The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘My mother hated the estate because, with her classical education and love of the ancient world, she felt it was sort of sybaritic. I loved it there. There was, for instance, an ice-bank so you could have ice any time in the summer: an ice mountain with a straw cap over it. That seemed incredibly luxurious.

  ‘Motor cars were few; but there was a friend of my grandfather’s called Lampl and I remember driving over the border with him and being so excited at going over there, probably into Czechoslovakia.’ Czechoslovakia (a recently created country: product of the Peace of Versailles) or wherever: countries were just names on the mixed packets of postage stamps that he used to send off for on approval.

  His grandmother’s Berlin apartment, in Hardenbergstrasse, Charlottenburg, was impressive but off-putting. ‘The drawing room was formal, dark, with a huge tasselled lamp over the table, incredibly comfortable and luxurious. Palm trees about a lot, carpets on the tables: a sort of palm court feeling, like the Ritz.’ The bedroom had a polar-bear rug and ivory objects, and statuettes of Napoleon Bonaparte. ‘There was a great fashion for Napoleoneana. Rather like people now having things of Hitler. My mother thought my grandmother was terribly vulgar as she had bridge parties where they drank beer.’

  His grandmother used to take him to the Charlottenburg museums and the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island. The painted bust of Nefertiti – recently made public and astonishingly immediate with its serene authority – impressed him more than the Rembrandts, which struck him as ‘brown and disgusting’.

  The Brasch relatives were familiar to Lucian, unlike the Freuds in Vienna; they were also wealthier and, in some cases, more memorable. ‘My mother was one of three sisters and there was an elder brother, Erwin Brasch, whom I never met. He was in the war and was an officer and was on patrol when he suddenly realised he had been deserted in this sinister wood by his platoon. He was captured, thrown into prison and then sent to Africa. In the train he went to the loo, broke the window and tried to jump out, but they caught him by his legs. After having been the only son from a wealthy family, trained in the law, when he came back from the war he was really troubled and restless and wandered around the streets and fell in with a religious lot and married a woman from the streets who had been a whore, supposedly. The marriage was a private marriage conducted in my grandparents’ flat and, not long after it, my uncle’s wife cursed my grandfather and said that she wouldn’t have children, or couldn’t have children, because he disapproved of the marriage. He was terribly upset by this and died.

  ‘My uncle became a Catholic missionary and went with his wife to the Mount of Olives where they built a house and he became manager of Barclay’s Bank – I always say Olive Branch – and was very friendly with the Arabs and everyone liked him, and one night, coming home from having dinner with the Arabs in the hills, he was murdered by the Irgun, probably mistaking him for a Jew, which he was, but he was a passionate Christian. That was in the thirties, not long before the war.

  ‘My mother’s younger sister, Gerda, whom she adored and would do anything for, was married to a children’s doctor called Carl Mosse. I had an extra toe on my small toe, which he removed when I was two or three. I said to my mother, “How dare you,” but she said she thought I would have had such trouble later if it hadn’t been taken off. Anyway, he left my aunt, went to China and lived at 101 Bubbling Well Road in Shanghai, where I used to write to him, just to be able to write the address on the envelope. He sent a backscratcher as “a present from”. I thought of him in a friendly way but my mother didn’t. “He’s awfully vulgar,” she said. A funny thing: when Uncle Carl went to China his three children turned into orientals: Jo, who I liked, looked like a Pekinese. The elder sister married a horrible art dealer, Hans Calmann, a banker who when he came to London became an art dealer because that was his passion. He had a gallery in St James’s Place; she died in Hamburg. I used to stay with them sometimes in their very grand eighteenth-century house in Hamburg. I remember a spiral staircase with old maps, with ships on the maps.’

