Category Archives: family

January 13, 2017 · 04:14

A perfect, eternal winter evening, thanks to Alban Berg

My parents made many efforts to connect with me, the distant, fear-plagued son they loved and appreciated, but just could not reach. I did not notice or understand their efforts then, but much later, long after they were gone.

Because, as a child and a very young person, I tended to avoid my father and find him difficult to relate to, they sometimes tried to bridge the chasm between us. It was awkward for both him and me, and for me it was also puzzling. As I saw it, we found each other strange and not particularly interesting or likable, so why did they insist on changing this?

When I was fourteen or fifteen, maybe the last attempt of this kind took place. I don’t remember how the conversations went or whether I was even part of them, but, right after New Year’s Day, my father and I took a regional train into the hilly region east of Cologne and spent most of a week in a small guest house, on a back alley in a tiny village. The train let us off in a town called Gummersbach, and from there we took a bus to our destination. It was deep winter, and the more I think about it, the year must have been 1968.

The previous summer, my father had spent five or six weeks in a clinic in the area. His doctor had sent him there to participate in controlled weight-loss and exercise programs. He did not cheat like the other men, who went to grocery stores and pubs to enhance their diet, but he did not lose any weight at all. Later I heard that my mother took him butter and other favorite things to eat when she and I visited every few days. I didn’t even notice. We were in a rustic, not very clean bed-and-breakfast not far away. Who lost weight during those weeks was I – unplanned, but very lucky for me.

My parents had probably found the guest house through recommendations from customers. The trip would have been my mother’s idea, and I’m sure she also bought our train tickets at the travel agency around the corner from the shoe store she owned and ran with my father. Then she packed both our suitcases. Maybe she even took the tram with us to the station and see us off. If we left on a Sunday, the store would have been closed. January was generally a quiet month, so she could easily handle the shop on her own with help from the one or two saleswomen who worked there. Until 1976, when my father had a heart attack while I was living in London, these would be the only days she had entirely to herself.

At that time, most people living in the city wore the same clothes for almost everything they did. If they participated in a sport, like soccer or running, they wore what went with that. But for hiking, bicycling, kicking a ball around, shopping, visiting family, running an errand to a government office, attending church – you wore respectable, clean clothes, not too dressy and certainly not shabby. Unless you were a mountain climber or dedicated to a sport, outdoor gear and specialized clothing for certain activities didn’t come into use until much later. Day in, day out, my father dressed in a white shirt and tie, a grey or brown suit, and an overcoat and hat when it was cold. We both would have had plain leather shoes, maybe with riffled rubber soles to make it easier to walk in snow and ice, but still useless for any more ambitious hikes. He had a hat. I didn’t.

Winters in Cologne were chilly, with temperatures close to freezing for many weeks. Sometimes, it snowed, but never for longer than a day or two, and within a few more days it was all melted. But as soon as the bus let us off, we were in a white country, where snow would have begun fallen sometime in October and kept coming since then. Main roads had been cleared, but fields and buildings were covered with a couple of feet of firm, old snow. Within a few steps, our feet were wet and freezing, our pant legs soaked, and our hands frozen, because we also lacked gloves.

I don’t remember how we found the unmarked guest house. My father must have had good directions. It was a small single-family home with just a handful of rentable rooms. We were the only guests. The Christmas tree was still in the living room, and seasonal cookies and pastries piled in a large plate on a table next to it. It smelled nice and felt most comfortable. We had separate rooms, and I’m sure we shared a bathroom.

Of those days, I don’t recall any conversations. We took all our meals at the house; there was no restaurant or café in the small village. I remember the silent, dark-haired woman who sometimes spoke with my father and ran the place.

We took endless walks in the snow, with our miserable shoes and thin clothing. The hills all looked alike, and within a few steps you lost sight of the village. There were hardly any people out and about, cattle and horses were in their barns, cars and trucks coming through were few. We walked slowly, because we did not want to slip and fall. Once or twice we got lost and did not find our way back to the house until after dark.

