This is where my parents got to know and love each other—he from Recklinghausen, a medical student, she from Nuremberg, studying English and German literature.

They met at a cross-faculty ball, two highly sensitive and life-hungry young people with difficult pasts, and fell head over heels in love.

Finally, there was someone who shared pain, depth, and joie de vivre with the same intensity as they themselves did.

The freedom they experienced here from their previous lives must have been intoxicating.

The gentle and expansive landscape with meadows, forests, water, and mountains, almost in the very south of Germany, student parties and new experiences.

For my first stop on the way to France, I consciously chose Breisach near Freiburg, where my parents apparently once stayed overnight—at least that’s what an old hotel address I found in one of their notebooks suggests. Of course, they wouldn’t have stayed here as students, as they wouldn’t have been able to afford a hotel.

Yet the landscape, the views I was able to capture today despite the cold, hint at how my parents must have enjoyed the special atmosphere and the almost French air here.

I remember how they spoke of their student years:

My mother in a room in the city with a (supposed) ban on male visitors, large bowls for washing, and secret excursions to the bakery—croissants!—and my father renting a room outside Freiburg, so poor that he sometimes had only bread and mustard to eat—and yet enjoyed the freedom of cycling into the city, even if once his eyelashes nearly froze together from the cold.

The few pictures from that time show them carefree at parties, even though they, like everyone else back then, looked more grown-up than later generations.

When my mother went to Paris as an au pair, my father followed her and took a job in a workshop. When he unknowingly tried to fill the gas tank of a French car through the wrong opening, he was nearly fired. And my mother’s host family was so concerned with staying slim that even she—who prided herself her whole life on not caring about food—later enjoyed baguette, cheese, and wine on a park bench with her beloved.

Their stories of the artists by the Seine, of evenings of dancing and jazz concerts in Freiburg, sounded truly wonder-ful, if also nostalgic, like a time that could never return.

I’m grateful to have caught at least a breath of that atmosphere today—and I raise a toast to the absolute freedom my parents have now become!