Life is a Journey: Live it (Part 36)

The other biography
The kindergarten Rübenkamp had one long, single-story house along the road Rübenkamp, with the administration office, kitchen, and four groups for the young children, situated towards the railway line in the back. Another house was located nearby for the elder children who attended school. In between was a playground accessible to all children. Besides the sandbox stood a mighty weeping willow with long branches.

In the middle of class four at Fraenkelstraße school, just on the other side of the road from Rübenkamp kindergarten, Brenda Neubert from Ole Enn 6 asked me to meet her under the weeping willow, as she had to share a secret with me. The kindergarten used to tell us that one day we would get married to each other. There was never any doubt in my mind that this prophecy one day would be fulfilled. Brenda Neubert and I, of course, were meant for each other. No question about it. When I met her under the long branches of the weeping willow, she told me her secret. The same day in the morning, Robert, one pupil from our class, had kissed her. My life ended from one second to the next.

I hated to eat matjes, and when I refused, I had to sit alone over my food until I managed to dispose of it, pretending to the kindergartners I had finally eaten it. The soil outside the house can give testimony to it. From early on, I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher myself. This created a pattern that followed me all my life. What I saw, and I started to love, I wanted for myself. To have the best chance to achieve my heart`s desire at the age of twelve, I helped the kindergarten teacher with the toddlers to feed the small children and help them have their afternoon sleep. I would play with them before the parents arrived to take them home. When at the age of fourteen, the age of attending kindergarten had ended, our mother would have cooked over the weekends our meals, and on our return from school, all we had to do was heat the meals. While Sabine Fuchs and I sat in the kitchen or living room to complete our homework and do as we were told by our teachers, Heidi Jürgensen would go out and chill or get ready for parties. She had set her mind on an easy, fun life, which meant having fun with the boys around. I had set my mind not to end up as stupid as my parents, but to get to know all that was available to me and beyond, for which reason, hard work at school and discipline were needed. From early on, I understood what, later as a Senior Lecturer, I would teach my students, that intellectual success, like A-Level or university qualification, is not by intelligence but achieved by the correct character. The correct character comes for free and is independent of parents, teachers, or bosses. It is the responsibility of every one of us to form, train, and preserve our character. Poverty seen in the years of childhood and beyond is no excuse for not being able to make it in life. Parents can be not intellectually well advanced do not mean it is a family condition. Very much depends on the decision someone makes for their life. Otherwise, many testimonies of lives changed, and chains of bad family history would not be voiced and given. To make people responsible for not having been able to achieve certain goals in life is laziness and never true. The only acceptable explanation is the decision God has for us at a certain given time and the end of our life on earth.

We had pets in our home. We had hamsters, fish in the aquarium, turtles in the same aquarium years later, and a rabbit from the Fishmarket of Hamburg, which Uncle Peter had bought us. We were told the rabbit will grow to a medium size. When the grey rabbit grew bigger and bigger, my mother decided to release him in the Stadtpark, where he probably died in the harsh winter. Us children she told the rabbit had to be taken down by the Vet.

I was never part of any gang or school clique as I preferred to stay home alone, finish my homework well, and prepare everything for classwork. When my work for school was finished, I sat down and wrote stories or books. I never wanted to get distracted by what others wanted me to do or what they had on their minds. When smoking among my classmates became popular, and peer pressure was the order of the day, I sneaked out in the dark and got one package of Camel filter cigarettes next to the vending machine to get my chocolate from. I looked around to ensure no one saw me buying the Camel filter cigarettes, which I hid under my bed for my mother not to spot them. While my mother was working, I stood on our balcony, hiding myself from people passing by, and put out the cigarettes by throwing them into a blue water container we used for the flowers on the balcony. The cigarettes did not taste good but gave me a bad smell and a cough. After just over half of the package, I decided to stop smoking. Hiding myself all the time and the bad taste the cigarettes gave me made my end after two weeks, my history of smoking. Meanwhile, Heidi Jürgensen continued and possibly still does till today.

In the school Fraenkelstraße, my class teacher, Mr Georg Friese, asked me to be in charge of the geographical collection on the top fourth floor of our school. The room had half of a normal classroom with many maps and models of geographic sites, deserts, Antarctica, mountainous terrains, and sea level models. I started by cataloguing them in a new system for teachers to find what they needed much faster. Each school break, I went up into that room, organising the geography collection, and was available for teachers asking for items needed for their classes. This gave me a good feeling knowing teachers had to follow my instructions. This position exposed my name in the entire school and gave me a prominent status. We had a student council quarterly newspaper to which I regularly contributed as a columnist, and I loved it.

As a teenager, I was desperate to have a father figure in my life. While my two sisters had my mother to ask her questions about their changing female bodies, my mother felt ashamed to share with me what was about to happen to my body and where children come from. Instead of telling me all about it, she came home one day and gave me a book to read. That is where I know sex from and how children come into this world. This was also the time my father appeared again and shortly disappeared again from my life. I needed a stable father-son relationship and not an on-and-off situation. Without him knowing, Mr Georg Friese became my father. At least my heart was attached to him. For him, certainly, I was a very ambitious pupil with very good marks, someone who loved to learn and engage in extra curriculum activites, someone worth promoting. He lived with his wife and two children at Goldbeckufer, which I had the privilege to see two times for important meetings. I am certain he never knew what he had meant to me. He knew that if he did not mark me for German language with a mark one, I would deeply get upset. Besides the German language, he was also my geography teacher.

The subjects I hated in school the most until I left school to attend Hamburg University were mathematics, chemistry, physics, and sports. My favourite subjects, though, were Politics, History, German, English, and Philosophy. All of them I studied at university while completing my university degree in Political Science and History.