My life - before and after the wall E-Book

Jochen Hüttenrauch

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

Seitenzahl: 460

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

When Emilie suddenly suffers a brain aneurysm during a skiing holiday, her husband Johan is brutally torn out of his previously comfortable life. This prompts him to review his past life, starting with his childhood on an "organic" farm and his career as an engineer in the GDR, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and what happened afterwards... Johan, alias "Blender", under which name the protagonist the Stasi, the East German secret police, has been a teetotaller, with many temptations in many places... In addition, the death-defying adventurer discovers his passion for mountaineering; he wants to conquer the highest peaks on earth, whatever the cost. But will he be able to defy the borderline experience of death?

Leseprobe

My Life - before and after the Wall

Memorable Times in My Life 

Dedication

For my Ameli

Why?

This work is partly inspired by real events, but it is an independent story. Therefore, the narrative does not claim to authentically reproduce events and people and their (professional and private) actions; rather, the author has created an independent, new work.

Long after the death of his parents, Johan realized that he knew very little about their lives and their thoughts on life. Perhaps he should have asked more questions when he was younger. But now it is far too late for that. Johan doesn't know whether his daughters and grandchildren will be the same. After the death of his beloved wife Emilie, he therefore decided to write down the things worth mentioning from his extraordinary and adventurous life. For his descendants, of course, but also for himself, so that he can look back on what he experienced. Perhaps his two daughters and grandchildren will one day be interested in finding out what their father and grandfather experienced.

Some passages in this life confession are neither moral nor suitable for young people. What is written down will certainly not necessarily make Johan more popular as a father and grandfather, but that was his life and he enjoyed living it.

The Shock in Ischgl

Emilie came trudging through the snow from behind a pile of wood covered in deep snow. Her pained face signaled that something was wrong. Just a few minutes earlier, we had been joking around with our collie "Kashmir" on our hike through the Paznaun valley from Ischgl to Galtür and enjoying the last day of our vacation in the best of moods. Emilie looked at me with suddenly dilated pupils and said: "I have a terrible headache, I'm dizzy, hold me tight." She literally fell into my arms and lost consciousness shortly afterwards.

For a moment, I was petrified. I couldn't understand what had happened. Looking at her pain-stricken face, I shook her in panic. When that didn't help, I laid her down in the freshly fallen powder snow and tried to wake her up by lightly slapping her face. Meanwhile, Kashmir jumped around us, believing the fooling around in the snow was continuing.

A few minutes earlier, we had passed a waste sorting plant in the open countryside between the two towns. I had seen in passing that people were working there. Perplexed as I was, I ordered Kashmir to take a seat next to Emilie and ran back to the plant. I briefly told two women who came towards me what had happened and asked them to wait with Emilie until I came back. When I arrived at the company premises, I explained to the first worker I came across that my wife was lying unconscious in the snow a few hundred meters further up. I asked the man to come to the scene of the accident in the van parked in front of the building. At that moment, however, I didn't know what was going to happen. Without hesitation, he got into the car and tried to drive up the steep, snow-covered path. Unfortunately, Kashmir hadn't waited with his mistress, but had run after me barking. After a few difficult slides, the van managed to pull up to the scene of the accident. The two women knelt next to my wife and tried to calm her down. She had woken up again in the meantime. After the driver saw Emilie's condition, he had the presence of mind to call the mountain rescue service immediately.

When we tried to get her up and lift her into the car, she vomited and moaned that she still had a terrible headache. Before we could even get her into the car, we heard the siren of the ambulance. A short time later we were on our way to the doctor's surgery in Ischgl with the siren blaring. The very friendly driver of the van followed the ambulance with me and the dog.

In the middle of the ski season, the medical station in Ischgl was very busy due to the daily ski accidents. Numerous patients were sitting in the waiting room. However, Emilie's examination had priority and went very quickly. My Emilie was responsive and could move her hands and feet. She told the doctor about her severe headache and that she would now prefer to go to the hotel to sleep. I had briefly described the course of the accident to him beforehand and was glad to hear from Emilie that she was already feeling better. I was all the more surprised that the attending doctor had ordered the rescue helicopter to fly her to the nearest hospital in Imst.

After just a few minutes, the helicopter landed in the designated area behind the doctor's surgery. After explaining the situation, the young emergency doctor on the crew decided without hesitation that Emilie should not be flown to the nearby district hospital but to Innsbruck University Hospital immediately. She was to be intubated before departure, but this failed as her veins could not be found despite intensive efforts. A problem that I had known about her for a long time.

It was now late in the morning. The emergency doctor told me that there was little point in turning up at the clinic in Innsbruck until late afternoon. I said goodbye to my Emilie with a kiss, somewhat relieved, without even suspecting at the time what lay ahead of us both in the coming days and months.

After the helicopter had taken off and I had paid the doctor's bill, I went back to the hotel with Kashmir.

Together with Heike and Mike Wolff, our best friends, we had booked a week's skiing vacation in one of the most beautiful hotels in Ischgl, the "Ischgler Hof". Emilie had given up skiing a few years ago. She was simply too scared for this sport. That's why we had taken our Kashmir with us as her constant companion. Every day she roamed the area alone with him while we had fun on the blue and red slopes of the beautiful ski area.

