Werner Pfennig—Frau Elena

Werner Pfennig’s relationship with Frau Elena is defined by the warmth of his childhood at Children’s House and the wartime memories through which he holds on to it. Her songs and fairy tales belong to his idea of home; even far from it, he longs for the familiar room, stove, and voices gathered there.

Childhood Bond

Frau Elena is part of the domestic world Werner remembers from his boyhood: a place of songs, stories, and warmth. In wartime, he longs to be back at Children’s House, hearing her sing and feeling heat from the potbelly stove. The memory is not an abstract refuge but a collection of familiar comforts, making his attachment to her inseparable from his sense of home.

Care Expressed Through Invention

Werner’s childhood question notebook preserves a small, revealing trace of his regard for Frau Elena: among his drawings and imagined devices is an electric bed heater he wanted to build for her. His curiosity about how things work thus extends beyond abstract puzzles into a wish to make something useful for someone he cares about. The notebook had been left beneath Werner’s old cot and was returned to him by Jutta Pfennig in a homemade envelope, carrying his childhood projects into his wartime life.

Memory Under Wartime Distance

The pull of Frau Elena’s songs grows sharper against Werner’s circumstances at the front. In the radio truck, surrounded by military equipment and exhausted by his assignment, he imagines returning to Children’s House: the stove’s heat, her singing, and the familiar company of childhood. Another recollection gathers the sounds and scraps of that earlier world—berries and carrot peels, bees at the window boxes, trains passing, and Frau Elena’s fairy tales. These memories show how the bond persists not through present contact, but through the ordinary details Werner carries with him as a measure of what he has lost.