Brigitte Moehwald

* 1961 † 2005

Brigitte's parents at the time of their marriage

結婚の時の両親

Childhood and Youth in Holzburg

青少年期

1961

With her brothers Heinrich and Hans 1953

兄さん達と一緒

Brigitte Anna Katharina Hahn was born on March 15, 1961 in the small village Holzburg in the Schwalm region of northern Hessen, Germany (West). She was the youngest child, considerably younger than her brothers Heinrich and Hans who were born in the early 1950s. The Schwalm is a predominantly agricultural region that took its name from the river Schwalm. Its agriculture was affluent enough to allow for the development of a typical traditional costume, the Schwaelmer Tracht, but until the 1970s it was also a region that was strongly socially stratified according to the size of landholding. Brigitte's parents owned a small-medium size farm, and Brigitte was raised in the traditions of the agricultural communities of this region that is proud of its traditions, customs, and dialect - Brigitte used to joke that standard German was her first foreign language.

1965

1969

Second year in elementary school 1968

小学校2年生

1972

1973

With her parents 1973

両親と一緒

1973

School excursion 1973

修学旅行

1973

1973

1974

1974

In the Schwalm one of the ways to show the status of your house was the number of under-skirts worn by the women. The more skirts, the higher the status. It is said that they wore up to seven under-skirts. In these pictures Brigitte wears about five.

Confirmation 1975

堅信礼

Brigitte was supposed to stay at home, marry a farmer, and take care of her parents in old age. But she did not agree with this plan, continued school after graduating from Haupschule, entered Gymnasium, and eventually got her Abitur which allowed her to enter university. Unfortunately her photo album does not contain any photos between her confirmation at age fourteen and her second year at Marburg university at age twenty. As far as she talked about these years, she was quite a rebellious youth. Her parents gave up agriculture in the 1970s and her father worked for several years in a factory in a nearby town, but he got ill with cancer and eventually died while she was still attending Gymnasium. In 1980 she started to study ethnology at Marburg university, but she changed to educational science specializing in adult education after the first year, and she moved into a short-lived community with several friends from educational science.

At Marburg University, 1980-1985

マーブルグ大学

1981

1982

1983

1983

1983

With her friend Rotraut Mielke at the Cavete in Marburg, 1983

With my sister Dagmar at her house in Fritzlar, 1984

With our French friend Daniel Baticle at my sister's house, 1984

In my kitchen, 1984

In 1983 I was still living together with Karin. She had been my room-mate since October 1977, and we had been lovers between 1978 and 1981. In 1980, our life trajectories started to move into opposite directions. After several years on the wild side, I was getting back on the academic career track, while Karin was plunging more and more into Marburg’s Night Life. Karin had been diagnosed with leukemia at age twelve, and her life expectancy had been estimated at ten years max. But she fought, and part of her fight was partying. And while I was writing my thesis and getting more and more involved in research and started to work as an assistant at Marburg University, Karin got more and more involved in partying every night. The shit hit the fan, when I found out that she was having various affairs with her drinking buddies. But while our relation cooled down to friends again, we still continued to live together; because she needed a person to look after her, especially after secondary cancers were detected in late 1981. In 1982 and 1983 Karin spent extended periods in hospital in Frankfurt, and during one of those periods I met Brigitte in March 1983. At that time she was still living together with her ex-boyfriend Peter, but they had already split up in 1982.

At my ARWO-Bau appartment in Berlin, 1984

At my ARWO-Bau apartment in Berlin, 1984

At that time I was preparing the manuscript of my first book for publication, which was a lot of work without computers and word-processing software, so I was not going out very much. And since friends started to complain that I had become too much of a hermit, I invited several of them for dinner. We had a good time with good food and wine, and when we had finished cleaning up, they decided it was time to go dancing. I was rather reluctant, because I didn’t like disco-music, but they convinced me to join them with the argument that there was this new place which played mainly rock and soul music. When we got to the place, I found a seat at the bar next to two young ladies, Brigitte and her friend Rotraud, who had decided to have a good time without their male room-mates. When I arrived, the two ladies were already quite tipsy, and Brigitte immediately started to hit on me. We spent a good time dancing and talking, and when I left, I invited her to a party at my friend Rudi’s house two days later. The next two days my friends kept on teasing me with my conquest of whom I didn’t even have a phone number. I didn’t really expect her to come, but I was nervous like a cat never-the-less. And then she came, and from that day we started dating, which very rapidly evolved into a very serious and passionate affair. By the end of June Karin had moved out of my house and Brigitte had moved into a new apartment of her own, and at the end of July we hitch-hiked together to France to visit my friends in Pontoise. Our relation continued to grow more and more intense, and in autumn we had basically decided that we would get married. But we continued to live apart, because it was widely unclear how much longer I could stay in Marburg, and because Brigitte had at least two more years of study until she could submit her M.A. thesis. At the time I applied for every open position in Japanese studies. The prospects were not very good, because the big expansion of West German Japanese studies had not yet begun, and social research on Japan was still a rather marginal field in West Germany. But then in early 1984 I got news from the Institute of East Asian Studies of the Free University of Berlin (West) that invited me for an interview for a position as a lecturer. The thing went well and I was hired for July 15, 1984. So I moved to West Berlin, while Brigitte continued with her studies in Marburg. For the next two years, one of us was on the road between Marburg and West Berlin every weekend, mainly using car-pooling services, but sometimes we had to hitch-hike. We also met a lot of interesting people during these two years.

