Memoirs of Marie Therese Miller-Degenfeld: An International Life in the Twentieth Century

By Marie Therese Miller-Degenfeld

Born Countess Marie Therese von Degenfeld-Schonburg, growing up as the beloved only daughter of a mother and aunt in one of the most beautiful castles in Bavaria, Neubeuern, Maria throws aside the protocols and expectations of the German aristocracy to marry an American diplomat. Born in 1908 and dying in 2005, Maria's life spanned the 20th century, two world wars, and encompassed life on four continents. Her eclectic education included personal correspondence and instruction from poet, Hugo v Hofmanstahl, instilling an ability to write openly and frankly whatever was on her heart. Her experiences with the major events of her century, her philosophy and views on volunteer service, the church, and other issues make this book an unusual picture of a 20th century life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Dec 20, 2006
• ISBN: 9781426939679

Marie Therese Miller-Degenfeld

Born Countess Marie-Therese von Degenfeld-Schonburg on January 14th 1908. Maria married American diplomat, Ralph Miller of New York City, and served with him in many foreign posts from 1932 until 1953. In 1958 she founded the Virginia Chapter of Recording for the Blind in Charlottesville and served on its board until her death at 97. She was a founding member of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She edited two books of her mother's correspondence with Austrian poet, Hofmanstahl, Hugo von Hofmanstahl - Ottonie von Degenfeld Briefwechsel, (two editions 1974 and 1976), S. Fischer Verlag, and The Poet And The Countess, 2000, Camden House. Maria lived an active life as a widow for 46 years dividing her time seasonally between homes Virginia, Barbados, and Bavaria. She in died on February 16th 2005, days after completing her memoirs.

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Copyright 2006 Marie Therese Miller-Degenfeld.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Names of Family

Introduction: My Three Lives

Book One:   Marie-Therese Countess Degenfeld-Schonburg, Baby

Part One:   My Family

Chapter 1     My Father

Chapter 2     Eybach

Chapter 3     Sweety

Chapter 4     Sisi

Chapter 5     My Bodenhausen Cousins

Part Two:   My Childhood

Chapter 6     The Child Marie Therese

Chapter 7     Neubeuern-Hinterhör

Chapter 8     History of the Neubeuern School

Chapter 9     Christmas

Part Three:   My Early Years

Chapter 10   Boarding School

Chapter 11   1925 Geneva

Chapter 12   After School and Debutante

Chapter 13   My First Trip to the USA

Chapter 14   My First Trip to Greece

Chapter 15   Books and Thoughts

Part Four:   My Ralph

Chapter 16   Meeting Ralph

Chapter 17   Mildred Miller

Chapter 18   Preparations and our Wedding

Book Two:   Mrs. Ralph Miller

Part Five:   Our Diplomatic Life

Chapter 19   Montevideo

Chapter 20   Interim in Washington and Back to Europe

Chapter 21   England 1935-1937

Chapter 22   The Batesons

Chapter 23   Home Leave 1937

Chapter 24   Cuba

Part Six:   The War Years

Chapter 25   Yule Farm

Chapter 26   Cairo

Chapter 27   Return to Hinterhör in 1945

Chapter 28   Summer of 1945

Part Seven   Ralph’s Last Years

Chapter 29   Canada

Chapter 30   End of Foreign Service

Chapter 31   Citizen

Chapter 32   Life as a Diplomat’s Wife

Book Three:   Marie-Therese Miller-Degenfeld

Part Eight:Travels

Greece: 1964

Barbados 1964-2001

Incaland and Beyond: 1974

Mayaland

Costa Rica: 1996

Trips with Grandchildren

Part Nine:   Hugo von Hofmanstahl

Memories of Hugo von Hofmannsthal

My Friendship with the HvH Society

The HvH Letters

Part Ten:   Reflections on My Life

Christmas

My Birthdays

Maria and the Church

Volunteering

Music in My Life

Foreword

My mother, Marie Therese died at her home, Yule Farm, in Charlottesville Virginia on February 16th, 2005 just after her 97th birthday. She was born Marie Therese Johanna Julie Charlotte Maragethe Dorothea, Countess von Degenfeld-Schonburg. She lived to be ninety-seven, but in the 69 years I knew her I heard her say her full name only once. Researching the names of our Degenfeld cousins in Eybach, I find that seven first names is the norm, so it must have been the custom to honor all god-parents and most family members at every family baptism.

