by Simon May
Luckily, we had a short time before we sat down for dinner when we could talk about, to us, normal subjects like music. My friend’s father was an avid amateur pianist and seemed thrilled to have discovered musicians with whom, he immediately announced, he was expecting to play. I fervently hoped that this bond might take the edge off the appalling embarrassment that was imminent. Surely, I told myself, music would decisively trump any religious or tribal heritage for our host; and so our fidelity to Beethoven would stand an excellent chance of redeeming, or at least masking or otherwise distracting from, our betrayal of Judaism. A betrayal that he and his family had not yet uncovered but inevitably would.
I sensed, though, that my hope was futile. Our pre-dinner discovery of common delight in music felt like a moment of reprieve when we could still keep secret our insolubly conflicted identity; and they could continue to assume, as I was certain they did, that a family of refugees from Hitler would be, at the least, secular Jews.
Then something terrible happened, about which I still cringe. As we sat down and the father began reading in Hebrew and his sons joined in and then they all modulated into song, out of synch with each other and grunting more than singing, I began to laugh. Uncontrollably. Loudly. I was shaking and getting redder and redder.
At first they ignored me. Perhaps because my reaction was incomprehensible; perhaps because they were absorbed in the liturgy. Presently I was thrown some perplexed glances, which became worried, then irritated.
I fought against my hilarity by imagining my father’s grave and the funeral I hadn’t been allowed to attend, but to no effect. I was able to stop only when the prayers were finally over and the kiddush wine was passed round – which gave me the opportunity to take a sip that I hoped would convey a sense of togetherness, and of knowing after all what I was supposed to do, and also of apology. For what pained me then, as now, is that they might have seen my laughter as mockery, though it was anything but. So I felt the greatest relief when their housekeeper, a Spanish woman, wheeled in the food, and I was able to be comforted by the familiarity of a meal. And the insoluble embarrassment of not knowing the prayers, or of how to present whoever I was, which had stoked my nervous laughter, did eventually trickle away.
Each time we visited this family, the Spanish housekeeper was so pleased to see us, not only because we loved and praised her food but also because after that first dinner I had confessed to her, in the privacy of her kitchen, that we were Catholic. It was a joy, she said, to have fellow Catholics in her home for once, especially on an intimate family occasion like a Friday evening.
37.
Banished to the car
My mother always used to say that families where a German Jew had married a British or North American Jew were very different in atmosphere to those where both spouses were German Jews. In the first case, the two cultures could meet, even if they might struggle to converse, and the children could learn to move more easily and naturally between these vastly different worlds. She maintained, for example, that it made all the difference that Samuel’s mother was English-born. He seemed to have an easier time of being a Brit.
Not that an entirely German, or Austrian, Jewish home would necessarily be any more relaxed. Dinners with Ernst and Ilse Gombrich, for example, he an art historian, she a pianist with whom my mother had played in their refugee days, were riven with tension, but for entirely different reasons. It was the need to maintain a regimen at all costs. After arriving and a few minutes of acclimatizing chat, we would sit down to listen to recordings – usually of string quartets, trios, and other chamber music. A favourite was the Hungarian Quartet, which was, by their common consent, the supreme master of the genre.
On one of those occasions, I was in the middle of revising for my high school exams and wanted to begin writing a practice essay. Soon after the first movement of Beethoven’s opus 130 quartet opened, I reached for my satchel, fished out some paper with such care that not a crackle could be heard, and started making notes.
Unceremoniously, Gombrich arose from his chair, went over to the player, and stopped the music mid-phrase. He then swivelled to face me. ‘One cannot both listen properly and work properly,’ he announced. ‘Which do you intend to do?’
I muttered something about having to revise, and promised that I would work quietly.
‘It isn’t a matter of noise,’ he riposted impatiently. ‘It is a matter of distracting those who wish to listen. And, as I said, of not being able to do both things properly. Which do you want to do?’
