The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  The only letters concerning the impending marriage that do survive are two from Eugen in Berlin to Fritz in London in August 1913. I found the letters in those drab boxes that appeared in Los Angeles all those years later. These two businesslike and yet tender notes were among the few treasures that my father had managed to preserve.

  Eugen noted that Louise would be a perfectly lovely bride, and that Fritz could “be sure that I will welcome your wife-to-be with the same love as one of my own children.” He continued with this somewhat gruff fatherly advice: “A young man should not marry until he has already acquired some wealth and has, at least, a secure position which gives him the assurance that he has sufficient income to live in accordance with his position and, most importantly, without worries. Love alone is not enough. You also need the necessary ‘pocket change’ to go along with it.” Eugen backed this up by noting that Fritz’s annual income as assistant director of the London branch was currently some fifty thousand marks, but would be increased to eighty thousand marks if and when he became director. In other words, the marriage should wait.

  Two things are significant in these missives. First, Eugen felt strongly that fifty thousand marks a year was insufficient for a married man to live in the style to which the Gutmanns were accustomed. This at a time when the average salary for a worker in Germany was barely over a thousand marks a year. Second, Eugen’s advice to Fritz is almost word for word the same he had earlier given his older son Herbert when he was contemplating marriage to (the less wealthy) Daisy von Frankenberg und Ludwigsdorf—and the result was exactly the same.

  Despite Eugen’s reservations, in November 1913, Fritz and Louise were married in a church because Louise had converted as well. The newlyweds departed for their honeymoon in Italy. Soon after, while staying at the new and grand Hotel Excelsior in Rome, Fritz received the following message from Eugen, in terse telegram style: “Yesterday meeting [of the Dresdner board of directors] named [you] director [of the London branch]—21/2 percent bonus. Greetings Papa.” The old man had come around and come through. In addition to the promotion, the honeymoon was successful on another level as well. By the time they returned to London, Louise was pregnant.

  Fritz took a comfortable country home just outside London in Byfleet, Surrey, for his family—complete with butler, maid, and cook—and assumed his new duties as the director of the London branch. Although Louise’s “delicate condition” soon precluded her involvement in outside social activities, it was a happy, promising time for a young couple just beginning their lives together.

  However, my grandfather had an almost uncanny and tragic knack for being in exactly the wrong place at precisely the wrong time.

  • • •

  In Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, a nineteen-year-old Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Barely five weeks later, following the German invasion of Belgium, at midnight on August 4, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Shock and confusion reigned in London—mixed with no small measure of war excitement. Shipping lines to the Continent were canceled; German ships in British harbors were seized. Telegraph and mail communications with Germany were cut off, a blockade of its ports begun. “Spy fever” raged with German bankers, journalists, and, curiously, waiters and domestics suspected of being advance agents for the Kaiser. A moratorium on all international financial transactions was imposed, and within days British police arrived at 65 Old Broad Street to seize the Dresdner Bank’s records and cash reserves—in effect putting the bank into British receivership. Similar police raids were conducted on the London branches of the Deutsche Bank and the Disconto-Gesellschaft.

  The quickly enacted Alien Restriction Order required all German and Austro-Hungarian nationals to register with the authorities. Military-age “enemy aliens” were barred from leaving England and traveling even to neutral countries, lest they return home to Germany and swell the ranks of the Kaiser’s armies. Soon, even German women were prohibited from leaving.

  Some wealthy and well-connected Germans managed to slip out of England in the very first days after war was declared and make it to various neutral countries—Holland, Sweden, and even the United States. Fritz and Louise could perhaps have done the same, but they did not. Fritz, no doubt, felt that Louise’s pregnancy made it too dangerous for her to travel. He probably also underestimated—not, as we’ll see, for the last time—the hatred and passions that modern war engendered, not just on the front lines but on the home front as well, even in supposedly civilized nations. Whatever the reason, instead of fleeing with the war’s first shots, they stayed and the window of opportunity to flee soon closed. Along with some sixty-six thousand other German and Austrian citizens—men, women, and children—Fritz and Louise were stranded in Britain.

