It was not comfortable to be a German in America anymore and even more so to work for a man who’d been a prisoner of war in Germany during World War I. Chris understood why Mr. Knowle distrusted him, but he hoped that his own good character might save his job. He opened the door of his car and got out. He would know in a few minutes whether the board of education had decided not to renew his contract, but he had to ask himself if he really wished to continue working in a place where his colleagues and students had begun to consider him one of the enemy.

It was damn unfair. He had created as much emotional, if not physical, distance from his birthplace and heritage as he could. He did not speak or think in German. He had earned money to pay for his graduate studies as a tutor to college students taking courses in German, but in conversation, he had distilled from his speech every trace of the language. He spoke English with a Texas accent. In college he had not fraternized with students of German descent, but had hung out with the sons and daughters of families as purebred as the University of Texas longhorn mascot. But even his longtime girlfriend, Brenda Lane, had gone sour on him after her cousin had been killed by a Luftwaffe bomb in London. “I know you’re not one of them, Chris,” she’d said, “but I can’t look at you without seeing the Nazi pilot that killed my cousin.”

He even planned to go through the legal process of getting his first name changed to Christopher during summer vacation. Maybe, after his first year of teaching at Stephen F. Austin, when the direction of the war in Europe had become painfully clear, he should have considered looking into a job out of state where he could better disassociate himself from the stigma of being from a town assumed to be a pocket of Nazis, but he wanted to finish his doctorate at the University of Texas so he could teach and coach one day at the college level. He loved the city of Austin with its youthful, bustling energy, its access to lakes and hills, its festivals and live music offerings. Chris thought it a bit haughty of Austinites to forget that Austin’s growing reputation as a mecca for music lovers had begun in the German beer gardens and halls of their city in the late 1800s.