by Ian Buruma
The story of my family, on the British side, is a story of assimilation. When Voltaire suggested that we should start planting coconuts, he was talking only about laws and institutions. But those who believe that political or legal institutions merely reflect only native traditions tend to be suspicious of assimilation. Immigrants, or the children of immigrants, are often suspected of having weak or divided loyalties. They wouldn’t be prepared to die for their country, for it isn’t, so to speak, in their blood. To prove such accusations wrong, some “assimilated” Jews have gone out of their way to hide or deny their family histories. At times, this was demanded of them. I think the fact that my grandparents did not, on the whole, feel obliged to do so explains their British patriotism. But they were discreet about their background, which may have been another sign of their Britishness—I hesitate to say Englishness—or it may point to a sense of unease that never quite went away.
Hermann Regensburg was, so far as I know, not an Anglophile while he was growing up. The Regensburgs were solid, middle-class Jews who wanted nothing more than to be solid, middle-class Germans. Hermann’s father changed his name from Loeb to Leopold and gave his children solid German names—Adolf, Hermann, Moritz. German Jews often went in for names with a Wagnerian ring: Sigmund and Siegfried were typical examples. The Regensburgs were not religious, but to have taken the final step toward assimilation and convert would have seemed abject to them. To wish to be German was natural. To profess a faith in Christ would have smacked of opportunism.
Culture, not religion, was the Regensburg business. Quite literally. Leopold sold musical instruments. If you needed a piano, you went to Regensburg in the Schnurgasse. But music was more than a business; it was a sign of education, Bildung. To be educated—to know your German classics, to be musical—was the secular route to assimilation. Jews would not just adopt German culture, they would be its guardians. Culture, especially music, took the place of religion; in some ways it was a religion. That may be why so many Jews loved Wagner, whose art was elevated, not least by the composer himself, into a religious cult. Although Wagner’s Teutonic paganism was streaked with Christianity, you did not have to be Christian to be swept away by it.
The problem for people like the Regensburgs was that German nationalism, fueled by Wagnerian mythology, pseudoscientific flimflam, and economic anxiety, was becoming overtly racialist toward the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the most poisonous racial nonsense was promoted by an English Wagnerian, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who settled in Bayreuth and became a German citizen in 1916, by which time my great-grandfathers had long gone and their sons were at war with their fathers’ native land.
Wagner himself, like Luther, still believed that a Jew could, as he put it with customary charm, “annihilate” his Jewishness by repudiating his ancestry, converting, and worshiping at the shrine of Bayreuth. So in theory a Jew could be a German. Some (perhaps more than some) Jews took this all too seriously. A man named Joseph Rubinstein, from the Russian city of Kharkov, begged Wagner to cure him of his “wretched” Jewish condition. Wagner apparently took a kind interest in the young man’s misfortune. But to the mystical chauvinists, like Chamberlain, who took a tribal view of Germanness, even radical, Wagnerian assimilation could never be enough: the Jew was an alien virus to be purged from the national bloodstream. The more a Jew took on the habits and thoughts of his gentile compatriots, the more he was to be feared. One of the first measures under the Third Reich was to force Jews to add the name Israel or Sarah to their other names, so there could be no more misunderstanding.
I have a photograph of one of my other great-grandfathers, Richard Schlesinger, also from Frankfurt, also an emigrant to Britain. The photograph was taken sometime in the late 1870s, in the studio of Otto van Bosch, “royal court photographer, Frankfurt and Paris.” Richard is dressed in the yellow and blue uniform of a Prussian soldier, his mustache curled in the military style. His face is set in an expression of manly fortitude that now looks theatrical: the attempt of a German Jew to adopt the Wilhelminian swagger. He must have tried his very best, Richard Schlesinger: patriot, soldier, and ardent enthusiast of Wagner’s music. And yet Richard was never given a commission. When he enquired about this, an officer expressed surprise at the young man’s naïveté. “But surely you must understand: you are a Jew.” Richard’s feeling of rejection must have been deep enough for it to become embedded in family lore. It is one of the few stories he left behind, as a warning of patriotism betrayed.
