by Simon May
Maybe, I think, he too, his inextinguishable trace in the embassy, which has lived alone there for so long, felt protected by her.
‘We must keep in touch,’ the chargé d’affaires says as the taxi disappears and we are alone on a corner of the great empty square. ‘You are one of ours now.’ And she tells me about an exhibition on German-Jewish artists-in-exile, sponsored by the embassy, that is opening the following week, promising to send me an invitation. I climb into my car, which is directly in front of the building, marvelling that, in an age of hyper-security, when no risk can be taken and nobody can be entirely beyond suspicion, it is permitted to park outside the embassy of a country that has been targeted by terrorists.
It is all so embracing, so un-barking, so unassuming. Like the question that, as I drive home, keeps replaying itself in my mind, and that seems to speak for my new Germany, for the refusal to answer drama with drama, or tragedy with redemption, as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who had arrived at Auschwitz sure that she would be selected to die is asked, with such taken-for-granted respect, by her German host:
‘And the vegan option is for madam?’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe an immense debt to the late novelist Aharon Appelfeld and to the philosopher A. C. Grayling for repeatedly urging me to persist with this project. Without their encouragement, my many years of discussion with, in particular, my mother and my two aunts – all three of whom I had bombarded, since my childhood, with questions about their lives and those of their parents, uncles, and grandparents – might never have made their way from my memories and scattered notes into print.
I am hugely grateful to friends and colleagues who kindly read the manuscript, in whole or part, at various stages of its writing, in particular Lydia Goehr, A. C. Grayling, Tim Judah, Anthony McCarten, Tom McCarthy, Hella Pick, Martin Ruehl, and Rosie Whitehouse.
I extend very special thanks to Daniel Wildmann, Director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London, who devoted innumerable hours and his formidable expertise to vetting my treatment of German-Jewish history, and from whom I have learned so much; and to Bill Swainson, who advised me extensively as a freelance editor, and under whose guidance the text went through several iterations.
Invaluable research assistance and expert advice was provided, at different times, by Boris Behnen, Ulrike Ehret, Julia Hörath, John Owen, Hester Vaizey, and Kim Wünschmann, and I want to record my gratitude to each of them. Kim and Julia discovered files in German archives of which I might otherwise have remained ignorant. In addition to his superb research, Boris kindly obtained the necessary permissions to reproduce and publish documents from those archives. Thank you to all their staff, especially at the Bundesarchiv, the German federal archive.
Renata de Jara and Elke Stahlke, the client–lawyer dream team, who spearheaded the restitution of a building and business in Berlin that had been Aryanized in 1939, and in which my grandparents had had a stake, kindly checked and approved the relevant chapters.
I thank Anita Lasker-Wallfisch for inviting me to join her on a four-day visit to Auschwitz in 2017, as well as for many discussions and reminiscences in her kitchen over takeout Thai dinners and her delicious home-made soups. Of the close-knit German-speaking Jewish circle in London in which I was raised, she is the last surviving member, and in particular the last to have known both my parents since before I was born. She is someone to whom I feel a deep bond of gratitude.
Finally, huge thanks are due to my wonderful agent, Caroline Michel, for championing this project, as well as to Tim Binding and Laurie Robertson and the whole team at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop. I extend equally huge thanks to my magnificent – and patient – commissioning editor, Georgina Morley, at Picador, with whom it has been a tremendous pleasure and privilege to work. I am indebted to Marissa Constantinou for her painstaking work and all her support; to Chloe May (no relation) for skilfully and meticulously guiding the text through to publication; and to Nick Humphrey, who brilliantly, and with necessary brutality, excised surplus verbiage, further proof that slimming and toning can be good for the health of an organism.
Most finally, I should like to thank Lord Byron’s Manfred for his encouragement –
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth
– but even more so W. B. Yeats:
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
NOTES
1Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, translated by Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), pp. 217–8.
2Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (London: Random House (Vintage), 1998), p. 333.
3‘Walking the Way of the Survivor; A Talk With Aharon Appelfeld’, Philip Roth, New York Times, 28 February 1988.
4Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, in Reflections, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). All my quotations from this work are taken from pp. 41–3.
5Letter to Alma Mahler in August 1914. Cited in Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), p. 72.
6Source: J. Eichenberg AG expropriation file. List of shareholders and their racial origins submitted to Berlin’s Police President. Location: ‘Akte zur Enteignung der J. Eichenberg AG’, Handelsregisterakte, HRB 22680 später HRB 51960, Landesamt zur Regelung offener Vermögensfragen, Berlin.
7Joachim Günther (Hrsg.), Neue Deutsche Hefte, Band 24, Heft 1 (Berlin: Neue Deutsche Hefte Verlag, 1977), p. 173.
8As quoted in Henriette von Gizycki, Kaplan Fahsel in seinem Werdegang unter Zuhilfenahme seiner Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Berlin: Germania Verlag, 1930), p. 120. All translations of Gizycki are mine.
9Gizycki, p. 103.
10Gizycki, p. 120.
11Falschheit und Arroganz.
12Gizycki, p. 15.
13Gizycki, p. 18.
