WANNSEE LAKE WAS BIG AND beautiful and surrounded by mansions and marinas, sailboats drifting by lazily in the distance. It was warm and sticky in crowded Berlin. But not here. Wannsee was breezy, the cool lake water a welcome reward for the long workweek. Being tan was suddenly chic, and sunbathing a new pastime, so young Germans traveled in droves on weekends to lie out and bake by the water. On summer Sundays, seventeen-year-old Jules Schulzbach would travel to Wannsee with his teenage girlfriend, Edith, who was two years younger. They’d rendezvous beneath the modern golden clock outside the Berlin Zoo train station, a popular meeting place, the smell of the elephants wafting out over the rattling train and traffic noise. It was a short train ride from the zoo station to Wannsee. Jules, fair skinned with light brown hair that turned even lighter in the sun, would rent a striped Strandkorb—a small portable roofed cabana—for himself and his love. They would spend the day swimming and then squeeze together, still damp, into their little cabana, watching the sunbathers bathe and the sailboats sail.
When the sun went down, Jules and Edith loved to go to Berlin’s clubs. They were both very stylish. Jules was handsome, with big, bright eyes set in a heart-shaped face. Edith was thin and graceful, with gray eyes and short dark hair with a marcel wave. They won ballroom dance competitions, tap dancing, fox-trotting, waltzing—and, their favorite, Argentinian tangoing—their way to top prizes. They went to concerts together, too, including those performed at the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, with its big golden dome and its Moorish Alhambra–like design, the center of the city’s Jewish community. Their fellow Berliner Albert Einstein, who was not only one of the greatest minds of his generation but was a pretty decent violinist, played a charity concert there one late January evening in 1930. He and his violin—which he nicknamed Lina (short for die Violine)—played to a packed house, the genius dressed in black tie, tails, and a matching yarmulke. Lina’s melancholy, soaring notes from Bach’s two violin concertos drifted over the crowd of three thousand.
Jules and Edith would also spend hours at the nearby movie houses, including the Biograph Theater just a couple doors down from his sister Mollie’s fur shop, and the Babylon cinema just around the corner. Its curved Bauhaus facade—sleek, spare, and elegant—was painted a golden hue, its name running in bold vertical neon on the building’s side and in the shape of a ziggurat atop its marquee. The theater took its name from the plot of Metropolis, director Fritz Lang’s 1927 retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel. The groundbreaking sci-fi dystopian tale told of an evil industrialist who uses technology to keep the masses down by enslaving them at the bottom of a giant skyscraper complex. Its Communist lesson of class struggle and capitalism left unchecked was a technological wonder, touting the latest in special effects. The movie’s futuristic style—including robots and big explosions amid vast architectural models of Art Deco buildings and Gothic cathedrals—had been inspired by Fritz Lang’s first trip to New York City in 1924. It cost more than $2 million to produce and had rocked the world—and Jules.
Enveloped in darkness, Jules and Edith watched the German and American silent films, reading the intertitles as the music from the orchestra pit and house organ washed over them. Jules collected autographed film cards like American boys would collect baseball cards, each one featuring a sepia-toned glamour shot of a famous actor or actress of the day, women with blond permanent waves and men decked out in white tuxedo jackets.
Weimar Berlin was a thoroughly modern metropolis—Europe’s first really—its cafés filled with people like Josephine Baker, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood, there to write his Berlin novels that would later become the stage play Cabaret. A left-wing stronghold, the city of four million was on the forefront of liberal thinking, nightclubs like the Eldorado and Silhouette accepting of homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgender people. As a result, it was at the center of Europe’s culture wars, with the new Nazi Party declaring it “decadent,” and citing rampant drug use and prostitution as the endgame of liberal thought. Jules had heard all about the Nazis and their leader, a rising political star named Adolf Hitler, whose rousing speeches convinced many young, disaffected Germans to join the burgeoning party’s ranks. When Wall Street collapsed in October 1929, Hitler’s audience began to grow. Nervous American investors pulled billions of marks in loans from Germany, sending that economy into free fall as well. Frightened and anxious, the general public in Germany started to seriously listen to Hitler, who blamed the Jews for the nation’s economic hardships.
It was already well known in the Jewish quarter, where Jules lived, that Hitler hated the Jews and wanted them removed from Europe. He had made that clear not only in those speeches but in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf. Under Hitler’s Berlin district leader, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Party members violently clashed with Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and Trotskyites in marches and riots in the streets and in meeting halls throughout the city. Rocks were thrown, knives were drawn, beer mugs and wooden chairs were smashed over heads.
But Jules avoided all that. He had heard the news surrounding All Quiet on the Western Front, the pacifist film that emotionally dramatized Germany’s loss in World War I. Protests erupted outside theaters, while inside, young Nazis unleashed mice, snakes, and stink bombs to force audiences out. Though a huge fan of American cinema, Hitler slammed the film for “endangering Germany’s reputation.” A veteran of the Great War, Hitler was bitterly angry about Germany’s defeat, blamed the kaiser, and longed to return the lost empire to its former glory.
