The origin of this self-ethnic purging within our family was decades before anyone had heard of Adolf Hitler; and it was far advanced before he took power. Emmy’s mother, Adele, reviled Jews, rigorously denied that her own mother was Jewish, and would never forgive Emmy for marrying a Jew. Or so my mother lamented, adding that Adele refused to address Ernst, her son-in-law, except with the formal ‘Sie’, and openly disdained him. To which he was resigned, without bitterness.
In fact, the only public honesty about Emmy’s Jewish roots came from a most unlikely source: Der Stürmer, a violently anti-Semitic newspaper that announced itself as a weekly ‘dedicated to fighting for the truth’ and, among other propaganda, ran semi-pornographic caricatures of Jews and accusations of blood libel. The occasion was an article about Emmy’s brother, Helmut Fahsel: philosopher, amateur boxer, model railway enthusiast, lover of fast cars, devotee of St Thomas Aquinas – and Catholic priest.
Helmut, my great-uncle, was a celebrity cleric. His great gift was oratory: he could take complicated themes, such as divine omnipotence and the problem of evil, and explain them in speeches that attracted crowds of hundreds. As late as 1977 he was still spoken of as ‘Germany’s most famous Catholic orator’ of the period between the late 1920s and the early 1930s.7 He also loathed the Nazis and was courageous enough to speak out against them in such prestigious venues as Berlin’s Philharmonie; so it was hardly surprising that he came to their attention.
It was screamingly obvious, Der Stürmer reported in August 1931, under the banner headline ‘Judenkaplan Fahsel’ (‘Jew-Chaplain Fahsel’), that he was an agent of subversive Jewish forces who were cunning enough to deploy one of their own in the guise of a Christian:
When we saw him with our own eyes, this priest, Fahsel, when we listened to his oily guttural sound, his countenance, and his way of talking with his hands, it became immediately clear: Fahsel has Jewish blood. His father was a Jew who had been baptized a Protestant. After his death, young Fahsel came into the home of his rich Jewish uncle. Ten years ago he was baptized a Catholic. And today he, the baptized Jew, is the famous chaplain of the secret Jewish string-pullers. Fahsel’s task is to sow confusion and discord among non-Jews and to preach forgiveness of the Jews. Reconciliation with the descendants of Christ’s murderers. If the Jew would preach these sorts of things as a rabbi, he would have no success. He therefore sends the Jew in the form of a priest. The really dumb ones fall for it. The bright ones know. They tell their neighbour: beware, look around you, the fox is among you!8
Der Stürmer’s staff had mixed up only a few of their facts. Helmut’s father, Georg Johannes Wilhelm Fahsel, who was the editor of the Norddeutsche Zeitung in Hamburg before his death in 1898 aged thirty-six, had been born a Protestant. But his mother, Maria Friederike Zander, had probably been born a Jew and then been baptized as an adult, sometime in the mid-nineteenth century.
It was also true that after their father’s early death Helmut and Emmy were adopted by their ‘rich Jewish uncle’, Arthur Rosenthal, who was married to their mother’s sister, Emma. Their mother, left destitute as a widow, had given her two children to the Rosenthals, who brought them up in a mansion with staff, works of art, embroidered tapestries, chinaware on display in large mahogany and glass cabinets, and other trappings of bourgeois life.
Rosenthal and his wife were childless and doted on their two adopted children. He added his name to theirs – my grandmother became Emmy Fahsel-Rosenthal – and as they grew into young adults he was generous in financing their education and developing ambitions. He found Emmy the best singing and piano teachers, and sent her to one of Montreux’s elegant ‘finishing schools’ when she was sixteen. He bought the scholarly Helmut every book he wished for, in the finest editions, supported his studies in the classics, and when the young man resolved to learn Catholic theology he co-financed those studies, too, with a close friend, to whom he introduced Emmy after she returned from Montreux and whom he hoped she would eventually marry: Ernst Liedtke.
That Helmut’s path to the priesthood had been supported by two Jews was unlikely to have escaped the attention of Der Stürmer.
It wasn’t just the Nazis who suspected Jewish contamination in Helmut. So did many of his fellow Catholics. Fahsel’s biographer and one-time landlady, Henriette von Gizycki, born Salomonski, herself a Jew who had converted to Catholicism – and who would perish in the Holocaust – laments that these co-religionists also saw his Jewish origins as a ‘blemish’.
