I was fortunate enough to spend this past April working out of my company’s office in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. My family was stationed in Germany from 1976-79, which was age 7-10 for me, and I’ve never been back there.
One weekend, I rented a car and decided to visit Biebesheim am Rhein, which is where my family lived while we were there. Biebesheim is about a half-hour south of Frankfurt (well, about 15 minutes on the Autobahn 
). The rental car company, Sixt, gave me a brand-new Mercedes M-class SUV for the weekend, so I was cruising along in style.
A lot of people, when they visit places they lived as a child, are disappointed to see how much they have changed. I was in for a surprise, though. Since the U.S. military presence in Europe has been greatly decreased in the last decade, a lot of installations have been returned to their respective countries’ governments. And former off-base housing is no longer used by the military.
Biebesheim has not changed a bit. Except for the fact that the buildings are now occupied by German citizens rather than Army personnel, the neighborhood is exactly as I remembered it. I took a few pictures of the building and the neighborhood around it.
My family lived on the 7th floor of the large high-rise in the pictures. Those playgrounds are just the same as they were 22 years ago–the structures look a lot smaller now, though. When I was a kid they seemed huge! The yard outside the building in the third picture on the left – it’s hard to tell in the picture – is grass growing up through cinderblocks. When I was nine years old, I was playing football with my friends, got tackled, and chipped a tooth on those blocks. The best part was seeing that the underground parking garage is still there. We used to get in so much trouble there. First, we used to ride our bikes down the ramp and slam on the brakes, leaving huge skid marks all the way down. Also, a bunch of us kids would get together and hold on to the bottom of the door, and one of us would run over and push the button; the door would open up and we’d all hang off the bottom. Usually the door would hold 6-8 kids before it wouldn’t open.
It was really weird to walk into a neighborhood that I haven’t seen in 22 years and know exactly where everything was. The middle picture in the bottom row is a restaurant at the back edge of the parking lot; just on the other side of it is a 12-15 foot dike, and on the other side of that is the Rhein river. If you hang a right and walk down the top of the dike for about a half-mile, you come to the Biebesheim Vogelpark, a bird sanctuary/zoo that my sister and I used to visit all the time.
That same weekend, I also visited Stuttgart, Heidelberg and Darmstadt to find them much the same as I remembered them. It was like visiting a museum filled with my own stuff–pretty cool.
Has anyone else had an opportunity to visit childhood homes?
