Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Baron Maximilian von Schoenebeck, “le beau Max,” soon became a familiar figure in fashionable Paris restaurants as well as at the gaming tables of Nice, Menton, Cannes and Monte Carlo, where he regularly lost large sums at baccarat and roulette. France was always the country he loved above any other, and it was in the French demi-monde where he felt most at home. Of his many mistresses Max asked only that they be chic, placid in temperament and well mannered; intelligence was never a requirement. Generous with presents and unfailingly polite, he always maintained amicable relations with the old mistress even as he was beginning negotiations with the new.

  In 1893 Max, now aged thirty, was again on leave from the army, currently in pursuit of an English heiress. This was a period when relations between France and Germany were dangerously strained, with intense resentment on the part of France over the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, while the Germans had been seriously alarmed by the recent Franco-Russian rapprochement. A new military attaché, Colonel Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, had been sent to Paris from Berlin, and under his regime an extensive intelligence network had been established. Numerous purloined letters, military documents and maps of French fortifications were regularly delivered to Schwartzkoppen’s office, supplied both by French and German agents, including civil servants and members of both countries’ armed forces. Max was one of the serving officers involved, and his activities were shortly to lead him into serious trouble.

  While in Paris at the end of the summer, Max was befriended by a French journalist, M. P. Durville. Durville was an expert on military affairs, having served in the French army and survived the terrible siege of Metz in 1870, which had left him with a profound loathing for Germans and Germany. Now, during this period of increasingly strained relations between the two countries, he was on the alert for any sign of espionage and double-dealing, and during his conversations with Schoenebeck began to see an irresistible opportunity. As Max began to confide his anxieties—his desperate need of money to finance the wooing of his wealthy heiress—Durville appeared sympathetic, promoting himself as pro-German and promising to do what he could to help. Before long Durville had persuaded Max to take part in a fake operation, passing on to German intelligence detailed maps and drawings of French fortifications near the eastern frontier. It was arranged that Max should collect these documents from Durville’s office on 7 November. Six days later he was arrested and brought to trial the following month. Found guilty, Max was sentenced to five years, later reduced to three, in the Conciergerie, the infamous dungeon on the Île-de-la-Cité, where during the Reign of Terror Marie Antoinette, among thousands of others, had been incarcerated.

  As Max was neither a high-ranking officer nor a notable society figure the story attracted little attention at the time. A year later, however, with the sudden explosive impact of the Dreyfus case—Dreyfus also accused, wrongly as it turned out, of spying for the Germans—Max’s treachery briefly became front-page news. The Paris paper La Presse triumphantly headlined the story “Un Espion Allemand en Correctionnelle. Comment Schoenebeck a été arrêté—Révélations sensationnelles” (“A German spy in court. How Schoenebeck was arrested—Sensational revelations”), running a lengthy interview with Durville, who provided a detailed account of Schoenebeck’s duplicity.

  Fortunately, the case made little impact in Germany. Apart from his immediate family, and of course the German military, few were aware of Schoenebeck’s fate. In later life he himself never spoke of it, and Sybille knew nothing about it until at the age of eighty-seven she was contacted by a historian in Freiburg who had been researching the story. The information shocked and appalled her. “Your letter has distressed me very much,” she wrote. “My father a prisoner of France? Three years in the Conciergerie? To me, it comes like a delayed bombshell.” No one in the family had ever mentioned such an event, she continued. “The idea that my father should have been as much as suspected of having spied against France, is very painful to me…My father, as I see him, as I remember him, loved France, was, as I became, an extreme Francophile.”

  At first she was mystified, but gradually certain memories from her distant childhood began to surface. One day, Sybille recalled, Max had been showing her some drawings he had made. “We leafed through an old sketchbook of his—which may have contained a sketch of barred windows and sketches of a turreted building: ‘That was when I was in the Conciergerie.’ Or words to that effect. No comment. No show of feeling. No narrative. To me, it felt gloomy if romantic, and as real or unreal as his other tales…I just took them in as a child will: tales in books, tales of life.”

