Lost Property was partly inspired by the current refugee crisis in Germany. But I also wanted to draw parallels with the refugee crisis in post-war Germany. In 1945, Germany was in ruins and yet it had to accept and assimilate ethnic German refugees kicked out of their ancestral homes in, for example: Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia, Baltic States, Rumania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. The numbers are staggering: some estimates put the number of refugees as high as 14,000,000. Many of these never made it to Germany. Between 600,000 and 2,500,000 refugees died en route through disease, violence or malnutrition.
One elderly lady (let me call her Frau X) told me her story. She arrived (aged 6) in Breuberg in the Odenwald in 1946 with her mother and her twin sisters (her father had been killed in Russia in 1943). She arrived in Breuberg because that was where the railway line ended. At that time, the railway helped service the tyre factory that had been used to supply tyres for the German army. Frau X stayed 6 weeks in Breuberg and then she moved on. She made a good life for herself in the Frankfurt area but in 2015, aged in her middle 70s, she expressed a desire to go back to the place where her life in Germany had started.
We spent time walking round the town but she remembered nothing. We went to the tyre factory (now owned by Pirelli) but she still recalled nothing. Then we visited Breuberg castle above the town – but no, she still remembered nothing.
Later that afternoon we went for coffee and cake in a cafe in the centre of town. Frau X looked around her. She looked at all the local people and, as time went by, she grew dark and silent. Quite out of the blue, she said:
“I don’t like these people.”
“What’s the matter with them,” I asked.
“They are cold, hostile.”
She got up and hurried out. Clearly, at last, some buried memory of that time all those years ago was rising to the surface and she did not want to confront it.
Frau X's story illustrates one of the main themes in “Lost Property.” This theme concerns the notion that an individual’s current feelings, his personality traits and her current behaviour may often be shaped by the past events the individual has been through. The theme suggests that an individual’s past may continue to affect his/her present until that individual becomes aware of the connection between his past and present and makes a decision to break the cycle. The pic above left shows a number of child refugees arriving in Germany in 1946. How on earth did they come to terms with this experience of displacement? How did this experience affect their lives and, if they had children themselves, did these refugees "infect" their own offspring?
In Lost Property, my protagonist, Monty Brodnitz is unable to accept his own father for what he was and this has resulted in a poor relationship with his own son. His wife Ingrid has suffered traumas in the past that result in her inability to shed tears. Peter Lutz’s father was such a powerful figure that all the son can do is try and live in his father’s shoes. Lost Property suggests that forgiveness is a powerful tool for breaking the past/present connection so that individuals can move on.
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