How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  Every day of this homecoming involves a visit to a museum in the afternoon and then a concert in the evening. On one of those days, the concert is a matinée, after which we have an early dinner and then go on to the theatre. The play is Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug, but we have really gone for the actor, Klaus Maria Brandauer. It’s almost sold out, and we get pretty much the last two seats. Up in the gods.

  Things do not go well after dinner. It takes half an hour to walk the hundred yards or so from the restaurant to the theatre, with frequent stops for Mother to catch her breath. Arriving with little time to spare before the performance begins, I discover that Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble has no elevator, which will mean climbing nearly fifty steps. I try to persuade her that this would be absurd. What’s the point? She has just had a heart attack from which she nearly died. Why now risk anything for the sake of a play, which we might hardly be able to see or hear from that height anyway?

  She is, as ever, unpersuadable. The heart attack was nothing serious, she declares. It is nonsense that she nearly died. All nonsense. I shouldn’t be taken in by ‘the hysteria of those doctors, whose professional interest it is to find problems.’

  After about fifteen steps she complains of breathlessness and stops to recover. She seems paralyzed, unable to go either up or down, and is losing her balance. Again, I suggest that we abandon the play. Again, this is just the spur she needs to continue. She resumes her climb. Then she gets chest pain. Now she is accusing me of causing her chest pain by trying to call off the evening. I struggle to remain calm by telling myself that, if she passes away now, it would be while doing what she wants to do, in the city where she wants to be. She would die almost exactly where she was born, in the one place that she says she has never stopped loving.

  Some minutes later, with the performance bell ringing relentlessly, we find ourselves in the highest part of the theatre, with all the students, only to realize that we have to climb several more steps in order to reach our row, and then to shuffle past a dozen people to our seats near the middle.

  There we sit for two and a half hours, with no air conditioning, in sweltering, oxygen-deprived conditions, too far from the stage to see the tiny actors or make out much of what they are saying.

  It is only as we are leaving that crisis hits. My mother sees a man in the foyer and freezes.

  ‘I feel so terrible,’ she says. ‘I need to get out of here immediately.’

  ‘But we are going, Mother. What’s the matter? I told you it was all too much, the heat, the Kleist, the climb . . .’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with any of that,’ she snaps, a look of panic on her face. ‘It’s him,’ she says, pointing weakly at the man. ‘He’s so tall.’

  ‘Tall? So what? You’re crazy, Mother!’ I try to lighten things by poking fun at the absurdity of her concern.

  ‘Oh God, I have to leave Berlin at once. I have to leave Germany. I never want to come back. He’s so tall,’ she repeats in the same horrified voice, which is now alarmingly breathless. ‘Those ghastly lanky limbs. And that disgusting confidence. I know those types. They were the Nazis. Oh, I wish we’d never come here.’

  ‘But lots of people are tall,’ I remonstrate. ‘Come on, let’s go. This is stupid.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she ripostes angrily. ‘You know nothing of those people. If you think I’m moving back here, you’re sorely mistaken. I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  There is no arguing with her. She looks frail and pale, and I fear the worst. Perhaps her recovery hasn’t been so robust. For sure, the whole trip is a folly. I reprimand myself for packing a concert and the theatre and dinner in a noisy restaurant into a few hours.

  As she begins to recover her composure, I walk her slowly through the foyer to the exit. Negotiating the steps down to the street, we run straight into the tall man chatting to his companions.

  ‘That sure felt a long play,’ he drawls in an American accent, ‘especially with no intermission. I doubt they’d ever put on something as impenetrable as Kleist on Broadway and fill the house. And with so many young people in the audience. Brandauer was worth coming to see, but I don’t think I understood more than a smattering – that kind of German is way too hard for me.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he adds as he and his friends walk off, ‘Brandauer’s a lot more entertaining as the baddie in that James Bond movie.’

  62.

  Mother’s death – My ‘return’ to Germany begins

  My mother’s near-death experience prompted me to ask her a question that had been an unspoken taboo for decades. What were her funeral instructions when the time came?

  I thought I’d start from an incontestable premise. ‘Mother, we are all going to die someday. It might not be soon, but it will happen. When it does happen, do you want to be buried as a Catholic, in a Jewish cemetery, or in a secular graveyard?’

  This brought everything back to what I thought was the insoluble problem of identity.

  ‘Throw my body into the nearest ditch!’ she commanded. ‘It’s over anyway, then. The person no longer exists, so what does it matter?’

  I told her that I would need more precise instructions than that.

  ‘In the Jewish cemetery where your father is, where they all are,’ she said, as if nothing could be more self-evident.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, astonished. ‘But you’ve been a Catholic all your adult life. Are you sure you don’t want a Catholic burial? And what about last rites?’

  ‘I want to be in that Jewish cemetery,’ she said.

