At the beginning of every festival season, in winter, there is a lot of loneliness surging up in me, no matter how hard I try to cover it up. I felt always abandoned, from childhood on, especially by my parents – my mother died early and left me unprotected to life; my father always felt, that I would never amount to anything other than shaming the family name, as he expressed it as a daily ration – and every year, at this time, it seems to me that the anchors that hold my survival-tent together are being ripped out of the ground. I feel more and more lonely, alone, and abandoned. I am not writing this that anyone should feel pity for me, I tell my story only because someone should know how very important and valuable families are in anybody’s life.

Of course, the problem is tethered to the crazy and scary history of Germany, and it started extremely early. Christmas 1944 was the last time the four Winklers – my mother, my father, and sister and I – celebrated Christmas together. Then in February we received, at the most, an eight-hour notice to all German citizens of the region, to evacuate immediately, toward the West. We were pulled out of the house, in which I was born, and with that, already that early, I lost the understanding of the principle definition of “home” or “belonging”. Our wonderful aunt, my mother’s sister, Frau Elisabeth Schlikker, was with us with her small children, Peter and Uta, searching for a safe haven from the advancing Allies, just to be forced to flee west to escape the Russians. The Winkler Family would not have done well without my aunt, because for whatever the reasons, my mother suddenly could not handle the pressure and her own despair.

Immediately after Christmas 1944, my father was conscripted into the Volkssturm, a military outfit made up of young boys and older men, a kind of last-resort citizen’s militia. He disappeared until the end of the Second World War. No one knew where he was, either dead, wounded or in a prisoner of war camp. The story then went on and on. Our dachshund had to be abandoned. We heard afterwards that he was clubbed to death by the soldiers. Today, I can see the problems faced by those who wanted to evacuate everyone to safety.

February was a very cold month. The Treck of horse-drawn wagons moved at a slow and steady pace, west. It would only halt to feed or water the horses at late afternoons, just before the darkness set in. There were few men and they were responsible for the horse-teams. Any child over eight and women had to move on foot, some, a few elders were allowed to be on the wagons with me, a six-year old. In some teams more wagons were tethered together for moving the loads of suitcases. Many of the women were carrying their belongings. One was not allowed to take anything more than one was able to carry. Most of the women wore several coats, because of the cold, but also for the sake of expanding their future wardrobes that did not fit into the luggage. For me the Treck was scary. Although the tempo was slow, it was relentless. Getting off the wagons to relieve oneself, did not mean that under all circumstances one could catch up with the Treck again. The flow was controlled by the German military, which changed priorities at a moment’s notice, either in favor of the military or the people on flight. Military vehicles had priority and various Trecks had to be rerouted. Turning left or right could sever you from your family – the fear and chances were real, one could be lost forever.

I remember that the adults talked of having walked through heavy snow, it was one of the coldest Februaries on record, for some two-hundred kilometers, others for nearly five-hundred kilometers until they had reached trains that moved them further west. Our caravan reached Hannover, when there was a major impending air-raid going on and we were packed into a bomb shelter next to the train station. But everybody was surprised that this time, although the sky was filled with massive amounts of Allied airplanes, no bombs fell. But the next day revealed the reality, Dresden had been so hideously fire-bombed. The planes had flown over the city of Hannover, and to everybody’s surprise did not drop bombs, even though Hannover was attacked on a regular schedule. My mother experienced high levels of claustrophobia in the air-raid bunkers. She was relieved to be allowed outside the shelter to breath freely. Then the information slowly filtered in, that Dresden had been decimated. My mother broke down in tears.

We finally arrived at our goal, in Schüttorf, some fifteen miles from the Dutch border. It was very dark; no lights because of air attacks on train tracks. We walked from the train station. It was very quiet. We rang the bell and were rushed into the warmth of the house of Ida Schlikker, the family matriarch, where we became guests of her son, my uncle Wilhelm and his wife Elisabeth. Ida Schlikker had her own difficulties and problems with the world, war or not. The war had made her house into a pigeon cove. It was loud, there were many voices, the doors were constantly opened and slammed shut, and the heavy footsteps echoed up and down the stairs. Aunt Ilse, uncle Wilhelm’s sister, lived in mansard on the top floor; dentist Klümper had three rooms on the second floor, opposite the three Winklers, my mother, my sister and I, who were assigned one room, right next to the young Schlikkers with their two children. They occupied two rooms. Grandmother Ida Schlikker lived in two rooms on the first floor, where the lawyer Hagels, a notary public, had his chancellery, a waiting room, and a living/bedroom, next to Leverett Rost’s, who ran his medical practice in two rooms. The kitchen at the time was in the basement. To relieve the congestion, for a short time, we lived with the Erdenbrinks on the Schottbrink, right next to teacher Hambeck. My father still hadn’t come back from the war.

