Monday, September 6, 2021

Eighteen and evolving in Ingolstadt

Dear grandkids,

What is it with this father of mine and his wide open heart?!

Gisela, Nora, Gisela again… and now Thomas meets 28-year-old Ingrid, mother to 4-year-old Karola!

I believe that Dad’s year in Ingolstadt as protector of “broken” Ingrid and Karola influenced him very deeply. It was an important year of maturity, growth, and self-knowledge that, I believe, stayed with him throughout his life.

As Dad writes, “In our rapport, she became younger and in need of a centering bond and I grew older and stronger, reveling in my role of provider of the bond we both needed. And we both felt loved for the role the other played.”

Here are his words:

In August, 1946, Gisela and I tiptoed into a very tentative, very hesitant exchange of letters again. We wrote, with a bit of a cool superiority, about how unforgettable the days of 1944 were, that their luster would never tarnish, and isn't it wonderful that we can now be such good friends.

Gisela was in the middle of her "conversion to a natural authority,” as they called her teacher education, and she was alternately scared and "longing for the new and unknown, for that big unexplored land," as she called the future ahead of her. On the same day that Gisela wrote that, Nora wrote that yes, I'm right, she probably has changed, and "feels like a doll who has learned to say a few sentences, but basically just has to sit in an armchair with a pretty smile and look attractive to men." Of course, they were both exaggerating, but they couldn't have expressed the difference in their personalities and ambitions more clearly.

For me, the future was literally a "big unexplored land.” It looked like we would really emigrate to the USA in the spring of 1947, just after I finished high school.

“We”? Who did Dad mean by “we”? Who would emigrate to American in 1947? He and his siblings? Ulli did eventually emigrate (and became a huge part of our lives), while Rainer stayed in Europe (Switzerland), but was the plan for all three of them to emigrate together in 1947? Obviously that didn’t work, as it wasn’t until 1953, after Dad met Mom and my oldest brother Michael was born, that they finally emigrated. But “they” consisted of people not even in Dad’s life in 1946. Curiouser and curiouser!

At the time, I was leaning toward studying Pharmacology which would require a couple of years of hands-on work to earn some money and get to know people and language "over there,” before starting the actual college work. That suited me just fine and gave me all the incentive I needed. I was anxious, I wrote in my diary, to replace the old European horse-and-buggy romanticism with the romance of experiencing something new, even if that new kind of "romance" is colder and more pragmatic than the German Romanticism we knew. But first, I just absolutely had to pass the exam at the end of the Special Course that was about to start.

The course began in September, and it was quite exciting. We read Homer in Greek, we read the Bible in Greek in place of the traditional religion class, we read Socrates’ Apologia, we practiced analytical geometry, and we focused deeply on German composition.

It was good to have older classmates, and I felt quite at home among them. I was just turning eighteen, while the other ten students were between 20 and 28. Among them, I mused, I had the feeling that I could see the outlines of the thinking and its character of the person I hoped to become. It was boys my own age that I had trouble with. If I couldn't be with older friends, I'd rather be with animals, or even with children, whose body, mind, and soul were still in balance. I was becoming a bit set in my outlook. Gisela, on the other hand, felt she was on a never-ending internal journey and felt sorry for people who couldn't relate to her flights of fancy. We were both trying to understand the directions in which our emerging personalities were pulling us. We were experiencing changes in ourselves, and we tried to build bridges from 1944, when everything for us was "eternal,” to our current lives when our focus had to be more pragmatic, realistic, and future-focused.

When fall came and all the students’ rooms were cold or couldn't be heated, five or six of us would go to the Hauptstrasse and study for hours at the coffee house (no, they didn’t have real coffee, of course, only Ersatzkaffee). Sometimes girls from the local girls’ high school sat at the table next to us and tried to study, too, or so they said. It was harder to concentrate then, especially when the girl in the red-white-and-black-striped sweater was there, the petite one with the brown eyes and the short dark hair. But that was just one good reason for doing the homework there. The other reason was that I didn't want to walk the long way home and back again for the afternoon classes.

I had trouble with people who considered themselves "wise and experienced.” That was as close as I remember getting to teenage rebellion. One of those sages was my principal, who called me to his office because I had attended a political meeting "without having obtained the prior approval of the Director of the School.” Oh, how I longed for the freedoms of America! And my landlord, Herr Bürger — “Bürger,” a provincial petit-bourgeois, what a fitting name! — was grinding on my nerves. He taught music he didn't understand to kids he didn't understand. He was small and narrow-minded, with closely-set eyes, and seemed to personify the type of person about whom we had just read in a Horace ode: Odi profanum et arceo — “I hate all that’s commonplace and keep it away from me.” I kept him away from me by moving closer into town.

