Was die Dörfer einst zusammenhielt

Stories from the Past: The Bright and Dark Sides of Rural Life

For centuries, it has endured: the village culture, as described by the eyewitnesses in Ulrike Siegel's book. Without sentimentality, they recount the many facets of village life in the 1950s and 60s. The sounds emanating from the forge and the farms. The smells that could instantly reveal whether a particular house was the carpenter's, the shoemaker's, or something else entirely.

Childhood in the countryside: village stories and personal memories. The village master and the village midwife: extinct professions that shaped village life. Village festivals in summer, biting cold in winter: life in the cycle of the seasons. How it used to be: daily life in the 1950s and 60s.

First-hand village stories: experiences that linger in memory.

The gray apron of the shoemaker, the quirks of the village teacher, and the railway clerk's question of why one would want to go to the city: it is primarily encounters with people that shaped life in the countryside. The men and women who bring their childhood back to life in this book speak volumes about the community that made the village atmosphere so vibrant. Their accounts ensure that typical village life does not fade into oblivion. "What once held the villages together" is a reading book about life in the past, presented without embellishments, keeping the memory of a very special way of life alive.