Peter Selz

by Paul J. Karlstrom

  “In ’35 I was kicked out of school [Realgymnasium] because I was Jewish.”27 Without access to education, there was simply no viable future for young Jews or for the community itself. For Peter’s parents, the critical objective became locating sponsors—relatives or friends—in England, the United States, Scandinavia, South America, China, Cuba, even Africa: any destination where they would be accepted. Palestine was for many the ideal refuge, the anticipated site of a long-desired Jewish state that through the symbolism of geography could reunite the Hebrew people with their historic past. But Edgar went to London; their half-brother, Paul Weil, already had a job in Paris. As for Peter, his journey would take him far from home—though not, as it turned out, in the direction he favored. “[My parents] didn’t want me to go to Palestine. So they found these very distant relatives, the Liebmanns, in New York. In order to get an immigration visa you had to have relatives. I don’t know exactly how my father found these people. I probably was told, but I don’t remember.”28 As Peter recounts, “I did not want to come to America, because I belonged to this left-wing, socialist, labor, Zionist youth group.”29 But according to Edgar, Peter was tricked into going to America by their parents, who were of course aware of their son’s political leanings: “Peter was an arch Zionist. Did he tell you this? He wanted to go to Israel [Palestine]. But my father discovered our relatives, the Liebmanns. And he wrote them a letter asking if they would accept, would take Peter to America. And he didn’t tell that to Peter. And when the letter of invitation arrived, he told Peter, ‘Look what’s coming out of the blue? You can’t ignore that. . . . It’s a letter from nowhere, inviting you to America. It’s a sign from God. You have to accept it.’”30

  In August 1936, seventeen-year-old Peter Selz traveled with his parents from Munich to Bremen. There, alone, he boarded the German ship Europa for the voyage to New York City. Telling the story decades later, he recalls how poignantly aware he was that he might not see his mother and father again. He has kept the several photographs that were taken as he and his parents said their good-byes while he prepared to ascend the gangplank (see Fig. 8).

  TWO New York

  STIEGLITZ, RHEINGOLD, AND 57TH STREET

  Aboard the Europa, Peter saw Americans who had been in Berlin for the Olympic Games. “They didn’t look so good to me because . . . they thought how nice everything was in Germany.” Although he did not go so far as to accuse them of admiring Adolf Hitler, in fact Peter had low expectations for his destination country.1 To him, even the Statue of Liberty was a letdown—somehow tacky, something of a cliché.

  It did not take long, however, before Peter was won over. Perhaps it is not going too far to say that he was seduced by America—or, to be more accurate, by New York City. “It was wonderful. I loved New York. I thought it was the most marvelous place, and it really felt good. I adjusted rather quickly.” In answering a question about whether he had studied English before arriving, he answered, “A little bit, just in high school.” And then he revealed the other side of his introduction to America: “There I was. I missed my parents. I didn’t know if I’d ever see them again, and they were in constant danger. I was looking in the paper every day. That felt terrible.”2

  Peter’s emigration had been relatively straightforward, effortless and without incident—in stark contrast to the experiences of other German Jews a year or so later. By 1939 it was extremely difficult, dangerous, and expensive to obtain the special emigration documents Jews required to leave Nazi Germany.3 Yet that year, Peter’s parents finally succeeded in joining their younger son in the United States. Their passage was rougher and more dangerous than Peter’s had been: “They had visas to come to America, but it was a long time—a year—off. [So] they got temporary visas to go to England. They lived in Cambridge for a year, and then sailed on one of the very hazardous voyages in 1939 when submarines were attacking all the [transatlantic] shipping.” Difficult as was the crossing, Eugen and Edith were more fortunate than others of the Selz and Drey families. As Peter put it, “Yeah, yeah. Some relatives of mine waited too long—I had uncles, aunts, and cousins who were shipped to the camps.”4

