Excerpt from Chapter 1:
Approaching Munchen
Hauptbahnhof (Munich Central Railway Station) by
S-Bahn from Munchen-Pasing, the train passes
Munchen Laim, Hackerbrucke and
Donnersbergerbrucke before going underground to
Marienplatz and Central. A short drive from
Donnersbergerbrucke station after crossing the
bridge leads to the suburb of Laim, where I was
born on 6 July 1922 and where in 1992 I
revisited St Rupert's, Das Katholische Pfarramt
(Catholic Parish Church), to see its massive and
impressive christening font where I had been
baptised.
My father was a
coppersmith by trade and worked for the railway
repair shop in Munich. In those days there was a
big demand for such a trade, especially from the
railways, as all steam engine vital parts were
made from copper or brass. Father learnt his
trade as an apprentice to his uncle at the
beginning of the new century, and it was just at
that time that the new Rathaus (Town Hall) was
being built on the Marien Platz in Munich. His
uncle had part of the contract to make and
install the 'Glockenspiel' in the tower where
every day at 12 noon and again at five in the
evening the medieval Knights rotate on their
duel ride on the upper platform, followed on the
lower tier by the Cooper's Guild figures
performing the Barrelmaker's dance. Since copper
was the material used in creating and making the
characters, my Father had a hand in the
installation of what has become a tourist
attraction now known all over the world. Father
told me that when the job was finished and the
machinery switched on for the first trialthey
discovered the knights were too tall to go
through the arches so they all had to be
dismantled and made shorter.
Before World War I,
Father served his military service in an
artillery regiment in the city of Augsburg where
he met my Mother and they were married. Mother
came from a farmer family in Mertingen near
Donauw"rth, about three or four stations out of
Augsburg. Her maiden name was Schretzmeier.
Fortunately my Father was not called up for
military service when the war started as his
trade was required by the railways. Mother, at
that time was in domestic employment with the
Diesel family as an apprentice cook and remained
with the family long after Rudolf disappeared in
the Channel on a ferry trip to England. (Rudolf
Diesel being the inventor of the diesel engine).
It was never established whether he jumped or
was pushed though it was known that, despite his
revolutionary invention, Rudolf was in dire
financial strife when he disappeared.
After the First World
War living conditions were grim. Wages were low,
food expensive and very hard to get which was a
direct consequence of the harsh conditions
imposed on Germany by the infamous Treaty of
Versailles. In order to improve himself Father
went to night school run by the railway
technical college in Freimann, a suburb of
Munich, and eventually managed to join the staff
of the Bavarian State Railway. This,
unfortunately, or fortunately, depending which
way one looks at it, involved being posted to
various stations on the rail network, mainly to
gain experience. My brother Wilhelm was born in
1920 and I must have been about eighteen months
when Father got his first posting to Freilassing,
a station on the Austrian border just outside
Salzburg. I remember very little of our stay
there except vaguely that we lived in a house in
the middle of a forest and was told there were
lots of witches roaming the woods at night. That
scared me quite a bit but I suppose they only
told me that to stop me exploring on my own.
In 1925 Father got his
second posting, this time to Offingen on the
main line from Munchen to Stuttgart. From then
on my memory is quite clear on some of the
exploits my brother and I got up to. One I
vividly remember is when he found a pair of
scissors and cut off my blond curls which Mum
was so proud of. Perhaps Willi was jealous or
maybe he just enjoyed what he was doing. Anyhow,
I guess I was lucky he didn't include my ears in
his artistic work.
The house we lived in
was next to the railway line but some distance
from the station. Schnuttenbach, the little
village nearest to us was across a wheat field
and was only accessible by a roundabout way
which meant my brother and I had very few
playmates and after Willi was sent to boarding
school in 1926 there were even fewer. I played
all sorts of imaginary games with home-made toys
- there weren't many toys in those days - and
the few things we had were pretty crude. I
wasn't allowed to go near the rail tracks so
spent a lot of time on the front door just
watching the trains go by. I was always on the
look-out for other interesting things I could do
and remember the belting I got one day when I
found the paint tin in the basement and started
painting the walls wearing my Sunday best
outfit. Mum wasn't too pleased about that and
Dad looked pretty grim too.
