How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  Indeed, far from not being German, my parents and their fellow refugees in London seemed to me, as a child, to be the only genuine Germans. Each time I visited Germany – which we did every year while my father was alive and then three times a year after he died – the Germans there never seemed really German. They somehow missed a third dimension: the rich, quietly intense warmth, pervaded by deep, unselfconscious integrity, which I had been taught to associate with the real Germany, non-Jewish and Jewish. Indeed, no nation was capable of greater nobility and integrity of spirit, my mother drummed into me, as exemplified by non-Jewish musicians such as the violinist Adolf Busch or the conductor Erich Kleiber – just as no nation had demonstrated greater venality.

  Though the intricacies of memory, denial, and guilt had made life in Germany seem so psychologically rigid back then, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and though the overt love for German culture that I felt even among our friends in London who had survived the death camps was so complicatedly impossible there, or at least unspeakable, I fantasized about going ‘back’ to Germany and living in a homely town, where people quarrelled and laughed and insisted and in particular complained in ways every nuance of which I recognized, and had a soul with which I was intimately familiar and that seemed to offer a refuge from being a refugee.

  And every time I arrived in Germany my spirit lifted. I loved the autobahns, with their impossibly smooth surfaces and their comforting blue signs, which gave way to gleaming yellow the moment you drove off them. I relished stopping at the oddly intimate Raststätten: highway restaurants where I would choose zwei Spiegeleier mit Erbsen (two fried eggs with peas), brought to the table by immaculately dressed servers, their cash tinkling in black pouches concealed under white lace pinafores. I felt consoled by the cozy expressions of elderly people meeting their friends for Kaffeeklatsch over cakes of unreal dimensions. I was overcome by the beauty of German landscape, the silence and scents and melancholy and secrets of which spoke directly to my soul. I was endlessly fascinated by German rigidity, some forms of which seem to provide a brilliant structure to life that makes possible the highest achievements of the human spirit; while others are mere prison houses for the mind that demand sterile conformity and are guarded by peculiarly mean-minded hostility towards all dissenters and outsiders. Despite its provincialism and often its pettiness, Germany felt richer in spirit than any other country I knew. For all its narrowness it was broader, more complicated, more generous.

  I resolved that when I grew up I would return to whatever Germany the future would bring. I would honour my father by planting myself back in his land and, unlike him, I would cease to be a refugee. Then I would be where he had come from and where I belonged. And Adolf Hitler, who had wanted to empty Germany of us, would not have won completely.

  To do this, however, would be a rebellion of the first order. Against my mother. The Germany she loved was no more. Hitler had destroyed it by throwing out the Jews and neutering the remaining Germans. The country, according to her, had been reduced to a vast factory churning out high-quality goods so that, by distraction through wealth, it could keep itself numb. Which it did superbly. The real Germany had ended with the war, so I would be returning to what she saw as an illegitimate, materialistic orphan of a country that in betraying its Jews had irredeemably betrayed itself.

  I was permitted only fleeting access to this half-Germany, and forbidden to enjoy or to say anything good about it. No German goods of any kind were allowed in our home. Above all, the language was off-limits to us, the next generation. Though German was the language of belonging, of our souls and our histories, it was more strictly out of bounds than even the new Germany itself. Though, within the walls of our London home, it was the language in which she and my father exclusively conversed; though almost all her friends were from Germany, Austria, and other German-speaking regions and spoke to each other only in their native tongue; though when the telephone rang I nearly always heard my mother answer in German, for us it was the prohibited language: die verbotene Sprache. Complete editions of Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and other classics lined our shelves – in some cases in two copies, one inherited from my father’s family and the other from my mother’s – all of them carted over to England with the few possessions they took; yet to me and my brother she resolutely spoke her broken and heavily accented English, and found it ridiculous when, from my mid-teens onwards, I tried to reply in my broken and heavily accented German.

  But a Jewish identity was even more out of the question. For I wasn’t really a Jew either, she often said, and so I had no right to identify myself as such. Or at least I wasn’t more than partially Jewish. That her father had been was never in question, but her mother, she usually maintained, was ‘Aryan’; and so Jewish law, which states that you are Jewish only if your mother’s line is, or if you convert, would pronounce her – and therefore me – to be an outsider. (Of course, Nazi law, she added, would have stipulated precisely the opposite, deeming me, even with three Jewish grandparents, a full Jew, with all that would have entailed.)

  Yet there were times when my mother spoke of her mother’s Jewish grandmother and other maternal Jewish ancestors, who would briefly come into focus before disappearing again. Which would mean that she herself was Jewish after all, and that I was.

  Which of these identities she attributed to her mother depended on states of mind whose laws I struggled to decipher. Her ethnic position was clear only in the company of most Jews, when she was categorically non-Jewish, and in the company of most non-Jewish Germans, when she was categorically Jewish.