‘I had better work,’ I said. ‘Shall I go to the kitchen?’
‘We have dinner prepared in the kitchen and the table is laid.’
‘Then I will go outside and sit in my mother’s car!’ I said.
‘Excellent idea,’ he replied. His countenance was unchanged: with his finger poised on the ‘stop’ button, he waited for me to leave the room. He was not going to start again until I had left.
‘Be back in fifty minutes, at seven o’clock, when we are having dinner.’
I returned forty-eight minutes later. The music was over and a warm smile broke over his face as I walked into the living room.
‘Did you make progress?’
‘Yes, I wrote three pages.’
‘Three pages! That is fantastic. I could never write three pages in just forty minutes.’
‘Fifty minutes.’
‘It doesn’t matter!’
‘But they were just revision,’ I protested. ‘Stuff I already knew. It was nothing. The things you write about are much more complicated and also they are original,’ I stammered, embarrassed that my trivial homework, repeated by hundreds of thousands, millions, of schoolchildren all around the land, could be included in the same breath as his path-breaking works.
‘Irrelevant!’ he shot back. ‘To write three pages in that time is admirable.’ And he extended his paw of a hand round my shoulder and led me into the kitchen.
It is hard to convey how happy I was in this world filled with strict but deeply warm-hearted people of astonishing cultivation and modesty. Modest in everything except the standards to which they held themselves – and others.
Gombrich himself had written many successful books; and yet he, like us, lived in the type of small, nondescript, suburban house that my mother affectionately called a ‘Hundehütte’ – a dog kennel.
Others, no less distinguished, were equally unassuming. Visits to the home of Peter Gellhorn, a conductor and pianist from Breslau, whom my mother had known since her student days in London, both romantically and professionally, and who had been chorus master at the Glyndebourne opera house and a conductor at Covent Garden, were no different. There would be a few minutes to catch up on what had happened since we all last met; cursory discussions of politics and literature; and then there was music. But with Peter it took a different form. Each time we visited, he would run through an entire opera at the piano, singing all the major parts himself – and when there were duos, trios, or quartets of singers, highlighting each leading voice sequentially.
This made for very long evenings when the opera in question was by Wagner. As it often was: he must have taken us through all ten main operas of the master, from The Flying Dutchman to Parsifal, at least twice over the years.
Peter’s devotion to music was absolute. Only the best was adequate. Just as among those audiences who came to our own home for my mother’s trio evenings, music was more than ‘the meaning of life’; it was life itself, the voice of being, the Creator’s self-revelation. One didn’t need to be a professional musician; but without deep musicality no other vocation could truly live.
Along with this perfectionism went unpretentiousness and discipline. Dinner after his exposition of an opera was always simple: soup followed by bread, cheese, and cuts of cold meat, possibly with a glass of wine. Again, you just had to fit in with his mania for order, or face the consequences. A guest’s coat could be hung only on a certain hook, and not on another. Larger
coats must be behind smaller ones. Failure to observe the rules would result in Peter rearranging all the misplaced items himself, accompanied by a look of thunder. A spilled salt cellar would evoke an explosion if you tried to clean up the mess yourself, which he insisted you could not do properly. With fierce concentration, he would wipe the grains off the edge of the table into his cupped hand and discard them in the sink, returning to the table to repeat the exercise, though there was no longer a grain to be seen. The job had to be completed meticulously – once, and then again.
38.
The European Union as saviour
By the time Karl Wongtschowski, the orthodontist and amateur violinist who used to turn up to Adela Kotowska’s Sunday teas, celebrated his hundredth birthday, in 1998, he had moved to a care home. It was a small gathering: Adela was there with her two sons; so was Karl’s girlfriend Lotte Herzfelder, my mother, and a few other refugees or their ‘children’, some of them already in their seventies.
Whenever one of us tried to make a speech, Karl waved us down, indicating his aversion to eulogies, which he found pointless. He had reached this birthday and that was that. A message from the Queen lay on a table next to a large cake and a disorderly pile of congratulatory cards.
