My dearest grandchildren,
My father, your great-grandfather, left me hundreds – no, thousands – of pages of his writings, from journals, to essays, to emails, to complete books. In addition, he left me many large binders full of his research findings. The enormity of it all is what kept me from writing “his” book. Where would I begin? Should I re-trace his steps and re-do his research, or is that just an immense waste of time? (It is.)
I’ve considered simply editing Dad’s book The Rim of the Volcano for clarity, self-publishing it, and calling it good. But I have associated personal experiences that add to the story. Experiences like meeting provenance researcher, Julia Essl at the Albertina Museum in Vienna and seeing on her office shelves binder after binder labeled “Carl Heumann. Experiences like being invited by the mayor of Chemnitz to participate in the museum exhibit honoring my father and grandfather almost 75 years after Carl’s death. Experiences like sleuthing, locating, and contacting the descendants of the man who I suspect was my grandfather’s protectorate and the reason that he was the only Jew left in Chemnitz in March, 1945, the month of his death. And experiences like what I’m immersed in and coordinating now – working with a variety of German museums that have identified art originally from Carl’s collection that are deemed to have been sold by Carl under duress and so are now being offered as restitution to his heirs.
This story spans many generations. Adele Kattwinkel, my great-grandmother (your great-great-great grandmother) and her daughter, Irmgard - Carl’s wife and the Aryan partner of a Jew in WWII Germany - corresponded often, and those letters (over 600 pages of them!) helped my father better understand his mother, who he never knew as an adult.
Fifty years after my grandmother’s death, my father wrote down his memories for his children and grandchildren and now I’m writing (well, blogging) my own related experiences for my children and you, my grandchildren.
So here’s what I’ve decided to do. Since most of my father’s material culminated in his writing of the Rim book, I’m going to post portions of that book separately and sequentially, “interrupting” now and then to add my own opinions, experiences, and perspectives. That should allow both Dad and I to have a voice – though the louder, more prominent voice will definitely (and appropriately) be his.
Today’s post: Chapter List and Forward to The Rim of the Volcano.
(It’s a title I never liked, by the way. I know what Dad was going for – as a Mischling, he looked into the fire and felt its heat, but he was never actually thrown into the volcano – but I think it’s confusing. I would have named it something simpler, like Mischling, Ersten Grades – Growing Up as a Half-Jew in Nazi Germany, but it’s Dad’s book.)
Here’s the Chapter List:
And here’s the Forward:
This is a fictional narration, but it’s based on my own research and experiences. What you read here is essentially true — "essentially" and not "completely" because some events had to be left out, others were changed slightly in time sequence, or simplified to make the story less confusing (yes, it was in reality even more tumultuous than it is told here!). But practically all of the personal events are based on my own experiences. A very few are from hearsay, but probably happened about as described. Names in general are not changed.
Living for more than half a century in a different world (27 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, 31 years in Ashland, Oregon) can play funny tricks on someone's memory, but that may not be altogether bad. In the process of evaporating details, the mind distills out the essence of a period, the main thing I am trying to convey.
The sources I used for research are rather limited, compared to what a historian would use. I am not a historian, nor is any of this written by or for historians. Events are my own interpretations, including my admitted prejudices. German documents and laws were mostly translated by me.
The Nazis were Germans, with a German leaning toward classifying people and actions into pigeon holes. For this, they found the cooperation of a bourgeois bureaucracy. One of the most frightening aspects of Nazi rule was its reliance on average people who were given the “legitimacy” of decrees (they called them laws) to do whatever the government directed. Most of the execution of the Nazi policies was utterly and terribly middle-class.
There were many secularized Jews in Germany who had been completely absorbed in German society to the point of being in no way different from those around them. They felt “German” long before they ever felt “Jewish.” Four years after the Nürnberg Laws had set the stage, Goering created the category of “Privileged Mixed Marriages.” These Jews were treated and harassed almost as badly as other Jews, but generally without being deported. There were tens of thousands of such families. Of course, the Nazis created that pigeon hole, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but to control them easier through bureaucracy.
The existence of the very phenomenon of “Privileged Mixed Marriages” is little known in this country, yet it is a part of history. In no way should what I say here be taken as an excuse for the horrors the Nazis brought upon Jews in general. For political reasons, they left areas of grey in their malice. Most of the 28,000 Jews who survived the Nazis in Germany were “Privileged.”
To understand this narrative, one has to examine and understand the timeline. Looking at my entire lifetime, the twelve years of Nazi rule (shown bold) were really only a small fraction of my entire life span, but war is the most impressionable time in anybody's life, so those years influenced me much beyond the actual length of time.
