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79. Life with Martin
- Purdue University Press
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264 D Chapter Seventy-Nine d Life wiTh mArTin What really came as a surprise was the realization that the man I had married actually relished the fact that his new wife was more than just a little different from the traditional image of a German pastor’s spouse.With a foreign passport, a decidedly different taste in clothes, favoring nail polish and make-up,driving anAmerican street cruiser still adorned with New York license plates,my husband actually seemed to derive a sublime pleasure from showing me off in public like an exotic bird, a glittering butterfly he had been fortunate enough to catch.When a waiter in a restaurant referred to me as“Frau tochter”(“Madam daughter”), Martin would beam with pleasure and kick me under the table. As far as the reactions of my own family were concerned,my mother,although shocked at first over my decision to marry a man the age of my father,welcomed her new son-in-law, a mere five months her junior, with her own special grace; however, she could not suppress theslightlyreproachful-soundingremarkthatithadnotbeenI,butsheherself,whohadonce been designated by her friend Else as her successor in case she did not outlive her husband. She came to the conclusion, though, that at least the man in question stayed in the family. Among those hesitant about coming to grips with the new situation was my own son. With his biological father never having shown much interest in him and barely over the heartache of losing a stepfather he had truly loved, Marcus balked at accepting stepfather number two. However, it was not long until he found out that Martin did not have any intentions of treating him as a stepson. The teenager came to realize that, for the first time in his life, he was going to have a real father. Giving up his resistance, he moved in with us and changed from the John F. Kennedy School in Berlin to the American military high school in Wiesbaden, planning to return to the United States for his college education. The relationship between father and son would deepen during the years to come, eventually motivating Marcus, while a college student in Greensboro, North Carolina, to change his name from Donaldson to Niemoeller by a simple court procedure,circumventing archaic German adoption laws. He broke the unexpected tidings to his father during a Christmas vacation, exhibiting a passport with the new name, which caused both to shed tears of unadulterated joy wholeheartedly shared by the entire Niemoeller family, including all his step siblings . Rarely would the two of them be seen sitting side by side without their arms around each other’s shoulders,an expression of the bond of love that could not be broken by death. The Promised Land 265 Like no one else I had ever met, Martin craved affection and physical closeness. Only now did I comprehend the full impact of Hitler’s cruelty; the demon knew exactly what he was doing when he sentenced this man, so desperately in need of sharing every feeling, every single thought with a human being, to total isolation. Alone in a cell over many years, surrounded by unspeakable horror, unable to touch anyone dear to him, never knowing what the next minute had in store for him, he had gone through the kind of hell that he could never truly describe to anyone. Life and happiness had once more returned to the spacious house on Brentanostrasse, for the past years a place of dismal solitary confinement for the widower.With a competent new housekeeper, a typist, and a driver at my disposal, I enthusiastically threw myself into my various duties. Aside from numerous high-level social functions, I was expected to be an executive secretary, a confidante, an administrator, a cook, and a gardener. In a surprise move, assisted by the Salvation Army, I had gotten rid of my husband’s dreary wardrobe in his absence, substituting it with nice, conventional clothes like English tweed jackets, flannel trousers, ties of good taste, and handsome cotton shirts. The Salvation Army came back once more to collect a truckload of horrible makeshift furniture, including taste-defying fixtures like lamps, chairs, tables, and other household pieces, which I replaced with beautiful items, mostly family heirlooms, that I had once shipped to New York and now to Wiesbaden. Obsessed with an almost physical aversion to handling money,my husband left financial transactions to me. All he claimed for himself...