Waiting for America

 Dear grandchildren,

I've started each entry with "Dear grandchildren," plural. But actually, until just a bit over a week ago, I had only one grandchild, 2-year-old Leo. He is now a big brother! Adayla was named after her great great great grandmother, Thomas' favorite grandmother, Adele (her parents spelled it so people in America would pronounce it correctly). I'll be writing more about Adele when I transcribe Das Märchen Haus, which describes Adele's memories of her own childhood in Wermelskirchen, Germany.

But first, let's finish Thomas' book, The Rim of the Volcano. I'm realizing with these last few entries that Thomas no longer speaks of the war - and really, why should he? He wanted nothing more than to put those grim years behind him and focus on the future, which included plans to emigrate to America. It would be a dream-come-true for him to to be able to leave the ruins of a defeated, demoralized, and destroyed country and begin anew in a country that he heard was free, beautiful, and exciting. He couldn't wait. But, it seemed, he had to.

Read on.

In April 1947, I completed my Abitur (comparable to a high school diploma, but with a 13^th year) from the Special Returning Soldiers course. My grades were nothing to write home about (if I had had one), but they were good enough to get by without having to take any oral exams which, as an introvert, I dreaded. My grade in religion was “sehr gut,” my math and English grades were ‘gut,” and everything else was “befriedigened” - sufficient. As it turned out, I earned my Abitur in the same year as my former classmates in Chemnitz. So now what? 

We planned to emigrate to America that year, so improving my English became my top priority. Ulli and her new friend Beate (who ended up being a lifelong friend) were already going to the Dolmetscherschule, interpreter’s school which, I decided, was a good idea for anyone planning to emigrate to America. So that became my next stop, too. My English was already pretty good, but this was as close as one could get to being immersed in a foreign language. Using Readers Digest magazines as textbooks, I learned about Lord Leverhulme, founder of Lever Brothers in England, something that would earned me top respect from Leverhulme’s niece who, it turned out, would become Rainer’s future mother-in-law. I also learned a bit more about women. I befriended Helga, the prettiest girl in class, and we studied together for weeks. When I was finally brave enough to visit her room one day (no phone then!), hoping to take our acquaintance to the next level, her landlady had news for me. “She moved out two days ago, to marry the very rich Generaldirektor of such-and-such a big company. She didn’t leave a new address.” So much for loyalty!

When it rains, it pours. The same troubled week, I found out that all our dreams about emigrating to America were just that: a dream. We were told that there were just too many DP’s (Displaced Persons in UN language) who had priority even over we “Rassisch Verfolgte^[1]” who had not been in one of the worst concentration camps.

“How long might that be?” we wanted to know.

“Who knows! Three years, four, maybe six  -- until all of them are taken care of.” 

Meanwhile, instead of us emigrating to America, my father’s brother, Uncle William (who, in 1937, had urged my father to leave Germany while he still could) came back to Germany from a few years in the US. While there, he learned the secrets of American advertising, and he figured -- rightly -- that the emerging economy of Germany must by now be ripe for exposure to a kind of super-modern commercialism. He founded what might have been the first American-style advertising agency in Germany, Heumann Werbegesellschaft  in Frankfurt, the center of West German commerce. And with that, our invitation to America ended at the same time that the US Embassy told us that we would have to wait years before we could emigrate. And with Uncle William’s return to Germany, we no longer had a contact in America. We were thoroughly discouraged.

Uncle William

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I decided to go to college, hoping that I could graduate before the emigration plans would become active again. The threat of an armed conflict between West and East at that time amounted only to verbal “teasing,” but Churchill probably meant it when he said “We’ve slaughtered the wrong pig!”  If such a war would break out, Germany would surely be very much at the center of it. The Berlin airlift of 1948, in which the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' transportation access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control, proved it soon enough.  If that war would ever break out, I wanted to be as far away as possible -- and on the right side. Nora, with her “noble Communist ideals” could be in love with Russia, but I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to go to America, and the sooner the better. If that meant an incomplete college education, so be it. Nothing could be worse that being in the middle of a war again. That fear for me was even stronger than the fear of Germans finding another way to go after Jews or half-Jews like me – which was also a terrifying thought. 

Luckily, the Cold War remained cold – at least at that time.

I turned back to my studies. It was time to make some life-altering decisions. Where should I study, and what subject? Should I go to university or Technische Hochschule^[2]? I wanted to stay in, but could I? How would I navigate these next years? Every decision, it seemed, came with life-altering ramifications. I’d had enough of life-altering ramifications; I simply wanted to settle in, go to school, and emigrate to America as soon as I was able.

