Billy and the Joels--The American rock star and his German family story

by Steffen Radlmaier

  The Higher Regional Court finally decided to rescind all previous decisions and the reparations chamber of the Munich District Court was ordered to review Joel’s claims once more.

  After a full four years, the appeal trial came to an end on March 25, 1959: The Third Senate of the Supreme Reparation Court in Nuremberg decided that there was no further need for the Munich District Court to review Joel’s case. The judges decided that the two million mark settlement between Neckermann and Joel made in 1955 was adequate. They considered Neckermann’s memory gaps and false statements to be irrelevant.

  Having just survived a heart attack and in a bad state of health, Neckermann was more than relieved by the outcome of this seemingly never-ending lawsuit. Behind the scenes, a bitter dogfight was going on involving mail-order entrepreneur Gustav Schickedanz, who was hoping to oust Neckermann from the market with Joel’s help. But the rapid rise of the politically savvy Frankfurt businessman, who had started off as ‘aryanizer’ of department stores and mail-order companies, was not so easy to stop in the land of the economic miracle: ‘Neckermann makes things possible’ became a much coined phrase in the burgeoning federal republic.

  In contrast, Karl Joel was unable to forget the past. Although he had finally come to terms with the outcome of the Neckermann case, he still had a score to settle with the German state. After all, they had not only deprived him of his citizenship in March 1940, they had also confiscated his assets. However, an end to this reparation lawsuit was not in sight.

  The hair-band business in New York was just about getting them by, his wife was still homesick, and his son had a failed marriage and had returned to Europe. What was there to keep him in the USA, a place where he’d never really felt at home?

  Now old people, Karl and Meta Joel finally returned to their former homeland in 1964. Karl was 75 and Meta 71 years old. A full 30 years had passed since the both of them had left Nuremberg. For Helmut, the return of his parents was a sign that they had somehow come to terms with their fate. “They just wanted to get some peace. My father had had enough of litigation. He also believed that, if there was one place a Jew could now feel safe, then it was Nuremberg.”

  The couple moved into an apartment in the up-market neighborhood of Erlenstegen. At least they no longer had money problems, thanks to the settlement with Neckermann. Karl Joel continued to get The New York Times and would occasionally treat himself to a dry martini in the Grand Hotel next to Nuremberg’s main railway station – the hotel where, back in the 1930s, Nazi functionaries would stay after the rallies, and where high-ranking officials were accommodated during the Nuremberg trials after the war. Apart from that, the old couple lived a very ordinary life. Their son Helmut came to visit only rarely: “We didn’t talk much about what happened. My father was a very withdrawn kind of person.”

  The ‘Joel file’ was finally closed by the reparations chamber of the Nuremberg-Fürth district court in 1968, the fateful year of youth and student protests. The state and Joel came to a settlement: Karl Joel received 38,000 German marks compensation and agreed to forego further claims. A rather paltry sum considering the former businessman had had to pay 354,932 Reichsmarks in Reich flight tax and 5,000 Reichsmarks in Jewish property tax to the Nazi state. Not to mention all the injustice and hurt he’d had to suffer.

  Arno Hamburger, who meanwhile was on the municipal council and involved in the Jewish religious community, was often in contact with his former classmate’s parents: “They weren’t embittered, but uprooted and, after all they’d been through, they no longer felt at home in Nuremberg. They could never quite overcome the deep distrust they felt about the Germans of their own generation.”

