Life is a Journey: Live it (Part 112)

The other autobiography
With wide-open eyes, I looked at Susanne Fröhlich as she had a small fight with Hans Wilder. They argued about the responsibility we carry for our thinking and actions whether or not we can blame it on the circumstances we find ourselves in or our background. Arguing along the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, with the propaganda voice of Lenin both could not come to a common agreement.

Susanne Fröhlich turned to me saying:“What do you think about it? Do the circumstances we were raised in and we live in determine our destiny or just be the basis on which we stand to use our free will and determine the next step in our life to reach where we are supposed to be?“

„Very good point that you are making,“ I took my sausage out from the fire, added mustard on it, thanked Hans Wider for handing me over a roasted piece of bread and knotted as Charles Darwin Jr offered me a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. „It is one of the most essential questions when it comes to the aspect of human development and...the development of societies.“ The sausage was just right, not overroasted, not burnt in any way, just right. I enjoyed every bite of it. „Let me use two stories...besides what I had told you about my eldest sister Heidi Jürgensen already...which go back when I was young and older in life. Young...let me think,“ I was not sure about the year the story was unfolding and left a significant mark on my life; the way I think about the progress of everyone of us. „I was around fourteen or fifteen still wanting to become a kindergarten teacher. We had to engage in a three-week internship. I opted for a kindergarten in Hamburg-Steilshoop which had a group of children living between freedom and prison. They were minors with a serious record of criminal offences such as shoplifting or physically attacking other children. There was a particular boy whom I loved so much. While in the group room, we played and carved wood into something nice or useful. There were tools all over the place. One day he got so angry about a situation that he took tools and threw them around the room. I asked the other children to leave the room. Only he and I were in the room. While I tried to calm him down he got angrier and angrier and his face turned red. Out of nowhere did he decided to lift a hammer and asked me to give way for him to run through the door only God knew what he would have done outside the room. I stood in his way. He threatened me with the hammer and said he would harm me. My instinct told me to shout against him as loud as possible and that is exactly what I did. I shouted for my life. He was shocked and dropped the hammer immediately running out of the room while passing me at my right side.

That boy was so much a part of my heart that I asked the single mother with two more children and a boyfriend who seemed to be more important to her than her children to meet the boy each Friday afternoon, and she agreed. We met in their apartment but mostly sitting outside on a bench. One Friday he came up to me waiting for him on the bench and sat there saying nothing. I allowed him to say nothing. After ten minutes of silence, both of us looked around watching people passing by he confessed to having stolen a bike. He did not want to possess it only having fun riding a bike at that particular moment. Very carefully with love in my voice, I tried to make him understand what he had done.

The other story that comes to my mind is about Florian Dettmann, a boy from the same house in Krüßweg 3. His mother suffered from Multiple Sclerosis a sickness where the muscles eat a human gradually. There is no cure for it. People affected will surely die a painful death. At first, she was able to use a car which was changed to fit her problem. Over time she had to sell the car and walking up and down the stairs was no longer possible for her. She stayed in her apartment only taken away once a week by an ambulance for outside treatment. Her husband, the father of Florian, had left her before her symptoms had materialised. Neighbours tried to help her bring food from the markets by accepting mail order deliveries. The further her sickness matured the angrier she got about anything. Neighbours stopped helping her as she stopped appreciating what they were doing for her. She hated her situation and made everyone around feel bad about it.

Forian was around his twenties and hopping from apprenticeship to the next. Once he started a professional training to become a butcher but gave it up half a year later. For months he stayed at home listening to very loud music smoking and smoking. Each time I met him I could smell him from far. He tried to avoid eye contact with me and never greeted me when seeing me. Living on the floor above him we could often hear loud male voices sharing words and ideas that did not make sense to me at all. Then he started training to become a mason. He stopped months later. Than a roofer, before settling to become a carpenter. His neighbour on the same floor Ruth Ratjens who knew him as a baby kept saying that because of his mother`s situation and his father not being around only his grandmother from time to time, advised him on what he should do, making him a young man that he was.

As much as I respected Ruth Ratjens my own experience and observation I totally disagree with her. My mother Ruth Willers, a single mother, a kitchen helper with professional qualifications of three years of training with three small children, divorced in the 1960s raised us. The time we were able to attend kindergarten in Rübenkamp she went back to full-time working. Her ex-husband did not pay any upkeep for us leaving the financial burden for her to handle and solve. And what was the result? Two children finished university. My finishing Hamburg University after five years with a Diplom-Politologe degree and my younger sister has a degree from a University of Applied Sciences, with long-distance courses. And Heidi Jürgensen, my eldest sister, is an Optician with Brille: Fielmann in Hamburg. No one needs to come to me to say that he or she cannot make it in life due to the circumstances in which the person was raised or finds themselves in.

On the contrary. I have often seen people from poor backgrounds be it financially or interllectually that use this momentum and the power which lies in such hardship to work extra hard and make it over time in life. Some migrants who get their acts together rise above locals who sit around trusting the system to help and push them. At a certain age...from eighteen and above...that is my humble opinion, everyone is responsible for their destiny and fate. Circumstances you might find yourself in may not favour you. But...but...but...“

Susanne Fröhlich laughed out loud: “Here we come again. But...but...but. What is your message to us?“