by Dan "Arthur" Gifford

Long before snicklefritz came to mean a batch of bad marijuana or the name of a cartoon cat in modern American popular culture, it was for centuries a German term of endearment for a small boy. And it was with that word and a pinch on the cheek that "Papa" Gustav Danziger used to greet me when I would visit his Viennese Candy Kitchen and Old World Restaurant -- simply called "Danziger's" -- or the Rathskeller below it with my father.

Edward "Papa" Danziger at Danziger's Old World Restaurant and Candy Store Chapel Hill

The greeting was quickly followed by a slice of peanut cake or Vienna Kranz or some other central European goodie to keep me occupied while Papa, sometimes joined by his son Ted, and my father would sip coffee and converse in German. For hours it seemed they would sip coffee and speak in German, and if they happened to be joined by Werner Friedrich (always "Doctor Friedrich" to me then), my father's Swiss born comparative literature professor, it could actually be hours.

 
"Papa" Danziger caricature logo showing him reading Goethe's Faust

By then I was wandering around the store and into the kitchen where I would learn special secrets about the candy that filled Danziger's Franklin Street display window. So when my elementary pals pressed their faces on that glass after school and salivated about the mystery of white chocolate (an object of fascination then), I could tell them with authority that it wasn't really chocolate. That would take us inside for a Papa D explanation, in English, about the difference between cacao and cacao butter und a schnitzel of each. Now, Freidrich at least noticed when my antsiness was nearing critical mass and would begin quizzing me on the German pronouns, or the names of states or countries outlined on cards he always seemed to have with him or the meaning of the "Famous Quotes" painted on Danziger's wall or he'd offer a synopsis of what was being discussed even if I didn't really understood what he was talking about. Tried explaining Hegel, Kant or Goethe to a five or six year old? Freidrich gave it a good shot, though. "Vhat can you zink ov zat you vant zo badly zat you vould zell your zoul to ze devil to have it as Faust did, Arthur?" ... "Uh, Black Forest Cake?"

Inside Danziger's Old World Restaurant and Candy store Franklin Street Chapel Hill. For the last 35 years this has been the located of the Shrunken Head.

Yes, there's a reason Papa D's caricature in this Danziger's ad is reading Faust. He had seen poor choices made on a mass scale and was looking for answers. So was my father, and that was their main common ground so far as I can tell.

Papa was Jewish according to the Nazi's definition, saw the handwriting on the wall, and left Austria. In fact, his family had been Lutheran for two generations. He was also a philosophical man with many questions about the roots and appeal of that master race evil that replaced the residual protections of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern reigns. A mild anti-Semitism may have been part of the natural social order in both countries just as it was all over Europe, but why would millions of people sell their souls to Hitler and go along with an extermination of Jews and others who had been their friends?

 
This is the Quotation Wall inside Danziger's Old World Restaurant and Candy Store

Unlike the Japanese Imperialists he had fought who were not signatories to the Geneva Conventions and had no cultural concept of either honorable surrender or protection of civilian noncombatants, the German volk had a history of all three yet had trashed the lot of it. Why? My father wrestled with that question and many others about a people with a humanistic history descending into Nazi hell while also struggling against his warrior nature and the civilian he was trying to be.

He was already in the Army when Pearl Harbor was hit and had served in both theaters of W.W.II and then Korea. As a forward artillery observer and scout, he generally snuck around behind enemy lines and either liked it or didn't depending on the time of day and his mood. The "liked it" eventually won and he went back in the Army for for twenty five years of special combat units on the East German border and three tours in Vietnam. He was truly the proverbial man you did not want to meet in a dark alley and I noticed early on those in Chapel Hill, a town filled with war veterans, showed him that deference. But he was a hard man with a sense of honor who was troubled by the soulless Nazis and SS, as opposed to the typical Wehrmacht soldier, he had encountered. He admired the SS martial skill and ferocity, but he was also aware that many of those uniforms were filled with some of the worst degenerates humans had produced and were little better than rabid animals that needed killing for the sake of the sane.

Henry Gifford the man who "saved" the Rathskeller by installing steel beams to keep the ceiling from collapsing

In the meantime, he was attending UNC and doing construction contracting on the side. I used to hear Ted Danziger say that my father was the person who had saved the Rathskeller he had started under the candy shop by installing several steel I beams to keep the sagging ceiling nobody else had noticed from caving in. He also did some shoring of the several side rooms like "The Cave" Ted literally dug out (hauling the dirt away in the trunk of his car) sans building permits to expand the Rathskeller.

Dan "Arthur" Gifford and his father Henry Gifford in 1956 in front of their house at 738 East Franklin Street  Chapel Hill

"The Rat" was a place I especially liked visiting with my father because of its high student energy -- drinking lots of beer will do that -- and the fact that everything was said in English. That meant I could take in the "my hard times during the depression were harder than your hard times during the depression" and the "my war experience was more terrifying than your war experience" stories everybody seemed to have. Papa D would occasionally come in and shake hands but "The Rat" didn't really seem to be his scene. It wasn't mine for a few weeks either after my mother asked me what I did with my father that day. My enthusiastic reply: "I watched daddy drink tea outa the bottle at the Rat."

That's when snicklefritz learned not to rat on what he learned at "The Rat."

Inside the newly opened Rathskeller - The Rat - Amber Alley Fanklin Steet Chapel Hill 1949

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