Berlin Center – I can’t see them in our class photos. Perhaps he is one of the people standing down in the back row. He lived with us in Fischerseinal Six, Apartment 17/08. Annette was different from everyone else in our class. She wore John Lennon glasses, a tie-dye blouse and bell-bottom, and when she spoke she inserted the word “stop” in every other sentence. I marveled at the blue VW Beetle with the opening roof, which is stacked six in front of Finchinsel as Annette walked between all the cars of yesteryear.

Our new classmate came from Munich. Then she was born and raised. Recently, however, she lived with her parents in West Berlin. It was said that Annette’s parents moved to East Berlin due to work and her father was a famous actor, Wolfgang Keeling. I had never heard the name before. Furthermore, we classmates knew that Annette only lived in our house with her mother. So where was this famous actor? For me as a ten-year-old, the whole thing was a bit confusing.

Annette I was kind of creepy

Annette and I had only one way to school for about four years. From Fischerinsel 6 it went to the Rosestrasse Bridge, then a bit further along Neue Roßstrasse and finally left onto the school yard of 15 POS. It was probably a five-minute walk. Nevertheless, I avoided walking this path with him. Annette was kind of creepy to me.

He got a grade in every subject except sports. His German essays are read as if they were written by an adult, melancholy texts of linguistic elegance. Annette also shone in art with paintings, drawings and collages. This super smart, slightly chubby girl left me at a disadvantage. I didn’t know what to talk to him about.

Then I would watch sports programs on television in the afternoon or sit in bed and read travel and adventure reports. However, this did not seem to be the right topic of conversation for Annette, who soon became friends with Nelle and also spent a lot of time with our class teacher, who also lived at Fisherinsale 6.

Why is anyone from the West allowed to join EOS?

“Annette we had a second home,” our teacher recalls. “Her mother was a set designer and was very much on the road, sometimes even for weeks when she was working in theaters away from home. In times like these, Annette was with us every day and you can clearly feel that she is longing for the family. The father immediately left with another woman upon arrival at the GDR. “She was exceptionally talented, she says, in many fields and so moved to EOS after eighth grade, what a bad thing. Because places in extended high school, ie grammar school, were scarce. The parents asked why someone from Germany had to get one of the few places.

Our teachers also cannot say that Antante was a German citizen at the time or that he had normal GDR citizenship. “Annette and her mom always had some extra travel options,” she recalls. “In summer, for example, they were allowed to go to Yugoslavia for four weeks every year. He had a vacation home there. Groznan was the name of the place, a type of artists colony. “

Our teacher never lost contact with his student, even when Annette and her mother moved away from Fisherinsale. First Friedrichshin, later West Berlin and Brussels. “Finally she was in Wales.”

After all?

“Yes, in the end. Annette is no longer alive. She died in 2011 in Wales. “

A few days later I’m sitting in the studio of Johann Killing, Annette’s mother. Your three-story house in a small village in Allagu is full of large-format oil paintings. My eighty-year-old hostess prepares espresso and tells of her daughter, who was born in Munich in the summer of 1960: “Wolfgang, Annette and I lived in a beautiful farmhouse on the outskirts of the city. Annette also started school there. But then Wolfgang really wanted to go to West Berlin because that was where you had to be in the 1960s. And so we moved from Munich to West Berlin in 1967, in a row house in Zehlhönfer, where Annette attended primary school. “This is the way things were taken in his course: the student protests against the Vietnam War, the demo during Shah’s visit.” In which Benno Ohnesarg was shot, verbal attacks were made against the Springer Press and his parliamentary opposition.

“Wolfgang,” recalls Johann, “was much older than the students and was still a soldier in World War II. But that’s why he was so angry. Because he hated war in any form. His. Almost all the boys in the class were killed in the war. In early 1968 the sentence slipped: ‘Then I will go where the GDR does not support the Vietnam War!’ The organizers of the big anti-Vietnam Congress conference at TU fueled her announcement, which was really just a slogan. “But suddenly things really gained momentum. As she recalls,” Horst Mähler and Alricke Menhof finally Held a press conference and made an announcement for Wolfgang, in which he returned the Camera Golden Camera ‘television award, among other things. The whole thing was also a game of sorts for him and he had something to do with arrogance. Certainly He made a lot of headlines by going to the GDR. “

Wolfgang Keeling immediately received roles in theater and formerly television and cinema productions. “I can only guess how Annette felt”, her mother says and “she started crying all over when it was said that you had to grow again”. This was probably the time Annette started withdrawing. Especially since Wolfgang soon had a new wife in the East and Johanna and Annette Fischerinsel moved with us to Six. “The apartment was fine,” the painter recalls, “only the housemates looked so gray, lame, and colorless.”