  Immediately after his release from prison Max left for Germany, where his return was welcomed by his regiment. Far from a disgrace, his sentence was regarded simply as an unfortunate consequence of his honourable activities in the service of his country, and shortly after his return to the Dragoons he was rewarded with promotion to first lieutenant. In July 1898 he retired from active service, after which he moved to Berlin. Three months later he was married.

  Berlin at the turn of the century was a rapidly spreading metropolis, with a population growing at a greater rate than anywhere else in Europe. From Prussian capital to the capital of the German Empire, Berlin had expanded into a great modern city, flourishing, in Sybille’s words, on “a tide of big money, big enterprise, big building, big ideas.” Now there was an extensive network of broad streets, with handsome department stores, modern theatres and fashionable restaurants. There was a transport system with not only horse-drawn trams but an elevated railway, the Ringbahn, and throughout the city a number of spacious public gardens—the Tiergarten, the Charlottenburg gardens, the Bellevuepark. There was a thriving financial and industrial centre, with new offices, public buildings and apartment blocks rising in almost every district. Most impressive was the wide and magnificent avenue of Unter den Linden, down which the resplendently uniformed Kaiser could often be seen riding at the head of a glitteringly accoutred troop of guards.

  One of the fastest-growing sections of society in Berlin was Jewish, with a population four times larger than anywhere else in the country. Due to the current period of prosperity much of the previously pervasive atmosphere of anti-Semitism had subsided. This wealthy and rapidly expanding Jewish community included a large number of assimilationist families, either with no religious faith or who were converts to Christianity, many of them regarded as an influential if slightly ambiguous elite, “ni Gotha, ni ghetto” (“neither from the Gotha [the directory of European princely and ducal families] nor from the ghetto”). There was a strong Jewish presence not only in banking and commerce but also in journalism, publishing, medicine and the law; and it was during this period that many of the most affluent Jewish families began marrying into the Christian aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie.

  For Maximilian von Schoenebeck, thirty-five and financially insecure, the prospect of such a match appeared irresistible. Soon after arriving in Berlin he met and quickly became engaged to Melanie Herz, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of Hermann Herz, a prosperous Jewish industrialist. The Herzes inhabited an imposing three-storey mansion on Voss Strasse, close to the Potsdamer Platz and backing onto the Imperial Chancellery. Wealthy manufacturers, part of a vanguard of assimilated Jewish businessmen, they were closely connected to some of the big banking families, to the Mendelssohns, Schwabachs and Bleichröders. One of their most notable forebears was the celebrated Henriette Herz, who in her Berlin salon had entertained such cultural celebrities as Goethe and Mirabeau, Schiller and Mme. de Genlis. This glamorous cultural background, however, held little significance for the next generation, who inhabited an altogether different environment. As Sybille was to describe them, the Herzes “had no interests, tastes or thoughts beyond their family and the comfort of their persons. While members of what might have been their world were dining to the sounds of Schubert and of Haydn, endowing research and adding Corot landscapes to their Bouchers an
d the Delacroix…[the Herzes] were adding bell-pulls and thickening the upholstery.”

  Hermann Herz’s father had originally made his fortune running an oil mill at Wittenberg on the banks of the Elbe, a business that had rapidly expanded, by the 1860s becoming a global industrial concern and diversifying in a number of directions. Not long after Max married into the family, the Herzes’ already substantial fortune exponentially increased with the development of a specialist detergent, “Schwarze Wäsche,” or “Black Wash.” The firm had been working for years on the difficult problem of effectively laundering black cloth, until finally, and with almost miraculous good timing, the new product was launched in January 1901, only days before the death of Queen Victoria. With the consequent massive demand for mourning that resulted, “Schwarze Wäsche” became a phenomenal bestseller.

  Unlike many Jewish families of their social standing, the Herzes had not become Christian; in fact they had little religious faith of any kind, and certainly no objection to their daughter’s engagement to Baron Schoenebeck, readily agreeing to her conversion to Catholicism. Melanie was provided with a handsome dowry, and the two were married in Berlin on 17 October 1898.

