Is return really possible? Even if you gain citizenship, as I did in May 2017, almost exactly eighty years after my parents were stripped of theirs; even if you find that the philosophy, the literature, the music to which you have the most powerful and natural affinity is that of your forebears – can the foundations that they lost ever be reclaimed? Without artifice or force?
The discovery of Klaus Meltzer and Eichenberg had opened up avenues to a lost homeland, but they couldn’t restitute it. In particular, I was amazed how little the return of Eichenberg, with its tangible asset, the handsome building in Prenzlauer Berg, meant to me. The possibility of historical justice – the fact that there were laws and bureaucracies dedicated to it – was exhilarating. But Eichenberg as a living entity was, of course, irretrievably gone. None of my direct family had ever lived there, so there were no ghosts to whom I felt close; the employees, managers, customers, and machinery had vanished; and the money was useful to my mother, but didn’t bring our Germany closer. A house can be restituted, but not a home.
And then, on 8 May 2017, just one day before I go to the German Embassy in London to collect my newly arrived certificate of German citizenship, a bombshell: Klaus Meltzer turns out not to be a lifeline to my murdered great-uncle, Ernst’s brother Theo.
In Auschwitz with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch a few weeks earlier, we are shown a book of names tracing a vast circle and listing the six million exterminated Jews.
I hasten to the ‘L’s, searching for my mother’s family name, Liedtke. There, I see who I am looking for: Theodor Liedtke. But not one; three. Two of these turn out to be the same Theodor, my great-uncle, both entries showing the victim as born in Christburg on 10 June 1885. One says that he died in Sachsenhausen in 1942, as my mother and Ilse had always told me, and as the package of his last possessions seemed to confirm. The other stuns me: it says that he was deported to Auschwitz on 1 March 1943.
So he didn’t die lugging stones at Sachsenhausen, or from a shot to the back of the head? So Ilse and Hedwig were both wrong? Beating back my imagination’s attempts to visualize this infinitely gentle soul being packed into a cattle truck, I notice that another Theodor Liedtke was also deported to Auschwitz, also from Berlin, and also in 1943. He arrived just a few weeks later. Unlike our Theo, he was born in 1887 in Berlin, rather than in 1885 in Christburg.
I hurry back with Anita to our hotel opposite the camp’s main gate; and, while she smokes a cigarette in a chair that the reception staff have placed for this sole purpose just outside the entrance, I get to work on Google. In minutes, I have discovered an entry on the other Theodor Liedtke, the one born in 1887 in Berlin, in a book on the confiscation of businesses and property from Jews in Germany, extracts of which can be read online.40 I learn that, in September 1942, Himmler decreed that all Jews still within Germany, even if they were already incarcerated in concentration camps like Sachsenhausen, or working as slave labourers, were to be transported to Auschwitz.41
Back in London, I email the author to ask for his sources. By return, he sends me an Attorney General’s report to a Berlin regional court, dated 7 November 1941, concerning the other Theodor Liedtke, and regrets that he can find nothing further on ours, except confirmation from the German Federal Archives that he was indeed deported to Auschwitz, and so did not die in Sachsenhausen, information that remains too painful to contemplate.
The other Theodor Liedtke, the Attorney General charges, owns an apron store and has a daughter called Ellen, into whose name he attempted to transfer his property in Berlin in 1940. This was exactly what Klaus Meltzer had told me, except that Klaus had said the transfer had happened in 1938 or 1939. In addition, and as Klaus said too, this Theodor was arrested for breaking the law, convicted by a civil court, and thrown into prison.
The report appears to solve the mystery of Ellen’s mother, who, it says, wasn’t Jewish and died in 1938. Moreover, I discover the real reason for his arrest, which wasn’t theft, as Klaus had said. The real reason was that Theodor Liedtke had falsely claimed he was a Hybrid of the First Degree rather than a full Jew – in other words, that he had only two Jewish grandparents rather than four. Indeed, in 1938 he had submitted petitions to have this racial status officially recognized, presumably in part so that his business and property should not be Aryanized, which would prevent him passing them to Ellen.
Though all these petitions had been rejected, in August 1940 he nonetheless went ahead with his plan to transfer his property into Ellen’s name. It occurs to me that this might be what Klaus meant by ‘theft’: if a full Jew’s property had to be Aryanized, in gifting it to his daughter he was, in effect, stealing his own property from the Aryan hands into which the law obliged it to be sold.
