The Prison Dilemma by Bernd Maelicke

Author:Bernd Maelicke
Language: deu
Format: epub
Publisher: Nomen Verlag
Published: 2019-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Turning points (2)

Besides returning to the care of my mother in the summer of 1953, I experienced another crucial turning point on October 5th, 1961.

It was a warm sunny day at summer’s end in 1961. I was a pupil in my final school year, the 13th grade, at Hans-Thoma-Gymnasium (German grammar school) in Lörrach, where I had been living with my mother and stepfather since 1955. I would be doing my German Abitur in spring of the following year and then moving to Freiburg to study law.

In the school summer holidays, my clique and I went to the public pool every single day. That’s where I noticed her, surrounded by her friends. She was fifteen, and I felt an indescribable attraction to her. She also attended Hans-Thoma-Gymnasium – she was in the 10th grade. Our classrooms were right next door to each other. We ran across each other almost every day and exchanged furtive smiles.

I knew her name was Hannelore. I had also found out that she boarded tram line 6 near her parents’ home in Lörrach-Stetten at one-thirty every Thursday to get to school. I myself was the proud owner of a rather old Vespa 50, the model with the lamp mounted to the fender.

On that 5th of October in 1961, I rode my Vespa to said tram station at just before half past one. I could already see her standing there from a distance. I brought my scooter to a screeching halt right next to her and asked if she fancied a ride to school. She gave a brief nod, swiftly hopped onto the back seat, and we embarked on our journey together that continues to this day.

You might be inclined to say: “A childhood crush. What does that have to do with imprisonment and offender rehabilitation?”. The moral of the story came three weeks later. Back then, it was common for young ladies to introduce their boyfriends to their parents very early on in a relationship. So, Hannelore took me home with her. I met her very likeable mother Klara, and was introduced to her father Kurt Eickmeier. He was almost two metres tall, a very impressive and imposing figure, twenty years my senior. He had a job that I had never heard of before. He was a probation worker. As it turned out, he was one of Germany’s first. And as such, he made a lasting contribution to the vocational profile and contents of the profession in post-war Germany.

I was steadfastly determined to study law and practice a legal profession. My role model was Canadian actor Raymond Burr who impressively portrayed attorney Perry Mason, the wheelchair-bound “defender of justice” in New York, in the black-and-white television broadcasts of the nineteen-fifties. I had never had that much interest in the persons behind the criminals. I was interested in the principle of justice, and not in something so obviously arduous as reintegrating criminals into society, like Kurt Eickmeier was. As our relationship grew closer, it slowly but surely led me to revise and rethink my stance.

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