Bad luck dwelt in every house.

It had established itself in our village and seemed to want to stay.

As soon as the neighbor's son had his driver's license in his pocket, he drove himself to his death.

Five minutes away from us lived a young, passionately guitar-playing woman with her daughter and her husband.

She fell ill with leukemia.

First she lost her hair, then she lost her courage and finally her life.

My best friend's mom drank.

When I rang the bell, she always opened the door, slurred a greeting and smiled.

A crooked mouth in a beautiful face.

Her wrists were so thin that one feared they might snap like a rotten branch.

My friend pulled me into her room by the sleeve, head down as if she couldn't meet her mother's eyes.

She was so ashamed.

Melanie Muehl

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Our village had a few hundred inhabitants.

There was neither a café nor a restaurant, there was only a cigarette machine, which I was sent to occasionally, a shop with the basic necessities, a church that was always full on Sundays, and a bus and train station.

However, the stops were mostly deserted, because neither the bus nor the train ran frequently.

Bayreuth, the nearest city, seemed infinitely far away.

At night there was dead silence.

Memory often plays tricks on you

We were newcomers, a single divorced woman with two children.

Patchwork, this term didn't exist back then, in the mid-eighties, at least not in our village.

It would not have been accurate at all, because a blended family lacked a new man and half-siblings.

The villagers, all small families in their own homes with a fondness for garden gnomes, eyed us.

There was pity in their eyes.

A disparagement that hurt.

I wanted to get out of this village.

Nothing is easier than cursing your own youth in the provinces.

Getting upset about the loneliness, the curiosity of the neighbors, the gossip, mendacity, backwardness and fake piety with their neatly folded hands in the service.

As if you had lived in hell and are now dissecting the former narrowness from which you escaped with a cosmopolitan perspective.

But memory plays many tricks on you.

I felt this tightness.

She could tie up your throat.

The longing to disappear in an anonymous, metropolitan crowd was great.

Thoughts of fleeing, as many young people in the province have.

When you are young, you have no idea what it means to take yourself everywhere.

But one thing helped against this narrowness and the concentrated unhappiness in our village: friendships.

Talking, being there for each other, actually around the clock - that made everything better and sometimes even quite bearable.

Novels like “Auerhaus” by Bov Bjerg have been written about such friendships and their power.

In this sadly beautiful bestseller turned film, young people move into an old house on the edge of the Swabian Jura, where they take care of their suicidal friend Frieder.

Frieder has tried to take his own life before.

His friends fear he might do it again.

So they are always close to him, building bridges over which Frieder timidly walks.

At one point he says, "I didn't want to kill myself.

I just didn't want to live anymore.

I think there is a difference.”

A burned guinea pig

Because the household budget is usually empty, the young people steal from the supermarket.

Coffee, stollen, packaged salami, wine.

The raids bond the group together like any bullshit you can get away with.

My girlfriend and I once tried to give a dignified burial to a dead guinea pig.

For us, worthy meant: cremation.

With plenty of fuel, so our idea, it should work.

We imagined the wind carrying the animal's ashes in all directions.

It went terribly wrong.