Only one member of our family wanted to hear nothing from me about the Eichenberg saga: my aunt, Ursel. Every time I tried to speak to her about it, she cut me off.
Ursel was so appalled at being confronted by this spectre of the Nazi past and of those fatal Jewish origins that she repeatedly told me she intended to repudiate her share of Eichenberg, insisting that it should go directly to her children. To be required, half a century after securing her non-Jewish status, to furnish German officials with proof of her parentage or of legal succession, was adding insult to injury, even if this time the motive was justice and the aim restitution. Whenever I raised the subject, her face froze in fury at history’s impertinence in thrusting on her, yet again, the status of a victim and a Jew. The rest of the Eichenberg lot could take the bait mockingly proffered by the wheel of fortune, but not her.
Something about the immensity of her repudiation awed as well as dismayed me. It wasn’t that a handsome payout couldn’t tempt her to suspend the rule that her Jewish origins must never be recognized. Rather I couldn’t help respecting her capacity to feel the pain of having once been marked out for social death – pain surprisingly easy to repress. Since her youth, she had, as I saw it, been oppressed by the emotional isolation of even the most assimilated German Jews from their host society; by their Sisyphean striving to be exceptional just in order to be accepted as ordinary; by the family mantra of ‘only the very best’. She despised the cliché that the German and Jewish traditions had been triumphantly symbiotic; for her, they were like two people who, however erotically attracted they might be to one another, are lethally incompatible. She refused the conviction, fervently held by my mother and later by me, that there was an unsurpassable harmony between the heights of German Kultur and of Jewish spirituality. For Ursel, this was nonsense on stilts, which had exacted a terrible psychic cost from Jews and had inevitably ended in catastrophe (a view that placed her, with supreme irony, in the company of some of the most distinguished German-Jewish intellectuals, such as Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Kabbalah). And although I still cling to that conviction, I grudgingly admired her independence of mind.
And, it seemed to me, her distaste for Eichenberg and for the consolations of restitution was motivated by something else too: the reality that there is no recovery from being a victim of the Third Reich. There is no justice or apology that can make good such degradation. Not even truth can. Truth can offer victims dignity of sorts, but the damage is irreparable.
I used to visit Ursel as often as I could in her cozy apartment in Munich, where she ran me baths overflowing with foamy pine essence, treated me to her incomparable comic imitations, and bought me my favourite food, which as a teenager was shrimp with pink cocktail sauce, a luxury that would have been unthinkable in my mother’s austere home, where gastronomic indulgence was that reconstituted crème caramel.
At lunchtime, we might amble into Käfer, an elegant restaurant, and the maître d’ would greet her with a bow and escort us past a phalanx of servers to her table, where she would order a Pfeffersteak, a side salad, and a glass of champagne, eat a couple of pieces of steak and discreetly drop the rest into the waiting mouth of her dachshund, Romeo, who was nestling at her feet. When Romeo sometimes bit a neat incision into the couture of a woman at the next table or left a permanent dental imprint in a husband’s trousers, Ursel apologized with such sovereign charm that recriminations died on our neighbours’ lips. She softened the stiffest countenances with her uncanny portrayals of people’s tics and obsessions. You could see her conjure mind and body, both still remarkably plastic in her eighties, into a role, and how the cabaret performer, the character dancer, and the classical stage actor would all get into their strides.
One day, on a brief visit to Munich, she presented me with a sealed envelope, which was waiting for me on a table by her front door. ‘That’s for you,’ she said curtly, as soon as I arrived. ‘I place all my interests in the Berlin thing in your hands.’
I was amazed. A short note gave me power of attorney over her interests in Eichenberg, ‘though’, it added puzzlingly, ‘not the interests of other investors’, as if these were somehow hers to dispose of.
‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ I asked.
‘Do whatever you like. I don’t want to hear anything more about this business. It disgusts me.’
‘But this is about justice,’ I protested. ‘Your parents invested in this.’ I deliberately said ‘parents’: any mention of her father’s name drew her into a vortex of panic and rejection, as if some black hole imperceptible to the rest of us were sucking her into its annihilating core.
‘And what about your children? They’ll understandably be furious if I have power of attorney over their inheritance. I’m not doing this, Ursel.’
‘You deal with it,’ she snapped, as though exiling the whole matter from Germany to a safe distance in faraway England.
But I was certain that I was going to do nothing with that letter, whatever her motive for writing it. I decided to file it away and speak about this poisoned chalice to nobody.