If it all changes E-Book

Gisela Bohnstedt-Hannon

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 291

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In her autobiography, the author describes her life as a child, teenager and single mother. It is the post-war period and takes place in the GDR until 1989. She tries to understand what influenced and shaped her. Her path through life is repeatedly blocked and called into question by historical, political and private changes. The family gradually breaks apart due to the division of Germany. The home village is bulldozed and other social ties are destroyed. In a country surrounded by walls and firing ranges, there is neither freedom of expression nor freedom to travel. When she tries to apply for a trip abroad, the situation finally escalates completely. To escape further reprisals, her only option is to separate from her children and flee to Hungary. The question remains: will everything turn out all right?

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Chapter I - Childhood

My parents and grandparents

Political situation

Early childhood

My godmother, Grete

Mr. Goerns

Renate and Aunt Frieda

Mr. Winkler

My brother and the town

First contact with state security

Chapter II - My youth

Berlin shortly before the Wall was built in 1961

13.08.1961: Construction of the Berlin Wall

20.08.1961: Vacation with my parents in the Harz Mountains

Sept. 1961: At the EOS in the municipal town

1962: Farewell to Mr. Winkler

Ibrahim, my pen friend

1963: Demolition of my home village

1965: Julia and the graduation trip to Hungary

1965: Abitur and Bernd

Chapter III - Study, children, work

1965/66: Marriage, left university. Frank's birth, divorce

1967/1968: Halle-Neustadt

August 1968: Hungary, Puszta, Flower carnival Debrecen

Puszta

Carnival of Flowers

21.08.1968: Special train to GDR (via Ukraine/Poland)

Prague Spring

1968-1972: Halle/Saale, study of pedagogy

January 21, 1971: Death of my mother

1971/72: Direct studies under difficult conditions

1972: Sandra's birth and employment in a school

1975: Failed teaching exam, children's health resort

1976: Critics of the regime

1977: Relocation and a new start

July 14, 1979: Death of my father

Remote learning at the Literature Institute

1983: Udo Lindenberg's "special train" to Pankow

1988: Invitation from the University of Sokoto/Nigeria

June 1989: Honecker consultation

Budapest: Juli 1989

12.08.1989: Vacation and alone at home

Letter to the Minister of the Interior

Sunday, August 13, 1989: 28th anniversary of the Berlin Wall

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Unter den Linden

To the Brandenburg Gate

At the Brandenburger Gate

Arrest and removal

Full body check and penalty seating with bright lights

14.08.1989: The interrogation

Breakfast in a café in Berlin

Chance meeting

15.08.1989: Allies

16.08-20.08.1989: Fairground Hoppegarten Hönow

A typical working day at the fair

Farewell to baking waffles

Friday, 25.08.1989: Preparation for the school year 89/90

In the School

Arrival at home

Chapter IV - Escape

Friday, 25.08.1989 22.00: Berlin-Dresden

Preparation for possible border control issues

Saturday, August 26, 6.00 a.m.: From Geising to Zinnwald

Zinnwald, Border crossing

On Czech soil

From Teplice to Bratislava

Sunday, 27.08.1989: In the forest of Bratislava

Slovakian border region, Samorin

Komarno

Acquaintance with two men from the GDR

Sunday, August 27, 1989, 3 p.m.: Komarno to Nove Zamky

Sturovo

Tupá

Monday, 28.08.1989: At the river Ipel

Sahy-Homok

Border breakthrough from Homok

Tuesday, 29.08.1989: In the middle of the Börszöny Mountains

The forester's lodge

The farmland island

On the way to Szentendre

Szentendre

Wednesday, 30.08.1989: In the Buda Hills

To Zalaegerszeg

With Julia in Zalagerszeg

Behind Lukacshaza: 1st escape attempt to Austria

Thursday, 31.08.1989: Szombathely Police Station

Second escape attempt to Austria

Friday, 01.09.1989: Szombathely Police Station again

Hitchhiking to Fonyod

01. and 02.09.1989: West German Embassyin Budapest

September 03, 1989: Provisional passports from the embassy....

