Although none of the Herzes showed any particular interest in Sybille, they were well disposed and materially she was indulged, her upstairs nursery well supplied with toys, including a rocking horse, a miniature railway, a puppet theatre and a toy stable. Every day she was taken for a walk, usually to the nearby Tiergarten, “the rather dismal public park,” with its boring straight paths and lawns surrounded by railings. Infinitely preferable was the Siegesallee, the broad, tree-lined boulevard that ran through the park and on to the Königsplatz. Along its entire length on either side stood a series of vast and magnificent marble statues of the Prussian kings and warriors of the past, designed as the Kaiser’s grandiose monument to his country’s glory. His critics derided the Siegesallee, dubbed “Puppenallee,” or “Dolls’ Avenue,” and regarded it as a ludicrous example of imperial folly. But to Sybille these towering heroic images, nobly gesturing, splendid in their armour and elaborate robes, were thrilling. “I would stand before each Margrave of Brandenburg or King of Prussia upon his pedestal and study his countenance and dates and that of his spouse and counsellors…My favourites were an epicene youth leaning upon his shield, Heinrich the Child, and a mysterious personage covered in chain mail, Waldemar the Bear.”
As before at Feldkirch, the most important person in Sybille’s life was her half-sister, Katzi: it was Katzi, “warm, generous, pleasure-loving,” whom she adored and on whom she relied the most. But Katzi was growing up, eager for fun, new clothes and a lively social life. She had been caught more than once out on the town flirting with handsome young officers over coffee and cakes, and in order to teach her a lesson had been sent for several months to a convent, where, predictably, she was miserable. On her return to Voss Strasse, it was Lisa who became her ally. Lisa was charmed by her stepdaughter’s high spirits and sympathetic to her keen interest in the opposite sex. Indeed for both women male admiration was central to their existence, and on this, despite the difference in age, they quickly colluded like a couple of sisters. “Men were attracted to them; rarely to both, though it happened,” Sybille recalled. Lisa had many friends in the theatre, one of whom, a drama critic, “took my mother to rehearsals of Ibsen and Shaw…then walked my sister in the public gardens treating her as…a very attractive, very alive young creature. There was not a niggle of jealousy.” It was Lisa, too, who although tone deaf herself, supported Katzi in her plans for a musical career, arranging an audition for her with the lieder singer Therese Behr, wife of the pianist Artur Schnabel. But Katzi’s ambitions were for grand opera, not lieder, so that particular project came to nothing.
Fortunately for Sybille she was soon to be rescued from her somewhat solitary existence. By the beginning of 1918 Lisa had become immersed in a new affair, which made her even more impatient than usual with her maternal responsibilities. Thus it was decided that her daughter should go to Hamburg, where she could stay with Anna Bernhardt, Lisa’s mother.
Blonde, blue-eyed and very pretty, Anna had been partly deaf since childhood, which sometimes led to difficulties in her social life, but she was intellectual and remarkably well read in German, French and English. Having lived alone since her divorce thirteen years earlier, Anna was delighted to care for the child, determined to do everything she could to make her happy and encourage her obvious intelligence. Sybille quickly settled into the comfortable house on Oberstrasse and became devoted to her kind and generous grandmother. A tutor was engaged, there were daily lessons in physical exercise, and Sybille soon made friends with a number of neighbourhood children. She also spent time with another member of the family, Anna’s Spanish mother-in-law, “a very small, very wrinkled, old woman…who never left the house…She hobbled about passages tatting lace, carrying a plate of pudding to her upstairs drawing room. In spite of my shrinking from age…she and I drank our chocolate and ate sweets together entirely in the manner of equals.”
When after a period of several months Anna was instructed to bring Sybille back to Berlin the child was distraught. She had grown deeply attached to her grandmother and found the prospect of leaving her painful in the extreme. To add to her wretchedness, she discovered on returning to Voss Strasse that Katzi was away, staying with the family of a young man to whom, briefly, she had become engaged. Years later Anna recalled the scene as she prepared to say goodbye. Her granddaughter had been hysterical: “You cried: ‘Katzi is gone, and now you go away, oh I won’t live any longer!’ And at the station you cried so desperately that people came to hug and cheer you.”