The gift was Theodor’s undoing: the lawyer whom he’d engaged to notarize it reported him to the authorities for failing to disclose that he was a full Jew. As a result, he was charged with the high crime, under the Nuremberg Laws, of concealing his ethnic identity. He was sentenced to eighteen months in jail, at the conclusion of which he was deported to Auschwitz and murdered.42
My mind flits to Ursel’s success in achieving Aryan status, and I marvel even more at how she pulled it off. At how a Nazi official as high-ranking as Hans Hinkel could be persuaded to intervene on her behalf; to order his underlings to tell the Reichstheaterkammer that all concerns about her racial origins should be dropped; to engage in direct correspondence by letter with this unknown young actor; to welcome her to his office. I’m horrified and relieved at the influence of Carl-Ludwig Duisberg, scion of IG Farben, one of the greatest industrial conglomerates of Germany, complicit in the Nazi project of enslavement and extermination; but then wonder at the risk that he and his wife, Ursel’s friend Jola, took on her behalf.
And I see with a clarity that I’d never allowed myself the fork in the road before which Ursel stood in late 1941: in the one direction, the stage, safety, and an ancient aristocratic title; in the other, the mounting perils of being a Hybrid of the First Degree as she became a racial reject, one of the living dead. I can hardly bear to recall the heart-rending moment in her letter to Hinkel where she thanks him for giving her back the life she had lost. How can I or anyone possibly criticize her repudiation of what was, to her, a lethal heritage?
But these thoughts are quickly overtaken by the new reality: Klaus Meltzer isn’t my cousin after all. He isn’t a link to our Theo and so to Ernst. He hasn’t opened a door to their lives. Clearly, he is the grandson of Theodor Liedtke the apron-store owner. His insistence that Theodor had been arrested and indicted as a criminal, which my mother rejected as nonsense, was not true of our Theodor. His certainty that Theodor had a wife – Klaus’s grandmother – was true of his Theodor, not ours. There was, it turned out, no evidence that ours led a double life. Perhaps my great-uncle’s housekeeper Hedwig had been so devoted to him that she really had been filled with joy every time he returned, even after going out for a few minutes. Perhaps the package that Ilse received, complete with his Judenpass, followed not his death but rather his transfer to a greater hell even than Sachsenhausen.
I feel a double loss of what I thought had been restored. Of Klaus, of course, and through him of a fuller sense of Theo’s existence than my mother’s descriptions of her and Ursel’s Saturday afternoon visits had given me: his life as a father, as a lover, as an owner of property, and as an entrepreneur. His life as a man of secrets, who wasn’t the open book that everybody imagined they saw. But, more poignantly still, of the ‘consolation’ that Theo died close to home, from a quick method of killing, which Ilse insisted was the way at Sachsenhausen, and not in an extermination camp, with its unspeakable rituals of nakedness and the panic of asphyxiation as the Zyklon B pellets start to work. Instead, I struggle to adjust to the vision of him having to endure that journey in the cattle truck and, if he survived it, the reception process at Auschwitz, which Anita had recounted to me in such detail during our visit to the camp: the shaving, the showering, the shouting, and then, at his age – fifty-eight, too old to be useful as slave labour – the gas chamber.
It seems stupid, this sense of loss, because my connection to him had been so tenuous anyway. But only now do I realize how much the discovery of Klaus, and what I thought was his umbilical link to the life of Theo, and through Theo back to Ernst and Emmy and Blumeshof, meant to me. Thanks to Klaus, Theo had come right up close: a life that had previously appeared to me in only three faint images – Theo at the Saturday teas with Mother and Ursel, Theo the salesman at Tietz’s department store, and Theo the prisoner at Sachsenhausen, in all of which he was present but barely visible – had filled out into a man with street-smarts and a villa and a wife and a daughter, with her Hitler-adulating prospective parents-in-law and his place in their living room under the portrait of the Führer. And all this recovered life was embodied in Klaus, the man in the attic with Gregor the mad parrot and the menorah and the certificates signed by Göring. Now, though, our Theo seemed further away, flatter than ever, as if his whole benevolent, blameless life had been lived with one foot already in the grave.