How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  The sisters’ conversion to Catholicism, about which they were passionate, must have been a huge step to terra firma. So many, at least in Berlin and elsewhere in Protestant north Germany, had used Protestantism as a stepping stone in the journey from Judaism that it had probably lost its magic as a mask. As an emblem of assimilation it was hackneyed; and in its Lutheran shape it was surely too local, too German (precisely what had made it attractive until the rise of Hitler), to afford a sense of protection from the fires of blood-and-soil nationalism. Whereas, even in its German hue, Catholicism was a universal rather than a merely national church. In the Vatican it had a ruling power base outside Germany that was willing – at least in principle and up to the extent that the Church’s own interests were safeguarded – to protect its flock, no matter what their ethnic heritage or where they lived.

  No less important for the three sisters, I think, Catholicism had sensuality and drama, especially in the cult of the Virgin Mary and the vivid lives of the saints – a drama that numbed pain and, for all its focus on suffering and death, was somehow life-giving. Or so I experienced it in my youth. Seeing them in church, I was gripped and disturbed and moved – all at once – by their agonized yet ecstatic, tormented yet swooning, expressions in prayer. They often seemed on the point of breaking into weeping, and sometimes did break into weeping, not only for the tragedy of Christ’s own suffering – which, from everything they said, they felt with shattering intensity – but also for the vast redemptive hope that it promised. When I dared to ask my mother about this, she appeared possessed by a power of imaginative insight into Christ’s condemnation and crucifixion that few priests, with their routine sermons, could match. And, thrillingly but fleetingly, a shaft of light was cast into her mysterious inner world, and its alchemy of identities, which I had been ordered to inherit.

  Back in the 1930s, how could spartan, self-reliant German Lutheranism possibly compete with this new religious haven? In those violent times, in which a family and its world were being destroyed, this mix of the sanctuary offered by a cosmopolitan Church and a rococo sensibility of dramatic intoxication and redemption through suffering was overwhelmingly seductive, promising to liberate someone with both German and Jewish heritages from the ever-increasing difficulty of belonging to either.

  And yet.

  Catholicism clearly offered no guarantee of ethnic concealment, least of all in Hitler’s Germany. More drastic measures were needed; and, as I see it, these had to bore further and further into one’s own soul rather than merely hide one’s origins from hostile outsiders. What had to be changed was not just how other people saw you but also – perhaps above all – how you saw yourself. Who you felt yourself to be. And even, to some extent, who you actually were.

  By the 1930s, the path to Christianity had been well-trodden by German-speaking Jews for well over a century. Hitler was in no way its instigator; nor were my family its pioneers. The composer Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, was baptized in 1816. Karl Marx was baptized in 1824, following his own father’s conversion. Since the early nineteenth century, many other Jews had become Christian, including the poet Heinrich Heine, the writer and creator of an illustrious Berlin literary salon Rahel Varnhagen, and the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.

  I knew several other German-Jewish families who had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in the 1930s, but none of them seemed to have attempted, let alone succeeded, to extirpate an entire heritage so that it no longer figured, except perhaps sporadically, in their self-identity.

  The remarkable and puzzling thing was this: with the aid of their Catholicism, the three sisters had so transformed their inner world to purge it of Jewish life and cultural memory that, even decades after the war was over and the Nazis and their race laws were discarded, their belonging in any way to the Jewish people seemed to them unreal and absurd – a sense that they conveyed to lifelong friends, colleagues, and in-laws, many, perhaps most, of whom had no idea that the Liedtke sisters had Jewish ancestry.

  This was a sense of unbelonging that I, in turn, inherited and that took me decades to begin to throw off. No matter how clear the facts, or how vividly I tried to imagine the reality of my Jewish origins, they seemed stubbornly incredible.

  How a Jewish identity gradually came to feel plausible to me, then legitimate, later still vital, and finally thrilling, I still do not know.

  10.

  ‘Life is continually shedding something that wants to die’

  After their father died, Ilse, Ursel, and Marianne, aged twenty-three, twenty-one, and nineteen, found themselves thrust into a disintegrating world from which each would be excluded in her own way. From now on, I think, this inner ethnic purging could no longer be a collective enterprise, but became a matter of what suited each of them best. Life, as Nietzsche once said, is continually shedding something that wants to die. And that, it always seemed to me, is what they took themselves to be doing: shedding, ever more decisively, something that they were sure wanted to die.

