Me and JC

When I first arrived in Clemson,  I knew nothing of South Carolina history.  While my parents were house hunting, the realtor tried to interest us in a historic property.  A classic two-story white house with four stately columns that John C Calhoun built for his mistress.  We inspected the house - I remember its musty smell and period furniture, the lovely view of the Blue Ridge out back, and my parents evaluation of it as a money sink.  Coincidentally, I absorbed the information that John C Calhoun was a locally revered big shot who had once been vice president.  I knew he was somehow connected with Thomas Clemson who founded the university I would eventually attend. 

A few years later, when I was a Clemson student, I was vaguely aware that the stand of old trees between the ‘Tin Cans’ - the boys dorms - and Sirrine Hall screened an old home called Fort Hill, and perhaps I knew it was build by Calhoun.  It wasn’t until the late seventies when I was on a visit with my fiancé and we were looking for a way to pass the time that I toured Fort Hill. I learned then that Thomas Clemson inherited the estate from his father-in-law and deeded it to the State on the condition that it would become the site of an agricultural college. I remember that the Clemson heat illustrated the desirability of having a detached kitchen. Perhaps I absorbed the fact that the cook would have been a slave woman.  If I did, I didn’t think about it much.  At the time, I was still very clear about being German. My guilt lay with the holocaust, not slavery.  If the tour guide mentioned that Fort Hill was a cotton plantation with about 100 slaves, I filed that as ancient history.

I visited Fort Hill again just last week.  My husband and I were on a trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains with his oldest daughter and her kids, and they wanted to see the place I’d lived.  Clemson was in the grip of a heat wave, and Fort Hill is air-conditioned.  I’d been thinking about Calhoun’s legacy for a couple of reasons. One of the largest lakes in the city of Minneapolis is Lake Calhoun -  it hadn’t occurred to me that it was named after John C until local activists began a campaign to change its name a few years ago. I learned that Calhoun had been Secretary of War when Fort Snelling, the base white settlers used to colonize the state, was built.  And, of course, while we were in South Carolina, the fact that the Emanuel AME church was on Calhoun street was much in the news.  

The first thing that greeted us inside the doors of Fort Hill were recently added foam core posters titled “The African-American Experience at Fort Hill.”  The tour guide was able to supplement the detailed descriptions of particular sales and purchases of slaves, as well as living conditions and punishments.  I asked her where the field hands lived, and she pointed toward the south end of campus. “Do you know where the architecture building is?”  I did.  “That’s where the field hand cottages were.”  I had a sudden revelation. I had spent my college years trucking back and forth between classes on a former cotton plantation, walking past the ghosts of slaves and never had a clue.

The final poster showed a picture taken in 1940 of Mr. Greenlee, a handsome white-haired man who started life as a stable slave.  I don’t know if he was the great-grandfather or great-uncle of my classmate Harry, who was our sophomore class president in 1970 and who is now a professor at Howard University.  

I’m not sure what to do with the knowledge that my college years were spent oblivious, criss-crossing former cotton fields soaked with slave sweat, feeling no trace of my privilege.  How pre-occupied I was with how much I didn’t want to be there.  For now, I’d love to be able to call our Minneapolis lake Lake Medoza - Loon Lake in Dakota. 

Ron and his daughter and grandchildren at Fort Hill

Like a Tourist

The first few times I returned to Germany I was at that awkward age when I believed I was extraordinarily visible.   Every move mattered.  I didn't want anyone to think I was no longer German, or worse, that I was trying to show off  with my new American manners.  I also still believed I would someday return, so it was crucial that I pick up all the latest slang and dress.  Over the years, that charade became impossible for me.  But I still tried hard not to look like a tourist.  This became less and less possible as I dragged around Europe with my husband - I can duck into a German department store, pick up a few pieces to transform my wardrobe and refuse to wear hiking shoes for sightseeing, but my Midwestern husband isn’t going to take off his Salomons or swap his Levis for German ‘Freizeithosen’.  Nor can he disguise the fact that he needs me to translate the menu.  And while Sophie is proud of her ability to manage in German,  we are still going to walking down the street discussing where to go next in English.  I’ve adapted to these changes, and most of the time, I’m comfortable bridging the cultural divide, but once in a while I get sucked into the “I can’t look like a tourist” vortex. So it was with some embarrassment that I told my cousin Sassi what Sophie and her boyfriend, Brian,  were most interested in seeing in München.  “They really want to go to a Biergarten,” I confessed.  We laughed about it, but Sassi was game.  She’s a relatively recent immigrant to Bavaria, and often squires her friends from Berlin around the city.  Apparently they, too, associate München with beer and pretzels.  On a beautiful sunny morning, we set out to take a series of busses and subways to the English Garden.  We sat at a communal bench in the sun, listening to a Bavarian oompah band, drinking beer,  and eating Würstchen.  I had a nice chat with the tourist from Iran sitting next to me.  Afterwards we went for a Sunday stroll through the gardens, and I thought I had survived the tourist ordeal.  The next day, it turned out I wasn’t done.  After Sophie completed her obligatory foray into German clothes shopping, she and Brian needed a bite to eat.  So off we went to the Hofbräuhaus.  Really?  Really.  I watched Sophie polish off a half liter of beer and a pork knuckle; Brian’s stomach was a bit touchy, so he opted for soup to go with his beer.  The food was better than I expected, and by the time we left I decided I was done pretending.  After all, even if I lived in Germany, I would still be a tourist in Bavaria.  

Sophie enjoying her Eisbein

Ruhpolding

As a child, I often heard my parents reminisce about their trip to Ruhpolding.  My mother always pronounced the word with a look of bliss on her face, so I came to associate this mythical place with pleasure.  When I got old enough to delve into the family collection of photo albums, I stumbled on a series of vacation shots, labeled Ruhpolding.  Both my parents looked very young, although they had outgrown the bony look of their earliest years.  One shot showed my father in hiking shorts, smoking a pipe in front of a romantic alpine vista, aiming a smoldering look at the camera.  Another featured my mother, her dimples flashing, holding a paper cone of cherries.  “We couldn’t really afford them,” my mother confided each time we encountered this image, “but I was pregnant with you and really wanted those cherries. They were delicious.”

I’ve been planning a trip to Austria in August - the goal was to spend some time in the mountains and in Vienna.  After studying flights and possible routes, I decided we’d fly into Munich and make a loop.  Sophie’s asked whether we could go see the Eagle’s Nest - Hitler’s mountain retreat in Southern Bavaria. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since she just finished a history course about daily life in Germany during the Nazi Era.  

