by Simon May
Occasionally, my mother tells me, Gregor Piatigorsky, a great Russian cellist who would emigrate to America in 1940 on the last passenger ship to leave France before the German occupation, knocks on the door unannounced – less to visit Emmy and Ernst than to feast his eyes on ‘the three graces’, as he calls the teenage daughters of the house. ‘You are lovely graces!’ he exclaims in his elegantly Russified German with its rolling ‘r’s. ‘But, I am sorry, none of you –’ and he pauses teasingly – ‘is a patch on your charming mother!’
Piatigorsky’s excuse for dropping in is that he needs a room to change into his white tie for the concerts at my grandparents’ downstairs neighbours, Baron and Baroness Schlippenbach, who have converted their twelve-room apartment, minus the kitchen, bathroom, and four bedrooms, into a concert hall, complete with a platform and curtains that two domestic staff draw back to reveal the artists for the evening. Baron Schlippenbach is a dandy who dabbles in poetry, likes to dress in eighteenth-century court costume, claims to have written a novel longer than War and Peace which is tucked away in a drawer waiting for its time to come, and has befriended many of Berlin’s leading musicians. He persuades virtuosos like Fritz Kreisler, Carl Flesch, reigning professor of violin in Berlin, and Piatigorsky to rehearse their programmes at his soirées; and few of these men are indifferent to the beautiful women whose animated conversation lights up the shadows of the reading room at the back of the apartment.
The concert hall is big enough for Schlippenbach to stage operas in full dress, performed by such singers as the then-legendary soprano Irene Eisinger, a decent-sized choir, and a chamber orchestra drawn from the Staatsoper, one of the city’s three opera houses, under its leader Josef Wolfsthal. The writer Walter Benjamin – whose own grandmother, Hedwig Schönflies, lived, until her death, in the apartment directly above my grandparents – gives a sense of the spaciousness of the apartments in Blumeshof 12:
The rooms in this apartment on the Blumeshof were not only numerous but also in some cases very large. To reach my grandmother at her window I had to cross the huge dining room and attain the farthest end of the living room. Only feast days, and above all Christmas Day, could give an idea of the capaciousness of these rooms.4
‘Above all, Christmas Day’! Preparations for this most deeply contented day of the year begin at least a week beforehand in Ernst and Emmy’s household, as in those of millions of Germans. The windows on the Advent calendar are nearly all open; the tree is carried in and decorated with candles and baubles; cookies of ginger, almond, and other Weihnachtsgebäck are laid out on brightly coloured plates beneath the tree; and finally, the presents, concealed until the previous evening in a locked cupboard, are distributed on three tables, then covered with cloths embroidered with a big woven ‘L’, a wedding present from Emmy’s adoptive father, Artur Rosenthal.
The girls have not been allowed into the room with the tree and the gifts all day, until, at precisely 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Ernst, chuckling with delight at his daughters’ excited anticipation, rings a bell. They rush out of Ilse’s room, where they have been confined out of sight of the last-minute preparations, and each of them sweeps the cloth off ‘her’ table. The tree is addressed with the traditional German Christmas song, ‘O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum’, followed by ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’, before a large goose, steaming in its basted golden-brown skin, is wheeled in by the proud cook, who is followed by the other staff, all dressed in their best and giggling conspiratorially.
As my mother lies dying in a London hospital ward some ninety years later, just three weeks before Christmas, she sings ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’ over and over again to the nurses; to a magnificent cockney called Dorothy in the next bed, who seems perplexed enough by the stream of foreign words to briefly cease complaining about the scandalous lateness of meals and the ‘madhouse’ that she deems the hospital to be on account of its inability to produce cheese sandwiches with unbuttered, crust-free, chewable bread; and to a Muslim woman in the bed opposite, her female relations sitting round her in veiled silence, her charming son ‘inspired’, he tells me, by the vivid happiness of my mother’s memories as she recalls the deep contentedness of the Christmas room, and the symphony of church bells in the distance, and the creaking of the staircase in her building as neighbours, non-Jewish and Jewish, return from church. The tenderness of Mother’s voice overwhelms me as she pauses, her eyes large with the wonder of childlike happiness, and repeats:
Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!
