The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  The Chinese matting in the apartment corridors was good to slide on. ‘I slid very fast and went through a glass door. My father’s horrible partner, Mr Kurtz (“Shorty”), who was hugely tall and, like all the assistants, in love with my mother, held my wrist hard to stop me from bleeding to death. It missed the artery by millimetres, so after that I had to write with my right hand. It was neater than my present writing; because it was Gothic writing with so many loops that I could fill in with colour. The scar weakened my wrist. I was always left-handed and there was a certain amount of talk about it.’ His mother kept a poem for Kurtz that he wrote in his new right-handed script:

  Lieber Kurz

  Hertzliche gluckliche wunsche

  Zum Kurzen geburtstag

  Ich habe Kurzlich gehort

  Das du 3 zentimeter

  Kurzer geworden

  Ich habe nur Kurze

  Zeit und muss bald

  Kurzschbuss machen

  Giete grusso von

  Mir

  Lux

  Dear Kurz

  Very happy short birthday

  I heard shortly

  That you are 3 cms shorter

  I only have a short time

  And must soon

  Cut this short.

  Lots of love

  Lux

  While memory isolates incidents, photographs flatten them. Family photos, particularly, lose immediacy and become just typical; within a few years they look quaint, a little while longer and pathos obtains. The three young Freuds posed in long trousers is one of those countless photographs that, had they not left Germany, would have been seen subsequently to foreshadow fate. ‘Me and my two brothers, in Berlin, in tailored clothes, which I find is a bit like, “all those lovely boys ended up in gas ovens”. Those dark looks.

  ‘I love German poetry but I loathe the German language.’

  In January 1933 President von Hindenburg made Hitler Chancellor. A month later the Reichstag fire and the orchestrated commotion the next morning meant a detour for Lucian on the way to his new school on the other side of Unter den Linden: the Französisches Gymnasium, where Embassy children were sent and French was spoken. Not that he went much. ‘I was ill with all the different things as a child and I never caught on there at all.’ He saw Hitler once in Matthäikirchplatz. ‘He had huge people on either side of him and he was tiny.

  ‘On Unter den Linden, on the side we used to walk down, there was Siegesallee [Victory Alley] and there were all the kings and emperors of Germany in marble and bronze, and one of the German kings that amused us – you know how children love fat people – was Karl the Fat. My Mosse cousins had an uncle – a relative – called Karl Selowsky who was a lawyer, quite young, and enormous and we thought he was wonderful. And then a terrible thing happened. On the way to his office (he was well-to-do and lived very well, no doubt that was why he was so enormous) he was got hold of by some Brownshirts and was badly beaten up and this news filtered through and seemed pretty terrible, but then he was OK and out again.’ Selowsky survived the war – in France – and became a judge in Karlsruhe.

  The Mosse children’s uncle, Rudolf Mosse – a German nationalist who became an officer in the war, won the Iron Cross first class and was supposed to go into the publishing business – had decided instead to take up farming, so he ran the family estate near Potsdam. According to Dick ‘Wolfi’ Mosse, ‘He tangled with the local Nazis, who didn’t like Jews as Prussian officers or as farmers. He was beaten up and arrested in 1933 at five in the morning and, whether he threw himself under a lorry on his way to the concentration camp or was thrown, either way, his body was delivered in a coffin.’ Sigmund Freud’s comment was that ‘Jews owning land was an obscenity to them as Jews were a “nomadic” race.’10

  In April 1933 the first boycott of Jewish shops was staged (‘I didn’t know there were Jewish shops’) and the banning of Jewish lawyers and doctors and other professions began. Ernst’s brother, Great-Uncle Olli, a civil engineer, left Berlin for Paris. There were meetings round the dinner table, the Freuds and friends debating what to do, whether to wait and see or leave forthwith. In May Ernst Freud, visiting his father in Vienna, mentioned Palestine as a possibility. Clement, whose turn it was to go with him, told his grandfather that he was referred to at school as ‘Jud Freud’. Book-burnings were organised in Berlin with verbose damnations for the works of certain writers: ‘Against soul-disintegrating exaggeration of the instinctual life I commit to the flames the writings of … Sigmund Freud’ was an official line.

