Shallowly rooted E-Book

Angelika Winter

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

Seitenzahl: 875

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

She makes her own decisions, but the author had no choice - a life in the GDR and after 42 years everything is different. Her very own way of life with constant questioning and questioning of the inner and outer chasing around from place to place, from plans to new plans, always doing, always doing - this is how she lives. The book tells the story of her grandparents from the beginning of the century, the thirties and forties of her mother's family, the stories of her entry into life as well as her childhood, youth, growing up and being an adult with struggles and perseverance. She met her biological father very late in life and had him write down his story in considerable detail, the life of an adolescent in Saxony before, during and after the Second World War.

Leseprobe

Dedication

I wrote this book because of myself and for myself.

Spotlights

Me - year after year in the world of that time

How many lines will there be in history books about the years 1949 to 1989 and a small state called GDR?

Back from today – when I could still feel myself

Shallowly rooted family trees

A cat has seven or nine lives

The inner voice and me

Victim – Perpetrator – Rescuer

How I made myself invisible

Those who are against something cry always louder than the majority

Speechlessness

Insights into circumstances and necessities

Trust? No problem, forget it!

The colorful curtain – What nobody ever wanted to know, and some things shouldn’t be known, see Embarrassments!

Embossed stamps of life

Cultivating loneliness – paths to paralysis

… and for the torn off scrap of soul there is the oyster

If I had ever had a choice, I would never have been born.

And now? Finally start! Four attempts are enough

There is a heavy black lump inside me that keeps getting tighter and tighter and keeps pulling more and more into itself. It is paralyzing me from finally sorting out the book, it is paralyzing me from continuing to organize my life and sort it into folders with photos and memories. It is like a spiral - don't write until the folders are finished, no, write what you already have and work on the folders at the same time or afterwards... It is terrible. I welcome every distraction and find countless excuses not to start, yet. I always start everything and at some point I stop - then I am drawn into the vortex of laziness. There is so much, I don't even know if I will be able to master the whole thing. Wanting is one thing, being able is another, but making it possible is a cross with the matter. I doubt and hinder myself. I find excuse after excuse and do nothing.

Finally, do it – one step at a time. Maybe you have something to say after all.

How long have I wanted to write a book, my book? For decades. I started over and over again, wrote individual chapters, filed them away. I was not very systematic; whenever I thought I absolutely had to write, I would write, get going, plan the next steps - and then something else would get in the way.

This year is going to be the final year, because I'm turning 70. During that time, I've accumulated all sorts of life, even if I didn't always see it as life. I know that I waited forever for someone to tell me when life would begin. I was already in my early twenties when it gradually dawned on me that it was already my life. Somehow, I didn't feel fit for life, not capable of living, and certainly not in a position to consciously shape my life. Actually, I didn't live, I “was lived”. Even though this passive form doesn't exist and is both grammatical and semantic nonsense, it still expresses best what life meant to me.

And why do I want to write about my life? Is it so important and interesting that it is worth describing? I am now convinced of that, because every life reflects the passage of time, and I grew up in a special time and in a special country whose existence will one day in the not-too-distant future take up fewer and fewer lines in the history books. Even now, twenty-eight years after it ceased to exist, the information about it has shrunk to a few highlights from which no one can put together a colorful picture. Somehow, I feel like a contemporary witness. I should now paint my picture, describe my life, even if it is one of millions, it still has very personal perspectives, the individual in the whole, the special in the general. In addition, I am one of the quiet millions for whom this country meant everything, who would never have become what they are without this country, who owe everything to this country, who liked it and wanted to help shape it so that it would be good for everyone. I didn't succeed. What presumption does a child have to want to know what is good and right? The cries of the loudmouths who were against it will definitely be remembered and will distort the picture. Freedom - the greatest good of mankind, how wonderful, how splendid, in the name of freedom any evil can be justified. Forget it, freedom is so vague, so incomprehensible, as open to interpretation as good and evil and right and wrong, all categories that I said goodbye to a long time ago. I no longer use these words because they are meaningless and only in the mouth of the speaker and in the eye of the beholder are something specific, something concrete, but not absolute. Wait, perhaps I could be a little more careful, because there is very little that could be characterized in this way. It may still become clear that for me they are not absolute values, typical, universal, abstract. I am an abstract thinker, a skeleton thinker, I want to see what stimulates movement under skin, flesh, muscles, organs. What causes what? Where is the actual cause of changes? I think in cause-effect fields, no other model of thought is available to me, although such a thing should certainly exist. So, I put my appearance in the world into the context of the environment. Why do I exist? What led to this? What was the environment like into which I was born and in which I grew up? Why did I become the way I did and not otherwise? What did I have inside me that dictated this and no other direction? That is another reason for my need to write down my life. I would like to get back on track. I know when and where I made serious mistakes and thereby set a course that drove me in a direction completely different from what I had wanted - not planned or wanted. Why did I make those decisions? Which puppet strings pulled on me? Why did I not find access to myself? Why do I withdraw into myself? Well, that's the second reason, the whole psychological side. Sometimes my inner voice comes into action. When did it speak to me and what was the result? When did I decide with my head, when from my gut and when not at all?

Do I want to leave my life experiences and wisdom to my children and grandchildren? I don't think so. I rarely spoke or told stories myself. More at first, then less and less, then I just answered questions, usually quite briefly, rather abstractly. And I rarely told facts. I asked myself whether they even wanted to know, how much of it, whether it interested them or not, but above all I didn't want to hear any comments, any "why". To be able to understand another person seems almost impossible to me, unless you have the ability to put yourself in the other person's shoes and to leave yourself out. Who can do that?

