The Tragic House in Kleingemund
Back in the summer of 1981 my family stayed in a house in Kleingemund, just west of Heidelberg, Germany. If you walk up SaarstraBe from the main road by the river, you turn left into “Im Franz Vollmer” street, and then it’s the second house of your right. We were living there for two months. The area is a very small micro town by the Neckar river, connected to the Neckargemund on the other side of the river. It was a very peaceful place back then and nothing going on there, except for the swimming pool park nearby. My sister had to go to the hospital in Heidelberg for medical operations. Our family went with her and we all stayed at that house. We had a great time there and I have fond memories of our stay there.
The house was a two floor building, a white house with dark wooden beans. All very German looking. The house was rented out with all the old furniture inside. The furniture and interior looked very dated and old, but we got used to it quickly. The bedrooms and bathroom were on the second floor, and downstairs there was the kitchen, the living room and a study. Between the floors there was a open staircase, with no safety railings to grab on to. It was probably modern when the house was built.
The study downstairs was a large room with a grand heavy wooden desk. It had woodcarvings all over it in the old style from around 1900. It has two impressive chairs opposite the desk. There was one window facing the back garden, but on all the walls there were bookshelves. The bookshelves were filled to the rim with books, rare old books and expensive books. Behind these books were more books, so two layers of rare books. My father loved this room. Perfect for a professor such as him. What a dream study. The prior owner of the house was a former Professor of Theology, at the University of Heidelberg. He had died some years before at an old age home. The house was being kept by the University, used for housing visiting scholars and other university guests.
Now, my parents found out later that the old professor had a family. A wife and one daughter. It appeared that the daughter did not claim the house as an inheritance, nor the belonging in the house. Not even the rare and valuable books in the study. But why? My parents asked around about this and found out that the daughter had moved out long ago, when she became an adult. After that the old professor had lived in the house with his wife. It appeared that his wife had for a long time asked her husband to fix the staircase to make it safer to walk down, but he never agreed to it. Years passed and they became old. Then one day his wife was walking down the stairs in the house, lost her footing and fell down the stairs. She died the next day in the hospital. The professor’s daughter never forgave her father and blamed him for her mothers death. They never spoke again.
The story of that house was tragic one. Once a lively home with love and care. Then a tragic accident happens, with might have been preventable or perhaps not. Blame and anger took root and people are shunned for life. The pride of a daughter and a father keep them apart. The father dies alone. No reconciliation takes place. The daughter does not show up at the funeral of her father and never revisits the old house. The heartbreak for me is, that many families have a version of this story.
Thankfully my own family does not have a story such as this one. I will make damn sure that it never will. My father later got his own study, when our family moved to a large house in 1987. He got another study again later in the last apartment that my parents lived in until my father died in 2023. My mother still lives in that apartment, now almost 93 years old. She uses the study now for herself, being a former journalist, she still writes. But my fathers study is intact and it shows a lifetime of book collecting. Scattered amongst the book, there are his science awards and recognition of acceptance to royal scientific academies. A life’s work displayed on bookshelves, for his loved one to remember.
I however remember him best playing badminton with me and my sister, in the back garden of that old house in Kleingemund, on a warm July evening of 1981. That memory holds more value to me, than anything on a bookshelf ever could.
A.G. Munson.
