I WAS NOT AFRAID the Guided Reflections of Sibylle Laurischk Conversations with Ronald Stockton
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I WAS NOT AFRAID The Guided Reflections of Sibylle Laurischk Conversations with Ronald Stockton March, 2020 Offenburg, Germany DEDICATION To Cora Antes She is her grandmother’s granddaughter Strong, intelligent, forceful, curious, unafraid (Her grandmother’s words) 3 4 I WAS NOT AFRAID The Guided Reflections of Sibylle Laurischk Conversations with Ronald Stockton Dedication 3 Table of Contents 5 Introduction 7 Editor's Note 11 I. Growing up in Offenburg 13 II. The War and Its Enduring Impact 39 III. The Women's Liberation Movement 63 IV. A Season in South Africa 69 V. Back in Germany 75 VI. Children and Politics. Serving in the Bundestag 89 VII. Reunification 97 VIII. Visits to America, Visits to Europe 105 Jane's Reflections 119 Epilogue and Ron's Reflections 123 5 6 INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT Ronald R. Stockton In 1980 I was in South Africa during my sabbatical. Sibylle Laurischk and her roommate were doing a law placement with the German-South African Chamber of Commerce. I met Sibylle on my first weekend in the country, in the national museum in Pretoria. I found her intelligent, thoughtful, and very pleasant. When I was not traveling around the country, the two women and I hung out, as we Americans might say. When I left, I invited them to come to Dearborn (in the Detroit area) to visit. Sibylle came, along with her American friend Linda. My wife and two sons really took to her. Back in Germany she met her future husband and got married. She had two children (Vera and Kai) and was pregnant with Ellen when Jane and I returned the visit. We enjoyed that time and had great fun with the kids. In time, her marriage broke up. One summer she decided to leave the kids with their father for two weeks to come visit us once again. We took her on a long trip around the Midwest, from Detroit to Chicago to Springfield (home of Abraham Lincoln) to St. Louis and then to Southern Illinois where Jane and I had grown up. She saw parts of America that few Germans ever see. (To say that she fell in love with Chicago would be an understatement). As each of her children finished their university education, she brought them to visit us as a graduation present. First Kai (2009), then Vera (2014), and finally Ellen (2019). Each time, I arranged for them to visit my classes and have an opportunity to meet some of my students for lunch or some social occasion. I also arranged for Sibylle to meet my colleagues and sometimes to talk to my classes. Once Sibylle came as a part of her Bundestag duties to learn what she could about the local Arab population. I arranged for her to meet Arab leaders, and individuals. Jane and I had British friends from the time we had lived in Kenya for two years in the 1960s. We kept in touch with those friends and visited them every few years. Whenever we made those UK visits, we also went to Germany to see Sibylle. Soon we started taking vacations together. We went to Poland, to Hungary, to Slovakia, to Vienna, to Switzerland. When the wall came down, we went to East Germany to explore the country and to visit Sibylle’s relatives. (Some relatives had a piece of property caught up in those ownership disputes that exploded after reunification. As an attorney, she was looked to as the person who could resolve those issues). We also visited Dresden and Herrnhut, a place where some of my Moravian Brethren/Fratrum Unitum ancestors might have lived. 7 We all found these visits enriching and bonding. We all felt that these visits gave us rich insights about history and culture (and each other) that we could never have gained otherwise. As a political scientist (at the University of Michigan-Dearborn) I felt fortunate to have a friend active in local politics, and later in the Bundestag, who could share insights about German and European history and politics. She felt the same way about having a friend who knew the Middle East and Africa and could explain American politics. We were definitely intellectual colleagues. In 2019 Sibylle had a serious health situation. She had left the Bundestag voluntarily at the end of her third term in 2013 but remained active in her profession of family law. In 2020 my university had its regular winter break. Jane suggested that I go to Germany to spend some time with Sibylle. It was a wonderful suggestion. Jane was in Arizona visiting our son and his family and could not join me but planned to make a similar visit in the spring. (The Coronavirus disrupted those plans). I went for five days from February 27 until March 5. We talked, went to restaurants, ate amazing German bread (we Americans have no such thing), visited Sibylle’s childhood best friend Ellen Mundinger, walked around the neighborhood (and the Offenburg Cemetery, which I dearly love), went over to Strassburg for a few hours, took an hour-long walk up the hill to Ortenberg, where Sibylle had grown up, and watched election returns on television. (The Israelis had their third election in a year; the Americans had “Super Tuesday” in which Joe Biden emerged as a major challenger to Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination; and Thuringia had its second election for Minister-President (governor), following a catastrophic (and short-lived) decision of the local Free Democrats/Liberals to form a coalition with the CDU and the ultra-right AFD. For two people who eat and breathe politics, it was perfect timing. International travel was curtailed shortly after my return. I have a personal passion for oral histories. I have organized projects involving students and colleagues, and organized a program on my campus so retiring faculty can deliver a farewell lecture to be preserved permanently in a virtual archive on the internet. I have also conducted three oral history projects. Over the years I have become comfortable with interviewing people. I saw this visit as an opportunity to make that happen. When I suggested the idea to Sibylle that first night, when I had just arrived, I was very cautious. Was I pushing her to do something that was really my project? I was pleased that she said she thought it sounded like an interesting idea. We prepared a list of topics to discuss and plunged in. These interviews were typically an hour or so. We did five of them in five days. Sometimes we covered different topics, which I broke into chapters. I edited the text and inserted some photos and commentary along the way but what is presented here is as in the original. I have always told Sibylle that she is a significant person. She is modest about this, but I am right. I do not mean significant in terms of changing history but significant in terms of being a prescient 8 observer of the world in which she lives. Those qualities were there very early. She was constantly watching and analyzing and seeing things that others did not see. In reading the first interview, the reader will realize that this was a very perceptive little girl. She was alert to differences of class and ethnicity. She became suddenly aware of the heavy burden of history, which, as Marx said, weighs on us like a nightmare. She was aware of the contradiction of what might be called privilege (being from a prominent family, being an ethnic German, having educational opportunities not available to everyone) while at the same time being marginalized by being an outsider in terms of her family history and lack of a Baden heritage. She was free from being targeted for her differences, and yet was aware that she did not quite fit. She is also of that generation of German youths who suddenly realized (in the 1960s and 1970s) that their parents were the people they were reading about in the history books. And she did not just sit on the sidelines and watch. She got engaged in local politics, served on her city council, and then figured out how to mobilize support to get nominated and elected to the Bundestag. She is somewhat cynical about her time in that important body but at the same time she had some things she wanted to achieve and set out to achieve them. She will tell you about that later. And should I note what I have told her more than once, that she is fearless in looking at her country’s history? The day after I returned to the U.S., I got a note from her with thanks, saying she was very pleased with the project. She said I was the only person who knew her well enough to have done such a thing. I was very pleased to receive that message. 9 10 EDITOR’S NOTE This text you are reading is almost exactly as transcribed by Suzanna Emilio. I broke some interviews into separate chapters and inserted sub-titles to make the narrative flow but the text is as in the original spoken version. The editing changes were few, most to smooth out the frequent pauses and repetitions that people make when they speak. In conversation, we edit these away in the act of listening, but in print they look jumbled. These interviews were not jumbled. They were very fluent. I did not make any efforts to modify the text to be more compatible with American English. Idiomatic phrases have not been replaced with the idioms of the American speaker.