My Family Past

Dear Stefan,
My Family past, an INTRO.

I try to find out what FAMILY means to me and others.

Your film underlines my direction away from the center of what we think about a family towards the edges of what there is.
I can’t recall any of the experience your film reveals.

But because of my age I can look back to what family meant to me and what I value now.

I have certainly – and so have many others – gathered images of “OUR FAMILY” over the years. Most of them are on my computer HD. In the 60s I painted some of my relatives. But there are collections of photos and negatives I never looked at.

Dear Will

I’m pleased to announce my video ‘Dementia Painting’ is out now! I’d be grateful if you could view this short video and make a brief comment.

Dementia Painting sent 29th Dec 2022

My older brother

I kept sketches and a portrait I painted of my older brother in 1968.
In 2019 I took a snapshot of him on my IPhone, in the workshop where our great grandfather founded the company Thust, 200 years ago, in 1819.
My brother died in 2021.
I am glad to have these two pictures of him, they are telling.

Do I need memories like that ? Do I need additional stories ?
Does he deserve special attention within “THE FAMILY”?

I chose him because of the unavoidable bond between us. He was 4 years
older and I looked up to HIM,
not to my one year younger brother.

We 3 lived together in one room in two different places, for 17 years, the first one bigger than the second one in size. He was 9 when we escaped from the Russians. The journey affected us, but him more than me. After 1945 he often woke us up screaming fire, fire. I also woke up at night and didn’t dare to go to the loo. I shook my head noisily until a glimmer of light made me feel secure.

I felt my brother was odd, loud and not that clever but there was a fatherly distance between him and me. He was the top builder (Baumeister), I had my own ideas. I was chatty, my mother said, but shy to people outside the family. Silently I had my girlfriend Memmie.

Silently our warm and humorous aunt became my “mother” because my mother had to spend long periods away from us in sanatoriums to cure her TB when I was 4 to 10 years old. When she was around she rested in a veranda, a kind of glasshouse attached to the dining room, inside this beautiful country house that took us in as refugees.

Talking about a Glasshouse, an event that stayed in everybody’s memory in the “family” and with me more than what actually happened, needs to be told here. I was getting dressed by my aunt standing on the table in front of a comfortably sized window when a massive explosion covering me in glass head to toe that had to be very carefully removed and I to be reminded not to move. The fiddling creature I was had to stay motionless like a statue. The massive bridge over the river Weser very near to us leading into the town had deliberately been destroyed by Germans to stop the Americans coming in. This happened just before the end of the war and before American soldiers threw Kommissbrot and sweets to us children out of the back of their jeeps. I walked over “die Notbrücke” = temporary bridge to my primary school for 4 years.

I also bonded with another aunt who was paralyzed. She lived near the primary school I had to walk to every morning and to return at midday, a long way over the temporary bridge, all on my own. This aunt I ran to after school, squeezing my body through the hedge of the playground in order to meet her. She lived on the other side of the road. That way I avoided being followed by a group of boys who often waited in hiding. They put my face into puddles or scared me otherwise. This aunt wasn’t a member of our family, that didn’t matter. She was kind and played board games with me.

Was our 8 years older “sister” who my “mother”/aunt had adopted when she had lost both her parents in a town near Königsberg in East Prussia, now Kaliningrad. Was SHE a member of our family ? For me our “sister” (Ziehschwester) was no outsider. I looked up to her. She was intelligent but also good at art. She talked a lot about one art teacher whom she loved. Perhaps that influenced my decision to become an art teacher myself, much later in life ?

I remember when I was 10 reading a letter telling me that I failed the entrance exam to the Gymnasium. I sat on our steps to the balcony and cried. It was a wake up call, away from childhood. I thought about my “sister” then because I had wished to enter the school she did so well in. She was just about to leave with splendid exam results.

Renate In 2003 on a visit to our Barn

I drew my older brother in 1968 when he decided to work in the “FIRMA” I did these sketches for a painting of him.

On The Left:

Colours 1 pink, yellow white 2 chrome
3 x ray On The Right:
Business man like a horse in a chess game About to jump
Marble, shells, Chrome

keen to
Jump out of (T)HIS sensible zone.

My older and younger brother, drawn by me in 1968.