The situation for German Jews became more difficult after the stock market crash of 1873. Leopold Regensburg was no longer alive. He died in 1871, when Hermann was only twelve, the victim of a smallpox epidemic spread by Prussian troops passing through town after their victory at Sedan. The stock market crash, and its consequences, were blamed on greedy Jewish speculators. Officially, Jews still enjoyed all the rights of gentiles. Unofficially, army commissions and high-ranking jobs in government service were almost always out of reach. You could prosper in the cities, in business, journalism, the “free professions,” or the arts, but full assimilation remained elusive, no matter how hard you tried. Trouble was always lurking in the German forest. When Jews got together in public places, especially in small towns, they kept their voices down and said “Italians” when they spoke of Jews.
Such was the atmosphere when Hermann and Adolf were invited to tea by two elderly English ladies who were living in Frankfurt, because life was cheaper there and they could manage on their modest English incomes. The Regensburgs practiced their English, ate homemade cakes, and played croquet on the lawn. Perhaps the ladies’ hospitality reinforced the common image of England as a civilized country that was good for the Jews. Had not England, at the peak of its power, had a Jewish prime minister? A Jewish earl, no less. The English gentleman, with his fine clothes and his fine manners, was a figure to look up to. Not only did he rule the world, but he was honest and believed in fair play. An English gentleman, so it seemed to many Jews all over Europe, was something to be.
One of the most extraordinary Anglophiliac documents about life in Wilhelminian Germany was written by a German Jew named Willy Ritter Liebermann von Wahlendorf. He was only a few years younger than Richard Schlesinger and Hermann Regensburg and wrote his memoirs in London, in 1936. He couldn’t resist calling it Mein Kampf, a title his posthumous publishers wisely dropped.*
Liebermann came from a much grander family than the Schlesingers or the Regensburgs. His father was a retired industrialist with an aristocratic title, a famous art collection, and connections with the kaiser himself. Max Liebermann, the painter, was a cousin, as was Walther Rathenau, the industrialist, who kept the German economy going during the First World War. Rathenau’s patriotism was repaid after the war with the slogan “Shoot down Walther Rathenau, the Goddamned Jewish swine!” A gang of right-wing zealots proceeded to do just that in 1922, by lobbing a hand grenade into his open limousine and shooting off an automatic gun as he passed down the Königsallee near his house in Berlin.
Willy Liebermann was a typical upper-class Berlin buck: scarred in student duels, dressed in elegant English suits, endowed with an unlimited supply of cash, and able to indulge his taste for horses and fine women, he cut a dash in high society—that is to say, mostly Jewish high society. Even at the highest level, borderlines were still observed. That even the Jewish grandees of Berlin, with their dueling scars, their wealth, and their patriotism, were keeping, or rather, were kept much to themselves, is rather astonishing. But perhaps this says more about Berlin at the time than about Germany. Gentile high society consisted mostly of Prussian Junkers, some of whom married Jewish girls for the money, but who otherwise would have had little in common with the more cultured Jews.
In 1886 Liebermann was called up to serve in a Prussian cavalry regiment as a private. And like Richard Schlesinger, he remained a private, even though his gentile contemporaries became officers within weeks of joining. The leader of his squadron, Captain Macke
nsen, didn’t bother to hide his contempt for Jews. Liebermann was forced to eat alone, while the other recruits were invited to the captain’s table. Stung in his Prussian sense of honor, Liebermann did what came naturally to him and challenged his captain to a duel. Always a gentleman, he aimed at the captain’s legs. Mackensen aimed at Liebermann’s head. Liebermann’s bullet hit home, the captain’s didn’t. Liebermann was charged with the crime of dueling with a superior officer.
