On Monday I had a hard boiled egg with curry on a piece of bread. I also had some of the home grown strawberries. Today I took some pictures of that little patch where the strawberries grow.
I just had a look at the post from Peter’s birthday:
https://auntyuta.com/2017/05/16/utas-diary-16th-may-2017/
This was the day when we had in Wollongong this lovely cheese board.
This is what I said towards the end of the post:
We had our brunch in that part of our backyard that looks a bit like we’re in the midst of the bush. There were six of us sitting down at the outside table. The younger people were busy preparing everything in the kitchen and then carrying it out. Caroline and Matthew had brought delicious food along from some of Sydney’s delicatessen shops as well as some Champagne. The food and drink was loved by all. Most of the pictures were taken by Caroline.
I looked up this post:
https://auntyuta.com/2016/03/12/utas-diary-two-weeks-before-easter-2016/
So in March 2016 I published this picture with some comments:
I like to sit outside in the morning sun. This simple garden furniture from their porch/terrace in Waverly (Sydney), which C and M had painted themselves many years ago, they wanted to throw out. But I told them I love it. So it is now installed at the north side of our house. There are a lot of trees, but the morning sun gets through a bit, and we love to sit there with our morning tea.
The following I copied from something that I published at Easter 2016.
https://auntyuta.com/2016/03/28/utas-diary-easter-2016/
Lucas looked around in our backyard and called it a “forest”. He loved running from the side gate on the south side of the house back to the table on the north side. He kept running, and running, and running with little Alexander always following him. That was after they had been looking for Easter eggs. Alexander was happy, when he found just one little egg. He did eat it straight away and let his big brother look for all the other eggs!
Our Granddaughter Natasha, the boys’ Aunty, took some pictures of her Nephews while sitting at the table with them.
Above the house of Josef and Hulda Spickermann in Lodz during the years before the end of World War Two.
Josef Alexander and Hulda celebrated their 50th Wedding Anniversary in November 1943. All their children with all their spouses and most of the grandchildren were present. Josef and Hulda had three daughters and three sons: Olga, Jenny, Elisabeth (Lies) and Edmund (E), Alexander (Oleg) and Ludwig (Luttek). I have a picture of the Golden Wedding with everyone in it. Here it is:
My father was the second son of Josef and Hulda. He married my mother, Irma Charlotte Summerer, on the 30th of September 1930. My mother was only nineteen at the time. Four years later, on the 21st of September 1934, I was born. In June of 1935 my parents travelled with me to Lodz (Poland) to visit Dad’s family there. My mother and I, we did not have our own passports. We were included in Dad’s passport as can be seen in the following picture.
As far as I know we stayed in Lodz with Tante Lies (Elisabeth) and Onkel Alfred. I have several pictures that show me with their son Horst who was born on the 7th of February 1935. Tante Lies was about the same age as my mother. Whereas Onkel Alred was twenty years older than his wife. He owned huge properties. We always thought they were rich.
In the above picture I am in the pram with my cousin Horst. There are also cousins George and Gerd, the sons of Tante Olga as well as cousin Ursula, the daughter of Tante Jenny. (Olga and Jenny were of course the older sisters of my father.) The picture is taken in the park of the Häuslers, Horst’s parents.
When I was six weeks old the grandparents, Hulda and Josef, came to Berlin for a visit, where they saw me for the first time. They were proud to have a grandchild by one of their sons. (Their other two sons did not have any children yet at the time). I think my twenty-three year old mother looks very pretty in that picture.
On the 9th of June 1938 my brother Bodo Alexander was born. He was born at home in our apartment in Berlin, Bozener Strasse. Here in this picture he is only a few hours old. I was thrilled to have a baby brother! I believed the ‘Klapperstorch’ had brought him. Mum’s sister Ilse was very excited about this addition to the family as well. Later on I always heard stories about how this home delivery took place. And I did sleep through all of it. When I woke up in the morning, Tante Ilse led me to the cot in the parent’s bedroom. And surprise, surprise, der Klapperstorch had brought a beautiful baby boy. There he was lying in the cot!
