I realized with an overwhelming sense of pride that there was a very specific relationship between the arrival of the Navemar, the overcrowded freighter carrying European refugees, and the other ships that crossed the Atlantic. After delivering materiel to Great Britain, the ships’ empty hulls were filled with wreckage from the Luftwaffe bombardment that demolished Bristol, England. The city was a major port for American supply ships. Unable to make the crossing empty, the ships were loaded with the rubble for ballast. Thus balanced, they sailed back to New York. The foundation for the roads in the New World was literally being laid with rubble from Hitler’s bombs.
Originally placed on a footbridge over the East River Drive in June of 1942 by Mayor LaGuardia, the plaque was relocated and rededicated by Cary Grant in 1974, when construction on the apartment complex Waterside Plaza was completed. It reads:
BENEATH THIS EAST RIVER DRIVE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK LIE STONES, BRICKS AND RUBBLE FROM THE BOMBED CITY OF BRISTOL IN ENGLAND
. . . . BROUGHT HERE IN BALLAST FROM OVERSEAS, THESE FRAGMENTS THAT ONCE WERE HOMES SHALL TESTIFY WHILE MEN LOVE FREEDOM TO THE RESOLUTION AND FORTITUDE OF THE PEOPLE OF BRITAIN. THEY SAW THEIR HOMES STRUCK DOWN WITHOUT WARNING. . . . IT WAS NOT THEIR HOMES BUT THEIR VALOR THAT KEPT THEM FREE. . . .
And broad-based under all
Is planted England’s oaken-hearted mood,
As rich in fortitude
As e’er went worldward from the island-wall.
ERECTED BY THE
ENGLISH-SPEAKING UNION OF THE UNITED STATES
1942
From the rubble of war a foundation was laid and a road built. I don’t believe that my father ever knew this detail. It seems that few people do, but it resonates. Both the Navemar and one of the ships that carried the rubble now lie at the bottom of the Atlantic, having been sunk by the enemy upon their return to Europe.
Reich stationery “Under New Management.”
CHAPTER 12
Details Are Confusing, and Freedom Is Just Another Word
“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.”
—Georgia O’Keeffe
If propaganda was the fulcrum of Hitler’s regime, then comedy was its antithesis. By all accounts, laughter is healing. How does one package freedom, or liberate a particular shade of red from the devil? One word: comedy. Charlie Chaplin did it as the Great Dictator; Mel Brooks wrote “Springtime for Hitler”; and my father? He “requisitioned” stationery from the Nazis and wrote caustic remarks in English to fend off the censors. Mel Brooks said, “[B]y using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths.”22 My father took something once meant to fanatically enslave the minds and hearts of a people and made use of it for the exact purpose and by the exact sort of people or person it was meant to destroy. His was a unique position of freedom.
I often think about him sitting over his writing paper, oval face and high forehead peeking over the typewriter keys as he tapped away, Acqua di Parma and pipe smoke surrounding him in a distinctive amalgam of scents that have transcended time. Words, one to the next, flowed from his fingers as from the hands of a seasoned writer, and a portrait of his life as a Jew in the army emerged on the paper whose sole purpose was to convey the assigning of orders to plunder, torture, and ethnically cleanse to the end of propagating Aryan purity. No longer a threat, the stationery served as a mnemonic device for the defeat of the Nazis—and freedom.
By writing these lines in English instead of French at the top of some of the letters, he left the reader little choice but to laugh at the incongruity: Strictly KOSHER kitchen!!!!! UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT!; Try our HOT PASTRAMI sandwich Special; See our latest success ‘Behind Barbed Wire’; Contracts made many years in advance; Under Completely New Management, NOW STRICTLY KOSHER; HEIL MOSES!; AMT. DES N.S.REICHSJUDEN FÜHRER’S ISRAEL WALTER C. WOLFF now called: THE PARTY OF THE GOOD-HEARTED? INNOCENT? SAURERKRAUT EATING, JEW-LOVING? GERMAN PEOPLE (INDEPENDENT AUSTRIAN BRANCH) [Office of the Leader of The Nationalist Socialist YOUNG JEWISH FÜHRER]. The juxtaposition of his words next to the Nazis’ is a form of appropriation and disambiguation. All of a sudden, the object that was once so toxic, so venomous, used for a state-sponsored murder campaign to kill millions, is transformed, creating a break from the past. The symbol of Nazism is desensitized, neutralized. By altering the semantics, my father reorients his readers so they may easily see the writing for what it is: a letter home to family and friends. He has asserted his freedom by obliterating the original intent of the stationery with his comedic tagline, often enough from the anti-Nazi context of a Jewish deli. More than that, humor becomes a tool for other meanings.