(Lovely boy with curly hair,
Sleep in heavenly peace!)
The idyll of Blumeshof is potent. Its moral order seems indestructible. Even when their lives are beset by anxiety, Ernst and Emmy’s marriage is free of it. It is a marriage of dovetailing desires and dislikes, rhythms and sympathies, unburdened by drama, boredom, jealousy, suspicion, or unfilled expectations. Their love is undisturbed by those torments where one person seems achingly elusive or, on the contrary, to press in on and crowd out the other’s inner world; unoppressed by the emptiness that couples can feel when they possess each other too securely. Their needs for each other never go beyond what they can give (with perhaps one exception). There are no rows, only loving disagreements. Her penchant for wild exaggeration is perfectly cushioned by his natural understatement, his self-control balanced by her spontaneity. They offer each other that deep security and well-being that is happiness.
At least, this is how all three daughters spoke to me of the marriage. As if in a dream reporting a dream, they would recall its perfections with identical superlatives and in the same self-evident tone. Over decades I heard paeans – entirely convincing – to its harmony and order, spoken by each in unvarying sentences that seemed as wholehearted as they were automatic. Even Ursel concurred that it was a remarkable match, though absolutely not to her dramatic taste.
The apartment itself embodied this contented union. The three sisters, their parents, the staff, and the relatives and friends who came to stay all had their own quarters where they slept, ate, relaxed, conversed, and worked; and when they crossed into other parts of the apartment they were like visitors on foreign turf. Each room had its distinctive atmosphere and furnishings, as if it were designed to support one particular life form. There was a room where my grandfather and grandmother had breakfast together, another where he worked or read, a third where she could be private, the library where they spent their evenings, the salon with the piano, an office in which his secretary banged away on a typewriter every morning from eight until noon, and another where he received colleagues. And there were the rooms at the back where the girls were confined while they still played with dolls, though Ilse stopped doing that at ten and found Ursel and my mother rather stupidly obsessed with the puppet theatre that they had built together and the private language that they had developed: their so-called ‘Maminasprache’, a playful perversion of German, replete with dramatically lurching cadences, based on the West Prussian dialect spoken by Ernst and his parents.
It was an upholstered universe of impeccable structure. Its laws felt palpably self-sustaining. The rougher sides of Berlin – poverty, anarchy, bigotry, and later the brownshirts – were literally out of sight and out of mind.
As Walter Benjamin said of his grandmother’s apartment upstairs, poverty, and even death itself, ‘could have no place in these rooms.’ To which he added mysteriously, but also illuminatingly: ‘Blumeshof has become for me an Elysium, an indefinite realm of the shades of deceased but immortal grandmothers.’
And, of course, grandfathers.
2.
‘Musician must always look beautiful’
‘Musician must always look beautiful,’ my mother remembered Piatigorsky saying in a stern tone that revealed a steelier side to the jocular Russian charmer than he normally presented – ‘Not just play beautiful, but appear beautiful! Even in a heatwave, he will still wear white tie and correct shoes – and alwa
ys comb hair! No excuse!’
Apart from that advice, he encouraged my mother, then aged twelve or thirteen, to take up the violin professionally. The conversation on one of his visits was succinct:
‘She looks perfect; she must play perfect!’ the handsome cellist commanded. ‘She is a natural, but she needs a top teacher. Enough with children’s teachers!’
‘Who is the right person?’ Ernst asked, in his relentlessly focused way. ‘The very best.’
(Whatever really mattered in our family always had to be ‘the very best’.)
‘There are only two in Berlin who would be right for her,’ Piatigorsky replied. ‘Josef Wolfsthal and Carl Flesch.’
Wolfsthal was Carl Flesch’s former student and among his most distinguished disciples. The master had written the definitive book on the subject, The Art of Violin Playing, and his student, who had been appointed professor at Berlin’s renowned Hochschule für Musik at twenty-six, followed its teachings to the letter.
