In the end, Ursel wanted more than the aristocratic bolthole that the Alvenslebens could provide, the absurdist milieu that cabaret offered, or the religious solution that Catholicism had to hand. All that was behind her when, in 1941, as even half-Jews felt under ever greater threat from the Nazi state, she took the attempt to escape Jewish origins, to bail out of her own heritage, one huge step further: she had herself officially accepted as Aryan.
She set about this task by dreaming up a story that, contrary to what she had understood until then, she was not the daughter of Ernst Liedtke. Rather, her allegedly non-Jewish mother had conceived her in an adulterous fling with a similarly uncontaminated man, who was now conveniently dead and so unavailable to deny his moment of madness. As my mother recounted it, she demanded that Emmy sign a sworn statement confessing to this infidelity and identifying the mysterious lover as a certain Kostas, a Greek violinist who, on moving to Berlin, had been financed and sheltered by none other than Ernst. The unfortunate Kostas was therefore posthumously deemed to have repaid his sponsor’s generosity by producing a love child with his young wife.
In fact, Kostas’s only intimacy with Emmy was to play violin sonatas with her at the piano, and his main contribution to the family was to encourage my mother’s passion for the violin. He promised, though, to play his new role to perfection, as Ursel’s naturally brown skin was surely the spitting image of the tanned Greek’s. That her complexion also bore an uncanny resemblance to Ernst’s could, for the time being, be swept under the carpet.
For all Emmy’s own ethnic self-concealment, she was, my mother said, agonized by Ursel’s determination to secure non-Jewish status and its repercussions for Ernst, whom it would publicly strip not only of a daughter but of a marriage that had been unwaveringly faithful. The whole venture was also terrifying for them both: sworn statements about one’s race that were discovered to be false could, they had heard, carry a penalty of death. Though Emmy desperately wanted to find a way of helping Ursel, for over a year she couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge her marital lapse. Only when Ursel’s half-Jewish friend and fellow actor, Katta Sterna, had herself obtained a certificate of Aryan origin by similar means, did Emmy agree to cooperate in turning Ursel into an Aryan.
Katta’s panache had always impressed Emmy. She had a string of films to her name and was also a hugely talented dancer and cabaret artist, openly bisexual, and a habitué of smoky clubs, where she sang popular lyrics.
Katta pulled out the stops to help Ursel slough off her Jewish origins, and the two friends trawled through a list of possible fathers before deciding on Kostas. Runner-up was an antique dealer, who had generously offered to provide a sworn statement owning up to his paternity, but he was rejected on account of his bleach-white skin and, worse, the fact that he was alive and traceable. Whereas Kostas, my mother said, had the advantage of being not only dead, but also Greek – Greece being, at that time, a hard country in which to verify people’s personal histories. And so Katta helped invent a story in which the Mediterranean lover and his German paramour had become so aroused by the music they were making together while the husband was poring over his dry legal files in court, that one day – just once – they had been unable to resist consummating this burning passion in the family living room, by the piano.
The next, and harder, question was how to get the new ethnic identity officially recognized. Emmy’s sworn statement admitting to the infidelity needed to clear a bureaucratic obstacle course, including an examination of Ursel’s case by the anthropologists at the Reichssippenamt, or ‘Reich Kinship Office’, the administration charged with ‘hereditary and racial investigations’,23 at the end of which the ethnic status of each grandparent would be determined. This was obviously a perilous undertaking for Emmy; after all, Der Stürmer had aired its suspicions about her brother, and her maternal grandmother’s membership in the Jewish community of Braunschweig was easy to discover. In addition, it would have been necessary to verify the ethnic credentials of the alleged father.
At first the idea was for Katta’s mother, an imperious woman with excellent connections and no Jewish heritage, to pull the necessary strings; but she was compromised by being the sister of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose work had been banned from German museums. An alternative route had to be found. And the ideal one, they realized, was through a fellow actor who had once starred in silent films: the talented and beautiful Jola Duisberg. She was an Austrian whom Ursel had known since her student days and who had married Carl-Ludwig Duisberg, son of Carl Duisberg, one of the founders of IG Farben, among Germany’s most powerful industrial conglomerates.
