How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  But Fahsel had another side to him that drew some of the sting of Nazi disdain. At the same time as he was lurching towards Catholicism, he was developing a passionate devotion to the ancient Germanic and Greek heroes, such as Siegfried and Theseus. He revered what he saw as their uncompromising masculinity and their courage, loyalty, selflessness, and solitude – and despised people who succumbed to the spell of sensuous charms or to the idyll of a comfortable life.12

  This talk was in the air. In Mein Kampf, Hitler portrays himself as just such a character – the lone individual brimming with bravery, loyalty, and honesty who forgoes the security of family life, guided by a higher force that has sent him to serve and save.

  But Fahsel didn’t just talk; he also imposed a rigorous physical exercise regime on himself, learned jiu-jitsu,13 practised athletics, joined the Anglo-American Boxing Club in Berlin,14 attended boxing matches at the Tiergartenhof Hall,15 and even engaged a boxing coach called Joe Edwards.16 He would spend long afternoons in the city’s museums admiring the male physiques depicted by classical Greek sculptures, which, as he confided in his diary, awoke in him ‘the youthful sense for a new rhythm and mood, for a new independence and democratic freedom’.17 And his day would often end at parties organized by the Association for Strength and Beauty.18

  While still at school he became, in good Greek fashion, the protégé of a cultured aristocrat who admired Helmut’s body as well as his ideals of physical and moral perfection. The older man would pick him up from school and greet the boy with a reverent and somewhat mannered kiss on the hands, on one occasion even gifting him a statue of Narcissus. Though Helmut professed himself repulsed as well as flattered by this attention, it seems that on balance he tolerated the admiration.19

  Artur Rosenthal had long been worried by Helmut’s deepening Catholic infatuation and his mystical experiences before statues of St Thomas Aquinas, but his worship of pagan ideals of manhood deeply troubled the old man. The final straw was the claim of one of Rosenthal’s domestic staff to have seen a breast expander hidden under Helmut’s bed, and rumours in the house that he was flagellating himself in his bedroom between sessions practising at the punchbag that he had suspended from the ceiling.

  Rosenthal decided to send the young man to Henriette von Gizycki’s boarding house, where a dose of normal life among young people struggling to make ends meet might bring him down to earth. The effect was exactly the opposite. Released from the staid atmosphere of Rosenthal’s home, with its grand dinners and servers and governesses, Helmut pursued his religious and bodily ideals more fervently than ever.

  Gizycki records how, after arriving in September 1908 in an open limousine, accompanied by a butler who carried his belongings, the sixteen-year-old Helmut immediately shut himself in his room to exercise with weights, declaring tartly: ‘I strive for perfection of the body.’20 He rejected the books she gave him – titles such as What A Young Man Needs to Know21 – and instead read either thrillers or else medieval philosophy. Either Conan Doyle or Thomas Aquinas.

  Why, she asked him, did he feed his mind with such lightweight stuff as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? Not for entertainment, Helmut answered, but because a scholar’s mind must achieve the brilliance and dexterity of a master detective.

  Helmut was deadly serious about these ideals, which blended medieval Christianity with old Germanic-pagan virtues, and didn’t take kindly to all the mockery that he encountered. The First World War was for him the great event that proved how vital they were to the development of a human being. Though he didn’t fight for more than a few months – he fell ill with fever in January 1915 while stationed in northern France and was discharged from the army that autumn – the war, he was convinced, magnificently confirmed that only a life governed by severe discipline, loyalty, and endurance can be happy.

  Yet none of this worship of ‘Germania’ and the military virtues allayed the Nazis’ mistrust. Helmut’s safety was becoming ever more imperilled until, sometime in early 1934, Hitler’s deputy chancellor Franz von Papen, so my mother told me, personally telephoned to urge him to flee the country.

