Desire and Inheritance

By John Eakins

A daughter of a German family moves to the U.S. as a young woman in the ‘60s but later wonders what shaped her family. She looks back at family documents and her memory, interviews family and others, and tells her story in this book that spans WWI, the depression, WWII, the reconstruction she knew growing up in the ‘50s, and beyond 2000. The story focuses on her and her farmer-businessman father whose sexual passions and desires and his concern to pass a significant inheritance to his children shaped all their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Eakins
• Release date: Jan 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310758010

John Eakins

While this account is in my name, the book Desire and Inheritance was written by my wife, Emilie, and me.Emilie Johanna Schmeiser Tipton grew up in Germany, as you have learned if you read the book. She came to the States in the early 1960s where she put her German experience to good use as a waitress at too many restaurants to list. In the late 1970s, she ran a grocery and meat market in Mantorville, Minnesota, first with her husband and then alone, with help from her children, and briefly from new husband. After retiring for three months, she worked again as a banquet server and then as a gas-station convenience store clerk. Since her second retirement, she has begun splitting her time between Arizona and Minnesota and is enjoying perpetual summer.John Eakins graduated from Wilmington College (now UNC-Wilmington), taught junior-high math for two years, and worked for IBM for 29 years, besides his brief experiences as cabinet-maker’s helper, butcher, and grocer. He has written some articles for his SCORE chapter in Rochester, Minnesota, which may still be found online. He may write again if he can tear himself away from following the sun with Emilie, his wife since 1990.

Book preview

Desire and Inheritance

A German family’s memoir through two wars and reconstruction

By Emilie Tipton and John Eakins

Smashwords Edition, Version 1

Copyright © 2014 Emilie Tipton and John Eakins

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission of the authors, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews.

All characters in this book are real but are depicted as recalled by Emilie Tipton with no extraordinary attempt to verify that the character or others remember events the same way Emilie does. That is one of the beauties of a memoir.

Credit Jeremy Taylor for the fine cover.

Photographs from Emilie Tipton’s family archive.

Bibliographic Information

Tipton, Emilie Johanna Schmeiser.

Desire and Inheritance /

Tipton, Emilie Johanna Schmeiser and Eakins, John James — First Edition

A daughter tells the story of her German family from WWI through 2002.

Personal memoir; Germany—History 1909-2002; World War 1916; German Farming; German Reconstruction 1945-1960; Germany—Biography; Mannheim (Germany) History 1951—1994

920 TI_D; BIO026000; BIO003000; BIO002000; BIO006000; BIO022000; ET060; TP090

Dedicated to Rosa and Alfons and to all well-meaning, hardworking parents

. . .

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Little Emmi

Diversions

Playmates

Changes

Chapter 2: Looking Back

Hilde’s

Inheritance

Deciding to Dig

Chapter 3: Bieringen—The Early Years

Fishing

Youth

Taking the Reins

Chapter 4: Opportunity in Bavaria

Walburga Anthofer

Anthofer and Schmeiser Stories

Maria Anthofer

Chapter 5: Evading Hitler

Blame

Rosa Anthofer

On the Move Again

Chapter 6: During the War

Hergenstadt

Escaping Nürnberg

Alfons is Drafted

Chapter 7: Postwar

Marital Strife

Final Rejections

Chapter 8: Struggling into Mannheim

Pfälzer Hof

A Pfälzer Hof Day

Chapter 9: Alfons vs. Rakoczy

Goodbye, Opa

Herr Faulhaber

Chapter 10: My Teenage Mannheim

After Maria

Emmi the Grocer

The Compromised Torte

Chapter11ComingOfAge

Not on My Wedding Night

Natural American

Chapter 12: While I was away

The Long Visit

Generosity and Frugality

Secrets and Death

Chapter 13: Their Final Years

Nursing Home

Chapter 14: Release

Anna’s Inheritance

Chapter 15: Vefi’s Last Years

Vefi Lingers On

Epilogue

Pictures

The Authors

Preface

I

I am the daughter of the German family revealed in this book. I went to the U.S. as a young woman in the ‘60s, but always wondered what made my family the way it was. As a young girl, of course, I didn’t know mine was different from anyone else’s. And now, after looking back into my recollections and talking with others about their memories of my family, I know my family was unique—a bit strange in some ways, pretty good in others. But so are most families their own unique mixture of strange, normal, and wonderful.

