PARTIALITY

My name is Anna Fischer.

I’m twenty-eight years old, born and raised in Frankfurt am Main.

If anyone asks me what it was like growing up, I tell them: I grew up learning how to need no one’s love.

There are two of us.

I’m the elder; my brother Lukas is four years younger.

For as long as I can remember, the scales of affection in our house tipped hard to one side, and that side was never mine.

I remember being in fourth grade at a primary school in the Bockenheim district.

Money was tight — my mother worked as a cashier at a supermarket, my father drove long-haul trucks for a freight company.

One winter evening, my mother came home with two warm pretzels.

Just two.

She gave Lukas the bigger one.

The smaller half went to me, along with: “You’re the sister.

It won’t kill you to give way a little.”

I was eight.

I didn’t understand what unfairness meant yet — I just bit into the cold half-pretzel and tried not to cry, because every time I cried, my mother called me selfish, said I didn’t know how to love my brother.

I grew up hearing that sentence hundreds, thousands of times: “You’re the sister.

You have to give way to your brother.”

Give way on food.

Give way on toys.

Give way on dreams.

At twelve, my teachers recommended I move up to Gymnasium — the academic track leading toward university — while most of my classmates were placed in Realschule.

The whole school was thrilled for me.

But that night, my parents talked for a long time, because Gymnasium meant more books, more supplies, more expensive school trips.

In the end, my mother decided: that month’s spare money would go toward Lukas joining the youth academy at Eintracht Frankfurt, “because the coach says he has talent, it’d be a shame to waste it.”

I still got to attend Gymnasium — but I started working at fourteen, handing out flyers, delivering newspapers before school, to pay for my own books and the class trips everyone else’s parents simply covered.

Lukas was different.

Name-brand football boots, a summer football camp in Austria, a new mountain bike — whatever he wanted, my mother found a way to get it.

As for me, I learned to make do without asking anyone for anything.