Moving –

An evocative undertaking (Part I).

In a recent post my Substack friend

rohn bayes

stated that he had lived in the same city since the seventies, possibly in the same house.  He feels happy there, no need to drastically change his surroundings. He has grown roots where he lives, and besides occasional trips he gladly stays just where he is now. Or that’s how I understood his piece.

Which made me realize that I don’t have roots. I’m anticipating yet another move, one that’s actually forced upon me, but it made me look back and take stock of the countless times that I have moved from one place to another. 

In Ulm, around 1948. Always loved dogs and cats.

Even when I  was little, I lived in different flats and houses and cities – I had almost forgotten about this. My mother was an actress in Graz/Austria where my father went to medical school to become a doctor, and that’s how they met – he saw her on the stage and was smitten. Austria had been annexed by the Nazis in 1938, but after the war ended and the Germans surrendered, and shortly after they got married in the spring of 1945, my mother had to leave Austria to stay with my father and his family. They lived in the Ruhr District, a metropolitan area around the river Ruhr in the north-western part of (then) West-Germany. The area has a long history of coal mining, with more than 800 active mines in the Ruhr District’s largest city, Essen, alone (during the 1950s and 60s). I remember that one had to wipe away the soot from window sills every morning; large, black particles the size of a gnat or a pinhead. By the mid- to late 70s most mines were shut down. At first, most of the buildings were dismantled; until somebody discovered that a number of them were designed by famous Bauhaus architects, like the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

An old schoolfriend took me to visit Zollverein last time I was in Germany, 2003.

Oh dear, I digressed…

After my father finished medical school and got his degree, he had to work as a resident physician at the local hospital for two years. This must have been from 1946 to 48, give or take a year. At that time, right after the war, interns didn’t receive any pay, and my mother was the “breadwinner”. For at least two seasons she had a contract with the municipal theater in Ulm, the oldest municipal theater in Germany. I stayed with her, but I was too young to remember anything. I do have recollections, however, from the time of her next contracts in Heidelberg and in Mannheim. We rented a room in an apartment in Heidelberg, for example, from an artist who created puppets for performers, department store displays, newspaper ads. I believe she was quite famous, and I loved her puppets. There was a Kindergarten not far down the road, and my mother must have thought I’d enjoy being amongst a bunch of kids I had never met before. Well, I didn’t. When play time was over and everybody left, I walked out of the door too, but I couldn’t recognize the house I lived in. Luckily the daughter of our landlady looked out of a window and saw me traipsing down the street. Was I ever glad when she ran after me and took me home!

My mother is in the middle. On the left is Albert Bassermann, bearer of the Iffland Ring, awarded to the “most significant and most worthy German-speaking theatrical actor”.

My mother became a full-time parent and house wife when I was 6 ½ years old and my sister was born in October of 1952.  It was the end of her career, and she never really recovered.

When I was nine, we moved from Herne to Bochum where my parents had bought a big old house with a big, beautiful, and wild garden. And that’s where my sister still lives – not in the same house, but in the same city. Whereas I couldn’t get far away fast enough. I chose to go to university in Munich because it was over 400 miles away from Bochum and my parents. I lived in at least eight different locations while in Munich, quite normal for a student.

In 1970 I drove overland from Germany to India and spent over a year traveling around – but I always tried to stay in one place for at least several weeks, if possible. I lived in so many interesting but always simple houses! In Nepal I rented a little cottage without electricity or running water. One had to go to the well to get water, and doing the laundry took all day: you gathered the items that needed washing, brought some soap, and then spent all day at the river: scrubbing, rinsing, whacking the wet cloth onto a stone like the Nepali women did. It was a lot of fun! 

In Kashmir, we spent some weeks on a houseboat on the Dal Lake near Srinagar. 

Houseboats on Dal Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir. Photo by Madhumita Das,  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

In Goa we rented a little fisherman’s house right by the beach. On the way to Japan, I stopped in Laos and lived in a house on stilts near the Mekong River, in Vientiane. The houses had stilts because the river would at times overflow and flood the roads. Which was hard to imagine; at the time I stayed there, the river bank went down for at least 80 feet, and at the bottom one had to walk a ways to reach the river. But the stilts were proof that the water level could indeed rise higher than the bank, reach the house, and flood the bottom part. Mind-boggling.

Wood and paper…

When I lived in Japan, I liked to spend the summers in Nagano in the Japanese Alps where it would be quite hot during the day but the air was dry and would cool down considerably during the night. The winter was much more pleasant in Kyoto with only a bit of snow at the most, while the summer was almost unbearable there — very hot and humid during the day, and almost the same at night. But a winter in Nagano —the walls of traditional Japanese houses are not much more than paper and don’t provide much protection from cold. Actually, the Japanese people have pretty efficient ways to stay warm when it’s cold: they raise the body temperature from the inside by drinking hot tea and/or hot sake and stepping into a very hot ofuro or deep bathtub every morning. And they use a kotatsu, a table frame covered with a heavy blanket on top of which sits the table top. Underneath the table is an electric heater, keeping your front and legs nice and toasty. Never mind about the back. For a foreigner, it takes a while to get used to all that…

Tomorrow I will post Part II, with more moves in the United States.