Some background: My father Martin was the oldest of Ernst Scharlemann's 10+ children; his younger brother Robert (so my "Uncle Bob") became a distinguished philosophy professor (really a theologian, a specialist on Paul Tillich) at the University of Virginia. Uncle Bob had a remarkable physical resemblance to my father, though of course Uncle Bob was younger, and also perhaps a bit smaller. My Dad had died in 1982, seven years before our visit to Bochum.
During our six months in Bochum, I lived with my wife Barbara, and our 8 year old daughter Tess in an old farmhouse that was a pleasant walk from the university. Among those renting rooms in the farmhouse was a Fulbright Fellow named Elizabeth. At some point she received a letter from a grad student at the University of Virginia, one who had just himself won a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Bochum, asking for tips on what he would encounter when he came. She wrote back to him, mentioning that she could not tell him much about kids in Bochum, since she had none, but (unbeknownst to us) telling him that if he had concerns about life with kids there, he could write to me, since we did have a child and had had to deal with schools, etc.
When the student at U Va. got the letter from Elizabeth, he was intrigued: his PhD advisor, who had encouraged him to apply to go to Bochum, was also named Scharlemann. He showed his advisor (you guessed it - Uncle Bob) the letter. It turns out that Uncle Bob knew of several Scharlemanns in Bochum, in fact it seemed to be Scharlemann Central in Germany, and in particular knew Kurt-Jürgen, whom he identified as his closest relative in Germany. But he had never heard of someone (me) living in Bochum named Martin Scharlemann, the same name as his brother (my father). He did not have our phone number, only the farmhouse address, but as it happened he was about to fly to Germany to speak at a conference near Bochum, so he decided he would just look up Kurt-Jürgen, see if he knew what was going on, and then go with him to meet the unknown Scharlemann (me).
When Uncle Bob tried to execute this plan, he ran into a problem: Kurt-Jürgen had just gone through a nasty divorce, and was in semi-hiding from his ex-wife. She was a beautiful and elegant blonde (name forgotten - I'll call her Angela) with a fondness for gold jewelry. Uncle Bob easily found Angela and (somewhat strangely IMHO) invited her to come along to visit our farmhouse, with no way to phone ahead. The upshot of all this was that one day, while I was at the university and my wife Barbara was working in the yard, Uncle Bob and Angela came walking up the farmhouse driveway, totally unannounced. To Barbara's eyes (she had never met Uncle Bob) it appeared that my father had come back from the dead, much rejuvenated, and was dropping in accompanied by a beautiful blonde angel.
The true situation was soon sorted out, and after a good laugh Uncle Bob invited us all out to have dinner in a local castle. (Dinner at a castle is apparently easily arranged in Germany.) The only thing I remember of the elegant dinner itself was that our daughter Tess managed to lose a tooth in the middle of it, quite a surprise for Uncle Bob, who was a confirmed bachelor and had no kids.
Having now learned from Bob that our closest relative in Germany (Kurt-Jürgen) lived in Bochum, I made a little bit of effort to try to locate him, but I did not succeed. Finally, the day before we left Germany for the United States, we decided to rent a car to get to the airport. We picked a random car rental place in Bochum (a medium-sized city) that had convenient public transportation from the farmhouse. At the rental agency, as we were filling out paperwork, the rental agent expressed surprise at the name Scharlemann. "Do you know a Kurt-Jürgen Scharlemann?" he asked, "Up until about a month ago he was the manager of this office." This remarkable coincidence would have been the perfect lead to try and find the guy, except we were about to leave the country! So I couldn't follow up, and so ends the story.
Except I did further learn from Bob that I had a younger relative in Bochum named Martina Scharlemann, and so kind of a namesake. She was Angela and Kurt-Jürgen's daughter. It was Uncle Bob's further claim that Martina was named for my Dad, who somehow had impressed Martina's parents during a much earlier visit to Germany.