How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  ‘Now comes the reckoning! Now we will throw these mediocre kitsch-mongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God!’5

  7.

  The hopeful case of Moritz Borchardt

  To his family’s astonishment, Ernst’s conviction that the Jews’ contributions to Germany’s national life would force the Nazis to rethink their anti-Semitic madness appeared to be spot on – and much sooner than he had thought. He was out of work for only a few weeks before his clerk notified him that he would be welcome to return to the court. He knew that this volte-face was hardly due to an ideological change of heart by the authorities. Nor was it likely to have been prompted by a generous interpretation of the rule exempting Jewish First World War veterans from the expulsion order: he had heard that plenty of them were being thrown out of their jobs, while younger Jews whose specialist knowledge was needed were being called back. It was, he felt, simply that Berlin’s courts must be grinding to a halt after losing so many of their best lawyers. Clients, including high Nazis, would be bereft of advocacy, and clamouring for the return of their attorneys. Divorcing couples petitioning his court would be unable to rid themselves of each other. Libelled Aryans wouldn’t be able to sue their persecutors. Deals would be left unconsummated. All of which was likely, given that almost 50 per cent of the lawyers in the city were of Jewish origin.

  Ernst was reassured by how many of his friends were also returning to their old posts. One was Professor Artur Nussbaum, a distinguished figure at Berlin University’s law faculty, who had been allowed into the classroom again to help his students prepare for their summer exams, and in whose apartment a few minutes’ walk from Blumeshof my mother had had many sleepovers with her close childhood friend, Nussbaum’s daughter, Marianne. And there was the remarkable Dr Richard Calé, a wiry, intense, fast-talking polymath, whose eldest daughter, Susanna, tutored my mother in ancient Greek. Calé was not only a great lawyer but a fine amateur violinist and composer, who hosted chamber music evenings attended by outstanding musicians of the day. After a brief period in which some of his non-Jewish clients had felt obliged to boycott his private practice, he was busier than ever.

  It was the same story in the medical profession. Expectant mothers were demanding the attention of the senior Herr Doktor, whatever his race. Aryan babies were not refusing to be born because Hitler had issued edicts against Jewish gynaecologists, such as another family friend, Dr Alfred Loeser.

  But, for Ernst, the most encouraging case of all was, again, Moritz Borchardt. Unlike most Jews, he hadn’t been fired and then hastily reinstated; he had retired in the normal way, on his sixty-fifth birthday, only twenty-four days before Hitler became chancellor, and despite the anti-Semitic frenzy in the air he had been given a sumptuous send-off by his largely non-Jewish staff. He was expecting to enjoy some rest and devote himself to his literary interests after decades of gruelling work, but soon after the Nazis got into power he was called out of retirement and offered a position at an exclusive private clinic. Lavish resources were made available, including Aryans to work under his absolute command, just as in the good old days. Far from destroying his career, Hitler seemed to have resurrected it.

  Nor did anything immediately change for the Borchardts on the home front. They continued hosting dinners at their apartment in Dörnbergstrasse, attended by the highest figures in German society and their five brilliant and Teutonically-named children: Dietrich, Gustav, Eva, Luise, and Albrecht. Everything about their life continued in its rigorous, settled way.

  Over lunch at his golf club in Buenos Aires in 2006, Albrecht Borchardt, who had emigrated there with his parents shortly before the outbreak of war, told me how his father had worked undisturbed in Berlin until and beyond the horrors of Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Jewish businesses, schools, homes, and synagogues all over Germany were wrecked and many Jews beaten to death. Professionally, he was unaffected, Albrecht said; he operated right up to the spring of 1939.

  ‘Could he continue working at the private clinic?’ I asked.

  Albrecht said that, yes, he could, until the authorities closed it down in 1936 – adding nonchalantly that he then moved into the clinic of Professor August Bier, where he practised medicine as normal, even operating on senior Nazis.

  There was no way that the authorities could have failed to know this. Bier, a non-Jew, had been president of the German Surgical Society and nobody would be able to work with him secretly.

  It was all so matter-of-fact in Albrecht Borchardt’s retelling of his father’s story. Everywhere he went after 1933, the necessary facilities and assistants were provided, up to his own demanding standards. The idea that the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history might have been gathering pace outside Moritz’s operating theatre remained imperceptible in his son’s telling of the story seven decades later.

  Like my parents, Albrecht appeared never to have left Germany. Though he had emigrated at sixteen and married a Brazilian Catholic with whom he had Spanish-speaking children, he seemed to have remained a German who couldn’t accept that he now belonged elsewhere.

  Immediately after the war, he had been the representative in Buenos Aires of a German company, which gave him the opportunity for regular trips to its headquarters. The company would put him up in one of the best local hotels, where he was given his favourite room in a part of the building that had survived the Allied bombing, with a view over mangled girders and pulverized stonework. He had been exhilarated, he told me, to contribute to the miraculous rebuilding of German industry after the war. Which other country could have managed this? What a privilege it had been to witness such creativity, to assist at the rebirth of this great nation.

