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We were definitely lost. Fortunately, it proved to be a pleasure to be lost in Heidelberg, Germany, on an impossibly sunny May morning. The Coastal Carolina University undergraduates who made up our group didn't seem very concerned; they were smiling out the windows of the bus, watching one charming shop and cobbled alley after another pass by as we chugged up the narrow Haupstrasse toward the amazing medieval castle that dominates the city's skyline. The Neckar River, a streak of silver that starts in the Black Forest and joins the Rhine hundreds of miles downstream, could be seen in horizontal glimpses to our left. We'd come from Coastal on a two-week study abroad program called The Grand Tour, and having spent time in Amsterdam, Bruges and Cologne, we had stopped in Heidelberg for a couple of days before proceeding to Rheims and on to Paris. Our group consisted of 41 undergraduates and five faculty. We faculty (Arne Flaten, Julinna Oxley, Scott Pleasant, Philip Whalen and me) had learned on the first day of the trip that cramming all 47 of us into the same city bus didn't do much for the American image abroad, so on this morning we'd split into two groups. One group (aka "The Competent Group") had boarded the correct bus and was no doubt already standing in wonder at the foot of Heidelberg's 15th century fortress. My group (aka the "Where the Heck Are We? Group") had boarded a second bus, a bus that was now poking its way through every one of Heidelberg's charming city squares, keeping the castle at a tantalizing distance.
In front, we faculty conferred around the map. We could get the group off the bus at the next stop and walk the rest of the way—the castle was in sight, after all, perhaps a mile in the distance. We could hop off and try to catch the correct bus. We could stay on this bus, which had the unintended virtue of showing us all these unexpected beauties of Heidelberg's city center, even if it didn't seem to be making much progress toward our desired destination. All three were attractive alternatives (as I said, we were pleasantly lost). None of us were interested in bothering the bus driver, whose baleful look suggested that he'd had, over the years, his fill on Heidelberg's own notoriously spirited local university students, to say nothing of foreign university students. One of the locals on the bus, a woman in her late twenties with a tote bag full of books at her side, leaned forward. "Americans?" "Yes." "May help you with your map?" It turns out we'd run into Andrea, a graduate student at the University of Heidelberg, who turned out to be an expert in English as a second language, how to spot lost tourists, the best places to eat in the city, and the arcana of the Heidelberg bus system. She invited us to follow her; she had some time to spare before her class and would guide us to the castle. We got off the bus at Andrea's normal stop—the University—and she gave us an impromptu walking tour of one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in Europe. Some of our students, having studied Heidelberg's history in preparation for the trip, nodded knowingly as she pointed out details of the university's history—its medieval founding by the Prince Elector of Palatinate (represented by the Palatinate Lion sculpture in the University Square), its importance to the Reformation (Martin Luther taught there) and its modern prominence (10 Nobel Prize winners). As we reached the edge of the University grounds, at the foot of the steep, narrow road that led up to the castle, we thanked Andrea, but she seemed almost embarrassed by our gratitude. "It is nothing," she said just as she turned to leave, "You gave us Mark Twain. Without him the city wouldn't be here today."
It was an odd comment, and as Andrea disappeared around a corner I knew we needed to learn more. In preparation for our trip to Europe, my students and I had studied Twain's 1880 travel book A Tramp Abroad, which relates in humorous detail the author's three month stay in Heidelberg, a place he called "the last possibility of the beautiful." I also knew that one of the reasons Heidelberg retains its charm today is that while the city was captured by American forces in World War II, it was never heavily bombed. What I wanted to know was why a local would associate these two facts. I asked some of my students to think about this question, and to be on the lookout in the next few days for details that were relevant to our reading of Twain's book or the later American military presence. Twenty-four hours later, as I held class in a conference room back at the hotel, I was gratified with reports of shops named after Mark Twain, and references in our Heidelberg maps to American-sounding streets like Bull Run Court and Alamo Circle. The connection between Mark Twain and World War II, it turns out, reminds us why we travel abroad, why we want our students to learn about other cultures, and why history and literature still matter. Andrea was correct. Without Mark Twain the city Heidelberg would probably have been destroyed. |
Last year, Professor Dan Ennis and four other faculty members led a group of 41 Coastal students on a study-abroad trip in Europe. They found out that sometimes getting off the beaten track can put you on the path to discovery. 
