by Ian Buruma
The hostel files contain instances of kindness shown by British gentiles. And Walter, in particular, likes to remember how “marvelous” the English people were, despite the fact that he still had to report to the authorities on his sixteenth birthday, as an “enemy alien.” (This would have been roughly at the same time his parents were about to be transported to Auschwitz.) But saving Jews from Germany was essentially a Jewish enterprise, a matter of taking care of “one’s own.”
And yet, despite the occasional yearning for “St. John’s Wood,” I don’t think Jewish solidarity sufficiently explains my grandparents’ rescue mission. They were generous people, and of course aware of family ties in Germany. But it was more than that. It has to do with the lack of irony in Win’s patriotic sentiments, and with their idea of England. Not all immigrants or children of immigrants were helpful when others rapped on the doors. Some Jews, anxious not to lose their places in society, were (and still are) afraid that newcomers, especially poor ones, could mean trouble. But to the Schlesingers the idea of England as a place of refuge was not just propaganda. They believed in it, in the way patriots do who cannot take freedom from persecution for granted. To them, the self-regarding clichés about Britain—fairness, liberty, tolerance, and so on—were not clichés. They cultivated them, in the way educated German Jews cultivated German music, philosophy, and humanism, and more superficial Anglomanes cultivate flowery accents and loud tweeds.
Their most remarkable gesture did not, in fact, concern Jews. The war had finally ended, my grandfather had just returned from India, where he had served as an army doctor, and the family looked forward to their first Christmas in peacetime. After six years of horror, after the sickening details of the German attempt to kill every last Jew had come out, after almost all remaining relatives in Germany had perished, the Schlesingers went to a local POW camp in Berkshire and invited two German soldiers to spend Christmas with them. It cannot have been an easy occasion. My aunt remembers awkwardness, with long gaps in the conversation. But the soldiers never forgot. It was what my grandfather would have thought of as the gentlemanly thing to do.
There was an element of Colonel Blimp in his attitude. In the wartime movie The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Blimp’s German friend, the aristocratic Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, is captured by the British during World War I. After the war is over, Theo is in despair about his country. Before returning to Germany, he has dinner at Blimp’s house, with a gathering of British officers and gentlemen. They reassure him that all will be well and that all England wants is fair play and fair trade. Theo is baffled by these Englishmen. He tells his German comrades that the British gentlemen are children: “Boys! Playing cricket! They win the shirts off our backs and now they want to give them back, because the game is over!”
But my grandfather was not naïve. He knew what the Nazis had done. And he knew he would not have survived in the country of his father. Unlike Blimp, he had to make sure he fitted in, in England, and if others didn’t like it, that was their problem, not his. His Blimpishness was a part of that. It was an attitude that rubbed off on at least some of the hostel children. Walter stayed in Highgate all his life. He feels British. He fits in. He says the British are marvelous. Others fitted in, more or less, elsewhere: Steffie Birnbaum in Israel, Ilse Salomon in the United States. Some never managed to fit in anywhere.
BEING UPROOTED BY force early in life can turn a person into a fearful xenophobe, clinging to the place of refuge like a drowning person to a raft, resentful of others who might wish to climb on too. It can also have the opposite effect. Lore Feig is one of the hostel children who stayed in London, where she lives with her husband, Manek Vajifdar, a Parsee. They met in 1947 at a meeting of the International Friendship League, the kind of well-meaning internationalist organization that flourished then. My grandfather had advised her against the marriage. I was not altogether surprised to hear it. That, too, was part of his Blimpishness. Tolerance, fair play, good manners, these were all to be encouraged, naturally. But marriage to an Indian would have been, well, unwise. His advice was ignored, and he came round eventually. Lore and Manek have two children, both educated at the French lycée in London. One is married to a Frenchman and lives in Paris, the other is in South Africa.
