The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  • • •

  By 1916 no German family, no matter how wealthy, could be totally isolated from the war’s effects. True, the residents at 10 Rauchstrasse were far better off than most. Black-market food prices could be paid, and what could not be bought could be grown. In the grounds behind the mansion the lawn was torn up and a vegetable garden planted. As soon as baby Bernard arrived in Berlin, Eugen even installed a cow on the estate grounds to provide milk for his grandson, which it faithfully did until it was stolen for meat by hungry Berliners. Parties and dinners were still held at the Tiergarten villa and the Schloss Zeesen, with a concert here and there, and occasional nights at the opera, but the grand and glittering affairs of prewar days receded into the past.

  Fortunately for Eugen, most of his sons would remain out of harm’s way. Fritz, of course, was isolated on the Isle of Man. Herbert continued as director of the Deutsche-Orient Bank. His extensive contacts with Germany’s ally the Ottoman Empire made Herbert vital to the war effort. Kurt, unlike most Germans, had held on to his liberal, pacifist beliefs even as the war began, beliefs that only grew stronger as the bloodletting went on. He authored a number of articles and essays questioning the war. His book La Vérité est en Marche! had to be published in Switzerland to keep a step ahead of the increasingly harsh German censors, not to mention internal security services. Kurt managed to stay out of jail but created endless headaches for Eugen.

  I discovered just recently that Max was not so fortunate. Wrenched from the comfort of Berlin’s salons, he found himself by the end of 1914 on the Eastern Front. Max fought valiantly in the frozen swamplands of Lithuania, ending up, improbably, as sergeant major of the Second Dragoon Guards.

  Despite successes on the Eastern Front, by autumn of 1918 the German army was exhausted and the people restless. A spirit of revolution and mutiny spread quickly throughout the country. Along with the German high command, the new German Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden—the same Prince Max who had escorted Great-Aunt Lili to the altar when she married the ill-fated baron—urged Kaiser Wilhelm to abdicate. On November 10, the last Kaiser begrudgingly crossed the border into neutral Holland and into sullen exile, never to return again to Germany. The Kaiser, now technically a war criminal, had begun the war by preaching unity throughout the Reich, but now resorted to blaming the Jews for his woes.

  The war had been a catastrophe for Germany. When the shooting stopped on November 11, 1918, 2 million German soldiers were dead, along with hundreds of thousands of civilians. After four years of their own staggering losses, the victors were in no mood to be generous to the vanquished. Through the Treaty of Versailles, Germany would be stripped of her colonies, see her national borders shrink, her military dismantled, her merchant fleet seized, and then have part of her territory occupied. Carl Melchior, a partner of Max Warburg’s and Germany’s financial adviser to the Treaty of Versailles, tried vainly to scale back the staggering war reparations. Years later, Hitler’s deputy in the Reichstag would blame Melchior, Rathenau, and Jews in general for Germany’s humiliating defeat.

  Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the Kaiser’s abdication, Germany was near anarchy. Although the moderate Social Democrats were in nominal control of the new German Republic, all was chaos as various left and right factions battled for supremacy. There were gun battles, strikes, mass demonstrations, assassinations, riots. In Berlin, civilians fired Mausers and machine guns from behind barricades, women cut up dead horses in the street for food, mobs ransacked stores, and disabled soldiers begged on the sides of the roads. For a while there was genuine fear of a Russian-style Bolshevik revolution in Germany, with all that would entail.

  The war had been a disaster for the Dresdner Bank as well. Its assets were seized in Britain, France, Russia, the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere—never to be returned. The bank had lost roughly half of its prewar capital. Wartime inflation, though a mere shadow of what was to come, had further weakened the Dresdner’s capital position, and Germany’s uncertain political and financial status had choked off access to almost all foreign credit.

  However, the Gutmann family had one bit of good news amid all this turmoil: even before the war ended, Fritz had finally managed to escape from the Isle of Man.