  I asked her the same question many times over the following years and always got the same answer. Her reply never had a redemptive quality: it never conveyed the sense that a repudiated heritage had finally been embraced; or that a source of banishment from the world was now a harbinger of solace. Just as with her sisters at the end of their own lives, there was no ‘closure’, such as that attributed to Rahel Varnhagen, the writer and Berlin salon host, who, according to her husband, proclaimed on her deathbed in 1833: ‘The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life – having been born a Jewess – this I should on no account now wish to have missed.’39 My mother never uttered such explicit words of reconciliation. She just changed her mind – and announced her decision as if the previous decades of tortured denial hadn’t happened.

  But I did feel a profound sense of redemptive closure when, after her death, five months short of her hundredth birthday, we buried her where she had wanted to be: in that Jewish cemetery, ‘where they all are.’

  Walking down the gravel paths between the graves, I could see why this was where she had chosen. I recognized names I hadn’t seen or heard since my youth. Esther Salamon, who had been a devoted friend of Luise Borchardt. The Freyhans, music lovers from Berlin. These were her people. Like her closest childhood friends, Marianne Nussbaum and Marianne Imberg, Mother’s circle, whether intimate or professional, had always been almost exclusively Jewish, not because they were Jewish but because, for all her insistence that she wasn’t of it, that was where she felt most at ease. That was her world.

  She rests in the Liberal Jewish Cemetery in London’s Pound Lane, a stone’s throw from my father, from Eddy, and from so many of the colleagues, friends, enemies, and rivals who filled her life.

  The move back to Berlin was not to be. This was her return.

  And then there is my own uncompleted ‘return’. In January 2017, three years after my mother’s death, I finally begin the process of claiming German citizenship, and at the same time of finding an apartment to buy in Berlin, looking to the future as well as to the past. I decide to go back to Germany, initially for half of each year, in order to try to be there in an everyday way, threaded, I hope, neither with nostalgia nor with an excessive yearning for future safety, but instead with patient, waiting attentiveness, so that my German inheritance might be in calm, realistic relationship to the country as it now is.


  On 2 January 2017, I turn up for my appointment at the German Embassy in London – the place, fuller with significance for me than any other building in London, where my father died over half a century earlier, falling back with that terrible thud; the place where my mother encountered the barking Nazi government official in 1937 and, slapping down her expired German passport, became stateless; the place where she regained her own German citizenship, sixty-one years later, in 1998; and now the place from where my journey back to Germany will begin.

  It feels like a no man’s land as I pace the anonymous waiting area, penned off from the embassy proper by a separate entrance and a security barrier. I’m glad I have to await my turn for an hour or more. The slow grind of officialdom intensifies the giddy feeling that I am about to find a way back into hundreds of years of belonging. Somehow the banality of the everyday makes the journey of homecoming more vivid, not less. I have a sense of the density of reality similar to what I felt in the park when Sally told me and my brother about our father’s death. Loss of father. Gain of father’s homeland. The two have been locked in dialogue all my life.

  This incredible sense of an end to a life suspended in exile isn’t dented by the anticlimax to my wait. When I get called, an official behind a glass pane that looks as if it could be bulletproof tells me that I’ve used the wrong application form. Descendants of refugees from Nazism, unlike other applicants for German nationality, must apply for naturalization under article 116, paragraph 2 of the German Constitution, which states that:

  Former German citizens who between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945 were deprived of their citizenship on political, racial, or religious grounds, and their descendants, shall on application have their citizenship restored. They shall be deemed never to have been deprived of their citizenship if they have established their domicile in Germany after May 8, 1945 and have not expressed a contrary intention.

  And then, four months later, after spending a few days in Auschwitz-Birkenau with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch – a survivor and old friend of my family, who had invited me to join her for this life-changing visit – I fly to Berlin to look for an apartment.

  By chance, the marketing suite for the new development that I visit at the insistence of the real-estate agent who’s helping me find a home, is on almost exactly the opposite side of the Tiergarten to where my mother and Ursel and Ilse and Ernst and Emmy lived.

  But it isn’t just Blumeshof that’s not on today’s map of Berlin – the address I’m trying to get to isn’t either. My grandparents’ home has been wiped off it; my potential new home isn’t yet on it. I get lost wandering down brand-new streets so bereft of place and patina that they seem like a practical joke played on this city of unrelenting history. One of them, which matches the name given to me by the agent, snakes around a vast crater presided over by a skyscraper crane, at the foot of which diggers and bulldozers zigzag like crazed aliens. Eventually I spot the building number I’m looking for, but the doorman at the deserted glass tower says this isn’t it.

  I return to the S-Bahn train station where I’d arrived a few minutes ago and see a stall selling currywurst, Berlin’s contribution to fast food, and behind it glimpse a woman with flaming orange hair, who might know the whereabouts of an address that must be one of the few places on the planet out of Google’s sights.

  Seeing me approach her stall, her eyes fix me with that defensively aggressive, sardonically humorous look which is a trademark of Berlin. While I’m still a couple of yards away and haven’t yet said a word, she blurts, in local dialect: ‘Junger Mann, hier wird jejessen und nicht jefragt!’– ‘Young man, here one eats and doesn’t ask!’

  She perceives, from my uncertain gait or from the questioning expression already forming on my face, that I’m going to ask her for help of some kind – and that she won’t make a penny out of me.

