How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  Part of me sympathized with Hans-Joachim. Wasn’t there a case for him to get some money back? The Aryanizers hadn’t been responsible for Hitler’s anti-Semitic obsession, even if they had profited from it. They had invested in a business that would have gone bankrupt if its Jewish owners and managers had been expelled without being replaced. And then in 1949 they, too, had seen the assets of the business confiscated – this time by the communists in East Berlin.

  In any event, as the twenty-first century got into its stride, I realized that I wasn’t done with Eichenberg either. A passionate desire to meet these Germans who had picked its shares from my grandmother and her co-investors crept up on me, partly because there is something delicious about feeling safe in the presence of a former enemy, especially when they happen to belong to a nation that you still love; and partly because I wanted to discover why this long-defunct business meant so much to them.

  August Plöger had died back in 1978 and was unmarried. Albert and Heinrich Fischer had also both died. And sadly, just a year before I cold-called their family home in 2006, so too had Albert’s son Hans-Joachim, who had fought so hard to prove that he was the true heir to Eichenberg. But when we spoke on the telephone, which we did twice, for what must have been a total of two or three hours, Hans-Joachim’s widow, Annette, seemed neither suspicious – ‘why are you calling us after all these years?’; nor condescending – ‘of course we personally had nothing against Jews’; nor strenuously apologetic – ‘we shouldn’t have profited from the Nazi racket’; nor artificially philo-Semitic. I liked the fact that she was none of these things.

  Her immediate candour and matter-of-fact tone astonished me. As did the freshness of her memory: there was no pause to recollect long-distant events. She said I was welcome to come and see her family’s papers on Eichenberg, which were stored in a trunk in her cellar, and to take copies of any that I wished to have. As a memento, she would give me an original share certificate in VEWAG – the new name that the Aryanizers reluctantly gave the company after the Police President’s office won its two-year battle to dispense with the supposedly Jewish-sounding ‘Eichenberg’.

  Within minutes of making contact, we were deep into history.

  At first, she told me that her father-in-law hadn’t been a Nazi; he had merely belonged to the National Socialist Motorists Corps. Later in our call, she said that he had, after all, succumbed to full Party membership soon after taking over Eichenberg. Nor had he made a point of seeking out confiscated Jewish firms – he was just looking for good investment opportunities, and there were lots of firms available to be taken over in the late 1930s, not only Jewish ones but thousands that had been brought down by Germany’s terrible economic situation that Hitler was trying to sort out. It was, in many ways, an exciting time: ‘Nineteen thirty-six to nineteen thirty-nine were lovely years for German people – not for Jewish people, of course, but for Germans, yes.’

  Her father-in-law, she said, had really wanted to invest in a hotel in Hamburg. He didn’t particularly like Berlin; and he felt more comfortable with the hospitality sector than with textiles. But August Plöger had heard through the Nazi Party grapevine about Eichenberg being for sale and had persuaded him that it could be a money-spinner. Plöger’s problem was that he didn’t have enough cash to invest in Eichenberg; nor did he have the necessary management expertise. One or two others had turned down the opportunity to co-invest with him before he approached Albert Fischer.

  Initially, Albert was worried that he had no experience at all of textiles, or of running a firm of Eichenberg’s size, with nearly 300 staff. This would be a huge step up from the car dealership that he and his brother Heinrich owned, which employed about 60 people, and which anyway was doing wonderfully selling the new VW beetle, the pride of Hitler’s Germany.

  What convinced him, according to Annette, were Plöger’s Nazi Party credentials. If Plöger could use his connections to get ministries to place contracts with Eichenberg for soldiers’ clothing, then the firm might be a treasure trove. Unfortunately, she said, Plöger was also something of an anti-Semite – unlike her father-in-law, who had taken pity on the ousted Jewish manager, Herbert Liepmann.

