Remembering My Mother

I was leafing through an old photo album of mine the other day and I came across some black and white pictures of my grandparents on my mother’s side. My grandfather was Swiss and a cheese-maker by trade. He came from the Canton of Thurgau in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. He was a large and extremely strong man. He used to shave his head with a straight razor every Saturday morning and when he was done he’d polish it with a smoked pork rind. He didn’t care that this attracted flies to his head. He’d convinced himself that the medicinal benefits outweighed the nuisance of the flies buzzing around his shiny dome and that the rank smell emanating from his head protected him from disease.

My grandfather had other strange routines as well, such as his eating habits. Watching him eat was not everyone’s cup of tea. He’d mix his salad and dessert together with the main course, cut everything up into bite sizes, then pour gravy over the whole mess and eat it with a spoon. He felt it all ended up together in his stomach anyway, so why bother with separate courses or table manners.

He rolled his own cigars from tobacco plants he grew in his garden and he always had two 100-liter barrels of potent apple cider in his cellar for his fortification. The cider came from trees in his orchard. He also raised rabbits and chickens and turkeys. My grandparents lived off their land in the middle of the city in the lean years during and after the war.

His arms and hands were huge. His skin was as tough as leather. One time he showed my brother and me how he could bounce a pointy kitchen knife off his biceps by flexing at the moment of impact. He didn’t even bleed. He was a tough man and not very nice. He spoke Switzer-deutsch, the guttural German dialect spoken by the people from the northern part of Switzerland. It was sometimes very difficult to understand him. But you never dared to tell him that, because he assumed everyone spoke like him and should be able to understand him. If you didn’t, you were stupid. Perhaps his hearing was impaired. I was scared to death of him when I was a child.

In his youth, he had been the Swiss “Hoseluepfle” champion, a form of wrestling popular in Switzerland in which you tried to upend your opponent by picking him up by his shorts, which ended in heavy cloth rolls around the waist and thighs and tossing him unto his back or off the mat. It literally means “lift by the pants,” sort of like a Swiss version of Sumo. His strength came from manipulating the 200 lb. wheels of Swiss cheese every day of his life since he was a boy.

My grandparents lived in Schweinfurt. During the war and the countless bombing raids on Schweinfurt’s ball bearing plants and extensive marshalling yards, my grandfather believed that because he was a Swiss citizen and thus a neutral, he should not have to suffer any bomb damage. When the bombs did hit his place, he was outraged. My grandmother told him that the airmen who dropped the bombs probably hadn’t seen his Swiss passport, which he always carried with him, and so mistook him for a Nazi. He didn’t think that was funny, but he never had a sense of humor, least of all about himself.

He also hated the Americans because they arrested him after the city fell and took him, along with all males over 16 years old in Schweinfurt, to an internment camp near the airport, where they were trying to ferret out the Nazis among them. The soldiers who arrested him, weren’t impressed with his Swiss papers. It didn’t matter, that they sent him home the next day with his passport. My grandfather held a grudge.

They should have arrested my grandmother instead. Unlike the rest of my family, my grandmother was a true believer before the war, a Nazi party member. On formal occasions, she liked to be addressed as “Partei Genossin” - party comrade. She had been turfed out of Switzerland before the war for insisting on flying swastika pennants on her car while visiting my grandfather’s family. They said it violated Swiss neutrality. She said it was the future. My grandmother was a nurse-midwife, who during her long career brought more than 5,000 babies into the world. My grandmother was also a speed demon who believed haste was of the essence when driving her car. She drove a 1936 DKW convertible, with which she and my grandfather toured all over Europe, until the Nazis confiscated it for the war effort in 1941.

The car’s seizure by the Nazis in the second year of the war forced her to use a bicycle to go to work until she retired in 1949. She believed in Germany’s destiny, as she put it, that is, until Allied bombs flattened the city around her. After that happened, she withdrew into her work and began to age fast. She died soon after the end of the war.

This fascination with speed seemed to run in the family. Maybe it was something in the genes. My mother was a motor-racing fan. In fact, she named me after Bernd Rosemeyer, the greatest Grand Prix driver of his day. Rosemeyer drove for Auto Union and was known as the “Nebelmeister” – the master of the fog. He excelled in wet driving conditions and his races against and victories over Rudolf Caracciola of Mercedes Benz and Tazio Nuvolari of Alfa Romeo made him a hero in Germany and abroad. His career was meteoric and lasted only three years. “Bernd literally did not know fear,” Caracciola said of his great rival. My mother never missed any of his races and would be glued to the radio at race time to follow the exploits of her hero Rosemeyer was killed in an Auto Union Streamliner during a land speed record attempt on the Frankfurt-Darmstadt-Heidelberg Autobahn on January 28, 1938. My mother was heartbroken when he crashed and died.

