Karen Strobel’s first email included Sina’s (or Zyne’s) death certificate and much information that I ignored. We then initiated an intense correspondence that is still ongoing, because Karen and Brigitte’s research uncovered very much that I had not known or understood. The case of Sina Aronsfrau’s murder is still partly unsolved and too intricate to explain fully here, but there are some elements of the story that have implications for my own psychological makeup, though I need to backtrack a bit in order to show why.
When I first learned that Sina Aronsfrau was murdered by anti-Semitic nationalist terrorists, a couple of years ago, I was at a loss to explain the cause of the assassination. The people who Professor Sabrow showed were responsible for killing Sina had previously murdered Matthias Erzberger, tried to murder Philipp Schiedemann, and then later killed Walther Rathenau. My problem was that these three people were very famous indeed: Erzberger had spoken out against the war in 1917 and signed the German armistice with the Allies in 1918, Schiedemann had been the Weimar Republic’s first chancellor, and Rathenau was foreign minister. Why would a terrorist outfit that was so ambitious in its political aims go after my great-grandfather?
The truth is, I wasn’t sure. Before Karen Strobel approached me, I did not know very much about Sina Aronsfrau. According to family lore, his son Simon, my grandmother’s oldest brother, was extraordinarily rich. They said that he owned his own private airplane in the 1920s, and that he had given my grandmother a department store, the Köln Kaufhaus, as a wedding gift. So the family story went. I wasn’t sure whether it was true, but it struck me that if Sina Aronsfrau owned a department store in Mannheim, he might have been targeted for that very reason.
The corner building in this 1930s photo still has the Aronsfrau name on the second floor, where Sina’s business was.
The H is for Hermann Aronsfrau, Sina’s second son.
I knew from reading a book by Paul Lerner that the Nazis decried Jewish-owned department stores as especially pernicious institutions, and also that Germany’s Jewish department store owners were universally of Polish origin, like Sina.233 So maybe Sina was a major tycoon, an owner of a chain of department stores, who had been singled out by the Organisation Consul for that reason, since they tended to go after big targets.
But these conjectures proved to be false. Paul Lerner’s book lists the Tietz family as the owners of the Frankfurt and Köln department stores that had supposedly belonged to my family. It is possible that Simon might have given his sister some shares for her wedding — these were joint stock companies by the 1920s — but neither she nor Simon owned anything approaching a partner’s stake. Karen Strobel and Brigitte Zwerger’s research has identified Sina’s and Simon’s businesses, and their places of residence, and the story is a bit different from what I had conjectured.
My family lore had it that my grandmother, Bronislawa Aronsfrau, was a German Jew of Polish origin, from a wealthy family, while my grandfather, Kurt Lomnitz, was a true yeque, that is a Jew of old German stock that had established itself in the Rhineland since the seventeenth century. Thus, the Lomnitzes, who were lawyers and doctors, were from an upper-middle-class family that had less money but more cultural capital than the Aronsfraus. That part of the equation is true to a certain extent, but my grandmother’s Polish origin was in fact less remote than I’d been led to believe: Bronis was actually born in Bochnia (Galicia, Poland), and emigrated to Mannheim when she was already nine years old. Her brother Simon, who was the eldest of the siblings, was sixteen when the family moved to Germany. The family’s move from Poland to Mannheim had been prompted by violence, and they embraced Germany as “a country where we need not be afraid anymore, where to be a Jew will be natural, without danger.”234
Also, the Aronsfraus were more deeply educated than I had been led to believe. Sina and his sons worked very hard from their arrival to Mannheim, and they prospered quite a bit. Simon and his brothers moved up the social ranks. Bronislawa, for her part, took a teaching degree and graduated first in her entire school. Unlike the men in my Lomnitz family, though, the Aronsfrau brothers did not fight in the First World War. Maybe they were too old to be drafted at the outbreak of the war, and it is unclear whether they were even considered German citizens in 1914. Sina, for his part, was active in Mannheim’s Eastern European Jewish community, and so remained unassimilated. In short, the Aronsfraus represented something that German Völkisch and anti-Semitic fanatics hated most particularly: foreign Jews who prospered while the Germans fought the war.