There was no newspaper, radio, nor TV for the guests. We did find a current issue of Hör Zu, a weekly magazine with a detailed program for all the major radio stations as well as the two or three German TV broadcasters operating then. A concert listing interested me. I asked my father for an evening’s loan of his portable radio, which he used to listen to political and sports news at 8 p.m. The program started after that, so we didn’t clash.

The reception was terrible. I was fully dressed and under the sheets in my bed, because it was freezing in the room. However, I had to keep moving around to adjust the antenna and improve the placement of the radio. I forget what the first piece played by the orchestra was, but I spent most of the time tweaking the frequency dial and repositioning radio and antenna

.

When the second program item began, I was used to the static and had achieved some sort of stability. The steady rushing sound was acceptable, and I’d gotten rid of the annoying chirping and whistling. I could give my full attention to the violin concerto by Alban Berg.

This was one of the best listening experiences in my whole life. Some detail was obliterated because of the poor transmission quality, but what remained was lovely, heartbreaking, amazing music. It touched me in a way few things ever did, and until that moment, probably nothing. I clearly remember the surprise and amazement when I heard the last section, where Berg weaves a Bach chorale into his music. The piece only takes a little over twenty minutes, but my felt experience time amounted to several hours. Berg’s violin concerto was a perfect match for the dry, cold, black January evening in this room, in this January, in this life. It made for an unforgettable moment. This happened almost fifty years ago, but I can still hear the barely-there ending. I knew then that this hearing of the Berg concerto would never leave me, and it hasn’t. It will be part of me until I leave this world.

I’m sure I listened to the symphony or whatever came next, but don’t remember what it was. Maybe I wrote in my journal, or read in my book. The following morning, I returned the radio to my father and thanked him. We spent another day or two in the snow before taking the bus and train home. I don’t recall going to church during out time in snow land – the village did not have a church, but we would have made our way to another village or town to go to mass. That means we were home before Sunday. My school started again on Monday. My father returned to the store. I don’t think we ever talked about these frozen, beautiful days together.

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May 6, 2014 · 16:21

Saints, heroes, villains, lost souls (8): Cruel man of mystery

Late in the 19th century, Hans Schaefer was born in the Saarland region of Germany, an industrial and coal-mining region where many people spoke French as well as German. As a young man and World War I veteran, shortly after the war, he had a brief relationship with a young woman who hired herself out as a nanny and house cleaner. I wrote about Maria Kohler elsewhere in this blog. That affair didn’t last. It was obvious that Hans and Maria had nothing in common. As he later told everybody who would listen, he was glad to be rid of her when he moved to Cologne for a job in a cable factory, where he spent twenty years or more.

One day, Maria appeared on his doorstep. She was pregnant, broke, and hoping he would take her in. She had left her home in Bühlerthal, in the Black Forest region of Germany, under a cloud. This was her first visit to a big city. Her dialect would definitely have made her a figure of ridicule, and her 8th-grade education would not have helped.

Maria and Hans were married. “I was sorry for her,” he told me. “She had nobody and nothing else.” In 1927, Maria gave birth to my mother, who spoke often about her father when I was growing up and both she and I had our problems with Maria, my grandmother. She adored Hans Schaefer, who was also her best friend. According to my mother, Hans was a genial, kind, good-looking, cultured man who spent most of his free time with his daughter. He took her on walks around the city, taught her how to roller-skate, helped her understand and appreciate classical music, and removed her from the vicious confusion of her mother’s furious, violently changing moods. Sometime in the second half of the 1930s, Hans and Maria were divorced, and you can read about Maria’s story in the other blog post. Hans, who had already started another relationship, was out of the picture. My mother grieved and never heard from him. Through people who knew others who knew him she heard that he was not drafted into the military to fight in World War II because of an injury from the first war. He remarried. He left the cable factory and ran a greengrocery store together with his wife. During the first years after World War II, my mother tried to contact him through the mail, but was never sure she had the right address. She never received a response, and eventually concluded that Hans Schaefer was no longer living. He had probably been killed in a bombing in the spring of 1945, just before the war ended.