The question was which teacher it would be. Flesch was the more famous and had the more illustrious students, but he liked to teach each of his students in front of his whole class. This was an efficient use of his time and trained the young men and women to perform before a demanding audience. Technique, musicianship, performance – you learned them all at once. Wolfsthal, by contrast, was willing to teach one-on-one.
‘So, do you want to do it?’ Ernst demanded, turning to my mother.
‘Of course I want to do it.’
‘And with whom?’
‘With Wolfsthal.’ The class thing was intimidating, especially as you were up against some of the greatest talents of the day, such as Henryk Szeryng.
‘It will be arranged,’ her father answered, ‘but you will need to cease your school studies immediately, and devote everything to the violin. Are you prepared for that?’
‘I am.’
A few weeks later, at Piatigorsky’s introduction, my mother began her studies with Josef Wolfsthal.
3.
Where Germans and Jews secretly met
Once a week at least, and usually on a Thursday evening, Ernst would walk straight from the law court in the Elssholzstrasse to meet Emmy at the Philharmonie, Berlin’s greatest concert hall. There they heard the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, or Erich Kleiber – and musicians like the pianist Artur Schnabel or the ‘cold but dazzling’ violinist Jascha Heifetz, who had all the prodigious talent that, they held, Eastern Europe and Russia could nourish in their Jewish natives, though they failed to foster the supreme cultivation that only the German-speaking lands could instil. Or Ernst and Emmy would go to one of the three opera houses that flourished in the city: the Staatsoper, where my mother’s teacher was concertmaster and where they heard Erich Kleiber’s famous performance of Wozzeck and Furtwängler conduct Tristan und Isolde; or the more experimental Kroll Oper, where Otto Klemperer reigned with his uncompromising ways; or the Städtische Oper, presided over by Bruno Walter.
They had a long-standing disagreement over who was the greatest symphonic conductor of this extraordinary collection. Ernst preferred the more controlled, yet sensuously rich, Walter – a Jewish conductor who had replaced his real surname, Schlesinger, with his middle name. He loved Walter’s classical vitality, his scrupulous emotional hygiene, and the refined joyousness of his phrasing; while most concert-goers’ favourite was the more mystical Furtwängler, whose incredible intensity of feeling evoked a religious sense of redemption. According to my mother, it was often said in Berlin at the time that Walter tended to be the Jews’ favourite and Furtwängler the non-Jewish Germans’, reflecting, she maintained, the reality that Jews have a quite distinct sensibility, no matter how German they felt, or how successfully they could articulate Germanic culture. It seemed from some of her accounts that there were parts of a Jewish sensibility that assimilation, however ardently and even violently pursued, never managed to touch.
At the same time, Ernst was not immune to the yearning of many German Romantics to find the divine immanent in the world, and to discover the absolute through music, art, and thought. Perhaps their unquenchable passion for spiritual purification rooted in the rigours of learning was where Germans and Jews of his times secretly met. In any event, such yearnings deeply appealed to those German Jews, like him, who wished to rise beyond their origins into what they saw as the grander, richer world of the German soul, a world that, unlike their ancestors’ effete traditions, was overflowing with new life. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Ernst loved Wagner’s Parsifal, that orgy of redemption set to the profoundest music, in which an angelically androgynous youth who doesn’t know even his name redeems a woman, Kundry, whom he transforms from a mocking denier of the Cross into a kind of spiritual bride. He also revered German philosophers in the tradition of Hegel who, though they might have criticized Judaism, were devoted to a vision of absolute reality in which history is destined to culminate – a vision that bore striking parallels to the ancient Jewish promise of a redeemed reality beyond history, in which unity will be brought to a fractured world.
Above all, for Ernst as for Hegel, such a culmination of history could only be German. From his earliest years, my grandfather was determined to make Germany – the spirit of Germany, the texture of Germany – his own, and to turn his back once and for all on his Jewish ancestry, with, as he saw it, its myriad of embarrassing customs and no longer spiritually relevant laws. For him, Jewish culture was the airless, parochial past; German Kultur the free, fertile future.
