"A stress-free life, music and always a glass of red wine and coffee". That seems to be the secret of 111-year-old Ilse Neumann from Taucha near Leipzig. The trained seamstress is probably the oldest woman in Saxony and also one of the oldest people in Germany. She has been living in a nursing home run by the German Red Cross in Taucha in the district of North Saxony for six and a half years.
She was born on July 23, 1914, just a few days before the start of the First World War. She lived through the most fundamental upheavals of the 20th century - from the imperial era through both world wars, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall to the digital age. Her marriage remained childless and after the death of her husband in 1976, she lived alone in her apartment in Taucha until she moved into a nursing home.
"Ilse used to look after our children when we went dancing and we also met up regularly," says Petra Junge. She and her husband Reinhard have been looking after the old lady, who was their neighbor, for many decades. They also often spent Fridays together. "She would come over and we would start the weekend with a bottle of red wine and a cigarette."
