Tapestry Of My Mother’s Life E-Book

Malve von Hassell

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Tapestry Of My Mother's Life is a biographical account of a woman coming of age in Germany during the 1930s. Malve von Hassell explores her mother's life through the fragmented lens of transmitted memory, and its impact on the second generation.

Born at her grandfather's house in Farther Pomerania, 1923, Christa von Hassell had to contend with the increasing and pervasive impact of the Nazi regime. As the child of a German army officer, she moved with her parents often. Through boarding school, university, marriage, the Second World War, life under Soviet occupation, and a new beginning in the West, eventually in America, the biography is an incredible, emotional journey of childhood, survival, and relationships.

The portrayal of Christa's life also focuses on the role of memory: shaped, distorted, and realigned in the continual process of telling stories of the past in conjunction with silence about many aspects. Children of women who shared similar experiences and life trajectories struggled with the challenge of learning about their parents' lives during extraordinary times, confounded by a wealth of stories on the one hand and a seemingly impenetrable veil of silence on the other.

Working through such memorabilia, as well as the tales of the past, can offer ways in which one can come to terms with the inherited detritus of thoughts and memories. As such, this account of the life of a unique and complex individual has also wider relevance in that it addresses age-old questions of the relationship between one generation and the next.

Leseprobe

TAPESTRY OF MY MOTHER’S LIFE

Stories, Fragments, and Silences

MALVE VON HASSELL

Copyright (C) 2021 Malve von Hassell

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Graham (Fading Street Services)

Cover art by CoverMint

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

Our life lasts seventy years, and at the very most eighty years, and if it has been delicious, it has been toil and labor; for it passes like the wind as if we were flying away.

Luther Bible

Psalm 90:10

CONTENTS

Prologue

1. Journey into Memory

2. Distances and Evasions

3. Ration cards, censorship, and compulsory labor

4. Letters from the Field

5. The Golden City

6. Waiting

7. Red Phoenix

8. Wolf Ulrich

9. Married Life

10. Acte de Presence

11. Resident Alien

12. Marriage of True Minds

13. Phoenix Unchained

14. Grooming Ghosts

Epilogue

Photos

Sources

Acknowledgments

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About the Author

PROLOGUE

THE SILENCE OF ZICKELBART

"Do you think Zickelbart is in there?"

Distracted from my efforts to open the window, I glanced at my brother. He was poking around in one of the boxes we pulled out of our parents’ closet.

"Zickelbart?" I laughed. "That’s all we need."

Zickelbart was one of a host of ghosts we had inherited from our parents. You might say one can’t inherit ghosts. But our ghosts were as substantial as anything else in the huge pile of things more politely referred to as the "estate."

The ancient air conditioner sputtered and groaned, reinforcing the sense of sitting below a laundry vent. Of course, my parents, inured to what they considered irrelevant minor discomforts, never replaced the unit. They got a new stove only because the old gas stove blew up; we later learned that the gas pipe had corroded. The refrigerator was a relic from the 1950s; my brothers and I finally pooled our funds and replaced it in 1987. For visitors, served tea from elegant silver tea sets in the stately living room filled with antique furniture, this insistence on frugality was bewildering and incomprehensible. For us, it was infuriating.

The window was stuck. It took all the strength I had to push it up. The air from the city streets was warm and heavy with humidity. Yet, when I poked my head outside, staring at 57th Street and York Avenue, the sense of relief was immediate. For a few moments I soaked in the sounds of traffic heading toward the bridge, sirens wailing, cars honking, and buses hissing and squealing as they stopped and lurched forward again.

I turned back into the room. The acrid smell of my brother’s cigars mingled with the fumes from a whiskey glass on the coffee table next to an ashtray filled with butts and crumpled up foil paper. Dust tickled my nose. Boxes were strewn all over the carpet. Pop music from a portable radio on my father’s desk blocked out some of the traffic noise.

The contrast was jarring.

