Rita, born and raised in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, moved into her first room at the age of 17 in Phoenix, Arizona.
A year earlier, this boy from California had appeared in her class, who was staying for a year as an exchange student, who spoke and laughed and thought differently and promised an opportunity: setting out on one’s own journey. And this is important, setting out on one’s own journey had nothing to do with running away from the cramped conditions of the Ruhr area, but rather with discovering new worlds. Yes, her parents’ apartment was tiny, four children, two rooms, the father a steelworker, the mother a saleswoman and housewife. But simple, cramped conditions do not necessarily mean simple, narrow minds.
Rita’s mother was never satisfied with being a housewife and mother, hiding away in the small apartment while her husband was on shift. She joined the Christian women’s association, the choir and the bowling club, appeared as a cabaret artist and acted in plays. Of course there were people in the town, not just men, who never tired of reciting the litany of the woman behind the stove with the cleaning rag in her hand, but it was not without reason that Rita’s father had chosen this lively, dark-haired beauty who read books and newspapers and happily debated politics with him.
The mother’s mother, Omma, was no stranger to the matter. If a grandchild accidentally called her “Grandma,” she would angrily rebuff it: “That’s not me, it sounds awful!” She lived five kilometers away in the Mannesmann workers’ housing estate and it was always busy at her house, especially on Sundays when the whole family came over. There was always some small child crawling around on the floor while a cousin smoked a cigar and an uncle had already had his third shot of schnapps that afternoon. Everyone was talking, basically at the same time. There was cake and coffee and lemonade, and they played Halma. At some point, Omma put on records: Conny Froboess and Peter Alexander, the Banjo Boys and operettas. In the early evening, the doorbell rang. “Well, Jupp, what do you want?” asked Omma, who ran a kind of Späti in her house. “I’ll take two Alt and two Köpi today,” answered Jupp. And again Grandma said: “Rita will get it. She knows what she’s doing.” And so Rita went down into the dark cellar and came upstairs with Altbier and Pils. She loved it.
Grandma was crazy about stories
Sometimes she stayed overnight with Grandma, who would read to her or tell her stories to help her fall asleep. Grandma was obsessed with stories and it was only many years later that Rita realized that there were children who were never read to. There was also an Oppa, who hardly anyone saw because he was injured in the war and wanted to spend his time alone in his bed.
So one day Rita said to her parents: “I want to go to America!” After a brief silence from her parents, her mother burst out: “If I had been able to, I would have gone straight away.” To which her father added: “It’s nice, but…”
How was it going to be paid for? Financially, the humble circumstances cannot be ignored. But Rita found a solution. She found out that the exchange organization offered scholarships. But you had to do something to get one: first, write an application and attach documents proving your humble origins, second, write an essay, and third, prove your suitability in the interview. She wrote the essay – she had chosen the topic of development policy – effortlessly; everyone, teachers and students alike, had noticed her light-hearted use of language for some time, her love of formulating things, her gift for not having to rewrite texts over and over again in rough form before she managed to produce a usable, final version. She liked to argue and discuss, and was first elected class representative and then school representative.
So Rita sent off the application and received an immediate response, which said that she had to be in Bad Godesberg in the morning in 14 days.
Her father drove her. During the trip, father and daughter had one of the debates they had often had before; he represented social democratic, moderate positions, she the more radical goals of the 1968 generation. They analyzed daily newspaper articles, went from Germany to the world situation and back again, I see it like this, no, no, you’re wrong, and when Rita sat in front of the selection committee, she was able to score points both with her knowledge and with her fearless demeanor. A few weeks later, the decision came: she was allowed to go.
“Vous êtes seule, Mademoiselle?”
The American host family sent her photos. Rita stood there in the Duisburg apartment, the photos in her hand, looking at orange and grapefruit trees, at a garden with a huge swimming pool in the middle.
So Arizona. It was a beautiful year, it was an educational one. With broad American accents instead of school English. With performances in a theater group. With graduating from high school. And with the experience of sitting in the middle of white, wealthy, racist America, which was waging a cruel war thousands of kilometers away in Vietnam.
After graduating from high school, back in Duisburg, she went to Paris, where she worked as an au pair and went to a language school. She liked the city, but the men got on her nerves. “Vous êtes seule, Mademoiselle?” She was constantly being called after. A Mr She absolutely refused to shake him off, so she turned around and slapped him in the face.