  • • •

  Fritz’s escape was not some feat of derring-do, but rather the result of an agreement signed in The Hague between the belligerents in 1917. Fritz’s brother-in-law, the neutral Swedish diplomat Hans Henrik von Essen, served as a vital go-between. Great Britain agreed to release to the custody of the Netherlands some sixteen hundred German internees, while Germany agreed to send a smaller number of British internees there. Loaded aboard a Dutch paddle steamer marked as a “hospital ship” to avoid German submarine attack, Fritz sailed to Rotterdam. The sixteen hundred men were technically still interned and, therefore, unable to return to Germany. However, for the first time they were allowed to move about more or less freely. Although Fritz seldom if ever spoke of his wartime experiences, other German internees later wrote of the joy of having a good meal in a restaurant, of seeing women and children again, of breathing free air. On the downside, a number of internees initially had trouble dodging cars and trolleys and even climbing stairs, none of which they had seen for nearly four years.

  Although initially restricted to the Rotterdam area, Fritz eventually got permission to relocate to the coastal resort of Noordwijk, which for him was almost like going home. As a boy he had spent many a Gutmann family holiday at the fashionable Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin, set amid the sand dunes. Inland, behind the windy dunes, began the vast tulip fields that stretched from Leiden north to Heemstede.

  That tradition would continue. In the 1950s my family would often stay in Noordwijk—also in the grand style that my father always insisted on, but could not really afford. Nick and I would play hide-and-seek among the giant wicker chairs on the windy beach, while my father was off to Amsterdam or The Hague on, what was to us, another of his mysterious quests.

  With money wired from Berlin, Fritz rented a generous suite of rooms, and after overcoming the usual mountain of Dutch red tape, Louise and three-year-old Bernard finally were able to cross the heavily guarded German-Dutch border and join him. The reunion, like their honeymoon, was successful on multiple levels—Louise was soon pregnant again.

  Still not allowed to return to Germany, Fritz waited for the war to end and pondered his future. Given the troubles Fritz foresaw for Germany and the situation at the Dresdner, the prospects did not seem particularly bright or appealing. Instinctively, he sensed that the peace and calm he found in neutral Holland, and its ability to act as a safe haven between opposing forces, would be key.

  Fritz was not the same man he had been four years earlier. Some of the changes were what one might expect of a former prisoner of war. He had developed an aversion to confined spaces, a desire to make up for lost time, and a near obsession with food (for the rest of his life Fritz would hate to see food wasted). But some of the changes went deeper. The years in prison had been a leveling experience. On the Isle of Man he had been closely aligned with men of every class and background and had found that he could move easily among them. Like his father, he would be dignified, but approachable; exacting, but at the same time generous. True, he could at times be angry and impatient. But he still maintained his wry sense of humor, only now with a sharper, almost caustic edge. With a comment or even just a look, he could be withering, even to those he loved. Yet, unlike so many others who had been caught up in the war, the years in prison, the memory of being marched through the London streets amid the crowds of jeering, hate-filled faces, had not left him with a lust for revenge. If anything, for the rest of his life he would feel nothing but disdain, even contempt, for nationalism, militarism, the superheated passions of politics and ideology and ethnic hatred—all of which would continue to consume Germany for decades after the war to end all wars.

  Perhaps Fritz sensed that Germany offered only chaos, whe
n all he wanted was peace. Whatever the reason, after four years of defiantly being a German, he would, ironically, soon no longer be one.

  Fritz and Louise by Man Ray, Paris, 1926.

  CHAPTER 4

  HOLLAND AND BOSBEEK: THE YEARS BETWEEN THE WARS

  Bosbeek in 1930.

  As Fritz waited for the war to grind to a halt, he had plenty of time to examine his options—and what role the Dresdner Bank might play in it all. His father was still in overall control of the bank, but at age seventy-eight Eugen had increasingly shifted day-to-day operations to his son Herbert and to Henry Nathan, a trusted friend and longtime board member. Sooner rather than later, the unthinkable, yet inevitable, would happen when Eugen relinquished control. Fritz had always got on well with his brother and Nathan, but he had lost almost four years on the Isle of Man. Now, at age thirty-one, it seemed likely that if he rejoined the Dresdner, he would be relegated to a somewhat minor role in the bank, perhaps indefinitely.