I forgot how I made the connection for finding the room in town, just a block from the cathedral. Somehow, it must have been through the school. One didn't just find a room through an ad or a note on a bulletin board, but always had to go through official bureaucratic channels. One of the professors at the Gymnasium — not one of mine — had just died, which meant that the family was no longer entitled to the entire floor space of the apartment, and had to take in someone: me. On the first of December I moved to Grießbadgasse 32, into the third-floor apartment where the widow of the professor lived with her daughter Ingrid, and Ingrid's daughter Karola, age four.

The kitchen was the only heated room in the apartment, and the kitchen table was the only place to do my homework, making my integration into the family easy and natural. Little Karola, or Pitti as she was called, was obviously seeking a father figure in her life, and I loved the role. I chopped wood for the kitchen stove, our only heating appliance. I cut up newspaper into toilet paper. I even went shopping for our "family” because, as a "victim of the Nazi regime,” I had a pass that entitled me to go to the front of food lines. I sat and listened, I read stories to little Karola, and I took her for walks to the old town fortifications. I automatically fell into my position in the tribal network: man in the house.

I have to wonder whether I was named – at least partially – after this Karola, who my Dad spoke of lovingly. He never specifically told me I was… nor did I ever ask. But when you think about it, this is the first young child he really knew and loved as an adult. There’s a likely connection, yes?

Why did the Lodging Office assign me to a place with three generations of women?! Did they figure it was an important part of my education? It turned out to be. In fact, what I learned in that apartment in Griesbadgasse was more important for my human development than all the humanistic school wisdom I was working so hard to understand at the Gymnasium.

Ingrid was 28, ten years older than I. She was in a bad state of imbalance because of everything she had been through lately. Four years ago, she had married the man she loved, having known him for five years, a promising stage actor in her beloved homeland of Silesia. They had their little girl Karola. Ingrid was working as Physical Therapist when the war machine rolled over her homeland. Silesia had been designated by the Allies to become a part of Poland. Along with millions of others, Ingrid's family was expelled. They had to flee into the German heartland on foot, taking only what they could carry or put in a small hand-pulled cart. Shortly after that flight, Ingrid's husband left her. The divorce was in process as I met her. And now, on top of the loss of home and husband, her father had died, and she had to care for an old mother and a young daughter at a most precarious and difficult time. Only Ingrid's level-headed, down-to-earth practicality was keeping her above water, and just barely. Then, just in time, I came along as the straw she could grab.

The straw itself was vulnerable. I was terribly lonely for human contact, although I was beginning to experience the new blossoming of the old romance with Gisela. That budding relationship had the drawback of being all by mail, and I was, shall we say, a curious young man.

The more Nora turned away from me, the more I remembered what I had - cruelly - sacrificed for Nora: Gisela, my real love, whose photo I had carried in a pouch around my neck all through the months of camp and on the walk through Saxony after liberation. I felt that I went through all this just for her. Gisela, the first girl to whom I had become engaged on a magic early-August day of 1944. Our innocent and pure love was the first for both of us, romantic as none since then, secret and defiant to our parents who objected strongly to what they didn’t know. That was what I wanted, she was I, she was my alter ego — why could I ever have felt otherwise?

It was with a delicious hint of melancholy that I now saw the feminine tenderness in all Gisela’s exuberant curiosity for unknown experiences and far-away places. She would not turn down the America I dreamed of, but would incorporate it in dreams of her own. How could I ever have left the one human being who, at one time, had been the angel of my pure and overflowing love? I started courting her again, tentative at first, not daring to think that she would be able to take me back now. In defiance of my real thoughts, I pretended that we were good friends now, and I called our mutual first love two years earlier “cheering to heaven, heartsick to death.” Which it was, at least in my own role as Gisela’s Cherubino.

Right into this heartbreaking decision between Nora and Gisela dropped Ingrid.

She was the one who was present in my life and she was the one with the greatest need of a strong arm around her shoulders, even if that arm was 10 years her junior. For two years she dedicated her mind, body, and soul to support a huge almost untenable load. Ingrid delighted in that young man who had fluttered into her house and life. She attached herself to me, and I found myself in a new role. Although I was much younger, I reveled in the feeling of being a real support to someone. I began to understand what Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach meant when she had said that "the people to whom we are a brace give us our support in life.” Before Christmas came, we had become very important to one another.

Ingrid Karola and Thomas 1946 Ingolstadt

(Ingrid, Karola, and Thomas – Ingolstadt, 1946)

It was warm and tender and liberating. Ingrid was the first real woman in my life. It was a wonderful experience to take her under my wing, while she took me under hers. And Ingrid did not say, as Nora had, "You are still so young!" In our rapport, she became younger and in need of a centering bond and I grew older and stronger, reveling in my role of provider of the bond we both needed. And we both felt loved for the role the other played. Why was it that all girls I had known were looking for more guidance and strength from me (I thought), but the only mature woman, Ingrid, said that the strongest bond she felt to me was her sense of feeling harbored and protected?

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