1932-1941

When you are 90 years old and write a book at this age, you have a long life with many eras and generations behind you and you think about today, everyone knows it.

I was born in 1932 in the Ruhr area, in the western suburb of Dortmund, in Dortmund-Huckarde. Not far away were coal mines where coal was extracted and steelworks where steel was produced and processed, in the midst of smoke, stench, noise and an already turbulent time. After the 1920s, this was characterized by poverty, unemployment, political unrest and the rise of nationalism.

My mother came from a family of miners, together with two sisters and two brothers, from Dortmund-Derne. My mother's father worked at the colliery, as they said. He worked as a hewer right in front of the coal. These were the men who, after working 600 to 1000 meters below ground, would get out of the transport lift as the blackest on their faces and reach daylight again. Grandpa Derne, as he was also known, worked in one of the many coal mines across the Ruhr region. Grandma Derne, from whom many recipes still exist, spent her life working in the house and garden. A typical miners' terraced house with a large garden, pigsty, henhouse and rabbit hutch had to be looked after. For miners in particular, the largest part of their livelihood was self-sufficiency. The pigsty was part of the house directly behind the kitchen. This meant that waste from the kitchen did not have to go far, in today's terms the garbage can for kitchen waste. The pig was part of the family, so to speak.

From the rear exit, the main entrance from the street was only used for visitors, you walked across the chicken yard and the rabbit hutches into the infinitely long garden. An arbor was only used by visiting family on Sundays. The kitchen garden was divided in the middle by a long, narrow path. Every spring, the garden was freshly dug over and the edges to the left and right of the path, the furrow edge, were firmly beaten with a spade 12 to 15 centimetres high as a substitute for an edging. This created a path border of earth that remained firm throughout the growing season. A large part of the garden was reserved for pig fodder, which was then stored for the winter in the so-called earth mounds. Otherwise, all the vegetables needed for summer and winter were grown. In the cool cellar of the house were barrels of beans and other vegetables. The shelves were full of jars of fruit and vegetables.

I still think of the type of houses with gardens when we visit Dresden, in Hellerau. Here, at the turn of the 19th century, a competition was held by the local furniture industry to create an entire village district with a wide variety of building types, from terraced detached houses to multi-storey buildings. The focal point is the market square, and thankfully everything is a listed building, so that the characteristics have been preserved without any conversions or extensions. Many typical owner-occupied estates no longer exist simply because of the addition of garages. Many estates were also built in the Ruhr area, mostly by large factories, using various construction models in the 1930s.

We lived