You’re lucky I didn’t kill you the way my father asked me to.
Lucky I didn’t abort you.
Lucky I wheeled you across the country to flee the war.
Not many of us are “lucky” enough to have had our mothers speak with such candor. But these are the three things Helga Schubert’s mom told her daughter to thank her lucky stars for.
It’s why her mother called Helga “Sunday’s child”—in the German idiom, the lucky one. Of course, she also happened to have been born on a Sunday, as we learn in the opening sequence of German media ARD’s documentary film, titled Sonntagskind.(Documentary in German, available through March).
All her life, Helga’s mother attributed the daughter’s successes to “luck,” never to anything her daughter may have done. She was just lucky. Sonntagskind.
And Schubert, now in her eighties, is experiencing a remarkable literary comeback: in 2020 she won Germany’s most prestigious literary award, The Ingeborg Bachmann Prize with her short story “Vom Aufstehen.” The story, “On Getting Up,” appears now for the first time in English in the British literary journal, Fictionable—translated by Aaron Sayne and me (Lillian M Banks). Her earlier works–Judasfrauen, for example–once only fully digested by conscientious professors of German like Mt. Holyoke’s Karen Remmler, who reviewed it in 1992–are now being revisited and re-released.
Schubert still finds it within her to credit her mother: in our interview with Richard Lea from Fictionable she tells listeners that “I always get lucky.” Give it a listen, here:
There’s got to be distance between the writer and their story
It feels as though she’s at once coming to terms with the mother who never wanted her while at the same time giving the mother her due. It’s a graceful flourish. A way of reclaiming childhood from the rubble and the ruins—turning to account a painful truth and acknowledging its intrinsic value. As truth.
On January 7, the remarkable writer turned 85.
We hope you’ll join us in wishing Helga a very happy birthday and a continued life of luck and lucky Sundays. She’s earned it.
Uncomfortable Truths 