Then the steel gate which was always open at that time, the curved approach to the main house and the servants house, lower and in a right angle left to the main house. The wooden bridge over the brook. I dammed up the brook occasionally until the meadow flooded. The meadow which Luckei Tauernsteiner mowed with a scythe. Then I helped him to put the hay into a small wagon that we had to pull ourselves. This was a real meadow with wildflowers, bees and all.
Of course, there was grandmother Christa, who I called Apa. That is why I was here in the first place. She lived on the second floor in the apartment on the right, looking from the outside. To the left lived the Bevers. Below the photographer Steger. The Tauernsteiner's servant's house had a dirt floor in the kitchen, the wash was done on a stone sink outside under the roof overhang in front of the kitchen. Luckei had no teeth. He couldn't read or write. In the summer he was a lot on the alm, guarding cows or goats.
Of course, there was grandmother Christa, who I called Apa. That is why I was here in the first place. She lived on the second floor in the apartment on the right, looking from the outside. To the left lived the Bevers. Below the photographer Steger. The Tauernsteiner's servant's house had a dirt floor in the kitchen, the wash was done on a stone sink outside under the roof overhang in front of the kitchen. Luckei had no teeth. He couldn't read or write. In the summer he was a lot on the alm, guarding cows or goats.
I was only 4, 5 or maybe 9, those were the years I spent summers with the motherly grandmother who she cooked a lot of macaroni with white sauce and ham for me. It was my favorite meal and one of the few she could manage without stress. She didn't grow up cooking, you see. She was a Prussian Noble, she had a cook and a nanny for the children. But then, in WWII her high ranking military husband was pulled out of his retirement and recruited by the Nazis. At the end of the war he was captured and eventually executed for war crimes by a Russian tribunal, while she was a refugee who, after long ordeal, eventually found shelter and a home here in Berchtesgaden.
There was a pond and a swamp where I wasn't supposed to go to, according to the rules. There was a secret steel door in the basement that was locked and led to a tunnel, I was told.
The attic had a few rafters with burn marks, the result of a lightning strike which the residents extinguished with a bucket chain, I was told and was impressed. Mr Bever had two dogs, German shepherds, the younger I recall was Gyp, she lived longer, so I would remember. Mr Bever told me how to train a dog and not be afraid. He called me Nebuchadnezzar, I have no clue, why. But I have been trying to rebuild Babylon ever since, first on my train set, then as a student and now in real life.
I know now, and slowly learned then, that Schneewinkel had been Himmler's residence during the war. That wasn't surprising since his boss had even two summer residences near Berchtesgaden. Later when I learned that these figures constituted Germany's original sin. It became clear that Schneewinkel had been a summer residence of the Berliners who lived in Munich. And because they were Jewish, their home was stolen from them and occupied by a Nazi leader since they all loved the Alps. The Berliners had survived the war, the Bevers were somehow connected and through that connection moved into the estate after it had been returned to the Berliners after the war. And that Apa somehow had known the Bevers from her time when she lived in Kolberg, a city that is now Polish.
But it was only after I unearthed a radio documentary about Schneewinkel that I learned that the estate had been quite the place in the "roaring twenties", when the Berliners owned it. Sigmund Freud wrote an entire treatise here and the German composer Max Reger had been a guest there, too. I learned that the Bevers were at least half Jews as well, since a Bever had married a Berliner. And that, in spite of my grandfather's involvement with the Nazis they had helped his wife to find a roof over her head after the war. Her husbands transgressions were not minor: He had become the commandant of Belgrade and before that had helped Hitler prepare an invasion of England while in Brussels. Back when I was visiting in Schneewinkel, the grandfather's positions and his fate were not exactly known to us, not even his wife knew about the execution until she received a document from the Red Cross much later. The term my grandmother used was that her husband had been "lost" or "kidnapped" (Verloren oder verschleppt).
I never thought that my post-war generation was unblemished by what a later German chancellor would call "the grace of the late birth." In fact, the German Nazi history has become part of my DNA, hard to shake and influencing much of what i have done and believe. But only now do I see how directly I was entangled with the German/Austrian history, good and bad. My childhood playground in Berchtesgaden was quite the fulcrum.
The attic had a few rafters with burn marks, the result of a lightning strike which the residents extinguished with a bucket chain, I was told and was impressed. Mr Bever had two dogs, German shepherds, the younger I recall was Gyp, she lived longer, so I would remember. Mr Bever told me how to train a dog and not be afraid. He called me Nebuchadnezzar, I have no clue, why. But I have been trying to rebuild Babylon ever since, first on my train set, then as a student and now in real life.
I know now, and slowly learned then, that Schneewinkel had been Himmler's residence during the war. That wasn't surprising since his boss had even two summer residences near Berchtesgaden. Later when I learned that these figures constituted Germany's original sin. It became clear that Schneewinkel had been a summer residence of the Berliners who lived in Munich. And because they were Jewish, their home was stolen from them and occupied by a Nazi leader since they all loved the Alps. The Berliners had survived the war, the Bevers were somehow connected and through that connection moved into the estate after it had been returned to the Berliners after the war. And that Apa somehow had known the Bevers from her time when she lived in Kolberg, a city that is now Polish.
But it was only after I unearthed a radio documentary about Schneewinkel that I learned that the estate had been quite the place in the "roaring twenties", when the Berliners owned it. Sigmund Freud wrote an entire treatise here and the German composer Max Reger had been a guest there, too. I learned that the Bevers were at least half Jews as well, since a Bever had married a Berliner. And that, in spite of my grandfather's involvement with the Nazis they had helped his wife to find a roof over her head after the war. Her husbands transgressions were not minor: He had become the commandant of Belgrade and before that had helped Hitler prepare an invasion of England while in Brussels. Back when I was visiting in Schneewinkel, the grandfather's positions and his fate were not exactly known to us, not even his wife knew about the execution until she received a document from the Red Cross much later. The term my grandmother used was that her husband had been "lost" or "kidnapped" (Verloren oder verschleppt).
I never thought that my post-war generation was unblemished by what a later German chancellor would call "the grace of the late birth." In fact, the German Nazi history has become part of my DNA, hard to shake and influencing much of what i have done and believe. But only now do I see how directly I was entangled with the German/Austrian history, good and bad. My childhood playground in Berchtesgaden was quite the fulcrum.
Klaus Philipsen
There would have to be also, the story of my other grandfather, whom the English pulled from his farm field to make him mayor of his village, since the villagers had vouched for his character and passive resistance against the Nazi regime.
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