On this last day of my vacation, I had nevertheless planned to go hiking with my wife and dog in the snowy Paznaun valley. I've now wondered a thousand times what would have happened if something like this had happened during their solitary walks on one of the previous days.

When I arrived at the hotel, I first called Heike to tell her what had happened. She didn't want to believe that Emilie was on her way to Innsbruck by helicopter.

We'd already had a fun-filled end to our vacation the night before in the hotel bar. All four of us raved about the great vacation we had together and resolved to definitely do it again next year. Emilie showed no signs of feeling unwell or illness the evening before.

That afternoon, she had taken the lift to visit us on the Idalp at an altitude of 2,300 meters to experience après-ski with us on the slopes n. Perhaps this altitude was the trigger for her illness.

In the early afternoon, I made my way to Innsbruck, about 100 kilometers away, perhaps to pick up Emilie? I had packed a few things as a precaution e in case she had to stay in hospital overnight. However, due to her condition when we said goodbye, I was very optimistic that I would be able to travel home to Berlin with her the next day. I was therefore very surprised when I was told in the central admissions department that she was in the intensive care unit of the neurosurgery department. Suddenly my heart was beating up to my neck. I couldn't work out what this meant. With weak knees, I tried to find the intensive care unit in the large clinic. I had to wait for some time at the admission gate. By this time, my hopes of going home together had already vanished. I tried to imagine what had actually happened to Emilie. Without result, of course.

After a short briefing and after I had disinfected my hands and put on a plastic apron, I was allowed to enter the intensive care unit after about half an hour's waiting time. I was welcomed there by the senior physician, who first told me that my wife was still in the operating theater. This was the next shock for me. Using MRI images, he then explained to me that Emilie had an aneurysm (widening of the cross-section of arterial blood vessels) in her brain. This aneurysm had burst and led to a cerebral haemorrhage. This hemorrhage irreparably destroyed a large part of the brain. However, the exact extent of the destruction cannot yet be determined.

A thousand things flashed through my mind at that moment: our now almost 40-year relationship, our children and grandchildren, Emilie's fashion store on Alex and - obviously - our joint living will. A few years ago, we had both drawn up a living will to enable each other to leave this world in a dignified manner. After the doctor's dramatic description, one of my first questions was therefore whether, based on current knowledge, it was likely that Emilie would be able to lead a life worth living again in the future. I was frightened of myself when I asked this question, as it was possibly a matter of life or death for my wife. The doctor explained to me that the skull would probably have to be opened to make room for the expected swelling of the brain. He needed my consent for this procedure.

It was explained to me that larger, healthy parts of the brain are perfectly capable of taking over the functions of the damaged areas of the brain with the appropriate therapy. A different life, but one worth living, was therefore possible. I was somewhat relieved when I agreed to this operation. I still wonder today whether that was the right decision.

The positive news from the doctor was that the bleeding in the brain had been stopped using the so-called "coiling method". Platinum coils are attached to a steel wire and pushed via a catheter from the lei ste to the aneurysm in the head. There, the coil is released from the catheter and immediately coils up into a spiral. This permanently fills the soft sagging in the vessel. This operation had not yet been completed when I spoke to the doctor.

At visiting time late in the evening, I sat at Emilie's bedside for two hours and held her hands. She had been put into an induced coma that would last for another three weeks. I counted twenty-two lines of cannulas and probes with which she was supplied and monitored by various instruments and infusion devices.

It was very shocking and somehow incomprehensible for me to see the person I loved very much and with whom I had shared my life for so long lying in this state and in this environment. I felt an infinite powerlessness, which I felt even more intensely over the next few months.

During the drive back to Ischgl, I was in a trance. My life began to flash before my eyes like a movie.

Wormstedt - Johan Hüttig's Home

On the first Sunday in December 1946, I saw the light of day as a real Sunday child in a home birth. My parents' house was in Wormstedt, a 1000-year-old village in the beautiful Thuringian countryside.

I certainly didn't have to torture myself anymore, because as the sixth member of the Hüttig family, my birth was almost routine for my mother Helene. The births of my two brothers Rudolf and Reiner and my three sisters Johanna, Margret and Gertraut had already created the conditions for my low-stress birth years before.

Margret once told me that she was woken up by our father because something new and exciting had arrived. She was very disappointed to see me as a ten-pound baby in the birth and death room of our house. The ten pounds were measured with reasonable accuracy on a cattle scale belonging to the farm. My sister had expected something sweet or great toys for the first Advent and not another whinging something that she now had to share with.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my amazement at how our parents managed to give birth to five out of six siblings in December. As if that wasn't enough, four of us saw the light of day on two consecutive days, almost on an annual basis. There must have been a special marital family holiday in March!

I probably owe my existence to my father's joy at returning home from being a prisoner of war. This joy and cheerfulness were certainly transferred to my character, for which I am still very grateful today.

My father Wilhelm, the German Kaiser sends his regards, had survived the Second World War and a few months in captivity unscathed. Dad never talked much about his war experiences. He was a driver and, thanks to his talent for repairing anything technical, he never saw the front line.

If I can believe the statements of my eldest sister Johanna and my cousin Annelise, who also lived in our house at the time, there were two more pregnancies of our mother after mine.