03.09. to 11.09.1989: Pioneer camp Zanka

Monday, 4.10.1989: News in Zanka

Sunday, 10.09.1989: Statement by Foreign Minister Hom

Tuesday, 12.10.1989: Dissolution of the refugee camp

Epilogue: What happened next

Thanks

Sources and literature

Foreword

Life is a story of development and begins with childhood. What shapes us? What are our goals in life? Can we realize them? Do we have the opportunities and the strength to overcome obstacles? Do we learn to distinguish between lies and truth, or do we allow ourselves to be deceived and misled? Throughout our lives, people and situations make us think and hopefully give us the chance to become the person we always wanted to be.

This autobiographical novel does not claim to be universally valid. It is the life story of a woman and her testimony of 40 years in the GDR.

The personalities and events mentioned are real; the dialog is partly invented.

Chapter I - Childhood

My parents and grandparents

My parents had a very difficult life, which I know from stories and have partly experienced myself. They both came from poor backgrounds.

My grandfather was killed in the First World War and left behind a widow with 6 children. My father was the youngest. My grandmother died during the Second World War when my father was taken prisoner.

I only got to know the grandparents on my mother's side.

This grandfather came back from the First World War with a wooden leg and met my grandmother in the military hospital, where she did simple unskilled labor. My mother was the eldest of 5 siblings. In 1938, at the age of 17, she married my father, who was 5 years older. My brother was bom a year before the outbreak of the Second World War. My father had to go to war in 1939 and the young family was separated for the next 7 years. My mother not only had to look after her own child, but also her four siblings, as her mother was ill all her life. My father was seriously wounded in the war on the Eastern Front. Shrapnel had drilled into his body. He was sent to a military hospital in Hamelin and was then sent to the Western Front with a shortened leg. In 1944, my mother received a missing person's report. It turned out that my father had been captured by the Americans in Normandy and was in a prisoner of war camp in Boston. Fortunately, he returned home in August 1946.

That gave me the chance to be bom. He was scarred by the war and was in pain for the rest of his life. Many relatives and friends had died in the war or perished in the bombing raids. My parents didn't talk much about it, they didn't want to look back. When I was born, I already had a 9-year-old brother. My mother was 26 and my father 31 years old. They were still young enough to make the best of their lives.

Political situation

After the victory over Hitler's Germany, the country was divided into four occupation zones by the Allies.

I was bom in Königsaue, a village in the Soviet-occupied zone. The village no longer exists today. It was bulldozed in the 1960s for brown coal. I was 2 years old when the Western Allies founded the Federal Republic of Germany on May 23, 1949, with the initially provisional seat of government in Bonn and Konrad Adenauer as its first president.

On October 7, 1949, the GDR was founded in the Soviet-occupied zone, which meant the division of Germany. The first and only president of the GDR was Wilhelm Pieck.

As a small child, of course, I knew none of this. I grew up in a part of the country that became increasingly isolated from the world over time.

Early childhood

I only have good memories of my childhood. They take place in a green landscape, with a wide blue sky, fruit trees, spoil heaps and lots of playmates. I was a happy child.

In 1950, when I was three years old, my parents got a small new apartment in a 15-family house built especially for miners at the end of the village. I still remember the move. We drove down the long Aschersleben road in Farmer Wahle's horse-drawn cart and the trailer behind us was loaded with furniture. I sat on the coachman's seat with my father and looked down at the two broad horses' backs. My parents were overjoyed to finally have a heated apartment. I no longer had to sleep in an unheated room with gloves and a hat on. Anyone who worked in the shaft was given a deposit of briquettes and a few liters of shaft schnapps, which they always gave to my grandpa Holzbein1.

We lived in the large shaft house with the neighbors almost like in a commune. There were three entrances for five families each. You had to follow the house rules and coordinate with the neighbors. The hallway, cellar, attic and yard had to be kept clean. A key was always handed out for this purpose. If you wanted to use the washhouse, you had to sign in on a roster.

Everything was limited to the bare necessities of the time and there was no question of modern living. There was neither a bathroom nor a toilet in the apartment, only a tap in the hallway.