  Amid all this confusion and misfortune and dawning worldwide catastrophe, on August 24, 1914, in Byfleet, Surrey, my father, Bernhard Friedrich Eugen Gutmann, was born. As a curious consequence, little Bernard (as he would come to be known) was thus under British law a British citizen, which would have a profound impact on his destiny, and mine. Despite their son’s dual nationality, Fritz and Louise were, by both law and allegiance, considered enemy aliens. Soon thereafter, the British government announced that all military-age enemy civilian males would be interned. My grandfather Fritz Gutmann would be one of them.

  This was unprecedented. In previous modern-era European wars, civilian citizens of belligerent states caught behind the lines may have been harassed, persecuted, driven out, or even murdered individually, but they had never been rounded up and imprisoned en masse. Germany reciprocated by arresting several thousand British civilians. Meanwhile, with few exceptions, all enemy alien women, children, and old men would be deported, regardless of how long they had lived in Britain, even if they were married to a British citizen.

  Fritz managed to avoid the first wave of internments, but for him and Louise, as with almost every other German still in England, life became increasingly difficult. Their movements were restricted by security regulations imposed on all enemy aliens and by a curfew from 9:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m. Rising anti-German public opinion left the young couple ostracized from their former British friends. Fritz and Louise, with their new baby, found themselves living under a form of house arrest. In time British anti-German attitudes hardened even further, especially after the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania by a German U-boat in May 1915, with great loss of life. During riots in London and other British cities, German-owned shops were attacked and ransacked by mobs. Parliament called for strict enforcement of the alien internment and deportation policies, with no exceptions whatever. The prevailing slogan was “Collar the Huns.”

  Mercifully, late in May 1915, a deal was worked out between the Germans and the British for the repatriation of noncombatants. Louise and baby Bernard bade Fritz a tearful good-bye and left for Harwich, where a cross-Channel ship, bound for neutral territory, was waiting.

  One of the rare family tales that I was able to extricate from my father went something like this: Because Bernard threw a tantrum, my father and my grandmother missed the ship they were scheduled to board, only to discover later that it had been struck by a torpedo or mine and sunk. Mercifully the next ship reached Holland safely. From there they crossed the border into Germany, then went on to Berlin, where they moved in with Eugen at the family home on 10 Rauchstrasse.

  • • •

  Fritz’s incarceration began in a rather civilized manner. A constable knocked on his door in Surrey and politely asked if the gentleman would be so good as to report to the police station in the morning. The following day Fritz went to the station, carrying only the permitted two small suitcases. From there he was transported to the Isle of Man, where some twenty-three thousand German and Austrian male civilian internees—an eclectic mix from every conceivable profession and social stratum—would spend the war behind bar
bed wire. It would be more than three years before Fritz would see his wife and baby son again.

  The Isle of Man is a tiny, sparsely populated, and windswept island set between England and Ireland in the stormy Irish Sea. For most of the past thousand years or so it has been a largely forgotten place—a barren and almost perpetually gloomy bit of rock far removed from the great affairs of the world. In 1914, the British government considered the Isle of Man to be the perfect place to isolate “enemy” civilians unlucky enough to find themselves stranded in Britain at the start of the First World War.

  Two internment camps were on the Isle of Man. The government requisitioned Douglas Camp, originally a holiday camp for boys, and surrounded it by twin barriers of ten-foot-high barbed wire. The larger Knockaloe Camp was built from scratch to handle the growing overload of internees. Initially housed in tents with bunks and straw-filled mattresses, the prisoners were later moved into single-story wooden huts. The camp food was predictably execrable; back in England the typical man on the street muttered that it was a pity the English had to feed the bloody Huns at all.

  There were some amenities: a camp hospital, a library, an athletic field for exercise, even a camp school where prisoners could lecture other prisoners ranging on subjects from “Glass Manufacture” to “A Pictorial Journey through North East Siberia.”

