08.1951 Wilhelmina leaves the house and has the business seized

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It couldn't last. Someday Alfred's marriage would explode. She says she's been put at the door, he denies it. Perhaps at the end of May or the beginning of June Wilhelmina Koos moved in with her daughter at 45 Bosstraat. Ironically, the glassworks was located there from 1942 to 1945 before the last move to the Charlottalei. The house was owned by family of Minny's husband from whom they rented. The story goes hard to hard and starts simple but goes more and more crescendo. Knowing Alfred if he is convinced of his right then it is impossible to make that clear in a reasonable way. On August 28, the case is initiated and an order is given by the court to not sell, move or anything else which makes Alfred and his company technically unemployed. On September 3rd the case is brought before the court and on September 12th there is a conciliation and the proceedings are stopped. Presumably the company has not started up again and he has made the plans to move to Luxembourg concrete. I don't know who whispered to him that things would be better in Luxembourg. It was thought that the Germans would cross the border en masse in Luxembourg to come and work in the glassworks at a lower wage than in Belgium because they couldn't find work in their own country. However, there were no glassblowers in that region, so he had to let his (expensive) Hemiksem people come over to Luxembourg. It was not a success. Many returned plagued by homesickness and business did not go as well as expected. The Czechs who had been making Christmas decorations for years were back after the war and came en masse with cheaper Christmas decorations on the European market so he could no longer compete even though he had a patent on the glass eye. At the beginning of 1952 he wrote to his daughter that this joke had cost 400,000 BEF from September 1951 to the end of 1951, which converted to its current value amounts to 76,029 €. Presumably the troubles with his wife also played a role in the decision to move to Luxembourg. If it would still go wrong, it would be legally much more difficult to bring a case from Belgium to Luxembourg.

In the period that his wife was no longer living with him, he wrote a 60 page story about her jealousy. In the end he let her go to a doctor, which, according to him, helped. However, in April 1952, a definitive rupture occurred in Grevenmacher. Until shortly before his death he keeps writing off the jealousy. He could not understand that. He did not understand that his wife was jealous because of separation anxiety. As a child she may have suffered a trauma because at that time and long afterwards orphans were pulled apart and had no contact with each other. The evolution of the Koos family can be found below.

1881-1886 Franz Koos marries Henriette Elisabeth Hense and have 5 children:

  1. 18.04.1881 Johann Gustav
  2. 04.03.1883 Georg
  3. 04.03.1886 Franz
  4. 2 others died less than one year old

Franz' wife dies on 27.05.1887

1888-1900 Franz Koos x Apolonia Weins and have 9 children:

  1. 11.06.1888 Theresa
  2. 01.08.1889 Georg Heinrich
  3. 23.07.1890 Margaret Mary
  4. 31.05.1893 Pauline Anna
  5. 31.07.1894 Maria Theresa
  6. 1895-1900 4 young children died

Franz' second wife dies on 01.08.1901

1903-1906 Franz Koos x widow Johanna Maria Cahlenberg and will have 2 children:

  1. 25.07.1904 Henriette Elise
  2. 17.11.1905 Wilhelmine Johanne Maria (later wife of Alfred)

Franz died on 02.01.1906 and left 10 children behind. The children from the 2nd and 3rd marriage were then separated. Wilhelmina only had contact with Henriette later on.

Wilhelmina suffered from separation anxiety that manifested itself in jealousy. She had finally found security with Alfred and nothing or no one would take that away from her. Only Alfred only saw the jealousy and not the underlying cause. He often added to it as you can read in the anecdotes when he comes back from the city. And that's how it goes wrong in the end. To make matters worse, Wilhelmina was very superstitious and consulted a charlatan cardlayer fortune-teller. She listened to her story and thought to herself 'I'm gonna be rich'. Each session cost a lot of money and each time Alfred was the guilty party that had to deal with 250 women. If you don't see this nonsense, it will continue into a fierce collision and leave a lot of money with a charlatan, resulting in a total breakdown of AJEKO.

Alfred, for his part, was abused by his mother when he was a child, perhaps because she could not stand him because of some disorder that was unknown at the time. People were on their own at the time and the doctor's remedy was often “keep up the courage” but that didn't help to solve problems. Alfred and Wilhelmina's background and their breakdown in communication caused their marriage to fail. See also some documents in the gallery of the sidebar.

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