And Germans? How did they come to be the way they were and to do the things they did during that time in the first half of the twentieth century? I have angrily carried that legacy since I was old enough to understand what happened. I’ve done a lot of listening and a lot of reading about how that could have been. You won’t find an answer in this book, although you may gain insights.

This story that I tell and that John puts on the page begins in the late 1800s and ends in the early 2000s, but its focus is really 1920 – 1980, the working life of my father, Alfons Schmeiser. He shaped my world and the worlds that each in my family inhabited even until after we each broke from his sphere of influence, as all children should. His tragedy was that he never broke the bonds of things that controlled him and kept him from the full, rich, happy life we all want. I hope that telling his story helps me do what he could not.

Emilie Tipton

II

I am the husband of the daughter of the German family revealed in this book you may be about to read. You may find the family within, their story, and the writing rather pedestrian when compared to important families whose lives were entangled in historically dramatic events and whose stories are told by wonderful writers. But the two of us have told this story because an average family who thrived at the edge of historical events has an interesting story even if told plainly.

It is told as a memoir because this form reflects lives as the average person lives it, and that way of telling a family’s story is inherently more appealing than is telling it as a history or biography with all the added details to create a complete historical context. The context of lives being lived is what that person believes is going on immediately around her. Emilie and I have told her family story by trying to recreate the personal context from her memory and from the way others told their stories and by adding her reflections as a mature adult. That most of us want to remember what might have made us do the things we did years earlier makes reading a memoir appealing.

Memoir has over the recent past gotten somewhat a bad name because many have been over-the-top and filled with fantasy and lies. This one certainly will have others mentioned in it saying, No! That did not happen like that. But that is only because Emilie remembers or interprets one way and the other person another, and we have no quarrel with that.

John Eakins

. . .

Introduction

This story is mostly my direct recollection of my family, recalled as an adult. I know my memories were changed by time and my reflections, but I make no apology for any of that. I did not do extensive research to find or correct any flaws in my memories, but I did some research on my trips to Germany by talking extensively with my aunt about what she remembered and getting her wartime diary and the document of my father’s inheritance. I also talked with several cousins and other people connected to my family about their recollections. Those recollections from others is a large part of the story.

I have chosen to use the German spelling for names of places where they might be spelled differently in English. The most obvious example is that I used Nürnberg rather than Nuremberg. And in many cases I used German words, italicized their first use, and defined them where not defined in context. Often I did this not because of any significance, but only because I recalled the German word and wanted to use it.

Finally this is simply my story of my German family. While I occasionally stray into philosophizing and focusing on themes and passions that seem significant to our family, in the end the story will be interesting to many who like stories about relationships, wars, business, and how a middle-class family can succeed moderately well in spite of its flaws and foibles.

Good reading,

Emilie Tipton

. . .

Chapter 1: Little Emmi

American tanks rolled into the farming village of Hergenstadt, about fifty kilometers east of Heidelberg, in May 1945. I was barely three. What I know about it comes from stories repeated many times through the years.

I grew up listening to the constant recounting of stories by my father, Alfons Schmeiser— I called him Babbe while on the farm. He bestowed on me memories from those times and his own memories from long before my birth. I will come to those later. My own memories begin after those tanks withdrew from our village along with their Amis—our epithet for American GI’s. And that is where I begin with what I remember, reinforced by my father’s stories, Tante Vefi’s memories, and recollections from others in the family.

Mutti—my mother, Rosa—gave me love and care. (We called her Mutti only after moving to Mannheim, but that is the way I think of her, not as Mamme as we called her in Hergenstadt.) Babbe made sure everyone on the farm had plenty to eat and places to sleep. I suffered no traumatic or undeserved punishments. I got attention and tasks appropriate to my age. I had all a child needs or should expect; why wouldn’t I be happy?

