I had chosen theology as a compromise between my mother's wishes and mine, but the choice was the actual beginning of my destiny-path.

That first theologian semester, summer 1958 - also the only time I remember with some nostalgia - I had a lesson in Biblical Hebrew every day. I had no idea, that Hebrew was also a spoken language, I had no awareness of the existence of the State of Israel, nor of the holocaust. To learn Hebrew was for me just another chore, like I had to learn Greek and Latin, only that I found it so difficult, that I was sure, I could never know it. I see myself sitting one day on the little wall in front of the main building of the university and crying with despair.

Still , a seed was growing in the darkness - without any awareness in my mind. I went to Sweden that summer holiday to work and teach German in a family and to prepare for my Hebrew examination.
Shortly before I had fallen in love with Ruediger, a suitor, whom I met in the Christian Students' Choir, which he joined, though he was neither a declared Christian nor a student. He had studied law and was now in his internship . He wanted me to study Nietzsche and get away from my "religion". So I studied Hebrew and Zarathustra and some anti-theistic Nietzschean treatises at the same time.

Sweden was the second foreign country to which I went - a rare adventure at that time, and again I had to ask myself, like in England two years before, why people looked at me as a German, while I was nothing but "Christa", or - in Sweden, where they are fond of adding people's second names - "Christa-Maria". It was then, that the question germinated in me, which later led to my book about solidarity, or the mutual dependency between the individual and the community. But everything was still numb and dumb in me.

The first glimmer of awareness came, when I was back at Tuebingen and sat at Ruediger's table, translating the story of Hannah and the birth of Samuel in the Bible [1. Samuel 1], in order to practice my Hebrew. I suddenly felt the joy of really "understanding" and couldn't help an outcry of exitement. Ruediger, who was sitting opposite me, studying whatever he was studying, made a face that let my heart freeze.

"What's the matter?" I asked.
And he said, with emphasis:
"I hate the very language!"

Despite my numbness I felt, that he was voicing something to which I could not agree. I ran out of his room, took my bike and drove home. Of course - my victim-mentality and feeling guilty in each and every situation, towards each and every person, made me crawl back the other morning and apologize for my behavior.

 

Yang went back to the Succayah and brought Yin.
And now the sun is gone and with it the end of the silence meeting with myself.
I have to let go~~~

 

23/2/93, Adar 2, 5753, 7.20

Don't forget, that I am telling this story to you three, first of all! You as one of those Succah-compositions of three unique human melodies, which give me cause to so much joy!

- to you Meirav Meidan, born in Rishon-Letzion, raised at Kibbutz Ein-Gev at the lake of Tiberias, meaning, that you are Israeli, nourished by the city culture and the kibbutz culture alike; you are 20 and you just finished the army; you are the first pupil of the Succat-Adam Training Situation for people who want to create their lives and realize their dreams;

- to you, Cornelia Maas, from the village Melchingen in South-Germany, you have travelled the world, lived in many countries, also in Israel, you went through much suffering, personally and by identifying with the sufferers in the world, you are 32 now and your path might be to build a bridge and a path between Germany and Israel, the forest and the desert;

 

Well, my mother's father was a painter - not a great one, I think, that's why he took up photography when this art had hardly been born. I don't know about any such "genes" in the family of my father, though. But the fact is, that my father sent hundreds of photographs to my mother, and when he was a village commander in occupied France - where he had relationships with the people which he describes in rosy colours - he had time to do what I do now: to write and combine the writing with photos.

Many feelings came up, when I chose the composition of each page and the minimal text to "explain" them. But here I want to mention only the circumstances, in which those photos fell into my hands. It was in 1983 - my sister in South-Germany had called me;"Mother is dying, if you want to see her, come immediately." I came, quite relieved that 16 years of illness would come to an end. I did not know then, that my mother still had something in store for me, something immensely important, vital for me - a great healing for both of us.

My sister lives at Gechingen, and every day for four weeks I drove on her bicycle 10 km up and down the hills to the hospital at Calw - the town of Hermann Hesse, always passing the house where he was born in the 19th century. My mother had been vegetating in a home for the chronically ill for the last 8 years.

When she visited me in Israel the second time, shortly before the 1967 war, she climbed the Massada with my husband and a visiting British cousin of his. I could not join them, having hardly recovered from a severe bleeding after the abortion of my fourth child, which my husband had demanded, I therefore was not present, when she suddenly passed out, close to the top of the ancient Jewish fortress. When she came back, she had lost her memory - totally ~~~

The 16 years of my mother's illness, her revival at Calw, her last 18 months with me in Ramat-Gan, her beautiful death and the healing that I experienced by taking care of her baby-needs day and night - are a story, that would fill a book. So far only a casette exists, in Hebrew and German, which I made after her death exactly 8 years ago, and which I called;

"A TIME FOR DYING"

Early in those days in 1983 I went to my mother's former house at Boeblingen, between Calw (in the Black Forest) and Stuttgart, the house in which then her sister lived with her family, after she had returned to Germany from her 20 year stay in Brasil. My aunt - actually my god-mother, but one who "couldn't care less" about me, and for whom I too stopped caring, when I got hit by her antisemitic attitude - was all too happy that I would finally take away all my mother's documents, books etc.