I remember the morning, when aunt Elisabeth arrived on uncle Wilhelm’s bicycle to let us know that her and my mother’s father had not survived and had died in Polish captivity. I am not sure how, when and where, we got in touch with aunt Margarete or grandmother Urbanczyk. All I understood was that Margarete had survived the destruction of Berlin.

Around Christmas 1945, my mother was admitted to a mental hospital in Osnabrück with a massive nervous breakdown, from which she never returned, after a typhoid episode. She was overwhelmed by the uncertainties. Although she was trained as a society-dame to support an academic professional, and had amazing craft skills and was a decent painter, she also played the piano with finesse, was a great gardener and loved taking care of animals, she lacked the skills necessary to survive with two children, but without help from a husband, who was somewhere, with whereabouts unknown. She had made all efforts to design “washable toys” for the Remy factory in Schüttorf, an assortment of zoo and circus animals, tigers and elephants, but soon the reality set in, that there was no immediate market, people were more concerned about how to procure food for their families. So the idea had to wait for better times. My mother was crushed. Unfortunately, she was also too proud to accept help. She tried through barter to support her family. She designed and embroidered objects and garments at night, but could not make any headway.

Her disappearance into the clinic and the absence of my father, was the reason for separating us children from the family, because the Catholic authorities of that period, decided that my sister and I should not live with my aunt, as she had married into a Protestant house. So I was placed with Apothecary Lodde’s family and my sister with the sexton of the Catholic church. Everything went very fast, like a blur. My father had not yet returned from Polish prisoner of war camp. We were bewildered and confused. Even though we seemed to have gotten through these trials, we never forgot them or are able to forget them. Each of the events changed us forever. For instance, I never believed anybody for a very long time that my mother had died. I rather believed that she went into hiding, and nobody wanted to reveal where.

There were all these vital snippets of life. Each family had its own problems; missing members, men not returning, persons starving. Even if the postmaster, who lived next door to the Schlikker-house, fell asleep in the sun one day, he was so utterly exhausted, and emaciated after returning from Russian captivity, he did not wake up, it wasn’t as if all things were negative. Uncle Wilhelm Schlikker came back from Russia after thousands of kilometers; my father also from Poland. We were reconnected with grandmother Urbanczyk, who came to the Schlikkers, and stayed. Things turned into a certain normality, still with lots of uncertainties, but life settled in. My grandfather Paul Winkler was also found, just a few kilometers away, living in Bielefeld. All of this, gave me a sense of belonging. 

From the day of his return, I hardly recognized my father. He had changed. His hair had turned white, and he looked like a much older man. He used to be a very content father. He enjoyed showing me off. We had wonderful walks, hand in hand. He always seemed happy. But this changed drastically. He had been seventeen years older than my mother. When he came from the war, he had to face the fact that he had lost her, and now unexpectedly was responsible for two children, without help. In addition, not like most people around us, who were able to continue their lives in the professions they had practiced before, he was barred from going back to his life as a psychiatrist. He was able to practice as a general physician, but because all mental clinic belonged to the state, and he had worked for the Nazis, it took much more time for him to be denazified by the Allies. He had to wait and wait, slowly but surely becoming an alcoholic. Not that he drank a lot; he didn’t eat enough and every beer was one too many. He was always unhappy when he returned home, and scolded us about our shortcomings until he finally fell asleep. 

Father’s denazification in relationship to other men, came rather late. It became a stigma, a blemish. At the time, there were no private psychiatric practices or clinics in Germany. While other lives retuned to normalcy, ours became more complex. My father began to measure everything we did against very strict gauges. “What will the neighbors think?” became our motto. We had to be better in anything. We were not allowed any mistakes, which for me turned out very difficult. From childhood on, I had great problems in reading texts. No matter how hard I tried, the words would change their spellings right in front of me and made little sense. Unless I froze numbers and messages to a piece of paper, they seemed to evaporate. It was clear, I was embarking on a lifelong bout with dyslexia, which neither my father, the psychiatrist, understood, nor he or my teachers would tolerate.