Until my mother’s death in 2009, my father’s library had always been a serene oasis. It had retained that quality even after his death ten years earlier. This room, more than any other in my parents’ home, reflected a perfect blend of their respective sensibilities and interests, a marriage of two minds. Undaunted by tall ceilings and ugly air conditioning units, my mother had chosen simple grey curtains with narrow trims in reds and blues and painted the walls in a light blue-grey. She and my father spent hours hanging the etchings of all the generals in opposition to Napoleon, with a double-headed eagle clock in the center. Bookshelves lined the walls up to the ceiling and were filled with books ranging from ancient history to the French Revolution, Russian literature, the Medici, and entire shelves of books on German history, in particular the 1930s and 1940s. On one of the top shelves, my mother arranged a collection of Nymphenburg porcelain horses and riders, stark white against the blue-grey background, some with falcons on their fists, others with hounds running alongside.

My father’s desk gave the feeling its owner had just left it a few minutes earlier, with its array of a leather folder, a silver inkpot, miscellaneous silver jars for pens and pencils, and piles of scrap paper he used for his notes. If I blinked, I could picture my father sitting over a book, so absorbed that he was oblivious to the world around him, while my mother placed the tea tray on the coffee table, covered with piles of art catalogues from her work as an art reporter. When she made tea just for the two of them, she used a pair of Meissen teacups, so fine and thin they were almost translucent, and the perfume of bergamot and Earl Grey or in winter a faint smoky tang of Lapsang Souchong filled the room. I loved the slices of toast and jam, an essential part of afternoon tea.

Now, my brother Agostino and I had to face the task of dealing with the liquidation of the estate. The time had come to clean the apartment and get it ready so we could put it on the market. I dreaded this process. In better days, while my brother Adrian was alive, he and I had often laughed and commiserated with each other about the task that awaited us, aware of the work involved as well as the emotionally wrenching process of tearing apart our parents' world.

I was sickened by the thought of pawing through my mother’s things.

Tired and drained after having cleared out Adrian's apartment after his death less than two months earlier, I had reached the point where I wished I could wave a wand and be done with it all. I had already collected stacks of bills and records and begun to work through the mountains of paperwork piled up in my office. My parents’ penchant for buying supplies that would last them into the next millennium, less politely expressed as hoarding, did not come as a surprise. Meanwhile, the contents of the walk-in closet, in family parlance the archive, far exceeded anything I could have imagined.

All afternoon, we worked on emptying out the large space. Trunks, rolled up rugs, cases of wine and whiskey, Yardley lavender soap, coffee bought in bulk, cans of tomato juice bulging with age, miscellaneous art posters, a wooden box filled with cakes of barrel soap, an unwieldy metal file cabinet stuffed with papers some of which dated back to the early 1800s, formal gowns, golden silk curtain panels, brittle and stiff with dirt, and elderberry juice containers ordered from Europe—we called it "ant syrup" when we were children. Everything smelled musty, coated with the dust of decades mixed with New York City soot that blew through the inadequately sealed windows.

My mother's presence in the apartment was palpable. Any moment she might come around the corner with the tea tray, reprimanding us for making a mess and eager to tell us stories about her day's adventures. It seemed inconceivable that she was gone. I loved her more than anyone in my life and by equal measure often sought to resist her powerful will, like a rock in a current, hard to steer around, and at the same time the source of endless joy and delight. We called her Mima, and just the name alone always evoked a sense of happiness. Many years later, I was thrilled to watch my son break into exuberant shouts of “Mima, Mima,” whenever she arrived at our house.

Christa would have been the first to say that she had lived a very full life. And yet, there were tremendous losses throughout. When Christa arrived in Bonn, the young capital of the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany, in 1950, she had left behind an entire world. The land of her birth and her childhood home had become a part of Poland. She had lived through the first years after the war under Soviet occupation in what was to become the new German Democratic Republic, also called East Germany. Her father, brother, first husband, and many friends had died in the war. Many of her relatives and friends were displaced from formerly German regions such as East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia.

Christa’s second husband, my father Wolf Ulrich von Hassell, had been gravely ill during the war, spending almost three years in a hospital. Many of his friends died in battle. His father died at the hands of the Nazis after the failed assassination attempt against Hitler known as the 20th of July plot. In the first decades after World War II, my father was treated by many Germans as the son of a traitor. Meanwhile, his sense of disconnect from postwar Germany was exacerbated by years spent abroad as a member of the diplomatic service.

