As a child, I was obsessed with everything connected to aviation—including patiently assembling, gluing and painting plastic airplane models. Of course almost all of these kits, in which I invested all my pocket money, were miniatures of military machines. Civilian or passenger planes were hardly found among them. And so the absurd situation arose, that —despite my consistently pacifist upbringing—my kid’s room slowly but constantly turned into a military airfield, on which all kinds of strategic maneuvers and dogfights were performed by me and my friends.
It is clear that such childlike war games are not real wars, but the expression of various subconscious processes that are channeled through them. As puberty progressed, I lost interest in aircraft as well as in model making. My air fleet had long been forgotten when I discovered it again in the basement more than 40 years later, jumbled up in boxes. I had just started clearing out the house after my mother’s death.
My mother, to whom I largely owe my pacifist upbringing, was a dressmaker. Born in 1933 and raised in a humble home, she was in many ways a typical representative of the war generation: she couldn’t throw anything away. Everything that theoretically could be needed again at some point in the future was kept and stored. There was plenty of space; she lived in the house, which had been built as a home for two families, for more than her last two decades alone. Then I found her irons. There were many of them. Tools of a female profession, replaced over years by better and more efficient models, but never disposed of. They all still worked. At some point the childlike fleet of aircraft and the motherly irons’ wall faced each other. Long time, over months. Male lust for aggression against a body of female gravity, resting unshakeably, radiating heat. It was inevitable that they would have to come together; their mutual attraction was too intense..