Görlitz Memories of memories

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64268-254-0
Verlag: novum pro Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 392 Seiten

'Sooner or later, every person invents a story for himself that he believes to be his life.' (Max Frisch) A life story is not a sum of memories seamlessly strung together, but a conglomeration of continually revised and reinterpreted retrospectives. Accordingly, this is a delicate journey back in time to who one believes oneself to be. The anecdotal travelogue is flanked by scientific miniatures that invite reflection. Stations are, for example, a naive toddler before and a serious boy in and after the war, a rebellious adolescent in the decade of the economic miracle or a dabbling adolescent in the birth years of the Federal Republic - a life story like any and yet like none. By reading it, you might learn something about yourself - or about the story you think is your life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Görlitz, Axel

Leseproben

Ecstasy is an experience that wants to be made again and again. One is eagerly driven toward a climax that never grants what one expects from it, namely lasting bliss. There is a pleasant subsiding, a relaxed saturation after the storm of emotions, but no end to the search for happiness. If you want to remember, you don't quite know what. The rise of excitement? The ecstatic moment? The separating languor? One can let oneself drift, but one can also want to keep oneself under control. Either way, driven or controlled, lust overwhelms head and body. It takes time to find a balance between the pressure of the senses and the counter-pressure of the mind. If one is lucky, this balance forms by the end of puberty. If one is unlucky, perhaps the climacteric distributes the weights differently. In the middle of the year, my mother and brother moved to a neighboring town not far away. My father had rented a spacious apartment and had our few pieces of furniture moved there, especially a grand piano, which made the move seem attractive to my mother. I was to join her later, on New Year's Day, because only then would funds for furnishing a child's room be available again. That was fine with me, since I felt comfortable with Aunt Tinchen and my boyfriend. Last but not least, I was on the verge of becoming a good Quintan; even in Latin I was certified to have achieved satisfactory results. So I looked forward to my last summer in this sooty city, often went with Aunt Tinchen to the Rhine and sometimes to a nearby reservoir for swimming. A gigantic dam gave its name to this lake, and there we stayed overnight with Tinchen's acquaintances. Each time I was impressed anew, on the one hand, by the pithy grandfather who took a daily dip in the lake and, as I was told, chopped holes in the ice for this purpose in cold winters, and on the other hand by his stuck-up granddaughter, a seventeen-year-old, as they said at the time, backfish, who, to my chagrin, permanently overlooked little boys. My hope of finally being able to capture her attention with the assertion that she surely wanted to know what I had dreamed of her tonight, because what one dreams during the first night in a strange house comes true, was deceived, she was not the least interested in my dreams. Without a word she simply left me, who would have liked to tell a fib about having dreamed of an intimate kiss. First love, first sorrow, but also growing certainty that wounds heal. The summer passed, my father took my birthday present to my aunt for the last time, and on Christmas Eve Tinchen's sister finally told us that it was time to say goodbye. The sister was often with us, on holidays anyway, and sometimes also on our trips to the Rhine or to the Sauerland, where the three of us hiked and, for my special joy, made picnics. The picnic was always donated by the sister, who invited us to eat sandwiches, pieces of cake and juices that she pressed herself. The sister was younger and, as I thought, also prettier than the aunt and lived in the same neighboring town to which my parents had moved, though not on the outskirts but in the city center. She rang in New Year's Eve with a persistent doorbell and a repeated "l'heure du départ sonne," and, barely admitted to the apartment, pounced on me and sobbed something about old women who would soon be alone again. When I told her that I wanted to end the year with my friend Bernhard, she let me go and immediately convinced the aunt that young should join young. In the end, they both hugged me in turn, shed a few tears, put money for the streetcar into my jacket pocket, and finally pressed my packed suitcase into my hand. I still had to promise to go to my parents on the last streetcar at the latest on New Year's night and to report my arrival immediately, then they took me down to the street. Until the next intersection, I looked around again and again, put down my suitcase a few times to wave with both hands, and finally disappeared around the corner. When one speaks of life stages, one means developmental stages that either introduce socially weighty initiation rites such as school enrollment, confirmation, marriage, etc., or individually significant events such as the first kiss, a violent panic attack, a severe loss, etc., to which one attributes drastic effects in retrospect. But despite all the excitement of going to school or all the tremors of a first