Mother wrote the following saga of her life as a work of love for her two children, seven grandchildren, and thirteen great-grandchildren to leave us a legacy of her life’s experiences and family history. To her dying day, she was clear-headed and had the most amazing memory. After researching, editing and publishing two books on her mother’s correspondence with poet, Hugo von Hofmanstahl, she developed the writing and researching skills and work ethic to become an interesting writer and story-teller. During her last thirty-five years she would spend most of her mornings researching or writing. For fun she would on occasion weave a delightful fairy tale around some incident she had found in our family history.

This tale of Marie Therese’s life spanning the 20th century (1908-2005), contains an intimate eye-witness account of a turbulent century, written by a diplomat’s wife who lived through its history on four continents, meeting many of its key players.

At ninety-six mother had still rarely ever been sick and continued to pursue her writing and active social life in her three homes, Yule Farm, Barbados, and Nussdorf. At that time she told me that because of her age she’d considered death but really quite liked her life and had decided to stay here! When she suddenly started feeling ill in the fall of 2004, she was diagnosed with a tumor in her bile duct. On hearing the diagnosis she said, "Well I guess one has to die of something. When it was deemed to be terminal we asked the doctor how long she might expect to live, as she was trying to finish writing this book. The doctor’s reply was, She should write fast."

Maria was, as usual, still very absorbed with her writing, her correspondence, and Recording for the Blind (she was honored at RFB’s 2005 fund-raiser ball just a couple of weeks before her death.) In short, she wasn’t sure she could fit her demise into a busy schedule!

Mother continued working on this manuscript until the end of 2004 with the intent that it would be published after her death. Professor Clifford A. Kiracofe, who had the gift of being able to read her handwriting, performed over several years the monumental task of keying her manuscripts into the computer and helping her with the editing and organization. Her dear friends, Professor and Mrs. Austen were helping her with the editing and planned a visit to work with her in early 2005. They were at Yule Farm when she died.

Names of Family

As I have written these memoirs for my own descendants, I have often used the nicknames people in my family went by:

•   Marie Therese Miller: née Comtesse Marie-Therese Degenfeld-Schonburg, known as Baby Degenfeld to the family, Maria Miller in America, Marie-Therese Miller-Degenfeld in Europe, and Oma to all my grand and great-grandchildren.

•   My mother, Countess Ottonie von Degenfeld-Schonburg: was Toenne to her siblings and Sweety to me, a name most friends eventually called her.

•   My aunt, Baroness Julie von Wendelstadt, née Countess Degenfeld-Schonburg: my father’s sister, was called Sisi (pronounced Zeezee), by all those close to her.

•   My father’s younger sister, Dorothea Baroness Bodenhausen: was known as Mädi.

•   My maternal grandparents, Hans and Margarete von Schwartz: I called Opa and Oma.

•   My paternal grandmother, Anna Countess von Degenfeld-Schonburg: was Ama to me.

For further interest in the family tree, see Appendix 1.

Introduction:

My Three Lives

Born in 1908, I am now nearly one hundred years old, a long life which seems to have had three entirely separate parts. In this narrative, I start with my childhood, come to the twenty-six years of being a wife to my American Ralph, and end with the long years I am still here alone.

Looking back, it seems to me that I have lived three separate lives. My childhood and growing up in Germany was followed by a life in the big wide world. Diplomatic dinners and royal receptions contrast totally from being an American farmer living at Yule Farm during World War II followed by many busy years alone.

Part I of this book was my life in Bavaria where I grew up and lived until I was 24 years old and got married in 1932. During those years of Marie-Therese Countess Degenfeld-Schonburg, I was Baby Degenfeld to family and friends. The word baby lost its connotation and turned in German into a name for me, so this first part of my life belonged to Baby Degenfeld.

Part II of my life I call The Life of Mrs. Ralph Miller, the diplomat’s wife. It is the life of the mother raising her two children, Rilice and Ralph, and moving from one part of the world to the next. All that happened between 1932 and 1959, when Ralph died very suddenly, aged 55, leaving me alone, a widow, at 51.

Part III, the third of these three lives, is the one of Maria Miller in the USA, or Marie-Therese Miller-Degenfeld in Germany. This is by far the longest part of My Three Lives.

