Actually, our author just wanted to clean up thoroughly again. Instead, she dives into the family history and comes across conflicting memories.
At some point, as the pandemic surges again, I’ll tire of the counsel of psychologists, sociologists, and therapists advocating more patience, yoga practice, Buddhist serenity, and arguing about whether dark gray feelings harm the soul’s immune system. I choose to follow the direction of the realists: employment is their message. Be creative. Finally repairing the rickety chair, finishing sewing the pillow case or sorting, putting away, clearing out and decluttering those thousands of things in the household that have been filling cupboards, drawers, shelves and chests of drawers for decades.
And so, on a dull, rainy day, I begin the big cleanup, knowing full well that it would take mental strength to say goodbye to the many memorabilia and let them go forever.
First off with the smelly old raincoats in the bright yellow of the eighties, worn on the North Frisian islands. Away with the sixties dresses, the motif socks from the day before yesterday and the dusty boxes with slides from Lake Garda that no one has ever looked at again and will never look at. Away with all the collected “Schöner Wohnen” booklets, the boxes full of Lego bricks and Barbie dolls without arms and legs, the countless porcelain mugs with dog and cat sayings and the high pile of newspaper articles that had been cut out.
Then, in the midst of this chaos, I come across wondrous finds and long-lost lucky items. In a toiletry bag, between plastic curlers and tubes of cream with an expired sell-by date, the golden ring with the three opals that the great-grandmother inherited from her great-granddaughter turned up for years. The valuable Montblanc fountain pen that has disappeared lies in a pencil case next to worn-out crayons, and the spare key for the garage that was thought lost is found in a hodgepodge of discarded and rusty small parts.
From a drawer I pull out the rather battered “Gumbo,” a cotton-filled orange bear that the first grader knitted and named him that. A few days later, the child, long grown up, will pick up the tattered little animal with a smile of emotion and melancholy.
In a corner of the cupboard – a double-column find – are my father’s diary and field post letters from World War I and II, bundled and tied with a bow. In 1914 my father, then 17 years old, volunteered for the front as a grenadier. The countless letters he wrote to his parents and siblings were, especially during his first days in the barracks, characterized by slogans such as: comradeship, national pride and love of the fatherland. In 1918, the last year of the war, the word “homesickness” was used more often. In one of his letters from Flanders and Verdun he says: “There will be an offensive soon, I hear the constant thunder of cannons and I am afraid. Oh, I’d rather be with you.”
Next to the letters are an old compass, his age-old glasses and the battered “life savers” spoon and fork – a tin cutlery set he happened to be carrying that took the bullet that was meant for him.
During the Second World War, my father was first a lieutenant, then a first lieutenant, later a captain and finally an acting major. In 1942 he was stationed in occupied France, and his diary mentions Paris, Reims and Lyon. At the end of 1942 he was sent to the front in Russia, in Kharkov. In his last letter he reports that he was wounded and that he is on his way back home. He had his own horse and a “lad” who helped him dress and put on and take off his boots. My mother’s letters in reply sometimes show illegible, run-down handwriting, and tears may have spilled over the paper. In his diary he repeatedly addressed the differences between a “healthy” love of fatherland, as he understood it, and a “sick” National Socialism, which included the crimes of the Nazis, which occupied and disturbed him for a long time. After the war he was stripped of his civil service status. He graduated as a judicial officer and then worked at the district court in Frankfurt.
Another drawer, another destiny. Babette Mentz, an aunt’s aunt, and what’s left of her life is in a box: an old, worn bag, two rosaries, a photo of her in a wooden frame and the Federal Cross of Merit, for 50 years of loyal service to her employer. When she was presented with that certificate at a small ceremony, she felt uncomfortable because she wasn’t used to being the center of attention.
I know her story, it has often been told to me. She came from a poor background in the Palatinate and worked for half a century as a maid in a bourgeois family with three daughters in Speyer. The stern “gracious gentleman” was a high school teacher, and the “gracious lady” never gave her name, but said “girl” to her, short and sharp as the crack of a whip. Her room was in the attic, and until the end she had to eat her meals alone in the kitchen, never at the table of her “master”, who she only had to wait on.
She was responsible for the laundry, was an ironer, cook, nanny, cleaning lady and family helper. She was everything. Her highlights were going to church on Sundays and trips to the Baltic Sea, where the family owned a holiday home. She was never married, and when the “lass” outgrew her day-to-day work, a niece took her in and Babette brought her savings. It was exactly 18,000 marks.
When I imagine her life today, her hard everyday life, she herself as a simple, modest woman with tired eyes and shuffling steps, in a flowered Trevira smock apron, her back hunched from the heavy heaving of the carpets on the pole in the yard, with rough , red, furrowed hands from hot cleaning water and the constant rinsing, when I think of the few free hours and the meager wages, I am overcome by sadness, but also anger and bitterness about the social conditions of that time, about the injustice, the exploitation by women. An interest group for servants, for housemaids, or even a union. Back then unthinkable!
More finds appear. Two old poetry albums, one covered with pink velvet and fitted with a gold metal clasp. The entry on the yellowed front page of the other book states that an Erna dedicated it to her dear sister Luisa more than 100 years ago.
The first saying, neatly written in calligraphy: “Roses, tulips, carnations, all the flowers are wilting, except for one little flower, this one is called forget-me-not.”
In the Biedermeier period from 1815, when poetry and language were considered treasures, the family register became the poetry album. A beautiful book, filled with quotes, verses, aphorisms, poems and sometimes also with kitschy rhymes, written by friends, parents, siblings, godparents, teachers or pastors and decorated with glued-in gleams of cute angels and birds. Some little books were adorned with drawings, silhouettes or even sacrificed locks of hair. Where else can you discover the charming, nostalgic albums these days? In forgotten drawers, at household liquidations, at flea markets or auction exchanges on the Internet.
And once again on this gray Thursday my gaze falls on a stack of paper. Christmas letters, notes and notes from a Swiss uncle of my late husband. I remember him clearly. He was already an organic and eco-disciple before the Greens had even invented themselves here in Germany. He lived according to the laws of the reformers of the famous Monte Verita in Ticino, an alternative movement of pacifists, artists, writers and free spirits.
His name was Peter and he lived with his wife and children in his hand-built “Hüsli” in Bassersdorf near Zurich. When we visited him there once, we were irritated that there was only raw food to eat and that the whole family ran around stark naked in their enchanted garden in the afternoon. He earned his money at Swissair. There he was responsible for aircraft safety, but he put a large part of his money into social projects in Africa, where he also flew several times a year to take care of the construction of a well or to lay the foundation stone for a school.
During his stopovers in Frankfurt he stayed with us and told stories. It amused him that with his long beard, brown robe and sandals, he was often mistaken for a mendicant monk and given coins. Then he bowed and murmured “Merci”.
“Kätherli” was the name of his wife, he raved about her, admired her, dedicated poems to her, composed songs for her and sent us painted portraits and photographs of her. Reflections of light fall on her blond hair, she has bowed her head slightly and is holding a book in her hand. She looks like she’s in a Dutch painting. We were all the more surprised and astonished when one day he informed us of his divorce without further explanation.
It’s already getting dark when I prepare a large, filled sack for disposal, but carefully pack the finds and memories into three boxes like treasures. They’re too good to throw away. May someone else someday rediscover these treasures and bring them to light.