  Hanging in the Freuds’ apartment, besides Lucian’s Brueghel reproductions and the Dürers, was a framed watercolour of oak trees by Ernst Freud who had studied art during his architectural training in Munich and remained partial to Klimt. His few surviving drawings – which Freud turned up when he went through his mother’s belongings after his father died – date from around 1913 and feature villas in diamantine Alps overlooking Italian lakes. Secessionist in spirit, carefully so, they do not suggest that he ever entertained any strong ambition to become a painter. Ernst once told his father, according to the Wolf Man, Freud’s famous patient, that it would be foolish for anyone such as him, of moderate means, to take up art. He did however have in his library George Grosz’s graphic portfolio Ecce Homo. Lucian admired the yellow bindings of his edition of Conrad and realised, later on, that he had quite a daring taste in modern literature. ‘A great deal of Rilke – my mother adored his work – and a first edition – the only edition then – of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.’ It puzzled him rather that his father had such books. ‘But then, lots of people have lively moments when students.’

  For their entertainment, once they were old enough, a projectionist was hired to show films in the apartment. ‘The first film I ever saw was actually an English film [in fact American] called Bring ’Em Back Alive, about wild animals.’ Made in 1932 the film featured a baby elephant being bottle-fed and fights between python and crocodile and python and tiger. ‘In Germany children weren’t allowed to see films with love interest – a kiss meant love interest – and the most marginal, near-dirty film some children were allowed to see was a Charlie Chaplin film, that one with the famous dance with the buns: The Gold Rush. It had a kiss in. That was the dirtiest film I saw. But Felix the Cat was all right.’

  Being Jewish, distinctively so, part of the Jewish 4 per cent of Berliners, had not impinged until then. The family never went to synagogue and there was no religious observance. ‘I was not a practising Jew but perhaps conscious of being a little non-Austrian. Like all proper Jews I’m not interested in religion.’ Years later he agreed joyfully with something that Isaiah Berlin said to him, quoting Heine: ‘The Jewish religion is not a religion, it’s a disaster.’ Lucie Freud did suggest once, perfunctorily, that he should try shul.‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s to do with your ancestry.’

  ‘So I went for one lesson or maybe two but I thought the rabbi smelt, so I said that I wouldn’t go any more. Mother was completely agnostic.’

  Ernst Freud had Zionist inclinations, and possibly a pious streak. ‘If it hadn’t been for the agnostic tradition of my grandfather, my father would have been quite talmudic, I think, because he liked the ritual and the curious sort of scholarship. He had all his volumes of the Talmud bound in red.’ But Sigmund Freud’s unbelief was persuasive. ‘His final kick at the Talmud was that book he published here in England: Moses and Monotheism, about Moses being an Egyptian floating down the river. An outrageous book.’

  The family could not but be conscious of their Jewishness, however, in that it was increasingly held against them and used against them. Sneers hardened into threats. ‘I used to collect cigarette cards: Abdulla cigarette cards had profiles of movie stars. Stephen and I got my brother Cle to ask people for them, to go into cafés where Nazis went and say, “Heil Hitler, have you got cigarette cards, please?” And some would say: “Yes, all right. So long as you don’t give them to any little Jewish boys.”’

  The Freud brothers hand in hand: Stefan, Clemens and Lucian (right), Berlin, 1927

  Art appreciation was something to be encouraged. And art as an expression of growing awareness: what better indication could one have of a child’s personal development? Lucie Freud kept the drawings sent to her by the boys in their letters from Hiddensee, the island off Germany’s Baltic coast where they spent summers, June to September, often while their parents stayed in Berlin or went off on their own leaving them with the governess.r />
  ‘Hiddensee lay stretched out from north to south, long and narrow like a lizard lying in the sun,’ Elizabeth von Arnim wrote in The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen, published in 1904. The island was the perfect playground. Anna Freud rhapsodised over it. ‘A combination of everything beautiful in one small patch and with air and wind and sun and freedom.’9 Sigmund Freud, who stayed there once, in 1930, in the lighthouse hotel, but left after a couple of days when his heart condition played up, said that it was a Gesundheitsparadies (health paradise) for the children, if not for him. The attractions – sea, sand and away from it all – were also its drawbacks. Einstein went to Hiddensee, as did Franz Kafka, Billy Wilder, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Fallada, Ernst Barlach, George Grosz, Erich Kästner, Rainer Rilke, Thomas Mann and Walter Trier, the cartoonist and illustrator, who drew carefree figures bouncing around its dunes and hills. At least one of these now celebrated cultural figures, Edgar Wind the art historian, once called on the Freuds. Little Lucian, according to his mother, said to him, ‘Wind: did you blow in through the window?’

