Klaus and Inga

Klaus and Inga are perhaps the perfect incarnation of gentility. In their company one dwells in a world softened by their attentive thoughtfulness and good taste. Your coat is always taken, doors are opened, and refreshments are always awaiting your place in their beautiful living room.

My Dad met Klaus in his Nixdorf days, and had been looking forward to re-connecting with him on this visit. As it happened Klaus and Inga were having as their house guests old friends of my Dad's Manfred and Lilo. The seven of us had dinner together twice, but it is the second dinner that particularly sticks out in my mind. Our last night in Berlin Klaus and Manfred cooked us a five course meal replete with Champagne, and a rosemary infused creme brule.

The evening started at five with tea and cake. Klaus explained that the tea is always taken with sugar and cream drizzled into the cup with a special ladle fashioned for that purpose specifically. Knowing that I studied art, Klaus showed me several exhibition catalogues from recent shows in Berlin. As I scanned their book shelves, I saw many beautiful books on art, and their walls betrayed a weakness for collecting paintings. I felt right at home.

I spoke to Klaus more about his interest in art over dinner. He said that when their children were small Inga would often take them to art galleries. They would only stay for half an hour, and to make it interesting she (or Klaus if he was there) would ask them at the end of tour which painting they would like to steal for themselves, which, of course, really got them to look at everything carefully. I love that! I'm definitely going to steal it, and use it on children in the future.

It was Inga who started to tell us about their life before the wall came down, up until that point it had been hard to imagine the lives of this beautiful family being punctured by something so traumatic. Inga does not speak very much English, but she did a wonderful job of illustrating her experiences for us. She told us about friends who would drive into East Berlin with passports to pass onto friends who otherwise might have waited indefinitely for one, and all about the difficulties of driving from the West into the East. However the most poignant moment for me came when she pulled out an old family photo album with pictures her children had taken of the opening of the checkpoints and early destruction of the wall. There they were, these pictures seamlessly integrated into an album of Birthdays, Christmasses, children growing and grown, parents ageing, in comparison, almost imperceptibly beside them. These pictures were like the notation of a birth, or a death, and suddenly something that for most of us holds itself aloft in history textbooks, or clips on youtube was a family affair - so very personal.