Annemarie Voss's story, as written by Aimee Robertson-West
I have spent much of my life standing beside things and telling their stories gently.
That is the habit of a docent. You do not lecture a painting—or a town—into meaning. You invite people to look a little longer. You ask another question. You notice a detail someone else has overlooked. Over time, I discovered that this is not simply how I speak about art. It is how I have learned to move through the world.
I have spent much of my life tending.
Tending to memory.
Tending to learning.
Tending to people.
Tending to the fragile threads that connect one generation to the next.
I did not always have words for that.
I was born in Kassel, Germany, in 1936, three years after Adolf Hitler came to power. My earliest memories are not of politics or war, but of atmosphere.
A child senses when the air in a room has weight. Conversations stopped when I entered. Curtains closed before dusk. Adults listened to the radio with a stillness that even children understood meant something important.
One evening my parents had gone to visit friends while I stayed home with my younger brother, who had recently recovered from measles. When he began to cry, I turned on the lights to check on him. Soon afterward, the police entered our apartment.
Only later did I understand why.
During wartime blackouts, lights could not be seen through uncovered windows. Something as ordinary as comforting a child could become dangerous. That is one of the lessons authoritarianism teaches. It makes ordinary life feel dangerous.
Another lesson took much longer to understand.
My father and grandfather quietly hid their Jewish bookkeeper from Nazi persecution. She and her husband's family eventually escaped Germany aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway to Shanghai before later immigrating to the United States.
When I was a little girl, I knew almost none of this.
Like many children, I inherited silence long before I inherited understanding. War eventually made itself impossible to ignore. When the bombing intensified, my mother took my brothers, my grandmothers, and me to a nearby village while my father remained behind repairing military vehicles. We lived in two small rooms without running water, a bathroom, or even a stove.
From nearly twenty miles away we watched Kassel burn. On the night of October 22, 1943, thousands of people died as the city disappeared beneath fire.
My father survived only because he found room inside one of the massive public bunkers. Years later I realized something. The destruction of a city is visible. The destruction of trust is quieter. After the war ended, Germany began rebuilding its streets, schools, businesses, and factories.
But rebuilding memory proved much harder.
When I returned to school, we studied Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. We did not study Hitler. We did not study the Holocaust. Those conversations had not yet found their way into classrooms. So I learned to ask questions. Questions that authority had left unanswered. Looking back, I think that curiosity has become another form of tending.
Eventually curiosity carried me across the Atlantic.
In 1956 I boarded the M.S. Berlin, expecting to spend a year in America improving my English before returning home. Instead, somewhere between Germany and New York, I met a young physician named Gert Voss. Within a year we were married.
Soon afterward we arrived in Muncie. People often ask why we stayed. The practical answer is simple. Muncie needed physicians.
There was a university where I hoped to continue learning. The summers felt brighter than the world I had left behind.
But I think there was another answer. Without realizing it, I had been searching for a place where tending could become a way of life. Medicine, I discovered, is one way of tending.
Throughout his career, Gert delivered more than 10,000 babies.
For years I thought of that simply as his work. Then, while building our home decades later, something remarkable happened.
The young electrician smiled and said Gert had delivered him.
Then the bricklayer.
Then the roofer.
Then the plumber.
At the grocery store.
At church.
Walking downtown.
Everywhere I went, I met people whose first moments of life had passed through my husband's hands. Only then did I understand that 10,000 babies was never really a number. It was a community.
Birth gave Gert tremendous hope. No matter what the newspaper said that morning, another child entered the world insisting tomorrow still existed. In our home, the future always had a heartbeat.
That work continues today through our son Peter and his wife Franky, and now through our grandson Derek and his wife Yashobha.
Three generations. Standing quietly at the threshold between what is and what will be.
Watching that continuity has taught me something; that every generation receives the future. Every generation also delivers it. My own work looked different. I taught my four children. I taught Ball State students. I helped immigrants learn English. I led discussion groups.
I spent years as a museum docent, inviting people to slow down long enough to notice what history was trying to say.
Teaching, I discovered, is another way of tending. Conversation is another. Art is another. Listening is another. Perhaps that is why I remain attentive to atmosphere. I do not believe today's America is the Germany of my childhood. History never repeats itself so neatly, but there is a reason why historians say that it rhymes.
I do know what it feels like when curiosity begins giving way to certainty. When complicated people become simple categories. When blame becomes easier than understanding.
Democracy has always been noisy. Noise does not frighten me.
The loss of curiosity does. As a docent I often asked visitors simple questions. What do you notice?
What might you have missed? Why do you think the artist wanted you to stand here instead of somewhere else?
Those questions matter because they keep us humble. They remind us that another perspective may reveal something we cannot yet see.
Flexibility is not merely an intellectual habit. It is a moral one. Rigid thinking leaves little room for another person's humanity.
I have lived long enough to know that kindness rarely makes headlines. But it quietly sustains communities every day.
I see it in volunteers welcoming refugees. Teachers stretching limited resources.
Artists helping neighbors imagine something beautiful. Food pantry workers. Hospital nurses.
People who continue showing up for one another long after applause has faded. That is the work that keeps a community from unraveling.
When I first arrived in Muncie, neighbors welcomed us.
Families like the Pettys and the Worthens did more than introduce themselves. They helped us belong. Today I try to offer others the same gift.
To sit with people through transition.
To acknowledge loss. To listen before speaking. To help someone feel seen. Perhaps that is all tending has ever been.
My husband helped deliver more than 10,000 beginnings. I have spent my own life tending to the lives followed.
Together those have become our shared act of faith. Faith that communities are built one relationship at a time. Faith that curiosity is stronger than certainty. Faith that tomorrow still arrives quietly—in classrooms, in communities, in conversations, in neighborhoods, and sometimes tomorrow arrives in new-life cries and the waiting hands of a physician welcoming another child into the world.
I have faith that atmosphere can change.
I have seen it before.