by Simon May
But I already had that – in duplicate.
‘Why can’t you give me one of the certificates in the name of VEWAG?’ I asked yet again. ‘It would mean a lot to me – and you said that you had several of them.’
I was about to point out that a share certificate in an abolished company, denominated in an abolished currency, and issued by an abolished state was surely of no practical use to either of us, when she said:
‘You never know, one day my son or his descendants might need it.’
59.
Restitution? No, thanks
Only one member of our family wanted to hear nothing from me about the Eichenberg saga: my aunt, Ursel. Every time I tried to speak to her about it, she cut me off.
Ursel was so appalled at being confronted by this spectre of the Nazi past and of those fatal Jewish origins that she repeatedly told me she intended to repudiate her share of Eichenberg, insisting that it should go directly to her children. To be required, half a century after securing her non-Jewish status, to furnish German officials with proof of her parentage or of legal succession, was adding insult to injury, even if this time the motive was justice and the aim restitution. Whenever I raised the subject, her face froze in fury at history’s impertinence in thrusting on her, yet again, the status of a victim and a Jew. The rest of the Eichenberg lot could take the bait mockingly proffered by the wheel of fortune, but not her.
Something about the immensity of her repudiation awed as well as dismayed me. It wasn’t that a handsome payout couldn’t tempt her to suspend the rule that her Jewish origins must never be recognized. Rather I couldn’t help respecting her capacity to feel the pain of having once been marked out for social death – pain surprisingly easy to repress. Since her youth, she had, as I saw it, been oppressed by the emotional isolation of even the most assimilated German Jews from their host society; by their Sisyphean striving to be exceptional just in order to be accepted as ordinary; by the family mantra of ‘only the very best’. She despised the cliché that the German and Jewish traditions had been triumphantly symbiotic; for her, they were like two people who, however erotically attracted they might be to one another, are lethally incompatible. She refused the conviction, fervently held by my mother and later by me, that there was an unsurpassable harmony between the heights of German Kultur and of Jewish spirituality. For Ursel, this was nonsense on stilts, which had exacted a terrible psychic cost from Jews and had inevitably ended in catastrophe (a view that placed her, with supreme irony, in the company of some of the most distinguished German-Jewish intellectuals, such as Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Kabbalah). And although I still cling to that conviction, I grudgingly admired her independence of mind.
And, it seemed to me, her distaste for Eichenberg and for the consolations of restitution was motivated by something else too: the reality that there is no recovery from being a victim of the Third Reich. There is no justice or apology that can make good such degradation. Not even truth can. Truth can offer victims dignity of sorts, but the damage is irreparable.
I used to visit Ursel as often as I could in her cozy apartment in Munich, where she ran me baths overflowing with foamy pine essence, treated me to her incomparable comic imitations, and bought me my favourite food, which as a teenager was shrimp with pink cocktail sauce, a luxury that would have been unthinkable in my mother’s austere home, where gastronomic indulgence was that reconstituted crème caramel.
At lunchtime, we might amble into Käfer, an elegant restaurant, and the maître d’ would greet her with a bow and escort us past a phalanx of servers to her table, where she would order a Pfeffersteak, a side salad, and a glass of champagne, eat a couple of pieces of steak and discreetly drop the rest into the waiting mouth of her dachshund, Romeo, who was nestling at her feet. When Romeo sometimes bit a neat incision into the couture of a woman at the next table or left a permanent dental imprint in a husband’s trousers, Ursel apologized with such sovereign charm that recriminations died on our neighbours’ lips. She softened the stiffest countenances with her uncanny portrayals of people’s tics and obsessions. You could see her conjure mind and body, both still remarkably plastic in her eighties, into a role, and how the cabaret performer, the character dancer, and the classical stage actor would all get into their strides.
One day, on a brief visit to Munich, she presented me with a sealed envelope, which was waiting for me on a table by her front door. ‘That’s for you,’ she said curtly, as soon as I arrived. ‘I place all my interests in the Berlin thing in your hands.’
