Adieu Les Belles Choses
Farewell the Beautiful Ones
Those were the words written on her last postcard. But it wasn’t here who wrote but we did.
She called me, that 4th of July 2007. Whether I could drive her to the hospital, she was not feeling well. A year ago, they had detected quite severe cervical cancer. She had been two weeks at the hospital. The Charité Berlin specialists at the Rudolf-Virchow hospital had operated on the cervix. Later, she got two rounds of chemotherapy. After that, she seemed well off again. Beautiful and sarcastic as ever, she had restarted working. She loved her job as the head and founder of VIVA style, beauty department of VIVA models. Her friends, her family, we all believed, that she had won the fight against the beast.
Danielle was my first wife and the first love of my life in our early 20ies. We knew that nothing lasts forever. We were too young and so eager to live life as if it was a novel. “La vie est un roman” (1983 by Alain Resnais, French director). That was our credo. We met at the university in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1983. She was from Marseille. It was her who made me return to Berlin.
Ten years after we separated. By then, Danielle was not only tied to Berlin but remained my closest friend, my little “sister.” She has been my marriage witness when I married my second wife in 2004…
