Christa Sallentien

Dear Christa Sallentien,

What a peculiar moment that my path has now come to cross with your life through these words, which I will never be able to send to you personally, since your living days have already passed. The coincidence of both our lives – mine and yours – of being or having been at the same school, has made our encounter possible. But then, not by coincidence but by choice, I’ve somehow decided to get to know you more as I picked your name out of the many ones listed in the archive. That choice was then based on the only clue that you perhaps have laid aside the path of art and changed into medicine to become a doctor.

Christa Sallentien, you were born 1936 in São Palo, Brazil, and came to Hamburg at the age of 20, together with your older brother. While he took up his training at the Theodor Wille company, a logistic firm which now specializes in military supply services and supply chain management, you started your studies at HFBK. Your father praised your drawing skills in a letter to a cousin, and from his words I assume, it was your parents’ idea to let you train in commercial graphics. From the archive I know that you studied at HFBK from 1956-1958, and again from 1960-1961. But I assume you did not finish your studies here since in the archive of the University of Hamburg – where you studied medicine from 1967-1976 – a “zero” was noted under the section “previous studies.” Numerically, there is a long gap until the final date registered in connection to your name: † 08.01.2019 in Hamburg. Here, your life in facts and numbers ends. Given the small amount of dates, we are inevitably forced into the realm of obscurity when imagining your life.

I mentioned your father briefly above and it is through his two short letters that my imagination of your life has been fed with. These letters were addressed to his cousin living in Germany, and it was when I searched your name that I found them online in a private letter collection. Your father, Heinz Sallentien, travelled by ship from Bremen to Rio de Janeiro on 05^th May 1923. According to the Bremer passenger list, he travelled in the middle class as a 23 year old unmarried man who had been living in Switzerland before.¹ In São Paulo, he settled down and worked as a chemist in a big cigarette factory. In 1933, your oldest sister Brigitte was born, followed later by your brother Klaus, and then you.

He mentioned you in a letter written to a cousin in 1956, in which he expressed his concerns about the Suez Crisis and the threat it posed to living in Germany. He urged you and your brother to have your belongings packed – “not to leave,” he wrote, “but to always be ready to travel at any time.” ² I wonder what your life was like during those years — which were your early years in Hamburg. I also wonder about your relationship with your father, since one part of his writing has caused me quite some unease while I was digging into your life. He mentioned an encounter with a far relative: a man who had been a night fighter pilot in the war and held the Nazi knight’s cross (Ritterkreuz). Your father spoke quite fondly of him, describing him as a “charming and fundamentally decent” man.

Christa Sallentien, this is all I could find out about you, and your family. You probably can imagine how many questions arose during my research into your life. But had we had the chance to meet in person, most likely I would not have felt comfortable asking them all. Still, it would have been a pleasure to hear your life story in your own voice.