Leaving and arriving E-Book

Elisabeth Steiner

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 197

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Bern after the Second World War, German war refugees, farmers in the Emmental, bizarre and quirky originals. The girl grows up privileged in a villa district. Her mother and father, both emotionally barren, are psychoanalytically trained doctors and idolize Sigmund Freud. This has far-reaching consequences. The reader experiences the young woman's turbulent intellectual and erotic development, her professional victories and defeats and her love affairs. As a psychotherapist, she fights against misery and for a better lot for refugees, for example in Rwanda and during the Balkan wars. The biography illustrates a fascinating piece of contemporary history. Open, self-critical and touching. The book was awarded the second prize of the Swiss Autobiography Award at the University of Zurich in 2023.

Leseprobe

Short biography

Born in Bern. She studied psychology at the University of Zurich, graduating with a degree in psychology. She then trained in Freudian psychoanalysis at the Freud Institute in Zurich. She worked for many years as a psychotherapist for victims of violence in her own practice in Zurich and in development cooperation. Her life has taken her to Kosovo and Rwanda, to the scenes of wars and massacres. She published numerous articles on these topics in specialist journals before turning to writing her own biography.

Preliminary remark

I am not describing an objective truth, nor do I claim to be. There is no objective truth, as every person perceives an event differently. I describe the people mentioned in the text from a very subjective point of view, which is naturally one-sided.

Agnes, my mother

My mother comes from parents who were farmers in the Emmental for generations. She loves her father, he is a role model for her. As a teenager, she gets into a fight with him. She wants to go to university. Her father says: "A decent woman doesn't go to university, she has to look after her husband and children." A profession is superfluous for a woman. She defends herself, saying she is not a woman with soup-to-nuts logic and dumpling arguments. She doesn't need sheets or pots and pans. A degree is the best dowry for her. A degree is the quickest and best way for her to escape the narrow, bourgeois petty bourgeoisie. A life as a bohemian seems appealing to her. In order to study, however, she is dependent on her father's money. After much toing and froing, her father finally agrees to pay for her studies. She attends grammar school and studies medicine in Bern and Vienna. In her youth, she had a huge hunger for literature, art and beauty. She devoured the French classics. It was the air she needed to breathe. She often likes to talk about her exciting student years. During this time, she is a cheerful, funny, entertaining young woman. With her beautiful alto voice, she sings the cheeky songs from the Threepenny Opera, "Mackie Messer", "Seeräuber-Jenny", "Surabaya Johnny", and entertains her fellow students. When she's in a good mood, I can get her to perform these songs for us children. She sings with a cheeky expression, boldly miming lasciviousness and swaying her hips. At university, she meets Friedhelm, my father. Friedhelm is a young man with charm, wit and mischief in his eyes, always full of mischief, he has a lively personality that attracts her. "Si pecca, pecca fortiter" (if you sin, then sin hard) is something he likes to say, and she finds it stunning and ignites her zest for life. In Vienna in 1935, she witnesses terrible scenes at the university. Her Jewish colleagues were expelled from the lecture hall. She watches helplessly.

After her state examination, she trained as a pediatrician. At the beginning of the Second World War, she marries Friedhelm. She wanted to marry without a church wedding. However, for the sake of peace with her parents, she does so. A priest friend promises to marry the couple without a vows. But the clever priest doesn't keep his promise. As a result, she inadvertently and unintentionally gets married with a Christian blessing. In the wedding photograph, she can be seen in elegant black Deuxpièces, which is modern and against the convention of the time. The ceremony is simple and takes place without pomp and ceremony among close friends. The couple waited four years to have a child until my brother and I, twins, were born in 1943. Because of the war, there was a shortage of doctors in the countryside and many surgeries were deserted. My mother takes over the practice during these years. We twins are looked after by a pediatric nurse. Then Agnes and Friedhelm buy a large house in Bern so that they can open a practice, Friedhelm as an internist and she as a pediatrician. Busy, full years followed. After my mother's death, we received many letters from former patients. They let us know how much she had been appreciated and loved as a pediatrician: "She knew how to give confidence, how to comfort sick children and worried parents." She would say to children who were afraid of injections: "I'm going to hurt you with the needle for a moment. Then you can hold me in your arms."

