Coming back from Stuttgart was not easy. I dreaded facing my parents. What would they say? They had collected an entire year’s wages in advance, and I had worked for the Schatz family for only six months.
But in truth, I didn’t care anymore. I had never asked to be enslaved. Whatever punishment waited for me at home, I knew one thing with absolute certainty: I would not go back to the Schatz family.
“Good for nothing!”
That was what they called me when I returned.
I never found out what the letter from Stuttgart said, and my parents never asked me what had happened. They didn’t seem interested in knowing why I had come home. As far as they were concerned, I had failed them.
My mother informed me that I would have to go back to work immediately. My father would decide where.
Several days later, I started working in an auto-parts factory on a piecework line. There were only a few women in our department, and in addition to doing our jobs, we were constantly occupied with keeping the men’s hands off us.
Every morning at 5:30, the company bus made its rounds to pick up the workers. By the time it reached my stop, it was usually crowded. I seldom made it to the back without being touched by one of the men. Every morning brought the same nightmare—the hands, the dirty remarks, the filthy stares.
I felt helpless.
Whenever I tried to defend myself, I became the center of attention. The men seemed to enjoy embarrassing me even more. Then came the lectures. Men ran the world, they told me. Men allowed women to work. Women had become too big-headed and had begun to think they had the right to voice their opinions.
The harassment did not end when we reached the factory.
The foreman always seemed to find some reason to “advise” me. That meant going with him to his office, where he could intimidate me and put his hands on me without anyone interfering.
Around that time, I noticed a young man from another department watching me. One day he asked whether I would like to spend my lunch break with him. I was glad to accept. By then, I had endured enough harassment to last the entire day, and sitting with him offered a small refuge from it.
After a few days, I began to feel safe around him. Little by little, some of my confidence returned. Knowing I would see him at lunchtime even made going to work less frightening.
We started dating.
Several months later, he asked me to marry him.
I told him about my life at home and warned him about my father, but he insisted on doing things properly and asking for my hand in marriage.
My father humiliated him. Right in front of me, he called him a low-class laborer and threw him out of the house.
Then he ordered me never to see him again.
We continued seeing each other anyway—except on Sundays.
Whenever I told my boyfriend what was happening at home, he always said the same thing.
“You have to get out of there.”
“But how?” I asked.
One day he looked at me and asked, “Do you know how to make babies?”
“Why do you ask me?”
He explained that if I became pregnant, my father would have to allow us to marry.
“This is the only way I know,” he said.
Until I was twenty-one, I needed my father’s permission for almost everything. Marriage was no exception.
Even the money I earned did not belong to me. When my first payday came, I received nothing but a receipt bearing my mother’s signature. She had already collected my paycheck without telling me.
It continued that way for months.
Then one day, during lunch, I fainted.
I was taken to the hospital, where the doctors discovered that I was suffering from malnutrition. I had become too weak for the hard physical work I was doing.
As a result, I was fired.
My parents were not intimidated by what had happened. Two days later, they sent me to work in a hotel kitchen, peeling potatoes and washing dishes.
Once again, payday brought me nothing but a receipt.
Then, one Sunday afternoon, my mother announced that we were going to have a very important visitor.
I knew the man. He had been to our house before, although no one had ever treated his visits as especially important. I wondered what had suddenly changed.
My mother told me to dress like a young lady. She even bought me lipstick.
That was when I understood.
I was being put on display.
After I served the coffee, my mother surprised me by asking, “Would you like to have a cup of coffee and a piece of cake with us?”
I must have stared at her.
I had never been allowed to drink coffee at home. Coffee was a luxury reserved for my father. Yet suddenly I was sitting with them as though I were an honored member of the family.
My mother dominated the conversation. She spoke enthusiastically about my business skills and all the other qualifications I supposedly possessed. Most of all, she emphasized how flexible I was.
I sat there listening and realized what she was doing.
She was selling me.
Not as a daughter. Not even as a young woman.
As property.
My father supplied the finishing touch. He brought out his violin, and I was expected to sing.
It was always the same song when he wanted to impress people, a song that forced me to hit high C again and again, in two different octaves. Normally, my voice was something other people praised.
That day, while I sang, I prayed silently:
I hated my voice and wished I would lose it.
Strangely enough, that wish came true after my first pregnancy, when I was twenty years old.
Later I learned that I was expected to marry the man.
I was not yet sixteen.
I cannot adequately describe what I felt when I understood what my parents had arranged. Somehow, though, I kept a smile on my face.
Not this time, I thought. You made this deal without me.
After the man left, my father explained that he had enough money to associate with the right kind of people. Marrying him, he said, would give me a perfect place in society.
My mother tried to comfort me.
“I know he is sixty-five,” she said, “but you won’t be married too long. He has liver cancer, and you will inherit everything when he dies. If you are a good wife for a couple of months, all of us will benefit.”
I did not sleep that night.
I lay awake for hours, trying to decide what to do. There was only one conclusion I could reach.
If I wanted to avoid marrying that man, I would have to leave home forever.
At five o’clock Monday morning, while everyone was still asleep, I slipped out of the house.
I hitchhiked to my boyfriend’s home, but when I arrived, his moped was gone. I knew he had already left for work. His workplace was not much farther, so I walked the rest of the way.
