14.

Ursel becomes a countess

For two years, Hinkel’s ethnic sorcery worked its magic. Ursel lived more or less in peace and eventually returned to the theatre in Bremen from which she had been evicted back in 1934, moving in with Lexi Alvensleben and her husband Wilhelm Roloff in August 1943. Now in her early thirties, she was entitled to think of herself once more as a genuine German and felt protected from the increasingly drastic measures that, she heard, were periodically threatened against Hybrids of the First Degree, including, from early 1942, calls for them to be deported to concentration camps. Above all, she could now fulfil the role on which, my mother insisted, she had set her heart ever since her teens: that of the aristocrat. Not just to mingle with aristocrats or to call Countess von Alvensleben ‘Mami’, but to gain a title of her own. Indeed, not just to gain a title, but, as she did with all her identities, to become – brilliantly, perceptively, and in her own unique way – the character she had assumed.

Her future husband, Franziskus Reichsgraf von Plettenberg-Lenhausen, had fallen in love with her when he caught sight of a small photo of her on the desk of his cousin, Elisabeth von Plettenberg. Franziskus at once declared that he was going to marry that girl in the photo and that nothing would stop him – an impulsiveness that appealed to Ursel as much as the tall, charming, and humorous man did. Now, in addition to enjoying her new identity, career, income, and safety, she could look forward to the security of marriage to a non-Jewish German. Instead of being an unemployable non-person belonging to a subhuman race, she was about to become the Reichsgräfin von Plettenberg-Lenhausen, part of a family with an ancient seat and a circle of relatives and friends that included many of Germany’s most illustrious aristocratic names: Stolberg, Böselager, Lehndorff, Dönhoff.

An inconceivable distance from Blumeshof 12.

 

The wedding, Ursel would tell me with relish, didn’t start well. Once more, certificates of ancestry were the stumbling block. Just like the Reichstheaterkammer, the people at the wedding registry wanted the original documents, and those vital papers, if they existed, had to be tracked down, or else invented. A note from Franziskus’s military superior – the ‘Higher Commander of the Flak Training and Replacement Regiments’ – permitting him to marry Ursel and attaching his own proof of Aryan origin wasn’t, of course, enough.

Franziskus was not, however, a man to be detained by petty officials, though he surely knew that permission to marry even a half-Jewish woman would, by now, almost certainly be refused. On the big day, 23 September 1943, they arrived at the civil marriage office in Hamburg, he in his Wehrmacht uniform, she in a simple dress and flat shoes, carrying a posy of flowers.

‘We cannot marry you unless the lady has her birth certificate and proof of her parents’ ancestry,’ the official snapped. ‘You should know such things and not waste this office’s time.’

But he hadn’t reckoned with the groom’s temper.

‘If you do not marry us now, and drop your pathetic zeal, I will fell you with a blow the like of which you have never experienced,’ boomed Franziskus at his would-be nemesis. ‘This is a time of war and the Reich needs fighting men, not bureaucrats at desks!’

The official looked terrified, then confused, and finally submissive.

‘Sir, I am not allowed to—’

‘You are speaking to a Count of the Reich and you will marry us now!’ Franziskus bellowed at the man, whose normally infallible weapon, a little rubber stamp that bore a swastika crowned with the name of his office, was trembling in his hands. ‘And do not waste the time of an officer of the Wehrmacht! Your superiors will hear from me about your obstructiveness!’

‘Sir, if you and the lady come back with the necessary papers, then I will certainly . . .’ And the man’s voice sighed a helpless official sigh.

Franziskus’s face flushed and he was about to lunge at the bureaucratic impediment. ‘Get on with it, or you will not know what has happened to you!’ the Count bellowed, not even giving the official time to get into his obsequious stride.

The marriage achieved, Franziskus left for military duties in the Netherlands, where he was stationed with the occupying German forces, while his bride returned to Bremen.