Though he had bought the cake, everything else was prepared with his own hands. The one thing he could no longer make himself was what he most wanted: music. And the care home boasted an out-of-tune upright piano in its communal room. Joy finally flushed Karl’s face when my mother announced that we were going to play Beethoven’s Spring sonata for him, her on the violin and me on the piano. After that Adela would chip in with her incomparable Chopin, though as usual she wouldn’t decide what to play until she sat down.
It had happened since I was ten or eleven: being called on to perform duos with my mother – or trios with her, and my brother on the cello. We often did it at home, when a group of her friends came over for a musical evening and a thoroughly rehearsed programme of chamber music unfolded in a ritualized way; a buffet supper was served afterwards, cobbled together by the three of us; and there would be earnest discussion on the merits of our performance until, much to my mother’s relief, the front door would be shut behind the last guest. And on Sundays we’d sometimes play at the two care homes in London dedicated to German-speaking Jewish refugees, their large halls filled with dozens of old people listening reverently – an audience for whom music was the most perfect way of experiencing, articulating, and celebrating the world.
Yet on many of these occasions, as at Karl’s birthday, I would feel something very different to the delicious joy of belonging, which émigré circles normally evoked in me. Instead, I could be overwhelmed by claustrophobia and melancholy. A world that had been destroyed, however magnificent and true it had been, couldn’t be a home for a person born into a different epoch. In the face of cultural devastation, there is no return. I became convinced that any meaningful future in exile had to somehow – but how? – bring the great values and sensibilities of that lost world into real relationship with the present one. Otherwise the result would be inner chaos: talents floundering in a void and incapable of being enjoyed.
From my teenage years onwards, my own refuge was immersion in science, and later in philosophy. The more contemporary, the better. At first, and to my cost, I refused history. Naively, I didn’t want to hear about what thinkers had thought in the past, in case they dragged me back into dead or dying worlds; I was interested only in what they had to say today.
And in part because surrender to England was so unthinkable – another recipe for floundering because we could never belong there – I developed lifelong passions for German philosophy and for European unification; for the creation of a great, integrated family of nations under the rule of supranational law, a family that together would overcome the destructive evils of self-exaltation and self-loathing. Here, I wouldn’t be faced with confinement to a nation state – or else with rejection of any loyalty to a polity, which would also throw me back into the void. ‘Europe’, with its immense cultural variety, was the perfect anchor for a life with problematical local roots.
Ironically, this self-Europeanization was exactly what Germany craved. It, too, was set on discovering a contemporary identity through a home that was supranational. I devoured the memoirs of Jean Monnet and the other founding fathers of what became the European Union, and saw this ideal as the nucleus of a new order that would not only hinder any repetition of the nationalist crimes of the past but, far beyond that, create a new kind of national identity grounded in a deepening intimacy with the otherness of neighbouring peoples and countries, rather than in insular defensiveness against them. European unity, I was and remain convinced, is among the West’s greatest post-war ideals.
PART IV
The Past Cannot be Restituted
1990–
39.
Love declaration to Germany
Since my childhood, every visit to Germany has been a homecoming to a world of uncanny familiarity. Germany is Heimat: the spiritual and cultural world to which I am most naturally attuned. A place where almost everything feels recognizable, even if I have never encountered it before: the depth in people’s faces – and their complexity, which seems more insoluble than other nations’; the abrupt mood swings, especially in Berlin; the pleasure in a voluptuous hopelessness that is ultimately a source of hope; the extremes of humanity and detachment, and of sensitivity and hardness; the intense confidence abutting awkward insecurity. No nation sees deeper and no nation is more naive.
