My father part III

Essentially, Werner Jakstein was an historian who used his job to explore the culture around him. One thing always led to another. Once, visiting a small museum in the north of Germany, he noticed a dusty pack of playing cards lying on the window sill. So he suggested to the museums director to lay out the cards on the table as if people were playing. I don't know if the museum's director followed his advice but my father, taking a closer look at the cards which were several hundred years old had his interest pricked and he started collecting old playing cards.

His collection, which contained cards from Europe to China via India, over the years grew to be the biggest of its kind in Germany. When he tried to sell it sometime during the Nazi years to an interested American collector, he was forbidden to do so. It was deemed to be too important to leave the country. He sold it after the war to the Altenburger Spielkarten firm in Stuttgard where it became the basic core of their museum. Aside from the fact that now he did not have to worry about the fate of his cards anymore, since neither my sister nor I were able to take them, he was able to hold lectures about their origins.

I don't know if my father became interested in Denmark because of his job in Altona, in any case, he spent quite some time in Kopenhagen, researching the work of the Danish architect C.F. Hansen (1756-1845) who had worked in Altona. He learned to speak and write Danish and in spite of his atrocious accent held often lectures there. Here he also met and married my mother who had partly grown up in Kopenhagen and whose mother was Danish.

Times in Germany were anything but calm, to say the least. The first World war broke out in 1914 and lasted 'til 1918, during which time my father had a desk job, since he was, at 38 years of age, too old to be sent to the front. Then came the hyper-inflation toward the height of which the wives would wait with empty baby buggies on payday to receive the huge bundles of worthless money and dash to the stores to buy whatever they could before the money was devalued again. I was born just after this horror ended. But unrest remained since there was not enough work for the workers.

Though the Deutsche mark was now stable the "Arbeitslosen" (the ones without work) were restless. My father watched them day in day out from his window at his office at townhall standing around idly, waiting for work which did not come. He decided, something needed to be done to help them think about something other then their and their family's misery. He organized cultural events, mostly concerts, asking anybody he could get hold of to donate their time. He had no problem convincing his artist friends to participate but had great difficulty convincing the city fathers to open up the hall without compensation since it would cost money to heat the hall. As history shows, small events such as these were not enough to stem the tide of unrest, later to culminate in the election of Hitler. Since we had moved to the suburbs I never experienced the street fights which raged in the cities.