People in the apartment block in the 50s - Part 1

My grandmothers and their story

(DE) When I was born into this apartment block community on the southern outskirts of Regensburg in 1953, most people living there had shared memories of the Nazi era, the war and the post-war period. Also, they were pretty optimistic about the future. Slowly, the post-war period turned into the economic miracle period.

But things were not yet ready. Housing shortages, restrictions and shortages still prevailed. For some more, for others less.

View of the courtyard area between the apartment blocks around 1950

The people who lived in these mud-brown housing blocks in tiny on average 46-square-metre flats without bathrooms belonged to the so-called „ordinary people", from welfare recipients like my grandmother on my mother's side to workers, lower-level employees and civil servants with their families, to better-off alone war widows. At the beginning of the 1950s, the East Refugees and displaced persons from the former German eastern territories that were ceded to Poland or the Soviet Union after the war arrived and were housed in newly built "people's flats for refugees". Stadtbau GmbH Regensburg built these housing blocks on a vacant lot between existing housing blocks.

1939 - two families in the new apartment block

With the start of the war in 1939, most families had moved into the newly built blocks of flats. My father's and mother's families lived only two doors away from each other. My parents were just six years old when they played in the street in front of the house, where I would also romp 15 years later.

So around 1939, my family's life began in the apartment block on the southern outskirts of Regensburg.

My grandmother Anna ca. 1941

Maternal grandmother

My maternal grandmother was single with three children, two girls and a boy. She should have owned a house in the countryside because her family, owners of a large farm in a village south of Regensburg, had left her and her husband a plot of land. But since my grandfather had died immediately after the birth of my mother (she was the youngest child) in 1933, the family took the building site away from her and gave it to her brother. He was supposed to build a house for himself and his family and provide a flat for his widowed sister and her three small children in the house. This he did. But living together turned out to be extremely difficult, as my grandmother often recounted. She was harassed by her sister-in-law and had to move around the house all the time. She helped on the farm and worked as a waitress while the grandmother looked after the children. Life was not as easy as it was anyway, but it could be unbearable when one could not get peace in one's own home. The sisters-in-law quarrelled, and finally, my grandmother decided that having her own flat in town and a job at the post office would give her a chance for an independent life. She no longer owned anything but was still happy in her micro-apartment paradise. In any case, this story always ended with a happy ending. From today's point of view, I wonder how my grandmother managed to look after these about 12, 8 and 6-year-old children during the war while doing her job at the post office.

After the war, when everything should have been easier, she was forced to give up her job for a male applicant. In the post-war period, the state's labour market strategy was that male breadwinners had priority over women when filling positions, even if women were the sole breadwinners. So she had to be thankful that as a welfare recipient, she at least was provided with an affordable flat.

Grandparents on my father's side

Around 1939, my paternal grandparents also considered themselves lucky to have their own home, even if it only measured 46 square metres. They had lived in the house of my grandfather's parents in Stadtamhof, a historic part of the old town just beyond the Stone Bridge. During the regular seasonal floodings by the river Danube in this area, the furniture often had to be put on pedestals, and the whole family moved to the first floor. In this part of town, my grandparent were members of a respected and extensive family of craftsmen. They treated my Swabian grandmother, who descended from a maid and who had also been a maid herself, somewhat arrogantly. My self-confident grandmother, who tended to be ladylike, was sensitive in this respect but quite belligerent if she had to be.

My grandfather always told me that as a young family man, he preferred to be in the pub with his mates from school rather than sitting at home with the family. That was probably another reason my grandmother wanted to move away from that environment because it was much easier to keep the money together if the husband didn't buy free drinks for the friends in the pub. In that, she was a Swabian throughout.

My father, little sister Renate and big sister Inge 1940)

In 1939 the family consisted of three children, an older daughter, a new born daughter, my father, the middle child born in 1933, and the parents. My grandfather was conscripted during the war and fought on the Eastern Front, where he was seriously wounded. As a child, I used to look at the visible hole only covered by skin in my grandfather's head, more precisely at the hairline. After the war, he was a registered war invalid, could no longer work and received a handsome war invalid's pension. My father's little sister died in a typhus epidemic immediately after the war, and his older sister emigrated to Australia with her Polish husband soon after. So by my birth in 1953, only three members were left in my father's family, living together in this tiny flat: A sick man, a lonely woman grieving for her children and a teenager who was away all week on a work assignment and only came back on weekends, when he went out with his friends as all teenagers like to do.

Housekeeping on 46 square metres

Since these flats looked the same in the 1950s as in the 1940s, I can still see the cramped conditions and the lack of "luxury", although I didn't feel that way then.

I grew up in this block of flats with my maternal grandmother for the first seven years and always returned to her when I felt my life was not so good. It was a humble home, but it was my humble home!

