A Meeting with Ingrid S. [1]
Angelika Mechtel [2]
Translated by xia23
We have arranged to meet in a café.
Ingrid S. sits across the table from me. She is still young, perhaps 25, and she is unhappy.
“I haven’t talked to anyone about my difficulties yet”, she says.
Last October her husband robbed a bank in the old town. He was arrested by police at the same day and held in custody until May 1975. “He hasn’t seen any other possibility”, Ingrid S. reports. She is afraid.
“You don’t need to be afraid”, I say, “all conversations I have had with wives of prisoners remain anonymous. Many of these women have the same problems as you.”
“It’s bad”, she thinks, “if you can’t talk to anyone about it, sometimes I sit at home and don’t know what to do. I’m often very lonely.”
Then she talks about her husband.
At the end of May this year he is sentenced to 5 years in prison. He will probably be released after 3 years, but 3 years are a long time.
While he was still in pretrial detention, Ingrid S. was allowed to visit him 15 minutes every two weeks.
“I don’t know, if you know situation there”, she says: “I often have waited for one or also two hours to see him. Then you sit in a small room, where there are also 8 or 10 other people there, and they were supposed to be able to talk to each other. You have so much to say and only a quarter of an hour. That’s bad.”
In the next few days her husband will be transferred to the prison in Straubing [3]. There she is allowed to visit him once a month for half an hour.
“Once in a month for half an hour”, says she, “that is not humane!”
Since her husband is in prison, he has written to her almost every day. Every letter, he has sent or received, is checked by the prison authorities.
“At first I had difficulty to write my letter the way I would have written them without censorship”, reports Ingrid S. “I was afraid of showing my feelings because I have known the other people will read these letters. But today, I simply don’t think about it anymore.”
“He has committed the crime because we were in deep debt”, she says. “In January 1974 we have bought an old house in the country, which we renovated, so we could live there. My husband has always handled the financial matters. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I have not asked about his concern either. That has been a mistake.
Every evening after work they have driven 50 kilometers from the city, in order to work on their house. It was often midnight by the time they got home, and they got up at six o’clock in the morning and went to office. That stressed them both out.
“We have not tried to excuse his act”, says Ingrid S., “but does the penal system have to be so inhumane?”
Her husband has been in prison, that many marriages break down, because no real contact is possible between the spouses. “The newspapers have reported, that the prisoners are demanding a room for sexual contacts”, reports Ingrid S., “but actually they only demand rooms, where they can meet their families without censorship.
The close family contact can be a chance for the resocialization.
Ingrid S. speaks of Sweden, because she has informed me about the penal system in Sweden. For you Sweden is a positive sample: “The connection between the prisoners with their families is possible there.”
Here in the Federal Republic [4] there is not even a counselling center for women, whose husbands are in prisons.
“I’m so alone”, says Ingrid S. “in workplace people talk to me, that I should leave my husband, and suddenly I was less valuable than my colleagues and I can’t talk to anyone about that.”
Ingrid S. has tried, to form a group of women who have the same difficulties, but no authority has helped her for that. So she is still alone today, as she was in October of last year.
I ask her: “Have you ever thought about leaving your husband?”
Ingrid S. replies: “I love my husband. I won’t leave him alone.”
[1]. p. 17. Eine Verabredung mit Ingrid S. Kontakt mit der Zeit. Dieter Stöpfgeshoff. Max Hueber Verlag. Germany, 1995.
[2]. Angelika Mechtel. 8/26/1943 – 2/8/2000. A German writer. She wrote stories, novels, poems, essays, radio plays and reportage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelika_Mechtel
[3]. Strawbing. A city in southern Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straubing
[4]. Federal Republic. Germany.