But the fetuses ended up in the fire after the secret, certainly painful abortions. Johanna was once playing under the kitchen table and witnessed a conversation between our mother and our neighbor Hella. They were talking about the preparations for this dangerous operation. Despite the ban on abortion, neighborly help was obviously common. So I was very lucky that I was just tolerated. Maybe Hella didn't have time either. Thank you, Hella!

My family must have been in dire straits after the war, that they resorted to such means of family planning. But I never felt that way myself as a child. In recent years, Rudolf has told me a lot about the desolate state of our farm, which gave me the impression that I had spent my early childhood on a different farm.

As my siblings were much older than me, we were never playmates. In fact, they were horrified when they had to play with me, as I often cried when something didn't go my way. It must have been particularly bad with card games or "Mensch ärgere dich nicht!".

My siblings were happy when they didn't have to look after me, and my parents with their large farm had more important things to do than look after me. So even as a small child, I had a lot of freedom, which I made the most of.

I remember when the first kindergarten opened in Wormstedt in 1951. At the age of five , I was curious to see what happened in such a kindergarten. So I went there on the first day. You had to bring your own toys. I had some very nice wooden houses, which I brought in full of expectation. After about a year, I picked them up again because my first day was also my last day of kindergarten. Playing under supervision was not my thing. Even as a little boy, I preferred to run around in the small woods in our village and in the open countryside.

My first playmate that I remember was Gunda, the daughter of my cousin Anneliese. She lived with her husband Romann in two rooms of our house. Romann was a handsome man and, apart from his black hair, the very model of an Aryan postulated by the Nazis. He was therefore recruited by the Waffen SS as a very young boy. After the war, Anneliese cut out the SS tattoo under his arm with a razor to protect him from the Nazi hunters. It helped, he died not so long ago, at the advanced age of 94. At the end of the 1950s, when the first big wave of refugees from the GDR took place, he disappeared to Swabia with his family.

During this time, several families, including long-established farmers, emigrated from our village to the west. It was always impressive for us children when a farm was found abandoned one morning. The roar of the hungry cattle quickly made it public. I still dimly remember a late-night family council meeting shortly before the Wall was built, when my parents also seriously considered following the general urge to head west. But they weren't brave enough, or the Wall prevented them from doing so.

My father was anything but a good farmer. His talents, which I also inherited, lay more in all things technical. It was said in the village that Wilhelm could repair anything, from a pocket watch to a combine harvester. He was therefore often out and about fixing other people's appliances. The work on the farm was therefore almost entirely down to our mother.

One of his hobbies was to get an old Lanz tractor from the 1920s up and running again. Despite months of effort, unfortunately without success. He also owes his nickname to this tractor. The thing only ever made a brief wub, wub and it was off again. In addition to "Diftel", "Wub-Wub" also stuck to him as a nickname. Today I can well understand that this orgy of repairs often led to arguments between my parents. It went so far that Helene once attacked Wilhelm with a pitchfork. Like the seven little goats, we children all hid in some hiding place during such arguments so that we wouldn't get hurt. The quarrels were usually so loud that the whole village knew that the Hüttigs were in trouble again.

Fortunately, Wilhelm was a very peaceful man, otherwise one of them would not have survived the ongoing quarrels for long.

I and my siblings were no strangers to corporal punishment, rightly or wrongly, but only from Helene. She often hit them, no matter what she had in her hand.

All the siblings agreed and still agree today that we still had a good mother. She was simply overwhelmed by all the work and the sole responsibility for the farm. As long as I knew her, she never once went on vacation. Every year she went to her mother's, my grandmother's, farm in Kleina for a weekend. My grandma Linda was the only one of my four grandparents that I got to know or, rather, see. The others were all dead by the time I was born. So the experiences I could pass on through my grandparents are rudimentary.

When mom was away, our dad was responsible for the children's physical well-being on such rare occasions. The only dish he knew how to make was pea sausage soup. We had to eat this strange soup for better or worse.

Cooking was done on a wood and coal-fired kitchen stove, which also prepared hot water for washing and heated the kitchen in winter.

The whole life of the family took place in the kitchen. The living room was only heated on high feast days and holidays. The Christmas tree usually stood there until Easter. When it had to be disposed of, it lost all its needles at the first touch.

Apart from the Sunday roast with Thuringian dumplings, I remember very little about lunch. However, I do remember one thing very well: "hot pears with yeast dumplings". As a large family, we also had big pots to cook in. The hot pears were ready, so my mother put the pot on the stone floor in the kitchen without the lid to cool down. As a three-year-old, I was playing at her feet and fell backwards into the pot with the hot pears. I screamed so loudly as a result. My scalded bottom and my best part were quickly blown vigorously by my mother and sprinkled with flour, as was customary for burns in those days. Everyone still enjoyed the pears with the special seasoning of my childhood bum - after all, it was one of our favorite foods.

In a household with six children, there have of course been several stories like this over the years. Reiner was once looking for his nightgown in the evening. As he was unsuccessful, everyone helped him look for it. After this was also unsuccessful, he undressed in the evening and realized that he had been wearing the nightgown all day. The laughter was huge.

Margret woke up one night and screamed loudly: "Mom, mom, help, there are dwarves in my bed." On closer inspection, the sinister gnomes turned out to be the tips of her pillow, filled to bursting with feathers.