  Had Hitler, I asked, changed his views of Germany? Had the abrupt dismissal and emigration of his father in 1939, Moritz’s despair in exile, the depression and silence into which he had sunk in Argentina, and then the violent stroke that left him almost completely paralyzed for the last seven years of his life compromised the son’s love for Germany? No, Albrecht said, not at all. Why should it change? Hitler boasted about embodying the German people, but he didn’t. No, thank goodness, he didn’t. Anti-Semitism was the province of the common man who had never met a Jew; but it had never been in the DNA of the people at large.

  As we surveyed the vast golf course in the gentle late-spring wind and chatted away about the wonders of the Teutonic mind, what a home it had provided for the Jews, and how great and warm-hearted the majority of German people were, I realized again how completely I identified with Albrecht’s feelings for Germany – and with how love, if it is sufficiently great, can persist even if the loved one tries to destroy your life. And yet I was struck by how his love for Germany seemed to have immunized him against any doubts about the country, doubts from which few non-Jewish Germans would be free; how, despite it all, not least his father’s terrible last years in Argentina and his brother Gustav’s deportation to a concentration camp, his passion for his homeland had remained steadfast. Unlike my mother and her sisters, he evinced no recognizable suffering, let alone trauma.

  Or perhaps the trauma was screaming at me precisely from out of his frozen loyalty; and I, locked into the same loyalty, lacked the ear to hear it.

  8.

  Ernst’s death

  For those less illustrious than Moritz Borchardt, ideology and race hatred were quickly to triumph again over the clamours of marooned clients, sick patients, and stricken businesses. The remaining scales fell from Ernst’s eyes soon after he had been ‘reinstated’, when he was abruptly confined to office work, out of public view, and no longer permitted to appear in court. More restrictions followed, until he was forbidden all direct contact with clients. He had become an invisible reject, without rights, whose role could be further shrunk at any moment – and he felt it bitterly. Outwardly he resumed his daily routine, walking to work in his suit and starched collar, greeting colleagues in the corridors, and conferring, as if
normally, with ‘his’ clerk. On Mondays he was particularly hopeful that they would get accustomed to him once more, and that habits of collegiate courtesy would win out over the commandment to hate; but then the sense of doom overpowered him again.

  Clearly, he was there only for as long as he could be of residual use, and until Hitler rejected once and for all the pleas for pragmatism that the nation’s saviour so despised. Ernst may have been in his old court, but, for his colleagues, for the authorities, and for Germany, he was already dead. They were palpably uninterested in his patriotism, his Protestantism, his professionalism, his love of Parsifal – or his First World War medal. His conviction that he would soon be unable to provide for his family wore him down. The horror that the Jewishness he thought he had assimilated out of existence had become a catastrophic liability to his young wife and daughters now haunted him day and night. The reality that his brilliant career, in which he had smoothly risen from humble provinciality to a position of responsibility in the capital of the Weimar Republic, had been shattered overnight, and that he was now discardable, reusable, and again discardable, all at whim, overwhelmed his modest but proud personality. Over the next few months he became increasingly depressed, brooding on the destruction of his life by his still-beloved Germany. On returning from his customary walk before lunch with Emmy on 17 December 1933, he collapsed and died of a heart attack in his wife’s arms, outside his own front door.

  ‘Sei froh!’ – ‘Be glad!’ – my mother said to Emmy that evening. ‘It was for the best. He couldn’t have coped with this. His death is a blessing.’ Ernst had been laid out on his bed, where Ilse repeatedly photographed the corpse.

  Sei froh? My mother didn’t just say it that evening; she never stopped saying it, even forty, seventy, eighty years later. Ilse said the same thing. Only Ursel couldn’t be drawn on the death. Though my father’s death gripped her, she never spoke to me about her father’s death. Had it never taken root in her? Or had it taken root so firmly that she couldn’t commemorate, let alone imitate it?

  As I heard this story over and over again from the other two sisters, I was besieged by questions. Did Ernst die so quickly and was the shock so calamitous because he had severed himself from his moorings in the ancient faith of his ancestors? Had this closing down of a whole area of innate sensibility and cultural memory fatally weakened him? Wasn’t that certificate, stamped by Department 9 of the Royal Prussian District Court, in which he had repudiated five thousand years of belonging, also a suicide note – part of a dying that had already been going on for many years and was not yet complete? And how weary did all that fighting against himself make him?

  Or is all this fidelity to roots dangerous nonsense? Isn’t identity fluid, revisable, multiple, and determined at least as much by our own experiences and choices as by our inheritance of a past? Haven’t cultural traditions adapted, merged, been lost, found new sources of life, ‘assimilated’, ever since human beings first lived in communities? Rather than finding himself enfeebled by his abandonment of Judaism, wasn’t Ernst’s catastrophe that his most treasured end – to be at one with, and to contribute to the best in, German culture – had been debarred to him almost overnight? That the door to the only world that made sense to him had been slammed shut? That, for this beloved world, which gave meaning to everything he did in his life, he no longer existed?