Germany, including no doubt its vices, is in my genes; in my mother’s deep musicianship; in my father’s fury at seeing two unmatched socks; in my own love of German philosophy; in the joys of spraying whipped cream onto my aunt Ilse’s Zwetschgentorte in her Berlin kitchen. No Nazi history could quell my love for this people, perhaps because none of us can help loving what we take to be the source of our being. Is it really so difficult to love those who have hated you if they define your existence?
So I can imagine why my great-uncle Theodor, Ernst’s brother, insists on staying in Berlin until the Gestapo come for him in 1942, though he is considered racial refuse by the nation that he holds dear and though he has to avoid seeing Emmy and Ilse or any other family member, for their own safety. Even after he is no longer allowed to work, he continues to live in the Bavarian Quarter of Berlin with his mother and their devoted housekeeper, Hedwig Kuss, who now finances their needs with the money she has saved over many years in their employment. A lifelong bachelor, Theo has lived there since they arrived in Berlin from their home town of Christburg in West Prussia, early in the twentieth century.
It is a happy household. Until Ernst’s death in 1933, he and Emmy visit on Friday evenings, when the Shabbat candles are lit; and on Saturday afternoons my mother and Ursel, and less regularly Ilse, drop in.
My mother will remember those visits all her life. While she fools around with Hedwig, Theo sits there and chuckles, gentle to the point of defencelessness.
From the mid-1930s, Hedwig has implored him to emigrate. Perhaps he would have left if Ernst had lived; Theo was always the less decisive of the two and, since childhood, had been taken under his elder brother’s wing. He knows that Ernst once had a property in Croatia, which he bought with a second cousin called Heinz, and that he had toyed with the idea of emigrating there. But that refuge, my mother said, vanished when Heinz secretly sold it and made off with the proceeds to Shanghai, a city to which many German Jews fled in the late 1930s as doors began to shut in the West.
Theo takes this betrayal of trust badly, which might be one more reason why he feels he has nowhere to go. Fundamentally, however, he finds a non-German existence inconceivable, even after the horrors of Kristallnacht. As the orgy of Nazi destruction intensifies, so does his passivity. He isn’t just depressed; he is sinking into the sort of inertia that seizes people when they cannot imagine any alternative to a dead end. When he does finally leave Berlin, in
1940 or 1941, it isn’t because the Nazis have tipped the scales for him; it is because Hedwig forces him to go.
She presents him, she tells Ilse after the war, with a small suitcase and directions to an address in Hungary.
‘Why there?’
‘Friends of mine,’ she says, pointing to a ticket, a map, and the coordinates of his hosts.
I see him standing silently in the apartment’s windowless corridor, his profile obscured by its shadows. To summon the energy to emigrate and make his way to a minor town in Hungary seems beyond his powers. That night, I imagine, he doesn’t go to bed, but sits in the old armchair in their living room, not exactly brooding, not exactly sad, but numb as thoughts meander through his mind, then fizzle out before they can offer him their conclusions. The next morning, he leaves – less frightened than dazed.
Somehow, he reaches the Hungarian border but never crosses it. Overcome by homesickness and the menace of Magyar hieroglyphics, he halts before an alien land and language.
A fortnight after his departure, as Hedwig is going about her chores, she hears a shy knock at the door. There he stands. She is appalled and frustrated. He enters silently, avoiding her questions. He sleeps on and off for days. Hedwig continues to cook for him, do his laundry, and address him respectfully as ‘der Herr’, as she has always done. Above all, she makes sure that nobody knows of his existence. On one of the few occasions he dares to venture out for fresh air, he has that chance encounter with Ilse in the street.
A few months later, Hedwig has another go at making Theo vanish. She gives notice to the landlord of their apartment and moves into a one-bedroom place, rented in her name. There, she hides him for almost a year, though she has heard that giving refuge to Jews is now punishable by deportation to a concentration camp – as, my mother said, happened to my father’s friend Gertrud Luckner – and she earns money for them by cleaning other people’s homes. He is still the boss, but now she is paying herself to work for him. Theo, she hopes, will officially disappear.
