Tante Friedas Geburtstag

Frieda at Sweet Sixteen

This blog entry will not mean much to most of the people I know, but today is the birthday of one of the five most important women of my childhood and youth, my Aunt Frieda. Other women joined their number over the years, but there is something special about these five, all born in the last decade of the 19th Century. I want to take a minute to bring Tante Frieda front and center, as well as mention the other four, in passing.

I was blessed with not two, but three grandmothers, as well as the sister of one and the sister-in-law of another, whom I credit with helping me know what it is to be loved and nurtured as a child and as a young man and given a sense of self that would see me through some hard times over the years. I’m talking about: Mabel, born in 1892, my paternal grandmother;  Carrie, born in 1896, Mabel’s sister;  Bertha, born in 1895, my maternal grandmother, whom I called Großmutter; Johanne, born in 1890, Bertha’s sister,  who took my mother in and brought her to America in 1923, after her own mother had to give her up in the middle of the Great War, 1914-18, and was known far and wide as Mutti, because that’s what my mother called her and because she fit the stereotype of a woman who baked for the world and made all strangers at her table into family.  And Frieda, born approximately 1890, who became the Lebensgefährtin (life partner) of Otto, the brother of Theo, my grandmother Bertha’s second husband, whom I called Großvater after he married Großmutter and enabled her to reclaim my mother (they lived next door to Mutti and Vati on Riverside Avenue in Torrington, Connecticut, where I was born).

I credit Tante Frieda with anchoring me in Berlin and giving me reason to want to emigrate there. And with the fact that I had to live a life of regret over a “history of things that never happened” when I failed to make that dream come true, partly because she died before I could pull it off, and partly because I got distracted by life in Japan.

Frieda is the only non-blood relative in the nurturing five, but was no less important in my life for all that. In fact, she outlived not only Onkel Otto, but all her other friends and family, and kept me coming back to Berlin for many years, particularly at Christmas time, because I couldn’t stand the idea of her spending that time alone.

Tante Frieda was a chemist, and remained in Berlin all through the war as the city came crashing down around her. Two weeks after it ended, a train trestle collapsed on her husband, killing him and leaving her to make her way alone in the wreckage of the Third Reich. Otto had lost his wife in the war, as well, and after a time they began spending their days together and eventually formed what was known in the day as an “Onkelehe” - an “uncle marriage” - in which two people got together but chose not to marry because if they did they would lose the studio apartments they had been assigned after so many years of waiting to get out from under living in a single room in somebody else’s apartment. Otto would take the bus every day to Frieda’s. She would make lunch, they would hang out, walk in the park, attend concerts and theater performances, and live pretty much as a couple, except that Otto would return to his studio at night. Today, these arrangements are called “life partnerships” and some are recognized the way common-law marriages are.

She was Frieda Müller, he was Otto Schmidt; they bore two of the most common names in the Germany of their day; John Smith meet Mary Jones. Soon after I entered the scene she began calling him “Null Null,” making fun of the fact that “Onkel Otto” - the letters OO - were the symbol of a public toilet. Not everybody’s idea of a good sense of humor, but it was done with great affection and I saw that they were happy together.

I tried for years to get her to talk about the war years. I learned from friends that her job as a chemist meant that she was considered a state official and there was pressure for her to join the Nazi Party. She refused, and as a result was frequently assigned the job of standing guard all night long. One night, when the air raid shelter she was in collapsed, she was forced to crawl through the dust in the dark into the shelter in the building next door. The floors were uneven and she took a bad fall, resulting in the loss of hearing in first one, then both of her ears. She wore a hearing aid in both ears, but found the buzzing so annoying she took them out when she was home alone. And she didn’t have a telephone. And that meant if I showed up unannounced I could drive the entire apartment house nuts until I could get her to realize I was pounding on the door. We took to leaving a broom in the hallway with a flag on the end of it to stick through the mail slot for those occasions. Even then, there were times when she was napping or forgot to leave the door to the hallway open and didn’t see me waving frantically for her attention.

I loved hanging out with her. She had an active mind and a curiosity about the world that made her a great storyteller and conversationalist. I would bring my friends Ed and Bonnie and Bob and Merrill over with me and Kaffee und Kuchen made those occasions feel as if we were celebrating birthdays. 

Some years after my time in the army ended* and I was going back only for a few weeks at a time, we went to an afternoon concert and ended up at the cafe at the top of the KaDeWe Department Store, just off the Kudamm in downtown Berlin. The West German government had decided to drive home the point that West Berlin belonged to the Federal Republic and arranged for a meeting of the Bundestag to be held in Berlin. The East Germans protested loudly and the Russians decided to fly their planes at eye level just over the tops of the buildings in the city. You could actually see the pilots and the roar was almost beyond endurance.

It was the only time I ever saw Tante Frieda throw in the towel. “I’ve got to go home. Too many war memories,” she said. And finally, she opened up about the war experiences and I got to hear some real horror stories of bodies in the street and death in all directions. The next day, though, she was back, her normal affable self again, making each day count. 

Another memory that sticks with me is the memory of the Bohnenkönig game she made us all play. My friend Achim and his wife Margit would have us over for Christmas dinner, and Tante Frieda insisted on bringing over a large plate of Berliner, a kind of jelly donut, except that in one of them she would place a coffee bean instead. We had to eat them all, one after another, until one of us found the bean and was crowned the “Bean King.” Nobody had the heart to tell her this was pure torture, especially after a hefty holiday meal. Those were the days when I was still able to endure great discomfort to avoid risking making a loved one feel bad. I’m no longer up to that sort of self-sacrifice.

Every year when August 30th comes around, I mark the day.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Tante Frieda!

*P.S. Aug. 30, in the afternoon - Decided to fact check - apologies for not doing this sooner. Found that this buzzing of the city by Russian planes took place in April 1965, i.e., while I was still there in the army and not in later years. Faulty memory. No other facts were harmed by this error that I can discern: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19650407.2.12&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1