Frankly ... Berlin  A Tribute to Gretchen

Every year in March, the month of International Women's Day, we talk a lot about gender equality and how much discrimination and violence against women is still part of everyday life. Our columnist Marie Leão tells the life story of a bona fide Berlinerin who’s been through the kind of hardships endured by many women here. And she thanks her for her help.

When I think of a woman who inspires me, I always think of Gretchen (name changed to protect her privacy). She was born on 3 October 1950 in Berlin-Friedrichshain and has had an extraordinary life. She tells so many amazing stories about herself that I sometimes wonder if they aren’t drawn from a film rather than real life. So, for so-called women’s month, here’s a tribute to a true Berlinerin and to all this city’s feisty women.

I met Gretchen many years ago through a friend of mine when I moved into a bigger flat and was looking for someone to clean house for me because, after two slipped discs and an operation on my back, I can’t even clean up my own mess anymore. Having a housekeeper is pretty much frowned upon in Germany, so not many people actually admit to it – I’m aware of that. But I sure am grateful for her help. Anyway, when I first met Gretchen, she told me straightaway in heavy Berlin accent, “I don’t work for just anyone!”

She’s one of nineteen children from her mother’s nine marriages. But she never really knew her mother because, due to abuse, the children were taken away and given up for adoption or sent to children's homes. Gretchen herself had to be hospitalized at only eight months old… due to malnutrition and an excess of toxic substances in her body. “My ma was out to kill us kids!” she suspects. After a long stay in hospital, the little girl was sent to the well-known Makarenko children's home, where she lived till she was eight: “Best years o’ my life!” she gushes.

Life on the street

Then her father came back from prison. She doesn’t know exactly why he’d been incarcerated, but she figures he was a political prisoner because after German reunification he received a tidy sum in compensation from the state. So Gretchen left Makarenko to live with her paternal grandmother and her father – who abused his children. At the age of thirteen, Gretchen tried to take her own life and ended up back in hospital. At fifteen, she ran away from home to live rough – in Friedrichshain park. She scraped by with odd jobs, sorting fruits and vegetables in grocery shops and washing dishes in Berlin bars. “At least I had lunch every day.” At sixteen, she had her first boyfriend and moved in with him. At some point, however, they discovered from photos that they had the same mother. So they split up… and Gretchen never heard from him again.

She told me she started cleaning at the age of eight. Later on she worked for four years in the emergency ward at Friedrichshain Hospital, earning two East German marks an hour. Her dream was to become a nurse, but she’d never got past fifth grade. Then she started working in construction. “All the prefab buildings in East Berlin – I worked on all of them, including the one I live in now,” she says with pride in Berlin slang. Meanwhile, she continued cleaning and working as a nurse as well on the side – and she still does because her pension is meagre.

“Berliner Schnauze”

Gretchen definitely got her brash, clever nature, her open and alert mind, from living out on the street. She’s a tough nut to crack and has an answer for everything, always in the purest Berlin dialect, known as Berliner Schnauze. Her deep, gravelly voice (no doubt partly thanks to Cabinet cigarettes, one of the few East German brands to survive German reunification) is a thunderclap that’s liable to scare you the first time you hear it. I once asked her if she had to sleep with an oxygen tank on account of her emphysema. “No way!” she replied. “Oxygen’s worse than smoking!”  

Big heart

When Germany took in a million refugees in 2015, she was there to help. To this day, she cares for the elderly and provides home help for people nearing the end of their lives. There’s always a little gift for someone in her shopping cart. She has even given me a great clothesline, a Swarovski egg and even a brand new TV set she didn’t need anymore. Just like that.

I’ve always found this situation strange and in a way contradictory: a white immigrant from Brazil’s upper middle class – an elite still benefiting to this day from privileges that stem from a history of colonial slavery in a racist country, which is why Brazil is still so far from social justice and social peace – ends up hiring a white cleaning lady from the richest nation in Europe who was grew up in poverty in the part of Germany that still lay behind the Iron Curtain only thirty years ago.

I asked her what she likes best about her work. “Contact with people. And that I get to butt in all the time and put in my two cents,” she said, laughing with relish. And the best thing in her life? “The times with my husband. Because we got along well, we could rely on each other, trust each other.” Any regrets? “None at all!”

March 2022