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A Tramp Abroad makes the most of its Heidelberg setting. Writing in that sardonic style for which he is most known, the author of Huckleberry Finn (many pages of which were written in a German hotel room) presents himself as the quintessential bumbling American tourist. He too gets lost: About the middle of the afternoon [our] guides called a halt and held a consultation. After consulting an hour they said their first suspicion remained intact—that is to say, they believed they were lost. I asked if they did not know it? No, they said, they couldn't absolutely know whether they were lost or not, because none of them had ever been in that part of the country before. He fails to master "the awful German language": Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. Inspired by the beauties of Europe, Twain tries his hand at painting: I painted my great picture, "Heidelberg Castle Illuminated"—my first really important work in oils—and had it hung up in the midst of a wilderness of oil-pictures in the Art Exhibition, with no name attached to it. To my great gratification it was instantly recognized as mine. Nonetheless, Twain took almost daily walks through "the huge ruin of Heidelberg Castle, with empty window arches, ivy-mailed battlements, moldering towers—"the Lear of inanimate nature deserted, discrowned, beaten by the storms, but royal still, and beautiful." The immense popularity of A Tramp Abroad (1880) introduced thousands of American readers to the "serene and satisfying charm" of the town.
In the decades after Twain's visit, Heidelberg became a major tourist attraction. Many Americans added it to their European itineraries in order to follow in Twain's steps. By the 1930s, Heidelberg was one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe. American students (like the future ambassador to Germany Jacob Gould Schurman and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jean Stafford) attended the University in increasing numbers in the 1920s and '30s, and when the Depression hit it was Americans who donated $500,000 to Heidelberg University for of a new classroom building. As the historian Steven P. Remy points out, "Scholars, students and writers from the United States found the university inviting and hospitable. With its reputation, legendary fraternities and charms, it represented to many the quintessential ‘German University.'" Yet this amity all but disappeared when the Nazis took over in the mid-1930s, purging Jewish faculty members and imposing a strict censorship. On March 29, 1945, the U. S. Army's 44th Infantry Division assembled across from Heidelberg on the north bank of the Neckar, fresh from having taken nearby Mannheim. Their next objective was Heidelberg itself. The commander of the 44th artillery, Brigadier General William Beiderlinden, asked his superiors for permission to delay the destruction of the city. Beiderlinden was aware of Heidelberg's cultural significance. Indeed, he told a reporter from Reader's Digest that he viewed the city "as a symbol of peacetime German culture." Because Heidelberg lacked military significance, it had rarely attracted the attention of Allied bombers, and as a result it was 90 percent intact when the American troop arrived (by contrast, Dresden was almost 75 percent destroyed). The Schloss was still standing, as was the University and the nearly 600-year-old Church of the Holy Spirit. The American high command agreed with Beiderlinden's proposal to delay the artillery barrage, and furthermore Beiderlinden was given permission to negotiate for the city's peaceful surrender.
The next 48 hours were crucial. Colonel Hubert Niessen of the German Medical Corps and Dr. Karl Neinhaus, the Burgomaster, were eager to preserve the city from ruin. The local Nazi party leader, however, issued an order forbidding surrender and announced that the three bridges that spanned the Neckar were to be destroyed. At 9 p.m., even as troops loyal to the Nazi regime were setting charges on the bridges, Niessen and his negotiating team crossed the river in an ambulance. As they reached the north bank of the Neckar, the charges exploded, leaving the delegation separated from the city and at the mercy of a fragile truce. Beiderlinden and Niessen, despite resistance from other members of their respective delegations, put in place the conditions for Heidelberg's peaceful surrender. The German army would withdraw to the east while the Americans crossed the river. Niessen re-crossed the Neckar at 3:30 a.m. in a boat paddled by a 16-year-old girl named Anni Thom. He tracked down the local military commander and convinced him to begin withdrawing his troops. American forces started to cross the river using a pontoon bridge the next day—Easter Sunday—to the sound of Heidelberg's church bells. There were reports of hostile fire from a few die-hard storm troopers, but Gen. Beiderlinden issued orders that "all fire upon Heidelberg…be held" so as to preserve his side of the agreement. By late afternoon even the few resisters had disappeared, and American troops secured the city that night. Stars and Stripes reported that "Immaculate Heidelberg" was spared because to shell it would have been like "firing on Princeton or Cambridge." Even today citizens of Heidelberg refer to Beiderlinden as "the savior of the city." When the general died in 1981, the German government sent an honor guard to his funeral. Because Heidelberg was taken almost completely intact, Americans (and later NATO) established large military bases in the area; the U. S. Army never really left. These days, one can walk just south of the city center, past the hospital where General George Patton died, past streets named after Christopher Columbus, Thomas Edison and Twain himself, and see a nondescript road that runs behind the U. S. Army's Campbell barracks. That street, "Tom Sawyer Strasse," embodies the strange American influence in Heidelberg—one part literary, the other part military—the latter humanized by the former. The day after our encounter with Andrea, with our group (all together now) on yet another bus, this one rumbling west toward France, one final discovery, one more connection between books and history, between place and culture: The name "Heidelberg" is derived from the German word "Heidelbeerenberg," which means "Huckleberry Mountain."
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Mark Twain composing 
