My dear grandchildren,
My father wrote Longest Year (his first book’s nickname) in 1979. My feeling is that, unlike Rim (his nickname for his second book, The Rim of the Volcano), which he researched incessantly and which he insisted be politically and historically accurate, Longest Year just flowed out of him because it was simply his memoir. Dad’s approach to Longest Year is much more natural and engaging because he takes on the role of a storyteller, which came naturally to him, whereas with Rim, with its factual political climate sections, he seemed to be more of a history professor, a role a bit less comfortable for Dad.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Dad originally wrote Longest Year in third person, telling the story of Peter Bauer, a Mischling (half-Jewish) boy who is forced to grow up far too quickly in WWII Germany during the Holocaust. When Dad merged Longest Year with Rim, he switched back to first person, but I think Peter’s personality still shines through.
I grew to really love Peter Bauer as I read Longest Year – which makes sense, since I’m positive I would have loved young Thomas Heumann!
What do you think?
Here we go!
Tuesday morning.
Tuesday was the day when Lippmann’s Butcher Shop sold beef broth. Watered down, but broth it was. Broth was one of the few items the butcher could sell without ration coupons. You had to get there early, though; the line began forming just after five o’clock, and there was no hope of getting any broth at all if you didn’t get in line well before seven.
I did. There were only twenty or thirty people in front of me.
Getting broth on Tuesday mornings was one of my housekeeping jobs. Since my mother died early in the year, I had to accept more of the duties around the house. Chores to exist, to survive. The simple business of living took so much time, so much attention and alertness, plus a certain amount of cunning.
We had been good customers at Lippmann’s for many years before the war, and Frau Lippmann was particularly fond of me, as she had watched me grow up from a carefree toddler to the serious boy I now was. It was only natural that the job of getting broth would fall on me. Who knows, Frau Lippmann might just slip me a small package of kidneys or a piece of liverwurst when no one was looking. For her, it was just good business to do that for some long-time customers. Eventually, at some time in the future, things would be normal again in Germany, and then one could not afford to lose customers like the Heumanns. Some time. Right now, anything normal seemed so long ago, and so far in the future.
There was no little package this time. I pushed my bicycle up Friedrich-Schlegel-Straße so I wouldn’t spill any of the bouillon from the aluminum pitcher hanging from my handlebar. By now, the sloshing liquid had formed a thin skin of cold fat, like miniature floes of ice. What a ridiculous thought: ice! I knew from the heavy smell and the texture of the dawn air that today would be another one of those warm late-fall days, the days of grace before the long winter set in.
I kicked the leaves in the gutter as I shuffled uphill, hoping to find a few freshly fallen chestnuts, dark brown and still with that smooth grain of highly polished wood, before they were all scuffed up, run over and shriveled. I collected chestnuts for no reason in particular, just to feel and enjoy their smoothness when I put my hands in my pocket. Neighborhood kids competed fiercely for chestnuts because the schools held war effort collections to ship to the soap factory.
When I opened the kitchen door, Liesbeth was already up, hobbling through the large kitchen in small, shuffling steps, making Ersatzkaffee[1] for breakfast.
Liesbeth was a leftover from old times, the only household help the Nürnberg Laws would allow Jews to have. According to the Laws, female household help had to be over 45, so there would be no danger of racially impure offspring in case master and servant forgot themselves and committed “Rassenschande.”[2] Rudolf, the butler — the other kind of permissible domestic help — had long ago been drafted into the army and was now somewhere in Russia. The Heumann kids had always whispered and snickered about Rudolf and Liesbeth, good souls, having a rather cozy “Aryan” arrangement up there in the servants’ quarters in the attic. No more.
Rudolf was no longer needed. The household had shrunk to where it consisted only of Father and me, now that Rainer, the oldest, was away in München, where he worked in a machine shop. He was serving the apprentice year he would need to become an engineer -- later, after the war, when they would admit half-Jewish people to universities again. For now, it was good to be a machinist because workers got somewhat higher food rations, and for the moment that mattered most, certainly more than pay or status.
My younger sister Ulli was living with our cousin Gaby in Adelsberg, on the outskirts of Chemnitz. It was lucky that Uncle Heinz and Aunt Gert could take her in. Living with them, Ulli escaped the constant threat of air raids and could be with Gaby, a much better companion than a big brother. And Gaby’s family was certainly a more suitable habitat for the 12-year-old girl than a household managed by a sickly spinster housekeeper and a solitary, grieving, and very impractical father.
(Ulli and Gaby, c 1944.)
So it was that Carl Heumann lived a withdrawn life, alone at home, alone with me, with his art collection, and with his relentless thoughts of present and future. If his thoughts were desperate, he did not let on. Sad, serious, guarded — yes, but he was too much of a romantic to admit to himself, let alone to me, how bleak their situation really was.
