A little post-war introspection

Dearest grandchildren.

I wish you could have met my father, Thomas, known to your parents as their beloved "Opa." He truly was "an engineer with the soul of a poet." Somehow, deep in my core, I always knew this, but to us he was just "Dad." It's only now, years after his death, as I go through his materials, that I realize what a romantic he was. 

Unlike my siblings and I, unlike your parents, and (hopefully) unlike you, Thomas wasn't able to make many real choices of his own in his early years. The circumstances all around him made those choices for him. War, survival, and just making his way in a very unstable Germany. He made the best of what he was given and, in this case, at least, even found love and a sense of belonging. 

I believe now that my father always lived a secret "parallel life" from the one he lived with us. Only now do I understand that he left much of his inner life, his romantic soul, in Germany. He and my mother Edith had a solid 53-year marriage (happy at times, but also often fraught with difficulty), but even there he didn't feel free to make his own choices, as Mom was pregnant with my brother Michael and, well, as anyone who knew Thomas knows, he always, always did the right thing.

I wish I'd known more of the man who wrote this!

In December 1946, I was eighteen. I went "home" to Rainer's family in München for Christmas where a letter from Gisela was waiting for me. "Everything,” she wrote, “that I had so carefully dammed up is now back again, only with even greater force. And worst of all, I am completely helpless!" The next day, a letter arrived from Ingrid. "All my thoughts are seeking you,” she wrote. “It is so wonderful that they have a place to go again and don't have to go 'round in circles anymore. I have so much to thank you for! I had lost everything in my life, and in my profound loneliness I cried to God for a human being who would say 'I am here — for you!’”

 My plan was to emigrate to America in a few months. Would I leave two unhappy people behind? My Christmas and New Years thoughts were deeply confused. Last Christmas I was in the refugee camp, transitioning from the Russian zone to the American zone. The Christmas before had been the last one with my father in my childhood home in Chemnitz. Each Christmas during these turbulent years, my hopes and fears had been vastly different, going from the hope for mere survival to excited anticipation of a new life. I had plenty to be thankful for this year, as I was making good headway into adulthood and emigration to America was on the near horizon. But I was deeply torn by my loves of 1946. Three women had loved me, each in her own way. All three had written to me at one time that they were listening to Mozart, and they wished I was with them. I loved each of them honestly — as I understood love — and had given to each and taken from each. At that moment, my life was deeply entwined with Ingrid's, and becoming so with Gisela's. I could sense their different loves enveloping me with the same warmth, but I could not feel good and right about it. I didn't want to hurt either of them, but I knew it was inevitable. Ingrid asked me in a letter to München; “Can you still pray?” If I did, it must have been for help to resolve the tug-of-war in my soul between my "heavenly love,” Gisela, and my “earthly love,” Ingrid.  I had dropped into Ingrid’s life as the support that she so desperately needed, and in giving her that support I found my own direction, with her help. At the end of 1946, when I was in München with Rainer, Ingrid wrote to me, “A letter from Gisela just arrived; I’ll send it to you. If it were from Nora I wouldn’t send it. I don’t like her. She’s hiding something, she’s not genuine. Watch out for her!”

Rainer called me a "widow comforter, “but that's all I remember of that Christmas in Solln with with Ulli, baby Andreas, and his parents, ready to get divorced. I was too self-absorbed in my own torments and elations, my own longings and my fears. I only remember Rainer’s cynicism.

Winter 1946/1947 was bitterly cold. My first duty upon return to Ingolstadt was to split the half-yard of wood that Ingrid had managed to "organize,” meaning to find, steal, trade, or barter. In this case, the wood was as a Christmas present from one of her massage patients. It would heat the kitchen for a while, but the heat didn’t reach the other rooms of the apartment. The kitchen faced south and during the early afternoon it sometimes felt like spring in there, even though the fire had gone out. It was a peaceful and quiet hour, "our sun hour,” as Ingrid called it, when we were alone in the kitchen with its couch.

I did have a bedroom on the north side of the house, but it wasn’t usable in winter except for quickly crawling under the blanket and waiting for cold feet to heat the even colder bed. I remember waking up many a morning with a crackling crust of ice that had formed on my blanket where my breath escaped out into the frozen air. The only warm evenings were the ones when Ingrid could convince her mother to go see a movie, so we could keep each other warm. At least we had electric light most of the time, albeit very strictly rationed, so electric heating was out of the question.

Gisela wrote from "Russian" Adelsberg: "We have a candle on our table every night this week, because we have evening electricity one week, and morning electricity the next. All the images from the bombing nights are rising up in my mind again, images that were just beginning to fade… along with the happier ones. Maybe, just maybe we could see each other once more before "that ugly America would swallow you up for good,” as she put it. There was some hope, because just then a fateful meeting was taking place in Moscow which would decide whether the borders between the two halves of Germany would ever open again. I was lucky: Gisela had left the back of her letter blank, so I could use it for notes on a history lesson — I had probably used up my ration of school note paper for letters to her!

