Why exactly she ‘finally left Germany’ was to be argued over for the rest of her life. Ursel insisted that my mother had merely followed her Jewish teacher, who had been forced to emigrate. Ilse went blank when the matter was raised; if pressed for an answer she said that Marianne had left for the sake of her teacher, but might also have found studying in Nazi Germany ‘difficult’. My mother echoed Ursel’s position when speaking to Jews. When speaking to most Germans, however, the reason was clearly her Jewish origins. Unless we happened to be visiting German families who, she worried, might not find such origins palatable.
Here, no reason at all was volunteered – my mother had left for England and that was that. Even the period of her emigration was kept vague. When our hosts enquired whom she had married, it was simply stated that my father was a ‘German’ who had also happened to find himself in England. What could be more natural, my mother seemed to imply, than for two Germans marooned on this alien island to seek refuge in each other?
Occasionally one of the less formal denizens of these German homes – for most seemed very reserved in those days, back in the early 1970s – would send the conversation into perilous territory by asking my mother the awkward question: ‘Wasn’t it hard for you, as a German, to abandon your homeland?’
At once the room seemed charged with menace. We all looked at each other. Who was going to answer? We children knew that the J-subject was under no circumstances to be raised by us in front of these particular hosts, even now, a quarter century or more after the end of the war.
As a child I did what was expected of me and kept silent. My silence felt cowardly, and I longed to blurt out the truth and be liberated from this infernal circus of ethnic evasion. Why did we have to go on living as if the Third Reich were alive and kicking? As if the identity of ‘Jew’ or ‘Hybrid of the First Degree’ were still a passport to social death? As if the Reich Kinship Office and its team of anthropologists were decreeing who we were or weren’t? But we had to: the topic remained a harbinger of unspeakable and insoluble pain for my mother and her sisters; and loyalty to them, fear of being doused in their hidden terrors, and incredulity that this identity could really be mine inhibited me from any dash for freedom.
My mother would sometimes relieve these stilted exchanges with a matter-of-fact admission that she had been studying with a teacher who had left in the 1930s. And that she had ‘followed’ him. She had emigrated because her teacher had emigrated.
The menace became confused. Why had the teacher emigrated? Now she would suggest something quite unexpected. What career prospects, she demanded, did a young violin teacher have in 1930s Germany, amid the country’s high unemployment and social chaos? Britain offered far better opportunities. This was the cue for her to praise everything British in terms so extravagant that the country became unrecognizable. Things went on there, she said, that made Germany seem an ineffectual backwater. Its economy? It far outstripped Germany’s! Its educational system? What those children learn! You can’t imagine it: at ten, my son could help his eighteen-year-old German cousin with her maths homework. The hospitals? The best and cleanest in the world. The people? Well mannered, sophisticated, and progressive, if not always neatly dressed. Efficiency? Sometimes a little wanting, but that is the flip side of a freedom-loving nature. Criminality? You hardly see any. If a youth stumbles on a gold watch in the street, they will place it considerately on a garden fence or hand it in at the nearest police station in the hope that it will be swiftly reunited with its owner.
Our hosts were visibly bemused. This was the 1970s, when Britain was known as ‘the sick man of Europe’. The streets were piled high with garbage. A punctual train was as rare as a black swan. Squalid and amateurish schools were the despair of the country’s own ‘chattering classes’. Drunken football hooligans were not exactly advertising the refinement of British manners. The economy was in meltdown. Entrepreneurs claimed to be giving up or fleeing, as the top rate of taxation somehow rose towards 100 per cent. The whole society seemed to be locked in class war, with the middle class despising the working class, and trade unionists and business bosses at each other’s throats, while aristocrats, disdainful of lower orders when they even noticed them, were living in deep complacency on their inherited assets. Inner cities were regularly on fire and some group or other was always taking ‘industrial action’ – in other words, going on strike. Bizarrely, England, at least, seemed to be revelling resignedly in this misery and in the orgies of complaining that it spawned – the only nation, it has been said, capable of feeling Schadenfreude toward itself; though, being England, it could always muddle through decline and chaos, so that everything would eventually turn out all right.
None of these realities deterred my mother from her main point: anyone in their right mind would move to Britain, whether in the 1930s or now, in the 1970s. Hitler almost seemed irrelevant to the question of why she or her teacher had ended up in London.
But we were all talking at cross-purposes. Our hosts had, I think, so little suspected any Jewish presence in their midst that they appeared to be asking quite another question. Was it not unpatriotic to emigrate? Let alone to Britain, towards which I sensed intense contempt in those days, despite residual admiration for such glories as the Beatles and parliamentary democracy. Disloyalty was what really concerned them. A German stays with their country when it is in crisis.
But in our family, to borrow a quip from the former Soviet Union, even the past couldn’t be predicted.