Word: altmann
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Resistance in Berlin. In The Dancing Bear, a warmhearted but coolheaded account of how Berlin rose from its ashes, Frances Faviell, wife of a British occupation officer, describes how the cold war tore one German family apart. The author met her heroine, Frau Maria Altmann, when the old German lady, who was pushing a handcart piled high with furniture, collapsed in the street. By her own admission, Author Faviell had gone to Germany "wanting vengeance," but in Frau Altmann's lined face she saw a quiet human courage that made vengeance seem irrelevant. For the next three years-through...
Herr Oskar Altmann, a stiff-backed Prussian of the old school, and his wife were prim and proper Berliners who suffered privation in silence but protested peevishly against such innovations as lipstick and slacks, which they thought "incorrect." Elder son Kurt was dead or a prisoner in Russia; Fritz, the younger boy, was a good-for-nothing young Nazi who had once betrayed his parents to the Gestapo and who soon would betray them again. Author Faviell's favorites were the two Altmann girls, as different as flesh and fire. Ursula, the pretty one, had been raped...
Through the winter of '46, when babies were wrapped in newspapers and thousands of Berliners froze to death, the Altmanns survived (though they would not admit it even to themselves) on the proceeds of Fritz's black-marketeering, on Frances Faviell's charity and on Ursula's sex appeal. Then Fritz fell afoul of the West Berlin police and fled to the Communists. Old Herr Altmann died, and shortly afterwards, Lilli collapsed while dancing. Though her mother would not believe it, frail little Lilli had had an abortion. She died murmuring "Vova," the nickname of some...
When Ursula and her G.I. lover got married and sailed away, Frau Altmann refused to go with them, because "I belong in Berlin." By her stubborn, unheroic courage, this old lady reduced the cold war to the commonplace. But in 1949 the best of the Altmanns died of lung cancer...