Lore and Manek Vajifdar’s house is located in the perfect English suburb, with flowery gardens, red mailboxes, tall trees, and polite neighbors. Their house is filled with presents and mementoes from foreign exchange students: a Japanese doll here, a Chinese picture there. Lore thinks of the students as a kind of extended international family. She and Manek have, as she puts it, “adopted” them.
Lore is a smartly dressed woman with white hair and beautiful pale skin. She served a lunch of chilled summer soup, meat with rice, and an English pudding. I thought of the questionnaire I had read, describing her, in 1939, as the pampered daughter of cultivated parents. I knew the large, somewhat pompous houses and tree-lined streets of Grünewald, the expensive Berlin suburb where she grew up, and never wanted to go back to, even just to see what it was like. It is difficult to associate Grünewald with violence. It is even harder to associate Barnes, or Highgate, or Hampstead Garden Suburb with violence. The English suburb feels like a refuge inside a country of refuge. But even there, bigotry lurks between the neatly tended flower beds. Lore told me why she sent her daughters to the lycée and not an English school. When Lore went to school in Richmond, during the war, her religious education teachers found it necessary to remind their pupils that “the Jews killed Our Lord.” And her fellow pupils thought Lore was a German spy who sneaked up Richmond Hill at night to send signals to Nazi bombers.
Listening to Lore, I wondered where I fitted in, the grandson of the British couple who saved her life. Lore, born a German, and Manek, a Parsee from Gujerat, were British. I was not, even though my accent was more English than theirs. Lore did not come to England by choice. Nor did Manek. He got stuck during the war. I had chosen London as my home. But national identity is not entirely a matter of choice. It is not the same as citizenship, which can be acquired. And a secular Jewish identity, which, unlike religion, cannot be acquired, is impossible to pin down: a shared facility for fitting in, perhaps? National identity is in any case not only a matter of how we see ourselves, but also how others choose to see us. Lore told me she still hears English people refer to her as a German. It annoys her. “I am not a German,” she said. Then, after a moment’s pause, she said: “Then again, I’m not quite sure what I am.”
On my way home to North London, I thought about the terror that drove so many people to this country and was reminded of a story I once heard from my first publisher. The story was about himself. He came to England from Germany on the Kindertransporte, like Lore, and was sent to an English boarding school. His housemaster, a kindly man, asked him to have a cup of tea in his study. They talked a bit, about this and that, and then the housemaster asked him what he would like to be when he grew up. And the boy answered: “I want to be an English gentleman. I want to be just like Leslie Howard.” The housemaster pondered this for a moment and said, “But my dear boy, he was an Hungarian.”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
DR. PEVSNER
I LIVE IN A STREET IN NORTHWEST LONDON. IT CANNOT BE described as beautiful, or even pretty. One might, at a pinch, say it has “character.” On one side, a row of functional, four-story, late Victorian terraced houses of porridge-colored brick; on the other, two redbrick semidetached houses with greater pretensions to gentility—one actually has a name: St. Aubyn’s. Between St. Aubyn’s and the early-twentieth-century church opposite our house is a shabby garden with a brick shed, where youth clubs gather for “disco nights.”
The church is remarkable only for its monumental ugliness. Porridge colored, like our house, but of a sicklier shade, it rises like a great brick colossus, a turbine factory or a power plant with a neo-Gothic window running down the middle. The vicars of St. Benet are Anglicans of the very highest k
ind: shabbily dressed and somewhat camp. I am told they would rather die than admit women as priests. As they greet their flock on Sunday mornings, cigarettes smoldering in their brown-stained fingers, incense comes wafting through the main door, which normally functions as the goal in street football games. The congregation is largely middle-aged and black: Caribbean cabdrivers, pious housewives, and the like.