  Also in 1939, but on a separate voyage, Peter’s brother, Edgar, came to the United States. He had first gone to London in 1934; there he stayed with his sponsors, friends of their parents, who had a metal business. Edgar attended the University of London, studying chemistry. Unable to get work legally because of visa restrictions, he did chemical analysis for his sponsors, working illegally at night (“black labor”) in a rented lab. He was, however, able to find a legal job with a family for his German sweetheart, Trudy Wertheimer, who soon followed him to London. When Edgar and Trudy were able to get visas to come to the United States, they went almost immediately to Chicago, where they were married. Their son, Thomas, was born in 1946 in Evanston, where the family soon made their home. Looking back over that time of transition, Edgar described a sort of longing for Germany lost. “It’s nostalgia. We had a good time in Germany, and then Hitler came along. We were very proud to be Germans [before that].”5 Furthermore, according to Edgar, the family did not fully identify with its Jewishness: “I mean we were not observant Jews. But under Hitler . . . well, we just knew we had to get out.”6

  As it turned out, although Edgar was the better student, Peter was more adaptable, better able to fully embrace the future. It was a matter not just of becoming American but of finding a way to do it along the artful lines opened to him during his youthful years in Munich with the inspirational example and tutelage of Grandfather Drey.

  The ability to quickly adapt to a new environment is an essential quality in the successful newcomer. Peter’s enthusiastic embrace of the new seemed to be not just a survival strategy but a useful—even, under the circumstances, fortuitous—character trait. In this case, a familiar immigrant story was enacted by an unusually well suited and receptive subject, one who knew intuitively how to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by this new land. By being able so easily to discard the past in favor of the present and, even more, an exciting future, he has demonstrated an enviable capacity for reinvention in the face of change. Peter’s story, as told by Peter, is artfully constructed to reinforce an almost picaresque idea of purpose, direction, adventure, and success.

  The initial business at hand, however, was to find a place for himself where he could somehow achieve the life goals he had already defined and brought with him. First, he had to create for himself a new—American—identity. A critical part of that process was, perhaps ironically, the seamless continuation of what had provided the social, recreational, and political framework for his life in Munich as a German Jew: the Werkleute. It even seems that the first step toward assimilation for Peter, and for many of his immigrant counterparts who found one another in New York, took place within what amounted to transplanted versions of the youth groups they had left behind.

  Peter and his friends from the early days in New York have various memories of the Werkleute and the crucial role it played in their young lives. Hildegard Bachert, Hannah Forbes (born Engel), and Peter were brought together far from their birthplaces through this network. Hildegard’s recollection of the system is the most detailed:

  It was all over Germany. It started in Berlin, then Mannheim and Munich, and Stuttgart. . . . The people in Germany kept a record of where we emigrated to and put all of us from the Werkleute together. They wrote us—that’s how I learned of Peter’s and Hannah’s existence. There was a central place in Germany that let us know. I think our respective group leaders told us where to find others, among them Peter and Hannah and another one who was called Beate [Steinitz, nicknamed Batz]. So we did more or less the same thing that we did in Germany. We read books together. We went on outings . . . on hikes. We spoke German, and we pursued the same kind of goals [as in Germany]. We were Zionists . . . idealists . . . sort of a little oasis in this strange American world. . . . We really pursued the same goals and ideals . . . had the same principl
es of life because we had the same background.7

  In addition, they saw themselves as part of a privileged class of immigrants, each and every one of them destined for success in America. The youth group, as an extension of German culture and education, provided the framework for their idealistic optimism.

  The role of their group as an unofficial immigrant halfway house between Germany and the United States was in some respects the main topic of a conversation I had with Peter and Hannah in 2008.8 The two friends, both approaching their nineties, were enjoying their reunion in the warm winter sun of a Southern California poolside setting. They had traveled a long way since the 1930s. Listening to them reminisce about their escape to America from different German cities, I was impressed by the extraordinary determination and adaptability that they and their fellow Jewish teenage refugees had exhibited.

  As their reminiscences turned to politics, Hannah said she thought of him as less political than he appears to be in recent books such as Art of Engagement (2006), which she proudly announced she had purchased and read. Peter explained, “We were left-wing Zionists, believed in a Jewish socialist country. As time went by we became slowly more Americanized, part of this American society. I have the same political attitude—but great regret as to what happened to Israel.”

