European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Workers sport group "Fichte"

1922 I joined the labour sports club ‘Fichte’.

And all the following years – we practiced gymnastics twice a week –

influenced us there.

My sister was in ‘Fichte’, and that was the reason why I joined them, too.

I was the only one in my class.

There were mainly reactionary teachers there.

They did not have anything in mind with ‘Fichte’.

Here in ‘Fichte’ I felt comfortable. It was nice for a child to be and to do sports with others.

On Sundays we sometimes went on excursions into the proximity of Berlin.

You just felt secure there in the circle of peers under the supervision of older people,

who pointed out a lot of things when we were walking

and that was something that impressed us especially.

The labourer sports movement had already been founded in the previous century

as a counter organisation to the civil sports movement that went more the chauvinistic way.

Apprenticeship, Inflation

I can’t remember when my father came back home.

When soldiers, who were demobbed, came through Tempelhof,

I always used to run there but I never saw my father with them.

One thing that just belongs to this time: 1923, the inflation.