Perhaps it’s her job to drag me to places I would avoid on my own.  Without her I would never have gone to Buchenwald.   I don’t want to close my eyes to that part of the past; it’s more that I’m afraid of getting stuck there.  Buchenwald brought cruelty alive in unexpected detailed ways that lodged in my heart and bubble up at unexpected moments.  For me, it was the path from the train to the barracks labeled Carachoweg ( which meant “ faster” path), where the guards harried the prisoners whose legs were weak from standing for hours wedged into cattle cars.  Their shouts echo in my imagination.  

I understand that the Eagle’s Nest is benign. It’s a lovely setting, with a great mountain view, that is said to have made Hitler dizzy, so that he only visited there a few times.   As I surveyed the map in search of a place close by to spend a few days, I spied Ruhpolding.  The town has a very user-friendly website that made it easy for me to reserve rooms.  Perhaps the site of my parents first vacation will provide balance and keep me from sliding too far into the past.  

Inherited Memory

I was barely eleven, waiting for the tram with my friend Ulli.  Someone walked up behind me, reaching over my satchel.  Intense pain sizzled from a spot on the back of neck.  I jerked around.  Torsten grinned, as he tossed his cigarette butt to the ground.  I registered the sprouting facial hair on his chin - he was in my class but had been held back at least twice.  Ulli screamed at him, but I just clenched my jaws.  My only goal to not react, not give him the satisfaction of seeing the pain he’d caused.  Ulli kept yelling at him as she pulled me toward the slowing tram.  Then she turned to me: “Why didn’t you say anything?”  

Over the years I often wondered why my automatic response is not fight or flight, but freeze.   Was it the repeated border crossings when I was still an infant - watching my mother pretending to be meek while the guards treated her like she was subhuman?  Or does it go farther back?  

Last year, I came across this article:  Memories pass between generations. Recent work in the field of epigenetics shows that genes can be altered by trauma and those altered genes modify the behavior in offspring.

It felt like a revelation and confirmation.  Memory transmitted between generations.  Perhaps now I could stop blaming myself for shutting down like a frightened rabbit whenever anyone in uniform challenged me.  Maybe my fears and anxieties aren’t a defect of character, as I’ve always believed.  

Shortly after “Dreaming in German” was published, I received an email from Michael Reddy, a healer, coach and shaman.  He had come across the book on Amazon and wanted to know if it  might be useful in his work with family constellation therapy.  Here’s an excerpt: “I’'m wondering if you know about family constellations--which came out of Germany originally?  Individual trauma, if it is serious enough affects the families of ancestors as well as the individual, can lodge in the higher level family system (or family soul), where it stays until some descendent lives out something similar.  It's like the unresolved in the family soul resurfaces.  This is a chance to heal it, but few people understand that.  Family constellations are a tool for revealing and clearing these kinds of systemic traumas.  The US is the laggard in this kind of work, while it is growing very quickly around the world.”

We traded pdf’s of our books. His is titled Health, Happiness, and Family Constellations - How Ancestors, Family Systems, and Hidden Loyalties Shape Your Life - and What You Can Do About It. I found it fascinating reading.  Bert Hellinger, who developed this work, was born in Germany in 1925, the same year as my father.  He served in the German Army, became a prisoner of war ( though in Belgium, not the US). After the war, he became a Catholic Priest and spent 16 years as a missionary living with the Zulu in South Africa. The connection with ancestors ( a central feature in Zulu beliefs) is critical to family constellations theory.  Hellinger is not without his flaws, yet the central ideas of family constellations therapy resonated with me.  The basic premise, as I understand it, is that people experiencing trauma are frequently in survival mode and cannot process their experience, so they shut down and keep functioning.  This leaves their unresolved trauma for their children and grandchildren to resolve or relive.

My Father (front and center) as a POW

Letters from the Past

My father was a letter writer.   Sometime during every weekend, he would disappear into his study, sit down behind his large blonde wood desk ( one of the few pieces of furniture that made the move from Germany), and insert sheets of personalized stationery into his portable olive green Olivetti.  The keys began to clatter at a jerky pace.  My father had never taken a typing course, rather he hunted and pecked, but rapidly since he had lots of practice.  He didn’t handwrite his letters because his handwriting was famously illegible.  The letters went home.  To his mother in Gera, who would pass them around to his siblings that remained there, and to his sister Marianne who lived in West Germany.  

I rarely got a letter from my father.  One of the letters I do have is one he sent when I first began writing.  My original concept for the book was less personal and more historical.  I wanted to tell the story of recent German history through my grandparents’ and parents’ biographies.  One reason this letter is precious is that in recent years, my father lost his verbal skills to the degree that I couldn’t remember them.  The letter brings his manners of speech back vividly, and also illustrates a thing or two about his character.  I had asked him to describe an encounter he’d had with an SS recruiter.

My father had just graduated from boarding school, had enlisted in the German army and was at home in Gera waiting to be called up. The year was 1943.  He wrote in German, and I’ve translated this as well as I am able.  

“One day, I was summoned to the Police where those guys had made themselves at home. At that point in time, lots of rumors where already floating around that the SS who considered themselves elite troops and expected to acquire only the best, were having greater and greater difficulties filling their ranks and were using all possible methods of pressure to recruit sufficient “volunteers.”  One story had it that they enlisted young women for their interviews who accused unwilling candidates of cowardice and tried to appeal to their honor, working every possible patriotic register that governments, and not just dictatorships, use when they require people for something that’s not so very popular.  With this knowledge, I sat across from this blonde, highly decorated SS officer, and was looking forward to the game that would develop.  I let him go on for quite a while trying to work all angles in the full knowledge that I would be able to confront him in the end with the reality that the competition already had me in their pocket, which he would finally have to indignantly accept, but not without lecturing me harshly for wasting his time.  Those were the pleasures of the little people during this segment of German history.”

My father (in his German army uniform) with his Dad

Eulogy for my Father

I suppose it’s only natural that we try to summarize a person after they are gone. 

