Our Visit with Uncle Hartmut and Aunt Gisela

by Dieter Barge

Chart II a – II and III

From April 28th to April 30th, 2015, we paid a visit to Edda’s Uncle Hartmut and his wife Gisela in Kochstedt near Dessau.

Hartmut, the first child of Bruno and Johanna Kegler, was born in 1931 in Stettin (Szczecin). He attended the elementary and high school in Hirschberg (town in Lower Silesia). In Thuringia he graduated from an agricultural institute and took his post-secondary education in Rostock and Halle.

From 1955 to 1991 he worked as a scientist at the Institute of Plant Pathology Aschersleben of the German Academy of Agricultural Sciences of Berlin. In 1959 he pursued his doctoral studies, which earned him in 1964 the postdoctoral qualifications as professor. Gisela was born in 1931 in Havelberg and had an active career in the teaching profession.

After the reunification of Germany, Hartmut was dismissed and became unemployed and a pensioner. This came as a result of the closure of the institure. Both Hartmut and Gisela are occupied with keeping the cultural heritage of Nobel Prize winner Albert Schweitzer alive, hold conferences and publish works related to this theme. The lived in Aschersleben am Bäckerstieg 11, where we had often visited them in past.

In 2011 we celebrated their combined 160th birthday in the wonderful town of Havelberg at the confluence of the Havel River (great for going paddling) with the Elbe River.

In 2014 their son Harald procured for them accommodation with in-house care facilities in the Dessau city district of Kochstedt.

Here we visited them for the first time. Hartmut had reserved a room for us in the guesthouse ‘Heideperle’. We had lots of time for stimulating conversation.