My father’s career as a diplomat took them from Germany to Italy, Belgium, and eventually the United States. After living abroad for the better part of their marriage, they made America their home, where Christa managed to embark on a second career in the latter part of her life.

"What are we going to do with all this?" My brother’s face was smudged with dirt, sweat beaded on his forehead, and his hair looked in need of a trim.

"Did you know there was so much in here?"

Agostino shook his head helplessly. He had what I privately thought of as the "family mouth"—wide, with thin lips, with a vulnerability like that of a child, and yet with expressions that could range from skepticism and amused detachment to grim resolution.

His expression of raw bewilderment echoed my feelings.

"What are we going to do with all this?" my brother asked again, holding a stack of papers in his hands as if it were about to explode. In a curious way, he appeared to take delight in the sheer horror of it all, relishing every single item we dragged out into the open, admiring the untrammeled eccentricity. I understood the sentiment to a degree.

With a mix of chagrin and affection, my brothers and I had often laughed about my father’s saving empty aspirin bottles for recycled nails (you never know when you might need them again), his careful harboring of spare decorative metal studs for the wooden rim of a Spanish brasero, the little piles of unused stamps detached from letters and dried on the windowsill, and his insistence that new shoes had to be kept in the closet for years—because they were still too new to be worn. He was shocked when my mother wanted to toss out an old suit of his.

"Look." Christa held up the suit for my father’s reluctant inspection. "The fabric is so old that the lapels are shiny."

"But, Christa, it's a very good suit," he protested. "We bought it at a fine store in Rome." That suit was over thirty years old.

Now, Agostino and I contemplated the pile in front of us.

"I definitely want to take the barrel soap home with me," I said.

For an instant, my brother smiled, and we were united. Both of us remembered the big pot Christa used for boiling the linen dinner napkins until the water turned cloudy. She stirred the grey mess with a big wooden masher, soaked the napkins in barrel soap, and boiled them some more until they were pristinely white and free of all stains. In the summers, she laid sheets and napkins out on the lawn, rubbed barrel soap into the fabric, and watered them diligently over and over, until the sun had sucked out all the spots and stains. "I am turning the bushes into ghosts," she’d announce proudly when draping sheets and towels over the shrubbery.

"I suppose we have to go through everything." Tentatively I pulled out a bundle of papers held together with crumbling sticky rubber bands from one of the boxes. "It’s letters." My father’s handwriting was unmistakable. "Letters to Christa."

Agostino wasn’t listening anymore. He was peering at the contents of a badly stained oversized German-style file folder. "Letters from the Red Cross," he said.

"What dates?"

"Nineteen forty-seven, nineteen forty-eight."

"Look at this," I exclaimed. We stared at bound notebooks and stacks of letters in an unfamiliar spiky script. "I wonder who wrote these."

My brother picked up one of the booklets. "This one has flowers glued into the pages and postcards. Signed by…," he peered at the handwriting. "Heinrich? Who in the world is Heinrich?"

I shook my head. "I can’t deal with this now. I have to go home." I closed up the box in front of me. "Toss the tomato cans before they explode."

"Do you think they were imported from Brussels?" Agostino asked with a smirk.

"Anything is possible." We lived in Brussels when we were children. Frugal and adverse to waste in any form, our parents never left anything behind on their various moves from Germany to Italy, Belgium, Germany again, and finally New York in the course of my father's career as a diplomat. "Why don’t you start sending me some of these boxes? I will go through them at home. Will you be okay?"

"There is so much here—even stuff from before the war." Agostino was still rifling through the contents of one of the boxes. He looked up, grinning at me. "Really, do you think Zickelbart is in there?"

"I wish you hadn’t suggested that." I shook my head, torn between laughter and tears.

On the way home, sitting on the bus in stop-and-go traffic on the Long Island Expressway, I thought about Zickelbart, one of our family ghosts.

Of course, Zickelbart did not properly belong in my childhood. He was a ghost from my mother's childhood in a place that belonged to the past in more ways than one. He figured prominently in Christa’s stories about Muttrin, the place in Pomerania where she spent much of her early years. After World War II, Muttrin became a part of Poland and is now called Motarzyno. It is located about an hour west of Gdansk close to the Baltic Sea.