Most women live at least two lives: the one growing up, being educated, and then finding their direction or destination. This period is never easy; one finds and then follows one’s inclinations or chooses a job or lives as a homemaker. After puberty, sex starts to play an important role; more often than not it becomes our guide in the choice of a mate. I am afraid that the importance of sex in youth often misleads people. They choose their heart-throb and, while they age, they find that first they had only looked at the outside of this mate, the beauty or glamour that had drawn them to him. Then, often, his character turns out not to be what was expected. This is why so many marriages end in divorce.

With me it was different. Yes, at first glance I did fall in love with this handsome young American. However, I soon had to realize that he, according to the tradition of my family, just was not eligible for me. The family veto created a big problem for me. I felt crushed when I was given the decisive No! by my family to my heart’s desire to marry this American. I had been groomed and educated by my adopted mother, Sisi, to be her successor in Neubeuern, and to that end I was expected to marry a German, or at least a European, aristocrat.

However, between my first meeting with Ralph and the decisive third one, fate had given me four years to think, and to grow up. (At our second meeting, I broke our relationship and told him that I couldn’t marry him.) I feel certain that Sisi’s disastrous second marriage had made me analyze each of my suitors very carefully, always with the question in mind, Do you really love me, or is the lure of owning my inheritance, the beautiful castle, Neubeuern, in the forefront of your thoughts? With Ralph, I was quite certain that he loved only me and had no thoughts about owning the castle. He rather wished to take me away from there, and that is what finally convinced me that it was right to follow him. We were both deeply in love with each other. I know, at that time, I felt I had found my lost other half, and that we belonged together.

It was in Paris, after all the wedding festivities had ended and we spent a last night in Europe, that I realized that I was now about to leave my home, all my loved ones, yes and even my country forever. After I had talked to both Sweety and Sisi on the phone once more, I broke down in floods of tears. With loving care and a champagne dinner at the Ritz, Ralph finally helped me to be myself again. Smiling the following day, I stepped on the Cap Arcona to sail from Cherbourg into my new life in the New World.

Book One:

Marie-Therese Countess Degenfeld-Schonburg, Baby

Part One:

My Family

Chapter 1:

My Father: Christoph-Martin Count Degenfeld-Schonburg (1866-1908)

Unfortunately, I cannot remember my father at all as he died of cancer three months after I was born. He was another Christoph-Martin, a name that returns again and again in the Degenfeld family. His life ended at age forty-two, only two years after falling head over heels in love with the young lady, Ottonie von Schwartz, who was helping to take care of his dying father. Father Alfred still had the pleasure of seeing the young couple’s happy engagement before he died in January 1906. Ottonie and Christoph were married in May 1906. Less than two years later, in April 1908, the young mother stood there with me, Marie-Therese, in her arms at his deathbed.

When moving from Hinterhör to Nussdorf in 1984, I carried boxes full of old papers and letters along, which had been kept for years at Hinterhör attic. It took me several summers to slowly go through these papers, and to decide what to do with them: what to discard and what to keep and act upon? In 2001, I decided it was time to open and read my father’s letters. I started with his letters home, to his father and more often to his mother. Now aged 93, I suddenly discovered this charming young man, my father Christoph Martin, or Stoffel as he was called. All of a sudden, this ghost turned into a real person for me. What joy!

It has always been a great sorrow to me that I had never known my father. His photographs show him tall and slender, with brown hair, wearing a little mustache. I am told he had gray-blue eyes and from all accounts he was a young gentleman of great charm. At age eight, he was sent away to boarding school. After that, his father, who having been a splendid cavalry officer, put him in a cavalry school. From there, he immediately entered the cavalry regiment of the Württemberg Yellow Dragoons. He loved the life of a cavalry officer and, just like his father, he adored horses.

Apparently, during those days in the military, he sent his laundry home every week and, returning his well-ironed shirts, his mother always added some kind of cookies or homemade specialty. Thereupon, a loving letter of thanks was always returned to his dear mother. Half the letters start with, It is nearly midnight, but I can’t go to sleep without thanking you.

In his early 30s, this young officer, who obviously must have made a name for himself in his regiment, was chosen to be the aide and chamberlain to Duke Albrecht, the successor to the King of Württemberg. Apparently, the Duke had chosen my father to be his aide because they had much in common as both loved horses and hunting. The Duke and his family were Roman Catholics, and my Lutheran father had to share their life, including going to church with them. I am told, Degenfeld was always very visible on these occasions, standing tall as a ramrod, while the whole congregation knelt, as Lutherans never kneel.

