Foreword

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On the boundary of the rural municipality of Weinböhla, there is a house that looks out of place among the modest DDR homes. It stands on an artificial hill and was built after the Wende, a turning point that began on 9 November 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and culminated in the reunification of West and East Germany on 3 October 1990. The wine-growing village of Weinböhla, unknown outside of its own region, lies in the heart of the former kingdom of Saxony. Moritzburg, the hunting lodge of the legendary monarch Augustus the Strong, is just a stone’s throw away. It is not far to Dresden either, the royal residence on the Elbe, or to Meissen, where the first European porcelain was produced.

An extensive family archive is stored in the basement of the house in Weinböhla. Although the records are patchy at first, more and more material has been preserved since the mid-nineteenth century: correspondence, diaries, all kinds of photographs and other pictures, official paperwork, commercial agreements, contracts and so on. I came across many documents in this archive – or rather, four cabinets full of disorganised papers – that I initially found difficult to place, pieces that raised all manner of questions.

Who was the man who, shortly before 1900, wrote such longing love letters (‘Mein liebes Herzglöckchen!’)? What is the architectural blueprint for a 28-metre-high factory chimney doing in there? And where did that 1917 declaration from Friedrich August III, ‘We, King of Saxony, have decided…’, come from? Why does the diary of a Wehrmacht soldier contain photographs of the forgotten bombardment of Middelburg? The testimony of an Italian forced labourer is no less surprising: ‘My employer, Jungblut, and his foreman, Lenz, were always good to us.’ And why would someone mention antique furniture in a statement for the Stasi, the DDR’s secret service?

Heads above water

An archive in the basement of a private residence. There must be tens of thousands of them in Germany. They have one thing in common: they are not openly accessible. That is also the case here. However, my mother-in-law, Brigitte, gave me permission to consult her ancestors’ legacy of documents. She lives in the whitewashed house in Weinböhla, with its Wintergarten and its large sun decks.

Brigitte is now 84 years old and has often spoken to me about her family. It is a family like so many others. Certainly not the kind of family whose members are to be found in history books. You would search in vain for any politicians, authors or artists among her blood relatives. An average family.

But that is exactly what makes it so fascinating. The archive in the basement in Weinböhla documents how people from the middle echelons of society kept their heads above water in turbulent times. Generation after generation. It was no easy task. The establishment of the German Empire in 1871 was followed by a series of dramatic developments in European history. These often originated in Germany. And even when this was not the case, the consequences of these developments hit that country particularly hard. It is a sort of focal point, not only the place where history is made, but also where it runs rampant.

Take Hilde, Brigitte’s mother, for example. She was born in 1902 and died almost a hundred years later, in 2001. Hilde grew up under Kaiser Wilhelm II, got married in the Weimar Republic, and had children during the Nazi dictatorship. She lived through the rise and fall of the DDR and, shortly before her death, the new Berliner Republik celebrated its tenth anniversary. A quarter of a century of democracy, divided between the 1920s and the 1990s, balanced against seven long decades during which Hilde lived under various regimes, some of them outright totalitarian.

Her life was shaped by the First World War, the hyperinflation of 1923 and the crash of 1929. She saw Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the horrors of the Second World War. These were followed by the Soviet-Russian occupation, the Cold War, the construction of the Berlin Wall and, as the grand finale, the Wende. This member of the family will not make it into any history books either, but you could say that Hilde’s small life took place against the backdrop of immense history.

Blind booking

It was during conversations with Brigitte that I came up with my plan to write a biography of her family. Maybe not starting at the very beginning, but at least from 1871, when the ‘long’ twentieth century dawned, with the new Empire. Emil the gardener’s son also happened to be born in that same year. He is the patriarch of a family line that had its home in Meißen and then later in Weinböhla.

For a long time, an apartment on Brauhausstraße in Meißen was at the centre of the family’s life. In the 1960s, the focus shifted to Weinböhla. Their final destination was, at least for now, the whitewashed house, a haven for a family that is scattered all over Germany.

In addition to the Grunewald line, which goes back to Emil, three other lines are important: Reinhard, Oehmigen and Otto. They appear in the family tree on page 11. The horizontal and vertical axes demonstrate that this history is not solely about the fortunes of four branches of a family tree, but also about the story of four generations. Its members were born in around 1870, 1900, 1930 and 1960. Their stories demonstrate over and over again that a person’s date of birth influences their opportunities. It is like making a blind booking, when you purchase a ticket without knowing where your flight is going: you have no idea where your life’s journey will take you, but your moment of departure seems to determine your ultimate destination.

The focus is on eight people in particular. They belong – down the path of the female lineage – to the Grunewald line. They are four married couples: Emil & Hedwig, Hanna & Hanns, Hilde & Hellmuth and Brigitte & Gerd. Four branches of the family tree, four generations and four marriages: they have allowed me to shine a light on 130 years of German history – not from a bird’s eye perspective, but as seen from below, from the point of view of people who experienced the effects of that history on a daily basis.

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De Wintertuin, p. 7-10
Translation: Laura Watkinson

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