My grandmother dreamed of becoming a writer all her life. When she was a child, her mother, like many women in the workers’ quarters of Essen, Germany, took in lodgers, subletting a room in their apartment, often to single men, in order to supplement the family’s income. The man who lived with Lotte’s family throughout her childhood appeared in anecdotes she told about her youth as “the Uncle”—an honorific that children in Germany were expected to bestow on family friends. Lotte’s parents must have felt great affection for this subletter because they named Lotte’s younger brother, Norbert, after him.

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Lotte’s Uncle Norbert made his living by sewing; a clubfoot kept him from taking on better-paid work in Essen’s coal mines or steel factories. When he was born, orthopedic interventions for this common condition, such as the Ponseti method of casting the foot to gradually redirect its growth, were still half a century away. Most children born with a clubfoot, not to mention more profound disabilities, were left with lifelong pain when walking or standing.

Sewing for a living meant that Norbert was nearly always home. His disability also kept him home when other men were sent to the trenches during World War I, which ended when Lotte was barely six years old. I don’t know how old she was when Norbert moved in. But as I try to imagine her sitting with Uncle Norbert while he sewed, I draw on my own early memories of my father’s father, Konrad: I spent many hours of my first years in a playpen my parents plopped right onto Opa Konrad’s workbench in the sewing shop above our store. Later I would often sit on a low wooden stool that the seamstresses in the shop used to climb onto the worktable or to crouch down to pin a customer’s hem. I remember the swish-swish of the big tailor’s scissors as they cut cloth along lines drawn with sharp-edged squares of waxy tailor’s chalk; how the cool smoothness of plastic, metal, and mother-of-pearl hugged my hands as I rifled through deep bins filled with stray buttons, hunting for treasures to string onto sturdy threads, making necklaces. In Lotte’s home, just like in mine, tailors, marooned on their workbenches, made for dependable babysitters, chatting with children, telling stories, looking up just in time to say “No, don’t put that in your mouth.”

There is her pencil, hovering, pouncing, picking away at punctuation marks, at faulty typography, but never, never straying toward faulty propaganda lines.

Behind bits of conversation and jokes tossed back and forth between seamstresses in my grandfather’s tailor shop, behind the hiss of the steam iron, the rat-tat-tat of sewing machines, behind the whoomph of the ventilators that suctioned cloth to the enormous steam ironing board, there was the big brown radio, always on, the rightmost of its six white Bakelite buttons pressed down for ultra shortwave, the round dial tuned to music, shows, and news. But Uncle Norbert’s tailor shop would have been quiet: he worked alone. The first radio show in Germany did not air until Lotte was ten, and most people could not afford a home radio until she was an adult. Sewing for a living meant that not only was Norbert a handy babysitter, but he also needed someone to keep him entertained: The child to whom he could tell stories became a child who would, eventually, tell him stories in return.

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As soon as Lotte learns how to read, she spends hours each day reading to Norbert from the newspaper or from books he brings home from the library. I imagine her crouched beneath his tailor’s workbench, on the low wooden tailor’s stool, a book open on her lap; Norbert will help her sound out the longer words. He’ll fold the *Essener Volkszeitung *or the *Essener General-Anzeiger *so that she can read a section appropriate for a young child.

In between readings, Lotte and Norbert talk about what they’ve learned. As she grows older, Norbert takes her to the theater on weekends, to concerts, or to the opera. The two of them are thick as thieves: between a father who works sixty hours a week in Krupp’s steel factory and a mother who is perpetually weak, fatigued, and often short-tempered from heart disease, Uncle Norbert is the adult in Lotte’s life who listens and who talks, who calls the doctor whenever Lotte’s mother faints, who is always there, always has time.

By the third grade, Lotte has become such an accomplished reader that she is regularly assigned to read to her classmates at school while they immerse themselves in art projects or needlework. Later, her teacher will praise her essays. And Lotte loves to write: the scritch of fountain pen on paper, the stories that unspool themselves in ink, line after line, page after page.

When Lotte finishes school, at age fourteen, in spring of 1927, it is the time of the Weimar Republic, the period when women first start to work outside the home in Germany, mostly as cleaners, shop assistants, seamstresses, nurses, or secretaries. Women also make first inroads into journalism, and some writers, like Irmgard Keun and Hedwig Courths-Mahler, publish the first bestsellers—for the first time it becomes possible for a woman to live on what she earns from her writing. Lotte sees the bylines of female reporters pop up in the *Essener Allgemeine Zeitung *or the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung. And she adores Hedwig Courths-Mahler’s serialized novels, eagerly awaiting each new installment.

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Perhaps it was Uncle Norbert who suggested that, if Lotte wanted to write, she might try to find work at a local paper. As it happens, just four years earlier, the *Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung *had opened its offices and a newly built printshop in the Reissmann-Grone-Haus in Essen’s Sachsenstraße, less than a half hour’s walk from Lotte’s family’s apartment. I imagine Lotte showing up at the busy printshop, maybe in response to a “help wanted” ad, with a recommendation letter from her teacher in hand. All the reading she has done has made her a spelling and grammar whiz, so, along with washing coffee cups, running errands, and feeding paper into the printing machine, she is hired to read page proofs before the trays of finished type are screwed into the press.