During that time, from 1945 to 1952, we all became a little weird. My sister never had a childhood. After mother’s death, she had to run the Winkler household as a nine-year-old. She was responsible for everything, from doing the laundry to cleaning the room, maintaining order, and buying food. She didn’t get much help from our relatives. Rather to the contrary, namely in the years, when groceries were very hard to find and most was rationed, she had to stand in line for hours, fighting for the few groceries available with much older, tougher and physically stronger women; and on top of that, when she got home without anything, she was rewarded by getting spanked.

At the time, all applications or résumés had to be handwritten, so one could see my father sitting at the table while writing the long résumés in his meticulous hand; and then again, one would find him waiting for the mail to find out if he could go back to his psychiatry. This devastating period lasted from 1945 to 52. After these difficult years, he was finally denazified, and he resumed his calling as psychiatrist at the sanatorium in Niedermarsberg. Our family-life became quieter and more normal during the Marsberger years.

Then all of sudden his professional life caught up with him again, and we were elated to be able to move away from Schüttorf, leaving years of deprivation behind us. I loved Niedermarsberg, claiming this place as our second home. There, we no longer were refugees. Also, at my new school in Fürstenberg, I no longer was considered an outsider, because all students came from the surrounding towns. We were all outsiders. But that wonderful feeling lasted just a short time. Father was promoted and we ended up in Geseke, a nondescript, very gray small town, which produced Portland cement, where Father became the director of a small mental clinic.

For me, this town was only a transfer station, because I was never home, having to attend the high school in Lippstadt and then later the Kunstschule Amsterdamm in Hamburg. Gütersloh, where my father finally lived and retired where and my sister founded her family, was never my home. I was only there between semesters or during the Christmas break, and after that, my life became totally intertwined with work for Chemie Grünenthal, which prompted my studies in America. There were no easy transitions, because everything happened very fast and was dislocated and far away.

This sense of isolation seemed to continue. My security tent lost more and more anchors. I was treated well by the faculty at Rhode Island School of Design. The students presented quite a different problem. A great number of students had been in the service during the Korean war, and took advantage of the benefits provided by the G.I. Bill. The other much larger group came from very affluent backgrounds and many behaved like true elitists, making fun of my accent, my history. I was lucky, a pair of students took pity on me, and helped me through the rough period, during which I also struggled with the English language. They were amazingly kind; trying to make me feel home. However, the curriculum promised little to be able to answer my questions about the specific use of “visual metaphors” in advertising. There was nothing.

What upset me most was Halloween 1959, when a group of classmates donned Nazi-uniforms and painted swastikas on the Providence synagogue. This was pretty much recorded in the Providence newspapers. They also tried to burn down the statue of Roger Williams, the founder of one of the first colonies on this continent. There also seemed to exist an underlying antisemitism, especially against one of the female students, who was bullied at every occasion to the point, when even the instructor told her to stop asking too many questions, taking away valuable time from the men. Later in my career, many of them had careers in Boston, but I made sure to keep all of them at arm’s lengths.

In addition, we had underestimated the costs of the study-stipend at Rhode Island School of Design, which we thought covered all costs, including room and board. Well it did not. Therefore, I had to sheepishly ask my father for additional funds. For one year, he gave me $50 per month, which broke down into $35 for rent, leaving $15 for food and art supplies. At the end of the year I was starving. I weighed 106 pounds. One morning, I stretched and passed out, falling and being wedged in between the bed and the dresser, having to be rescued. That bleak picture changed when Erika joined me – she later became my wife. We had better food and although we had to be very frugal until my first professional assignment, we at least were not starving. I am quite sure that we were not the only young people that had to be equally frugal; for many it was certainly much worse and harder. 