  ‘Hiddensee was between Germany and Denmark, opposite Rügen, where Isherwood and Spender went. It was a long strip of an island in the shape of a seahorse with some hills at the far end where there were some rather grand houses, castellated places, where the Nazis had a castle, and then a narrow middle part, which you could walk across in ten minutes, with the middle village, where we had a house, with a baker’s next door where Linde the governess used to take the plum cake she’d made to be baked, and then a far-off village, Neuendorf, where people practised free love.’ Lucian’s mother tried explaining to him what they did. ‘These are odd people,’ she said.

  The Freuds’ cottage in the village of Vitte was steep-roofed and semi-detached; the other half belonged to a fisherman and his family called Kollwitz. ‘They spoke Mundart [dialect] Plattdeutsch. The daughter, Irma, was ten, pretty and very strong and had a huge German plait and she would sing, “Dengst du den, dengst du den …”, a song that translated “Do you really think, you Berlin weed, that I like you …?” A large pear tree stood by the house, which I had a lot of life in.’ He drew himself as an elfin nipper standing between house and pear tree with an airship – the Graf Zeppelin – passing overhead.

  Hiddensee House with Artist, Pear Tree and Zeppelin, c.1930

  Lucie Freud kept a record of the holiday summers in a series of photo albums, a dozen altogether, mostly one snapshot per page for the usual arrival, the walk to the house along the track between flat pastures where horses grazed, sailing expeditions, picnics behind a wicker windbreak with buckets and spades and model boats, Billy the greyhound in his muzzle, Ernst in holiday trousers, the three boys lolling on a swing seat, Lucian looking out to sea, Lucian with a retinue of admiring little girls. One summer their Mosse cousins joined them and they played diabolo, at which Lucian showed off his dexterity, and hide and seek in the pine trees, where they were thrilled to be trespassing.

  Lucian with kitten, c.1928

  Mishaps were a further stimulus. ‘I was cycling in the middle village on a fixed pedal cycle and obviously it couldn’t brake, so I came down from higher ground to the harbour whizzing pedals at speed and threw myself off the bike, as I couldn’t swim. My mother, in trousers, and her friend Tanya were standing there as I crashed on to the pebbles and covered myself in cuts and bruises.’ And then there was school, obligatory when the stay on Hiddensee was prolonged beyond high summer. ‘Huge classes of village boys. We were asked “How long did the Thirty Years War last?” and I was the only boy who could answer. The schoolmaster was sweet on Linde.’

  Lucian sent drawings to his mother with covering letters in spiky German script. ‘This is good, take care of it,’ he wrote on one of them. Looking through them sixty years later, still smarting at being explained by David Sylvester, he remarked that, if not a ‘born artist’, certainly he had been a lively beginner, drawing the lighthouse on the point and the clumsy great ferries Swanti and Caprivi, seabirds aloft and bright flowers shoved in jugs. What better subject than what they’d been enjoying, a boat trip to Denmark or jelly for tea?

  One afternoon, while they were playing bowls, a cart filled with drunks came lurching down the grass strip that ran through the village. ‘We moved out of the way, to let it pass, and my mother was obviously very worried when they slowed up and leered at her. One of them, a red-faced, huge young man, said – looking at Stephen, who hadn’t taken in what was happening – “Mildly Jewish-looking youth, I would say,” and my mother went scarlet. I remember that: the strange atmosphere. The whole thing was very very odd.

  ‘There used to be thunderstorms in the hills on Hiddensee. They were trapped there and couldn’t get away and got stuck, people said. I liked that idea.’

  Unlike their Mosse cousins, the Freuds were sent to state schools. Lucian began at the Volksschule near by in the Derfflingerstrasse in 1931 when he was eight. He went on his own. Choosing a smallish street for the purpose, he tried his own version of Russian roulette, standing on the pavement, eyes closed, counting to ten and running across, eyes still shut. ‘To test my fate. Until finally hit. I was hit by a car and thrown up in the air and as I came down I was hit again as the car stopped. I lay there and a crowd formed and wanted to lynch the poor driver. As I went through the air I wetted myself, as you do when you’re dead. The crowd said we must have your address, so I pretended to be deaf and dumb and limped away. In the bath the governess said, “What happened?” I’d been hit on the thighs and was all blue. I was running when the car hit me and went up, perfectly relaxed I suppose. Well, I proved that I was not indestructible. Mother never found out.