Picture teenage Lotte there: a short slip of a girl in a building full of grown men. In the foreman’s office above the printing floor, she bends over a small desk, her feet propped on a rung of her chair, pencil in hand, tongue sticking out as she concentrates on marking typesetting errors, the ink on her proof sheets still wet. Large windows connect the typesetter’s office to the workshop below, where men are lined up in rows, throwing lead slugs of type into trays. Beyond them, the press stands silent, its open maw hungry for the evening edition’s type.

How much of what Lotte proofreads is she taking in? Two years earlier, Hitler was arrested, sentenced, and jailed for his coup attempt in Bavaria. Right-leaning judges freed him a few months later. Within a year, he published Mein Kampf, created the SS as his personal bodyguard, and refounded the Nazi Party. What is Lotte thinking about a paper that pontificates about the “superiority” of the “German Race,” that propagandizes the right of this “superior race” to displace “lesser peoples”? A paper that is purporting to represent workers, like Lotte’s father, but is really targeted at well-to-do steel barons, and which soon transforms itself into a Nazi propaganda machine?

Below the windows that line one office wall, Lotte’s corrected spellings are being set in lead. She watches the foreman hand over the sheets, watches the bent backs of the typesetters, watches their arms fly as they sling letters, plop, plop, plop, into the setting frames. These men, these whirling arms, are framing what’s to come, feeding the presses, day after day, pounding stories into brains.

What is happening to Lotte’s brain here? There are the leaden letters, day after day, the proof sheets, the still-wet ink. There is her pencil, hovering, pouncing, picking away at punctuation marks, at faulty typography, but never, never straying toward faulty propaganda lines. Lotte wants to stay here, by the letters, by the press. She wants to be sent out on assignment, to write. But, day after day, her brain grows heavy, dull. Day after day, Lotte’s head droops, drops, sinks onto the proof sheet on her desk. She startles awake, looks up, wipes drool from her cheek onto her sleeve, stares down at ink smeared across her once-clean shirt. She jumps up, runs to the bathroom, gazes at herself in the small, spotted mirror above the sink. Brown curls. Huge blue eyes. She turns her head to try and read the ink stamped across her cheek: propaganda’s mirror image, imprinted across teenage skin. Führer. Weltherrschaft. She is a walking advertisement for Hitler’s words, printed in reverse. Sometimes, to find mistakes, you have to read a sentence back to front, the mirror showing you what’s really there. *Herrenvolk. *Oh God. She cannot stay. She wants to stay. She wants to write. She wants to be Hedwig Courths-Mahler, hold onto her pencil, to the press, the print, the make-believe stories of female heroines holding out against the odds, her words flying, flying, as paper unspools and unspools.

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Watch Lotte return to her desk, face wiped clean, sleeve still damp. Watch how she hunches over her proof sheet, her feet hinged on the rung between the chair legs because they don’t quite reach the floor. Slowly, slowly, her head begins to nod forward, her eyes close. She’ll jerk awake, focus on the letters beneath her pencil stub, until her head begins to sink again.

Eventually, the foreman shakes her shoulder. “Lotte,” he says, “child, wake up.”

She startles, looks at him bleary-eyed, then wipes a dribble of saliva from the corner of her mouth. After months of watching her, the foreman still can’t believe that anyone can fall asleep like that while the press on the other side of the office window is shaking the house.

The typesetters, busy slotting the evening edition into place, don’t look up. Lotte looks down at drips of drool on the green rubber mat that covers her desk. “Sorry,” she says, “it’s only been a minute.”

“Lotte, we’ve got to talk.”

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A frown gathers her eyebrows, her eyes turn determined. “It won’t happen again.”

“You know you can’t promise that. Look, Lotte, you’re a bright girl. And I know you really want to keep working here.”

“Then don’t fire me.”

Are the typesetters’ heads jerking around? Or is the press’s rumbling loud enough to cover up her sharp tone?

Lotte softens her voice. “Really, it won’t happen again.”

“I don’t think you can control it,” the foreman says, “or else you would.”

It feels wrong to the foreman that he has to shout this to make himself heard. But the printing press is so loud there is no quiet place in the building to have this talk.

“I’ve watched you; you don’t fall asleep like other people. And you’ve already told me you’re not staying up late at night.”

Lotte shakes her head no. They’ve been here before. She’s getting plenty of sleep, she says. And he knows she really wants to be here—she’s waiting for a chance. And why not? He’s seen it happen for plenty of the guys: Running odd jobs for the press office one day and then, bang, they’re sent out for their first story when two workers’ marches happen at once and nobody else has the time to cover the opening performance of the new play at the Grillo Theater that day.

She thinks she can write, and maybe she can. He can count on her to find the missing punctuation, switched letters, spelling mistakes. But this isn’t the place for her. Perhaps if she were in the newsroom upstairs, not down here, right above the press. But her assignment isn’t something he can do anything about; he needs her to feed paper into the ever-hungry press—and he has seen her head nod forward as her hands go slack too close to its lead-toothed maw.