Life got a bit more
exciting when we moved to the main station
building where there were more interesting
things to see and do. I could watch the trains
go past by simply looking out the window. The
platform was right outside our living room so
there was always quite a bit of activity as all
the prospective travellers assembled outside our
window waiting for their trains. Mum must have
been pretty au fait with the timetable as she
used to shut it to keep out the nosey faces. I
watched lots of trains, including the 'Orient
Express' which thundered through the station
twice a week. It must have been very important
as it had absolute priority on the line and all
other trains had to wait on side lines to let it
pass. It was a shiny dark green train with
golden stripes in the middle of each carriage
with 'Wagon Lit' written along the centre of
them. I didn't know what that meant, but then I
couldn't read yet, though it wouldn't have
helped if I could since it was French. I was
told that was where people slept and it puzzled
me that people got into trains to go to sleep
instead of looking out the windows.
Unfortunately some trains did not fare so well.
I remember one
terrible accident where two express trains or 'Schnellzge'
collided head on at full speed in dense fog
killing 120 people and injuring many more. The
impact made the carriages of both trains rear up
like giant snakes and crush on top of each
other, spilling and squashing the passengers. It
all happened near the cottage we had lived in
before moving to the station. I was most upset
when Mum wouldn't allow me to go down there to
have a closer look; it wasn't proper for little
children to watch that, she reasoned. Besides,
the Army was there and had the area cordoned
off.
Another incident I
remember was one foggy morning when Hubler the
stationmaster went to find out why a signal
light was not working. On the way back he was
knocked down by a train and cut to pieces. Poor
chap; I remember him well. He had a huge blister
on his lower lip which they said was a
birthmark, though I didn't know what that meant.
I used to get his afternoon beer from the
Bahnhof Wirtschaft (railway cafe) and his sudden
demise was a sad blow for me because I looked
forward to that little errand each day. I asked
Dad when Hubler was coming back and he said he
didn't think he would be back for quite some
time...
Offingen was an
industrial town. It had a large woodchip
processing plant and a huge paper manufacturing
complex as well as a large felt factory,
consequently there were lots of activities in
the railway goods yard. I spent a lot of time
down there as the yard was full of exciting
things to watch, such as timber logs being
unloaded and debarked by teams of workers, then
loaded on to horse-drawn trailers to be taken to
the woodchip mill and stacks of felt bales
waiting to be loaded on to rail wagons. The big
paper manufacturing complex was just in the
process of being dismantled and stripped of all
machinery, including its huge boilers which were
being transported slowly along the road on
wooden rollers, to be loaded on to railway
carriages - part of the Versailles Treaty
imposed reparations. I suppose they were
destined for France, or some other European
country.
The only drawback was
after all the workmen and their horses had left
in the evening I had to go down with a little
cart and bucket and collect what the horses had
left behind. It didn't do much for my ego but a
lot of good for the garden. Quite often after
coal was unloaded by teams of labourers with
shovels amidst plenty of noise and dust, I had
to make a few additional trips to the yard to
collect the coal which fell between the wagons
and the horse carts. Mum used it to keep the
potbelly stove going in our living room and in
the 'Wohnzimmer' (best room of the house) on the
very rare occasions when she made that room
accessible for use that was mainly on holidays
like Christmas or Easter or perhaps when we had
visitors. For the rest of the year it was only a
show room to be kept nice and tidy and most of
the time locked up.
Mum took me on a train
trip early one morning. We went to see my
Grand-Mother in Mertingen. Granny was sick in
bed. That was the only time I ever saw her. She
died a few months later. The farm was run by my
oncle and his wife. I clearly remember the dunny
and huge dungheap in the yard, right outside the
front door. They had about 25 cows and three
children as well and they all lived in the big
house together, of course the cows had their own
sleeping quarters seperated from the kitchen by
a sort of a washroom cum Laundry. All the
bedrooms were upstairs, right over the 'moo's
dormitary. (natural central heating!!!)
Tony was the oldest of
their three children maybe five or six years
older than I was. Mary, the second one was my
brother's age and the youngest one was just a
baby and I can't remember her name. Mum had two
more brothers, one was killed in the first war
on the Passchendaele-Ypres front in Flanders the
first hour he got posted there and the other was
lucky enough to come back home and was now
working on a farm nearby. As an ironic twist of
fate Tony, the oldest boy, was serving in the
Augsburg artillery garrison when the war (W.W.ii)
started with Poland. He was killed in the first
week he got there. Mary, according to what my
Father told me, married comfortably into a large
farm in Buttenwiesen, a village near Mertingen.