Here I am with Opa Spickermann at the ‘Reichssportfeld’ in June 1938 soon after the birth of brother Bodo. It was a time when Mum still had to stay in bed. Tante Ilse and her husband Adolf Schlinke owned a ‘Wanderer’ car. In that they drove Dad, Opa and me to the Reichssportfeld for an outing. Probably so Opa could see a bit of Berlin. Presumably he had come all the way from Lodz to Berlin to see his first born grandson by the name of Spickermann.
Dad, Granddad, Tante Ilse and little Uta,
(I guess, Onkel Addi took the picture.)
UNSER KIND’ – OUR CHILD , this is the title of a book Mum used for recording notes about my development. Here are some of the notes:
“Uta was born on Friday, 21st September 1934, at 19 hrs and 55 min. in Berlin-Schöneberg. Her birth weight was 3200 g, she was 51 cm in length.
Friday, 5th October 1934, Uta 14 days old. This is the day when she was outside for the first time. She had her first solid food on the 23rd December. She enjoyed eating biscuit with orange juice. On 2nd April 1935 she drank out of a small cup all by herself.
On 27th February 1935, Tante Ilse’s birthday, she wore a dress for the first time. She congratulated Aunty with some violets in her hand. When Uta was four months old she raised herself up into a sitting position for the first time. She could already stand quite well when she was six months. She was ten months and two days old when she took the first two steps all by herself. She could climb one step by herself at twelve months without holding onto anything.
Her first tooth appeared when she wasn’t quite seven months old yet. At twelve months she had six teeth at the top and two at the bottom. These teeth appeared one after another without any problems. On the 20th of March Uta wore ‘Schuhchen’ (little shoes) for the first time.
On the 24th of March 1935, a Sunday, she was baptised in the ‘Kirche zum Heilbronn’ by Pfarrer Wiligmann. Uta’s first words were “wau, wau”. Later she said “Mama” and then “Papa” and “Buh”. With “Buh” she meant ball.
She had three small pox vaccinations, because the first two weren’t successful. (Unsuccessful on 12.5.36 and 24.10.36. Successful vaccination on 13.4.37.)”
Here now is what Mum wrote on the 26th of September 1935: “Uta likes children a real lot. She wants to play with every one. She loves to play in the sand. – When I take her out she always likes to stand up in her pram and she smiles at every one. People always take notice of her. When Uta was ten months old I took her on a bike-tour. She was placed in a basket-seat which was fastened to my handle-bar. We went along the Promenade of Münster. It started raining a bit. Because of this she ended up with a bit of a cold.
She was eleven months when she was for the first time in an outside water, the Aasee of Münster. The temperature was 24 degrees (Celsius). Uta went across the German border into Poland when she was nine months. This was her first major trip. Destination Lodz.
For Uta’s first birthday we were still in Münster. Sissi and Teo were our guests. Uta loved all the presents. All day long she played with her toys.”
And there’s a list of all the presents I received, from Aunty in Berlin, from Grandma in Leipzig and also from the grandparents in Lodz.
These are pictures from Lodz in June 1935. I’m in the pictures with my cousin Horst who was born in February 1935.
These are pictures of me from July 1935 in Münster/Westphalia
These are two more pictures from September 1935
Mum wrote I loved to play with sand. Here I’m sitting at one of the sand-boxes (Buddelkasten) with my ‘boy-friend’. I think I was fond of boys at a young age!
The last two pictures are taken in my ‘Kinderzimmer’. I have great fun sitting in the little bed which is for dolls and teddies. There’s one of the chairs which was a gift all the way from Lodz for my first birthday.
I have here a few more pictures Mum took of me as a toddler. Apparently I wanted to try out whatever other children had, be it a toy car, a doll’s pram or a big tricycle. I didn’t own any of these things, but gee I was keen on trying them out!