  Papen considered himself a devout Catholic and admired Fahsel’s religious writings. He didn’t mince his words in his phone call: Fahsel should make sure he was on a particular train departing for Switzerland at dawn the next morning – a ticket would be waiting for him at a mutual friend’s house. The alternative was immediate arrest. His sermons and public lectures were unacceptable, unpatriotic, Jew-friendly and, for all their ideals of noble manhood, smelled of decadence. Even Fahsel’s views on sexuality displeased the authorities, with their edification of Eros as a window onto God and a path to ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness.

  Fahsel took the advice and left for Switzerland on the train that Papen had specified, setting up near Locarno with a Spanish widow, her sister, and her Italian housekeeper. A few weeks later his library followed, with its vast collection of philosophy and theology books, along with his model railway set and his collection of boxing gloves. The Spanish widow had been dispatched to Berlin to rescue these prized possessions, which she packed to his demanding specifications and cleared for export – not an easy task to perform on behalf of a man on the run from the Nazi regime.

  For almost two decades Helmut lived self-sufficiently in a wing of her mansion overlooking Lake Maggiore, studying, working out at the leather punchbag, playing with his model railway, and listening to his jazz recordings, of which he had hundreds. She bought him whatever books he needed, always in the finest editions; he began his six-volume translation of Thomas Aquinas from Latin into German; and well into middle age he continued to model his life on that of a young aristocrat in ancient Athens.

  He was never to return to Germany, except for a brief and unsuccessful stint in the early 1950s as a parish priest in the Pfalz region. While there, he attempted to resume his public lectures in philosophy and religion, but his ideas no longer found the reception they had enjoyed before the war and he soon returned to his Swiss retreat.

  When the Spanish widow died, another wealthy woman, a Madame Simon who lived in nearby Muralto, came to the rescue, and it wasn’t long before Fahsel moved in with her. Though he took the Spanish widow’s Italian housekeeper with him, the old order couldn’t easily be recreated and Madame Simon began to realize that she wanted Fahsel for herself. The Italian housekeeper was an interloper who understood nothing about housekeeping or Fahsel’s real needs. She had to go.

  Fahsel refused to fire the Italian housekeeper. Madame Simon was incensed by his cozy relationship with the employee of her predecessor and threatened to cut off the generous allowance she paid him for new books, knowing that this would hurt even more than an end to his supply of fine food and wine. One day, as she was driving him around the lake, past the gentle slopes with their blossoming hydrangeas, she stopped at the side of the road and presented him with an ultimatum: if the Italian housekeeper didn’t go, he would have to. He was to dismiss the housekeeper before dinner that evening or Madame Simon would dismiss her for him.

  He dismissed her.

  Ursel’s World: The Aryan Aristocrat in Hiding

  12.

  From the Liedtkes to the aristocrats

  Ursel never felt at ease within the impeccable universe of Blumeshof 12, and I think I can understand why. Devoted though I am to this inheritance, its nervy, quasi-religious obsession with music, art, and learning; its mantra of ‘only the very best’; and its conviction that it is exceptional can all be crushing. The exalted standards that it prizes, magnificent though they are in themselves, can feel like a carapace that holds reality at bay – a carapace inside which bubble unconquerable panic and perplexity.

  In 1927, aged only fifteen, Ursel made a decision of astonishing independent-mindedness. She was going to leave her parents’ home and insert herself into a new family – a family, as I see it, absolutely removed not only from the Jewish experience, but from anyone whose ideals, however noble, were sustained
by marginalization, rootlessness, and the ever-present invisible chasm that made it impossible to take firm ground for granted.

  Aryan wasn’t enough. Aryans could worry about all those things. Nor did the passion for Kultur among the non-Jewish Bildungsbürgertum necessarily insulate them from feelings of being marooned in a world over which they were powerless. Many of them would later support Hitler as a solution to precisely such anxieties. Only one group appeared to have unshakable confidence in its roots, no matter what other sources of insecurity might beset it – not the fakery of brazen confidence, but the calm sort, pervaded by an impregnable sense of status; a group that wouldn’t begin to recognize the particular existential despair that plagued the Liedtke family: the aristocrats.