So, I prefer to tell my story and stories from my point of view without expecting a counterargument. If someone is interested, read it, if someone stops reading, stop reading, I don't want to hear or read anything about it. I just want to get it off my chest.

I took the following sentence from a reader’s letter:

"No, these are not trivial things. They speak from my soul. There is no person you know less about than your own parents or children."

How often have I decided: "Now you're finally going to start writing your book!" How many beginnings, first sentences with a "shock-taking quality", with impact that open the valve and let thoughts, memories and reflections flow, have I drafted - but I never picked up the pen and just started writing. Why not? A thousand excuses in front of me and pretexts put forward as objective reasons. Other things were always more important. Everyday life with its recurring and repetitive little things, the eternal household, the functioning of which is so important for freeing the head, but which eats up insatiably, namely time, strength, energy, desire, joy and leaves behind a tired body and mind, which now again provides the excuse for locking thoughts away in their brain shell and the supposedly necessary process of maturation. Thoughts are always ripe as soon as they can be felt as formulated sentences or moving images or triggered excitement. It is fascinating to notice the big bang of thought with astonishment. It materializes in the mind with suddenness and immediacy and can hardly ever be traced back to the quantitative particles and the stirring, bubbling whirlpool of the movement of the whole, which has transformed it into a leap into the quality of the comprehensibility of an idea. How hard it is to hold on to it, if one lets it be. It is clear, beautiful, unambiguously there, can be tailored into pretty sentence garments, but if it is forced onto paper, it is fleeting, empty, banal, simply gone.

My book beginnings? My "breakthrough sentences"? I can't think of one anymore. Thinking about titles is incredibly time-consuming, and in fact, finding a title seems to be the most difficult thing.

If I take a name that countless writers have used, as they must have spent more time coming up with the title than they did writing the story down, the reader knows immediately: Aha, another life story from the cradle to the grave, in the worst case scenario, but at least with some long or short catastrophes that brings the world - but it is only the human world - to a standstill for a few seconds and then everything is completely different and the reader leaves matured or purified or destroyed. The supply of human lives is endless, each of which has taken a different course - and again many of them are the same in their monotony and repetition, the supply of names, which of course must be meaningful, they have to sound good, they have to attract attention. When people walk past the book displays, they ask themselves: Who is Erwin Moorbach/Silke Ehlers? What do I care about Frieder Richter/Hanna Seebohm? Nevertheless, titles with names have appeal.

In any case, I couldn't decide on a name because I didn't want it to reveal whether it was a man or a woman. Why not? Because I can already hear the preconceptions: "Another women's novel, either romantic and dreaming of true love, unfulfilled sentimentality and tragic love", or "a feminist has the compulsive need to give it to the world!" Are men's names used as book titles just as often as women's names? In other words, were men's lives described just as often as women's lives? What makes the difference? I'll think about that soon. I went through this phase of thinking about names when I was in my early twenties, because I was sitting in the reading room of Staatsbibliothek Unter den Linden in front of a thick, empty notepad with the full intention, strong will and a child in my belly, wanting to write all my sorrows off my chest before life took me away. I sat in front of the first blank sheet of paper for seven hours, not moving from my seat, staring out of the window into the atrium and surrendering myself to November, which also took me. Not a single word was written on the paper. With a deep sigh and the conscious isolation of what I had lived, experienced and felt up to that point, I let myself be carried away by life, helpless and depressed.

I gave up.

Then I found a wonderful title, almost twenty years later.

The book was to be called "Settling Accounts at 40". And I wanted to settle accounts, mercilessly with myself and my environment. And what didn't I have to settle accounts with... Did I settle accounts? I didn't write anything down. I did put notebooks out again, made space. I looked for places to write until I was back in the State Library, where I had a lot of other work with me and was doing it, until I finally wanted to treat myself to the treat of writing down the inner, exhausting experiences. What did I write down? Nothing. First, I must have time for myself... I must have a place where I won't be disturbed. I don't know anything about writing, I can't just write blindly, untrained, spontaneously and clumsily. It will be full of me - me - me - me - me, my irrelevant outpourings will twist and turn as vainly as the navel of the world and believe they are important. What a presumption! Stay humble, nobody cares anyway!

When I was fifty, the title was to be “Circles, Planes and Angles.”

I'm sitting in the reading room of Staatsbibliothek Unter den Linden, only occasionally glancing into the November-colored atrium and writing whatever comes to mind in my shamelessly smudged handwriting. Amazingly, I'm not holding the pen as tightly as a chisel, the sheet of paper is quickly covered with uneven writing from the first minute, and I'm excited to see where the day will take me. I haven't been able to find the sentences that were still clearly in front of me this morning. Where could they be? Oh, and why am I suddenly writing now? Aren't I still overwhelmed by the bookstores with their hundreds of books that I absolutely must read first so that I might at some point understand something about the world? Haven't more than enough people already delighted readers with their insights? Are the thousands of books in these venerable rooms here and millions elsewhere in the world not enough to deter me from adding a meager elaboration when I should rather be gathering knowledge and finally making something of my life?

I don't know it.

I just want to know why nothing came of me, why I am not prepared to simply state the facts of my life, because I cannot bear them myself. Sometimes I try to formulate sentences in my head to familiarize myself with the facts of my life, to simply accept them. Either I start to cry and almost melt with pity for myself, or I am overcome with anger at the people around me at the time and I could still send them to hell without forgiveness today. Somehow I bear it with me, just by carrying it around in irreconcilable anger - or I feel so desperate about my inability to live, my inability to live and my helplessness to cope with life and to make something of the many plans and approaches that I can swim along calmly, peacefully, self-determined and contentedly accepting the world around me in waves of tension and relaxation, and just increasing quantity.