I was keen to get an inside into My models when I was 15. This Got me to the thoughts on the Painting about my brother.

In the 1990s I went to an exhibition of the american painter Hopper and liked what I saw because he seem to look into houses from the outside in. Hitchcock’s films do the same.

Here I come back to my thoughts on families. I feel right to have chosen my brother in my art, as the centre of my own family experience. It makes me authentic and nearer to a true story that I can share with others. On the journey to Poland with him I found time to talk one night as we had to share a bed and I revealed that I always felt alienated by family gatherings. He was quite shocked. I added that I could not understand why nobody ever asked me anything about my divorce as if that was “normal” to happen. He took it in.

Days later he told me that in retrospect he had made the wrong decision to marry his wife and that at the time he was too shy to come out to the woman he really loved. It was very moving to me to hear this.
After my brother’s death – two years later – his wife told me that she could not relate to him for quite some years and that she felt relieved when he had gone. I sort of knew. I wasn’t even shocked, nobody was, I think.

I have pictures that show that this was not always so but the bond didn’t last.

Why?

My brother had followed his own mission, spending years mostly in his car to manage all contacts and deals whilst driving as a “salesman” in order to release his burdens of debts he had accumulated over the years. He refused operations on his back. On my journey with him I had to witness his downfall, literally. He could hardly walk and later on needed a wheelchair. Living in his own “capsule” brought him down.

Tragic it may be, but HE never saw it like that. And, when I listened to many people who had dealings with him they all were full of praise about his vitality, friendly open approach, care for his workforce and about his sense for a respectful representation of the dead in burials and the fine art of masonry that often he chose and designed himself.

For me it is important to judge him rightly.

We went to see my grandfather’s place where trading is still going on, although much reduced. The factory was always part of a village that was half German but now is Polish, half Chekslovakian.

I made a painting in 2016, a turning table where the visitor could shift and change the outlines of Europe’s uncertain borders. That is my almost silly comment on the confusion of political divides in Europe often completely disregarding human relevance. I don’t belittle the dramatic and violent circumstances that happened. But what I ridicule is the glorifications of the successes of war. I am interested in case studies that explain why wars happen and about any steps to avoid them.

Europe

Europe?

My older brother identified with “THE THUST FAMILY”. In 2019 he organised a tour to celebrate 200 Years of successful stone manufacturing by the Thusts started in Breslau, now Wroclaw. My brother was born there in 1937. I was born 1940 in the mountainous area of lower Silesia, where my father had to overlook a new quarry. I am interested in the historical and political facts of our family and recognise the successes my brother felt to be part of. He pointed at the process of ‘Wiedergutmachung’ = reconciliation after the 2WW and through the EU. I was astonished about the housing and living standards now in Poland.

The painting I did in 1968 of him I carefully planned. It shows him entering his life as a young willful business man. His clothes were like layers to support his performance. His body was like his inner life, open to development, not open to me and others. It always fascinated me to deal with layers and I tried to represent an inner and outer existence, the inner being the hidden and less obvious areas even for ourselves. As a teenager I made a model house with a door in the roof in order to look inside. There are shots in Hitchcock’s films with windows and doors to look in from the outside. Paintings by the American painter Edward Hopper looking from the outside in.

The Photo I took of my brother in 2019 is a snapshot on our excursion where severe back ache didn’t allow him to stand up properly. This happened inside the workshop of the founder of the Thust’s manufacturer in 1819. The now Polish mayor offered him a seat and received a brochure about this event in return. This was well received with a great deal of interest for future connections and deals.

My brother sat there like a person in a painting by Courbet, the painter who in the 19th century personally went to forgeries to study people in action including the bosses. I knew how important this gathering was to my brother and how fulfilling it was for him to say something about the intentions of him and his family to reconcile what happened to the Polish people in WW2. Within a second I did this “speaking” shot that doesn’t need any explanation. Here my brother reveals his message to the world. I was fond of him then.

What does the reader think about reconciliation = Wiedergutmachung ?

Should I feel guilty about what my parents experienced ?

Instead of judging, should I research and take in account what actually happened ?

Three adult men, including my father, expected to be financially secure in a business that could not be successful enough any more after the war. My brother tried to avoid bankruptcy by creating two more branches selling Thust monuments, one after the fall of the wall near Leipzig, the other in Wroclaw, Breslau, his birthplace.