  The answer came in the form of Count Werner and Countess Alexandra von Alvensleben, their son, Werner, and their three daughters, Lexi, Annali, and ‘Baby’. Ursel and Lexi had become friends at the small private school to which Ernst had sent her on her return from a six-month cure in Zuoz, in the Swiss Alps, for a minor lung ailment. Back in Germany, Ursel found it difficult to reintegrate into the public school system and her parents hoped that a private education would be the answer. It hardly mattered: she was uninterested in academic study and had already discovered her talent for acting; but she did find there the new, safer world for which she longed. To my grandfather’s distress and my grandmother’s resentful admiration, Ursel laid siege to the Alvenslebens’ deliciously self-assured life. She adopted their tastes in clothes, interior decoration, furniture, and manners. Soon she adopted the girls’ mother too, even calling her ‘Mami’.22

  Mami reciprocated with strange intensity. She was captivated by Ursel’s cutting wit, her virtuosic jesting, and her way of seeking out deeply conservative circles in which she would behave with defiant unconventionality. Ursel, for her part, delighted not just in Mami’s protective care but also in eccentricities like her predilection for cooking while dressed in galoshes, overcoat, and a wide-brimmed hat. The two became inseparable, confiding their secrets to one another until Mami’s death nearly forty years later.

  These Alvenslebens were a remarkable family who were unstintingly benevolent to my own, from their solidarity with my grandfather after his dismissal in 1933 to Lexi’s many decades of friendship with Ursel and kindness to Ilse. Lexi’s father Werner had been one of the very few to visit Ernst in the dreadful days after Hitler’s accession to power when many others were afraid to be associated with him. Lexi had not only been Ursel’s closest friend since their schooldays but coincidentally ended up living almost next door to Ilse’s photographic atelier in the Budapesterstrasse from the summer of 1944, after moving from Bremen to Berlin in order to be near her now-imprisoned husband. And she stubbornly went on living there, Ilse said, even after bombs had destroyed a great part of her building and there was almost a clean line of vision from her apartment directly into the cellar. She was loyal, poised, intelligent, unpretentious, cultured, offbeat, and tremendously courageous.

  Lexi’s family really did offer Ursel an escape from that disturbingly serious world of the Liedtkes, a world shot through with the gravity that, as I see it, Ernst embodied in its most concentrated form. A German Jew like him didn’t just bear the name of two peoples; he bore the burden of these two richly burdened peoples, and the redemptive dreams of both. Into him flowed two spiritual inheritances that each placed supreme value on a deep and rigorous and grounded and virtuous cultivation of the mind in the service of the true and the good – the Germans with their devotion to Bildung and the Jews with their fervour for study and learning and the moral law. When the vehemently held ideals of those inheritances came together, one could inadvertently surrender the joy, indeed the lightness, peculiar to each.

  As a result, some German Jews – among them my own family – took their seriousness about life to extremes that were life-destroying. Every word, every act, every decision, and every non-decision could be loaded with such crushing meaning that existence itself became intractable. Life was not allowed to dance, but had to be filled with cultural hope so vast that it could swallow up the terror of ordinary reality. Exhaustion was inevitable.

  If you craved escape from all this, there were at least three durable ways. Discover a world that wasn’t Jewish or German in the contemporary bourgeois sense of the Bildungsbürgertum: the world of the Alvenslebens. Send up seriousness with satire: the world of cabaret. Or find a religion that will promise release from life’s suffering in one redeeming leap: the world of the Catholic convert.

  Ursel wasn’t one for doing things by halves. She went, with total dedication, for all three.

  13.

  Ursel becomes an Aryan

  In the end, Ursel wanted more than the aristocratic bolthole that the Alvenslebens could provide, the absurdist milieu that cabaret offered, or the religious solution that Catholicism had to hand. All that was behind her when, in 1941, as even half-Jews felt under ever greater threat from the Nazi state, she took the attempt to escape Jewish origins, to bail out of her own heritage, one huge step further: she had herself officially accepted as Aryan.

