by Guy Stern
And yet through bad years and good years, my mother hid her worries and my father rarely gave vent to them. We three siblings, born in Hildesheim, never felt deprived of anything. My mother could transform a most simple meal into a gourmet’s delight. She would put soup dishes filled with milk close to a window until it had turned into sour milk. She would put some fruit and a layer of sugar into it and the combination of sour and sweet made for an exotic evening meal. (So much for today’s modern refrigeration, of which we had none!) Or she could accomplish culinary transformations by words alone. When my father returned at times with some of his staple of sandwiches uneaten, my mother came up with the fairytale name of “Hasenbrot” for it, meaning a sandwich wrested from hares. My brother and I would fight for such magical morsels. Love has a stupendous wingspread.
They clawed their way upward. One domestic acquisition tells the story of their miniscale climb. When buying their basic furniture for their Hildesheim apartment, they had splurged on a luxurious easy chair. Both loved it as their repose for holiday siestas—and so decided to take turns sinking into its inviting arms. But when Dad’s business soared after the years of inflation, they threw economics to the winds and bought the twin of that chair and held a family celebration when it arrived.
Of course in 1938, my family’s entire property, like that of all German Jews, was confiscated by the Nazi government, and my family was shunted to a so-called Jew House. To Shakespeare we owe the poetic remark that “he who steals my purse” (or my armchairs for that matter), “steals trash.” But can you adopt that flippancy, if so much sweat attaches to the acquisition of “mere” objects? I now can infer from our weekly routine how my parents struggled, how the upward climb was accomplished. Dad got up first, shortly before six, Mother a few minutes later. She placed the sandwiches packed the night before into the pockets of his overcoat, quickly ground some carefully measured-out coffee beans, and poured him a self-squeezed glass of orange juice. She had read of its benefits long before juices became commonplace in Germany. Then a cup of coffee to accompany his marmalade-laden piece of bread and Dad was off. He picked up two suitcases, one small, and one large, containing samples of the fabrics-in-season he would present to his prospective customers. He also carried an assortment of duplicate samples, intended as presents for the small daughters of preferred customers. These “Puppenlappen,” once artfully stitched, became elegant additions to the wardrobe of their dolls. They were heavy, those suitcases. Wanting to show my masculinity shortly before being dubbed a “man” at age thirteen by the rules of the Jewish religion, I found that I, despite all my calisthenics, had to draw on every muscle to carry one suitcase a few steps. Dad, a diminutive forty-year-old, mastered both suitcases down four flights of stairs, three blocks to the next streetcar stop, on to the railroad station to mount a train to Elze, Gronau, or Nordstemmen, towns that even today command little space on the map of the State of Lower Saxony. I accompanied him there once or twice during school holidays and had trouble keeping pace with him, especially when he raced from one farm to the next. I once suggested buying a car. “That would eat up all our profit,” he answered. Fortunately, whatever one could say about the Weimar Republic, the trains ran on time!
He would return home between six or seven, except from places like Gronau with its numerous customers. Then he stayed overnight at a “pension,” a sort of bed and breakfast. Otherwise he returned slightly before dinner. Werner and I were relegated to the care of our sleep-in maid and our parents would share an evening meal, variations on a potpourri of soup, fish, potato, and vegetables. Needless to say, both were in need of restoratives, both physically and mentally. Mom had in the meanwhile managed the household, tamed two boys, supervised their homework, and handled the customers who had strayed into town rather than await Dad’s periodic arrival at their homes.
We joined the two for dessert. Dad wanted to know how we had fared at school, not only if my grades in algebra were improving, but also whether I had stopped my daily fisticuffs with that nasty classmate, Heuer. He wasn’t paying tuition, my father threatened me, for dishing out or receiving body blows or a black eye during recess between classes.
After worship services on Saturdays, Mom and Dad became the store’s shipping clerks. They packed up the orders Dad had taken during the week; all three of us carried them downstairs to a “firm-owned” hand-drawn wagon and then Dad and I pulled it to an inn about a mile away. That’s where a “Fuhrmann,” a deliveryman, spent the weekend preparatory to his rounds of endless commuting between Hildesheim and the rural villages. His carriage was horse drawn; later, the horsepower of a truck took over. He apparently made an adequate living by underselling the post office. That was, of course, the reason why Dad used him.