As there was no bathroom in any of the apartments, the washhouse was used on Saturdays for children's bathing. If you were too big for the small zinc bathtub, you could also go to the shaft and use a bathtub in the miners' washhouses for 50 pfennigs. However, you couldn't sit in it for as long as you wanted, as there were usually other villagers waiting who also wanted to treat themselves to the luxury of a bath.

To get to the toilets, the so-called outhouses, you had to cross the courtyard to a smaller building, which also included the wash house, the stables and the hayloft. Every entrance to the house had such a building. Behind it were stables to keep chickens, rabbits and other domestic animals. In the beginning, my parents also had a goat.

When I went to school, my mother started working in the mine shaft and was given one housekeeping day a month, which she needed it in order to do the laundry. She soaked everything in tubs and containers the evening before. The work clothes were always particularly dirty from the coal dust. Everything was pre-washed first before it was put into the large washing kettle filled with suds, under which there was a coal stove that always had to be refilled. The laundry in the boiler was slowly heated and moved back and forth with a wooden rotating spindle. My mother would then take pieces out of the kettle one by one, place them in a wooden tub and work on them with a brush and washboard. I hated washing clothes. My mother couldn't get me to do the washing of handkerchiefs on the washboard. She never forced me to do anything I didn't like.

Laundry was hung out in the large courtyard between the washhouse and the house in both summer and winter. Wooden laundry supports were placed under the lines so that the laundry could flutter high in the wind and dry faster. In winter, it was sometimes scary when the frozen pants and jackets moved up and down and rattled in the wind. There were clothes drying racks in the yard all year round. When I was learning to ride a bike, I once hit a clothes horse, tipped over and banged my knee. But clothes horses were very good for building stilts and it was great fun to run around the yard with them later on.

Our apartment was about 50 square meters and had two bedrooms and a kitchen-living room. I initially shared a room with my older brother, but when he went into an apprenticeship at the age of 15 and only came home at weekends, I had the room to myself.

We didn't have much, a bed for everyone, a shared closet, a table, 4 chairs and a stove with removable iron rings. My brother had once shown me how to make potato peels spin on the stove. He peeled the skin off a potato so that it looked like a spiral, attached it to the upper part of a wooden skewer and stuck the lower part into the potato, which he then placed on the hot oven plate. It looked very pretty as the potato spiral turned around the skewer. However, my father suddenly came into the room and the game was over. He shouted at my brother and slapped him in the face. "Do you have to show her such nonsense!" Later, I secretly showed other playmates the trick. There were often arguments between my brother and my father. It was probably because they had been separated from each other for too long due to the war and my brother saw me as competition.

There were only a few games I played with him. He usually tricked me or made fun of me: "Bet you can't repeat that? Say it really quickly: Hirsch heüß ich2." Then he would laugh at me: "You're probably a pig!" When he wanted to eat my pudding, he would distract me: "Look, there's a big bird on the roof." I usually fell for it and lost out. He was going through puberty and only ever wanted to roam around with his friends of the same age. His little sister was a nuisance. I can't remember him looking after me even once.

My parents worked from the moment they got up until they went to bed. After the morning shift in the pit and a simple lunch at home, they usually went to the allotment or to a rented plot of land where they grew fruit and vegetables or potatoes. They looked after the chickens, rabbits and goats. The additional self-sufficiency was necessary because what they got from the ration cards was not enough to live on. You needed barter goods or extra money to buy special things, such as butter or honey. The ration cards were only abolished in the GDR in 1958, when I was 11 years old. In West Germany, this had already happened in 1950, as a result of the Marshall Plan. While the Soviet Union insisted on reparations payments as compensation for the war and removed businesses and railroad tracks, the USA supported the western post-war countries with loans and aid deliveries. In the GDR, the aim was to improve living conditions by increasing working performance in line with the Soviet model. To this end, Adolf Hennecke launched a movement that focused primarily on increasing benefits in the mining industry. Naturally, the working population was not enthusiastic about the demand for higher benefits while working and living conditions remained poor. In 1953, there was a popular uprising throughout the country, which was quickly put down by the deployment of Soviet tanks and police units. There were also riots in the Königsauer Schacht. As a child, I didn't notice any of this, only that gradually more and more of my classmates were absent.

