1 - The vines of Berlin | Rondeau

“Becoming a child running in meadows and woods, it is in Congy, in the village of my maternal grandparents, that I discover the secret numbers of our destinies. I question the silences and the rare confidences of the men in my family. My grandfather, a winemaker, a veteran of 1914, unjustly arrested as a collaborator in 1944. My father, an idealistic teacher, barely freed from his forest, a prisoner in a stalag for over three years, a resistor. They reluctantly pass on to me some snippets from the humble night. The wars have left too many scars on their closed or too transparent hearts. Silence and resignation are their daily bread. They are people without ancestors and without family papers. I understand their laconicism, and I cannot help but think that their poverty rightfully belongs to the poetry of the world. But it is not only the world of yesterday that turns my Champagne dervish soul. I have a seismograph connected to my temples that transmits to me the feats of an era where time's pace accelerates like never before. Thus were my childhood and youth, often solitary, expanded in a time that was not just the present moment. I had the earth for honey and I was eager to take my place in a long patience. Revolution and love fill the summer of my twenties. The great surprise of 1968 decides many things. I leave Paris (already) for over ten years, some of which were spent as a worker in factories along the Moselle. Each man advances in his own life with this servant by his side mentioned in an old chronicle, whose face is turned backwards: "you shall call her memory". I feel like I have always known this woman by my side. Just as I have always known that one day I will write this book to tell of my discovery of the world and the early need I felt to narrate it.” D.R.