During a visit with my father a few months before he died, we spent a great deal of time talking about his father, Carl. The closer Dad came to the end of his life, the more he seemed to want to talk about his own father.
My father was only 16 when he found Carl dead in the furnace room of the home to which he had been relegated for years, left alone with only his beloved art collection. His non-Jewish wife who, by her sheer existence had protected him from Nazi evacuation, was now dead and his half-Jewish children had been sent to labor camps or to live with relatives. Orphaned by 16, my father never had an adult relationship with his own father. In my opinion, Thomas remained forever Carl’s child, looking for his approval.
At one point, Dad asked me to follow him into his office. We’d been talking about Carl and he wanted to show me where I could find more information “when the time comes.” Dad’s gait was slow and unsteady and he leaned heavily on a cane that he had recently begun to use.
I remember vividly that as I walked slowly behind my father, I asked him somewhat nonchalantly, “Dad, do you ever feel that your father is still watching you now, seventy-five years later, aware of everything you do and everything you even think – and that he’s still judging you?” It had become obvious to me, as Dad began to open up more and more about his past, that this was true. Unlike our children, who had quite appropriately shed the need for constant parental approval as they grew from children to teens to adults, the sudden death of Carl when his son was still young, prevented this natural, healthy transition and, as a result, my dad was forever “stuck.”
Dad stopped suddenly and stood motionless in front of me, his back hunched over, looking from behind like an old, frail man. He turned slightly toward me so I could only partially see his face, which which now looked especially gaunt and pale. He paused and stared silently at the floor for an uncomfortably long time, then took a deep breath.
“Yes, Carol, I do. I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but I think you might be right.” Now he looked directly at me. “Yes… yes.” I realized then that this had never occurred to my father. This was a revelation for him.
He slowly walked into his office and sat in his chair, ruffling a few papers on his desk. “I forgot what I was going to show you,” he said.
In 1996, my father was asked to contribute to a book about the neighborhood in which he grew up in Chemnitz, called Der Kassberg. That book now sits on my shelf. This is what I found folded and inserted into the pages of the book.
And here’s the book and the essay Thomas wrote about Carl (photos added by me).
“Remembering My Father Carl Heumann
Can memory be trusted? Having lived for a half century on another continent, I find myself today in a twilight where memories are beginning to fade, but where legend has not yet turned into myth. In March 1945, at the age of sixteen, I had to bury my father before I had had a chance to understand him as a human being. Since then, I have created for myself a picture in which some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces fit tolerably well together, but which has not yet matured into a totally satisfying portrait.
He was, in all his humbleness and simplicity, too complex a person for that.
Both of my parents were Romanticists. My mother wanted me to become a "bridge builder," a purely ideological thought for her; she had no idea that a Structural Engineer is something considerably more prosaic than her idealized image of building bridges between people and nations. My father would have liked to see me as a pastor somewhere out in the country. Visualize, it you will, an idyllic engraving by Ludwig Richter: sitting on a wooden bench in front of the house, a dog by my feet, smoking a pipe, sunset time. It was probably this leaning toward the idealistic which led my father to collect German Romanticist art.
Imagine the irony: a cosmopolitan businessman, a banker, born as a Jew, chooses the most German of all German periods in art - Romanticism! One has to have lived abroad for a while to become aware of the specific "Germanness" of this art: precise in its mannerism of "the jagged oakleaf and rounded beech leaf technique,” esthetic without exception, idealistic, but also well-behaved and sentimental, pedantic and confined. One becomes more cynical.
How deeply-felt was my father's conviction that, contrary to the Nazis, he was a good German? In 1938, when the intentions of the Regime became obvious to anyone, my father's two younger brothers fled to the USA and tried to convince him to join them. Tragically, his German way of thinking joined his idealism which, in retrospect at least, seems almost naïve: I have served in the World War and earned a Distinguished Service Medal, I am a Christian, highly respected in the community, I have never done anything illegal, I am married to an Aryan and therefore live in a "privileged mixed marriage” - they can't touch me! Not much later, this man, who in his innermost being was a German Romanticist, was branded a "Jewish enemy of the people" by the Nazis along with all other Germans born to Jewish parents.
He remained in “his" Germany, spoke "his" language, remained true to "his" culture and education, and disrupted the daily life of his family as little as possible.