How on earth did Mum convince the children to let me try out their things so she could take these photos?
.
On my fourth birthday Tante Ilse gave me a ‘Puppenwagen’, a pram for my
dolls.
Mum kept a big photo album with pictures of me. Growing up, I always liked to look at all these pictures. However, I remember distinctly that the following pictures annoyed me quite a bit. I felt awful that the pictures showed me being so very plump! When I was told I looked ‘cute’ I tended not to believe it. I was self conscious at an early age and mostly didn’t feel ‘cute’ at all. I still often don’t like my picture taken because I think I might look awful! The adults in the pictures are my Mum, Tante Ilse and Onkel Addi. I wonder who took the pictures with all three adults in it. Was it perhaps my father? Pussi was Tante Ilse’s dog. Apparently I loved carrying this dog.
For good measure I want to include here another blog with my father and mother in it and some of the extended family.
My father, Alexander Spickermann, was born in Lodz on the 13th of May 1904. The following picture of him was taken in about 1916. This is the earliest picture I have of him.
Alexander’s brother Edmund Spickermann, was born in 1902. Both brothers studied in Leipzig, Germany. The following pictures are from 1925 in the city of Leipzig. There is first Alexander and then Edmund. Both brothers are in their student outfits. And then there is a picture of both of them in front of the Völkerschlacht-Denkmal in Leipzig.
Alexander and Charlotte are my parents. They were married on the 25th of September 1930. Earlier that year, that is in 1930, Alexander promoted to Dr. phil and Edmund, I think, to Dr. rer.pol. The above picture is from 1925 when Alexander and Edmund first met Charlotte and Ilse. Charlotte was only fourteen years old at the time. Her sister Ilse was eighteen. Below is my parents’ wedding photo from the 25th of September 1930. (Charlotte was born on the 23rd of March 1911 and Ilse on the 27th of February 1907).
Above is another photo of Dad from 1930. The next photo was taken around Easter of 1935.
Dad is holding me. I had been born on the 21st of September 1934. So I am about six months in that picture.
In the above picture Dad is probably not quite forty yet. And then there is the photo of the Grandparents’ Golden Wedding Anniversary in Litzmannstadt (Lodz) in November of 1943. On the left is my sixteen year old cousin Ursula; next are Dad and Mum and I am in front beside Grossmutter (Grandma). I am nine years old.
Below now is the picture that was taken in June of 1938 soon after the home-birth of my brother Bodo. Since February of 1930 Ilse had been married to Adolf Schlinke (Onkel Addi). They owned this beautiful car, called ‘Wanderer’.
Grossvater Josef Spickermann (Granddad) was in Berlin for a visit. Presumably to see Bodo, his new grandson. The Schlinkes took Granddad, Dad and me for an outing in their car. The picture was taken in Berlin at the Reichssportfeld. Dad is in the picture on the left.
The next picture is taken at the Baltic seaside resort of Graal/Müritz in 1940. In the ‘Strandkorb’ are Mum and Tante Ilse, Dad is standing next to them.
I copied three more photos, probably all from the 1950s. The first one is Dad in his office, the two others are party photos with Dad and his family. In the last photo are Dad and his three sisters and two brothers. They were probably celebrating someone’s birthday. The Spickermanns liked to come together as a family.
http://www.touristinspiration.com/knowledge/things-to-see-and-do/bayerischer-platz-12454.html
” . . . . The ”Bayerischer Platz” is the center of the ”Bayerisches Viertel”, (Bavarian district), with many streets named after Bavarian cities, which was destroyed a lot [more] during World War II (about 60%). . . . . ”
I just had a look at my post from January 2015 about Bayerishces Viertel. We used to live in Bozener Strasse. I always assumed that the town of “Bozen” was in Bavaria. I know now that is not the case.
Bolzano (Bozen) is in Southern Tyrol and belongs now to Italy.
