Grandchildren mine,
One day, you will look back on the house(s) you grew up in and you’ll remember details that will astound your own kids – the chip in the paint where the pantry door gently hit the wall (and the sound that it made)… the bathroom lock that got just a little stuck if you pressed too hard… the cabinet door that required just a bit more force to open. We all have those memories about our childhood home.
Here are my father’s memories of the house at 10 Reichstrasse, Chemnitz.
The house itself tells much about life in those days -- and about my privileged childhood. It was essentially a three-story building, plus a full basement. In all that space, there were only two real bedrooms, the parents’ and the kids’, which had a playroom attached. There was a whole slew of other rooms, though: a large entry hall, a music room furnished in Biedermeyer style, a “Queen Anne Room” (off-limits to kids), a dining a breakfast room, Father's "Collection" room and office, my Mother's "Damenzimmer,” (ladies’ room), the dressing room, and a large bathroom, one of four in the house. On the attic floor, there was a guest room, also furnished in Biedermeyer, and an assortment of servants' rooms, a laundry drying room, and (most importantly) the ping-pong table for the model railroad, and Rainer’s tools. Below the house, separate cellar rooms for furnace, coal, potatoes, wine, and storage.
A set of large glass plate photographs of my father’s childhood home survived the war. What a house it must have been!
The oval-shaped silver cookie bin on the table also graced our home as I grew up. Only the fanciest cookies went into it; “normal” cookies went elsewhere! I’m not sure how my father got it out of Germany, but I know that he loved it. Eventually, he bequeathed it to my oldest brother, Michael, who has it in his home today.
I wish I knew what rooms these were. I’ve tried to discern which room is which from my father’s descriptions. Perhaps you can figure it out?
Dad drew a layout of his home for us at one time, but I have no idea where it is. I have a vague recollection of seeing it after he died. Do I have it? Dang – down the worm hole I go…!
I believe that the photo of Irmgard, my grandmother was taken in her sitting room. The photo on the right is of Carl’s office, where he spent most of his time after he was stripped by the Nazis of his job as bank president.
Irmgard again, perhaps in her dressing room?
*I found it!* Here is the floor plan my dad created of his childhood house in Chemnitz.
My father was able to bring the etching above the bureau on the far left to America with him and it graced the walls of every house he lived in. It is “a portrait of the architect Hans Christian Genelli, the uncle of the artist, Bonaventura Genelli, created in 1814. My brother Stephan has it in his house now.
My father continues:
Thinking back, I spent as much of my childhood in the attic rooms as in the playroom. The attic was much more interesting - the slanted ceilings had an opening in the roof for skylights. From there you could see all the way to the airport. You could see the biplanes taking off, and once there was even a Zeppelin. The laundry drying room was as wide as the whole house, all unfinished raw wood, safe from all intruders. That’s where Rainer and I shot our air rifles for hours on end.
The attic contained all the things that our parents didn’t know what to do with - the architect’s model of our house, the Christmas tree decorations, our parents’ old Carnival costumes much older than we were, Mutti’s old doll house from when she was a little girl, and more. And best of all, Rainer's tool chest, chemistry table, and the ping-pong table on the very top floor where nobody lived but overnight guests and the servants.
We kids were allowed almost everywhere. The radio was in Mutti’s room, the homework desk was in the dressing room, the telephone was in the "table-service arranging" room (butler’s pantry?) between the kitchen and the dining room, and the tub in the bathroom sometimes held our model racecar track, complete with a sharply banked turn at the end.
(Thomas, Ulli, and Rainer, c 1935.)
It was not unusual at the time, in a society defined by class, to have a middle-class house fit for a lifestyle that seems out of time and out of place now -- much too big, requiring and accommodating two live-in servants, "cultured,” opulent, and impractical. In reality, it was probably much smaller than I remember -- doesn’t that always happen with childhood memories? I remember it as a Gone with the Wind mansion like the ones in the Old South of yesteryear America.
This photo of my father’s childhood home never elicited great emotion from me until I visited Chemnitz in 2018 (a trip worthy of a post or three itself!). Now it still gives me a lump in my throat because… well, because this is what that location looks like today.
This is my daughter Kat, Carl’s great grandchild, in front of 10 Reichstrasse, 2018.
And here’s Ulli in front of where her childhood home once stood.
It’s heartbreaking.
Telling memories are in that house. There was a spot in Father's art collection room with which I connect two later events. It was the spot where I was standing when I got the only slap in the face I remember, for a report card showing a "D" in Greek. The other memory, tied forever to the same spot, was Father telling me that Mother had died.
It’s not easy to explain my perception of the relationship between my parents. The simple answer is that I hardly noticed one. It was common for parents in those days not to show any emotion or affection in front of the kids, at least I don’t remember ever seeing them kiss or even touch. They were very proper and formal, at least as much as I observed. I have no doubt that they were dedicated and loyal to each other, but they didn’t show anything beyond it, ever. If they had, it might have - God forbid! - raised questions as to where I came from. I’m sure that there was no greater priority for my father than caring for his family.
My mother, as a non-Jew married to a Jew during WWII Germany, had a heroic role to play to provide for the functioning of the family under circumstances over which she had no control, and it was her sheer existence that allowed the family the title of “privileged,” at least in the eyes of the Nazis.
She knew that, by a stroke of some politician’s caprice, her role could change any moment. Her husband provided the cool head and stoic attitude. She was much more impulsive, but she managed to provide for us all under the most difficult circumstances, with the most outwardly emotional steadiness she could manage. She never discussed the pressures she was under in any terms beyond acknowledging everybody else’s difficulties.
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