By Jim Sack

One of my heroes died just before Christmas. I found out minutes ago and have been seeing him in my memory for the past couple of hours.

Manfred Reussner was in his 50s. He died suddenly. That’s all I know. The message from his wife in Gera, our sister city in Germany, was terse, to the point, restrained. I cried.

Manfred grew up in post-war East Germany near Gera. His part of Germany was in the Soviet zone and he grew up with all that implied: Soviet soldiers everywhere, shortages, the shame of the war, the heroic propaganda of the socialist regime, the Stazi, but his stolid, determined, creative, indomitable German mindset.

I met him in 1991, the second year I visited Gera, a small city nestled in the hills of Eastern Thuringen, south of Leipzig, west of Dresden, north of Nurnberg. I stayed, as a member of the Fort Wayne delegation, in his home for a week. He scrambled every day to please me, to attend to my schedule, to drive me about, to help me build a relationship between Gera and Fort Wayne. He said clearly to me a hundred times a day that he loved America and I, the embodiment of the American ideal, was the object of his kindness, admiration, attention. I am absolutely sure that he loved America to his last breath.

His marriage was a story of post-war Germany. His wife, the gracious woman who has long managed the link between Gera and Fort Wayne, was the daughter of a Czech man and German woman, the man had been a prisoner in Germany during the war, the woman, a young beauty from Gera. They met in 1945 in Gera working together to clear rubble from American bombings. They fell in love, moved to Prague and had a baby girl. Years later, Manfred, the leader of a Gera sport club, saw that young beauty in Prague at a boxing match between his club and a Czech club; she was the translator, Czech to German. For the coming year he drove the route between his apartment in Gera and hers in Prague until she relented. They set up home in Gera, the city where her father and mother had met on a pile of rubble.

Manfred was a construction manager during the communist era, he would tell me stories of having to scrounge around East Germany to find some promised, but seldom delivered supplies, to finish a project. Central planning, he would laugh, never quite worked, but, as Forbes Magazine once noted, the Germans, through their tenacity and ingenuity, made it work to its highest potential. Manfred was that sort of German: strong, a true man, determined, not easily put off. He once took me to visit his mother at her farm south of Gera, on a hill overlooking rolling meadows and dense forests of oak and pine. O Tannenbaum. She was gray and wizened and lined, the source of his strength and determination. In her 70s, she was still a woman of fine features. I asked her about her life and she would get a vacant look, a distant look, a melancholy look. She had seen the Kaiser, the Nazis, the Russians, the sadness and loss of war, the frustrations of reconstruction. She and Manfred would tell short stories of rebuilding their Germany. I can only imagine what they endured.

So, I am glad that Manfred could tell me his stories and that he could sit contently, if a German can ever be content, in front of the TV and watch the fights, he loved the fights. And, he loved America, and gave that love to me and any other Fort Wayner who ever crossed his indomitable path. Ruhet in Gott, Mani.

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