That’s how she left it until the spring of 1971, keeping her father alive in her stories. But then, after decades without contact with my mother, one spring afternoon Hans Schaefer walked into the shoe shop she and my father owned and where they worked six days a week. My father greeted him and asked how he could help him. “I am here to see my daughter,” Hans said. My father called his wife. “I almost lost consciousness,” she told me. “He had cut off all contact, never responded to a Christmas card or anything else, and I had stopped hoping for him to get in touch with me many years ago. I thought he had passed away, and remembered him as I remembered him from before he divorced my mother.”

Apparently, she asked Hans a few questions to make sure he was who he said he was, because she did not trust her eyes nor his words. She was still in shock when she came home that night and told me about the encounter. Hans had asked for her forgiveness and given some hazy explanation, something to do with him thinking his ex-wife had turned his daughter against him and he would not be welcome. “But you sent him all those cards,” my father said. “I know, it doesn’t’ make any sense,” my mother answered.

Still, she tried to make the best of it. For several months, she visited him every other week or so, usually on Saturday afternoons. She took the bus to his part of town when the shop closed at two, and came home around eight p.m. or so, which was quite late for her. She never said much about these visits, but she seemed happy to be able to have a relationship with her father.

One Saturday, she gave her time with Hans Schaefer to me. She had arranged for me to visit him. I couldn’t tell you if that was her idea or prompted by his request. I had no idea what to expect. I remember the long walk through wealthy, green neighborhoods on that early summer day. My grandfather lived in a small row house off a busy arterial. He was small, limped, wore thick glasses, smiled much, and made me feel at home. He talked about his ex-wife, my grandmother, and how disgusted he was when he learned she had come out as a lesbian. He was down on the Catholic church and religion in general, which mortified my mother. He had cooked some chicken and vegetables, cut a couple of baguettes into slices, and told me the French were so healthy because they always ate bread with their meals. At an age when I knew most of everything, I found him naïve and poorly informed, but I enjoyed his company. Except for when he talked about my grandmother, whom he despised, he was funny and warm. I could imagine that Hans Schaefer had been a wonderful dad to my mother when she was a child. He made coffee. We ate some dry cake, even drank a little wine. When I left him, I felt I had made a good friend and looked forward to seeing him again. At the time, he was no longer working; the greengrocery business had been closed or sold.

My mother saw him the following week and reported that he had also enjoyed meeting me. Some of his ideas and opinions were a strange mixture of Marxist and nationalist concepts, and his judgment of current affairs and the state of the world was clouded. There were no books in his house, and no classical records, either. He only read a sleazy tabloid paper, nothing else. But so what. I liked him and thought of him as a good man.

When another Saturday visit came around, my mother was greeted by a young woman who said she had been Hans’ girlfriend. Indeed, Hans had mentioned a girlfriend and how proud he was to have met her. His wife had left him or maybe was no longer living, I can’t recall. The girlfriend told my mother that Hans had suddenly died a couple of days ago. She did not let my mother into the house, because he had instructed her not to. She even produced a note in pencil, written by Hans hours before he died, telling her urgently not to let his daughter inside the house, not to give her anything of his, not to engage in conversation with her, and not to invite her to the funeral. My mother recognized his handwriting. She left, devastated and in tears.

When my mother was sad, the turned very quiet, pale, and distant. It took days and days before she was ready to tell me about that last visit. She was horribly confused by her father’s note, and offended that the girlfriend would have followed his wishes without any compassion for her. Something broke in her then. Her memories of the good, kind, caring father had been obliterated. Soon, Hans was no longer talked about. But I don’t think she was ever able to forget him. Soon after, I went my own way and was estranged from my parents for some years, so I don’t know how she dealt with what had been done to her.

I can imagine why Hans sought his daughter out, that day in the shop. But why he saw fit to cause her such pain when his end was near, I have no idea. I remember him as a cruel man who could be very loving and friendly when he wished to. You can argue whether it would have been better for my mother never to have seen him again. She learned some sort of truth about him and maybe herself and the world, but at enormous cost.