What is a three-, four-, or five-year-old expected to see beyond herself? Nothing of the undercurrents of the lives of adults surrounding her as long as they never rose to roil the smooth waters of her life. Only later would I learn the depth of adult lives. And the war, especially in spring 1945, created more exhaustion, anxiety, and strife in their lives than they ever wanted to see again. But the economic aftermath was worse for some. And the tension between Mutti and Babbe was near snapping. I was oblivious of it all. These were happy times for me.

. . .

Many people lived on our farm. Besides Mutti, Babbe, and the farm workers, Tante Vefi (Babbe’s sister) lived with us, and Tante Resi (Mutti’s sister) was often with us. They worked side by side with Mutti. My sister Maria, born five years before me, worked with the women.

My other older sister, Berta, eight years older than Maria, was there too. But I have only faint memory of her from those days. My brother, Karl, two years younger than Maria and three older than me, remembers Berta from that time; my sister Waltraud, two years my junior, has no recollection of her at all. A greater divide than thirteen years kept Berta from me, I would learn later.

Mutti baked twice a week, and the other women there helped if not working in the fields. In the large kitchen, they kneaded the dough for twenty huge loaves of rye bread, weighing almost five pounds each. They baked the loaves in the wood-burning oven that protruded out from the kitchen’s back wall. A steel door on this long back wall gave access to the oven. A child could walk upright in it. The loaves of bread and the cakes that emerged were beautiful and tasty.

In that large kitchen, the women cooked meals for more than thirty family members and workers, including Opa and Oma, who lived on the other farm, which Babbe leased out to the Lepples. On the large, wood stove, they boiled water for baths, laundry, and butchering the chickens from the coop behind the kitchen.

Our family ate in the kitchen, but Mutti fed all the workers in the large dining room on the ground floor, beneath the kitchen. Adjacent to the dining room, accessible from the living quarters, were the stalls for forty cows.

This house was very old, I think from the 1600s. In those days, cows, hay, and farm equipment were placed under the same roof as the family’s living quarters. This provided additional warmth and safety, but it increased the risk of fire for the family. That risk and increasing cleanliness and changing fashions gave rise to separate barns.

Hay was stored above the stalls, but the living room was also above them. The hayloft was accessible from that floor and from the floor above, where most of the workers slept. Manure from the stalls was stacked in front of the house, making a Misthaufen, a manure pile. The land sloped up from the stalls on the left to the right rear corner, so that the back doors from the hayloft and kitchen were also almost at ground level.

The kitchen had no icebox, and the pantry on the north wall of the house was used to keep food cool. I watched Mutti churn butter in that pantry. After it set awhile and firmed up, she used the tines of a fork to adorn it with a zigzag motif.

Mutti spun wool and recycled old clothes. I watched her and my aunts and other women take apart dresses, shirts, coats, and trousers and make new garments from the pieces. They knitted sweaters from unraveled wool of old ones. Mutti, Tante Resi, and Tante Vefi talked together as they worked, often smiling and laughing. They included in their circle some of the many other women on the farm. I never heard them complain that they had little or worked hard. They kept me a happy little girl, sheltered from such troubles, paying attention only to things directly affecting her.

. . .

Mutti loved to work outside in the vegetable garden or the field when she had time between the never-ending cooking and cleaning. She often took Waltraud, Karl, and me into the field or more likely would set us to play in the ditch near the field. She seldom had time for a long reprieve from the housework, but we children all liked going to the field.

One day Mutti and Tante Vefi packed up Karl, Waltraud, and me and took us into the farm field. We stayed there all day, and we went back there the next day and the next. It was strange to be there all day and never in the kitchen.