Ten of the letters burst with that particular hypnotic shade of red associated with the Nazis. But, with the heading of “Under New Management,” as he wrote, they cross the line from horror to laughter, revealing a strange metamorphosis of purpose. He turned them out like a short-order cook preparing a blue-plate special. On those particular sheets of stationery, whether typed or in longhand, he began each one with his genre of black humor emblazoned across the top, before continuing on. One letter describes the atrocities committed at Ebensee, the concentration camp in Austria that he visited, sandwiched between a rather Proustian description of lunch and his midnight snack. He found no humor in what he witnessed, but in order to deliver the news of what he saw he found that he had to speak around the subject. Seven decades on, his anecdotal descriptions are an invitation through the looking glass.
They are indeed a metaphor for freedom. With every new reading, he forces us to look, to face his enemy once again before closing the door and rooting himself in his future, rarely if ever to speak of the subject again. Present fell into the dust of decades past, forever linking us by an invisible chain. There is no delusion or denial in his writing. Liberated from the clutch of the devil, the stationery boldly bears the eagle gripping a wreath and balancing the swastika in its claws, as if the bird of prey were stopped in flight. Only much later, as Death’s door slowly opened to welcome my father, did unspoken memory find expression in hallucinations and then in words tangible enough for me to grasp. I am haunted by a few of his final words. They are the ultimate reminder that he never forgot. “When I hear that sound, I think, I am a Jew. I am a Jew. I am a Jew.”
I never understood exactly what he was referring to, but his remark was a watershed moment for me during those last few days of his life. It made my hair stand on end and ran a chill down my spine. Something awful had occurred in his distant past. Though I never got to ask him what happened, or why that particular sound elicited such a strong reaction, I have the letters, which have painted an extraordinary picture of his youth and young manhood.
There is other, more sterile stationery that leans less on the drama of a colorful border but is no less startling. It is as white as the Nazi paragon’s hair was blond. A perfectly embossed Nazi state eagle sits in the upper left corner. The bird holds a wreath with a centered swastika in his claws. Just underneath is printed:
DER GAULEITER UND
REICHSSTATHALTER
IN SALZBURG
Looking at the letterhead, I couldn’t help but notice the striking resemblance to Helvetica and felt compelled to research the Nazi’s use of typeface. Hitler was the one who decided to abandon the traditional German Fraktur for a more legible typeface: easier to read, easier for the Nazi state to spread the word, simple. The newer typeface clearly reflects a Bauhaus modernist trend in its design. Which is rather paradoxical, considering Hitler closed down the school because it didn’t reflect his ideal of an Aryan Germany, since many of the students were Jews and modernism was too forward-thinking for the Thousand-Year Reich. The typeface, however, is not Helvetica. That was created in the late fifties. The developers of Helvetica had no ties to the Nazis and were not anti-Semitic, but it is absolutely fascinating how a typeface such as that or Futu
ra can be so universally absorbed by the masses.
Futura, for example, was originally developed by Paul Renner, who was opposed to Nazism but whose typeface was adopted by the Nazis and is still one the most post popular ones today, used by companies ranging from Volkswagen to Louis Vuitton and Domino’s Pizza. Futura somehow led me to look for the original owner of this particular sheet of stationery. Once I found out who it belonged to, every time I clicked on his name in the Google search engine the same frustratingly banal if damning information popped up, until, lo and behold, a portion of his Nuremberg interrogation report surfaced on a fabulous website called fold3.com, which provides access to military records.
