During the early part of my schooling, I skipped several grades, so that I finished high school at age 16. Starting college that young was out of the question, so it became necessary to figure out something useful for me to do for the year I would need to reach something approaching college age.
Our high school German teacher, Father Felix, used to spend two months each summer at an approximate German equivalent of our high school - a boarding school near the Dutch-German border, run by German Franciscan monks. Our school had hosted some of their students, typically for no longer than a month. The suggestion that I spend a full academic year over there seemed like a reasonable solution to the warehousing problem.
And so I ended up spending September '73 - June '74 in Kolleg St Ludwig, in a small town called Vlodrop.
Which, if you hadn't guessed already, is the building shown in the pictures on the right.
Not quite as scary as it looks in that
second picture, St Ludwig's was built between 1904 and 1908, a place to educate the sons of the Catholic middle classes of the Rhineland. Because of residual anti-Catholicism stemming from Bismarck's Kulturkampf, the (Franciscan) order was denied permission to build the school on German soil, and so St Ludwig's had the odd distinction of being located 50 meters on the Dutch side of the border, despite catering entirely to German students and being staffed by German teachers.
I had a blast the year I was there - learned to drink beer (not only sanctioned, but expected), learned a lot of German - even survived the visit, for Easter, of my entire family. (A visit rendered memorable because they drove from Ireland, so that much of the time was spent in white-knuckled fear of our lives, as our Dad hurtled blindly through the Dutch roundabouts, often taking three circuits to emerge).
It was clear even then that the school's days were numbered, so it was no great surprise when I heard later that the school was to close for good in 1978.
What would become of the buildings? There were several different rumors, ranging from conversion to a health spa, to a state-sanctioned "comfort station" for truckers (those Dutch!).