In addition to his work in the shaft, my father also wove wicker baskets for the farmers, worked as a handyman for the roofer and went hamster trapping. I often gave the hamster and rabbit skins to Mr. Sonntag in the village and got a few pennies for them, sometimes even a mark, which I handed in at home. My mother also earned extra money by sewing clothes for other people or working as a washerwoman. Despite all the work, my parents were always in a good mood, because for them work also meant balance and relaxation. They were happy when everything thrived in the garden. Mother loved flowers more than anything. That's why asters, dahlias and Bleeding Hearts bloomed in the front garden.

At harvest time, her mother often sat together with other neighbors' wives on the large farm. They chopped homegrown beans or carrots, cut up apples or pitted cherries, depending on what needed to be processed. They told stories and sometimes sang songs: "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore"3 or "Im schönsten Wiesengrunde"4. My mother was a very good housewife, she cooked, baked, pickled cucumbers, made sauerkraut and made balloons for redcurrant wine in the cellar.

My parents had a strict daily routine, but it left me a lot of freedom. It was important to my parents that I always studied and did my homework. I was only involved in the housework to a limited extent. I was only allowed to help with the shopping. I was given a shopping list and ration cards. Then my mother sent me out, usually on Saturday, on the bike that my father had put together from old parts.

I knew my way around the village and the villagers knew me too. I loved shopping, got milk from Mrs. Breiche, sausage and meat from Kinne the butcher, muckefuck5, flour and margarine from Bremer the grocer and bread from one of the bakers, Brachvogel or Rust.

When I remember my childhood, I know what it's like to have a home. Everyone knows you and you know everyone. I still have the village map in my head and know what most people's names were and where they lived. Festivals were organized in the village and people celebrated together. In Königsaue there was the annual miners' festival, with a parade, dancing and children's games such as sack races, egg races and maypole climbing. Once, as a ten-year-old, I even went on stage and sang "Chico Charlie". The villagers applauded and said I would definitely become a pop singer one day. I loved singing and was also in the school choir.

My parents bought me a mandolin and I was soon playing in a mandolin group in the village with Mr. Kersten. But I wasn't really interested in becoming a star and I found reading music far too strenuous. The most impressive thing was the 200th anniversary celebrations in 1953. Everyone was proud of our village, which had been founded by the Prussian King Frederick II, known as Old Fritz. The inhabitants made a real spectacle of it, dressing up as cossets and farmers, just as their ancestors had looked back then, driving through the village in Palatinate covered wagons and dancing through the village streets in traditional costumes. The festival lasted for a few days and there was probably no one who didn't take part. Even a storyteller was organized for the children, which I particularly enjoyed.

My parents couldn't afford to go on vacation. At that time, there were only 14 days of vacation a year. I usually spent the summer vacations at children's holiday camps, in the Harz Mountains, in Thuringia, at the Müritz or on the Baltic Sea, sometimes also with my Aunt Ella in Ballenstedt, where there were two younger cousins.

I remember once traveling with my parents on the train to Magdeburg to visit Uncle Ernst and Aunt Anni. They lived at Ostrowskistraße 89 and I must have been about 4 years old. Anni was a cousin of my mother. On the train from Aschersleben we had to open our umbrellas because the roof of the carriage was leaking and it was raining cats and dogs. Aunt Anni had given me a tiny little doll's pram with a doll, which I pulled behind me on a ribbon.

The trolley with the little doll often fell over on the bumpy footpaths and the adults waited patiently until I had collected everything again. At some point, my father took me in his arms and said: "Look up there!" Magdeburg was one of the cities most destroyed by the war, in comparison even worse than Dresden, Cologne or Berlin, and it took several years for everything to be rebuilt. That was the first time I saw a ruin from the war, a large bombed-out house. The gable end had been tom open and I could see into a sooty room where there was still a single table. I have kept the image in my memory.