  There’s everything of this city’s magnificent spirit not only in what she says but in how she says it: biting, ironic, tough, critical, cozy, and mocking. Rude and yet strangely warm. I begin to mutter something about being in a hurry now and coming back another time to buy a sausage, but the withering scepticism in her eyes makes the almost empty promise die on my lips. It’s only after I cease to present myself as a supplicant and concede that she has better things to do than explain the local topography that, interspersed with a rant decrying the developers who are ruining her city, she tells me precisely how to find the marketing suite, which it seems I’ve already passed a couple of times.

  It feels odd to walk into that glossy atmosphere, surrounded by brochures and coffee machines and immaculately dressed sales people and a model of the huge development that will spring up nearby. I’m so close to the primal source, Blumeshof, which could exist in only one place on earth; yet I’m inspecting the kind of home that could be anywhere in the world.

  Far from buying off-plan, or looking in this part of town, which feels far too urban, I told the agent that I wanted to find a small apartment near the woods and lakes in the far west of Berlin, and not in a new-build but in one of the houses with high ceilings and art-deco entrances from the turn of the twentieth century. But she encourages me to give this a go as it’s near the river and a stone’s throw from an expanse of green – so it almost meets my criteria. Besides, if I change my mind, I can always sell my ‘option’ to another buyer – perhaps for a premium. I’d better hurry, she warns. A French woman has already reserved an entire floor. An Indian man has put down a deposit on another floor. People from Hamburg and Norway and America are all racing to sign contracts as she and I speak.

  But aren’t I supposed to be returning to my roots? Is this not-yet-existing building a home or an asset? Will anyone live here or will it be a pied-à-terre for investors? The whole point is that I don’t want to consider myself a foreigner in this city. This is to be my new home in Germany and not a perch in a foreign land.

  After lingering at the crater, and trying to imagine myself living above it, I retrace my tracks back to the woman with the orange hair, who is turning over a row of sausages on her grill; and then, walking on, I reach the six-lane Strasse des 17. Juni, which commemorates the workers’ uprising in East Berlin in 1953 that was bloodily quashed by the communist authorities and the Red Army. On the other side of the road is the Tiergarten – a part of it that I’ve never been to. I decide to go for a stroll before returning to commit myself reluctantly to one of the apartments.

  No sooner am I inside its hallowed precincts than I am amazed to find myself in front of the Rousseau Island of family legend – the island around which my mother had ice-skated as a child and that she thought was spelled ‘Russo’ – one of those names marking a beloved world that lives defiantly within me. So this is where it is! So it really exists! I am euphoric, but also pervaded by gentle dread – not the dread of loss, but the dread of discovery. Will the loved one be forever elusive? Am I being vapidly sentimental?

  Naively, greedily, I want to possess and imbibe this sacred space so deeply that its reality will be 100 per cent present to me; so that it can never slip away again. And, on the other side of the park, the bombed Elysium of Blumeshof comes into focus, drawing me close, and I feel my grandparents standing next to me, living at full throttle and yet pervaded by despair, warning me and welcoming me. I can see its network of rooms, Ernst’s study, Emmy’s reading room, the piano at which she accompanies herself singing Lieder, the girls’ rooms, the Christmas table, the steaming goose, the cloths embroidered with a big woven ‘L’ for Liedtke. I can hear Ernst ringing the bell. And I can hear Walter Benjamin asking of my grandparents’ apartment, as he did of his own grandmother’s upstairs: What words can describe ‘the almost immemorial feeling of bourgeois security that emanated from these rooms’? The ‘solidity’ and the fragility – it is all there, in black and white.

  But I’d better go back to the marketing suite. If I don’t take an option on one of those apartments, the woman from France or the man from India might buy it up too.
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  63.

  A devastating discovery

  Is return really possible? Even if you gain citizenship, as I did in May 2017, almost exactly eighty years after my parents were stripped of theirs; even if you find that the philosophy, the literature, the music to which you have the most powerful and natural affinity is that of your forebears – can the foundations that they lost ever be reclaimed? Without artifice or force?

  The discovery of Klaus Meltzer and Eichenberg had opened up avenues to a lost homeland, but they couldn’t restitute it. In particular, I was amazed how little the return of Eichenberg, with its tangible asset, the handsome building in Prenzlauer Berg, meant to me. The possibility of historical justice – the fact that there were laws and bureaucracies dedicated to it – was exhilarating. But Eichenberg as a living entity was, of course, irretrievably gone. None of my direct family had ever lived there, so there were no ghosts to whom I felt close; the employees, managers, customers, and machinery had vanished; and the money was useful to my mother, but didn’t bring our Germany closer. A house can be restituted, but not a home.

  And then, on 8 May 2017, just one day before I go to the German Embassy in London to collect my newly arrived certificate of German citizenship, a bombshell: Klaus Meltzer turns out not to be a lifeline to my murdered great-uncle, Ernst’s brother Theo.

  In Auschwitz with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch a few weeks earlier, we are shown a book of names tracing a vast circle and listing the six million exterminated Jews.