My mother, who got her driver’s license at age 50, followed in her hero's footsteps. She drove a 1955 Lloyd 400S, a tiny four-seater of a car with a 2-cylinder, 2-cycle engine which generated 13 HP, with the power of a souped-up lawn mower and a top speed of 80 kph. It cost DM3,780, about $900 in those days. The car sounded like a hoarse and hungry wolf, when it got up to speed. People called it a “Leukoplast-Bomber” even though its body was no longer made from Bakelite, plywood and imitation leather, as the earlier models. Leukoplast was the name of a then-popular form of Band-Aid. This model was the first with a steel body. I sported two rear-hinged doors, a trunk, which, for the first time, could be opened from the outside and, another first, windows that could be cranked open by hand.

My mother didn’t care what people thought of her. To her, the Lloyd was a racecar. She was, what you might call, daring, maybe even reckless, behind the wheel. She passed other traffic on principle and knew only one speed, petal to the metal. She was a good driver, never hit another car, never got a ticket. Of course, this was before speed limits were posted on highways in Germany.

There was one incident my father always brought up when my mother’s driving was discussed. My father hated riding in that car, because he barely fit in. He was too tall and his head was jammed against the roof. But he had never gotten a license to drive, so he had to ride in what he called the death seat next to my mother. This particular incident happened on a winter day on an icy road in northeastern Bavaria. The Lloyd, going full out, failed to negotiate a curve, rolled over and ended up upside down in a snow bank. This was in the days before mandatory seatbelts. Anyway, they were lucky. Nobody got hurt. They climbed out of the car, turned it right side up, popped out the dent in the roof. Got back in and drove off at speed. This car was my mother’s ticket to freedom.

My mother died while I was working for Uncle Sam on the other side of the world and my uncle’s needs prevailed. She died from cancer caused by secondary smoke at age 59. She only got to enjoy life for a short time. Thinking about her still makes me sad, particularly this time of year.

My mother’s birthday is on the 23rd of December. She would be 104 years old this year, if she were still alive. My father, who had a somewhat droll sense of humor, used to give her one shoe for her birthday and the other for Christmas the next day. My mother didn’t think it was funny at all.

My mother has been dead a long time, 45 years, in fact. She and I were close. I was her baby, born when she was 35 years old, ten years after my older brother, an afterthought or an accident. I had a sort of love/hate relationship with her. When I was a kid, my mother was the enforcer in our house. My father wasn’t into punishment. He never touched me, but deferred to her. She had a very fast, vicious and accurate back hand. This went on until I grew too tall for her and she’d have to jump or use a stool to smack me in the mouth. By then I didn’t stand still for that anymore. After that she berated me with sermons on the pratfalls of alcohol and the deadly sin of sloth and how they were going to ruin my life. I didn’t listen. Perhaps I should have.

She could be intimidating. She stood barely 5’and weighed at most 100 pounds. She had a voice that could do a drill sergeant proud. She also had a broken nose, where one of her classmates had whacked her with a medicine ball when she was a teenager. She’d never seen the need to have her nose straightened. When she got angry, you didn’t want to mess with her.

She was my protector. For example, when I had problems in high school my mother stepped front and center. I had asked my teachers, who all had been fervent believers in the man with the funny mustache in their previous incarnations, to explain Auschwitz and Dachau, a taboo subject in those early days after the war. You don’t rock the boat in Germany. Instead of answers I got bad grades. My teachers told my mother that I was not classic education material and would never make it to university. My mother didn’t help matters when she called my teachers Nazi swine and warned them that she would make a major public stink about their past, if her son didn’t graduate.

At least she didn’t kick them in the balls and throw them down the stairs, as she had done with the Reverend Krenkel, our Lutheran minister, who made the mistake of coming to our house to tell my mother that her son would not be confirmed, because I had laced the reverend’s New Testament with sneezing powder during confirmation classes and had embarrassed him in front of his students. My mother made short shrift of the good pastor and threw him bodily down the stairs into the entry hall. She followed him downstairs and asked him if he thought his superiors would appreciate his well-known taste in little girls. Needless to say, I was confirmed on schedule.

I don’t know what it is about this mother-son relationship, but even nearly half a century after her death, I can feel the tug of the umbilical cord. I know that I am who I am because of my mother. She believed in never giving up, in seeing things through to the end, in standing up for what was right and damn the consequences. I can feel her presence. Following her lead was not always easy and I have learned to compromise, something she would never do. But then she wasn’t a salesman like I. Her success or failure wasn’t measured in dollars and cents. She was a mother.