Then it struck me. I knew what I had to do to get over the feeling of emptiness, to give my life meaning. I had to put together what the professor had told me and begin by writing Maximilian and Nadia’s story. I pressed a button on the recorder. This time it was the green light that came on, and Professor Wagner’s voice filled the room.
MAXIMILIAN AND NADIA’S STORY
The year was 1934. A tall, slender tutor in a perfectly tailored suit strode purposefully but gracefully toward a small crowd that had gathered in the courtyard of the Munich University Law School. His face bore a stern, almost angry, expression.
Everyone noticed him at once. Indeed, people tended to notice Maximilian Wagner wherever he went.
Young women noticed him because he was handsome and gallant. The Nazis noticed him because he epitomized their ideal of the master race. Professors noticed him because he was an intelligent, hardworking, and original thinker who had reached his position at an unusually young age.
The students in the courtyard moved out of his way as he marched toward a group of about a dozen Nazis who had surrounded a young woman. When he reached them, they stopped tormenting her at once and turned toward him.
German students were still always impeccably respectful to their tutors. Even if he was only slightly older than them, he was still their tutor, and they all knew that he had a brilliant career ahead of him, and that he would play a leading role in the new Germany that would dominate the world.
The young woman, disheveled and trembling with fear and impotent rage, remained in a defensive position, crouching slightly with her arms raised to protect her face. The young tutor held out his hand to her. The students parted to make way for her, and she stepped behind Maximilian without taking his hand. She stood straight now but, mortified at being the center of attention, she didn’t look around.
“But you’re an Aryan German. Why are you protecting a Jew?” asked one of the Nazi students.
“I’m stopping an injustice. Don’t forget that this is a law school.” Maximilian replied confidently.
At that, they dispersed, muttering.
Within a few moments they were alone in the courtyard. Maximilian turned and caught the girl’s eye. She gave him a shy and somewhat admiring look.
“Are you all right, Nadia?”
“Thank you very much, I’m fine now of course.”
“Come, let’s have coffee.”
As they walked, he found himself amazed that he’d been able to act with such calm confidence. He’d been trying for months to establish a relationship with her, but he’d always been too awkward and shy even to get started. He’d thought about her every moment of every day, and had felt so charged with exhilaration when he was near her that he could barely put one foot in front of the other without stumbling. But then, he hadn’t done what he’d done to win her favor. He’d done it because it was the right thing to do, and hoped it was something he would have done for anyone.
As they left the campus together, Maximilian sensed with tremendous joy that a new chapter in his life was beginning. That afternoon, for the first time, they sat at a table together over coffee and Bienenstick cake. Nothing in the world was more important to him than being close to Nadia, and being alone with her at that moment made him happier than he remembered ever being, but he was also aware that the situation was quite grim. Nadia realized that she could no longer study at the university, and she was heartbroken.
“I can tutor you privately. I hate what’s happening and I can’t stand to see a student as promising as you be shut out like this.”
Nadia stared at the table gloomily.
“As those Nazis said, you’re an Aryan German. What makes you want to take a risk like this?”
“Being German doesn’t mean having to behave like an animal with no conscience. This country is going through a very bad period right now, but I believe the German people will come to their senses and stop putting up with this kind of nonsense.”
Nadia gave him a look of hopelessness, as if there was so much she would like to say that she knew this kindhearted young man couldn’t possibly understand. Then she gave him a smile of gratitude and slowly shook her head.
“Please. If not for your own sake, then for mine, so that I can ease my conscience. This nonsense won’t last long, and then you can take your exams and keep studying at the university.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I don’t think it’s safe for you to come to the campus anymore. The Nazis are getting more and more violent. They’re even threatening some of the professors.”
Nadia tried unsuccessfully to keep her doubt and fear from showing on her face.
“Since you feel it’s too dangerous for me to set foot on campus, I presume you don’t intend to tutor me there.”
“No…I mean yes, I don’t intend to tutor you there.”
“Then where?”
He smiled happily and put his hand on hers.
“Don’t worry, I know a place where you’ll be perfectly safe, where no one will touch you.”
A few days later, in his study at home, Maximilian felt a thrill of anticipation as he looked around to make sure everything was just right. He’d put out glasses of fruit juice and a plate of cookies, and had covered them with napkins.
When his mother passed down the hall he ran out and asked her, “Does my jacket match my trousers?”
“Yes, Max, I already told you, you look fine.”
“Yes, but…should I take off my jacket? The weather is warm…. If I just wear my shirt and trousers…Should I put on a darker shirt?”
“Hmm, yes, maybe you should wear one that’s a little darker.”
He rushed to his bedroom. His mother called after him.
“Max! What is this girl’s name?”
“Nadia! She’ll be here any minute—please show her in if she comes while I’m in my room?”
“Of course,” she said.
Then she glanced at the clock in the hall. There was more than half an hour before the lesson was to start. She laughed affectionately.
