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A Farm and Eleven Children

Ewald Frie

The Quiet Farewell to Farming Life

During the 1960s, the proud tradition of rural agriculture with its livestock markets, self-sufficiency and back-breaking work disappeared at a rapid pace, but with very little noise. Ewald Frie uses the example of his own family to give an account of this major change. With a light touch, using telling scenes and examples, he shows how his parents’ world began to disappear, how his siblings pursued different paths in life, and how general social change affected the countryside.

Stock bulls for the monthly auction, cows and pigs in the fields, horses pulling the plough, a kitchen garden, the farm profitably run by parents, children and workers: the rural life of the 1950s seems closer to the Middle Ages than to our own time. But then everything changed: once-affluent and respected farmers, despite all their efforts to modernise, were suddenly seen as impoverished and backward; their children smelt of the stables, and felt ashamed. The Catholic Church provided ways out of the farming world with new youth work. The welfare state helped with training and the handing-over of farms. By the 1970s, the rural world had changed completely. And this change happened so quietly that people look back on it now with incredulity: ‘My God, I lived through that, and now it seems like something from another century.’ Ewald Frie asked his ten siblings, born between 1944 and 1969, how they experienced this period. His brilliantly written book brings the era to life with an unerringly laconic quality.


*When farming life came to an end – the end of an era

*A family lives through the disappearance of farming life in the 1950s and 1960s

*Effectively weaves together the family’s own experiences and the historical context

*A compelling and moving book written in rich and vivid prose

*For readers of Christiane Hoffmann’s bestseller ‘Alles, was wir nicht erinnern’

Available products
Book

Published 2023-02-16 by C.H.Beck , ISBN: 9783406797170

Main content page count: 192 Pages

ISBN: 9783406797170

Book

Published 2023-02-16T09:08:36.004Z by C.H.Beck , ISBN: 9783406797170

Absolute page count: 191 Pages

ISBN: 9783406797170

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Frie, Ewald: History of the World (2019)

    Simplified Chinese: CITIC Press Corporation

Complex Chinese: Faces Publications

    Korean: Donga M&B Co.