The strangest act, which my siblings still laugh about today, was something I did. As the smallest, I always had to be the first to go to bed at night. It was therefore also my job to take the chamber pot into the bedroom, which I usually used as soon as I had put it in its place. One evening, when I had fallen asleep on the sofa, my mother woke me up and asked me to go back to bed. Still half asleep, I took my slippers, which were high fabric slippers with buckles, in one hand and the chamber pot in the other. Armed like this, I walked up the stairs towards the bedroom, almost sleepwalking. I placed the chamber pot under my bed and the slippers in the pot's usual place. I then unerringly aimed for my slippers and peed all over them. Gertraut followed me and almost wet her pants laughing at the sight of this action.

My eldest sister Johanna probably had the hardest time of all of us. According to our mother, she was responsible for many of the things we, and especially me, got up to. She never tattled, but I always got a spanking from her to make up for it. Johanna could be as stubborn and stubborn as a donkey. I remember that she could stand outside for hours after being reprimanded, regardless of whether it was raining or snowing.

A historical review testifies to the great musicality of the Hüttig family. My grandfather Otto, whom I unfortunately never had the chance to meet, was the choirmaster of the Wormstedt church choir, but above all he was the chairman of the Thuringian Singers' Association. In this capacity, he also took part in the legendary 10th German Singers' Association Festival in Vienna in 1928 t .

But the musical tradition goes back even further. Ludwig Christoph Hüttig, my great-great-grandfather, who lived from 1818 to 1871, was a choir adjutant, i.e. a music officer in the military. I mention this because we still had the symbols of Ludwig's status in our attic, namely the very beautiful drum major's baton and his spiked cap. Unfortunately these relics from the past did not survive my playfulness - ignorant as I was. The only attic find I still have today is the 1939 edition of the banned book "Mein Kampf" by a certain Adolf Hitler.

M using and playing the piano were therefore a family ient tradition. I particularly remember the Christmas ceremonies. Our dad would sit at the piano and we would sing Christmas carols to his playing. It was important to our parents that all the children received piano training. My siblings had to endure it. However, shortly before it was my turn, our piano teacher died. At the time, I was glad that the bitter cup had passed me by. As an adult, however, I often regretted never having learned to play a musical instrument. Incidentally, the music teacher, Mr. Mehring from Apolda, was paid in kind, such as eggs, sausage and other edibles from the farm.

Reiner had the saddest fate of us children . He was certainly the most creative of us. Painting and playing the piano were among his favorite pastimes. Starting at the age of twelve, Reiner had difficulty walking. As a three-year-old, I could already run faster than him. I remember him saying to me when we left for a spa stay: "When I get back home, I'll be much faster than you." Unfortunately, that remained his pipe dream.

After a few years, he was no longer able to walk despite lengthy stays in hospital and convalescent homes. He spent the last part of his life lying in a plaster bed in our kitchen to enable him to participate in family life. One of the few tasks I had to do was to look after Reiner. This meant keeping him company, holding the urine bottle when he had to wee and helping him to eat, as he was slowly going blind and his arms were gradually failing. When I touched his penis to put it in the bottle, he sometimes got an erection. I didn't think anything of it at the time. Later I realized that, as an eighteen-year-old, he had never had the opportunity to get together with a woman because of his illness. My touching him aroused him sexually. According to the 21st century interpretation, this could be considered child abuse. But this 'abuse' certainly didn't harm me. On the contrary, in retrospect I'm glad that I was able to help Reiner get a little sexual arousal.

Reiner died three days before my tenth birthday. I was alone with him in the kitchen after school that afternoon. Reiner was sleeping and suddenly he coughed terribly, rolled his eyes and stopped breathing after a short time. I ran screaming into the yard and called for help. My sister Johanna came immediately. But no one was able to help. Reiner had survived his five-year ordeal.

The funeral took place on my tenth birthday. I remember that on this birthday I was given a small persipan pig, i.e. a pig made from the marzipan substitute that was common at the time.

Before the funeral, Reiner's body was laid out in the room where he and all of us were born. The laying out was in an open coffin and everyone from the village who paid a condolence visit also had the opportunity to say goodbye to our deceased brother.

There are photos of this laying out in our family album. As a ten-year-old boy, it was strange for me to sleep under the same roof as my dead brother. That's why I was allowed to go to bed with my parents on those nights. But when I woke up in the morning, I was back in my own iron crib, which was slowly becoming too small for me at that age.

Reiner was carried to the cemetery by six strong men from our village, accompanied by the ringing of bells. The school children's choir sang at his grave while my brother was laid to rest. My sister Johanna, incomprehensibly for me, did not attend the funeral service. I later found out that she was pregnant. A funeral service in this state was taboo at the time.

After Reiner's death, I had almost unlimited freedom apart from the chore of going to school. For the reasons already mentioned, my siblings were happy when they didn't have to look after me. My parents were also unable to look after me because of the many tasks on the farm.

The place in the kitchen where Reiner's deathbed stood almost became the undoing of me and my parents' house. Alone at home in the evening, I almost managed to burn down our house. Sitting on the sofa, I played bonfire. A pile of crumpled up newspaper that I had set alight threatened to get out of control very quickly. With great effort and a bucket of water, I had just managed to prevent the flames from spreading to the sofa. The floorboards, soaked with floor polish, had a burn mark on them that was impossible to miss. My parents' shock was followed by a beating. Even deserved. I should have known better.

