In an effort to better understand my German roots, I began to research old photographs of my family. I wanted to develop a series of paintings about my childhood years in Germany after the war: people, places and scenes. I selected images that best conveyed my family’s history of happy and tragic times. The photographs I selected were based on the people and events that had an enormous impact during my youth.  The photographs were enlarged, mounted on canvas and painted.

The “Deutschland Family” series currently comprises two triptychs (six panels) which document a fifteen-year period from 1945 to 1960, six panels of which are exhibited here.

I admit crying while painting my roots around my father, August Breuer. I remembered seeing this picture once long ago as a child and it frightened me. It wasn't until my mother's death in 1982, that I saw it again, found in between my mother's letters. It shows my father arriving by train in Düsseldorf, coming back from Russia, seriously injured. He is carrying a tin of hard boiled eggs, looking up to a platform that is no longer there. He is looking at the person who took this photograph before picking him up. My father was not alone. As bad as things had been during the war, there was hope. He had his life, two sons, his sisters and brothers. To me, the eggs, a symbol of new life, were equally as poetic as roots.

My father is standing with his two brothers on the ground where his former house and business, destroyed by bombs, once stood. My father's first wife, Anita and their 10 year old son Rolf, my Aunt Mally and her two children were all killed in the attack just before my father returned home from Russia. The debris had been cleared and the plans for a new house were underway. It's a bizarre scene - they are already wearing new suits, smoking cigars and looking relaxed and happy, a testimony to the rebuilding of nations and men.

In this photograph, the war seemed so far in the past. My cousins Irmgard, Edith and Elsbeth are walking with Uncle Hans on the Koenigsallee, an elegant and famous boulevard in Düsseldorf. With the ruins of war in the background, they are wearing new spring outfits; a new generation looking to a bright future.

I will always remember the feeling of being cocooned between big bosoms and food. There were the two uncles and five aunts from my father’s side and two sisters and one uncle from my mother’s side. Lots of cousins and endless amounts of food; rooms filled with laughter, happiness, eating and drinking – feelings of comfort and warmth.

As a child, I felt without exception that only if I behaved, was obedient and thankful, I would be loved. This is a picture of Anke (my best old friend even today) and me in our matching coats. The coats were beige, a practical color selected by our mothers because they didn’t show dirt. We were good Catholic girls, following parental rules, never questioning authority. We were taught to be uncomplaining and grateful; that, unlike them, we were lucky to be born after the war.

My father died April 13th and since Easter was the following weekend, he was buried on the 19th , the day I turned 12. Forced to walk in the procession behind my father’s casket, on my birthday, I was in shock, unable to shed one tear. My mother, who was left with the family business and four children to raise, was more shocked panicked. Looking back, this was the day my childhood ended, where I cut my roots and, though unprepared, started out on my own.