They pushed Waltraud and me to the field in our white, wicker baby buggy. Mutti parked it and us in the ditch by the field while she used her hoe to cultivate potatoes and sugar beets. Mutti told Karl to stay in the ditch with us little girls, but soon he was naughty. He was a real mama’s boy and found many ways to show his displeasure at being separated from Mutti even though he was close enough to see her in the field. To quiet him, she took him into the field with her and returned him to the ditch with us when he became too tired to object. They repeated this several times each day.

Mutti was very thin; so were most of the women and many of the men. Times were hard, food was scarce. Hard farm labor and nursing one child after the other had sapped Mutti’s health and strength. She lost all her teeth and hair at the end of the war, and she weighed only ninety pounds. By the time I noticed her condition, she was recovering. She always worked hard, whether in the kitchen or in the field; but she found ways to conserve her strength. Pains from hard times during the war and three or four years after racked her until her death.

Our daily trips to the fields in the buggy were short-lived, though it seemed long to me then. Only much later did I learn that Babbe’s lust for another woman was the reason we were banished to the fields. (More about that later.) But I knew nothing of that as the kitchen happily returned to the center of my world when Mutti and Tante Vefi again prepared meals for us and for all the workers on the farm.

Traveling Aunt

Early in 1946 Tante Resi had returned from München to Osterburken on one of the first scheduled trains since the war ended. She and her six-year-old son, Karl-Heinz, walked the last six kilometers to Hergenstadt. Mutti had heard nothing from her or from Mutti’s family in Ilmendorf for a year.

And Tante Vefi’s husband, Sepp—Josef Scheininger, had not contacted her since before the war ended. All she knew was that he had been captured on the Russian front. Tante Vefi worked on the farm and visited other friends and family by any available mode of transportation. Resumption of rail travel was a godsend for her.

After Tante Resi’s visit, Tante Vefi introduced me to travel when she got the itch for a long journey—it was not for nothing that we knew her as die Reisetante (the traveling aunt). She knew that Mutti had her hands full: farm workers and family to be fed and kept in clean clothes, children to be chased and loved, and her brother Alfons—my Babbe—for a husband. I long thought that Tante Vefi decided to remove some of Mutti’s burden by taking me traveling with her. I was the only logical one for her to take—Waltraud was too young, Karl would never leave Mutti, and Maria and Berta were too valuable as workers.

Tante Vefi lifted a bike from a truck in nearby Hopfengarten where Oma and Opa lived. The truck was loaded with odds and ends, things appropriated from bombed sections of cities and towns several kilometers away. Many such things were abandoned, waiting to be used by the first person needing them. Almost certainly the truck driver never missed it.

The war had rendered many things totally unusable: bridges were down, railroad tracks were bombed and twisted where not missing altogether, and roads were often pocked with bomb craters where not impassable altogether. The crippled infrastructure held the clockwork German train service to fits and starts, so we needed the bike to supplement our rail travel.

From our farmhouse at the bottom, Tante Vefi pushed the bike up the long hill while I marched determinedly to keep close. Mutti followed us, asking if I really wanted to go on such a long trip. She warned me how very far away Tante was taking me and that it would be many, many nights that I had to sleep somewhere else without being able to come home if I should miss her or the others. What about my Opa and Oma?

But I had said my good-byes at the house. I never turned to look at her—I had made up my young mind. At the top of the hill, we passed the chapel where, to Opa Karl’s delight, I sang the loudest of all at Sunday mass. When the grade of the road allowed, Tante Vefi pedaled to the train station in Osterburken. I sat behind on the Gepäckträger and clasped my arms around her waist. On either side of the handlebars hung large bags stuffed with farm food for our trip and for gifts to the people we would visit. Our final destination was the village of Irsching and Tante Vefi’s father-in-law.

In Osterburken, she told me not to let go of the bike while she stood in line to buy our tickets. I loved her and knew she adored me. I would not disappoint her though I could barely reach the handlebars. I never let go of them—even as the bike fell over. My hands still clutched the handlebars as I lay across the bike. It was our bike, and no one was going to take it from me. As she rushed over with the tickets, the others waiting in line chastised her for leaving a small child with such a large bike. (Typical Germans.)

