A good friend in my (c)old hometown in Germany sent me this photo of the "Arbeitsamt", which is like our Centrelink, except in Germany they don't just shovel out the money to the unemployables but "haff vays of making them work".
Having lived for most of my childhood and early teens across the road from the "Arbeitsamt" at Cyriaksring 47, it is debateable whether I sucked in my lifelong Protestant work ethic with my mother's milk or absorbed it through the ever-present sight of this forbidding building. Leafless trees, grey skies, grey figures, and not a car in sight as they came on foot or at best by bicycle, with just a lucky few by motorbike.
"Der Ernst des Lebens" hadn't touched us children yet — although the adults around us left us with no illusions — and we got our fun from touching those iron lamp-posts outside the "Arbeitsamt" which seemed to have been badly earthed because touching them send a mild electric shock through anyone who dared. Those who were lucky to have a "Groschen" or two, would rent a "Ballonroller" from the make-shift hut on the right in the photo, one of which was a fruitstall from which a blond and buxom young "Fräulein" straight from the pages of a "Kraft durch Freude"-brochure sold such exotic fruits as oranges and bananas.
Those were the "Nachkriegsjahre" and I was yet to taste my first orange or banana, which is why I still remember, seventy years later, a sporty young bikerider who, day after day, would lean against the fruitstall and buy and eat one banana at a time. Only years later would it dawn on me that he may even have hated bananas but needed an excuse to get the attention of that "Kraft durch Freude"-Fräulein. How innocent we were! And how poor we were without actually knowing how poor we were!
