And After the Fire

by Lauren Belfer

  Lily gave the bidder’s registration number.

  “Thank you very much, Lily. And thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. That concludes our business for this afternoon.”

  Applause filled the room.

  The overhead screens provided monetary conversions into several currencies. At £32 million, the cantata had sold for more than $49 million.

  Susanna felt dazed.

  Fournier rose. A crowd gathered around him. He bowed, one hand across his chest, signaling his modesty and gratitude. Susanna saw that his smile was false. He was putting on a show of happiness at the extraordinary amount of money the cantata had yielded.

  People organized themselves to leave. Fournier moved from one area of the room to another, speaking with acquaintances. He nodded, he frowned . . . he was gathering facts, evaluating clues from gossiping dealers and other experts in the room. Bound by standard confidentiality agreements, Sotheby’s wouldn’t reveal who had purchased the cantata.

  Now Fournier and Ian McCloud were leaving the room, surrounded by a flow of conversation. Fournier gave Susanna a sharp nod, as if he himself were making an auction bid: their signal that she should make her way upstairs, where McCloud was hosting a private reception.

  She didn’t share the elevator with them.

  Upstairs, Fournier was waiting for her.

  “My dear, my dear.” He looked shaken. “I don’t know what happened. And old Ian can’t and won’t, even for a friend like me, reveal a thing. Very smug he’s looking, too. He certainly turned a tidy profit for his company today.”

  Susanna followed his gaze. McCloud was in the center of a crowd of company executives, accepting congratulations. In his late fifties, going a little soft in the middle, hair thinning, McCloud radiated an aura of trustworthiness. The Sotheby’s sales commission on the cantata would come to almost £4 million, more than $6 million, added to the so-called hammer price.

  “All I know so far is Owen was on the telephone with a Japanese individual. Owen covered his mouth with his hand, but my source was sitting nearby and definitely heard him speaking Japanese. I’m assuming Owen was on the phone with a certain hedge-fund fellow, well known to me, a secretive collector. Someone I could have worked with, even though he was outside my original plans. Why did he, too, drop out?” Fournier asked, exasperated. “What’s a few million either way to a person like that? Idiot. Now I’ve ended up in a situation where I’ve got not one single clue to the identity of the person who acquired the manuscript.”

  It could be anyone, Susanna realized. Maybe even a neo-Nazi, after all.

  “I need a drink,” Fournier said.

  They walked to the drinks table, and Susanna asked for tonic and lime. She wasn’t in the mood for alcohol. Her sense of remorse grew. Had she made the right decision, bringing the cantata here?

  Hors d’oeuvres were served by the black-clad wait staff. Gradually other guests arrived, mostly dealers and journalists. Susanna, reluctant to have herself identified even in an introduction, stayed a bit apart from the crowd, and for now at least, Fournier kept her company, as if they were simply companions for the afternoon. He related to her the names and occupations of the people he recognized.

  A woman with dark blond hair cut into a pageboy style, and wearing a loose, flowing jacket, approached them. “Frederick Fournier, am I right?” Her manner was exuberant. Her accent, American. “I’m Amy Cowden, from The Washington Post.”

  Greetings were exchanged, and Frederic glided over Susanna’s name.

  “I’m wondering what you think about the artifact going to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.”

  Fournier paused. “Sorry?”

  “Forgive me, I thought you knew.”

  “We’ve been rather on our own up here—escaping the vultures of the press, if you don’t mind my putting it that way,” he said, teasing her but also buying time to think this through, Susanna understood. “So what’s this rumor you’ve heard, Ms. Cowden?”

  “No rumor. My information is from a direct source. I’m told the artifact will be sent to the Holocaust Museum on permanent loan.”

  Fournier said nothing. Then he exclaimed: “The perfect place for it!”

  “The donor, if that’s the correct word for him—or her—” Ms. Cowden said, “will be making it available to approved scholars only. No publication, no performances, no recordings.”

