by Leslie Helm
“What about the daughter, Miki?” I asked.
“The daughter? I don’t know. Maybe she was the geisha’s daughter. Maybe she was the cook’s daughter. Maybe the cook and the geisha were married. They were running a fancy restaurant in Shanghai when the war ended. They must have come with the first boats that brought refugees from China. When the Occupation wound down, I guess their business on the island fell apart. One day they disappeared. When we went to inspect the house, we found they had stolen all the copper gutters. They probably sold them for scrap.”
Later that night, a few of the men took me to a nearby bar. The owner, a woman with a heart-shaped face who looked twenty-five but was clearly older, served us whiskey and water. Her enchanting smile and easy conversation pulled us into a cozy circle. She flattered me in a gentle way that relaxed me and made me feel smart and witty. I felt as if she were an old girlfriend who knew my deepest secrets. The way she moved her hands gracefully as she talked, her musical laugh when someone made a joke, put me in a trance. She was no geisha—but she had the alluring talents of a woman of that world.
I wondered what it must have been like for my father to have a woman like this catering to his every desire. Dad said Miki had so much in common with him. Perhaps Miki, like a chameleon, had merely adjusted her personality to match his. She had made herself the kind of sophisticated woman she knew Dad would love by claiming to have been a newspaper reporter and a nurse. Miki turned the island into a paradise in which Dad truly felt like a lord. Dad never learned that the island paradise was as ephemeral as Urashima Taro’s undersea palace.
IN THE FALL OF 1950, after studying in Paris on the GI Bill, Dad returned to classes at the University of California, Berkeley. He was part of a small group of students in Professor Robert Scalapino’s class on Japanese politics who hung out together that included Hans Baerwald, who later taught at the Univesity of California, Los Angeles, and Ogata Sadako (nee Nomura), who would later serve as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At coffee shops they railed against the McCarthy-era loyalty oaths their professors were being forced to sign. They played pingpong at the student union and ate noodles at a Japanese restaurant. They established “The Society for the Preservation of Parlor Games,” a fancy name for the parties where they played charades. Most were BIJs (Born in Japans), but there were also several who had attended the Army Language School during the war.
Among them was my mother, Barbara Schinzinger, an attractive twenty-four-year-old German with dark, frizzy, shoulder-length hair, high rounded cheekbones and an infectious laugh. Her English was so good the others never thought of her as German.
Mother was particularly attracted to two of the men, both BIJs. One was a blonde, gregarious boy who had been raised in Japan by missionary parents. The other was a shy boy with dark, baby-faced good looks. When the blonde boy came down with mononucleosis halfway through the semester and was forced to stay in bed for a few weeks, it was left to the shy one to drive Mother home from a dinner at Professor Scalapino’s house. That was when he finally gathered the courage to ask her out. The shy one was Don Helm, my father.
OPPOSITE: Robert Schinzinger and daughter Barbara.
Mom found Dad smart and urbane. He was interested in art and literature. She loved the fact that she could speak to him in French as well as Japanese and English. But what she found particularly alluring was something sensitive, even vulnerable, about him. She liked how, on their first date to a symphony concert, Dad placed his hand over hers, as if by accident.
When Dad brought Mom home to have dinner with his parents in Piedmont, where he was still living at the time, she liked the way Dad and his two brothers sang in harmony as they washed the dishes. She liked his parents, Julie and Betty, and was impressed by how well-read Betty was, even though she had never gone to college.
Betty loved Mom, too, and for Dad that was the best endorsement. My dad saw my mom as an intoxicating concoction of the innocent and the intellectual, the humorous and the adventurous. Charming and articulate, Mom represented to Dad the best of his new American life. Mom loved to tell stories of the world around her that she found ironic or amusing. She loved to talk of the two young women she worked for in Santa Barbara when she first arrived in America. They claimed to be close to the Eisenhower family and insisted on formal dinners each night at which Mom had to serve them dressed formally with a white towel hanging over one arm. Her laughter was never at the expense of another. If Dad teased Mom, she didn’t take offense. She simply laughed with him and Dad felt witty instead of mean.