kiss, we never realize that our life's path forks at that very moment, but only in retrospect attach attributes such as groundbreaking or formative to such moments. On closer inspection, it also turns out that we do not assign these attributes to our experiences ourselves, but are assigned them by someone else. That the seriousness of life begins with school or that passion breaks out with the first kiss are often heard platitudes that one adopts as worldly wisdoms and ultimately sees confirmed by one's own life. In this way, life in general is mirrored in the particular: whatever happens to someone is likely to have happened to more or less everyone at some point. I arrived just in time to say goodbye to my friend's parents, who were on their way to a New Year's Eve party. The mother said that this was probably goodbye forever and, when Bernhard and I assured each other of our everlasting friendship, added seriously: "You will become a worker, and Peter will become an academic. And later he will drive a big car and won't even recognize you when he passes very close to you." Of course, we didn't believe her and decided to spend the evening as befits male friends. Bernhard uncorked the bottle of liquor his father was saving for a special occasion, which he thought had now come, and tore open a pack of cigarettes, knowing from Indian books that smoking together bonds indissolubly. Since I could not avoid a ceremony that welds two lives together forever, I temporarily suspended my vow never to smoke again. So we drank "here's to our very special!" one sip and another, puffing one cigarette after another after each "Hugh, my blood brother!" until the bottle and pack were empty. Shortly after midnight, Bernhard was no longer responsive. I decided to take the last streetcar to my family, who, it being New Year's Eve, were surely still celebrating. Somehow I managed to climb the coupled car and not slip off the seat until I reached the "Stadtmitte" stop. What happened next I remember only fragmentarily. When "Stadtmitte" was called out, I was already so nauseous that I had to get out immediately so as not to sully the inside of the car. On swaying sidewalks I headed for the nearby apartment of Aunt Tinchen's sister. Because the sister was with the aunt, no one answered the door, and I had to gain access to the apartment through the open pantry window. The sister later told me that she had found me unconscious on the living room sofa, dressed and with goose grease on both shoes, because the Christmas roast leftover had been placed under the pantry window for cooling. Since it was not to be overlooked - more exactly: over-scented -, where my unconsciousness stemmed from, she did not say anything to my parents at first, but waited for my resurrection. She had to wait 24 hours for that, and then another 12 hours, because a sudden dizzy spell put an end to my first attempt to go home and drove me back to the sofa again. However, in the meantime she had made my parents believe that my stopover in "Stadtmitte" was part of a New Year's Eve arrangement planned by the sisters. When I finally regained my equilibrium, the first thing I did was to renew my non-smoking oath. Childhood and adolescence are social inventions that could only be made over the course of time: for example, the average age had to have risen by several decades, education and training had to have been declared a matter for special institutions such as schools, or family and workplace had to have been separated in order to discover a new stage in life. With a life expectancy of little more than thirty years, with parents as teachers and a family business as a livelihood, years of exemption from having to assume an adult role would have made no sense. There were children, but no childhood, boy, but no youth, but only at first none, later small and finally real adults, who differed according to their abilities to take over and fulfill duties. Subsequently, mankind became older and older and the everyday world became more and more confusing. The rural population sought its salvation in the chaos of the cities, and the crafts lost their clientele to the anonymity of the factories, so that homesteads and handicraft enterprises could no longer be profitably managed. Farmers and journeymen became day laborers, merchants became entrepreneurs, who found it difficult to find their way in the new confusion and were therefore no longer able to make their children strong for life themselves. The task of enabling young people to grow up and work was entrusted to the state. For this purpose, a period of life had to be reserved before adulthood, which was called childhood and was soon filled with all the expectations of happiness that remained unfulfilled in adulthood. The question is why happiness should find a home precisely in this early stage. 5. My new home was a four-room apartment on the second floor of a three-family house. Downstairs lived the landlord, a four-toned man with a Rhenish singsong, whose massive body omnipresently shielded his wife and daughter from strangers' glances. Since he never seemed to leave the house, the tenants also found themselves constantly watched. The resident of the attic apartment, who left in the morning when everyone was still asleep and came home when everyone was asleep again, was rarely seen. To the right of the entrance door, the square hallway led off to the children's room, which was...