14Gizycki, p. 20.
15Gizycki, p. 52.
16Gizycki, p. 57.
17‘weckte den jugendlichen Sinn für einen neuen Rhythmus und Humor, für eine neue Selbständigkeit und demokratische Freiheit’ – Helmut Fahsel, diary entry, cited in Gizycki, p. 17.
18Verein für Kraft und Schönheit.
19Gizycki, pp. 18–20.
20‘Ich strebe nach Vollkommenheit des Körpers’. Gizycki, p. 12.
21Was ein junger Mann wissen muss.
22Annali von Alvensleben, Abgehoben (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 1998), p. 18.
23The Reichssippenamt was charged with Erb- und rassenkundliche Untersuchungen.
24A Mischling ersten Grades, which I have translated as ‘Hybrid of the First Degree’, was defined as a person with two Jewish grandparents and was forbidden to marry an Aryan German. They were, though, free to marry each other. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–39 (London: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 145–51. A Mischling zweiten Grades (‘Hybrid of the Second Degree’) was a quarter-Jew: one with a single Jewish grandparent.
25Quoted in Christopher R. Browning (with Jürgen Matthäus), The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 404.
26In August 1935, the Genossenschaft der deutschen Bühnenangehörigen, which actors had to join in order to become members of the Reichstheaterkammer, demanded proof of Aryan background from all its members (not just from newcomers). It was a long-drawn-out process – the last demand for proof was sent out in February 1938. Florian Odenwald, Der nazistische Kampf gegen das ‘Undeutsche’ in Theater und Film 1920–1945 (München: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2006), pp. 193–6.
27Bundesarchiv Berlin, BArch, R9361V/16995.
28BArch, R9361V/56771. My translation.
29BArch, R9361V/56771. My translation.
30Werner Finck, Witz als Schicksal – Schicksal als Witz (Hamburg: Mario
n von Schröder Verlag, 1966), p. 60.
31Christabel Bielenberg, When I Was a German, 1934–1945: An Englishwoman in Nazi Germany (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 111–2.
32Eisernes Kreuz 2. Klasse, Einsernes Kreuz 1. Klasse, Ehrenpokal der Luftwaffe, Deutsches Kreuz in Gold.
33Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes.
34Annette Haller, Der Jüdische Friedhof an der Weidegasse in Trier (Trier: Paulinus Verlag, 2003), pp. xvi–xvii.
35‘Der Name Eiche sowie Eichenberg haben einen urdeutschen Klang.’ My translation.
36Source: J. Eichenberg AG expropriation file, letters to the Berlin Police President’s office of August Plöger, 1 July 1939, and of his lawyer Walter Patschan, 26 August 1940. Location: ‘Akte zur Enteignung der J. Eichenberg AG’, Handelsregisterakte, HRB 22680 später HRB 51960, Landesamt zur Regelung offener Vermögensfragen Berlin.
37Source: J. Eichenberg AG expropriation file. Location: ‘Akte zur Enteignung der J. Eichenberg AG’, Handelsregisterakte, HRB 22680 später HRB 51960, Landesamt zur Regelung offener Vermögensfragen Berlin.
38This paragraph on Charlotte Pommer is indebted to Sabine Hildebrandt, The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), pp. 165–6.
39Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 85.
40Christoph Kreutzmüller, Final Sale in Berlin: The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930–1945, translated by Jane Paulick and Jefferson Chase (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), p. 277.
41Kreutzmüller, p. 328.
42Kreutzmüller, p. 277.
SOURCES
Everything recounted in this book is based on one or more of my notes, my memory, my impressions, my views, and my interpretation of events. In addition, wherever I could expand and verify stories by consulting official archives, notably in the case of my aunt Ursel’s achievement of Aryan status in 1941 and of the restitution of J. Eichenberg AG in the 1990s, I have done so.
I am grateful to the following archives, from whose files I have quoted and/or reproduced images: Bundesarchiv Berlin; Bundesarchiv–Abteilung Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau; Landesamt zur Regelung offener Vermögensfragen Berlin; Staatsarchiv Bremen. Detailed references are given at the appropriate points in the text and can be found in the notes. Credits for images are recorded in the list of illustrations.
My narrative of events and times before my birth, or that I otherwise did not witness first hand, is, overwhelmingly, the result of years of discussion with – verging on interrogation of – my mother and her two sisters. From a young age I was compulsively interested in their lives and choices, in part as a way of finding my own grounding in a family and a history that seemed as elusive as they were endowed with cultural riches – so that many of the footholds that I thought I had secured turned out to be provisional, or illusory, or forbidden, or all three.
In particular, I interviewed my mother extensively about her life – and the lives of her sisters, parents, uncles, and grandparents, as well as of my father and his brother – over a period of eighteen years, from 1988 to 2006.
I also had long discussions with the late Klaus Meltzer about his life, as well as those of his parents and grandparents, and it is with his enthusiastic blessing and approval that I recount aspects of his own family story and of our encounters. He also kindly gifted me photos from his albums, two of which are reproduced here.
