My Mother's Fairytales

© Silke Hesse, 2013

My Mother’s Fairytales

Silke Hesse

My mother’s brother, my very dear Uncle Arnold whose judgment I always trusted, once said to me: You know, your mother writes fairytales. I have often thought about this pronouncement. What was he trying to tell me and what does it mean to be writing fairytales. Is it necessarily a bad thing?

Of course I knew what my uncle was referring to specifically on that occasion. When my mother was sixteen and he was twelve, my grandfather had divorced the wife who had borne him seven children and who had recently spent the better part of three years trying to get medical help for her terminally ill second daughter. He had done so in order to marry a “femme fatale”. To make things worse, this woman had previously been my grandmother’s house guest for extended periods. My mother, who had up to then adored her father and been furthered as his gifted darling, was absolutely outraged. But for her teenage brothers this seductive, flirtatious, and beautiful stepmother was a revelation. My uncle had clearly admired her greatly and the lovely woman he then married probably resembled her in charm and beauty and style.

The very first writings of my mother that we children got to know were her fairytale puppet plays. They were performed for us and the other children of a war-time internment camp. The one dedicated to me on my first camp birthday was called “The Magic Crown”. It begins with a princess who has been lost for three days in a wild forest, (a forest much like those my mother had talked about roaming as a girl.) The princess’ crown, to which her fairy godmother had attached three wishes, has that morning been snatched from her by a swan. Shortly after, the princess comes upon a house and then upon its owner a witch. She there discovers that her predicament is due to that wicked enchantress’ spells. The witch, furious that the crown she so covets is missing, dramatically vents her anger before stabbing the princess. Next, a soldier enters; the swan (actually the fairy godmother in disguise) has just brought him the crown and told him that he is expected to perform some heroic deed with its help; if he succeeds, his courage will be rewarded. The soldier (my father was, incidentally, a decorated veteran of WWI) now comes upon the beautiful dead princess and since he is holding the crown, successfully wishes her back to life. When she tells him about the witch, he rushes forward to kill the murderess. The witch deftly paralyses the soldier; he won’t escape her! The princess however, knows the power of the crown and uses the second wish to dispatch the witch and annul the spell;  the third wish then secures a happy married life for the couple.

The play is dynamically rhymed but the story is too simple even for children, also rather too bloodthirsty. Why did my mother not choose one of the kinder traditional fairytales that we were all familiar with? Years later, when I read her description of her stepmother and particularly of the precautions she felt she needed to take before introducing her fiancé to that enchantress, I understood that she had to get this story off her chest before writing anything else. My mother’s stepmother had, one could say, tried to take her crown off her by estranging her father from her and causing him to deny his daughter her birthright, namely the schooling to study for a profession of her choice; who knows, she may also have intended to paralyze and win over my mother’s fiancé with her charm, much as she had her brothers. But my mother was able to alert my soon-to-be father by mimicking the enchantress’ predictable performance; and thus warned of her wiles, he could laugh at her act. So all ended well and the couple did live “happily ever after”. (My uncle, of course, would hardly have recognized the stepmother story in this play.)

My mother’s next puppet play was all about healing her heroine’s sick father. This becomes a quest that requires great bravery, perseverance and kindness on the girl’s part. She first sets off to find a rare herb which can give her father some relief, but compassion then forces her to give it to a sick old woman she meets by the wayside (of course this is, once again, the fairy in disguise). Thereupon she is told how to achieve more permanent healing. She will first have to steal the devil’s three golden hairs which each contain a wish. Once in hell, she then has to forge an unsavory alliance with the devil’s grandmother in order to get what she needs. Next, she has to scale a high cliff at the top of which a dragon guards the water of life. And finally, after refusing to commit the deadly sin of killing the dragon, she has to awaken the prince hiding within the bewitched monster in order to secure the precious water for them all. (Perhaps, in this story, the father stood for ailing Germany, the prince for bewitched Germany, and the various ordeals presumably alluded to the potentially dangerous and at times unsavory anti-Hitler activities my mother was drawn into after meeting my father in Berlin in January 1933. Of course we children would have had no idea of all this.)