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November 12, 2013 · 20:47

Saints, heroes, villains, lost souls (7): A unique grandmother’s sad, brave life

My grandmother, Maria Kohler, was a courageous, resourceful misfit with a lovely soprano voice. Around 1920, she left her home and village in Germany’s Black Forest and took a few trains to another region, the Saarland, not far from the French border. This was an unusual step; nobody in this farming family had ever traveled except for the men who were made to go to war. Maria had lost five or six brothers in the recent World War. In the Saarland, she worked in people’s households, cleaning, running errands, and taking care of children. She had a relationship with a man, Hans Schaefer. He eventually moved to Cologne to take a job in a steel cable factory.

Maria was let go by a couple of her clients and fell on hard times. Once again, she left town. She found out where Hans Schaefer lived and showed up on his doorstep sometime around 1925. Later, both Maria and Hans confirmed that this was not a high moment. She said, “I did not know where else to go and had nobody to turn to. It seemed practical for us to get married.” He said, “I felt pressured into marrying her, because she was lost. I felt sorry for her.”

Maria and Hans married. She gave birth to my mother in 1927. There are no happy stories from their lives together. Hans liked to listen to opera on the radio; Maria rattled dishes and told him to “turn that garbage off.” He liked soccer; she hated it and his friends, even more. They never took vacations, either alone or apart. By all accounts, she was a horrible housekeeper who always cooked way too much and threw tons of food away because it spoiled or she did something awful to it. She apparently did not like being a mother, much, either. In pictures of her and the baby, later the child, she always looked disgusted or bored. Hans and family members all described her as cold and uncaring.

However, during those years of a miserable marriage, Maria developed a network of women friends who were close to her almost until she died in the 1970s, when I had already left the country. I don’t know how she met these women. Maybe at church, where she sang in the choir. Maybe in the homes where she did domestic work. Or at the bank where she cleaned after hours. I met some of them in the late 1950s and 60, when she took care of me during the day. They were interesting, funny, and unconventional—even I could tell. Nothing like any other people I met in those gray days. Maria gossiped with almost anybody she saw more than once on the street, probably her favorite occupation, walking or standing and talking, talking, sometimes for an hour or more. But she always made disparaging remarks about the women who were not part of her circle. “She’s dumb, her husband is the boss at home.”

In 1937, following a hysterectomy, Maria was very ill for months. She survived, and she and Hans soon divorced. Later, he told me he left her because she had “become a lesbian” and was impossible to live with. Of course, that would have been a devastating accusation during the Nazi era, even though the regime was slightly more tolerant of gay women than men, who were persecuted, packed off to concentration camps, and murdered.

After the divorce, Hans lived his own life and eventually remarried. He disappeared from my mother’s life until 1971—a story for another blog post. Maria and her daughter lived by themselves. My mother was never willing to talk about that time after her father had left. When the war intensified and Cologne was bombed repeatedly, Maria and the child moved to the Kohler family home in the Black Forest. By all accounts, this was a horrible period for Maria. Nobody loved or even liked her, but they felt obliged to help her out. She and her brothers and sisters did not get along. One day, her brother shoved her down a few steps during a fight, and she fell on a few spiky indoor cacti. My mother was still enjoying the cruel moment when she told me about it decades later.

What I think made Maria often so hard to get along with was that she did not want to be like everybody, she wanted to be different. Better. Interesting. She wanted to be somebody special who does special things. But she lacked the self-awareness and education that would have helped her find and make something of her talents, so she was constantly overreaching. Every week day and most Saturdays, she cooked for my parents and me, dishing up huge amounts of tasteless, salty, greasy, or bitter food that drowned in oceans of brown, fatty sauce. In post-war Germany, people delighted in eating lots and lots, especially meats. Maria never met a pork chop or fish filet that did not want to be excessively breaded and salted, and overcooked in a pan full of some sort of grease until it was almost black and tough to chew. She baked cookies in the same manner, and sent large boxes full of them to her sister, who in return always gave us a package of delicious, sophisticated cookies and cakes of her own making. Even mild or humorous criticism of Maria’s cooking and baking was an insult to her. She sent sections of the newspaper to the relatives in the Black Forest, so they could get an idea of the news from the big city. She wanted to be asked to sing in the church choir, but was offended when people expected her to show up for a mass. She had strong judgments about people and politics, but also was usually completely misinformed.