I finally want to know, to know why. I don't want to know everything, I don't want to find the philosopher's stone, I just want to trace the circles of my little life, experience how the circles get bigger, recognize the different levels that suddenly open like abysses and choose and see the angles from which you can look at things.

Before I make a first correction and expansion of what I have already written, I would like to calm myself down and free myself from nightmarish hauntings in daylight, whose stereotypical repetition in stamped-out word and sentence fragments sends my thoughts spinning in an ever-accelerating whirlpool and write down some of the nasty things that are on my mind. Ever since the stone of pressure and stress, of the constant fear of not being able to achieve something, was taken from me, the inside of my head has resembled something that I call Pandora's box opened. Since I only know that no one should ever open Pandora's box, since it only contains misfortune, I want to close mine again as quickly as possible. Perhaps this will work by letting out the bad things I feel? I don't know.

If I wanted to summarize my life in a few sentences – at the age of fifty, the retrospective perspective offered itself – this is what came out:

In my childhood I loved playing real games with rules, reading all kinds of books, and being a nanny - after all, I was the best-paid nanny in the apartment block, earning 0.50 marks per afternoon. I loved going to school, school was my purpose in life, my world of well-being and security. At home, my mother took out her frustrations on me and my brother. When I reached puberty, I became strange, inhibited and more inhibited, helpless and reserved, although being withdrawn was already one of my childhood traits. My youth was not characterized by the typical pleasures of my age - I went to school, studied, read and withdrew - I only went dancing twice between the busy years of 15 and 19.

At 17, I was in a “nuthouse” – inpatient for neurological treatment sounds better, of course. During my studies, I suddenly freed myself from physical shackles, but not without falling into extreme stories. After my studies, I had a child, not conceived consciously or intentionally, but fully aware that I had conceived. Although I knew that the child’s father and I were not compatible, and I didn’t really want to marry him, the constraints grew into such a mess that I agreed to the marriage against my better judgment, because I was the only one unwilling to see the necessity for it and the solution to the problem. So, I was the only one left behind, and everyone else was happy. As a result of this union, I gave up my career, which would have led me straight to a doctorate with a job for life and professional respect. After three and a half years of marriage, I put an end to the nightmare of marriage, the nightmare of everyday and professional life, because now my daughter’s development seemed to be threatened. My nerves had been treated therapeutically long before. The communicative, show-off husband with a sunny disposition but a violent temper disrupted my life as long and as much as he could until I had put on the special armor that would let him bounce off. The divorce was a horror event.

I remarried two years later, and a year later we had a son, consciously, willingly and with great desire. My husband adopted my daughter, we built our family, our life and loved each other quietly, quietly and privately. It could have been a perfect match until the end of our lives, we were suited to each other. A disgusting illness took hold of my husband. Little by little this illness took hold of our lives until it finally dominated everything. For thirteen years epilepsy was our latent and acute family life companion. Again, it was the children that I gave up my husband for, so as not to lose them and to give them a normal life. The sacrifice was enough in the interests of the children's future. The divorce was a matter of minutes after quarterly therapy with a psychologist. I couldn't talk to anyone about it, and I still can't today. It lumps like guilt inside me and allows no justification. Because a good six months later my sick husband died. After thirteen years, wouldn't I have been able to endure the fourteenth and last one? Who would believe me when I said that he could have lived to be a hundred, as the doctor assured me - and all three of us would have gone crazy?

The first was not a father, the second was a father with time for the interests of his children, until he became a pedant who enforced discipline, and the children preferred to avoid him.

The third was middle age when we married at 41 and 46. His three children were grown up, of legal age, and he dreamed of two holidays a year, garden weekends, and cultural activities in his free time. My son was only ten years old. We became a family, side by side, with me in the middle. My grown-up daughter moved into the freedom of independent living. I tried to give my husband and son what they needed and wanted at the same time - but it was rarely possible.

On our first wedding anniversary, the turning point came. This meant the end of our careers. My husband retrained with great energy and commitment and never found a job. I found work, gave it up, tried other jobs, found a job that provided work and a living for five years. I became unemployed due to a lack of work and searched obsessively for a way out and a job, worn down by nervous stress. After six weeks, I had a job that was completely different from my job through a newspaper advert, which I threw myself into with all my determination, filling my head with things I had never had a clue about before. I bore the choleric outbursts of my boss and master with gritted teeth, expecting a pay rise after a year. What I got was dismissal for lack of work. I had to sacrifice myself so that a few others could continue. I turned down a temporary part-time offer because it was financially insane. My previous employer made me an offer so that I only had to accept a quarter of a year of unemployment. With perspective, I managed to get through the quarter quite well, financially with an overdraft and nervously with a few manageable bouts of depression.

Because what could work was guaranteed not to work for me, the offer didn't work out and I almost drowned in depression. No, I won't let myself be defeated. I'm like a weed, hard and stubborn, weeds never die, they always come back.

The prospect was living from hand to mouth, working hourly on a fee basis, looking for someone yourself, adding up the small stuff and paying rent, electricity, etc. and seeing if there was anything left over. No more dreams, no more plans. Living from one day to the next. Not wanting anything, just getting by.

I resigned myself to it.

Well, isn't it great?

Three marriages, but never a man who didn't force me to have to - have to - have to earn the family's living myself. It's fair, because after all I grew up in an age of the blessings of equality. Do I suddenly want to enjoy the old, despised division of roles and have it easy or even be provided for? That's presumptuous. There's no justification for me to presume doing that.

