Ursel never felt at ease within the impeccable universe of Blumeshof 12, and I think I can understand why. Devoted though I am to this inheritance, its nervy, quasi-religious obsession with music, art, and learning; its mantra of ‘only the very best’; and its conviction that it is exceptional can all be crushing. The exalted standards that it prizes, magnificent though they are in themselves, can feel like a carapace that holds reality at bay – a carapace inside which bubble unconquerable panic and perplexity.
In 1927, aged only fifteen, Ursel made a decision of astonishing independent-mindedness. She was going to leave her parents’ home and insert herself into a new family – a family, as I see it, absolutely removed not only from the Jewish experience, but from anyone whose ideals, however noble, were sustained by marginalization, rootlessness, and the ever-present invisible chasm that made it impossible to take firm ground for granted.
Aryan wasn’t enough. Aryans could worry about all those things. Nor did the passion for Kultur among the non-Jewish Bildungsbürgertum necessarily insulate them from feelings of being marooned in a world over which they were powerless. Many of them would later support Hitler as a solution to precisely such anxieties. Only one group appeared to have unshakable confidence in its roots, no matter what other sources of insecurity might beset it – not the fakery of brazen confidence, but the calm sort, pervaded by an impregnable sense of status; a group that wouldn’t begin to recognize the particular existential despair that plagued the Liedtke family: the aristocrats.
The answer came in the form of Count Werner and Countess Alexandra von Alvensleben, their son, Werner, and their three daughters, Lexi, Annali, and ‘Baby’. Ursel and Lexi had become friends at the small private school to which Ernst had sent her on her return from a six-month cure in Zuoz, in the Swiss Alps, for a minor lung ailment. Back in Germany, Ursel found it difficult to reintegrate into the public school system and her parents hoped that a private education would be the answer. It hardly mattered: she was uninterested in academic study and had already discovered her talent for acting; but she did find there the new, safer world for which she longed. To my grandfather’s distress and my grandmother’s resentful admiration, Ursel laid siege to the Alvenslebens’ deliciously self-assured life. She adopted their tastes in clothes, interior decoration, furniture, and manners. Soon she adopted the girls’ mother too, even calling her ‘Mami’.22
Mami reciprocated with strange intensity. She was captivated by Ursel’s cutting wit, her virtuosic jesting, and her way of seeking out deeply conservative circles in which she would behave with defiant unconventionality. Ursel, for her part, delighted not just in Mami’s protective care but also in eccentricities like her predilection for cooking while dressed in galoshes, overcoat, and a wide-brimmed hat. The two became inseparable, confiding their secrets to one another until Mami’s death nearly forty years later.
These Alvenslebens were a remarkable family who were unstintingly benevolent to my own, from their solidarity with my grandfather after his dismissal in 1933 to Lexi’s many decades of friendship with Ursel and kindness to Ilse. Lexi’s father Werner had been one of the very few to visit Ernst in the dreadful days after Hitler’s accession to power when many others were afraid to be associated with him. Lexi had not only been Ursel’s closest friend since their schooldays but coincidentally ended up living almost next door to Ilse’s photographic atelier in the Budapesterstrasse from the summer of 1944, after moving from Bremen to Berlin in order to be near her now-imprisoned husband. And she stubbornly went on living there, Ilse said, even after bombs had destroyed a great part of her building and there was almost a clean line of vision from her apartment directly into the cellar. She was loyal, poised, intelligent, unpretentious, cultured, offbeat, and tremendously courageous.
Lexi’s family really did offer Ursel an escape from that disturbingly serious world of the Liedtkes, a world shot through with the gravity that, as I see it, Ernst embodied in its most concentrated form. A German Jew like him didn’t just bear the name of two peoples; he bore the burden of these two richly burdened peoples, and the redemptive dreams of both. Into him flowed two spiritual inheritances that each placed supreme value on a deep and rigorous and grounded and virtuous cultivation of the mind in the service of the true and the good – the Germans with their devotion to Bildung and the Jews with their fervour for study and learning and the moral law. When the vehemently held ideals of those inheritances came together, one could inadvertently surrender the joy, indeed the lightness, peculiar to each.
As a result, some German Jews – among them my own family – took their seriousness about life to extremes that were life-destroying. Every word, every act, every decision, and every non-decision could be loaded with such crushing meaning that existence itself became intractable. Life was not allowed to dance, but had to be filled with cultural hope so vast that it could swallow up the terror of ordinary reality. Exhaustion was inevitable.
If you craved escape from all this, there were at least three durable ways. Discover a world that wasn’t Jewish or German in the contemporary bourgeois sense of the Bildungsbürgertum: the world of the Alvenslebens. Send up seriousness with satire: the world of cabaret. Or find a religion that will promise release from life’s suffering in one redeeming leap: the world of the Catholic convert.
Ursel wasn’t one for doing things by halves. She went, with total dedication, for all three.