As the duke’s wife had died while giving birth to her sixth child, there was no one to run that big household, full of children. So this young bachelor, Christoph-Martin Degenfeld, had to take care of it all. This meant finding and installing servants, nannies, and tutors, as well as keeping the household accounts and paying all the staff. In his letters, I can see that they were always short of money and still they had to keep up appearances. Father also had to keep the Duke’s list of social obligations, had to arrange his dinners and organize balls to the last detail, discussing the menus with the cook, ordering the flowers, and making all the seating arrangements. Beside this court life, he was still an officer in his regiment, and had his own company to care for. I do not know how he did it all; he must have burned the midnight oil as letters to his mother usually start, It’s after midnight.

Whether it was lack of time or interest, Christoph told Ottonie in a letter that he had never fallen deeply in love before meeting her. At that time, he was thirty-nine years old. In one of his letters during their courtship, I read the following, I can only marry a rich girl, as I am far from rich myself. She then warned him saying, You’d better think again, as I am as poor as a church mouse, being the tenth child of her parents eleven children. His answer was, My dearest, I could have married rich princesses, who would constantly wish to dress up and do nothing but go to balls and amuse themselves, but that never appealed to me. I know that you can be happy with as little as I can. I feel sure that, in spirit, you are richer than anyone else I know.

When I opened those boxes of letters, I was amazed by the size of the young couple’s correspondence. Less than two years had passed between their courtship, marriage, and his untimely death, and in this short time, they seem to have been separated as much as they were together. On those occasions they seemed to have written each other every day.

Ottonie entered Christoph’s life while she was staying in Eybach, helping to nurse his father in his last illness. There a charming relationship had developed between the old man and this young girl. My grandfather seemed to have fallen in love with Ottonie, and she reciprocated in a very natural and delightful way. This, apparently, put my grandmother’s nose out of joint, as she seemed to be jealous of this flirtation.

As often as possible, Christoph-Martin rushed home for short visits to see his old and obviously dying father. During these visits, it seems he had suddenly lost his heart to Ottonie. On one of his quick visits, he popped the question and the two young people got engaged. My mother told me a charming little tale of the time she and Christoph had just gotten engaged. Christoph had slipped a ring off his finger and put it on Ottonie’s. So the following day, Christoph’s sister Mädy, recognizing her brother’s ring on Ottonie’s finger, lectured her. Ottonie, one can’t accept and wear a ring from a man, unless one is engaged to him, she said. Ottonie answered, And if that is the case! The two of them had hoped to keep this engagement secret for a little while but now the cat was out of the bag and great joy spread through the entire house. I suppose the family had given up hope that this old bachelor would ever get married; and right away, the slightly hurt feelings of mother Degenfeld turned into love toward this new daughter.

Now a few days into the new year of 1906, they had to lay dear grandfather into his grave. Then the plans and preparations for their wedding had to be made. May 5th was the date they chose and Ottonie departed for Sondershausen where she had to break the news to her family. The von Schwartz family had to swallow the surprise but they were always ready for a party. I am sure they threw themselves with zest into the wedding preparations and the small town of Sondershausen was agog that their well known little Ottonie was walking to the altar with a count.

Already before setting their wedding date, my father knew that he would not be living in Stuttgart for the next few years. His boss, the Duke, being a general, was made General in Command of the district of Kassel in Hesse. So it seemed useless to look for a flat somewhere in Stuttgart, where his own bachelor’s apartment would have been too small for the two of them. For that reason, Christoph planned a rather long honeymoon in Switzerland. During those three months, my father had to return every three weeks to Stuttgart for a few days to attend to the Duke’s business, paying the staff, and seeing that all was running well. During that week, Ottonie would either stay with friends of her own or with very charming cousins of the Degenfelds in Geneva, the Bunges. A generation later, these same cousins were very kind and hospitable to me when I spent a year in Geneva studying French.

Soon after their honeymoon in Switzerland was over, where they had enjoyed climbing the peaks of the Swiss Alps together, Ottonie was called back to Eybach to take care of her mother-in-law, my Ama, who was in poor health. It was not until months later that she could, finally, start keeping house with her husband in Kassel.

