Ingeborg Wolf, born in 1915 and still on the move

In July 1915 the Eastern offensive of the Central Powers begins, the German protection troops in German South West Africa capitulate, and a child is born in Thorn on the Vistula who is still alive today. And how.

In her apartment in Kronberg im Taunus, Ingeborg Wolf explains as soon as she is greeted why her short haircut is so bad, even though it has just been washed. Something outsiders can’t find. But Wolf, in a trench dress with a long pearl necklace and gold earrings, angrily tugs at a strand of white hair above his ear. From her point of view, the walker she is leaning on also needs to be explained. “I haven’t been able to stand on my own for three years.” She said she was still skiing in her late 90s.

“107 is no small thing,” sums up the small, petite woman before she even sits down at the glossy lacquered wooden table with the pale pink bouquet of roses. 107 – that’s how old Ingeborg Wolf will be this Sunday. That afternoon she had already written half of the 40 invitations. There is still more than a week until the celebrations in a restaurant in the Taunus and in the Kronberg retirement home where she has lived for a quarter of a century.

“Mom is always there”

And so the hundred and six year old talks about 1915 and the years after, the earliest childhood in First World War: “It was a hard winter, we were freezing and had little to eat.” For three years she had a middle ear infection. For Ingeborg Wolf, this is the reason why she needed one of those annoying hearing aids at an early age – at 70. “I haven’t been able to listen to music since 1995.”

Still standing, Wolf says, “My mother died when I was seven. No, I was ten, but I looked like seven.” That was in 1926. Even after the old lady finally sat down at the table slowly, carefully and with the help of a friend who often stopped by, she kept talking about her mother. “Mom is always there,” says the old daughter, who has no children herself, almost a century after her mother’s death. “My father was the great scientist, my mother the artistically inclined.”