While his case was pending, Liebermann escaped for a short holiday to Belgium. He played the casinos in Ostende, lounged around the salons of Brussels, and stayed with his beloved Uncle Eduard, an old Anglophile, who had made his fortune as a stockbroker in London. One night in Ostende, Willy’s cousin gave him some advice. Not having taken it, Willy wrote in 1936, was “the greatest blunder of my life, which was not lacking in stupidities.” Willy, the cousin said, you have a long life ahead of you. You are a fine young man. You’ve had your experience with the German army. Don’t build your life on illusions. The Germans are never grateful. “There is but one country,” he continued, “where people like you can live a free and respectable life as ‘independent gentlemen.’ It’s the only country where you will be happy, because the English are gentlemen and the only people who judge individuals by their inner worth.”
Perhaps the English ladies, living on their “competences” in Frankfurt, gave similar advice to Adolf and Hermann. Or perhaps it was simply the promise of greater opportunies that first drew Adolf to London. The family music business didn’t outlive Leopold by many years. After Adolf became Ad and had acquired his Nash house in Regent’s Park, with his “Lady Ad,” he encouraged his brother to follow suit.
But Hermann always remained Hermann, living in a more modest house in Hampstead, with a wife named Anna, from Kassel. Anna Alsberg came from a similar milieu of secular, educated German Jews. Her people lived so far from the Jewish tradition that Anna’s nephew, the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, began to have serious doubts about the consequences of assimilation. After almost converting to Christianity himself, he realized that German Jews were striving so hard to conform to Wagner’s prescription of denial that Judaism might disappear altogether. He tried to stop this erosion by teaching other middle-class German Jews to observe Jewish law. Already paralyzed by progressive sclerosis, he worked for years on a new German translation of the Bible. It was a mercy for him that he died in 1929, before the almost total destruction of German Jewry began.
My great-grandfathers made their living on the London Stock Exchange, that institution Karl Marx, among other anti-Semites, identified with Jewish money worship, and Voltaire praised as the symbol of English tolerance. In fact, for many immigrants the stock exchange was but a means to an end that had proven impossible in the country they had left behind: assimilation with dignity. If they could not feel entirely British themselves, their children could, or so it was hoped. My great-grandparents lived in that peculiar North London world of German émigrés who spoke English to one another, ate roast beef on Sundays, sent their sons to public schools, and listened to Beethoven and Wagner. Bildung, in the sense of self-improvement through high culture, was one thing from the old country they transferred to their children, and indeed grandchildren. That, and a particular ideal of the Englishman, fastidious in his dress, gentlemanly in his manners, and imbued by a unique sense of fair play. Some immigrants paid tribute to this ideal by dressing, or speaking, or behaving with an excessive degree of courtliness and care that might be described as theatrical, and perhaps even rather un-English.
Of the two great-grandfathers, Richard was the more successful businessman. Otherwise, his life remains obscure. He attended the same school in Frankfurt as Hermann Regensburg, came to London at roughly the same time, and moved in the same North London circles. While Hermann revered Beethoven, Richard loved Wagner. But unlike Hermann, Richard was of the Orthodox faith. My mother had only fearful memories of him, because by the time she knew him, he could speak only in a hoarse whisper and drooled down his shirt. He died in 1940 of Parkinson’s disease.
He lies buried in the Orthodox cemetery in North London, a spot that is now surrounded by mostly Caribbean and Asian neighborhoods. His grave is marked by a simple gray granite slab with his name and date of birth, next to a similar slab marking the grave of his wife, Estella, who was born in Manchester. Not far from their graves is a brick wall, separating the Orthodox from the liberal Jews. I visited on a gray, wet day and felt oddly unmoved by the occasion. It was an exclusive cemetery, an enclave of the faithful. This was not a place I could ever be buried in. The straight lines of tombs, some of them topped with lugubrious, shrouded figures, gave the impression of rigid order, even in death. As I walked past the graves, I listened to the Indian music wafting over the wall from a Hindu festival nearby.
There is only one person alive with clear memories of Richard—my grandfather’s cousin, Marjorie Schwab. She was well into her nineties when I went to see her at a private retirement home in the New Forest. There was something almost German about the area: woody smells of birch and pine, families with knobbly sticks walking briskly on the forest paths, village shops selling rustic souvenirs, horny penknives, and the like. Marjorie’s room was in a pleasant two-story house, surrounded at discreet distances by similar homes. Inside, there was a faint smell of detergent. There were ramps for wheelchairs and an electric lift going up and down the stairs with an efficient whirring sound.
