Now it’s all in the past. The one-meter-high layer of magazines, papers and newspapers on the floor of the small room with the pretty flowered armchairs. The avalanche of empty shampoo and shower gel bottles, cosmetics and cans that spilled over the light marble-colored bathroom and made it unusable. The brown cardboard mountain of 87 moving boxes that rose up in the bedroom and living room and swallowed up the light from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
All the things – tens of thousands of them for sure – that were lying like rubble in, on and between the piles of boxes were also driven away on the back of the junk remover. Among them: the foxtail and the fur hat, 23 corsages, a ceramic frog family (4.50 DM each), 15 pans, Ungaro pumps (size 40), five heart-shaped soaps (1.99 DM each), a battered Barbie, 350 blank postcards, clothes with price tags on them, ten large wall mirrors in the Baroque style, candlesticks, hats and bags, so many hats and bags. And all the rubbish that merged with the good things to form an almost inseparable mass. Good heavens, how much rubbish there was!
The stench that had been hanging in the air outside the apartment door like an unwashed doorman has also vanished. And of course the black hollow is no longer there, on the left side of the pile in the living room, where the mother had lain dead for days. As if laid out on her bed of rubbish.
Sophie Weber sits down on the light beige living room sofa with elegantly curved legs, one of the few pieces of furniture that survived under the rubbish carpet, and looks through the emptiness into the light and open air.
For weeks – initially in a white disposable overall – she dug through her deceased mother’s belongings in the four-room apartment, sorted, kept, gave away, and let the junk removers take them. Sometimes she felt nothing at all, sometimes a lot. She was disgusted, amazed, struggled, happy, remembered, and looked into each box as if into a small abyss at the bottom of which lay the history of her family.
Sophie Weber, 42 years old, grew up in this condition with her mother Brigitte near Stuttgart. Both women have different names and will remain anonymous to protect the family.
Brigitte Weber has been a single mother since the birth of her child. Her daughter says that she has had a hard time with people all her life. Or perhaps people have had a hard time with her. “She was not empathetic.” Brigitte quickly falls out with friends, relatives, colleagues, men. Her child also feels unloved.
Brigitte Weber’s relationship to the silent, patient things around her seems all the closer. For as long as she can remember, her mother has bought and collected things, unable to part with anything, says Sophie. In her childhood, there were still small free spaces, paths through the accumulations in the apartments, which she changed several times.
But even then, her daughter didn’t dare bring a book from the library. The growing pile of newspapers would surely have swallowed it up. She always keeps her school things in her school bag.
There is no room for the child in the overcrowded rooms. His clothes are piled up on chairs, unwashed for weeks. Sophie does not have a room of her own. She has to share a bed with her mother. When she comes home from school in the afternoon, all she can do is watch the television. She feels “chained up” in front of it for hours.
She often wanders through the shops in town, studying the contents of the shelves to pass the time until bedtime. She would have loved to have toys! When she was clearing out the apartment, she found children’s books, games and painting materials, all brand new. Her mother must have bought them later and buried them in the chaos.
There were two Brigittes, says Sophie Weber. The hoarder mother at home who often opens cans of ravioli for her daughter because there is rubbish in the sink, on top of it and in the oven. The one who soaks plastic packaging and aluminium lids in the sink, bathtub and buckets to take them to the recycling centre – which she never does.
She is quick-tempered and mean. Instead of talking to her daughter, she only criticizes her. “Pluck your eyebrows already! Put on some makeup! Lose weight!” is what the adolescent, who to this day prefers to wear jeans, sneakers and sweaters, hears.
And then there is the radiant outdoor Brigitte with flowing hair, wearing a fur coat and cherry-red lipstick that she smears over the rims of her glasses. She is funny, self-ironic and quick-witted and shows off her daughter in a dress with a ruffled collar and white tights. She has extravagant taste and buys Limoges porcelain, 125 euros a cup.
This woman is a little exhausting, but she has an originality that can be very captivating. And that perhaps contributes to the fact that no one frees the child. Not neighbors, not acquaintances, not relatives, not teachers, not the mother herself. Although she does have moments of self-awareness. “You need your own room,” she sometimes says to Sophie.
But then: “Everything would be better if we had a bigger house.” She sticks a note in the frame of the kitchen door that says: “Deception, nothing but deception! Bouquet of roses and garbage. How do they fit together?”
Sophie often wondered where her mother’s collecting mania and her lack of love came from and how the two were connected. Whether her mother – born in 1943 – spent her whole life trying to leave the rough post-war conditions in Swabia, the low-class milieu in which she grew up as the daughter of a widowed seamstress, behind her. Her father had been kidnapped by Italian partisans during the war. He never returned.
There is no single cause behind the compulsive hoarding and littering that is known as hoarding syndrome. It is often a companion to schizophrenia, psychosis or borderline disorders. Fear of loss, trauma, the inability to regulate oneself and feel can be behind it. Psychoanalysis speaks of holes in the soul that need to be filled. Nobody knows what drove Brigitte Weber to her collecting mania. She never sought help.
The daughter did it differently. When she developed psychological problems during her studies, she went into treatment. She worked her way back to an independent life and towards a degree, even though she was still carrying the burden of her mother’s neglect and coldness. The intangible legacy of the parents is not so easy to clear away.
“To this day, I still have trouble perceiving my feelings. As a child, I had to shut them off from myself because otherwise I would have been too sad,” says Sophie Weber. She also knows the urge to keep things. One time, she collected 15 empty boxes on her balcony. A friend pointed this out to her. So she threw them all away.
As a teenager, she also freed herself from the forced relationship with her mother. She became increasingly depressed, and her classmates teased her about her dirty clothes. She withdrew and didn’t go to school for weeks. In the ninth grade, she told a teacher what was going on at home. “Then you just have to clean up,” was his only advice.
On the way home, she spots a sign for a psychiatric practice and simply goes in. The psychiatrist listens and refers her to the youth welfare office. They react immediately. At 15, Sophie moves into a supervised residential group for young people. She gets her high school diploma, completes an apprenticeship, and goes to university. Her mother supports her financially.
Contact with her remains loose and difficult, and in the end hardly exists at all. Anger was the strongest feeling towards her mother, says Sophie Weber. Anger at the fact that she never met her halfway and that she still has to suffer because of her. The anger does not go away even when the police inform her that Brigitte has died, alone in the apartment.
It was only after a few days that the overflowing mailbox seemed strange to the neighbors. All enmity ends in death. That is not the case for every fate. At least she feels relief: “I used to ask myself: ‘Why doesn’t she take care of me?’ Now I don’t have to anymore, she’s dead.”
When she has the certificate of inheritance, Sophie starts sorting and clearing out. She has found a lot of things in the mess that she wants to keep. Useful things like a suitcase, tea towels, a set of cutlery and pens. But also memories. Her school yearbook, certificates, a fencing foil with a mask, and a pair of shoes that she has been missing for a long time. Also family photos. Of her grandparents, great-grandparents, unknown relatives, of Brigitte Weber as a young woman with Sophie in her arms.
Recently she went to visit one of her mother’s old cousins and asked her to tell her who the woman in the pictures was and what her mother was like before she was a mother.
She wants to rent out the apartment. The rooms are empty now. Lots of space for a new life in them.
By Lisa Welzhofer
The original of this article “Between garbage and luxury porcelain: Sophie’s strange childhood with her hoarder mother” comes from STUTTGARTER ZEITUNG.