In 1973 she began studying social sciences and political science, first in Aachen and then at the Otto Suhr Institute in Berlin. In 1977 she wrote her thesis on Emma Goldmann, an anarchist, peace activist and feminist. She then moved on to Milan, Italy, where she taught German. She wrote for the “taz”. She was still able to write texts effortlessly, without constant corrections after countless attempts, because she had already turned what she wanted to say over and over in her head. For some politically sensitive articles, such as the investigations by the West Berlin public prosecutor’s office into West Berlin skinheads who were involved in an attack on the East Berlin Zion Church in October 1987, she used the name of her grandmother, Helene Korf. The West German and East German secret services took a close look at her, and much later in her Stasi file she was on a list of people who were classified as “political underground activities” and were to be put in an isolation camp on a specific date.
She joined the “Alternative List”, initially working as a parliamentary group assistant in the House of Representatives and then as press spokesperson. She left the “AL” again because some members did not distance themselves enough from terrorist attacks, but voted Green all her life. She met Giovanni from Florence and commuted between Berlin and his apartment, which was not heated, which she suffered from in winter, and Rita, who loved the warmth and traveled to faraway countries at least once a year where she was sure that she would not freeze.
They addressed each other formally for two years
she got Press Officer and head of public relations for the Senate Department for Health and Social Affairs, 1989, the year the Wall opened. And the year she met Wolfgang in the oyster bar at KadeWe. Wolfgang, the conservative journalist at ZDF, who wore a suit even when hiking, a “gentilhomme”, not a gruff Parisian follower, who courted Rita, the wild “taz” aunt, with perfect form. He gave her magnificent bouquets of flowers, which she placed everywhere in the Oranienstrasse shared flat. He sent a wealth of carefully worded letters and postcards. He extended invitations. They addressed each other formally for two years. Rita enjoyed this art of adoration. He asked her – they were now on first name terms – to become his wife. But she refused. Not out of a lack of love, but rather out of an impulse not to follow the old, traditional norm.
Together they discovered the East, travelled through the new federal states and former Eastern Bloc countries, and Rita began to learn Polish. The fall of the Berlin Wall, says Sophie, their daughter, born in 1991, was the great political event in their lives, “they were completely obsessed with the East”. Unlike for so many leftists, reunification had always been the only acceptable option for Rita.
When Sophie turned 18 and decided to go to Cambridge, her parents finally got married. A kind of gift to mark her coming of age and saying goodbye to childhood. Rita then proposed, in the oyster bar in KaDeWe. And Wolfgang did not refuse.
They were a couple for 27 years. In 2015, Wolfgang died of a brain tumor.
Rita was torn apart by grief, but she did not become a silent, lonely widow. She continued to live as intensely as before. As her daughter says, she remained the anarchist who had worked for the state for half her life. The feminist who was a wife and mother. The working-class child from Duisburg, the world traveler, the journalist.
She enrolled as a guest student at Humboldt University and the Free University, attended seminars on Jewish immigrants in the USA, on political philosophy and literature. She exchanged texts with her daughter, pretended not to notice when her daughter took one of her books without thinking about it, and now her daughter says: Whose books should I steal now? She traveled to Israel, Uzbekistan and Iran. Improved her Polish. Served on a jury for children’s theater plays.
She still didn’t like being spoken to in the morning during breakfast, or being given unnecessary advice like taking an umbrella with you when it rains. Instead, she liked to turn around in front of the mirror before going out to readings, concerts, the opera, the theater, to talk and drink with her “wine bar clique.”
She became a grandmother herself, who took her granddaughter to the playground, told stories and recorded books so that the child could still hear her voice later on. Because she knew that she would soon fall silent. A week after her granddaughter was born, Rita was diagnosed with cancer.
After a routine procedure in November 2022, friends asked her: How are you? And she answered: So-so. At that moment, it was clear to everyone: There was something serious. The time of therapies began, of side effects, of pain. She gave information in a factual and precise journalistic manner. No lamentations. But then she stopped laughing her special grandma laugh, stopped picking up the child, stopped running with him across the playgrounds.
After Rita’s death, her daughter found a poem by Philip Larkin, “What are days for?”
Days are where we live.
They come, wake us up
Over and over again.
They are there to
To start again and again,
To be surprised,
Sometimes to survive them, and
To remember them.