  On Liepmann’s last evening in Germany, after he had sold the business as well as his family’s apartment in Berlin, Albert invited him to dinner. It was a convivial occasion, according to Annette: ‘My father-in-law didn’t give Liepmann money or valuables like jewellery; but he gave him hospitality.’ He got a good dinner, with lots of wine, and then he was put up for the night. Liepmann caught a train to the Belgian coast before dawn the next morning, delighted, she maintained, that his business was to be left in such capable hands.

  56.

  How to have a good war

  After the Aryanization, Annette said, August Plöger contacted the business’s clients at once to tell them that it was no longer Jewish and needn’t be boycotted. More importantly, he worked his magic with the ministries – and trench coats as well as jackets and shirts for the army began rolling off Eichenberg’s production line. Soon the business was going so well that her father-in-law, Albert Fischer, was able to take 30,000 Reichsmarks out of it and give 10,000 to his son, Hans-Joachim.

  But this switch in Eichenberg’s production wasn’t only good for business, she added. It also got Plöger something else that he wanted from his ministry contacts: exemption from military service. His work at Eichenberg was deemed important to the war effort, which was what you needed to avoid being called up. Meanwhile, Albert switched his car dealership and repair business to servicing vehicles for the Wehrmacht, and this too was regarded as important to the war effort.

  Albert’s cultured and luxury-loving brother Heinrich was now on Eichenberg’s supervisory board, together with its recently acquired SS and SA members. But supervising a garment business was hardly his idea of fun. He got himself assigned to the German Embassy in Paris – no longer a war zone, since France was now occupied – where he was in his element. Paris offered excellent concerts, fine wines, charming women, and lovely country resorts to which he would repair at weekends.

  The three Aryanizers were certainly having a good war.

  Eichenberg prospered too – until its building in Prenzlauer Berg took a direct hit from a bomb in early 1945 and partly burned down. But by then the owners had already suspended most of its production and hauled its equipment off to a safer part of Germany. Albert Fischer gathered all the money from the business that he could lay his hands on, as well as some of the portable assets, and distributed it among friends and colleagues whom he trusted to hide it for him until the fighting was over. He then fled westwards, to his home town, on one of the last trains out of Berlin, which was by now besieged on all sides by the Red Army.

  Albert Fischer’s trust was misplaced, Annette said: the cash all vanished. But Eichenberg never left his mind. He had invested so much in it, after all. Not just to buy it; more costly were upgrades to the machinery, new staff to replace the Jews, a ‘social fund’ that the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the Nazi-controlled union, had demanded, improvements to the work and leisure areas ordered by the Amt Schönheit der Arbeit, the Office of the Beauty of Labour, and, immediately after the war, extensive repairs to the bomb-damaged building.

  On top of investing all this in the business only to see it confiscated in 1949, along came Herbert Liepmann a couple of years later demanding compensation for the Aryanization. As far as Albert Fischer was concerned, she continued, the 40,000 Deutsche marks that the compliant court ordered be paid to Liepmann and his relatives in 1954 confirmed his own moral right to Eichenberg. It also redoubled his determination to get it back.

  So, in the mid-1950s, he went to East Berlin, which was still easy to do in those days, before the Wall had been built, to see what had happened to Eichenberg’s building since the communists turned it into a ‘Property of the People’. When he saw it, he was overcome by emotion and yearned to have it restituted to him. He saw himself in that edifice: his work,
his history – and his future. He immediately engaged a lawyer to lobby the East German authorities.

  But the lawyer’s letters went unanswered. Albert then had a fresh idea: he and Herbert Liepmann should mount a joint approach to get the building back! The support of a victim of Nazism might induce the communists to be more sympathetic. The Jew and the Aryanizer could be a winning team.

  But Liepmann had no trouble resisting the temptation to get into bed with a man who, as he saw it, had connived in stealing his family’s business. Not that the East German government would have accepted the idea anyway. Far from welcoming Westerners to run privatized enterprises, it was nationalizing everything in sight. Albert Fischer’s proposal was out of the question. He left East Berlin, never to return.

  57.

  ‘Progress!’

