NOVEMBER 7, SUNDAY

LOST AND FOUND

It is still dark outside as Susie makes coffee in Wilde Blumen, Wildflower, our Airbnb in the middle of Winsen on the Aller. The theme of the photographic workshop that I sat in on for a few hours in Athens was Intimacy and Place. While the analysis of the students who were presenting their photo projects to each other was too abstract for me to follow, I realize that my last week has been an almost overwhelming experience of intimacy with people in place after place through photographs and words, my own small photo project here on this page. Efi’s intimate intense story in Athens and Paros, experiencing the gypsy and vegetable markets of Athens with prize winning photographers around the table as we ate squid and octopus and drank wine, and Dorothee’s and Margit’s intimate stories and the swirl of competing world views in Aschaffenburg, a place that was important to me 60 years ago, and then suddenly being in Kathe’s home town and reliving stories of her life yesterday all tug at me and make me wonder.

Yesterday for Sunday lunch Susie and I were at Heinrich and Elke’s house with their son Christian visiting along with Maria Schrader, the daughter of Hinnerk, Kathe’s brother, who stopped by on her way from Hannover and on her way to Berlin to do a zoom presentation to UCLA students as part of her promotion of her film, “Ich Bin Dein Mensch” I Am Your Man.

Mixed in with this were famous Guggenheim winning photographers and Maria, even more famous and recognized everywhere and the odd way in which a spell is cast on me and others as we respond to famous people. In American Maria is famous for winning an Emmy last year as best director of a film series for Unorthodox, a Netflix film. This summer she won a number of prizes at the Berlin Film Festival for “Ich Bin Dein Mensch” which she wrote with Jan, her partner, and directed including a number of awards which are the German equivalent of the American Academy awards. “Ich Bin Dein Mensch” is the German nomination for the best foreign film at the 2022 American Academy Awards.

There were two Maria’s yesterday, the People Magazine famous actress and movie director and Maria Schrader, daughter of Hinnerk Schrader, Kathe’s brother and Heinrich’s childhood friend and Susie’s cousin. We all sensed the aura of being famous, but she quickly became herself, one of us.

Because we asked her to, because we all knew and cared for him, Maria told us about the almost unbelievable night when her father, Hinnerk, a well known German artist, but Kathe’s brother and Susie’s uncle and Heinrich’s friend and my brother-in-law, died. Hinnerk filled a room with his presence when he entered it with his vibrancy and stories and his death was hard to believe. It was the night, November 9, 1989, 32 years ago almost to the day, when the Berlin Wall came down; it was the night that Hinnerk went to see why a very good family friend was not answering the phone and found her dead; it was the night that Maria was starring in her first professional play at the age of 24 and the whole family was driving to Bonn to be in attendance; it was the opening night of the play, the premiere of the play by an Israeli playwright who would be in attendance; it was the night that Maria was going to introduce her parents to the parents of Dani, her Jewish, Swiss boyfriend. Hinnerk came back from finding the friend dead, went up to the bathroom to wash up, shouted out and fell and cut his head so badly that he never regained consciousness. I remember getting a phone call and telling Kathe at some event in Kittridge Theater at Warren Wilson College and her world turning upside down as we were suddenly rushing to fly her to Germany.

We also talked about Kathe’s death. Elke her best friend was present every day on Facetime as Kathe was dying. Then three night’s before she died, at 2 in the morning, Kathe suddenly resurrected and was full of delight and laughter claiming everything would be ok as she sang German Christmas carols. At 8 that morning she FaceTimed Elke and Ula, as they were on a walk together, and the three old friends sang a song in German together about the coming of May.

And we talked about Maria’s film work. She was just back from five months of making a film about the journalists who unraveled the Harvey Weinstein Me Too story and today Maria starts editing the three hours of film. She will have to cut out much that people want to say, intimate sharing, and might hurt or offend these people who poured their hearts out in the process.

But as I write this I realize that while there is the world of the rich and famous and the swirling lives of people all around me, that, like everyone, what I am writing here is simply my own idiosyncratic and nondescript very ordinary passage and, as with everyone, my experience of intimacy and place this last week is what is swirling around me and is what I can share. These were the things that touched me today. Maria shares intense stories of other people through film and through her acting and she shared her intense story of her father’s death last night. We also talked about her mother who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. We talked of Hinnerk’s brothers Bernhard’s death by drowning in the Aller years ago. We talked about Kathe’s delusions for months before she died. We talked about Christian’s daughter Nela making a presentation with her university group at the Glasgow Climate summit a few days ago. Richard, my brother, popped in on Facetime and showed us his Paris apartment for a week.

But in the end I, like everyone else, makes his or her own passage and that is all I can really share, what happened today.

I could have stayed in my house in Swannanoa with photographs of Kathe and other reminders of her presence around me while I had breakfast, lunch and supper and attended church on Sunday with visits by family, a routine of 60 years. But I didn’t. I pushed a button, got on the plane, and began to wander, so simple to do. And this passage into the unknown in Paros, Athens, Aschaffenburg, Winsen has been a mythic adventure that is both puzzling and overwhelming. Outwardly I am an anonymous, genial almost invisible octogenarian carefully making my way along without tripping and inwardly I have been turning somersaults and flying high for six weeks as I experience one intense experience after another, often in the lives of others. All of these experiences release me from my routine, domestic, Swannanoa life. I have been in so many places that I don’t know where I am, and I’ve relived my life at different times and through other people’s lives at different times. I have the feeling of being lost in the stars, lost in space and time, appearing here and appearing there and not being anywhere at all.

And yet as I sit in Kathe’s hometown by the school where she both lived and attended, and the church she sang in, and am in the presence of her friends and relatives and her daughter, who is also feeling the Germanness of her mother in a new way and think of family in Asheville, I feel at the same time, grounded and at home.