Nor can it have helped Fahsel that one of the encounters that shaped his religious life and pushed him towards Catholicism was with Rabbi Leo Baeck, an illustrious scholar and the leader of progressive Judaism in Germany. Or that he publicly attacked anti-Semites who repudiated the Old Testament and denied that Jesus was a Jew. Gizycki reports a meeting in the Philharmonie in about 1928, where Helmut confronted the Nazi author Arthur Dinter, whose bestselling novel, The Sin Against the Blood, declared that an Aryan woman who had once had sex with a Jewish man would inevitably have polluted offspring, even if they were fathered by an Aryan:
The excitement in the hall was so great that Fahsel couldn’t be heard at all. With a great command ‘Quiet!’ he achieved complete silence. As a Catholic priest he defended the importance of the Old Testament. As a result he lost the sympathy of all those in his audience of a völkisch, anti-Semitic disposition.9
What really baffled Fahsel’s biographer was how such rumours about his Jewishness could possibly have been spread when they were evidently groundless. To ‘honour the truth’, she quotes the following sentence from Fahsel’s own notebooks:
A journalist later mentioned the rich Jewish uncle and gave vent to the erroneous and absurd opinion that I had Jewish parents who had been baptized. Anti-Semites should calm down [about that], but they should also know that I have experienced from Jews acts of the highest kind-heartedness and loyalty, free of any falsehood and arrogance.10
Me, a Jew? Fahsel’s sangfroid, just like Emmy’s and Ilse’s, is masterly. Crucially, he believed his own story. Like Ilse’s courage in hiding Jews, Helmut’s generous feelings for them, his recognition of their virtues, his affirmation of the Old Testament, and his denial that they exhibited the vices of anti-Semitic stereotype – falsehood and arrogance11 – were extended from his impregnable conviction that he was not one of them – and that any idea to the contrary was absurd.
But Fahsel had another side to him that drew some of the sting of Nazi disdain. At the same time as he was lurching towards Catholicism, he was developing a passionate devotion to the ancient Germanic and Greek heroes, such as Siegfried and Theseus. He revered what he saw as their uncompromising masculinity and their courage, loyalty, selflessness, and solitude – and despised people who succumbed to the spell of sensuous charms or to the idyll of a comfortable life.12
This talk was in the air. In Mein Kampf, Hitler portrays himself as just such a character – the lone individual brimming with bravery, loyalty, and honesty who forgoes the security of family life, guided by a higher force that has sent him to serve and save.
But Fahsel didn’t just talk; he also imposed a rigorous physical exercise regime on himself, learned jiu-jitsu,13 practised athletics, joined the Anglo-American Boxing Club in Berlin,14 attended boxing matches at the Tiergartenhof Hall,15 and even engaged a boxing coach called Joe Edwards.16 He would spend long afternoons in the city’s museums admiring the male physiques depicted by classical Greek sculptures, which, as he confided in his diary, awoke in him ‘the youthful sense for a new rhythm and mood, for a new independence and democratic freedom’.17 And his day would often end at parties organized by the Association for Strength and Beauty.18
While still at school he became, in good Greek fashion, the protégé of a cultured aristocrat who admired Helmut’s body as well as his ideals of physical and moral perfection. The older man would pick him up from school and greet the boy with a reverent and somewhat mannered kiss on the hands, on one occasion even gifting him a statue of Narcissus. Though Helmut professed himself repulsed as well as flattered by this attention, it seems that on balance he tolerated the admiration.19
Artur Rosenthal had long been worried by Helmut’s deepening Catholic infatuation and his mystical experiences before statues of St Thomas Aquinas, but his worship of pagan ideals of manhood deeply troubled the old man. The final straw was the claim of one of Rosenthal’s domestic staff to have seen a breast expander hidden under Helmut’s bed, and rumours in the house that he was flagellating himself in his bedroom between sessions practising at the punchbag that he had suspended from the ceiling.
