By Claudia von Duehren
Sometimes the small garden with the beautiful hydrangeas is their only retreat when their gang of little rascals gets too temperamental inside. BZ home visit to Alexa Hennig von Lange (49).
The bestselling author lives with her husband, the journalist Marcus Jauer (47), and their three children (6, 8, 10) and their older son (19) in a charming garden apartment. Her 23-year-old daughter has her home around the corner.
“She often comes by for dinner or helps with the little siblings when I have to go on a book tour,” reveals Alexa Hennig von Lange with a grin. The family has rented the apartment in the backyard of an old building for four years: “Here in the depot there used to be a mustard factory. Unfortunately, she is not for sale.”
Alexa Hennig von Lange lives with her family in a coach house in Prenzlauer Berg. Her latest book was also written here Photo: Peter Mueller
“I met a whole new person on these tapes“
The author’s latest book was written in her little garden paradise, and indoors when the weather is bad. “The Checkered Girls” (Dumont, 22 euros) is the first part of a trilogy about her grandmother Klara, who was born in Westphalia in 1908. The basis for her new work is an amazing treasure that her mother has guarded for over two decades. Shortly before her death at 93 and almost completely blind, the former teacher had spoken her entire life on 150 tapes.
“I met a whole new person on these tapes. We seven grandchildren feared our grandma a little because of her strictness. But when she talks about her childhood on the cassette, she sounds very happy and soft,” reports the granddaughter.
The life of this happy young woman became increasingly dark with the world economic crisis and the enormous unemployment in Germany. In 1929 she was lucky enough to get a job as a home economics teacher in a children’s home in Oranienbaum in Saxony. Children from poor families who had contracted tuberculosis were cared for there. But the financial situation of the home deteriorated.
Klara, who was now running the house, hoped for help from the new rulers. She realized too late who she had gotten involved with. The National Socialists turned the house into a women’s educational home, which was intended to awaken a love for the people and children in the students. Because of their plaid uniform, the students were nicknamed “the plaid girls”.
Three generations: at their christening with their mother Ursula and their grandmother Klara (right) Photo: private
While listening to the cassettes, Alexa Hennig von Lange experienced how a young, fun-loving person got caught up in the wheels of history, i.e. National Socialism. “The question of whether and for how long one really had to participate in order to ensure one’s own survival became more and more pressing.”
She copied over 100 pages of her grandmother’s quotes for the book. “It reminds me of the everyday life of that time in a very rich way, so that a whole world came into being before my eyes,” she reports. Also that listening to things sometimes got to her kidneys. “For her, happiness and unhappiness were often very close together.”
“The Checkered Girls”
To the true story of her grandmother, the author added Tolla, a little Jewish orphan girl. The character Klara feels deeply connected to the child and tries to protect her from the Nazis. “For me, this child symbolizes the loss of innocence that society suffered when it decided against humanity,” explains Alexa Hennig von Lange. But the fiction is also important to her so that the book is not understood as a biography of her grandmother.
The Checkered Girl is out now and is set to be the start of a trilogy Photo: Peter Müller; Dumont publishing house
In addition to the cassettes, the memories of her mother Ursula (79) also helped the author a lot. “It was a very nice collaboration and brought us very close to the family history. That also triggered a feeling of peace in us, because many grandparents later didn’t want to talk about the Nazi era.” Many years ago, her mother had suggested using the cassettes for a book. But for a long time she shied away from exposing herself to her grandmother’s strictness again. “When I listened to some tapes many years ago, I couldn’t understand at all what she was trying to tell us. I guess I had to mature myself as a mother and as a person to understand everything.”
In order to understand the atmosphere of that time, the author also traveled to Saxony and visited the former sanatorium near Dessau. On her 150 cassettes, her grandmother reports down to the smallest detail about the building, the children and classmates. She failed to mention that a synagogue was on fire just a few minutes’ walk away.
