Noblesse Oblige

My father spent 26.5 years in the American Army. He spent most of that overseas, which is how he met my mother who was a German national.

At the time, the exchange rate was four German marks to the American dollar. My parents had a maid, as did many American soldiers stationed in Germany around that time. The exchange rate meant all American soldiers were relatively wealthy compared to the Germans around them.

One of my mother's sisters ended up a single parent with young kids at home when her first husband died. My parents generously helped her out in the aftermath of his death. For example, they bought her a washer and dryer as a gift so she could do laundry at home instead of at a laundromat, making it far easier to manage work and raising children alone.

This was quite a lot of money for the time period. At the time, it was extremely common to have a washer and a clothes line, not a dryer. My parents could afford to be insanely jealous as "commoners" because of the exchange rate making my father's American paycheck worth so much more locally.

My parents also visited her fairly often. She lived in a really small town and my parents really spread the money around and got treated like visiting celebrities. Kids on bikes trailed their car into town while they threw candy out the window at them.

The local grocer stayed open just for them so they could buy groceries the day they arrived. A nearby farmer let them come get fresh milk for the kids on a weekend morning. 

My mother's mother came from a low level noble family that sold the title when they fell on hard times. I didn't really know that when I was little and even after I learned it, most of the time I had no awareness at all of how this impacted my mother and made her different from other people or how this impacted my life.

But she once told me that when she visited her widowed sister, she bought enough food for both families because my mother wanted to eat well and she added "You can't eat in front of people while they go hungry. That don't work."

Her generosity was a form of enlightened self interest. But it was also a form of noblesse oblige.

Her explanation of why she did that is the one and only time in my life that I felt like I could clearly see that my mother came from a noble line and was taught things growing up that "ordinary Joes" don't typically get taught.

Much later in life I learned that German nobility in particular was very big on the idea that they existed to serve the people and being a noble came with that as an explicit duty.