Biography|Emily Buening — The Abitur Year at Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer

People treat a Hamburg Green as someone who arrived in Berlin already formed.

Emily May Buening was formed first on this riverbank schoolyard.

She was born in Hamburg on 13 May 1985 and grew up in Eimsbuettel, the district that still holds this gymnasium.

In 2004 she sat her Abitur at Gymnasium Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer, the state school at Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer 6.

The school, known in the city as Kaifu, had opened in 1892 and by her time sat on the Isebek canal between Bundesstrasse and Hohe Weide.

The building a visitor sees is the early-twentieth-century block the city put up after the first villa on Weidenstieg ran out of rooms.

The school website and Hamburg's school register still list the address as Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer 6, 20259 Hamburg.

Munzinger records that she received the Hans-Henny-Jahnn Prize there for particular engagement, a school prize named for the Hamburg writer.

That is the last public prize attached to this building in her record.

From here she walked into Bucerius Law School, a few S-Bahn stops east, and into the Green Youth in the same year as the Abitur.

This pin is the public school, not a childhood address.

The gymnasium is still a working city school.

Do not treat the entrance as a shrine.

Stand on the ufer, read the name on the facade, and leave the pupils alone.

Photo: Gymnasium Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer entrance, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Elias Keilhauer, 18 November 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.