SOLID WALLS

SOLID WALLS

The small, semidetached 1960s white bungalow had a brown picket fence. It was part of a string of row houses built to meet the demand for WWII postwar housing in Germany, a country that had to rebuild itself from the ground up. The modest structure had a fenced in back yard with my mother’s vegetable garden and flowerbeds and the luxury of a one-car garage. Its mortgage was all that my father could afford on a civil service salary.

It was important to both my parents that the solid brick walls would keep us three children safe from a world they had perceived as hostile in their own childhoods. My mother’s forced separation from her family to live in a Hitler Youth institution at 9 and my father being drafted into the war effort at 15 years old had shaped their outlooks and had left them with a craving for a stability that remained elusive.

Outwardly the house in a good neighborhood provided us a respectable place in the middle class of a country that was busy living what was called an economic miracle. But on the inside families were struggling to shut out the ghosts of their past that were overshadowing all aspects of their lives. We three children were unable to escape the screaming matches of our parents’ deteriorating marriage that resonated off the wallpapered walls.

The walls that were meant to protect were imprisoning us until we were old enough to leave. In later years I never enjoyed much going back for visits. But when my widowed mother sold the house 50 years later, I cried at the last walk through.