Marie and Heinrich Simon as a newly married couple in 1948. (photo credit bm.1)
Living on a provisional basis was over now; my parents’ lives ran on well-ordered lines. They were both studying at Berlin University, which changed its name to the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1949.
Marie Simon concluded her studies with her doctoral degree on 14 February 1951. ‘In my dissertation,’ she wrote in 1972, ‘I dealt with the border area between philosophy and classical philology that has remained my field of research.’*
In 1956 she became acting lecturer in the department of the history of philosophy in classical antiquity. Only when she had taken the examination for the next academic rank up, in 1969, was she promoted to full lecturer, and her appointment to full professor of the literary and cultural history of classical antiquity followed in September 1973, relatively late. She was fifty-one years old by then.
Marie Simon, née Jalowicz, aged sixty-two, at an occasion in the cultural room of the East Berlin Jewish Community, in 1984.
My father (1921–2010), who gained his doctoral degree at the same time as she did, became a lecturer a good deal earlier, and with effect from 1 December 1960 was initially professor of classical Arabic and Arab philosophy at the same university.
While my mother retired from her professorial chair in September 1982, she remained active at the university until the middle of the 1990s.
Thousands of students must have heard her inspiring and fascinating lectures. Among other subjects, she lectured to classical philologists on the philosophy and religious history of classical antiquity and to philosophy students on the history of philosophy (classical antiquity to French materialism); she gave archaeological students an introduction to Greek philosophy; she lectured to cultural scientists on the cultural history of antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and to theological students on the history of Greek philosophy.
None of these students knew the details of her life; I have asked many of her former students about that.
Around 1970, however, when my mother did once mention, in a seminar on classical poetry with very few participants, that as a forced labourer working at a lathe she used to recite all the poetry she knew by heart to take her mind off the tedious work, the students were so surprised that they asked for no further details.
One of my mother’s former students, the classical philologist and well-known journalist Detlev Lücke (1942–2007), said that Marie Simon gave her students stability and a sense of direction in difficult political times. In the weekly newspaper Der Freitag, where he was an editor for a long time, he remembered: ‘What was so impressive in Marie Simon was the extraordinary clarity of her arguments. To me, her lectures were something special … They were so well attended because she provided richer and more profound ideas than was usual in the standard compulsory lectures for social scientists.’*
Lücke describes her, his academic mentor, who ‘showed no sign of her bourgeois origins’ as ‘a very modest, honest woman. Anything extravagant was part of her nature. She arrived to give lectures with a cigarette in her hand, and noticeably well dressed, which was rather non-German and therefore, of course, wonderful. Her searching look from under her eyelids went right through you.’
During my own university studies I would very much have liked to attend my mother’s lectures, but she wouldn’t let me – or rather, she asked me not to do so because my presence would make her nervous. So unfortunately I cannot say what distinguished them at first hand. As well as communicating her solid knowledge of their subjects, they must have contained political allusions to the circumstances of her times. My mother, typically, kept at a critical distance from those circumstances. Detlev Lücke summed it up by writing, ‘She confined herself strictly to her scholarly context, which in itself was interesting enough. Others in the Institute … tried to demonstrate that, from the historical viewpoint, the Soviet Union was the third Rome, but Marie Simon never indulged in such comparisons.’*
She was not afraid of the authorities, for one thing because over the decades she had come to enjoy something of the status of a veteran, having joined the Communist Party on 15 November 1945, and after the union of the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party in 1946, an event that she welcomed, she was a member of the SED, the Social Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic.
I never asked her whether she thought of herself as a communist. She would probably have replied that politically she was on the left. Being a member of the Jewish Community and running a fundamentally kosher household did not represent any contradiction to her.
An important aspect of her work on philosophy was her study of Utopias, particularly the question of how long they remain utopian and what puts an end to that state of affairs. In her opinion, all Utopias ending in -ism, socialism and Zionism alike, had failed.
At the university, she was one of that ‘honourable circle of scholars and university teachers who, with their wealth of expertise and courage in defending the truth, withstood doctrinaire impositions, and who taught and exemplified the ideal claim of a new society rooted in solidarity against the distorted image of the illiberal, authoritarian social state.’ These were the words of her colleague, the philosopher Gerd Irrlitz, in an obituary of her. He went on, ‘In discussions … I appreciated Marie Simon’s persistence in defending the criteria of scholarly criticism and rejecting officious politicisation – and I saw how disappointed she was by the turn that events had taken.’