Zickelbart means "Ragged Beard." Who was Zickelbart? Where did he come from? My mother had no idea. This disembodied spirit appeared on occasion in Christa’s childhood home, upsetting the balance of the house for days on end. The lack of details left me free to imagine him and to give him color and substance.

When I was a little girl, lying in bed at night and trying to keep nightmares at bay, I pictured Zickelbart sweeping through the house, his hands reaching out as if to plead and to repel, brushing the whitewashed walls with his fingertips. The pointy beard always appeared ragged and slightly tinged with green. The slippers were worn and floppy looking, too long as if running away from the bony feet, blue with cold, sticking out underneath grey-striped pajama legs that seemingly independently indicated the bowlegs of their inhabitant. I borrowed the silk pajamas from my father just as I imposed my father's skinny bowlegs on Zickelbart. His spread-out arms fluttered as he weaved through endless hallways, with staring eyes and mouth wide open, pleading without a sound, in the shadow kingdom of passed-on memories.

Zickelbart flitted in and out of Christa's stories often enough that it was as if I had known him all my life—baffling, inconsolable, and timeless, a melody haunting my dreams, as familiar as the warm earthen colors in the pattern of the Indian wall hanging in my mother’s bedroom, stitched by a girl until the day of her marriage and destined never to be completed. Kept alive by her vibrant images, the country of Christa’s childhood seemed suspended in space like the horses in Rilke's poem "The Carousel", hesitating for a long time before finally sinking away into the ground. And we had internalized it all; at times it was more real than our own lives.

Zickelbart remained a question mark as did so many other details in my mother’s stories. Yet we clung to them, charmed by her enthusiasm and her gift for storytelling as much as by the world she conjured in front of our eyes. I loved the glow in my mother’s eyes when she began to talk, altering her stories slightly at each retelling, never finishing anyone. The world conveyed by her words had acquired a life of its own in the memories of its survivors and our imagination—akin to a love that haunted us because it got stopped in its tracks and could never move forward, or the fragmented recollections of a childhood arrested at a critical age.

Sometimes my mother talked about writing it all down, but she never did. I am oddly glad that this is so. It leaves me free to play with her stories in my mind. It didn’t bother me in the least that the stories she told us were fragmented. Their fascination lay in their being partially hidden as well as part of a world that was gone. A complete story would have been stifling.

The images of a magical childhood home filled with endless charm were all the more irresistible in that they provided a respite from the vaguely referenced themes of an insidious growing fear in the 1930s, war, loss of home and land, destruction, death of loved ones, disappearance, imprisonment, execution, starvation, fear, and exhaustion, on both my mother’s and my father's sides of the family. It was akin to reading a book with disparate storylines on alternating pages, one with spectacular colorful illustrations and vivid details, the other filled with sparse commentary, references to experiences hard to put into words, and blank spaces. And yet, even as a child, while listening spellbound, there were times when I wanted to escape. The compelling force of these stories overwhelmed me and made everything in my own life appear insignificant. It was impossible to look away or fail to listen.

I should burn the contents of those boxes, I thought. I struggled with resentment against my mother. She had sat on all this for years. Who was Heinrich? She never told us about him. She left the letters for us to find. Wasn't it enough of a burden to know that almost every single object in my parents' house had a history and an emotional punch that could not be shaken off? I was torn between the overwhelming urge to shut the door in all of it, on the one hand, and the nagging desire to explore these worlds that were not my own and yet occupied so much of my thoughts, on the other.

The longer I thought about all this, the more I realized that I wanted to write down what I know about the arc of my mother's life—as a form of bearing witness and a way of offering the next generation a means of coming to terms with the weight of the past. I wanted to acknowledge the letters’ existence and their tenor and mood, weaving them into the known facts of Christa’s life during those years while adding my conjectures about her actions and choices. At the same time, I wanted to preserve the privacy of the writers of these letters. It proved to be a precarious balancing act between filling out Christa’s remarkable story and respecting her silence.

