We live through the history of our era by the skin of our teeth.

129 years ago today, my grandmother Maria Theresa Edelmann was born in a slum in the German city of Paderborn. She lived through the history of her era by the skin of her teeth because she was the illegitimate daughter of a rope maker who wanted nothing to do with the family he created. After- being abandoned by the rope maker, she and her mother ended up in a poor house.

They resided in debtor's prison for a few years until My grandmother's mum found a man willing to marry her and settle her debts. Marie Theresa's stepfather was a hard-working paper hanger who liked to drink and be vicious to the vulnerable under his roof.

My grandmother took her stepfather's abuse until, at the age of 12, she ran off to Hamburg. Marie Theresa found work as a kitchen maid at a hotel located in a rough section of Hamburg whose clientele were sailors, pimps and prostitutes.

 In time, she fell in love with a waiter. They made plans to marry, but in 1914, her fiancé went to war for the Kaiser and left for the Western Front. Not long after the Great War began in August 1914, Marie Theresa's fiancé died in some forgetful side show of the conflict because he failed to duck or lit a cigarette when it wasn't advisable..

When the First World War ended, Marie Theresa was only 23 but had the life experiences of someone who had lived into old age. In just two decades of existence- she had encountered the worst humanity could offer women from poor backgrounds.

She wasn't soured by the hardship and the unfairness of it all because, in the new German republic, she fell in love again with a soldier who had survived the catastrophe of Passchendaele. It too didn't last long because her lover, who dodged bombs and bullets in trenches from English and French troops, could not withstand the perniciousness of the Spanish Flu. In 1920, my grandmother became a hotel manager in the Reeperbahn district of Hamburg during the Weimar Republic. In 1928, she had a love affair with a socialist, trade union organiser from Berlin, named Fritz. Their relationship left my grandmother pregnant with the child who years later became my mother.

History repeated itself because the socialist, trade union organiser named Fritz abandoned my grandmother and mum. He was a gadfly who believed more in revolution rather than personal responsibility.

1928 wasn’t a good year to be born working class in Germany because its ordinary citizens were paying a heavy price in reparations to the Allies for being the loser in the first Great War ten years previous. But it was the best year; my mum would see in Germany until after the Second World War, as each year that followed 1928 was more unsettling than the next. 1929 was when Wall Street crashed. 1930, millions of Germans were out of work and on the breadline. 1931, the banking crisis and recession caused Germany to plunge like an elevator shorn of its cables into a Great Depression. 1932, the Nazis became the largest party in Germany's Reichstag. 1933, Hitler became Chancellor, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Had it not been for Germany's economic collapse, my grandmother could have made it as a single mother on the wages she received as a manager of a dodgy hotel for sailors and shady businessmen. The financial and political instability of the times necessitated my grandmother become the mistress of a man who could provide both physical and monetary safety during an era of extremism. As my mother said in later life about my grandmother’s lover/provider. “He wasn’t the best sort, but there could have been worse.”

Uncle Henry, as he was known to my mother, was an overweight opportunistic importer of tobacco products. On weekdays, Henry deserted his wife and lived with my grandmother in an apartment he rented for her- located in a leafy suburb of Hamburg near its airport. On weekends he returned to his wife and five children, who lived in a small town north of the city.

To Henry, this division of affection and time was a perfect arrangement except for one inconvenience; my mother. It’s not that he disliked my mum, just her presence in his life. “I was a talkative inquisitive child wrapped around my mother’s apron strings. I disturbed his lovemaking to my mother and his business scheming.”

Henry was good at schemes because he had convinced an importer of games, who also happened to be a communist to sell a controlling interest in his company to him as protection against the Nazis. That same cunning had Henry arrange for my mother to become a foster child to a working-class family in the Altona district who were short of cash. My mother was parcelled off on weekdays to her new family and returned on weekends to visit her mother.

Henry dropped dead of a heart attack in 1944 after consuming a rich meal cooked for him by my grandmother and my mother returned to live with my grandmother..

After the Second World War, my grandmother's stepfather showed up at her doorstep because he was homeless and widowed. My grandmother took him in.

It was an act of charity he did not reciprocate to my grandmother as he was often belligerent and ungrateful living under her roof. In 1946, on my mum's birthday, he went to the basement of my grandmother's apartment and hung himself from a rope lashed to a beam. My grandmother said it was the kindest act he had ever done for others- in his life.

In 1949, my mother left Germany to begin a new life with my father in England and then years later in Canada. My mother made infrequent trips to Germany to visit my grandmother. My grandmother continued to work in hotel kitchens until a motorcycle accident in the 1960s made her unable to stand for long periods.

In 1973, I visited my grandmother with my mum. After the death of her half-sister who had taken care of her, my grandmother moved into a spartan long-term care facility with hallways that reeked of stale urine. My grandmother's room consisted of a sturdy bed, a bedside table with a fresh newspaper on it and a vase of flowers.

The last day we visited my grandmother before we flew back to Canada, my mother cried as she held her mum. I was ten, but I remember my grandmother's words.

"Why are you crying? You are going home to your family who loves you, and you love them. I have had my time, child. It was good."

My grandmother died in 1975. I am paraphrasing, but the report from the director of her care home stated that she raged against the dying of the light until a photo of my mother was put into her hand. Marie Theresa Edelmann: Brilliant, beautiful, angry, sarcastic difficult and misunderstood by most, including me showed an unfailing loyalty to her daughter, my mother, to her last breath.

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