This two-family corner building in Mannheim (M2, 17) is where Sina Aronsfrau and his family lived.
And there is more still. Founded in the early seventeenth century, Mannheim never had a Jewish ghetto. Jews had always been free to live anywhere in the city. For their part, Sina and his eldest son Simon took up residence near the Rathaus (city hall), in a very nice upper-middle-class neighborhood. Living there must have been a proud achievement for them, but Karen Strobel and Brigitte Zwerger’s meticulous research also shows that the Aronsfraus were pretty much surrounded by Nazis. Sina’s next-door neighbor, Heinrich Tillessen, was the uncle of Karl and Heinrich Tillessen, who had murdered Matthias Erzberger a month before Sina’s assassination.
Karl Tillessen was the head of a department within Organisation Consul entrusted specifically with terrorist attacks. He was also the person who ordered Fischer and Stern’s attempt on Walther Rathenau’s life, and orchestrated Ernst von Salomon’s participation in it. In other words, my great-grandfather’s next-door neighbors were implicated in the plot to murder him. Sina Aronsfrau was neither an accidental target nor a major public figure. Rather, he was well known to his assassins, or at least to the people who ordered the killing.
There may well have been some rivalry between these neighboring families. One of the Tillessen daughters was an opera singer, like my grandmother. Maybe there was some envy or competition there, or coming from another cousin, Bruno Tillessen, who was an actor and opera singer in Munich, which is where my grandmother studied and earned the favor of Bruno Walter. Walter, who was also Jewish and a close collaborator of Gustav Mahler, was at that point director of the Bavarian State Opera, and so was also the pivotal leader for authentic Wagner performances in Germany, since Bayreuth had closed during the First World War. There may have been jealousy or frustration there, as well. But beyond this baseless speculation, it is certain that some of the Tillessens were downwardly mobile in the postwar years, while Simon, Sina’s eldest, opened two new branches of their business in 1919, one in Essen and the other in Gelsenkirchen.
And the Tillessens weren’t the Aronsfraus’ only Nazi neighbors, either. A couple of houses down the street from Sina Aronsfrau and the Tillessens lived Richard Cordier, who was chairman of the local NSDAP (Nazi Party) in Mannheim. Cordier instigated an assault on young Jewish merchants at the Strohmarkt on January 7, 1922, a few months before Sina’s assassination. Simon Aronsfrau, for his part, lived in a very nice nearby building, but after the first war a Dr. Hermann Eckard moved into the downstairs apartment, and Eckard was one of Mannheim’s most active Nazi Party members. In short, Sina, the Polish Jew who prospered, and whose children deeply identified with Germany high culture, was living in the midst of the upper crust of the local Nazi Party.
Simon Aronsfrau and his family occupied the third floor of this Mannheim building (M6, 9).
Map of the district of Mannheim where Sina Aronsfrau lived, one block from the Rathaus, or city hall.
Sina’s assassination also happened at a time of steep inflation and unemployment in postwar Germany, and this provided a good opportunity for upper-middle-class Nazi leaders, like the Tillessens and the Cordiers, to recruit followers among the working classes. The price of bread had risen 75 percent in the months prior to Sina’s assassination. There were rail strikes, and a number of shrill and at least mildly violent anti-Semitic incidents in Mannheim during those mo
nths, all orchestrated by the newly formed Nazi Party. All orchestrated by Sina’s neighbors, in other words.
The day that Sina was murdered, thirty-five new members enlisted in Mannheim’s NSDAP, which was the single largest spike in enrollments in the local party up to that point. Strobel and Zwerger’s research thus suggests that the Sina Aronsfrau murder may have been used to channel local anxieties, caused by hyperinflation and lack of work, against Jews and toward enlistment in the party. A prosperous, overtly Polish Jew who had thrived during and after the war was a very useful target.