I could make a list of things about my father:

He loved to travel
He loved his family 
He loved his work
He loved good food
He loved parties
He loved to be a host
He loved classical music
He loved harmonious space and light
He loved a good political discussion
He loved to read

So many of the things he loved slipped away from him in the last five years.  If time strips us down to our essence, and sometimes I believe it does, then he was radiant love.  At the end, unless he was too tired, which was more and more of the time, he beamed at those he cared about, his entire face lighting up with pleasure. He became a very sensitive receptive soul.

When I was a child, I believed that my parents’ generation must have been different from me, somehow more courageous and less sensitive, to have survived the chaos, fear, and hunger of the thirties and forties.  It would have been too heartbreaking to imagine them as capable of pain as I was. I couldn’t admit to myself how terrified they must have been until I saw that sensitive human being emerge as age stripped away all the defenses. When my father told stories from those times, he hid behind an ironic, slightly humorous story telling style that had me fooled until almost the end.

When my father first moved to Minnesota, it became quickly obvious that he wasn’t able to make new friends, that he would be completely reliant on Ron and me for his emotional life.  It felt like a huge weight.  It was a big responsibility, and I won’t pretend there weren’t days and weeks when I wanted to run away from it. At the same time, I am glad for the time we had with him in our care.

Here are some of the gifts I received during these last years:  

My father had very definite musical tastes - he’d made these so clear over the years, that I didn’t feel comfortable imposing my own more wide-ranging ones on him, even when he no longer had the energy to protest.  Add to that the fact that one sure way to bring him pleasure was to take him to a piano concert.  My father’s presence renewed and broadened my appreciation for classical music and that has enriched my life.

As my father lost the will and energy to talk,  he taught me the importance of being present, nonverbally.  Our family was extremely verbal - we talked for the sheer pleasure of turning an elegant phrase or showing off complex vocabulary. The only way to get some quiet was to hide behind a book; that was a sacred act and anyone reading could only be disturbed if truly necessary.  As it became harder for my father to talk I struggled to keep the conversation going, at first.  I strained to fill the airspace and fished for topics that could provoke a response.  The first time I decided to just be quiet was on a car ride.  I had picked my father up at dusk to take him to my house for dinner.  I said nothing.  After about five minutes, my father said:  “Look at the moon. It’s beautiful.”   I’m grateful that my father reminded me to look at he moon.

My father loved sitting in the sun.  It was one of his last remaining reliable pleasures.  Over the last few years, I’ve spent hours sitting in the sun, listening to the birds, watching the leaves sway in the breeze.  I’m grateful for that.

The best present I received came one day while he was recovering from a broken leg and had to stay at a nursing home.  It was September, the sun was still warm, and every afternoon, I wheeled him out into the flower garden where we sat for about an hour.  One day, he said, looking away into the flowers: “I know that moving you from Germany to South Carolina was hard on you.”  It sounds so simple.  But it healed me.

Siegfried Poser  January 23, 1925 - February 19, 2014

Oil

Many times a day I hear the trains rumbling by my studio - the old Northrup King Building  is hard on the railway line. I see either black tank cars carrying oil from North Dakota or the big open cars that used to mean grain, but now hold sand mined in Wisconsin and Minnesota, headed for the fracking fields.  Lucky for me, my house is a little further from the tracks, because the trains run all night long.  Depending on the wind direction, I can hear a soft mournful lowing or a low roar as the trains approach the crossing about a mile away.  I read in the paper that the unfortunates whose houses are closer have been complaining that they can no longer sleep or have guests over because of the increased train noise.  I feel lucky that I’m not that close, at least at night.  I try not to calculate what an exploding oil car would do to me as I work just across the parking lot.  But then I think about what the constant traffic means.  

My memory tells me that even before the oil companies discovered fracking, we had more than enough fossil fuel reserves left to nudge earth’s climate into killing us off.  I used to think that we needed to curb global warming to “save the earth.”  It wasn’t until recently that I realized the earth will outlive us.  We are such a temporary blip that if you start taking the long view, you realize that the destruction the earth will unleash on us if we don’t change our ways will be a self-correction, a shaking off of the foolish mammals who didn’t appreciate the delicate conditions that allowed them to flourish.  I picture the earth shaking us off like a dog shaking off fleas.  And just like the last few times there were mass extinctions, some other form of life will hang on and flourish as conditions shift to a new normal.  We - like the dinosaurs before us - won’t be around to see it.  Unless we get smart and leave most of that oil in the ground.

It's easy to get paralyzed in the face of this overwhelming insanity.  If, like me, you want to find your way out of despair, I recommend   reading Joanna Macy's book "Active Hope."  

Editing Memoir

When my writers' group read the first draft of my memoir, one of them said: “There are so many places in here where you describe feeling tense and anxious, but nothing really bad ever happens.” She looked confused.  I think that was the first time I realized that I am more anxious than normal people.  I had spent years trying to understand why my toes curled to grip the floor while I was brushing my teeth before work in the morning.  I knew it was odd.  My first response to that observation was the obvious one: Every time I noticed it, I forced my toes to unfold.  Whenever I noticed my neck stiffen and my trapezius muscles quivering, I took deep breaths and  yelled at myself to relax.  I chastised myself for shaking with nerves before confronting my boss about an unjust performance appraisal; I tried not to admit that I had to write scripts so I could force myself to call strangers on the phone.  At least I was no longer afraid to pump my own gas at unfamiliar filling stations.  

After my writing group meeting, I pored over the manuscript and tried to guess which of my anxiety episodes would seem warranted to others, and which I needed to edit out.  The border crossing fear seemed reasonable - I left that.  I left a touch of my old phone anxiety, though I cut back to just one episode.  Even relatively normal people got nervous about driving through New York City, so I allowed my jaw to clench.  But most of my hyped up ways of interacting with the world fell to my red pen.  Anxiety was not the subject of this memoir.  I shoved it into the background, so it wouldn’t take over the narrative.

Over the years, I’ve grown less anxious.  Not accidentally.  I’ve had to work hard at it.  The first and most effective antidote I stumbled onto while I was in graduate school.  Hatha Yoga. The seventies kind - slow, carried out in a dim room, with a generous dose of corpse pose at the end.  I hadn’t known that my body was capable of letting go.  It never really had before. Well, maybe after sex, or after a long run, but never for long.  I loved that feeling of melting into the floor.  Loved it so much, that I didn’t have to force myself to practice most days.  I no longer practice in that form, but since my late twenties, I’ve always had a daily practice. Some combination of meditation and movement.  For the last five years, it’s been daily Qi Gong and mindfulness meditation, with a dash of gyrokinesis or yoga thrown in.  