  Just four days before Fritz’s thirty-second birthday, the war ended.

  While celebrating in Amsterdam, Fritz and Louise met a thirty-three-year-old Hamburg-born banker and stockbroker named Ernst Proehl, and his Austrian Jewish wife. The two young couples, who both had small children, quickly took to each other. Proehl, a naturalized Dutch citizen with a seat on the Amsterdam stock exchange, was, like Fritz, intelligent, sophisticated, and urbane. They also shared a passion for art.

  Proehl was a shrewd businessman with an eye for opportunity. Both he and Fritz saw that neutral Holland stood to benefit from the financial paralysis that would engulf postwar Germany. He understood also that Fritz’s international banking experience and his position in what was still Germany’s second-largest bank could be an invaluable asset. Proehl proposed that Fritz remain in Holland and that they go into business together. They were thinking along the same lines. Fritz found it an attractive notion, a chance to achieve independence, to live his own life out from under the shadow of his father and his older brother.

  Of no small importance was that Fritz liked Holland. A constitutional monarchy, liberal by tradition, and with a rich artistic and cultural heritage, the Netherlands was a peaceful place. Holland’s last war had been back in 1830 against Belgium, and that hadn’t really been a war at all. Fritz liked the people and he liked the countryside. After the inner torment of years of incarceration, his soul was soothed by the flat and endlessly serene Dutch landscape. It may have been somewhat dull compared with Paris or London, or even prewar Berlin, but for a man with a young and growing family, Holland suited him perfectly.

  Fritz returned to Berlin to greet his father and announce his decision to the family. Happily, Fritz’s idea to settle in Holland also appealed to Eugen and the Dresdner. Until Germany could shed its pariah status among foreign investors and get its economic house in order, the Dresdner desperately needed a neutral-based affiliate that could channel foreign credit to the bank—and how fortunate that the affiliate would be headed by someone of unquestioned loyalty and trustworthiness.

  So in early 1919 the firm Proehl & Gutmann was registered with the Dutch government and the Amsterdam stock exchange, with offices on the fashionable Gouden Bocht (Golden Bend) stretch of the Herengracht, a canal in Amsterdam. Firma Proehl & Gutmann would specialize in short-term bank acceptances, international lines of credit, and stock issues—much of it in collaboration with the Dresdner Bank.

  Fritz’s decision to go into business in Holland had been fortuitous. Dozens of other German banks would also open affiliate offices in Amsterdam to escape the postwar chaos and credit restrictions imposed on Germany, but Firma Proehl & Gutmann had been among the first, and it prospered. Later Eugen, as retiring chairman, purchased a controlling share in the firm for the Dresdner in 1920. Technically, Fritz was thus again answerable to the family business, rendering his period of independence brief, but there were compensations. With the buyout, Fritz and Ernst Proehl were suddenly very wealthy men.

  Fritz and Louise leased an elegant town house on the Koningslaan, overlooking the Vondelpark, in the heart of the city, and began to live their lives together—for the second time. Fritz’s family flourished. Daughter Lili was born on July 17, 1919, this no doubt to the childish annoyance of her five-year-old brother, my father. After the long years of separation, Bernard was just getting to know his father. He had always imagined his father returning with a long beard, like an explorer. Bernard was having to make serious adjustments when, suddenly, there was a new center in Fritz’s universe—Lili, bubbly and precocious, Daddy’s perfect little angel. In a photograph of Lili that survives, she is age four, dressed in a mink-lined coat and muff, a mirror of the young Louise. As Fritz adored Louise, so he adored little Lili.

  Young Bernard had a somewhat more difficult time. Quiet, deliberative, and extremely close to his rather indulgent mother, he suddenly had to deal with a new authority figure when his father returned home. Fritz, though loving and affectionate, could at times also be demanding and impatient. In contrast to his sister, a photograph of Bernard at age nine shows him dressed in the still-obligatory sailor suit, with his arms stubbornly crossed, and his dark eyes staring almost defiantly at the camera. Additionally, Bernard was left-handed, which was then considered something of an affliction—one to be corrected. His being forced to write with his right hand at school no doubt contributed to the slight stutter he developed as a child, which would in times of stress manifest itself throughout his life. However, his being a natural lefty in a right-handed world left him almost completely ambidextrous, often an advantage in what was Bernard’s primary passion—sports. Unlike his father, Bernard was a gifted athlete, excelling from a young age in ice-skating. The winter-frozen canals of Holland were an ideal training ground. Soon he added skiing, tennis, ice hockey, and even cricket to his list of achievements, and still later javelin and discus throwing.