  My grandfather found his own way to survive the tedium and isolation—he devoured every book available. Then, compensating for a missed university life, he indulged his fellow inmates with erudite lectures on theater, literature, and philosophy—everything from Ibsen to Marx to Darwin. Prisoners could receive and send mail—thoroughly censored—and they were allowed to organize concerts and plays. Ironically, Fritz, who had often dreamed of being a theater director, was allowed to stage a number of Shakespearean productions—in German (notably Theodor Fontane’s famous translation of Hamlet). Many in Germany still maintain that Shakespeare in German is better. Meanwhile, all the women’s parts were played by men in female attire, with Fritz appearing, in cameo, usually as an old man. His English was impeccable, but he stubbornly refused to speak it on the grounds that if he was locked up for the crime of being a German, then a German he would be. Like most of his Berlin contemporaries Fritz had started off as a confirmed Anglophile—sadly that died on the Isle of Man.

  Hobbies and small crafts were encouraged among the internees. Drawings and other artworks were also popular. One internee named Brelow carved from wood and old bone a beautifully intricate ex libris stamp for Fritz, portraying an art deco sphinxlike figure over the name F. B. Gutmann. The ex libris stamp, and a signed and (later) framed copy of the pencil-and-charcoal drawing that served as the prototype, were among Fritz’s most precious mementos after the war.

  The stamp itself was later lost, but almost unbelievably, some years ago while I was rummaging through an antique-books shop in Rotterdam, I was astonished to see hanging, on the wall above a shelf of dusty, old editions, the framed prototype drawing of the ex libris stamp, signed by the artist and inscribed Douglas, 1917. I knew that the drawing must once have been my grandfather’s. It seemed quite impossible, almost eerie, that I would stumble by chance upon such a thing, and yet there it was. Feigning indifference, and of course not mentioning my personal connection, I asked the antiques dealer if he knew where this somewhat unusual item had come from. I already knew the bitter answer, but the shopkeeper only shrugged. With a minimum of haggling, I bought it for seventy-five euros, which for the shopkeeper was a fair price. For me, the old framed drawing was priceless.

  Despite the grim surroundings on the Isle of Man, one might argue that Fritz and the other internees were actually lucky. Unlike German soldiers, the German men who were interned on the Isle of Man could be reasonably certain, barring some serious medical problem, of surviving the war.

  Still, I imagine that Fritz would have been more than willing to take his chances. None of Fritz’s many letters home survive, but I did find, in those old boxes, a poem in his wartime notebook (on theater and philosophy) that he wrote, in German, during his incarceration:

  The nights are impassable palaces.

  Lurking through are the mysterious grins of horror.

  Behind doors ghosts are assembling,

  not knowing about each other

  not knowing about life

  or about the burden of the prowling masses,

  crowding the earth.

  Nor had they ever heard the roaring song of love.

  Not to comprehend is the fate of the damned.

  Their feelings numbed, they languish in derangement

  and die the death of poverty.

  Shove them beneath the stubble field!

  But the victors grow and ascend through the ether

  in the twilight of the universe

  and herald the song that the others despise.

  Other accounts of life in the camps speak of the mind-numbing monotony, the soul-killing isolation. By the end of the war, international observers reported that almost every internee suffered to some degree from a form of clinical depression dubbed barbed-wire disease. Fritz did not go mad behind the wire, but as the wasted months and years passed by, he was increasingly bitter, angry, and defiant. He waited and waited, feeling his youth slipping away. He dreamed of his wife and child.

  • • •

  The euphoria for war was perhaps greatest in Germany. Pastors, priests, and rabbis alike preached that the war was just and necessary, and of course that God was on Germany’s side—a timeless and universal conceit. Strangely, most German Jews saw the war as an opportunity, a chance to prove once and for all their inherent Germanness, and to remove the still-lingering barriers against them in the army and the German civil service. After all, the Kaiser himself had announced in his initial war speech to the Reichstag that there could no longer be distinctions of religion, class, or ethnicity in Germany. “I know only Germans,” Wilhelm declared to thunderous approval.

