Once a week at least, and usually on a Thursday evening, Ernst would walk straight from the law court in the Elssholzstrasse to meet Emmy at the Philharmonie, Berlin’s greatest concert hall. There they heard the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, or Erich Kleiber – and musicians like the pianist Artur Schnabel or the ‘cold but dazzling’ violinist Jascha Heifetz, who had all the prodigious talent that, they held, Eastern Europe and Russia could nourish in their Jewish natives, though they failed to foster the supreme cultivation that only the German-speaking lands could instil. Or Ernst and Emmy would go to one of the three opera houses that flourished in the city: the Staatsoper, where my mother’s teacher was concertmaster and where they heard Erich Kleiber’s famous performance of Wozzeck and Furtwängler conduct Tristan und Isolde; or the more experimental Kroll Oper, where Otto Klemperer reigned with his uncompromising ways; or the Städtische Oper, presided over by Bruno Walter.
They had a long-standing disagreement over who was the greatest symphonic conductor of this extraordinary collection. Ernst preferred the more controlled, yet sensuously rich, Walter – a Jewish conductor who had replaced his real surname, Schlesinger, with his middle name. He loved Walter’s classical vitality, his scrupulous emotional hygiene, and the refined joyousness of his phrasing; while most concert-goers’ favourite was the more mystical Furtwängler, whose incredible intensity of feeling evoked a religious sense of redemption. According to my mother, it was often said in Berlin at the time that Walter tended to be the Jews’ favourite and Furtwängler the non-Jewish Germans’, reflecting, she maintained, the reality that Jews have a quite distinct sensibility, no matter how German they felt, or how successfully they could articulate Germanic culture. It seemed from some of her accounts that there were parts of a Jewish sensibility that assimilation, however ardently and even violently pursued, never managed to touch.
At the same time, Ernst was not immune to the yearning of many German Romantics to find the divine immanent in the world, and to discover the absolute through music, art, and thought. Perhaps their unquenchable passion for spiritual purification rooted in the rigours of learning was where Germans and Jews of his times secretly met. In any event, such yearnings deeply appealed to those German Jews, like him, who wished to rise beyond their origins into what they saw as the grander, richer world of the German soul, a world that, unlike their ancestors’ effete traditions, was overflowing with new life. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Ernst loved Wagner’s Parsifal, that orgy of redemption set to the profoundest music, in which an angelically androgynous youth who doesn’t know even his name redeems a woman, Kundry, whom he transforms from a mocking denier of the Cross into a kind of spiritual bride. He also revered German philosophers in the tradition of Hegel who, though they might have criticized Judaism, were devoted to a vision of absolute reality in which history is destined to culminate – a vision that bore striking parallels to the ancient Jewish promise of a redeemed reality beyond history, in which unity will be brought to a fractured world.
Above all, for Ernst as for Hegel, such a culmination of history could only be German. From his earliest years, my grandfather was determined to make Germany – the spirit of Germany, the texture of Germany – his own, and to turn his back once and for all on his Jewish ancestry, with, as he saw it, its myriad of embarrassing customs and no longer spiritually relevant laws. For him, Jewish culture was the airless, parochial past; German Kultur the free, fertile future.
He longed to serve Germany in any way he could. In the First World War he had lobbied to join the cavalry and fight on the front line, but after falling off his horse within days of joining the service, he was quickly transferred to Intelligence and a desk in Berlin. Applying his formidable willpower to this new assignment, he was awarded a medal by the Kaiser for unscrambling enemy code. He was deeply proud of the medal, though kept it locked up in a secret place and was reluctant to talk about it outside the family. It didn’t just recognize his unwavering loyalty to Germany; it was also, he was sure, official proof of his acceptance by Germany and of the power of an enlightened state to override or somehow to render harmless the anti-Semitism that refused to sleep.
As a child I liked everything about this story – that my grandfather was a German patriot; that he was too steeped in the dreamy heights of German culture to ride a horse; that he was able to see through a sophisticated enemy aided by no more than a smattering of rumours and quarter-truths. His pristine demeanour, perfectly groomed hair, and trimmed moustache exuded a sense of duty, efficiency, order, and discipline – those quintessentially German virtues, so deliciously reassuring and life-giving when devoted to noble ends. His lips pouted with precision. His rimless glasses rested on a straight no-nonsense nose and framed his melancholically determined eyes. But I kept all this Teutonic bliss under wraps during my high school years in 1970s England, a time when anti-German sentiment and memories of both world wars were still very much alive, when classmates would jack their right arms up in mock Nazi salutes on hearing my mother’s accent, and when having two German parents marked me out as inescapably alien.
Or at least I hoped it marked me out as alien, because, like both my parents, I refused to accept that Germany had been lost. And that they had really emigrated.