The Armistice was declared on 11 November 1918, two days after the abdication of the Kaiser and the establishment of the German Republic. By this time living conditions had deteriorated dramatically, even for such families as the Herzes. The head of the family, Katzi’s grandfather, had died at the beginning of the war, and now it was discovered that almost no money remained. The consequence of this revelation was not only the immediate introduction of stringent economies in household expenditure but also the end of Maximilian’s generous allowance, arranged on his marriage to Melanie and continued ever since.
Shortly before the Armistice, and with the end of the war clearly in sight, Maximilian and Katzi had left to return to Baden. Lisa meanwhile went with her daughter for a few days to Boltenhagen, a resort on the Baltic coast, where during the past couple of summers she had taken both Sybille and Katzi on holiday from Berlin. Their journey home was unfortunately timed, coinciding with the outbreak of what became known as the November Revolution, an uprising begun by sailors of the Imperial Navy which quickly spread across the country. Mother and daughter were caught up in the revolt at Schwerin, in the Duchy of Mecklenburg, where they were ordered off the train and herded into a hotel on the main square. “Here the sailors with their banners and slogans were mutinying all right,” Sybille recalled. “There was shooting and much noise…The windows giving on to that square were broad and high. Most of us were crouching on the floor. Not so my mother: she stood up to look. The sailors, she said firmly, were right to mutiny—it was time, the Kaiser’s regime was rotten…The shooting must have stopped by nightfall. Whoever was in charge did not judge it safe for us to leave. The bedrooms were full up, so we all slept on the floor. After daybreak, another train, another journey…”
Eventually Lisa and Sybille reached Feldkirch. On the surface little had changed: the village had been left unharmed, the farms were still functioning, although there was a notable shortage of young men. At the schloss there were fewer servants: no coachman, no butler, and a couple of local girls taking the place of the trained parlourmaids previously employed. The stables were empty, as all the horses had been requisitioned, and there were no other animals—no pigs, no sheep, no chickens or ducks; the garden was a tangle of nettles and ivy and fallen trees. Fortunately, however, the interior of the house was found to be intact, its “contents undisturbed, dusted, my father’s collection in museum-order, and thus for a brief spell of time, on a diminishing scale, a vie de château resumed.”
Yet although the house itself remained largely unaltered, some major changes were about to occur in the Schoenebecks’ family life. The first, taking place only weeks after Sybille’s arrival home, was Katzi’s permanent departure following her wedding on 24 December 1918. Katzi at only nineteen had married a man much older than herself, Hans Erich Borgmann, a wealthy alderman, who immediately took his young wife back to his home town of Wiesbaden. Katzi’s sudden departure was extremely painful for Sybille: her sister had been her only ally, and now she was gone. Left alone with her parents, the little girl felt painfully isolated: she had no friend, no one to play with, no one in whom she could confide.
As before, neither of her parents had much time for her. Maximilian spent most of the day in his library, or in the park with a newly acquired menagerie, which included several large dogs and a couple of donkeys, Fanny and Flora, on which Sybille, without much enthusiasm, learned to ride. Lisa, bored by her husband, bored by the country, was
impatient with her daughter, whose childish inadequacies, as she saw them, frequently exasperated her. Sybille, who feared her sharp tongue and dreaded being alone with her, was relieved when Lisa disappeared to spend time with one of her lovers. “[My mother] did not suffer little fools gladly. That I was her own made not a scrap of difference. When I was slow, she called me slow, when I was quick she called me a parrot. Compassionate in her principles, she was high-handed even harsh in her daily dealings.” In middle age, looking back at her childhood, Sybille wrote, “[the] truth is that I have never grown up, and did not do so because I always missed having a real mother and father: parents in fact, a family.”
By the age of eight Sybille had received no formal education at all. “My father hadn’t thought about it, my mother vaguely held that any child of hers would somehow pick it up.” It was not until an acquaintance expressed shock at this state of affairs that it was decided that something must be done, and arrangements were hastily made for her to attend school at the Ursuline convent in Freiburg.