The stationery my father used for a letter dated October 9, 1945, belonged to Gustav Adolf Scheel. Hitler appointed him, in his last will and testament, to be the new acting minister of culture in his post-suicide cabinet. Scheel, the son of a minister, had studied theology and medicine, and according to his Nuremberg interrogation file, joined the SA (Sturmabteilung—the Geman Nazi paramilitary group formed in 1921 that was called the Brown Shirts) in 1930, rising steadily through the ranks from Studentenführer during his university years to the advisor for cultural matters, as it related to the Nazi Party, for all of the instructors in every category of education and for every scholastic organization. He earned every position he held and ultimately was appointed the acting head of the administrative district and imperial lieutenant of Salzburg until May of 1945. He had an extremely high rank in the SS as the head of the police in several districts, including Salzburg. And finally Adolf Hitler appointed him minister of culture in his last will and testament as the twelfth appointee on his list. “In order to give the German people a government composed of honorable men,—a government that will fulfill its pledge to continue the war by every means—I appoint the following members of the new cabinet as leaders of the nation. . . .”
This sheet of paper definitely belonged to him. Scheel was also single-handedly responsible for the deportation of the Karlsruhe Jews, who had roots there since the seventeenth century. He sent most of them to their deaths. After the war, during the peaceful handover of Salzburg to the Americans, he fled and was later arrested and tried for crimes against humanity. He was very cooperative during his interrogation and implicated others. Upon his eventual release and “denazification,” he settled in Hamburg, where he worked at the harbor for a time before returning to medicine as an assistant doctor at a hospital. The British arrested him once again in the 1950s for taking part in the illegal underground extremist group called the Naumann Circle. Scheel held close to twenty different positions in the Nazi Party, and denazification apparently was not an option he chose to live by.
After the Holocaust, in the mid-fifties, when he formed his first home furnishings company, a precursor to Bon Marché, my father designed a letterhead that I’ve always found alluring. He chose a trendy new typeface developed by two Swiss designers who aptly named it Helvetica, Latin for “Swiss.” Helvetica was modern and neutral. Perfect to represent a company whose designs would forever be steeped in modernism and Bauhaus tradition.
But, instead of using black, he chose that particular shade of red. I realized this at some point with the shock of recognition and the sudden realization that my father’s memory was porous, not at all immune to the color and graphics of Nazi propaganda. Once the reader sees both sheets of paper, the Nazi stationery and his, side by side, the accident of its influence is unmistakable. My father created his new letterhead using three distinct but equally important components. His choice of Helvetica is a clear signifier of the modernist tradition in design with a nod to the safest and loveliest years of his childhood spent at a boarding school in Switzerland. His use of our family insignia is a nod to his German heritage; and lastly his choice of that red is a signifier of freedom from the oppression of tyranny.
In Chinese culture, red signifies good fortune and joy. Call it a Jewish spring. A short time later, as his business developed, he reduced Bon Marché’s logo to its purest form. He set the wolf in the shield and crown between the words “Bon” and “Marché,” exactly like the Third Reich stationery with the red border. In other words, he clipped the enemy’s wings. Unconsciously, at least, he was forever caught between the two worlds of his past and his present. In an effort to free himself from his wartime memories, he suppressed them, but the aesthetic influences of that era were too strong even for him. With the gift of one green box, I have woven threads of history into a portrait of my father as the man he became.
* * * *
At the end of his video testimony, when asked if he had anything else to say, he took a breath and without looking directly into the camera, his voice broke over his silence. “It is a great pity that so few of us lived to tell their story and lived even to smile about it.” Then, with a smile, he said, “I mean, I can’t help it, but giving some Kraut a bottle of oil to drink when he is expecting wine still amuses me. I can’t help it, but those are just moments that happened there.” During a time when the promise of a tomorrow was so uncertain, it took courage to temper the atrocities of death, loss, and ruin with moments of happiness and laughter.