In his lighter moments, Hitler loved Laurel and Hardy and Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. (Later, as Führer, he would often screen two films a night and sometimes one over lunch in his private screening room.) One of his favorite films was 1924’s Die Nibelungen, a retelling of the thirteenth-century poem upon which Richard Wagner’s operatic Ring cycle was also based. Hitler would see Die Nibelungen at least twenty times, drawing a correlation between current events and his favorite movie. To Hitler, the revenge fantasy of Die Nibelungen symbolized Germany’s strength and rise from the humiliations of World War I. He loved the story’s heroic character, Siegfried, even though the film was directed by a Jew, Fritz Lang, the genius behind Metropolis.
When he wasn’t being entertained, Jules was busy entertaining those around him. He loved to be the center of attention, telling stories and making people laugh. As the youngest in his family, he had always entertained his five older siblings, particularly his sister Golda, the oldest. She was a bit of a rebel, quiet but headstrong with a steely determination to claim her own place in the world. Golda resembled Jules the most with her big eyes, fine nose, and light hair. Fourteen years older than Jules, Golda had moved to Amsterdam for a while, had married, and had a son. When her husband died in the influenza pandemic, Golda moved back to Berlin in 1918 with her baby boy, Don. Being alone in a foreign land with a baby was too much tragedy for a twenty-year-old to handle on her own. She came back to heal, but wound up helping to heal the rest of the Schulzbach family as well. Their father, a decorated Austrian soldier from the Great War, would soon die of complications from his injuries. Acting as a second mother to both Jules and Cilly, the youngest girl in the Schulzbach family, Golda would throw her sturdy arms around them and hug them tight. And Jules would make sure that she laughed.
Dressing up from time to time as Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, he put on the mustache and the hat, and waddled along with a cane, cracking everyone up. When he got a bit older, Jules pretended to play his girlfriend, Edith, like an upright bass, sitting her on his lap and plucking out imaginary notes on her stomach, popping his lips to imitate the sound. Edith was still in high school when he met her, a serious girl, who, like Golda, was not quick to smile. But his bass routine made her, and everyone around them, laugh. Jules’s relentless optimism and high spirits could sometimes be exhausting, but Edith loved him for it. And loved him as much as he loved her.
To earn money for their nights on the town, Jules got his first job working for Mollie, his second-oldest sister, and her husband, David, in their fur shop on Münzstrasse in the Mitte district in central Berlin. It was a sprawling, two-story place with mirrors along the walls, chandeliers above, and leopard skin rugs below. Paintings of a roaring tiger and a lion head flanked David’s last name on the sign outside the shop. It was called Schmerz, which means “pain” in German, which was fitting for a furrier, if you were an animal or an animal lover. A row of sewing machines lined the back room, manned by a large staff of white-coated furriers, both male and female, including young Jules, his hair parted in the center in the style of the day. Stuffed minks squatted on the shelves up front, and a live German shepherd was kept as a watchdog and pet.
Mollie, who was a decade older than Jules, would become the benevolent head of the family, proudest of them all to be a Berliner. Since their father had been laid to rest in the nearby Weissensee Cemetery, Mollie had taken charge of the finances, helping her mother support the family, then—as her siblings came of age—providing them work through David’s fur business. Mollie even helped her older sister, Golda, find love again, setting her up in 1920 with David’s handsome brother, Simon, a tailor in Berlin. Brothers marrying sisters. It made the family even stronger. Jules’s sister Sara also married a tailor and ran her own fur shop in the upscale Moabit section of the city with their brother Max, a hunchback.
When it came to his needlework and design, Jules was an artist. But he was also developing into quite a salesman, catering to both wives of bankers with traditional tastes and the more stylish customers looking for versions of the slope-shouldered, fur-trimmed wrap recently made famous by Coco Chanel, which boasted cuffs as big as muffs and a collar so huge it resembled a sleeping dog. Jules was witty and loved to tell a good story, two characteristics that endeared him to his lady customers. He spoke Hochdeutsch, High German, with an upper-class accent, but was also fluent in Berliner Schnauze—Berlin lip—the sarcastic sense of humor special to the city’s inhabitants. Jules was proud to be German and even more proud to be from Berlin, the only one in his family born there—a place where everyone seemed to be from someplace else. The Schulzbachs’ original hometown of Kolomyia in Galicia had a strong Jewish community—half of the city’s population—and was a center of Ukrainian culture with thirty synagogues and scores of publishing houses, newspapers, and magazines, and a public library that was one of the first in the region. But in 1910, two years before Jules was born, the city officially began to turn against the Jews, voting to prohibit them from the local trades.
So here they were in Berlin. Here, the Schulzbachs made their living freely, as tailors and furriers. But fur—and the money to be made from it—were not Jules’s passion. Edith Friedmann was.
Jules did his best to enjoy the good life with Edith, but couldn’t ignore the danger that was threatening their carefree nights dancing and their long cool days at the Wannsee beach. As the sailboats drifted into their field of vision, Jules and Edith would admire the mansions across the lake. Right across from the lido where they always sunbathed was a cream-colored stone villa tucked into the wooded shoreline. Before the London plane trees were fully bloomed, Jules could just make out the three-story building if he squinted hard enough from his striped beach chair. For now, it was just another mansion on the far shore, with manicured lawns and hedges and a colorful garden surrounded by classical statues.
Jules, of course, could not foresee what would soon take place in that elegant Wannsee villa. That over a buffet lunch, with fine cognac and imported cigars, fifteen German bureaucrats and military officers would gather to discuss the murder of all of Europe’s Jews, Jules’s and Edith’s families included.