Christmas Day, 1932. In retrospect his world might look fragile and delusory, a house of cards waiting to collapse. The menace of anti-Semitism is nothing new: it has been there for as long as he can bear to recall it. Nonetheless, it is a reality against which, grandfather Ernst is sure, the solidity of his life insulates him.
He has it all: A respected position in one of Berlin’s leading law courts, the Kammergericht on the Elssholzstrasse – which still exists, indeed is Germany’s oldest surviving court. Three talented daughters – Ilse, Ursel (Ursula), and Marianne, my mother – unusually, for those days, all embarking on professions. A large apartment in prosperous ‘Berlin West’ – Berlin W. – the magic ‘W’, pronounced ‘vey’ and spoken with awe by my mother and her sisters, for it denotes a protected zone of high bourgeois Kultur, with its impregnable ethic of seriousness and learning and its veneration of music and philosophy, art and theatre. No more Jewishness – that he sees as behind him now, banished to the past, conquered, extirpated, anachronistic, inauthentic; a problem finally solved, not just to the outside world but even, somehow, in his innermost soul, where the sensibility and instincts of millennia no longer hold conscious sway. A cultured, beautiful, and officially non-Jewish wife – who is aware that she is halachically Jewish and yet, decades after her death in 1965 and right into the twenty-first century, my mother continues to speak of her sometimes as Jewish but usually as ‘Aryan’, and in either case with equal conviction. Above all, there is his beloved Germany: a nation of deep thinkers, dazzling musicians, epoch-making scientists, discipline, order, and integrity. Germany: a culture of incomparable richness, from which the human spirit has grown to transcendental heights. In which innocence and knowingness, divine naivety and self-consciousness, all flourish in fertile tension. In which the austere and the overwrought restlessly coexist. Germany: for him and his kind, the greatest culture in the contemporary West, and probably in the world. Athens on the River Spree. Without slaves.
My grandfather fills his days with law and his evenings with cultured conversations around the dinner table with his wife Emmy and their daughters – though, according to my mother, from about fourteen Ursel, the middle daughter, begins to absent herself. Her home and especially her father make her uncomfortable. It all seems frighteningly, oppressively, serious. And, I imagine, perhaps the seriousness conceals something else: the perilous unreality of her parents’ belief in the safety and solidity of their lives; and their terror before the fragility of civilization.
After dinner, Ernst and Emmy usually read German classics aloud to each other: poems of Schiller or extracts from Goethe’s Italian Journey, in the footsteps of which Ernst had followed as a young man and which still inspire the annual trips he makes to Italy each summer, accompanied by either Ilse or Marianne (Ursel refuses to go). Sometimes he reads Novalis and Tieck, or he gets his mind around Kant, Hegel, or another of those dense German philosophers. And Emmy occasionally interjects with a poem or two of the hundreds that she learned by heart in her childhood and at the finishing school in Montreux where her rich Jewish uncle and adoptive father, Artur Rosenthal, sent her in her late teens.
Or Emmy goes to the piano and accompanies herself singing Lieder. Though her voice is small, she is highly musical – more so than Ernst, who lacks her innate understanding of phrasing and tonality. She is naive, though also intensely aware, given to wild exaggeration, and easily infatuated with the latest fashions in healthy eating, such as Graham bread, herbal teas, and anything that comes from England. Even in her seventies, when I knew her – she died when I was nine – she had an evergreen youthfulness, walked briskly on spindle-thin legs, found most things either unbelievably wonderful or unbelievably terrible, craved the protection of others yet was formidably self-reliant, and had an unnerving stare betraying, I was sure, intelligence and stubbornness of a high order.
Most Saturday afternoons she makes English tea and combs Berlin for bread that is textureless enough for truly English sandwiches. She has her furniture upholstered in English material by the downstairs neighbour, a Baroness Schlippenbach, who imports fabrics, and swoons over its delights, saying, ‘Ach, children, isn’t it beautiful? It’s so tasteful! It’s so English!’
