Sina Aronsfrau
My grandmother Bronislawa’s father died in the city of Mannheim on May 22, 1922. His name was Sina Aronsfrau. In other words, my great-grandfather had the same name as my father, although my father had a Latinized version of it bestowed on him (“Cinna” in place of “Sina” or “Zyna”). Equipped just with this information about the person of my great-grandfather — his name and date of death — I began to look for more details: it was likely that I would find at least some news about a prosperous merchant who had been murdered in Mannheim in 1922. I figured that I would need to delve into local newspapers, but to my astonishment, a simple Google search yielded some results!
According to Wikipedia, the murder of Sina Aronsfrau is attributed to a group of men including Hermann Willibald Fischer, who was a member of an extreme-right (Freikorps) terrorist group called Organisation Consul. This group operated between 1919 and 1923, and it had close connections to the Nazi Party (NSDAP), which was formed around the same time. The mission of Organisation Consul was, in its own words, “to cultivate and disseminate nationalist thought; to wage war against all antinationalists and internationalists; the just war against Jews, social democracy, and leftist radicalism; and to foment internal unrest so as to overthrow the antinationalist Weimar Constitution…”225 Fischer, who according to Wikipedia was somehow involved in my great-grandfather’s assassination, became famous for having been one of the three men responsible for murdering Walther Rathenau, the German minister of foreign relations and (not inconsequentially) an assimilated Jew. Rathenau was murdered barely two months after my great-grandfather, on June 24, 1922,226 and in fact it was the investigation into his murder that led officials to discover that Organisation Consul was also implicated in the assassination of my father’s grandfather.
Wikipedia’s source for this information is a book on Rathenau’s murder written by Humboldt University historian Martin Sabrow, I wrote to Professor Sabrow asking for further information, and he responded with many more details. (Like the Tennessee Williams character Blanche Dubois, this book has “always depended on the kindness of strangers.”)
The police never credibly solved the murder, Sabrow wrote, but there is no doubt that it was a political killing, because nothing was stolen. During the police investigation into the Rathenau murder, several witnesses mentioned the murder of Sina Aronsfrau, implicating the writer and nationalist extremist Ernst von Salomon as well. The young men who formed Organisation Consul were all from “good families” — well-educated and ideologically motivated radicals. The idea to orchestrate political killings took shape during night discussions, and it produced a long hit list that, according to Salomon, had some names scratched out and others added. Many of the people on that list seem to have been put there for reasons that were not transparent to all members of the group. Salomon actually saw the hit list in the room of another one of Rathenau’s assassins, and one of the leading ideologues of the movement, Edwin Kern: “It was, in fact, a single dirty sheet of paper with names scribbled all over it in pencil, some crossed out, some written in again. Many of the names meant absolutely nothing to me, and I had to take a lot of trouble to find out who the people were…I remember thinking that there were a lot of Jewish names.”227
Professor Sabrow shared information from the Rathenau murder investigation with me. The detective Waldemar Niedrig testified that Salomon had confessed to him his involvement in Sina Aronsfrau’s assassination: “Salomon himself told me that all three of them had [approached] Sina Aronsfrau in his Mannheim office and asked him if he was Sinai Aronsfrau. In response to his affirmative, they said: ‘We were just looking for you,’ and immediately fired the shot.”228
Niedrig’s testimony was corroborated by a second witness, Theodor Bruedigam, who said that he had heard from a member of the Organisation Consul that Sina Aronsfrau’s assassination had been carried out by Karl Tillessen and two other members of the organization, one of whom was probably Ernst von Salomon, who himself, twenty years later, published a protracted “Questionnaire”/confession, in which he acknowledged that, beyond his role in the Rathenau assassination, he had also taken part in several other crimes during those years.229
The murders carried out by Organisation Consul were executions that seem generally to have been decided by a council modeled on medieval Vehmic tribunals, which judged the person to be killed in absentia and then ordered the hit. It was not immediately clear why they targeted Sina Aronsfrau, who, though Jewish and reasonably wealthy, was not a prominent public figure in Mannheim.