Sometimes my mother would tell me a bedtime story or sing me a song. I loved listening to the song "Schlaf ein, schlaf ein, mein Kindelein"6. She sang it very sensitively. It wasn't until much later that I understood why it was so close to me and what this song must have really meant to her.

„ Wenn andere Mädchen zum Balle gehen und springen,

dann muss ich an der Wiege stehen und singen:

Schiaf ein. Schlaf ein, mein Kindelein,

wo mag denn nur dein Vater sein?

Da weinte das Mädel so sehr.“7

My brother once told me that our mother had often sung this song to him during the war when he was still small.

When I was alone in the apartment during my parents' night shift, I was sometimes frightened. It could happen that the floral pattern on the curtains turned into horrible ghosts and I had to crawl under the quilt. Sometimes the ghosts' heads would flash brightly and then jump all over the four walls. This actually meant that my father was passing by with the electric locomotive. He had explained it to me and said that I didn't need to be scared, but I was anyway.

When I once told my mother about the ghosts in the curtains, she took me to the large country store in Breite Straße, the building where the Löffler inn used to be. You could buy a lot of things there now, because Königsaue had become a central place.

My modest mother told the sales clerk that she wanted to buy curtains for her bedroom. The saleswoman's reply still rings in my ears today: "The curtains should match the bed frame. What color is your bed frame?" We didn't have a bed surround. Firstly, it was a luxury item by our standards and secondly, the bedroom was so small that not even a bed surround would have fitted in. Even the bedside cabinets had to stand on top of the closet. I felt so sorry for my mother. I don't remember what she said. She then bought a light green fabric and sewed the curtains at home.

Although I grew up as an only child, I never felt alone. I had no problems making friends and my playmates were boys and girls. We played soccer, built potato pits or climbed trees; played with dolls or marbles or played circle games, father-mother-child or hide-and-seek. I was never bored. There was always something interesting to discover. You met children everywhere when you went out into the yard or the street. Shortly before Easter, I collected fuel for the Easter bonfire on the Osterberg with other children. We went through the village with a handcart and rang the farmers' doorbells. We were happy about every old tire we could get hold of. Rubber tires would burn like hell.

In May, we went out with buckets of water and shook cock-chafer beetles off the maple frees in Ascherslebener Straße. We used them to feed the chickens, who greedily pounced on them. Supposedly they laid more eggs as a result. In winter, we usually went sledging or skiing. The Mühlberg was the best place for downhill runs. In the autumn, you could collect chestnuts and make animals out of them.

I didn't go to kindergarten and later I didn't go to after-school care either. Perhaps I was very lucky that not everything was so well organized in those years.

I think the whole village was my home at times. I had lots of school friends who took me home with them after school. My parents actually always wanted me to go home straight after school and do my homework. But that hardly ever happened. My friends usually had a mother or grandmother at home and I was allowed to eat with them after school: Himmel und Erde8, plum dumplings, black sour or swede soup. While playing afterwards, I regularly forgot the time to get home on time. When my parents came home from their early shift at around 2.30 p.m., they often had no choice but to look for me all over the village. I could be anywhere, at Maria's in the vicarage, at Gudrun's in the Gasthaus zum goldenen Stern, at Helga's in the mayor's house, at Ingrid's, whose father was a teacher and grandfather a painter, or at Erika's on the Neubauern farm. My parents had to scold me a lot, but the drama kept repeating itself. However, I always did my homework and there were never any nasty entries in my diary.

When I played with the neighbor's children, whose parents also worked shifts, it often didn't end well. We were a small, close-knit group of 7 children: Richard, Ute, Eckhard, Rainer, Bernd, Raimund and me. Without supervision, we did a lot of nonsense in our naivety. Once we played hide and seek in the cornfield and trampled all the grain into crop circles. A storm couldn't have done such a bad job. Afterwards, our parents had to pay compensation to the farmer who had suffered the damage.

Another time we played Indians and made a small campfire. The wind carried a spark away into the big straw straw. It caught fire and the fire department had to put it out. Our parents had to pay for that too.

We secretly stole our mothers' umbrellas and played parachute jumping on the heels of the coal mine. The wind blew underneath and broke the poles. Our mothers suffered the damage.

