Abroad, the English Speaking Union, Freemasons, Rotary International, and the Royal Aeronautical Society. Australians and New Zealanders
gravitate to the “Down Under Group,” which meets monthly. “Munich Caledonians” promotes Scottish cultural and social events. The “Munich Hash House Harriers” are a club for “drinkers with a running problem” that
offers “free beer for first-timers.” There’s an “English Fiction Writers” group that you can join whether published or unpublished, “all genres welcome,” and an “English Golfing Society.” “MAPC” is the
“Munich-American Peace Committee”; “MELTA” stands for Munich English Language Teachers Association; “MESS” is the acronym for “Munich English-Speaking Sportdivers,” who meet for monthly dives;
“Sunday Walk” is a group of Anglo-Americans who meet every Sunday afternoon at 1:30 p.m., rain or shine, to take a 15-kilometer hike starting from some S-Bahn (rapid commuter train) station.
English-language religious services for practically every faith are offered at a dozen Munich churches, some of which have Anglo-American ministers, and there’s even a Munich Jewish Sunday
School for English-speaking youngsters.
Irish pubs and American restaurants (not to be confused with the 28 McDonald’s eateries in Munich and seven in Frankfurt) are popping and opening up everywhere.
At Murphy’s in Munich you can have an Irish Sunday brunch; at the Irish Folk Pub you can choose between 70 different whiskies and play darts; and O’Reilly’s is billed as the elegant “quieter” Irish pub “in an upscale location.” Munich’s Opus One offers California wines and sophisticated American cuisine; Papa Joe’s is noted for its quesadillas and authentic nachos, and Santa Fe offers Tex-Mex dishes. Concurrently there are Anglo-American shops, such as Pomeroy & Winterbottom, which calls itself “a small British island in downtown Munich,” Snowdonia Classics, which offers everything from Victorian towel rails to soaps and oils from the Scottish Highlands, and the British Shop that, in addition to selling cards, toys, and various foods, makes freshly cut sandwiches “with real English bread and British fillings” every day at noon. Frankfurt’s latest is a genuine American deli.
In both Frankfurt and Munich there are numerous cinemas that show movies either only in English or run the original English versions at least a couple of days a week.
But where the Anglo-American community is at its most vibrant, and also making its greatest impact on Germans, is in theater. Professional, semi-pro, and amateur groups dot the map.
One of the most successful is the “Frankfurt English Theater,” launched by U.S.-born Judith Rosenbauer, a teacher by training and an actress and theater manager by calling. It started in a
converted warehouse in 1979 and since 1990 has been in a 200-seat auditorium with proscenium stage on Kaiserstrasse, one of Frankfurt’s classiest and priciest streets, that the city built for her. She gets a DM
450,000 (about $320,000) subsidy from the municipal cultural affairs office, has a few commercial sponsors, and also a “Club of 100” American and English friends, each of whom pays DM 3,000 a year in exchange
for which they get eight free tickets. Rosenbauer does one long-run production each season and hires most of her actors in London.
City support and commercial sponsorship are something Anglo-American theater buffs in Munich can only dream about, but the scene is lively nonetheless. There are four semi-pro and amateur
groups who compete for time-blocks and space at a small, 80-seat downtown auditorium called Theater-im-Karlshof.
One is the MET-Munich English Theatre-of which Paddy Daley, a former Royal Air Force fighter pilot, is the producer-manager and Jamey Reynolds, an American who acted professionally Off-Off
Broadway and is now the drama teacher at Munich International School, the artistic director. Native-English speakers, some of them pros, the majority highly qualified amateurs who live and work in and around
Munich, make up the cast for the group’s four to six productions each year.
“The Profs,” who made their debut on a Munich stage in 1994, are a group of Britons and Americans who had previously performed international theater in English in Starnberg, a near-by town,
for more than ten years.
There are also the “English Speaking Union Players” and “The Irish Theatre Workshop.”
Productions range from deadly serious to rollicking comedy with works by such authors as Edward Albee, Jean Anouilh, Noel Coward, Ariel Dorfman, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, John Osborne,
Peter Shaffer, and George Bernard Shaw-always in English. Though resident Anglo-Americans account for most of the audiences, all four groups try to attract Germans and offer discount tickets to German school
groups. How much do they understand?
“Some of the plays are full of accents and slang-British and American,” says Kevin Sparks, who frequently performs with the Munich English Theatre, “so I don’t know if German audiences
understand everything we say, but they do seem to understand our body language.”
Though they do it mainly for their own and the large Anglo-American community’s enjoyment, these English theater groups have enriched Munich’s cultural and multicultural life.
Benjamin Thompson a.k.a. Count Rumford, of Woburn, Massachusetts, whose twice-life-size statue stands on Maximilianstrasse, within shouting distance of the Bavarian state parliament building
and the Bavarian prime minister’s office, would surely have approved.
