This is Gisela Steineckert’s great gift: to let others close very close to them, to open themselves, to look into them.
Photo: Picture Alliance / dpa | Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert
You can tell how well the author did to gather friends and companions again, readers who turned to them, interpreters of their songs – yes, also letters to me are included. But later. Because they are very personal writing, Gisela Steineckert only calls her addressees with their first names. Nobody should feel demonstrated and even have to complain afterwards. You read this book anyway because you want to learn something about the author.
This week, on May 13, she became 94. It can no longer travel all over the country from one event to another. Even if she would love to do that. She is sometimes dependent on help at home. Working on this book was a community work. Granddaughter Laura helped her to watch the letters from 25 years and to choose the most interesting ones. And that, you can feel it when reading, must have been a great pleasure. Because every letter came from memories. Against being alone. Gisela Steineckert lives in her apartment, her usual environment, but she is not alone.
Daughter Kirsten, granddaughter Laura, great -granddaughter Leni Marie and many friends. Her husband Wilhelm died in 2016. How heavy the time was when he fell ill when he fell on Parkinson’s when he blindly and also changed in his being that she made no secret of it. In general, she opens her heart in her letters. When Wilhelm got sick, both even married in church. And then she rented out to the nursing home with him and accompanied him all the difficult days so that he died in her arms.
We learn how older people are brave. And how this bravery grows by not crawling yourself, but donating to other people. This is Gisela Steineckert’s great gift: to let others close very close to them, to open themselves, to look into them. Her poems and songs, which she wrote singers and singers, also live on the body of this. She wrote 4,000 song texts, over 40 books, in GDR times ten film scenarios and five radio plays. Jürgen Walter, Dirk Michaelis, Veronika Fischer, Frank Schöbel – they are all gathered here again, together with Egon Krenz, Walter Kaufmann and others.
This is Gisela Steineckert’s great gift: to let others close very close to them, to open themselves, to look into them.
They had spotted tons of paper together, said Laura on the phone. Such an abundance of material that would otherwise have been idle and that was to be sorted again and again. Gisela Steineckert wrote thousands of letters. It is a whole life in it. The miserable childhood with a drinking father and a unreliable mother, the strength of the little girl, not to break it, but to learn how to do everything differently. It is one of those who have experienced the war. So they also know what that means and the “simple peace”, as a particularly catchy song by her, consider it as important as just something. The time in the GDR with a singing movement, in the committee for entertainment art – again and again it has been thinking about the political changes since then. Memories that you also have to sort in constant flashes that you also have to sort. She has always said her opinion: “That I have always dared to live completely and to put it back with almost no risk,” says her power even today. “Without my mistakes, without my experiences, without my lifelong look and never -tired interest in other people, only out of education, that would not have been enough.”
There had been letter volumes from her in 1984 and 1998. The years from 1999 to 2023 are now followed. That was important, says Laura, because it is a piece of contemporary history and this project did well. She speaks of the “feeling of happiness of narrative” and sometimes of excessive demands. Hugs in thoughts. She is a loving guide. “If I can do something for you, then let me know” – what she writes, I heard from her several times.
We made a conversation book together in 2013: “Life has something”. In the meantime it is also sold out in antiquarian. I keep hearing how many would like to have in your hands. And I beging the publisher to put it on again. “I did not develop a self for doing anything,” I read to myself in your letter dated May 16, 2015. “If I am not active, be it that I read in a barren time, then I am nobody, then I lose everything that carries me, what gets new strength out of me, which temporarily takes away pain, and what gives me the feeling of being alive.” So a new project on the horizon may appear after this book.
Gisela Steineckert: Because of then and now. New Life, 303 S., born, 20 €.