  At first, it seemed as if German unity could be realized. The Prussian high command, albeit grudgingly, finally allowed a handful of Jews into the officer corps. Louise’s uncle Eugen von Landau became the first Jewish cavalry officer to make it to the rank of major (without converting). Jews also were admitted in greater numbers to the higher ranks of the judiciary and civil service. But eventually, as the casualties at the front mounted—a third of a million Germans dead at Verdun alone—and the deprivations at home grew more severe, the German people’s initial enthusiasm for the war, and the sense of national unity that it had engendered, began to sour. Military requirements, coupled with the increasingly effective British naval blockade, made fresh foodstuffs increasingly hard to find. Long queues formed outside shops for bread, milk, sugar, everything. By the end of 1916, turnips and beets were the primary staples of the urban German diet, and some foods, such as fresh meat, were almost impossible to get in the cities, even at wildly inflated black-market prices. There were riots in some German cities.

  As in almost every period of economic or social stress in Germany, the latent anti-Semitism that seemed to lurk just below the German psyche began to reassert itself. Much of the widespread fear and contempt was directed at the Ostjuden, the poor and culturally foreign Eastern European Jews who streamed by the tens of thousands into Germany from the Eastern Front and congregated in the cities in appallingly primitive conditions. Many German Jews worried that the newcomers would erase the gains that they had made in assimilation.

  Native-born German Jews were not immune to the renewed wave of anti-Semitism. German Jewish bankers and industrialists, it was muttered, were intentionally prolonging the war to boost their profits; Jewish black marketers were getting rich while Christian babies starved. Right-wing members of the Reichstag claimed that young German Jewish men were “draft dodgers,” and even if they were conscripted, they always got safe, cushy jobs in the rear, while the “real” Germans did the fighting. In a seemingly self-defeating effort to prove that last calumny, in
late 1916 the German high command ordered a survey of the troops—the infamous “Jew census”—to determine how many Jews were serving in the army, and in what capacity. When it was found that a hundred thousand German Jews were in the ranks, and serving in equal proportion in the front lines, the report was officially suppressed.

  Meanwhile, another “census” demonstrated even more dramatically the devotion of German Jews to their country—namely twelve thousand Jews died fighting for the fatherland. Among them were Sergeant Erich Waldemar Gutmann, the twenty-five-year-old son of Eugen’s brother Alfred, killed in Flanders in 1915 while serving in an infantry regiment, and Lieutenant Hans Gutmann, the thirty-three-year-old only son of Eugen’s brother Max, also killed in Belgium in 1916.

  Many years later, during a visit to Dresden’s New Jewish Cemetery with my wife, May, and our ten-year-old son, James, I found poor Erich’s and Hans’s names inscribed on a post–World War I monument to the Jewish sons of the city who had died for the Vaterland. Along the mossy east wall I discovered the graves and headstones of the Familie Gutmann—among them the graves of the Bohemian patriarch, Bernhard, his wife, Marie, and their son Alfred. The stones were inscribed in Hebrew and German and bore Stars of David. Somehow, those Jewish graves and symbols, and that cenotaph to World War I Jewish war dead, had survived virtually undisturbed for the last eighty years—from Nazi rule, then Allied bombing, to Soviet invasion, and, finally, East German skinheads bearing spray-paint cans. It seemed nothing short of miraculous—so much so that I wondered if the spirits of those dead young Jewish soldiers had somehow served as otherworldly guardians at the gate of the cemetery.

  The rabbi who unlocked the seldom-used gate and let us in had sensed I was Jewish and had given me a yarmulke to wear. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him that my branch of the Gutmanns hadn’t been Jewish since 1898. But seeing those graves, feeling that connection, I wondered if, for me at least, that was completely true.