  Susanna almost took Fournier’s arm to steady herself, she felt so buoyed by her good luck. The cantata had found another guardian, someone with the financial means to protect it, and to allow it to be studied but not exploited.

  “Is that so. Well, well,” Fournier said. “Thank you for taking the time to let me know. Tell me, are you based in London?”

  “No, I’m here on vacation, but my editor . . .”

  Fournier elicited a recitation of the ins and outs of Ms. Cowden’s career as if he had nothing else on his mind. Soon other guests joined them, and the conversation shifted to a much-heralded auction of contemporary art that was coming up the following week. Fournier and Susanna stepped aside, Fournier turning his back to the crowd.

  “There’s no cause for concern,” he said, although he appeared crestfallen. “No performing, no recording, no publishing—the Holocaust Museum would never agree to such an arrangement. The very notion is absurd. The Holocaust Museum receives government funds. I suspect this plan would be against the First Amendment. Would the museum’s directors actually violate the Constitution of the United States? No, they would not. I’m guessing the buyer hasn’t checked with the museum. The directors of the Holocaust Museum have always supported full transparency. I’m certain they understand that great art belongs to the world. Or at least that they will understand after I’ve told them. I’ll fly to Washington tomorrow.” At the prospect, he rubbed his hands together almost gleefully. “No worries, Susanna. I’ll salvage this situation. What’s important now is to pretend that this was exactly what I wanted all along. The Holocaust Museum in Washington—brilliant, as the British would say.”

  Susanna perceived that she was receiving a rather remarkable education from Frederic Augustus Fournier. Whether she’d ever be able to put these tutorials to good use, she doubted.

  “Smiles on our faces, et cetera. Over forty-nine million dollars for charity, and any way you look at it, the day’s been a success. We have cause for celebration.”

  He went to the center of the room. He took a glass of champagne from a passing server. He silenced the room and gave a toast:

  “To Ian McCloud, whose perspicacity and patience has led us to this astonishing day. On behalf of the anonymous consigner . . .”

  Susanna moved farther away from the group and stood alone near the windows. This was no longer her battle.

  She checked her phone. Dan had sent her a text, Thinking of you. She looked forward to briefing him in full when she returned home.

  She had more than $49 million to give to charity. That figure constituted almost five years of what the Barstow Foundation gave away. She had work to do, the type of work that filled her with energy and determination.

  Although she’d had no alcohol, she felt light-headed. The continuing toasts and laughter on the other side of the room began to seem far away. She had a sense of herself outside time . . . linked to Sara Itzig Levy and her husband entertaining Beethoven in their palais on the Spree, to Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel directing her Sunday concerts, to Ernst and Gertrude Gensler talking on the terrace of their home in Weimar, and to her own family, in the town of Eger in the Sudetenland. One line, one history, one story, each element part of the whole.

  She experienced a startling perception of freedom, as if her true self were bursting from an outdated façade. Her years of mourning were over. The rest of her life was about to begin.

  Historical Note and Sources

  And After the Fire is a combination of fact and fiction, of characters real and imagined. The lost work of art that unites the novel’s historical strands is
fictional, but its content is plausible in every detail, and its quotations from the writings of Martin Luther are actual. Like other Baroque composers, Johann Sebastian Bach did in fact create cantatas with polemical religious content; this was only one aspect of his work, and by no means the totality of his endeavors.

  Sara Itzig Levy and her husband, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Wilhelm Hensel, Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and their family and friends, are historical figures, as is Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. I have striven to portray their lives realistically, based on what is known about them. (Their interactions with the fictional cantata are, of course, invented.) Most scholars assume that Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s Cantilena nuptiarum was written for the marriage of Sara Itzig to Samuel Salomon Levy. On the website of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, one can view Sara’s and Samuel’s entries in the Stammbuch (Album Amicorum) of Mirjam Oppenheimer Itzig.

  Dr. Joseph Werner, his daughter Dr. Gertrude Gensler, and son-in-law, Ernst Gensler, as well as Eva Reinhardt, are fictional. The description of their home is based on actual locations in and around Weimar.