The gravesite of Sina Aronsfrau, in the Jewish cemetery of Mannheim.*1
My brothers and I grew up with the feeling that Nazi violence and the Holocaust were not so very immediate, because our family had escaped. In reality, though, it had been a horror that had struck home even before the rise of Hitler, but that was then rendered distant by careful and deliberate omission. Even my grandmother’s brief autobiographical notes skip over it. And my own father was so confused by his mother’s false clues that he was unable to tell me, even when he was eighty-four years old, of his mother’s suffering over the murder of her father, which happened when she was almost thirty and barely three years before my father’s birth.
Cinna was also not told that his mother’s singing career had been cut short by racial persecution. Bronis had her stage debut while still at Munich, where she had studied singing, in a concert that was conducted by Bruno Walter, who afterward said of her that she had a voice of rare beauty. As a result of this success, Bronis received her first regular contract as a performer, but in the end the contract was not signed because she was Jewish. She was nevertheless able to get a promising concert career going, after an acclaimed performance at Cologne’s famous Guerzenich Concert Hall, followed by a national tour: “I make the tour across the country and feel already the uncertainty, the fear. The conductors ask about my “race,” they themselves ashamed, afraid. And the sickness in my body from my remote youth — here it was again.”230
The sickness of her youth that she refers to is the dread that she felt when her family fled Poland, for Germany, in 1901. The depth of Bronis’s losses is hard to reconstruct, because she was always so private about all of this, but she did write about what Germany had meant for her, after Poland:
How I love this country, how I love the people, I adore everything which comes from there. My mother knows poems from Heine, Goethe, she sings Lieder, German lieder, she has a beautiful voice and people say that one day I will sing like her. One day I will be a singer, an opera singer, I will be famous and I will sing German Lieder and show my country how proud I am to be a part of it…I study Bach, and Haendel and Mozart and in my conscience is always one idea: to show how I am part of this my country, how deep I feel their music and now I can express it. It is like an obsession.
My father, who grew up hiding his connection to Germany — both in Belgium and in Chile — had an imprecise idea of the depth of his mother’s attachment to German culture, and does not seem to have been told that racial hatred had denied his mother a singing career, along with all of her passionately cultivated feelings of belonging. Instead, Cinna was led to believe that my grandmother’s father had denied her a stage career.
Nor did he know the connection between his grandfather’s assassination and the speed with which his parents decided to leave Germany, just a few months after Hitler’s election, in 1933. True, they had left thanks to my grandfather’s prompting, very shortly after a Nazi-organized public humiliation of Cologne’s Jewish lawyers, who were paraded through the city in a garbage truck. But I now realize that Sina Aronsfrau’s assassination by the Nazis probably helped my grandfather convince his wife and her family to leave Germany so early.
Most troubling for me, Cinna couldn’t seem to put himself in his mother’s shoes, a woman who had lost her father, siblings, and nephews, her national identification, and her career because of anti-Semit
ism, as he tried to explain the silences that he had assimilated during his “overprotected” childhood. Maternal protection took the form of hiding the truth.
What’s in a name?
There is a Jewish tradition of naming a child after a deceased relative. In the case of my family, there are several cousins of my daughter’s generation named Lisa (or Elisa) and also a Noemí, in honor of my grandmother, Lisa Noemí. There are two Mishas (“Miguel” and “Michael”), and two Ricardos, after my maternal and paternal grandfathers. Sometimes only the first letter of a name is used to honor the deceased, or the person is honored by way of the child’s middle name. My middle name, for example, is Walter, in honor of my great-uncle, Walter Lomnitz, whom I never met. My brother Jorge, may he rest in peace, had Simon as a middle name, to honor our uncle Simon, my grandmother Bronis’s older brother. My sister is named for her great-grandmother Tania.