  She set about this task by dreaming up a story that, contrary to what she had understood until then, she was not the daughter of Ernst Liedtke. Rather, her allegedly non-Jewish mother had conceived her in an adulterous fling with a similarly uncontaminated man, who was now conveniently dead and so unavailable to deny his moment of madness. As my mother recounted it, she demanded that Emmy sign a sworn statement confessing to this infidelity and identifying the mysterious lover as a certain Kostas, a Greek violinist who, on moving to Berlin, had been financed and sheltered by none other than Ernst. The unfortunate Kostas was therefore posthumously deemed to have repaid his sponsor’s generosity by producing a love child with his young wife.

  In fact, Kostas’s only intimacy with Emmy was to play violin sonatas with her at the piano, and his main contribution to the family was to encourage my mother’s passion for the violin. He promised, though, to play his new role to perfection, as Ursel’s naturally brown skin was surely the spitting image of the tanned Greek’s. That her complexion also bore an uncanny resemblance to Ernst’s could, for the time being, be swept under the carpet.

  For all Emmy’s own ethnic self-concealment, she was, my mother said, agonized by Ursel’s determination to secure non-Jewish status and its repercussions for Ernst, whom it would publicly strip not only of a daughter but of a marriage that had been unwaveringly faithful. The whole venture was also terrifying for them both: sworn statements about one’s race that were discovered to be false could, they had heard, carry a penalty of death. Though Emmy desperately wanted to find a way of helping Ursel, for over a year she couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge her marital lapse. Only when Ursel’s half-Jewish friend and fellow actor, Katta Sterna, had herself obtained a certificate of Aryan origin by similar means, did Emmy agree to cooperate in turning Ursel into an Aryan.

  Katta’s panache had always impressed Emmy. She had a string of films to her name and was also a hugely talented dancer and cabaret artist, openly bisexual, and a habitué of smoky clubs, where she sang popular lyrics.

  Katta pulled out the stops to help Ursel slough off her Jewish origins, and the two friends trawled through a list of possible fathers before deciding on Kostas. Runner-up was an antique dealer, who had generously offered to provide a sworn statement owning up to his paternity, but he was rejected on account of his bleach-white skin and, worse, the fact that he was alive and traceable. Whereas Kostas, my mother said, had the advantage of being not only dead, but also Greek – Greece being, at that time, a hard country in which to verify people’s personal histories. And so Katta helped invent a story in which the Mediterranean lover and his German paramour had become so aroused by the music they were making together while the husband was poring over his dry legal files in court, that one day – just once – they had been unable to resist consummating this burning passion in the family living room, by the piano.<
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  The next, and harder, question was how to get the new ethnic identity officially recognized. Emmy’s sworn statement admitting to the infidelity needed to clear a bureaucratic obstacle course, including an examination of Ursel’s case by the anthropologists at the Reichssippenamt, or ‘Reich Kinship Office’, the administration charged with ‘hereditary and racial investigations’,23 at the end of which the ethnic status of each grandparent would be determined. This was obviously a perilous undertaking for Emmy; after all, Der Stürmer had aired its suspicions about her brother, and her maternal grandmother’s membership in the Jewish community of Braunschweig was easy to discover. In addition, it would have been necessary to verify the ethnic credentials of the alleged father.

  At first the idea was for Katta’s mother, an imperious woman with excellent connections and no Jewish heritage, to pull the necessary strings; but she was compromised by being the sister of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose work had been banned from German museums. An alternative route had to be found. And the ideal one, they realized, was through a fellow actor who had once starred in silent films: the talented and beautiful Jola Duisberg. She was an Austrian whom Ursel had known since her student days and who had married Carl-Ludwig Duisberg, son of Carl Duisberg, one of the founders of IG Farben, among Germany’s most powerful industrial conglomerates.