  They felt the same as the Jewish author Hermann Kesten, who was also from Nuremberg and who had also weathered the Nazi era in exile in New York. He wrote the following in the mid-60s: “There wasn’t a city in the world I felt more at home in than Nuremberg. And there wasn’t a city in the world where I felt so alien. Nuremberg is as lost and forgotten as my childhood, my youth once spent […] inside and outside the walls and moat of this tradition-steeped and history-charged city. […] When one goes through such a burgeoning, civilized new city, one that sometimes seems to forget that here once stood the old, free imperial city of Nuremberg, one hardly wants to believe that, just 20 years ago it was one of the chief cities of the Third Reich. Of course, the Third Reich looked just as Swedenborg had imagined hell to look like; that is, just like the ordinary world, but with a demonic bent.”39

  Karl Joel was unable to find peace towards the end of his life. After the death of his wife in 1971, he went on living alone in Nuremberg; he went on regular visits to his son, who was now living with his second wife in Bad Homburg. When Helmut moved to Vienna in 1976, Karl – now in his late eighties – returned to Berlin. The city held many memories of his childhood, and he still had a few acquaintances there. He later returned to Nuremberg again to live in an old peoples’ home run by the Jewish religious community: A patriarch without a company, a mail-order entrepreneur without a country. After suffering a stroke, Karl moved in with his son, who was now living in London. That was where, in 1982, he died at the biblical age of 93. He was buried beside his wife in the Jewish cemetery in Nuremberg.

  The Faraway Father

  After Helmut Joel left his wife so suddenly in 1957, Rosalind had to struggle along alone with the two children in Levittown, Hicksville. It was a difficult time, not just financially. All of a sudden the Joels were poor and outsiders in the new town, and they no longer conformed to the conservative ideals of the 1950s, as Billy remembers: “We weren’t like everybody else on the block. We were kind of wackos, the weirdos. If you weren’t – at least, image-wise – the nuclear family, if you didn’t keep your lawn trimmed, you know, there was tension with the neighbors … my mom didn’t have many friends in the neighborhood. I didn’t have many friends in the neighborhood.”40

  A Jewish family without a man in the house, an attractive but single mother with children and money problems – a family that didn’t conform to the ideal world the bourgeois neighbors watched on the pre-prime-time TV serials. Divorce was a taboo subject, and it was difficult for a woman to get an interesting job. Rosalind tried to make ends meet by taking badly paid secretarial or bookkeeping jobs. Helmut helped her out financially as well as he could. “He never abandoned us”, Billy says, “he sent a check every week…but things got different after he had left.”41

  Apart from the checks there was no sign of life from Helmut – no calls, no postcards. Nothing.

  While Helmut Joel was busy trying to get the newly invented television into the households of other countries, his ex-wife could hardly afford to buy such a luxury for her own home. The Joels’ house and garden didn’t look as tidy as those of the neighbors. They had no garage, and there wasn’t a big American road cruiser parked out in front of the house, but an old Renault Dauphine.

  However, despite all her money problems, Rosalind made sure that Billy still got his piano lessons. He learnt to appreciate the same composers his father had admired: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. It wasn’t exactly the same music his friends were listening to on the radio: songs by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone, Paul Anka and Peggy Lee.

  Billy the Kid: booklet of Joel´s album “Songs in the Attic” · © Steffen Radlmaier

  But music was the sanctum to which the sensitive young boy retreated when things once again got too much for him. He would often sit at the piano and play himself into his own little world, far away from the problems of everyday life. Billy had to learn that life wasn’t always a bowl of cherries much earlier than most of his friends. Although he did like to play ball with the neighborhood kids, climb trees or run about in the streets, most seemed to see him as a bit of a dreamer, more of a loner. Those feelings of loneliness and abandonment continued to torture him throughout his life.

  The boy suffered under his father’s disappe
arance without a trace. Like many children of divorced parents, he felt guilty and asked himself if perhaps he himself wasn’t the real reason for the family drama: maybe he hadn’t been well-behaved enough, or maybe his father didn’t like him? “For a child it’s incomprehensible when the parents separate,” says Billy Joel today, “it’s like death. It’s the death of the family. I don’t believe you ever get over that.”

  If there were problems at school, Rosalind would often explain away her difficult situation as a single mom by saying her husband was in the merchant navy and therefore seldom at home. And Billy would also come up with ingenious explanations for the absence of his father, often giving him the image of an unattainable hero. His fantasy was inspired by his excessive reading habits: Billy had an insatiable appetite for the books his mother would get him from the library, whether illustrated hardbacks, novels or history books, Billy read everything he could get his hands on.