  According to Lucie Freud, rich German Jews had taken to going to England to give birth, thereby endowing the baby with a place-name on birth certificate and passport that would serve to impress officials; she and Ernst, however, had no reason to regret their lack of foresight in this respect. When I first met him, Freud told me that his parents had planned leaving before Hitler came to power and sent money well in advance. In 1933 quitting Germany was a relatively straightforward business. Fifty thousand Jews left in the course of the year; obstructions and confiscations (‘flight taxes’) were not yet in place and there was little idea of any worse fate than penury and disqualification. For the Freuds the move, as Lucian remembered, was fairly easy. ‘It’s not that we were well-to-do, but we were reasonably comfortable. Lots of Jewish people in similar positions, or perhaps more wealthy people, didn’t think it could happen, didn’t think it would go that far, didn’t believe it.’ Having decided to move to England Ernst went ahead to London to see if there were any prospects for him there and to find a suitable school for the boys. While there he attempted to strike up useful contacts: Erich Mendelsohn, who had already moved there; his one-time employer in Munich, Fritz Landauer, who also had settled in London; and he showed his work to Edwin Lutyens, the top name in British architecture at the time. Robert Lutyens his son was a possible partner, he thought. He saw the need to publicise himself. Homes and Gardens was to publish, in March 1934, an account of his Scherk house of 1931 in Berlin. He secured reduced fees meanwhile for the boys at Dartington School in Devon.

  While he was away Lucie took Gab (Stephen) to see Mae West in I’m No Angel. Lucian, she said, wasn’t old enough.

  In July the two younger boys, together with their cousin Jo Mosse and a couple of others, went on a three-week camping trip to the lakes and rivers of Mecklenburg. This was, Lucian felt, ‘a kind of toughening-up treat’. The Edvige II, a motorboat, with portholes in each side and an awning at the stern, operated as the Seeschule Racki, Racki being the skipper, ‘a good-looking, big, young non-Jewish type. He was rough and tough: he taught us swimming by pushing us in. We kept a log and Racki made a film with a commentary and it said about me: “Lucian, over-excited as always …”’ On the bank of one of the lakes they spotted a lunatic with a bucket on his head making a speech thinking he was Hindenburg.

  ‘We were already planning going to England so Racki taught us what he said were English swear words. “Burrshit,” he said.’

  For some months there had been English lessons. ‘The first book I read in English was Black Beauty. Actually Alice in Wonderland was the first, but I didn’t understand it fully. I remember trying to read it at Cottbus; being there, with the ice-house outside the sitting room, me being with my mother and saying the first sentence: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do …” And down the rabbit hole she went, “never once considering how in the world she was to get out again”.’

  In one of the letters Lucian wrote to his father with news of his swimming and long-jumping, a haircut and new check trousers, he added as an illustrative footnote a cheerful little talking skyscraper that said, ‘Scrape me break me cloud then Unemployed Freud can build me again.’11

  This was optimistic. For when it came to making the break from one way of life to another with no welcome and hardly any likelihood of return, the shock of dislocation could be devastating, as their neighbours the Hamburgers found w
hen in November 1933 they left Berlin. Michael Hamburger was sent to school the day after they arrived in Edinburgh. ‘I and my younger brother walked to school unaccompanied – in Berlin we always had our governess with us – because we were all under such extreme stress: Father had to pass all his exams in one year to be allowed to practise in England and mother, confronted with an extremely cold house where in the past she had had servants, could spare no time for us. My brother was weeping. We spoke no English and didn’t know where we were.’12 Soon afterwards they moved from Edinburgh to Hove, then to St John’s Wood.