Sometimes I think I was the only person in the world who knew a good and generous side of Maria, especially later in her life. Because my parents were always at work in their shoe shop, six days a week and seven in the run-up to Christmas, she was the one to take care of me from shortly after I was born until I was about 12 years old, when I started doing my homework in the back of the store, spent more time with friends, and did not see her so much anymore. Maria cooked for me, and often that was even good—simple potato soups, frittatas, vegetables, fried fish, and more. She read me stories from the paper. We went for long walks through downtown Cologne and the city’s parks. Sometimes she took me along to her part-time evening job cleaning a bank branch, where it always stank of cigars and cigarettes and the stuffed suits’ awful lunches. We went to the movies together, watching Disney cartoons and newsreels. We spent endless hours playing board games. She also took me around the department stores and the places where she bought milk, vegetables, meat, and fish, long before supermarkets arrived. She chatted with all the storekeepers, who were usually very nice to me. And, when I began going to school, Maria figured out that I did not comprehend the writing lessons, and helped me through that hard time until I could write. She was also the one to understand that my eyesight was bad and that was the reason for my being slow to learn. I simply could not see what the teacher wrote on the blackboard.

I was the only one who saw how many aspirins and pain killers Maria took every day. When she cried and complained about the people who had disappointed and betrayed her, I was the only one who heard her. For years, I was also the only one who knew about her continuing friendships with the group of older women. There was at least one bitter scene where my mother told Maria not to expose me to them. I kept quiet after that. Maria didn’t care about anything her daughter told her—they disliked each other very much—so she remained loyal to her friends.

Maria did not live with us. She rented a miserable, cold room (no bathroom, shared toilet eight steps down) at the far end of the street. Instead of paying rent, she kept the public areas of the building clean. When we moved to another part of town, she had to ride the buses and trams to get to our place, where I needed feeding and the laundry and other household chores needed to be done. She lived in that hole until she died. My parents, who were by then financially set, never tried to move her someplace more comfortable. “She would not have wanted that,” my mother said later. My parents paid Maria a small amount of money for all her work. I have forgotten how much it was, but I was ashamed when I did find out.

Maria’s is a sad story, as you see. For too long, she was much too close to me, and some of her nervous, crazy restlessness became mine. She also passed on a strange sense of wanting to be special, along with many fears. Because her moods could swing from warm and sunny to screaming furious in a few seconds, and I never knew what brought on the change, I was pathologically vigilant and considerate of other people’s imagined feelings for many years, and always tried to guess and anticipate what everybody was thinking and feeling. None of these things were healthy, and they are all part of me.

Maria died alone, like we all do, but she had been abandoned long before by everybody she knew. Her friends had already passed on. I doubt that anybody cried for her, least of all her daughter. I was out of the country and not in touch with my parents. I had no tears when I heard of her death much later, but I was and am sometimes sad for how her life unfolded.

When I think of my grandmother today, I prefer to recall the good times—when she told me about animals and their habits, when we bought some foam filling for our cushions and all the colorful flakes spilled out of the bag on the way home and we laughed and laughed when we realized that was happening, or when I eavesdropped on her and her friends’ warm, intimate conversations without really understanding a word of them. Other times, I remember the mysteries—why did she always draw pentagrams on shopping lists and other pieces of paper? What did she know about herself when she decided to leave home? To what extent was she really involved with her parish’s dangerous efforts to shelter and save Jews and communists during the Nazi years? What did she really believe? But I will never know.

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