  Before he died, Albert told his son Hans-Joachim to continue battling to get Eichenberg returned to their family.

  Taking his father’s wishes to heart, Hans-Joachim travelled to East Berlin with Annette not long after Albert’s death. They walked for an hour or two around the dilapidated building. The parts that Albert had paid to have repaired in the 1940s were still pristine, but otherwise it looked weary with neglect. Yet the visit only stiffened Hans-Joachim’s resolve to take it over and restore the range of products that it had made before the Aryanization. He began looking for an apartment for his wife and their children, but when Annette saw the tiny communist dwellings with their shabby interiors and run-down yards, not to mention the empty shops, she put her foot down. ‘You can go there, but without us,’ she told him. ‘I am not living in a communist country, for any factory in the world. This whole Eichenberg business destroyed your father’s marriage’ – Albert divorced in the late forties after his years in Berlin had estranged him from his wife of nearly four decades, whom he had left in their home town – ‘and if we go back to it, it will destroy ours.’

  ‘He thought that I’d like the boat on the Wannsee!’ she added.

  ‘The boat?’

  Eichenberg, according to her, owned a boat on the Wannsee for entertaining its clients – along with a boathouse, or a share in one.

  Eichenberg’s corporate boat was news to me. It certainly hadn’t tempted Annette to move to East Berlin. Nor was she prepared to compromise by living in West Berlin while her husband worked from Monday to Friday in the communist part of the city. That would have required him to cross the Wall twice a week, with all the security and the searches – an insane idea, she said.

  As she spoke, I wondered if my grandfather’s boat on the Wannsee, which he and his family had occasionally sailed on summer weekends, was the same boat. My mother was always greatly amused by Ernst’s pride in it. It was one of her father’s touchingly naive ideas, she would say. Apart from being a financial millstone, Berlin’s long winters under low-hanging grey clouds made it unusable for much of the year; Ilse alone knew how to work it; and they could all think of better things to do with their free time than schlep out to the Wannsee only to expend hours preparing it to sail and then closing it up again at the end of the day.

  Not to be deterred – or believing that his wife would change her mind once the factory was his again and she had laid eyes on the boat nestled in its wooden hut – Hans-Joachim engaged a lawyer to explore how he could get the business back. But he received the same advice as his father had a decade earlier. Even if he and his family became East German citizens, he was told, restitution in any form was unthinkable because the factory had been taken over under Nazi Aryanization laws. It wasn’t that the communist government cared about its expropriation from Jewish ownership, Annette emphasized; rather they weren’t going to help anyone who had benefited from Nazi policy.

  After their meeting with the lawyer, they retraced their steps back to Eichenberg’s building. Hans-Joachim took out his camera and looked about him furtively. A passing pedestrian glanced at this Westerner and said sternly: ‘Over here, you are not allowed to photograph.’ He quickly took a few pictures with his camera concealed under an open coat, noticing the new name of the company: Fortschritt! – Progress!

  Back home, he put the photos in that trunk in his cellar, which Annette had mentioned in our first telephone call. He would regularly go down there to dust them off and to imagine a new life in the communist east, reunited with his rightful inheritance and investing his future in Fortschritt!

  58.

  The elusive share certificate

  In late 1989, Annette said, days after the fall of the Wall, Hans-Joachim was struck by exactly the same idea as Renata and her cousin Inge-Margot would have during their conversation in Florida a year later – except he didn’t need Saddam Hussein to jog his memory. That property in Prenzlauer Berg! Now the moment had really come to get it back! At first, he thought that the best plan would be to do a deal with the heirs of the former Jewish owners, much as his father had tried to do with Herbert Liepmann. They would surely want to talk: after all, it wasn’t easy for people scattered around the world to repossess an old business and get it started again.