  But Hannah responded, “You know what surprised me in your book? I thought that you were much more radical now. Your last book . . . I do not remember that you were that radical [then]. Were you?”

  “Probably not, but over the years—I was pretty much on the left all my life.”

  “Well, so was I. And my husband was an ex-communist!”9

  Hannah and Peter did not talk only of their early political convictions, however. Almost out of the blue they turned their attention to sex, or rather the absence of it as an activity within the group. Hannah introduced the topic: “I went camping once with one of the guys, a tent on Lake George. My aunt, a substitute mother I lived with until I got married, said to me, ‘You can’t go with a fellow camping. This is not Germany!’”10

  Peter picked up the theme. “Now, this is very interesting. Sex was not important somehow.”

  Hannah continued, “Not the way it is to kids these days. . . . Peter, you and I went skiing alone in Vermont, just the two of us. On New Year’s Eve. Remember that?”

  Peter did, and added, “Yes. And there was no sex.”11

  Hannah insisted that they—and their American Werkleute friends— were “really not involved in sex as much.” But what about when they fell in love? Peter replied, “Well, then we had sex.” In fact, his first true romantic attachment was Hildegard: “We called her Gina, which is Hebrew for [little] garden. She liked gardens. And she was beautiful.”12

  Peter has a small leather snapshot album that he showed me early on in discussions of this chapter of his life. “This is Hildegard,” he told me on another occasion, “the first love of my life. You should interview her, find out why she dropped me.”13 It was evident that Peter still regretted this loss of almost seventy years earlier. Photos of Gina and Peter from the late 1930s, some taken on hikes in New Hampshire and Vermont, reveal how beautiful she was, how handsome he was, and what an attractive couple they made. In one portrait (Fig. 9) they even look somewhat alike, happy, and very young—she was eighteen and he was twenty. Peter sighed and said, “We were very much in love. I’ve never gotten over Hildegard.”14

  On a pleasant late-January day I took the elevator up to Galerie St. Etienne, founded by Otto Kallir, at 24 West 57th Street. Co-director Hildegard had worked there since 1940. The walls of the smallish gallery were covered with Peter’s kind of paintings—Viennese Secessionists such as Klimt and Schiele, a Kokoschka, and a few other, more recent artists in the same vein. Along with Grandma Moses, these artists had been the mainstay of Kallir’s gallery since about 1939.

  On the phone Hildegard had seemed charming, as she proved to be in person. She expressed pleasure when I told her about the photo album and what a handsome couple they made. She smiled as she said, “We were young and idealistic.” Over about an hour’s time we talked mainly about their friendship, Peter’s introducing her to art and her exposing him to music, her history with the galleries, and the Werkleute group where they met and courted. Most interesting was her description of the growing division among the young people around the issues of Zionism, German language and culture, and assimilation. “We were both children of parents who stayed behind,” she said. “We grew up in a minute because of the difficult times in Nazi Germany, and we had to live on our own even though we were very young. . . . But Peter’s grandmother [Marie Drey] made it across [in 1938]. She was one of those proverbially highly cultured German people . . . and she knew a great deal about art. That’s where Peter came from.” In this respect Peter influenced Gina, introducing her to what became her life’s occupation: “He took me to all the art galleries and museums; he knew a lot more about art than I did. We knew all the galleries, just about all.” Hildegard created a vivid picture of a social group that served as an indispensable support structure for these young German Jewish newcomers, many of them on their own. “We helped each other in goodness knows how many ways. And in spite of the fact that our parents were very much in danger . . . we had a good time.”15

  This had to be the most important component of Peter’s new life, his life-line as he made the transition from German to American. But Hildegard found his transformation troublesome, unseemly in its rapidity.

