During that first summer in Berlin, my strangest encounter took place in the shadow of the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church. The ruined church tower in western Berlin is quite an eyeful, and the elderly woman standing before it was quite an earful. The husband agreed, Giovanni took her to a hotel room and, according to Helge later, her “entire world to date collapsed”. Eventually she found a new home in West Berlin, then a walled-in, anything goes alternative paradise. Like a real-life sister of Hedda Gabler and Shirley Valentine, Helge Goetze was a one-woman, multimedia emancipation movement.

Source: The Irish Times December 23, 2025 17:57 UTC