There was something at once endearing and naïve about Mom. The ear for speech that helped her pick up so many languages also led her to adopt some of the slang Dad had picked up in the army. One day, Dad was looking over Mom’s shoulder as she played a game of solitaire when he was shocked to hear her say to herself: “This son-of-a-bitch goes here, and this son-of-a-bitch goes there.”
In less than two months, Barbara and Don were engaged to be married. They were similar in many ways. Both were of German heritage and both were born and raised in Japan. And yet, Barbara’s experiences in Japan could not have been more different. Where the Helms, over three generations, had built a successful business and grown up regarding Japanese as their employees and servants, Barbara’s family lived among the Japanese as neighbors and friends. Her father, Robert Schinzinger, whom I called Opa, interacted with Japanese intellectuals both as a student of Japanese philosophy and culture as well as a teacher of German philosophy and literature. He wrote a German-Japanese dictionary that came to be widely used both in Germany and in Japan. Whereas the Helms had consciously separated themselves from Japanese society and often felt alienated from it, Robert, as a teacher and scholar, found a comfortable place in society and was respected for it. Novelist Mishima Yukio was one of his students. Many students, among them Nakayama Shozen, the head of Tenrikyo, one of Japan’s largest Buddhist sects, would continue to send Robert gifts for decades after they had graduated from his class. As a journalist traveling through Japan, I constantly ran into people in important positions who had been students of Robert’s, and without exception, they loved and respected him. I took special pride in Robert being my beloved Opa.
I remember Opa as a tall, thin man whose shoulders always seemed hunched over, perhaps from having to bend down each time he passed through a doorway or perhaps because of the many tragedies he had experienced: He was virtually blind as the result of a childhood disease; had lived through two world wars; lost three homes, one each to flood, bombs and fire; and suffered through the early death of his wife. Opa had a bottlebrush moustache that turned downward with the corners of his mouth, and it always made me think he was a little sad. During his lifetime, he had seen mankind engage in horrible deeds. It seemed to me that his philosophy was simple—if you didn’t expect too much of the world, it was less likely to disappoint you. He had a quiet confidence I envied. His laugh was so warm and infectious, and so lit up his dour face, that I always wanted to say something funny just to hear it.
Robert Schinzinger arrived in Kobe from Germany by ship via the Suez Canal on September 3, 1923, two days after the Kanto earthquake had destroyed most of Yokohama and Tokyo, 260 miles to the east. His tropical tan silk suit, which he had just had tailored in Hong Kong, looked smart on his tall, thin frame. His blue eyes were the color of the sky and his blond hair was brushed straight back. In a photo, his long arms were wrapped around his wife, Annelise, whose unruly, dark, frizzy hair was tied in a ponytail at the back. Annelise had always been a self-assured young woman, but the separation from her family in Germany had been hard on her and she often brooded, as Opa recalled in his unpublished reminiscences, The Mosaic of My Life. Annelise now tilted her head back to look up at Opa. She smiled and Opa kissed her on the lips.
Robert Schinzinger with wife Annelise.
They looked down from the ship’s deck onto the bustling pier below: coolies loaded bags onto handcarts; rickshaw men wended t
heir way through the crowds; a uniformed chauffeur helped a kimonoclad woman into an automobile; men in Japanese garments wore bowler hats.
Opa had taken his doctorate in philosophy, studying under such luminaries as Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. Opa’s father, an attorney, married the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, but he himself rarely had money because he looked down on his rich merchant clients, making it hard for him to retain their business. When Opa needed money to print three hundred copies of his dissertation, a requirement for getting his Ph.D., he turned to his rich Uncle Albert. This eccentric man had made a small fortune representing Krupp, the German arms company, in Japan. On his return to Germany, Albert had become the honorary Japanese consul general in Berlin. It was while visiting Albert’s three-story mansion in Freiburg named Villa Sakura and seeing his Japanese antiques that Robert first became enamored of Japan. When he was unable to find a job in Germany’s inflation-wracked economy, it was Uncle Albert who found him a job teaching German in Japan.
