Steiner Leaving and arriving

An autobiography
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64268-357-8
Verlag: novum publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 164 Seiten

Bern after the Second World War, German war refugees, farmers in the Emmental, bizarre and quirky originals. The girl grows up privileged in a villa district. Her mother and father, both emotionally barren, are psychoanalytically trained doctors and idolize Sigmund Freud. This has far-reaching consequences. The reader experiences the young woman's turbulent intellectual and erotic development, her professional victories and defeats and her love affairs. As a psychotherapist, she fights against misery and for a better lot for refugees, for example in Rwanda and during the Balkan wars. The biography illustrates a fascinating piece of contemporary history. Open, self-critical and touching. The book was awarded the second prize of the Swiss Autobiography Award at the University of Zurich in 2023.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steiner, Elisabeth

Leseproben

Agnes, my mother My mother comes from parents who were farmers in the Emmental for generations. She loves her father, he is a role model for her. As a teenager, she gets into a fight with him. She wants to go to university. Her father says: "A decent woman doesn't go to university, she has to look after her husband and children." A profession is superfluous for a woman. She defends herself, saying she is not a woman with soup-to-nuts logic and dumpling arguments. She doesn't need sheets or pots and pans. A degree is the best dowry for her. A degree is the quickest and best way for her to escape the narrow, bourgeois petty bourgeoisie. A life as a bohemian seems appealing to her. In order to study, however, she is dependent on her father's money. After much toing and froing, her father finally agrees to pay for her studies. She attends grammar school and studies medicine in Bern and Vienna. In her youth, she had a huge hunger for literature, art and beauty. She devoured the French classics. It was the air she needed to breathe. She often likes to talk about her exciting student years. During this time, she is a cheerful, funny, entertaining young woman. With her beautiful alto voice, she sings the cheeky songs from the Threepenny Opera, "Mackie Messer", "Seeräuber-Jenny", "Surabaya Johnny", and entertains her fellow students. When she's in a good mood, I can get her to perform these songs for us children. She sings with a cheeky expression, boldly miming lasciviousness and swaying her hips. At university, she meets Friedhelm, my father. Friedhelm is a young man with charm, wit and mischief in his eyes, always full of mischief, he has a lively personality that attracts her. "Si pecca, pecca fortiter" (if you sin, then sin hard) is something he likes to say, and she finds it stunning and ignites her zest for life. In Vienna in 1935, she witnesses terrible scenes at the university. Her Jewish colleagues were expelled from the lecture hall. She watches helplessly. After her state examination, she trained as a pediatrician. At the beginning of the Second World War, she marries Friedhelm. She wanted to marry without a church wedding. However, for the sake of peace with her parents, she does so. A priest friend promises to marry the couple without a vows. But the clever priest doesn't keep his promise. As a result, she inadvertently and unintentionally gets married with a Christian blessing. In the wedding photograph, she can be seen in elegant black Deuxpièces, which is modern and against the convention of the time. The ceremony is simple and takes place without pomp and ceremony among close friends. The couple waited four years to have a child until my brother and I, twins, were born in 1943. Because of the war, there was a shortage of doctors in the countryside and many surgeries were deserted. My mother takes over the practice during these years. We twins are looked after by a pediatric nurse. Then Agnes and Friedhelm buy a large house in Bern so that they can open a practice, Friedhelm as an internist and she as a pediatrician. Busy, full years followed. After my mother's death, we received many letters from former patients. They let us know how much she had been appreciated and loved as a pediatrician: "She knew how to give confidence, how to comfort sick children and worried parents." She would say to children who were afraid of injections: "I'm going to hurt you for a moment with the needle. Then you can hold me in your arms." Agnes is a brilliant organizer. She pulls all the strings, both in the office and in the family. She employs a maid for the household. She does the administrative work for the two practices herself. A trainee works in the medical laboratory and my mother is training her as a laboratory technician. My father gives lectures on psychosomatic topics in various committees. Agnes helps him with his writing, as she is better at expressing herself linguistically than he is. She edits his lectures and rewrites whole sections. In the evenings, she teaches us children the rules of German and French grammar, helps us with our schoolwork and prepares us for the exam to enter the Progymnasium. She knows and invents memorable, funny mnemonic devices in the form of rhymes: Venez mes choux, mes bijoux, mes joujoux sur mes genoux et jetez des cailloux à ces hiboux plein de