In fact, I had been to Salzburg once before, decades earlier, as a high school student. We had taken the train from Munich, where maybe 15 of us were staying in a little hotel near the Hauptbahnhof, supervised by one of our school’s two German teachers, Frau Bell. The trip was an exercise in cultural immersion, the value of which, like that of learning another language, was apparently self-evident enough that I can’t remember questioning it until I was throwing up the convenience-store pizza I had ordered in German. Frau Bell assumed I’d been drinking. No doubt she offered insight and instruction along the way, but my enduring memory of her is the disappointment that crossed her face when, waiting for the train that would take us to Dachau, a few of us posed irreverently with candy cigarettes. It was winter then, and I remember standing in front of the elaborate fountain outside the Salzburg Cathedral, mugging for more photos in the bitter cold.…