How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  I hasten to the ‘L’s, searching for my mother’s family name, Liedtke. There, I see who I am looking for: Theodor Liedtke. But not one; three. Two of these turn out to be the same Theodor, my great-uncle, both entries showing the victim as born in Christburg on 10 June 1885. One says that he died in Sachsenhausen in 1942, as my mother and Ilse had always told me, and as the package of his last possessions seemed to confirm. The other stuns me: it says that he was deported to Auschwitz on 1 March 1943.

  So he didn’t die lugging stones at Sachsenhausen, or from a shot to the back of the head? So Ilse and Hedwig were both wrong? Beating back my imagination’s attempts to visualize this infinitely gentle soul being packed into a cattle truck, I notice that another Theodor Liedtke was also deported to Auschwitz, also from Berlin, and also in 1943. He arrived just a few weeks later. Unlike our Theo, he was born in 1887 in Berlin, rather than in 1885 in Christburg.

  I hurry back with Anita to our hotel opposite the camp’s main gate; and, while she smokes a cigarette in a chair that the reception staff have placed for this sole purpose just outside the entrance, I get to work on Google. In minutes, I have discovered an entry on the other Theodor Liedtke, the one born in 1887 in Berlin, in a book on the confiscation of businesses and property from Jews in Germany, extracts of which can be read online.40 I learn that, in September 1942, Himmler decreed that all Jews still within Germany, even if they were already incarcerated in concentration camps like Sachsenhausen, or working as slave labourers, were to be transported to Auschwitz.41

  Back in London, I email the author to ask for his sources. By return, he sends me an Attorney General’s report to a Berlin regional court, dated 7 November 1941, concerning the other Theodor Liedtke, and regrets that he can find nothing further on ours, except confirmation from the German Federal Archives that he was indeed deported to Auschwitz, and so did not die in Sachsenhausen, information that remains too painful to contemplate.

  The other Theodor Liedtke, the Attorney General charges, owns an apron store and has a daughter called Ellen, into whose name he attempted to transfer his property in Berlin in 1940. This was exactly what Klaus Meltzer had told me, except that Klaus had said the transfer had happened in 1938 or 1939. In addition, and as Klaus said too, this Theodor was arrested for breaking the law, convicted by a civil court, and thrown into prison.

  The report appears to solve the mystery of Ellen’s mother, who, it says, wasn’t Jewish and died in 1938. Moreover, I discover the real reason for his arrest, which wasn’t theft, as Klaus had said. The real reason was that Theodor Liedtke had falsely claimed he was a Hybrid of the First Degree rather than a full Jew – in other words, that he had only two Jewish grandparents rather than four. Indeed, in 1938 he had submitted petitions to have this racial status officially recognized, presumably in part so that his business and property should not be Aryanized, which would prevent him passing them to Ellen.

  Though all these petitions had been rejected, in August 1940 he nonetheless went ahead with his plan to transfer his property into Ellen’s name. It occurs to me that this might be what Klaus meant by ‘theft’: if a full Jew’s property had to be Aryanized, in gifting it to his daughter he was, in effect, stealing his own property from the Aryan hands into which the law obliged it to be sold.

  The gift was Theodor’s undoing: the lawyer whom he’d engaged to notarize it reported him to the authorities for failing to disclose that he was a full Jew. As a result, he was charged with the high crime, under the Nuremberg Laws, of concealing his ethnic identity. He was sentenced to eighteen months in jail, at the conclusion of which he was deported to Auschwitz and murdered.42

  My mind flits to Ursel’s success in achieving Aryan status, and I marvel even more at how she pulled it off. At how a Nazi official as high-ranking as Hans Hinkel could be persuaded to intervene on her behalf; to order his underlings to tell the Reichstheaterkammer that all concerns about her racial origins should be dropped; to engage in direct correspondence by letter with this unknown young actor; to welcome her to his office. I’m horrified and relieved at the influence of Carl-Ludwig Duisberg, scion of IG Farben, one of the greatest industrial conglomerates of Germany, complicit in the Nazi project of enslavement and extermination; but then wonder at the risk that he and his wife, Ursel’s friend Jola, took on her behalf.