  After the wedding the couple left Berlin to live in Spain, in a rented villa with a large garden near Granada. Here Max continued to follow the life he had led since boyhood, buying antique furniture and spending much of his time with his beloved menagerie. Within only a few months, Melanie became pregnant, and on 19 July 1899 gave birth to a daughter, Maximiliane Henriette Ida. Six years later Melanie died of tuberculosis, leaving Max alone, with a small child on his hands. Unable to cope, he returned briefly to Berlin, where he left the little girl in the care of her Herz grandparents, while he returned, no doubt with relief, to a peripatetic and often solitary existence abroad, supported by a generous income provided by the Herzes. For the next couple of years he was able to continue much as before, alternating between rural solitude and the pleasures of the town, indulging in numerous affairs and heedlessly gambling away his annual income. It was three years after Melanie’s death that Max met the woman who was to become his second wife.

  Lisa Bernhardt, charming, beautiful and rich, seemed to have all the qualities Max required. Recently Lisa had broken off an affair with a married man, whose wife had reportedly threatened suicide after discovering her husband’s infidelity. In need of distraction and accustomed to male admiration, Lisa encouraged the advances of this charming homme du monde, who was instantly infatuated. Attracted as much by her elegance and sophistication as by her considerable fortune, Max lost little time in proposing, and Lisa, bruised by the failure of her recent relationship, accepted.

  Born on 24 October 1883, twenty years younger than Schoenebeck, Lisa was the daughter of a wealthy businessman from Hamburg. Her father, Max Bernhardt, half Spanish and a prominent member of the Jewish community, had made a fortune with a substantial business importing goods from India. His wife, Anna Levy, was the daughter of a successful lawyer, with a considerable income of her own. The Bernhardts travelled widely, with Anna, in the early years at least, accompanying her husband on his journeys not only in Europe but to the Americas, India, Sumatra and Japan. Unfortunately the marriage was wretchedly unhappy since Bernhardt, a womaniser and compulsive spendthrift, had repeatedly to be rescued from financial crises by his wife. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter, but before long Anna came to loathe her husband and his irresponsible, hedonistic way of life. An affair with a dancer was the final straw, and in 1905, when Lisa was twenty-two, the couple divorced, after which Anna continued to live in Hamburg, in the fashionable district of Fontenay near the banks of the Alster.

  Lisa, who after the divorce never saw her father again, was adored by her mother. Anna had done everything she could during Lisa’s childhood to nurture her exceptional intelligence, encouraging her to read widely, making sure she was fluent both in English and French. Before their divorce, Lisa had frequently accompanied her parents on their travels in Europe, her mother taking her to visit the galleries and museums which she herself had come to know so well. A ravishing young woman, Lisa was of medium height, with a curvaceous figure, golden skin and a head of thick chestnut-coloured hair; she was lively and clever, impatient of stupidity and inclined to be opinionated, thoroughly enjoying vigorous debate in the company of those she considered her intellectual equals. From girlhood she had attracted male admiration, indeed quickly came to expect it, and by her early twenties had enjoyed a number of affairs. She had also received several proposals of marriage, including one from the millionaire banker Henry Ladenberg, all of which she turned down.

  Lisa was twenty-five when she met Max von Schoenebeck. Initially intrigued by the handsome baron and amused by his eccentricities, she viewed the prospect of marriage with favour. But before long Max’s lengthy silences, his complete lack of interest in literature, history and politics, convinced her she would be making a mistake. In December 1908, however, a few months after their first meeting and just as Lisa was on the point of breaking off the engagement, a scandal erupted which traumatised Max, and indeed the entire Schoenebeck family.

  Of his four brothers Max had always felt closest to Gustav, a full-time career soldier in the Prussian army, who was then stationed at Allenstein, a garrison in the east of the country, near the Russian border. Here in December 1908 Max was spending a comfortable Christmas with Gustav and his wife, Antonia, whose substantial dowry had provided the couple with a far higher standard of living than that affordable on army pay. Gustav, like his brother indifferent to social life, spent most of his time either on exercises with his battalion or hunting, leaving his very pretty, very flirtatious wife to amuse herself with his fellow officers. For almost a year Antonia had been conducting an affair with a Captain Goeben, who had quickly became obsessed by her, determined somehow to do away with her husband. Early on the morning of 27 December, Max entered his brother’s room to find him lifeless, lying on his bed bleeding from a gunshot wound in his forehead. Accused of the murder, Goeben confessed and was sentenced to death, but cut his throat shortly before he was due to be hanged.