My grandmother Bronis’s eldest brother, Simon, on April 22, 1916.*2
There are two other Jewish naming traditions worth mentioning: to give the baby the name of a favorite biblical figure (Abraham, Isaac, Esther, Miriam, etc.) or, in lieu of using an identifiably Jewish name, to use one liked by the parents and that identifies the child with the culture of the place where they are born. My paternal grandfather’s family, for example, who were assimilated Jews, all had German names: Siegfried, Richard (“Kurt”), Walter, and Günther, for instance. My grandmother’s family was different, though, because they had emigrated from Poland.
Sina Aronsfrau.
My great-grandfather Sina was born in Witznitz (Bukovina, Austro-Hungarian Empire), and so not very far from Nova Sulitza, but he moved from there to Bochnia (Galicia, Poland), where his children were born. My grandmother Bronislawa, who was born in 1892, and her parents and siblings moved from Bochnia to Mannheim in 1901. The exact circumstances of the family’s departure from Poland aren’t clear, but it was undoubtedly influenced by anti-Semitic violence. Indeed, my grandmother’s memoir practically begins with traumatic memories from that specific episode:
My mother holds me in her arms; I am crying, it seems to me, that this endless going, going will never stop, this sickness in my body will never end. The beautiful voice of my mother calms my tears: “Soon we will be there, in a wonderful country, nobody will hurt us any more, we will be happy, free.”…I am looking at my brother — how strange he looks with his broken nose. I see still the boys running after him, throwing stones, chasing him. We kept it a secret, not wanting to upset my parents — and so his nose became crooked.231
Germany was to be, for the Aronsfrau family, a wonderful country “where to be a Jew will be natural, without danger.” And it was in Germany that the family made a generationally inflected transition to taking on Christian names. But my great-grandfather, Sina, who was already forty-two when he arrived to Germany, didn’t make that much of an effort to “pass” or assimilate as German.
Rather, he kept his Jewish name, Zyne — pronounced “Tsineh” — or Sina, and chose not to use a German cognate, whereas Simon, his eldest son, who arrived in Germany at age sixteen, did get a Christian name, as did all the rest of his siblings. Although Mannheim had a Jewish community since the town’s foundation, in the early seventeenth century, Sina identified with Mannheim’s Eastern European Jewish émigrés; and at the time of his murder he and his wife, Malka, were on the board of the Ahawas Scholem Club, which was an affiliate of the East Jewish Association. And although Sina dressed both modernly and elegantly — as befitted a prosperous haberdasher — he did not relinquish a certain Eastern Jewish air, the way that his children did. This can be ascertained in the only remaining photo that we have of Sina (above), in contrast with his children’s assimilation to German society.
Photo of the Aronsfrau siblings taken on the day of my grandmother’s wedding (with the groom, my grandfather, in the top row on the right) in 1924, two years after Sina Aronsfrau’s assassination.
There is a clue here as to why my father received the rather unusual name of Cinna. It is a homonym for Sina, of course, but with a spelling that is Latin rather than Jewish. Cinna, a secondary figure in Roman history, appears as a conspirator in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and is also the protagonist in a play by Pierre Corneille. I was always told that the name ran in the family, but there are no other Cinnas in an Aronsfrau family tree that dates back to the mid-nineteenth century.
Rather than family tradition, there was in fact a lot of fear encrypted in my father’s name. My grandmother gave her firstborn a Latinized version of her own murdered father’s name. Her father, though, had been killed because he was Jewish, so that my father’s Jewishness was at least made a little more discreet in his given name. Sina Aronsfrau was murdered in 1922, and Cinna Lomnitz was born in 1925, but the real reasons for Sina’s murder were a great secret that was forever kept from both my father and his brother. Indeed, in a fragmentary memoir that my father wrote in 1987, which we only discovered after his death, Cinna does mention that his grandfather had been murdered (a fact that he had never shared with us), but then he attributes the murder to a thief, and not a Nazi or proto-Nazi hate crime.