Rumors were flying around Ingolstadt about Ingrid and me. We were seen in town together, arm in arm, together picking Pitti up from school. I felt very adult, and Ingrid felt very secure. Life was normalizing. For us in the West it was so much better than in the East, where Gisela walked two hours to school through the snow in the morning and two hours home at night. There were no trolleys or buses due to lack of power, gas, tires — lack of everything over there - except ideology.

I decided then that after graduation I would sit down and write the "Life Memoirs of a Nineteen-Year-Old.” Much later, when I would be old, say in twenty or forty years, I would probably enjoy reading them, I said to myself.

Oh yes - after graduation, that's when life would start for real. By then I was back to wanting to become a bridge builder. I decided that I would start working on the Donau Bridge project, getting some of my practical work out of the way by helping to rebuild the bridge that the Nazis had blown up at the end of the war. I don't quite know what "practical work" I imagined, but it didn’t matter, as nothing ever came of it, probably because I found out that it would have consisted of mixing and carrying concrete buckets (no cranes in those days)!

In the last few weeks before the final high school exam, I crammed very hard, and tried to move heaven and earth to pass the exam, having both a heavenly love and an earthly love crossing their fingers for me: a deeply innocent and esoteric love from one, and a womanly, equally profound love from the other. The double-pull must have worked, as I did so well that I didn't even have to take the oral exam. And my math test was the best in class! In retrospect, that wasn't so good. It was a fluke that went straight to my head and lodged there, convincing me that engineering must be my calling.

The year 1946 was a year of intense confusion for me, though I didn’t fully recognize it at the time. Externally, I was totally wrapped up in getting my life plans in order, but internally it was a year of dealing with three women (all of them older than I) who loved me — and whom I loved. I suppose I was mature beyond my years, having lost both parents the year before, and having survived the Holocaust. But the women who occupied my heart were mature in a different, uniquely feminine way.

If those were my defining years, I still had a lot of defining to do in 1947. My letters bespeak a person I don't really know any more - or want to know, to be honest.

What speaks from my letters is a self-important kid who had acquired mannerisms from his father that today, to an American, are terribly German and rather unlikable. I must have thought at the time — assuming I even consciously thought about it — that my reputed "maturity" obligated me to be a stiltedly rational, rigid, morally impeccable guiding light to those around me. That was my father’s influence on me, with all the annoyances that go with it. When my mother called someone a “Schulmeister” (a schoolmaster), she used the term with an inflection in her voice that told even us kids that she was talking about one of my father’s less likable traits.

Today, a good deal of that rigidity remains, but in encountering myself in those letters of sixty years ago, I realize how grateful I am that America rescued me from staying either too firmly on the path of a German schoolmaster's righteousness or on the path of the German other-worldly sentimentalist. I do try, but I have never be able to shed a certain German heaviness that I acquired not only from my parents but from the entirety of all German culture.

It’s interesting to read between the lines of my 60-year-old letters. Already then there was conflict between the poetic and the technical, a conflict I haven't resolved to this day.  The reason is that it's really the story of my life, and that of many immigrants - the desire to be the easy-going, can-do, uncomplicated and practical American, with the realization that just barely under that surface sits the inflexible, ultra-organized, somewhat arrogant and elitist German.  

Many Germans can be defined by where they fit on a two-dimensional rational-sentimental coordinate system. When you add to that the third dimension of leading a life in a pragmatic, materialistic, and money-dominated society, the potential for life-long internal skirmishes becomes apparent. The stool I'm sitting on today has three supporting legs, each supplied by one of the long-term influences in my life: a meticulous father, a romantic mother, and a strong wife of fifty-some years. 

Carl and Irmgard Heumann, Thomas' parents, before his birth - likely around the time of their marriage in 1919.

 

 

 

Thomas and Edith Heumann (my parents), around 1995 or 2000.

 

The three legs are not, and have never been, equal in length or in strength. The ups and downs and imbalances in my life were in large part due to the constant shifting of that tripod. It's a good thing that a tripod never wobbles or rocks; it can slant, it can teeter, it can be firm or precarious, but it can never wobble.

My letters of the late 1940s preached and kvetched of self-importance, only to suddenly flip into the warm and thoughtful ponderings of a poet. How could Gisela, with her dreamy, unrealistic flights of fancy and optimism, love me? How could warm and down-to-earth Ingrid love me? They both did, and both must have been more accepting and forgiving than I gave them credit for. They were mature enough to make the allowances I wasn't willing to make.

 

Post-war poetry

Dear grandchildren,

What 17-year-old guy (or girl) do you know who loves poetry this much?! As I mentioned previously, my father Thomas had the sole of a poet. He was about as far from “macho” as one could get and never understood the testosterone-driven hyper-masculinity that American society clearly found so appealing in the 70s and 80s (look up the TV shows Magnum PI, Miami Vice, and MacGyver), and even through the early 2000s.