The third play is about an unemployed soldier who has made a pact with the devil that requires him to be unkempt and nomadic for seven years in order to gain the riches needed to marry and do good in the world. It obviously alludes to my father’s life. I cannot, nor would I want to, reconstruct the messages that passed between the three actors of this play, my mother, her younger sister, and my father, but I am quite sure there were messages and they would have hinted at basic rules. We were at the time an unconventional family composed of three adults and three children who inhabited two tiny adjacent rooms; as it turned out, the adult triumvirate worked well for a good ten years in all.

As far as we children, for whom the plays were ostensibly written, were concerned, they were clearly intended as entertainment, much of it relying on my mother’s lively, often funny and sometimes outrageous dialogues. As to be expected of “fairytales”, their stories also contained simple lessons about the rewards to be expected for bravery, kindness, perseverance and loyalty. My mother’s plays could perhaps be classed as “family entertainment”; they addressed more than one audience at a time, though never admitting as much, and they upheld solid “family values”. Of course they were not really fairytales; at the time my father was writing those for us.

My mother was a writer by talent and temperament with an excellent control of eventually two languages. She always wrote for the people in her life: long informative letters at the very least. In 1973, when my husband and I were over in Germany with our four children, she sent me the German draft of a family history concerning the people who had been closest to her when she was a child: the grandmother she adored, her mother, her father, her cousins and the aunts and uncles who would assemble for family gatherings. Over the years, she had told me any amount of stories of all these people and I felt I knew and loved them. In this account she presented them critically for the first time. There was her great-grandfather whose business in Buenos Ayres had failed and who had eventually died in an institution for alcoholics, leaving his wife and three daughters relying on their ingenuity to survive elegantly in straitened circumstances. One of the daughters was her gifted grandmother, who ended up marrying a rich, thoroughly kind and decent man with whom she was, however, initially not in love. She chose marriage to escape the ignominy of having to earn a living for the family with piano lessons. She was then a grateful, loyal and loving wife till his relatively early death. Her daughter, my grandmother, grew up sheltered by the stifling protectiveness of a mother whom she had no hope of challenging or rivaling and who made sure that while her grooming, her singing and her social graces were furthered, her mind was left quite undeveloped. Thus my grandmother’s only escape from her much loved mother had been to publicly declare her engagement to her brother’s friend, my grandfather, at a house party, thus creating a situation where her mother could not intervene. With this move, the young woman, who was soon to give birth to a child almost every year, had placed herself at the mercy of her clever and travelled husband. He, for his part, had decided to follow the trend of the times and switch from the beauty-worshipping Athenian lifestyle, with which his wife had grown up, to a masculinist Spartan one. So my grandmother was required to be harsh with herself and her children against all her natural inclinations and acquired habits; and that meant that her mothering suffered. My mother’s manuscript also told of her father’s family. With the exception of her father, who made a name for himself as a banker, the other sons and daughters, her uncles and aunts, all elected to become or to marry soldiers in elite, aristocratic regiments. They wore decorative uniforms but were somewhat debauched and fulfilled little useful purpose in life. Their children, whom my mother had encountered when she was four, seemed to be permitted if not encouraged to be aggressively and nastily hierarchical in their games.

My mother wrote this family history at a time when the failings of German society, which had supposedly led to the disasters of the 20^th century, were under constant investigation by academics, writers and journalists. Her account could have provided a disturbing and welcome contribution. But she chose, perhaps wisely, not to translate this text or show  it to other members of the family. All the same, she continued to write about various branches and generations of her German family.

Family was very important to my mother. As a young child, she had been allowed to wander unrestricted through the gardens and past the villas of her many relatives who all lived close by and kept an eye on her as she passed. She and a “twin” cousin from down the road had grown up like brother and sister; together they had a day a week with their amazing grandmother. Later, my mother also had extended stays at the houses of other relatives. Her father’s family owned a large country mansion that had room for everyone to get together at holiday time, so the cousins all knew each other. In those days, people from the upper middle classes had large houses, servants to do the chores, and women with leisure-time for guests. They also had lifestyles, education, and culture that provided valuable learning experiences and they had good manners to make you feel at home wherever you were. By the end of WWII, most of these people and their houses had disappeared: three of my mother’s brothers and a stepbrother had fallen, her parents had died, her father and his wife by suicide to escape the Russians who were hunting for landowners, the house in Berlin had been flattened by bombs, my grandfather’s historic little palais in Silesia had become Polish and would soon be demolished, factories no longer existed, and so on and so on. But of course my mother had left Germany by then; my parents’ livelihood now lay in Australia where our German family was soon, unfortunately, no longer welcome.