The convent of the Society of the Sisters of St. Ursula of the Blessed Virgin, known as the Schwarzen Klosters (“Black Abbey”), is a large, solid, five-storey building with a handsome church attached; constructed in the early eighteenth century, its purpose had always been to provide schooling for girls. Sybille entered as a day girl, bewildered suddenly to find herself in a maze of endless rooms and corridors, peopled by black-clad nuns and swarming with girls, all older and in appearance far more sophisticated than herself. At first Sybille was petrified by the nuns, by their large crucifixes, their veils and habits, although she soon found them to be kind and only “gently dictatorial.” As a new girl she was placed on a bench at the back of the class, where rather to her surprise she forgot her fear and found herself immediately engaged, quickly winning the approval of the teachers by enthusiastically joining in the discussions. “[I was] entranced by the magic of a verbal lesson…Surprise and approval were in the air. I drank it up. So far, so good. Then came a recess. Another nun took charge. She banged a gavel and in a strong voice called ‘Diktat’—pens and copy books were presented right and left like small arms…I froze.”
Although at an early age she had taught herself to read, Sybille had not learned to write. The nuns were astonished: a child of her age unable to write! Never had there been such a case before. “They swarmed around me, black cloth billowing about unseen feet—humming to each other in distress…What would they do? Teach me to write. From scratch. Well, they tried. At once. Day after day I was whisked off into a discreet little study on an upper floor.” Unfortunately the process was only partly successful, and for the rest of her life Sybille’s handwriting remained virtually illegible, “hard to read for me, impenetrable for anyone else.” Over the years it was to remain a constant source of complaint from her numerous correspondents, who variously described it as indecipherable, a cat’s scrawl, an Egyptian hieroglyph. “I can never read your writing (alas, what I have missed),” lamented one old friend, while another in a frenzy of frustration exclaimed, “Your handwriting is calculated to defy the most expert cryptographers!”
For reasons she never discovered, Sybille’s attendance at the convent lasted only a few weeks. “It just came to an end…I had not been withdrawn, I had not been expelled, I was just back home.” Lisa, unconcerned, made some vague suggestion of hiring a governess, an idea irritably dismissed by Max, who instead decided his daughter should complete her education at the village school.
And so this was arranged, with Sybille, now nine years old, attending classes every weekday from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. The schoolhouse was a fairly new building, with a ground-floor classroom in which about thirty children sat with their slates, the youngest in front, the seniors, the eleven-year-olds, at the back. In recognition of her aristocratic status, Sybille, addressed as “Baronin Billi,” was given a desk to herself—the other pupils shared a desk between four—and positioned a little apart from the rest of the class. There was one teacher, “a youngish man in a town suit,” who divided his attention between the varied age groups, giving dictation as well as reading and singing lessons and making sure the catechism was learned by heart. Lessons were conducted in educated German, Hochdeutsch, although between themselves the children, Sybille included, always spoke in the local dialect, Alemannisch. Sybille soon made friends among her fellow pupils, much preferring the company of boys to girls. With her new companions she enjoyed taking part in boisterous games, often in her room at the schloss, and in fine weather roaming the fields, Sybille in dungarees or in a favourite Red Indian outfit, a present from her mother. She joined her little gang in helping with the harvest, stacking logs, or “getting on a farmhorse when no one was looking,” often ending the day in one of the village houses for a meal of cold bacon, bread and cider.
Sybille had been at the school only a short while before her life at home changed dramatically. Relations between her parents had long been wretchedly unhappy, alternating between periods of glacial silence and increasingly bitter quarrels ending in violent shouting matches. Then one day Lisa declared she was leaving for Berlin, taking Sybille with her. For a brief period mother and daughter stayed at a pension in the centre of the city, Sybille knowing nothing of the purpose of the visit, until Lisa suddenly announced that her father would shortly be coming to take her back to Feldkirch. When Maximilian arrived, Lisa remained upstairs, refusing to see him, and thus the miserable marriage came to an end.
Max, although angry and humiliated by what he regarded as his wife’s unforgiveable behaviour, agreed to divorce Lisa, a process eventually finalised at the regional court in Freiburg on 22 April 1922, twelve years almost to the day after the couple had married in Berlin. Four months later Lisa gave birth to a son, by yet another of her many lovers, but the baby died after only a few weeks.
When Lisa went, so did her income. Now Max was left with almost nothing except for the schloss—which although purchased with Lisa’s money she had allowed him to keep—and his military pension. Retired from the army shortly before the war with the rank of major, Max had been awarded the statutory pension, which previously had been of little consequence; now, however, its inadequacy was distressingly apparent and Max immediately applied for a retrospective promotion to lieutenant-colonel; his request was refused.