  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jewish women were at the center of a salon culture that developed in Berlin and allowed the mingling of Christians and Jews, aristocrats and commoners, for discussions and musical performances. This was a culture fraught with contradictions, however, and anti-Jewish bias lurked beneath the surface. For example, although Wilhelm von Humboldt publicly worked for the legal emancipation of Jews, his letters reveal strong anti-Jewish prejudice. The incident involving Count Achim von Arnim at Sara Levy’s home in 1811 was among the great scandals of the era.

  The Mendelssohn bank was founded in 1795 by Joseph Mendelssohn, son of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His brother Abraham joined the firm about a decade later. The bank prospered, joining the ranks of the most important European banking houses. Paul Mendelssohn-Barholdy expanded its work into Russia. The bank was liquidated in 1938, under pressure from the Nazi regime to “Aryanize.”

  Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel died just as she was beginning to publish her work, and she was essentially forgotten after her death. During the past twenty-five years, however, her compositions and her story have gradually been rediscovered. Today, thanks to many excellent recordings of her music as well as the superlative biography by R. Larry Todd, Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, she is beginning to receive the high recognition she deserves. Wilhelm Hensel, her husband, was a well-known artist, especially admired for his portrait drawings.

  Richard Wagner did indeed publish a screed in which he condemns the music of Felix Mendelssohn because of Mendelssohn’s Jewish heritage.

  The Berlin Jewish orphanage established by Baruch Auerbach and endowed by Sara Levy remained in existence until November 1942, when the last remaining children were deported on the twenty-third Osttransport from Berlin and murdered at Auschwitz. The Hitler Youth then requisitioned the building.

  The contemporary characters in the novel, including Susanna Kessler and her family, Daniel Erhardt, Scott Schiffman, Robertson Barstow, Dietrich Bauer, and Frederic Augustus Fournier, are fictional. Dietrich Bauer’s story is very loosely based on the controversial case of the German musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, who died in 1999.

  In portraying the world of musicology, I have been inspired by the many dedicated scholars I’ve been lucky enough to meet over the years. Although some characters in And After the Fire may bear minor, superficial similarities to individuals I have met, they are creations of my imagination. Scholarly groups do exist to study the history of music from a religiously devotional perspective. For an overview of such a Bach group’s activities, see Theologische Bachforschung Heute: Dokumentation und Bibliographie der Internationalen Arbeitsgemeinschaft für theologische Bachforschung 1976–1996, edited by Renate Steiger.

  As I researched the story, I relied on letters, diaries, and memoirs as well as scholarly books and articles. I traveled to Berlin, Leipzig, and Weimar several times to do on-site research. I visited Buchenwald twice and have re-created it in the novel as carefully and truthfully as possible. The American military did, in fact, take German civilians on tours of the camp at the end of the war. More information about the camp can be found on the website: http://www.buchenwald.de/en/69/

  The other materials most helpful to me in my research are listed here by topic.

  On the Jews of Germany before the Holocaust:

  • The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933, by Amos Elon

  • Der Berliner Salon im 19. Jahrhundert (1780–1914), by Petra Wilhelmy

  • Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin, by Deborah Hertz

  • How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin, by Deborah Hertz

  • Jewish Women in Enlightenment Berlin, by Natalie Naimark-Goldberg

  • Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation, by Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun

  • Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870, edited by Frances Malino and David Sorken

  • The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, and Crisis, 1770–1830, by Steven M. Lowenstein

  • The Warburgs, by Ron Chernow

  • Jews in Berlin, edited by Andreas Nachama, Julius H. Schoeps, and Hermann Simon; translated by Michael S. Cullen and Allison Brown

  • “A Lost Paradise of a Female Culture? Some Critical Questions Regarding the Scholarship on Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century German Salons,” by Ulrike Weckel, in German History 18 (2000)