Life with equal rights went well, full-time employment, housework, raised two children to high school and university, money earned, housing, food, clothing, and vacation guaranteed. Was I ever tired and exhausted? Was I ever able to let things go and not do what needed to be done? Could I ever have felt any other impulses than functional ability, even weakness, illness, moodiness, wanting to let myself go? The answer to all these questions is no. So, I am a friendly, reserved person, dogged, goal-oriented, constantly at work, which is packaged in a great way, not very willing to communicate, not very normal human, not capable of small talk, efficient under great, long-term pressure. What is left of me? Where am I? Is there anything left of me? What kind of natural human being would I have become if all my abilities had had equal opportunities?

I'm going back into the past. Maybe I'll find out. Maybe the motive behind the common thread of my self-destructive life will become clear.

Originally, I also thought of the title for my story: “Why I never amounted to anything.”

Finally, do it – one step at a time. Maybe you have something to say after all.

How many lines will there be in the history book about the years 1949 to 1989 and a small state called GDR?

All the voices that have been loudly heard over the last 25 years about these years had something to say against this state, this enclave in German history. I don't want to list or repeat the derogatory adjectives. I wasn't against it; I would never have become a dissident or opponent. I was happy to have grown up in this country. I had the best opportunities that a person can have in their development. As a young person, I was happy to have been born in this country and not in any other country in the world, I couldn't have imagined a better country. From childhood on, I wanted to give all my strength to the GDR, so that life would always be better for all people.

These forty years were the most important of my life, they were my first long life. I belonged to this life.

The beginning begins at the beginning – but which one?

2.1 August 1947

Later, weather statisticians would report that it was the hottest summer of the 20th century, the summer of 1947. In the small Saxon town, the sun beat down mercilessly in the early hours of the morning. A young girl, heavily pregnant, pulled a handcart up the steep main street with her head bowing. She walked slowly, bent forward, but her natural movement was hampered by her round belly, which looked like a swallowed football on her delicate figure, like a real foreign object.

The few people on the street whose attention the young woman attracted simply by the clattering and rattling of the handcart on the cobblestones of the Long Street - which deservedly bore its name - cast a brief glance at her and probably thought something like: "My God, in this heat and in this condition..." Or: "Still a child herself..." Or: "That's what she gets for it, yes, punishment must be imposed." The town midwife came briskly down the street on the opposite side with her instrument bag and thought to herself: "It won't be long now." The young girl lowered her head even further in a flash and turned it abruptly to the side. If she could have, she would have hidden herself in shame. With a heavy heart, depressed, she pulled the cart. The Lange Straße now made a slight turn to the left, at the large square fountain it turned right at a right angle, now at least a little downhill, before turning right again at a right angle, where a gentle incline was now beginning to appear. Past the post office, along the edge of the town park, past the railway crossing, leaving the noise of the station behind her, the dark-haired girl pulled the handcart undeterred along the main street to the edge of the town. There she turned right into an allotment colony, whose large iron gate she could only open with difficulty. The second garden on the left was her destination at the second crossroad. On the left half of the two hundred square meter area, row after row of potatoes lined up. It was better that the young woman did not take the time to rest, because inside she could hear her mother's voice: "Where is that human being? How long is it taking her to get those few potatoes. She is no use, but puts a child into the world. And she doesn't care how we're going to raise the child..." She hastily started digging, hoping that the size of the potatoes would be OK for her mother! She threw, pushed, and put the "Ardäppel" in the brown, thick-threaded, patched sack she had brought with her. When it was half full, she wanted to lift it onto the cart, but it was already too heavy. She pulled and tugged and struggled, but her fat belly and the potato sack got in each other's way. Finally, she managed it with the help of her knees and shoulders. Of course, there were still not enough potatoes, so she dug, bent, picked up, stretched her upper body up, put the potatoes in the sack, again, again, further, further... The distance to the handcart increased with each row. Suddenly a puddle formed in the potato furrow beneath her, a stabbing pain shot through her loins that almost took her breath away, she felt dizzy. "My bag of waters has burst, I have to go back." She grabbed the handcart, tied the sack up and propped it up so that it couldn't fall over. She carefully locked the garden gate and set off. Her body contracted at intervals like waves, interrupting her steady, dragging gait. But as soon as the pain subsided, she gritted her teeth and grabbed the handle with concentrated energy and continued her way back along the seemingly endlessly winding road. The scorching heat made her lips crack, the pain of the contractions numbed her senses, but as if wound up, she made her way back home the two, three, four kilometers long with the rumbling handcart and the sack of potatoes on it. The intervals between taking a breath and easing herself from the pain became shorter and shorter, the girl's gait faster and faster. The sun was high in the sky, the city seemed deserted, only the delicate figure of a girl in rhythmically irregular intervals seemed to be the only living being, and the clatter and banging, the rumbling of the vehicle pushing and rolling downhill echoed in front of the square of houses on the market square and jumped as if in zigzags from house to house opposite down the whole of Long Street.

The girl was out of her mind as she pushed down the brass handle of the front door, pushed the cart in with the last of her strength, ran down the long, narrow, sloping but at least cool hallway, ripped open the back door, pulled the cart through and left it in the small, square backyard, then screamed loudly. The mother ran down the stairs of the back house as fast as she could; she had heard the rumbling in the hallway very loudly, but the scream had alarmed her. She looked only briefly at the writhing and twisting girl and immediately understood that it was high time. "I'm going to get the midwife. Go upstairs and wash yourself properly." The mother was gone, the back door slammed several times because of the powerful rebound.

