Farewell to Angi

It feels irresponsible to write about a woman I barely knew, in a way. But last week one of my father's cousins was buried, and I'd like to pay tribute.

The first time I remember meeting her at length was at her and her husband's apartment in western Berlin. On a quiet street off one of the main thoroughfares of the city during the Cold War, they were on the first floor above ground level, in an 'Altbau' that predated the Second World War and likely the 20th century altogether. It had a little balcony off the dining room, and indoors older wooden furniture, glass, and china sets. My uncle Pu and I sat together with Angi and her husband, in a living room set away from the street.

Angi tended to the family legacy in part (the legacy being for example a social role in the pre-1930s Berlin, and devotion to music). But it felt to me like there was little 'chauvinism' or clannishness about her approach; it was a responsibility like others, and one that fell to her also by default as an eldest daughter. Altogether I did not feel evaluated as a member of the clan. And I also felt that if I went to a restaurant with her, she would not ignore or be rude to the waiters out of a sense of her social status.

At any rate, during this meeting, as far as I remember, we discussed the new German spelling rules introduced in the 1990s, family gossip, and so on and so forth. And at the end Angi took me into a room beside the entrance, with books neatly shelved from floor to ceiling, to try to figure out which German author she could recommend for me to read who'd write in a fairly contemporary style. When I said that I tended to avoid depressing books because life was depressing enough, she didn't insinuate that I was overdramatic or fail to understand, and instead agreed wholeheartedly. In the end she recommended Max Frisch.

In 2006 and later, I felt that our family fit in awkwardly to my grandparents' and parents' circles from the 1980s or earlier. (We were pretty bohemian. Relatives would tentatively ring our doorbell around midnight, then come in and stay to chat, knowing that we were bound to be awake, for example...)

But she and her husband were, in their dry but friendly way, accepting. And when my father died, one of the things that comforted me was remembering how they and others had shown up unexpectedly at our apartment to help celebrate in honour of his 60th birthday.