Agnes is a brilliant organizer. She pulls all the strings, both in the office and in the family. She employs a maid for the household. She does the administrative work for the two practices herself. A trainee works in the medical laboratory and my mother is training her as a laboratory technician. My father gives lectures on psychosomatic topics in various committees. Agnes helps him with his writing, as she is better at expressing herself linguistically than he is. She edits his lectures and rewrites whole sections. In the evenings, she teaches us children the rules of German and French grammar, helps us with our schoolwork and prepares us for the exam to enter the Progymnasium.She knows and invents memorable, funny mnemonic devices in the form of rhymes:Venez mes choux, mes bijoux, mes joujoux sur mes genoux et jetez des cailloux à ces hiboux plein de poux!These are the seven exceptions to the pluralization of nouns ending in-ou,which have an x rather than an s at the end of the word. Or in Latin: after si, nisi, ne, num, quo, quanto, ubi, cum, our ali falls over. After the conjunctions listed, the indefinite pronoun "aliquis/aliquid" loses the prefix "ali". The mnemonic bridges remain in our memory to this day. She teaches developmental psychology at a school for nurses and child educators. She manages to juggle all of this in her everyday life. How she manages this is a mystery to me. Her creative energy is enormous. She enjoys all her tasks and does them with dedication, but sometimes she seems exhausted.

She also underwent psychoanalysis for many years with an analyst whom she admired. Unfortunately for her, he was a friend of my father. I am deliberately writing about her misfortune. How can an analyst do his work well if he knows the analyst's husband personally and is also friends with him? Nowadays that would be a serious malpractice. At that time, the effects of such bias were still too little known.

One day, when I'm nine, I come home from school and I'm walking up the stairs. My mother hasn't noticed my arrival. She is standing in front of the kitchen, upset. She says angrily to my father: "... or I'll take the children with me!" What do these words mean? Had she told my father she wanted to leave him? Surely there had been an argument beforehand. These words, which I pick up, are confusing, I don't even want to know or take note of them. From then on, the mother seems to suffer; for many years she is plagued by stomach pains, which she fights with painkillers. There is not much left of the cheerful, cheeky Agnes who sang revolutionary songs and staged them. I notice that my father is increasingly going on vacation alone, without my mother, brother and me. She says that spouses don't always have to stick together, that independence is also important and good. As a result, I am proud to have such modern parents who spend their vacations independently of each other. Today I am amazed at how gullible and naive I was as a child.

In addition to her clever mind, her mother has a variety of manual skills. She sews clothes, cooks on Sundays when the maid is off, works in the garden and plants flowers. She can repair faulty electrical wiring and appliances herself without having to call in a specialist. She loves tinkering and working on things herself. Sometimes the repairs she carries out are daring and dangerous, resulting in short circuits and bangs.

She laughs, half seriously, half self-deprecatingly, and says: "You can give me the dried, shrivelled oranges, I'll gladly eat them." What does she mean? Is she making fun of her tendency to sacrifice herself or is she serious? What does she expect from us children? My brother and I take her at her word and are delighted with the juicy oranges.

Sacrificing herself for others and putting her own needs aside is one side of Agnes. But when it comes to her house in the Emmental, the Stöckli, she asserts her wishes and decides alone. She does not involve her own sister, the second owner of the house, in her decisions and usually does so in such a way that her sister cannot see through it.

After moving to Zurich to study - my brother lives at home in Bern until his medical state examination - she devotes herself to her interest in art history, especially modern art and literature. At one point, she remarks sadly: "I'm aware that the contacts I have now will become fewer as I get older. That's inevitable." She says this sadly, as if there is nothing you can do to prevent loneliness and you are at the mercy of it.

In 1964, my father is diagnosed with a brain tumor and is forced to give up his practice. The first symptoms were speech disorders, he suffered from aphasia. She took him to a speech therapist and did speech exercises with him, but these had little effect because of the growing tumor. Now his father is often angry because he can no longer express himself with words. Mother and brother experience his increasing powerlessness and despair at first hand. We watch helplessly as his brain is gradually destroyed by the tumor. After a while, he can only babble. I'm a little further away, I only see my sick father occasionally at the weekend when I visit him at home.

In addition to working for the practice, she cared for my seriously ill father at home for two years until his death. She is now fifty-five. After his death, she learned modern Greek, went on trips to Greece and immersed herself in an old passion, Greek mythology. She had always known which gods were related to each other and how.