We took our seats, and the train began pulling from the station. I remember looking out the window and excitedly yelling, Tante! Look! The trees and houses are moving. She could not convince me otherwise. Travel was magic, and it has remained so.

Our first stop was Würzburg where we visited her husband’s Tante Hedwig. We arrived at night. Black GIs closely guarded the train station. They showered me with smiles and food. Tante Vefi felt as though we had won the lottery. She marveled at how I charmed these dark skinned GIs with innocence, trust, and friendliness while other Germans feared and loathed them.

Hedwig’s house was on the other side of Würzburg, and Tante Vefi had to pedal the bike through the city. She lamented to Hedwig, How afraid I was of riding the bike in the dark of night, weighed down with bags of precious food while all of Europe is on strict rations. And then to have the small child sitting behind on the Gepäckträger. She turned to me and smiled. Emmi is the bravest and best companion to travel with. She emptied her pockets of cocoa, chocolate bars, crackers, powdered milk, and other delicacies the GIs had given me. She told Hedwig that she had not yet heard from Sepp.

The next day we continued on the bike to Ansbach where we stayed with Tante Vefi’s mother-in-law, long divorced from Sepp’s father. She had fled from Nürnberg, as had Tante Vefi, and was staying at her father’s home, in his little garden shed behind the house–not to be confused with a potting shed. German garden sheds usually have chairs, couches, and tables for breaks from work and for enjoying nature’s nearness.

The mother-in-law, Tante Vefi, and I were all to sleep on mattresses on the floor, but I was no longer a happy little Fräulein: I was dead-tired and determined not to be put down on a mattress in that old shed. Tante Vefi was not as indulgent as Mutti. She paddled my behind, sternly put me on the makeshift bed, and left me there.

The old Opa felt sorry for me. He came and gave me some Schnapps to settle me down. My little body shivered from top to bottom as the liquid fire and ice coated my throat. I slept well. A few days later, we continued on to Ingolstadt to spend a few nights with Tante Vefi’s friend Eugenia.

We rode the train to Ingolstadt, the bike in the baggage car. After our visit with Eugenia, Tante Vefi pedaled the few kilometers to Irsching where we stayed three weeks with Sepp’s father. He loved me like my own Opa Karl and fed me the best morsels from his meager table.

He would set me on his lap and ask, Who am I? I would look at him with exasperation and say, "Du Depp (you moron). You are my relative." He laughed and repeated the scene when anyone new stopped in. I loved the old man; but Lenz, who courted his daughter, Leni, was my favorite. If he did not show up on time for his visits, I traipsed all over the village looking for him.

Since that trip with Tante Vefi, I have suffered from Fernweh, the aching for distant places. The trip also sealed my special bond with Tante Vefi forever.

Diversions

Mutti, Tante Vefi, and the others who worked in the kitchen used us kids as an excuse for a break when work allowed. In the winter they took us riding on rudimentary sleds they tied together. Each woman set one of us smaller children on and jumped on behind. We raced down the hill on the road from the chapel through the village until we slowed to a halt at the incline of the hill rising to Hopfengarten, the little place where Oma and Opa lived. It is an exaggeration to call it a village—there were only three or four farmhouses.

For breaks in the summer, they set us in the middle of wild strawberry patches while they put strawberries into pails. We picked and ate the sweet fruits close by. Mutti and Vefi warned us that, if we did not stop eating them, we would not get any strawberries doused with thick cream skimmed from the milk. There has never been anything better tasting than those small strawberries mashed with a fork and mixed with cream and sugar into a thick sauce.

Once I coaxed Babbe into taking me strawberry picking. I was proud that he took me. I cannot remember him doing such a thing with the other children. When we returned with a large bucket full of strawberries and Babbe handed it to Mutti, she gasped and asked, Where did you get all these, Alfons?

He knew his fields and woods well. He had found the best strawberry patches in the forest and kept them a secret. None of you bother to look diligently, otherwise you would find them, he said in a chastising way, yet in good humor.

