I tried to play with patches in (Tortoise)git today, apparently for the second time since using git: it complained that I was already in the middle of patching.
So without much thinking, I clicked on "abort" since I didn't care about the old patch-attempt any more, and now all my commits of the last four weeks are gone.
What happened? How can git do this to me? ;-)
(as you can see in my own answer below, at least I got my commits back. But changes in the working copy are gone forever, the way I understand it. Quite harsh to any novel user that clicking "Abort" on some far-ago action will at the same time destroy current work without warning... I guess git likes to do its name justice once in a while ;-) )