Summer, 1939: My clear memories of Sonneberg go back to the year 1939. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War1, we spent the summer holidays with my grandmother in Thuringia, and I will try to write down what I remember from this trip.
Father had started working for the city of Leipzig at that time and mother had already packed her suitcases with snow-white, starched dresses and shirts days before departure, just to be able to stand up to her strict mother-in-law. Departure from Leipzig Central Station was a big event. As a Swabian child, I had only come a year before from a small village to the big Saxon city, which was still so foreign to the whole family. At home there had only been a small station, on whose two tracks only a few slow trains crept past every day.
So we had now embarked on our last carefree holiday in that peaceful summer. We looked for our train in the long row of 31 platforms and listened to the loudspeaker announcing the arrival and departure of passengers from many European countries. At the time we had no idea that the huge curved glass dome above us, which had particularly delighted our father, the structural engineer, would collapse in a matter of seconds in just a few years under the impact of the all-destroying bombs and transform the entire, unique station into unimaginable chaos.
My brother, who was two years old at the time, had been safely loaded onto the train along with his pram, and the train slowly glided out of the station hall. It slid for a long time over countless switches until it finally found the right track heading towards Thuringia. Father leaned back in his armchair and immersed himself in one of his favorite books about the Hohenstaufen2. In a few hours we were approaching the Stockheim railway junction by express train. This place had completely disappeared from my memory until recently. By chance I now found out that this small transfer station is in Bavaria and has not disappeared behind the Iron Curtain.
Nevertheless, it has lost all meaning for me today, because there are no longer any trains that could take me from there to Sonneberg in half an hour.
The closer we got to the Thuringian Forest with its mighty dark green firs, the happier our father looked. His homeland still meant a lot to him. Only our usually talkative mother became a little quieter. She didn’t grumble, but she would certainly have liked to go to her Swabian homeland or even to the seaside during the holidays. But grandmother lived in Sonneberg and had plenty of room for all of us. We didn’t have to go to an expensive hotel, and this fact was always decisive when it came to the wallet of a civil servant, because this professional group was by no means among the wealthy at the time. The pension that would later beckon, which our mother would not live to see, was no consolation to her even then.
I, on the other hand, always enjoyed going to Sonneberg. Even though my strict grandmother often cast a small shadow over my expectations, I always knew that a wonderful aunt was waiting for me there, and never again in my life would there be someone who would spoil me as wonderfully as she did.
Finally arriving at the longed-for destination of our journey, the spacious station forecourt awaited us, the beautiful new town hall shining in bright colors with the inevitable swastika flag, but also the huge, brightly painted Sonneberg rider’s flag, set up in the middle of the square, a landmark of the home of the toy that left no doubt: we had arrived in the city of the world-famous dolls.
Once we had crossed the square, we noticed the huge Woolworth building on the right, which was not to play a role in my life until much later. Then it only took a few more steps to get to Sonneberg’s main street. Slowly and gradually rising, Bahnhofstrasse leads past familiar facades in a straight line to number 4, our grandparents’ house and factory. In the last hundred meters there is no longer an asphalt road, but more and more pretty little front gardens appear. Towards the end, the view falls on a large undeveloped plot of land on the left with many old trees and immediately behind it the white three-story house appears, home of Berta Schellhorn, our grandmother, who has been widowed since 1935.
She has majestically positioned herself in front of the green privet hedge at the iron railing, with the inevitable black apron over her strictly cut grey dress, she shows no sign of joy at seeing us again as she vomits. While our father is about to burst into tears of joy, she looks at our mother with a stern look and then bends down stiffly to embrace me. Am I mistaken, or is her body trembling a little with happy excitement? You had to know Grandmother very well to notice these discreet signs of affection.
But even though I was always a little afraid of her as long as she lived, even then, as a little girl, I knew that she would look after us for 14 days and only put the best food on the table so that we could recover properly from the unhealthy life in the big city. Of course, in the mornings she would make sure that I washed myself thoroughly with ice-cold water, even in the areas that were otherwise somewhat neglected, but every evening there would be a piece of candy dangling from my washcloth that was hung outside the kitchen window to dry. How would she have admitted that this surprise had come from her and, given her otherwise strict nature, I was often inclined to believe that it really was an angel. It was only much later, when I learned more about the hard and deprived lives of many Sonneberg women, that I was able to understand my grandmother better and suspect why she had become such a taciturn and stubborn person over the years.
- World War II began in Europe on September 1st 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. This invasion prompted Britain and France to declare war on Germany two days later, on 3 September 1939.
↩︎ - The Hohenstaufen dynasty, also known as the Staufer, was a prominent German noble family that played a significant role in European history during the Middle Ages. The dynasty ruled the Holy Roman Empire and various other territories from the late 11th century until the mid-13th century. Key figures in the dynasty include Frederick I Barbarossa, who reigned as Holy Roman Emperor from 1155 to 1190, and his grandson Frederick II, who was emperor from 1220 to 1250. These rulers were known for their military campaigns, administrative reforms, and conflicts with the Papacy ↩︎