A Protected Early Childhood in Chemnitz

 

Grandchildren dearest,

And so it begins: my father’s narrative of his youth as a “Mischling” (half-Jew) in Nazi Germany.

The first five years of my father’s life had nothing at all to do with “Mischling” or “Jew” or “Nazi.” Instead, it was a protected, idyllic, carefree early childhood in a loving, upper-class family in Chemnitz, Germany, about 250 miles south of Berlin in the state of Saxony.  

For me, Chemnitz was a word I’d heard all my life as the place where my father grew up - a “sooty, industrial town,” as he described it - but beyond that knowledge it held no meaning for me whatsoever, especially since it was “off-limits” to most Westerners, as it had become a part of East Germany after the war. Its name had even been changed to Karl Marx Stadt, after communism's most zealous intellectual advocate.

All that changed in early 2018, when I received a letter from Barbara Ludwig, the mayor of Chemnitz, inviting me and “my company” to Chemnitz to celebrate my father and grandfather, who were to be recognized with an art exhibit in their honor following my father’s bequeathal of three pieces from my grandfather’s collection. The city would even pick up the cost of our trip!

‘Whaaaaat?!’ you ask?

That was my reaction, too!

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, my father will introduce us to his Chemnitz. I’ll get back to the story of my Chemnitz later.

“Kamanist’n komm’n”-- that’s the caption Mother gave this photo of me: how a German four--year-old would say “The Communists are coming!” From the balcony of my play room, I could watch the street fights between the Nazis and the Communists below. We lived on Reichs-strasse in Chemnitz, the “Empire Street” of old, I guess, leading from Prague in the south to Leipzig to the north and beyond.

The city of Chemnitz was an industrial city of 350,000 inhabitants, not far from Dresden (the "Florence on the Elbe River") and Leipzig (Bach's City). Chemnitz was pretty ugly and sooty, with smokestacks all over.

What a strange phenomenon memory is! When you know a place before and after a war, two memories stick in your mind: the old one -- the real one! -- is alive and visual. You can close your eyes and walk through it. You can smell the soot and the smoke and the oil. You can feel the excitement of walking to the big drug store downtown, in that side street between the city hall plaza and the main post office -- the only one that has KMnO4 for your chemical experiments. You can hear the screeching of the street car as it goes around the curve, the flange of its wheel rubbing against the track in the roadway. You can feel the apprehension of the air raid sirens possibly sounding an alarm before you get home; well, probably not, because it’s still early in the day. That’s one picture..

The other memory, the fading one, is of the post-war city, a different city, really. Its name is no longer “Chemnitz”; it’s “Karl-Marx-Stadt” now, as if Karl Marx ever had anything to do with Chemnitz!

The drug store is gone now. The entire street is gone, and so are the streets around it, replaced by an open-air bus depot. A wing of City Hall is still standing, restored the best they could. Even Brunner’s bookstore is there, on the street floor of City Hall, but it’s selling different books now. Very different. In front of City Hall is a children’s railway, run by someone unshaven with a heavy Czech (or is it Polish?) accent.

People look as they always have, with long unsmiling faces, only a shade shabbier. And they speak the same dialect, heavy and ugly on the ears, like a kid learning to play a cheap violin. It’s a dialect no adult can learn, nor would one want to. If you learned it as your only language when you were a child (a sure sign of being very much “of the people”), no matter what foreign language you may have learned later, you could not help but pronounce “e” as though you were saying “hair.” And you would always use the “soft” consonants g for both g and k, and d for both d and t, and b for b and p: “boat” and “bode” would sound alike, as would “coal” and “goal.” If, however, you wanted to sound educated, you would pronounce them both “hard”: “bank” would come out “pank”, “dent” would be “tent”, and “bail” would be “pail.”

My mother grew up in Bavaria. My father grew up in Saxony. THIS I knew, from the very beginning! I heard it often – sometimes in jest and sometimes in anger: “Du… BAYER!” (“You Bavarian!”) “Du… SAXE!” (“You Saxon!”) To them, this was a defining difference – and neither of them ever let the other forget it!I Did my father really speak like a kid learning to play a cheap violin? I never really heard their German accents (though my friends sure did) and I certainly never heard the differences between their German dialects.

There are hardly any cars on the streets, and the few there are black. They belong to Communist Party offices. Most people use bicycles or the streetcars instead. The Wanderer Car factory, one of the brands of the original “Auto Union,” with its four-ring logo (Omi’s note: Audi?), was in Chemnitz. It made cars and bicycles - and typewriters! Bicycle lanes on highways were are the norm. Unlike in the US, bicycles are used by children and adults alike. When I first came to American in 1953, bicycles in the US were considered toys, sold by “Toy and Bicycle” stores.