None of this means that I no longer tense up.  I never know when I’ll find myself carried off by an irrational bout.  Sometimes it hits when I travel, though that’s not a predictable trigger.  Whenever it does, I see my mother, pacing alongside the track at the Krefeld railroad station, lips pressed tight, clutching tickets.  And my daughter, fingers curled tight around the steering wheel, seat pulled up as far as it will go.  I wish I could edit the anxiety out of their lives as well.

Legacy

When I first published my memoir I’m not sure what I expected - I mostly felt a strong need to get my manuscript out into the world. I had done some research about potential market in writing my book proposal, so I suspected that the book would interest German-Americans, possibly other European immigrants.  What I didn’t expect was that the book itself would form a connection that I had mostly avoided during my time here.  It would connect with me with other people like myself - Germans who had migrated to the US since World War II.  Years ago, writing to an author involved digging out the publisher’s address and sending off a note in care of someone else - I always found that daunting to the point of impossibility.  Communication has become so much easier, and much more of a two-way street.

I love the emails I’ve gotten from readers all over the US who tell me their own immigration stories.  There are parallels and differences, but most of all I have become aware that I am not in any way alone.  I’ve received links to recipes for German hard rolls, the best online source for German deli items, and, most gratifying of all, deeply felt thanks for expressing shared feelings.

I’ve also been referred to several books I had missed.  I just finished a memoir by J. Elke Ertle titled Walled-In: A West Berlin Girl’s Journey to Freedom.  The thread of the story couldn’t be more different from mine, but I was impressed with the writing and the author’s ability to convey the atmosphere of living in West Berlin during the Cold War.  I also admired her successful use of geo-politics as a metaphor for her own family dynamics. Right now, I’m reading a book given to me by a friend after she finished mine.  It’s called On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood by Irmgard Hunt.  

As I’ve been talking to other German immigrants and reading these memoirs, I’ve been struck once again by the horrendous legacy of fear and insecurity Germans of the post-war generation inherited.  Not only the tremendous weight of processing the burden of the holocaust.  That’s the obvious issue.  What has come into focus for me is how difficult our grandparents’ lived were.  They grew up during World War I, with all the deprivations that implies, then suffered through the economically difficult times in the twenties.  And just when they finally began to prosper, Hitler dragged the country into another war. And then, for those stuck in East Germany, the struggle continued.   My Grandfather, Opa Gustav, was a perfect example.  His father was drafted at the beginning of World War I.  Gustav had to leave school at 14 to support the family in his father’s absence.  He became an apprentice to a fur merchant in Leipzig.  After the War, he and his father began to build a business manufacturing jewelry displays.  By 1933, the business was at last functioning well enough that Gustav could afford to take his family on their first vacation.  He struggled to keep his business alive during the Second World War and just managed to avoid the draft by converting to manufacturing weapons cases - this made his job necessary to the war effort.  He spent the rest of his life trying to keep the business going in the hostile environment of East Germany.  When I consider that legacy, I have two main reactions.  Is it any wonder that a part of me cannot trust in peace and prosperity?  And:  I am incredibly lucky to have made it to the age of 60 in peace time.  

Eating "German" in America

One dilemma I have every time I drive from St. Paul to Madison is lunch.  I am a picky eater.   I want my food home made from actual ingredients and I avoid cheese and wheat.  In St. Paul and Madison, I have a choice of locally owned restaurants that cook from scratch.  It’s the wilds of Wisconsin that appear to be a wasteland of national chains where everything contains unpronounceable hidden ingredients and is smothered in cheese.  I realize that eating industrial food once in a while isn’t going to kill me - that takes repeated daily exposure - but I keep trying to find a stopping point that provides some local charm.  We’ve tried Norske Nook, the Red Moose Grill in Black River Falls,  and a Coffee House in Menomonie. Last time we decided to stop at Germanhaus in Camp Douglas.  There are copious remnants of Wisconsin’s German past scattered about the countryside, and I’ve checked out their menus via smartphone.  Hamburgers and Beer Cheese Soup crowd onto the pages along with Bratwurst and the occasional Schnitzel. 

Germanhaus advertises its heritage in old German script and looks like an Alpine chalet mated with a cinderblock diner.  As I step inside, the mix shifts to 50’s German restaurant melded with rural supper club.  Red vinyl upholstered chairs surround formica tables,  elaborate wood and wrought-iron lamps hanging from acoustic ceiling tile illuminate Bavarian castles and villages lovingly rendered on sheetrock.  Painted scrolled woodwork completes the look.   It’s a bicultural mid 20th century fairy tale.  I order a bratwurst with red cabbage.  The wurst itself is first class.  Some local butcher is faithfully following his great-grandfather’s recipe. The waitress tells us it’s served with horseradish sauce instead of mustard, because the restaurant owner is from Frankfurt.   It comes with a toasted hot dog bun, and a tiny dish of canned red cabbage.  My husband orders the BLT.  I may come back, but next time I’ll skip the cabbage.  Maybe they make their own potato salad.

When I go to my favorite Japanese Restaurant in the Twin Cities, the place is half full of Japanese students.  At dim sum at the Yang-tze, I can barely hear myself talk, because there’s nothing quite so lively as a room full of Chinese chatting with friends.  I used to wonder whether the food at these restaurants seems as limited and out of date as what I find at German restaurants.  I suppose it’s because the big wave of German immigration occurred in the late 1800’s and most of them came from southern Germany, but the food is relentlessly old-fashioned and Bavarian.  The Black Forest in Minneapolis has updated their menu to include some fifties favorites ( Hawaii Toast!), but other than that it’s traditional.  Glockenspiel, Gasthof zur Gemütlichkeit, and Gasthof Bavarian Hunter - with the exception of a signature dish or two, they could trade menus.  

During the eighties, the owners of the Black Forest opened a daring contemporary German restaurant called Lorelei.  It fizzled after only a few months.  I ate there only once during it’s brief existence.   I clearly remember the white walls, the selection of wines, and the tasty trout.  I don’t know whether the restaurant failed because Minnesota wasn’t ready for the concept. Perhaps there were business reasons.  