On Sundays Dad took the family on outings. He followed a citywide custom and hence, our excursions were incessantly interrupted by encounters with neighbors or fellow members of the Jewish community. Werner and I were treated to grownup gossip, which we deciphered before going to sleep. But the main treat was the Sunday afternoon coffee-hour at one of the outdoor cafes, at the end of a hefty and prolonged walk through the park. Dad ordered exotic cakes, let’s say with strawberries and whipped cream, plus coffee and cocoa. By way of variation Mom would pack sandwiches for our Sunday supper; we’d take them to a restaurant close by, order drinks, and return hours way past our usual bedtime. I still find that routine endearing, when these days my wife and I sit down with friends at a Munich beer garden, devouring our packed lunches.
On Mondays the routine would begin anew. It did not differ greatly from those of my Jewish classmates, except where much greater wealth allowed a more ostentatious lifestyle.
One of my classmates, a girl belonging to an upper-class family, disparaged our lifestyle as “a daily feast of rice pudding.” I knew better. It also contained some exotic fruits. My parents belonged to a theater-going group that had branches in virtually all German cities. When I had outgrown typical children’s performances, such as Little Peter’s Trip to the Moon, my parents purchased an extra ticket for their son, stage-struck even then. After watching Friedrich von Schiller’s William Tell, I reread the drama several times, until I could declaim whole passages, much to the chagrin of my father, who deplored some of the dramatist’s more grandiloquent lines. My parents also took me along to musical events. Ironically, from my perspective today they sported an open ear for Wagner and a closed one for Kurt Weill. A gala performance, chosen as a farewell gift to a Hildesheim star lured away by a Berlin stage, was Weill-Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. I was pointedly not taken. To their minds these worst fears of questionable language and situations were realized. “How could that great actress have chosen that trash as her farewell performance?” they asked as they came into the door.
But my mother also did not ingest Wagner uncritically, although I surmise they did not know of his blatant anti-Semitism. Mom and Dad had taken me, at the tender age of six, along to my first introduction to grand opera. “We have read you the stories of Siegfried, now you can see something like it at an opera house in Hannover.”
What can I say? It turned the kid on. During the train ride home, I exulted about Lohengrin’s bravery, his dueling prowess as he “smashed” Friedrich von Telramund in a duel and his permanent squelching of Elsa’s rosiness. “Well,” said my mother, “that was certainly not a very chivalric way to leave Elsa, for no real good reason at all.” That was the first time I began to perceive that there is a feministic way to look at literature.
One other occasion, my sixth birthday, competes in the vividness of my recollection with the fusty Wagnerian event on the Hannover Opera stage.
At age fourteen my voice changed, announcing my transition from childhood to adolescence. My love for music, however, stayed with me. And when Cantor Cysner announced that he would team up with Mrs. Moses, the wife of the community’s vice president, and with Mr. Rubenstein, a gifted violinist and a prestigious member of our community to put on Haydn’s
Toy Symphony. I was literally the first in line for tryouts. I chose the toy horn as my instrument. (Of course none of us knew at that time that Haydn’s alleged composition was not his at all but likely Mozart’s father’s, as later research showed.)
I looked forward to the tryout with some trepidation, unnecessary as it turned out, since the toy horn, like most of the toy instruments of this symphony, gave out only one tone. The tryout was correspondingly simple. “I will now play the beginning of the Toy Symphony and you will interrupt when I reach the seventh bar!” said Mrs. Moses. I frantically started beating the rhythm and passed the test. We performed in the auditorium of the Jewish Community House, opposite our synagogue, before a packed house. I heartily blew my trumpet and earned loud applause from the Stern family. My friends and I basked in our musical triumph until an older friend, damn him, dampened my satisfaction in that virtuoso performance. “So you think all those people came out to hear you play? Well, think again! Don’t you know that Katie Moses, appearing in public, brings out every male, twenty to seventy?” I called my friend a cynic; I was then unacquainted with the term “bombshell” or its German equivalent.