  • The Education of Fanny Lewald: An Autobiography, translated, edited, and annotated by Hanna Ballin Lewis

  • Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Life in Letters, edited by Heinz and Gudrun Becker; translated by Mark Violette

  On World War II and the Holocaust:

  • The Engineers of the “Final Solution”: Topf & Sons—Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens, accompanying book to an exhibition of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation in connection with the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

  • Ordinary Men, by Christopher R. Browning

  • The Eichmann Trial, by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  • Neighbors, by Jan T. Gross

  • The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer

  • Atlas of the Holocaust, by Martin Gilbert

  • Liberating the Concentration Camps: GIs Remember, a publication of the National Museum of American Jewish Military History

  • Liberation 1945, a publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

  • 1945: The Year of Liberation, a publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

  • The Rape of Europa, by Lynn H. Nicholas

  Concerning Sara Levy:

  • “Ein förmlicher Sebastian und Philipp Emanuel Bach-Kultus”: Sara Levy und ihr musikalisches Wirken, by Peter Wollny

  • “Sara Levy and the Making of Musical Taste in Berlin,” by Peter Wollny, in Musical Quarterly 77 (1993)

  • “A Bach Cult in Late-Eighteenth-Century Berlin: Sara Levy’s Musical Salon,” by Christoph Wolff, in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 58 (2005)

  • “Bach-Kultus” in Berlin um 1800, Sara Levy und ihr musikalish-literarischer Salon, Ausstellung im Gartenhaus des Mendelssohn-Hauses Leipzig, by Peter Wollny and Dagmar Paetzold

  • Paul Erman: Ein Berliner Gelehrtenleben 1764–1851, by Wilhelm Erman

  To access the Stammbuch (Album Amicorum) of Mirjam Oppenheimer Itzig, with its entries by Sara Levy and Samuel Salomon Levy, in the collection of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, see: https://www.lbi.org/digibaeck/results/?term=Itzig&qtype=basic&dtype=any&filter=All&paging=25

  In my research on the Mendelssohn Bartholdy family, I particularly relied on:

  • Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, by R. Larry Todd

  • Felix Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, by R. Larry Todd

  I
also used the following:

  • Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Ewig die deine; Briefe von Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy an Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein, edited by Wolfgang Dinglinger and Rudolf Elvers

  • Die Familie Mendelssohn: Stammbaum von Moses Mendelssohn bis zur siebenten Generation, by Hans-Günter Klein

  • Felix Mendelssohn: A Life in Letters, edited by Rudolf Elvers; translated by Craig Tomlinson

  • The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition, by Jeffrey S. Sposato

  • Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion, by Celia Applegate

  • The Mendelssohns of Jaegerstrasse, an exhibition at the Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft, Jaegerstrasse 51, Berlin

  • The Mendelssohn Family (1729–1847): From Letters and Journals, by Sebastian Hensel

  • “Versteckt in der Geschichte—Bartholdys Meierei,” by Elke von Nieding, in Mendelssohn Studien 15 (2007)

  • Europa im Porträt: Zeichnungen von Wilhelm Hensel 1794–1861, by Cécile Lowenthal-Hensel and Sigrid Gräfin von Strachwitz

  • The Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn, Collected, Edited and Translated with Introductory Essays and Notes, by Marcia J. Citron (Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s letters in the novel are drawn from this collection.)

  A fascinating examination of the architecture of Leipzigerstrasse 3 and the acoustics of the Gartensaal is available at: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~dtl/89S/restrict/Gartensaal/Gartensaal.html

  To view the Mendelssohn family’s Gartenzeitung, see: http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht/?PPN=PPN690124759&LOGID=LOG_0001

  On Johann Sebastian Bach and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach:

  • Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, by Christoph Wolff

  • Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment, by James R. Gaines

  • Katalog der Wasserzeichen in Bachs Originalhandschriften, in two volumes, by Yoshitake Kobayashi

  • Melodic Index to the Works of Johann Sebastian Bach, compiled by May deForest McAll