I continued to live in the very small apartment in Solln with Rainer, Renate, Ulli, and baby Andreas, but that soon became untenable. Already, Rainer and Renate were divorcing.  Rainer had met Inge, the wealthy niece of one of the Lever brothers. With her came different plans for Rainer, such as a move to Switzerland, where they could access Inge’s considerable wealth. 

What followed were many trips to the München city offices and the Wohnungsamt, the lodging bureau. Yes, the city was deeply involved in who lived where. It turned out that a legal citizen of München was defined as someone who was a resident on July 31, 1945. Luckily, I could prove that Rainer, proactive as he was, had already registered me with police as a resident with him in April, 1945.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 That left the even more difficult task of a room assignment by the bureau. After many visits, and hours of standing in line, I was assigned a room at Thierschstrasse 26, second floor. That’s where I was going to spend the next four years, and in those years München (not Chemnitz) became the city that I would always consider as “home.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Despite having just completed a high school education that focused on truly “academic” studies like medicine, law, and theology, I decided that a technical field was more my kind of thing. We lived in a defeated and desperately needy country, so all medical schools were hopelessly overcrowded. When I was young, I had wanted to become a veterinarian, but now veterinary medicine seemed to be a useless luxury. So how does one combine the attractions of the study of law with a technical field? One becomes a patent attorney, which required first the technical degree of Diplomingenieur, and then a law degree. Seemed reasonable, though tentative. 

Or should I become the bridge builder, as my mother always wanted, an expression of her romantic imagination, nothing else. 

In any case, I was on my way to the München Technical University. But first I’d need to register. 

To get to the registration office, I had to balancing carefully along a thin board which had been laid across a large bombed-out section of the badly damaged building. Once inside, I was immediately informed that everybody wanted to study structural engineering because Germany was in ruins so not only bridges, but roads, buildings, and the entire infrastructure of the country would need to be rebuilt. Sorry, the structural engineering program was full. How about mechanical engineering, or electrical?  I didn’t have to ponder this decision. Electrons and I have a rather uneasy relationship, unlike my relationship with screws and bolts and steam engines, so my decision was made: mechanical it was.  Now I needed permission to live in München (which I already had) and money to finance my education. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ah yes – money.

Rainer had secured a loan for me at a local bank with which my father had previously had connections. That was great, but it was not enough, so I managed to obtain some additional support from the State Ministry for Racially, Religiously, and Politically Persecuted People under Nazi Rule. That covered tuition, plus a stipend of DM 100 during the school year (about $ 25.00 a month!) and DM 75 during vacations. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Once again I “walked the plank” to the TH admissions office to register, but once again I faced another hurdle. This time I learned that I would be required to serve six months in the Student Auxiliary Service to help repair the destroyed university buildings. I was put on a list of hopeful Mechanical Engineering freshmen for winter semester, 1948/49 and I was also assigned an apprentice position with a small local plumbing company. Most of the plumbing work in the TH buildings consisted of salvaging what pieces we could from destroyed buildings, cleaning them, straightening twisted pipe (if we could), rethreading them, and then installing them in the new buildings. As it turned out, working as a plumber was a major part of my education, not in terms of a degree, but for very practical reason that later in my life I would have houses to take care of. I learned the art of making do, of improvising, working with what could be made available.

Omi's note: Dad was always good at this - sometimes to the exasperation of his very American teenage daughter who wanted new stuff. But no - Dad always insisted on using up what you have, modifying what you could, and making do.

Sometimes we worked with mechanical linkages, drives, gearing, cams, interlocks, and other gizmos and gadgets. I loved it. That’s what I wanted to learn, I decided. How much better these models were than new electrical circuits that you can’t get your hands on and that make no sense!

In spring I transferred to the Wärmekraft Building, the power plant for the TH. In addition to heat, they would also provide the steam power for the labs for university departments that worked with steam engines, heat transfer, turbines, should such departments ever exist again. The work was not as interesting and consisted mainly of preventing the coal hoppers that were fed from a conveyor belt above the furnaces from plugging up.  That assignment had the advantage of introducing me to students who would become close friends for the coming four years: Sigi (who eventually became an Engineering professor at the TH), Walter, and Wolfgang.

---

^[1] German-speaking Racially Persecuted Persons

^[2] Technical University