Going into the woods with Mutti and Tante Vefi to pick raspberries was not as much fun because the bushes attacked us kids with their thorny branches. They pulled at our shirts and pants and pricked our skin. Mutti and Tante Vefi laughed at our scratches and told us to be careful. They taught us to be efficient little Germans by picking with two hands. They laughed often on these outings–what a joy it was for them to get away from the house.

With the berries, Mutti made syrup and jam. She mixed the syrup in water for a sweet summer drink and in winter drizzled it on my hot cream of wheat cooked with creamy milk. We slathered the jam on bread, cakes, and cookies.

During the spring and summer particularly, itinerant photographers came to the farm. They had done this since the invention of photography, and my family had pictures taken by them through the years, even during the war. Mutti often had them take pictures of us children and the women of the family.

Opa and Oma

Most days Mutti and Tante Vefi and the others had no time for entertaining us little ones. I was too small to help with the chores, and I was on my own for diversion. On washday the women boiled the laundry in large pots, retrieved it with wooden spoons, and plopped it onto the kitchen table. They rubbed stubborn stains with soap and scrubbed them with hog-bristle brushes. Berta and Maria had to help, and Waltraud was still so young that someone had to chase after her. Karl whined and clung to Mutti’s apron even as she leaned into the heavy work—he and I seldom played together except with his army men when he was sick. So, tired of being told to stay out of the way, I climbed down from the long bench along the wall and left.

Washdays were laborious for the women and made the kitchen steamy and smelly. It was a good day to escape–Mutti would not notice for a while that I was missing. Whenever she did notice and if no one could find me in the little time they had to look, she fretted until Babbe came into sight from the fields or from some chore or diversion.

Then she would say something like, Emmi is gone again, Alfons. Go and find her. She may be lost or in some trouble.

Your worries are wasted on that one, Rosa, he assured her with those or similar words. She’s gone up the hill to Hopfengarten to see her Opa Karl and Johanna. She’ll be back before dark, or they will send word.

On many days Opa and Oma came to Hergenstadt to help with the chores, and I missed them when they did not. They always welcomed me with happy smiles and hugs when I traveled to see them on my escapes.

I was probably the only person in the family who adored Oma Johanna. She was the only grandmother I ever knew. She was Babbe’s stepmother. He despised her, but he loved and respected his father, my Opa Karl. His respect for Opa was the only reason that I was named both for Johanna and for Babbe’s mother, Emilie–or so I thought.

Oma and Opa had no phone, so someone would have to travel up the hill to Hopfengarten if they wanted to make sure I was safely there. Whenever I was able to wheedle an overnight stay, Opa gave word to someone going from Hopfengarten to Hergenstadt, and that person stopped at the farm to deliver the message.

The road up the hill to Hopfengarten ran through thick woods. The path worn alongside it was in the edge of the woods and kept some trees and bushes between me and the horse-drawn wagons and the neighbors who were sure to be driving. Whenever I saw one, I hid so that they would not return me home.

Oma and Opa never returned me after my brave march up the long hill. They beamed when I opened their door. Oma immediately fell into a special thanksgiving prayer for my safe arrival. Opa, being more practical and less religious, fortified me with blood sausage, thinly sliced by his pocketknife. Piercing each slice with the knife, he dunked it into a small bowl of vinegar and put it on my plate. He ate his straight from the knife. For dessert I got to stick my finger into the big, glass honey jar on the bottom shelf of their wardrobe.

Thin rounds of noodle dough often lay drying on flower-sack towels spread neatly on their bed, on top of the feather ticks that kept the two of them toasty warm on cold winter nights. From those noodle rounds, Oma made the best stuffed noodles—even Babbe admitted that. Gefüllte Nudeln are similar to Italian ravioli but larger. Oma filled hers with sautéed parsley, onions, and croutons; cooked them in salt water; and then fried them in fine oil or butter.

At night I crawled up on the bed to sleep in the Graebele (the crease in the bed where the two single mattresses meet in the double frame). Above the bed hung Oma’s big picture of Jesus surrounded by children. She promised I would inherit it.