Now his letters came alternately from Stuttgart and from Kassel. My father had to take charge of the Duke’s move with his six children and their large household with servants, tutors and governesses. He had to make the palace of the former Duke of Hesse-Kassel, who no longer resided there, and which had been placed at Duke Albrecht’s disposal, livable and cozy for him. He also had to find a house for himself and his bride. Now the letters talk mostly about furniture and wedding gifts that had arrived. Ottonie should write thank you notes, without having seen these gifts.

My father seemed very close to his sister Julie, my Aunt Sisi. During the past years, whenever he could get away for a few days from his duties, he would visit her in Neubeuern and, if possible, climb up to her cabin on the Heuberg to shoot a buck. He was a passionate hunter. His happiest days were when he had to accompany the Duke and his two brothers on their annual hunting trips in the Austrian Alps.

Christoph and Julie seemed to be the caretakers of their entire family. They had a brother, my Uncle Fredy, who was mentally retarded and lived somewhere in a little town near Eybach, with a male nurse. Brother and sister shared caring for him. And then there was their youngest sister Mädy, who seemed to spend more time in Eybach or in Neubeuern, with her children, than with her husband Eberhard von Bodenhausen (Reinhild’s grandfather) in the Rhineland, where he was a director of the famous Krupp steel works.

With Mädy, things always seemed to be dramatic, and she would call for help. Once, when she had lost a maid or a nanny, she had the nerve to ask Sweety for my nanny, Mary, to be sent to her. Or she would just bring her children to Eybach, or to Neubeuern, and dump them there. She had been the youngest of my grandparents’ four children, and my grandfather had loved and spoiled her to death; so, to my mind, she never really grew up. All my life, I can remember hearing Sweety and Sisi saying, Poor Mädy. Something I could never quite understand: why poor? Her charming husband had an important position and was a very prominent figure. But she always seemed to cry out for help, and drove her husband, and everyone else, to distraction.

With his rather small income, my father always managed to find the right gifts for everyone. He never asked, What is your wish? Instead, he watched until he found out, and then there would be the right gift. According to my mother, his motto was, I’m not rich enough for cheap buying – most times those cheap things don’t last anyway. So his gifts were always first class.

It surprised me very much to find mention in his letters that Ottonie seemed to be in poor health. After my grandfather’s death, she certainly had been overworked from nursing and lifting him. So they sent her right away to recuperate at her friend Carola’s who was newly married to a rich man owning a house on the French Riviera. This was Christoph’s and her first separation. Then returning from their honeymoon, after nursing her mother-in-law, Ottonie herself had to go to Wiesbaden for a cure. While expecting me, she was sent to spend six weeks in Sisi’s hunting lodge on the Heuberg as the altitude was to alleviate her constant migraine headaches. As long as I can remember, she suffered monthly from those terrible migraine headaches so that she had to lie down in a dark room for one or two days and I was told to be quiet and not to disturb her.

The nervous exhaustion Sweety experienced after having gone through my very difficult birth from which to recover she never had taken time, followed by my father’s death, was disastrous for her. She could not walk after my father’s burial, as a severe shock had set in. For eighteen months she had to use a wheelchair. A Swedish osteopath in Wiesbaden helped her to slowly regain her strength.

To me, Sweety was strong, healthy, and very sporty. She loved to play tennis, which was much slower and tamer than today’s game. They wore long skirts, and always hit the ball to their opponent, not away from their opponent. While watching me play with friends, she once called me aside during our game to reprimand me saying, You are very unsporting in your game by always knocking the ball as far from your opponent as possible. It took her quite a while to understand the difference between her tennis of the nineteenth century and ours of the twentieth. Her most beloved sport was hiking through the mountains, and in the winter she was quite a good skier. She started to teach me skiing when I was four years old, and she herself kept it up way into her seventies.

Naturally, had my father lived, both her and my life would have followed a very different path. We probably would have lived in Stuttgart and, if the world had not changed entirely after World War I, his Duke would have been king. Then they had plans to fix a farmhouse on the Alb to live in rather than living in the old castle as Ottonie had never been a fan of castles.

As fate changed all this, who am I to ask questions? I am very thankful with the way my life has turned out. My family did all they could for me so that I should not suffer from being a fatherless child. I grew up in a happy and healthy atmosphere, though I always missed having siblings.