  It was a dying that I inherited whole. But in my life it took the form of a mandate to die, rather than something I myself willed. For me, the purging of Jewish heritage and consciousness was not a liberation; it was an evisceration – a great emptying of my inner world, an emptying that, for many years, I did not feel at liberty to reverse wholesale and without inhibition; for to open the doors to Jewish life would be savagely to betray my mother and all the suffering it had caused her. And even after I began to defy the mandate by letting that life seep tentatively back in – from my early teens through close friendships with Jewish classmates; in my early twenties by going secretly to synagogue services – I still found it preposterous to think of myself as a Jew. Merely to entertain the thought was to be enveloped at once in a cloud of guilt and impossibility. Even worse, it was to feel an impostor – as if a fake Jew was the only kind I could ever genuinely be.

  Of the three sisters’ stories, Ilse’s remains the most extraordinary because her means of concealment from the outside world were the most economical. She lived in Berlin through the twelve years of the Third Reich with a confidence in her safety founded not in reckless bravado but in utter self-assurance. She told me many times, without betraying any wonder that this was possible, that throughout the whole Nazi period she had never felt frightened. Not after her father had been evicted from work, nor after he had collapsed and died at his front door. Not after Kristallnacht. Not after her uncle Theo was deported and murdered. Not after people started disappearing in their thousands. Not after the Allied bombing began in earnest. Fear, she said, only set in with the arrival of occupying Soviet soldiers in Berlin following Germany’s capitulation in May 1945.

  A year or so after Ernst’s death, Ilse became engaged to Harald Böhmelt, an up-and-coming conductor, composer, and Nazi Party member who had joined Hitler’s party as early as 1932. He was a colourful and successful composer of film music, who would become best known for writing soundtracks for hit movies like Kleiner Mann – was nun? (Little Man, What Now?), as well as for Nazi propaganda reels.

  The engagement had been difficult while Ernst was alive; according to my mother, my grandfather disapproved of his prospective son-in-law, whom he found uncultured and uneducated. But, protected by Böhmelt and probably by friends of his who were higher up the Nazi hierarchy, Ilse thrived throughout the 1930s and into the war. She lived openly and freely, and was often to be seen dancing away the evening at Babelsberg, the Hollywood of Nazi Germany, with Böhmelt and a ballroomful of Goebbels’s favourites.

  At the same time, together with her close friend Christabel Bielenberg, who was married to a dissident German lawyer called Peter Bielenberg, she helped run a secret network in Berlin that hid Jews throughout the war. Did this courageous work enable her to feel that she herself did not belong to the people whom she was hiding? In concealing these Jews was she also hiding the Jew in her? Not just from others, but from herself?

  Ursel, f
or her part, was closing in on the aristocratic world into which she would eventually marry. After five years in the wilderness, without the necessary permission to work, she managed within less than twenty-four months to gain official acceptance as an Aryan in late 1941, to rejoin the theatre at Bremen in September 1943, and, in the same month, to become a high-ranking countess, a ‘Reichsgräfin’. An astonishing triple feat.

  Meanwhile, Marianne was in north London, immersed in the parallel world of German-Austrian refugees, where she saw herself as a lone ‘non-Jew’ in an otherwise entirely Jewish universe. She had emigrated to England, aged twenty, only because her Jewish teacher of violin, Max Rostal, had gone there. Otherwise, according to the dominant version of events promulgated by the three sisters, she would have had no reason to leave Germany.

  All this subterfuge had been directed at the Jewishness of Ernst, whom the Nazi state had already outed and dispatched. But what about Emmy, their mother? After all, her maternal grandmother, Bertha Hecht, had definitely been Jewish, and so, probably, had her grandmother on her father’s side. Of the grandfathers, both of whom had died young, ‘too little was known’.

