Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Bauer

The local Army base offers German lessons for Americans that want to improve their German language skills.  I started taking classes with Frau Bauer in early 2010.  I took four of her classes and was looking forward to a fifth this fall.  Tina had also taken two of her classes and was signed up for a third.  Her classes were really good for me and I learned a lot.  I always felt like I got more out of the classes than I paid for.


This semester's classes was supposed to start in late September and run through mid-December.  Unfortunately, the administration office called the house a week before class was scheduled to start to tell us that Frau Bauer was ill and the classes were being canceled.  At that time, they had hopes that the classes would be offered in January.  I sent Frau Bauer a short email to see how she was doing but she never wrote back to me.

On October 17th, Frau Bauer's daughter replied to that email to tell me that Frau Bauer had died of cancer the previous week.  She had been in the United States to visit family when she collapsed in mid-September.  She was taken to the hospital and subsequently diagnosed with advanced cancer.  The doctors told her she had three to six months to live (or longer if treatments were successful).  She was transferred back to Saint Joseph's hospital here in Wiesbaden where she unexpectedly died in her sleep less than five weeks after collapsing.

After she died, I learned that she had been teaching German to Americans for over twenty years.  Before that, she taught English to German school children.  My coworker Jamie was able to attend the funeral and meet her daughter (Jamie and I took the classes together).  Tina and I had previously made plans to be on vacation in London so we were unable to attend the services.

Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Bauer.  You will be missed.