The flat consisted of a kitchen and two little rooms. Still, the centre and heart of the apartment was the eat-in kitchen with a coal cooker, a ceramic sink with running but only cold water, a kitchen buffet, a couch with a dining table in front of it and three chairs, one of which was a wash stool. This wash stool was necessary so the residents could wash themselves in the kitchen. When you lifted the lid, a basin and a soap dish appeared. The washing facility was ready. Another essential feature was the radio in the corner next to the couch at the dining table. It played all day long. And my maternal grandmother had a "green thumb", so there had to be room for many plants. That was it! At least four, sometimes five, people lived in this space.

Life took place in the kitchen. Here people cooked, washed, did their minor laundry, ate, sat comfortably together, listened to the radio and talked.

In winter, the kitchen was heated. The other two rooms were cold because they were only used as bedrooms, which were never heated then. Why else would hot-water bottles have been invented?!

The tiny tube-like room leading from the kitchen was equipped with a coal stove but rarely used. What was the point? People sat together in the kitchen in summer and winter. No one claimed such a thing as a retreat or privacy during the day or evening before going to bed.

Family on my mother's side around 1950: sister Sissi, brother Xaver, my mother Erna and my grandma.

When I expanded the family through my arrival, my grandmother and her three adult children lived in this tiny flat without a bathroom. There were usually five of us, though the occupants changed. When my parents married in 1955 and moved into a small apartment in an old building, I stayed parked with grandma because they both worked long hours. My aunt also married and moved to Munich with her husband, who got his first job there.

By now, my uncle had copied his little sister and became an unplanned father. So in 1958, he and his pregnant wife moved in with grandma, who surrendered her bedroom to the young family. Grandma and I, and partly my newborn cousin, slept in the longish small room.

So for all of us, it was the kitchen-cum-living room, cooking room, dining room and, in the absence of a bathroom, the bathroom too. And, of course, my mother, who had already moved away, often sat at the kitchen table in the evenings since my father was on his work assignment during the week and only came home at weekends. Even my aunt and her husband from Munich visited during their holidays and slept on the folding couch in the kitchen.

That can't possibly go well! There must have been frequent quarrels when so many people sat on top of each other in such a small space!

That was certainly the case, but I only remember sometimes a bad atmosphere in the room. During such time I pretended to play quietly in a corner. Probably my harmony- and peace-seeking grandmother was responsible because the more quarrelsome family members didn't dare to come out of hiding in her presence.

But the memories that have stayed with me all my life are the stories of the olden days that used to make the rounds at the kitchen table in the evenings when I was already in bed, and the door to the kitchen was just ajar. The stories came to me along with the light.

For example, my 18-year-old aunt by marriage, whom I adored very much, told, while catching runs in the nylon stockings with a special needle, that as a teenager, she often escaped secretly at night via the dustbins under her window to go dancing or meet friends. I was full of admiration!

Tales from the "Her Highness“

Servants of the princely household (my grandmother 3rd from left) in Höfling Palace - 20s

My grandmother enthusiastically recounted her time as a young maid at Prince Thurn & Taxis. On Sundays, her Highness, the Princess, sometimes ensured the maids were chauffeured to a dance and back again. In my grandmother's view, her Highness couldn't put a foot wrong.

"Anni," said Her Highness, "why didn't you come to us?" She meant that when my grandmother had become pregnant unintentionally and unmarried, she should have confided in the Princess, although she was no longer in her service.

"Yes," I also wondered in my bed, "why didn't grandma go to her Highness, and perhaps she would have become a princess instead of a poor grandma?"

I never found out about Grandma's reasons. Perhaps she was ashamed or too proud.

But she was really proud of her time in Rotterdam, Holland, from 1926 to 1927, immediately after her employment at Thurn & Taxis. She enjoyed life as a maid with a Dutch family and felt very much at home in this country. It was simply fantastic there, she enthused.

My grandmother (on the left) in Holland 1926/27

However, her mother often asked her for money because her father had so many legal affairs and spent too much on them. The farm, the existence of the family had been endangered time and again. Finally, her mother asked my grandmother to come home and help on the farm.

She did so because she did not want to let her mother down. So the misfortune took its course.

My grandma became an unmarried mother, then a wife and mother of three, then a single widow with three small children, after that a displaced and penniless sister-in-law, finally a postal worker with a city apartment, and after the war until she died in the 1980s, a recipient of welfare who had to be supported by her children.

I loved this grandma very much, but the older I got, the angrier I looked at that fate. I often wondered at what point in her life's journey my grandma should have set a different course to lead a better, more self-determined life. She may have covered her despondency with humour, but I know she suffered greatly from her dependence on her children, not poverty per se. And I swore to myself that I would never in my life submit to the will of others.