In this post, like the last few, Thomas continues to turn inward and we get to know more about his spirit and thoughtful personality as a young man. War and daily survival are no longer his sole focus and he is able to settle back into school and begin to ponder what he wants the rest of his life to look like.

Here are his words – and some poems!

I wrote to Nora: “You have no idea how anxious I am to start a normal, regular life and to get back into learning again! Being so unproductive in Adelsberg was the hardest part of those months.” I’m not sure how sincerely I meant that. Much of what we wrote in letters that went back and forth every few days consisted of things we had heard, but not quite digested. How could we have? Nora was a few months older than I, and probably many months ahead of me in maturity, although I wouldn’t have admitted it then. Her letters spoke of real yearning and commitment; they sounded very honest and they probably were. I was longing for the dark winter evenings when we took endless walks in the forests around her parents’ house in Adelsberg. Those walks, for me, were the essence of being together:

Es hat nun all die Stunden

still vor sich hingeschneit.

Die Erde ist verschwunden

in Schnee und Ewigkeit.

Und langsam schon und leise

verwandelt sich der Tag.

Der Abend auf seine Weise

erhebt sich hinter dem Hag.

Wir wollen nichts mehr sagen,

die Worte sind so laut.

Was wir im Herzen tragen,

ist uns ja alles vertraut.

Und wenn dann so beim Wandern

sich Schulter an Schulter lehnt,

fühlt einer in dem andern,

wie er sich nach ihm sehnt.

Die Flocken fallen und wehen,

die Dämmerung hüllt uns ein.

Wir wollen nur ... so ... hingehen ...

und ganz beieinander sein.

-- Manfred Hausmann

It has for all these hours

been snowing silently.

The earth has almost vanished

in white eternity.

Now very still and slowly

the day transforms itself.

The evening in its manner

rises behind the grove.

Let us not even whisper.

Our words, they are so loud.

We know so well what thinking

Lies deep in our hearts.

 

And then, when, in so walking,

shoulder and shoulder meet,

one senses in the other

the longing thoughts we share.

The flakes are falling and drifting,

The dusk envelops us.

Let’s just ... keep ... walking,

and feel together and close.

Ah yes, Nora… But there’s no time for dreaming! Reality demands that I try to buy some pencils for Nora! She’s taking drawing lessons and can’t find pencils, especially soft ones, in the Russian Zone.

For the first time in three years, I would soon return to a classroom. My old school in Chemnitz was a Humanistisches Gymnasium – that is, a college prep school emphasizing Latin, Greek, and the Humanist liberal education and the values that go along with them. The Theresiengymnasium in München was beginning to operate again on a limited basis. The school rooms near the Goetheplatz had been largely spared from bomb damage, the old Nazi teachers had been thrown out, and just enough coal was available to at least keep the rooms from freezing. Most of the windows were still boarded up.

(Theresiengymnasium today)

Like my Gymnasium in Chemnitz, it had the pedigree of a proper old school from the years after the First World War. It looked oddly familiar: dark hallways, massive wooden handrails on the stairs, with knobs on top to keep kids from having fun by sliding down on them. It even smelled like my school in Chemnitz, a mixture of locker room, pissoir, and chalk. Just about now my old classmates were probably returning to their own lives. I felt awkward: re-entering a childhood world as a walking anachronism.

The principal looked at my papers from Chemnitz. The report card from 1942 told him that Geography and Physics were my only “good” subjects; the rest were average or below, with Math and History just barely passing. The report card of March 1943, when the Nazis had thrown me out of school, wasn’t much better: Math was still terrible. So was Greek. But then I also had a piece of paper saying that I was certifiably “meticulous, courteous, focused, and tenacious,” plus affidavits about the private lessons in four languages and all that, and about the Nazi labor camp. The principal studied me, then studied the papers, weighing his guidelines carefully. He finally accepted me as the equivalent of a Junior — provisionally.

The two months I spent at the Theresiengymnasium apparently made little academic impression on me, because I hardly remember any of it. In fact, I remember nothing at all about Latin and Greek, other than how difficult it was to get back into studying. It had only been a year and a half since I last sat down to study a subject or write a paper, but what a tumultuous time it was! I’m positive my achievements in class were less than impressive.

I was especially impressed by two things: the classes were coed (a first-time and rather uncomfortable experience for me!) and the German lessons were interesting. I found study buddies in a clearly very sophisticated young man and a very pretty (but, OK, less sophisticated) young woman. The German teacher, to my great surprise, was a woman! Never in my life, in any school, had I seen a woman teacher before. She had a particular fondness for poetry (and thus, I, a fondness for her) and showed us how differently Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Nicolaus Lenau used similar images to deal with loss:

Meine eingelegten Ruder triefen,

Tropfen fallen langsam in die Tiefen.