A few years earlier, there was a major fire in Wormstedt. The largest field barn in our village was ablaze one evening and burned to the ground. Many villagers watched the gruesome spectacle from a respectful distance. I was also able to watch the meter-high flames and feel the heat. The fire department was only able to prevent the fire from spreading. Extinguishing it was out of the question. The following morning, the barn was gone. The dead sheep that had been locked in there lay around naked with bloated bodies and stank terribly. The question for me is: did I start the campfire inspired by this fire, or did I have the presence of mind to act correctly and put out the fire because of this experience? Either way, my parents' house is still standing.

The farmhouse, which consists of a total of ten more or less large rooms, was built in 1777 by the Hanß family as an adobe and half-timbered building. The farmer Robert Lepold Hüttig, from Flurstedt, married into the family on April 13, 1875 and took over the farm.

The associated stables date from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. It also included around 17 hectares of fields and meadows. A lot of livestock needed to be looked after every day. There were six cows, three horses, various pigs and lots of small livestock such as sheep, goats, geese, ducks, chickens and rabbits.

In addition to the livestock, we always had one or two dogs and lots of cats. I remember a maximum of twelve cats. Together with Gertraut, I often organized cat meetings in the kitchen. Our biggest and oldest cat was very stubborn and always wanted to leave the meeting on his own. So I once tied him up by his hind leg to prevent him from escaping. I shouldn't have done that. He escaped again and got stuck on the rope; when I tried to untie him, he bit me terribly on the hand, I bled like a pig and still have a scar today as a memento of our boss cat.

But lots of cats also means lots of kittens. On a large farm, you usually only find the cute kittens when they are a bit bigger and really cute. I was then the one who had to make sure that the population didn't get out of hand. I threw the little kittens against a wall with no qualms. When they were stunned after one or sometimes two throws, they went into the slurry pit. This procedure sounds pretty brutal, but on a farm it was normal to kill animals, either to keep reproduction in check or to eat them later with relish.

It was curious that as children we were not allowed to watch cows, mares or sows being bred. We had a magnificent breeding bull on our farm for several years. Whenever cows were brought in from other farms to be mated, I was locked in the house as a child until the procedure was successfully completed. Nevertheless, my playmates raden and I found ways and means of observing the animals' lovemaking. Sharing what we learned with my peers after the seemingly brutal sex act, which sometimes required human assistance to find the right entrance to the cow, was always great fun.

Sexuality always played an important and exciting role for us as village children. Experiences were gathered and exchanged even before we went to school.

I remember one such early sexual experience with painful consequences. Together with one of my best playmates Georg, we lured Gunda into a tobacco field on a beautiful summer's day. We were invisible to outsiders among the two-metre-high tobacco plants. Together we persuaded Gunda to show us her pussy. In return, we bared our little snips, as we called our penis back then. Gunda, who was perhaps six years old, confessed to her mother in the evening that Johan and Georg had shown her the wrong bottom. As a result, my mother gave her another painful spanking the next day.

My grandmother's sister, Clara von der Gönne, also lived on our farm in the fifties. So I have a bit of blue blood in me too!

She was expropriated after the war. Her family used to own the manor, the brewery and the inn in our village.

She was only able to save a few of her large possessions, including a book on the "Anatomy of Women". This reference book was well hidden from us children. Since I knew where she hid the key to her now tiny apartment above the horse stables, I secretly sneaked into her closet to rummage through the old aunt's things and found this interesting book. It had a full-page picture of a naked woman, which was the biggest thing for me back then. Only my ne best friends were allowed to look at it after swearing not to tell anyone. This naked woman was the most exciting thing you could show in those apparently bourgeois and repressed times.

The annual slaughter festivals were always highlights in the daily monotony on the farm. To slaughter your own pig, you had to get a slaughtering license. But farmers only got one if the delivery plan for pigs imposed by the socialist state was fulfilled. However, the family of eight was also hungry despite not fulfilling the plan. It sometimes happened that a pig disappeared from the barn one night.

In order to dismember the missing animal as quietly as possible, cavities were created in the barn during the harvest season in summer (slaughtering only took place in winter, of course) when stacking the bales of straw, which were suitable as a murder cave for killing the pig. As the youngest member of the family, I at least was not privy to such actions for reasons of secrecy. Despite all precautions, my parents were once caught black-butchering. As my noble aunt was also involved, the crime was punished with a hefty fine. It was also worth a short article about the machinations of the former large landowners in the "Bauernecho", the daily newspaper of the Thuringian farmers.

But most of Hüttig's home slaughters were legal and sometimes really festive. The biggest one I can remember cost the lives of two pigs and a young bull. On the third and last day of the slaughter, the fire department band even played a march for us. The hard-working brass players and the other hard-working helpers were then, of course, well fed.

The pig slaughter always had a similar procedure. Before it started, the laundry room, where they also bathed every Saturday, was thoroughly cleaned. A fire was made under the brick kettle at night so that the water was already boiling when the butcher arrived gens. When Hugo, our butcher, arrived, everything just listened to his command. The first rule was that women on their period had no business in the slaughterhouse. Any contact with the meat was forbidden. I won't go into the extent to which it was substantiated that there was otherwise a risk of the sausage spoiling.

