Birgitta M. Schulte. In search of the past
“Grün und Blau – Polackenfrau!” (“Green and blue – Polack woman!”). As a six-year-old in her first year of primary school, Birgitta had no idea of the meaning of the words that she and the other children were calling after one of the other girls there. Certainly, she couldn’t have guessed that they might actually have been used against her. When she looked down, she could see the green and blue colours in her neatly pleated skirt, just like the other girl.
Birgitta M. Schulte was born in Bochum in 1951. Although she was enrolled at the Drusenberg primary school there, she soon had to leave her first-year class. Her parents moved to Steinheim in Westphalia, where they had the opportunity to run their own chemist’s shop, and took Birgitta and her brother, who was five years younger, with them. From year five onwards, she attended the structured secondary school in Detmold, which was later renamed the “Grabbe Gymnasium”. It was here that she took her “Abitur” (“A-Level”) school-leaving exams. Her father had already sat his Abitur at the Freiherr vom Stein structured secondary school in Recklinghausen, the first grammar school in the Ruhr region to take on pupils from “Haupt- and Realschulen” (less academically oriented lower secondary schools – translator’s note), and thus, especially, helped children from workers’ families to gain a higher education. This was just the kind of academic opportunity of which Adam in “Ruhrgemüse, polnisch” dreams.
Her father wanted her to enter the family business at the chemist’s shop. Under pressure from him, she went on to study pharmacy. After doing so well at school and enjoying learning as a pupil there, she now had difficulty coping with the exams. At some point, she decided to quit. She simply didn’t want to be a pharmacist, and this was something that her father had to accept. Finally, Birgitta M. Schulte began studying to be a teacher of German and political science in Braunschweig and Bremen. She published her final thesis on Ödön von Horváth and then began work not as a teacher, but on the editorial board of the “educational magazines” division of the Westermann Verlag publishing house. Later, she contributed to the youth trade union magazine “ran”, as well as to “päd.extra”, a self-administered operation that published books and an influential magazine for teachers, as well as a journal on social work.
In 1984, Schulte went one step further and went freelance as a journalist. Initially, most of her work was produced for radio. Her contributions here included items on gender relations during the First World War for the “Kultur und Wissenschaft” (“Culture and Science”) programme on the WDR station, as well as half-hour features such as “Der Beinah-Mord in Mesopotamien. Agatha Christie und die Archäologie” (“The Near-Murder in Mesopotamia. Agatha Christie and Archaeology”) for the Hessischer Rundfunk radio station. She also took on work for radio broadcasters such as Deutschlandfunk and Radio Bremen. Schulte also wrote an impressive range of articles for the print media. Her work was not only published in specialist journals such as “Pädagogik” (“Pedagogy”), “Deutsche Lehrerzeitung” (“The German Teacher’s Newspaper”) and “Erziehung und Wissenschaft” (“Education and Science”), but also in well-known daily newspapers such as the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, the “Tagesspiegel” and the “Frankfurter Rundschau”. Her main areas of interest soon became apparent. As well as “education”, she was also interested in “women”, “culture” and “ecology”.
As a journalist, standing still is simply not an option. Schulte was constantly delving into interesting new topics and has still not lost her love of learning. When radio stations began taking on fewer verbal contributions, Schulte looked around for other work opportunities and trained as a coach at the University of Bielefeld. One of her focal areas was biological sex in the cultural sphere, or “gender”. How do socially ascribed roles impact women and men? How do I consciously respond to them? What are the opportunities and limits of a gender-appropriate way of speaking and writing? As a specialist in “gender issues” in the Journalistinnenbund (association of female journalists) since 1999, Birgitta M. Schulte offers a range of different training courses on gender for the “Deutschland” magazine and for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation JournalistenAkademie (Journalist Academy), some in cooperation with the government Press and Information Office. She was a member of the “Gender-Training” network, offered courses on the subject in Germany and abroad, and from 2002 to 2006 was deputy chairwoman of the Journalistinnenbund.
It is a reflection of her extraordinary energy that alongside her work as a freelance journalist, she also found time to write non-fiction books and short stories. In 1999, for example, the Christel-Göttert-Verlag published a portrait of the writer, dramatist and journalist Ilse Langner (1899–1987) entitled “Ich möchte die Welt hinreißen” (“I want to thrill the world”). Schulte became increasingly fascinated by the life and work of the author, who was born in Wrocław. Together with the actor Cornelia Niemann, she wrote a solo stage piece on Langner, which was performed at the Literaturhaus Frankfurt and elsewhere.
When Schulte retired in 2015, she dedicated more of her time to her literary work. This included stories that she had written in previous years, which were published by Chili-Verlag in 2020 under the title “Findungen. Erzählungen über Annäherung” (“Findings. Stories about Coming Closer”). One day, while packing her belongings during a house move, she discovered the family history album and saw that her father’s ancestors bore Polish names. Her father had never spoken about his Polish roots, or of a connection with Poland in any form. How could that have happened? Schulte had always regarded herself as being “purely” German. Now, she began to realise that her feeling of not belonging might have something to do with the history of migration that no-one in the family had talked about. In her words: “My father disowned his Polish origins. Perhaps it was because of a sense of shame that he never talked about them. The Polish migrants to the Ruhr region were poor and were not really made to feel welcome.”