  And I see with a clarity that I’d never allowed myself the fork in the road before which Ursel stood in late 1941: in the one direction, the stage, safety, and an ancient aristocratic title; in the other, the mounting perils of being a Hybrid of the First Degree as she became a racial reject, one of the living dead. I can hardly bear to recall the heart-rending moment in her letter to Hinkel where she thanks him for giving her back the life she had lost. How can I or anyone possibly criticize her repudiation of what was, to her, a lethal heritage?

  But these thoughts are quickly overtaken by the new reality: Klaus Meltzer isn’t my cousin after all. He isn’t a link to our Theo and so to Ernst. He hasn’t opened a door to their lives. Clearly, he is the grandson of Theodor Liedtke the apron-store owner. His insistence that Theodor had been arrested and indicted as a criminal, which my mother rejected as nonsense, was not true of our Theodor. His certainty that Theodor had a wife – Klaus’s grandmother – was true of his Theodor, not ours. There was, it turned out, no evidence that ours led a double life. Perhaps my great-uncle’s housekeeper Hedwig had been so devoted to him that she really had been filled with joy every time he returned, even after going out for a few minutes. Perhaps the package that Ilse received, complete with his Judenpass, followed not his death but rather his transfer to a greater hell even than Sachsenhausen.

  I feel a double loss of what I thought had been restored. Of Klaus, of course, and through him of a fuller sense of Theo’s existence than my mother’s descriptions of her and Ursel’s Saturday afternoon visits had given me: his life as a father, as a lover, as an owner of property, and as an entrepreneur. His life as a man of secrets, who wasn’t the open book that everybody imagined they saw. But, more poignantly still, of the ‘consolation’ that Theo died close to home, from a quick method of killing, which Ilse insisted was the way at Sachsenhausen, and not in an extermination camp, with its unspeakable rituals of nakedness and the panic of asphyxiation as the Zyklon B pellets start to work. Instead, I struggle to adjust to the vision of him having to endure that journey in the cattle truck and, if he survived it, the reception process at Auschwitz, which Anita had recounted to me in such detail during our visit to the camp: the shaving, the showering, the shouting, and then, at his age – fifty-eight, too old to be useful as slave labour – the gas chamber.

  It seems stupid, this sense of loss, because my connection to him had been so tenuous anyway. But only now do I realize how much the discovery of Klaus, and what I thought was his umbilical link to the life of Theo, and through Theo back to Ernst and Emmy and Blumeshof, meant to me. Thanks to Klaus, Theo had come right up close: a life that had previously appeared to me in only three faint images – Theo at the Saturday teas with Mother and Ursel, Theo the salesman at Tietz’s department store, and Theo the prisoner at Sachsenhausen, in all of which he was present but barely visible – had filled out into a man with street-smarts and a villa and a wife and a daughter, with her Hitler-adulating prospective parents-in-law and his place in their living room under the portrait of the Führer. And all this recovered life was embodied in Klaus, the man in the attic with Gregor the mad parrot and the menorah and the certificates signed by Göring. Now, though, our Theo seemed further away, flatter than ever, as if his whole benevolent, blameless life had been lived with one foot already in the grave.

  64.

  The woman and the dandy

  Quite apart from the impossibility of restituting a lost or stolen past, I am surely yearning for an idealized homeland that never existed. I might even be indulging in the sorts of fantasies that cost Ernst his life – except that my fantasies, unlike his, are wholly unrealistic. I am convinced that, in
his day, the famous German-Jewish cultural symbiosis, from which each party had so immeasurably profited, even if only one had done the loving, really had existed. Whereas, after Hitler, the Holocaust, and the evisceration of so much German culture in the Third Reich, the intense creativity of that relationship was destroyed, at least for the time being.

  Even German philosophy, to which I have devoted most of my adult life, has recently been making strenuous efforts to abandon its traditional ways of thinking, instead craving to become more anglicized, precisely as I moved in the opposite direction, discovering my own philosophical habitat in the German mind, from Hegel to Heidegger, via Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – thinkers who rivet me and speak to me, even when I don’t understand them.