Another signifier of my setting-in-adolescence was a streak of rebelliousness, notably against religion. During one of my visits to the ancestral home of my grandparents, I began to read Moses Mendelssohn and his followers and discovered some of the many rationalistic refutations of the Bible that were common at that time. The views expressed in those texts dovetailed with my grandfather’s low opinion of the miracles that suffuse the Old Testament. They simply couldn’t have happened, he declared. The doubts cast by the book and him fell on fertile grounds. Nor did I hesitate to spread my budding heresy with my contemporaries. My apostasy soon came to the attention of the community’s hoi polloi. The pillars of our faith were tottering! Our youth leader, Seppl Cysner, was enjoined to cure me of my deviant ideas. He corralled me after one of our Saturday meetings. As a good debater he declared my sources spurious. But I stood my ground. Beneath his disapproval at my obstinacy, I could sense a certain respect for a mind ready to go its own way. My heresy would continue to withstand the arguments of rabbis and priests that chanced upon my wayward route at various stages of my life.
CHAPTER TWO
The Nazis Come to Power
But all those boyish contemplations were overshadowed by an event that augured the end of the world in which we had lived, and it would soon spell the end of my childhood and adolescence. On January 31, 1933 all classes of our high school abandoned their syllabi. Most of our teachers and most of my fellow students acted as though the Messiah had stepped into our midst, heralding an event that would restore the glory of the fatherland. Our teachers also announced that on the coming evening there would be a parade of all true patriots in every town of Germany to proclaim that Adolf Hitler was now steering the fortunes of our nation. Every student—no excuse accepted—was to join the glorious demonstration. Did any of my classmates notice, as we Jewish students observed, that Dr. Heinrich, our math teacher, had quietly entered his class and merely announced that the given assignment was being held over till the next meeting, and then left the room as if on tiptoes?
When I arrived home my parents were in dead earnest. We boys were told that we were not to leave the apartment under any circumstances. Then the telephone rang. Mr. Buchterkirchen, one of my father’s in-town customers, was on the line. His orgiastic voice was audible across the living room. “My wife and I are coming over to your place this evening! You have a better view of that incomparable torchlight parade!” There was no way to refuse this self-generated invitation. Against our inclination we all looked out our living room window and all of us became spectators of this march of national hubris. At the twilight of this intimidating display of rampant power, there appeared a motley group of youngsters, the high school boys—no girls—of Hildesheim. I even spotted some of my schoolmates. They did not march in lockstep. They would soon learn.
Only years later, as I reflected on that infamous evening, did it occur to me that I had witnessed the first step of the Nazi’s embrace of an evolving iconography, the symbolism of fire and destruction. Flames and fires accompanied the Third Reich from its strident inception to its apocalyptic demise. An endless torchlight parade had turned night into surrealistic day in my hometown and all across Germany. On February 27 that year, the flames of the Reichstag fire also consumed the last vestiges of the Weimar Constitution; on May 10, 1933, the Nazis burned books; five years later, on November 9 and 10, 1938, they burned the synagogues. In 1939 they commenced bombing and scorching European cities; in 1942 the gas ovens of the death camps were lit; and in 1944 and 1945 whole German cities went up in fire and smoke, including the corpse of the chief arsonist of that world conflagration.
That January evening in 1933 ushered in the removal of Jews from German civil society, forcing them into “an outcast state,” to quote Shakespeare. But this sundering of our roots came rather gradually. Playmates and best friends were instructed by their parents, and likely by teachers too, to ignore us. They began walking by without a greeting. We were kicked out of our sports clubs and youth organizations, banned from swimming pools, nature walks, and discussion groups. For me, the most galling separation was removal from my beloved gym club, Eintracht. That hurt.