Her younger sister was not so fortunate. After
the Americans left the village in 1945 they also
left her pregnant. She was only 19 at the time.
I was told she had a baby-girl. My American
'relation', I suppose!!
Of course the best
time I had was when my brother was home on
school holidays. We went down to the goods yard
on the weekends when everything was at a
standstill and had the whole place to ourselves.
We played in the empty wagons, using the brake
cabooses on the end of some of the goods
carriages as imaginary train engines but of
course this activity came to an end when Dad
found out we'd loosened the brake wheel and it
started to roll down the slope to crash on to
another car. We were put under house arrest for
a few Sundays after that, though it wasn't
really that bad as we had to go to church so
were always dressed in our Sunday best with
washed face and hands, thus ruling out play in
the goods yard anyway.
Our house on the
station had no front or back yard except for a
small area across the road where Dad cultivated
a small garden. No place outside was private so
the moment you stepped out the front door you
were on railway property. In a seperate building
at the end of the house, about 10 metre from our
living room windows were the public toilets and
on a hot day one never dared to open the window
on that side of the house otherwise the whole
house was immediately filled with the smell of
carbolic fumes, the stuff they used to disinfect
the urinals.
The toilets were of
cesspit construction and had to be emptied
frequently. That in itself was a special
occasion for me, very exciting to watch when the
cesspit 'engineer' with his horse-drawn barrel
cart arrived to do his precision job. I clearly
remember one particular occasion when I stood on
the other side of the barrel and watched through
the spokes of the wheels how the operator ladled
out and emptied the stuff into the aperture on
top of the barrel with the touch of an expert,
not spilling an ounce but he must have been
distracted or maybe he spotted me standing there
as all of a sudden the contents of the large
ladle came oozing down on top of me.
I was never allowed to
watch him again after that! That was one
occasion when Mum had to open the windows but
this time she was more concerned for the stink
to go out, not the smell to come in, while she
attempted to get me cleaned up. There was no
bath in the house and the only hot water was
from the cooking range in the kitchen so it must
have been a tiresome task since the communal
clothes washing facility across the road was not
available to her for some days yet.
I remember the day
Father went on a trip to Munich and decided to
take me with him. We left on the early morning
commuter train to Neu-Offingen and boarded the
express train to Munich with very few stops in
between. It was very exciting sitting on the
wooden bench by the window listening to the
clacking noise of the wheels making contact with
the track expansion joints and stretching my
neck to watch the telegraph posts sweep by. I
was fascinated by the wires flowing in
continuous up and down motion from post to post
past the window only to disappear on going
through a station. But the excitement became a
bit too much and I fell asleep and when Dad woke
me it was about midday and we were in Mnchen
Hauptbahnhof which was crowded. The air stank
from burned off coal belching from the parked
steam engines. I hung on to Dad's hand knowing
he wouldn't get lost as he was born and brought
up in Munich and walking along the platform I
was sure he could see people's heads whereas I
could only see trousers and swishing skirts. We
crossed a few platforms and boarded another
train for a short trip to what Dad said was the
Ostbahnhof.
Outside the station
square was what looked like a single railway
carriage in the middle of the street with a
stick coming out of the roof and a wheel on its
top resting on a wire above. "That's a Trambahn"
Dad said. "It runs on a rail track in the
street, and the stick is there to bring the
electricity down from the overhead wire to make
its motor run." I couldn't see anything coming
down the stick and was really puzzled, even more
so when the conducter pulled it by the attached
string and swivelled it round from one end of
the vehicle to the other which caused a big
spark when the wheel made contact with the wire
again. 'Clang, clang' went a bell followed by a
whining noise from its electric motor and the
street car moved off along the street. I was
staring at the the car until it was out of sight
hoping to see a few more sparks.
There was another
street car there, also on rails but with two
horses up front and a uniformed Kutscher with a
heavily bearded face stood on a platform in
front holding a big wheel. Ah, I knew that,
brake wheel, I observed to myself. Dad paid some
money to the Schaffner and we stepped aboard and
waited for more people to join us. The vehicle
was open on both sides so it was the Schaffner's
job to make sure everyone was seated before he
pulled a string hanging from the roof which
shook a bell on the Kutscher's platform. My eyes
were glued on the Schaffner's activity so missed
what the Kutscher did to the horses to make them
move.