On starting to read his letters, while noticing his small handwriting, I suddenly saw that he had used the German script. Unfortunately, this is no longer used or taught in Germany. I find this to be a tragedy as no one can now decipher their ancestor’s letters. Thank God I had learned to read and write as he did, hence I had no problem with his letters. Through my father’s letters, I also got a new understanding of my Degenfeld grandmother. I only remember her after she had had a stroke, when she obviously was no longer the same person she used to be. My father often mentions his mother’s generosity. It seems that she had some income of her own and used it like he did, giving gifts in a very kind and thoughtful way. I have never been told much about her life before her marriage, except that the Hügels lived in a castle called Rheinthal in southwest Germany, where she and her brother, Paul Baron Hügel, grew up and had a carefree life.

Also in my father’s letters, I discovered his love of nature – letting me see the heavenly blue of a mountain gentian or a golden meadow of trollius – in this, I recognize myself. I probably have inherited my great love of nature from him as well as from Sweety.

It is also amazing how certain family traits skip a generation, and how his love for horses has been reborn in Rilice; however, she got that from her father, too. So far, none of you seem to have inherited his real passion for hunting deer or other animals; however, this may also have to do with our rather different lifestyle today. Until I had read his letters, I hadn’t realized how charming my father Christoph-Martin had been. I am now so happy that I was given this chance to get acquainted with him through his own letters. I do wish, however, that Sweety had given the letters to me sooner, when I could still have asked her questions; how much more would I have learned to understand and to love this father.

Sweety told me that he was ready to die, when the finality of his illness became clear to him, but he suffered from the thought of having to leave her and this newborn baby behind. That is when he talked with his sister Julie, and she assured him that she and Jan would take care of his family. Sweety told me that, after she laid me in his arms, she heard him sadly talking to his child thus: Do you suppose you and I can play hide and seek together in the long row of linden trees in Eybach some day?

He was given a near regal funeral. The Duke came with his two brothers. His own company of the Yellow Dragoons was there to carry him, ahead of the family and many friends, to the cemetery in Eybach.

Chapter 2:

Eybach

The Degenfeld ancestral castle, Schloss Eybach, in the village of the same name, is situated in Württemberg, a former kingdom, now a state in the Federal Republic of Germany. In that part of Germany there are very ancient, low, rocky mountains known as the Alb, and in one of its tight little valleys lies Eybach. Before the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the castle had stood on top of the Alb. It was totally destroyed during that war. In 1709, another generation of Degenfelds built a new castle, this time down in the valley. It is nestled against the rocks on which the old castle had stood. Arriving on the valley road and after passing through the village, you enter the courtyard through an iron gate, a much needed protection for our ancestors and their belongings in the old days. In the courtyard, to the right were the stables: one of these oldest buildings is still in existence today. After World War II, my Degenfeld cousins transformed this stable into living quarters for refugees from Eastern Europe. While excavating there, they found artifacts from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Separating the village from the castle is a little brook (Bach) called the Eyb (Eibe, yew tree). The village and the brook derive their name, Eybach, from the remains of very old yew trees in the castle garden.

The L-shaped castle, a typical Renaissance building of three stories, has large oval entry doors. These open into a rather cold stone entrance hall with high ceilings and a wide stone staircase where you shiver even in summer. Remaining downstairs, you pass the large reception hall with a fireplace on each end. Enormous paintings of royalty, and of ancestors as well as a view into a formal garden greet you there. The Eyb is rolling by on the street side and a fountain sends a cascade up in the air in front of the façade of the building. My young cousin, Madeleine, who trained as a landscape gardener before her marriage to Ferdinand Degenfeld, the present heir, has done a lovely job of laying out flowerbeds all along the paths. Unfortunately, the row of tall linden trees that grew along the hillside, and in which I played as a child, have all died of old age and are now, I’m glad to say, being replaced by young linden trees.

All the corridors in the castle are plastered with portraits of ancestors, some in armor and some in their period costumes. They all seemed to be staring at me and, naturally, that scared me when I was little. The salons, with their high ceilings and eight-foot windows, look out onto the formal gardens with the big fountain, in which usually large trout swim around waiting to be eaten. Large ancient tile stoves of great beauty stand in those salons and gave the freezing people some heat. Hidden behind those rooms are the family archives with the historically valuable family memorabilia. As a great treat, my cousin Gottfried would sometimes lead us there and show us some of the ancient family heirlooms.

