Good to meet you… Rev Renate Wilkinson

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2016/apr/22/good-to-meet-you-rev-renate-wilkinson

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I met my husband in 1968 on an exchange visit from Germany to Queen’s Theological College in Birmingham. We say we saw the coal dust in each other’s eyes. John is from a mining family in Barnsley and my father was a coal miner in Dortmund. We married in June 1970. On our honeymoon in a small guesthouse in Devon I was persona non grata for a few days when Germany beat England in the football World Cup. Then Italy beat Germany and relationships were restored. As well as a portable radio, the Guardian newspaper was an essential presence, as my husband followed the results of the general election in the same week.

Reading the Guardian helped me get to know the country that had become my new home. It enabled me to join in conversation about the issues of the day. I come from a family whose history was shaped by the Third Reich. My father was a member of the communist party. He was imprisoned in the mid-1930s and in the latter part of the war was called up into the penal battalion 999. He was stationed in Greece where, with other anti-fascist soldiers, he collaborated with the resistance, defected and joined them. At the end of the war he was handed over to the British and returned home from a POW camp in Egypt in 1947.

I greatly appreciate the strong support the Guardian is giving to the campaign for Britain to remain a member of the EU. I want our grandchildren to grow up in something bigger than this small island. I want them to know that Britain and Germany are part of a wider European history and culture that has shaped the world for good and for ill.

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