After the Nazis forced him out of his bank, he undertook veritable pilgrimages to the places in Italy where, 150 years earlier, a group of friends called "Romano-Germans" had spent so much time and created so much of their art, from Olevano, to the Campagna, to the Abruzzi. As his freedom of movement was more and more curtailed, and as his dignity was subjected to increasing insults, he retreated more and more into the sanctity of his study. The more he became isolated from society, and the more people shunned him (or he them, so as not to endanger them through contact with him), the dearer the past became to him. The artists, the painters, the watercolorists of old became his daily contacts. He lived their lives and thinking, their style and even their friendships.
Always dressed in a white collar, tie, and vest, Carl buried himself in the card file, the art cabinets, and the research library, meticulously sharpened pencil and huge white eraser in hand. Or at least so it looked to us children. But we also knew that there was something very uneasy about all this, because he often quoted the fervent refrain from a poem by Clemens Brentano: "Build a wall around us..."
To be on the safe side, he proclaimed himself "a totally apolitical person" to the few people he continued to see or could see. He was not about to become involved in incriminating political discussions. Toward us children, his instinct of self-preservation told him to keep completely quiet about anything political. He probably did not want to burden us with the decisions as to what was OK to repeat "on the outside ,” and what was not. My parents exercised the greatest care to protect us from even knowing about the worries and hardship which they suffered daily, as we learned much later. It is for this reason - and perhaps in contrast to everything that was yet to come - that I remember my childhood in the thirties as a secure haven. I recall vividly the enthusiasm with which my father showed and explained pictures from the collection to us children; the way he would open the huge picture Bible by Schnorr von Karolsfeld, usually in the Old Testament section, to tell us the stories which he believed form an important part of the core of knowledge of an educated person. I also remember the embarrassed curiosity with which we children eyed figure drawings of nudes, but the thing most alive in my memory is the thoughtfulness with which pictures were framed and hung throughout the house. My parents knew that the atmosphere of the pictures, the Biedermeier furniture, the ever-present music, and the library, must shape not only the taste but, in the final analysis, even the outlook on life for their children.
The idyll could not last. Soon the realities encroaching upon the home from the outside became overwhelming. My older brother was not allowed to attend university. My younger sister was not even allowed to start high school. I myself was thrown out of high school halfway through. My father became more and more housebound. Friends and acquaintances either disappeared or stayed away. Soon, loyal and courageous Parson Hoffmann remained the only faithful visitor to the house at ReichsstraBe 10. He, too, was a collector of German Romanticists and an expert on one of their exponents, Ludwig Richter.
The tighter the Nazis wove their web around Jews, the more circumspect my father became. On the one hand, he carefully familiarized himself with the details of the "legal" limits which were imposed on him, and he was meticulous in his care never to violate them. On the other hand, he knew very well which rights remained for him, and he made use of them. He transferred the ownership of the collection to my non-Jewish mother. Holding the office of Vice Consul of the neutral Portugal, I suspect he also exploited the limited amount of protection that office may have afforded him, but I don't know that. In any case, he succeeded in remaining one of the Jews living in "privileged mixed marriages" in Germany who escaped deportation. I like to think, maybe naively so, that his integrity and his incorruptible correctness elevated him somehow above the baseness of the persecution.
Today I myself am a father and grandfather. I have lived a decade longer than he did, and I find myself trying to imagine how painful his last year after the death of my mother must have been. I can't. I cannot identify with the state of mind of a man who lives in an idealized past while the world around him collapses in chaos. I cannot visualize how a man, too impractical to know how to brew a cup of tea, could cope with the improvisations of sheltering a dozen refugees in his house. I try in vain to guess at the anguish of knowing that his two sons were being held in Nazi Labor Camps , their fate becoming more uncertain every day, while normal communications were almost impossible.
On the other hand, I can fully understand that the pictures he kept in the house, even during those climactic final months of the war, were an absolute necessity for his sanity. He had long ago stored the bulk of the collection in bank safes, but he just could not bring himself to take the largest oil paintings off the walls as well.
He also kept one small suitcase at home which held smaller pieces he was working with at the time. That suitcase accompanied him down to the basement shelter during every air raid alert. Eventually it became his fate. During the raid on March 5, 1945, when the house was already in flames and all inhabitants had fled to the outside, he crawled back through the furnace room window to rescue the suitcase. He never reached it. A direct hit of an Allied bomb ended the life of a man who had survived years of humiliation by the Nazis, and whose liberation now finally seemed within reach.
A week later I found him dead in the furnace room.”
By Thomas Heumann
Ashland, OR.
August, 1996
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