
I first met Franz Stanzel at the 1988 Grainau Canadian Studies conference in Bavaria, held at a rustic lodge a few kilometers southwest of Garmisch Partenkirchen, site of the 1936 Winter Olympics, and a similar distance northeast of the Eibsee with its huge resort hotel which from 1940 to 1945 was requisitioned as a recreation centre by the Luftwaffe. Midway through the conference we took a long walk through snowy pine woods and I casually asked my genial companion how he had become interested in Canadian literature. He replied that it had been a complicated war-time accident, that he had been a prisoner of war in Quebec. He added that on Germany’s March 1938 invasion of Austria, when he was 14, his family had fled to Rumania, which a military coup however would soon make a German ally. Forced to join the German armed forces, he had enlisted in the navy in late 1940. His U-boat was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1942, he was rescued by the British and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Quebec. He was surprised to find the prisoners there encouraged to plant and maintain a vegetable garden. The food was better than his parents had been eating in wartime Europe. Kindly elderly women brought the younger prisoners like himself both cookies and books, including classic works of English literature. On