The pig was usually led from the pigsty to the adjacent laundry room, squealing loudly. The animals must have sensed that their last hour had come. Sometimes it was a battle of two or three men against one pig until the animal was correctly placed. The pig was killed with the captive bolt pistol by a shot to the skull. Lying on the ground, the butcher then finished the animal off with a cut through the throat and the carotid artery. The blood had to be collected with a bowl held underneath. Later, it was my job as the smallest one to hold the bowl, while a strong man had to hold the front legs so that the animal didn't thrash about too much. The first time I was allowed to take part in the killing, the butcher asked me to hold the hind leg of the lying pig. I only did that once. When I tried to hold the leg, I landed in a high arc in the next corner. You simply couldn't hold the strong hind leg, which later became the knuckle of pork, and it wasn't necessary, because the kicks went nowhere if no one made a fool of themselves. Another one of Hugo's nastinesses was the way he put on my personal liverwurst. As a liverwurst fan, I'm supposed to have once said: "Ech asse nar Lawerworscht." To do this, he wrapped the pig's intestines around my head and neck. All my siblings had gone through this procedure before and laughed maliciously at me for it.

Cleaning the intestines was a job that required a good stomach. The intestines had to be turned over and cleaned with a wooden scraper, revealing the fully and half-digested intestinal contents. Often with mas sen of roundworms. Because of the stench, this could only be done in the yard. Hugo always chose the one that had annoyed him before.

Despite this unappetizing procedure, the sausage, which was later stuffed into the intestines, always tasted very good. To cut up the pig, it was tied to a horizontal ladder and, depending on the weight of the animal, placed against the wall by two or three men. The butcher alone was then responsible for cutting the meat with an axe and a sharp knife. To cut the meat under Hugo's command, everyone had to do it again.

As already mentioned, my father was a technology freak. At the slaughter festival with the two pigs and the ox, a lot of meat had to be minced with the mincer to make sausages. Back then, turning the mincer was usually done by hand. But my father had an ingenious idea. Our large kitchen table made of sturdy oak wood was transported to the farmyard and wedged there. Instead of a crank, a pulley was mounted on the meat grinder, which was bolted to the table. We had a 3 hp electric motor, which was the same size as a 30 kW electric drive today. It was also wedged into the paved yard. A flat belt from the threshing machine was used to transmit power between the motor and the mincer. Before switching it on, my father checked everything again and Romann, who had helped him to assemble the technology, sat down on the table for safety. The butcher and his curious helpers positioned themselves around the technical monster in great anticipation, but at a respectful distance. So we were ready to go. My father started the engine and lo and behold, the wolf started turning. But when the motor was switched to full power, there was a powerful jolt, the table fell over and Romann crashed onto the pavement in a high arc. Luckily, the mincer survived the action unscathed so that the hobbyists were able to turn the meat with their muscle power instead of their brain power.

Cooking the blood, liver and rind sausage in the cauldron was a particularly exciting act. The pig's stomach, which also had to be cooked and was filled with black pudding and tongue, was the most sensitive object in the cauldron. If the stomach burst during cooking, the sausage soup tasted even heartier, but eight to ten pounds of good tongue sausage were lost. Unfortunately, this often happened to Hugo, so our mother even changed butchers once.

In the village, it was customary to distribute the sausage soup together with a small cooked sausage to relatives and friends. It was then returned when the other farms were slaughtered. For me, this meant carrying hot sausage soup in a tin jug to the friendly farms and families. I often came back with little treats.

After butchering, the ham, cooked sausage and crackling were smoked in a smokehouse built into the house. During this time, the whole house smelled of smouldering beech wood and smoked sausage. After smoking, 30 to 40 smoked sausages and ham were hung in the pantry. For the first few weeks, they dripped away there. An old farm chest, which is still in my possession today, stood under the sausage. The traces of the dripping sausages can still be seen and even smelled 60 years later. In those days, flour milled from our own grain was stored in this chest. The traces of the mice that ate the flour can still be seen today.

Next to the chest was a large wooden barrel containing the sugar. It was sugar from our own sugar beet harvest, which we received through the delivery of beets. Harvesting the beets was a sweaty affair. There was a special beet fork for this. The procedure was to prick, loosen, pull out and throw onto the wagon. It was hard work until the wagon was full, only surpassed by potato picking. The transportation of the turnips by horse and cart to the next railroad station was another difficult undertaking.

Today, a lot is being done to protect the environment and even more is being said about it. It is therefore interesting to take a look at our farm in the fifties and sixties through the eyes of an environmentalist. Apart from the highly sulphurous raw lignite that we burned for heating and cooking back then, our farm was an almost closed ecosystem. Almost everything that was produced on the farm was recycled. Let's start with the slaughter of a pig. We ate all the meat and offal as roasts, hams or sausages. The stinking intestinal contents were fed to the surviving pigs, who obviously didn't mind the stench. The bones and back skin had to be delivered and were processed into soap and pigskin. The belly button and penis were hung up in the yard in winter as salt-free bird food and were also loved by the songbirds. All organic matter such as excrement, manure and urine went into the manure and slurry pit and was later used to fertilize the fields. Even the ash ended up in the fields at some point. The open-air toilet was located directly above the slurry pit, but we called it the "shit house". The "Bauernecho" (farmer's echo) was used for back duties if there was anything left over after reading or packing eggs for sale. This had to be made usable for the rear services by intensive crumpling.