Envy
My father was never told the true story of his grandfather’s murder, but his mother and father certainly knew it. In fact, they knew it despite Nazi efforts to obfuscate the case, which I will not get into here, except to say that it involved coaxing two Nazi minors, Max Josef Über and Eduard Däumling, to confess to having accidentally shot and killed Sina Aronsfrau in an effort to rob him. Däumling and Über were tried and convicted for attempted robbery, and let go after a short prison term, after which they went on to good careers under National Socialism. Later (1967), Max Josef Über reached the position of CEO of the German Ford Company (no less!).
Still, despite these youths’ confession, after the investigation of the Rathenau murder unfolded and was made public, Organisation Consul’s participation in Sina Aronsfrau’s murder was also known. Clearly my grandmother herself believed that it was the Nazis who had killed her father, and not a disgruntled employee who wanted to rob him, since that is what she confidentially told my mother. Moreover, Bronis knew the Tillessens, and had lived in Mannheim when the anti-Semitic riots started there; she knew that Cordier was head of the local Nazi branch, and that her brother Simon’s downstairs neighbor was a prominent Nazi. Still, she preferred to keep her two sons in the dark about all of that, confiding the information only to one of her daughters-in-law, my mother.
Cinna himself did not understand the depth of his connection to Sina, or the full reason for his mother’s protectiveness. And yet, at some deep level, he did understand at least something of all of this, for I have never met anyone as aware — as dreadfully aware — of the power of envy as my father. He could smell it a mile away. Cinna was attentive even to the possibility of envy, and was always at pains to avoid it, and to keep triumph, accomplishment, and luck as discreet and inconspicuous as possible.
This fear of envy is also a Jewish thing, I think. Certainly for those generations, though I myself was raised with a bit of that too. My great-grandfather Boris was attentive to and concerned about envy, and so was my mother. But my father was sensitive to an extreme degree: for him mimesis was not only about fitting in, it was also about not standing out. It was a form of self-effacement, and dread of hubris. His grandfather had been murdered because of it, and his uncle Simon then squandered his money at the race tracks. Bronis protected her son Cinna from her father Sina’s fate, by leading him to believe that her father had been murdered while being robbed. She wanted him to understand that envy could easily turn to murder, and so it needed to be recognized and deflected in time.
Poor Cinna
Dead Rose
An icy breeze silences your rustling, your dormant warmth
Jar of Anguish
My opening cries for you
Because you will receive from me my overflowing, my deaf yearning
Beginning of Autumn
I wonder that today time stops in my hands and my
head rests on the knees of the infinite.
These are among the few poems that I have by my father. Almost nothing. I don’t know the exact date of their creation — probably near the end of the 1940s. They are lines that he wrote for a composition by his friend, the musician Leon Schidlowsky, who used them in his work “Five Poems for Contralto and Piano.” It is likely that the contralto for whom these musical settings were composed was my grandmother Bronis, who gave classes in operatic singing from her house in Santiago. They are vitalist poems, despite their quiet melancholy, and they were written during an engaged and open young adulthood that followed my father’s prolonged reclusion during his high school years.
Cinna may have written the poems in Israel, as they seem at least at one point to allude to the physical transformation that came with life on a kibbutz. This is suggested in the final poem that Cinna wrote for Schidlowsky: “My hands, I offer my hands to the moon / Hands covered by the resin of work and oblivion.”
