Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 3, 1990 TAG: 9007030519
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
She was standing in a kitchen in Sydney, Australia, holding a box of china that belonged to a friend who was moving. The TV was on and the program was interrupted for a news flash.
"That's how I heard. I held onto that box - I couldn't believe it," said the Blacksburg resident and West German citizen.
The Berlin Wall was falling, and for the first time in 45 years, Hinkelmann glimpsed the chance to return to the land and life she was forced to flee as a child.
Last week, she and her husband, Klaus Hinkelmann, flew to Europe for a four-week journey into her past. While she's there, Hinkelmann wants to find out if she has any claim to her family's 1,300-acre estate in East Germany.
"Nobody knows what will happen. It's a legal question," she said. The estate is currently a state-owned seed farm.
Before leaving, Hinkelmann shared some of her memories in an interview on the back porch of her Highland Park home, overlooking the Appalachian hills in Montgomery County.
"I had given the communist government 10 more years to crumble, but they beat me to it," she said with the hearty laugh that follows most of her remarks.
The 50-year-old woman, despite having lived most her adult life in the United States, speaks with a heavy accent - one of the few things she has left from her childhood in Germany.
The estate near the city of Halle, about 60 miles southwest of Berlin, had been in her father's family since 1895. The house is 150 years old, Hinkelmann said, with 36 windows and a dining hall large enough to seat 200.
Her father, Guenther Gneist, raised livestock on the land. There also were quarries and sand pits to provide building materials.
After World War II, the communists took over the estate - illegally, Hinkelmann said. From that point, the lives of Gneists - descendants of French and German nobility - changed forever.
Her father began receiving death threats because of his wealth, she said. "He left on a bicycle for the West. The Mercedes would not have been any good. It was conspicuous and there was no fuel."
Hinkelmann, 6 at the time, her 4-year-old brother, their mother and a nurse fled south that winter, then rode in a cattle car to the refugee camp at Friedland, on the border of the two Germanies.
That spring, they joined her father near a small village in the forest. He logged timber with a horse, and the Gneists shared a house with another family that also had fled the newly formed communist country.
During this time, Hinkelmann said, her mother sneaked back into East Germany several times, traveling the 200 miles alone to retrieve family heirlooms, photographs and other possessions from the house.
"Until she got caught. And she didn't want to go to Siberia. So she stopped."
It was also during this time that Hinkelmann would walk two miles through the woods, sometimes before dawn, to school in the village. She learned not to be afraid, a quality she still exhibits.
"Me, I'm not scared of anything," she said.
The family moved every few years as her father sought better jobs and living conditions. They wound up in Saarland, in the southwestern tip of West Germany, where he managed an estate.
Although they lived comfortably, the Gneists would never regain their former status or wealth.
"My mother never got over it," Hinkelmann said. "But what can you do? You just have to live with it."
Klaus Hinkelmann, who had a Ph.D. in statistics from Iowa State in Ames, was teaching at Frieburg University in West Germany when Christa met him at the bookstore where she worked.
They married in 1966 and later moved to Blacksburg when he accepted a professorship at Virginia Tech. He is now the head of statistics in his department.
Since then, Hinkelmann has become somewhat of an activist. She is a familiar face and voice at Blacksburg Town Council meetings, where she often speaks her mind about issues that concern her.
"Because my rights were taken away, I lost them and I can't stand to see someone else's rights taken away or stepped on," she said.
Over the years she has helped to preserve the land where the golf course is, urged town officials to build the water tower on North Main Street rather than on the golf course, and has fought the development of Forest Ridge Estates, which would have increased traffic in the Highland Park and Forest Hills neighborhoods.
Most recently, Hinkelmann partook in the outcry against a proposal to extend Patrick Henry Drive to South Main Street at Airport Drive, which would have destroyed several homes, some of them historic.
Town officials say an extension to create a loop is needed to ease traffic congestion downtown.
But, said Hinkelmann, "It takes 10 minutes to get from one end of town to another. You don't need a $9 million road.
"I won't take baloney."
While spending six months in Australia last year while her husband was on sabbatical, Hinkelmann became involved with a neighborhood group trying to save an abandoned railroad from development.
And, now that the Iron Curtain has been lifted, Hinkelmann finally has passage to go fight for her family home, her heritage and her lost years in her homeland.
by CNB