Читать книгу This Uncontainable Feeling of Freedom - Christian Broecking - Страница 8

Daily Family Business: Guests First

Day-to-day family life in the inn was organized around the opening hours of the restaurant. According to Schweizer, the kitchen maid was responsible for getting the schoolchildren out of bed and giving them breakfast. “I never knew when the employees got up, or where they had breakfast. The restaurant was always open until half past midnight, and then everyone went to bed late. The restaurant didn’t open before 9 AM, so we children were awake before that and had to go to school. We didn’t get anything to eat until all the guests had been served, the guests always came first. On Sunday afternoons, we were fed around 3 o’clock. There was a little room downstairs where the family and the employees ate.”

Father: Cooking for 100

Karl Schweizer was born January 2, 1902 in Hallau, a small town in the Blauburgunder wine region around Schaffhausen. He trained as a cook and worked in various restaurants in Switzerland, including in Lucerne, where he met Schweizer’s mother, Frieda Bösch. At the Landhaus, Karl did the cooking, while Frieda was responsible for the buffet. “We had a waitstaff: one woman who was temporary help and one who was a permanent employee. My mother organized all that. They both always had a lot to do; they worked themselves to death. My father died of a heart attack suddenly one day. I don’t remember him ever being sick. He just overexerted himself. He did a crazy amount of work. In the hall there were a lot of gatherings, and he would cook for 100 people. Really, innkeepers like that shouldn’t have had children. They hardly had any time for the children.”

Schweizer’s sister Margrit says that the meeting hall was booked almost every Saturday: “About 100 people would be there. Sometimes there were concerts, or the city musicians rehearsed there. And whenever the hall wasn’t occupied, our older sister Lotte played there, from the time she was a small child. Later Irène did too, of course—they always went to play piano as soon as they were able and had the time.” Their father sang in the men’s chorus, and probably also had a clarinet, which the children later found among his possessions. Margrit thinks that Irène’s musicality came from their father, “who could pick up any instrument and play something on it. I remember him playing fiddle and harmonica. He was never allowed to learn to play an instrument as a boy. He probably would have been quite a good musician if he had had time and had learned an instrument.” Schweizer commented: “Unfortunately, when I started playing piano he wasn’t there to hear it.”

Their memories of their childhood are fragile and selective. Schweizer remembers only a few hours spent with her father: “We didn’t have a car then, and my father couldn’t drive. But I know that he took me with him sometimes when he went somewhere in the country with a guest, visiting other inns. Afternoons, when he had a few hours free. Sometimes it was just me with them, sometimes my little sister was there also. Then I sat in the back, we’d stop for something to eat, and I was allowed to have a Fanta or a cola. Once I felt so bad that I threw up in the car—he was a little angry with me about that.” Margrit describes their father as “very emotional. Chefs are all a little like that, trying things out and getting upset when they don’t work. Irène gets impatient very quickly, and our father was like that too. If things don’t go the way she wants, or she has to wait, she also has this impatience. And she was already like that as a small child. She’d throw something out the window on impulse, not even knowing what she was doing. Once she broke a windowpane that way, just in the moment, in a frenzy.” Irène, though, doesn’t remember her father that way: “My father was a very energetic man—people said he had a short temper. I probably inherited that, as a child I also had a short temper. If I didn’t like something, I flipped out and broke things. I was very impulsive.”

Mother: Always Working

Their mother, Frieda Sophie (née Bösch), was born October 8, 1907 in Lucerne. She had to work as a waitress from a young age. Margrit remembers: “Our father died very young. Our mother was very busy and had little time for the three of us children. Irène soon created her own world to live in. It was a similar story for my oldest sister, Lotte – she left quickly and, after interning in Vevey, lived in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. She didn’t come home until our mother fell ill; then she found work here in Schaffhausen and stayed with her mother until she died. But the three of us never really had what I’d call a close family life. When I was 17 or 18, our mother couldn’t go on any longer, she had simply worked too much. At the end, she only lived a couple of years apart from the restaurant before she died.”

Schweizer says her mother had always wanted to be a dancer, “and my younger sister had a little ballet career—she learned ballet, the ballet school held classes in our hall, and she danced ballet for years. My mother liked that direction, but she never forced us to do anything. Later, she knew that I played in Berlin and all over, but she never said anything about it, and she didn’t really know what I did. We were raised freely and our mother trusted us. At night, we could’ve brought men home with us, the bar was open until half past midnight. But maybe because we weren’t being watched so closely, we weren’t really interested in doing anything stupid. Nor was Lotte. She had a boyfriend, a pianist, and I had many friends, including the ones from school, and we visited each other.” She felt the lack of parental affection, even if this was partly compensated for by Odette, the server in the restaurant who took care of the children and who Schweizer calls her “second mother.” “My mother had no idea, never said anything about it, that in 1960 I won first prize at the amateur festival in Zürich. We didn’t talk about it.”