Higher Ground, Anke Stelling [historical books to read .TXT] 📗

coffee and eating cake, and you realise that cake isn’t enough to satisfy his hungry heart.

But you’re also realistic enough to know that you can’t buy happiness, but you can buy cake; that day it was the cheesecake you had made especially for Grandpa. And for a while, it calmed your heart to mix the flour and butter and sugar, stir in the quark, put the cake in the oven and watch it rise. And didn’t it turn out well? Grandpa Raimund sliced it up and put a forkful in his mouth. Mmm, how delicious! And it would be some time before his hungry heart needed stilling again, and until then, the cake would gently melt on his tongue.

But unfortunately, the sight of somebody trying to numb their hunger, either with cheesecake or gummy bears, hurts more than anything else, right?

The Boss sings for me. I listen to his comforting diagnosis.

‘Hungry heart’ sounds better than ‘borderline’, which is Ingmar’s diagnosis for me.

I heard it from Ulf, my conscientious go-between: ‘Ingmar said that you probably don’t know where you stop and others start.’

‘Really?’ I said and waited for Ulf to burst out laughing, but he didn’t burst: he looked sad and pensive.

‘It’s not like nobody’s trying to understand you.’

Ulf is trying to act as a go-between. He’s an architect for building groups: that requires mediation skills. You don’t have to deal with just one homeowner, but five, ten, or twenty. And each one has a hungry heart.

Ingmar could have numbed his six years ago with an act of charity. That didn’t work out, so his heart is still pounding and looking for explanations and diagnoses. Diagnoses are so much better than a vague feeling that something’s not right!

I understand Ingmar for wanting to tidy up the world for himself and his children according to the DSM.

I understand Ulf for thinking that if we all try to understand each other, then surely we’ll be able to see eye to eye, to forgive and forget.

I understand Frank for not wanting to forgive and forget, for wanting to make an utterly unforgiving gesture for once in his life — ‘Get out, all of you! I don’t give a shit what happens!’ — after years of his nerves and boundaries being trampled on by his wife and annoying sons, and his wife’s friends and their annoying kids, and God knows who and what else — ‘That’s enough!’ I understand all that.

I am the Queen of Understanding.

Understanding is a highly effective means of numbing hungry, painful hearts; it’s much better than anger, because, at some point, anger needs to erupt so that you don’t choke on it or burst. And who knows, it might strike the wrong person or be over-the-top in the first place — unjustified even. In any case, it’s risky because it’s loud and very visible. An angry person is already a victim; an understanding person is in control.

My mother never risked getting angry either.

‘I could slit somebody’s throat,’ she would sometimes say. She would play down the brutal image with a mocking tone, a friendly, calm expression, and restrained posture, all of which erased any suspicion that she would ever slit anybody’s throat.

We talked for hours; Renate’s right about that.

We discussed hundreds of questions and situations, but the lesson she taught me was to be understanding — as a weapon of defence and evasion, the opposite of justified anger and incisive insight.

Do you think, Bea, that I had the slightest clue what made my mother so angry that she felt like slitting somebody’s throat?

She used to tell three stories about her younger days: first, the one about the girls in fourth grade, who gave her the cold shoulder because of a fashion show. Second, about her first boyfriend, who was happy to date but not marry her. And last, about her father, who once beat her with a clothes hanger because he thought it was her fault that her little sister was almost run over by a car.

Stories full of unatoned injustice that were told not to make me take my mother’s side and feel angry towards the girls, her boyfriend, or her father, but to make it clear that she too had once been a girl and could empathise with me. Bad things had happened to her, but she’d survived. And she’d done it by figuring everything out and understanding the other side: the girls were probably just jealous, the boyfriend had been too much under his father’s thumb, and her father had suffered a nasty shock.

September 1957; Southern Germany.

One day, when Marianne was in the fourth grade of Gomadingen primary school, her mother told her that Neumaier, the children’s outfitter, had asked whether her two daughters would like to take part in an event he was planning that coming Saturday. There was a fair in town, and his shop was going to take part by presenting its new winter collection.

Marianne didn’t understand straight away. What was she being asked to do? Who had asked? What was a ‘winter correction’?

‘A fashion show,’ her mother said. ‘You’ll have to walk down the catwalk and show people what they can buy this winter. And Brigitte too, for the smaller children.’

Marianne thought about it. A fashion show, wow. But unfortunately, only at Neumaier’s, not in Paris. It wasn’t the same as being booked as a model for a photo shoot, but almost. You had to be pretty to be asked. Did that mean she was pretty? Gerda was the prettiest of all the girls in her class, and Evi, of course. And Ingrid had the best clothes, not from Neumaier, but from Königstraße in Stuttgart. Everybody envied her. But they’d all envy Marianne too, when they heard that she’d been asked to take part in a fashion show. Why didn’t Neumaier ask his own children or Gerda or Evi? It’s obvious why he didn’t ask Ingrid: her mother didn’t buy clothes from him.

That evening, Marianne’s mother told her father about Neumaier’s proposal. And that