Schulte remembers that her father used to say to her mother: “Never leave the cabbage too long on the stove.” Now, she understands why. The smell of “Kappes” was a “poor people’s smell” typical for Polish immigrants. Schulte’s father had ambition. With his “Abitur” qualification, he was keen to leave his working class roots behind. As Schulte explains: “I experienced my father as a distinguished member of the higher class, and yet at the same time, he refused to obey the dress code, wearing knickerbockers instead of a suit, and no tie. Did his clothes still reek of Kappes?”
She was determined to find out more. She searched the internet for the places where her grandparents were born and asked her mother questions with a street map in her hand: Which street names do you remember? At the same time, she was furious about the fact that in 2015, Germany still didn’t consider itself to be a country that welcomed immigrants. The so-called “refugee crisis” was discussed ad nauseam. Migrants were often broadly perceived as a threat, as was reflected by the reaction of many people to the events that occurred in front of Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve 2015/2016. According to Schulte: “The motivation to write the novel was both personal and political.”
As a journalist, and increasingly also as a writer, she reconstructed her family history. Her ancestors on her father’s side came from Gryzlin and Lubawa (Löbau), in the strip of land in West Prussia on the border with East Prussia, which at that time (from 1863 to ca. 1890) was inhabited by Poles. It was an area with few tarmacked roads, with straw roof houses and a higher crime rate than the neighbouring areas of West Prussia. Schulte concluded that her ancestors were poor and that they hoped for a better life in the Ruhr region. Her assumption seemed to be confirmed by the fact that more people emigrated from this eastern part of the country than from other regions.
Researching the material for “Ruhrgemüse, polnisch” was not always an easy task. Schulte produced a chronological overview of the (political) events in the Nordstadt district of Dortmund, where the events in the novel take place. Her aim was to develop the story along the lines of these events, and to use what little information she had been given by her mother. She sought out experts, was given a private tour by a “Nordstadt-VerFührungen” guide, searched the Dortmund city archives and combed through old newspapers. She also gained very useful insights from the book “Wir Unsichtbaren. Geschichte der Polen in Deutschland” (“We the Invisibles. The Story of the Poles in Germany”) (2014, C.H. Beck). The book was written by Peter Oliver Loew, who also drew Schulte’s attention to the Porta Polonica online platform, which became another research source. Even so, there were times when she was at a loss as to how to continue. “History from below” is not easy to research, since very little has been written about the real-life experiences of simple workers.
When, despite these challenges, she had managed to write half the manuscript, Schulte suddenly discovered her great cousin on her father’s side; a living source who was able to provide her with a wealth of information. Now, her research picked up speed again. She also became acquainted with the cultural adviser of the Westpreußisches Landesmuseum (West Prussian Regional Museum) in Warendorf, and travelled with her on a small group tour to Gdańsk and Malbork. The state archive in Gdańsk was also very supportive of Schulte’s ambitious project to create a fictionalised description, yet one that was fed by historical sources, of a Polish worker family in Dortmund in the period between 1893 and 1931.
Finally, “Ruhrgemüse, polnisch” was accepted by a publishing house, and was published in 2025 by STROUX edition. The story takes the reader into a world that is unfamiliar to many people and which is often treated as though it did not exist. At the same time, Schulte offers insights, in cursive text, into the way the novel came about: her search for her ancestors and the questions that guided her research. Through her work, she was able to retrieve a part of her family history that had been splintered off, and to do something to counter the unwillingness by her father, who had died from cancer in 1979, to talk about his roots. While this did not mean that Schulte was fully able to shake the feeling of being caught between two worlds, it did help her understand herself better. It’s now become clear to her that she was influenced by the values, rules of behaviour and expectations from two different cultural milieux. Her mother came from an upper middle-class background, while her father was a migrant seeking a better education and a path out of poverty, who considered it necessary to rigorously deny his own roots in order to climb the social ladder.
“Ruhrgemüse, polnisch” is by no means a therapeutic novel, even if working on it certainly helped Schulte’s healing process. It is rather an absorbing story of people who try their luck in a new place and who are faced with the challenge of making a life for themselves with just a few resources, in an environment where they are not necessarily welcome. The novel, which was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair and elsewhere, was received well in the press. It was compared with Buddenbrooks in terms of its structure and praised as a multi-layered family novel that combines historical experiences with present-day issues. For some readers, the slim volume filled with interesting details echoed events from their own family history, and offered them access to an aspect of their identity that had previously been hidden.
For Birgitta M. Schulte, her Polish background has enriched her life and broadened her cultural experience. She hopes for closer economic and military ties between Poland and Germany, particularly in light of the political events of the last few years. She is already working on a new novel. However, she is not yet willing to say what it is about.
Anselm Neft, May 2026
The author online: https://www.birgittam-schulte.de/sites/de/aktuell.php