"Now we go to the
Giesinger Kirche, to the Ostfriedhof," Dad said,
"and I will show you where your Grandparents are
buried." I was quite excited, because I had
never met them before. I knew what they looked
like from a photograph at home in the living
room. Grand-dad was sitting on a horse and had a
sabre on his belt and wore a stiff top hat plus
a very long beard. He was in the Munich mounted
police. Grand-ma wore a long dark skirt which
trailed the floor and a white long- sleeved
blouse with a tightly frilled collar up to the
ears and had dark plaited hair.
The Trambahn stopped
at the gates of the cemetery where we got off
and Dad bought a bunch of flowers from one of
the numerous sellers lined up at the entrance.
It was a long walk down the gravel path to
wherever Dad had in mind we were going and I
hung on to his hand again, his other clutching
the flowers. I had no idea what the place was
all about. Finally he stopped in front of a huge
stone with some writing on its face and put the
flowers down and sprinkled some water from a
little bowl on the ground. I asked Dad why
Grand-ma and Grand- dad weren't there and he
said they were but they were sleeping. I still
thought they could have come since I'd had such
a tiring day to get there, but didn't want to
ask anymore questions as he didn't look too
happy so I shut up and we quietly walked back to
the entrance.
Outside there were
quite a few automobiles. Dad said you could hire
them to take you wherever you wanted to go but
they were too expensive. I would like to have
had a ride in one but instead we looked for the
horse-drawn buggies, the Fiakers. Dad had some
important talk with one of the Kutschers, and I
was lifted up on to the wooden bench and he
climbed and sat beside me. "We are going to see
uncle Max who lives in Giesing" he said. Then
there was a sharp 'clang, clang, clang' from
somewhere behind followed by the whining motor
and wheel clatter of a streecar as it overtook
us on our left at some breath-taking speed. Just
as well our horse was fitted with blinkers. We
trotted on until we reached Onkel Max's street
where the Kutscher brought his horse to a
standstill with a hefty 'whoa' and an enormous
pull on his brake ratchet. Dad lifted me down
and paid the Kutscher who after a loud 'Grss
Gott' and a slight tap on my head with his whip
pulled out into the street again.
Onkel Max and Tante
Emelie lived on the second floor of a tenement
building and I remember him being bald headed
and much older than Dad. I thought he was my
Grand-dad and he wasn't too happy about that
though Dad had a good laugh. They had three
children, two boys and a girl but they were much
bigger than me. Dad said he had to be back home
again in the morning so we couldn't stay long.
He had some beer with uncle Max and Tante Emelie
gave me a Kracherl and a Brezel which wasn't the
best thing to do as on our drive back to the
Ostbahnhof in the buggy Dad had to ask the
Kutscher to stop because I had to do a wee and
he wasn't at all pleased that I did it into the
spokes of the buggy wheel.
There were other
relatives living in Munich at that time. Tante
Amalia, Dad's sister, lived in the Schwanthaler
Strasse on the way to Laim and there was Onkel
Gustl (Gustav) who lived out in Sendlingen, way
past the Sendlinger Torplatz, but Dad said it
was too far to walk but he would take me there
some other time. I was glad about that as I was
too tired to walk anymore. I must have fallen
asleep the moment we got on the train as I can't
remember how I got home.
Quite often I visited
the signal lamp cleaner who had his shed a
little further on from the toilet block. His job
was to collect all the signal lamps during the
day, clean them and fill them with carbide and
water and then take them back to the signals in
the evening. He was an ex soldier from the war
and told me how it had been in the trenches in
Flanders. He was quite an inventive chap and one
day he showed me how to make a bomb. He got a
beer bottle, put some carbide in and filled it
with water, closed it and put it outside in a
trench where it exploded and one glass fragment
hit me on the hand, nearly cutting off my thumb.
I ran home and told Mum I had cut myself on a
broken beer bottle, which actually was the
truth. Anyhow, it didn't come as a surprise when
my parents bundled me off in 1928 to join my
brother at the boarding school in Algasing.