He was just a boy when he earned his first money, carrying neighbors’ groceries in his wagon. As an adolescent, he stripped the electric wiring of destroyed houses, which led to work as an electrician. But life under Russian occupation was “cruel,” he said, adding impishly, “Much was worse than matcha lattes.”
At 18, to avoid being forced to join the government’s police force, he escaped East Germany, lying to the guards that he was going to visit his grandparents in West Berlin, he said. He wore a suit and rode his bicycle. He never returned.
What followed was an adulthood full of pivots. He found that his boisterous personality was more suited to sales. He excelled, and his commissions ensured that his three children had a more comfortable life than his own. It didn’t always work out, like the time he tried to sell bicycles in a town with steep roads, or when he invested in a Munich construction company that went bankrupt.
“If there was any straw to grasp at, I grabbed it,” he said, using the German idiom.
At retirement age, he kept working. He drove delivery vans, sold insurance and even became a door-to-door salesman of frozen food. Today, when he is not swimming, walking or shooting TikTok videos, he makes some extra money as a day trader, watching the stock market on his TV.
“I always have to have one euro more in my wallet than I spend,” he said.
Still, he has had to accept that building a comfortable life has not spared him from tragedy. In 2013, his son died at age 53 from an undiagnosed illness after living abroad, leaving Mr. Kalecinski to raise his granddaughter. Ever the optimist, he is grateful that he now has a multigenerational home, a rarity in Germany. Living with his granddaughter, now 34, and her three children has allowed them to share their burdens, he said.
