A Farm and Eleven Children

Stock bulls for the monthly auction, cows and pigs in the fields, horses pulling the plough, a kitchen garden, the farm profitably run by parents, children and workers: the rural life of the 1950s seems closer to the Middle Ages than to our own time. But then everything changed: once-affluent and respected farmers, despite all their efforts to modernise, were suddenly seen as impoverished and backward; their children smelt of the stables, and felt ashamed. The Catholic Church provided ways out of the farming world with new youth work. The welfare state helped with training and the handing-over of farms. By the 1970s, the rural world had changed completely. And this change happened so quietly that people look back on it now with incredulity: ‘My God, I lived through that, and now it seems like something from another century.’ Ewald Frie asked his ten siblings, born between 1944 and 1969, how they experienced this period. His brilliantly written book brings the era to life with an unerringly laconic quality.

*When farming life came to an end – the end of an era

*A family lives through the disappearance of farming life in the 1950s and 1960s

*Effectively weaves together the family’s own experiences and the historical context

*A compelling and moving book written in rich and vivid prose

*For readers of Christiane Hoffmann’s bestseller ‘Alles, was wir nicht erinnern’