How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  If the Bildungsbürgertum was conscious of any danger, so my mother would say, that danger came not from the bearers of power above but from the petit bourgeois below: from the world, again uniquely German, of Spiessertum.

  Long after the war, Spiessertum continued to be seen by my mother and her sisters as the real enemy – the barbarian spirit permanently at the gate. If they wanted to damn a person, an idea, or even an article of clothing they called it Spiessig, by which they meant riddled with pretence, small-mindedness, a cringe-making desire to impress, and above all no feeling for Kultur.

  Everything the Spiesser did was insistently petty, affected, trivial. He was obsessed with securing comfort and predictability for himself. He spoke with just-so hand movements, pleased at mastering his narrow universe, and quick to resent outsiders who he perceived as threatening it. All this perversity was deemed to have a single origin: his inferiority complex, or Minderwertigkeitskomplex. I remember this as the one universally applicable accusation that would be levelled at whatever anyone did of which my mother or her sisters disapproved. (Nor was I exempt from this all-purpose diagnosis of Spiess rooted in a Minderwertigkeitskomplex when my ideals departed from theirs, or were deemed too ‘modern’.)

  But my grandparents’ hostility to the Spiesser wasn’t directed just at their alleged small-mindedness or lack of cultivation. In addition, they feared something else entirely, against which they might be defenceless: the festering resentment that was stoked, as they saw it, precisely by the inferiority complex of the Spiesser and that was truly menacing because it was insatiable. In the Germany of the early twentieth century, it made such people extremely dangerous, especially to semi-outsiders like Jews. Many in the ruling classes might also be crass and uncultured, but they were ‘secure’ in themselves, and therefore unlikely to become hostage to violent hatred. They might be nationalistic and anti-Semitic, but never with the bitterness of the Spiesser. In the phrase so often used by my mother, ‘they didn’t need to be angry’.

  And then, beyond the borders of the ruling classes as well as of Spiessertum, lay a class the very existence of which was as painful to my grandparents as it was barely spoken of by them: the true poor. ‘We knew little of the terrible poverty in Berlin,’ my mother so often said to me. She recalled encountering these people at close range only when accompanying Emmy to choose domestic staff. There, in scenes that would haunt her for life, row upon row of emaciated faces stared out of rags at this passing woman in her fine dress, their sallow eyes beseeching her for the chance to scrub a pantry. To what dwellings they would return if not offered the salvation of domestic work was unclear. How they would feed themselves – and perhaps children kept well hidden lest they deter an offer of employment – was a question that suggested a vista of horror best not seen.

  Not seen but nonetheless not entirely suppressed: thus did their own bourgeois ‘solidity’ appear all the more impregnable to my grandparents. A glimmering awareness of this Hades of penury made it all the harder for them to imagine poverty invading the Elysium of Blumeshof. And the numbness of those crumpled faces, their sole focus on the practicalities of surviving another day, seemed to insulate the poor from the anti-Semitism and nationalism that made the Spiessertum feel so sinister.

  Of course, the Bildungsbürgertum could also be infested by nativist impulses that saw Jews as interlopers who threatened to corrupt the primordial Germanic spirit, which it was the goal of Bildung to cultivate. But, Ernst and Emmy were sure, such impulses would always be subordinate to the egalitarian ideals that defined its calling. It was, after all, a class indebted to heroes like Beethoven and Schiller and Lessing, whose visions of tolerance and universal brotherhood it saw as emblematic of the humanistic ethos in which it so passionately believed. These geniuses demonstrated, my grandparents were convinced, that German culture could take both a national form – for they supremely expressed the German soul – and yet be devoted to the broadest humanistic ideals. More than that: they demonstrated that German culture, and above all music that was loved all over the world, was uniquely able to respond to an egalitarian and universal calling.

  And so, within the protective embrace, real and imagined, of this class – a class into which he had risen only a few years beforehand – a momentous further step away from his Jewish inheritance eventually seemed to Ernst not merely natural but essential.