  Peter and Gina were “engaged”—anticipating marriage, though they thought it unnecessary and unbohemian to be formally engaged. As Peter talked about his days with Gina he was visibly transformed, his voice softening as he spoke of the youthful love lost long ago. And Gina remembered just how it was lost:

  He was another man at that time and that basically is the reason we came apart. He became a different person. Young as I was, I noticed that change, and I could see that he was going where I didn’t want to go. That’s why we broke up, the long and short of it. . . . Basically, he wanted to assimilate and become a typical American and shed his past. He would only speak English. Maybe he moved on too quickly for me. . . . Our activities were no longer in the depth that I wanted them to be. Perhaps I was too much of an idealist. . . . And I was slower in adapting. Faster in learning the language but not as fast in translating it into our relationship. Especially as the standards changed.16

  Nonetheless, Hildegard fondly recalled their best moments and acknowledged that she herself had done some “stupid things along the way.” She seemed to take pleasure in her former (presumably first) boyfriend’s professional accomplishments: “He really arrived. My goodness, he did very well.”17 Still, at the mention of Peter’s becoming a Californian, attracted to the lifestyle and intrigued by the hippie youth culture, Hildegard astutely observed, “He was in his element. And I couldn’t have gone along with that to save my life.”18 For her, the distance from Mannheim to New York was less than that from Manhattan’s 57th Street to the Berkeley hills. Peter’s capacity for adaptation and change may have lost him Gina, but it ultimately gained him the art life in California in which he has thrived.

  For Peter, Gina was the great event of his first five years in New York. And as a companion, she was a part of his other object of desire, as he shared his “romance” with the New York art world with her, creating a thoroughly seductive experience. Then Gina unexpectedly “dropped him,” as he put it. But he had close at hand something to replace her, finding some degree of consolation in throwing himself even further into the art social scene. As she observed, with the “gallery-crawling” life he was in his element. In this observation she was not only perceptive but also prescient. Peter was a natural creature of the insular and self-congratulatory world of galleries, dealers, and artists.

  • • •

  When Peter came to live with the Liebmann family in 1936, he enrolled in the Fieldston School of Ethical Culture (the humanistic secular high school) in the Riv
erdale section of the Bronx. Founded by Felix Adler in 1878, the school has a long list of notable (and sometimes notorious) alumni, many of them art world luminaries—artists as well as administrators. Whether or not he was aware of it, Peter was in the right company for the realization of his ambitions. Victor D’Amico, who headed the art department at the school from 1926 to 1948, was also director of the education department at the Museum of Modern Art for more than thirty years until his retirement in 1969. Their paths were to cross again.

  As Peter was approaching the end of his only year at the school, he was asked at one of the Liebmann family meetings around the table what he would like to do; he couldn’t stay in school indefinitely. He responded that, in light of his own family history, he’d like to make a living doing something in art. This was met with the disapproving observation that “we already have one relative in the art business”— Peter remembers and has often repeated the exact wording of the following judgment—“and nothing’s ever become of Cousin Alfred.” At his very first opportunity, of course, Peter went to introduce himself to this “unsuccessful” relative—Alfred Stieglitz, whose gallery, An American Place, was on Madison Avenue.

  A career in art did not come immediately or directly, however. Upon graduation from Fieldston, Peter spent a year at Columbia University before his parents arrived in 1939, whereupon he supported himself and them by working at the Liebmanns’ Rheingold brewery in Bushwick. But Peter benefited enormously from the fortuitous opportunity to spend time with Stieglitz, who was among the leading advocates of modernist art, American as well as European. Peter describes Cousin Alfred as picking up in New York where Grandfather Drey left off back in Munich: “If my grandfather was my first mentor, Alfred Stieglitz was my second.”19 Peter described the beginning of this relationship: “I introduced myself to Stieglitz and spent all the time I could hanging out at the gallery and meeting all the artists. He loved to talk. I didn’t know anything about modern art at that point, and he started telling me what it was all about.”20 These conversations continued over some time: “He sort of took me under his wing, and I spent a great deal of the spare time I had at the American Place, talking to him—or rather more listening to him—and watching him, and looking at the Doves, O’Keeffes, and Marins he had on the wall. Those were the only painters he still had in those days. And I learned a great deal from Stieglitz about how to look at painting, what modern art meant, about the aesthetics and the social values.”21