Look at it:
1886 Carl Heumann born, first child in a Jewish family
1894 Irmgard Buddecke born
pre-1914 Carl Heumann is baptized Protestant-Lutheran
1914-1918 World War I, Carl in German Army (Medal: “EK II”)
1919 My parents get married
1923 Rainer is born
1928 I am born in Chemnitz
1932 Ulrike is born
1933 Nazis come to power
1934 I enter grade school
1935 The "Nürnberg Laws" define and restrict Jews
1938 I enter High School (“Gymnasium”)
1939 World War II starts in Europe
1942 The Wannsee Conference implements "The Final Solution"
1943 I am dismissed from Gymnasium
1944 Jan: My mother dies of a brain tumor
Nov: I enter Slave Labor Camp
1945 Feb: Last Transport of Jews to Theresienstadt from Chemnitz
Mar: My father dies in air raid on Chemnitz, our house is destroyed
Apr: I am freed from Labor Camp
May: Germany capitulates
Dec: Left Russian Zone of Germany for München in US Zone
1946 Gymnasium in Ingolstadt
1947 Abitur ( High School graduation)
1947-1952 Technical University Munich
1951 Married Edith Reiss
1952 Michael born
1953 We emigrate to US
↑
58 years!
↓
2011 Today
I see my past as having had six lives. This narrative covers my first and second lives, possibly the most important ones. Lives 3 and 4 each would merit a whole book all by themselves, and lives 5 and 6 would make another one. What a rich life I’ve had!
First life: Childhood: birth to age to 16, 1928 to 1944 Protected life in Chemnitz
Second life: Youth: age 16-19, 1944-1947. Labor Camp, Gisela, Nora, Ingrid
Third life: College Years: age 19-23, 1948-1951: Gisela, Ruth. Hilde, Uschi, Chris. Hans/Muttchen.
Fourth life; Married Life: age 23-52, 1951-1980: Edith, Emigration, Kids, America,
Engineering Profession.
Fifth life: Retirement: age 52-76, 1980-2004: Ashland, Grandkids, Video Production,
B&B, Edith’s death.
Sixth life: After Edith: from age 76 on: Chris, Barbara, Jennifer.
Marriage and new life with Lou.
In the Fall of 2010, Dr. Nitsche sent me some very interesting papers that were supposed to shed some light on the history of my family under Nazi rule. Dr. Nitsche is a historian who wrote a book "Jews in Chemnitz" and is now researching aspects of Jewish history in my home town. The papers he sent me were rather informative for me personally, so I sent copies to all of you and to Ulrike (Ulli) in Berkeley, assuming they would be interesting to everyone else. Wrong! They were interesting alright, but more importantly they raised a lot more questions in you than they answered. I am so thankful that you asked some of those questions!
The process of writing this book was both revealing and troubling to me. Your questions showed me that I had been very negligent while you were growing up. I never really told you in any meaningful way about what it was like to grow up in Germany, raised by parents with German values and habits, and fenced out from society at large under Nazi restrictions and oppressions against a “Jewish family.” But mainly I have not told you (or your own descendants!) enough of what life in general was like at that time and at that place, what schools were like, my relationship to my parents, and how we were existing without many of today's normal conveniences (like cars), let alone unthinkable technological developments (like cell phones). This writing is supposed to make up somehow for some of my failure to tell you over the years, including how a Fascist dictatorship and a war literally influenced any and all daily activities, choices, and relationships. I will also tell you about some choices I made, but I leave it to you to judge whether the decisions were good ones, and what -- if anything -- one can learn from them.
To give the reader a concept of the contemporary events, three perspectives will be used.
Each chapter will be preceded by a summary of what I understand the political and public situation to be at the time, based on my own knowledge and the research I have done myself.
That will be followed by an interpretation of some of the almost 2,000 decrees and “laws” the Nazis issued during that time for the single purpose of dealing with “the Jewish Question,” based on a collection by Joseph Walk, called Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS Staat[1] (1981).
Only then will I give a narrative of my and my family’s life at the same period. We grew up very protected. The contrast between what really went on on the outside and our awareness of it, is often dramatic.
The “Peter Bauer” story I wrote earlier is being incorporated.
The one omission I regret most is that I didn’t ask my father, while he was still alive, about his family, his parents, his childhood, and life at the time. He never volunteered to talk about any of that. Rainer didn’t know much more, nor did he want to talk at all about his own life, and neither did my cousin Edith in Zürich. Their common answer to any question was a dismissive “Ach ja ...” -- period. All of them are dead now, nobody is left to ask any more.
Writing today about myself and my youth is not strictly an egocentric exercise, I’m also trying to be a good ancestor now. I am writing this now because I think my children and descendants need to know and remember their history, to be aware of what society must never be allowed to repeat.
This narrative essentially ends with my admission to the TH (Technische Hochschule) in München in 1947. What comes after is a whole different story to be added some other time -- possibly..
Roger Rosenblatt of NPR said the reasons why we write are:
to make suffering endurable,
to make evil intelligible,
to make justice desirable, and
to make love possible.
I’ll try to be true to all four of those.
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