MELINA MÖRSDORF

„The gate in front of the entrance to the house wasn’t there before. The woman, whose name in this story is Cornelia Hoppe, stops and looks up. From the
From the rooms on the fourth floor, she says, you could see the windows of the house opposite and what was going on inside. The building with the red facade used to be a brothel.
We have arranged to meet Hoppe for a walk along Hamburger Berg, the amusement mile of St. Pauli, where she lived with her family 50 years ago. First stop: her old home. The new fence is designed to stop party-goers from loitering on the steps of the entrance at the weekend with Bacardi-Cola from the bakery next door. The residents like urbanity, but don’t want alcoholics too close to them.
There was no such fence in Hoppe’s childhood. Even then, she remembers, shouting and bar noise came in from outside, the air in the apartment was stuffy because her mother and father chain-smoked, there was no shower, no bath and no heating. Instead, there was mold on the walls and furniture that was ready for the scrap heap. The brothers shared a room; Cornelia slept with her parents. They just wanted to get drunk, get intoxicated and stagger back into the light.
“Säuferkind. Mein Leben als Co-Abhängige und wie ich trotzdem glücklich wurde” is the title of the book in which Cornelia Hoppe not only tells the story of how she and her brothers were left to their own devices, but also of the maelstrom into which their parents‘ alcoholism threw them for decades of their lives.“

I was allowed to accompany “Cornelia” around the neighborhood for an afternoon and was impressed by her strength and courage to face life.
Text: Jana Felgenhauer.