The girl dragged herself to the stairs, she only managed the five high stone steps on all fours and with the use of her whole body, but she was able to hold on to the banister and pull herself up the eleven wooden steps to the first floor. Behind the entrance door she bent down to pick up the chamber pot, which was always under the lowest widest step of the stairs to the bedroom. She, Dunja, dragged it behind her as she laboriously crawled into the kitchen. An unbearable pressure on her bladder and anus dominated her body. She took off her panties, pulled her dress over her head and squatted on the chamber pot, her legs stretched out and spread, her hands on the floor behind her to stabilize her body, because her moving belly had a life of its own and made her body a buffer. Sitting on the pot, she slid to the wash bench under the window. She lifted the lid; the wash bowl underneath was empty. In a minute when the pain subsided, she got up, reached for the water jug and poured water into the bowl. When she put the jug down, the pain stabbed again. She writhed, bent and twisted and began to rub her body from top to bottom with the washcloth, which she repeatedly dipped into the small wash bowl. Hurried steps tripped up the stairs. The kitchen door was thrown open, the midwife put down her bag and after a few steps grabbed Dunja under the arms. "Yes, yes, you didn't want to see me this morning and now you need me. Where is the bed?" The mother, gasping for breath, opened the door to the next room, which was actually the "parlor", where instead of the large table in the middle there was a freshly made bed in the sun-drenched room. The midwife and mother laid the whimpering Dunja on the bed and covered her with a sheet. “You’ll have to wait a moment.” The mother prepared fresh water for the midwife to wash her hands, then put the large kettle on the iron stove to boil water. “In this heat, you should also fire it up!” The midwife grabbed her instrument bag and took it into the next room. She began to examine the woman in labor. “The cervix is already very dilated. We can begin.” Dunja heard and saw as if through a veil; she rolled back and forth, whimpering quietly to herself and breathing quickly, loudly, with eyes wide with fear. “Calm, very calm. Breathe evenly, breathe deeply, breathe in and out. Now pull your legs up, keep going, hold your breath and now push, push, pant and again.” No one knew how much time passed. A fourteen-year-old boy, who had just been raging up the stairs, stood rooted to the spot in the kitchen when he heard the unfamiliar words and groans from the living room. The mother, who had just come back into the kitchen to check on the water, hastily signaled him to go away and not come back for an hour or two. Without a word, he stormed off. From the next room, increasingly frightened cries could be heard, interspersed with the midwife's soothing voice. "Now gather your strength and press really hard, press, it's already looking, and press... yes, yes, again and yessssss..." Accompanied by a long drawn-out sigh. "Wait, I have to cut the umbilical cord from your neck first." A brief click, the midwife grabbed the newborn by the feet, held it up with its head down, and gave it a light pat on the bottom. The baby's first cry, timid, more like a whine, left everyone frozen for a few seconds. Then there was a lot of busy work: washing the baby, measuring it, weighing it, changing its diaper, dressing it: "It's a girl. 47 cm, 2500 g, congratulations." The two women busily did what needed to be done. After the new mother had been prepared for rest and the little creature was sleeping peacefully in its basket at the foot of the bed within sight of its maiden mother, the midwife and mother quietly closed the door behind them and sat down at the large dining table in the kitchen. The mother put cool, homemade blackcurrant juice on the table, a refreshment after the exertion. Then they whispered to each other. "And what will happen next? Who is the father? Will he marry her?" "What will happen... Oh, we'll get her through it."

2.2 My entry into life

Little Angelika – that was me – was born on August 28, 1947, at 10:20 a.m. in the small Saxon town of Pulsnitz.

Dunja slept and woke, dreamed and lay with her eyes open in the middle of the living room, whose west-facing windows were now letting in more and more sunlight. She was exhausted and very calm. Her gaze kept wandering to the baby basket, in which a small creature was sleeping peacefully. It was breathing evenly, its chest rising and falling. Sometimes it moved its little hands. When the door opened a crack, Dunja quickly closed her eyes. Quiet steps crept towards the basket. The fourteen-year-old boy's voice whispered: "Now look who's here. Look, here's your uncle. I'm your uncle Christian. Look!"

Of course, the baby didn't look, but a smile crossed Dunja's face. Her brother had announced himself as her daughter's uncle.

Dunja lay half awake and gave herself over to the silence. She was allowed to lie down and rest, and she lay there and felt her body calm down, recovering from the exertion. Again, and again her eyes wandered to the baby basket, in which the little worm was sleeping comfortably, pink and pale, stretching now and then and breathing heavily with a sigh.

Oh, if only it could always be like this… But time passes and nothing can stop it.

Let us fill the small town in Saxony with living people, as far as they are important in my story.