From then on Maximilian tutored Nadia twice a week. They also began to see each other more often outside lessons. They met whenever they could. Nadia rarely proposed they meet, but she accepted Maximilian’s invitations.
One weekend afternoon, the harmonious sound of four instruments filled the hall. Two violins, a viola, and a cello. Maximilian and his friends met every week to play music, and for some weeks Nadia had been coming to listen to them.
That day they were playing Schubert’s Serenade. As the music flowed, the young girl got up, opened the door, and went out onto the balcony. The balcony looked out over the back of the university, and she could see part of the empty courtyard. They’d thought it would be safe for her to be there on the weekend. Nadia stood perfectly still on the balcony, her back to the young musicians.
Max joined her on the balcony when the piece was over. He took her by the shoulders and gently turned her toward him, and as he did so, he felt a sudden ache in his heart. The girl’s beautiful eyes were filled with tears. Without saying a word she looked into the young man’s eyes, and then put her arms around his neck and began to sob. After waiting for the girl’s sobs to subside Max asked, “What’s the matter?”
When she didn’t answer he asked, “Is it because the composer is Austrian, like Hitler?”
Nadia was unable to speak.
“I’ll explain later,” she said.
A few days later when he was tutoring her at home, Max asked again what had upset her.
“This may be hard to understand, but when I hear such beautiful music played so well, I feel sad as well as happy. It somehow seems to transcend the human and I fall into a kind of trance. How can man create something so exquisite? It’s like the voice of God.�
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Nadia didn’t come to the quartet’s practice the following weekend. Max explained why, and they talked about how some people were more affected by music than others. They recalled that Tolstoy, the composer of the Kreutzer Sonata, couldn’t listen to music when he was writing or when he was feeling particularly sensitive. He would feel like a leaf caught in a storm and his feelings would be shaken to the core. Like him, Nadia did not perceive music as beautiful sounds, but as something devastating.
Then Max told them that he was going to compose a serenade for Nadia. From that day on, he would devote his life to this, and he would put all of his heart and musical talent into it.
Max and Nadia began to spend more time together. They went to restaurants and strolled in the park hand in hand. They made an interesting—indeed striking—couple: a slim, willowy girl with long black hair and green eyes next to a tall, blond man. Nadia was like no one else; she looked both northern and southern.
However, they no longer went to concerts together. Once, when they’d attended a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Nadia had sat gripping the arms of her seat with sweat pouring from her brow. Max had finally had to lead her out of the hall under the disapproving gaze of the audience. Every moment Max spent with her, he grew more deeply enamored of her, but he also began to realize that she was very highly strung and subject to storms of emotion that made her tremble like a leaf.
Maximilian was rereading Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. He’d liked the novel when he’d read it as a boy, but he hadn’t understood why it had caused such an epidemic of suicides among young people. Now, though, he realized that one had to be in love to fully appreciate the novel. He thought about her constantly. He thought about her when he lectured at the university, and he saw her face when he played the violin. She was the last thing he thought about when he went to sleep and the first thing he thought about when he woke. The only thing that kept him sane was composing the Serenade. At times it seemed madness to try to emulate one of the greatest musical works of all time, but he kept at it, working for hours at his mother’s magnificent Bösendorfer piano.
Schubert had written his Serenade one afternoon in 1826 while sitting with friends in Zum Biersack garden. He flipped through a volume of poetry that had been sitting on the table, and when one poem caught his attention he said, “Such a sweet melody has just come to me, if only I had a sheet of staff paper with me.” One of his friends drew some staves on the back of a train ticket, and Schubert wrote his great piece right there and then, with waiters rushing back and forth and fiddlers wandering from table to table.
Maximilian knew that if he titled his piece Serenade it would be compared unfavorably to Schubert’s work, yet he felt compelled to do so nevertheless.
(The world that Maximilian is describing is so foreign to me I have trouble believing it’s real. If I hadn’t heard the story from him myself, I would have found it terribly overstated: people committing suicide over a novel, young men pining for their sweethearts and composing serenades for them. I couldn’t see anyone behaving like this today. I couldn’t imagine Ahmet or Tarık or even Kerem behaving like this. Perhaps it was the spirit of the times.)
Maximilian’s mother, Hannelore, was an accomplished pianist. Music was an essential part of the education of wealthy children, and she was no exception to that belief, having received a musical education and provided one for her son. When Maximilian had finished his composition, he showed it to her and asked if they could play it together. He played it on the violin and she accompanied him on the piano, and together they worked out several problems of rhythm and harmony.
Nadia joined them for dinner that evening, and they had a pleasant meal together, avoiding talk of politics, the tension in the country, and what was being done to the Jews. Afterwards, over coffee, Hannelore mentioned that Max had composed a beautiful piece of music. Then Hannelore sat down at the piano and Max picked up his violin and they began to play. Everyone else sat in silence as the room filled with the deeply enchanting music.
Maximilian’s father, Albert, listened with great pleasure, but Nadia became quite agitated, and she had to bite her lips to keep from weeping. She was swept up in a storm of emotion but did her best not to show it. When the piece was finished everyone applauded.