Opa and Annelise found a Japanese house far from Kobe’s foreign settlement. Their large shipping crate, which contained a brass bed, a brand new Junker & Ruh coal-burning stove, dishes, table linens, bed sheets and dozens of boxes of books, arrived on the back of a horse-drawn wagon. The name on the side of the wagon amused Opa because it was a German name: Helm Brothers Ltd.
Opa had intended to follow a career as a serious philosopher, so it must have been hard for him during those first few weeks teaching at an elite high school for the sons of the wealthy. They talked incessantly and refused to listen to what the teacher had to say.
I learned about those tough early days for my Grandfather Schinzinger at an unusual gathering I was invited to in 1992 by an alumni group that called itself “The Association of Those Who Sing the Songs Taught by Professor Schinzinger.” They paid my way from Tokyo to Osaka so I could attend the fiftieth anniversary of the closing of their elite high school, which had been shut down at the end of the war. The reunion was a lavish one held in a giant ballroom. Many of the men wore their old school uniforms: the stiff, full-length skirts once worn by samurai, black capes and black caps. They gathered around an artificial bonfire and sang old military songs. Later in the evening, the whole ballroom fell silent as the master of ceremonies called on a very special association to come to the stage: It was the association that had invited me. The men who walked to the stage included retired doctors, lawyers, professors and chief executives. The youngest was 82. When they started to sing, the power and sweetness that came from those aging vocal chords took my breath away. The men sang, in good German, old folk songs about apprentices traveling in the countryside, bird songs and sweethearts left behind.
“Your singing was wonderful,” I said to one of the men when he came down from the stage. Then I asked him what he remembered of Opa, who had died a few years earlier.
“When he first came to teach us, we were unruly. Nobody listened to him. The professor never raised his voice. One day, he stopped talking and just started to sing softly. We quieted down because we were curious. The songs were so beautiful, we asked him to teach them to us.
“The songs I learned from Professor Schinzinger were my lifelong treasure,” said the student, who, half a century later, had helped found the association to sing those songs again and to remember those good times with Opa.
As a teacher and philosopher, Opa found his identity in translating Japanese philosophy for German readers and explaining German philosophy and culture to his Japanese students. Over time, he found it increasingly difficult to express pride in his country. Annelise learned in 1933 that her brother had been denied a job in the German government because of his Jewish heritage. Annelise’s great-grandfather, Ludwig Binswanger, had been born Jewish before he converted to Christianity when he migrated to Switzerland from Germany after the revolution of 1848 and started a sanatorium to treat nervous disorders. Annelise’s uncle, also Ludwig Binswanger, took over the sanatorium and maintained an active correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Binswanger offered Freud a place to stay when it became clear in 1938 that Jews would be targeted in Austria as they had been in Germany. When Annelise’s father, a longtime government official, learned that his son could not enter the German civil service, he committed suicide by jumping into the Rhine.
Opa’s brother had also suffered under the Nazi regime. He had been a leader in a German youth group, and when he complained of the way the group was being politicized, he was accused of being a homosexual and imprisoned.
By the spring of 1934, Nazi influence pervaded the German community in Japan as well. Opa was forced to resign from the board of the Association of Foreign Teachers when Nazi colleagues were offended by an article he had written.
Yet, as much as he hated the Nazis, Opa felt it was his duty to continue to teach his students about the “true” Germany, the home of Kant and Goethe. Opa and Annelise decorated their Japanese house with valuable heirlooms from Germany and invited Opa’s Japanese students so they could experience what a good German home was like. For Annelise, the house represented a piece of the old Germany she once knew. She served her Japanese guests with china she received as her dowry and linens from her mother-in-law and old Rhineland wine glasses inherited from Opa’s mother’s wealthy family. A philosopher visiting Opa from Germany compared the home to Goethe’s gartenhaus.