Throughout my childhood, my father was for me a figure of admiration and beauty. Cinna was soft-spoken, and had a delicate sense of irony as well as an encompassing intelligence, with vast knowledge that he never showed off, but which one could call on when necessary. When I was born, Cinna was already an established scientist. He founded the Institute of Geophysics at the Universidad de Chile. We later went to Berkeley, and from there to Mexico City, and in each of those places he was well regarded professionally. And then there was also something that for me had all of the panache of a nobility title, the Lomnitz law — which was an equation proposed by Cinna in his doctoral thesis on the torsion of rocks, which later became canonized as scientific law by Sir Harold Geffreys, a celebrated geophysicist at the University of Cambridge. More recently, my father’s equation has been generalized as a relevant principle for all of fluid physics.235
From my perspective, Cinna was not someone to be pitied particularly; on the contrary, he was in almost every sense admirable. He was tall, handsome, professionally successful, and admired by his many friends. He had the magnanimity to support his wife, my mother, in her meteoric career. He was the head of my family. Nevertheless, his mother, my grandmother Bronis, at times referred to him as “poor Cinna.” Where did that come from?
In the memoir draft that I’ve mentioned, Cinna speaks of his mother: “Like the woman of great character that she was, she struggled continually with God and destiny to anticipate all of the misfortunes that might materialize and that her fertile imagination presented to her as plausible.”236 He goes on to say: “She knew what adversity and misfortune were. Her father, a peaceful old man with a gray beard (this is how I saw him in an old photograph) had been murdered in his store by thieves. Soon afterward, her venerated mother, an energetic and brilliant woman, died prematurely from a serious illness. Life for her was a balancing act, a tightrope walk over the abyss.”237
My grandmother Bronis in a studio photo from the late 1930s or early 1940s.
Overprotection of her children and a deep fear of the poor were the net result of this anxiety. In his memoir, Cinna recounts how one day his mother looked for him high and low and jerked him away terrified when she finally found him at the funeral cortège of a well-known fisherman on the Knokke beach in Belgium, where they spent their summers. Cinna began to cry over the injustice of his mother’s rage. “Upon seeing my reaction, my mother immediately calmed down and began to explain to me, as a teacher might, that it could be dangerous for a boy to hang around with ‘poor people,’ because they could have all manner of contagious diseases.”238
According to my father, it was at that moment that he began a prolonged rebellion against his mother. “The townspeople, and in this case, the town of Knokke, were my people…”239 I think that it is truer to say that my father’s rebellion manifested itself principally in a kind of self-destructive isolation. In the process, he allowed his mother to wrap him up in her angst, something that in the end may have been a self-sacrificial way of protecting her.
“What I wouldn’t give, my beautiful mother, to once again caress your golden hair and take refuge next to you, as I did when I was a boy! Who might bring you back now from the infinite expanse of time and death, with your soft eyes and white skin!”
In this elegiac tone, Cinna invokes his mother and begins to piece together his fragile memoirs. I think that Cinna’s supposed weakness was feigned as a concession to his mother’s need to protect him but it in fact refl
ected his worries about protecting her. And this is interesting to me, because we have already seen how the column figure, a role of stoic strength, was in my mother’s family a form of intergenerational protection. In the case of my father, whose childhood took place in times of Nazism, to accept the outward role of the weakling, or at least that of the introvert, was in some deeply self-destructive fashion a way of protecting his mother, at least up to a point.
It is impossible to imagine that my grandmother didn’t often think of her father when pronouncing the name of her son, but as there was much to fear around the subject of Sina Aronsfrau’s murder, the story that she told was deliberately altered. My father was already sixty years old when he sat down to write his memoir; still, he tells the story in the following way: “A peaceful old man with a gray beard (this is how I saw him in an old portrait) had been murdered in his store by thieves.”240 There is in this story a strong example of displacement: the Nazi becomes a common thief, and a murder motivated by racial hatred from competitors is turned into a murder motivated by an employee’s envy.
Despite police versions to the contrary, my grandmother knew that her father’s murder was never the result of a common robbery. A central element of that murder’s mystery, which might have been deliberately unresolved by members of a police force that sympathized increasingly with nascent fascism, was precisely that there had been no robbery at all. The report published in the Frankfurter Zeitung at the time states: “Last night, the merchant Sina Aronsfrau was murdered in his home, from where he ran a wholesale textile business. Nothing at all was taken.”241 Such murders, with no associated robbery, were characteristic of the political executions carried out by the Organisation Consul.
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