  Inevitably, the story became the subject of much salacious gossip and was widely reported, both in Germany and abroad. It was endowed with far greater significance, however, when taken up by the campaigning journalist, Maximilian Harden, in his weekly publication Die Zukunft.

  Harden, a ferocious critic of the Kaiser, had recently been prominent in publicising what became known as the “Eulenburg affair,” exposing homosexual conduct and widespread immorality at the highest level of the army and of the imperial court. Now with the Allenstein case Harden was able to fuel his argument. The article received enormous publicity and the Schoenebeck name quickly became notorious, leaving Max devastated not only by the murder of his brother but also by the shame and unwelcome exposure the case had brought on the family. Harden “wrote a searing leader under the heading of our family name,” Sybille later recorded. “The scandal was remarkable for the variety of ill-natured emotions it aroused; it even excited more anti-Semitism, my father’s first marriage to a deceased Jewish heiress was dragged in and the poor Herzes with it.” She was never to forgive Harden for the damage he caused, later portraying him in her novel A Legacy as Quintus Narden, “a muckraker who writes with heavy irony of a noble family’s failings, tells the truth but never the whole truth.”

  When Lisa saw how painfully the scandal had affected Max she felt unable to abandon him. After nearly a year of mourning, plans were made for the wedding, with Lisa, who had been baptised Protestant at birth, received into the Catholic Church. On 23 April 1910, she and Max were married in the Ludwigskirche in Berlin.

  Impatient as ever to leave Germany, Max took his new wife to Spain, to Ronda in Andalusia, where they settled into a pleasant whitewashed villa with a shady patio and large, overgrown garden. For Max this was an ideal location: here he contentedly passed the time painting,
communicating with his birds and animals, and disappearing at regular intervals to Granada and Seville, from where he would return accompanied by packing cases full of elaborately carved furniture, pictures, porcelain and ancient statuary. But for Lisa the experience was stifling. Ronda, hemmed in by mountains, was bitterly cold in winter, in summer full of dust and flies, with little to disturb the silence of the narrow, shuttered streets. They knew almost no one and it was unthinkable for a gentlewoman to go out on her own. Lisa, full of energy, craving admiration and intellectual stimulus, longed for a sophisticated social life; with her husband she had almost nothing in common; he rarely picked up a book, except for the occasional volume of Sherlock Holmes, cared little for company, and was capable of maintaining a broody silence for hours at a time. It was not long before Lisa made up her mind to leave him, but before she had the opportunity to raise the subject she discovered she was pregnant—her escape route, at least for the immediate future, effectively cut off.

  Max, who had been disappointed that his first child was a girl, was delighted by the prospect of an heir, even if it meant abandoning his beloved Spain to return to Germany for the birth. It was arranged that for the next few months the Schoenebecks would stay in Berlin, in a comfortable apartment on Lietzenburger Strasse in Charlottenburg, a prosperous district to the west of the city centre.

  Although Max never cared for city life, at least this brief period gave him the opportunity to become better acquainted with the daughter from his first marriage. Maximiliane, now eleven years old, had been living with her Herz grandparents in Voss Strasse, a luxurious if somewhat suffocating environment for an only child. Her grandparents were affectionate and kind, but also restrictive, with every minute of her day controlled by rules and timetables. She had seen her father on only a few occasions, during his infrequent visits to Berlin, but now for the first time she was allowed to accompany him on outings, and without the presence of nursemaid or governess. Max for his part quickly grew fond of this lively child, with her thick dark hair, large eyes and pretty face, always known, for her rather feline features, as “Katzi.” Fortunately, when Lisa was introduced to Katzi she took to her at once, amused by her frivolity and high spirits.