In Frankfurt

1985

In her apartment in the Weidenhaeuser Strasse, Marburg, 1985

With her mother in Holzburg, 1985

In her apartment in Marburg, 1985

With my mother at a restaurant in Marburg on the day we got married, 1985

Signing our marriage certificate at the registry office in Marburg, November 22, 1985

In West Berlin, 1985

West Berlin

1986-1989

Moving into our apartment in Schillerpromenade, 1986

1986

In Frankfurt, 1986

1987

In our apartment,

Schillerpromenade 15, 1000 Berlin 44

1987

For the first half year in Berlin I found an apartment with ARWO-Bau close to the Wall near the Checkpoint Sonnenallee. These apartments were designed as temporary housing for newly arrived workers in West Berlin. But after much searching, I found an apartment in the Schillerpromenade in Neukoelln, and in December 1984 I finally could make my relocation from Marburg to Berlin. In the meanwhile Brigitte had decided to finish her studies as quickly as possible and was intensively preparing her master thesis. Brigitte changed and grew incredibly during the first three years we were together. When we met in March 1983 she was a cute little girl with a vivid intellect, but she completely lacked self-confidence and heavily depended upon her two-years older friend Rothraut who acted as her mentor concerning every aspect of her life and her studies. But being together with me also meant to become actively involved in discussing my research, to travel together through Europe and to and from Berlin and also to participate in international conferences where she was accepted and recognized in her own right. This not only considerably enlarged her social contacts, it also considerably broadened her mental and academic horizons and slowly, but continuously increased her self-esteem and independence. She more and more evolved into a critical social scientist, and by the time she applied for her master thesis on the relation of critical theory and theories of adult education in the summer of 1985, she no longer was a cute little girl, but a competent and self-assured young woman. This showed in her personal relations. Her relation with Rotraud was reversed. Now Brigitte had become the mentor for Rotraud and her boyfriend Hans, and she coached them to finish their studies and write their master thesis. It also showed in her relations with her elder brothers, who first were quite reluctant to recognize how much their little sister had grown. Brigitte finished her thesis in record time, and in November 1985 we finally got married (we had basically decided to do this during our first trip to Pontoise in the summer of 1983). After her last examinations in January 1986 Brigitte moved to West Berlin. Through the introduction of one of our friends she found work as a library assistant at the Institute of Statistics at the Berlin Institute of Technology. She also enrolled in a post-graduate course for media management at the Berlin Institute of Technology. 1986 was a good year for us. The intellectual climate in Berlin was very different from Marburg. This was a metropolis not a provincial backwater. We met a lot of people from many different countries, traveled a lot, and Brigitte became something like a fixed feature in European Japanese Studies, because we always came together to any conference after we had participated in the European Association of Japanese Studies’ conference in Paris in September 1985. After I started to work at the East Asian Institute, I had wholeheartedly plunged into the many opportunities for international academic contacts, and in the autumn of 1986 this paid off. I applied for a scholarship with the Japan Foundation, and not only had received an invitation from the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Socials Science, but also very strong recommendation letters from very eminent Japanese and European scholars. In my prior unsuccessful applications for scholarships I had been lacking this kind of backup, and I still was quite wary whether my application would go through or not. And then in the spring of 1987 I got a phone call from the Japanese consulate in Berlin informing me that I had been accepted for a one-year professional scholarship to Japan starting on September 1. I had to go to Tokyo alone, but in April 1988 Brigitte came together with my sister, my brother-in-law, and a friend of my sister to visit me in Japan. The other three left after two weeks, but Brigitte stayed for almost two months. She had brought Japan Rail Passes and we traveled for three weeks from Kagoshima to Aomori. Brigitte loved Japan, and this trip became very important for a major decision we had to make in the autumn of 1988.

First Trip to Japan, April-May 1988

最初の日本旅行　1988年4・5月

With the mother and 100-years old grandmother of our friend Hosoda in Tachikawa

In Morioka

At Hosoda's house in Tachikawa

At a restaurant in Tokyo with the family of our friend Ijuin Ritsu

After a party at the house of our friends Takaichi and Emi Yoshizawa in Tachikawa

At my apartment at the Tokyo University International Lodge

At the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu in Kamakura

At Takaichi and Emi Yoshizwa's house

in Tachikawa

Near the castle in Matsumoto

With Teruko and Yasuo Handa in Yamadera

Yamadera

With the Handa Family at their house in Sendai

Back in Berlin

September 1988

In the autumn of 1988 we had to make a very important decision. While I was still in Tokyo I had a visit in July by Josef Kreiner. He had just been appointed by the German Federal Government as the first director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo and he was visiting Japan for the preparations (the institute started to work in Tokyo in the autumn of 1988) and he was also looking for possible research staff that had Japan experience and a good command of Japanese language, and several people had recommended me. I knew Kreiner since 1974, and he was one of the German Japanese Studies’ specialists who highly appreciated my work. So he tried to recruit me for the institute. At the time my boss from the Free University, Sung-Jo Park, was also visiting at the Institute of Social Science, and Kreiner and Park also discussed the matter. But I could not decide immediately without having consulted the matter with Brigitte. It was a five-year contract, very tempting financially as well as professionally. I immediately called Brigitte and wrote her a letter. Her first reaction was positive, but there was left the question what she could do in Japan. Then in August I attended a symposium in Nagano Prefecture together with Hara Hiroko and we were riding the train together, which gave us ample opportunities to discuss various matters. We also discussed Kreiner’s offer and she offered spontaneously that Brigitte could become a research fellow at the Institute of Women’s Studies of Ochanomizu University. So after I got back to Berlin, Brigitte and I seriously discussed the matter and then decided that I should apply for a position of a full-time researcher. My application was decided in January 1989, and my work in Tokyo was to start on May 1st.

At her place of work at the library of the Institute of Statistic a the Berlin Institute of Technology, 1989

1989

Breakfirst at home, 1989

West Belin, 1989

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