missing papers, small photos and 50 deutsch mark

dear friends!
last night putting up the blog took at least half an hour (for not-so-computer-literates: that should take not more than two minutes). the connection from facebook to blogger.com somehow didn´t work. i couldn´t remember my username on blogger.com and so on. i was almost falling from my chair when i was finally finished. not by overjoy, but by falling asleep.

most of today i felt pretty useless. my mother and me have to make the joint return of my father and my mother. from the year 2006. my father always wanted to do it but couldn´t find one paper. seems like he didn´t need it. in replacement there is another paper from my father we need now, which we can´t find. thus we were today sorting thru piles of paper again. my mother in the eating room, me in my former sleeping room where we have the computer now. i thought i had emptied the room from paper (not completely of course), but i came across more sources of paper. underneath the second desk. and inside the desk. at the bottom in one of the drawers i found a photo album from my fathers family. with little, squarrish black and white photos not bigger than huge stamps. from the architecture, the fashion and the moustaches of the men i would say the photos were taken around the beginning to the middle, some maybe at the end of the thirties. when i see pictures from this period of time i am always curious about the historical context. questions like "were the nazis already in power?", "had the war already started?", "how was life in the thirties?" went through my head. in my family hitler and the nazis were never an issue of discussion. only in the last couple of years i started to understand that my father was not quite sure about his standpoint. one of our basis of communication in recent years was watching movies together. his favourite were wild-west movies, but we could agree on any kind of action movie - martial arts, historical, crime, whatever. except movies about the nazi era. i guess a reason was a mixture of guilt, embarrassment and a couple of other feelings. my grandmother was pretty fond of hitler - at least she was pretending. i remember once in my childhood when i stayed with my grandparents she was defending hitler. in the mean time i figured that she was at least half polish, probably hundred percent. my grandmother had a polish maiden name. and she spoke german with some very hard accent. which was normal for me. it has been always like this. only recently, after having lived in former yugoslavia and worked with refugees, i came behind these little secrets. like the serbs in croatia who are 150% croatian, but more for their own security and well-being than for ideological or nationalsit reasons (another question is: "what does it mean do be of some nationality?" i leave that for the left-over-pile-of-things-to-talk-about). my father was member of the hitler youth, but at the end of the war never old enough to have been in charge of something or a child soldier. i do not know the role of his family, i only guess that my father was a victim of his own projections. at least in this case. i also found birthday greeting cards to my father, always the same for each birthday from one of his fellow parachuters. and fifty german marks. my mother wants me to ask tommorrow at the bank if they still would exchange it. i doubt that. but i found that we could sell it on ebay;-)

nite everybody,
burkhard