Nichts, das mich verdroß! Nichts, das mich erfreute!

Nieder rinnt ein schmerzensloses Heute!

Unter mir — ach, aus dem Licht verschwunden —

Träumen noch die schönern meiner Stunden.

Aus der blauen Tiefe ruft das Gestern:

Sind im Licht noch manche meiner Schwestern?

-

Lying on my vessel’s edge, my oars are dripping.

Drops are falling slowly, slowly in the deep.

Nothing that upsets me, nothing cheers me up.

A present without pain is trickling down.

Below me — ah, from daylight vanished —

Lie my bygone fairer hours, dreaming.

From the azure depths, the past is calling:

Are there sisters up there in the light?

The other poem, by Lenau, still comes to mind today when I’m near a stream:

Sahst du ein Glück vorübergehn,

Das nie sich wiederfindet,

Ist’s gut in einen Strom zu sehn

Wo alles wogt und schwindet.....

...Hinträumend wird Vergessenheit

Des Herzens Wunde schließen.

Die Seele sieht in ihrem Leid

Sich selbst vorüberfließen.

-

When you have met a passing bliss

that never will return,

It’s good to stare into a stream

Where all is surge and fading...

...And as you dream, forgetting will

Heal all your pain and heartbreak.

Your soul will see itself

Flow past, with all its anguish.

We analyzed these poems to death in class, but neither of them touched me especially deeply. I’m sure they were chosen by the teacher because there was still so much misery all around and so much healing to be done. Not a single one of the kids in class had come through the war without major losses: a father, an older brother, a friend, a home, an entire homeland. So much of the immediate past was still so painful – like festering wounds of the soul.

Our teacher read one poem to us and didn’t even ask us to analyze it. It is by Lulu von Strauß und Torney, who was still alive then:

Und wenn ich selber längst gestorben bin,

Wird meine Erde blühend stehn,

Und Saat und Sichel, Schnee und Sommerpracht,

Und weißer Tag und blaue Mitternacht

Wird über die geliebte Scholle gehn.

Und werden Tage ganz wie heute sein:

Die Gärten voll vom Dufte der Syringen,

Und weiße Wolken, die im Blauen ziehn,

Und junger Felder seidnes Ährengrün,

Und drüberhin ein endlos Lerchensingen.

Und werden Kinder lachen vor dem Tor

Und an den Hecken grüne Zweige brechen,

Und werden Mädchen wandern Arm in Arm

Und durch den Sommerabend, still und warm,

Mit leisen Lippen von der Liebe sprechen.

Und wird wie heut der junge Erdentag

Von keinem Gestern wissen mehr, noch sagen;

Und wird wie heut doch jeder Sommerwind

Aus tausend Tagen, die vergessen sind,

Geheime Süße auf den Flügeln tragen.

-

And even then, when I am long dead

My earth will stand in bloom again,

And seed and sickle, snow and summer’s joy

And white-hot day and cobalt-colored night

Will sweep across the cherished ground.

And then there will be days just like today:

The gardens heavy with the lilacs’ scent,

White clouds are drifting in a sea of blue,

The silken green expanse of growing corn,

And high above the endless song of larks.

And children will be laughing out of doors

And will break twigs from hedges by the road,

And girls will wander, arm in arm, and will,

Throughout the warm and quiet summer’s eve

Speak secretly of love with muted lips.

And then as now, the day in all its youth

Will neither know nor speak of any yesterdays.

And yet, just like today, each summer’s breeze

Will carry in its wings the secret sweetness

Of thousand past and long forgotten days.

Now, isn’t that enough reward for a couple of months at school?

That poem struck an immediate chord in me in 1946, and even six decades later, after we have spoiled so much of our environment, it is still one of the most comforting, almost cheerful poems I know, and few poems have had as much presence or given me as much peace as this one. With all its vivid images, it’s hard to get through a beautiful summer without being reminded of it over and over. With tears in my eyes.

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.

Spring 1943 Brings Changes

Dear grandkids,

I got to know my father better as I edited this post. Since he died, I’ve read some of his more private thoughts (as he kept a journal throughout his life) and I was struck by how deeply hurt and, as a result, somewhat insecure my father was at his core. This was definitely not the impression anyone who knew him had of him. In fact, at his memorial, the theme of my father’s life and its impact on others quickly became apparent: he was the one everyone looked up to for guidance – especially moral guidance – in their lives. He was deeply loved and admired for his wisdom, his deep sense of morality, and his kindness.

Long into my adult years, even the thought of my father dying would render me breathless and would bring immediate tears, as I considered him my North Star, the guiding force in everything I did. It was not unlike my father’s admiration for his own father and, it turns out, for his older brother. While my father’s admiration for his father was likely well-placed (though who actually knows?), he was haunted and even bullied by his older brother for decades after the war ended, even while they lived on different continents.