“Lotte, it just takes some people that way. It’s the lead. The air down here is full of it. And if you keep breathing it in, you’ll only be getting worse.”

She looks like she’s about to cry, but she’s got to know.

“This is the third time just today. You’ve been getting worse each month. It’s not right to keep you on.”

He can see her swallow, pull herself together. She won’t cry after all. She’s quick, she’s funny, she’s got spunk. The men will miss her. But she can’t stay.

“We’ve sure loved having you here,” the foreman says.

I don’t know why the foreman was so certain that Lotte’s sleepiness was due to lead exposure—despite narcolepsy being a relatively rare condition, he might have seen symptoms of lead poisoning in enough of his workers that the conclusion seemed obvious to him. We still don’t know how exactly lead can trigger narcolepsy in genetically susceptible people—one theory suggests that it destroys brain cells that produce a neuropeptide called hypocretin, which is needed to prevent daytime sleepiness.

*

Lotte’s next job is in what she referred to as Haus Bethanien—I believe this may have been a residence for elderly ladies. Together with other girls, she cleans rooms, makes beds, serves meals. Her sleepiness follows her there. Often, she feels so bone-tired that she sneaks up the attic stairs, plops down on a wooden step, and falls asleep, her head propped against the banister. The only reason she does not lose her job is because one of her friends keeps watch for their supervisor, races up the stairs, and shakes Lotte awake before her absence is noticed.

Perhaps she stopped because the real story—of fear, of friends who disappeared, of leaden letters, marching men, of deportations and concentration camps, bombs and hunger, loss and cold—this real story could not be told.

I don’t know how long Lotte works at Haus Bethanien. It is the middle of the Golden Twenties, when the Dawes Plan helps the German economy boom, unemployment is at a historic low, and theater, music, and literature blossom. But the economic upswing in Germany is not shared by steel and coal workers in the Ruhr area, where strikes for fair wages and a shortening of the sixty-hour work week prompt steel barons to order massive lockouts and layoffs. Two hundred and forty thousand striking workers are fired. Over the next several years their unions win, over and over, in the courts, but the Weimar government is powerless to enforce court decisions against the owners of coal mines and steel factories.

As a result, a quarter of a million families in the Ruhr region descend into utter poverty. I don’t know if Lotte’s father was among the workers who lost their jobs, but if so, the family would have subsisted on meager aid from the union, the supplement to the rent they received from Uncle Norbert, and whatever Lotte might be able to earn. By the time the conflict ends, Lotte is sixteen. Soon after her seventeenth birthday, the Great Depression hits, American banks call in the credits they extended to German companies, and the German economy collapses.

*

Sometime during these turbulent years, Uncle Norbert opens a tobacconist’s store. Standing behind the counter is hard for him, so he hires Lotte to help run it. The store window displays expensive cigars, but mostly Lotte sells “looseys”—individual cigarettes, bought by young men who are out of work. Alfred, her future husband, will meet her that way: buying a cigarette or two when he has pennies to spare. Over the next twelve or thirteen years, Lotte will get pregnant, marry Alfred, and survive war, displacement, hunger, and five Cesarean sections. There will be no time to write. Alfred will be wounded in the war but, unlike so many other husbands, he will eventually come home. Lotte will feel grateful that he does, that she has what so many women all around her will crave all their lives: a husband who is alive, who will do anything to keep the family fed and safe. For the remaining decades of her life, she will worry about Elfriede, Anna, and baby Alfred, the three children who survive their births: all of them restless, driven, unable to sit down, to be still and breathe, unable to listen, always on the go.

Only after Alfred’s death, alone in her small apartment, will Lotte finally sit down with her daughter Anna’s discarded appointment books. She will pick up the pen she dropped so long ago. She knows the story she wants to write: the dreamy coffee-in-the-garden scene, the yarns in pink and baby blue, the husband who comes home from work, shared joy about a pregnancy.

But Lotte’s reading to six-year-old me stopped with her protagonists’ embarrassed, joyful smiles. If she wrote more, those pages failed to make her vicious cut for the boxed-up anthology of old letters and miscellaneous documents she left behind in the two drawers of her rolltop desk. I never asked what happened to the happy couple in her story after she read to me. I don’t know if the wife finished the baby sweaters, or if they saw their children born and grown. Perhaps Lotte’s writing stalled because the story had been set in her present-day 1970s, when an ultrasound told women not just about their baby’s health but also what color yarn to buy. Perhaps a story starting in a garden where women knitted, unafraid, a place where husbands returned home from work instead of war, could not carry a plot. Perhaps she stopped because the real story—of fear, of friends who disappeared, of leaden letters, marching men, of deportations and concentration camps, bombs and hunger, loss and cold—this real story could not be told.

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From Unexploded Ordnance: What She Felt. What They Feared. How They Survived. What They Saw. by Catharina Coenen. Copyright © 2025. Available from Restless Books.