Love at work: How do they stand it?
Day and night together: Gisela and Walter Richardt run a hotel in the Harz
Where, where last night was the Stammtisch, is now the breakfast table covered. Gisela and Walter Richardt are sitting together. She has a bread smeared with homemade jam, he is still quietly studying the newspaper. The door opens. The first guests arrive, head for the buffet and look for their seats. "Good morning," greet one, "how far is it from here to Brocken?" Gisela Richardt looks up. A micromoment passes. The wife, who sits at the breakfast table with her husband, becomes the landlady who takes care of her customers. The day starts. Until late, the Richardts are now there for the business. Together. Walter and Gisela Richardt run the "Hotel zur Erholung" in Ilsenburg in the Harz *, nine beds, a restaurant serving regional cuisine. "Familiar led", they describe it on the homepage. Specifically, this means: you throw the shop for two. As in many family businesses in Germany, work and private life are almost impossible to separate. The Richardts live this life in the fourth generation, they inherited it so to speak. Others have deliberately decided to do so. Like Heidi and Hans-Jürgen Koch. They are animal photographers, internationally successful. And only in a double pack. Or Doris and Jürgen Ebert, who live in the SOS village community Grimmen-Hohenwieden with eight mainly mentally handicapped under one roof. The Richardts, the Eberts and the Kochs live a model that makes you think earlier - but still occurs much more often than you think: Around three quarters of all companies in German-speaking countries are still family businesses today. Fritz J. Simon, Professor at the Institute for Family Business of the University of Witten / Herdecke, has studied this form of life. The couples are active on two fields at the same time, he says. Each has its own rules. On the one hand, love is the ultimate currency. On the other money. If the model succeeds, they must score in both games. And they have to manage to mediate between the roles as spouses and business partners.
* www.hotel-zur-erholung.com
The two are a public couple. 16 eyes watch them live.
Always within the call of the other: Doris and Jürgen Ebert live and work in an SOS Children's Village Community
Doris and Jürgen Ebert came by chance to this life model. Jürgen Ebert met his cousin, who lives in an SOS village community with mentally handicapped people. "I do not believe what I saw," he said to his wife afterwards. "How she can stand - to live and work with her husband." At that time, the Eberts still lived like others, he went to the office as a controller, she was a teacher. His no to the life form of his cousin had been very violent. And yet he often drove to her now. Doris came with me. Would that be something? The idea was like a seed that matured. And at some point they looked at each other and knew: Yes.
"The classic - the family jumps up from the breakfast table, and everyone runs in his direction -, that never met my idea of a good life," says Doris Ebert. So they came to SOSDorfgemeinschaft Hohenwieden * at the gates of the small town of Vorpommern Grimmen. "My little island, finally," thought Doris Ebert, when she arrived here. Four houses, a few stables, workshops, a greenhouse: everything is manageable. She manages the housekeeping, Juergen maintains care with the caretakers together - sweeping the paths, mending the fences, painting the walls. They are almost always within arm's reach of each other.
It's midday. Pause. The residents trudge over the yard, strip the rubber boots in front of the door, wash earth or sanding dust from their hands. Soon the house is full of voices. It smells like fresh spinach. Off to the table. Everyone has their place. Jürgen Ebert sits, surveying everything, at the front of the board, next to Ines and Wolfgang, two caretakers, who have been living with Eberts for almost ten years. Then Doris Ebert. Then the others. Falko, Franziska, Klara, Tim, Heike and Stefan. A lot of grown-up people who would not be able to do it without help from outside.
What are you? A little family. A little flat sharing. A bit residents of a full-stationary facility with everything connected with it: clothes, laundry, shopping, bath cleaning, doctor visits, vacation. Doris and Jürgen Ebert are there to make the days for all reliable and beautiful. This includes clear rules. One of them is: we always eat together.
They know a lot better how we tick.
The two are a public couple. 16 eyes are on them when they open the meal, and watch them live. The inhabitants of the three other houses in the village also take part, the colleagues as well as the cared for."If I had ever thought of fooling my husband, I would have failed," says Doris Ebert. Because the people in charge feel exactly what is going on. "They may not say so - but as we tick, they know a lot better than we do."
Every two weeks, the two have three days off. They explore the area, take their dinghy, go fishing. For Doris Ebert, these times are almost sacred. "If something comes up, then I'll be bilious," she says. For though they see each other day in and day out and from morning to night, they feel they see little. "I can already look at him," she says, "but do not talk to him.What is not for stranger ears, I pinch myself off until the day is over, we really need to do something about having time together. "
"We got to know each other again," he says. In the past, what one person told the other about his job was always colored. The boss or the other was the idiot, you yourself always right. Now both experience the same situation and have to behave in it - like the other day when a caregiver asked if she could go on vacation. "Of course that goes," one had said; "that overburdens you", the other. At first, she was often taken in by such moments, thinking, "What's up, he understands me otherwise, I'm his wife." Today she attaches importance to everyone speaking only for themselves. "I can not expect the others to perceive us as two if I always keep the same score as him." She looks at him. Smiles softly. And says, "But that's very difficult, I always want to help you."
Even if the two are employed - unlike in the classic family business - the economic basis is linked to the success of the relationship. If one wants to leave, both have to leave. They should provide a good basic mood in the house: be happy that the day begins, that you are there. And you. And you. "Whoever has this as a job can not be a broom behind the door," says Doris Ebert. "If the relationship does not work, then it's fair to say we're stopping."
But that's not very likely right now. The potential for conflict is small, both say. Why? "Because I love Jürgen very much," says Doris Ebert openly. Jürgen Ebert's ears blush. "Of course we sometimes argue," he says. "But then we quickly look at how the cow comes off the ice, conflicts are not maintained, but named and solved."
* www.sos-kinderdorf.de
Love at work? They are only available in a double pack.
Her pictures are basically two names: Heidi and Hans-Jürgen Koch travel together as animal photographers around the world
The classic thing - that everyone lives their own lives, with large areas in which the other does not occur - never seemed to Heidi and Hans-Jürgen Koch particularly attractive. "That depends on our special kind of relationship," says Hans-Jürgen Koch. Unlike the eberts, the chefs did not have to adjust the relationship to the job, but find a job that suited their love. Today, the two wildlife photographers *. They are called "duo bestiale" among colleagues. They are only available in a double pack. Whether it's a photo project about house mice or a trip to the brown bears in Alaska - they're always on the go together.
Once, when they were photographing in the savannah, they even had to pretend that they were one. For the cheetah, two single easy prey would have been. Together they looked tall and scary. Like an animal looking through the camera on one side, trying to make the image that they both dreamed of. The other side used a cane to scare off the wild dogs they wanted to attack, leaving their backs free. The photo succeeded. In the end, as always, they put their names under each other.
They wanted it that way, at the end of their studies - Heidi was a social worker, Hans-Jürgen behavioral scientist. They wanted to travel. Be on the move. Taking photos. And above all, be together. So they went to the bank to start a business startup loan. They were lucky: they believed in them there. And soon the first big order came.
He talks, she interrupts him. She talks, he gives his mustard. She says he says, "Of course I was right." She says, "And if so." They are clearly two.
He relies on keeping the overview.
He: Type of big boy who can lose himself in what he does. She: the considered, the plans. Those who, before they leave for Alaska and have themselves helicopter-set amidst the vast forests to photograph brown bears, read everything they can find, "all those terrible bear books," as he calls them, reports of accidents, of Injuries, of bears that attack humans. Even before they set off, she knows what it's like when a bear's jaw scrape the scalp. I need it, "she says," and I'll make sure it does not happen. " While he lies in the dirt when he lies in the dirt and is focused only on the picture. And relying on it to keep track.
Before each of these projects pass weeks, sometimes months of planning. Conceive topics, convince editors, think about how this could be done, when and where. Times in which we slobber infinitely, as Hans-Jürgen calls it. In which they commute between two floors, the apartment and the office, where both sit next to each other, everyone does his thing, they talk on the phone, he backs up the data, she writes exposés, he researches what is new and might be interesting. In these phases, the images are created in the mind. "Then we are like two amoebas," he says, the biologist, "where one stops and the other begins is fluid." Life is about work. Nevertheless, they would never call themselves colleagues. "It's like a farmer's," he says. "He does not say: That's my colleague, but this is my wife." That they succeed, that they are successful in what they do and how they do it, is an expression of the special nature of their relationship. For those, they say, have been special from the very beginning. Hans-Jürgen Koch enjoys it when his wife talks about the summer in which her love began. Heidi, in tenth grade and as good as finished with school, had discovered a boy in the year under whom she liked. She did not know him yet. But she knew she wanted him. So she went to the headmaster and said that her testimony was not very good, was it possible to repeat the year? She got away with it - and ended up in Hans-Jürgens class. The summer came, she drove with him to the lake, fed him with potato salad and conquered his heart.
Yes, there were times when things went up and down. There was even a time when he was ready for a study place to leave the common nest. When he packed his things and moved. But the next day he came back and said that was not what he wanted - and moved back in. "It's not the same with us as it is with others that it's important that everyone has their own - their own room, their own money," she says, and he says, "weird, but it's true." As if to prove it, he shows them the wallet: a stuffed copy from the Globetrotter store and so tattered that it takes two hands to hold it. "One alone," he says with a grin, "can not serve that anymore."
* www.animal-affairs.com
It can not just go one. You have to get together.
For Walter Richardt, the innkeeper from the Harz, all thinking about life plans is far away. His path was marked early.
He brings a cast-iron doll's stove out of the showcase. "My first," he says. For mini pancakes, soups, fried potatoes. He wanted to become a shipwright, out into the world. But the grandparents, the mother, the guests persuaded him. He first learned waiter, then cook. "Well," he says in his calm, dry manner, "so I came to the grandma's kitchen." Now all he needed was the right woman. "Because that's how a shop stands and falls." She just stood by the fence one day. Gisela, who was visiting Ilsenburg. "He saw me and it sparked," she says. "It was that simple," he replies with a laugh. Only that she learned plastic worker, not waiters. He grunted and shoved, but she could not change that. He therefore put the relationship on hold. But at some point Gisela was back at the fence. She also says today, after 36 years: "I would take the man again."
You have to get together. Otherwise it will not work.
How did you do that? "Looked," says Gisela. Walter had helped wash dishes as a child, with a few bricks as a kick, because the sink was too high, and witnessed what happened to his grandparents. And Gisela had it told. Nevertheless, there were and are crises. And days when everything goes wrong. If suddenly a guest wants fried potatoes instead of croquettes. She comes into the kitchen, where he is in full swing and this tiny extra is too much and he is outraging. "Grandpa threw a knife," she knows. Walter hurls words. And everyone is listening. Because the wall between the guest room and the kitchen is thin. "Man, Walter," she says then, "I'd still yell with a funnel, think of the guests." - "If he has a bad day, he'll complain a lot," she says. Emotionally she keeps him at such moments at a distance. She degrades him. From spouse to cook. And "cooks are not fine people". Walter grins at her as she says that, because it's a household word in the family. Their second wisdom is: "You have to gather yourself, otherwise it will not work." It can not just go one. Where would she be without Walter's delicious roast venison, the rabbit leg, the steamed catfish? And where would he be without Gisela's friendly manner, the quick legs, the knack for dealing with the guests? Disturbances in the private sphere disturb the atmosphere in the business. And conversely, in times when there is a lot going on, most of the time the private problems are off the table. For the sour-cucumber time, the winter months, when hardly anyone in the Harz holidays, the revenue sink and boredom annoys the nerves, the two have a little trick.They conclude the inn "Zur Erholung" for two or three weeks and travel away "somewhere where the phone can not get there".
And further? Two out of three daughters work in the catering industry. One in the Palatinate, the other in a five-star house in London. "But you know how it is today," says the mother. The father replies: "Best, they are looking for a cook" - to marry, he says -, "costs the most in a business and brings the clientele." Walter Richardt must go now to pick up the granddaughter. She likes to be in the inn and gives them a hand. Carry out the cheeseboard - a board as long as your arms. "You have to want that," says Walter Richardt, proud grandfather. "Then many things go."