We’ll go into that more when we discuss Letters from Family and Friends (1945 – 1983), but here is a quick excerpt that illustrates the relationship between Rainer and Thomas as they grew older. The year was 1972. Thomas had done quite well in his career as a mechanical engineer and had even invented a 360-degree laser – a first in the field and very useful in the construction industry. He was proud of himself and we were very proud of him, too.

Rainer, however, had this to say:

“Thomas, what, please, does one do with a portable laser tool? It’s possible that you don’t know either, in which case, don’t bother to reply. Also, we are glad that you can rest on your laurels about the swimming pool you built. Obviously, you have reached, according to the Peter Principle (I hope I don’t have to doubt that you know it) the final level of incompetence and are making the best of it. To call it enviable wouldn’t be correct, because it’s something one simply has to do, that’s all.”

So this man who my father idolized all his life was, in reality, a bully and, it seems, a real butthead. The above excerpt is just one of many letters he wrote to both his sister, Ulli and to his brother, Thomas, over a period of 50 years, cruelly criticizing them for life choices they made, insisting that said choice would be looked upon with disgusted horror by their parents. Who Ulli dated, who my father married, what career my father chose – you name it, Rainer criticized it.

And yet, my brothers and I, as well as our cousins, had no knowledge of this side of Rainer. Instead, he was presented to us as my father and aunt had seen him in their youth – high on a pedestal, deserving of much admiration, to be revered. I was in my mid-forties before Dad admitted the truth to me – that this man he looked up to for most of his life was undeserving of his – or our – admiration.

And that, my dear grandchildren, is generational trauma at work.

(I’m sorry, dear family, but one of my goals for this blog is honestly. No more sugar-coating, no more misplaced admiration where it is not earned and deserved, no more baseless judgement or cruel bigotry. That stuff stops here and now.)

Here are my father’s words:

The year 1943 was marked for me by three events: Rainer leaving home, being thrown out of school, and my Confirmation. All three happened just before Easter, which in that year happened at the latest possible date, April 25.

Rainer’s departure happened first and had a significant impact on me. We had been very close - or perhaps that was just my impression because he was five years older than I, so I had a natural hero worship for him. He seemed to know everything. While I was still struggling with the first year of Latin, he was already was reading Greek. He told me political and dirty jokes, confirming what I was learning in my secret exploration of the book, Liebesleben in der Nature. Rainer also took advantage of me being a much younger brother, insisting “Vorg’n, mitg’n. nachg’n,” which is short for “vorgehen. mitgehen, and nachgehen (“go in front of me, go with me, go behind me”).” My resentment of that kind of treatment, if any, was superseded by my admiration for him as an older, and therefore much wiser, brother. That worship lasted until he died – always older, better, and richer than I.

But my admiration did not last long after his death.

(Thomas and Rainer as young adults.)

In March, Rainer left for München, where he would complete a “Praktikum” consisting of hands-on work at a machine shop, prior to studying Mechanical Engineering. With luck, he hoped to be able to audit some lectures at the Technical University, even though he knew he would not be allowed admission. My sister Ulli had been sent to live with relatives in the countryside, to be safe from bombs, so I became an only child at home with my parents, who continued to protect me from the increasingly precarious political situation. Dealing with it was a much heavier burden for them (I now know!) than standing in line, shopping, and black-out constructions that had become my job. Suddenly, with Rainer gone, I had become the oldest son. What a responsibility -- in my mind! In reality, it was my own illusion: Mother wrote Rainer regular love letters because her dedication to her first son remained as strong as ever, but also because he was handy for secretly delivering letters and greetings to Edwin Fischer whenever he gave concerts in München or Salzburg. Father, too, discussed more “adult” subjects with Rainer whenever he came home -- things one would never say on the phone because of the well-known fact that wiretapping was common.

The second event occurred at the beginning of Easter vacation. On March 31^st, the Nazi policy of Ausgrenzung^[1] caught up with me. It happened suddenly when I received my report card with the word “TERMINAL” stamped across it, and the note that I had been admitted to the State Gymnasium on April 12, 1939, and that I “left it” on March 31, 1943, which was a euphemism for being booted out of school because I was a “Mischling Ersten Grades.” For my parents, it must have been expected, because even half-Jews were no longer allowed to attend any kind of higher education. Rainer was not allowed to attend the Technical University in München, I was not allowed to remain in high school, and Ulli was not allowed to begin high school. It did not come out of a clear blue sky; it came from a sky that was getting heavier and darker, one cloud at the time. It was part of the system of slowly tightening the noose, one notch at a time.

Not one of my teachers, nor the “Gold Pheasant” Nazi school principal said good-bye to me. During spring break, I simply ceased to exist. After the brief vacation, school continued without me. Times were so confusing and so unpredictable that no one noticed the absence of one classmate. Students moved, fathers were drafted or transferred -- so what? I doubt the other students gave my absence a thought. My close friends knew what was happening, and for them it wasn't so shocking. After all (so said the propaganda machine), there was a war on, and those Jews had to be punished.