I now know that this tour through Silesia with 150 invited guests was THE END of his and his family’s work after 200 years.
After my brother’s death every member of his family made sure not to pay parts of his debts. It was a drag for us living in England and others in Paris and it applied to his two adopted children and their 3 children, his grandchildren, as well..

He represents an important part of OUR FAMILY, a disjointed entity, a growing success story and a sudden complete destruction in the years of 1945 – 46, a lingering after the war, a feeling of homesickness in my father’s families and a brave effort to overcome her own illness and disappointments by my mother. I now do understand why I kept my distance, even cried at one wedding gathering. I felt desperate about any gloss, pomp, pride or joy within any family gathering then.

I admit, I still feel like a joy killer, because of it. And I should not be, because there is no reason now to be a downer.

But it is just the same when I am confronted with British Royal Family celebrations. I know about the joy but I can not share it.

What does the reader think about reconciliation = Wiedergutmachung ? Should I feel guilty about what my parents experienced ?

Instead of judging, should I research and take in account what actually happened ?

My father

was not part of OUR escape.
When we moved to live near Frankfurt in 1951 and my mother was finally able to have a “FAMILY” as she had always wanted, I got to know my father because he was not present on our escape in 1945. and not afterwards.

HE
was at the front either in Belgium or Russia. He had appeared once or twice for a very short visit in 1947 after his escape from a Polish Camp. He tried hard then to find a place for us to live. But my vision of moving in 1951 into a villa opposite the train station, as somebody told me, didn’t come true. Instead we moved into a council flat with 5 other parties and I had a half an hour’s walk to the station! My father didn’t have enough money to afford a “posh house”. It was a 4 room flat not even near to his workplace. It was a house built for refugees, the flat size of 65 qm for 6 people. I read this in my mother’s diary, just recently. And we had to have a woman helper who lived in one room next to a minute kitchen corner.

I became aware of the struggles in the business my father had. Becoming aware of his troubles spoiled my relationship with him. He wasn’t the father I expected to have. He had a lot to offer but it seemed to me a story of the past. His war and after war experiences had made it difficult for him as well to be the father he would have liked to be. He was creative and musical, playing piano and other instruments. He often disappeared at nights to collect mushrooms like he had done to make a living on his heroic escape. After all he was a Dr.Thust and had studied geology in Silesia and knew that land inside out. He would not have survived his escape from this Polish camp in the industrial zone of the upper Silesia and to the mountains of the lower country, where we used to live, and back to the factory where his father and sister died from typhus. He spent 3 months hiding, living rough and selling mushrooms.
When he reappeared with open leg-wounds he was unrecognisable, my mother told me. Later he wrote a book about it, turning this experience into a romanticised novel, a mistake to my mind. In his diary though he records devastating experiences and the dangers he had to overcome border checks.

MY MOTHER

Only now do I realise how lucky I was to feel that I had two mothers !

Was this possibly harmful to my real mother ? When I think about this, I don’t really know because they became very good friends and my respect is certainly on her side.
The creative bursts and the sense of humour in my early childhood years until I was 10 I received from the way my aunt was with me.

From 1930 to 1933 my mother taught children in a Portuguese family .
In a book about other German “Fräulein” on the Azores I read that she was more old fashioned but therefore respected by the children. One of her children said in an interview 50 years later that she had lessons in Geography, Writing, Reading, Listening, Singing, Playing, Sports, Walks and did so well that she still can speak German, even now !

In a letter to me in 1983 my very reasonable mother got her strength because of her belief in God, so she said.
She had collected all letters I wrote to her. And so did I kept hers to me. I reconstructed forgotten parts of my life. We had honest exchanges. I thank her for that. She really gave me what I needed, responses, unlike people who didn’t say anything about my work or films. She was trained in child care. (Sie war eine Kindergärtnerin). I questioned her and wrote back with a sense of humour: “What to do with trees that grow NOT straight ?” I was flippened. But what she said about Hitler in 1939, that I instantly respected:

‘Hitler’s drive to be above God. That is hybris !’

Clara Krönig leading a “Horde” In Hamburg

She as a German Educator on the Azores, 1930-1933, wearing woollen socks in the hot climate!