  The 1950s saw the escalation of the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union, with both sides stoking the fires of fear of an atomic war. The hysteria that abounded had a deep impact on the political and social climate in the USA. Scary, rather bizarre rules of conduct were used to prepare adults and children alike for the supposed threat. They were warned not to eat the snow in winter as it might be radioactively contaminated. And schools held routine safety exercises in preparation for the worst-case scenario: as soon as they heard the siren in the classrooms, the pupils would have to crouch underneath their desks – for protection against air raids. “I was a Cold War kid all my life. I thought we were going to get blown to hell any day.”42

  But there were other bugbears for Billy to face at home. Often feeling totally abandoned and overwhelmed, his mother would sometimes just hole up in her bedroom. “She missed her husband and felt she was being shunned by the neighbors,” says Billy Joel today. However, he doesn’t believe his mother suffered from depression or alcoholism, as some biographers have claimed: “We never noticed anything. And I’m sure my mother would have told me about it when I was having my own problems with alcohol.”

  Nevertheless, there were good times too: Rosalind was generally thought of as a warm-hearted if slightly eccentric woman, and was also capable of being very cheerful and youthful. She would often stow the children and their friends and Whitey the little dog into her old car and off they’d go for a picnic at the seaside. There where the villas and parks of the rich people were located.

  Religion didn’t play a big part in family life: like the parental generation before them, they took a liberal view of the Jewish faith: “There was no religion practiced in my family for at least three generations, and from what I understand back then that wasn’t uncommon. We had Christmas and because all my friends were Italian, Polish or Irish, I went to mass on Sundays. I thought that’s what you did as a kid. I had no Jewish upbringing. In fact, the first time I wore a yarmulke was at my grandfather’s funeral. They buried him as a Jew, and he was an atheist; he would have hated that, despised it. I thought even then that it was hypocritical.”43

  Like his father before him, it was the reaction of his school chums that first gave him an idea of what it was like to be a Jew. He likes to tell anecdotes like this one: “One time there was this kid threatening me: ‘Joel, you killed Jesus! The Jews nailed Jesus to the cross. And that’s why I’m gonna kick your ass.’ Another time a girl in my class said to me: ‘Don’t you know that Jews have horns on their heads’? I ran straight home and looked in the mirror to see if it was true.”44

  Perhaps that was one of the reasons Rosalind didn’t want to attract attention but rather blend in with her neighborhood. She never took her children to the synagogue, and most of Billy’s friends were anyhow Catholic. He often went to mass with them, and was even an altar boy for a while and got to ring the bell. Later on the Joels started to go to a protestant church, and the children were eventually even baptized there. Billy was eleven at the time. However, this Christian episode didn’t last too long. One day while giving the sermon, the protestant pastor held up a dollar note and said: “This here is the flag of the Jews.” That was the last time the Joels went to church.

  “I became very cynical about all religions. But I believe in the golden rule: Don’t do to others what you would not have done to you. That’s how far I do believe in religion. All the rest for me is hocus-pocus. I’m not going to denigrate people who believe in their religions, because I think faith can be a good thing. However faith that is displaced or corrupted can be a very negative thing.”

  Although he missed his father badly, growing up in a women’s household had a good side for Billy in that he had to be the man of the house from a fairly early age. Looking back, he remembers that he never had to be scared of an authoritarian father, as was the case with quite a few of his friends, who were often beaten if they’d done something wrong. And there was always his grandfather Phillip Nyman to look up to, a man who impressed with his knowledge and education.

  The family’s relationship with Carl and Meta Joel was never very close, and was very soon broken off after Billy’s parents separated. According to Billy, that had something to do with the fact that his German grandparents thought they were something better, and looked down upon the unconventional Nymans and their Eastern European roots. Whatever the case, the families were divided into two opposing sides, blaming each other for the marriage fiasco. Billy never saw his German grandparents again.