Of course, some of my friends knew which way the wind was blowing. After the war, some of them told me that they were sorry not to have given me more help and moral support at the time. Much of their indifference was simply due to the expectation that such regulations were normal. That kind of government was all any of us had ever experienced. How could they possibly know better? It wasn't until they had lived in a free democracy for a few years that it dawned in them how cruel such treatment really was. At the 50th class reunion in 1997, an elderly gentleman approached me, introduced himself as one of the Hitler Youth Leaders, and apologized that 55 years earlier he had snubbed me so thoughtlessly and openly. He had thought about it a lot in the years since, he said, and he just wanted me to know. To say that was as important for him as it was for me to hear it.

My father was obviously deeply pained by his classmates’ sudden disregard for him – no matter how much he insists that he took it in stride. I think this deeply impacted him for the rest of his life – especially in conjunction with what I see as his brother’s emotional abandonment.

In my father's notes, this paragraph appears at this point. He didn't include it in The Rim of the Volcano, but I'm taking the liberty of re-inserting it here because his words were both terrifying and prophetic: 

(Today, at the end of the century, after living in liberty for so long, the enormity of it all is still not quite fathomable. It would be equivalent to an order from the Department of Education in Washington DC saying that no high school, college, or university is allowed to admit any student with an Islamic parent. No funds would be spent on those students, as they are unworthy of an education. And no accredited teacher would be allowed to teach them privately, either. Think about that - and then imagine that there is absolutely no discussion about that new law anywhere, certainly not in the media, and that no one would dare question it, for fear of being suspected of protecting Muslims. We're so lucky that it could never happen here. Or could it? Could it be a human failing rather than a national one? Could the three necessary ingredients - people's xenophobia, demonization by the government, and the pressure of war - ever come together in America to produce something similar? Impossible! US citizens with Japanese ancestors would never be forced into internment -- RIGHT?!)

Dad wrote these words in the late 1990s, long before Trump was mentioned anywhere but in the New York tabloids. At that time, I would have thought Dad was simply being paranoid to suggest that our democracy is anything but rock solid. NOW I know that democracy is actually extremely fragile and that if someone like Hitler - or Trump - is allowed to lead, the first order of business for them is to dismantle that democracy, piece by piece - demonizing and then dismantling the media, identifying a "them" and convincing a naive population that they are to be hated, and promising that "only they" can fix the problems that plague an otherwise great nation - until they are dictators.

Okay, deep breath... and back to Thomas' story.  

I must admit that I felt somewhat liberated at the time – and what fourteen-year-old boy wouldn’t? No longer would I need to put on my tie each morning, bicycle to school, take tests, and listen to old teachers for whom I had no respect, talking on subjects that didn’t interest me. I would still see my best friends in private French lessons, and the others were less important to me than my freedom from school. At first, I would bicycle to school to meet my class at the door when school was dismissed, but that turned out to be more embarrassing than pleasant. Some students greeted me and asked what I was doing, some just waved, and some noticed me and went on their way. I never knew whether they didn't want to talk to me, or whether they were just unsure as to how to behave in that situation. No one made a nasty remark, but I stopped those encounters quickly.

My parents knew that their children’s continuing education was important, even if they couldn’t attend school. As it turned out, there was a loophole in the law, and luckily my parents were able to slip me through it. I think Father probably researched it carefully ahead of time with his attorney, but I didn’t know about it until I got my final report card. The law stated that Jewish and other “undesirable” teachers were to be fired so they would not corrupt precious German students. Dismissed less-precious students (like me) could be instructed, but only by the dismissed less precious teachers. The result was that during the next 18 months I received an education that was vastly more liberal, intensive, impartial, and openminded than what my precious former classmates received.

“He’s taking it well, but not happily,” Mother wrote to her mother, about me. “Sometimes I get tears in my eyes, as when he said ‘Private lessons will be monotonous, Mutti. Do I get to invite my friends once every few months, so we can talk?’ He says ‘talk’, but he means ‘laugh’! Believe me, Mother, I haven’t heard the boy laugh for months! And yesterday in church, he fainted. He insisted it was only his empty stomach, but all I can think is, what will happen next?” Everything was very uncertain and only that constant dread and uncertainty mattered anymore.

My father found the best dismissed teachers in Chemnitz. From our French teacher I learned more German, art history, intellectual history, and common sense than in the four years before I was dismissed. And another fired high school teacher, Professor Pilzer, who was a Mischling like me, became my math and physics instructor. Herr Epstein tried in vain to fill the big gaps in my Latin and Greek knowledge that my previous teachers had already wrestled with. And when my previous classmates began to learn English in school, I began lessons at home.

Physical Education was not needed because my teachers were spread all over Chemnitz, so I rode my bike from one end of town to the other. During that time I had very little contact with kids my age. Most of my friends lived in a completely different world than I did, and most hadn’t given my circumstances a second thought.