My mother defended my brother’s fatherly care for his workers against bullish Unions destroying his business through strikes and long paid holidays. I understood, because his finances were near to collapse throughout his life. Contrasting that, in 1986 I felt that unions in Germany had after years of confrontation successfully brought employers to the table to discuss “best deals” for all sides. I also felt that my brother forced himself too much to solve an irresolvable situation. I never openly talked to him about that, I thought I couldn’t.
Who would be so tactless to confront him and my own mother ?
And did I have no regard for my “family” ? But was that so ? I might have been outspoken to her but I loved her, I loved her for my exchanges and that I could open up to her. She became a treasure to me and in that way “beautiful”.

When Tony Ben said “I believe in the fact of Jesus but not in his divinity” I was with him.

My studies in theology, and one professor of radical theology in particular, got me to ask the question about Jesus, who he really was ? Considering that nothing about him existed before 40 years after his death, lectures guided us students to find the earliest words, sentences and thoughts he could have uttered in The New Testament written in Greek, a caesarean piece of work.

I never experienced an intelligent person denying the existence of Jesus. I myself see him as an outstanding living person with his own struggle. I encouraged students to read the stories and parables critically and in the way I have learned … to make them aware of interpretations. Hundreds of images and films tried to visualise “the truth”. But what comes nearer to it, what is further away from it?

Words are images in themselves but also able to open images in us.

How do we deal with God?

How do we deal with any established church or a sect?

What do we do when we can’t relate to beliefs and believers?

Do we avoid conversations or confrontations?

How do we stand our ground?

I read diaries from my mother after the war. From 1946 to 1948 she almost constantly was sent to hospitals or Sanatoriums to cure her TB. Hope to prevent the worst went in 1947. Her mother was called in to help. The change of rooms, from two to a one bedroom, indicated the seriousness of the situation. My mother called for the last supper. After Christmas she had a haemorrhage and was helped with ice bags. Our father was called in by phone. But…

She recalled feeling liturgic and that she took it for granted to be as it should be.

But a medical specialist tried at last minute a new procedure on her. He replaced one lung with a pneuma. After 6 torturous weeks my mother slowly recovered. It was a miracle, so everybody said.

It was and still is unbelievable that after all that she decided to create her dream of a family in 1951, when we left the place and town that had provided us with the care we needed to overcome our escape.

In our incredibly modest new flat for refugees a photo was taken to show the success of her dream: The picture of her 3 boys in musical interaction.

I knew about the struggles behind the scenes.

Every photo, every filming is beautifying simply because of the techniques in use. I can not go behind that. But the reality often is everything else than wishful. And things change all the time and so do my perspectives on what was really going on. And, so it still is. I might see what happened but I can not catch it or run after it.

All I can say about my mother is: There was enough reason for her to feel proud. With a helper she managed the essentials. Mostly lying down. She managed us astonishingly well. She trusted us.
We experienced to be trusted.

I learned to be trusting and to be patient from her.

Here she is in 1976 teaching my 5 year old daughter.

They had a very good relationship and my daughter In 1992 made a Großmutter Album for my second daughter, born in 1996.

My mother showed us this large photo of her father, our GRANDFATHER

Here she is in 1976 teaching my 5 year old daughter.

They had a very good relationship and my daughter In 1992 made a Großmutter Album for my second daughter, born in 1996.

My mother showed us this large photo of her father, our GRANDFATHER

This photo is the only visual I REMEMBER of him and of his past. I knew it well. It was valued like an icon for us children and taken as what it was, simply, that my mother loved him deeply. And was it because he died of TB when he was only 56 ?

When I look deeper there are stories of illness, business success and collapse and even bad behaviour in his life. Thousands of family pictures perform no more then a positive appraisal but I search for pictures nearer to the truth. Through my mother’s writing I found out that my grandfather lost his mother when he was 13 and that she died of TB …as well. She was the second wife of a successful businessman whose first wife had died of “Schwindssucht” = consumption or tuberculosis as it was called at the time… Both are referred to as very beautiful and kind women.