Maximilian stood and said, “This may be the first time anyone has made a proposal of marriage with his mother’s help, but here goes. Nadia, will you marry me?”
This was too much for Nadia, and she covered her face with her hands and ran into the garden. Max’s family watched in astonishment as he ran out after her. He searched for her in the twilit garden, and when he found her in the gazebo, he wrapped her in his arms and pressed her head against his shoulder.
“I’m serious Nadia, please marry me,” he said, and kissed her on the lips for the first time.
The following evening Max’s parents sat him down for a painful and awkward talk, yet nothing they said could get through to him. It was clear that they were not opposed in principle to his marrying a Jewish girl, and that they were only thinking of his happiness, but this made no difference to him.
“I know how painful it will be for you not to go through with this marriage,” his mother said.
There was a long silence.
“But still,” Albert continued, “compared with the pain that you would suffer over the years if you were to marry…”
Maximilian just listened without answering, waiting for his parents to finish.
The scene was repeated several times over the next few days.
“They won’t leave your wife alone and they won’t leave her parents alone either, they won’t miss any opportunity to punish her for marrying an Aryan,” Albert warned his son.
“We don’t know what kind of country this will be for your children to grow up in either,” his wife added. “They could face a lifetime of persecution.”
That evening Maximilian answered his parents for the first time, “I’m going to marry Nadia. She agreed yesterday evening.”
His mother was at a loss for words. She looked at her husband for help. He just sat there, deep in thought, leaning forward with his chin resting on his hand. Then, suddenly, he sat up.
“In that case, we’d better start planning your wedding!”
His wife looked at him as if he’d gone mad. Then Max began to laugh. Then his father and finally his mother began to laugh too. All three of them laughed long and loud. With tears in her eyes, his mother said, “I knew anyway that he wouldn’t give up. He’s a Wagner too. I know this family only too well. When they have got something into their heads…”
Later, when they’d calmed down, Albert said, “You’ll have to move to another city, as far away as possible, and conceal the fact that Nadia is a Jew. As Frau Wagner, she’ll be above suspicion.”
They all agreed to this, and soon afterwards they visited Nadia’s family. They were originally from Romania and lived above her father’s tailor shop in a dilapidated building in the suburbs. Since the boycott, their circumstances had been diminished.
They were happy with the announcement, but also quite anxious.
A few weeks later Max and Nadia had a small wedding ceremony in the Wagner’s garden, and were married according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church. Afterwards, however, after all the guests had left, the two families held a Jewish wedding.
Nadia and Maximilian stood under the chuppah. The two families poured wine into their goblets, blessing them according to Jewish tradition, and broke the glasses. Texts were read from the Old and New Testament; they wore the kippah and read the ketubah; and observed all the traditions, including “the seven blessings.”
Then the bridegroom took his violin, and Hannelore sat at the piano, which had been brought out into the garden and illuminated by candles. As they played, tears like jewels rolled from Nadia’s
eyes. When the music had ended and the applause had died down, Maximilian announced that he had titled the piece Serenade für Nadia.
This wedding was a ceremony that couldn’t normally take place under Nazi administration. Nadia’s family was very pleased. The Roman Catholic Wagner family had behaved with tolerance and had given their consent to everything.
A short time after the wedding, Maximilian began work at Heidelberg University and they moved to that beautiful city. There, they soon established a pleasant life for themselves.
Nadia’s official name was Deborah, and they all agreed that for safety they would use this name. Frau Deborah Wagner was a good German name.
There were no Jews at the university to which Max transferred. In fact there were none left at his old university either. A few of his friends had gone to Istanbul, and in the letters that came via Marseilles, they spoke of being content there.
They lived a comfortable and respectable life as Mr. and Mrs. Wagner, and only when they were alone at night did they give voice to their fear and anxiety. They could not believe how bad the situation had become. They had believed that the Third Reich would fall within a few years, but on the contrary, it had become stronger. There were rumors that Jews were being sent to concentration camps.
Nadia’s family had made a sudden decision to flee to Romania, and Max and Nadia were relieved because they felt they would be safer there. More and more people were supporting the Nazis, who could carry out their policies of persecution with impunity. Few dared to criticize them, and those who were allowed to do so were being manipulated to create an illusion of democracy.
Then the Nazis seized on news of an assassination in Paris to move their agenda forward. A seventeen-year-old Polish boy shot a member of the German embassy staff in revenge for the murder of his parents. It was presented as a Jewish attack on the Nazis, and they turned it into a propaganda tool. The explosion that Max and “Deborah” had feared began on the night of 9 November 1938, which would be remembered thereafter as Kristallnacht. By morning, thousands of Jewish businesses had been looted, synagogues had been vandalized, Jewish graves had been desecrated, hundreds of people were injured, and ninety-one Jews were killed. The rising sun and the flames of burning buildings were reflected in the shards of broken glass that covered the streets.
Serenade for Nadia Page 16