2.3 Richard

When the father, Dunja's father, came home, breathing heavily despite being only 38 years old and walking with a shuffling gait, which was not only an expression of his exhaustion after the hard physical work and the terrible, sweltering heat of that August day, Dora told him that Dunja had given birth to a girl, that everyone was healthy and that everything had gone well. Richard washed the coal dust from his body; Dora had poured water into the wash basin for him. He panted and splashed as he washed. His thin body revealed all his ribs. The left side of his chest was disfigured by a huge scar on his back, while the smooth, healed edges of a round scar could be seen in front. There were similar scars on both thighs, front and back. He only exposed his body when he was alone with Dora. He did not want to talk about the sniper in the tree in a clearing outside Stalingrad, whose marksmanship he had to thank for the two bullets that had gone through his thigh and the clean lung that had almost cost him his life. Only the tin he had worn on his chest stopped the shot. This story was later passed down from generation to generation. He had been restored to health in the hospital and had thus been spared the Stalingrad pocket and the hell that came with it. Being a prisoner of war in Russia kept him alive, because he wanted to live, live, live and one day return home to faraway Germany to his wife Dora and their two children, Dunja and Christian. In the summer of 1947, he was part of a group of released prisoners of war. They had been on the road for weeks and months, starving, in tattered uniforms, worn-out boots and without any belongings. He was one of those returning home; he had not seen his family and the country for over four years. The greeting was cautious and awkward. He had never imagined it like this in his life-sustaining dreams of home. His family no longer lived on Schulstrasse, and he had to ask around to find them. Dunja, his seventeen-year-old daughter, was heavily pregnant and just stalked around with her head bowed. Fourteen-year-old Christian had become a lively little boy, whose mouth never stopped talking, who was always busy with something. His wife Dora was overwhelmed with worry and worries and vented her anger, ranting and complaining. On the first evening of his return home, when the family had gathered around the large rectangular table for a meager evening meal - jacket potatoes with cottage cheese and salt - he had announced to his family after dinner that they were only allowed to ask about his time in the war today, that he would only talk about it today, and that later he would never say another word about it, because war was the most terrible thing that could happen to a person. He never wanted to hear about the war again, let alone talk about it. He kept this vow until the end of his life. He never spoke of the war. He wanted to live, he had to support his family, he wanted his wife to have it a little easier after the difficult years alone with their two children. He wanted to have enough to eat, he wanted to have fun and enjoy life. That he was about to become a grandfather when he himself had hardly lived... At the age of 20 (he was born on January 23rd 1909 in Pulsnitz on the Meissen side, the son of factory worker Richard Nitz and his wife, née Katzer, whose family were always up for pranks and jokes and were well known in town for them; they had five children, two boys, Georg and Richard, and three girls, Dora, Hildegard and Gertrud), he married a woman seven years older than him (Dora born on August 17th 1902), whom he impregnated. The child was already a year old at the time of the wedding - Dunja. He enjoyed life a lot and was taken with the clean, quiet maid with the light blue eyes and her tightly coiffed blonde hair... At that time, Dora only had eyes for Richard and his mandolin, to the sound of which he sang devotedly. Dunja was born in the summer of 1929 - out of wedlock, with her mother's surname. The Great Depression also threw the world in the small Saxon town out of joint. Richard lost his job because his father was an active trade unionist and stood up for his colleagues, and the name Nitz was therefore very disreputable with the management, so he had to get by with odd jobs and go "stamping" for six years. Dora had to take on work from home. The textile factories and weaving mills often had small jobs to give to home workers. If Richard had not sometimes acted as a joker, joke teller, zither and mandolin player at family celebrations and weddings in the surrounding villages, which at least brought in something for the family to eat, it would have been even worse. One day his best friend, Frenzel Kurt, had turned up in a brown uniform and said to him: "Richard, things are looking up now. Adolf is making Germany something again. To us he is a simple worker. You should come to us too." Somehow Kurt's words had frightened him. People in power doing something for the poor? There had never been anything like it. He wanted to wait and see. Gradually the line in front of the job center became shorter, the color brown appeared more frequently in the townscape, small town life became orderly and regulated, people walked more quickly and busily, the streams to the factory gates became wider and wider, the order situation in the textile factories seemed to be getting better and better. Elastic bands, belts and ribbons, mainly in grey, were woven and became components of uniforms. In 1936 Richard was hired to build the motorway, earning two marks an hour.

Would there be war again? There had to be war again. Dunja and Christian went to school, teacher Frister taught them discipline and order, with strictness, shouting and the infamous cane, which he too had felt whistle down on his fingertips and bottom more than once. Dunja got it more often than the boy, teacher Frister had often said that she had just as much nonsense in her head as her father. Always just pranks and tricks, thoughts of how I can get back at someone so that the laughs are on my side...

Then he was drafted into the Wehrmacht as a soldier. And now he was standing here in the kitchen, freshly washed, wearing a fresh undershirt, and in the next room lay his child and his child's child. He went over to them. A tiny new life. He looked at the baby for a long time.

Dora called for dinner. There was soup, lentil soup. The three of them ate in silence until Dora said: "Richard, after dinner you could ride your bike to Lomnitz and tell Gerold."

Richard got his bike out of the shed and pedaled slowly. The road to Lomnitz wound up and down for twelve kilometers. The sun was still shining brightly in the sky. People were working in the fields. Richard looked out for Gerold. From a distance and in the blazing sun, it was difficult to distinguish between the people. They were all thin. Finally, he recognized the boy. He stood at the edge of the field, leaning on his bike, and simply waited for the boy to recognize him. They had not seen each other often before, except once when they were chopping stumps in the forest, and then they had sawed the wood together at home. Gerold talked a lot, he always expressed himself so well. Perhaps it was because his father was better than everyone else, after all he was the estate inspector in Dittersbach. The Russians had put him back in charge of managing the estate; after all, someone had to look after the harvest and the livestock; everyone needed to eat… That's why Gerold worked in agriculture, where there was food, and nourishment was the hardest thing, even a year and a half after the end of the war.

"Today you became the father of a healthy daughter. Both are doing well."

Gerold was happy: “I’ll come on Saturday.”

He went back to work in the fields. They would certainly work until nightfall. Tomorrow, Friday, at the crack of dawn, they would go out into the fields again until late in the evening, but Saturday only until midday, then he could finally go to Pulsnitz to see Dunja and the baby. His thoughts were only about Dunja.