I had not seen Marjorie for more than thirty years. It felt strange to be greeted by a balding, elderly lady who looked remarkably like my grandfather. We talked about cricket, in which she took a deep interest. She spoke rather brusquely in the slight northern accent of her native Manchester. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she said. “All I remember of Richard is that he wore a bottle-green suit.” What was he like? “The suit?” No, my great-grandfather. “Oh, very German, very German.” I pressed her for more. “Great stickler for rules. Always had to have rules. Everyone was terrified of him.”
And that, really, was more or less that. It was as if his life was now lost forever, like a hard drive being deleted on a computer. I asked Marjorie whether her family had come from Germany too. It was a stupid question. I should have known better. She was an Ellinger. The Ellingers had been in Manchester for at least two generations. “Oh, no!” she said, sounding a bit miffed. “Very British. Can’t bear the Germans. Went on holiday there once, a trip along the Rhine. Loathed it.” We resumed our conversation about cricket.
MY GRANDPARENTS Bernard Schlesinger and Winifred (“Win”) Repensburg were as British as German Jews were German. That is to say, it was not understated. They liked to be seen to be British, to prove their loyalty, even perhaps to themselves. “Blighty,” Bernard wrote in a letter to Win from France in 1918, was “the really one and only country.” He was eighteen when he volunteered, straight from school, as a soldier in 1915. The next year, he was a stretcher-bearer in the Royal Westminster Rifles, carrying men with stinking wounds through the slimy trenches around the Somme. It was an experience he never talked about, even though he passed on mementos of that war to me. As a boy, I cherished his brass buttons, his field dressing pack, and his badges as though they were relics. Bernard volunteered again in 1939, when he was in his forties, and again, to be held in reserve, in 1948, during the Berlin blockade, and again in 1957, and finally, once again, in 1963, when he was told, very politely, that at his age there really would be no more need for him to defend his country physically.
I read the early letters, written during World War I, when Bernard and Win were still pining partners in a love match of which his protective parents disapproved, with particular fascination. I wanted to know how past and present might have been in conflict. It cannot always have been easy, after all, to fight an enemy nation whose citizens included one’s own relatives. One of the more remarkable aspects of the Great War is how letters between British and German branches of the family continued to be exchanged un
til the end. Yet the anti-Hun hysteria that swept across Britain was fiercer than in World War II. I looked for signs of it in the letters. But Bernard and Win seem to have kept a dignified distance from the general mood, without ever doubting which side they were on.
In a letter from school, in the spring of 1915, Bernard reports to Winifred: “In orchestra we are doing all English music. Its quite pretty some of it. [The music master] calls it ‘healthy.’ Why this epithet I cannot imagine. I wonder if now he considers Beethoven—night-marey & Brahms—indigestible.” This he still found mildly amusing. When he heard that his cello teacher, “an awful sport who has been at Uppingham 17 years & far longer than the beastly old Head Master is going to be given the sack because he is a naturalized German,” he was disgusted.
Later that year he tells a story that suggests not so much divided loyalty as anxiety in the family. In his typically breezy tone—he had not yet been sent to the Somme—Bernard describes the visit to his parents’ house in London of a man named Wulston Holmes. Holmes was a marvel of improvisation on the piano. He played anything you wanted: waltzes, polkas, Schubert, Beethoven, music-hall ditties, anything. Bernard asked him whether he could improvise a funeral march. No problem. It was, writes Bernard, “an uplifting funeral march which would really make you die a cheerful death.” The effect on his father, Richard, was, naturally, disturbing. “Father looked rather glum at the end of it & so I asked him if for father’s benefit he would play an antiwar tonic. A romping, cheery piece was immediately forthcoming & even father forgot the war for a few minutes.” One would have liked to know more. Who is to say what went through Richard’s mind, but he must have viewed his son’s innocent zeal to fight for king and country with a degree of ambivalence.