After his father’s death, the L-shaped three-story building, where my grandfather Alfred grew up, was divided. One part was to be his and the other his stepmother’s. As he was a people person, he chose the part that had most of the bedrooms because it overlooked the gate. He liked to see his peasants, woodsmen, and farmers walk by, he would have a friendly little chat with all. They, apparently, all adored him. Being the son of his father’s first wife, he was the heir to the estate. His half-brother now moved with his mother into the more elegant front part of the building, which had French doors leading over stone steps into the gardens.

While my father and his siblings grew up, the relations between the two sides of the family were still rather strained on account of my grandfather’s very dictatorial stepmother.

This lady, née Baroness von Norman, was known by my father and his sisters as the nasty Norman. She showed little love for her stepchildren, and treated them with disdain. Here I should mention that Alfred’s older brother, again a Christoph-Martin, for reasons of his own, decided not to accept his inheritance of Eybach and all that went with it. Instead, in the mid-19th century, he sailed to the United States.

My grandmother in Eybach, whom I called Ama, always seemed extremely old to me. She always was dressed in black, with a little black cap edged with white lace on her head. She must have been in her seventies then, much younger than I am now as I write this. As she had had a stroke, she walked slowly with a cane and always needed help. To me, she was not a grandmother to cuddle up to as I did with Oma. I never got the feeling of being really close to Ama.

I can’t recall when I first was taken to Eybach, but I do remember those very early trips when we went to stay with my Ama Degenfeld. I must have been three or four years old then. Every summer, Sisi, Sweety, and I, naturally with my nanny, Mary, would travel by train to Eybach. The train took us to the small town of Geislingen, where we arrived about mid-afternoon, and an hour’s drive in a horse carriage conveyed us to Eybach, always arriving by teatime. A table laden with wonderful buttered Bretzels always awaited us. The Bretzels in Eybach were the best in the world, and I eagerly looked forward to them as I never had a special sweet tooth and chose Bretzels over cake.

Each year it always turned out to be a well-organized expedition lasting the whole month of August. There was no electricity in the castle in those days; kerosene lamps or candles gave the light and only the large old tile stoves heated the rooms; I suppose that is why we only went in summer. There were no bathrooms and only very cold WCs. A maid brought a round tin tub into the bedroom in the morning, and she placed pitchers of hot and cold water next to it. Mary would sit me in the middle of the tub and scrub me. That was how one lived in Eybach in those days. It seemed quite Spartan and was a very different kind of life from that in Neubeuern, which had been renovated with all modern conveniences just before I was born.

We used to arrive in Eybach carrying two large cardboard boxes containing wreaths made by the gardener in Neubeuern. They were to be placed on the graves of my father and grandfather. After tea, the wreaths were taken out of their brown boxes by a dear old servant. I can still see him carrying those heavy wreaths, one in each hand, while Sisi, Sweety, Mary, and I walked beside him to the cemetery. It took about ten minutes walking through the village, past a little pond with very fierce geese. We were all scared to pass these hissing geese and I held my Mary’s hand very tightly.

Arriving at the cemetery, we first passed through the part where the local people were buried. Then we opened a wrought-iron gate in the rear to a little garden where the Degenfelds are buried. Now the wreaths were placed on the graves and I was told, "Here lies your Papi." I knew that a Papi was a father and that I didn’t have one. I didn’t miss a father because I never knew one. I was happy with my two mothers: Sweety and Sisi. But the thought that he should be lying there, unseen, made me feel very uncomfortable. I was too young to take it all in. Why did the grown-ups look so sad? And why did tears run down my Sweety’s cheeks? All this made me feel very uneasy and, for that reason, I disliked the whole place Eybach.

We were again in Eybach for our August visit in 1914, when World War I had just started. The first thing I remember from that visit was Sweety taking me to the railroad station in Geislingen. There stood a tremendously long train filled with soldiers. We, as some other people, were handing out chocolates, candy, cigarettes, and flowers to give some cheer to those troops headed for war. I was fascinated by these cheery soldiers in their uniforms.