My father and my beloved grandfather died in the early 1960s, then my uncle Wilhelm and my cousin Friedrich in a car accident, then aunt Margarete, who burned up in a fire car crash  – although I had lost contact with her and we had grown apart, her death seemed to close the German curtain. Then Grandmother Urbanczyk and Grandmother Ida, followed by Erika’s father and years later her mother – the latter were both stars in my firmament, namely they headed a family that got along well and that always supported each other. The list began to be joined by good friends and other wonderful people in their travel across the Jordan River. The last blow was the demise of Hermann and Luise Hudemann, my cousin’s in laws, then aunt Elisabeth and also Werner Güthoff, my sister’s husband. I knew little about my sister’s Güthoff-family. I never had the feeling that I was welcome. It was as if my sister was afraid that I would embarrass her in front of her in-laws. But then again, she had enough to do with our father, who lived with her after retirement.

At my first high school in Schüttorf, it was obvious, I was not a successful student. I hated my teachers, who all became good Christians, Catholics or Protestants, overnight, even if they had been devoted Nazis just a minute before, sending students to Russia with enthusiastic flag waving and cheers. They could not lie to me, because I had proof of their deceptions, namely all these photos in my uncle Wilhelm’s photo-album.

For one year, when my mother died, and my father was somewhere in the war, I became a foster child with the arch-catholic family of the only Apothecary in Schüttorf, the Loddes; with early church services every morning, rain or shine, before the workday began, for all to see. They, like the high school teachers had been devoted Nazis. They suffered little. The Allied had shut down all alcohol businesses. The town was completely dry, but the Apothecaries were allowed certain amounts of alcohol for medicinal purposes. Instead, the Loddes used it for barter and became very affluent in those days. They had everything, legally or illegally. I hated the Loddes, even though they were very good to me. I never took their word of explanation for my mother’s demise. I claimed for all my juvenile years, that they, and the rest of the family had hidden her, and kept her out of my reach.

The Loddes never did understand the trauma they put me through almost every week. I was always invited to dinner by them, but my sister or my father, never. The same game was repeated week after week. At Loddes, I lied, claiming that I had already had dinner at home, and I was so full that I could not swallow another bite, and when I got home, I was immediately tortured with many questions from my father and my sister: “What did you get to eat?” And when I revealed that I was still hungry and hadn’t eaten, I got a true threshing. During the immediate time after the war, food became a social weapon, which was used by everybody, including the Schlikker house, because when this part of the family received a care-package, they would divide the spoils behind closed doors. The Winkler-kids would not allow themselves to be seen as jealous. We did not need cocoa or sugar or anything else. We were fine without it.

In my eyes, Schüttorf had many good sides for me, but it just wasn’t like Plagwitz. Plagwitz was “home”, and in my mind stayed “home”, surrounded by “homeland”. In Schüttorf we were “refugees”; who were told that we did not belong; and should go back from where we had come, which of course was impossible and is never a true option, because circumstances always change. One would be again just a stranger, who did not belong and should go back . . . to where? Even high school director Hambeck, who seemed always annoyed with me, shouted at me, shaking his finger in my face: “You don’t belong here at all. You will never be part of us.” 

On the other hand, seeing a twentieth century town, overnight, being thrown back into the nineteenth or even an earlier century and survive, was a formidable eyeopener and had its rewards, from which I learned more than from anybody in my family. The men in my family lost self-sufficiency. They were superfluous. One needed survival skills, brain and brawn. Nobody needed a psychiatrist or one who could quote a famous passage from Latin or Greek. One needed one that could cut the soil, seed the grain, and bring in the harvest, the ability to swing an axe, hammer or scythe, able to use a rake, dig for coal, turn a ceramic pot, weave that cloth. 

