JUNE 1, SUNDAY

VISITING GERMAN COUSINS

This day will be one of the high points of the visit by my son Tom’s family and for me. Tom and I had a marvelous breakfast on the garden terrace of Elke and Heinrich’s house of bakery fresh brotchen and croissants with fresh fruit and coffee.

Then we met Kathy, Hannah and Caroline for the church service in the church that my wife Kathe so loved as she grew up in Winsen. The order of the service in German was new to all of us, not knowing when to stand up or sit down and not being able to burst into chanting with the rest of the small congregation. It was a communion Sunday. All of the congregation came forward with the grape juice drinkers lined up on one side and we Americans, along with most of the congregation, on the wine drinking side. We were served our wine and a wafer, then all put our hand on the shoulder of the person next to us in solidarity. I was a beautiful service.

We walked from church to Stadt Bremen but when we got to the Main Street we saw that it was blocked off and people were setting up for a street fair of food trucks and children’s activities mixed with stores selling things on the sidewalk.

Then we were off to Stadt Bremen, the Gasthaus where Kathe and I would have had our wedding meal if we had married in Winsen, a meal we finally had on our 50th wedding anniversary with the close friends who were still alive, the people who would have been there 50 years earlier.

We crossed the bridge over the Aller river close to where the raft of logs had set off a week earlier to get to Stadt Bremen. The food was served in a tradtional dining room which we had to ourselves. At the beginning of the meal the three Schrader sisters, Kathe’s brother, Hinnerk’s children and Tom’s cousins arrived. One of them, Eva, he had never met, the second, Henny, he had played with in Winsen when he was five, and Marie whom he had met and has become a famous actress and film director, having in the last few years directed Netflix’s “Unorthodox” for which she won an Emmy as director and “She Said” a film about Harvey Weinstein’s fall and conviction.

But the biggest news was that their mother, Elisabeth, who made art all her life but in the shadow of her husband, Hinnerk, who was a famous German painter, had been “discovered” and exhibited by a Berlin gallery owner at the Berlin Bienielle, a huge Berlin art fair. Suddenly she was a sought after German artist whose paintings are considered to be exceptional and valuable. This all happened unexpectedly about two weeks ago and the sisters are all very proud of her. But Elisabeth, who has been sliding into dementia for the past 15 years, which we have watched happening on visits, is being cared for in a home for people with advanced dementia in Hamburg, close to Eva’s apartment, and no longer even recognizes her children or can know that she is being recognized and praised for her drawings and knitted sculptures.

After our meal together we all walked around the Winsen street fair together and talked and talked, even pulling in my daughter Susie on Facetime from Asheville.

And then the sisters drove us to Celle with our bags and we said goodbye. It was a marvelous day.

Bild newspaper article about Elisabeth

BILD NEWSPAPER ARTICLE ABOUT ELISABETH

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WINSEN STREET FAIR

https://share.icloud.com/photos/057ewAKadcPD0SOwM6uZVdBZA

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0a1_RKTXuymlhTp7qN6nYyJiA