NOVEMBER 13, SATURDAY

FAMILY

Yesterday was extended family day. Susie and I came back to Germany to bring Kathe home by spreading her ashes at the family cemetery plot and at the place in the Aller River where her brother Bernard drowned. But it turns out that bringing Kathe home has reconnected us with all the wonderful things that Kathe gave us when she decided to come to America after I invited her to. She didn’t have to come to America and she certainly didn’t realize what she was getting into when she accepted a one way ticket on the SS Bremen. But she went on her own to Hamburg to get examined for a green card so that she could work in America, an intimidating experience, and then she left her family and the village that she loved at a time when travel was still slow and expensive and telephone calls very expensive so that America was very far away. It wasn’t the huge jump that the immigrant ancestors of most Americans made first on rickety boats and later in steerage with no expectation that they would ever see their home towns or family again, but it was a big jump that she as a 22 year old made and it completely altered the direction of her life.

But now we are realizing how much it altered the direction of our lives. She brought us not only Germany with all of its traditions and customs but also brought us her German family and extended family and her childhood friends, some of whom we visited yesterday and will again today.

Saturday started out with a surprise. Maria called to get a picture of Susie and her driver’s license because she was booking us a rental car for the week. It was also a way to get us to a village an hour away where we met at 3 p.m. for a Schrader celebration with enormous pillow sized slices of cakes of every sort in a thousand year old Fachwerk house that is now a cafe.

But before that we had a breakfast of brotchen and wurst, and egg and cheese at Elke’s house. Kathe brought us Elke’s family as well as Winsen. Visiting yesterday was Nora, Elke’s grandchild who is training to be a dentist. Nora drove us to Celle to meet Maria and to pick up the rental car, the same Skoda that I was so amazed by in Aschaffenburg, a computer on wheels that does everything including telling us the speed limit on the dashboard, having Google maps in front of us all the time and turning the headlights up and down whenever we met a car at night.

Then we had a fascinating morning sitting in Elke’s house as we learned from Maria about the complications of making a high budget American movie, a process that because of American unions and rules costs more than ten times as much as making the same movie in Germany would cost.

And then we were off to Müllern-Hof Bauerncafe in Müden/Ortze and the family gathering in a large fachwerk building that had at one point been one half barn and the other half house.

But first I have to tell about that family that I married into. I have a weak memory and a strong imagination and, except for Maria, I can’t get my facts straight by looking on Wikipedia. Kathe, who never forgot anything, was my memory. So I am open to correcting anything I write here if someone knows better.

Ewald Schrader, born 1900, married Kathe Lerche, born about1904. He grew up on a farm in the town of Vollbutel, with a father and a grandfather named Ewald Schrader. The oldest son inherited the farm and the other sons became professional people of one kind or another. The farm house was the same kind of half barn/half house as the inn we later visited. Ewald became a school teacher. He taught at Garssen, then at Bergen, and finally become Rektor of the Realschule in Winsen/Aller where the family lived in an apartment above the school. This story is better told in Kathe’s autobiography on line at kathemosher.com. There were five children. Linde the oldest who married Alex Miechowski, a German Polish aristocrat’s son who was going to inherit a huge farm in Poland and who lost everything during the war and spent his life tending the pigs and other livestock at the Riseholme Farm Institute in Riseholme, Lincolnshire on the edge of the cathedral town of Lincoln. Linde was a nurse who went to England to get training and met Alex and married him with both becoming British citizens with a very English family of Martin, Bettina and Christine all of whom are married, each twice. Tina and Martin still live in Lincoln, Tina right across the street from where she grew up. Kathe visited them for extended periods when young and the whole family has visited us in Swannanoa, Tina several times when Susie and I went off to India. So this is my very English family who bring me England. I hope to visit them on my Paris trip in April/May.

Yesterday we gathered with Kathe’s very German family and now my very German family. Bernhard, the second child drowned at 17 in the Aller River and Volker, who married twice, who had no children, worked his adult life at Dettmer Muller, the department store in Celle. He died in 2014. Hinnerk was the third child. He was an artist and an art teacher who married Elisabeth and died young at 57 on the day the Berlin Wall came down. They had three children, Maria, the film director and actress, Henny, a digital designer married to Bertrand, a French citizen, with one child, Chiara. Henny and Bertrand speak English to each other and I think their daughter is trilingual. They have lived and worked in Amsterdam; Portland, Oregon; Berlin and are now living in Haarlem, Netherlands just outside Amsterdam. Eva had a German mother and American father and was adopted by Hinnerk and Elisabeth. She is a Cello performer and teacher and lives in Hamburg. Elisabeth, their mother, has Alzheimer’s and now is in her late 80’s and is physically fit but barely recognizes her children. She is an artist in her own right making elaborate line drawings, beautiful plaster sculptures and large abstract figures knitted out of telephone wire. She has a beautiful voice and sings softly much of the time, including during our Gasthof visit yesterday.

These are the facts of the family connections Kathe brought us but not the feel of the presence of all of these special people. Eva visited us in America in 2014 on a solo Amtrak, Greyhound and rented car trip around the United States as she visited us, her birth mother in Baton Rouge and Henny in Portland. Yesterday it was the warm presence of the Schrader family that was so alive as we sat and talked. My generation is passing on leaving three sets of cousins, one very German, one very British and one very American widely separated over the years and now coming together again.

So we ate fried eggs and ham on toast and each had a little of each of six huge pieces of delicious cake we selected and drank coffee and talked and talked and exchanged gifts and made each other feel more alive. It was a marvelous day.

When Kathe died I felt as if I was not only losing her, but was also losing all that she had brought me, Germany and England, relatives and friends. But now I realize that Kathe has cemented, is cementing, all of these ties. Because of Kathe I still have England and Germany, warm relatives and good friends. We came back and played Skipbo again last night with Nora joining in. Inadvertently and again by a streak of luck, I won. But it was the feeling of being among friends, of belonging, that made me feel so good, putting me to sleep with a full heart with Kathe still giving me so much to be thankful for.