“During the gradual decline of the Romans’ influence in the 7th century, Bavarian immigration took place and the first mention of a Bavarian ruler in Bolzano dates from 679.[5] At that time, the Bavarians named the nearby villages around Bolzano Bauzanum or Bauzana.[6] Germanpopulations have been present in the region of Tyrol since this time.”
It seems, even though it belongs to Italy, the German population in Southern Tyrol is predominant. Here is what I found in wikipedia about the modern-day South Tyrol:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Tyrol
“Modern-day South Tyrol, an autonomous Italian province created in 1948, was part of the Austro-Hungarian County of Tyrol until 1918 (then known as Deutschsüdtirol and occasionally Mitteltirol[1]). It was annexed by Italy following the defeat of the Central Powersin World War I. It has been part of a cross-border joint entity, the Euroregion Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino, since 2001.
My friend Eva Todtenhausen once tought me the text to the following Tyrol melody:
I was ten at the time, and I still remember the words!
https://auntyuta.com/2015/01/27/bayerisches-viertel-2/
This post brings back memories about Bozener Strasse. This is the street where I lived during most of my childhood and early adulthood years. Some of the buildings look a lot more colourful now than they used to. I like some of the very bright colours. During the 1930s and 1940s we children would use Bozener Strasse as our playground because there were usually no cars parked there. Our street was very out of the way and had no through traffic. Tante Ilse and Onkel Addi for instance parked their car in a nearby garage. I think to that garage it was a five minute walk!
I sometimes like to just browse through some older posts of mine. Being able to ‘search’ for certain subjects, often helps to find some posts that I am specially looking for. Today for instance I wanted to find a picture from my first birthday. I assumed that at some time I had published this picture that was taken on my first birthday. Inserting “first Birthday” in the search space, resulted in the following:
https://auntyuta.com/?s=first+Birthday&submit=Search
Alas, nothing came up about my first birthday, but on the other hand quite a few posts that I enjoyed having another look at. Feel welcome, to browse through some of my posts too. I hope you find some of the posts interesting.
Cheerio, and have a good day!
http://www.dw.com/en/milena-glimbovski-germany/a-18742296
“The average German produces 250 kilograms (550 pounds) of waste every year. And if you go grocery shopping at a normal German supermarket, you’ll quickly see why: From meat to cheese, vegetables to fruit, most items on sale are wrapped in plastic. That’s something 25-year-old Milena Glimbovski couldn’t wrap her head around.
“Why is all of this food I buy every day wrapped in so much plastic? Is that really necessary?” Milena says. “I mean, it’s crazy: you can even buy ecologically friendly condoms, but you can’t get food without packaging,” she adds.
So she decided to set up Berlin’s first packaging-free supermarket. That was not a piece of cake: For example, finding suppliers who deliver food without packaging took her a whole six months.
What started as just an idea in 2012 finally became a reality in September 2014. Since then, Milena has been the proud owner of a small shop, aptly called “Original Unverpackt” (Original Unpackaged).
It is located in Berlin’s vibrant, trendy Kreuzberg district, and sells 400 different products – from nuts to noodles – all package-free. Customers can fill as much of each product as they want into small linen bags, Tupperware they bring from home, or glass jars they can get in Milena’s shop. As long as it’s reusable.”
“Original Unverpackt” is a small supermarket that looks more like a kiosk, and yet it offers 500 different products – from nuts to noodles – all package-free.”
What does that have to do with the climate?
“Milena is doing the climate a big favor: In order to produce plastic wrapping, it takes fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. About four percent of the world’s annual petroleum production is converted directly into making plastics, and another four percent gets burned to fuel the process. To produce one kilogram of plastic, six kilograms of carbon dioxide are emitted – that’s about as much as a 40-kilometer-long car ride emits. This obviously doesn’t do the climate any good.
Milena’s customers love not only the products, but also the shopping experience itself: Turns out that shuffling nuts into bags brought from home is actually way more fun than just tossing a pre-packaged bag of nuts into a cart.