IG Farben had long supported the Nazi Party financially. It also supplied Hitler’s military with key materials needed to wage war and would go on to exploit vast numbers of slave labourers at the IG Farben Buna plant, which was part of the Auschwitz complex. Carl-Ludwig himself retained excellent connections to the regime. Crucially, as a film director and producer, he was close to the Reichstheaterkammer, the ‘Reich Theatre Chamber’, to which actors had to belong in order to work – and which had expelled Ursel back in 1936.
By 1934 the Reichstheaterkammer had swallowed up the other acting unions and professional associations that remained from pre-Hitler times, and that still included Jews and Mischlinge ersten Grades, or ‘Hybrids of the First Degree’, as half-Jews were known under Nazi law.24 It, in turn, was a division of the Reichskulturkammer, or ‘Reich Culture Chamber’, which had been founded in November 1933 and which eventually brought all cultural activities in the Third Reich under state control.
Joseph Goebbels himself was president of the Reichskulturkammer, which he made an organ of his Ministry for the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, and by May 1935 he had stepped up efforts to drive out Jews and other non-Aryans. To be a member of any of its divisions you now had to provide proof of your Aryan ancestry.
To help ensure that non-Aryans were excluded from the Reichskulturkammer and all its divisions, Goebbels appointed a certain Hans Hinkel, a senior Propaganda Ministry official and an SS officer, as one of its Geschäftsführer, or chief executives, as such giving him high responsibility for removing Jews from every aspect of German cultural life.
It is at precisely this time that Ursel, aged twenty-three, finds herself hounded by the Reichstheaterkammer for proof of Aryan identity. She has been sent a questionnaire demanding details of her racial origins, and has repeatedly stalled when reminded to return it. Impatience at the slow purging of Jews from German theatre is mounting among senior figures, including Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess and the Nazi Party’s ideologue Alfred Rosenberg – he who proclaims that ‘The Jewish question is solved for Germany only when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew lives on the European continent up to the Urals.’25 Finally, on 15 April 1936, a new deadline is set for all those who have not yet handed in their questionnaires. Failure to do so, it is warned, will lead to immediate expulsion.26
Which is exactly what happens to Ursel. She is expelled in 1936 after failing to answer a ‘final reminder’ sent by the Reichstheaterkammer giving her ten further days to prove her Aryan status. But seeing no way, back then, to invent such proof, she has already abandoned the world of theatre for the less regulated demimonde of cabaret – where she has joined Isa Vermehren and begun her journey to Catholicism.
So, to resurface as an Aryan in 1941, as she will do, and to be accepted again into the ranks of the Reichstheaterkammer is an astonishing about-turn. It seems that the Duisbergs end up going, on Ursel’s behalf, over the head even of the Reichstheaterkammer, to none other than Hans Hinkel, who in April of that same year has been promoted to the rank of general secretary in the Reichskulturkammer. With his parallel career in the SS and his membership of Hitler’s prestigious ‘Blood Order’, few officials in the entire Nazi state are in a better position than Hinkel to oversee the bureaucratic task of turning a Jew into an Aryan.
Do they get his attention by going to Goebbels himself? Does Hinkel receive financial inducements from the Duisbergs? Does he have designs on Ursel? We don’t know. In the state archives in Berlin there is a file containing Hinkel’s correspondence with Carl-Ludwig Duisberg, including a letter of thanks to Hinkel for his condolences on the death of Duisberg’s father in 1935, Duisberg’s ‘heartfelt’ congratulations to Hinkel on his promotion to Ministerialdirektor, a letter of reference from Hinkel, dated 12 January 1940, attesting to Duisberg’s ‘personal and political reliability’, and, a few months later, an invitation to Duisberg to lead a troupe of actors to entertain German troops in occupied France27 – all of which suggest a close connection between Ursel’s benefactor and the man who is in a position to save not just her career but possibly her life.
What we do know is that Ursel, a young actor with almost no experience, whose most recent work has been in cabaret venues subsequently closed down by Goebbels, who was expelled from the Reichstheaterkammer five long years beforehand, and who has survived in ethnic purgatory ever since, now finds herself invited for an intimate chat with one of Goebbels’s right-hand men: a Nazi personally and professionally dedicated to ridding German culture of people like herself.
