the good times - a German fraternity meeting

It wasn´t long before Mauricio was convinced by the brothers in his house to join the fraternity in which he was already living, and soon the campaign was on to get John and I to join one, too. There were two big problems from the outset. The first problem was that John and I are Episcopalians. Mauricio, who is Mexican and Catholic to the bone, explained to us that we might consider converting, and noted that being a Catholic wasn´t "all that bad." Besides, he said, we could do a year of Catholicism as "you know, a sort of test run." He also argued that the Episcopal church is a lot like the Catholic church and little more than the result of the cantankerous Henry VIII, which has some truth to it, but becoming Catholic seemed like a very big step, and to convert in order to become eligible for fraternity membership -- especially as a "test run" -- would have been obviously ridiculous.

But on top of it all anyway, as a member of SigEp back home at Davidson i swore I wouldn´t be joining any other fraternities after I joined SigEp so as not to dilute the system and so on. So you see, joining Mauricio´s fraternity was out of the question on several levels.

Nevertheless a German gentleman named Sebastian Krems from another fraternity across the street -- they´re called Studentenverbindungen, by the way -- decided that he wasn´t going to be dissuaded by silly things like these, and what followed was a flurry of invitations to functions at his house. John and Mauricio and I attended several of them. But the best one, depicted in the photo, I attended by myself.

The history of the Studentenverbindungen goes back to the early 19th century, especially that year 1848 when everybody in Germany became a communist and the mobs in Austria forced Metternich to resign. All the links lead to articles about the histories of these subjects in Wikipedia, in case you´re interested in them further.

In any event, it was at one of these Verbindungen that I was invited to observe rituals, which date back to those heady days in the 19th century. Getting all dressed up like old-fashioned German soldiers, singing roaring songs, drinking great flasks of beer and playing with big swords is really what they meant by "rituals." I had a blast. There are some great traditions and some not so great ones: for example, if you don´t take care to close your song book as soon as everyone´s finished singing, all your neighbors will set their beers on the open pages until you notice you´re mistake; then you have to drink them all. But the not so great tradition is that you may not go to the bathroom for long stretches of time due to an obscure fraternal law that was put in place to prevent members from getting atrociously drunk during this sort of semi-serious event. Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell me about this rule until half-way into the evening; later I only avoided the most appalling of accidents by the narrowest of margins.

These were good times.