I was amazed. A short note gave me power of attorney over her interests in Eichenberg, ‘though’, it added puzzlingly, ‘not the interests of other investors’, as if these were somehow hers to dispose of.
‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ I asked.
‘Do whatever you like. I don’t want to hear anything more about this business. It disgusts me.’
‘But this is about justice,’ I protested. ‘Your parents invested in this.’ I deliberately said ‘parents’: any mention of her father’s name drew her into a vortex of panic and rejection, as if some black hole imperceptible to the rest of us were sucking her into its annihilating core.
‘And what about your children? They’ll understandably be furious if I have power of attorney over their inheritance. I’m not doing this, Ursel.’
‘You deal with it,’ she snapped, as though exiling the whole matter from Germany to a safe distance in faraway England.
But I was certain that I was going to do nothing with that letter, whatever her motive for writing it. I decided to file it away and speak about this poisoned chalice to nobody.
60.
Romeo in Bayreuth
Romeo was the other reason I relished my trips to Munich. He was a remarkable dog, and not only because of his taste for fillet steak, or the uncanny way in which his moods would mirror Ursel’s. Musically, too, he seemed to have very clear preferences. He loved opera but found piano sonatas and chamber music boring. He listened quietly to Mozart for hours, curled up on his cushion, occasionally half opening his eyes to check in with his boss; but he appeared to find Wagner intolerable. If I persuaded her to play a recording of Parsifal, his luxuriant little body would freeze, he would look uneasily around him, shoot us a disapproving glance, uncurl himself, and lumber sufferingly out of the room.
Here, as in many things, he was perfectly attuned to Ursel, who also loathed Wagner. She was repelled, it seemed to me, by what she saw as the solemnity and mystery, the sacred dignity, with which his music invests melancholy, vengefulness, and insatiable eros; and by the bogus, indeed dangerous, way in which, she thought, it fetishizes ancient Teutonic myths.
For many years, my mother, brother, and I were the beneficiaries of her Wagner aversion, for she gratefully offloaded onto us the tickets she received for the festival at Bayreuth from two kind-hearted doctors, Jochen and Eva Kabelitz, who invited us to stay with them for the week-long pilgrimages we ended up making each summer.
The tickets, rare as gold dust in those days – the waiting list was said to be eight years from the time you first applied – cascaded down to us along a line of Wagner refuseniks, who seemed to treat them as temptations to histrionic degradation, to be handled with gloves and pinched noses. The Kabelitzs, who were offered the tickets by neighbours, passed them on to Ursel, and from her they found their way to us, but not before being rejected by her close friend, a doctor called Charlotte Pommer.
Charlotte had first met Ursel through Lexi Alvensleben – and was the original source of her connection to the Kabelitzs. Enormously courageous, ethical, and sensitive, she had been one of the few doctors in Nazi Germany to refuse to work on the bodies of executed victims of the regime. As a young graduate in Berlin in 1941, assigned to the laboratory of Hermann Stieve, a distinguished anatomist who regularly received the corpses of freshly hanged prisoners from the nearby Plötzensee Prison, she one day saw the bodies of three dissidents whom she personally kn
ew lying on the dissection table. She resigned at once, only to be moved to the surgical department at the state hospital of the police in Berlin, where she did all she could to support and protect those in the resistance movement who crossed her path. In March 1945, she was arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to prison, which she escaped a few weeks later amid the chaos of the collapsing Nazi state.38
It was thanks to Charlotte Pommer’s rejected tickets for Bayreuth that I fell in love with Wagner’s music. Not that my devotion to the cult was immediate. When my mother first took me and my brother to worship at the temple, I was seventeen, and found the Ring, with its four operas over sixteen hours, unbearable not only in length but also in what I then took to be their baroque, self-indulgent kitsch, the tedious grandiloquence of their motifs and heroes, and the way the music could endow the pettiest emotion with heaven-smashing grandeur. After the first act of Siegfried, my brother and I went on strike. We told our mother that we wouldn’t be going back after the interval, and instead curled up in front of our hosts’ television and watched thrillers and action movies. Until, returning in raptures to the Kabelitzs’ house in the second interval of the final opera, Götterdämmerung, and finding us playing with Romeo in the garden, our mother demanded that we attend the last, climactic act. ‘Children,’ she announced, ‘you cannot miss this. You will not know why until you hear it!’