A combative grandma as a role model

In this respect, my paternal grandmother was of a different breed.

My paternal grandmother Käthe 1953)

Since she lived only two doors down from me, I visited her quite often, sitting at the kitchen table in the same kitchen as at home and begging, "Grandma, tell me about the olden days!"

That's how I learned she was born on a cold November night in 1909 on a farm in the Allgäu, a mountainous farm area in the southwest of Germany. Her mother, the farmer's daughter, disappeared to Augsburg (a city about 100 km away) the very next day, leaving the baby with her father and sister. The father of the newborn child, a farmhand, was so unhappy that my great-grandmother didn't want anything to do with him, child or no child, that he decided to emigrate to America. His trail was lost there. At least, that's how the story was told in the family. But it's also plausible that he ran away not so much out of lovesickness but because of the alimony he had to pay. Who knows!

The stories about my grandmother's ordeal began when she was a small child. Because neither her mother nor her grandfather really wanted her, she was given to a foster family in Landsberg am Lech, a town about 70 km away. The foster father was a prison guard, so she lived in the shadow of the prison*. The family had been very good to her, but then, during a visit to acquaintances of the foster family, she had not been able to resist the temptation and had taken a little doll. Back home, in view of the prison walls, she believed she would be locked up behind them sooner or later. The guilty conscience and fear led to her feigning terrible homesickness and finally being taken to her less-than-enthusiastic mother, who was now married and had another two children. Her grandfather was also not thrilled about her return. So, she was placed on farms as a maid when she was still at primary school age, where she was often treated badly, even mistreated, she recounted.

But she was not defeated. Although she became a maid like her mother, she retained her pride and dignity. I never heard this grandmother worship any of her employers. They were just employers at best, exploiters at worst, who had to be stood up to. She didn't put up with anything. It was this fighting spirit that I liked so much about her.

One example has remained in my memory.

She had a weakness for fine lingerie. So she saved, which was her nature anyway, but as a young woman, she bought herself lace underwear from her hard-earned savings. One day, when she changed jobs, her employer searched her suitcase and found the silk and lace underwear. The lady of the house was upset and claimed she had stolen it because such things could never be in a servant's possession.

"Well," my grandmother replied haughtily, "you can ask in the lingerie shop who can afford such things here!" She said and walked away!

My paternal grandmother (on the left in the picture) with my mother and grandfather. She was a role model of fighting spirit

I liked that. I wanted to be like that. No matter where I ended up, no one should be allowed to hurt my pride and dignity without punishment. The "superiors" would not be able to do any ham to me because I would not recognise any superiority by these people. My interest in politics and my political attitude stem from that time, from my grandmother's stories.

I wanted to fight for social justice and dignity. For me, authorities did not get a foot on the ground. To this day, I still harbour a deep mistrust of them.

People in the apartment block - My grandmothers and I

Yes, I learned those life lessons from my grandmothers’ experiences. However, one thing stuck in my mind. It gave me food for thought: My peace-loving grandmother did not stand up for herself much, even giving the impression of resignation, but she was popular and valued by everyone. In contrast, the popularity ratings of my proud and quarrelsome grandmother were relatively low. I certainly felt the dilemma early on, long before I knew the word for it.

I even owe my lifelong passion for literature to my grandmothers because I come from an "educationally deprived" family, or an "educationally deprived" milieu, as one would say today. My parents had specific deficits that were neither recognised nor named in working-class families then. My father was intelligent and professionally successful but dyslexic, as I know today. My efficient and skilful mother would probably be diagnosed with ADHD today. Reading books, being quiet and concentrating was not her thing.

But both my grandmothers enjoyed reading more than anything. While my stubborn paternal grandmother not only had Dostoevsky and Tolstoy on her bookshelf but also read them enthusiastically, my maternal grandmother didn't have a bookshelf at all. She fetched stacks of romance, doctor's and aristocratic novels from the library and devoured them with great pleasure. Both grandmothers could be seen sitting at the kitchen table reading a book in their sparse free time.

Both grandmothers, as different as they were, lived in the same block of flats, and both had a significant influence on me, perhaps even more influence than my parents.

In these blocks of flats of my early childhood, that is, in the first eight years from 1953 to 1961, women were much more present and outnumbered men. All the women who didn't go to work like my mother seemed quite old to me.

However, when I consider that my maternal grandmother was only 49 years old when I was born in 1953, and my paternal grandmother was only 44, memory and reality do not quite match. According to today's criteria, these grandmothers were middle-aged women, and presumably, so were their neighbours, all of whom I considered equally grandmotherly in age. They were not too old to build a life for themselves after the war.

(TA)

*The prison in Landsberg am Lech is famous because Adolf Hitler was imprisoned there in 1923/24.