Rosenthal decided to send the young man to Henriette von Gizycki’s boarding house, where a dose of normal life among young people struggling to make ends meet might bring him down to earth. The effect was exactly the opposite. Released from the staid atmosphere of Rosenthal’s home, with its grand dinners and servers and governesses, Helmut pursued his religious and bodily ideals more fervently than ever.
Gizycki records how, after arriving in September 1908 in an open limousine, accompanied by a butler who carried his belongings, the sixteen-year-old Helmut immediately shut himself in his room to exercise with weights, declaring tartly: ‘I strive for perfection of the body.’20 He rejected the books she gave him – titles such as What A Young Man Needs to Know21 – and instead read either thrillers or else medieval philosophy. Either Conan Doyle or Thomas Aquinas.
Why, she asked him, did he feed his mind with such lightweight stuff as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? Not for entertainment, Helmut answered, but because a scholar’s mind must achieve the brilliance and dexterity of a master detective.
Helmut was deadly serious about these ideals, which blended medieval Christianity with old Germanic-pagan virtues, and didn’t take kindly to all the mockery that he encountered. The First World War was for him the great event that proved how vital they were to the development of a human being. Though he didn’t fight for more than a few months – he fell ill with fever in January 1915 while stationed in northern France and was discharged from the army that autumn – the war, he was convinced, magnificently confirmed that only a life governed by severe discipline, loyalty, and endurance can be happy.
Yet none of this worship of ‘Germania’ and the military virtues allayed the Nazis’ mistrust. Helmut’s safety was becoming ever more imperilled until, sometime in early 1934, Hitler’s deputy chancellor Franz von Papen, so my mother told me, personally telephoned to urge him to flee the country.
Papen considered himself a devout Catholic and admired Fahsel’s religious writings. He didn’t mince his words in his phone call: Fahsel should make sure he was on a particular train departing for Switzerland at dawn the next morning – a ticket would be waiting for him at a mutual friend’s house. The alternative was immediate arrest. His sermons and public lectures were unacceptable, unpatriotic, Jew-friendly and, for all their ideals of noble manhood, smelled of decadence. Even Fahsel’s views on sexuality displeased the authorities, with their edification of Eros as a window onto God and a path to ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness.
Fahsel took the advice and left for Switzerland on the train that Papen had specified, setting up near Locarno with a Spanish widow, her sister, and her Italian housekeeper. A few weeks later his library followed, with its vast collection of philosophy and theology books, along with his model railway set and his collection of boxing gloves. The Spanish widow had been dispatched to Berlin to rescue these prized possessions, which she packed to his demanding specifications and cleared for export – not an easy task to perform on behalf of a man on the run from the Nazi regime.
For almost two decades Helmut lived self-sufficiently in a wing of her mansion overlooking Lake Maggiore, studying, working out at the leather punchbag, playing with his model railway, and listening to his jazz recordings, of which he had hundreds. She bought him whatever books he needed, always in the finest editions; he began his six-volume translation of Thomas Aquinas from Latin into German; and well into middle age he continued to model his life on that of a young aristocrat in ancient Athens.
He was never to return to Germany, except for a brief and unsuccessful stint in the early 1950s as a parish priest in the Pfalz region. While there, he attempted to resume his public lectures in philosophy and religion, but his ideas no longer found the reception they had enjoyed before the war and he soon returned to his Swiss retreat.
When the Spanish widow died, another wealthy woman, a Madame Simon who lived in nearby Muralto, came to the rescue, and it wasn’t long before Fahsel moved in with her. Though he took the Spanish widow’s Italian housekeeper with him, the old order couldn’t easily be recreated and Madame Simon began to realize that she wanted Fahsel for herself. The Italian housekeeper was an interloper who understood nothing about housekeeping or Fahsel’s real needs. She had to go.
Fahsel refused to fire the Italian housekeeper. Madame Simon was incensed by his cozy relationship with the employee of her predecessor and threatened to cut off the generous allowance she paid him for new books, knowing that this would hurt even more than an end to his supply of fine food and wine. One day, as she was driving him around the lake, past the gentle slopes with their blossoming hydrangeas, she stopped at the side of the road and presented him with an ultimatum: if the Italian housekeeper didn’t go, he would have to. He was to dismiss the housekeeper before dinner that evening or Madame Simon would dismiss her for him.
He dismissed her.