  But then he thought better of it. Why go into coalition with the Jewish heirs? His case was surely stronger than theirs. As his father had rightly argued, it wasn’t their family’s fault that the original owners had been thrown out; but once they were, the place would have gone bankrupt if someone hadn’t come along and rescued it. And if they had stayed, would they have been able to persuade Göring’s Ministry to buy jackets and shirts off them? Could they have afforded repairs to the bomb damage, immediately after the war? Of course not. But beyond all that, his family had suffered a greater injustice than the Jewish heirs had; for at least Herbert Liepmann had received compensation back in 1954, whereas the communists had grabbed Eichenberg without paying his father a penny. Hence he was entitled to its restitution. He engaged a law firm to press this case.

  Though not entirely without logic, Hans-Joachim’s arguments were hardly going to cut ice in 1990s Germany, and his claim for restitution was officially rejected in 1992. Like his father before him, he never got over the loss of Eichenberg. He would say: ‘My goodness! How can all this that my family built up, with so much love and effort and money, now be gone?’ And then, Annette added, he would try to console himself: ‘We were like the German aristocrats who lost their ancestral estates behind the Iron Curtain.’ After the communist takeover of East Germany, she said, they also suffered the confiscation of what they loved and was rightfully theirs. He recognized there was nothing he could do, but he couldn’t accept it.

  Again, like his father before him, he told his son always to remember Eichenberg and how much their family had done for the firm. Shortly before he died in 2005, Annette said, he gave his son a share certificate of the company. ‘Keep that in memory of our beloved Eichenberg,’ he had said. ‘Let its memory live. It was ours.’

  Annette had been telling me all this in our phone calls; her openness amazes me now, as it did then. Her story flowed whole and vivid, as if it had occupied her for years. Though I had no further pressing questions to ask, I wanted to see that trunk in her cellar, stuffed with Eichenberg papers. Above all, I coveted the share certificate bearing the firm’s Aryanized name, VEWAG, that she’d offered to give me. Perhaps it was just the thrill of holding a document that non-Aryan hands couldn’t have held in 1942, when the new name was registered; and of touching history in however token a way.

  I decided to visit her on my next trip to Germany, a few weeks later.

  But our evening was uneventful. Annette and I had already exhausted the subject in our calls. And being face to face was oddly inhibiting, as if trying to establish a personal connection made it harder to discuss this intensely personal matter; whereas, talking as strangers down a phone line, we’d been unguarded and relaxed.

  When the time came to leave her house, it felt an abrupt change of gear to remind her of the trunk and the share certificate.

  ‘Of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘Come down to the cellar, but I’
m not sure there is as much there as I had thought.’

  There was nothing – not a single paper about the firm. There was a lot about other family businesses back to the 1930s; and there were documents from the 1940s and ’50s that seemed to concern the car dealership.

  ‘No Eichenberg papers at all?’ I persisted.

  ‘Oh, I did find a photocopy of the 1954 court judgement about the 40,000 Deutsche marks that we paid Herbert Liepmann and the other Jewish people from England,’ she said, as we were leafing through yet another file on the car business. ‘I put it upstairs on the coffee table. You can have that, if you wish.’

  ‘I know that document; it’s in my own Eichenberg file,’ I told her.

  ‘Well, they got the 40,000 and then the building back. I think they should at least have refunded my husband what his father spent repairing the damage inflicted by British and American bombs. We should have got that money back!’

  She spoke in a strident tone that had earlier been completely absent. But now was hardly the time to reopen all that history. Besides, her husband’s lawyer had already demanded, several times, that we refund the 40,000 – though, as far as I knew, he hadn’t also claimed the money that Albert had spent repairing the bombed roof.

  ‘And the share certificate with the Aryanized – the new – name?’ I asked again as we climbed back up from the cellar.

  But she had changed her mind. I wasn’t going to get the trophy I wanted.

  Her voice became colder still, as if the tangibility of the Aryanized share certificate brought home her family’s loss of Eichenberg with a vividness that banished the charm of reconciliation with us, the descendants of the original owners. The only document she was prepared to give me, she repeated, was a photocopy of the 1954 court judgement that had gone against her father-in-law and that, in her mind, justified financial compensation from the Jewish families to hers.