  ‘Derfflingerstrasse was very mixed, middle class and working class. I had a friend called Schucki – Schuckmeier or something, very plebeian – who was my friend, at school only. It was slightly unthinkable to bring a street boy home.

  ‘“What do you do at Christmas?” he asked me. “We have half Christmas and half Chanukah. What do you do?” “My brothers and sisters, father and mother and grandparents, we eat and drink until we fall under the table,” he said. I was mad on skating and, looking for danger in the Tiergarten, I skated under a bridge, got through but, where the ice was thin, went into the water. A man, very thin and dressed in black – Berlin poor – pulled me out and he turned out to be Schucki’s father. After that I was allowed to take Schucki home.

  As circumstances worsened, economic disaster triggering extreme reactions, the ten-year-old Lucian became aware gradually that politics could affect him. ‘There was a socially conscious teacher who was obviously very fond of my mother, and he was worried about the situation in Germany and he said in class, “Any of the boys whose parents are unemployed, will you put your hands up?” I’d heard a lot of talk at home (my father was getting less and less work and there was less and less for him to do) so I put my hand up and the teacher gave me a strange smile and said, “Oh, you can put your hand down.” I felt rather badly about it because there were really poor then and for us it didn’t count. For us it was like not having the pudding in the restaurant.’

  Lucian c.1929

  Going down the street with his mother one day Lucian started chalking swastikas on the wall. Puzzled at her appalled reaction, he told her that it was just something all his friends did. By then he was involved with a school gang that went in for lighting fires and minor daredevilry, behaviour inspired, where Lucian was concerned, by Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (published in 1928, filmed in 1931 with a script by Kästner and Billy Wilder) in which a pack of boys from Wilmersdorf, the neighbouring working-class district, outwit a bank robber turned pickpocket. Being the keenest and smallest in the gang, Lucian was the one who volunteered to go into the shop on the way home from school to pocket Trumpf chocolate. However, he found himself excluded from the new after-school activity: Hitler Youth meetings. Unlike all but two of the others he was ineligible. His classmates told him that he wasn’t missing much. ‘“Don’t worry,” th
ey said, “Thursday afternoons we just sing songs and eat sausages.”

  ‘Strange as it may sound, at that age, a great deal of my conversation with the other boys was about politics. I was aware of the excitement. I listened very much: “Vote for Hitler or Hindenberg.” I remember these words like Reichskanzler [Reich Chancellor], which I’d never heard before.’

  In 1931 the Ullsteins moved away from Regentenstrasse because they objected to being overshadowed by a ten-storey office block erected next door to them beside the Landwehrkanal: the Shell-Haus by Emil Fahrenkamp, in the International Modern Style, later to become headquarters of the Navy High Command and one of the few buildings in the district that was to survive the war. The Freuds moved as well, though not to avoid modernism, to the nearby Matthäikirchstrasse 4, to a large early nineteenth-century apartment, more elegant than Regentenstrasse, with a garden just big enough for athletics. ‘I had the idea of training for the long jump. It was better doing it with someone else, especially someone who was worse; not someone that, in the ordinary way, I’d have chosen.’ The boy was called Goldschmidt. ‘He’d got that special thing, it’s a kind of Jewish upbringing thing, which makes people opposite of athletic. Isaiah Berlin had it: indoor characteristics, basically unphysical. It doesn’t show when older.’

  In November 1931 all three brothers caught scarlet fever and were kept indoors for six weeks, during which time they were sent commiserations from the school on Hiddensee. ‘It was to do with my governess who was courted by the schoolmaster, Dr Heldige: a huge package of letters from Hiddensee to Berlin. One of them said, “I’m afraid I’m new so I don’t know how to write to you.”’ Their mother wrote to her in-laws that, when released from their seclusion, the boys ‘flew and leapt down the stairs in a way that frightened and alarmed me’.