  On 28 November 1910, just over a year after his marriage to the Protestant Emmy and shortly after the birth of their first child, Ilse, he took just that step and formally renounced the faith of his ancestors. He filed an official form, which was stamped by Department 9 of the Royal Prussian District Court of the Schöneberg district of Berlin and authorized by a law passed on 14 May 1873, with a single signature bringing thousands of years of belonging to an end. It was an odd business: how could a covenant made between a people and its god and recorded in holy scripture be undone by a document stamped by a German bureaucrat? What role could the German state conceivably have in confirming that a relationship between a human being and the creator of the world did or didn’t exist?

  In fact, Ernst’s abandonment of Judaism must have been something of an afterthought, as he had already had himself baptized two months earlier, on 22 September 1910. Some official might have reminded him that in order to be a Christian one had to cease being a Jew, and so he had hurriedly gone along to Department 9 to get his exit visa. In practice, he continued to live something of a double life in which he and Emmy lit the Shabbat candles with his mother on Friday evenings, though, it seems, as strangers in their own home, and were occasionally seen in the pews of their local Protestant church on Sundays. But he irrevocably spurned those Jews who identified openly with their religion or who were less ‘German’ than he. It was they, he felt, who attracted anti-Semitism with their alienness. He came to see himself, to his marrow, as a Prussian, a Protestant, and a patriot, and remained unshakably convinced that Germany – his Germany – was the most profound, vibrant, and creative culture in the world.

  As to the rise of Hitler, he found that a sick joke. ‘You will see!’ he announced to his family after Hitler had wangled his way to power in January 1933. ‘That man won’t last more than six months.’ When he saw my grandmother silently weep as Hitler’s furiously rolling ‘r’s fanned out from the radio into the cultivated restraint of their apartment, he would gently admonish her premature fears. ‘Don’t cry,’ he would say tenderly, ‘please don’t let this distress you so.’ And he would turn anxiously to his daughters: ‘This whole thing is absurd: the Germans will wake up soon and repudiate it!’

  5.

  ‘Get out of here immediately, you East-Asian monkey’

  A few weeks later, his life collapsed. On 17 April 1933, a Monday, he walked, as usual, from Blumeshof to the law court near the corner of Elssholzstrasse and Pallasstrasse, arriving, as he always did, punctually at 8.30 a.m., to an unexpected greeting from his normally courteous clerk, which my mother would repeat in disbelieving horror until the day she died:

  ‘Hau hier sofort ab, Du ostasiatischer Affe!’ – ‘Get out of here immediately, you East Asian monkey!’ – the young man yelled, contemptuously using the familiar ‘Du’ that would otherwise have been an inconceivable way of addressing any colleague, let alone a superior. He then slammed the door in Ernst’s face.

  Of course, Ernst knew that Jewish lawyers were supposed to be thrown out of work in their thousands. With the exception – for now – of First World War veterans who had served at the front, which he hadn’t, as well as of some of his older colleagues. But he didn’t believe it happened like this, without a word of explanation, an embarrassed excuse about orders from high up, or a written notice of dismissal with long reference numbers and the customary sign-off ‘Im Auftrag’ in the official German style. How could his clerk just lose it in this unstructured, chaotic way?

  No, he must go in and discuss it properly. But first he must have a talk with a senior colleague.

  He
warily opened the door to the offices. His clerk was standing with his back to it, chatting to someone else. The young man swivelled around, stared furiously at this interloper, grabbed him by both shoulders and heaved him to the edge of the landing. He then hurled him down the stairs.

  ‘Hau hier ab, Du dreck Jude!’ – ‘Get out of here, you filthy Jew!’ – he yelled, incensed by the Jew’s nerve in trying to enter. ‘East Asian monkey!’ he repeated as his former boss tumbled down the stone steps.

  From halfway down the flight of stairs, the older man looked up to see the clerk staring victoriously down at him. Without mockery. The young man’s hate was too vast for the subtleties of mockery. The door slammed shut again.

  Alone, stunned, and enveloped, I imagine, by terror that all his bearings in the world might be illusory, Ernst enquired silently of the closed door above him what he was to do now.

