The Light - An Alumni Publication Summer 2015 | Page 14

Reflections
ERIN BLAKEMORE

PROGRAM: Germany, 1996
OCCUPATION: Author
HOME: Boulder, CO
Erin Blakemore is a Boulder, Colorado-based author and historian. Her
debut book, The Heroine’s Bookshelf (Harper), won a Colorado Book Award
for Nonfiction and has been translated into Italian, Korean and Portuguese. Erin has
written about history and culture for TIME, Smithsonian.com, mental floss, NPR’s This I Believe, The
Onion, Popular Science, Modern Farmer and many other publications. She still speaks German and
would welcome a piece of Schmalzbrot. You can find more of her work at erinblakemore.com.

SINGING IN GERMAN
The church was ancient and lined with bones. The
music was old, too. Together, we bounced through the
eight-part double chorus, glided through a capellas,
thrilled to horns and timpani and operatic voices.
I was sixteen years old, and even though
I was singing a Latin mass by an Italian
man, I was really singing in German.
I arrived in Germany with a suitcase, a phone
card and an admonition not to use it too often. My
exchange year with YFU would never have been
possible without the Congress-Bundestag scholarship
I had applied for on a whim, bored with suburban
San Diego and longing to see something beyond
my small world. After a bewildering journey that

Blakemore (center with hat) enjoys time with her choir friends in 1996
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YFU

involved the near complete destruction of my luggage
(thanks, United), I arrived in Germany knowing
three words: ja, nein, and the word for “potato.”
In retrospect, my host parents’ suggestion I
join the local choir probably came from a sense of
desperation. Buried in a language I did not understand,
lonely and homesick, I was having trouble adjusting
to my educational environment (an all-girls’ Catholic
school) and all of my surroundings. I remember
walking around the house, looking at the tempting
bookshelves, full to bursting with books I could not
read, and crying. Like every fifteen-year-old, life was
large, soaked in dramatics, and all about me—and
early on, Germany did not exactly agree with me.