2.4 Gerold thinks of Dunja

How he had liked her when one day in 1946 she stood at the door of the servants' kitchen of the manor in Lomnitz and the farmer said: "This is Dunja, she is doing her compulsory year here now." The dark-haired girl with the huge green eyes and the protruding upper jaw held her head down, her hands folded behind her back, she looked at the floor with shame. She seemed shy and afraid. The farmer had said to her: "Sit down there and eat with us, we'll be leaving early tomorrow morning." The farmer had gone, and she sat down on the edge of the bench in an empty spot and waited until the maid put a plate in front of her with soup, turnip soup. She didn't look at anyone as she ate the soup slowly and reluctantly, with long teeth. "Who are you?" "I'm Dunja from Pulsnitz," she answered, barely audibly. "Aren't you Pohlischen's Annemarie's cousin?" She nodded. "Nobody here has such a strange name. It sounds so Russian." What should she have said to that? Everyone had been surprised by her name until now, it wasn't her fault that she was called Dunja and not Edelgard, which was her middle name, very German but boring.

The eight to ten young people ate their soup, but there was no bread with it. They spoke little; the day's work in the fields had made them tired. After the kitchen was tidied and the cattle were looked after, they sat around on the farm under the big tree for a while and chatted, then they gradually went to sleep. Gerold remembered the many weeks it had taken for Dunja to “unfreeze”. At work he had repeatedly tried to get close to her, to tease her. Gradually she became livelier, gave quick-witted answers and had funny ideas. She tied his jacket sleeves together, swapped shoes and made even more unusual jokes, and she looked like an innocent lamb. She picked up quickly and twisted everything into a joke. She was soon very popular, her zest for life was infectious and captivating. Gerold had fallen in love with her, although he often went to the edge of the forest with Gretel in the evenings. There was a dance at Erbgericht Inn on the weekend. The young people went dancing every Saturday. They looked forward to this event all week long, they dreamed of dancing in very fancy clothes, which none of them had but which they embellished with ideas, of the dancing prince and of being the most beautiful. All Sunday and the half week after that they panted over every look and every movement and who was with whom. The dance in Erbgericht Inn was the center of their lives. Gerold didn't really feel comfortable dancing, he preferred to stand at the bar with a beer in his hand and talk, he always had a lot of listeners because he spoke quickly and in chosen words, which made him stand out from the farm boys in the village. They only bragged about who could take the most, how much they had already drunk and what they had done when they were drunk. They felt most comfortable when they could make fun of someone who had done something stupid, so that they could show off their outstanding skills. Gerold was excellent at describing fools, which he exposed to laughter. Then he remembered the shock that shot through him when, during the selection of ladies, his farmer's girls surrounded him, all giggling, and Dunja took his hand and said politely: "May I have this dance?" He had no idea what to do; dancing was his weak point. He avoided it. Dunja pulled him to the dance floor and danced with him; suddenly it was very easy. She pulled him into the rhythm, led him very gently and motioned him to follow in her footsteps. Suddenly he no longer felt awkward and at the mercy of the dance; Dunja danced to him. He even found dancing pleasant and admired Dunja for how she could dance...

There was a spark, they liked each other more and more and spent their free time together whenever possible. Their hands touched when they were tying sheaves, when no one was looking. Gerold carried the potato baskets filled by Dunja to the ladder wagon, while eating in the large servants' kitchen they looked into each other's eyes for longer and longer, under the tree on the farm they moved closer to each other, sometimes they went for a walk along the edge of the field, their fingers intertwined, they began to kiss shyly.

In November there was a fair, the biggest festival in the country. The harvest had been brought in; the soil was waiting for winter. People celebrated. There was plenty to eat and drink, everyone could eat their fill. There was meat and sausage, otherwise a rarity, huge sheet cakes had been baked as if for festive occasions, and beer was ready in barrels.

There was a level of exuberance among the people that was not seen at any other time of the year. Gerold did not let Dunja go. They went into the barn; the hay was soft, and the blanket was warm. He loved her with all the youthful impetuosity, and she returned his touches; their movements matched each other.

Dunja did not know what had happened to her, they had never touched each other like this before. They were both seventeen-year-olds, still children, in the second year of peace after the devastating world war, which had left people fighting for survival day after day, and whose time after that had taken away the fear of bombs, but was once again a fight for life, for daily nourishment. One day after the other they "lived through", their existence was fought for. Were there dreams? What did the old people dream of? Perhaps of a safe roof over their heads, a warm room, enough to eat? What did the young people dream of? Not having to work hard from early in the morning until late at night, so that they could no longer feel their bodies, of celebrating, dancing, being happy, laughing and living, new shoes, new clothes, smart trousers...

2.5 Mosaics

Up to this point, I see everything like a color film before my eyes. Colorful mosaic pieces from Grandma's scant reports, but peppered with plenty of instructions and, above all, judgments about what is right and what is wrong. Pieces from Grandpa's coughing, glances, labored breathing and walking, pieces from Christian's imaginative ideas, combinations of thoughts and nonstop busyness. Pieces from Dunja's glorifying, verbose, rambling stories and justifying explanations have and continue to piece together this picture of her roots, which plays out before my mind's eye before my own memory sets in. It will be some time before that happens, and the mosaic will continue to be put into letters.