Then a trainman offered to show me the engine. I was six years old by then and was delighted with that offer. The conductor lifted me up into the locomotive and, suddenly, the engine started puffing, the whistle blowing, the train moved; I got scared. The train had only advanced a little bit so that the soldiers further back would also get some of the attention and goodies. After a short while, the whistle started blowing again and the train started puffing and moving, yes, really moving, and off it went with me there alone on the engine, without my Sweety. Naturally, I got very frightened and started to cry for my Sweety while the dear engineer was trying to comfort me. There was no way to stop the train at that point as it was going up a steep hill with nowhere to stop and get off. So I had to ride with them all the way to the next station. My memory stops before my happy reunion with Sweety; I only recall my frightened tears.

At that time, the garden wing of the Schloss was inhabited by an old aunt, Tante Gabriele, the widow of grandfather’s stepbrother, and her two spinster daughters. I remember them always dressed in rather dark, old, dowdy clothes. The taller of the two was Tante Jella, who was often seen in the yard taking care of her chickens. She, apparently, had a real passion for chickens and, being a little queer in the head, she decided once she had to help a hen that wouldn’t sit on her eggs to hatch them. She took the nest of eggs to bed with her and remained with them there for three weeks, hoping to hatch live chickens. I can’t vouch for the story or the results; I only heard about it later as all were laughing at the dear old lady.

Her sister, Tante Liselotte, was even crazier than Tante Jella. She apparently had a religious mania that drove her to commit suicide. I think she stated in a note she left behind that a female sacrifice was needed to counteract the killings men did in war. So she jumped from the 200 foot high rock, where the first castle had once stood, down into the garden and to her death. I wasn’t supposed to know or hear anything about her death because all such events were kept from children in those days. But everyone was whispering and I had the uneasy feeling that something dreadful had happened. The afternoon of the funeral, I was put to bed for my nap as usual. However, I knew strange things were going on, and nobody seemed to be nearby, neither Sweety nor my Mary. So I crept out of bed and tiptoed through the corridor to a window that looked out into the garden. There I saw a long dark box being carried through the garden by people all dressed in black carrying wreaths. The dark box seemed very mysterious and very frightening to me.

This whole affair was very upsetting to me as I did not understand what it was all about. I dared not ask because I had disobeyed strict orders not to get out of bed. I had a very bad conscience for a long time. It was an experience I remember so vividly to this day, and from which I have learned that one should never leave small children all alone in a house. I had nightmares about it for years.

Before her death, Ama Degenfeld spent the winters with us in Neubeuern and the rest of the year in Eybach. Some of my earliest memories are the outings with my grandmother in a horse-drawn carriage, or sleigh in winter, in Neubeuern. On this particular day, we were riding in a sleigh. The early spring snow was starting to melt so, at times, the sleigh made crunchy noises on the pebbles. We were covered with blankets and they were covered with fur rugs, fox furs with tails hanging down the back of the sled, so one was always warm and cozy in cold weather. I also remember wearing a little brown leather coat and a fur-lined bonnet to match. I know this little outfit well as Sweety had kept it and Rilice wore it when she was a baby on our two Christmases in Neubeuern.

Now it was time for the first snowdrops to peek out in places. Suddenly, the coachman, who was also keen on wild flowers, discovered some. He stopped the sleigh, and lifted me to the ground, as I got very excited and absolutely wanted to pick some snowdrops myself to bring to my beloved Sisi. I distinctly remember that I fell over while trying to pick the little white flowers: I really must have been very tiny, maybe three years old, not to be able to break off a snowdrop without tumbling down. I think this is my very first memory.

In the 1920s, when we would go back to Eybach again after World War I, it was to see how my Uncle Fredy, father’s invalid younger brother, was getting along. He was mentally retarded. After my grandmother had died in 1915, he was moved to Eybach with his male nurse. He had the mentality of an eight to ten-year-old child. However, it was astonishing how he still spoke perfect English and French, naturally with a child’s vocabulary. He had learned both those languages at home and he never forgot them. Again, he made Eybach a kind of depressing place for all of us with his unpredictable moods.

I had two cousins who also lived there. They were the sons of Uncle Konrad, son of Tante Gabriele, and Aunt Ilka. The older one, Kurt, was a few years younger than I. He was very good looking, a really dear boy, and we had lots of fun together. The younger, Martin, was an epileptic and was rather difficult. Kurt was full of pranks, and I remember how mad he made me once by dropping a live frog down my neck. Poor Kurt, the heir to the place, became a casualty of the terrible battle of Stalingrad in World War II. Martin lived on into his seventies, and, through his long illness, he had become rather weird, much like my Uncle Fredy and his two aunts. At times he became aggressive. I