Remembering German grandmothers

A friend of mine, now approaching his 80s, just lost a friend of fifty years who was 88. I sent him that standard but woefully inadequate ¨Sorry for your loss¨ message. When death comes lofty language is easily mistaken for insincerity, so experience teaches us to settle for silence, and hope that those suffering loss will understand that this is a time when less equals more.

This friend of mine responded with a wonderful history of his fifty years of relationship with the deceased, essentially turning the death into an opportunity to count his blessings.  Now that I have reached an age where death is routine, I have a keen respect for such skill.  It becomes evident that there is more than ¨sorry for your loss¨that one can say.  

One can of course retreat to the reminder that grief is invariably a reflection of love and affection.  At least that has been my experience - that the greater the love the greater the grief. But that doesn't guarantee that grief will be any easier to process.

I was raised in a German family, largely by a German grandmother named Bertha who mistook me for a prince.  Everybody should be so lucky.  Her affection gave me the confidence all children should be granted to go out into the world unafraid and prepared for the slings and arrows and the hostility we all have to face.  I have been the beneficiary of not just a mother's love, but the love of aunts and grandmothers - plural - as well.  I got more than a fair allotment; in addition to my grandmother - meine Großmutter,  I got to establish a close relationship with Großmutter's sister-in-law, my great aunt Frieda, when I established a second home in Berlin. Frieda and her life-partner went through life as the German equivalent of John Smith and Mary Jones.  He was Otto Schmidt and she was Frieda Müller.  Special people despite their "ordinary" names.

I'm going on about Tante Frieda because today is her birthday.  She died back in the early 1980s at the age of 94, so you can't say she didn't live a full life.  How happy it was is another question.  She lived through the Second World War in Berlin, forced to work through the night and the bombing because her work as a pharmacist made her too valuable to be given time off.  Because she refused to join the Nazi party she had to work nights, as well, as a guard in a bomb shelter, and crawling from one bombed-out shelter to the next in the pitch black one night she fell and suffered from a loss of hearing as a result. 

She looked back on those days with remarkable equanimity. The one and only time I saw her vulnerable was when we were having coffee at a cafe on the top floor of the KaDeWe Department store in downtown West Berlin and had to endure the roar of Russian planes flying by close enough that you could see the pilots.  Soviet/Western Power hostility had been ongoing since the Soviet Blockade of West Berlin had resulted in the Berlin Airlift in 1948-9 and the Russians were protesting the latest quarrel - if I remember right, it was the decision of the Bundestag to hold a session in Berlin. 

"Take me out of here," she said, and as we finished our Kaffee und Kuchen at home I got her to talk about her war experiences for the first time ever. My admiration for her powers of endurance, already high, went through the roof.

I googled "Frieda Müller" Sachsenwaldstraße - her address - just now on the wildly improbable chance something about her might show up.  What did come up was another "Mary Jones," Gertrud this time instead of Frieda, living in the same Steglitz district of Berlin, a woman born around the same time as Tante Frieda, who was deported to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt in 1943 before being transferred to Auschwitz and murdered a year later. An unknown grandmother worth remembering for a far more earnest reason.

Gertrud's name appears on a "stumbling block" (Stolperstein) - one of those more than 100,000 brass plates now memorializing the victims of the Nazis that have been placed around the country to mark the residences of the victims carried away in the Holocaust. 

I'm reminded of Jesus and the thieves on a cross in Monty Python's Life of Brian singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," that wonderful satire of the the pollyanna "Today shalt Thou be with me in Paradise" insistence on avoiding the harsh realities of life - death, for example. But I have to admit there are multiple ways of processing grief and remembering the good parts while downplaying the not-so-good parts. That's the mood I'm in today, thinking back on my grandmother's practice of sneaking a shot of Liebfraumilch - we kept it a secret from my mother - when I would come home from school and celebrate a good test result.  And on the insistence that the grandmothers of the Holocaust, like Gertrud, not be forgotten. And on the good fortune Tante Frieda, one of the cheeriest people I have ever known, experienced of making it through the war more-or-less in one piece.

I don't want to "sum things up" by pretending we can will ourselves to focus on the bright side of things. And I don't want to downplay the difference between the two grandmothers who loomed large in in my personal life and the unknown victim of the Holocaust who died in the most grotesque of circumstances when I was only four years old.

But I also don't want to miss a chance to celebrate the richness of lives lived to the fullest while remembering our commitment to never letting the authoritarians ever ready to take advantage of our limitations to keep us from that goal.

Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda.

The Penguin Lessons - a film review

 I went to live in Argentina for several months in 2007 when friends of mine decided to accompany their daughter there for a gap year before she started college. I had been there before to visit them in Bariloche, a town in Patagonia known for harboring both Nazis fleeing arrest after World War II and Argentines being chased by the military dictatorship which held the country in its grip from 1976 to 1983. That incongruity - the town is famous for its chocolates and its Swiss chalets - led me to dig into the history of the "dirty war,"  in which opponents were snatched off the street and stuffed into Ford Falcons and dropped into the ocean from helicopters, and where children were stolen from their families and given to military families to raise as their own.  I had grown up in a German-heritage family and knew a lot about evil in theory, but here now in Argentina I got to see it and feel it up close.