When thinking about Christa’s life from the 1930s through World War II, I found myself confronting contradictions and gaps wherever I looked. I had a few facts and a timeline of events, a few notes written by Christa while at university, a box full of letters, the majority of which were written by a man I never knew about, and her stories about her time in Prague, supplemented by a description of Christa in the memoirs of a friend. I was forced to piece together an image of her life from fragments she shared and the stories I have heard from others.

What struck me most of all was the fact that my mother, so compelling in telling stories of her life, became silent and non-communicative in important respects.

Christa’s silence, in part typical for her generation, was also intrinsic to her personality. Throughout her life, Christa was unwilling to talk about anything that she could not manage in her own mind. She was the master of suppression and denial—in particular in matters where she fought bitterly against her inability to control a situation. My brother Adrian’s nickname for her was "the queen of denial." Christa’s survival instincts drove her to engage in something called totschweigen; literally, this means "keeping silent about something until it is dead," more properly translated as "suppressing something." Another expression that applies is nicht wahrhaben wollen. Again, the translation "denying something" is a poor shadow of the word, more precisely rendered as "not wanting something to be true."

As an aside, I might point out that the German verb schweigen, here inadequately translated as "keeping silent," connotes silence as an act of doing rather than a state. The notion of silence as an active choice runs like a drumbeat through the lives of people of my mother’s generation, and it shaped her relationships with us as well as with others. We had a plethora of words and stories that disguised huge swathes of impenetrable silence.

Christa’s life was not that different from that of many of her peers who came of age in the 1930s in Germany, lived through the war, and had to rebuild their existence in the subsequent decades. Christa was a product of her time and her upbringing, and her strategies to survive were mirrored by other women of her generation, in particular, those from a similar social class and cultural background.

The habit of silence on many issues, so deeply ingrained, is a common thread when looking at their life stories. I suspect that many were silent out of a reluctance to burden their children as much as out of an overwhelming sense of discomfort and unease in speaking about their roles as witnesses or even participants at a time when Nazi ideology permeated every level of existence, tightening its grip on every activity and imposing increasingly stringent controls over movement, writing, and actions. The silence lifted to some extent in the 1980s and subsequent decades, when more individuals began to write down what they remembered. These women lived through extraordinary times. Each of their stories deserves to be told.

Christa’s story is also a universal one in that it touches upon the challenges resulting from relations between one generation and the next and the complexities of interactions between parents and children. We are shaped by those who have preceded us, especially our parents. As children of parents, all imperfect in innumerable ways whether present or absent, we are left with burdens to carry and to negotiate these in our own lives until we learn that we are also, if not exclusively, the product of our own choices. This too is a story that must be told to provide tools for the next generation to look back, understand, and ultimately move beyond the lives that have gone before.

The process of untangling the threads of my mother's life was inextricably linked to the impact her life had on my brothers and me. Of course, I could speak only about my reactions and feelings, even if occasionally the temptation to speculate about my brothers’ was hard to resist.

Meanwhile, first and foremost, I wanted to weave as complete a picture as possible out of the fragments, real, perceived, or imagined, of Christa’s life story and to capture the essence of this unique, complex, irreplaceable individual.

1

JOURNEY INTO MEMORY

Christa spent the first hours of her life in a drawer.

I picture this drawer as slightly dusty and musty, lined with newspaper. It happened to be the top drawer of a dresser in a room in her grandfather’s house, presumably with a faint scent of lavender and stuffed with her grandfather’s fine linen handkerchiefs.

Christa was born in her maternal grandfather’s house in Muttrin, Pomerania. Her parents were staying there in between the military postings of Christa’s father.

On the day of Christa’s birth on December 21, 1923, there had been a snowstorm. When her mother’s labor pains set in, my grandfather dispatched Chauffeur Reimann to fetch the doctor. For reasons unknown, the chauffeur decided to drive to Stolp, the capital of the district, about sixteen miles away, instead of seeking the help of a doctor in a nearby village. On the way, he promptly got stuck in the snow. He trudged back to the house. After a hasty conference between my grandfather and my great-grandfather, August, the carriage driver, was instructed to harness the horses and drive to the nearest village doctor. Just like Chauffeur Reimann, August got stuck in the snow.