To load the manure, the cart with its iron-tyred wooden wheels had to be pushed backwards towards the manure. One day our shithouse broke down. The walls collapsed so far that you could see the whole yard from the top. I still remember my mother sitting on it. If, as usual, there was no paper in the toilet, she would shout loudly: "Paper!" That was the signal for whoever was closest to sprint off to get a newspaper.

Back to environmental protection. We only washed up with hot water, and the pigs got the washing-up water. There were no exhaust fumes from engines, as everything was moved with our two or three draught horses. If something broke and couldn't be repaired or used for something else, it went into the "Scherbengasse", an approximately 60-centimeter-wide space between our house and the neighbouring house. This alley was never emptied once during my entire childhood. For us children, it was a real treasure trove of exotic relics from the past from time to time.

In spring, after my eleventh birthday, I got my first dog of my own. Mira, an old German hunting dog, was the daughter of the dog from my mother's parents' farm in Kleina. From then on, I spent a large part of my ample free time with my dog. Mira was not the first dog on our farm. Her predecessor, Molli, was a chain dog who was unfortunately very snappy due to his restrictive attitude. I was afraid of him and was therefore unable to build a relationship with this German shepherd mix. But I remember his bitter end very well.

The fur man came to the village regularly, perhaps once a month, with a horse-drawn cart. He collected bones, rabbit skins and also skinned pork loins. Together with my father, he killed our old dog Molli. Unfortunately in a bestial way. My father had put Molli's chain through the gap in the barn door and pulled the dog so close to the door that he could no longer move. The fur man then smashed the dog's head in with an axe. Although I didn't like Molli, I cried watching this massacre. But killing was part of everyday life on a farm.

I was often out and about with Mira in the unfortunately very small village woods or in the hallway. Today I wonder what I was doing there all the time.

We formed gangs of children, built leaf huts in the forest and fought against each other. Even back then, I had to prove my leadership qualities as the gang leader of a children's gang. I was elected leader by the members in a non-secret ballot.

The election was often preceded by violent power struggles. Once I was almost knocked unconscious in one of these fights when my classmate and eternal rival Rolli took over power in our gang. Even here I realized that the road to power is rocky and not always equally successful. It was a good school for my later life. After a short time, my friend and rival Rolli had to relinquish power to me, not entirely voluntarily, after a brief nosebleed.

Of course, our gang also had weapons. These were usually swords carved from sticks. We made our own bows and arrows by scavenging hazelnut bushes. Rubber catapults, made from forks of branches and tire rubber, were also part of the arsenal. We even secretly had real weapons as leftovers from the war. I was the proud owner of a rusty sabre that must have come from the First World War and must have been very beautiful at one time. I also owned a revolver for a short time. Unfortunately, after I borrowed it once, I never saw it again. My most valuable weapon, however, was a well-preserved carbine from the Second World War. Due to a lack of cartridges, I tried to load it with bullets and shoot it, which fortunately didn't work. Of course, such a special treasure had to be well hidden. The little mortuary in our cemetery, which was rarely used, was a good hiding place. At some point, however, the dangerous weapon disappeared from there. Our village's municipal servant probably found the carbine and confiscated it.

In addition to tending the cemetery, the many tasks of our community servant, known as "Bimmel-Arno", also included calling out announcements in the village. As I could hardly be heard over with my pronunciation even as a teenager, I was sometimes allowed to take on this task. It worked like this: At several central locations in our village, a large hand bell was rung continuously to lure the residents out onto the street so that news and information of general interest, such as community meetings, power cuts or funeral dates, could be announced in a voice that could not be overheard.

One of my favorite pastimes in the woods and fields was climbing trees. It was important for me to climb trees that were usually impossible for my playmates to climb. I remember an old pollarded willow on the edge of the Utenbach stream. The head of the willow, already quite spacious due to decades of cutting wattle branches, was four to five meters high. However, the trunk offered few opportunities to get up there. Nevertheless, I had already climbed it several times, some of them involving daring climbs. Klaus, one of my playmates, was determined to reach the top of the willow. With my help and advice, he reached the top after several attempts. But his happiness at the top was short-lived. He was so scared of the descent that I had to call for help from the volunteer fire department after several of his ineffectual attempts. They rescued him from the lofty heights with a ladder, laughing derisively. Klaus was ridiculed by the other children for a long time afterwards. We haven't been real friends since then.

In September 1953, I started school together with five other children from our village. With the best will in the world, I can't remember how I started school or what was in the sugar cone. This school bag was no consolation to me for the freedom I had to give up. If I remember correctly, I wasn't particularly motivated from the start to spend half the day at school while the woods and fields were waiting for me outside.

The lessons were organized in such a way that the first and third classes were taught together in one classroom by one teacher . Our class teacher, Miss Gärtner, walked from the neighboring village every day with the only first-grader. There was no bus service to this village two kilometers away at the time. There were 14 pupils in both classes together.

We made our first attempts at writing and arithmetic on slates. In addition to the snack, it was important to bring a freshly sharpened slate pencil and a damp sponge, which was attached to the outside of the school bag with a string. I never forgot my lunch.

There was a school building in the village that consisted of one classroom, which my father and my older siblings attended during the war. Today, this building is a popular restaurant called "Zur alten Dorfschule".