Her summons had a quality I knew well: it opened my eyes and ears to a liberating realm of sensibility – a realm ignored, so she seemed to say, at the risk of becoming a stunted person. I was smitten from the first moment of that act, unable to understand why I had been so bored. Despite the troubling appeal of Wagner’s music to the baser instincts as well as to the noblest, its conjuring of purity out of corruption or decay, and its capacity to disorient, even degrade, ethical sense, since that evening I have never ceased to feel emancipated by its bewitching evocation of intimacy – lost, craved, attained, unattainable.
Ursel usually drove over from Munich to join us on those magical days, and would sit on the terrace of the Kabelitzs’ house smoking cigarettes and picking the meat and smoked salmon out of the sandwiches that Eva had prepared for the hour-long intervals. Romeo was at her feet, warming himself in the sun that seemed to shine with particular gentleness over Bayreuth and the hills around it, snapping into alertness only to receive morsels of unwanted food that his mistress dropped onto the flagstones.
Not that Romeo always waited for delicacies to be tossed into his mouth. Though he preferred being fed to feeding himself, and was a deft catch even from the far side of a room, he sometimes found the temptation to grab irresistible. One of those moments was at a birthday party I had in the countryside near Munich, where a magnificent Black Forest cake awaited me.
We were chatting under the afternoon sun on that summer’s day, and I was about to be marched into the house to inspect the multi-layered construction that had taken many hours to prepare, when Romeo slunk out of the kitchen pointedly averting his head. Something was clearly amiss. We called and whistled to attract his attention, but he continued tracing a wide arc around us, ignoring even Ursel’s summons of last resort: a stern tone of voice which he generally knew to obey. Only when she surprised him from behind did he spin anxiously towards us, his eyes sunken and guilty – and his snout snow white.
He was still trying to lick the incriminating evidence from his whiskers as we rushed into the kitchen to find the cake’s three layers meticulously separated from one another and the cream cleaned off both sides of each layer, leaving only the liqueur-infused chocolate sponge. Stray cherries soaked in kirsch were lying rejected on the counter, which glistened with Romeo’s saliva.
The entire birthday cake had to be abandoned. But what again impressed me was his discernment. He drew the line at alcohol: like Wagner, it just wasn’t for him.
61.
Mother’s last ‘last visit’ to Berlin
On a Saturday evening in October 2009, I am on a train, returning from Paris to London, when my phone rings. It is my mother.
‘Simy, I have never felt so bad in my life,’ she says, sounding frightened and vulnerable. ‘I don’t know what’s happening, but I have never felt like this.’
She has a tight chest and feels like she is dying. I know it must be serious because she is always ‘unbelievably well’ and ‘as strong as a horse’. And it is true: in her then ninety-five years, she has never had any illness except for colds, and even those fizzled out in her eighties, since when I haven’t known her unwell at all, aside from one nasty attack of shingles. Until eighty-five, she was still hiking every summer in the Swiss Alps and was able to play the violin without the slightest shaking of her bow arm or impairment of her hearing. And she has never worn glasses, whether to see near or far.
Three tense hours later – I call her every few minutes because I want to comfort her and know that she is still alive – I arrive at her house. She looks fine, and she is in great spirits. ‘It was nothing,’ she says, ‘I feel completely normal.’ But I am worried. ‘Mother, let’s go to a hospital for a quick check,’ I urge her. ‘You did say you’d never felt so bad in your life.’
She refuses. I sit with her for an hour or two, and become convinced that she is indeed fine. Perhaps it was one of her occasional panic attacks, for which she has beta blockers at the ready.
The following evening, she calls me again, at about the same time. ‘Simy, this is terrible. Please come over now. Please.’