Their man and husband himself was the 13th child of a well respected family, trading in garments in Bielefeld and Hamburg, in ‘Bielefelder Leinen’. Going back in history,
his mother was the oldest of 12 siblings. They lived in respectful positions in the Hanseatic town of Bremen. This explains my mothers attraction to holidays in Bremen and the attraction to an uncle who had really helped her in difficult times but died in the 1st WW.
My mother was 40 when she nearly died of TB herself …but survived and lived with one lung becoming 81 !

In 1968 I responded to an offer to finish my studies in Bremen. For 4 years I lived there. My daughter was born in 1971 !
She was brought up by her mother there until she was 20. There are very important connections to this town for me originating from my mother’s love to relatives in Bremen.

In 1908 my grandfather helped his cousins in a broker’s business and functioned as bookkeeper at first but advanced to be the general manager by 1913. The war in 1914 stopped trade and took away men to run the business. He had to serve on the homefront but was not suitable for hard work. In the cold winter of 1916/17, the so-called turnips winter, he worked as a locomotive stoker in Hamburg’s shunting traffic 15 hrs a day. After falling from a tram he had to stop working but was sent to a post office sorting place. I have no images of any of his workings but my mother wroteI about his family life: “At home he was often exhausted but always had time for us and was extremely thorough in whatever he touched. He was caring and expected the same from my older brother and me. We were reminded not to say anything unfavourable about people who are not in the room. Inside we could joke with everybody present and he was humorous.

But he beat me 3 times as far as I remember and it had a lasting effect. It was sudden, hard and insulting and I had to say sorry afterwards. That I could hardly manage. It took me years to get over it.

Sunday church service and walks were tradition, so was the playing and the reading in the afternoons. His reading aloud was widely appreciated and attracted visitors, so did the music playing. Over the years we got to know many books because our father was such a good orator. He was a real house man although we only lived on one floor and we had to take pensioners in.”

Thoughts

The amount of children mothers bore in the 1800s makes me think.
It doesn’t seem to only be class related. It reminds me of Dickens and the graphics of Gustave Dore. And, what was the effect on the population on the whole ?

I wonder why in the 18th and 19th century some people had so many children ?

I wonder why TB was such a dominant illness and how it compares to diseases we have to overcome now ?

I wonder about the strictness of education and the acceptance of beating ?

And…

I often think about the fact that Hitler in his youth was severely and constantly beaten up over many years.

I found some pictures of my grandmother with him, after all, in 1901

and a photo from her silver wedding with my grandfather in 1928 when he already knew he would die but never openly talked about it

My Grandmother

Images of my grandmother, we called her Grossmama, are well stored in my mind, firstly the photographs throughout her life and later in a film I did but also in some of my drawings.

My grandmother had a fatal fall from a HighTrain platform in Hamburg near where she lived in the 1950s. She was pushed from somebody rushing along and onto the track. She was saved but suffered from that head percussion all her life from then on. In 1970s my mother took her and later my father into an adequate flat, where my ‘Grossmama’ became 96.

My “mother”, aunt Gathi who became 102

Here she was being 92 leaving her place to see Renate

My 8 year older “sister“ Renate wrote to celebrate aunt Gathi’s 100th birthday:

“You were an eighth child. Your father died at 49 when you were 6. You experienced two world wars. You said “Terror leads to healing. Forget yourself and your own security, be carefree, even cheerful”. That mindset freed your head and hands and changed deficiency into capacity.

In 1925 you lost your “Mongolite” (down-syndrome) brother and your mother !

The first WWar had given you no chance to marry but opened the way to help many children.

You worked in Youth Welfare, in a parish congregation in Berlin and then with a federation in East Prussia to help children who were uncared-for and neglected in big cities. 1928-1932 you were given the chance to lead a children’s home with a friend near the East Baltic sea and it turned out to be a very happy time for you. You had to find food and clothes from practically nowhere but the children themselves helped and years later thanked you for this enjoyable time.

You even created your own “family” and adopted a son who tragically died at 19 early in the war.
But after that you created YOUR children’s home in the high mountains of Silesia and also adopted a young boy after the bombing of Hamburg. Although,… this precious place for homeless children was sold to a property developer and you had to give it up, leaving all the children !!!

In 1939 C was in the situation when she urgently needed help because she suffered from TB and had to be treated in a sanatorium. You helped out with her 3 children and 3 other bedwetters from relatives from Cologne who had escaped the bombing in 1942. Then you added a full orphan into your “family”. In Februar 1945 all of you could not be regarded to live in a safe place where you were any longer. You decided to flee from the Russian army who was 30 miles away. With 7 family members including one helper, your adopted boy and me, the orphan girl.

