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Heinz Czechowski

Heinz Czechowski - Childhood Landscape: Wilder Mann

In his book Der Garten meines Vaters (My Father’s Garden), Heinz Czechowski collects short stories in which he remembers his haunts as a child and young man. ‘Childhood Landscape: Wilder Mann’ was written in 1968 and tells of the bombing of Dresden and the resulting transformation of the city, which he only revisited years later. Wilder Mann is a suburb on the northern edge of the city.

Childhood Landscape: Wilder Mann (Part 1)

So I want to write something down, something about Dresden, my hometown, but how? Even before I have set the first lines down on paper, the beautiful revelation, that we call memory, seems to dissipate. So, where do you start? In childhood? All right then: one day in another city you walk your son to school for the first time. In the hallway a smell of floor oils, ink, disinfectants. How was it back then?

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Childhood Landscape: Wilder Mann (Part 2)

In the no. 11 tram that goes to Weisser Hirsch, two very old aristocratic gentlemen remember how they once served in the same regiment. Elderly ladies complain about care packages from the West that haven’t arrived. Aging spinsters lay wreaths in the Hofkirche’s crypt, the resting place of the house of Wettin’s last reigning August, who is said to have stood down in the year 1918 with the words, rather unbefitting of royalty: ‘Deal with this mess yourselves’.

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