Were the residents of Fisherinsale really gray and dull that Johanna Killing remembers us? I have to think how angry I was when Vesis told how deserted East Berlin was in the 1970s or 1980s. In the meantime I have felt that this was indeed so. You can still see that today in the photos by Klaus Badiker and Harald Hauswal. Both captured East Berlin and people’s everyday lives in their photographs. Insight is: Yes, of course, it was gray!

Annette really wanted to go back to the West

One day Johanna Keeling discovered a request for an apartment exchange on the notice board at Fisherinsale 6. Someone offered a three-room apartment in an old building on Friedrichshin and wanted to swap for Fisherkinsall’s three-room apartment. Johann remembers Killing, saying, “He was completely mad and unconscious at the time.” “Somebody voluntarily left their new apartment to move to an old apartment with stove heat. But I wanted more than sixty five square meters of space on Fisherkinsall, and that’s why Annette and I moved into an old apartment. The rooms were large and the rooms very high. We stayed there until the exit in the autumn of 1977. “

Nelle, the one in our class photo with the glasses on, was Annette’s best friend. She thinks that it was Annette who really wanted to go back west. Something to do with Annette’s upcoming eighteenth birthday, Neale says, “that was it”. He then had to choose GDR citizenship and then was not allowed to go to Yugoslavia in the summer. “Neale still has dozens of letters that Annette sent him. From her lines she read the desire for a home, for a family, for her parents living there, especially a father. “That’s why later he was often a ‘strong father’ type of male.”

book

This text is taken from Andreas Ulrich from the recently published book “Die Kinder von der Fischerkinsl” (Berlin edition 2021 by Be.bra Verlag, 224 pages, 24 euros). This is a slightly shorter version of the first chapter.

The diary that Anteté kept in his first year in West Berlin and began in the evening, when he left the GDR from across the border at Invilandrastus, is preserved: “I saw a cat leisurely and from the west to the eastern tiger.” Was unaffected by “The same evening she goes to a shared apartment on the Hardburgstrasse. He said: “West Berlin, this provocative word, glowing and shining, as the GDR nose away from the moon for me, had suddenly become a reality. I sat right in the middle. I never felt so absurd.”

“GDR Nose” participates not only with the old country, but also with her mother. For a long time, mother and daughter have been seen talking to each other. “Especially on Annette’s side, it wasn’t a joke, she actually had a very strained relationship with her mother. Because she was never really there for her daughter,” Neale remembers.

He discovered West Berlin nightlife, with no curfew

Annette was seventeen years old and exploring West Berlin nightlife, with no curfew, and going back to school after a few weeks. Regarding my first time in Hansplatz’s high school, he wrote: “From my old school I had a habit of working intensively, which was seen as an effort here, I was called the ‘Walking Lexicon’, I was Was seen, but was hardly contacted “After some time he said,” I could not get away from my GDR image, but I got away with GDR discipline. Like everyone else, I gave up the legally secured key. Started quitting, I used it more than others. ”

Sometime she graduated from high school, “fell in love every now and then and then married this physics professor to FU”, Neale says. He soon divorced the professor. But he still completed his training to become a naturopath. At some point Annette became interested in homeopathy, Chinese medicine, healing through herbs, fragrances, aromatherapy and crystals.

Painter, reiki master, singing teacher, wife, world’s best man’s boyfriend

“And then,” her friend tells me, “Annette met the great love of her life, the man.” A Belgian music professor, who lived in a magnificent palace in the middle of the internationally renowned organ specialist Brussels. Annette traveled to Canada, the US and Brazil. While her husband played for hours in churches and churches, she mostly sat beside him with a sketch pad and cross vaults, altars, paintings of saints and stained glass windows could be seen.

A grand meal was served at home in Brussels with friends. All conversations revolved around the limbs. “Annette couldn’t say no and at some point he broke. Multiple sclerosis was already well advanced,” recalls Neale.

In 2007 Annette met her future husband Geoffrey on the Internet, packed her bags for the last time in her life and moved to live with her in South Wales.

Geoffrey referred to himself as the Crystal Healer and was considered a type of guru in this scene. Annette’s Twitter account still exists online. There he described himself as “the painter, Reiki master, singer’s coach, wife and lover as the only”. Painter, Reiki Master, singing teacher, wife and lover of the best man in the world. He reads with satisfaction, I think.