Meanwhile, the electricity had gone out as it often did when there was a thunderstorm or a snowstorm. Christa’s father had to assist the midwife, holding a dim oil lamp, and after Christa finally made her appearance, her mother fainted. Perhaps her blood pressure had dropped after she lost too much blood. In the general panic, they wrapped Christa in newspaper and placed her in the drawer. When the panic subsided and they remembered the baby, they found her content and quiet in her drawer.

Looking back at my mother’s life, it seemed a fitting and telling beginning. Christa had an uncanny ability to adjust. When circumstances required it, she was compliant. When she was free to act, she acted. When she could seize control, she seized it. When control was taken from her irrevocably, she created a space for herself within the confines life dictated.

"This dramatic entrance hasn’t harmed me," Christa said with a laugh when she described the day of her birth.

Muttrin, an estate in Pomerania, had been in Christa's maternal family's possession from the 13th century until 1945. It included ten outlying branch farms. The principal industry was the growing of seed potatoes. There were thirty agricultural enterprises associated with Muttrin and the various branch farms, spread out over about 2,253 hectares or 5,567 acres. While there were a few small landowners in the region, a majority of the land belonged to the Zitzewitz family as well as two other families.

In 1939, the village of Muttrin had a population of 748, with eighty-five buildings for housing for workers. There was a bakery, a construction enterprise, a distillery, and an operation for the drying of potatoes, an inn, a wholesale enterprise for potatoes, a department store, a seed production enterprise, a saddlery, a tailor, a cobbler, a carpenter, and a livestock dealer. Muttrin was essentially self-sufficient; nearly everything needed was produced on the estate.

This included linen. To this day, I have dinner napkins and other linens from Muttrin, where the flax for it was grown, spun, and woven. They were identified with red monograms and with numbers, i.e., No. 9 out of a set of thirty-six. The bedrooms were numbered to make it easier for the maids to sort the sheets and towels bearing the number of the respective room.

There was rarely a need to buy anything from outside the estate. Occasionally, Christa’s grandfather went on a shopping trip to Stolp. Christa claimed that this happened just once a year. When he returned, the children were called to his study, and he handed out one single striped peppermint candy to each child.

Muttrin was typical of landed estates in Pomerania. However, unlike many other estates, it survived the Depression in good form. With tenacity and hard work, Christa’s grandfather turned Muttrin into one of the most modern and profitable country estates in all of Pomerania. He initiated many innovations and improvements, including better bathing facilities throughout the village, a telephone network linking all the districts, and the construction of the railway line (Stolpetalbahn) from Stolp via Rathsdamnitz, Jamrin, and Muttrin, to Budow. It was built between 1894 and 1906, and it was in existence until 1945. As a result, Muttrin gained three loading stations in Muttrin, Nimzewe, and Jamrin. During my great-grandfather’s tenure, new stables, barns, factory facilities, and apartments as well as a community house and youth center made their appearance. Muttrin was known for its social welfare network, good relations with neighboring farmers, and its reputation as an exemplary agricultural enterprise.

His son, Friedrich von Zitzewitz, the last owner of Muttrin, continued this work. He arranged for the development of more housing equipped with running water and an expanded electricity network. Water and electricity were provided free of charge to all working on the estate. He improved the roads and upgraded the telephone network so that he could run the entire operation efficiently from a central location.

Christa and her brother Hans-Melchior spent several years of her childhood in Muttrin and even attended the village school for a while. Until the last years of the war, she regularly returned to Muttrin for the holidays. From my mother’s descriptions, I had the impression of seemingly unlimited space to accommodate all the aunts, uncles, and cousins, and other guests who descended upon Muttrin, especially during the summer months.

For years, my mother had painted an image for us, with her passionate words and her glowing eyes. In my memory, the center of that image shifts as if held in the shaky circle of a search light. The cone of light slides across the cobblestones of the large farmyard in front of the manor house, along the red brick wall enclosing the park, toward the façade of the house, where it briefly rests on the yellow wallpaper in the drawing-room. It hovers on the doors to the winter garden and briefly glances at the opening that led to my great-grandmother’s rooms so that one could imagine the short sharp bark of her snowy white Pomeranians.

