Bad Kissingen, Germany
⭐ Big shout out to Heidi for her donation! Thank you! ⭐
Back in February 2024, I took a trip to Bad Kissingen, Germany, to see my great grandmother’s village.
I knew we had a family grave there and I knew that my great grandmother lived above a cinema they owned after she moved back to Bad Kissingen from Berlin.
Did I know the name of the cinema? No.
Did I have any other information about the cinema? No.
So before I left to visit the village, I dug in to see what I could find. This is what I found:
allekinos.com
Here you can see my great grandmother’s name - Anna Hendel - and that it is located in Bad Kissingen on Ludwigstrasse 16.
A great starting point.
Next was to go see the village.
Unfortunately when I arrived to Nuremberg, the country was having a train strike and I stayed at the Nuremberg HBF for hours till I could navigate through a maze of trains to finally get to Bad Kissingen.
I took a picture of the inside of the train because it splits into two and boy was that confusing (haha).
I finally made it to Bad Kissingen and my wonderful Airbnb host, Peter, picked me up from the train station.
The next day I decided to go see the place where the cinema used to be and walked through the city center to the cemetery I knew my family was buried. I stopped by this church pictured with the arched roofs and wrote down a prayer on a slip of paper.
The picture with the little circular lake is the park that is in front of the historical cemetery - Kapellenfriedhof. The two pictures of the orangey-looking church are of the inside of the Kapellenfriedhof where my family is buried. I took my lunch to the cemetery to eat near my family’s grave. I enjoyed being with them.
Ever since I moved overseas in 2013 I had dreamed of going to Bad Kissingen. Life always seemed to be busy.
So after I was done eating, I got up to lay flowers down for Omi (my great grandmother) and to my surprise I find this plastered on the foot of the family grave. I almost missed it because the text can only be seen from an up-close angle (almost like it was supposed to be hidden):
„Im März 2013 kamen Nachkommen der Familie Hendel Wagner aus Brasilien hierher, um ihre Herkunft zu ehren. Gott hat uns gesegnet.“
Translation: In March 2013, descendants of the Hendel Wagner family from Brazil came here to honor their origins. God has blessed us.
Well…that was a curveball.
We all know what it means when Germans after WW2 went to South America. It is the stereotypical story. Let’s just say it was a frenzy of figuring out what the heck this meant and who they heck they were.
Heidi, my youngest sister, was the one who found the following information:
Heinz Hendel Wagner (Bad Kissigen, Bavaria, Germany 1921 - São Paulo, São Paulo, 1982). Painter. Studied at the School of Applied Arts in Breslau, Germany. After serving as a volunteer for the German Red Cross between 1940 and 1945, he moved to France, where he furthered his artistic studies and began a course in dentistry at the University of Paris. In 1953, he came to São Paulo, became a disciple of Luigi Zanoto and joined the Ateliê Expressão. In the 1960s, together with the Spanish painter Francesc Domingo Segura (1893 - 1974), he founded the Grupo Bisonte.
[source]
How Heinz is directly connected is still unsolved but it is on the questions list.
I placed the flowers on Omi’s grave and came back the next day to clean the grave as best as I could given it was still winter time.
I also wanted to check out if one of grandma’s friends were still in town as my older sister, Amanda, went there with her years earlier. She told me which hotel to go to.
My grandma sitting on the steps of her friend’s hotel, Haus Marga.
When I walked in, no one was at the front desk, so I called the number on the business card and some lady (who sounded like she was in the back of the hallway inside the hotel) answered. She was angry when I asked if she is the new owner as her voice was younger than I expected. She said she wasn’t “new” since she had had the business for over a decade. We had this whole conversation while I could hear her down the ways behind a door (lol).
Grandma’s friend had moved to Frankfurt to live with her children. And so, Bad Kissingen holds one less person to talk to about my grandma.
Till next time,
Caitlin
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