APPENDIX
To the Editors of The New Yorker: A Letter from Austria
My father’s advocacy for the Displaced Persons did not completely end after his return to the United States. In April 1946, after his demobilization, one of the first things he did was to draft a letter to The New Yorker. The rough draft survived in the green metal box and is reprinted here in its entirety.
New York City, 24 April 1946
To the Editors of The New Yorker/ “Letter from Austria”
Reading reports on the political situation within the American Zone in Germany, it occurred to me the situation in our zone in Austria is very much the same; I have just returned from Austria. Most of the blame for this preposterous situation must go to the individual Military Government officials. To anyone who has been in Austria for any length of time, it is an open secret that the Military Government officers have in most cases no qualifications other than their military rank, for the job they are holding.
Most of the men who formed the core of the M[ilitary] G[overnment] when it was still in the hothouse stage, who had received proper training, and who had been selected for their special abilities, have now gone home. If a unit had any excess officers, who, because of their inefficiency, general ignorance, or their character, could not be used to command troops, they were promptly assigned jobs commensurate with their rank—positions for which they were utterly unqualified. A pitifully low percentage of these officials are acquainted with political past of Austria, and their knowledge of present political trends and recent developments is almost completely missing.
Many have no interest whatsoever in their job, and devote much of their time to the improvement of their lavish villas, or maybe the apartments of their mistresses. Their primary interests in life are wine, women, and song, loot and cheap flattery on the part of their civilian “friends,” who make it a point to call them major, colonel, or captain at every turn. It is not an uncommon sight to see some of these “ladies” riding around in powerful automobiles, run on American army gas. As appears to be the case in Bavaria, some of the girls occupy very important positions in the military and civil government, and their direct and indirect qualification for these jobs seem to be their sex-appeals, or possibly their ability to speak English. The knowledge on the part of the MG personnel is indeed rare, and their reliance on politically shady interpreters of varying efficiency is complete.
As a typical example of these prevailing conditions, I can mention the case of the civilian supply officer for the city of Linz, in Upper Austria; he has been a 2nd Lt. for several years, never having been promoted because of his inefficiency, and general ignorance. Previously he had served as a supply officer for a small unit, his duties being largely taken care of by his non-com. When that unit was reduced in size, he requested a transfer to the Mil
itary Government, so as to be able to remain with his mistress, a known Nazi sympathizer. After he received the job he appointed some shady characters, with very doubtful political pasts, to assist him in his duties; one of them was arrested when he attempted to appropriate property under American control, presumably for the Military Government. Upon questioning it was established that he was “arrestable” on several counts.
As is the case in Germany, the Nazis in Austria, are slowly but surely infiltrating into positions of importance, regaining some of their lost influence. The three major parties now recognized in Austria are the Social Democratic (Socialist), Christian Social (Rightist) and Communist parties. The Christian Social Party, supported by the US officialdom—unofficially, and the Catholic Church openly, is the one which won the recent elections. Why? Well, the Church always has a strong position in Austria; furthermore, the party included in its election program a plank which openly advocated that Austrians should let “bygones be bygones” as far as the “little Nazis” were concerned; they also used the familiar catch-phrases of “anti-Communist bulwark” etc. It is true that the former members of the NSDAP were deprived of the right to vote, but then again it is a well-known fact to students of the Nazi Party that a very large number of Nazis never became members of the party proper. As a matter of fact many applicants for membership in the NSDAP were turned down when National-Socialism was riding high, and the party was supposed to be an organization of the elite! Thus, many convinced and fanatical Nazis were never enrolled in the NSDAP, and are today, not only voting, but in many instances appointed to or running for office, the only condition for running for office being, that the applicant never belonged to the Party.
Of course, there is what is commonly referred to as “screening” by the Counter Intelligence Corps; this procedure, however, often merely involves questioning of the individual. In a minority of cases a serious investigation is conducted. Even these insufficient attempts at establishing a person’s loyalty is frequently conducted by Austrian employees of CIC. Instances where such civilian personnel of CIC turned out to be notorious Nazis, are, unfortunately, not rare.
Someday You Will Understand Page 29
