Chapter 1ForewordZUM GELEIT
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Now your memoirs are being printed, dearest Mother, and your wish is fulfilled seven years after your death. You died a beautiful, wondrous, unconscious death. You, who feared it so ardently and wanted to keep it at bay for decades yet, were overtaken by it in the midst of your colourful Tempio-world, in radiant health, eager to work, preparing for Christmas, and surrounded by the tender love of your children. The last part of the “novel of your life,” which was to tell of your life together with the children you had at last found again, remained unwritten; it would perhaps have been the least interesting, but most certainly the happiest; for whatever you also were and wanted to be, you restless one, you who roamed the wide world of wonder and longing, you who sinned against the mother-instinct as no other and for it suffered greatly and painfully as no other, you were nevertheless, in the last and original sense, a mother, and for that you have been loved beyond measure. In the hearts of your children you have raised for yourself an imperishable monument, and in every good, naïve, warm feeling of life that seizes us, we sense you and the mysterious meaning, inexpressible in words, of our common blood.
May none of those whom my mother mentions here, and who are still living, feel in any way personally hurt. Just as her graciousness disarmed everyone who came into contact with her — even her so-called enemies — so my mother belonged, as her greatest friend said, “to those people rarer than blue dogs: namely, those who know no moral censure.”
Hatzenberg, summer 1926 — Helga Gericke