Many years after my father died, my mother revealed a secret that she had previously kept to herself. I was thirty-five at the time. She confessed that my father had had a secret love affair with Florence for many years. She says this with tears in her eyes. Friedhelm had confessed it to her early on. It is obvious to me that this deeply hurtful and shameful experience had plunged her into deep grief for years and caused her great distress. She had concealed her father's infidelity from us children because we were supposed to grow up with an untarnished image of our father. Now she realizes that this concealment had an unfortunate effect on us children. We had often said that the father remained a mystery. She had thought about separation or divorce for a long time. She decided against such a step because she was afraid of being ostracized as a divorced woman. She is not the kind of person who makes contact and finds a new partner quickly. As she speaks, I can sense how difficult this confession was for her, how she had struggled for years and how much she feared losing face and being devalued. At the same time, she is relieved that she has decided to confess.

Even before my mother uncovered the secret, I had somehow known as a child that Florence had been an important figure in my father's life. I didn't want to know anything more about it until I was thirty. But at the same time, I did know. This "knowledge" had lain dormant in the darkness of my unconscious, or more precisely in my preconscious, until my mother revealed it. When my mother let me in on it, the scales fell from my eyes in one fell swoop. That was a relief. My dark suspicions were confirmed. I hadn't imagined anything as a child. From then on, I was able to bear the bitter fact of my father's frequent absences because of his love affair better than I had thought.

Why had she cared for Friedhelm for so long without help after he had hurt her so much with his infidelity? How was she able to do that? She said: "I was able to work off a lot of things by caring for him." A mysterious remark that was difficult to interpret and not very clear. Did she mean her anger at Friedhelm? Did she have secret feelings of triumph over her now terminally ill, brainless husband while caring for him?

In our family, it was customary to avoid arguments whenever possible. Among us, feelings such as anger, annoyance, disappointment, hurt and triumph were rarely revealed. For a long time, the relationship between my mother and me had not been good. One day I told her that I had started a new analysis, not least to improve my relationship with her. That touched her. Since then, closeness and a bond have developed between us.

Friedhelm, my father

Friedhelm, my father, died when I was twenty-three. He remains a mystery to me to this day, many things about his personality are still a mystery to me. Many questions remain unanswered and will probably never be answered. There are several reasons for this: He was a person who mostly kept a low profile. He was often absent, sometimes I didn't see him for a whole week. If he was in the house, he was either working in his practice or in the study, where he wanted to be quiet. On a day-to-day basis, he was hardly tangible or accessible; he didn't share his real life with us children. He rarely talked about his youth or about himself.

Now I imagine him sitting in a bar in Bern in 1951, in his forty-second year, waiting for his childhood friend Don. I imagine what he is thinking and feeling in the bar: the atmosphere in the bar is good for him. People say that going to the bar is disreputable, but that doesn't bother him. He finally wants to get away, away from the feeling of not really belonging to the family, away from the feeling of being an extra in a supporting role. Here, in the piano bar, he can relax from work. He comes here often and enjoys listening to the pianist. He is singing a song by Édith Piaf, which he likes so much and makes him dream. He thinks back to the golden age of theCabaret Cornichonin Zurich with its bold, cheeky songs about the fascists, which were magic moments for him. He looks around him. There are some pretty young women here, he likes to look at them. He thinks about it. Back there on the left, the young, cheeky woman is probably French. French women can drape any rag around their bodies, they are always elegant. The erotically charged atmosphere makes him feel exhilarated. He knows that he is good-looking, has charm and charisma and his cheerful nature makes him look like a sonny boy. He has a reputation for being a mischievous rascal. He moves with a lively, bouncy step. He considers whether he should approach the pretty French woman. He decides not to and to wait for his childhood friend Don instead. He likes Don because he knows how to tell good jokes. As teenagers, they often played jokes together. He likes to think back to that time. He once visited Don. In the house where Don lived, there was a restaurant where guests ate lunch on a terrace in the summer. They had both looked out of the open window on the second floor at the diners. Suddenly Don had stood up and taken a small Flobert rifle out of the box, inserted a cartridge and positioned himself by the window. There was a salt cellar on the table. Don had taken aim at it and shot it away in front of the guests' noses. Don had always been a talented marksman. After this rascally prank, the teachers had said that they were both petty criminals. Friedhelm thought about it: No, he wasn't a petty criminal, it had simply been pubescent stupidity. Another anecdote comes to mind. He had visited a patient in hospital. Catholic nurses worked there. He had noticed a crucifix in a patient's room. He had said to the nurse: "The crucified man is wearing a pretty bikini." The woman had reacted rather shocked. An acquaintance once told him, Friedhelm, that he was a tactless bully. Friedhelm thinks, no, he's not a bully, he just says and means a lot of things ironically. He simply enjoys making people laugh. Religion and superstition annoy him. He has nothing to do with either. As an atheist, he is simply an enlightened spirit.