It was always important to my mother that we should have the sense of belonging and background that comes with a large and interesting family, and as this family no longer existed in real life, she created it for us in her family histories. Because she wanted us to be proud of our ancestors, she generally neglected to mention their faults; because she wanted her readers to be fascinated, she emphasized the “olden days” and their historical settings; and because she wanted it all to be alive, she placed herself in the middle of the stories and wrote them from a participant’s perspective. She also wanted us to feel part of an ethical tradition of caring, community involvement, and love of the world that may not ever have existed in quite the way she described it but that could form a solid basis for her own family’s values. So she wrote family history a little like the chroniclers of royal houses once wrote histories of kingdoms, with a future in mind that would need to garner pride and loyalty from its past. My uncle was right: she did write fairytales about an imaginary golden age but she wrote them to inspire, not to deceive and she wrote them for the young generation rather than the adults who could be expected to face the facts. She also wrote them in defiance of those who had once been Germany’s enemies and refused to forget their anger. In her stories, she was both “the princess” and the wayward little girl who had to learn to acknowledge her errors; it was easy to identify with her in both roles. What she wrote was always wonderful to read for she was a natural storyteller. And in the end I think she did succeed in creating something like a dynasty but more importantly, also a close community of people with compatible values who were genuinely fond of each other and helpful to each other beyond the call of duty. The open house she kept for children and grandchildren, where we would all holiday together at Christmas, was the practical side of her campaign.

My mother died some fourteen years ago but the family she created, that swirling current of love and jealousy and helpfulness and rediscovery and above all of belonging, continues to exist with its fringe of outsiders who have elected to be members and been accepted. Throughout her life my mother had many foster children as well as other adopted relations. Recently –  it had been eight years since the last reunion –  fifty or so of us met again. In preparation I had decided to translate and distribute at long last her critical account of the family. If anyone read it, no one has since felt the urge to comment. Her decision to let it disappear had obviously been right. I also translated a story about her great-grandfather she wrote for our children, her first set of grandchildren, when they were young and I offered to read this to a new generation of children. In spite of the inconvenient and noisy rain, everyone turned up, adults included, and the reaction was extraordinarily powerful: there were cries and the tears flowed freely.

In brief, this is the story: Great-grandfather Balduin von Bartels, a wool merchant living in Buenos Ayres with his Jewish-Christian wife and his young family of three daughters, goes on a hunting expedition one day and shoots a puma. It turns out to have had a cub. Full of remorse, Balduin takes the little creature home and rears it as a pet. His daughters love playing in the garden with their rather large kitten and Balduin himself takes it for walks through the town after work. He is its master and it obeys him completely. But as the animal grows, Balduin’s wife, who has seen it lying in wait for the servants, becomes more and more worried. After some time, the family has to move to England. The captain of their ship very reluctantly agrees to let the animal travel in its master’s cabin. It is the frightened crew who are now the wild animal’s pretended prey whenever Balduin is not looking. In London a hotel owner too is coerced into letting the puma stay in its master’s rooms. Neither the girls nor the puma like the bleak, foggy and restrictive city; the Londoners, in turn, are highly suspicious of the big cat being walked through their streets at night. One day someone forgets to close the apartment door and the puma escapes into the corridors and eventually the foyer of the hotel, causing panic. The game is up; Balduin has to take the animal to the London zoo. There the puma is miserable and reproachful when visited on weekends; it is then not long before it dies. This is a colonial version of the Romantic dream of a Golden Age, a Garden of Eden where man and beast can live together in peace and harmony. But only until the first sin is committed.