poux! These are the seven exceptions to the pluralization of nouns ending in -ou, which have an x rather than an s at the end of the word. Or in Latin: after si, nisi, ne, num, quo, quanto, ubi, cum, our ali falls over. After the conjunctions listed, the indefinite pronoun "aliquis/aliquid" loses the prefix "ali". The mnemonic bridges remain in our memory to this day. She teaches developmental psychology at a school for nurses and child educators. She manages to juggle all of this in her everyday life. How she manages this is a mystery to me. Her creative energy is enormous. She enjoys all her tasks and does them with dedication, but sometimes she seems exhausted. She also underwent psychoanalysis for many years with an analyst whom she admired. Unfortunately for her, he was a friend of my father. I am deliberately writing about her misfortune. How can an analyst do his work well if he knows the analyst's husband personally and is also friends with him? Nowadays that would be a serious malpractice. At that time, the effects of such bias were still too little known. One day, when I'm nine, I come home from school and I'm walking up the stairs. My mother hasn't noticed my arrival. She is standing in front of the kitchen, upset. She says angrily to my father: "... or I'll take the children with me!" What do these words mean? Had she told my father she wanted to leave him? Surely there had been an argument beforehand. These words, which I pick up, are confusing, I don't even want to know or take note of them. From then on, the mother seems to suffer; for many years she is plagued by stomach pains, which she fights with painkillers. There is not much left of the cheerful, cheeky Agnes who sang revolutionary songs and staged them. I notice that my father is increasingly going on vacation alone, without my mother, brother and me. She says that spouses don't always have to stick together, that independence is also important and good. As a result, I am proud to have such modern parents who spend their vacations independently of each other. Today I am amazed at how gullible and naive I was as a child. In addition to her clever mind, her mother has a variety of manual skills. She sews clothes, cooks on Sundays when the maid is off, works in the garden and plants flowers. She can repair faulty electrical wiring and appliances herself without having to call in a specialist. She loves tinkering and working on things herself. Sometimes the repairs she carries out are daring and dangerous, resulting in short circuits and bangs. She laughs, half seriously, half self-deprecatingly, and says: "You can give me the dried, shrivelled oranges, I'll be happy to eat them." What does she mean? Is she making fun of her tendency to sacrifice herself or is she serious? What does she expect from us children? My brother and I take her at her word and are delighted with the juicy oranges. Sacrificing herself for others and putting her own needs aside is one side of Agnes. But when it comes to her house in the Emmental, the Stöckli, she asserts her wishes and decides alone. She does not involve her own sister, the second owner of the house, in her decisions and usually does so in such a way that her sister cannot see through it. After moving to Zurich to study - my brother lives at home in Bern until his medical state examination - she devotes herself to her interest in art history, especially modern art and literature. At one point she remarks sadly: "I'm aware that the contacts I have now will become fewer as I get older. That's inevitable." She says this sadly, as if there is nothing you can do to prevent loneliness and you are at the mercy of it. In 1964, my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor and was forced to give up his practice. The first symptoms were speech disorders, he suffered from aphasia. She took him to a speech therapist and did speech exercises with him, but these had little effect because of the growing tumor. Now his father is often angry because he can no longer express himself with words. Mother and brother experience his increasing powerlessness and despair at first hand. We watch helplessly as his brain is gradually destroyed by the tumor. After a while, he can only babble. I'm a little further away, I only see my sick father occasionally at the weekend when I visit him at home. In addition to working for the practice, she cared for my seriously ill father at home for two years until his death. She is now fifty-five. After his death, she learned modern Greek, went on trips to Greece and immersed herself in an old passion, Greek mythology. She had always known which gods were related to each other and how. Many years after my father died, my mother revealed a secret that she had previously kept to herself. I was thirty-five at the time. She confessed that my father had had a secret love affair with Florence for many years. She says this with tears in her eyes. Friedhelm had confessed it to her early on. It is obvious to me that this deeply hurtful and shameful experience had plunged her into deep grief for years and caused her great distress. She had concealed her father's infidelity from us children because we were supposed to grow up with an untarnished image of our father. Now she realizes that this concealment had an unfortunate effect on us children. We had often said that the father remained a mystery. She had thought about separation...