The light turns, creeps through the park across the tops of the beeches, past the fruit tree orchard, shivers across the mound of the ice cellar, passes the red brick façades of the stables and the dairy, and returns to the entrance to the cellar where the large kitchen is located. The cone captures the trembling shadow of Zickelbart the ghost before he vanishes and the light flickers out.

Christa’s descriptions were so vivid that it was as if I walked beside her when she came in from outside. One of her favorite haunts was the cloakroom, typical of manor houses in Pomerania, next to the entrance. It comprised an entire world of hunting, horses, and dogs, and smelled of leather, old loden coats, gun oil, smoke, and soap. Everything gave off an air of having been forgotten there and at the same time forbidden to the children—horrifying and wonderful in turn. I had no difficulty imagining Christa as a little girl, peeking into the cloakroom, and reveling in the rich scents.

The main house had two central poles, the office of Christa’s grandfather and her grandmother’s boudoir.

Christa liked to sit on a little leather stool in her grandfather’s office, gazing at the rows of lithographs of famous horses by Franz Krüger above the desk and listening to her grandfather as he made his evening phone calls to the various farm managers. Christa’s favorite moment was when her grandfather’s stern voice relaxed. That meant he was talking to Hermann, the most trusted of the managers, on the branch farm Nimzewe.

The other pole was the domain belonging to Christa’s grandmother. During the school year, when there were no other visitors in the house and after Christa and her brother had finished their homework, they would sit at the big table with their grandmother in her boudoir.

Christa’s grandmother always worked. Her grandmother knitted or did needlework while instructing Christa in these arts. Christa knitted, while her brother Hans-Melchior worked on handicraft projects, cutting, gluing, and painting. The children munched on apples, and their grandmother told them stories—from her childhood, legends, tales, and best of all, creepy stories, some invented and some based on actual events.

Christa told us that during those times, her grandmother’s personality came to the fore—she was relaxed, funny, and full of imagination. At other times, she understood her role as someone who took the backseat to her imposing husband. With infinite patience, she tolerated the entire army of aunts, descending upon Muttrin over the summer months, who enjoyed tearing her to shreds with criticism. Her calm response invariable was, "This is their home," while she tirelessly managed to take care of everyone in the house and beyond.

Meanwhile, there was another domain around which life revolved, and that was the kitchen, ruled by Mamsell Hübner.

Mamsell is derived from the French word Mademoiselle but was used also for married ladies as a form of respect. And Mamsell Hübner, the cook in Muttrin, was a formidable presence as the powerful and inviolable ruler of her realm. She was only thrown off balance by the periodic ghostly appearance of Zickelbart. On such occasions, Mamsell Hübner would be in a state of extreme distress for days at a time with dire effects on everything in her purview. Food got burned, milk turned sour, and the famous "Four Men Sausage"—why it bore this memorable name my mother never was able to figure out—was salted beyond recognition. When the children appeared in search of extra helpings of bread and cheese, they were sent away empty-handed. Kitchen maids trod softly, afraid of getting barked at, and my great-grandmother gave Mamsell Hübner a wide berth. Eventually, the crisis would pass, and the house returned to normal.

My favorite stories involved the food Christa described in mouthwatering details. I don't know what was more important to me as I listened—the food, tempting, mysterious, and appalling in turn, or my mother's evident delight. There was Schmalz, that peculiar German culinary specialty of rendered goose fat, allowed to congeal until it was a firm greyish mass. One ate it as a spread on bread or toast, preferably with a pinch of salt. There were goose tongues with apple sauce—apparently a Pomeranian delicacy. Christa raved about something bearing the evocative name of Floom which consisted of coarsely ground goose fat mixed with goose meat cut into small pieces and drenched in marjoram. She insisted that the oven in the kitchen produced the best bread in the whole world—warm and fragrant with the crust always just at the edge of being scorched. Christa and the other children in Muttrin regularly visited the kitchen where they raided the larder for generous helpings of bread with cheese and Schmalz.

