Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda

Tomorrow is my Tante Frieda's birthday. Try as I may, I cannot locate her actual birth year, so I can only guess it must be somewhere in the vicinity of my grandmother's birth year, which was 1895.  That would put her at 129 today. Nice old age for someone who is still very much alive in your memory.

I've blogged before - probably several times; I tend to repeat myself a lot these days - about my time in Berlin and my connection with one of my favorite people of all time, my Aunt Frieda - so I won't go into detail here, except to repeat that some of my favorite family members are chosen, not birth family. My "great aunt" Frieda Müller, was the Lebensgefährte (life companion) of my mother's mother's second husband (i.e., not my mother's father)'s brother. Guess you can't get more non-biological than that.

For friends and family who want to read more, check out my blog entry from November 13, 1999, entitled "We Don't Care About the Berlin Wall Very Much." It's a reaction to the lack of interest my Japanese students were showing in the Second World War and the Cold War that followed it that made me kind of grouchy. I understand that it's a universal human truth that adults are going to wail over their kids' lack of shared interest in the things they think are important, but I also feel that some parts of history should be kept alive if, for no other reason, so that we can learn from mistakes and not repeat them.

There was an article in this week's Sunday New York Times about Cambodian efforts to teach their kids about the Pol Pot regime. I'm also acutely aware that the last of the Holocaust Survivors are now almost all gone and despite heroic efforts to keep those memories alive, they will eventually go too.

Each of us fights this battle on a personal level as we age. I'm now 84 and am aware that I'm the last German-speaking member of my mother's side of the family. Many of them never knew the grandparents I grew up with and practically none of them feel any connection with Germany. That saddens me, because that is still a living breathing part of my identity.

So for the next few days I'm going to be toasting my beloved Tante Frieda and talking my husband's ear off, ignoring his rolling eyes as I repeat something I've bored him with half a dozen times before. As long as I'm alive, she will be alive.

The photo above is one of several I managed to pull from her collection. It now hangs on the wall on a staircase and I see it every day (when I take time to notice it). I believe it was taken in about 1910 when she was about 15, give or take - I could be off by several years. In a world in which Germans are famous for their precision (think cameras, cars and trains running on time - in the old days, I mean, that's gone now too) I'm a lousy representative of the tribe.

In any case, Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag - Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda. Du bleibst unvergessen - you are not forgotten.