I remember Chemnitz by its net of streetcar lines. One of the main streets in Chemnitz was (and is) Zwickauer Strasse, leading to where most of the industry was located, not only Wanderer, but many factories making machine tools and textiles, stockings in particular. (In 1958, when I interviewed with American Machinist magazine at McGraw-Hill in New York City, the editor rattled off all the names of the machine tools made in Chemnitz when he found out I was born there!) Streetcar #1 ran along Zwickauer Strasse, and was one of the lines we could use to get to our house. It was a long uphill block from there. For an easier downhill walk to the house, one would use streetcar #8, along Weststrasse.

The house where I was born was a large single-family house in a “good” mixed neighborhood called The Kassberg, where one could find villas, schools, offices, and shops. Our house was at 10 Reichstrasse, a large corner property surrounded by a garden with an iron fence which sat on a stone wall. (Later, during the war, we had “donate” that iron fence, to be re-cast into cannons, tanks, and guns).

Next to our house was a separate garage with a laundry room and apartment above it. In the early years, the garage was used as Father's fencing arena -- the only kind of sport, other than cross country skiing and ping-pong, that my father had an interest in. The apartment above the garage was the place where the "Hausmeister^[1]" family lived. The Hausmeister took care of our house, firing up the central furnace and partly smothering it for the night, stoking it again in the morning. He shoveled the fuel from the coal cellar and did handyman work around the house. He also taught my brother Rainer and I to play chess. On the side, he had an assembly-line job in one of the nearby factories.

In addition to the Hausmeister, there were people who came to our house on a regular basis: the baker delivered fresh rolls before anyone got up in the morning, every day, summer and winter. The milk man came later, the wash woman once a week, the ironing woman the week after.

I remember laundry days in particular, when the two big built-in brick tubs in the laundry room would be heated with wood and coal until the water boiled and the whole room was so steamy you could hardly see the opposite wall. The steam even engulfed the drying centrifuge that I got to try to crank sometimes. The clothes lines were strung outside on poles, covering the lawn and part of our play area, leaving only the sand box exposed.

Across Reichsstrasse from our house in one direction was a central postal administration building, and in the other direction stood a large synagogue and a small private hospital.

This postcard depicts Stephansplatz, where my father’s house was located. I believe that my father’s house is the one in the front left, behind the railing. The synagogue can be seen on the right. I believe the hospital is behind it.

Within a couple of blocks was our grade school, the dentist's office, and a tiny round park where one could learn to skate or ride a scooter. To one side of that little park was one of the high schools. The justice building, with its small jail, was a long block away. There were no stores in this part of the neighborhood, except for a small grocery store where one could buy candy or juice powder, if one had the money. Most of the individual houses around were other villas, all of them occupied by professionals. Some of the tenement apartment houses, occupied by factory workers, were only a block away, but we were never allowed to play with the kids from there.

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After serving an apprenticeship in accounting at a famous bank in Dresden, and an internship at the Paris Bourse^[2], my father, Carl Heumann worked his way up at the private bank of Bayer & Heinze in Chemnitz, where he, by 1920, had already become a partial owner and a Kommandatist^[3].

But there was a serious problem. Carl lacked a university education. No college degree meant no no title, and in Germany you were a nobody if you had no title. To become a “Herr Kommerzienrat^[4]” would take years, at best. So the solution for my father the banker was to become a vice consul of some country whose interests he could represent professionally. I am not aware of the process he went through, but my father obtained the title of Vice Consul of Portugal in 1929, thus becomming "Herr Konsul Heumann.” Mother became “Frau Konsul.” Problem solved.

(The importance of having a title became clear to me a quarter-century later. I had finished Engineering School in München, thus I was entitled to - but very rarely used - the title “Diplomingenieur^[5].” It was very important to my father-in-law at the time that his daughter married the “right kind” of engineer, not just any old “Ingenieur” from a non-academic engineering school, but one from a college that was accredited to also bestow a PhD degree in engineering. So now his letters to his daughter Edith in America could be addressed to Frau Diplomingenieur E. H.”)

Before I was born, my father started an art collection, probably as a balance to his daily business work at the bank. He started with famous Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), a Prussian engraver, but he soon added Ludwig Richter (1803-1884) who was more representative of the art that my father loved.

For my wedding in 1983, Dad gave me the full collection of Richter…

    

    

…as well as a small Menzel which I love.

German Romanticism became so much of his personality that over the years that his name and his chosen art were often spoken in the same breath by other art collectors. He eventually became a respected expert on German Romantic art, and his collection became one of the most important of that time. This, above everything else, speaks to the fact that he felt so much more “German” than “Jewish.” How ironic that a man who would soon be classified by the Nazis as an “enemy of Germany” picked the most essentially “German” art form one could imagine!

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^[1] The Hausmeister, - literally “house master” - in our case a family of four.

^[2] Bourse = Stock Exchange

^[3] Bayer & Heinze was a Kommanditgesellschaft, the German form of a Limited Liability Corporation.

^[4] A “Councilor of Commerce”, an honorable title for real big shots in business

^[5] i.e. and engineer with a “Diploma” from a university-level college.