  Normally his clerk was waiting attentively for his arrival. Ernst would often glimpse him as he entered the Kammergericht, bending over his boss’s desk with dutiful concentration, preparing the files that were needed that day. He liked his clerk, and though they maintained the strict distance between a senior and his junior that was customary in the Germany of those times, there had been undeniable respect and even affection between them.

  For the next few weeks, Ernst spent most of his time sitting in inconsolable gloom in his study at home. As my mother recounted it, he didn’t agonize out loud about how he could so suddenly be expelled from his profession for a Jewish origin that he thought he had repudiated more decisively than any Aryan could on his behalf. Though he was by then well aware that Hitler was evicting Jews from all public employment, he was sure he sensed pragmatism behind the bluster. The poetry of hatred so beloved of the ranting Austrian would be replaced by the prose of economic interest; and the sacking of the Jews would be temporary. Sometimes he thought of asking Herr von Hackwitz, who deputized for him when he was on holiday, to take over his whole practice for the time being, but then he abandoned the idea as too hasty.

  He would perk up after dinner when friends dropped in, as some continued to do. Rechtsanwalt Krämer now came almost every evening and offered his holiday home in Berchtesgaden, near Hitler’s own house, as a retreat. Baron Schlippenbach and his fabric-obsessed wife from downstairs continued inviting Ernst and Emmy to their musical soirées. Their upstairs neighbour, an elderly Jewish woman who had inherited the apartment from Walter Benjamin’s grandmother, Hedwig Schoenflies, seemed to think that Germans loved their Jews too much to support the government’s racial obsessions, and was remarkably relaxed about everything. Most touching of all was Werner von Alvensleben, the father of Ursel’s best friend, Lexi Alvensleben. He would come over unannounced. ‘I am so sorry, Herr Liedtke,’ my mother reported him as saying, as he paced around Ernst’s music room, pausing to place an arm gingerly over his shoulder – not a gesture that, in those days, one German man extended lightly to another. ‘I am so sorry about what you are going through. But it will get better. Be patient. It cannot go on like this.’ He glanced expectantly at his friend for signs of optimism, and tried to discuss other subjects, especially their daughters: neither his headstrong daughter Lexi nor the rebellious Ursel had fitted in well at school but both were now thriving. Indeed, Ernst could be very proud, Alvensleben said, of Ursel’s job at a theatre in Bremen that she’d secured so quickly after graduating from the acting academy of Ilka Grüning.

  Though Alvensleben, a cultured man of deeply conservative instincts, wasn’t especially interested in music, he knew what it meant to his friend and before his visits he usually took care to inform himself about the latest concerts at the Philharmonie, which Ernst could no longer afford to attend: my mother’s meticulously kept booklet chronicling the concerts she had heard since she was a small girl stops precisely in April 1933.

  Each time he came, my mother said, Alvensleben would leave my grandparents’ home silently, thoughtfully, appalled.

  6.

  The operation on Lenin

  Ernst’s visitors helped restore his faith in himself, at least as paterfamilias. When he returned from seeing them off at the door only to be confronted by his daughters’ confused despair, he would sit them down for history lessons that recalled the flourishing of German Jews in his own lifetime. Those people you used to see in the Philharmonie – Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber, Artur Schnabel, Carl Flesch – he would explain, his voice finding a new buoyancy, were celebrated in Berlin, whereas only a few decades earlier they would have been lucky to be eking out a living as a menial toiler.

  Not just celebrated. Many of these Jews had Aryans working for them as devoted assistants, deputies, researchers, and students; they dispensed promotions and salary increases, their stature commanding fear and awe. Ernst drew particular hope from the case of Professor Moritz Borchardt, a pioneering neurosurgeon who was one of his oldest friends – and whose daughter Luise was my mother’s schoolmate and, decades later, my godmother. Moritz was descended from a family of ‘poor tradesmen’, he would emphasize, and rose to become head of surgery at the Moabit Hospital, a university clinic, and was made a Geheimrat – a privy councillor – by the Kaiser. When Moritz arrived at the hospital each morning, the doorman would telephone the wards to warn the doctors and nurses and junior surgeons – most of them non-Jews – that the boss was in the building; and they would at once rush to make sure the tables were spotless, the floors shining like mirrors, and the curtains tied back at the same height on both sides of the windows. He would say to his younger staff, ‘Don’t even think of marrying yet! As long as you work here you are married to your work and to your duty!’ And when he left in the evening, his assistants would run out into the street in front of the hospital and stand respectfully in a line as he got into his taxi.