My mother had prefaced her tale with a letter to her grandchildren describing how her grandmother, the eldest of Balduin's three little girls, used to tell her and her cousin-brother this story. Recently I mentioned the Puma story to this cousin’s widow. But it was I who told your mother this story; she didn’t know it at the time, was the response. I protested; but then I started to wonder why our mother had never told it to us, her children, when the supposed teller, her grandmother, had always played such a large part in her reminiscences. My mother told me she later showed her cousin her story and he was able to contribute the name and sex of the puma: she was a lady-cat with the name of Desdemona, a detail his widow claims not to have known. Maybe my mother had initially forgotten the story and then recalled it all when her memory was jerked. Her cousin’s widow had a very different take on the Balduin story: “What a ridiculous affectation to be walking the streets with a wild animal on your leash! What did people like that think they were doing!” was her comment. The cousin’s family had inherited a portrait of Balduin which they had no interest in displaying, perhaps because it came with the story of his alcoholism and his eventual death in an institution for drinkers. My mother, for her part, presented Balduin to us as a noble and universally respected businessman, though she knew that his business had failed either before or after he transferred it from Buenos Ayres to German Town in Bradford. The two different slants on the story could hardly both have originated with my mother’s grandmother. Was my mother’s the “true” story as her grandmother had told it to the children, her tribute to a lost father? All we can say with certainty now is that Balduin had a puma which he reared from a cub; everything else could have been just a fairytale. Luckily I was unaware of these complications when I read my mother’s story to its rapt audience.

In 1954 when she was 44 and the mother of a significantly handicapped, four-year-old Down’s Syndrome boy whom she always insisted on caring for herself, my mother accepted the Presidency of the newly formed Australian-German Welfare Society. It was an honorary position offered to her by the wife of the German ambassador and it consumed most of her formidable energies for the next thirty years and more. At the time, Australia was taking in large numbers of German-speaking displaced persons. Once they had left, Germany no longer accepted responsibility for them while Australia would only do so after five years of residency. Many of these migrants were young people who had only ever known the turmoil of war and its aftermath; many had less than the normal education, spoke little English, and had little professional training. They had often coupled up with whatever partner they could find in their fractured and lonely worlds. Some had been severely traumatized by their war experiences. All this meant that there were soon problems related to poverty, unemployment, loneliness, marital breakdown, alcoholism, sickness, accident, mental health and the orphaning of children. Australian welfare organizations, who could not speak these clients’ language, were finding it difficult to work out how to help and welcomed the new charity they had lobbied for. For the German-speaking volunteers of the Welfare Society all this meant a busy life. There were home visits to make, often to distant five-acre blocks with their shabby temporary homes, and days of office appointments. Governments had to be lobbied and bureaucracies dealt with. There was fund-raising with its organization of large-scale society balls. There were health issues and legal conundrums to be dealt with, as well as worried parents and possessive grandparents in Germany. My mother was involved with all aspects of this work.

At some stage, my mother started writing a monthly newsletter The Welfarer, in which she explained to donors and volunteers what the work of the Society entailed; among its most persuasive contributions were case studies which she turned into stories of individual clients or families, always using changed names. In 1987, 26 of these were then published under the title Fates and Fortunes. Experiences of German Migrants in Australia in the Günter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, with an introduction by Professor Horst Priessnitz. My mother writes of these histories: “they should make our readers aware of the infinite variety of problems which face people who, uprooted from their original countries, are trying to adapt to Australian conditions and the English language” (15). These biographies add up to a fascinating history of German post-war migration to Australia. It is hard to know to what extent my mother adapted or simplified them; they sound authentic and typical. But here too we have elements of fairytale. The team of anonymous welfare workers is presented as being always of one mind, working as cooperatively and efficiently as bees in a beehive. This was of course never quite the case. I know there were, for example, people who resented my mother’s dominance. There were also different philosophies of social work around at the time, some more paternalistic or more enabling than others. For my mother, not surprisingly, the welfare society’s function was to stand in for the absent families of migrants and she had plenty of family experience.  Fates and Fortunes gives the impression of an ideal, cooperatively egalitarian and amazingly efficient workplace, the sort of workplace we might all strive to have. Its lack of drama effectively puts the narrative spotlight on the migrants and their problems and that is perfectly proper here.