Reparation started immediately. The British and Polish occupation forces were quick to shut off electricity for most of all daylight hours and ration it for few hours at night, removing any of the machinery of the textile industry of the town, as well as any motorized piece of equipment, driven by electricity or gasoline, and shipped it to Britain. Gone were radios, gramophones, telephones and toasters. If one saw a passenger car, it had no motor, but was pulled by horse or cow. It was like Henry Morgenthau’s plan had envisioned it, Germany without industry and technology, as an agricultural land. For this town of fifteen thousand not to sink into a mire, within days, it had to find its ways to independence, based on the revival of ancient survival skills. And all of those roared back. While the textile industry was down and had to wait for the Marshall plan, the loom, which was in all attics, was brushed off and made productive. All watermills took farmers’ grain in for milling. The shops of the blacksmith, the upholsterer, the furniture-carpenter, shoemaker, wheelwright, ceramist, harness maker, all opened up and made the small town function. Luckily, the forest yielded the firewood, but one had to cut it, move it and stack it.                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Of course, there were problems: In 1945, there was not yet a school lunch program, so the farmers’ children were asked to bring sandwiches for the refugee-children. But it was never nice to be at the receiving end. Sometimes they didn’t hand over the sandwiches in a nice way. Instead, they tossed them into the middle of the table. The same was with the organized Christmas parties for refugee children. You couldn’t say no. You had to participate. When it came to giving gifts, it became clear that the people who organized the party had already chosen the best toys for their own children. I hated it, because in the few gifts that I ever received, dice and board games, in which everything was missing, the rules, as well as the game pieces. But then you had to say thank you for it, and if you didn’t, there was always the hard handwriting of my father, who like my sister, was always afraid that I would embarrass the family.

The same was true for my professional life in the USA. In 1960, in New York, nobody wanted to have anything to do with a German. Here I was a Nazi child. One of my RISD teachers, whose relatives died in concentration camps, did not let me into his class. He later apologized. Later was too late, I never overcame the damage. Even later, in the middle-seventies, when I argued legitimately for an academic agenda, I was greeted with a Hitler-greeting by a colleague and faculty member. I was appalled and still am. But that also means, in contrast, that I received a lot of help from many people who, interestingly enough, were almost all Jewish or were related to Jews. When I think back, this is my favorite time in America, being accepted. I’ve always got on well at Brandeis. 

In 1960, I made an appointment with Herb Lubalin, the famous art director of the Sudler & Hennessy agency in New York. When he found out, I was German, he made short shrift. He did not want to see me. For two years prior coming to the States, I had worked as designer for a German pharmaceutical company. So when I came to RISD, Professor Pfeuffer made all arrangements for me to visit Ciba/Geigy in Summit, New Jesey. There, Mr. Marmaras, who was the corporate contact person between Ciba/Geigy and Sudler &Hennessy, invited me to visit the agency. Again, I was introduced to Herb Lubalin. It was a very uncomfortable moment for him as well as me, both not allowing the former experience to overshadow the meeting. 

So that I could be looked upon in favor by my own German family, and in respect of my father, who at that time had passed away, I became dean and later director of various prominent programs and schools, only to find out that I never had interests or administrative skills in controlling or ordering people around. These years have been the worst. I always wanted my family to be proud of me, which I think, I unfortunately never achieved. My best years, from the very beginning were those in which I worked with students, starting as a visiting lecturer at Simmons College, and then later at Southeastern Massachusetts University, now U Mass Dartmouth. Because of my father’s strong criticism, I never thought before that I had the gift of teaching. I never liked the title “professor”, because I saw myself much more like a collaborator, trying to learn parallel to the students. I look back at most of my teaching years as satisfying and great opportunities for me to grow up intellectually next to the students,

Of course I always had certain opinions and had to defend them very often, and I made all the tactical mistakes that I shouldn’t have. Adopting a former colleague’s mantra: “No secrets = No surprises”, everyone around me realized that everything had to be discussed in the open, not secretly or behind closed doors. One would think that, especially in America, such a motto that supports the ideals of democracy would be accepted. Not so! There were other things that my colleagues despised. I believed in “one-stop shopping” for students, to solve their problems not tomorrow, but immediately; also, in an “open door” policy, “unless it has something to do with what is personal, all campus issues belong to everybody”. Having been in love with the Native American process to come to consensus, in which the individual represents just her/himself and no one else, as cumbersome it may be, it is the only true democratic process, making each equal in their relationship to others. I have tried to apply this process wherever I have worked or taught . . . and have always failed, just to try again.

There has been one major success. For about five semesters, I ran a late-afternoon Friday seminar for undergraduate and graduate students. There was no course contents determined by me or credit given. There were some strict requirements. Each student had to become prepared to present as well as lead the discussion on their and other’s topics. Nobody was allowed to sit back, each had to produce. Many participants looked back at the opportunities of collaboration as being inspiring as well as fulfilling. It was an ultimately successful example of the Native American process to form consensus. It was delivered with humor, commitment and great efforts by all. I am especially proud of this experiment. There may have been a self-disception, namely that I believe more in “democracy” than many of my dictatorial colleagues.