Some years ago, in 1994, a teacher in Germany, Harold Roth, asked me to contribute to an anthology for German high school students meant to acquaint them with the pain inflicted on German-Jewish youngsters during the Nazi period. Thus my thoughts and feelings became part of a collection titled, “Es tat weh, nicht mehr dazu zu gehören” (“It hurt to no longer be part of it”), which became a standard German textbook. Here is my English translation of what I wrote:
The time was spring 1934. I am twelve years old. Hitler has been in power for about a year. Please, think now of a breakfast table on a sunny Sunday morning: my parents, my brother, and I are having another cup of coffee, and my little sister is lying in her crib. We are relaxed; you can still, if only briefly, shut out the bad news that you hear on the radio or read in the newspapers. Suddenly, there is a ring at the door. Who could be calling so early on a Sunday morning? The outside world is suddenly breaking in on us, sweeping in like a gust of wind and spreading fear in its wake. My father goes to the door. But the five men standing in front of our apartment are not the dreaded Secret Police. Dad recognizes them as the Board of the Sports Club Eintracht, or “Harmony” in English, to which I belong. They walk in and my mother offers them seats, but they remain standing. They look awkward in their Sunday best, and then finally a member of the delegation, Mr. Stövesandt, begins to talk in a halting voice. I know him quite well. He is the father of Gustav, a good friend of mine. We are both on a boys’ soccer team, and when I got a birthday present, a table soccer set with small metal players, and was making up teams, Gustav came over to our house to give the toy its inauguration. (I beat Gustav by a score of 8:7)
Mr. Stövesandt dragged the words out of his mouth: “You know, we really like your Günther. He is really a whiz on the gym horse. Well, he is not so good on the parallel bars. And your Günther wrote such wonderful and funny reports about those outings that Mr. Behrens organized. But, you see, we got orders from high up: Cancel the membership of all Jewish members in your club.”
I couldn’t believe it. I was a good athlete and, as best I knew, I was the only Jew in the entire club. Couldn’t they make an exception? My father’s voice cut into those immature thoughts. With a sort of finality, he said: “We understand your position.” And then they left. But at the door Mr. Stövesandt turned around and said, “Günther, if you want to come to our stadium and use the track, it’s okay with us.” I never did.
Of course our classroom instruction changed as well. The Nazi term was it was being “gleichgeschaltet”; it had to “toe the Nazi line.” Each region was dealt a Nazi as cultural minister, and heads rolled, down to the instructors of kindergartens. Our high school principal was
transferred to the boondocks and a party stalwart was dutifully installed. But to our parents’ surprise the changes he made were, with one notable exception, merely cosmetic. As a university administrator in later life, I found an obvious explanation for his restraint. His administrative and pedagogical skills were no match for those of his predecessor who had built up an exemplary high school. The newcomer, who initially did not even bar Jewish parents from PTA meetings, simply took over a smoothly running institution and, with rhetorical embellishments, attributed all the school’s virtues to his leadership.
The one exception was his selection of candidates for faculty vacancies. All of us snickered at the eventual replacement for elementary French instruction. On the instructor’s first day in class, he gave a dictation. Not even our prize French student, a descendant of Huguenots, had the slightest idea what he was trying to convey with his garbled French. More troublesome was the new director’s choice of a geography cum art teacher. During his first class, the teacher asked us for a definition of German folk art. Our class, used to trick questions, observed a cautionary silence. After castigating our stupidity, he gave us his own effusive definition. I only recall one plank of his tottering platform: “For all those reasons, no Jew can ever produce German folk art.”
Soon other propagandistic insertions into our syllabi followed. Perhaps as a follow-up to the Nazi book burning, further orders came “from above” to falsify our history textbook. Toward the end of 1933, Mr. Schwerdtfeger, our history teacher, entered our classroom carrying several packages of handouts and, as we learned shortly thereafter, several single-edged razor blades. He started writing numbers on the board. “I am passing out razor blades. Take your textbooks and cut out all pages indicated on the blackboard. Careful, though, that you leave enough space on the margins to paste in substitute pages.” We did as told. All positive achievements by Jews, other “inferior races,” and political “deviants” were excised and replaced by historical distortions and falsehoods.
