I crashed my bike last night while riding around inner Oslo on my way home from the university. Or rather, I couldn’t handle it for a few split seconds after shifting gears as somehow the chain got loose. I managed to get home and scared one person that I had chosen to tell about it over mobile messaging, just in case I had some more severe commotio cerebri that would make it impossible for me to communicate this morning in which case the person could call the ambulance the net day. Of course nothing happened,and so I’m sitting here with nothing left but a right foot with a few scrapes which renders me sick enough not to make plans to leave this room too much for the next day or so.

It is much worse with my grandmother. My grandmother has been living on her bike. And now she won’t be able to ride it any more. My grandmother without a bike? Not something I can think of. But she likes to ride trains too – usually along that route that she fled along on her bike during the end of WWII.

“My best friend” is what she calls her bike, and she has been riding it since some time in the thirties, as far as I understand. My grandmother on my father’s side was born in 1920 in the former eastern provinces of Germany. Through her father she learned about the Social Democrats, but her parents divorced early, and she didn’t connect well with her parents later on in life. My grandmother says openly that she was screaming “Heil Hitler” when the Nazi-German troops marched in and connected the Eastern provinces with the rest of German, thereby destroying the Polish corridor that had connected Poland to the sea. Although she enjoyed the time in the BDM (Cooperation of German Girls) and had hoped that Germany would win the war, she says that she could not understand the treatment of the Jews: “‘From a logical perspective that might all be right,’ I told my fiancee, ‘but what about the human perspective…?'” Her father ended up being in a concentration camp for six months because he handed a cigarette o a Polish worker and refused to apologize for his behavior. “When he came home,” my grandmother says, “he was shaved completely bald. They had told him that he was not allowed to tell anything about what was going on there. He didn’t say a word, but he was never the same again.”

In 1945, when the war was about to end, my grandmother was in central Germany. She managed to see Dresden in ruins, and the train she took up North from Berlin was the last train to leave the city – a fact that nobody could know about before afterwards. In what is now North-Eastern Germany, she had a friend who had stayed in contact with my grandmother’s fiancee. And so she got to know that he was in Neumünster, a city in North-western Germany. My grandmother chose to steal a bike from a home that looked quite intact; “I thought: ‘They have everything left, and I have nothing.’,” my grandmother has explained many times, fearing that I would hold her bike-stealing against her fifty to sixty years after it happened. With the bike, she rode and rode westwards. “How did you manage to stay in the right direction with all that war around,”I remember asking her a few years back. “You could make out the train tracks as there would be low flying air planes above the trains,” she answered, in a seemingly unaltered voice.

Since then, her bike has been everything for her. University friends of my father have told about situations when she would be riding her bike packed with bags in the third gear uphill on the street lacking asphalt in Kiel during the sixties and seventies. And she has continued to ride around with everything reaching from cupboards to large pieces of wood that she found until recently. She has moved around Schleswig-Holstein quite a bit since the end of the eighties, when she left the family apartment in Kiel, and everywhere she went, she turned into an icon. A few years after I left the area, she gave up the house my parents bought for her a few years earlier, and moved to Schleswig – only 7 km away from my parents in Schuby. She still rode her bike, and she was soon known by most of the police in the area, and my father received reports from many of his patients about the doings of his mother. Because besides riding her bike, she had a few other interesting activities – like taking extensive train rides across Northern Germany just for the fun of it, or spending hours entire days picking up trash in the woods as she felt none else was doing it. Even when she still lived 1.5 h train ride southwards, she would deposit small gifts in front of my parents door on weekend mornings, just to travel back home or to some other destination before any of the Schuby-ites woke up.

I myself used to visit her a lot when I was younger, and she also made sure that I trained how to ride a bike, whenever she visited us in Schuby. When I moved out and into a flat in Flensburg together with two of my class mates, she would visit us there – and also he two others sharing the flat were instructed to call her “Grossmutti” (“big mother” – an old-fashined way of saying “grandmother” in German). She made sure to have a professional put up curtains in my room, would mostly bring along cakes or soups that she had made herself. She would often park her bike across the street and then walk up and down the road until I or one of the others got home from school.

But then the accidents started. “If you stop moving, you’ll start to rust,” my grandmother, who has never owned a TV, likes to say. But at some point of time she stopped being safe in traffic. The first time was several years ago, and she gave the police a false name and address, and when they followed her, she tricked them by riding up a one way road the wrong way. Over the next few times, the injuries got more severe, and she ended up in hospital several times. When I called my parents about a week ago to ask what they thought about the German election results, they said that she has now agreed to give up her bike, which is standing in a deposit at a police station somewhere. According to my parents, she wants me to have it, “cause he really doesn’t have anything real [a good bike]” as she told them. Apparently it’s the end of an era.Now maybe she’ll agree to get a phone again.