The next morning we walked the two kilometers to church in Oberkessach for mass, which they attended every day. The small chapel in Hergenstadt had a visiting priest from Adelsheim only on Sunday. They praised me for keeping up with their strides and for never complaining of being tired although I extended their walk to nearly an hour each way.

Oma prayed constantly, and I learned all the prayers. I loved the church. When I was five, I was sure that I would be a nun. Oma, however, did have one prayer that I did not adopt for myself: for God to take her soon because she could not wait to be with him.

Prayer was her answer to everything. When we could not find some misplaced item, Oma let others search while she started her litany to the saint of the lost and found. I witnessed what I thought was miracle after miracle of things found. Of course, I was young and easily impressed, but even today I like to believe that her devotion made a difference. Mutti had a different theory of finding lost items: she said, The house loses nothing, meaning, Look carefully; it’s around here somewhere.

Kubach

Oma and Opa’s was not the only home I visited. My other favorite person for escapes was Kubach. He and Tante Vefi were friendly while Onkel Sepp was away during and after the war, with no one knowing whether he would ever return. Neither had children and they poured their affection onto me, the middle child. I suppose they thought I did not get the same attention as Maria, the oldest; Karl, the only boy; or Waltraud, the beautiful baby.

One particularly nasty spring Sunday, I decided that I did not like the smell of whatever was cooking for lunch. I knew where I could get the most wonderful hard salami and white bread.

I decided to take the only companion I could boss into coming with me. I kept an eye on the busy women in the kitchen while I got little Waltraud into her coat and hat. We slipped off through the meadow toward Kubach’s home in Leibenstadt, another tiny village. The two-kilometer excursion took a long time since Waltraud, not quite three, needed frequent rests.

I was very excited when we arrived at Kubach’s. I was sure that he would be very happy to see me and to see that I had brought the beautiful Waltraud to visit him. He opened the door, and I saw his great surprise, particularly at seeing little Waltraud. But to my utter disappointment, he began right away to scold me for coming in such weather and especially for dragging my tiny sister through the wet and cold.

He hung our coats by the wood stove to dry and then sliced salami for our lunch, all the while reprimanding me for bringing her so far from home without my parent’s knowledge. He had no phone to call them. He had no way to get them word that we were not lost or kidnapped on the way to Opa’s. He could use a phone in the village as he did whenever he had to make a call, but he had to get us bundled up and into the Kutsche (carriage) even to do that. He might as well deliver us home once he had us packaged. He urged us to eat quickly while he went out and hitched up the horse.

When he closed the door, I dragged Waltraud over to show her the long, thick, blond Zopf (braid) in the glass box sitting on Kubach’s writing desk.

It’s from the head of his dead mother, I whispered importantly, introducing my sister to the secrets of adults.

As he guided the horse through the meadow path, Kubach gently continued reprimanding me for putting little Waltraud in such danger. You are a big girl and have made this walk many times, but it is too far for her. His mood lightened as we got closer to Hergenstadt. She is so small yet that she could fall into a hole and you might never find her. The village came into view and then the farmhouse and vegetable garden. There Tante Vefi stood and waved her greeting as we approached. At that point, Kubach lost all interest in reprimands.

Of course, only much later could I understand Kubach’s concern and how truly fortunate we were that nothing bad happened. I had to have children of my own to appreciate the many dangers we skirted on that little adventure and many I had later.

Everybody liked corpulent, friendly Kubach. He was noticeably older than Tante Vefi. He slaughtered and butchered for Babbe and other farmers in the area. Many farmers could not pay cash, but paid with whatever farm product they had to spare.

A person can use only so much food, particularly living alone; so he often got his pick of less necessary, but more precious items. Many of those, such as casks of wine, he brought with him when he came almost every evening. He relaxed with Mutti and Tante Vefi in our living room.

The women liked getting out of the kitchen. It had been their workroom all day, and the table and bench were rough and worn.