Suddenly impoverished, Max was obliged to dismiss all the servants, and most rooms in the house were closed, with living quarters confined to the top floor. Here Max had his bedroom and dressing room, Sybille slept in Katzi’s old room and the morning room was used for dining, with a makeshift kitchen installed in what had been the governess’s bedroom. A village woman, Lina Hauser, was brought in to do all the domestic work, sleeping in a tiny room off the corridor and joining the Schoenebecks for meals. Lina—“a shy, stiff peasant,” kind, simple, deeply religious—was devoted to Max and worked tirelessly and without complaint. It was Lina who did all the housework, the washing and ironing, the cooking (described as “execrable” by Sybille), as well as chopping firewood, lighting stoves, feeding the poultry, picking fruit, and working in the kitchen garden. Here she was helped by Sybille, who also joined her in mucking out the donkeys’ stables and making the dogs’ dinners in the makeshift kitchen. Lina, Sybille recalled, “treated me (affectionately) as her kitchenmaid-cum-stable boy…To her I was both an underservant and the employer’s daughter.”
“Overnight,” Sybille wrote, “we were the new poor.” Yet their situation was hardly unique: by 1921 the whole country was in the grip of a raging inflation, largely due to the massive reparations, hundreds of billions of gold marks, demanded from Germany by the Allied powers. The mark, which in August 1914 had been valued at 4.19 to the U.S. dollar, in December 1922 was valued at 7,589 to the dollar, and by November the following year at 2.5 trillion to the dollar, effectively reducing to penury a large part of the population. “The scale of its catastrophic course then is no longer within our imaginations,” wr
ote Sybille nearly eighty years later. “What had bought a house the year before, a piano last month, a pound of butter last week, bought a newspaper in the morning but no longer on that afternoon.” Unlike many, the Schoenebecks were fortunate in that at Feldkirch they were able to live off the land, and at least they had enough to eat and were able to keep the house running. “We turned ourselves into a no-cash economy. Produce and barter.” Felled timber and cider made from apples from the orchard were exchanged for bread, butter, milk, salt and candles; potatoes were grown on part of the ploughed-up lawn, while poultry, pigs and a couple of sheep were kept in the little park. Occasionally a small parcel would arrive with packets of tea or peppercorns sent by Katzi from Wiesbaden, which as part of the prosperous French zone suffered fewer restrictions than the rest of the country.
In contrast to his wife, Maximilian was well liked in Feldkirch: unfailingly polite, he took trouble to engage with the villagers, listening to what they had to say, ready to discuss topics of local interest and concern. Now, although leading a life of almost hermetic retirement, he continued to show his customary courtesy, always asking after wives and children of the local farmers, sharing a glass of wine with the men after their bartering had been concluded. There was, however, only one member of the community invited inside the house: the parish priest, for whom every six months or so Max himself, with a certain amount of sighing and complaint, prepared an elaborate dinner.
Attending Mass at the parish church was one of the few activities which Sybille and her father undertook together. As owners of the schloss, the Schoenebecks had their own pew, near to the altar and at a distance from the rest of the congregation; in recognition of their status they entered the church not through the main door, like everyone else, but through the sacristy. From the beginning Sybille was fascinated by the theatricality of the ritual, by the priest in his embroidered vestments, the acolytes with their censers, the organ music, the prayers, the chanting of the litany. Soon she had learned the litany by heart, boasting that she could recite it from beginning to end without once looking at her missal. Before long the challenge was taken up and she was put to the test. “One evening in May I found myself kneeling in conspicuous isolation, missal shut beside me, chanting in the right blend of Hochdeutsch and patois line after line punctuated by the thunderous response behind me. ‘Du Engel des Herrn.’ ‘Bet f’r oonsh!’ (Patois for ‘Bete für uns.’) ‘Du heilige Jungfrau.’ ‘Bet f’r oonsh!’ ‘Du elfenbeinerner Turm.’ ‘Bet f’r oonsh!’…It lasted for the best part of five minutes and it was intoxicating.” Shortly before her tenth birthday, Sybille, with other young girls from the village, began preparing for her first Communion. By this time she had become so enthralled with the whole performance that she asked if she might serve as an altar boy; her father, somewhat to her surprise, was agreeable and so was the priest, but when her request was referred to the bishop he turned it down.
Sybille Bedford Page 4