Then, when the Austrian crown prince, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife were assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Vienna wanted to resolve the Serbian question once and for all. That would only be possible, however, with the help of its German allies. Meanwhile, England and Russia were allies, and the Russians backed Serbia against Austria’s July Ultimatum. With the Russian mobilization of July 31, the die was cast in Berlin for a military solution, and so began the war that would later be called the First World War and that led to a decisive break in history and in the life of mankind. In August 1914, the “good old days” came to an end, and the era of horrific twentieth-century warfare was born.
Poem by Alice Frank, June 1912 (photo credit 4.1)
Poem by Alice Frank, June 1912 (photo credit 4.2)
At first the soldiers went off to war as though to a picnic in the countryside—singing, sticking flowers in their rifles, and promising to be back home by Christmas at the latest. No one suspected that the war would last for four long, hard years with staggering losses of life on all sides. By autumn, after the conquest of Belgium, the German advance was already brought to a halt, at the Battle of the Marne. The yearlong trench war at Verdun, in northern France, and in Flanders, took the lives of millions of soldiers. The battles remained outside the German borders, with the German armies laying waste to the neighboring countries and using poison gas for the first time in history in the Battle of Ypres; for the French and the Belgians, on the other hand, the Grande Guerre with its slaughterhouses of Verdun and Flanders remains a living memory down to this day. While the German men gave their lives “on the field of honor,” the women were asked to give their all “on the home front”: their enemy was the lack of food, which grew worse and worse and eventually led to widespread famine.
Until they were granted equal civil rights, the Jews had not been allowed to serve in the German army. Now, with the outbreak of World War I, a large number of German Jews hoped that by proving their patriotism and voluntarily enlisting, they could finally assert a German national identity and assimilate fully into German society. Despite the slander spread by anti-Semites that the Jews would shirk active duty, in truth the percentage of the Jewish population that voluntarily enlisted was higher than the national average. A hundred thousand Jews fought in World War I, and thirty thousand were decorated for “bravery in the face of the enemy.” Twelve thousand died for their “German fatherland.”
What happened to the Frank family in World War I? They too felt themselves to be German—they were German. Nevertheless, they could not have been as enthusiastic about the war as many others were. They had relatives in England, relatives in France. As recently as the summer of 1914, Michael’s brother Léon Frank had come to visit Mertonstrasse in Frankfurt with his wife, Nanette, and their sons Oscar, Georges, and Jean-Michel. The great fear they must have had, that cousin would have to take up arms against cousin, was now bitter truth. When their first and then their second son fell in battle against Germany, Léon Frank jumped out of a window in despair and Nanette had to be sent to a sanatorium. Only Jean-Michel, twenty years old, remained behind. Herbert would later visit him in Paris and probably stayed with him for a while in his apartment on Avenue Kléber.
Front: Nanette, Jean-Michel, and Léon Frank; rear: Oscar and Georges (photo credit 4.3)
Right at the start of the war, Alice Frank had signed up as a volunteer nurse at the Kyffhäuser military hospital in Frank-furt, according to a certificate from the “Hospital Personnel Employment Office” dated September 21, 1914. In June 1917, she was awarded the honorary medallion for volunteer nurses. There is also a pass from Reserve Hospital X granting Nurse Alice Frank permission to leave Frankfurt am Main for Travemünde, valid from July 1 to August 1, 1917, at midnight. “All authorities are hereby requested to permit the bearer to travel unhindered and give the bearer any aid and assistance that should be necessary. Signed: Head Doctor.” Underneath it says: “1. This pass must be shown to the window attendants freely and voluntarily when purchasing a military train ticket, must be shown upon demand during the journey, and must be handed in upon returning from leave. 2. Do not answer any questions! Do not discuss any military matters! (Espionage hazard!) 3. For travel on personal business, purchase only public rail tickets.” One additional document survives: “Frau Alice Frank, recommended by Dr. Grünwald, is hereby authorized to wear Red Cross Armband #581.” Later, Leni too would sign up as a nurse at the military hospital.