  For some reason, my grandmother Emmy divulged this information only to my mother, sometimes as fact and at other times as rumour. Or, perhaps, of the three sisters only my mother could bear to remember it. In any event, it was a dead letter for Emmy. Though she despised anti-Semitism and evinced no trace of it, she took herself to be an Aryan – and was accepted as one. So when, in 1939, a Jewish textile business called J. Eichenberg AG in which she and Ernst had invested back in 1924 was ‘Aryanized’ – compelled by law to be sold to non-Jews – she was the only shareholder in the roster of the soon-to-be-dispossessed by which the racial affiliation ‘arisch’ appears.6

  What prompted those unpredictable moments when my mother’s labyrinth of vagueness about Emmy’s maternal grandmother would give way to decisive clarity? She was then so quick to recall not just the full name of this woman but her place and approximate year of birth that, when, already in my thirties, I finally forced her to search for this ancestor who seemed to hold the keys to our Jewish identity, she needed just a fortnight to track down the necessary proof.

  It came in the form of a handwritten document, dated 8 June 1841, from the city archives of Braunschweig, near Hannover, proving Bertha Hecht’s membership in its Jewish community. All it took to confirm her identity, and so Emmy’s Jewish identity, was a call to the city hall and payment of a small fee. In return, the archivist dispatched a photocopy of the original document – and in the process restituted my fourth Jewish grandparent.

  But that is all it would have taken for a Nazi official to unearth the document and blow Emmy’s cover. Just a phone call. She was lucky that nobody made that call or checked on her other grandmother, who bore the name Zander, also typically Jewish. But the trick here wasn’t the accident of official documents with fishy names remaining undiscovered. Nor was it to get false papers, or hide in cellars, or sleep with the enemy, or not divulge your identity to outsiders – or even to your own children. Many others did all that, only some of whom survived. Again, the harder trick was deceiving yourself so deeply that not even you remembered – or could believe – who you were. Ernst might have had a stab at this; but in truth he had barely begun. His wife had done better, and by the late 1930s their three daughters were well on their own way.

  11.

  Great-uncle Helmut: priest, philosopher, boxer

  The origin of this self-ethnic purging within our family was decades before anyone had heard of Adolf Hitler; and it was far advanced before he took power. Emmy’s mother, Adele, reviled Jews, rigorously denied that her own mother was Jewish, and would never forgive Emmy for marrying a Jew. Or so my mother lamented, adding that Adele refused to address Ernst, her son-in-law, except with the formal ‘Sie’, and openly disdained him. To which he was resigned, without bitterness.

  In fact, the only public honesty about Emmy’s Jewish roots came from a most unlikely source: Der Stürmer, a violently anti-Semitic newspaper that announced itself as a weekly ‘dedicated to fighting for the truth’ and, among other propaganda, ran semi-pornographic caricatures of Jews and accusations of blood libel. The occasion was an article about Emmy’s brother, Helmut Fahsel: philosopher, amateur boxer, model railway enthusiast, lover of fast cars, devotee of St Thomas Aquinas – and Catholic priest.

  Helmut, my great-uncle, was a celebrity cleric. His great gift was oratory: he could take complicated themes, such as divine omnipotence and the problem of evil, and explain them in speeches that attracted crowds of hundreds. As late as 1977 he was still spoken of as ‘Germany’s most famous Catholic orator’ of the period between the late 1920s and the early 1930s.7 He also loathed the Nazis and was courageous enough to speak out against them in such prestigious venues as Berlin’s Philharmonie; so it was hardly surprising that he came to their attention.

  It was screamingly obvious, Der Stürmer reported in August 1931, under the banner headline ‘Judenkaplan Fahsel’ (‘Jew-Chaplain Fahsel’), that he was an agent of subversive Jewish forces who were cunning enough to deploy one of their own in the guise of a Christian:

  When we saw him with our own eyes, this priest, Fahsel, when we listened to his oily guttural sound, his countenance, and his way of talking with his hands, it became immediately clear: Fahsel has Jewish blood. His father was a Jew who had been baptized a Protestant. After his death, young Fahsel came into the home of his rich Jewish uncle. Ten years ago he was baptized a Catholic. And today he, the baptized Jew, is the famous chaplain of the secret Jewish string-pullers. Fahsel’s task is to sow confusion and discord among non-Jews and to preach forgiveness of the Jews. Reconciliation with the descendants of Christ’s murderers. If the Jew would preach these sorts of things as a rabbi, he would have no success. He therefore sends the Jew in the form of a priest. The really dumb ones fall for it. The bright ones know. They tell their neighbour: beware, look around you, the fox is among you!8

