Brockhöfe

Brockhöfe is the place where Fiete Honka recalls having found, for two years, the happiness and human acceptance otherwise largely absent from his life. After his flight from East Germany in 1952, Bauer Geerdes took him in as a son; decades later, Fiete’s memory of that time remains a private paradise he imagines being able to begin again.

Setting and Fiete’s Arrival

In 1952, shortly after escaping East Germany, Fiete came to Brockhöfe, amid the Lüneburg Heath. Bauer Geerdes accepted him as a son, giving the young man a place in a life that Fiete remembers not as merely fortunate but as more happiness than he had ever dared imagine, or believed one person could deserve.

Two Years of Belonging

Fiete’s recollection centers less on any particular incident than on what Bauer Geerdes offered him: for the first time, another person took a genuine interest in him, tried to understand him, and treated him with understanding and even love. The two years in Brockhöfe became his measure of happiness, a striking contrast with the seventeen years before them and the seventeen years that followed, which he remembers as bringing none.

Memory as an Imagined Return

Long after leaving Brockhöfe, Fiete often imagines a time machine set to that place and period, arranged so that whenever the happiness ended it would begin again. The memory also shapes the way he interprets the present: he thinks he may be due another miracle, perhaps in the form of a new angel sent after Bauer Geerdes. In a drunken Sunday fantasy, he briefly mistakes the old woman beside him for the beautiful young woman he longs for, before the reality of the present dispels the vision. Brockhöfe thus persists not simply as a location from Fiete’s past but as the lost home against which his later hopes and disappointments are measured.