1940 – December
As a child my mother wrote in her diary that I was “Himmelhoch jauchzend – zu Tode betrübt ”: cheering in joy – deadly sad.
I was born in the snow of the ’giant mountains’ of Silesia (now Poland), the ‘Riesen Gebirge’, on 11 December 1940.
With six other members of our extended family, in February 1945, I was put, carrying a rucksack, at night into the last goods train to escape from the advancing Russian army that was destroying Breslau (now Wroclaw) where my father had studied and my older brother was born. It took a week to get to Dresden, which was destroyed a week later in a firestorm by a British air raid.
1945 – February
Trains stopped at night. Darkness, fires and staying in bunkers affected me and my brothers in the years to come. We lived as refugees but – so very lucky – were taken up by a family who had just lost their son in the last days of the war. They ran a glass factory in West Germany near Hamel. We lived in the back of their comfortable house and from then on played in their protected garden. I went to primary school until I was 10 but failed the entrance exam to the Gymnasium and had to go back a year.
1953 – August
I had to repeat the exam a year later in Limburg, near Frankfurt, where we moved because of my father’s work. My mother joined us after years of suffering TB and being cured in sanatoriums.
My grandfather with Omi and his grandchildren in 1943. I am in a chair below him.
My grandfather was a successful businessman in Silesia. He stayed on after the war ended in 1945 but could not persuade the Polish people who had taken over his business to help with the transfer. In the turmoil of 1946 he lost a daughter and his own life. My father tried to help but was taken into a Polish prisoner-of-war camp.
He took groups out from the camp to collect herbs and mushrooms for the kitchen. This gave him a chance to escape but also the means to live for four months in hiding and trading.
One of the many quarries my grandfather and father managed in Silesia.
My four years older and one year younger brother and me were mostly brought up by our mother’s friend aunt Gathi, who designed this board game of our escape.
Dresden after the fire storm, 13th – 15th Feb 1945.
What was it like, my
Early Childhood
Hood being hooded, a hood for protection, a cover
Hooded – behütet – cared for – beward – warded
My mother rolled me in a worm blanket and let me in the snow
As a baby
She told me that? When did I hear it? What did I think??
What effect did my childhood have on me?
WHAT ARE THE FACTS?
What is the story?
What IS the story?
What have YOU to tell?
WHAT IS TRAUMA?
1953 – September • 1957 – September • 1961 – Feb
MY TEENS
My father reappeared in 1947 in West Germany, run down and wounded. after recouping he joined his brother and brother-in-law to make a living in the only stone manufacturing place in West Germany that had survived the loss of the big industrial spread of quarries and factories in Silesia – seven quarries and the main factory, with about 600-800 employees, in the south of Silesia were lost and never compensated for.
My uncles and father’s efforts to establish the firm only led to financial hardship in all three families.
My uncle and father’s efforts to establish the firm only led to financial hardship in all three families. My father’s musical and folk music talent and studies and his ambition to reform the culture of cemeteries were greatly honoured, but he was not a businessman. His romantic orientations and his rich family background were very different to my mother’s modest Lutheran education in Hamburg. Their characters hardly matched. References to the resistance to Hitler from Luther, orientated by Niemöller and Bonhöfer, dominated my upbringing in a protestant context. My father was a pantheist. I liked our pastor and raised questions about the stories of Christ in a Youth Club but I distanced myself from going to church, preferring searching to churching. I loved playing games and, more than anything, theatrical sketches. Tennessee William’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, which we rehearsed on four chairs to simulate a car, was a hit. I resented any ‘Heimat’ (homeland) sentiments. I might have looked ‘sweet’ but being ‘sweet’ was not my thing.
References to the resistance to Hitler by Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a part of the protestant Church after 1934 dominated my upbringing. Thje confession coming out after the war from the theologian Martin Niemöller convinced me to become a conscientious objector, after he said:
“First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”
I liked our pastor who raised critical questions in the youth cllub about the stories of Christ. But I distanced myself from going to ‘church, preferring searching to Churching.
I loved playing games but more than anything I loved theatrical sketches. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire we rehearsed on four chairs to simulate a car. That was a hit.
I resented any ‘Heimat’ = homeland sentiments. I might have looked ‘sweet’ but being ‘sweet’ was not my thing when thinking about the past.
1951 – September
By train I went to nearby Limburg to a boys’ grammar school, getting up at 6 am every morning, but I wasn’t a good learner. I had to find ways to overcome my bad memory for words and names, a lifelong struggle and nearly had to repeat one further year when I was 13. My parents tried to find alternative schools but couldn’t afford it.
1957 – May
They found another grammar school nearby and I used a moped to get there during my three final years in a gender-mixed gymnasium to reach the abitur.
The reputation of this town, Hadamar, was stained by Hitler, who had sent and murdered ‘unfit for life’ people there.
I resented the school curriculum, with only very few English lessons but learning Latin and Greek and no art.
1961 – Feb
I loved the German lessons with literature that gave me insights into my own past and led to my first political awareness.
Afternoons I spent making things like house models, pipes and drums for Contra – and Morris dancing. My mother gave me a violin and organised lessons when I was 14. I impressed the school assembly by playing the Max Bruch violin concerto, without notes, in the school hall when I was 18.
At home I suppressed my dislike of baroque house music and the organ my brother played. My father practised Schubert on the piano but neighbours living above spoiled it for him by banging on the ceiling to make him stop.
I joined the Young Orchestra in Hesse in the nearby Kasseel and spent occasional weekends and concerts there but gave it up when I decided to draw, with the aim of becoming an art teacher.
How to get out of your own past?
How to develop away from my uprooted family?
‘Entwurzelt”, without roots?
Did I like to be a teenager?
What did I know about my parents?
What did they tell me?
My father was ‘stumm’. He said nothing about the war but had a diary in his office and had written a book about the story of his escape in a romanticised way that I never red before I was 60, after his death. But `I didn’t like it. I much preferred the harsh facts of his daily notes. I then wanted to know more about him as he had studied in Munich and was present in 1923 at Hitler’s beer hall putsch. I was too late.
I am easily full of resentments. One example is when family members said I was like my father. I am sorry because `I didn’t do him justice then.
He was a creative outsider and suffered from a lack of recognition in the wider family. I always felt sorry for him.
My mother favoured me. She talked about her parents, loved her father and her brother, an extrovert art historian, and she past on what she had read to me. She was fearless in her trust to us children. She guided me, really. She thought I should become a carpenter. But I, sadly so, couldn’t really bond with her.
Next – 60s – 70s