  Bertrand Russell, writing that October in a news magazine, Everyman, on ‘Why Are Alien Groups Hated?’, talked about the revival of ‘utterly unreasonable dislikes’ in Germany in the months since the Nazis had acquired power. ‘Spain ruined itself by the expulsion of the Jews and Moors. In almost every white man’s country, the average among Jews is higher than amongst the rest of the population, not only in intelligence, but in public spirit, in artistic capacity, in industry, in fact in almost every valuable quality.’13 A subsequent editor of Everyman, Major F. Yeats-Brown, who described himself as ‘friendly to British Jews’, was more enthusiastic than his distinguished contributor about ‘the active, integral, authoritarian state’ that Germany was fast becoming. English tourists, he reported, came back impressed with the ‘spirit of business-as-usual and cheerful self-respect’. So-called ‘Down-and-outs’, he added, ‘are collected into Labour Camps and provided with work, clothing, food, pocket money. Youths of both sexes possess magnificent physiques … Hard work and serious play are the order of the day. Germany is pre-War. The Jews are ostracised as they were then. France is hated, England half-envied, half-despised.’14 Ernst Freud remarked that English people were welcoming, though when they said something nice about Hitler, thinking to be friendly, he was speechless.

  Immediately before leaving Germany the Freuds went to stay in Vienna, all of them except Lucian. ‘We could choose and I refused and went to my Calmann cousins in Hamburg.’ Then they left. ‘It was just in time. Afterwards it became much more difficult. We weren’t refugees, we were émigrés.’ Being émigrés they could take all they wanted with them. Money over and above the amount allowed out with them was hidden in the leg of a circular table with a red marble top, designed by Ernst, though not with concealment in mind. The household dispersed. Kurtz worked as a servant for a while in Scotland, Ernst’s other assistant Augenfelt came with them, and Linde the governess too, but she returned to Germany shortly before the war and went into a nunnery. Grandmother Brasch remained in Berlin. ‘She stayed on and came just before the war with just the five pounds which was allowed.’ Forced to divest herself of Gross Gaglow, she sold it to a Zionist organisation set up to train Jews for work on the land in Israel. This was soon forfeit.

  The Regentenstrasse neighbourhood became a diplomatic quarter where the embassies and legations of Axis-friendly or Axis-acquired countries accumulated, among them those of Austria, Argentina, Greece, Japan, Hungary, Romania, Spain and Yugoslavia.

  2

  ‘Very much a slightly artistic place’

  In September 1933, Lucie Freud took the boys to England. Their English was now jingle standard:

  Ring ting ting

  Hear the bell ring

  School has begun.

  The school chosen for them was the recently founded Dartington Hall on the Dartington Estate near Totnes in Devon. The Elmhirsts, owners of the estate, were hospitable utopians, Dorothy Elmhirst being rich and Leonard Elmhirst a former agricultural adviser to the great Bengali poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore. Lucie Freud stayed with them while the boys settled in. ‘They patronised her a bit. My mother wasn’t proud, but she was rather amused by Dorothy Elmhirst, who would say “of course, of course”, all the time.’

  In November, Ernst Freud finally wound up his Berlin business affairs, dismantled the Matthäikirchstrasse apartment, sold the Hiddensee house to a Leipzig lawyer and returned to London, this time for good. He was by nature optimistic, Lucian always found, and keen to appear confident. Lucian and Clement had sent him a Mabel Lucie Attwell postcard of an extravagantly dimpled child lisping: ‘It’s nice to have a man about the house.’ The apartment he took for the time being was in Clarges Street, off Piccadilly. ‘When I asked my mother why there, she said, “Your father asked what’s the equivalent in London of living in the district next to the Tiergarten?” “Mayfair,” they said, “without question.” After a short time, when they got to know one or two people, my parents realised that there was no need to live there.’

  Impressive introductory address though it was, 36 Clarges Street lacked domestic staff. ‘Two maisonettes, sharing a butler, an ex-butler called Humble, in fact, who had charge of the property and who didn’t like looking after my guinea pigs in the holidays.’ Lucie Freud never forgot the occasion when, exhilarated at cooking for practically the first time in her life, she went into the fish shop in Shepherd’s Market and asked for cod and the fishmonger’s response was: ‘Cod? In Mayfair?’ Soon a maid called Jones was hired and taught to cook. Lucian himself quite liked being there. He took to fish and chips and would eat nothing else for a while, cod, cod, cod and chips, until the thought of batter nauseated him permanently. There was a cigarette machine on the ground floor, which he discovered could be fixed to cough up packets with a halfpenny change fastened to them for the investment of a halfpenny instead of the required shilling. Also, Clarges Street was near Hyde Park, celebrated for its loitering soldiers and nursemaids. There, on Rotten Row, he could admire the horses – ‘I felt this was a very English thing’ – always hoping to find bearing reins being used so that he could then reproach the riders for the practice so fiercely condemned in Black Beauty. A harangue would have been an impressive exercise of his uncertain English.