I believe that Cinna had a secret identity. He grew up, as he told me, overprotected by his mother, and to an extreme degree. It seems to me that his mother obsessively shielded her little “Cinnalein” because she had been so unable to protect her father. She even hid from my father his true identity as the grandson of a murder victim, and specifically as the victim of a hate crime. He was told that his name came from a Hebrew word that means “strong man,” but as Israeli friends have confirmed, there is no variant of “Sina” or “Tsina” or “Sinai” that quite suggests this interpretation. A strong man is what my grandparents wished him to be, due to the extreme vulnerability that was encoded in his name.
As my father told me, he and his brother Eric played as children looking at the rich illustrations of animals in Brehm’s nature book; and when they encountered “ugly toads,” they named them “Hitler” and “Goering.” They knew that there was something ugly there, and that it was very close, but they couldn’t quite identify it from their bourgeois house in Brussels, where they were pampered and surrounded by nannies and protected from the horror that had already claimed the life of their grandfather and would soon decimate the rest of the family.
The wedding of my grandparents Kurt Lomnitz and Bronislawa Aronsfrau, in Wiesbaden, 1924. In the back row, to the left, is Walther Lomnitz, and in the center is Günther Lomnitz. In the second row, Wally and Leska Lomnitz. The rest are Bronislawa’s siblings.
Cinna and Eric spoke in French to each other. They were afraid of being identified as Germans (Boches) in Belgium, but their eagerness for assimilation had also been fostered by their mother, who encouraged them to identify with Belgium, much as her own mother had urged her to embrace German identity:
Before me is the picture of my mother holding me in her arms and talking to me about this new homeland — Germany. Like her I have tried to give my children the same feeling everywhere we land. I tried to convince them that this is the end of our wandering. Poor children — how perfect they spoke French, trying to forget German as I wanted to forget Polish many years ago. How their room in Brussels was adorned with the pictures of the King and his family. How they knew the words of the national anthem and how proudly they used to sing it.
She then tried the same thing in Chile, though by that point, the incentives for assimilation were guided less by hope than by fear. In the case of my father, though, his propensity to adapt and go with the current had been hardwired by virtue of his very name.
Names, like passports, often contain a trace of fear. Mine is Claudio. It is a name that was quite popular in Chile when I was born. It was chosen so that I might blend and be Chilean. However, Claudio also carries hidden behind it a second, not especially Latin, name, Walter, which comes from a deceased
uncle on the Lomnitz side. And even a third, unregistered, Hebrew name, Dov, which I have very rarely had the occasion or temptation to use, but it exists. My grandfather Misha, on the other hand, imbued with a strong sense of Jewish nationalism, decided at a certain point to try to forgo Adler, a last name that suggested desire to assimilate into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in favor of the Hebrew Ben Tzvi, which means “Son of Tzvi” (which was Hershel’s Hebrew name). In doing this, Misha attempted what many other founders of Israel and members of his generation had done, some of whom became Ben-Aharon, Ben-Gurion, or Ben-Dayan, for instance. The recognition that the Adler name was a result of collective oppression prompted a gesture of fearlessness and the adoption of a new name. There is fear there too, I think, and a determination to overcome it.
My father’s name, however, is the most secretly painful of all the names I know. It points to an absent grandfather whose cause of death his mother couldn’t and wouldn’t share even with her own son. The overprotection that Cinna so suffered stemmed not only from my grandmother’s mortal fear, but also from the impossibility of defending or even crying openly for her father. And my father never really understood the full implications of his own name.
The Aronsfrau murder
About a month ago I received an email from a Karen Strobel, who introduced herself as a researcher in the Mannheim City Archives, working in the section that is dedicated to the documentation of the National Socialism period. Together with a retired history teacher, Brigitte Zwerger, Karen has been doing research and writing on the assassination of Sina Aronsfrau.232 The case came to their attention because of Martin Sabrow’s book on the Rathenau murder, and it rang some bells for them because Karen and Brigitte have worked to uncover the history of national socialism in Mannheim, a city that prides itself — not unjustly — on the strength of its socialist and communist past, but that has tended to forget the Nazi agitation that also flourished there. Karen Strobel heard that I was a descendant of Sina, and that I had published information on the case in Spanish. She was contacting me for that reason, and also to share her research findings.
Nuestra América Page 28