I still haven’t quite identified the source of my discomfort with German heritage as it’s celebrated in the US.  I cringe when it’s primarily about beer and lederhosen, dirndls and pretzels distorted through 100 years of assimilation.  When I first moved to the US, people would tell me “I’m German.”  How exciting.  I was so starved for a chat in my own language.  But I quickly learned that “I’m German” meant one of their grandparents had come from Germany, and that their German vocabulary consisted of “Auf Wiedersehen” and “Wienerschnitzel”, usually memorized from The Sound of Music.  When I stray into a German restaurant, I have the same sense of “too bad, I thought I was close.”

Home Movies

“We convert your old video and movies to DVD!”  I drive past this sign at least once a month, but this time it grabs my attention.  Hurry, I think, before that pile of VHS tapes ( and even worse, the 8 mm tapes that I never got around to editing and transferring) become so obsolete they’ll be trash.   So I drag myself down to the basement where the library of videos has found a home.  

It’s not a new problem.  My Opa Gustav was what we now call an “early adopter.”  If there was a new appliance or gadget, he got one of the early models.  Sometime in the thirties, he acquired an 8 mm movie camera.  We inherited it in the fifties - made of cold, black metal, so heavy I could barely hold it up.  When I was a child, I could rarely persuade him to dust off the portable screen and set up the equally heavy and ancient projector.  Fleeting images flickered into view:  my mother on a swing, a glimpse of her sweeping the courtyard. When this snippet jerked into view my mother whispered to me that when she was young,  her sister would shriek: “ Look at her, she’s a lefty!”  every time.    As an only child, I flinched at the obvious intent to injure.  Opa also owned two purchased cartoons, each about 5 minutes long, one of Mickey Mouse and the other of Donald Duck. His possession of these American imports hinted at a time before the War,   before Western decadence was censored by the Communist Party.   I have no idea what happened to these precious strips of celluloid.  They probably went out with the garbage when the medium changed to 16mm.

Sometime in the 80’s my father had his reels of movies (8 and 16mm) transformed to video.  It was this set of three VHS tapes, titled “Poser Family Memories”  that I first dug out and took over to my father’s.  At this age, he is often withdrawn and shows little reaction to anything.  The movies got his attention.  His eyes focused, and as the images slid by, he began to supply names and places.  

What struck me was not just the magic of seeing my younger self and a parade of people who exist only in memory.  As a memoir writer, what intrigued me was that I couldn’t remember most of these events.  When you head out with your camera, you record happy moments. Vacations, holidays, visitors.  Most of the time, you are not stealthy, so your subjects put on a show.  They smile, they wave, they put extra effort into enjoying being alive.  If we didn’t have home movies, most of these moments would evaporate.

Real memory records the mundane, the daily trivia, the odd detail.  The color of a longed-for bicycle, the light illuminating the living room rug, a dog seen daily on the way to kindergarten, the numerous complex hooks and eyes on my grandmother’s corset.  Or the dramatic.  Getting caught in a lie and punished.  The squealing tires from a crashing motorcycle just around the corner.  The look of surprised agony in my mother’s face when she told me about being teased for being left-handed.

But here’s the painful thrill of watching my mother unpack a picnic lunch for my six-year-old self, secure in some Bavarian meadow, South Carolina a distant place on some half-remembered map.  There I am, 16, lithe and perfect, but hunching my shoulders to protect my insecure heart.  And again, at 30, confident and sleek with new love.  My father, at forty, a few pounds overweight, with impossible dark hair.  With a shock, I  spot a once beloved dress that I haven’t thought about in years. 

What do these celluloid, soon to be digital, snippets mean?  Once watched, some of them enter the realm of memory as hand-me-downs - we remember seeing the movie of a fugitive event.  But they don’t have the texture of those moments deeply recorded in our cells.  You can’t smell your mother’s perfume, the way you can when you close your eyes and reconstruct a moment on the way to the airport to pick up your father. 

Which is real?  

The Power of Silence

Once every summer, we drive 4 and a half hours north to find silence.  This morning, I woke up to sunshine leaking past the curtains.  I walked down to the dock on Flour Lake.  When I am in the city, this is the place I imagine when instructed to go to a favorite restorative spot in my mind.  This dock, these gently lapping waves, the line of pines reflected in the water, the white, billowing clouds. An eagle circling over the trees to my right. Today, I settled on the dock cross-legged, drank in the beloved view, and closed my eyes. 

At first, I heard nothing.  My city battered ears felt dull and muffled.  I breathed in,  letting the taste of cool water and pine linger in the back of my throat. A spot of sun burning on my left cheek.  Gradually, as my ears settled into the quiet, I began to hear.  A single car passing on the access road a mile away.  Birds chirping. A bluejay’s squawk.  The slight movement of leaves in the breeze.  And then, the mad cackling of a pair of loons, calling to each other, over and over on Hungry Jack Lake - the next lake over in the lacy pattern of scattered water that makes up the Boundary Waters. 

I feel my edges dissolve.  This is it. I am home on this precious planet Earth.

Who's Got Soul?

A few days ago, the afternoon DJ on the Current played an Al Green song.  To my surprise I found myself singing along.  When I  got to my studio I plugged in my iPhone, booted up Pandora and set up 70’s soul as a new station.  All afternoon, I left it on, as I slip cast elements for a new sculpture.  It took a few hours - I go into a creative trance when I work, so I’m not consciously paying attention - before I realized that I knew all of this music.  During the 70’s,  I didn’t think I  listened to it.  Didn’t listen to it consciously at least.  I never bought a single Soul record.  Because in South Carolina, Soul was the music played at high school dances, the background on the radio, drifting across bars in Myrtle Beach, wafting from frat houses on summer afternoons.  It was the music favored by white cheerleaders and crew-cut boys in chinos and alligator shirts, and it was everything I was trying to avoid.  

I listened to Cream and the Stones and later Acid Rock and early Heavy Metal.  I played Led Zeppelin II until I had not only memorized the words to every song,  I could sing them in order.  I banded together with all the long-haired outsiders marooned in Clemson  - a small community even in the early seventies.  We’d wander past the frat houses late on a Saturday night, certain we were superior to those drunken boys risking their lives balancing on window ledges in their liquor haze.  To the strains of the Supremes and the Temptations.  

As I trimmed excess clay, an image from a spend-the-night party circa 1969 popped into my head.  Three of my classmates - well-behaved 15 year-old white girls whose parents had deep roots in the South - sitting on the floor, deep in the night, playing a new record.  Who was it?  Otis Redding? Lou Rawls?  One was holding the album cover - I remember a sexy black man portrayed on a white background -  cradling it in her freckled arms, gushing over the music, the voice, ultimately the man.  The other two looking on enthralled.  