I found the letters of my father, the photographs ~~~ I brought them to the hospital, and while sitting by her side, leafed through them, asking her sometimes about this or that picture, knowing that I would get an interesting answer, not related at all to the content of what I saw.
"Oh", she would say for instance, "this was when I worked as a house-keeper in Johann Sebastian Bach's family. Sometimes I was allowed to go up to him, when he played the organ in the church!"
Or: "This is when Immanuel and Micha approached the border".

Differences between times, distances between countries, distinctions between people did not exist for her. A photo with the title "In the amphitheatre of Nimes, france, January 1943", showing my father, seemed to give me the clue for

identifying the ancient amphitheatre on two colored pictures which she must have taken on a tour with a group between my departure in 1964 and the beginning of her disease. I asked her and she said:

"This is the lions' den, where they stage Daniel, how he occupied himself with the lions. I must go to the toilet" [what almost caused her death was a severe bladder-infection, therefore the constant urge despite her catheter].
"What did I tell you that you have in your belly [I meant the catheter]?"
"A hole".
"And in the hole?"
"A lions' den! - Ha! there is Daniel tidying up!"

While waiting for my porridge to get cool, I looked up the story of "Daniel in the lions' den" in the Bible, despite my aversion to and phobia of the Aramaic langage in which this story is written:

The people were denouncing Daniel for not having obeyed the king's command. The king - a prisoner to his own laws and his own servants - has to fulfill his threat against his will and throw Daniel to the lions, hoping that Daniel's God would save him. And indeed, in the morning he found Daniel as alive as ever: "for I am pure".

It is called (in Hebrew): ha-rachel [the mother sheep] - ha-aryeh [the lion]!

Looking at Ruben's picture,
I feel a mystical connection with the work I'm doing through these pages:

Despite my victim pattern and the martyr role to which I was attached for so long,
I did not obey "society's command" to give up my vocation, to betray my dreams.
The victim pattern, the martyr role -
they surely manifested a lot of menacing lions,
dreadful reflections of my d e n i a l s ,
but they could not and cannot "hurt" me (Daniel 6,24) nor "crash my bones" (6,25), "for I am pure".
What does this mean, "pure"?

If you believe, that I can write these things without having to cope heavily with my fear, even terror, of being accused of "lack of humility", you are mistaken. I had no idea, how enslaving this craving for being judged "humble' still is. I thought I had worked on the pattern often enough ever since that co-counseling session with Yanina about the egg-story:

When I was nine, I was given a pair of torn socks to renew: I had to cut them from the heels downward and add the two feet by knitting them with pieces of threads, which constantly needed to be joined - a tedious job, as every knitter knows. I was sitting and labouring in the sunshine in front of the house we lived in, with its not yet replaced cardboard windows, - it was 2 years after the Great War - , enduring the mockery of the playing children: "grandma, grandma!"
(Tears now~~~)
I was good in knitting and finished the socks. Before I brought them to the neighbour, who was living in a little hut in her big garden, together with her son Otmar, who would wear these socks (and who would rape me a year later), I asked my mother: "How much money should I ask for?"

She said: "Sei   b e s c h e i d e n . Be modest! Ask only for an egg." (Eggs, like all the food then was still rationed, but this woman had hens).

"And so you got your EGG", Yanina finished the story instead of me.

I thought, I had shed all my tears then. But the screams stayed stuck in my throat~~~

Before I immigrated to Israel, I did a favour to my mother, accompanying her on a trip to Holland, where her few fond childhood memories were buried. The only thing I remember from this trip is my standing - in a Van-Gogh museum - in front of a painting, which no one seemed to notice. It showed an open Bible, with seemingly empty pages. But when I looked closely, I saw written in Roman numbers:
               Isaie LIII

and in front of this Bible and its message a book by Emile Zola, which was modern at Van Gogh's time:
              La Joie de Vivre, The Joy of Living.

It took me 27 years to find the latter in a Parisian bookshop. But I never finished reading it after I understood, that the book was not at all what I had imagined - a positive contradiction to the suffering of the "Servant of the Lord" in that Biblical chapter,- but a bitter irony. (By the way, one figure in Zola's book is someone, always called "the old woman"! She was, in fact, only 50 years old, the age at which I became pregnant with the Succah-Vision~~~)

Not knowing the painter's true intention nor his suffering, which made him choose the subject - I constantly pictured the "Joie de Vivre" as the other pole, with which I wanted to balance my "Servant of the Lord" attitude.