While the Nazi system tried to fit all the young kids into the Nazi mold in Germany, Father gave me the confidence that one could remain above the baseness of persecution simply by living a life of uncompromising integrity and correct behavior. Although he never talked to me about it, I began to understand that striving for this sense of superiority could make or break a character when the chips are down.
In a way, I believe Father repressed many of the events that he saw around him. In the early Nazi years, he was convinced that the Nazis could not last long. That is why he had not followed his brothers to America in 1938, when public intimidation and abuse of anything Jewish had accelerated to a pitch where one could foresee what lay ahead. After all, he reasoned, Konsul Heumann was a respected and law-abiding German citizen and “they just couldn’t do that to me.” He clung to this belief to the end.
Our house had lost much of the joy that I had known when I was a small boy, when these walls had been alive with warmth and music, and when well-groomed people who smelled good and spoke of things I didn’t understand came to visit. Now the air was cold, except in what used to be the children’s playroom. In other rooms of the large house, a thick dust, like the frost of a winter morning, had settled on the Biedermeyer furniture.
I hurried up the steps to my room because I still had to do some homework to finish for the Latin lesson at 9:00. I didn’t like Latin, I didn’t like Dr. Epstein who taught me, but I had come to like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I was in the process of reading. There was so little that was stable or consistent in our lives, and here was Ovid who seemed to accept -- even embrace -- a constant flow and change, and do it with a twinkle in his eyes. I liked that.
Dr. Epstein was just one of my tutors. For more than a year now, ever since the Party had decreed that Germans classified as “Mischling Ersten Grades” were no longer allowed to get a high school education, I had been given private lessons by teachers who themselves were barred from teaching school, either because they, too, were racially not acceptable, or because they had been Social Democrats or had other subversive ideas. There was now a completely withdrawn elite underground intelligentsia whose only means of support was tutoring.
It was Herr Epping who introduced me to a much wider field of thought and of art than I would have been taught in public schools. While the high school muddled on under a new uniformed Nazi as Principal, while my former classmates spent the mornings in crowded classrooms and afternoons at mandatory Hitler Youth meetings, I, the outcast, received a broad, humanistic, and liberal education -- exactly the kind of thing the Nazis were trying to prevent!
Herr Epping was also the one who taught French to me and to two of my former classmates. These weekly French lessons were the only means of keeping in touch with my old friends from school, or, for that matter, with anybody my own age. Of course, I was also spared (or not permitted, as they saw it!) membership in the otherwise compulsory Hitler Youth, so the only other young people I ever talked to were Ulli and Gaby and, sometimes their neighbor children.
One of those neighbor children, Gisela, was the reason why, on this day, much of Ovid went in one ear and out the other. Last night, she and I had sat hand-in-hand way up there on the balcony, listening to Haydn’s Schöpfung. The melodies were still swirling around in my head, along with the memories of her sweet sideways glances when I had walked her home in the moonlight.
How could Ovid compete with that?
Last week, Gisela and I had spent a whole afternoon at the Stadtpark. We rented a boat on the lake, and I rowed it across to where the big willow tree hung its branches all the way down into the water. We hid from the eyes of the world there and sat by the park aviary until it was dark.
The aviary was no architectural beauty, but to me it was more glorious than all of the Austrian Baroque Herr Epping kept talking about.
One day, as I left the house to see Gieslea, Father was ill at ease. “Um … er … Thoooomas,” he finally said, “there will be no such thing as kissing or things like that, OK?” Little did Vati know that smooching was exactly what I was going for, and we (at least I) were much too innocent and romantic for “things like that.”
That one sentence from my father comprised the total sex education I ever received from home.
In my mind, every moment of this relationship had grown into a major event, central to my whole being. After all, ahead of us was a whole life together. Last August we had promised to love each other as long as we lived — how could it ever be different? I even immortalized our whole romance in a tongue-in-cheek “Epos” (in hexameter!) which I brought to the vegetable nursery where Gisela worked as part of her war-time labor duty. I could see absolutely nothing unusual about a parody of Homer being recited right there, between cabbages and compost heaps. Gisela was so much a part of every minute of my waking day that, say, even reciting the passé composé of sentir in French class would quite naturally recall for me the scent of Gisela’s hair.
You know how I said that I devoured Longest Year when Dad gave the book to me for Christmas in 1979? I did – except for the “love scenes” – because that wasn’t… well, my mom! Silly, I know. But editing Dad’s words today was the first time that I carefully read my father’s memories about his first love. That’s just a plugging-my-ears thing, right? You’ll do it about your own parents, I’ll bet!
[1] “Coffee replacement” - the stuff made from roasted barley that didn’t taste like coffee, but was called coffee because it looked like it.
[2] “Racial Defilement” the worst crime possible: sex between an “Aryan” and a Jew or other race the Nazis chose to consider inferior
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