  In the meanwhile, Billy’s passion for music was not to be overheard – nor overseen. He had an eye-opening experience in the fourth grade: his very first performance as a rock singer. He did an imitation of Elvis Presley, who was setting the world of rock and roll on fire and storming the charts with songs like “Heartbreak Hotel”, “Jailhouse Rock” and “Love Me Tender”. Billy put his heart and soul into a rendition of “Hound Dog”, wiggling his hips at the girls so wolfishly that it got too much for his teacher. But, for the first time, Billy had felt the magical power of rock and roll. “That was where it began. When I got pulled off the stage for singing like Elvis in the fourth grade, it was like I beat the system. I got away with something before they could stop me.”45

  It soon became clear to the talented piano pupil that a classical music career was going to be out of the question. The hours and hours of finger exercises alone got on his nerves. “It never looked to be a very much fun life to be a concert pianist. I never wanted to be Vladimir Horowitz. I never really enjoyed playing the classics, although I’m glad I did it.”46

  Billy became increasingly interested in pop music, rhythm and blues and jazz. A concert by soul singer James Brown was his first experience of a live performance. One of the reasons that concert in Harlem left such an impression on the 13-year-old and his two friends from Hicksville was the fact that they were practically the only white people there in the Apollo Theater. The wild way in which James Brown moved about the stage fascinated Billy: “Pop music hadn’t really hit me till then, but after that – James Brown, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and the Phil Spector records did it for me. That was the first music I really felt.”47

  His musical worldview was revolutionized again in 1964 by, of all things, the Ed Sullivan Show. The famous TV host presented the Beatles for the first time on national TV on February 9, 1964. Over 73 million people (45 percent of the population) saw the show. As part of their triumphal march across the world, the Fab Four from Liverpool in England were about to conquer America. Their song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had only been released in January of that year and was the fastest selling single in the history of music. And, to the astonishment of the older generation, Beatlemania was now taking the USA by storm. It was just 77 days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which had sunk the nation into a kind of collective depression, when Pan Am flight 101 landed in New York and the Beatles started cracking their strange jokes at a press conference. John, Paul, George and Ringo epitomized
fresh, youthful energy and lightened the country’s mood with their yeah-yeah-yeah hedonism. It seemed as if America had simply been waiting for the Beatles.

  “When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, I was fourteen years-old. I’m in the biggest part of the baby-boom generation. And we felt that something was taken away from us. A certain hope, a certain idealism, something that was ours. Because what Kennedy – whether he was a good president or not – represented was youth and progress and the new. When Lyndon B. Johnson became president, the old political thing came back. Everybody became very cynical. We were Cold War kids and kind of lost. In February 1964, that is only two months later, who comes to America? The Beatles. And they represented youth, the new, originality. They came from this little shitty town called Liverpool and they were rock stars…we all went crazy and we all became pop music fans. Millions and millions of young people were influenced by this. I think that was the beginning of a huge wave, the golden era for rock and pop music. Anyone could be a successful musician.”

  And it wasn’t just Billy who was electrified by the four lads from Liverpool: They looked so refreshingly different to the old stars from New York, Nashville and Hollywood; they were irreverent and funny and made outrageously infectious music. The guys were young and didn’t take anything seriously, not even themselves. That was something that particularly appealed to the pubescent boy from Hicksville.

  He was going through his rebellious phase and was looking to find affinity and approval in a clique of peers with whom he’d hang around in the neighborhood streets and parks. As a member of the Parkway Green Gang, Billy drank cheap red wine, sniffed glue and did his best to pick up girls: “We used to sneak off to find Italian-style clothes, tight black shirts and stuff. Some guys had the really pointy shoes, casino pants. Me? I was one of those crew-cut guys with white sneakers. That was before punks, before greasers. ‘Punk’ was an insult. ‘Whaddya mean, I’m a punk? I’m a hitter.’ We didn’t really know what to call ourselves. We thought we were just cool.”48