It goes without saying that Robert, Otto, and Herbert also took part in World War I. Robert served in the First Squadron, Cavalry Regiment, on horseback. Herbert was in the Eighteenth Army and left Frankfurt in early December 1914 for Lüttich. Otto was drafted into a Rhineland infantry artillery regiment in 1915. He sent numerous letters from his barracks in Mainz, the first of which, from August 7, 1915, displays a naive and carefree attitude that is hard to even imagine today:
Dear everyone, You would have enjoyed my calling-up yesterday as much as I did. After a very good meal in the main train station, we drove here and arrived at 11:00 a.m. in our bunk, i.e. straw sack, 19 people in a room for 8. Today we were split up, clothed, & had to thoroughly clean house. My job was to wash the windows & put my boots in order etc. On the whole I believe I am very lucky to be here. Unlike with Robert, almost everyone here is older and rather fat and cut a lot of slack, & so the training here should be pretty easy. The sergeant is very quiet & friendly, in short everything’s fine for now.
In two weeks I should be allowed to live outside the barracks. The food is very good here, but feel free to send stuff anyway—eggs, cigars and cigarettes, no clothes yet except a pair of socks.
Five days later he wrote again, to say that the training was indeed very easy, he was never even tired; his muscles were sore sometimes, but that wasn’t a bad thing. Aside from that, he said how much he was looking forward to their visit, it would definitely be especially interesting for Helene to get to see the inside of a barrack.
Otto’s letters to Leni during the war are particularly affectionate and worried about her. He calls her Lunner, Lunni, Leni—children who are loved have lots of names.
On one occasion, he wrote: “You write, ‘Now I’m doing something else.’ What else? If you stay single, then I’ll stay single too, and we’ll keep a wonderful house together, right? Dummy! What a thing to contemplate now.”
Less than a week later:
Your letter was so sweet and sincere that I don’t want to wait long to answer it. I’m glad that you can write to me that way, you know how important it is to me that we be able to live in perfect harmony and how glad I am to mediate whenever it’s a question of clearing up misunderstandings.
We’ve probably had fewer misunderstandings than most people, don’t you think? because our personalities are kind of similar & so I’m glad when I see that you trust your brother Otto & that we can still talk to each other freely, the way we always did. That is worth a lot, dear Lunni, I often think and have often thought that mothers and siblings are the only people in the world you can truly rely on—at least that’s maybe how it is with us Jews.
With Robert you’ll never be like you are with me, and that’s only natural, but where there’s a will to understand or at least recognize the other point of view, then understanding is possible. You yourself could observe that many times, between Robert and Mother too. Whenever anything goes wrong, Robert is there and ready to help out. That’s the best sign, since it’s in the most difficult times that people show their true nature openly, while in daily life everything is muddled & every passing mood or impression is reflected in their behavior.
How clearly we can see here the Otto Frank who would later, in the Secret Annex, always try to mediate between people and strive for mutual understanding and sympathy. When we read his letters, it is impossible to avoid the thought that Anne Frank inherited much, much more from her father than just her external appearance. His spirit, his love of others, and his
humanistic principles shaped his daughter as well.
Otto mentioned the relationship between Leni and their brother Robert again and again in his letters. It was apparently not always a happy one, but a card that Robert wrote to Leni for her twenty-third birthday demonstrates that the discord was not truly serious. The card showed Sergeant Robert Frank on horseback and is addressed to “Miss Leni Frank, Munich, Bayerischer Hof.” (Did Leni really take a vacation to a Munich hotel in the middle of the war?)