She had not been thrown off course by the fact that the country for which she had consciously decided no longer existed; the old Federal Republic of West Germany was never a viable alternative for her. Yet the huge political changes after the fall of the Berlin Wall made her uneasy. In addition, there was a family tragedy: my sister, three years my junior, who had just taken her doctoral degree and was following in the scholarly footsteps of my parents, died of an incurable disease on 27 November 1989.
My mother bore this blow of fate with her characteristic strength, and shared her mourning only with my father. She did not talk about it to other people.
However, her grief over my sister’s death may have been one of the reasons why she went along with my wish for her to dictate her memoirs. It is absolutely certain that if she had not wanted to, no one in the world could have made her change her mind.
In the course of the long time I have spent working on the story of my mother’s survival, I have often wondered how far the experiences of wartime persecution determined her life after it. Can anyone really function properly after all that? What fears did it leave behind?
In looking at that question I must, of course, be careful not to see all my mother’s characteristics as the result of what she had experienced. All the same, I will mention a few later consequences.
My mother was on friendly terms with everyone she knew, but kept her distance; she had hardly any close friends. Yet there were exceptions, such as the historian of classical antiquity Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf (1901–1979).
The two women retained a formal mode of address in public, calling each other Sie, but they were intimate friends. My mother’s friendship was not just with the university professor, but with her alter ego, the successful writer who published her novels about Native Americans under the name of Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich. The basis of their friendship was that both, in their very different ways, had fought against the Nazis, and if necessary they continued to fight at the university.
My mother couldn’t stand either protracted goodbyes or late arrivals on the part of her family and friends. It was taken for granted that until her death I phoned her several times a day.
Finally, her experiences caught up with her after a major operation, when she had not fully come round from the anaesthetic and was firmly convinced that the Nazis were torturing her with sharp-edged cannulas.
Only today do I fully understand some aspects of her behaviour. As a child, I was never allowed to wear a ski
cap, although I would have loved to look like the other schoolchildren. But on the grounds that ski caps were ‘Nazi headgear’, I was given a fur cap instead. No explanation was forthcoming, and I had a feeling that I had better not ask for one.
Nor did anyone tell me why Trude Neuke, who lived in our neighbourhood, always called my mother ‘Hannchen’ when the two of them happened to meet in the street. I did know, however, that Marie Jalowicz had once gone under the false name of Johanna Koch.
Her relationship with the ‘real’ Johanna Koch, whom Marie Jalowicz Simon describes at length in all her ambivalence in her memoirs, was to play a part in my mother’s life once more after Frau Koch’s death.
On the whole, my mother succeeded in looking back at her past life soberly and with composure. Frau Koch is an exception in that my mother never really got over their relationship, and sometimes was overcome by panic, thinking that Johanna Koch might unexpectedly come to our door.
When Frau Koch died on 20 January 1994, a will of 18 February 1940 suddenly came to light. In this will, Emil and Johanna Koch left their entire estate to ‘Fräulein Marie Jalowicz as their heir’. Towards the end of her life, then, my mother got her parents’ house in Kaulsdorf-Süd back. She never set foot in it again; she gave it to me soon after the legacy came through, although not without asking the family’s lawyer to go to see her in hospital, where she had to spend a good deal of time at that point.
In front of the lawyer, she told my wife and me that she would make the gift only if my family immediately sold the property that weighed on her mind so much, and we did as she wanted.
When we were clearing the house in the early summer of 1994, my father turned up unexpectedly. He went into what had been the Kochs’ bedroom, and with the air of someone who knew what he was looking for opened a drawer in the bedside table and took out a number of documents. They included a passport made out in Bulgaria and my mother’s identity card, both in the name of Johanna Koch.
Shortly before my mother left Kaulsdorf for Pankow at the end of August 1945, Johanna Koch had simply taken these documents out of her handbag on the grounds that they were her papers.
I assume that my father was acting on my mother’s behalf. When he was about to take them away with him, I protested and asked him to let me have them. At the time, I was already forming a decision to preserve the life story of Marie Jalowicz Simon.