The memory is crisp. I must have retained this image because of my confusion.  The girls were clearly crushing on this man the way I thrilled to the bad boys of Rock. I couldn’t square what I saw with the rules of racial politics I’d pieced together by painstaking observation.  What I saw sensed was lush and sticky, forbidden.    There, in the studio, 45 years later, I got it.  In the South of 1969, no other music could touch the level of danger and rebellion of Soul.

Living My Father's Past

Last Sunday, we picked up my father, loaded up the wheelchair and headed out to Como Park for an outdoor concert. The evening was humid but cooling off slightly and I was thrilled to find the usually packed parking lot offering up a single handicapped spot right near the Pavilion. I pulled out the handicapped sticker issued to me under Dr. Lagalwar’s signature ( he had them issue me one that’s good until 2017 - makes me shudder a little to imagine doing this four years from now),  slipped it on my rear view mirror and, after a bit of maneuvering, we rolled in the direction of the trombones that were already in full swing.  And Swing it was. 

As we settled in, I scanned the audience.  There were a few stray families with toddlers, but mostly I saw a lot of permed white curls.  For most of the audience “Sentimental Journey” was an adolescent memory.  I’ve been to enough of these concerts in the last few years that I was pleased to find Stan Bann’s Big Bone Band unusually skillful.  I relaxed in the summer breeze and found myself thinking about this phenomenon of reliving your parent’s past.  

My father has no tolerance for music that doesn’t meet certain parameters:  it has to be classical ( and then preferably Beethoven or the Romantic Composers) or it has to be pre-50’s Jazz or Swing.  All my life this has been such a definite rule, that I automatically switch my car radio to the Classical Station (or pop in a Louis Armstrong CD) when I’m picking him up at the Assisted Living.  Since I drive him somewhere at least twice a week, this is having an impact on my musical experience. 

When he first moved to Minnesota, we tried taking him to a few plays, but it became clear that his dementia made it hard for him to follow the action.  Music, on the other hand, held his attention.  I’ve gone to a lot of concerts in the past four years that would not have made my high priority list.  Chamber music, piano concertos, swing and jazz - some days I’m grateful for new discoveries, and other days I feel like I’m being abducted into his world.

More complex was the period - mostly over now - when he wanted to relive World War II.  I thought I had dealt with the German past exhaustively when I was in my thirties.  Back then, I plowed through everything in the library pursuing the question that bothered me most:  Was there something inherent in the German character that predisposed us to genocide?  I was relieved to find that the answer seemed to be “no”, although it did seem that Germans were more organized than Turks or Cambodians.  Just how organized, I didn’t realize until my father’s insatiable need to relive the Third Reich led me to find copies of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and some truly horrifying German documentaries that drew on SS documentary photography and even some film.  

Most revealing was the night we watched a movie called After the Fall. It’s fiction, based on memoir, and set in an elite Nazi boarding school similar to the one my father attended.  I switched on the movie for him, and then settled in to file his tax documents.  I soon lost track of my folders.  The brutality of the movie - the discipline imposed in order to make brave Aryan men out of boys - shocked me.  My father stared at the screen, rapt.  The stories my father told of his time at the NAPOLA in Köslin told of friendships with other boys, occasional pranks, a crush on one of the teacher’s daughters.  I leaned toward him during a break in the action and asked: “Was it really this bad?”  He tore his eyes from the screen and nodded toward me. “There were days.”

I had a sudden vision of my father - a sensitive boy who loved to play the piano and caper around the house pretending to be someone else, raised by a father who resisted corporal punishment - hundreds of miles from home exposed to this harsh environment.  A place where feelings were weakness and survival meant acquiring a tough exterior.  No wonder he didn’t take my mother’s and my homesickness seriously.  It was only a feeling.  

Lost Pages: Sundays in Krefeld (late 50's/early 60's)

On Sundays it feels like the whole town’s asleep except for the church bells echoing through the deserted streets.  In the mornings, myfather takes me on an adventure. I love it when we stroll to the freight train terminal. It’s closed like everything else; the cars rest on the tracks, empty, their open doors inviting.  We scramble from car to car, playing hide and seek, imagining journeys hidden between sacks of grain or stacked cabbages.

When we return, the thick smell of gravy warms us.  If our timing is good, my mother has the dumplings steaming in a bowl, and is ladling the gravy into its boat. The dumplings have a distinct smell of their own -  earthy but more subtle than boiled potatoes.  My father and I crunch left-over croutons as we help set the table.  For me, the roast is an afterthought.  I cut up my dumpling, spread the pieces in a thin layer across my plate and drown them in the thick brown sauce.  Whatever vegetable and meat accompany this feast take second place.

Sunday afternoons are for outings or visits with friends.  Whichever we are doing, we have to dress.  My father wears a suit with a white shirt and tie, my mother and I put on our best dresses. If we don’t have an invitation and no one is coming to visit us, we take the street car to the City Park or the Zoo, or all the way out to Ürdingen - the part of town along the Rhine.  There we stroll along the Rhine promenade, past other well-dressed families.   Sometimes we bring stale bread to feed the pigeons.   At five o’clock, when it’s Kaffeklatsch time,  everyone converges on the cafes for their Sunday torte and coffee.

If we are invited for ‘coffee,’ we first have to stop at the railroad station - the only place stores are allowed to open on Sunday - and buy flowers.  Then we take the streetcar to our destination.    The streetcars run less frequently on Sundays, but every one of them is full of people dressed in their best clothes, most of them carrying bouquets.  My favorite family to visit are the Willes.  They live just a few streetcar stops away.  When we ring the bell labeled ‘Wille’ at the front entrance of their apartment building, Onkel Bernhard sticks his head out the window and drops the housekey.  We let ourselves in and climb up the steps.  Just outside the door, my mother unwraps the flowers and hands them to me to present.  Tante Jutta ushers us into the cramped foyer,  and I curtsy and hand the bouquet to her.  She leads us into the living room, where the table is set with a white table cloth, fine china and coffee cups for the grown-ups, juice glasses for their son Rainer and me.  A torte, sometimes buttercream, sometimes glazed fruit,  and a plate of cookies wait in the center.  Rainer enters to greet my parents with a proper handshake and bow.   Tante Jutta disappears to find a vase and to finish making the coffee and whip the cream for the torte, while we settle in at the table.

