Speaking of role models, mine was Onkel Dagobert Duck when I was ten. Christina, my classmate, had brought a Mickey Mouse comic book to school. The glossy introduced me to Disney’s cartoon characters. I thoroughly enjoyed the adventures of Donald Duck and his nephews Tick, Trick, and Track. But I idolized the triplet’s great uncle, Dagobert Duck. It was the stingy miser who set my imagination on fire.

Here was this elderly business duck, dressed in a red frock, top hat, pince-nez glasses, and spats who had accumulated so much money that the heaps of bills and coins piled high in his basement. In fact, Onkel Dagobert was forced to turn the pile regularly with a pitchfork to prevent his fortune from growing moldy. With shrewdness and thrift he had become the richest duck in the world.

At age ten, I wanted to be like Onkel Dagobert because in the mid 50s my parents and I still lived in a one-room apartment. There was barely enough money to make ends meet. Luxury items were out of the question. A touch of Onkel Dagobert was what we needed. I had been thrifty. I had bank-deposited every Pfennig I had won playing cards with my parents during long winter evenings. Still, to my knowledge, I did not need a pitchfork to turn the pile. What was I doing wrong? In any case, I was going to model myself after Onkel Dagobert and maybe I, too, would be able to dive into my mountain of money.

Decades later I learned that Donald Duck’s nephews were actually named Huey, Dewey, and Louie by their creator. And the children in the United States called my hero Uncle Scrooge. Where did these names originate? Uncle Scrooge, I learned, was named after the miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, from the novel “A Christmas Carol.” Onkel Dagobert, on the other hand, got his name from a Merovingian king. The Merovingian dynasty ruled Germania Superior from the middle of the 5th century. This region was a province of the Roman Empire at that time and included southwestern Germany and today’s cities of Wiesbaden and Mainz.

Fifty years have passed since those childhood fantasies, and I know only one thing for sure: I still don’t need a pitchfork, not even a hand shovel.

For a sneak peek at the first 20+ pages of my memoir, Walled-In: A West Berlin Girl’s Journey to Freedom, click “Download a free excerpt” on my home page and feel free to follow my blog about anything German: historic and current events, people, places and food.

Walled-In is my story of growing up in Berlin during the Cold War. Juxtaposing the events that engulfed Berlin during the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall and Kennedy’s Berlin visit with the struggle against my equally insurmountable parental walls, Walled-In is about freedom vs. conformity, conflict vs. harmony, domination vs. submission, loyalty vs. betrayal.