  It was in the 1980s, half a century later, when I first heard about Borchardt’s stellar career up to and, amazingly, beyond 1933, from his daughter Luise. He was, she said, a celebrity in Berlin, who had operated on Paul Loebe, the president of the Reichstag, a bevy of top German generals, and many other powerful people, including Lenin, whom the Kremlin had secretly asked Borchardt to treat after the Soviet Union’s best doctors had failed to understand the mysterious brain disease that was disabling the prophet of world revolution.

  My mother often talked about the operation on Lenin. She was still talking about it into the second decade of the twenty-first century, nearly one hundred years after the event. It wasn’t just Borchardt’s fame that thrilled her; nor was it only the heights that German Jews had been permitted to attain. It was, above all, the trust that had been placed in this Jewish surgeon. Trust: the one thing that was denied to Jews wherever they were, but in the end the only thing that mattered. Everyone suspected, my mother said, that the Kremlin was lying when they claimed that Moritz had gone to Moscow in 1922 in order to remove a bullet that had lodged in Lenin’s neck during an assassination attempt four years earlier. But within its walls the Kremlin had confronted the truth about Lenin’s illness. And the truth had taken them to Borchardt. Russia and Germany – two of the world’s greatest powers and two of the world’s most anti-Semitic nations – had both needed and welcomed and celebrated Moritz Borchardt.

  Ernst was sure that his own career, like Borchardt’s, had been made possible by the bumpy, sometimes retracted, but ultimately hugely progressive steps that had transformed Jewish fortunes since 1812, when Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm III had reluctantly approved an edict granting the Jews of Prussia full citizenship. Despite the suspension of that edict not long afterwards, the reality, as he saw it, was that Jews had mostly begun the nineteenth century as paupers and outcasts and ended it as well-educated and prosperous. In 1871 his hero, Bismarck, had sponsored an emancipation law that abolished all restrictions on political and civil rights; and in 1875, the same year in which he was born, mixed civil marriages between Jews and Christians were legal throughout Germany for the first time. Jews became prominent power brokers in the regime,
adopted Germanic names, increasingly married into high bourgeois non-Jewish families, and excelled in almost all areas of cultural and intellectual life.

  Of course, there was still much anti-Semitism in practice, especially after the stock market crashes of 1873 and 1929, for which Jewish deviousness and greed were naturally blamed. Yet for all the lingering problems, vast progress had been made since 1743, when the great Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, trailblazing a path out of the ghetto and later known as ‘the German Socrates’, reputedly found that he could enter Berlin only through the gate reserved for cattle, swine, and Jews.

  Surely, Ernst told his anxious family, such advances in the position of Jews were an irreversible historical achievement with deep roots in the egalitarian ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment – roots that couldn’t be destroyed by government decree and motley bunches of stormtroopers. Millions of Germans had so profited from the Jews’ enthusiastic contribution to the nation’s life that he was confident they wouldn’t support a policy and a government that deprived the country of legions of skilled doctors, scientists, weapons designers, engineers, architects, and lawyers. Though Hitler had blamed the Jews for Germany’s humiliation in the First World War, the reality was that many of them had celebrated German war aims as ardently as the most jingoistic non-Jews.

  But, for all his love of Germany and German culture, Ernst despised that jingoism. He cringed, my mother said, at those highly cultured Jews who paraded their zeal for war as if it were a natural extension of their infatuation with Kultur and Bildung, rather than its antithesis. He loathed the popular songs written by Ernst Lissauer, a Jewish poet, such as ‘Song of Hate Against England’ (‘Hassgesang gegen England’). And he would certainly have recoiled from Arnold Schoenberg’s xenophobic roar when the great Jewish composer compared the German army’s attack on what he saw as decadent France with his own will to overturn an ossified musical tradition, represented by the music of Bizet and Ravel: