Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  Win’s reply, given the conventions of the time, is loving and generous. She thanks him for his understanding: “My dearest, it was certainly not your fault; it has always been man’s privilege to be weak in those things, just as it has for ever been woman’s duty to be strong. You simply accepted your privilege, while I failed lamentably in my duty, so it is I who come to you and ask your forgiveness, my dear one.” She goes on to say how much stronger their marital bonds will be for “fighting our battles together.”

  This is the same letter in which she laments not being a man. She was referring to men’s pleasures in university life. But there could be another way of reading this sentiment. She might, consciously or not, have tired, at least once in a while, of her duty to be strong.

  To fight against sexual temptation was for most people, especially of their background, the norm. Bernard was surely right when he said, less in his own defense than as a statement of fact, that his friskiness was “one of the natural results of a very lengthy engagement.” The physical longing that must have tormented both of them is beyond the imagination of men and women grown up after the middle of the twentieth century, for whom delayed gratification is merely a waste of time. But this may not be in every respect a gain. The passion felt by Win and Bernard is perhaps equally beyond the comprehension of those who have never experienced such yearning.

  —

  In the end, after much dithering on her part and encouragement on his, Win did go to Oxford, to St. Hilda’s Hall, founded in 1893 as a college for women. Among her letters is a large photograph, taken in 1924, of Win sitting with faculty and students in the senior common room. As one of the shortest people present, Win is seated in the second row, behind a number of taller women sitting on the ground. Nothing in her rather shy demeanor suggests that she was actually the president of the SCR. She has dark rings under her eyes, suggesting sleeplessness. The hairstyle of the time, thick mops of hair brushed back rather severely from the parting, and the college look of blue blazers and sensible sweaters, does not flatter the students lined up for the official photograph. They look distinctly dowdy.

  That Win was the exact contemporary at Oxford of Evelyn Waugh and his circle of aesthetes seems extraordinary. They were worlds apart. While the Old Etonian dandies of Christ Church were hopping into one another’s beds, declaiming modern poetry through megaphones, and rolling around drunk in the quad, Win and her friends were singing in choirs, punting on the river, and enjoying “cocoa evenings” in their rooms.

  Still, something of the languid atmosphere of Oxford seeps into her letters once in a while, despite her innocence compared to the aesthetes. Here she is on “May Morning,” the traditional revelry after all-night balls, when the new day is heralded by hymn-singing from the top of Magdalen Tower: “Upon the stroke of six from the Magdalen bell, there was a breathless hush, as instantly the melody broke forth upon the morning air, and floated down to us, clear and thin. The minute the hymns were over, there was a wild stampede of punts, canoes, scullers, each making tracks for a coveted breakfast spot . . . The river was crowded and it was like a summer’s day, everybody in flannels and bright clothes. We looked a disgrace and behaved very badly—sucking oranges through sugar in the face of the public and smoking, which is strictly forbidden” (May 5, 1922).

  Win read modern languages, but concentrated on German literature rather than French. She must already have been reasonably fluent in German when she chose that subject for her school exams, along with classics and math. Apart from a fondness for reading stories to us from Struwwelpeter (Shockheaded Peter) when we were children, which we enjoyed, and the plots of Wagner’s operas, which we didn’t, she never showed a particular devotion to German literature, so far as I can remember. But she does mention, in a letter written on October 19, 1919, that she was “working up” one or two “stiff books” for her examinations. She chose Heinrich Heine’s Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (Religion and Philosophy in Germany), a “hefty work,” she declares, “but awfully interesting.”

  May Ball

  Win’s relationship with Germany and the German language was ambivalent, as one might expect. As long as I knew her, she always expressed a healthy British disdain for the native country of her parents. The first German expression I became aware of, I think, was Schadenfreude, taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, something Win described to us many times as a particularly German characteristic.

  Children from mixed marriages or children of immigrants seldom adopt an attitude of complete cultural neutrality. It is easier now that mixed marriages in many Western cities are becoming the norm rather than the exception. But people in previous generations often felt the need to choose, and would identify with one half of their “identity” by excessively disparaging the other. In the case of Bernard and Win, Germany’s behavior made it rather easy for them to plump wholeheartedly for the country of their birth. My own life owes a great deal to their choices, since my often rosy-hued view of England was to some degree a caricature of theirs—a caricature of a caricature, really.

  The fiercely anti-German sentiments of the British had not disappeared just a few years after the war. Yet Win’s correspondence still sends mixed signals. In August 1920, she was spending a holiday with her parents and her sister, Margaret (Meg), at a hotel on the coast of Devon. She eyes the empty dance floor wistfully and is reminded of Bernard’s absence. With him, or any man, in the party, she thinks that “we should soon get to know other people, but Margaret and I alone never will, I fear. Mother and father are naturally rather shy and retiring people and more so under present circumstances.” These circumstances clearly had nothing to do with being Jewish and everything with having German accents.

  In late October of that same year, however, she is astonished at how much German is spoken in a play by John Galsworthy, set in an Austrian railway station. “They couldn’t have done that a year or so back,” she remarks. The play she saw, entitled The Little Man, was in fact written in 1913. The theme is practical altruism, as opposed to the merely verbal kind. Win sees the play chiefly as a study of national characteristics: the noisy, verbose Yank, the doltish Dutch boy, the English exchanging discreet smiles at the foolishness of foreigners, and the German, “who is pompous, overbearing and selfish.”

  Win was less sentimental about “family” than Bernard; she was indeed less sentimental about everything, except for her devotion to him, which I hesitate to call sentimental. Family visits to Kassel were regarded as a duty rather than as a pleasure. But her account of a visit in July 1920 to Uncle Adolf Alsberg, a well-to-do surgeon who worked on X-rays with the famous Dr. Röntgen, Cousin Franz the philosopher, Tante Dele, and others is fascinating on many levels.

  This was only two years after the most devastating war in the history of man. She is delighted to see that German officials have become much friendlier than before the war, to the point of being almost obsequious: bags are checked only casually and with a smile, stationmasters see to the foreign traveler’s every comfort. British soldiers, still stationed in the occupied Rhineland, wave them through passport control, “perhaps because we were countrymen of theirs.”

  When Win and her brother, Walter, arrive in Kassel, they are immediately “surrounded and slobbered over by seething masses of relatives.” Walter, not normally a placid man, is behaving “like a lamb,” and although “some of the people are far from tactful in their remarks, he and I are taking it all philosophically and smothering our sentiments. After all it is only a fortnight, and we are being as quiet and amiable and affectionate as good little nieces and nephews should be.”

  As to the possible nature of these remarks, and Walter’s response to them, I shall come to that presently.

  In spite of some obvious hardships due to the past war, such as an acute shortage of coal, so that even prosperous families such as the Alsbergs in Kassel can have hot baths only twice a week, Win is
stunned by the elegance and comfort of their lives. The food is excellent, “Onkel” Adolf’s house is “palatial,” fitted with every modern appliance and exquisitely furnished with “a glorious collection of pictures and antique furniture and marvellously blended carpets.” Ah, she exclaims, “People here do understand real comfort . . . far better than they do in England.”

  Standing on the balcony of this palatial house, Win gazes at the “glorious countryside” with the “ex-Kaiser’s ‘Schloss’ bang in the centre of the view,”* and she is struck by the “bitter irony” that “six years of such stirring disaster could pass over the world and yet leave all this just as it was, lying there so serenely, and peacefully, and we here just the same as ever, gazing at it all, and the old Schloss smiling at us in the same old way, although it has changed hands now. I am thankful that nature can withstand so much, aren’t you?”

  This was on July 7, 1920. After 1945, the Schloss, Uncle Adolf’s house, and most of Kassel had been flattened by bombs, and none of the relatives who stayed in Germany had survived Hitler’s Reich; a large and hideous real estate company stands on the spot of the house today.

  On July 11, Win’s tone changes sharply. “My own beloved,” she begins, “I am so home-sick for you, and I haven’t had a single syllable to comfort me.” She is “longing for England again, although [the relatives] are all fearfully good to us here.” Then comes a familiar complaint: “They are so horribly brainy, and I can’t follow them in all their intellectual flights, philosophical, literary, and religious . . . I thank heaven daily that you are not one of these genii with an abnormal portion of grey matter, but that you are a normal, cheerful, warm-hearted man with a sense of humour and human understanding. These people are all in the first place philosophers and ‘Gelehrter’ [scholars] and in second place human beings and family men, and they are all so earnest—they hardly know how to laugh and they can’t take life lightly.”

  Having struggled myself with the highly abstract language of Franz Rosenzweig’s theological works, I can see why Win grew a little impatient. I also recognize her sentiments in those of her eldest son, my uncle John, the film director. This highly educated man (Balliol College, Oxford) was always going on about “intellectuals,” as though they were enemies trying to oppress him or make him feel inferior. I was an “intellectual” in his eyes, and forgiven for this flaw only because I was his nephew. But this attitude had more to do with his artistic temperament. He stressed his instinctive qualities, which were, in his defensive view, beyond the understanding of critics and others who lived by their intellect. In Win’s case, something else was at play, something directly related to her idea of being English. For it is an old patriotic prejudice, going back at least to the eighteenth century, that the true son of Roast Beef and Old England is blessed with instinctive common sense, a humorous disposition, and human decency, while the Frenchman is affected and the German abstract and ponderous.

  Her brother, Walter, was always regarded as the highbrow in the family. My mother was rather afraid of him, worried that some intellectual insufficiency on her part would be exposed. Some of her brothers and sisters felt rather the same. My uncle Roger in particular, the cricketer in the family, was disapproved of as a sportsman, and thus a bit of a philistine.

  I liked Uncle Walter (I never called him “Great-Uncle”), a barrister and judge by profession. We would have earnest conversations in the kitchen of his house in Hampstead, in the street where Sigmund Freud once lived, about God and the meaning of life, while his wife, Aunty Dora, was in the living room with her female companion. Uncle Walter’s own sexual proclivities were ambiguous and probably never acted upon; he did have a lifelong penchant for work with troubled youths, and was reputed to show a certain leniency in court toward handsome young men. Walter and Dora produced six children. It was an eccentric household.

  On their visit to Kassel in 1920, there clearly had been an unpleasant confrontation between Walter and his cousin Franz Rosenzweig, who was then busy setting up a center for Jewish learning in Frankfurt. How to forge an authentic, unapologetic Jewish identity in the mainstream of German society was his life’s work. This unsettled Walter, who had converted to Anglicanism just at the time when his cousin had resisted a similar temptation. The story I was always told is that Franz decided against such a move, even as he was about to step into a church. This is not actually what happened. He had indeed decided to become a Christian, in 1913, but he wanted to do so as a Jew. Like his British relatives, he grew up in a nonreligious family who believed in assimilation. His closest friend was a Jew who had converted. So instead of stepping into a church, Franz first entered a synagogue in Berlin on Yom Kippur. That is when he decided that he would remain true to the faith of his ancestors after all. Unusually for a German Jew, Rosenzweig was much taken by the Polish Jews he had met during the war. They seemed happier in their skins, more genuine than middle-class German Jews, whom, in a letter to his mother, Franz called “degenerate parvenus.”*

  Referring to their unhappy encounter in Kassel, Walter sent a letter to Franz more or less apologizing for his hostility, but still accusing Franz of being humorless, too theoretical, and morbid. But a more extraordinary exchange followed three years later, in November 1923, when Walter explained why he became a Christian and a socialist. He believed that only the universal spirit of Christ would finally do away with racial, religious, and national divisions. This line of thinking was not entirely original. There were many Jews who thought that Marxism would perform the same miracle. With Walter’s letter came a long essay, which managed to be both facile and pompous. It is entitled The Jews.

  It is in this essay that some of Win’s sentiments about the family in Kassel are most clearly echoed, albeit in a somewhat more robust fashion. “The Englishman,” Uncle Walter intones, “takes his cold dip in the early morning, when the hoar-frost glitters on the lawns, plays his game of football in the blinding rain, and stands half the day in the deep field, roasting in the sun, just waiting to stop a cricket ball; and the Jew, with a self-satisfied shrug of his shoulders, sits at his office desk and smiles—‘Let them do it,’ he thinks, ‘if it amuses them; personally I am much better employed here and infinitely more comfortable.’”

  It is possible that a certain irony is intended here, which would almost surely have been lost on Rosenzweig. But I’m not sure irony was Walter’s strong suit either. He continues, “But perhaps he [the Jew] is wrong . . . even today the mingy little man loses in personality what he gains in intellect; and while the brainless giant may be a pompous ass, the self-assertive dwarf is as often considered a bumptious little worm. And that is precisely what we, alas, too easily become, when we allow the spirit excessive liberties with the flesh.”

  These are astonishing words, coming from a man who never voluntarily stopped a cricket ball in his life—indeed, one of the family legends, conveyed to me by my mother, was that “ball play was forbidden in Uncle Walter’s house.”

  He goes on, lecturing his brilliant German cousin: “Those of us who have been to an English Public School or have served in the Great War, have begun to realise this, for we have been taught to develop body and mind in their right proportions, and have at least had the opportunity of seeing and appreciating the other point of view.”

  In Walter’s case appreciation turned into complete assimilation. It was time, he argued, to discard the “mad, antiquated and unworthy” Jewish belief in their status as the chosen ones and melt into the bosom of Christ.

  Rosenzweig dictated an exquisitely polite riposte, dated December 28, 1923. He was not at all surprised to hear about the turn his cousin’s life had taken. That was in the cards ever since his parents decided to send him to an English boarding school. Had he converted with an eye on worldly advantage? Not consciously, to be sure. “However,” writes Franz, “that there are certain advantages which you will hardly be able to avoid, is beyond question.”

  As far
as Walter’s essay on the Jews is concerned, Franz strongly advises him not to publish it. In his words, “Jews have every right to criticize Jewishness harshly. And Christians can be as stupid about Judaism as they like. But a Jew who gets baptized cannot be in either camp. For on this topic, no one will believe him.”

  Walter’s mother, my great-grandmother Anna Alsberg, whom I can just about remember as a kindly old lady who served us high tea in her flat in St. John’s Wood and spoke English with an accent, followed her son into the Anglican Church.

  Win did not. She resisted any organized faith, even though in the last years of her life she regularly accompanied Bernard to the Liberal* Jewish synagogue in Oxford. As a young woman she slightly disapproved of Bernard’s residual loyalty to the religion he had been brought up in. There is a humorous reference to their differences in a letter sent on September 21, 1920, by Bernard from the Regina Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he was on holiday with his parents. Holidays abroad were taken quite regularly by the Schlesinger family, mostly in Switzerland, a country of which Bernard would remain deeply fond for the rest of his life.

  He thanks Win for sending them a tin of proper English tea: “You saved our lives with it as the Swiss stuff is no better than hay.” He then announces that he will be fasting on the following day—“Day of Atonement, you know.” She might well not have known. He continues, “Watch her disapproving face! Still, I am ready to uphold my personal view to the whole Regensburg family severally, or collectively . . . Never mind, Win, in future years when I’ve trolled off to one of my yearly visits to Synagogue and have sent you off with a friend to get a square meal somewhere, I won’t forget to put in a good word for you.”