Mr. Pooter might once almost have lived in our street. His creator, George Grossmith, was born nearby. But by the time our part of Kentish Town was built, much of the area had acquired a sinister reputation as a slum where messy murders took place. The social class of our street could be fixed with some precision until recent times. It was populated first by English railway clerks, then by working-class Irish families. But by the 1970s, with the arrival of squatters, students, and middle-class gentrifiers, its social makeup became fuzzy. Next to us lives a large Bangladeshi family, whose members are always scrupulously polite when we meet them outside, but scream at one another day and night behind closed doors. On the other side is a shifting population of council tenants, as well as a family from Scarborough whose main occupation, apart from watching television, listening to 1960s rock music, and eating takeaway pizzas, is to patch up dodgy-looking cars.
John Betjeman wrote an affectionate poem about our local main street and its Anglo-Norman parish church, which he described as “curious.” But it’s difficult to imagine our street, let alone the hideous St. Benet, attracting the literary or art historical interest of anybody. Yet there it is, in Dr. Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Buildings of England: He describes the church opposite our house without praise or blame:
St Benet, Lupton Street. By Hare, Bodley’s successor. The chancel 1908, the nave and facade 1927. Tall and aisleless, with long windows above which gables cut into the roof. The type is similar to certain C20 school chapels.
It is not an exciting description. But only Pevsner, the indefatigable recorder of England’s architectural heritage, would have taken the trouble to look at it at all.
The fifty volumes of The Buildings of England, almost all written, as well as edited, by Pevsner himself, are, in their way, as remarkable a document of Anglophilia as Voltaire’s Letters concerning the English Nation. Nothing quite like it had ever been done before. There were county histories, and Murray’s Guides, and Shell Guides, and so on, usually well written and amusing, full of pictures, historical anecdotes, and topographical descriptions. But before Pevsner no one had done a systematic guide to England’s buildings. Pevsner has been criticized for being a German pedant, a dogmatic socialist, and, most oddly, a promoter of English xenophobia, and his guide to England’s architecture is certainly not without personal bias, but he enabled the English to look at themselves, and the places they live and work in, with more knowledge than they ever had before.
The story of Nikolaus Pevsner in England is the story of a refugee and an Anglophile. It is also part of a longer story, which goes back to Voltaire’s coconuts: the clash between nativism and internationalism, between Herder and Voltaire, English conservatism and European radicalism, the trust in reason and the worship of tradition. What makes Pevsner such a remarkable figure is that he exemplified these contradictions without really resolving them. He arrived in Britain as an apostle of modernism, socialism, and European progress and ended up as an admirer of the conservative English “national character.” And he did this from a peculiarly German perspective. It is as though Herder and Voltaire were combined in Pevsner’s Anglophilia. At worst, he was a confused Hegelian, but at best he was a one-man bridge across the English Channel. (The tunnel was built after his time, but he would no doubt have approved of it, as something fitting the spirit of the age.)
I have in front of me a photograph of Pevsner, or N.P. as he was called by his students and friends. It was taken in the winter of 1974. The trees have shed their leaves. N.P. stands in the foreground, dressed in the style of a British don: herringbone tweed jacket, wool waistcoat, checked shirt. The face above the tweed is more Central European: a large nose, pensive eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, a tight, determined mouth; the face of an intelligent man who can’t sit still. His head is tilted, as though in tribute, toward an English perpendicular church, the simple, solid, squat, flat-topped style of which he regarded as the essence of the simple, solid, conservative English character.
Pevsner came to live in Britain for good in 1935, to escape from Nazi persecution. He was technically a Jewish refugee, but he did not think of himself as being particularly Jewish. He was, as his son, Dieter, told me, more German than Jewish.
Pevsner was born in Leipzig in 1902. His paternal grandparents were Russian Jews, but his father, a furrier, had no interest in Judaism, or any other religion, and his mother, an intellectual Anglophile who ran a kind of salon for artists and writers, didn’t either. When N.P. married Lola, whose mother was Jewish and father a Christian, he felt no qualms about becoming a Lutheran, nor did his parents object. Pevsner’s children can remember their parents speaking German to each other at least until the end of the war, and sometimes even after, but they cannot remember any Jewish jokes at the family table, or the common game of Jewish geography, at which my own grandmother excelled: “Is he …? Is she …? … forty-five?”
