ALS HEDWIG IN DEN RHEIN FIEL

In Duisburg at the end of the 1920s Hedwig and her brother and sister, Walter and Hilde, were messing around on a plank of wood that stretched between a wall of the harbour and a ship. Suddenly Hedwig fell between the wall and the boat into the river Rhine. Luckily she was saved and the story became a family legend.

Over 70 years later the siblings still remember clearly, but also very differently, their childhoods in Duisburg harbour: their parents and their grandparents; the difficulties of their upbringings and the corporal punishment they received. As far as Hilde is concerned: "our parents never hit us", but Walter recalls "our mother would smack me with a hand brush like she was hitting old iron."

Independently from each other and without restraint Hedwig, Walter and Hilde casually offer their personal accounts of the time. The tale of when Hedwig fell into the Rhine leads to a set of fascinating orals histories in which the brother and sisters grant us extremely vivid insights into their relationships with each other and into their own individual personalities.