  And even if we cannot flourish without fidelity to our roots, surely we can’t live out everything we are? Some parts of our mosaic of identity speak to us with such familiarity and intensity that all our other roots seem insipid by comparison. I know people with one Jewish grandparent – there are some, like Ruth in the Bible, with none – who claim this heritage as their chief identity and become Orthodox Jews and feel they have finally found a home to which they are unequivocally called. And I know others with the same heritage who, to this day, loathe and repudiate it and crave nothing more than its final extinction, so that they and their numberless descendants need never more be burdened with its curse.

  But what happens when you don’t just loathe and repudiate this root or that, but go for your oldest – and try to kill it? When you try to wipe a major part of the slate of your own heritage clean and start again? Isn’t there something here of the spirit of those social experimenters who thought that human beings could be made tabula rasa and then re-constituted, free of the despised past? Don’t we know from those experiments that, even given titanic will, nature and history refuse to go quietly?

  Ernst has bequeathed to us, his descendants, the task of facing these enigmas. And, even when I think I have faced them, I know that I am still fumbling.

  PART II

  Three Sisters, Three Destinies

  1933–1945

  9.

  Next stop: Catholicism

  From 17 December 1933, in the early afternoon, my mother, it seems, was neither happy nor unhappy. A sense of suspended animation, of swathes of life being on permanent hold, emigrated with her to London, and became my inheritance to grapple and live with.

  Were there family dinners, or weekends on the boat moored on the shore of the Wannsee that Ernst had bought just a couple of years earlier? Did she see loyal friends and colleagues – Alvensleben, Krämer, Hackwitz? Did she eventually go to concerts again? How long did her mother continue living at Blumeshof 12?

  No memories.

  Did she attend her father’s funeral? Where was he buried? And who came, apart from ‘everybody’?

  No memories.

  About politics and Hitler and speeches and rallies and signs against Jews she also can’t recall anything, though until 1938 she was regularly in Berlin. Family members whose Jewishness was not a matter of debate or concealment – her father’s mother and his brother Theo – now vanish from consciousness. Though the three sisters had dropped in on their grandmother almost every Saturday afternoon for years, none of them can remember when she died or whether she was deported. They can’t even remember her name, though she was the relative they saw most often. They do know the name of their other grandmother, Emmy’s mother, the supposedly Aryan grandmother whom they seldom met because she so despised Ernst. She was called Adele. They can remember the names of family friends, even distant ones, but not of Ernst’s mother, their favourite grandparent. How were she and Theo, her younger son, faring at this time? Not a clue. Did they ever see them after December 1933? It seems not, except for one accidental encounter between Ilse and Theo on a street corner, but that was years later, near the end of 1941. Theo lived in Berlin until he was deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942, the date at which he comes alive again in the three sisters’ memories.

  What do they vividly remember of the years from 1934 up to the beginning of the war? They remember their dramatic conversions – the most wonderful moment of their lives, they told me, at least until they had children. All three became fervent Catholics after Hitler came to power, my mother first, in 1934, then Ilse, and finally Ursel. They remember their studies and then their nascent careers: Ilse the photographer, Ursel the actor, Marianne the violinist. And they remember where they lived: Ilse stayed in Berlin, where she opened an atelier on the Budapesterstrasse, which flourished beyond the beginning of the war, counting many Nazis among its clients. Marianne, my mother, moved to London in 1934, following her violin teacher Max Rostal, another former student of Carl Flesch, with whom she had started lessons after Josef Wolfsthal suddenly died, aged thirty-one. Rostal had been dismissed from his job at Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik in April the previous year, and had then made a living teaching at the home of one of his students, Marianne Imberg, a close friend of my mother; but when the Imbergs left for New York and his other Jewish students trickled out of the country, he had finally been forced by penury to emigrate.

  Meanwhile Ursel already had her job at the theatre in Bremen, performing mainly classical roles, though that came to a sudden end in the summer of 1934 after the Reichstheaterkammer – the ‘Reich Theatre Chamber
’, a professional organization under the ultimate direction of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, to which all actors had to belong in order to be permitted to work – demanded proof of Aryan parentage, which at that time she had no idea how to secure or invent. After repeatedly warning Ursel that she wasn’t providing the necessary paperwork, or even paying her dues – which she was withholding to give the impression that the missing paperwork was the result of slovenliness rather than ethnic evasion – she was finally expelled in 1936, which meant she was banned from acting.

  And so, returning to Berlin, she looked for casual work in dance halls and cabarets that Goebbels hadn’t yet brought under his control or closed down – a world of satire perfectly suited to her talent for mimicry and to her spellbindingly labile body; a world that, my mother used to say, with a knowing chuckle, was far more to Ursel’s taste than the worthy German classics that she had been obliged to perform in Bremen.

  Here in the demi-monde, she forged what was to be a lifelong friendship with Isa Vermehren, a singer, accordion player, actor, and daughter of a Protestant family from Lübeck, who became a Catholic in 1938 and who would turn out to be key to Ursel’s own conversion. Isa’s switch to Catholicism was more dramatic, for it would take her all the way to the nunnery. Catalyzed by her, Ursel became a Catholic between Kristallnacht and the outbreak of war, the last of the Liedtke sisters to make that momentous decision.