Pseudo kisses and kinky kisses
On a mild autumn day in 1908, an Alsatian girl stretches out a handful of caramel sweets to a girl from the Palatinate. Both are six years old, wearing white aprons and live in the same house in Colmar. This is the beginning of a fascinating friendship that will last for more than 90 years and withstand many burdens.
In "Marthe and Mathilde" Pascale Hugues, the granddaughter of both women, wrote down the story of this friendship. For a long time, says the French journalist, she hesitated with this project. A book about your own grandmothers? Who should care? And did they even want to reveal so much personal information? "The limits of the sheep were much lower in this generation." On the other hand, they did not let go of the women. There was something that needed to be told, a literally outrageous story behind the family story you gave to countless celebrations with your grandmothers.
Nice and harmless everything starts. Marthe and Mathilde, who grow up in Alsace, are inseparable from the first encounter. When one is away, the other waits eagerly for her homecoming. On postcards, they swear eternal loyalty in their typical language mix: "Marthele, you do not go net yet! Later they get their children almost at the same time - two of them will mate. They often quarrel, for Mathilde, slender, elegant and more beautiful than the other, is often irritable and unpredictable in her moods. Her friend, who is mostly cheerful and well-balanced, always forgives these attacks.
Their close relationship ends when Marthe falls ill with Alzheimer's and simply forgets the other. Only a few years this separation in life lasts. They almost leave it together. Shortly after Marthe dies, Mathilde follows her.
Pascale Hugues tells it all completely unsentimental. As the saying goes, the "eternal grandmothers" look like "a pair of inseparable horses" when, stooped by age, they stagger through the city, clinging to each other. Or she wonders about the different behavior of the two women, one of whom, Marthe, is always busy while Mathilde sits around and lets herself be served by her. Why is Marthe doing that? Why does she always take that back? Questions to which she will find an answer much later.
Pascale Hugues gives the silence a voice
In general, the somewhat stiff Mathilde sometimes seems strange to her as a child. She does not like her bruised "pseudo kisses," unlike the other grandma's kisses that "rattle" over her child cheeks. On Sundays, when the whole family meets at Marthe's table, Mathilde, disgustedly wrapped in the smoke of her cigarettes, sits apart from the others, while her friend infects everyone in the round with her happiness. Pascale Hugues's comment: "Mathilde's jealousy got on my nerves." A mistake, as she admits later. "I did not understand for a long time what infinite sadness rose in her, Mathilde felt excluded, her story interested nobody."
Only after many years does this story come to light. It is New Year's Eve 1989. The wall has just fallen. On television, the German fireworks pop. "With stones and horse apples, they drove them out," says Mathilde suddenly in the middle of celebrating her granddaughter. She hardly recognizes her rough voice again. Trembling, the old woman shows her a stack of photos that has lain in a shoebox on the closet for many years.
The pictures, taken in Colmar in 1919, document the first wave of German expulsions from Alsace. They show families standing in the street carrying suitcases and a few belongings under their arms. Onlookers stand on the edge, some spit on the people, before they are sent on covered wagons across the Rhine. For decades, they lived together peacefully, and even won a little autonomy for their region under Bismarck's direction. But now the French liberators are in the country, and Alsace gets rid of its Germans as if they were leper.
Mathilde, 17 at the time, stands somewhere and ducks. The daughter of a Belgian and a German, who has been living in Colmar for 13 years, is afraid to be expelled as well. A cowardice that does not forgive the over 80-year-old. Never before has she spoken of this degrading scene of the postwar winter. Now she is accusing for the first time. And Pascale Hugues gives her a voice. Not only does she break the silence that lay like a stone on her family for many years, but for the first time she understands why Marthe has always withdrawn herself from her difficult friend."When I discovered Mathilde's hidden life story, I realized that Marthe was the only constant of her life, the connector that held the two parts together before and after 1918." She goes on a historical search for clues. For decades no one in France has been interested in the fate of the German-born Alsatians. The Germans as victims? Unthinkable.
The hatred for the "Boches" continues today
Four years of Nazi dictatorship in the Second World War stir up hatred for the "Boches", which continues to some extent today. "The German heritage, already taboo in Alsace, became a National Socialist heritage after 1945," she writes at one point. In contrast to the displaced East Germans, there was no lobby, no associations, no monument for the Germans expelled from Alsace after 1919. But something else drives her to write about this little-known chapter of history. It has something to do with their own German heritage and their split relationship to it.
She is sitting in her favorite cafe. Small wobbly bistro tables, wooden chairs, the coffee machine roars in the background. A typically French ambience, you could say that suits the lively and open French woman. But the café is not in Strasbourg or Paris, but in Berlin, in the Schöneberg district. She lives around the corner. Ironically, here in the country with which she wanted to "have nothing to do" for a long time.
As a teenager, she recalls, she just found the Germans boring. With deep distaste, she looked at the hordes of German coaches who daily invaded their hometown of Strasbourg and spat out these arrogant, but always a bit clumsy looking tourists. Comical beings who had equipped themselves with shorts and hiking boots just to cross the forecourt of Strasbourg Cathedral. She was not alone in her negative attitude. On family trips to the Black Forest, her father scoffed at the lack of lightness of the Germans: "Here even the firs are taut."
Pascale Hugues is not afraid to quote in her book the whole range of resentments again. "It was a good thing in Alsace to despise the Germans," she says frankly. Why, this can be read in history books: The inhabitants of the tortured borderland between the Rhine and Vosges had to change nationality four times over the course of 74 years without asking.
In this nationality chaos with its absurd and often humiliating consequences Marthe and Mathilde grow up. They can disperse the "Kameradle", as they call themselves, but not. When the French "liberated" Alsace in 1919 after 47 years, the country cheers, but a majority of the population no longer speaks French.
Marthe, who is easily recognized as French but can only speak Alsatian, has to learn the language again with difficulty. Mathilde, who has learned French perfectly from her Belgian mother, is no longer allowed to go to school. "No Boches here", you inform the director one morning. Her former classmates mock her in the street. For a while she barely leaves the house. Only Marthe visits her every day. For months, Mathilde's family awaits deportation. Her father, Karl Georg Goerke, a respected businessman, loses his business. He and many others of the more than 100,000 "Old Germans" write petitions to the authorities, in which they show their loyalty to France. Decades later, great-granddaughter Pascale sits howling in an archive in Colmar as she reads those submissive letters from which the naked fear speaks.
German? French? Torn!
Later, the family succeeds in concealing their German origins. The feeling of not being wanted remains. "Do not attract attention, show an exemplary national spirit" becomes Mathilde's motto. On July 14, the national holiday, she always swings her paper flag, but her granddaughter tells her how bad-tempered she is. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the border region connect something, whether they were Germans or always Alsatians, it could be called a sense of inferiority. In their own country, they are only considered "disguised Frenchmen".
"This back and forth between two countries is a huge trauma in the subconscious of the Alsatians," says the author in almost accent-free German. To this day, there is this fear, as too German-friendly and thus to be considered a traitor. "We have to constantly prove that we are French." How deeply rooted she was, she told herself, when she asked a taxi driver in Berlin if she was German, and she answered a little too hard: "But no, I'm French! " Afterwards, she could only shake her head.
She has lived in Berlin for almost 20 years. Shortly before the change she left London, where she had previously lived for seven years to work as a correspondent for the daily newspaper "Libération" in Germany. Your editor-in-chief is relieved that someone sacrifices himself to go to the Boches - "Yeah, that's how he really put it," she says with a laugh.
For many in the generation of their parents, the Germans were at best boring, at worst worrying. But when she arrives in Berlin, she does not feel alienated there at all. The old palaces remind them of the stately buildings in Strasbourg, built there by the same Prussian architects. Even more: She marries a German, the filmmaker Thomas Kufus, gets with him two sons, now twelve and nine years old, and remains. Her grandmother Mathilde is happy. The granddaughter remains critical. This can be read in her column for many years in the "Tagesspiegel". Funny and ingenious texts in which she examines German but also French customs and sensitivities.
For four years Pascale Hugues worked on "Marthe and Mathilde". Faded flourishes in diaries and letters deciphered until her eyes hurt. Rummaged in old newspapers and archives. And, above all, dig into their memory. She already knew a lot, she says. Result of numerous table discussions in the house of her grandmother Marthe. "Tell me something!", That's how the opulent Alsatian meals started and ended on a regular basis. The plot of her book follows this stream of memories, is more associative and erratic than chronological.
The memory is not without gaps
Many questions remain open. The memory is like a filter, much falls through below. That the narrator does not conceal this is to be credited to her. She also wrote something about the soul with this book. When Mathilde dies, she seems to take her "huge story" to the grave. "I'm the last one who could tell all that," says Pascale Hugues. She feels that her grandmother has only now found her peace. She, too, is catching up with something missed. Only when writing, she realizes that the outrage of this woman, who so alienated her as a child, were only the aftermath of her old fear of being marginalized, humiliated, expelled.
At the end, she revisits her grave, which lies under a tree on a mountain in the Vosges. And for the first time realizes that you can look from up there to Germany. It's as if the old lady had finally reconciled with this difficult legacy. And you yourself? "I love Berlin," she replies without hesitation. One and a half years ago she finally requested the documents for dual citizenship. She can then be French and German. At some point, maybe. , ,
Recommended reading: Pascale Hugues: "Marthe and Mathilde: A family between France and Germany", Rowohlt, 288 pages, 19.90 euros