The timing cannot be coincidental. Out of the blue, in June 1941, just weeks after Hinkel is promoted to the rank of general secretary in the Reichskulturkammer, his underlings at the Reichstheaterkammer are ordered to send over Ursel’s complete file. Moreover, it seems that she is now permitted to deal directly with Hinkel’s officals in the Reichskulturkammer rather than only with its subsidiary theatre division.
What happens next is mysterious. Perhaps nothing happens save a wait and a documented effort by Ursel to track down proof of origin. In any event, less than four months later, on 23 October 1941, Goebbels’s Ministry calmly informs the Reichstheaterkammer, without elaborating, that it need have no concerns about accepting Ursel as a member and should hasten to pass the good news to her.
The effect is magical. Ursel reapplies to the Reichstheaterkammer, and is immediately accepted. The only problem is that, as a matter of routine procedure, she has to sign a statement assuring them of that wretched Aryan ancestry. Oh, and the statement must be supported by original evidence. She seems to be back where she started. But of course she isn’t. She is able to say that the ‘proof’ is in the powerful hands of Goebbels’s Ministry of the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda.
Ever diligent, the Reichstheaterkammer writes to the Ministry informing them that they have passed the news to Ursel, though they would appreciate confirmation that evidence of her ancestry has indeed been examined and accepted:
7 November 1941.
52219 B/J/Schf.
To: Reich Ministry for the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda
Berlin W8
Wilhelmplatz 8-9
Subject: Actress Ursula Liedtke, born 21.10.1912 Berlin
Reference: BeKA 20303 – 19.4. of 23 October 1941
Your decision of 23 October 1941 was communicated orally to the above-named during her appearance here in person. On 3 November, she signed the declaration that she is of Aryan origin. Upon request to produce documents about her ancestry, she stated that her documents have been handed over to you, so that an examination of them cannot be made from here. If proof of parentage is to be checked by you, I kindly ask you to inform me of the result in due course.28
Does Ursel really obtain Aryan ancestry certificates? Is the whole story of her mother’s adulterous fling with Kostas, or whoever was finally chosen as her father, so lacking in credibility, or so perilous to pursue, that it is abandoned? Or does Hinkel simply produce a note expressing satisfaction with her racial credentials, perhaps with the help of an ‘expert opinion’ to this end from obliging colleagues at the Reich Kinship Office? That his role is crucial is suggested by a rapturous and deeply moving letter of thanks to Hinkel, written by Ursel in her own hand just six weeks after the Ministry gets involved in her case:
17.7.41
Very respected Herr Staatsrat,
For weeks now I have been waiting in vain for my father’s papers from Christburg [Ernst’s birthplace]. As soon as I have received these papers, I shall call on you. For the last few weeks I have been with Frau Duisberg in Vornbach [a castle in Bavaria purchased by Carl-Ludwig Duisberg in 1938] – and you can imagine in what a great state of bliss I have been since the day I visited you. Never in my life shall I forget how kind you have been to me and I often talk about you with Frau Duisberg. I will call you immediately when I come to Berlin. Hopefully you too can soon take a few weeks of vacation and relax from your hard work. I am so endlessly grateful to you. You have absolutely given me back my purpose in life.
I send very warm greetings and will always remain indebted to you,
Ursula Liedtke29
Despite my many discussions with Ursel, it remains unclear to me why her declaration of Aryan origin was accepted and how the necessary racial proofs were furnished, if they were. Of one thing she was always sure: the Propaganda Ministry and Hinkel had conjured a miracle. Quite apart from removing all obstacles to her employment, she had heard, by late 1941, that it was getting even harder, if not impossible, for a Hybrid of the First Degree to be allowed to marry an Aryan, a mixed union that had been forbidden under the 1935 Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, except by special permission. Far more seriously, she feared that powerful forces in the Nazi Party were agitating for half-Jews to be consigned to forced labour, and even sterilized. As she saw it back then, without Katta Sterna, the beautiful Jola, Carl-Ludwig Duisberg, and ‘Herr Staatsrat, SS-Oberführer, Pg. [Parteigenosse] Hans Hinkel, Reichskulturwalter’, as Hinkel is addressed in correspondence, she might have no right to a job, no right to marry a German, no right to have children – and possibly no right to live.