Austria. Zell am See.
Band of Brothers and the Vision of Austria
As a young guy, I was completely swept away by the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. Beautifully filmed and written, it told the true story of one of the most courageous groups of men this world has ever known. Week after week I watched, following Easy Company of the 101st Airborne through Normandy, Belgium, Bastogne, and Berchtesgaden. Eastward they fought, pushing back the German army town by town, often in brutal conditions.
After 11 long months—spent in the frozen woods of Bastogne or storming Nazi-occupied villages like Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, Eindhoven, and Foy—these men finally saw their duty come to a close in the German Alps. The final episode of the series was titled Zell am See. Here, at last, they swam in a mountain lake, rested in peace, and breathed freely under the shadow of the Austrian Alps.
To me, it was the perfect ending: to fight within an inch of your life and then find rest in a place of such beauty. That vision of Austria stayed with me: rest, peace, overwhelming mountains, and rolling green countrysides.
First Impressions of Vienna
When I arrived in Austria, that wasn’t my first impression. Unlike Easy Company, who rolled in by truck through the Alps, we popped up in downtown Vienna at the Wien Rennweg metro station. With the wind in our faces and a map torn from the guidebook, we set off to find our hotel.
“Wir haben eine Reservierung unter dem Namen Grimes,” I proudly announced at the desk, drawing on a two-week crash course in German.
“Welcome to Vienna, Herr Grimes,” the clerk smiled. “Not to worry—we all speak English here.”
And so ended my attempts at German.
Vienna was just as picturesque and romantic as one might expect: horse-drawn carriages, grand Habsburg estates, crowds gathered to watch opera in the street. We explored mile after mile until our (well, my) feet could take no more. The next morning, we grabbed our little Volkswagen Polo and headed west up the Danube Valley.
Along the Danube
Each town we passed had its story.
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Dürnstein: a tiny riverside village whose castle once imprisoned Richard the Lionheart in 1192.
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Melk: a small town home to the largest Benedictine Abbey in the world.
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Mauthausen: little more than a sign from the road, but instantly recognizable as one of the notorious concentration camps.
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Linz: birthplace of Hitler, whose twisted ideology spread from here.
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Salzburg: Mozart’s birthplace, idyllic in every way except for parking. (It really was sixteen going on seventeen minutes before we found a spot, and when we did it was a long, long way to walk.)
Zell am See: A Personal Pilgrimage
We continued west into the Bavarian Alps. Our route was out of the way and added hours to our journey to Munich, but there was a reason: Zell am See.
As we exited the highway, I imagined myself not in a little Polo but in the back of a deuce-and-a-half with Easy Company. Zell am See unfolded before us—not as the modern resort town of today, but as I had pictured it: a quiet lakeside village, its residents just beginning to breathe in peace after years of war, perhaps uneasy at the sight of American soldiers.
I could see Dick Winters diving into the lake, Shifty Powers stalking a deer in the woods, Doc Roe staring up at the mountainside, trying to forget Bastogne. Our time there was short, just a stop along the way, but for me it was the end of a long journey I had carried in my imagination for years.
For a moment, I shared that ending with Easy Company. Then the rumble of the deuce-and-a-half faded, and I was back in the Volkswagen Polo, back in reality.
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