  Nor do I have any answers to my big questions: Could love for a lost Germany forge a path to intimacy with the new? Could that German-Jewish world of Bildung, with its breadth and humanity, whose wounded but defiant spirit lived on in our London home, have a vibrant, if utterly different, future?

  One reality has helped me, like, I am sure, many other children of refugees from Nazism, find a path back to Germany: the country’s amazing determination to apologize and do justice to the Jews – amazing because, as a rule, human beings do everything they can to avoid responsibility for the horrors that they perpetrate against each other. Yet here were the Germans, or at least vast numbers of them, doggedly taking responsibility and atoning, not – or not only – because the world was demanding it of them, but because they needed to in order to go forward as a nation. Their self-respect, and so their identity as Germans, depended on it. This is a breakthrough in how peoples behave to one another; a profound contribution to civilization.

  Which other people has ever done this systematically, let alone made repentance and reparations to its historical victims central to its own identity – and so a source not just of shame but also of strength and national renewal? The British for the Kenyan Mau Mau? The Americans for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam? The French for the horrors of the Algerian War? Any of those three nations for the incalculable suffering inflicted on black people by slavery and the slave trade?

  Distressingly, I also come across flashes of anti-Semitism in today’s Germany – and by no means just on the uncouth, unsalonfähig, far right, to which many people would like to think it is confined, but also in more furtive and more polite forms among the otherwise tolerant majority. There are undoubtedly deep pockets of resentment about all the restitutions and reparations, along with the endless pressure to remember and to repent, as if the Jew were an omnipresent moral sadist, holding a whip over the German conscience and never allowing it peace or self-respect. Who knows how much bitterness towards Jews already lies latent in Germans after so many decades of drilling themselves into shame, of being told that the words ‘Germany’, ‘crime’, ‘guilt’, and ‘apology’ are synonymous?

  And there are also occasions when the action of a Jew provokes scary outrage: the sort of outrage that blames a people and not an individual; that says, ‘He did it because he is a Jew.’ This has to be acknowledged too, though it doesn’t diminish my love for Germany one iota – and I would prefer to pretend that it isn’t happening, or at least that it is harmless.

  When it does happen, people seem to be getting a lot off their chests, quietly and in private. The conversation I overheard in a cafe in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district in April 2007 still hurts, all these years later.

  A man and a woman are sitting at the next table, the woman snappily dressed in a two-piece suit, the man more dandyish, with fashionably unkempt hair and a silk cravat stuffed into his open shirt. The woman seems to have lots of cultured friends, speaks of private views at trendy art galleries and premieres at the opera that she has recently attended, and works two days a week for a prestigious charity together with other well-connected people. Her companion has been to many of the same openings and premieres, made films in his youth, then worked in the gallery world in another German city, and now spends most of his time writing. After about a quarter of an hour, their conversation takes an abrupt turn:

  ‘He has that typically Jewish arrogance,’ the woman says. Her voice sounds relaxed, but her face is etched with hate.

  ‘Did he survive the war here with his family, or how come we have a Jewish entrepreneur here, of his age?’ the man replies. ‘Or is he one of those Russian immigrants?’

  ‘No, he’s not Russian. His parents returned after the war, I think. They were in England or America. I despise the way he talks and struts.’

  ‘If he were a German, wouldn’t you just say he was an arrogant person?’ an embarrassed voice says behind the woman. I hadn’t noticed him until then. He is with them, though the table is too small for them all to fit round it and he looks stuck onto her side like a squirrel on a tree trunk. ‘You wouldn’t say he was an arrogant German.’

  ‘Of course, I blame Germans too when they do bad things,’ the woman replies.

  ‘But you blame Hans or Peter, you don’t blame them as Germans,’ the third person continues. ‘Anyway, he’s a friend of yours, that entrepreneur. I’ve seen him at your parties several times.’

  ‘Yes, but nowadays I just meet him at X’s, the novelist. Another Jew. Though I avoid going there. I can’t stand the way he tries to ingratiate himself into Berlin society. He invites Germans over for his Passover evenings every year, as if he craves our recognition. It’s excruciating, though his rituals are quite amusing. Harmless, really.’

  ‘What are his books like?’