In 1994, at the age of 84, my mother once again drew on her formidable memory  to write an account of our two years in the family internment Camp at Tatura, Victoria. She intended it as a resource for the recently opened Internment Museum, curated by Lurline Knee. It has since been available there, first in German, soon also in an English translation. The internment of women and children during WWII had been a well-guarded secret up to then and it took a certain amount of courage to bring it to public attention. My mother felt that this was not the time to come forward with complaints. Our internment camp was initially quite Spartan and by no means hygienic, but it had been organized as efficiently and humanely as possible under the circumstances and it was also gradually improved. My mother wanted to make the point that here, as elsewhere in life, it was ultimately up to the individual to make the best of his or her situation.

The camp could be seen as having its good sides and she listed them. It allowed you to meet an amazing number of people from many parts of the world, hear their stories and make new friendships. It allowed you to function as part of an egalitarian community. It released you from many of the pressures of everyday life, such as supporting yourself financially and running a household, and it gave you enough leisure to be creative in a medium of your choice or to study if you were so inclined. In it your children had the opportunity to go to a school run by talented amateurs and become proficient in German, for some, like her own children, a second language. And we had playmates galore. The inevitable war-time worries about loved ones were easier to cope with if you were among people whose hopes and fears were similar. It was also easier for internees to receive Red Cross or Vatican messages from relatives overseas than for the rest of the population. The primitive conditions and the school camp atmosphere could give rise to a playfulness most adults in the real world had had to put aside. Improvising became a game, as did token resistance to authority. And you could learn here how little one needed to be content.

It was this framework: what does a human being actually need to live, that my mother chose to give her collection of memories cohesion and something like scientific legitimacy. She began by asking whether humans required anything more than food, shelter, and the equivalent of clothing, needs they had in common with other animals. Her answer eventually is that humans distinguish themselves by a desire to learn and to teach and these two basic human needs manifested themselves powerfully once the more primitive animal needs were catered for, as in the camp. (I personally would have thought that the human need to control one’s life, to make life choices, which often required some ingenuity in the camp, is more basic and learning more often at its service.) As a writer, my mother was of course herself a teacher, her main lessons being resilience and getting on with life for the benefit of all.

Surprisingly, one of the conclusions she came to here was the irrelevance of money. She seemed to forget that somebody, namely Australian and British taxpayers, was paying for our board and keep; and when it came to extras to be ordered from outside the camp, our family, which had not had its accounts blocked because we were Australians by nationality, had all the money we wanted. But complaints about the money economy are a rusted-on part of the German “back to nature” syndrome. The real appeal of having and needing no money was, of course, the egalitarianism this produced.

As earlier said, internment had its positive sides and to illustrate that, my mother could recall any number of amusing and interesting situations and episodes from camp days. For herself as narrator, she invented a cheeky, gregarious persona to get this message across, a persona that was completely new to me. My memories of her in the camp are of a serious, dignified, slightly haughty person who did not mix easily with any but close friends of a similar background, also someone with a meticulous sense of duty, and a deep sense of sadness. She took things much more seriously than either my father or my aunt. I cannot remember her laughing. But she was always a warm, caring and unselfish mother for us. I suspect that she only realized what qualities were needed to enjoy camp life much later in life. Writing her account would have given her the opportunity to make up for past deficiencies, at least in the imagination, for my mother worked on herself all her life.

In summary: What characterizes all my mother’s typical writings is an avoidance of psychological perspectives in favor of practical problem solving and an avoidance of conflict in favor of ideal harmonious scenarios. (I grew up to believe that arguments were never permissible; consequently, I was almost incapable of fighting for myself.) This approach meant that her characters never plumbed their depths. My mother had encountered a good deal of sorrow in her life: the betrayal by her father and the long preoccupation of her mother with her ailing sister, later the war-related loss of nearly all her family, the hostility she met with in Australia, the drowning of a little daughter on her shift, the early death of her second sister through a car accident, the difficulties of raising a disabled child that would never grow up, and more. She never talked about these things, though she could listen sensitively and wisely to the problems of others. What was needed, in her view, was stoical strength and defiance, and what was important was to get on with life, enjoy it, do good deeds, and be of maximum help to those around you. In this she succeeded admirably: but with spiritual help, she would have said. My mother was an active elder in her church. And during one period of her life she recorded a number of significant and arresting dream visions. I think I was the only one apart from my father she showed them to.