Winfried Seibert - The girl that could not be named Esther

I assumed — I had no doubt about it — that G. was to be found in Brandenburg, a province in the central-eastern portion of Germany, adjoining Berlin. In the completely altered world since fall 1989, when the wall had come down, this was a particularly exciting task. Maybe that‘s why it was so easy to make a false assumption. Since September 1991, I had represented the newly founded state of Brandenburg in the soon-to-be reunited Germany for its Establishment under Article 36 of the Unification Treaty, and I was also advising the East German Radio Network for Brandenburg (ORB) in its initial phase. Everything seemed quite simple – in 1938 the independent city G. in Brandenburg could only have been the city of Gubin 1 › Reference.

My query of October 16, 1991, to the registry office in Gubin at first went unanswered. I had unexpected difficulties in making a telephone call there because my office first had to find out that the listing was not under Gubin, but under the East German name of Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Gubin 2 › Reference. Finally I learned that the new Gubin lay left of the Goerlitz branch of the Neisse River — that is, in East Germany — while the old city, with the town hall and the courts, lay on the right bank of the Neisse and had thus become Polish. The archive in Zielona Gora, previously Gruenberg, responded with a cordial letter and the report of my being dead wrong. There were no registry documents and no church records for our Pastor L.

If you are stuck, you ask the press. Other than that, I hoped to find in old newspaper records at least a birth notice of a little girl born on August 11, 1938. Maybe even with the name Esther, since for a few days after the birth the ban on this name might not have been communicated to this family.

All this activity made a big commotion, both in Gubin and around Gubin. The newspaper Lausitzer Rundschau was extremely helpful; it even did research on its own — ultimately all in vain — at the church supervisory office regarding Pastor L. On March 19, 1992, it issued a call to its readers:

The RUNDSCHAU has received an unusual letter from an attorney‘s office in the previous West German Republic. He is seeking documents and information regarding a certain Pastor L. and his daughter born August 11, 1938, in Gubin...

The attorney’s office is interested as well in finding this daughter, who apparently was born on August 11, 1938, and whose parents wanted to name her Esther. In accordance with the demonic spirit of the Nazi era, this name was rejected with somewhat fearful reasoning.

That was worded verbatim from my letter of January 24, 1992. There was a reader response that led to a certain Pastor Friedrich Wilhelm Lucas, who had however been pastor in Gubin only up to 1929. I then learned from his housekeeper, then living in Remscheid, that from Gubin he had moved to Usedom (Baltic island). After the war, in 1946, he had buried Gerhart Hauptmann 3 › Referenceon Hiddensee (another Baltic island).

These events were hazy in the memory of the readers of the Lausitzer Rundschau. It could hardly be otherwise after so long a time. After all, this Pastor Lucas had already been away from Gubin for 17 years at the time he presided at the burial of the great writer. This makes it all the more amazing that a few people even remembered the burial of a writer far from Gubin. A few even thought that Pastor Lucas had officiated at the burial of the Danish writer Martin Andersen Nexo, who had died in Dresden in 1954. This was all very exciting and very interesting, but it brought me no nearer to finding the Pastor L. I was looking for.

Old runs of Gubin newspapers were not to be found in Gubin. On the Polish side as well, the search was fruitless. In the Gubin of today, a barren field with a few stunted trees stands where the marketplace and town center used to be. Just beyond this there is a very lively black market, and only then does the town proper begin. I still had no answer from archives in Berlin (East or West) regarding any existing copies of Gubin newspapers. A birth announcement would have helped a lot. At least then the family name, of which only the initial letter “L” was known, would have been revealed.

On April 10, 1992, the Protestant Central Archive in Berlin wrote to me that, based on the pastoral almanac of the church province of Brandenburg of the year 1939, in 1938 no Pastor “L.” was active in Gubin. Thus in the entire Gubin area there was no Pastor L. to be found. How was that possible?

If G. was Gubin, then Pastor L. would not necessarily have to have been from Gubin, that is, he need not have been a pastor in Gubin. The registry office was then, as it is today, responsible for every child born in its district. The child had to be registered at the birthplace. G. was then the birthplace of Esther. That much was certain. The parents‘ place of residence, however, was still an open question. The family of the pastor could have been passing through, or perhaps they were visiting the wife‘s parents for the birth. Anything was possible. But then the birth would still have had to be registered in Gubin. If that were the case, then the search had to be broken off. Pastor L. could have come from any place in the German Reich. He was not to be found.

This is, if G. was Gubin. But was it really Gubin? How had I come to that conclusion? I had assumed that G. must lie in the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and I had liberally identified that jurisdiction with the state of Brandenburg. But was that correct? It was unbelievably wrong – but more of that later.

I then took a step back in my search. Perhaps there was a chance to fill in some of the unknown quantities in the equation. If the Supreme Court decision had been published in other professional journals, perhaps there was more to read there. The content in such publications is often given in an abridged form. It might be possible to find information in another journal that had fallen by the wayside when the item was published in the Legal Weekly. In the library of my state court, I found a reference to two other publications: StAZ 38.464 and JFG 18.261.

StAZ stands for Zeitschrift fuer Standesamtswesen — The Bulletin for Registry Office Activities — which still exists today under the title The Registry Office. The publisher sent me a copy of its publication of the Esther decision in which there was a reference not to G., but to a place called W. At first I thought this was a typo in the transcription of the decision — W. instead of G., an easy mistake to make — now I know better. Here too I should have read the text more carefully, for it said the following:

Pastor L. in W. reported to the registry office that he had given the name ‘Esther’ to his daughter born August 11, 1938.

Pastor L. thus lived in W., and the responsible registry office could still have been in G. The combination of the two place-name initials didn’t help much. There remained the search suggested by the third publication: JFG. Those initials stood for the Jahrbuch fuer Rechtsprechung in der freiwilligen Gerichtsbarkeit – Yearbook of Legal Decisions in Civil Status Matters That was the breakthrough.

From this yearbook I could identify the two lower level jurisdictions of the district and state courts of Essen, a large industrial city in the Ruhr Valley, completely on the other end of the country from Gubin. Gubin, Lusatia, Brandenburg without Greater Berlin – all these had been dead ends. Hard to understand, even if I learned a lot from these detours. So – Essen it was. The two cities with a „G“ in the area of Essen, Gladbeck and Gelsenkirchen, each had their own district court.

A quick look at the text of the law, which would have been a smart thing to do earlier, gave me the answer. According to section 50 of the Civil Status Law, the district courts with authority in matters of civil status are those courts that are based in the same place as a state court. The district court in Essen was then responsible for the entire state court area of Essen.