Archive for the ‘Childhood’ Category
What’s wrong with Germany?
That’s the question I often get asked by my relatives and other locals who are puzzled by my peregrinations (left 28 years ago) and nationality changes (two). After all, it’s not a bad country. It has more than its fair share of culture; of great writers, composers, artists, photographers. It’s clean, people are reasonable, landscapes [...]
Filed under: 1980s, Childhood, Germany, Music, Youth | Closed
Tags: German language, German music, schlager, Yiddish
Family, lost and found
You might have noticed at this point that my family was more of the “unhappy in its own way” kind. Helmed by parents whose own parents had never shown them much affection, which meant they never learned how dispense it themselves, my family was an archipelago of six individuals with few bonds. We were four [...]
Filed under: 2000s, Childhood, Germany, Third Reich, World War II, Youth | Closed
Tags: Brighton Beach, family, friendship, isolation, loss, mortality, sadness, sisters, unhappiness
Patterns: mortality
I originally started this blog to find out if there were larger patterns to the things I love. The tags don’t lie: there is a very consistent theme to almost all of my posts, and it’s mortality. Oof. I hadn’t quite expected that. I think of myself as an optimistic, forward-looking person. And all I seem [...]
Filed under: Childhood, Mother, World War II | Closed
Tags: childhood, family, flight, grandparents, legacy, loss, mortality, my mother, patterns
Gloomy Sundays
When I was a teenager, I got shipped off to Berlin once a year. Those couple of weeks were by far the happiest times in my young life. Theoretically I was supposed to babysit my two young cousins but practically I would spend many days roaming the city entirely unsupervised. This might strike observers as [...]
Filed under: 1980s, Berlin, Childhood, Germany, Photographers, Youth | Closed
Tags: 1980s, adolescence, Berlin, freedom, Michael Schmidt, nothingness, Sundays
Into the very opposite direction
Dropping out of high school was surprisingly easy. One day, instead of going to school, I went to the local job center to look for an apprenticeship for tailoring. They sent me to a clothes factory a few villages over to take an aptitude test. I had to follow a few drawn curlicues on a [...]
Filed under: Books, Childhood, Clothes, Germany, Thomas Bernhard, Youth | Closed
Tags: adolescence, apprenticeship, Der Keller, factory, job center, literature, quitting high school, relief, Salzburg, Scherzhauserfeldsiedlung, school, The Basement, the opposite direction, Thomas Bernhard
The dead in your backyard
I grew up in a very pretty village in one of the more picturesque parts of (then) rural Germany. It did have a small factory, but the overall vibe was agricultural. The farmer a couple of streets down would sell you a liter of fresh raw milk for one Mark, and our house was surrounded [...]
Filed under: Childhood, Germany, History, Third Reich, World War II | Closed
Tags: Baader Meinhof, cemetery, childhood, concentration camp, forced labor, Germany, Harald Isermeyer, Hitlers Hinterhof, hometown, mortality, Nike missile base, Rote Armee Fraktion, Third Reich
The final loosening
Walter Serner’s Letzte Lockerung (hard to translate: last loosening? final loosening?) was one of the guidebooks of my teenage years. It billed itself as a guide to conmanship, and contains several hundred themed aphorisms and directives on how to live life with a certain kind of haute grifter style. It is imbued with a 1920s [...]
Filed under: 1980s, Books, Childhood, Germany, History, Third Reich, Walter Serner, World War II, Writers | Closed
Tags: aphorisms, cool, detachment, Dorothea Herz, Dorothea Serner, guide to living, Letzte Lockerung, mortality, murder, Walter Serner, World War I
What is style?
Jean Genet There are many definitions of what style is. I’d like to add mine. Style is a response to injury – it’s a way of dealing with pain. Those that are truly stylish, and not merely fashionable or well turned out, are often those who grew up deprived of love or attention, who had [...]
Filed under: 1980s, Books, Childhood, Fashion designers, Germany, Mother, Writers, Youth | Closed
Tags: 1970s, adolescence, childhood, clothes, Jean Genet, my mother, Pain, style, Vivienne Westwood
When I first started this blog I had decided that this would be a documentation of my journey into patternmaking. The kinds of patterns you need to make clothes. Because I like clothes, design and sewing. I had arrived at some kind of crossroads in my life where I decided to work less and make [...]
Filed under: Books, Childhood, Music, photography, Writers, Youth | Closed
Tags: connecting dots, patternmaking, seeing patterns
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