Freiburg im Breisgau Synagogue, burned to the ground 1938, memorial footprint until now click here
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Finding my husband in Freiburg. Twice. SJ Dodgson MJoTA 2014 v8n2 p0831
I took a long time learning to be a good wife. The 3 times I tried were all to professional men with blue eyes, mostly German ancestry and Roman Catholic. My first was an Australian with a German last name, Gavan Schneider MD BS, my second was an American with a Finnish name that migrated to the coalfields of Pennsylvania via Poland, Raymond Pekala MD, which union produced Angus and Miles Dodgson Pekala. My third, whom I married for better or worse in June 1993, is totally German, Lothar Blossfeld Dipl Physik (Heidelberg). We have 2 children, Allister and Patience.
Almost as if I married the same man 3 times. Even more
peculiar is that I was born in England in the long shadow of the second
world war, and from when I could talk I knew that the Germans had tried
to kill us all. Twice. World War I and World War II. And did succeed in
killing at least a dozen or so of my close male relatives.
My mother came from 2 contrasting breeds of Belfast
Irish: Quakers who tolerate everyone, and Presbyterians who tolerate
hardly anyone. She caused quite a fuss when she told her parents she was
bringing my father home to Belfast for the wedding: an Englishman named
Michael? A name only used in Ireland by Catholics?
Lothar however, is not terribly Catholic. He is a mix of Catholic, Jewish and Lutheran, although when asked to pay the compulsory state tax for churches, he managed to wriggle out of it by saying he did not believe in anything. He always went to Catholic church with me on Christmas with my 2 Pekala sons and, after they appeared, our son and daughter.
I met Lothar in April 1986, in a pub in Freiburg-im-Breisgau and rapidly we moved into a pattern that lasted 12 years, of him visiting me in New Jersey or traveling with me, and me and the children visiting him in Freiburg and his parents in Frankfurt. After 6 years he bought a hotel in Breitnau. In 1998, 6 years after that, I started working as a professional medical writer, with no vacation time, and that was the end of my trips to Germany. In 2008, Lothar sold the hotel, without bothering to send me my possessions, and in 2013 was placed in an old people's home in Freiburg by his landlady. Who blocked all access to his family. My daughter and I found him in August 2014, after no replies from any of his contacts, and after going to the police in Freiburg to file a missing person's report.
Now that Lothar has Parkinson's Disease and needs his family, we were there for him. Doing our best to rescue him from his landlady whom he has said used threats to gain control over his health, residence, assets and block his family. German courts thought perfectly reasonable the concept that a man with dementia, who needs someone to wipe his bottom, could decide to never ever see his only family again. Our ties with Germany are severed.
During my father's trip before he died, he visited me in New Jersey, and then Lothar in Freiberg-im-Breisgau in 1986, to whom he spoke in German. My father learned German, from a German prisoner-of-war working on his parent's farm during World
War II, and honed in Australia through a friendship with German
refugees.
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Germany. SJ Dodgson MJoTA 2013 v7n2 p1216
Today is December 16, Beethoven's birthday. I know that because I grew up reading a newspaper comic, Peanuts,
for whom Beethoven's birthday was extremely important. The comic's
creator, Charles Schultz, had a German name, as do a lot of Americans.
America is very German: in the early 1900s more immigrants came from
Germany than anywhere else and they influenced the foods we eat like
pretzels.
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News feed from Der Spiegel
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Lufthansa Plane Lost in Switzerland SJ Dodgson MJoTA 2015 v9n1p0322
Is this tragic crash of a German plane flying from Barcelona, Spain to Duesseldorf, Germany, a metaphor for Germany losing control over European Union? The press conference given by the CEO of Lufthansa insisted that the pilots passed all medical and technical tests and no red flags were raised. I believe them. An airline has no upside in a crash, none at all, and ethical airline companies do everything possible to avert these crashes.
But I also believe that in Germany, rules are made for efficiency, not for humans.
I went to Germany in 1986 to learn some surgical techniques. I was a research assistant professor at an American Ivy League university (University of Pennsylvania) As the mother of 2 American adults whose father is a German scientist imprisoned in a hospital in Germany, I affirm their rules were not made for humans.
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Picture below: Brilliant engineering, taking risks and doing everything they can to lower greenhouse gas output and water usage. Germany is leading the way, and US police need to be arresting parents whose children have access to guns, rather than parents who leave their kids outside a store, with the whole world watching them, so they can nip in and buy a loaf of bread.
These young people were enjoying the afternoon breezes on the arches of a footbridge, near the University of Freiburg and the main train station in Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Where I took the background picture in July 2015.
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![Location of Germany (dark green)– in Europe (green & dark grey)– in the European Union (green) – [Legend]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/EU-Germany.svg/250px-EU-Germany.svg.png)