The third event was my Protestant Confirmation, by my father’s dear friend and fellow art collector, Walter Hoffmann.

It is interesting to note what was important for my parents in this regard. I have letters from both of my parents to Adele, my grandmother. My father bragged that I was a model student in Confirmation class, and that I passed the final exam with “a special laudatory comment by the Pastor.” Mother’s concerns were more practical. “How will the child get a confirmation suit?” she asked her mother, Adele, in a letter. In Germany at the time, young boys traditionally wore short pants or knickers, transitioning to long pants and a suit only when they were older. It was a rite of passage – and I had no long pants, no suit! Mother complained bitterly to her mother about the apparent lack of understanding of the ˆBezugscheinstelle,” the Purchase Permit Office that had not the least understanding for the dire need. What was I to do - wear knickerbockers for my Confirmation? Unfathomable! Mutti finally had a bright idea: my grandfather had recently died, so why not ask her mother for one of my grandfather’s old dark suits and have it altered for me? It worked. After a few visits to the tailor and, I’m sure, considerable sweet-talking and bribing him, I had a big boy suit. The photo of me with Omama Adele, still in mourning for the original owner of that altered suit, is one of my favorites.

 

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^[1] “Fencing out” some people, as opposed to Gleichschaltung (empower to work in the same direction), which was another “program” word the Nazis loved to use.

By the way, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. There are people in 2021 America who insist that the Holocaust never happened. Part of my incentive for writing this blog is to leave the very real words of my father and his very real memories that confirm, beyond a doubt, that the Holocaust did, indeed, happen.

The fact that I even have to say that is mortifying.

A Chemistry Experiment Gone Bad

My dear grandchildren,

This is the post where the stars in my eyes fade upon the realization that, whereas my father was a prolific writer, he was not really a very good writer. I’m spending hours upon hours a day editing his writing for grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and clarity. English was his second language, so it’s understandable, but this is the same father who (along with my teacher mother) was adamant that my ability to write well in English was as important as… well, as important as reading and writing French apparently was to his parents. (Read on…)

I apologize in advance if I am the omi who insists that my grandchildren be good writers. But seriously, guys, be good writers. It’s important!

And that’s how generational trauma happens. Go ahead – blame me!  :-)

Here is my dad’s (edited) writing for today. This entry has nothing to do with war and everything to do with the experience of being 14 years old.

In 1942, I was fourteen. It is an age when any young person, anywhere in the world, at any time in history, seeks answers to what life is all about – particularly regarding “those things that must not be discussed.” In our home, two subjects were taboo: sex and any information about my father’s relatives and ancestors. No one ever spoke to me about either of them, especially about sex. Grown-ups giggled and whispered, but we were never let in on the secret.

My research on the “sex secret” was limited to the noon hour, when both my parents had their mid-day nap. In their beds, in darkness, clad in their night clothes. That was when I had the library to myself and I could explore Vandervelde, a sex education book for grownups whose own parents probably never mentioned anything like sex, either. Like us, they were probably left to find out from friends who might know more than we did. What was all that secrecy about? Must be something great!

I looked everywhere for information about “Vandervelde, a sex education book” in Germany. I couldn’t find anything anywhere about such a book! Maybe Dad meant Van der Velde?!

These are from Amazon. Maybe I should order them and sneak a peek?!

 

I knew all about the birds and the bees because of the book Das Liebesleben in der Natur^[1]. Maybe my parents left that book out on purpose. I learned all about the birds and the bees, and did my own extrapolating about humans - wrong, of course.

     

(From The Booklooker)

I found this one, too!

My life was protected, again and still, from all that went on outside of my direct involvement with the world. My world revolved around my own life and my own concerns. One of them was Rainer’s chemistry lab that was set up on the third floor near Rainer’s tool closet. 1942 was Rainer’s last year at home. He had gotten his Abitur (basically, high school diploma) and was ready to move to München, which meant that I would inherit his tools and his chemistry lab. I was thrilled.

Our house had three stories plus a basement below. The central hall of the top floor had been turned into what amounted to big brother's territory: his tool chest and a table for his chemistry experiments. I was still relegated to the playroom for the "two little ones" (and with a girl,!), so Rainer's attic hall required his permission for entry and was to me a paradise yet to be attained, a prime reason in my mind to grow up fast. 

One day, while our little sister Ulli and our parents were out of the house, Rainer gave me an orientation on the details of his chemistry lab, showing me some of the important items in his lab, including a water hose that ran from the attic bathroom to the lab table (because you can’t run a lab without water, right?). Rainer was deep into his chemistry experiment that day, one that used stinky sulfur dioxide, something that was best done with parents and little sister out of the house. He allowed me to watch and even gave me the job of washing out the vials, which wasn't easy because the garden hose he had rigged between the bathroom faucet and the chemistry table ended in a tiny little valve from his chemistry set. But I was proud to have gotten everything clean and not breaking anything in the process. Too bad we had to stop for our Saturday bath, a directive from our parents to have completed by the time they returned.