“ In 1939 Clara was in the situation when she urgently needed help because she suffered from TB and had to be treated in a sanatorium. You helped out with her 3 children and 3 other bedwetters from relatives from Cologne who had escaped the bombing in 1942. Then you added a full orphan into your “family”. In Februar 1945 all of you could not be regarded to live in a safe place, where you were, any longer. You decided to flee from the Russian army who was 30 kilometers away. With 7 family members including one helper, your adopted boy and me, the orphan girl, you dressed and fitted us out for emergencies and with food and pressed us into the last train leaving our station at night. We went through Dresden before it was bombed, lived in bunkers but found refuge in the house of a glass manufacturer, a contact connected to the Bremen families of C.There you brought us up, 3 boys and me, the adopted “daughter”, from 1945 until 1950.

Your life carried on to be superbly active and helpful to others. Many people supported you until late into your life with thanks.”

Me: The Stoevesandt were protestants of the Swiss reformed Church, strict and minimalist in their decor. We learned from them to help each other and, we had the luck to use their house and the garden and benefitted from the many fruits. The biggest celebration in the throughout white painted reformist Church is the colourful harvest festival. We also decorated the altar in the Luther church with fruits and flowers and from their garden.

I got from my mothers diary that the declaration of war on Poland on the 1st Sept 1939 shook and shocked her. The facts about the Warsaw Ghettos, I heard about when I was 17, as a student, my mother had not known. What later on she knew or heard about Auschwitz, only 40 miles away from where we lived, I never found out. We lived in the most beautiful mountains, a skiing resort and healing walls with steaming saline deposits to clean the air and cure bronchitis…Her diary mentions warnings from friends and doctors and relatives about the politics around them. I found only vague lines about the resistance at the time in Silesia.

Only during the journey with my brother in 2019 did I hear that the castle Fürstenstein, a tourist attraction very near to where we lived, was a place for Hitler to hide. The bunkers and caves underneath were his centre to develop the nuclear bomb, a failed undertaking as the Oppenheimer film makes clear. At the time America had planned to test and drop nuclear bombs on towns in Germany. They did it in Japan shortly after that. It is hard to believe that I was born in the midst of all this horror and that it took me so long to comprehend the seriousness of all this.

My younger brother was born when the Wannsee Conference had sealed the fate of Millions of Jews.

I heard that the reason why we could get a goods train at the last minute in February to leave our place had something to do with this very important train link to the potential Hitler Schloss and his bunker there. Nothing is known about any workers. Were they either sent to Siberia or executed ?

Those are rumours.

Important to know is my aunt’s belief in God based on the bible. I did hardly take this in, it was part of a daily ingredient served with an open mind, tolerance and humour. I certainly picked up on these influences later in my life…So for example when I jerk when people start eating before everybody is at the table and meal is served. We did a short prayer and held hands before we started eating and thanked each other for what we had after a meal.

On Sundays we sang before or after.

I stopped doing all of this and didn’t miss it as a teenager and student. Now only when people take everything for granted I suppress my anger. I am aware that these habits had an effect on me, they are still in me and somehow I value them.

Two or three stories and events are unforgettable to me. When my aunt said “da lachen ja die Hühner” (that makes the chickens laugh) or when she offered us food we didn’t want to eat, and called it “Maulmarschier Speise” (a march in your mouth meal) and when she went to shops with me to ask the keeper for anything he could give us, including toys, to lay out on an open market sale to help the poor or in order to earn money for people in need.

She herself earned money painting little oil patterns and dots onto glasses based on a Silesian tradition. She praised the end crusts of bread to us and gave it to the best helper of us. She could dress up herself in beautiful traditional eastern european clothes with hoods.

When she dressed us up and made costumes of different birds to perform alongside verses for a summer show in the garden she was at her best and got me excited. I was influenced by a circus number I had seen at the time in a circus next to where we lived. On one of these garden events I proudly jumped from the swing structure onto a mattress, calling it ‘The Death Jump’.

I wonder if you, the reader, would also have stories from your childhood to tell.