The domestic idyll is occasionally interrupted by friends who drop in after dinner. The benign lawyer, Wilhelm Krämer, my mother’s godfather, who was in the same student fraternity as Ernst and is soon to be promoted to the Reichsgericht, Germany’s Supreme Court, in Leipzig, where he will stay right up to 1945, regularly breaks into their quiet time after dinner for a drink. So does another lawyer, Herr Hans-Harald von Hackwitz, a tall, reedy, and handsome loner who deputizes for Ernst while he is on holiday. Hackwitz’s gait and speech are as stiff as his name and he is unaware of being followed around the large living room – my mother always chuckles as she tells me this story – by Ursel, who mimics his mannerisms behind his back and pretends that she can’t wait to get her hands on him. ‘I don’t understand that child; I just don’t understand her,’ Ernst says disapprovingly as Ursel turns the gestures, tics, and eccentricities of her parents’ friends into festivals of clowning. The mutual incomprehension, even mistrust, between Ernst and Ursel is already there; subtly she is repudiating him, her millstone of earnestness. ‘But,’ Ernst continues, ‘why such a charming young man refuses to get married, I don’t know.’
Occasionally, my mother tells me, Gregor Piatigorsky, a great Russian cellist who would emigrate to America in 1940 on the last passenger ship to leave France before the German occupation, knocks on the door unannounced – less to visit Emmy and Ernst than to feast his eyes on ‘the three graces’, as he calls the teenage daughters of the house. ‘You are lovely graces!’ he exclaims in his elegantly Russified German with its rolling ‘r’s. ‘But, I am sorry, none of you –’ and he pauses teasingly – ‘is a patch on your charming mother!’
Piatigorsky’s excuse for dropping in is that he needs a room to change into his white tie for the concerts at my grandparents’ downstairs neighbours, Baron and Baroness Schlippenbach, who have converted their twelve-room apartment, minus the kitchen, bathroom, and four bedrooms, into a concert hall, complete with a platform and curtains that two domestic staff draw back to reveal the artists for the evening. Baron Schlippenbach is a dandy who dabbles in poetry, likes to dress in eighteenth-century court costume, claims to have written a novel longer than War and Peace which is tucked away in a drawer waiting for its time to come, and has befriended many of Berlin’s leading musicians. He persuades virtuosos like Fritz Kreisler, Carl Flesch, reigning professor of violin in Berlin, and Piatigorsky to rehearse their programmes at his soirées; and few of these men are indifferent to the beautiful women whose animated conversation lights up the shadows of the reading room at the back of the apartment.
The concert hall is big enough for Schlippenbach to stage operas in full dress, performed by such singers as the then-legendary soprano Irene Eisinger, a decent-sized choir, and a chamber orchestra drawn from the Staatsoper, one of the city’s three opera houses, under its leader Josef Wolfsthal. The writer Walter Benjamin – whose own grandmother, Hedwig Schönflies, lived, until her death, in the apartment directly above my grandparents – gives a sense of the spaciousness of the apartments in Blumeshof 12:
The rooms in this apartment on the Blumeshof were not only numerous but also in some cases very large. To reach my grandmother at her window I had to cross the huge dining room and attain the farthest end of the living room. Only feast days, and above all Christmas Day, could give an idea of the capaciousness of these rooms.4
‘Above all, Christmas Day’! Preparations for this most deeply contented day of the year begin at least a week beforehand in Ernst and Emmy’s household, as in those of millions of Germans. The windows on the Advent calendar are nearly all open; the tree is carried in and decorated with candles and baubles; cookies of ginger, almond, and other Weihnachtsgebäck are laid out on brightly coloured plates beneath the tree; and finally, the presents, concealed until the previous evening in a locked cupboard, are distributed on three tables, then covered with cloths embroidered with a big woven ‘L’, a wedding present from Emmy’s adoptive father, Artur Rosenthal.