I rush over and tell her we are going to A & E, whether she agrees or not. ‘All right,’ she says, ‘but no ambulance. If you call an ambulance, I will certainly die.’
We get into my car and drive to the nearest hospital. On the way, she abruptly complains of chest pain. It is Sunday evening, at about 8 p.m. By midnight, the results are in: she’s had a major heart attack, maybe two. They are going to keep her in for one night.
At 4 a.m. I’m awoken by the telephone. ‘This is reception at Cardiology,’ the voice announces. ‘Your mother is standing here in her coat, demanding to leave. She says you promised to collect her an hour ago, but we aren’t allowed to release her after the diagnosis she’s had.’
I jump into my car and arrive at the hospital to find her surrounded by a senior cardiologist, a junior doctor, and a nurse. She is accusing them of being as bad as Nazis, incarcerating her against her will, and interfering in private questions of health, which are none of their business.
‘I’m sure you’ve experienced this before,’ I apologize. ‘This is the first time she’s been in a hospital bed since my brother was born.’
‘Actually, no, we haven’t experienced this before,’ the junior doctor puts in. ‘We cannot let your mother go until she is out of immediate danger.’
They are in collective professional lockdown.
I try to persuade her to stay, at least until that afternoon, but she refuses. If I don’t drive her home, she will walk out, this minute, and find a taxi in the street. If that isn’t possible, she’d prefer to die.
A few minutes later they surrender.
Over the following days, my mother declines dramatically. She is soon bedridden and hardly able to take even fluids. Sometimes she can’t recognize me, or else thinks I am her father, then her brother, then another relative she hasn’t seen for years.
A week after the heart attack, the doctor takes me aside while visiting her house and warns me, in that pitilessly matter-of-fact voice sometimes assumed by medics when delivering terrible news, that my mother has seventy-two hours to live. Everything is going wrong, he says. Her blood chemistry is all over the place; the ECG is a jagged disaster; blood pressure is yo-yoing; and her body is ‘shutting down’ – a euphemism for dying. There is nothing to be done: she is far too old for surgery and medication would be useless.
Now it is only a matter of planning the funeral.
Six weeks later, my mother and I are on a flight to Berlin. After recovering enough to get out of bed, to start reading a
nd going out again, and to maintain her house in the immaculate way that she likes it, she wants a break and asks me if I’d accompany her on yet another last visit to her native city. She is determined to go to a concert every day for the week that we’re going to be there. She loves Berlin; it’s never stopped being her Heimat, she says. And she’s never, for a moment, felt happy in exile. ‘Never, for a moment,’ she repeats over and over. In fact, she announces a few days before we leave, she wants to move back, three-quarters of a century after emigrating.
I duly agree to arrange the visit, though I’m doubtful that she will relocate to a Germany that has changed out of all recognition since the 1930s. Nonetheless, I engage someone in Berlin to look for suitable care homes and draw up a shortlist for me to visit on another trip to the city. The plan to move back, impractical though it is, thrills me: the idea that there will, after all, be a return; that Hitler’s expulsion will finally be defied. I glimpse the promise that life can be lived for real, rather than in an ‘as if’ or provisional way.
In my euphoria, one obvious point doesn’t occur to me: that she might end up living under one roof with an ex-Nazi or two, or find herself at breakfast next to someone with just the sort of body language that would make her want to flee Germany faster than she escaped that hospital in the middle of the night.
We land in Berlin at around 9.30 one evening. A friend has generously lent us his apartment on Walter-Benjamin-Platz, and after depositing our cases there, we rush to an Italian restaurant as it is about to shut, persuading the maître d’ to provide us with pasta, salad, and a bottle of red wine. At 1 a.m. Mother is tucked up in bed, exhilarated as she always is – at first – to be back on her home turf: the one place in Germany, she insists, that never had broad Nazi sympathies, indeed whose natives mocked Hitler and his absurd speeches and marches. The Führer, according to her, was a political squatter who had set up his headquarters in hostile territory. He knew that he would never win over Berliners, with their abrasive independent-mindedness.
