The Tale of the Two Evil Blacksmiths

I had dinner with Lilo last night, which was fun.  I swear, she knows the most about Berlin out of anybody in the entire city.  I told her about an art exhibit I was planning on seeing at some point, by John Heartfield, a German who anglicized his name in protest against the NAZIs, who did anti-NAZI propaganda in the Dadaistic style of collage, and of course Lilo not only has several books of his work, but also knew him and told me where he lived in East Berlin (on Friedrichstrasse).

But what I found most striking about what we talked about was the story of the woman who she bought her house in Zingst from.  The house used to be a blacksmith’s workshop, and this woman had been married to the blacksmith.  She was a blacksmith’s daughter, and her only real option for marriage was to marry her father’s apprentice.  His first apprentice was her true love.  But it was during WWI, and he had to go off to fight for the Germans.  He actually survived the war, and had a few days to spend in Berlin before going back home to the small town in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern where the blacksmith’s daughter lived.  He walked out of the Stettiner Bahnhof (now S-Bhf Nordbahnhof) and was immediately run over and killed by the Strassenbahn (S-Bahn).  Later, the woman married her father’s next apprentice, and he was a mean, stingy man, who would make his wife come to him in the smithy to ask for money to do the little grocery shopping they had to do (they had a farm as well as a vegetable garden).  When she got back, she’d have to give him all of the change, and he would check to make sure  she hadn’t bought any sweets for their children.

The story goes on… so her husband had a brother, who was also a blacksmith, but he owned his own small company and had about 5 or 6 workers.  He was quite wealthy and he owned a large villa outside of Hamburg.  He was also a very hard man, who was cruel to his wife and children, as well as the workers.  One day, two of his workers beat him to death.  Normally, they would have been sentenced to death, but WWII had just begun, so they were sent to fight in a battalion of criminals, who were always sent to the most dangerous battles.  The wife of the Hamburg blacksmith was so grateful to these two men who killed her husband, that she sent them care packages throughout the entire war, but nobody knows what happened to them in the end, whether they lived or were killed in combat.  And so ends the tale...