Onkel Bernhard and Tante Jutta are not really my aunt and uncle.  I called them ‘Tante’ and ‘Onkel’ because that’s how we refer to any adult we know well.  It’s more respectful than calling an adult by a first name, but not as distant as saying ‘Herr’ or ‘Frau’ Wille.  It also allows me to use the informal ‘Du’ instead of the formal ‘Sie.’  Onkel Bernhard is an old friend of my parents.  They’d been at textile school together.  Onkel Bernhard had stayed to graduate and even work in East Germany for a few years before coming West.  My father helped him get a job at Kleinewefers where he works.

Rainer is exactly my age - he was even born on the same day.  Even though he is a boy, I like to play with him.  He has the toys I wish for but don’t get because they are boy toys: an electric train with an elaborate track and a medieval castle with a working drawbridge and armies of little metal knights.  Unlike other boys, he knows to stop tickling and wrestling when I yell “Enough!” Before we could play, we had to sit at the table with the adults, eating cake and drinking apple juice.  Finally, the adults decide we’ve sat still long enough, and give us permission to go. Rainer’s room is tiny, so most of his toys are upstairs, in an attic storage room.  It’s cold up there, and there are no carpets on the painted wood floor.  We wear sweaters and roll around wrestling until we are warm enough to lie down on our stomachs in front of Rainer’s castle, ready to conduct elaborate battles and pretend there are princesses to be rescued. Neither of us ever takes the part of the princess; we collaborate in the rescues.  We stay up there until the chill stiffens our joints.  The adults usually get so involved in their conversation that they don’t call us down until it is time for supper.  We run down the stairs to warm up and are glad for the hot herb tea with our sourdough rye and cold cuts.  The fathers drink beer and after dinner, Onkel Bernhard offers some brandy.  Tante Jutta passes around pieces of chocolate.  My parents consulted their watches to make sure we don’t miss the tram home.  When it is time to leave, I shake everyone’s hand with a  curtsy, though I exaggerate the motion with Rainer. He bows extra deep and pretends to loose his balance, so we crash into each other and upset the umbrella stand.  My father says:” It’s definitely time to go home. You guys are so tired you’re getting slap happy.”

Outside, it is dark  except for the dim light cast by the street lamps.  We are almost late for the tram, so my parents hold my hands and we walk as fast as I can.  My mother’s heels click on the sidewalk. In the Sunday evening quiet, her steps echo off the rows of apartment buildings, counting out a beat for me to follow.  We reach the stop with a minute to spare.  The tram screeches to a stop in front of us.  The inside glows with the warmth of lights reflected in the polished wood seats, most of them empty.  I lean against my father on the way home, insisting, of course, that I am not tired.

Me, in about 1958, dressed in my Sunday finery, out for a walk in the park.

Saying No to My Father

My father sits on the deck, and clears his throat.  His voice is barely audible, his words slurred.  He hasn’t said anything more than yes, no, or ok in weeks, lost in some nonverbal space the doctors call dementia.  I have to move closer.  He starts over.  “I need to make one more trip to Germany, and I want you to be my travel companion.”  My heart clenches.  We had this conversation a year ago.  At the time, Ron said immediately, “Impossible.” 

But I understand that yearning for home.  I researched all possible ways to make the trip, including checking into the logistics of getting handicapped hotel rooms and making an ocean crossing.  I discovered that it would be impossible to get travel health insurance for someone over 85 with a history of heart attacks. He’s prone to losing all sense of time and location, even at the Assisted Living, so I would have to share a room with him.  I wondered if he wanted to go home to die.  If that was it, I wanted it to be possible, but in the end, I was relieved when he stopped asking.

“We could fly to Boston, and stay a few days with your sister to recover, and then fly to Frankfurt. From there we could take the train to Gera.”  He’s thought it all through.  Travel planning was a constant all his life.  Even after he retired from his career in international sales, he lived for the next trip.  When he told me that he was done traveling six years ago, I think he expected he could just lie down and wait for the end. 

I listen to his whole plan.  When he is finished, I try to divert him by asking why he wants to go.
Remind him that he had decided he couldn’t fly to Europe anymore.  He really doesn’t have an answer.  At some point he says, “I don’t want to get sentimental about this.”  He never could talk about feelings. 

Instead, he says he wants to pay his respects to his companion Hannelore’s grave, and that he wants to see his childhood home once more.  I ask him if photographs would help.  If he would like to Skype with his sister.  He nods.  That might help.

Ten minutes later he starts over.  “I need to you to come with me to Germany one more time.”
I try several different approaches, but as the evening advances, and the June Minnesota sun begins its slow descent behind the trees, I realize that nothing short of “no” will work.  

For decades I carried anger against my father for not letting me return to Germany.  The memory of how trapped I felt as an adolescent still makes me choke.  But having to say “no, we cannot make another trip to Germany.  You have to stay here, now”  doesn’t give me the slightest satisfaction.  It only breaks my heart. 

Violence and Nature

A few days ago, I stood, facing the window, doing my morning qi gong.  As my arms flowed into seven steps a gorgeous dragonfly swooped toward me.  I just had time to register the striking black striped wings, when a bird plunged after it, plucked it off the window and dashed it to the concrete patio below.  Then it neatly severed the wings off the stunned body, and flew up, carrying it’s prize away.  So much for the illusion of tranquility in nature.

The following night a line of violent thunderstorms moved swept across Minnesota.  Waves of water crashing into the bedroom window panes woke me out of a groggy sleep at 4 am.  I squeezed my eyes shut.  I was sleep-deprived from a week of waking up early to the voices of my granddaughters - welcome voices, but early nonetheless.  Maybe if I just lay still, nature would subside.  The wind intensified until the house began to shiver.  Huge rumbles of thunder rolled across my head.  I felt like I was lying under a roller coaster.  Then a huge thunk.  The bedroom door opened.  A flash of lightning illuminated Hallie, her arms wrapped around herself, whispering: “A tree just fell over in the front yard.”  I jerked up.  Followed her out into the living room.  More lightning flashes.  The entire front yard a jungle of tree parts.  Huge branches flung from the locust barred the sidewalk, the 45 year-old-ash’s exposed roots made a wall between us the neighbors.  Its trunk blocked the street.  “At least it didn’t fall on the house,” I said.   On the opposite side of the house, the damage looked light. Until I saw the hot tub lid twisted off its metal hinges, peeled back.  I was grateful it hadn’t crashed through the window.  The maple, my favorite of all the trees, stood lopsided, one of its huge arms twisted off. But it stood.  As we circled the house, the storm began to calm, the rain let up. The worst was over.