But when they get to the spaghetti section, many customers are a bit helpless, Milena says. “They wonder: where could we possibly put that?” Spaghetti won’t fit in most Tupperware containers.
But Milena is used to solving problems, so she even has an answer to this: “Old Pringles tubes,” she says and smiles. Genius.”
http://www.eurozine.com/europe-the-reconstruction-of-the-free-world/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrike_Gu%C3%A9rot
Oct. 9, 2017, 12:55 PM
FRANKFURT AM MAIN, Germany, Oct. 9, 2017 /CNW/ – The winner of the German Book Prize 2017 is Robert Menasse for his novel “Die Hauptstadt” (Suhrkamp).
Statement from the jury:
“The humane is always worth striving for; it is never reliably given: With his novel ‘Die Hauptstadt’, Robert Menasse vividly shows that this also applies to the European Union. With great dramaturgical skill, he light-handedly digs into the deepest layers of this world we call our own – making unmistakably clear that, among other things, the economy alone will not be able to guarantee us a peaceful future. Those who are undermining the peace project that is Europe are among us – not infrequently, ‘the others’ are we ourselves. With ‘Die Hauptstadt’, Robert Menasse has achieved the goal he set for himself: In the novel, contemporaneity is realised with such literary ability that contemporaries will recognise themselves in it and those born later will be better able to understand these times.”
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Bartelmann
Who was Wilhelm Bartelmann?” inventor of the beach basket” Google celebrating 172nd birthday. Wilhelm Bartelmann The “strandkorb” beach-chair was invented in 1882 by German basket maker Wilhelm Bartelmann in Rostock, originally for his customer Elfriede Maltzahn, who suffered from rheumatism and had requested in his workshop a “seating accommodation for the beach that would provide shelter from the sun and wind” Wilhelm Bartelmann Biography Born: 7 October 1845 Died: 25 July 1930, Rostock, Germany
https://auntyuta.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=11106&action=edit
I remember “beach baskets” from my childhood days. The above picture from 1940 of a “Strandkorb” with my mother and Tante Ilse in it and my father leaning on the side of the Strandkorb I published in a blog here:
https://auntyuta.com/2016/05/25/my-father/
Heaps of Beach Baskets to be seen here:
I just found another blog I wrote about our stay in Graal/Muritz in 1940:
https://auntyuta.com/2012/01/16/the-beach-at-graalmuritz/
During the summer of 1940 we were on holidays at the Baltic Sea. We had rented a small cottage. Auntie Ilse was staying with Mum, little Bodo and me most of the time. Our maid Gertrud was with us too. Dad worked during the week in Berlin and came to Graal only on weekends.
Two year old Bodo must have already been quite a walker. I remember that Dad took us for walks in the nearby forest where we would be looking for blueberries. These berries were quite delicious. We would eat them for supper with some sugar and milk.
The beach was not far from our cottage. We went there every day. A photographer had a shop close by. During the day he often took pictures of people on the beach. The following day he displayed the pictures in front of his shop ready for sale. I think people did not order to have their pictures taken. They bought them only if they happened to like them.
In my files I have two of these pictures. They are more than seventy years old now. I was reminded of these pictures when we went to an Australian beach the other day. In one of these old pictures you can see my father with my mother and Auntie Ilse. The women sit in their ‘Strandkorb’. These ‘Strandkörbe’ are very popular on all German beaches. They are popular still to this day. They are a good windshelter. I think people usually place them in such a way that they can catch the sun. Mum and Auntie Ilse were always proud of their suntan.
To start with I copy here what I found about the Honey Place on the internet:
It says:
During our recent holidays we decided one day to drive to Coffs Harbour for an outing. On the way there we stopped at the Urunga Honey Place. We had a lovely time there, sitting in the sun sipping our tea. We also bought some delicious honey.
We very much liked our break at the Honey Place. But Coffs Harbour was not so good for us on that day. I’ll write about this some other time.
PS: The Honey Ice-Cream was delicious!
AuntyUta 