  Both children were as Dutch as any of their school chums and spoke the language like natives, but the legal reality was more complicated. Lili was by birth a Dutch citizen, as well as, through her parents, a German citizen, while Bernard was still both German and British, and Fritz and Louise remained, technically, Germans. Fritz simplified the situation in 1924 when, after the required five-year residency period, he and Louise—and through them, young Bernard—officially renounced their German citizenship and became naturalized Dutch citizens. For Fritz, always a man of the world, it was an emotionally liberating moment. Germany had begun to feel claustrophobic. He had never felt as German as his father, Eugen, who was German down to his very soul.

  Dutch citizenship had various practical advantages, but I suspect that deeper down Fritz desired to further insulate himself and his new family from the bitter, and often violent, upheavals now escalating in Germany. Under the generally well-intentioned, but fatally weak governance of the Weimar Republic, the chaos that had immediately followed the end of the war continued unabated into the mid-1920s. Strikes, political street fights, assassinations, left-wing revolts in the Ruhr, and right-wing revolts in Berlin and Munich were ripping the country asunder. The Munich revolt included, ominously, an attempted “putsch” by a tiny party called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, led by an obscure ex-corporal.

  Perhaps the most grievous blow to the nation was the infamous hyperinflation of the early 1920s—a period of printing-press insanity that at its worst point saw the German currency decline to roughly 4 trillion marks to the dollar. A loaf of bread that had cost one mark before the war now suddenly cost, incredibly, 200 billion marks. The inflation wiped out the savings of millions of Germans. The country devolved into essentially a barter economy, with hausfraus selling their shoes to buy bread and their family heirlooms to buy coal. Inflation was finally brought under control in 1924 with the help of Hjalmar Schacht, a former Dresdner Bank executive.

  Schacht was, by then, the Weimar government’s commissioner of currency. However, the nation’s moral foundations had been badly shaken. Crime, pros
titution, divorce, suicide, and corruption all soared. And, as always in Germany during times of crisis, so did anti-Semitism. Mobs in Berlin on at least one occasion ransacked several Jewish-owned shops amid cries of “Kill the Jews!” Fritz could only watch Germany with increasing apprehension from the relative peace of Holland.

  The Dresdner Bank, like all German banks, had suffered during the inflation madness, but it survived under the capable direction of the team Eugen left behind. One added burden was the need to take on hundreds of extra bank employees just to handle the huge piles of million-mark and later billion-mark notes then in circulation. Among those new employees, and by all accounts not a particularly good one, was a frustrated writer named Joseph Goebbels. His Jewish girlfriend had helped him get a job as a clerk in the Cologne branch.

  Eugen had retired in 1920, taking on the mostly honorary position of chairman emeritus. His seminal role in the bank’s history was memorialized with a life-size bronze bust by the noted sculptor Hugo Lederer. The original was installed in the great banking hall of the Berlin headquarters, with copies placed in every branch office.

  Embracing his newfound freedom, Eugen spent less and less time in Berlin. He enjoyed visiting the luxury resorts and spas in the more healthful climes of the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps, and taking the healing waters at Bad Gastein in Austria. Worn down by the war and the shocking collapse of the old Germany he had known and loved, Eugen had grown increasingly frail in his later years. A photo I found shows him with hair and mustache brilliantly white, sitting dignifiedly erect, but with his obviously expensive suit hanging in loose folds over his thinning frame. Still, he retained his sense of humor and love of children and family. My father, then eleven, later remembered how his grandfather had doted on him and little Lili when they had visited him at his hotel in Interlaken—and how the old man, still up to his old tricks, had delighted in cheating them at cards.