Dear Doctor,

I start this letter with a photograph that seems like a premonition.

The story goes like this: it was the twenties, and everybody liked Anselm Schwär. He was handsome, he was ambitious and he managed to do well even then.

I have got in front of me the very few things that remain from him: basically, a few photographs and postcards -most of them related to the Kugelhaus in Dresden-. He was obsessed with that building that doesn’t exist anymore. Well, much of Dresden doesn’t exist anymore, but I mean that this building wasn’t destroyed during the war, they demolished it earlier.

Anselm Schwär, was my great-grandfather. An indulgent, selfish, spoiled guy playing the philanthropist to gain money and influence. He was some kind of doctor, like you, but probably a bit more sinister. He married my great-grandmother Elise in 1928. The date wasn’t arbitrary, he chose it to coincide with the inauguration of the Kugelhaus. They celebrated the wedding there too. I don’t know if it was at the café or at the terrace outside. We have got photos of both places, but there is no photo of the wedding itself.

Soon Elise got pregnant of their first child, Editha (on the photo), who was said to have been conceived in the Kugelhaus. Anselm started calling his wife Kugelfrau as a loving nickname then, and so it has passed through generations in the family as synonymous with pregnant women, and more precisely, with abandoned pregnant women.

By 1939 they had had two more children, among them my grandfather Anselm, and Elise was expecting a fourth.

It was clear then that the war was inevitable, but Anselm kept making plans. Unexpectedly, he got permission to visit the New York fair and he embarked as soon as he could.

I keep the only postcard he sent to his family on arrival. He doesn’t mention the war or anything, it just says “Thrilled to see this building, symbol of a new beginning”. Elise overjoyed at the thought that she would shortly join him in America for that new beginning, but those were to be the last news she had from him. It soon became obvious for her that he had planned it all to escape the war without keeping them in mind: he had taken everything important or valuable, leaving the family barely with the necessary.

That is the reason why the photos we have are just the ones he discarded; bad copies, or portraits of people that weren’t important to him, like his work colleagues, year after year, in front of the Kugelhaus.

Only Elise and my grandfather Anselm survived the war.

Grandfather Anselm married grandmother Anna in 1969. But this second Anselm wasn’t much better than the first one. He left home one morning and never came back. They said he had crossed to the West. He didn’t even wait to know his own baby -my mother-, who was on the way.

So with this background, my mother decided she could do without a husband, and she had me as a single mother. That hasn’t helped at all, I have to say. Instead of an absent father, I have had dozens of itinerant fathers.

My mother blames the first Anselm as much as she blames the Kugelhaus; its ghost haunts us. She says the world would have been a better place if it hadn’t been built. Great-grandfather Anselm spent too much time on it, so he got its curse and then passed it to us.

Dresden has nearly forgotten the Kugelhaus, passersby in this beautiful garden do not know it was ever here. It is just me who remains, the last person who can keep the malediction alive. I hope you understand now why I never wanted children. May the trauma end with me.

Johanna Schwär