As we were now a multi-grade school, the classrooms were spread around the village. We had lessons at in the converted living room of the village teacher's house. Unfortunately, he had an unpleasant characteristic. Every evening at nightfall, he made a patrol through the village. For us children, it was the sign that we had to take the shortest route home. Teachers were no longer officially punished, but failure to comply with his orders sometimes resulted in a slap in the face, either from the teacher or from our parents.

Two classrooms were located in the old brewery building of my aristocratic relatives. The building was expropriated in 1946. As part of the land reform in the Soviet occupation zone, large landowners, war criminals and active NSDAP members were expropriated without compensation.

In 1954, the brewery was demolished in order to build a new school on the same site as part of the National Development Program (NAW). This meant: construction using the demolition material through voluntary work by the villagers and students from the Apolda School of Civil Engineering. At this point, it should be mentioned that my sister Johanna met her husband Horst in this way. He was a student at the construction school in Apolda and was able to demonstrate his skills as a bricklayer by helping with the construction of the new school.

I myself cleaned bricks when I was a little boy. I got a penny per brick for the piggy bank. However, I didn't have a piggy bank, so my money always evaporated quickly. For 20 pfennigs, you could take a ride on the chain carousel or go up in the air on an air swing at the funfair. It was a good tradition for a traveling showman to move from one fair to another through the villages with his carousel and swing.

After four years of construction, the school was inaugurated in 1958. Before the inauguration, there were rumors that the then President of the GDR Wilhelm Pieck would come. This was probably more the dream of our mayor. However, the school was actually handed over in the presence of the chairman of the district council and the district school board. The village elders had probably overestimated the importance of our village.

The school was actually supposed to be inaugurated in 1957, when Wormstedt celebrated its millennium. We had certainly been too slow and hadn't cleaned enough stones.

To mark the millennium, several lime trees were planted in various places in our village. I was one of the six children who had the honor of being the sponsor of one of the newly planted trees. One of the challenges was that I had to recite a poem in public. The text was then buried in a bottle under the roots. It is only thanks to the good care of my brother Rudolf that my lime tree is the only one that survived the first few years and has now grown into a strong old lime tree. It is well known that lime trees can grow very old. Perhaps in a few hundred years, people will be able to read my poem and my name.

Thanks to the new school building, which was spacious by the standards of the time, I had lessons from the sixth grade together with children from the neighboring villages of Utenbach, Kösnitz and Pfuhlsborn.

The old school became a sports hall. We had sports lessons together with our girls. The time began when I became more and more interested in the charms of the opposite sex. As a boy of twelve, we always wore shorts in summer and winter. In winter, we wore long knitted stockings with them. So a bodice with suspenders was also the order of the day. When doing sports in the hall, the knitted stockings were taken off, but the bodice remained under the black gym shorts. There were only black gym shorts! The suspenders then dangled visibly and seductively out of the trouser legs. I was always terribly ashamed of this when the girls giggled because of this dress code.

Thank God my favorite Angelika - for me the most beautiful girl at school - was not in my class, but one class above me. I was already aware that I had no chance of ending up with her, so I always secretly admired her and imagined how envious everyone else would be if she was my friend.

A meeting with Angelika almost made me sink into the ground with shame. I took the bus to Apolda with my mother to go shopping. At 1.60 meters tall and weighing 90 kilos, my mother needed much more than just a seat on the bus, so I was pretty much squeezed in next to her at the window. The way into town led through Utenbach. Angelika also lived here. She got on the bus with a friend and, to my horror, sat in the seats opposite us. As usual, my mother began to unpack her sandwiches and eat them with relish. Angelika looked at me disdainfully and giggled with her friend at my squashed heap of misery. From then on, I stopped daydreaming about her and tried to avoid her.

The summer camps organized by the school during the summer vacations were particular highlights of my childhood. They were the first and only opportunity to get away from Wormstedt for a longer period of time. The first time was in 1959 when we spent three weeks on a campsite in Ilmenau. The accommodation was of course separated into male and female in large tents. The tent of the pubescent girls, including Angelika, was constantly besieged by a group of teenage boys from Ilmenau. As cavaliers and protectors of our girls, we tried several times to drive the besiegers away, unfortunately with moderate success. When the harassment by the egg-borns got out of hand, our sports teacher, Mr. Jacob, a short, wiry older gentleman (around 40), devised a battle plan that amused us all greatly. Incidentally, Mr. Jacob was also the tailor in our village. His idea was: "You herd the six or seven half-wits around the girls' tent. I'll catch them all and take them to the police." We imagined what it would have looked like if the brave little tailor had caught the seven strong boys in one fell swoop and handed them over to the police. Unfortunately, I can't remember how the problem was actually solved back then. Perhaps the boys from Ilmenau found another vacation group with even prettier girls after all.

We spent most of our vacation camp time at the forest swimming pool in Stützerbach. Of course, we also hiked through the beautiful Thuringian Forest from time to time. Also up the famous Kickelhahn, Ilmenau's 861-metre-high local mountain. A few minutes away from the observation tower on the summit is the Goethe cottage, where the prince of poets is said to have written his famous poem "Wanderers' Night Song" (Above all peaks is peace ...).

The following years, our vacation camps were twice at the Baltic Sea in Ückeritz on the island of Usedom.