My paternal grandmother is sitting in the front row, the fifth child from the left. The year is 1897. The school is in Feuchtwangen, a prosperous Franconian town in northern Bavaria.
This is the oldest picture I have of my grandmother. A cousin (from my mother's side of the family), a retired historian, tells me that the children in this picture are all from prosperous families. How can you tell, I ask him. Look at the shoes, the white lace collars, the aprons.
My grandmother's family has lived in this town forever. I have many cousins there, all I need is to knock on a door and ask. Apparently. I never have. We meet every couple of years, birthdays, jubilees, funerals, and everybody is polite and friendly. We promise to visit each other. But we never do. This family is utterly divided, there are feuds that go back generations, about land and money, brothers returning from WWI unwilling to talk to each other, the women whispering mean gossip behind closed doors, my grandmother in her element.
I only know of the feuds because she always talked about them. Endless stories.
Here, she is just a small girl. I don't for a moment believe she was ever shy.
family feuds over land and money are the most depressing thing ever. i know this first hand. that is another extraordinary photograph.
ReplyDeleteImagine all the stories you could write using this as a jumping off point! Family feuds --- another can of worms we could all contribute to, but probably better to stay mum!
ReplyDeleteWhoa. This is remarkable -- the picture, the hint of your words. Story. Stories. What would we do without them? How would we live and be sane?
ReplyDeleteI love all the little faces in this photo. The teacher seems quite formidable, but I guess you would have to be with that many little ones under your care. As for the family feuds, I wonder why the brothers came back from WWI not speaking to each other? You are lucky your grandmother would tell you these stories.
ReplyDeleteThat teacher looks quite severe! But maybe it's the dress.
ReplyDeleteVery cool photo. I would love to see it in color, to know what the kids were wearing. It's so interesting what happens in families. The feuds that go on unsettled, the stories passed down for a few generations. Even now, in our own lives the discontents that persist for years.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me there is quite a lot of variety in the children's appearance, even though their faces mostly look severe and frowning (didn't people have to keep straight faces for long exposures then?). But their clothes are varied, different styles and fabrics and trimmings, their hairstyles, face shapes and colouring. The teacher maybe looks severe but the children next to her have their little hands on her shoulders. Fascinating, all those lives and consciousnesses, everything that lay ahead, all gone now.
ReplyDeletePhotographs taken in this era often involved a lot of glum looking faces. The subjects were required to stay still for a number of seconds and it was difficult (ie, non-intuitive) to sustain a smile for that length of time. It's conceivable, given that the teacher appears to be wearing black, she was a widow though this seems unlikely. Even in my primary schooldays (during and immediately after WW2) all my teachers were elderly single women.
ReplyDeleteI knew both my sets of grand-parents and my paternal grandmother lived to a great age (92), dying in 1963. If I'd had the historical curiosity I have now as an adult she might have been a rich source of nineteenth-century info. As it was her chat about her family tended to be claustrophobic and repetitive, and she preferred to talk about current politics in a comfortable middle-class way or about what were then modern-day movies, since my uncle drove her to one of the cinemas in the nearby large city every week until she was quite old.
However, in the way of things, I lived a somewhat inward life as a child, greatly affected by the break-up of my parents' marriage when I was about eight. The doings of adults were as nothing compared with the relationship I had with an imaginary circle of friends I'd created, and my childhood ended rather earlier than most when I started work on the local newspaper a week before my sixteenth birthday.
Sorry, this is mostly about me. I'll stick to the point in future.
I wonder if any of them were not spanked? They all have the look of children who've seen fear, with varying reactions.
ReplyDeleteSometimes there are feuds. Sometimes, people just don't like each other, I think. Resentments are sometimes real, earned responses. Sometimes... well, people, eh?