Richard was the instigator of all nonsense. He was the eldest, who also taught us how to smoke with a puff. He had bought Muck cigarettes from the kiosk, supposedly for his father. He explained to us how to do it properly: pull hard on the cigarette, as if inhaling, then swallow the smoke and exhale it through your nose. There would then be a lot of smoke curls. It was not intended that this would make us sick.

From then on, our parents forbade us to play with Richard. He was later sent to the youth work camp because he was difficult to bring up, but he had actually always been a good playmate with great ideas. Unfortunately, he lost his father as a child when he fell off a ridge in an excavator. I will never forget those childhood years and I still feel sorry today for what happened to Richard.

But the way life was and the way it developed, it was normal for me. My childhood was an adventurous time, without control and restrictions.

But didn't it later have to become a conflict when I realized the contrast between feeling free and being locked up?

My godmother, Grete

I still remember how I once drove all alone in a doll's pram along a country road to visit Aunt Grete and my great-grandmother. I was just 3 years old. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, but my parents were still fast asleep. First I looked at the picture book I knew by heart, where Katrinchen visits her grandmother: "You can joke over milk and cake" it said. I liked that. I got dressed and set off with the doll's pram. I knew the way to Winningen along the 3 km long country road, because my father had often taken me on his shoulders when we walked there. Aunt Grete had given me the baby doll in the doll's pram. On the way, I picked a bunch of flowers from a cornfield. It had been the same in the picture book. Strangely enough, I didn't meet anyone. It must have been very early in the morning.

I arrived safely at Aunt Grete's and great-grandmother's house, but neither of them were very happy and there was no milk and cake. Aunt Grete was very agitated and borrowed a bicycle basket, put me in it, strapped the doll's pram onto the back seat and immediately drove me back home. My parents were stunned, but overjoyed. They had already missed me and had looked for me everywhere in the village. But no one had seen me, which wasn't really surprising.

The walks to Aunt Grete's soon disappeared forever, because there was no way to get to the West.

In the 1950s, she had gone to the West with her grown-up children Liselotte and Werner.

She was no longer able to accompany me on the rest of my life's journey.

Mr. Goerns

The child's paradise was gradually destroyed. I can still see myself standing in front of the school building with my classmates from Year 1. The Easter vacations were over. We were happy to see our teacher again, whom we loved dearly. Most of the children were brought to school by their mothers, holding hands. The bell had long since rung for lessons. But our teacher didn't show up. I wonder if he was ill. Hopefully nothing had happened to him. He always came from the neighboring village on his bike. He usually took me to school on the back seat because he passed our house anyway and I had the longest way to school from class. My mother had been wondering that morning. She hadn't seen him today. Then she had taken me to school. Now we found out. We cried until our eyes hurt, everyone cried, the children and the mothers. We couldn't believe it. Our beloved Mr. Goerns had left. He would never come back. Why had he done that? Had he not thought of us children at all? How could he leave so easily? We all loved him so much.

One day, the school desk in the row in front of me was also empty. The quiet, clever Martin, my first secret great love, Martin, who had shared his only chewing gum from the West with me and who had not yet known that I wanted to marry him one day, had disappeared one day with his parents to the West. An old school picture shows that he really did exist. He never found out about my childhood dreams. I'm sure he forgot about me at some point. He will never have known that he or his parents hurt me very much.

There were also Volker, Bodo and Bärbel and many others, whose names I have since forgotten, who were suddenly no longer there.

Nevertheless, not everything was just a series of sad experiences for me. Children create their own fantasy world and are known to play and laugh even in times of war or in concentration camps. Many of my former compatriots would now object: You can't compare that and it wasn't that bad in the GDR either. They had many wonderful experiences as pioneers and would never want to forget them. For them, they were hours of togetherness with their classmates and friends. I know, I know these hours too. But I didn't like many of these events. They weren't my games that were played there. I most certainly didn't want to play according to rules that were set and controlled by the pioneer leaders or teachers.