  School however was the England he first knew. ‘Deepest Devon, red soil, and you had your own room, which was nice.’ His grandfather had heard well of Dartington from a Dutch patient who had told him that it was the only school in England with good food. So it proved. ‘A line from one of the girls there was “Starvation diet: lobster”.’ In the Shell Guide to Devon, published in 1935, John Betjeman described Dartington as ‘a co-educational school to which modern authors and intellectuals send their sons’. Given the renown of Sigmund Freud, his was a good name to have on the school roll. Accordingly, Ernst negotiated reduced school fees. Stephen, Lucian and Clement were to fit in with Bertrand and Dora Russell’s John and Kate, the Huxley children and the son of G. E. Moore the philosopher. Not to mention Miranda Domvile, whose father was one of Oswald Mosley’s lieutenants. (‘She thought modern education was so ghastly she might as well be educated there.’) And Dani Petrov whose father, Lucian understood, ‘was something in the Russian Revolution’.

  The school, which in 1933 had been going only seven years, had recently expanded to take 150 pupils. ‘Boys and girls at the school can learn besides “school” work from practical activities connected with the estate,’ Betjeman noted in the Shell Guide. The prospectus stressed self-regulation. ‘We set no prohibitions on things to be seen or touched, nor any bounds to the children’s wanderings on or outside the Estate. The first thing the individual boy has to do is to find his feet and to learn to know something about himself, his fellows and the world around him.’ That suited Lucian. As far as he was concerned, ‘Dartington had only one rule: no pushing people into the swimming pool.

  ‘I took three years to find my feet. The headmaster, W. B. Curry, had indiscriminate appetites; he was fat and jolly and wrote books – I looked at them once – and I did such an awful thing – not understanding anything about England, school or behaviour. Letters would arrive and be put on the desk in the front hall and I opened a letter addressed to my housemother, Marge Foss: a love-letter from Curry to her. You mustn’t do that, I was told; there was real annoyance, but I didn’t know. I realised I’d done an unsuitable thing quite soon when I read it. I didn’t do it secretly t
hough. It was like animals learn by copying: people always opened letters, so I opened the letter.’ He was equally insouciant with his own correspondence. ‘Grandfather sent me and my brothers a letter with a five-pound note each, grand and crinkling. I threw mine away because I didn’t know what it was.’

  The school awarded neither marks nor prizes, imposed no penalties, banned competition save in team games, and classes were voluntary, at least in theory. ‘We exert no compulsory attendance at classes nor are we greatly worried if the first term appears wasted in wandering about,’ the prospectus said. Lucian took advantage of this. No educational scheme, however sympathetic, would have suited him, stranger that he was, awkward with his new right-handed writing and his broken English. When he tried out what he thought was his English swear word, ‘Burrshit’, he got no reaction.

  A birthday letter to his father, with a drawing of a horse and a goat grinning in a field under a purple crayon sky, mentions daily cricket and a feast for which provisions were already laid in, and, most important, he wrote: ‘Ich gehe jeden tag in die farm’ (I go to the farm every day).1 The school farm, across a field from Foxhole Copse, the main buildings, offered escape. ‘That’s where my life really was. I didn’t talk to people and so, spending all the time on the farm, I had a solitary life, which I liked.’ Animal husbandry was part of the Dartington scheme and Lucian took full advantage. ‘I got up at five or six and helped Bob the farmer milk the goats and so on; after milking the goats I smelt so much I was avoided. I was quite pleased about that. When I fed the pigs early in the morning and switched on the light, rats came out of the gutter and I shut my eyes and banged them with my spade; it was terrifying, banging their backs. They felt soft and they jumped at me. I was afraid they’d get into my wellingtons.’