Rebellion and reflection [1]
Werner Heiduczek [2]
Translated by xia23
The presence of my daughter Yana on this not very friendly planet is grounded on the social conditions, from which I determined to break off.
Now you have to know, that I have still had two more daughters, whom I care no less at all. But all the same.
The eldest daughter, Christiane, whom I let my wife’s mother raise. I was a student, and I was far more interested in the early medieval poems, the Greek philosopher Sokrates and Plato than my mother-in-law and child. With a student friend I had one day cut the lectures, in order to find a name on the hill in the city. Goethe’s wife Christiane Vulpius seemed appropriate to us, to be a godfather of a process, on which something depended.
They say yes: “If you have the name, you have the soul.”
Grandmother, mother and child lived in two tiny rooms of a farm house, where I brought pieces of the world of a big city every weekend together with the learned gossip of a student of the first semester.
One days I came back, when Christiane – she was 8 months old – sat in her cart, playing with her own feces with her finger, and then put the finger in her mouth. I felt sick to the highest degree and held a talk with my wife and my mother-in-law on cleanliness and child upbringing and drove back to the university city. There I thought the Plato’s sentence, the good is beautiful and the beautiful is good.
Meanwhile my wife, on her contributions I had relied, every morning rode her bike to school, taught, rode home in the big break, suckled the child, rode back to school and taught again.
My mother-in-law collected ears of corn, potatoes, sugar beets from the harvested fields. It was the time of hunger after the war.
No wonder: Christiane loved her grandmother, with whom she grew up, far more than me. That seemed to me, it was farther away from the laws of nature. I put great value on the relationship as an advocate of Rousseau’s theses.
So I let my own mother take care of my second daughter. To understand the following I must say something about my mother. She was a simple woman and at the time she could speak on her own life correctly neither in German nor in Polish but only in two mixed languages. So I see this as an early reason for my tendency to be international and poetic. she couldn’t recognize the state authoritarian. She only loved the word of the priest, with whom my father and my eldest brother played the cards sometimes.
After the war I brought my mother from Zabrze [3], a city which de Gaulle [4] at his visit to Poland in 1968, described not without politic flirt as the most Polish of Polish cities, to Halle [5]. In the meantime I had turned away from Catholicism, which for my mother seemed a great evil and impression of clear decline of the world, from which the T. S. Eliot [6] says, they would not go with a bang, but with a whimper in the end.
My mother became also Kerstin’s educator. I gave the child this name still under the impression of Swedish film “She Only Danced One Summer”, which everyone talked about at that time.
As first my mother had Kerstin baptized. My wife and I learned this half a year later. That Kerstin used the children’s Bible as a picture book, did not bother me, as atheist I also considered the Old Testament as a great work of world literature. Her Marian songs [7] let me think not without sentimentality on my own childhood, which I spent hours after the May devotion [8] with girls in the park.
But one day Kerstin prattled to me as follows: “First I love the dear God, then I love you.”
I confess, a jealousy on the dear God was still greater than the jealousy on my mother-in-law. I took these words as humiliation and decided to father a third daughter, whom I wanted to form after my image.
When asked since when I had felt like a revolutionary, I named this event.
[1] Aufruht und Besinnung. p. 81. Kontakt mit der Zeit. Dieter Stöpfgeshoff. Max Hueber Verlag. Germany, 1995.
[2]. Werner Heiduczek. A German writer. 11/24/1926 – 7/28/2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heiduczek
[3]. Zabrze. A Polish city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabrze
[4]. de Gaule. Charles de Gaule. Ex-president of France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle
[5]. Halle. A German city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle_(Saale)
[6]. T. S. Eliot. 9/26/1888 - 1/4/1965. An American poet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot
[7]. Marian songs. Christian songs on Mary, mother of Jesus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymns_to_Mary
[8]. May devotion. Activity in May honoring Mary, mother of Jesus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_devotions_to_the_Blessed_Virgin_Mary