Christa and her brother were best friends with the daughter of the carriage driver August Schallock and the son of Butler Friedrich respectively, who shared a house within walking distance of the manor. August lived on one side and Friedrich on the other. When visiting Mother Schallock, the wife of August, Christa loved to peek into the seemingly bottomless iron pot on the stove filled with “pig potatoes”—mushy potatoes deemed just good enough for pigs—and covetously eyed the large green glass bottle on the counter, filled with gently fermenting current wine. The children were not allowed to drink it and as a result, loved it all the more. Mother Schallock always worried that "the children from the castle" didn't get enough to eat—a misconception the children didn't hesitate to exploit. In the goodness of her heart, she prepared pancakes; the children's principal contributions were a ravenous appetite, despite the just consumed afternoon tea and cake at home, and the eggs Christa had filched from her grandmother’s chicken coop. The manager of the estate caught her several times, but never gave her away.

A child of Pomerania, especially a child who grew up on one of the largest seed potato enterprises in the region, Christa loved potatoes—boiled, baked with oil and salt, roasted in a fire, fried, and mashed. Potatoes freshly harvested in the late summer were her notion of a culinary paradise. Yet, to her everlasting fury, in Muttrin, the fresh potatoes went into storage. The old ones had to be eaten first.

For the midday meal, everyone in residence assembled around the long table, waiting for the master of the house. When his steps in the entrance could be heard, Butler Friedrich rushed into the dining room. Excited as if announcing the Second Coming, he shouted, "Herr Rittmeister, Herr Rittmeister." Friedrich-Karl von Zitzewitz’s military title, used by everyone as a courtesy, roughly translated as "cavalry captain." Upon taking his seat, Christa’s grandfather began his customary inquisition. Had Emmy remembered to send a package of goose paté to Cousin Berta? Had she sent smoked pheasants to Erika? Had she sent a leg of venison to Vera? He went through a long list in this fashion, stern and relentless. Finally, his entire demeanor changed as he looked around for his grandson, Christa’s brother Hans-Melchior, and said, "And how is my little boy? What did you do today?"

According to my mother, the "little boy" was a rascal with a penchant for getting in trouble. However, Christa loved her brother completely and unquestionably, and it never occurred to her to doubt the arrangement whereby she, the younger one by two years, was the one who would get all the blame whenever her brother had engaged in a misdeed. She told me later that she had always felt the need to protect Hans-Melchior as if she had had a premonition that his life would end too soon. He was killed in battle at age twenty-two.

Life was framed around the agricultural cycle and holiday traditions.

I could never get enough of her descriptions of the traditions observed during the Christmas season. Three large fir trees were set up in the salon and decorated with white candles. A few chaste ornaments enlivened this austere arrangement. They were added to console the children who preferred the gaudier decorations of trees favored by people living in the village. The salon was off-limits to the children until Christmas Eve.

Of even greater interest to me was an activity Christa called finsteln. This word appears in no dictionary; it has at its root the meaning of something dark and gloomy. Indeed, in her telling, it involved all members of the large household sitting around a large table in the dark while passing objects along underneath the table. Christa said that there was nothing as frightening as a glove filled with wet sand when you couldn't see it. My grandmother was particularly inventive when it came to devising gross and creepy things to hand along in the dark.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, the children took gifts to the people in the neighboring villages. Usually, there was enough snow on the roads for August the driver to take a sleigh, with bells attached to the horse’s harness. Everyone was wrapped in thick fur blankets. The carriage rolled through the streets, stopping at all the branch farms, where the children delivered presents and ate cookies while August downed generous offerings of Schnapps. This in turn contributed to the increasing speed of the sleigh as it made its way back to Muttrin.

On New Year's Eve, an ancient ritual was enacted. It was supposed to ensure good health, prosperity, and fertility in the New Year. It involved the so-called Neujahrsschimmel, that is, "the grey horse of the New Year." Four young men of the village descended upon the manor house. They were disguised as a horse, a bear, a woman, and a stork, all bearing switches, which they applied liberally wherever they could. Their arrival was announced by shrieking kitchen maids who scampered up the stairs from the kitchen to evade pursuit. The four made the rounds of the village and received money and Schnapps for their efforts.