My mother was always convinced that chance had allowed her to survive. In a lecture of 1993 on the ‘U-boats’ who had survived the Nazi period, she generalised on the subject in these words:
The justifiable wish of the scholar or serious literary writer to establish rules leads us to neglect what, as I see it, is the deciding factor of chance. But what is chance?
According to Spinoza’s definition, it is an asylum ignorantiae. ‘Chance’ is an auxiliary word, and like all auxiliary words really shows the helplessness with which we naïvely define the obscure. The survival of every one of those who went on the run from the Nazis rests on a chain of chance incidents that can often be called almost incredible and miraculous.
I will not call such chance incidents dispensations of providence, which would be unscientific and indeed blasphemous, for that interpretation implies knowledge of what cannot be known, the supposition that one has explored what by definition is the highest of all decrees, which would be both foolish and presumptuous. Would the survival of determined individuals be a blessing or a curse if it depended on predestination and divine guidance, in view of the murder of a million children? We have to come to terms with the fact that we cannot solve the riddle, we must content ourselves with admitting to our ignorance and grant it an asylum by using the word ‘chance’, and establishing that it is the deciding factor in all stories of survival.
Hermann Simon
Berlin, September 2013
* Als Zwangsarbeiterin in Berlin. Die Aufzeichnungen der Volkswirtin Elisabeth Freund [A Woman Forced Labourer in Berlin. Account of the economist Elisabeth Freund], ed. and annotated Carola Sachse, Berlin, 1996.
† Häftling Nr. 124868 [Prisoner No. 124868], in Neuköllner Pitaval. Wahre Kriminalgeschichten aus Berlin [A Neukölln Case. True crime stories from Berlin], Rotbuch-Verlag, 1994, pp. 79 ff.
* ‘Declaration of property’ of 23 July 1944; under the heading Residential Address, Fritz Goldberg is given at ‘C2, 32 Landsbergerstr. […] to 6 February 1943, after that living illegally.’ (Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv Rep 36A Oberfinanzpräsident Berlin Brandenburg [II] No. 11552.)
* Account of life of Marie Jalowicz of 8 October 1945, Landesarchiv Berlin, classification C Rep 118–01 No. 2754. On the attached questionnaire she writes, ‘I eluded the Gestapo and lived illegally for three years.’
*Times change, and we change with them.
* Referring to a nineteenth-century novel by Wilhelm Raabe, Abu Telfan oder Die Heimkehr vom Mondgebirge [Abu Telfan, or, Return from the Mountains of the Moon].
† Two applications by Marie Jalowicz to be recognised as a victim of Fascism have been preserved, one of 8 October 1945, in which she wanted to be recognised as a political campaigner (now in the Landesarchiv), and the second of 23 October 1945, to the Department of Victims of the Nuremberg Laws, for recognition as a persecuted Jew (now in the Centrum Judaicum). The second bears a handwritten comment: ‘Politically acknowledged’. I know of no parallel case of a persecuted Jew applying for recognition both on political grounds and also as a victim of the Nuremberg legislature.
* CV of Marie Simon dated 16 October 1972. Personal file in the archives of the Humboldt University of Berlin.
* ‘ “Telling the Whole Truth at the End of One’s Life.” In Conversation: Hermann Simon and Detlev Lücke on Marie Simon, who as a Jew living in Berlin had gone to ground and survived the war’, Freitag, 19 May 2000, p. 17.
* Ibid.