The girls have not been allowed into the room with the tree and the gifts all day, until, at precisely 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Ernst, chuckling with delight at his daughters’ excited anticipation, rings a bell. They rush out of Ilse’s room, where they have been confined out of sight of the last-minute preparations, and each of them sweeps the cloth off ‘her’ table. The tree is addressed with the traditional German Christmas song, ‘O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum’, followed by ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’, before a large goose, steaming in its basted golden-brown skin, is wheeled in by the proud cook, who is followed by the other staff, all dressed in their best and giggling conspiratorially.
As my mother lies dying in a London hospital ward some ninety years later, just three weeks before Christmas, she sings ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’ over and over again to the nurses; to a magnificent cockney called Dorothy in the next bed, who seems perplexed enough by the stream of foreign words to briefly cease complaining about the scandalous lateness of meals and the ‘madhouse’ that she deems the hospital to be on account of its inability to produce cheese sandwiches with unbuttered, crust-free, chewable bread; and to a Muslim woman in the bed opposite, her female relations sitting round her in veiled silence, her charming son ‘inspired’, he tells me, by the vivid happiness of my mother’s memories as she recalls the deep contentedness of the Christmas room, and the symphony of church bells in the distance, and the creaking of the staircase in her building as neighbours, non-Jewish and Jewish, return from church. The tenderness of Mother’s voice overwhelms me as she pauses, her eyes large with the wonder of childlike happiness, and repeats:
Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!
(Lovely boy with curly hair,
Sleep in heavenly peace!)
The idyll of Blumeshof is potent. Its moral order seems indestructible. Even when their lives are beset by anxiety, Ernst and Emmy’s marriage is free of it. It is a marriage of dovetailing desires and dislikes, rhythms and sympathies, unburdened by drama, boredom, jealousy, suspicion, or unfilled expectations. Their love is undisturbed by those torments where one person seems achingly elusive or, on the contrary, to press in on and crowd out the other’s inner world; unoppressed by the emptiness that couples can feel when they possess each other too securely. Their needs for each other never go beyond what they can give (with perhaps one exception). There are no rows, only loving disagreements. Her penchant for wild exaggeration is perfectly cushioned by his natural understatement, his self-control balanced by her spontaneity. They offer each other that deep security and well-being that is happiness.
At least, this is how all three daughters spoke to me of the marriage. As if in a dream reporting a dream, they would recall its perfections with identical superlatives and in the same self-evident tone. Over decades I heard paeans – entirely convincing – to its harmony and order, spoken by each in unvarying sentences that seemed as wholehearted as they were automatic. Even Ursel concurred that it was a remarkable match, though absolutely not to her dramatic taste.
The apartment itself embodied this contented union. The three sisters, their parents, the staff, and the relatives and friends who came to stay all had their own quarters where they slept, ate, relaxed, conversed, and worked; and when they crossed into other parts of the apartment they were like visitors on foreign turf. Each room had its distinctive atmosphere and furnishings, as if it were designed to support one particular life form. There was a room where my grandfather and grandmother had breakfast together, another where he worked or read, a third where she could be private, the library where they spent their evenings, the salon with the piano, an office in which his secretary banged away on a typewriter every morning from eight until noon, and another where he received colleagues. And there were the rooms at the back where the girls were confined while they still played with dolls, though Ilse stopped doing that at ten and found Ursel and my mother rather stupidly obsessed with the puppet theatre that they had built together and the private language that they had developed: their so-called ‘Maminasprache’, a playful perversion of German, replete with dramatically lurching cadences, based on the West Prussian dialect spoken by Ernst and his parents.
It was an upholstered universe of impeccable structure. Its laws felt palpably self-sustaining. The rougher sides of Berlin – poverty, anarchy, bigotry, and later the brownshirts – were literally out of sight and out of mind.
As Walter Benjamin said of his grandmother’s apartment upstairs, poverty, and even death itself, ‘could have no place in these rooms.’ To which he added mysteriously, but also illuminatingly: ‘Blumeshof has become for me an Elysium, an indefinite realm of the shades of deceased but immortal grandmothers.’
And, of course, grandfathers.