Here, Renate talks about her favourite aunt, Fanny. Fanny was the sister of her grandmother, Berta Schellhorn.
During every holiday in Sonneberg, I couldn’t wait to finally escape to Aunt Fanny’s. She lived just a stone’s throw from Grandma. A few more meters up Bahnhofstrasse, and you turn left into Kirchstrasse and you’re standing in front of the Nennstielhaus.
Even at the risk of repeating myself, one can only understand the charm of this place if one knows the rooms a little. But it is enough to wander through “the kitchen”, the shop and the factory to get a small impression of how fascinating these places seemed to me at all times of the year.
Above all, you have to experience the soul of the house, the woman who worked tirelessly there and gave all her love and patience to countless children.
After a happy childhood with her three sisters in the Greulingshaus, Aunt Fanny only had two more good decades. In 1907 she married the rather wealthy factory owner Oscar Nennstiel, with whom she even went on a honeymoon to Lake Garda [Italy] , which was quite a thing for the time. Uncle Oscar certainly liked to show himself with his pretty, slim young wife. Even after many years, the delicate features still showed the former beauty, until suffering left its deep mark.
In 1908, Aunt Fanny gave birth to her only son, Werner, who must have been a lovable and always cheerful person. A little spoiled, but that was hardly surprising given his mother’s kindness and indulgence. Werner married a pretty blonde woman from a Sonneberg clothing store. Ludwig Linker1, her father, had come to Sonneberg from East Prussia. Aunt Lotte had very modern views for the time and even less housewifely virtues. So she was not at all to her mother-in-law’s taste. I must mention, however, that young women who married into Sonneberg families never had it easy, even if they themselves were a miracle of virtue and fulfillment of duty.
Uncle Oscar died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1928 and did not live to see his four grandchildren. Ludi, Walter, Fritz and Werner Nennstiel were born between 1933 and 1939. Aunt Fanny was now carrying the burden of the factory and her stationery business, and every free minute she had belonged to her grandchildren, as well as to all the young people who, like me, rushed through the kitchen door several times a day to be pampered by her, or simply to pour out their hearts, because the dear woman was always understanding and knew how to comfort every sorrow.
The main attraction was the small stationery shop, which, especially during the war years, still had many things hidden on its shelves that were no longer available to buy. Before my time there was also a wide range of the best Offenbach leather goods, but only two old-fashioned handbags in a cardboard box remained. Sometimes Aunt Fanny took out the showpieces, which were carefully wrapped in tissue paper, and when her small, skilled hands stroked the brittle leather, her thoughts probably wandered back to the past, when she was still dressed up to go to the theater in Coburg with her sisters.
The shop had two display windows. In one there were exercise books, slates, pencils, paint boxes, basically everything that a little ABC student needs on the first day of school. The right window was decorated with mostly brightly colored candy cones that Aunt Fanny made herself in her cardboard factory. You might assume that these things were actually quite everyday, but you must not forget that you could get pretty much anything you wanted in this shop. And if you had only smeared two pages in a coloring book and another one suddenly aroused more interest, you could just get a new one. From an educational point of view, this is certainly not to be welcomed, but what child has this insight?
The deeper you went into the dark shop, the more interesting it became. There were two musty-smelling corridors, and there I usually crawled around on the ladder to get to the large boxes in which family tree pictures, paper cuttings and old postcards were kept.
We then fiddling around with all the things we had managed to get at Aunt Fanny’s kitchen table. There were no restrictions. If, for example, the jigsaw hit the table rather than the plywood it was intended for, it was no bad luck, and if the paint pot fell over, which happened quite often, especially when there were often ten children having fun at the table at the same time, Aunt Fanny would quietly put everything back in order. She quickly dried a few of the children’s tears, because of course we often had a falling out, and at the same time she prepared our favorite dish. Mine was rice porridge with raspberries. To top it all off, she often gave us a little surprise to take home.
Her kitchen was particularly lively on Sundays. Her four grandchildren came regularly and, when the weather was bad, often turned the room into a real madhouse. The grandmother always had play clothes ready for them. Everything they were wearing went into the washtub, and in the evenings, when the boys had had their fun, they were dressed in new clothes. With their shoes polished, they marched down Bahnhofstrasse to the Linker department store, lined up like organ pipes. Aunt Fanny always walked with them to the corner, and a happy smile often spread across her face when she looked after her four boys after a Sunday full of toil and trouble.
- Ludwig Linker was a prominent figure in Sonneberg during the 1930s and 1940s. He served as the mayor (Bürgermeister) of Sonneberg from 1934 to 1945
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