Who was Irmgard Heumann (nee Buddecke)?

My dear grandchildren,

This entry is primarily about your great-great grandmother, Irmgard. Actually, in many ways, this entire BLOG is about her because her existence as a non-Jew so heavily impacted her husband’s existence as a Jew and their children’s existences as Mischlinge.

Without a doubt, I would have loved Irmgard. From everything I’ve heard, my favorite cousin Claudia (Ulli’s daughter) is much like Irmgard, both in looks and in personality – and I adore Claudia (that’s Claudia, to my left)!

    

Irmgard was, from all we can tell, practical, organized and, as Thomas writes below, “romantic and sensitive.” From the 600 pages of letters written to her mother, Adele and to others, one can tell that Irmgard was also resourceful, creative, extremely loving, and efficient – all qualities that also make Claudia so wonderful. Oh, how I wish we could have known her!

Here are my father’s words for today:

Many of my parents’ friends and families were from the Rhineland and lived there when the air war (the Nazis called it “terror bombing”) devastated the west portion of Germany -- Aachen, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, and practically every city along the Rhine. The misery of the people living in those areas was total and never-ending. My parents took in as many friends and as much family as they could, which only added to the stress for my mother, a hostess with a soft heart full of compassion. With the extra guests, everything was stretched thinner. At one point, Mutti realized that in just one of the hundreds of hotels and pensions destroyed, thousands of beds and blankets, must have gone up in smoke. Just a single set of blankets, sheets, and pillows would have made things so much better for the homeless people Mother had taken in!

(Both Carl’s and Irmgard’s families originally came from the area around Köln, which was heavily bombed.)

And yet, in spite of (or perhaps because of?) so much misery, it was still possible to fall in love. Much to our amusement, and with the teasing it called for (at least for us kids!), our mother was hopelessly in love with Edwin Fischer, the pianist whose romantic and heartfelt interpretations she endlessly admired. She was probably one of many women who felt the same way about the famous man who was adored as one of the most sensitive interpreters of the music she loved so much. But Irmgard was different; she actually met him, spent evenings with him at friends’ houses, exchanged books and thoughts with him, both in letters and in person. She went to every rehearsal she could, and once, at a famous performance of the Brahms B-flat piano concert with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting, she actually felt him looking at her at the beginning of the third movement, when he wasn’t playing. Apparently, they talked about it afterwards. “We were both suppressing tears at that point,” Irmgard wrote to her mother about the incident.

I found an actual recording of Edwin Fischer playing Brahms, with Wilhelm Furtwängler  conducting! Wow, what if Irmgard were actually here?!

Those were the thoughts that kept Irmgard able to face life. Carl, as even a “privileged” Jew, could not accompany her to concerts, so he encouraged her frequent trips to performances and rehearsals in Dresden, Leipzig, and München. She maintained a frequent correspondence with Fischer’s secretary, but much to her chagrin, Edwin himself rarely answered the letters she wrote to him. He had his secretary do it, which made her only more anxious to get a personal reply from him.

Did Carl consciously encourage her to have this distraction from her weary life with him? Did he feel guilty for her being tied to him by the fate of politics? Did it occur to either of them that she could - maybe - have a glamorous and most satisfying life with a famous and most compatible artist? Had she made the wrong decision for herself when her brother had tried to talk her into divorce?

Both Irmgard and Carl strongly denied any of it. In fact, she even entangled Rainer to secretly deliver her letters to Edwin when he was in München, just so Carl would not find out. And then Irmgard had to convince her mother, Adele, that she was loyal - “treu” - to Carl forever.

(Carl and Irmgard in the early 1920s, shortly after their wedding.)

And yet, and yet ….

My mother was an extremely romantic and sensitive woman. Although Carl transferred the ownership of his art collection to her for practical political reasons since, as a Jew, he wasn’t allowed to keep it in his name, I don’t believe that she could ever really relate to any of the art in Father’s collection. The works in Father’s collection were precise and tightly executed and, although it was called “romanticist” art, it was far from being “romantic” as we think of the word. It relates to an ideal of life, more than to its artistry. It is like Carl’s handwriting - precise and never quite “free,” correct and proper, uniformly slanted, and predictable.

(Carl’s handwriting)

Mother’s “romanticism” was much more impulsive, leaning to music and poetry. As much as Mother needed Father’s reasonable and reserved decision-making, what made her angrier than anything was someone being “pedantic like a school master,” as she called it. In this regard, Rainer and Ulli were Mother’s children, while I was my father’s.