At the beginning of my career, certainly very naive, I saw the university as a special place where professors and students came together to expand knowledge and pursue new ideas to achieve a better understanding of humanistic ideals. Then later, probably far too late, I was shaken up by the reality that the American academic environment is just a big hotbed of all sorts of corruption. It is a place of the most selfish “deal making” between colleagues, administrators, trustees, and students. In the “Land of Unlimited Opportunity”, America, one hand washes the other, but only as long as one can benefit from it. You have to have connections. At Harvard, for example, you don’t train to become an intellectual expert, but to learn the etiquette with which to live in same self-selected circles, thereby controlling one’s own destiny and that of others.

I have seen SMU/UMassD faculty members receive tenure on the basis of having one photograph in an international travel show, while listing each stop as if it were a unique, separate event; or receiving tenure and promotion not on any academic contributions, but housekeeping projects that had nothing to do with academic assignments as teachers and researchers; or results of sabbaticals, which may have yielded great stories about different places and cuisine, but where Ersatz-reports on accomplishments, thoroughly inflated, because little effort was made; or when a faculty member was lauded as “teacher of the year”, based on competitions, when too few faculty members applied or were recommended; or as at UIUC, where editing a selection of existing papers has become equal to writing about a new thesis or discovery. If this idea should gain momentum, then in the future, instead of editing the submissions of papers, it might be enough to have just read one book to gain promotion and tenure. Wherever I have been, at most, even at the supposedly distinguished institutions, I have seen corruption and opportunistic behavior.

The ones who have always supported me unfortunately are long gone and my circle has become very small, the uninteresting ones stayed. I have always tried very hard to get in touch with everyone who has helped me or from whom I have learned so much. Our hundred year-end cards tried to say “thank you”. “We appreciate your friendship and care.” I am sure there will be few answers, times have changed so much.

But what is left behind is precious. Otherwise I couldn’t start another day without these memories; like my Aunt Elisabeth, the only one who hugged me at times. There was nobody else; I did not care for my aunt Margarete or even Grandmother Urbanczyk, even though she claimed my mother as her favorite child. In reality she had very little to do with us. She abandoned my sister.

At my aunt Elisabeth’s home, I always felt safe. She was always there for me, until she ended up in a home for the aged. Same of course is true with the whole Hudemann family, with Luise and Hermann, when both were still alive, with whom I spent many wonderful hours in Mellinghausen, and with Luise, later in Sulingen and Ratzeburg, after Hermann had died. The next generation of the Hundemanns literally took me into their families and offered me their home, in Mellinghausen – with their wonderful neighbors, the Schuhmacher, whom I remember fondly – as well as in Ratzeburg. They let me take part in their wonderfully warm family life, and that I hope they will want to generously bestow on me until the end of my life. Her daughters have grown deeply into my heart, as have the grandchildren. I have made sure to be forced to think of them every day, because their names are embedded in my computer passwords, integrated in all kinds of different configurations. That is why I always think of them when I open my email or prepare my correspondence, even to get into the internet. We have no children. We unfortunately missed that, because without children one automatically becomes lonely and forgotten. Who then will make efforts to look in on us?

It is true that it was only through hard work that I could distinguish myself from US citizens. At the time of the 1950s, Germans had no personal identity anywhere, only if one loved descriptions of the Autobahn or Bavarian Umpah-Music or Lederhosen. There were no happy German celebrations, like July 14th in Paris, or July 4th in Washington. Octoberfest, maybe. Every town and village had its turkey-shoot, but there was no national anthem. The only difference came from work. Work became a cover-up, for everything, lack of education, dysfunctional family, ethnical differences, ideological conflicts, on and on. And so work became my identity in the United States and it still is. The locals didn’t want to know anything about “my” Germany. But when it came to performance, they could rely on me. I quit Harvard a couple of times, even SMU/UMassD, where I’ve worked for almost thirty years and have been called back three times; or the Kansas City Art Institute, which called me back twice, even though I failed, because I always fought for the highest level of excellence in everything.

So, after all my toil, successes and failures, what is left? Only unwanted, excruciating painful loneliness.