Though I had closely followed the restitution of J. Eichenberg AG in the 1990s and had access to the confiscation and restitution files through my mother, who was one of its direct heirs, many additional facets of the story that I tell here come from conversations with the two people closest to it over the longest period: Renata de Jara, who represented the largest portion of heirs and was the court-appointed Nachtragsabwicklerin, entrusted with managing Eichenberg’s liquidation; and Elke Stahlke, the lawyer engaged by Renata and the person who first discovered the Aryanization file from the Nazi period. I cleared the entire text in chapters 49–54 with both of them. In addition, Judith Bieling checked and approved the chapter relating to her. Some names in those and related chapters have been changed to protect the identity of the people concerned.
In addition, the names of the priest in chapters 29 and 31, the pastor in chapter 32, and the friar and priest in chapter 33 have been changed.
I quote extensively from the biography of my great-uncle Helmut Fahsel by Henriette von Gizycki: Kaplan Fahsel in seinem Werdegang unter Zuhilfenahme seiner Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Berlin: Germania Verlag, 1930). The English translations here are my own.
Where I use quotation and direct speech to relay conversations, I cannot and do not vouch that every word is faithful to the original; but I am as certain as I can be that I have conveyed their meaning and essence truthfully and accurately. Scenes or dialogues that my interlocutor did not directly witness, such as between the Rosenthals and their Jewish lodger in chapter 18, but which were related to them first hand, are unverifiable; but the content is as I recall it being transmitted to me, in this case by Ilse.
HOW TO BE A REFUGEE
Simon May was born in London, the son of a violinist and a brush manufacturer. Visiting professor of philosophy at King’s College London, his books include Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion, Love: A History, Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’, The Power of Cute, and Thinking Aloud, a collection of his own aphorisms. His work has been translated into ten languages and regularly features in major newspapers worldwide.
Also by Simon May
Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion
Love: A History
Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’
The Power of Cute
Thinking Aloud: A Handbook of Aphorisms
Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’: A Critical Guide (ed.)
Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy (co-ed.)
1. My maternal grandparents and their three daughters on holiday in the Swiss Alps in the mid-1920s. L. to r.: Ilse, Emmy, Marianne, Ursel, and Ernst Liedtke.
2. A room in my grandparents’ Berlin apartment at Blumeshof 12.
3. Ernst’s certificate of his exit from Judaism in 1910.
4. Ernst’s certificate of baptism, from the same year.
5. Ernst and his brother Theo sailing from Bremen to New York on board the Kaiser Wilhelm II in1909.
6. L. to r.: Marianne, Ursel, Ilse. Berlin, 1917.
7. Ernst and Emmy on the North Sea island of Helgoland in 1926.
8. The Liedtkes’ boat on the Wannsee. Ernst in the peaked cap, Emmy next to him and Ilse to the left of the gangplank.
9. The final page of Marianne’s concert and theatre notebook, which begins in 1924, when she was ten, and ends abruptly in April 1933, after Ernst’s dismissal, with performances by Wilhelm Furtwängler and the quartet of her violin teacher, Max Rostal.
10. Ilse.
11. Ursel.
12. Marianne.
13. The three sisters as teenagers.
14. Marianne and Ursel playing violin and accordion with canine audience.
15. Ursel (r.) and probably Katta Sterna (l.) in a Berlin cabaret.
16. Tea on the Liedtkes’ boat. L. to r.: unidentified, Ursel, Emmy, Ernst, Marianne.
17. Ilse and her boyfriend, Harald Böhmelt, at the Trichter dance hall on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, late 1930s. L. to r.: Peter Franke, Werner Finck, unidentified, Erich Kästner, Harald Böhmelt, Ilse, unidentified.
18. Ellen Liedtke (nickname ‘Schneckelchen’), putative daughter of Theo Liedtke, and her fiancé, Walter Meltzer (‘Schnuckelchen’), in 1939.
19. Walter Meltzer (bottom middle) with comrades in Nuremberg during the 1933 Nazi Party rally.
20. Ursel (r. standing) with Maria ‘Baby’ von Alvensleben (r. seated), probably Lexi von Alve
nsleben (middle seated), and their mother, Countess Alexandra von Alvensleben (l. seated), at the yacht club Klub am Rupenhorn, Berlin, 1931.
21. My mother, Marianne, with violin.
22. Marianne playing in a wartime concert at the National Gallery in London. On the reverse of the photo she writes: ‘The concert was moved to the basement as a bomb had just fallen upstairs.’
23. A Czech Trio programme from 1941. The Trio was sponsored by the Czech government-in-exile in the UK and provided my mother’s first legitimate earnings as a refugee.
24. Ursel’s letter of thanks, dated 17 July 1941, to SS officer Hans Hinkel, one of Joseph Goebbels’s senior officials, who was key to her achieving Aryan status.
25. The resident’s cards on Ursel in Bremen City Hall, 1931–43. Directly underneath an entry recording her recent marriage to Franziskus an official writes: ‘Gestapo enquired on 21.10.43’(r.). On the other card (above), she is listed as having two Jewish grandparents, despite having been accepted as an Aryan two years previously.