Pevsner was interested in English art and the English national character before he was forced to leave Germany. The idea of national character was generally in the European air, but in German air in particular. It is always a great temptation to jump to conclusions about national characters by looking at art or buildings. Goethe detected—or thought he did—the honest, spontaneous, Gothic nature of his people in the spires of Strasbourg Cathedral. The Danish architect and author Steen Eiler Rasmussen was convinced that sash windows reflected the essence of the practical English character: windows that never quite fit, ventilating rooms with a permanent draft of fresh air.
My own idea of England is a stuccoed Victorian vicarage with a huge lawn, but as soon as I picture it in my mind, I realize I’m looking at my grandparents’ house, which says more about my own memories than the English character. That is the trouble with national essences, or spirits, or characters: they cannot be pinned down; there are too many associations, personal and historical, to be boiled down into an essence. But Pevsner was obsessed by national character. He was forever chasing it, as though it were a shy, exotic butterfly to be caught in the expert’s net.
Pevsner’s professor of art history at Leipzig was Wilhelm Pinder, a man of great wit and erudition who spent a lifetime tracking down the essence of the German character, not just in fourteenth-century German art, but also in twentieth-century expressionism, and even in Bauhaus architecture. The German national character, he said, was given to abstraction and spiritual extremism—the exact opposite of what his pupil would later describe as the matter-of-fact English character. German art, Pinder believed, was an attempt to make the invisible visible. His mission was not only to define the national character but to make Germans aware of it, through lectures, illustrated books, and popular art historical guides. Art history, to him, was a way to foster national awareness and pride. Others shared this ambition, which led to an extraordinary flowering of serious popular education in Germany. But in some cases, including Pinder’s, brooding about national character also led to an embrace of the Nazi cause. Pinder gave speeches in praise of Hitler in 1933 and 1939, by which time Pevsner was in Merseyside, in an internment camp for enemy aliens, no doubt reflecting on the vagaries of the English character. And yet Pevsner stayed loyal to his professor. His book on European academies of art, published in London during the war, was dedicated to Pinder.
The idea of latching Englishness, or English art, onto a thoroughly German idea was, as we know, not new. In a way, that is what the young Pevsner did in his earliest studies of the English character. It almost amounted to a modern form of Ossianismus or Shakespearomania. Like many young men in the Weimar Republic, he was a modernist. He believed that the clean lines of
Bauhaus architecture and its ideals of well-designed commercial products and good, functional housing for the masses were in the true spirit of the times. The zeitgeist was modernist. Pevsner, like his professor, was a great believer in zeitgeist. The idea was first developed by Hegel, who thought that history was subject to universal laws. One time spirit follows another, in a logical chain of progress. Styles change with the times, along with economic and political conditions. To adopt the style of a previous age was, in Pevsner’s phrase, to commit the crime of “historicism.” But national character (Volksgeist) functions as a kind of recurring leitmotif. Modernism, then, was the inevitable result of everything that had happened before. But it was affected, in different nations, by different national spirits.
Pevsner had already worked out the essence of the English national spirit early on. It was not strikingly original. The English, he wrote in a German paper in 1934, were reserved, pragmatic, realistic, practical, reasonable people. But they could also be prone to strange, poetic fancies. English art excelled in understated portraits, finely observed genre pictures, sharp satire, sometimes with the decorative richness that was typical of Celtic design. But since so much in English art was realistic, it would follow, according to Pevsner, that English rebels would be inclined to move in the opposite direction and escape into the world of dreams and fairy tales. This, too, was based on a Hegelian notion borrowed from Pinder. National character, like the zeitgeist, is subject to a “dialectical process”; it is a synthesis of contradictions. Pinder, and consequently Pevsner, called these “polarities.” So Hogarth, the satirist, Constable, the realist, and Blake, the dreamer, were all quintessentially English.