  ‘Well, you know, he has his pretensions. I doubt they are particularly good. I have no idea if they sell. He wants to create a sort of salon – to be in. Pushy. That type.’

  ‘What I find really disgraceful,’ the dandy says, ‘a scandal, is the Kirchner.’ He is referring to the controversial restitution in 2006 of a painting by the expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the heirs of a Jewish art collector who had once owned it. ‘That painting belongs to us; the Jew sold it in the thirties for a proper price; and now they are using their typically Jewish techniques to get it back. And, of course, our cowardly Berlin Senate, a bunch of innocents, falls for their blackmail and gives it back. Those people in London and New York have had enough from us!’

  ‘Those people are in any case immoral,’ the woman corrects him sternly. She pauses as outrage bloats her countenance. ‘I find the thing sickening,’ she continues, and her face twists itself into a mask of revulsion.

  Now the atmosphere is getting really unpleasant. An avalanche of hate is gathering pace. The third person looks on helplessly. He seems trapped in a dilemma: to defend the Jews would merely arouse the woman to further incrimination; but to say nothing might look as if he is acquiescing in her charges, or, worse, sees them as unanswerable.

  ‘Yes, that’s actually what one always said about them,’ the dandy replies caustically, and his expression becomes animated. ‘People will again say: “The Jews” . . .’ – he says the word awkwardly, so he begins again – ‘People will say: “Jewish people cannot be trusted; they are only out for themselves!” Jewish people had better watch out for that. The Kirchner is ours.’

  He keeps glancing uneasily at the woman, as if frightened of her vehemence but also not wanting to be outdone by it, fearful perhaps of appearing feeble or unpatriotic or too compromising in the face of foreign evil. ‘They’ve had enough justice from us Germans; this is now exploitation,’ he adds pointedly, spoon-feeding her a morsel of her favourite food.

  Although he is the less venomous of the two, I find him the more sinister. He seems indifferent to the Kirchner, yet he is getting swept along by the murky joys of indignation. He is dark, but in a weak way.

  ‘Anyway, this has nothing to do with justice,’ the woman goes on. ‘And the worst are those Jewish lawyers with their success fees. Taking a commission on the plunder – disgusting! The auction houses, the banks, the law firms, they are all controlled by Jews in America, and they are just taking
us trusting Germans for a ride.’ She fumes and hates, and the dandy tries to fume and hate along with her. A powerful aroma of poison drifts over from their table.

  ‘What about your own restitution?’ the third person asks the woman, with seemingly feigned nonchalance. ‘You didn’t object to that.’

  This is clearly his way of taking a little revenge on her. He looks hurt.

  The dandy is surprised. ‘You got restitution?’

  ‘Oh, I took no interest in that. My brother did it all. He interests himself in all that sort of stuff.’

  ‘How come you got restitution?’ the dandy presses.

  ‘Well, my grandmother had an interest in a building in the Czech Republic that her family lost after the communist takeover. After the Wall fell, we were offered some money.’

  ‘You took a lawyer and fought hard to get that money,’ the third person interjects. At last he is summoning some confidence.

  The dandy doesn’t seem bothered one way or the other. The woman shrugs, as if the whole thing has nothing to do with her, though she doesn’t deny she accepted the money. She shrugs to perfection. If the third person thinks that she is rattled by her own hypocrisy, he is mistaken.

  Later that evening, unable to free myself of the conversation in the cafe, I realize that what mystifies me most about it isn’t that the woman was blaming a people rather than a person: that, as she saw it, there would always be Jews eager to exploit the Germans’ honest decency and burden of guilt for their own revolting ends. What really mystifies me is the spiritual feel of her hate. Spiritual because her hate seemed to see the Jew as personifying greed raised to the level of desecration; and because it seemed to inspire her with the kind of moral zeal to resist and vanquish the desecrator that is typically afforded by religious faith. Who knows how much theft and exploitation, or indeed rape and murder, committed by locals against locals, had gone on in Germany while the Kirchner affair was raging? I imagine that the woman would have been appalled at such crimes, but when she thought of the Jew who got the Kirchner back, she didn’t only see criminal behaviour; she saw sacrilege. We were in the realm not of the miscreant but of the blasphemer – in short, the realm of the sacred.