I also imagine my father thinking about one of his quirks while waiting for Don. He used to hide money from Agnes, his wife, sometimes in secret, special places. Once in the luggage compartment of his Chevrolet, his car, a thousand-dollar bill, another time a banknote in a book in his library. After a while, he forgot where the money was. The cleaning lady found it during the spring cleaning and then put it in her own pocket. He was equally unlucky with the money in the luggage compartment. It was only after the car had been sold that he remembered that he had hidden money there. Why is he depriving himself of his money in this stupid way? Does it annoy him that Agnes, his wife, has more money than he does? Would it be a triumph if he had more savings than her? He can't find an answer and looks at his watch. He has been waiting here in the bar for an hour. He decides to go home.

Twelve years pass after this visit to the bar. In winter, Friedhelm gets a tan from a sunbed. He thinks he looks more attractive with a tan. At this time, it was not yet known that strong radiation from sunbeds can have a carcinogenic effect. At the age of fifty-four, Friedhelm suffers an epileptic seizure. He thinks the seizure is related to heart problems. At first he cannot believe the diagnosis of a brain tumor. Friedhelm dies at the age of fifty-six. Was it the high-altitude sun that killed him? Had vanity cost him his life?

It was unbearable for both my mother and us children to have to witness his mental decline. During the last weeks of his life, we laughed often and heartily at the funny stories about Friedhelm. We need the laughter to cope with the loss and grief. A few weeks before his death, Florence appears and wants to say goodbye. We children don't yet know who she is or what significance she had in his life.

Apart from the story about the barrel of salt that was shot away, I'm sure my father was up to other tricks in his youth. But he hardly ever talked about it. I didn't ask him either. His youthful pranks probably had to do with his own strict, irascible father, my grandfather, whom he had always feared. I often found Friedhelm's desire for provocation, his urge to offend or frighten authorities, tactless and hurtful. This betrayed a sometimes lacking empathy for the religious feelings of others. Did he feel compelled to provoke others because in this way he no longer had to suffer his fear and powerlessness passively, but could fight it in an active role?

Today, I have ambivalent feelings about my father's love affair. Secret love affairs are nothing special and happen often. Many poets, from Goethe to Flaubert, tell of them. I never talked to my parents about the reasons for his infidelity, how it came about and why. Whether he had a guilty conscience about his mistress, whether he blamed himself, I have no idea, I don't know. Guessing would be pure speculation. As an adult, on the one hand I think it was lousy that he put my mother through a mistress for years. On the other hand, I also see his love affair as a sign of a love of life, a desire for adventure, a carefree attitude, a desire to escape, a fear of being trapped in marriage. I also found his love affair interesting and even likeable. I forgive him for wanting to live life to the full. But it makes me sad that my parents didn't find another, less painful solution to the conflicts between them. It was disappointing that he lacked the courage to admit his love affair to us children. Disappointing that, as a psychoanalyst who is supposed to be committed to the truth, he resorted to deceptive manoeuvres and didn't realize that this was misleading and not worthwhile. In my eyes, he is not an irresponsible airhead. But he evaded his responsibility towards the mother and us children. Did he deceive us children because he was afraid we would despise him and he would lose our love if we knew the truth? I don't know that either. But I am sure of one thing: he was right that I also shied away from confrontation, that I saw him in a glorified, rosy light as a teenager. Back then, I wouldn't have been able to look behind my father's smooth, glossy, friendly façade. My need to worship him, to put him on a pedestal, was too strong. It was a great disappointment when I discovered after his death that, apart from a few lectures, he had left no writings or other evidence of his work for posterity.

First memories - childhood in the post-war period in a doctor's family

My twin brother and I were born in Bern in the middle of the Second World War, in 1943, the day after Stalingrad fell. We remain the only children. For many people, twins arouse special attention and pleasure: "How nice, a girl and a boy." Many see us as a couple and as a unit. I like that, and so I enjoy being a twin for the first five years. We are strong as a duo, the brother is always there, a constant companion. Never alone and always a companion for play. That's how I felt as a small child. It wasn't until later that there were arguments about boundaries and fights about who was in charge of whom. These fights were fierce for several years, sometimes to the point of bloodshed. You might think that twins are born at the same time. But this is not the case. They do not struggle through the birth canal together at the same time. Even with twins, there is one who first sees the light of day out of the darkness. There is a first-born and a second-born. I am the firstborn. The birth order will be important for my life, but I don't know whether it will be for him too. My brother and I are each half, but each a whole person. I have a spot in my left pupil, he is flawless.