Picture Credits
All photographs and documents are from the private property of Hermann Simon, with the exception of the following illustrations. The publisher thanks their originators or the possessors of the rights to them for kind permission to reproduce them here:
[3.1], New Synagogue Foundation, Berlin – Centrum Judaicum, archive signature CJA 4 1, no. 2058; [3.2], the family of Hans Goll; [4.1], Neukölln Museum; [4.2 and 4.3], Archive of circus, music-hall and other artistes, Marburg; [5.1], Hennie Burgers; [bm.1], Joachim Thurn
Thanks to the Following Institutions and Persons
Administrative Office for Citizenship and Order, Berlin, head office for affairs of inhabitants; Administrative Office for Health and Social Affairs, Berlin, medical records (Dieter Dureck); Archive of circus, music-hall and other artistes in Marburg (Karl Braun); Archives of the Berlin Traffic Services (Christian Piepert);
Archives of the Charles University, Prague (Petr Svobodny); Archives of the District Museum of Friedrichhain-Kreuzberg (Gerhard Grosche); Archives of the Humboldt University, Berlin (Winfried Schulze); Archives of the University of Vienna (Kurt Mühlberger); Berlin-Kreuzberg District Museum (Detlef Krenz); Berlin Law Society (Hans-Joachim Ehrig, Marion Petrusky); Berlin Museum of Communications (Veit Didczuneit); Berlin Provincial Archive (Kerstin Bötticher, Gisela Erler, Andreas Matschenz, Anne Rothschenk, Axel Schröder, Bianca Welzing-Bräutigam); Brandenburg Main Provincial Archive (Monika Nakath); Bundeswehr Museum of Military History in Dresden (Gerhard Bauer); Central State Archive of Bulgaria; Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Registry Office, Berlin (Fr. Teuchert); Dahme-Spreewald District Archive (Karin Deumer); Embassy of the Republic of Bulgaria, Berlin (Violeta Karaivanova, Radi Naidenov, Meglena Plugtschieva); Federal Archive, Berlin (Undine Beier, Heinz Fehlauer, Andreas Grunwald, Monika Kaiser); Federal Commissioner for the documents of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (BstU); Federalnoe Archivnoe Agenstvo, Moscow (Andrey N. Artizov); German Department – WASt (Bernd Gericke, Wolfgang Remmers, Hans H. Söchtig, Hans Peter Wollny); German Railways Company History/Historical Collection (Susanne Kill); German Resistanc
e Memorial (Johannes Tuchel; Andreas Herbst); German Technical Museum of Berlin Foundation (Alfred Gottwald); Marzahn-Hellersdorf Museum (Dorothee Ifland); Municipal and District Archive of Arnstadt (Andrea Kirchschlager); Municipal Archive of Detmold (Andreas Ruppert); International Tracing Service Bad Arolsen (Susanne Urban); Municipal Archive of Mannheim (Karen Strobel); Municipal Archive of Oranienburg (Petra Ramlow); Municipal and Provincial Archive of Vienna; Municipality of Wieselburg (Gerhard Buchegger); Neukölln Museum (Julia Dilger); New Synagogue Berlin Foundation – Centrum Judaicum (Sabine Hank, Barbara Welker, Anna Fischer, Daniela Gauding, Monika Junker, Stephan Kummer, Chana Schütz); Pankow Museum (Birgit Kirchhöfer); Parish of Wieselburg (Franz Dammerer); Political Archive of the Foreign Office (Martin Kröger, Sabine Schafferdt); Provincial Archive of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rheinland Department (Peter Klefisch); Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum (Monika Liebscher); Siemens Archive (Frank Wittendorfer); Spandau Museum of Municipal History, archive (Heiko Metz); Topography of Terror Foundation (Andreas Sander); Quierschied Registry Office (Irmgard Pfoser).
Monika Behrens; Inge and Josef Bornhorst; Hennie Burgers; David Dambitsch; Vladimir Danovsky; Christian Dirks; Ralf Dose; Kurt-Leo Eger; Jochen Fahlenkamp; Jochen Fleischhacker; Ernest Fontheim; Eugen Herman-Friede; Ulrich Werner Grimm; Ora Guttmann; Karen Holtmann; Akim Jah; Harald Kindermann; Dorothea Kolland; Norbert Krenzlin; Christoph Kreuzmüller; Heike Lindemann; Hans-Jürgen Lödden; Ingo Loose; Alexander Lorenz; Dick de Mildt; Frank R. Mützel; Uwe Naumann; Rainer Nitsch; Karl-Heinz Noack; Cord Pagenstecher; Andreas Pretzel; C.F. Ruter; Angelika Salomon; Deborah Simon; Christian Schölzel; Mila Zaharieva-Schmolke; Hans-Georg Schrader; Diana Schulle; Brigitte Schulz; Barbara Sauer; Rebecca Schwoch; Jürgen Sielemann; Isolde Stark; Jonny Markschiess van Trix; Sabine Wehrle; Grischa Worner.
Underground in Berlin Page 34