Otto’s letters to Leni grew more and more intense and heartfelt. For example, on Christmas 1916, to his “dear Lunni”:
Thank you for the two letters, and I’m glad you’re being reasonable and sticking by Mother and Grandma as best you can. I’m also very glad you put up with Robert better this time, you know I’m a little [illegible] when it comes to family. Herbi really has had the worst luck and is in by far the worst situation of the three of us. I feel tremendously sorry for him, poor guy, but of course that doesn’t do much good in these terrible times. […] It can’t go on much longer, even if the Entente Minister can’t seem to shut his trap.
Things were apparently not going well for Herbert. He was serving in the Fifth Army, Western Front, Second Company, 149th Reinforcement Battalion. His grandmother Cornelia wrote to her grandson, her “Dearest Herbelchen” (he was twenty-five years old at the time), on December 28, 1916:
I’m so terribly worried about you and sadly with good reason. Your last letter sounds a bit more satisfactory T.G. [Thank God] as far as rations are concerned but everything else seems to leave a lot to be desired. Believe me, my golden boy, that I miss you, your soup plate is always standing ready, but Leni, who wants to take your place, is not always punctual and so your place is often empty. […] Don’t lose courage, it looks like better days are on their way, stay healthy, that is what I hope for more than anything.
The following year, August 28, 1917, Robert wrote and told his mother how good it was that Herbert could now stay at home. This letter also contained a drawing that Robert titled “Cross Section Through My Room Under the Churchyard Wall,” a surreal drawing that uncannily depicts the dangers of war, death lurking everywhere around the soldier in his exhausted sleep.
Robert Frank as a soldier in World War I (photo credit 4.5)
From a distance, from the battlefield, Otto was also concerned about his sister’s love life, which apparently gave rise to a lot of discussion. On May 19, 1917, Otto wrote to his “dear Lunni” about a certain K. and Leni’s feelings for him: “I’ve now heard all sorts of things and there’s nothing unflattering about K. in Mother’s letters, but only now in your letters do I see how serious you are. I can only say that I find your inclination to wait and see & consider to be thoroughly reasonable & at the same time I can’t imagine how you feel.” Otto tries to advise his sister, and talks about feelings and the language of the heart, “since if a girl marries a man she doesn’t really love she can have only half a life & you know that yourself.”
In a later letter to Leni, staying in Travemünde at the time, Otto writes about their grandmother Cornelia, who “suffers so much from nerves and from the fact that you are not there with her now & neither is Robert. When she’s in an excited state there isn’t much anyone can do to help her, but still the feeling of being left alone is always depressing for her.” In the same letter Otto also mentions that, try as he might, he cannot share Robert’s unhappiness at the sale of one of their paintings, an Adam and Eve; he is glad “to have the naked couple out of the house at last. Nowadays you have to be happy with any ‘cash’ you can get, because who knows what’s coming next.[…] I devour the newspapers & hope that the Russians will get a good thrashing so that we can finally be done with all this. I don’t think Russia will last another winter & I’m sticking to my optimistic point of view.”
The further progress of the war showed how wrong Otto Frank (now a sergeant major) and his optimistic opinion were. But the letter is significant for two other reasons. First, Cornelia was suffering “from nerves” again—in other words, her multiple illnesses should be considered as falling within the range of symptoms categorized as “neurasthenia” at the time, which today we would probably call depression. Second, the Franks, whose bank specializing in foreign currency exchange was obviously doing very little business in wartime, were apparently forced to sell valuable objects from their house, which hurt Robert’s artistic sensibilities but prompted Otto, always much more pragmatic, to comment that in these times people were happy with whatever cash they could get.
Letter from Robert Frank to Alice, August 28, 1917 (photo credit 4.6)
On August 31, 1917, he then wrote a very beautiful, sympathetic letter to Leni, who was struggling with an unhappy or at least unsatisfactory love affair. This letter also shows how openly the Frank family would discuss their problems among themselves.
