How a mother turned her drowned daughter’s passion into a thriving patisserie

A staff member serves a customer in the shop set up to ‘understand what drove Johanna’s passion’, her mother said. Photograph: Axel Javier Sulzbacher/Panos View image in fullscreen A staff member serves a customer in the shop set up to ‘understand what drove Johanna’s passion’, her mother said. Photograph: Axel Javier Sulzbacher/Panos How a mother turned her drowned daughter’s passion into a thriving patisserie Hamburg shop set up in tribute to aspiring pastry chef becomes ‘happy’ pilgrimage site for grieving parents J ohanna Orth was a fun-loving, determined little girl and later a purpose-driven young woman who revelled in making a creative mess in the kitchen. Her parents, Inka and Ralph, chuckle quietly as they remember the stacks of batter-covered bowls, spatulas and whisks repeatedly left in the sink. With time, Johanna’s cakes and pastries grew more sophisticated and elaborate, guided by her grandmother, Marlies, who was also a talented baker. Marlies’ own ambition of opening a cafe one day had been thwarted by the demands of motherhood and postwar Germany’s rigid gender roles. View image in fullscreen Johanna Orth had completed her training and planned to open a shop when her home was inundated in a freak rainstorm in July 2021. Photograph: Martina Goyert Johanna inherited the dream and worked hard to make it a reality, completing the rigorous training to become a certified master patissière who could hold her own with the rarefied global cadre of magicians of the sweet. In 2021, aged 22, she was completing her business school training before opening her own shop named for Marlies when a freak summer deluge bore down on her home town of Bad Neuenahr, in western Germany’s Ahr valley. The river’s water levels peaked at nearly 10 metres, roughly twice those recorded during the previous record flood five years before. On the night of 14-15 July, a panicked Johanna called her parents on holiday in Spain as the waters rushed into her ground-floor flat. As she told them her furniture was beginning to float around her sitting room, the line went dead. View image in fullscreen Cars and rubble in Bad Neuenahr a day after the Ahr River peaked at almost 10 metres. Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images Their daughter’s body was found two days later in a parking garage, her slight frame probably carried away by the current when she tried to escape via her terrace door. She was among more than 220 people who perished across Europe in the disaster . “That was the unspeakable night we’ll never forget, which took our beloved daughter away from us,” Inka said. The Orths share a blinding grief that they say only other parents who have lost a child can comprehend. The residence for senior citizens that they ran was destroyed in the flood, their sense of meaning and even will to live washed away with the raging river. For 10 weeks, Inka retreated inside their home in agony and avoided contact with neighbours, who would sometimes cross the street to avoi