One of these unpopular events was the cops and robbers game. I had to sit still all afternoon, hiding behind a bush, until someone finally found me. I was very angry. I would have preferred to just go home. In the end, I couldn't be happy that I was one of the few people who hadn't been found. I wanted to play something else, something I enjoyed, not what I was supposed to.

Renate and Aunt Frieda

I had a cousin of the same age, Renate. Her mother was my father's older sister, whose first husband had died in the war. She married a second time. She had two daughters from her first marriage and her new husband had a son. Today we call that a patchwork family. So Renate had three different half-siblings. My last memory of her was my 10th birthday, the last children's birthday party she attended.

For reasons of space, we were both supposed to sleep together in one bed. That was very nice for us. I can’t remember what was actually so funny in the books under the quilt. Maybe it was just the joy of the forbidden game with the flashlight, but you can only laugh with someone you like and understand. I remember that we also sang songs to each other. Her favorite song was "Weiße Boote"9. She sang the chorus: "Weia candios"10 so loudly, perhaps so terribly, that our parents came into the room and told us to be quiet. Otherwise they would have to separate us. But we didn’t want that after all.

As children, we were important to each other. Today, we each lead our own lives. Nothing can simply be continued after such a long time. I still have postcards from her from the summer camp. She doesn't even remember that she was there, in Schöllerhau. "How are you? I'm doing well. Your Renate." She has lived in Munich since 1958 and, as far as I know, has never visited her homeland again.

Mr. Winkler

Today, after all these years, I know that the distinguished old Mr. Winkler was one of the people who made a deep impression on me in my childhood like no other. But he could not have foreseen that he would lay the foundation for my further development and my attitude to life.

At first, I didn't know what to make of him. The villagers were prejudiced against him. No one in the village knew anything about his past. He had moved here after the war. In those days, old people often sat on chairs or benches in front of their houses in the summer and talked to each other. Old Mr. Winkler never did that.

Was he too delicate? Perhaps he was. In any case, he stood out from the other villagers. The local men walked around in work clothes, Manchester pants with suspenders and checked shirts. Mr. Winkler always wore a plain shirt with a vest and a matching tie.

He didn't seem to fit in with the village at all. He seemed like a professor. They made fun of him. It was at the time when Walter Ulbricht was already waiting in the wings to replace Wilhelm Pieck. It was said that Winkler had sued someone who had called him a goatee. In fact, he also had a beard like Walter Ulbricht. Some said that he also had those cunning little eyes.

As soon as he approached a group of storytellers with his stick, everyone fell silent and Winkler passed them by like an ice-cold shiver.

The old-timers found it all the more surprising that the children suddenly took an interest in him and asked: "What have you to do with him?"

The children laughed and replied: "It's interesting with him" and ran off with all sorts of things under their arms.

Back then, I was one of the children who visited Mr. Winkler. The first time a younger playmate took me along. He had said: "Mr. Winkler can build great kites, which he then gives away. If you come along, he might give you one too." I don't remember why I went with him. At least not for the kite. It may have been curiosity, a thirst for adventure or a test of courage.

I remember my first visit when the old gentleman at the top of the stairs looked down over the banister and asked: "What kind of tall lady is Mr. Eckhard bringing with him today?"

That sounded funny and then again it didn't. He held out his hand with the signet ring. I could see that his fingernails were clean and well-groomed. His father's hands, on the other hand, were two big paws and never had spotlessly clean fingernails.

I was overwhelmed by what I found here. On a round table were lots of sticker-covered screw-top jars with thick absorbent cotton cocoons, brown manikins, caterpillars and butterflies. Suddenly, I was engrossed in an interesting conversation with the old man. He showed me a jar containing a green caterpillar about 5 cm long with black horizontal stripes and red dots all over its body. I had always been disgusted by the small green caterpillars that hung from apple trees on long threads. But this caterpillar here looked very pretty. It was sitting on a carrot leaf and it was funny to watch the appetite with which it nibbled on it. Papilio Machaon Linne was written on the glass. "What kind of butterfly do you think it will grow into?" asked Mr. Winkler. We children had no idea and tried unsuccessfully to guess which butterfly the beautiful caterpillar might one day become.