An old friend recommended a 2024 movie just out on Netflix called The Penguin Lessons.  It's based on a memoir of an English teacher in Buenos Aires who encounters a penguin covered in oil slick while on a vacation trip to Uruguay, cleans the penguin up and smuggles it back to Buenos Aires. The lead actor is English comedian Steve Coogan.  I began this review with the political background - the story takes place in the early days of the dictadura - because it's the elephant in the room.  A better metaphor would be to call it the weak link. The story is sweet and almost impossibly endearing - what's not to love about a penguin paddling around the house - but the fascists get let off lightly, and that keeps the film from succeeding, in my opinion.  It's still a lovely experience when you're in need of a feel-good evening in front of the screen, but it does require you to leave your conscience in check a bit.  Perhaps more than just a bit.

I wanted to find a way to tell you I'd come across a delightful film I'd like to recommend to you, but I find the encounter with fascism that we find ourselves in at present contextualizes much of how I see the world these days, and certainly makes it impossible to avoid mentioning the fascism of Argentina half a century ago that has left a permanent mark on my conscience. Like the protagonist Steve Coogan character, who fails to come to the aid of a friend as she is being arrested, I stumble around looking for a place to start, and find myself stumped over what action I can take, other than to call out what I see happening right in front of us, as a bare minimum.

Watch the film.  Enjoy the warm embrace of the characters.  Let yourself be delighted by an animal who mates for life and let your mind run free over reflections on loyalty, living with evil and deciding when to lie low and when to speak up.

Netflix.

The Responsibility of Surviving

I remember well a conversation I had with one of my heroes - my aunt Frieda in Berlin - about thirty years ago when she revealed to me that she had already outlived all of her family and most of her friends. I couldn't get the thought out of my mind that "surviving" was perhaps not the greatest thing in the world one could aspire to.  Intellectually, I understood the term "survivor's guilt" and was profoundly moved by the 1980 movie, Ordinary People, about a family of two sons in which one son dies in a boating accident and the other son goes mad with guilt about not being able to save him. But simply outliving everybody is a different story: there should be no guilt, in the normal course of things, about being lucky.

Trouble is, when you outlive everybody - or even most people - who mean anything you, it's not the guilt that plagues you; it's simple loneliness. You think of something, encounter something, that makes you want to share it with somebody - only to re-remember that they're not there anymore.

Bounce (left); Miki (right)

I have a dozen images of old friends on my computer desktop, following my conviction that the best way to approach bad news is to stare it down, and not run and hide from it.  I hear something new about Switzerland and want to contact Doris to confirm it.  She's there, a big broad smile on her face, among the dozen. And the same goes for all the others. I spend most of my time alone in my room at the computer, and chatting with these friends-gone-by happens a whole lot.  Twelve of these images are of people; one is of the all-time loves of my life, our dogs Miki and Bounce.  They lived to fourteen - not a bad age for chihuahuas, but their deaths are up there with the worst things I have ever experienced.

I learned many years ago that when people reported the death of a loved one that the very worst thing you could do is try to cheer them up, or try to make sense of the death.  Instead, the clichéd "Sorry for your loss," insincere as it sounds, was probably the best thing to say.  And then shut up and say no more.  But it has always been hard for me to keep my mouth shut. I live by and for words. I use language to explain, to work out dilemmas, to comfort, to provoke, to uplift.  I want terribly to say something like, "You know that pain that you are feeling tends to come in direct proportion to the love you feel for that person."  It sounds true, and most probably is.

I am now 85 and people are dropping all around me. I now get to experience what Tante Frieda went through on a daily basis. And it's not just that I miss those who have died; I worry about being a drag with others in my life still here because talking about death and dying is, if not an outright taboo, at least a terrible downer.  

I remember hearing the Dalai Lama, when asked what he intended to do now that he was retiring, answer, calmly and with his usual warm charm, "I intend to spend the rest of my time preparing for my death."

Bravo, DL, I said.  Not afraid to demonstrate how one brings death into one's life and takes it in stride.  I joined a group called Death Café that meets every couple of months to talk about death and dying to break down this hypersensitivity around the topic.  It's not for everybody, and I fully sympathize with young people who want to avoid thoughts of end times before it would appear to be a useful thing to do, but I find it enriching to share with total strangers something this intimate.

Speaking of the Dalai Lama...  He's another hero of mine, right up there with Tante Frieda.  You know the couplet saying, "There are only two rules you need to follow in life.  One is 'Don't sweat the small stuff" and the other is 'Remember, it's all small stuff.'"  Well, the Dalai Lama has one I think is as wise: "Be kind whenever possible." and "It's always possible."

So why am I talking about death and dying suddenly? Well, one reason is it's on my mind a lot. Another is it disciplines and focuses the mind, helps you get your priorities straight.  Shows you how temporary the reward is for being able to score a good put-down and how much value there is in being kind.

A third reason is a video I just came across which I found quite moving.  Of someone reading a love letter a man writes to his dead wife. I want to share it with you here.

May you live long and prosper.  And may you live among kind folk.