  To add to her palette of identities, my mother had become a Catholic just after Hitler came to power and not long before she emigrated to England in 1934. She hadn’t, though, converted from Judaism, but rather from the Protestantism in which she had been raised and to which her father had belatedly converted.

  The result of these ethnic-religious contortions was always the same: I was not allowed to identify myself as Jewish, just as I wasn’t allowed to be a contemporary German. But nor was it permissible to consider myself English or British. Indeed, this was the greatest taboo of all, because the English spirit was deemed alien in a way that neither the Jewish nor even the post-war German spirit was. Though not a word of criticism was ever to be uttered against the country that had given my parents refuge, to feel English would be a betrayal of everything that I really was, whatever that might be. Worse, it would be to admit – or rather to pretend – that we had abandoned the pre-war culture of our origin, even though that culture no longer existed.

  Above all, it would be to betray the sacred duty of a refugee: never allow yourself to arrive. Contribute everything in your power to your host country, in order to say thank you and to be accepted; be unflinchingly patriotic; support its institutions, and even be pillars of those institutions; but do not succumb to its inner life. Be fully in your new home, but never of it.

  So who was I? The answer became strangely clear: I was an émigré (though I had never left anywhere), who belonged to the culture of a Germany which was now extinct (though I had never lived there), with a Jewish origin (sometimes admissible, sometimes not), and permanent temporary residency in the country of my birth. My only legitimate identity, according to my mother, was to somehow recreate a bygone German world that was the only world worth living for. Her mandate, in short, was to live a life rooted in a culture that had disappeared before I was born, and whose language I was not permitted to speak, but that was nonetheless my golden inheritance – and make it shine in an alien country and era. Oh, and I was to do all that as a practising Catholic, which, being a universal faith, did not confine me to any particular country or era – or indeed ethnic group.

  As I was growing up, this lost culture and country were represented above all by one idol – German music, as performed by always dead, usually German, and often Jewish musicians. Though that culture had vanished, it was the only dimension of life not to feel provisional. Every
thing else existed in limbo, as the émigré’s world so often does.

  For me, this inheritance came to be embodied within our family in one man. Not my own father, whose death, as spellbindingly recounted by Ursel, had triggered my search for this world of the assimilated German Jew, but whose own life had been too decisively extinguished to provide any road map for that search. Rather, this loved heritage became personified by my mother’s father, Ernst Liedtke, whom she held up as the paragon of an assimilated German Jew: cultured, educated, deeply moral, law-abiding, and patriotic. Born in 1875 into a poor family of grain traders in West Prussia, he was a contemporary of that extraordinary generation of German-speaking Jews who had so richly reimagined German and indeed world culture: Albert Einstein had transformed our understanding of the universe; Arnold Schoenberg had produced an entirely new music; Franz Kafka had invented a unique literature; Sigmund Freud had fathered a revolutionary conception of the mind; and so on, in nearly every field of endeavour.

  These largely non-religious Jews seemed to Ernst to vindicate his highly assimilated life, and even to guarantee its safety. More than that, they confirmed that though Jewish tradition might have been a ladder to the heights of German culture, and though its values and sensibility might have enabled some Jews to become more creatively German than the Germans, it was now a ladder that could and should be discarded.

  By the age of eleven, five years after my father began to disappear, I was sure that I couldn’t hope to make sense of this inheritance and to solve the enigma of identity that it had handed to me unless I could first find a way into the life that Ernst and my grandmother Emmy had created in the Berlin of the early twentieth century – a life that my mother had spoken of for as long as I could remember. I would need to understand the very different fates of Ernst’s and Emmy’s respective brothers: one of them, Theo, a shy salesman in a Berlin department store who was deported and murdered; the other, Helmut, a convert to Catholicism who, it has been said, was the most famous Catholic orator in Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Above all, I would need to trace the very different lives – before, during, and after the Nazi tyranny – of Ernst and Emmy’s three daughters, and to understand what they had each made of this common inheritance, of which they were the direct bearers and witnesses.

  My quest to regain some vital connection to my dead father, and to the German-Jewish world from which he came, supplied the motive; but the thread that led me into that labyrinth was the life of Ernst, who lived on through my remaining parent and two aunts with a vivid presence that my own father was denied. And I was determined from that evening in the Swiss chalet to go after him, his family, and his legacy.

  PART I

  A Berlin Idyll

  1910–1933

  I have always loved assimilated Jews, because that was where the Jewish character, and also, perhaps, Jewish fate, was concentrated with greatest force.

  Aharon Appelfeld3

  1.

  Blumeshof 12

  Christmas Day, 1932. In retrospect his world might look fragile and delusory, a house of cards waiting to collapse. The menace of anti-Semitism is nothing new: it has been there for as long as he can bear to recall it. Nonetheless, it is a reality against which, grandfather Ernst is sure, the solidity of his life insulates him.

  He has it all: A respected position in one of Berlin’s leading law courts, the Kammergericht on the Elssholzstrasse – which still exists, indeed is Germany’s oldest surviving court. Three talented daughters – Ilse, Ursel (Ursula), and Marianne, my mother – unusually, for those days, all embarking on professions. A large apartment in prosperous ‘Berlin West’ – Berlin W. – the magic ‘W’, pronounced ‘vey’ and spoken with awe by my mother and her sisters, for it denotes a protected zone of high bourgeois Kultur, with its impregnable ethic of seriousness and learning and its veneration of music and philosophy, art and theatre. No more Jewishness – that he sees as behind him now, banished to the past, conquered, extirpated, anachronistic, inauthentic; a problem finally solved, not just to the outside world but even, somehow, in his innermost soul, where the sensibility and instincts of millennia no longer hold conscious sway. A cultured, beautiful, and officially non-Jewish wife – who is aware that she is halachically Jewish and yet, decades after her death in 1965 and right into the twenty-first century, my mother continues to speak of her sometimes as Jewish but usually as ‘Aryan’, and in either case with equal conviction. Above all, there is his beloved Germany: a nation of deep thinkers, dazzling musicians, epoch-making scientists, discipline, order, and integrity. Germany: a culture of incomparable richness, from which the human spirit has grown to transcendental heights. In which innocence and knowingness, divine naivety and self-consciousness, all flourish in fertile tension. In which the austere and the overwrought restlessly coexist. Germany: for him and his kind, the greatest culture in the contemporary West, and probably in the world. Athens on the River Spree. Without slaves.

  My grandfather fills his days with law and his evenings with cultured conversations around the dinner table with his wife Emmy and their daughters – though, according to my mother, from about fourteen Ursel, the middle daughter, begins to absent herself. Her home and especially her father make her uncomfortable. It all seems frighteningly, oppressively, serious. And, I imagine, perhaps the seriousness conceals something else: the perilous unreality of her parents’ belief in the safety and solidity of their lives; and their terror before the fragility of civilization.

  After dinner, Ernst and Emmy usually read German classics aloud to each other: poems of Schiller or extracts from Goethe’s Italian Journey, in the footsteps of which Ernst had followed as a young man and which still inspire the annual trips he makes to Italy each summer, accompanied by either Ilse or Marianne (Ursel refuses to go). Sometimes he reads Novalis and Tieck, or he gets his mind around Kant, Hegel, or another of those dense German philosophers. And Emmy occasionally interjects with a poem or two of the hundreds that she learned by heart in her childhood and at the finishing school in Montreux where her rich Jewish uncle and adoptive father, Artur Rosenthal, sent her in her late teens.

  Or Emmy goes to the piano and accompanies herself singing Lieder. Though her voice is small, she is highly musical – more so than Ernst, who lacks her innate understanding of phrasing and tonality. She is naive, though also intensely aware, given to wild exaggeration, and easily infatuated with the latest fashions in healthy eating, such as Graham bread, herbal teas, and anything that comes from England. Even in her seventies, when I knew her – she died when I was nine – she had an evergreen youthfulness, walked briskly on spindle-thin legs, found most things either unbelievably wonderful or unbelievably terrible, craved the protection of others yet was formidably self-reliant, and had an unnerving stare betraying, I was sure, intelligence and stubbornness of a high order.

  Most Saturday afternoons she makes English tea and combs Berlin for bread that is textureless enough for truly English sandwiches. She has her furniture upholstered in English material by the downstairs neighbour, a Baroness Schlippenbach, who imports fabrics, and swoons over its delights, saying, ‘Ach, children, isn’t it beautiful? It’s so tasteful! It’s so English!’

  The domestic idyll is occasionally interrupted by friends who drop in after dinner. The benign lawyer, Wilhelm Krämer, my mother’s godfather, who was in the same student fraternity as Ernst and is soon to be promoted to the Reichsgericht, Germany’s Supreme Court, in Leipzig, where he will stay right up to 1945, regularly breaks into their quiet time after dinner for a drink. So does another lawyer, Herr Hans-Harald von Hackwitz, a tall, reedy, and handsome loner who deputizes for Ernst while he is on holiday. Hackwitz’s gait and speech are as stiff as his name and he is unaware of being followed around the large living room – my mother always chuckles as she tells me this story – by Ursel, who mimics his mannerisms behind his back and pretends that she can’t wait to get her hands on him. ‘I don’t understand that child; I just don’t underst
and her,’ Ernst says disapprovingly as Ursel turns the gestures, tics, and eccentricities of her parents’ friends into festivals of clowning. The mutual incomprehension, even mistrust, between Ernst and Ursel is already there; subtly she is repudiating him, her millstone of earnestness. ‘But,’ Ernst continues, ‘why such a charming young man refuses to get married, I don’t know.’