Before I start sharing with you pictures from the
gallery of my life, I would like to write briefly about my family tree which may
illuminate why I am what I am, and then too I can lay all the blame on my mad
family. I blame them completely.
Right at the top is me, Gerhard Heinzelmann, born in July 1940 in Esslingen am Neckar in Germany. I was once married and have that to thank for two offspring who have lovely kids of their own, my grand children. I love them all.
Three of my four brothers have gone the way of all flesh.
Down the left hand side of the ancestor’s table you will find my father’s side. As far as one knows they were farmers, farmhands, lumberjacks, woodsmen or millers in the Black Forest. Generally they were all poor and my father’s father, whom I never met, owned a mill near Alpirsbach. The mill was in a deep valley, surrounded by endless pine forests and life there must have been one of utter loneliness. Grandfather Heinzelmann liked to spend his money on booze, which contributed to him dying young. His mill was taken from him and given to strangers and his wife, my fathers mother, grandmother Heinzelmann was left penniless, with three sons to raise. However, she was a Schwâb, and made of sterner stuff, and soon had a grocery shop in Nürtingen. I never knew her but my father always said that she was a good woman, saving all the money and believing in God the Almighty. My mother said that she was mean and hard without love or feelings. Well, believe whom you like. If I would write a motto for my father’s family it would be: The poorer the better.
On the right side of the table is set out my mother’s family. She was born in Köln, or as you would say, Cologne. Her family was very posh and poor – but not always poor. I never met her father, Grandfather Franz. He owned an Engineering School. He died suddenly before the war and he left no money and his wife and three daughters never forgave him for that. My mother mother’s family came from Preussen and, as I was often told as a small child, one of them was the personal dentist of Frederic the Great. His name was apparently Herr Krausemuth and he got the Blue Eagle Order (OBE) from the King – or was he a Knight of the Order of the Red Eagle? (ORE) Nobody really knows. If I would write a motto for my mother’s family, it would be: We are posh, the rest be damned.
And then there is the mysterious third branch of the family: the Junkers of Hohenkreuz. They had big estates near the town of Kreuz, now called Krz or something Polish, in Lower Silesia. Their tenants planted sugar beet and in the Junkers factories they changed the beet into sugar and there was good money in that. The Junker had two manor houses and a castle. One of the Junkers, apparently uncle Kurt, was Reichsbahn Präsident of Silesia before the war. Another of the Junkers bought at the turn of the 19th-20th century a lot of shares in Russian Railways that were never built and when the Bolsheviks took over, the shares became useless and that Junker lost all his money and the hotel that he owned in Frankfurt an der Oder. Nobody knows whether that branch of Junkers ever actually existed but I do know that my uncle Kurt existed because I read the letters he wrote to my aunt Käte, my mother’s sister, and the letters are very sad because the communists in the DDR starved him to death by withholding his pension and he was to proud to beg… I read his letters once and will never touch them again.
I never found out how my father and mother met. I know that, at that time, my father was working in Köln. He was involved with knitting machines. I often wondered how it was possible that they understood one another when they met as my father spoke Swabian and my mother the dialect of the Rhineland. Either they found each other hiding in the same corner or religion brought them together. It must have been terrible for them both: the righteousness of the poor meeting the aloofness of the posh. How they ever managed to weather this cultural clash of their past and the interference of their families amazes me.
Anyway, my parents gave birth to my brothers and, most importantly, me. Is that not enough?