Prose and Passion: the house Johanna built

Thursday, June 22, 2023

the house Johanna built

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 40:

Johanna Kauer, the oldest of the five daughters of the station master of Adamsweiler, worked as a secretary at the Berufsschule (vocational college) Bad Kreuznach and then took early retirement on (slightly dubious) health reasons. In 1934, she built herself a house in the village of Hahnenbach, where her cousin Ferdinand Giloy ran the pub and owed her money. She got the land from him in lieu of repayment. She shared the house with various family members including her niece Ruth and her children (1943-1945) who had used Johanna's health as an excuse to get out of Königsberg in good time; her sister Kätha (1943-1953), and her cousin Ferdinand Weirich (1945-1952).

Here she is contemplating her home in 1943:

An even earlier photo shows the house with its bare walls:

Not sure who is standing outside the door on the right, could be Ruth on the right and Johanna peeping round the corner, but this is just a guess.

And here is one from the early 1960s, when Johanna's niece Ruth and her husband Richard moved in.

After their children had finished school, they gave up their flat in Idar-Oberstein to move to the sticks (not my idea of fun), which meant they had to buy the car shown in the picture (an Opel Kapitän I believe) so Richard could commute to his school. Before the move their home was literally just across the road from the school.

Johanna kept quite a few things from her parental household including an encyclopedia from the 1870s and various pieces of 19th century furniture and kitchen equipment. Since then, the possessions of various households have also washed up there when people had to flee (eg from Königsberg) or died. Thus, the house remains a treasure trove for family history, and one of the main sources of the photos I am sharing in this series. Most recently, I looked through the cookery books (which I'm not really interested in) and discovered the hand-written recipe book of Maria Pfersching, wife of Heinrich the cellist).

Johanna also made a key contribution to our family history by manually copying the Weis chronicles from 1891. Her copy survives, while the original has gone missing. She also kept letters from lots of relatives, which are now a precious resource.

In the spirit of its history of housing refugees, it is now home to two displaced persons from Ukraine. If and when that war ends without triggering the nuclear apocalypse, we will have to find a new usage model for the house, as currently there is nobody who wants to live there and look after the house. It really is quite remote, 5 km from the nearest town.

UPDATE 27.8.2023: I just added a few recent photos of old things found in the house to my flickr and tagged them Hahnenbach. I also went through earlier uploads to apply this tag more systematically.

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

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With this post I'm closing season 2 (there are still plenty of photos left for a third season). So this is the table of contents of the entire season:

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

I also should mention from time to time that this whole thing with old photos has been influenced by all the orphaned photos I see on flea markets, and by this little book I found at Oxfam 14 years ago.