Chapter One of Dietrich W. Botstiber’s Autobiography Not on the Mayflower (2007)

Dietrich Botstiber was born in 1912 in Vienna, Austria, during the final years of the Habsburg monarchy when the country flourished with abundant natural resources and high culture. In his memoirs, Botstiber writes about his life in Austria during the first part of the twentieth century, and describes an Austria of great beauty and bounty that, over those years, diminished in size, culture, wealth and prestige, due in large part to the breakup of the Habsburg Dual-Monarchy, the 1938 Anschluss and the ensuing war. Botstiber witnessed the most unsettling times in Austrian history, but in Chapter One he poignantly recounts the innocence of his own youth in 1931 when he was 18.