Whatever my mother’s declared reason for leaving Germany happened to be, once she had abandoned her invalid passport at the German Embassy in London she was stateless – but by no means homeless. Where Ursel had adopted the Alvenslebens and their aristocratic network as a surrogate family, my mother now had hers in the dense and intense world of London’s German-speaking Jewish émigré community – a community of scientists, insurance brokers, traders, bankers, architects, artists, historians and doctors, bonded not just by exile but, above all, by music.
Here, her shifting identities – German, Catholic, student, refugee, Jew – gained another: in 1939 she was adopted as an honorary Czech. Her adopter was the Czech government then in exile in London, led by Edvard Beneš, who had been President of Czechoslovakia until Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in 1938, and Jan Masaryk, who became foreign minister of the exiled government after many years as ambassador to London.
Masaryk had a substantial budget for promoting Czech culture in the UK and was set on supporting a piano, violin, and cello trio, the Czech Trio, which had been founded in Prague in 1933, but had lost its original violinist on moving to London. Its pianist was Walter Süsskind, a native of Prague who would later become director of the Aspen Festival in the United States; its cellist was Karel Horschitz, who was urgently persuaded to change his surname to the less scatological-sounding ‘Horitz’; and its new violinist was my mother, Marianne Liedtke.
The problem was that my mother not only wasn’t Czech, but had an unmistakably Germanic name – not ideal at a time when Czechoslovakia had recently been overrun by her native country.
But a family as deft as ours at juggling its identities could surely rise to this challenge. She at once cabled Emmy for help. Had an ancestor passed through the area and perhaps stayed there for a few years? Or, even better, married a Czech and produced a traceable child or two? Emmy had always been good at pulling ‘forgotten’ origins out of the hat – and, when necessary, at forgetting them again. Nor did she disappoint this time. A faint memory of local forebears quickly assumed sharp contours, birth and death certificates were excavated from dusty cellars, and my mother was able to report to Masaryk that she had a maternal great-grandfather, Leopold Wilhelm Dütschke, who had been born in 1829 near Lissa, a small town in Bohemia, which had then been German but was now Czech.
Admittedly Dütschke had no known affinity with Czech culture – in fact, the rise of the Czech national movement had caused him to flee his birthplace and settle in Hamburg, where he died long before his home town became part of the newly formed Czechoslovakia. But, for the purposes of membership in the Czech Trio, he seemed to offer real credentials. My mother therefore resolved to change her name from Liedtke to Dütschke.
Masaryk was unimpressed. A connection to Czech lands was useless if her new name was as brazenly German as Dütschke. Dütschke was even worse than Liedtke – it seemed to be formed out of the word Deutsch. The name sounded like an invasion.
He hit on a simpler solution: ‘Marianne Liedtke’ should morph into ‘Maria Lidka’. Lidka was the stuff of folk idyll: the name of countless Czech women and of the country’s major chocolate brand. And Maria . . . well, one thought of fresh-faced girls skipping down Bohemian country paths on their way to Sunday Mass.
It was a sweetheart deal. The trio was a runaway success, performing all over Britain and, most memorably, in the National Gallery’s wartime concerts, as well as marking Czechoslovak national holidays, especially Independence Day. Though its programmes often showcased the German classics, they were peppered with enough Czech music to look as though Dvorak were being seasoned with Beethoven rather than the other way around. And my mother, to whom Czech music had been almost wholly alien until not long before, was now hailed as playing it as only a native can: ‘Czech music played by Czechs’ ran a headline in the London Star in March 1940. ‘Bohemian music, with its strong and immediate appeal, played authentically in the national manner’, wrote The Times in the same month. ‘They graduated from the Masterschool of the Bohemians with Smetana and Dvorak on their daily syllabus’, boasted the Czech Trio’s publicity flyer of its young players.
But my mother didn’t just get another identity with which to navigate her life. Thanks to the Czech Trio, she finally gained a legitimate income. She could now rent a one-room apartment, rather than living in a series of damp bedsits and teaching rich but untalented amateurs in return for enough cash for a day’s food and a bus ticket home.