2.6 Dora – What do I know about Grandma Dora’s beginning?

Dora was the second girl, the middle of five children, and was born on August 17, 1902, in Großnaundorf. Her mother died when Dora was eleven years old. She and her sister Lene, who was two years older than her, had to look after their two younger brothers. Their father August Wenk had been working as a bricklayer in Dresden since the early 1920s and provided for the children's livelihood. I don't know who looked after them during the day. The father was irescible, quick-tempered and hit the children hard if they didn't obey. He suffered badly from sciatica. In one fit of rage he brought the children a bunch of bananas as something very special. They didn't know them, they bit straight into them with the peel on, and they didn't like them, never again. What would they do with such strange foreign stuff? At some point the pain almost drove August mad. One Sunday after lunch, as he was resting on the sofa in the kitchen while the children played peacefully on the floor, he swallowed a large dose of arsenic and died. The arsenic preserved his bones, so that in the 1950s, when the cemetery was remodeled - old graves can be removed after thirty years if there is no family interest in the grave remaining - his complete skull was found.

The eldest son, who settled in Doberschütz, was considered the head of the family. The youngest brother, Paul, also committed suicide sometime in the 1920s.

After leaving the village school, Dora went into employment. She was placed in a household in Königsbrück, where she shared a servant's room with another girl, and was a domestic servant, a maid for everything, free room and board, one Saturday a month off, a few marks of earnings that she saved scrupulously for her trousseau. She wanted to get married when the right man came along. She waited. She went from job to job and lived to the age of twenty-six, an old girl. Then the fun-loving Richard entered her life, who was so different from her, fun-loving, carefree and infectiously cheerful. Richard also had four siblings, three cheerful sisters and a brother who always cried tears when he laughed. The worst nonsense, however, was hatched by their mother, Nitzen's mother, née Kratzer. She set the alarm clock to ring at ten o'clock in the evening to send her daughters' admirers home, and she put stuffed figures in front of people's front doors to scare them. In fact, scaring someone was the greatest of all jokes. Any means were acceptable. Making fun of people made her live to a ripe old age. I know from hearsay that she also played her inimitable antics in front of me, her great-granddaughter.

2.7 Dora and Richard

They were an unequal couple, with opposite characters. They married on July 13, 1930, in Großnaundorf, when their daughter Dunja was already one year old (as I could see from the family register, nobody had ever mentioned it). Was that supposed to work out? Disappointed expectations had made Dora a strict, malicious mother to Dunja, the cause of her life's fetters, and a nagging, directing, reprimanding and regimenting wife to Richard, she hated "his pleasure-seeking, gambling nature", but also a loving, pampering mother to Christian, whom she would much rather have called Waldemar-Ehrenfried, but Richard had asserted his "horse nature" when he went to register the birth of his dream son, and last but not least, a pedantic housewife concerned with order and cleanliness in the miserable back house, which looked like a house cut in halves, because it only had a roof on one side, the back house, the ground floor of which included a large laundry room with a boiler for the front house residents, bicycle sheds and rabbit pens, as well as the shed for wood and coal for the back house residents. On the first floor was the kitchen-living room with two small windows looking out onto the courtyard, on the left side of which were three outhouses for the families of all the front and back house residents and the “Konsum shop” employees, next to it was the covered ash pit, on the back wall of the front house was the water tap from which the water had to be fetched and carried upstairs, because there was only a water pipe in the front house on the landings, above that were the Konsum shop windows at the back, then came the creaky wooden door, entrance and exit door to the backyard and a long hallway through which one got to the street. On the right, a high, brown picket fence on a stone wall formed the boundary to the neighboring house, the house of the photographer Kahle. Photo studio on the ground floor, living rooms on the two floors above, the laboratory in the long extension parallel to the picket fence, a tree growing firmly against the house, a birch, the only greenery in both courtyards, paved with countless small stones in the photographer's house, in front of the rear building with large blocks of stone, evenly arranged around a drain hole in the middle of the courtyard, covered with an iron grate that was no great feat for rats to climb through, as they found their secret paths from the swampy area of the castle pond nearby .

Back to the rear building, a dividing wall between the kitchen and the living room behind it, both rooms forming the entire width of the house. From the two windows of the living room, you could see down onto the neighbor's vegetable garden, the wall of the castle opposite, a forest surrounding the castle pond and strips of wall to the right, the roof of a flat building to the left.

The steep wooden staircase up led to the bedroom, which was as wide as the two rooms below, but so slanted that the two hatches on the roof side could only be reached by lying on your stomach. An even steeper staircase led to the attic, where firewood and onions were stored. The back house had even more mysterious corners that were worth exploring later.

Dora had been assigned this back house because Dunja would have a child and the space on Schulstrasse was no longer sufficient for the growing family. The back house was Dora's domain, which she ruled and commanded. Dora became a grandmother at a time when she didn't know how she was going to support the family. She would have loved to kill Dunja when she realized that the girl was pregnant. And she struck her again and again with the seven-strap belt that was hanging at the doorway within easy reach. She screamed and raged and fumed, almost scalding Dunja in the hot sitz bath. Dunja's young, fertile body held the fetus, nourished it and allowed it to thrive. This disgrace, this unspeakable disgrace...

Dunja had to go home and do homework, what would she have thought? How would a child be fed in these difficult times when there was not enough to eat?

2.8 Back to August 30, 1947

Gerold arrived on Saturday afternoon. He had stolen a chicken from the farmer on the way and was now bringing it to Dora so that she could prepare a hearty meal for the woman who had just given birth.

He carefully sat down next to Dunja on the edge of the bed in the living room and held her hand, stroking her face. He whispered as if he did not dare to speak out loud for fear of disturbing the rosy, sleeping baby.

It was a moment to stop time, a moment of happiness - but in vain. Fate took its course...

2.9 My Baptism

2.9.1 Facts and data

copy from the church register

Baptismal Register 1947, page 105 no. 96