|
|
 |
WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
| |
|
| |
 |
Back |
 |
Contents |
Page 5 |
|
Home
Page |
Forward |
 |
| |
| |
The Education of a German Girl
When I was sixteen, I entered the Schoneberg
commercial high school, where I was an average student in the subjects that
would prepare me to become a secretary in two years. My father was drinking and
beginning to let himself go; my mother was grumbling constantly. I wanted to
earn my own living and get away from my parents and that stifling
atmosphere.
When I was eighteen, I got a job as a stenographer
with Schering, a large drug firm. I would get up at 6:30 and cross Berlin on
the S-Bahn to Wedding, where I would spend hour after hour pounding out on my
typewriter chemical formulas I could not understand and making sausage
sandwiches for my fat young boss. I was so young that my fellow workers had
little use for me until I began to act like them and say bad things about the
people in other departments. Then they let me share their gossip and tales of
sexual adventures.
I seldom breathed the air of Germany, confined as I
was in the sealed retort that was Berlin. Sometimes I would go to see an aunt
in the "Zone" – East Germany – or visit some other relative in West
Germany. I was shy and rarely went out with boys. They did not attract me much
anyway. The ones I met reminded me of younger versions of my father. I didn't
know any students at all, and I never had a chance to speak a language other
than the one I had heard around me for twenty years.
In West Berlin, as
in the Federal Republic, most people voted for Konrad Adenauer's Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) or for the Social Democrats (SPD). My parents voted CDU.
I myself liked the SPD because of Willy Brandt, whose young, open face
contrasted with those of the other politicians.
I did not know myself
at all and never tried to, but because I was completely unattached, with no
change in sight, I felt a certain dissatisfaction. I showed it in a total lack
of enthusiasm for the prospects my mother envisioned for me: a bank account, a
trousseau, a suitable marriage such as my cousin Christa had made. Soon my
family was calling me a bad daughter. But I held firm, and doubtless this is
what saved me. I never again took that "straight" road that led, I had found,
to anything but happiness.
From the time of my twenty first birthday on
February 13, 1960, I had but one thing in mind: to leave that city for which I
nevertheless felt a deep, though inexplicable, fondness. In my many crossings
from West to East Berlin, especially on Sundays, I had made the monuments, the
museums, and even the streets
|
|
| |
| |
| |
WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
|
Back |
Page 5 |
Forward |
|
|