We took a bath in the nearby bathroom. (One bath, of course, to save water.) To young boys, the purpose of a bath is not to get clean; it is for underwater car races, for submerging the toy submarine, only to have to pop up high out of the water, clearly lacking the properties of a real submarine... and it is a time for boy talk.

Our bath was interrupted by a loud voice coming from downstairs."Where are the boys... and is someone frying eggs?!" Clearly our parents and Ulli had arrived home.

Ulli, with great anticipation, thought she heard dinner frying in the kitchen. But that blip-plop-pott-pud wasn't the sound of bacon frying. Wrong. It was a steady stream of water pouring from the hose on the chemistry table, now minus its tiny valve. When we turned off  the faucet after our bath, it turned out, the sudden increase in water pressure separated the maybe-not-so-ingenious hose from the attic bathroom to the lab table. Now water was dripping from the ceilings into the bedrooms, the hall, the playroom, even running down the attic steps,rivulets forming on and under the wallpaper and finally pooling into puddles in the wood parquet! Yikes!

"Buckets! Quick! And mops! Towels, more of them!" Herr Pennsdorf, the caretaker who lived above our garage, was summoned and requested to bring with him his wife and children.It would take everyone to deal with this flood! Being an expert at all things structural, Pennsdorf looked panicked, but never lost his Saxon lethargy. "Herr Gonsuhl, he droned in his broad Saxon dialect, "That ceiling's coming down."

The fancy coffered ceiling never actually did come down, but it sported a big brown blotch throughout the war until, a few years after our domestic flood, it suffered the same grim fate as the rest of the ceilings in our house which, unlike this one, had preserved their snow-white luster.

When the excitement that naturally followed this catastrophe was over, Rainer showed me his diary entry for the day, a page filled to near-blackness with circles, spirals, confused jagged shapes and a whole cacophony of round and jagged scribbles. Rainer’s journal entry was all about our parents’ different temperaments. We spoke of our parents not by using affectionate terms like "Dad" and "Mom," but rather as "he" and "she," characterizing them as "round" and "jagged" -  and their response to the chemistry debacle illustrated their round and jagged temperaments perfectly.  Father, the “round” one (even by appearance), planned, directed and punished and worried, with all the deliberate rationality he could muster under the dire circumstances, while “jagged” Mother, in contrast, was nervous, panicked, and fastidiously practical, mopping up water and finding more buckets and towels than I knew we had.

At that time, we were still rather sheltered children, not at all conscious of how cruel life was becoming for people like my parents, while life on the surface shone with Nazi glory. How bizarre the new realities must have been to anyone accustomed to the normalcy of the life they had known. It wasn't until much later that we realized the extreme pressures weighing on our parents at that time, making it completely understandable (in retrospect) that they were acting "round, " "jagged," or any other way they could manage without losing their sanity. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chemistry was exciting, but most of the time I was busy with schoolwork, especially private French lessons from Herr Epping, a staunch Social Democrat who had been stripped of his job as principal of the local girls’ high school. Herr Epping would come to have a major influence on my life in years to come.

My parents believed that, while learning languages like Latin, Greek and English is important, one must know how to speak and write the “only truly cultured language,” French, in order to call oneself a well-educated person. My own interest in French got so strong that I began to read the French newspaper (by then of course totally controlled by the German Occupation of France!) and had French conversation with Father at dinner. That year, my Christmas present to my parents was reciting a memorized French fable by La Fontaine, including, for extra credit, a German translation.

Ulli, meanwhile, was finishing elementary school. Her teachers were impressed with her intelligence and diligence, assuring our parents that she was well qualified to enter the best high school for girls, but the Nazis would not allow it. Like us, she was a Mischling Ersten Grades and therefor would not be admitted to high school, just as Rainer was not admitted to the Technical University in München. Mutti knew that, if some Nazi, somewhere, would be willing to stick his neck out, Ulli could continue to go to school, but no official anywhere would stick his neck out. So Ulli was told that she was “still too tender” to go to high school with her friends, which was the one and only thing she really wanted. For years into her future, Ulli thought that the reason she was not admitted to high school was that she was not smart enough. Just imagine!

Everyone was constantly hungry and cold. By this time, life was interrupted numerous times during the day, and often at night, by air raid sirens. Nothing was normal anymore.

My mother Irmgard was well aware that her sheer existence as a non-Jew was the only thing that stood between her Jewish husband and an evil and hostile regime that wanted him dead. During this time, she wrote to her mother, Adele, that she was completely disheartened by a world full of madness and irrationality and that she was often “drenched in tears” over the lack of smiles and any humor in her family’s life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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^[1] “Love Life in Nature”