In 1938, toward the end of the rainy season, it poured for three days and three nights ceaselessly until the earth and mountains above Kobe were saturated with water. The little stream next to Opa’s gartenhaus became a turbulent river.
A few days later, an old lady who lived nearby knocked so violently on their kitchen door that the glass window broke.
“Come out quickly, the water is already underneath your house!” the old lady shouted.
Annelise and Opa grabbed a few clothes and evacuated to the old shrine nearby. Their maid, fearing the worst, quickly threw the silverware in a tablecloth and brought it along. Fortunately, the children were at school. Suddenly Annelise realized she had left behind the dog and the children’s new shoes. She ran back to the house before Opa could stop her. She retrieved the shoes but the dog was nowhere to be found. Then she ran back to the shrine. She had barely reached her husband’s side when he saw the first wall of their house collapse under the power of the rising water.
Opa didn’t think the shrine was safe enough, so they climbed over fallen trees to higher ground. On the way, they met a teacher from the Catholic middle school.
“How is your house?” the priest asked.
“It is sailing away toward the ocean,” Opa replied.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it started. It wasn’t until the children had located their parents and had learned that the dog was dead that they started to cry.
Everybody was supportive. Japanese and foreign friends put the Schinzinger family up in their cramped homes and offered them blankets and second-hand clothes. Annelise found one brown dress that seemed in particularly good condition, but she mourned the loss of all her German belongings, the things that connected her to her family and home, which she missed every day. For Opa, the biggest loss was all the files he had carefully compiled for a challenging translation of the works of Nishida Kitaro, a leading Japanese philosopher.
The flood was just the first of worse things to come. Not long afterward, Opa was standing in front of the post office when he read the bulletin: “Hitler marches into Poland.” Although many of his German colleagues in Japan were excited at the prospect of war in Europe, Opa had seen the horrors of World War I. He was seventeen when he was drafted, and because of his blindness, sent to work as a medical orderly at a big military hospital in Frankfurt. “One of my duties was to take the corpses of the dead soldiers on a black pushcart to the dissecting room where the attendant didn’t treat them any better than a butcher treats slaughtered cattle,” Opa would later recall in his memoir.
Although Opa and Annelise hated the Nazis, they did not want th
eir children to be isolated from their friends, so they allowed Barbara (my mom) and her younger brother, Roland, to take part in the German Youth, the local variant of the Hitler Youth. In deference to their host country and ally, Japan, the organization allowed part-Japanese members. In Germany, only pure Aryans were permitted in the Hitler Youth. Mom loved the youth group with its handsome uniforms and camp trips. Her father tried to counteract the propaganda taught by the leaders of the German Youth. If the children repeated something they had heard about “evil Jews,” their father would say: “Our friend so and so is a Jew. Do you think he is evil?”
Years later, Opa would reflect on that time and ask, Was that enough? Anybody who outlived the war had somehow found a way to save his own skin. “As Karl Jaspers had once suggested in his book The Question of German Guilt,” Opa wrote, “it may simply have been impossible to live through Hitler’s horrible regime and not share in the guilt.” At heart a pragmatist, Opa did not believe in sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. And the full horror of what the Nazis were doing in the death camps may not have yet reached Japan.
And yet I cannot escape feeling Hitler’s evil touched my mother. There is a picture of her at age fifteen that appeared in the May 1939 issue of the Berliner Illustrierte, the German equivalent of Life magazine, next to a picture of a young Princess Elizabeth (later Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II) in a swimsuit.
Mother had just won the gold medal for the hundred-meter sprint in the Kobe Junior Olympics. Her dark, wavy, shoulder-length hair was pulled back and tied in a thin ribbon. She had a small rounded chin and a prominent, but nicely-shaped nose. She wore a carefree smile as she leaned forward, arms outstretched, to receive a large glass case containing a Japanese doll. Mother was wearing dark shorts and a white, polo-style shirt buttoned up to the neck. Prominently printed on the center of her shirt, between her youthful breasts, was a swastika. Mom had unknowingly become a poster child for the Nazis.