As I tried to go back to sleep, my thoughts turned toward violence of another kind.  Earlier in the week, I had written an editorial about my father and how he made it through World War II alive.  His survival hinged on intuitive strokes of luck that had always seemed random to me.  A flaw in the structure of his toes caused the Nazi air force to reject him for pilot training ( almost all German pilots died), he narrowly avoided being recruited by the SS, and when his unit lost their first major battle, he survived to be shipped off to the US.  Narrow escapes from the forces of violence.  

I lay in my safe bed, listening to the rumble of thunder recede, the rain subsiding into a gentle wash,  wondering about nature and human nature.

To read the editorial see the link below.

 http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/212556341.html

What was left of the dragon fly

Lost Pages: Hunger

My grandmother never used a potato peeler.  It was too wasteful.  True German housewives used knives to get thinner peels.  I have never known hunger or war, so I work at my kitchen sink, thick chunks of potato peel dropping from my peeler.  In front of me, my window glows with reflected Minnesota snow, and my American husband chops peppers beside me.  In the corner, a huge refrigerator hums, its belly brimming with food.

Still, I see my grandmother’s potato peels spiraling from her knife.  There were transparent, so thin that her potatoes emerged bumpy, eyes intact.  A mountain of potato peels grew from her knife in her lifetime.  Like every other woman in her East German town, she peeled potatoes to boil every day and grated them for dumplings on Sunday.

Before my parents and I left Germany when I was thirteen, I visited her in Gera every year for at least a week.  I remember sitting on a creaky kitchen chair, swinging my legs, as my grandmother unwound potato peels into a chipped enamel bowl cradled in her lap.  It was summer, and it was morning.  The white net curtains brushed against the panes of the open casement window.  Outside, a delivery truck crashed through the potholes in the cobblestones.  A pot of salted water waited on the table.

Her hand released memory as she uncovered pale potato flesh.  She told me how, during the war, her stream of peels grew longer.  More potatoes, less meat.  Then potatoes were rationed: five pounds per person per week in ’42 down to four pounds by ’44.  In ’45, after the war was over, even potatoes were hard to find.  Her knife stopped for weeks.

She fed her three youngest children two slices of bread each day.  She sprinkled the bread with salt and pepper and told them to close their eyes and conjure up the taste of liverwurst.  Sometimes, she could get a few grams of yeast to spread on top.  Once Gina, who was eight, came home bearing a bouillon cube, a gift from her piano teacher who’d had a package from America.  She made soup for five.

My legs hung still.  I strained to imagine years without cake or sausage.  Grandmother turned toward me, peering over the tops of her bifocals, quiet for a moment.

Then she talked about my father.  When he returned in ’46, well-fed and strong, from his US POW camp, he was twenty-two.  She sent him out on his old bicycle - the tires were so worn that he had to patch them every ten kilometers - to Gauern where her cousins had a farm.  He could work at the farm for a day, harvesting hay or digging turnips, eat his fill at their table, and maybe earn a few potatoes to bring home.  When they didn’t have any to spare, he could steal potatoes in the village fields.  Once he got arrested, but another time he escaped with a whole sack.  They feasted then.  Potato soup, potato pancakes for days.

How could my father have stolen?  She shook her head and bent closer to her knife saying: We would do anything for food.  It was a terrible, terrible time.

Exposed! Effects of Publishing Memoir

Ever since Dreaming in German has been available, people come up to me at parties telling me: “I just finished your book, and now I feel like I know everything about you.” I’m never quite sure how to respond.  Usually I mumble something about not having thought that out so well.  They often grin and say, “Yes, it’s weird, because I know you, but you don’t know me so well.”  A side effect of publishing memoir that no one warned me about.  

While I was writing, I did agonize over my Dad’s reaction. Especially early on, when my first drafts were powered by my need to express the anger I still felt at him for seeming impervious ( and oblivious) to my pain.  When I finally finished the manuscript, I’d gained some perspective, but as I handed him a copy to read, I fretted.  I knew I was breaking a family rule. One so basic, no one ever had to say it out loud.  “Do not distress your father.”

I needn’t have worried.  He read the whole thing in a matter of two days on a visit to my house.  I watched out of the corner of my eye, interpreting every facial expression.  He did look tense for a few hours.  When he closed the book his comment was: “Wow, you struggled with this for a long time, but it came out all right in the end.”  Phew. I should have been able to predict that response.  My mother used to say: “Your father only sees what he wants to see.”  After I recovered from the relief, I was miffed.  All my encounters with loss reduced to “it came out all right?” Once again, I’d failed to pierce his defenses. Hmm.  Still, he was proud of me for writing a book.

My other concern was my mother’s family.  Would Tante Isolde ever hear of the book?  My cousins?  Shouldn’t be a problem. I wrote the book in English, was publishing it in the US.  I have hopes of translating it and releasing it in Germany - anybody know a translator? - but that will take time. By the time I finally navigated the self-publishing process, my cousin Matthias’ stepdaughter had come to the US to teach German, and was my facebook friend.  A fact that I didn’t fully register until after I published the book, she ordered a copy and Matthias sent me a picture of himself in front of the Christmas tree, holding it up.  I haven’t heard from him since, but he’s always been sporadic at keeping in touch.  

What surprised me even more than realizing I had exposed my intimate details to acquaintances and strangers,  were the email and facebook messages from fellow displaced Germans.  I never knew I was one among thousands.  There are facebook groups with names like “Germans transplanted to the USA” sharing their nostalgia.  One man whose story roughly parallels my own, suggested I add a recipe feature to my website and sent me some links to his favorite sources for German foods.  I suppose simple demographics could have predicted this development.  What I never would have predicted is how many other people tell me they identify with my displacement.  My dentist said he only moved from small town northern Minnesota to the “Cities” as we call Minneapolis/St. Paul around here. Yet, he said, he understood my impulse to be careful when negotiating the two cultures.  “I always think twice about what I say, because I don’t want to offend someone when I visit home.  I don’t want them to think I’m talking down to them.”

 I guess it proves one of the maxims of memoir writing.  The more specific you are in writing about your own experience, the more people will be able to find echoes in their lives.