40,000 Catholics, 4,000 Protestants and 40 Jews: Growing up in a small Bavarian town in the post-war period – the speech by historian Michael Brenner on the occasion of the Cultural Honorary Award of the City of Munich.
Our house looked the same from the outside as all the other houses on the street. But nothing inside was like the other houses in this small Bavarian town near the Iron Curtain, where 40,000 Catholics, 4,000 Protestants and 40 Jews lived. It was a white-plastered semi-detached house from the 1950s with a large garden with birch and maple trees. There was a tree with sweet cherries and a tree with sour cherries. The house was surrounded by the clubhouse at the football field, where drunken fans would roar along to Heino and Udo Jürgens every Saturday evening, and by the barracks with American GIs, whose children were called to lunch in Upper Palatinate dialect by their mothers in the apartment blocks opposite.