Latest posts
-
Family
It is quite difficult for me to tell you anything from my own solid memories without the influence of wishful thinking from the time before 1939. I have almost no exact memories from the time before that. It is a mixture of stories my parents, relatives and acquaintances of our family told, conclusions, and information…
-
Lilac scents & Berlin’s air
Our father spent most of his time in the house for the first few days due to the danger of being picked up and deported by the Russians. But then, we wanted to know whether my mother’s parents and her sister had survived. To get there, we had to travel through the city centre and…
-
Firefly Schnapps
Occupied by the Russians (before the division of Berlin among the Allies), life was normal to such an extent that one could take the S-Bahn from Berlin to Potsdam without controls. The company Permutit, for which our father worked and treated water, had been commissioned by a schnapps distillery in Potsdam – I’m not quite…
-
Hard winter
With the invasion of the Russians, water, electricity, and gas were not always available. Therefore, our father had organised batteries & a charger for us and the rest of the family. Since we usually had power outages during the day, we were able to bridge the times without electricity well. By the way, we already…
-
Thoughts on the war
With the arrival of the Western Allies and the withdrawal of the Russians from the western part of Berlin, normalisation finally began – at least for all those who, like us, were living in the US sector – now American, British or French. Basic supplies were slowly improving, but many luxury goods remained far out…
-
Morning salutes
It was time to get back to school. Classes took place only provisionally at first, and with the old teachers from the “old days” – whether Nazi or not – they were good teachers. Most of the younger teachers had not yet returned from captivity. For me, school took place in barracks, as the actual…
-
Wasel
My classmate Wasel was always up for anything if it attracted enough attention. He came as a displaced child from the Baltic States and unfortunately only stayed for a short time at the Askanische Gymnasium, which we simply called Aska. Maybug time – back then, these little bugs were still around in large quantities. One…
-
Suspensions
I heard the term “concilium abeundi – school expulsion” a few times at that time. The first time it happened was on the Aska. We had started a school newspaper in our class, which was distributed at school. It was called “Der Klassenkurier (Class Courier)”. Our class teacher was still quite young and, therefore, probably…
-
Class trip
Winter was back, and our school allowed us a class trip to the Harz (mountain area in Germany). Our class leader – a teacher I didn’t know at all – was quite lazy, but his credo included physical exercise. And that was asking for trouble with a troop of mostly absolutely nonathletic teenagers. This year,…
-
Matric
My final school exams caused me a lot of headaches. It was not the lack of good grades but a guilty conscience towards our parents, especially since our father’s health was getting worse and worse. I knew how to have an easy life in my school years. I constantly had – not always intelligent –…