At the gate, I told the guard there was an emergency and asked him to get my boyfriend.
He came out immediately.
“I took the day off. What is going on?”
“I’ll tell you when we’re away from here,” I said.
He took me to his parents’ house. It was the first time I had met them, and they welcomed me into their home. We sat together in the kitchen, and I told him everything that had happened over the weekend.
“We have to get married,” he said. “We’ll make sure your father has to say yes. The only way is for you to get pregnant.”
We spent the rest of the day making plans for our future.
Late that evening, he asked me to come to bed with him.
I hesitated.
“Don’t you want a baby?” he asked.
Only then did I begin to understand what he meant.
Yet I could not make myself accept that making a baby involved the same act as what Lutz had done to me. In my mind, the two things could not belong together.
At about four in the morning, my boyfriend suddenly asked, “How come you’re not a virgin anymore?”
I froze.
I didn’t know how to answer.
He kept questioning me.
“Who did you have sex with before we met?”
I could not tell him that it had been my half-brother.
When I refused to answer, his questions turned into accusations. Then he began yelling and calling me names.
“You lied to me. I thought you were different from the other girls. I will never marry a slut like you.”
He ran from the house.
“Go!” he shouted. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”
I went numb.
I had nowhere to go. I could not return home. The future I had imagined only hours earlier had disappeared.
For a while, I felt as though my life had no value at all.
I left the house and wandered through town. Eventually, I hitchhiked back to Harburg and went up to the castle. I sat there for hours, looking down and thinking about my life.
I felt trapped. I was too young to control my own life, too young to escape the authority of the adults around me, and I could see no way forward.
In my handbag, I had a small pair of scissors. In despair, I tried to cut open a vein in my left wrist. Even that failed. The bleeding soon stopped.
I remember thinking that I couldn’t do anything right.
Hours passed.
Then something in me changed.
If I could not die, I would run.
So I ran.
For the next month, I hitchhiked throughout Germany. Eventually, I met a woman named Barbara, who invited me to live with her. She helped me find work as a waitress.
For the first time, it seemed possible that I might build a life of my own.
But after only a couple of weeks, I began losing weight. Eventually, I weighed only seventy-nine pounds. I finally understood how sick I had become and knew that I needed a doctor.
I didn’t know where to find one, so I went to the police and asked for help.
I told them my story.
Instead of taking me to a doctor, they transferred me back to the police in the town where my parents lived. There I had to tell the story all over again, first to the police and then to the Child Protection Department.
After several hours of waiting, a woman came to speak with me.
She told me there was nothing she could do.
I would have to go home.
“Your parents are already here to pick you up,” she said.
She explained that she had spoken with them. My father had told her that I was always inventing horrible stories because I wanted attention.
“Is it true?” she asked.
I stared at her.
“What do I have to do so you will believe me? If you send me home, I will run away again—or I will find another way.”
Something in my voice must have concerned her, because she asked what I meant.
I told her I was prepared to steal. I told her I might even kill my father. I would rather go to prison than return home.
That was finally enough.
She promised me that I would not have to go back.
The following day, I was taken to another town and placed in a home where many young girls lived. Most of them were pregnant.
Two days later, I was taken to the hospital for surgery. When I returned, one of the girls explained to me that I had had a tubal pregnancy.
Four months later, I was given an opportunity to enter a three-year tailoring school.
Tailoring was not what I dreamed of doing with my life. But when I looked at the opportunity, I saw something far more important than a profession.
I saw three years away from my family.
So I took the entrance examination.
I passed.
There were fourteen apprentices in my class, and I began to discover something about myself that no one had ever encouraged me to believe: I was capable.
Every year we had to take an examination. After my second year, my senior master told me that she planned to recommend me for early graduation.
Then my psoriasis became so severe that I spent six weeks in the hospital.
At first, I was terrified by how much school I would miss. I had worked too hard to lose the opportunity now. But my teacher reassured me.
She had confidence that I would succeed anyway.
When I returned to school, a letter arrived from the Chamber of Industry and Commerce. I had been granted permission to take my final examinations eight months early.
I graduated at the top of the practical examination in a class of forty girls.
It took me years to understand what that achievement truly represented.
For most of my childhood and adolescence, other people had decided what I was worth, where I would work, what would happen to my wages, whom I could see, and even whom I should marry. I had been taught to accept their authority as though I had no rights of my own.
Slowly, I learned otherwise.
I began to understand that I had the same rights as other people. I gained the knowledge and perspective I needed to recognize that much of what I had lived through was wrong.
Then came the harder task: unlearning the patterns that had been forced upon me.
Little by little, I began to build a different life.
And, perhaps most importantly, I began to find something I had been denied for so long—the confidence to stand up for myself when someone tried to intimidate, control, or hurt me.
The psychological pattern described is consistent with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) resulting from prolonged abuse, sexual trauma, exploitation, and coercive control. The trauma manifested in learned helplessness, shame, fear, low self-worth, and profound hopelessness, culminating in a suicide attempt. Despite these effects, she demonstrated significant resilience, gradually developing independence, confidence, and healthy boundaries.
In 1996, CPTSD was formally diagnosed by two psychologists and documented in her medical record.