Dearest Lunni,
I am finally resolved to answer your letter, first of all because I’ve just gotten some free time & second since I’ve received letters from both Robert and Mother mentioning E.S. [Ernst Schneider]. Mother writes to say that you’ve given up the correspondence with him & Robert gave me his opinion based on his conversation with you, so now I need to write and relay it to you again, since it’s precisely our open and honest conversations with each other that lay the foundation for our mutual trust. Robert has the impression that you think about this man much too much & that in spite of your assurances to the contrary you secretly harbor the hope & idea that something might come of this after all. And he thinks it’s so self-evident that this would meet the strongest resistance not only from Mother but also from him &, he assumes, from me and Herbert that we don’t even need to talk about it.
Dear child, we don’t live in an ideal world. I believe you & I can’t and don’t want to pass judgment on this man. As I wrote to you before, I don’t see any point in preserving a relationship that can’t lead to anything healthy. Think of it this way: It was something beautiful. Consider it as an interlude, a brief, beautiful, ideal time in these war years during which happy, pure souls like you miss out on much more than many other people. But draw a line under the episode & don’t let there be nasty aftereffects. Let what was beautiful remain beautiful. Ideals are ideal precisely because they can’t be achieved.
In a later letter, Otto returned to the problem again: “As for Ernst, I already told you that I value him as a person. I don’t think he was right for you, even aside from the pecuniary and familial requirements he is not suited by nature to guide and direct you. A man you can trust […] but not, it seems to me, someone strong enough to carry out what he attempts. A friend, but no husband. He has certain similarities to me, actually, in his understanding, his softheartedness.”
Otto Frank thus feels himself similar to this man in understanding, and in softheartedness. His self-assessment is even clearer in a later letter to Leni: “What you write about me is too flattering to be true. I have as much ego as anyone, I just express it in another form. The same time I got your letter I received a few lines from Elsa R., who also sings my praises. It’s just that it makes me happy to make other people happy, & so both parties benefit. There’s nothing to thank or praise me for, I just do what my reason & conscience tell me to.”
This letter brings to life the Otto Frank whom his daughter Anne worshipped without it ever being entirely clear why from her diary. He must really have been as tolerant, balanced, and civilized as his contemporaries described him as being—a serious, thoughtful man. At the same time, these letters show his tendency to withdraw or keep himself out of the limelight, a quality which would distinguish him later in the Secret Annex, and which must have been an important part of his personality. In any case, he was writing these letters from the battlefield, under outward circumstances that must have weighed heavily upon him—his life was constantly in danger—and yet he worried about his sister and her love life, keeping quiet about his own problems. This self-effacement can also be seen in a letter
to his grandmother Cornelia:
If wishes could make you better then you would truly have nothing to complain about, but as it is, we can only hope as always that you can relax a little & that in better times you will get pleasure again from us & from life. You mustn’t lose courage, even when things look bad.
Everything’s fine with me & there’s no reason to worry about me at all, I’m not worrying about myself. Yesterday I went to church with Lieutenant Sch. & was looking out at the countryside when I noticed a pair of pigeons in the corner. Today we delivered the pigeons to their proper destination—they were carrier pigeons that had gotten lost. I thought of you & a delicious roast squab, but you have to let carrier pigeons fulfill their destinies. So I am now in search of some chickens, & hope I’ll manage to get hold of a couple somehow.
Otto wrote nothing about life as a soldier, mentioning neither his fears nor the death that reigned all around him—there was not a word about his own despair. Only once do we get a hint of how he probably felt. In a letter to Leni, he wrote: “When can we finally start our comfortable life? I’ve really started thinking again & a man really does miss women, that’s how it is, a man alone is half a life. So my thoughts roam here and there, but they don’t settle on anything. You think of the past & you plan for the future & it’s all a useless game, it’s a strange feeling.” In a birthday letter to his grandmother Cornelia, he wrote: “I never once thought about ‘New Year’s’ [Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year]. What is there to celebrate? I’m very sorry to hear that Trauda has lost another nephew. How many people are suffering like that, day after day? You can’t even understand how anyone’s still left to carry on the fight.”
Anne Frank's Family Page 9