  Der Stürmer’s staff had mixed up only a few of their facts. Helmut’s father, Georg Johannes Wilhelm Fahsel, who was the editor of the Norddeutsche Zeitung in Hamburg before his death in 1898 aged thirty-six, had been born a Protestant. But his mother, Maria Friederike Zander, had probably been born a Jew and then been baptized as an adult, sometime in the mid-nineteenth century.

  It was also true that after their father’s early death Helmut and Emmy were adopted by their ‘rich Jewish uncle’, Arthur Rosenthal, who was married to their mother’s sister, Emma. Their mother, left destitute as a widow, had given her two children to the Rosenthals, who brought them up in a mansion with staff, works of art, embroidered tapestries, chinaware on display in large mahogany and glass cabinets, and other trappings of bourgeois life.

  Rosenthal and his wife were childless and doted on their two adopted children. He added his name to theirs – my grandmother became Emmy Fahsel-Rosenthal – and as they grew into young adults he was generous in financing their education and developing ambitions. He found Emmy the best singing and piano teachers, and sent her to one of Montreux’s elegant ‘finishing schools’ when she was sixteen. He bought the scholarly Helmut every book he wished for, in the finest editions, supported his studies in the classics, and when the young man resolved to learn Catholic theology he co-financed those studies, too, with a close friend, to whom he introduced Emmy after she returned from Montreux and whom he hoped she would eventually marry: Ernst Liedtke.

  That Helmut’s path to the priesthood had been supported by two Jews was unlikely to have escaped the attention of Der Stürmer.

  It wasn’t just the Nazis who suspected Jewish contamination in Helmut. So did many of his fellow Catholics. Fahsel’s biographer and one-time landlady, Henriette von Gizycki, born Salomonski, herself a Jew who had converted to Catholicism – and who would perish in the Holocaust – laments that these co-religionists also saw his Jewish origins as a ‘blemish’.

  Nor can it have helped Fa
hsel that one of the encounters that shaped his religious life and pushed him towards Catholicism was with Rabbi Leo Baeck, an illustrious scholar and the leader of progressive Judaism in Germany. Or that he publicly attacked anti-Semites who repudiated the Old Testament and denied that Jesus was a Jew. Gizycki reports a meeting in the Philharmonie in about 1928, where Helmut confronted the Nazi author Arthur Dinter, whose bestselling novel, The Sin Against the Blood, declared that an Aryan woman who had once had sex with a Jewish man would inevitably have polluted offspring, even if they were fathered by an Aryan:

  The excitement in the hall was so great that Fahsel couldn’t be heard at all. With a great command ‘Quiet!’ he achieved complete silence. As a Catholic priest he defended the importance of the Old Testament. As a result he lost the sympathy of all those in his audience of a völkisch, anti-Semitic disposition.9

  What really baffled Fahsel’s biographer was how such rumours about his Jewishness could possibly have been spread when they were evidently groundless. To ‘honour the truth’, she quotes the following sentence from Fahsel’s own notebooks:

  A journalist later mentioned the rich Jewish uncle and gave vent to the erroneous and absurd opinion that I had Jewish parents who had been baptized. Anti-Semites should calm down [about that], but they should also know that I have experienced from Jews acts of the highest kind-heartedness and loyalty, free of any falsehood and arrogance.10

  Me, a Jew? Fahsel’s sangfroid, just like Emmy’s and Ilse’s, is masterly. Crucially, he believed his own story. Like Ilse’s courage in hiding Jews, Helmut’s generous feelings for them, his recognition of their virtues, his affirmation of the Old Testament, and his denial that they exhibited the vices of anti-Semitic stereotype – falsehood and arrogance11 – were extended from his impregnable conviction that he was not one of them – and that any idea to the contrary was absurd.