He longed to serve Germany in any way he could. In the First World War he had lobbied to join the cavalry and fight on the front line, but after falling off his horse within days of joining the service, he was quickly transferred to Intelligence and a desk in Berlin. Applying his formidable willpower to this new assignment, he was awarded a medal by the Kaiser for unscrambling enemy code. He was deeply proud of the medal, though kept it locked up in a secret place and was reluctant to talk about it outside the family. It didn’t just recognize his unwavering loyalty to Germany; it was also, he was sure, official proof of his acceptance by Germany and of the power of an enlightened state to override or somehow to render harmless the anti-Semitism that refused to sleep.
As a child I liked everything about this story – that my grandfather was a German patriot; that he was too steeped in the dreamy heights of German culture to ride a horse; that he was able to see through a sophisticated enemy aided by no more than a smattering of rumours and quarter-truths. His pristine demeanour, perfectly groomed hair, and trimmed moustache exuded a sense of duty, efficiency, order, and discipline – those quintessentially German virtues, so deliciously reassuring and life-giving when devoted to noble ends. His lips pouted with precision. His rimless glasses rested on a straight no-nonsense nose and framed his melancholically determined eyes. But I kept all this Teutonic bliss under wraps during my high school years in 1970s England, a time when anti-German sentiment and memories of both world wars were still very much alive, when classmates would jack their right arms up in mock Nazi salutes on hearing my mother’s accent, and when having two German parents marked me out as inescapably alien.
Or at least I hoped it marked me out as alien, because, like both my parents, I refused to accept that Germany had been lost. And that they had really emigrated.
4.
Ernst’s conversion
Ernst was raised in Christburg, a town of fewer than 3,300 inhabitants, then in West Prussia (now Dzierzgoń in northern Poland). Born in 1875, it seems extraordinary that my grandfather – only a long generation removed from me – could have been alive when Otto von Bismarck, his political hero, was chancellor of Germany, Benjamin Disraeli prime minister of Great Britain, and Ulysses S. Grant president of the United States; and that he had grown up well within the lifetimes of such figures as Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Emily Dickinson, Wagner, and Nietzsche.
His father, a trader of grains, had died young, and his mo
ther – warm, quiet, and intense – doted on him and his less energetic brother Theodor. After attending high school in nearby Graudenz, today’s Polish city of Grudziadz, he became the first member of his family to go on to higher education, studying law at the University of Königsberg – the open, free-trading capital of East Prussia, founded by the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century, that had been home to the philosopher Kant as well as to the world’s best marzipan.
But Königsberg – later renamed Kaliningrad by Stalin, who turned it into one of the Soviet Union’s ‘closed’ cities where the Kremlin built its top-secret military bases – felt too confining to Ernst, despite the freedom it enjoyed as one of the great seaport cities of the ancient Hanseatic League. On graduating in 1898, he left for Berlin to seek his fortune as a lawyer, first working for an import-export business, then joining a firm of commercial lawyers, and eventually gaining admission to the family law division of the Kammergericht in 1906. He married Emmy Fahsel-Rosenthal, seventeen years his junior, in 1909, and became an exemplary member of that uniquely German social class: the Bildungsbürgertum, literally translated as the ‘cultivated citizenry’.
Ernst had risen into this burgeoning class by dint of willpower and education, and he was fervent in his loyalty to it on account of its cultured ideals: its devotion to music, literature, philosophy, and, to a lesser degree, science as the way for the individual to tap his or her humanity at its deepest sources – indeed, as sacred activities. The Bildungsbürgertum had emerged as recently as the mid-eighteenth century, just a few decades before the beginnings of Jewish emancipation. Inspired by the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment, it looked to a future in which the nation would be glorified by learning and liberty. For Ernst, it came to seem like a sanctuary that politics couldn’t touch, a realm of freedom and equality and belonging and respect for the dignity of the individual, which would be left in peace by rulers who, mercifully, had little interest in its cultural ideals. It was, to him, the most elevated and authentic source of German patriotism; it was where the German soul, in all its richness, found its purest expression.
