Brancato ’65 Says Life in Germany “Just Happened”

Albert Brancato ’65 is living a life he never expected when he entered St. Joseph’s Prep in the fall of 1961. As a young man from Upper Darby, he never thought he would have spent 50 years as an expat living in Germany, however, passions that were sparked at the Prep led to a successful and happy life abroad.

Brancato was one of three children born to Isabel and Al, Senior. Isabel was a stay-at-home mother while Al was the baseball coach at Saint Joseph’s College, a position he began after spending a few years as a member of Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s. Though he never finished school, Al, Sr. valued education, and his connection to the Jesuits gave the Prep an extra advantage when young Al was choosing a high school.

“My parents had a politically ‘mixed’ marriage that made for animated dinner conversations,” recalls Al. Politics run deep in his family as his aunt, Anna Brancato, was the first woman Democrat to serve in the Pennsylvania State House. During the 1964 presidential election, Al was spokesman of the Prep's Conservative Club and gave a speech on a local TV show called "Youth in Convention."

Al arrived at the Prep in 1961 and happily found outstanding teachers who served him as mentors both then and later in life. 

“There were four men who were instrumental in helping me,” Brancato says: 

At the Prep, Al served as co-captain on the tennis team. He laughs and says “my yearbook tells me that I was also in the Chemistry Club. I remember being part of the Glee Club and the prom committee junior year. I was an enthusiastic member of the film seminar.” 

“The Prep laid the foundations for my later intellectual life,” Brancato says. “I built on all of them and used the tools given to me at the Prep to complete my higher education. I think it was the breadth of the educational approach at the Prep, including a strong portfolio in the liberal arts, that formed me and enriched my life.”

After graduating from the Prep, Brancato joined several classmates at Saint Joseph’s College, which he calls the “most enjoyable years of my education. I profited from the Prep-to-College Jesuit continuity and I sailed through the college learning experience, with a major in history and minor in German.” He continued his study of history at Bryn Mawr College, earning master’s and doctoral degrees there. “The Jesuit ‘whole man’ ideal mixed well with the Quaker spirit of tolerance at Bryn Mawr,” recalls Brancato.

At Bryn Mawr, he studied German history, an interest that first formed when he began studying German at the Prep. His master’s thesis focused on Germany's Social Democratic Party and foreign policy at the end of the first World War. He then took that topic a step further for his Ph.D. dissertation, expanding the study to the end of World War II in 1945. He received a generous scholarship from the German government to complete his studies to access Germany’s federal archives. He arrived in Bonn, then West Germany’s capital, in September 1972, and found the transition difficult and lonely.

“My command of German was poor, and it was hard to make friends,” he says. “As a solution, I decided to join some sort of club where I could meet Germans and practice the language. I was 25 years old, and after a long struggle, had finally accepted the fact that I was gay. So I began attending meetings of the gay student organization at Bonn University. On my way to the university one day, I noticed a good-looking German fellow at the bus stop. That evening, he suddenly appeared at the gay group. After the meeting, he invited me back to his place for a glass of wine. That was the beginning of a loving relationship that lasted 49 years. And that was my main reason to stay in Germany.”

He found work as an American English teacher at the Berlitz School in Bonn. Through connections there, he found a job at a military publishing house and worked at the publisher's for four years as translator and editor of one of their periodicals. Finally, in 1980, he found work as a translator at the German Ministry of Economics, where he stayed until he retired in 2012. 

Since retirement, he has remained active as a volunteer at the August Macke Museum in Bonn as translator of its website and exhibition materials, compiling class notes for graduate student alumni for Bryn Mawr College's Bulletin, and heading support groups in Cologne and Bonn for people afflicted by the movement disorder Essential Tremor, which he inherited from his father. Recently, at the behest of his classmate Rev. Thomas McCoog, S.J. ’65, he published two book reviews in the Journal of Jesuit Studies.  

Brancato was recently widowed after his husband Michael, who had suffered with dementia for a few years before contracting COVID, passed away. The couple was together for nearly 50 years but according to Brancato had “legalized our relationship immediately after Germany instituted Registered Same-Sex Partnerships in 2001. And then, in 2014, as soon as Maryland allowed same-sex marriage, we drove to Elkton, Maryland, during a trip back to Philadelphia and eloped. Finally, Germany allowed us to transform our Registered Partnership into a full marriage.”

Being a Prep graduate and a member of the Class of 1965 (“the last class to graduate before the Great Fire,” he says) is important to Brancato. “I do enjoy keeping up with my classmates; Facebook makes that easy,” he says. “Charlie Gallagher keeps us classmates from ’65 connected and I smile warmly whenever a name from the Prep pops up in my email or Facebook inbox.”

With nearly 60 years of life after the Prep in his experience, Brancato offers advice to present and future Prep Hawks. “Continue to use the foundations laid during your years at our alma mater to excel along whatever path you embark on,” he says. “My own path wasn't planned. It just happened.”