by Lily Tuck
The occupation of the Rhineland takes place following the armistice on November 11, 1918. The occupying forces consist of American, Belgian, British, and French, and the city of Bonn lies under British jurisdiction. British soldiers are billeted in Emilie’s house. Although they are civil enough, Emilie objects that the soldiers drink and smoke and put their feet up—without removing their dirty boots—on the furniture and ruin the damask chair covers and the silk cushions. Emilie tries to hold her tongue and to keep her daughter, Edith, who is eleven and tall for her age, out of their way. She cannot be too careful, considering the growing incident of rape—although, according to rumor, the American soldiers are the worst.
The British soldiers do not leave the Rhineland until 1929, but by 1920, despite the British Commander General Sir William Robertson’s worries over security, the ban against fraternization between the German population and the occupying forces has been lifted. By then, too, Emilie has gotten accustomed to and grown more tolerant of the billeted soldiers in her house. They are young and homesick, and do not mean any harm. Perhaps, too, Liliane imagines, Emilie, in spite of herself, has become fond of one of them:
A captain in the British Army, he is a bit older than the other soldiers; he has also seen and survived more battles—including two battles of Ypres, the fourth (also known as the Battle of Estaires) in the spring of 1918 and the fifth and last battle in the fall of 1918. He has been wounded and walks with a slight limp. He comes from a village in the Cotswolds—a house with a thatch roof, with hollyhocks growing in the garden, is how Emilie pictures it—where he lives with his mother. In civilian life, he is a music teacher at a boys’ public school. Fortunately, the piano, a Bechstein, in Emilie’s house has survived the war and Emilie urges him to make use of it. Emilie finds music to be a great solace and, each night, after the children have gone to bed, she sits in the living room and listens while he plays. He plays beautifully. Bach, especially, and Emilie is transported. . . .
But Liliane does not finish; she cannot imagine her grandmother and the British captain in bed together.
The 1920s in Germany are marred and marked by inflation. The inflation begins during the war, which is financed by government borrowing rather than by savings and taxation. Once Germany loses the war, it has to pay massive reparations—in addition, it has lost the economically productive Ruhr and the province of Upper Silesia—and, to do so, the government begins to print money, then more and more money, until by 1923, the government is awash with money and the money is valueless. The exchange rate between the mark and the dollar is one trillion marks to one dollar; wheelbarrows filled with money cannot buy a newspaper—it is cheaper to build a fire with banknotes than it is with a newspaper. A single egg costs Emilie 80,000,000,000 marks; a pair of shoes for Edith costs 32,000,000,000,000 marks. People barter and steal, beggars fill the streets. The inflation ends with the introduction of the Rentenmark but the blame, particularly among the middle class, who have lost all their cash savings, is laid on liberal institutions and on bankers. Some Germans go so far as to refer to the inflated banknotes as “Jew confetti.” This attitude contributes to Hitler’s rise to power, which coincides with his joining the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, later commonly known as the Nazi Party), which is both anti-Communist and opposed to the postwar government of the Weimar Republic as well as extremely nationalistic and anti-Semitic.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany. Four weeks later on February 27, the Reichstag goes up in flames and Hitler demands an emergency decree that restricts such democratic rights as free expression of opinion, freedom of the press, rights of assembly and intensifies security by allowing warrants for house searches and orders for confiscation of property. In less than two months Hitler has become a dictator and the transformation of Germany and the persecution of the Jews has begun in earnest. Jewish children are no longer allowed to attend public schools and have to provide for their own education. Jewish physicians are no longer allowed to practice in hospitals—or only in emergencies. Likewise, Jewish professors and teachers are deprived of their Venia Legendi (authorization to teach at a university), and all cultural societies have to conform with the “Aryan Clause,” which again bans Jews. In addition, Jews are not allowed to buy foreign currency and permitted to send only half of their assets abroad—by 1938, that amount dwindles to only 3 percent.
Liliane’s grandmother Emilie lives in Bonn but, fortunately, Fritz has a fellowship and is in Cambridge, England; Rudy, too, has left and is in Paris making films; Edith, married to a Peruvian by birth, lives on their country estate, Dunkelsdorf, located in the new German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Marguerite, Emilie’s younger sister, is married to an impoverished Hungarian count and they live in Schloss Tura, an immense dilapidated castle a few miles east of Budapest; shortly before the start of the war, Marguerite’s husband is rounded up by the Nazis and shot. The rest of Emilie’s family live in Hamburg. A port city and a traditionally liberal one, Hamburg, Germany’s window to the Anglo-Saxon world, will, for a short time, remain more tolerant in regard to its Jewish population.
In 1935, Hitler begins to prepare for war. He decrees three years of compulsory service for Germans—one in a labor force, two in the armed forces. Jews are excluded. He imposes air raid precautions—every house has to have an air warden—and gas masks are distributed to everyone but the Jews. Anti-Jewish propaganda escalates: posters along the beaches of the River Elbe proclaim that Jews are not welcome to bathe there; Party papers and journals accuse Jews of obscene sexual crimes. Soon after, the Nuremberg Laws are passed forbidding marriage (and sexual intercourse) between Jews and Germans and prohibiting the employment of Aryans under forty-five in a Jewish household. A second law strips German Jews of their citizenship by classifying them as state subjects as opposed to citizens of the Reich. The laws also classify persons with four German grandparents as full German citizens (Staatsbürger), persons descended from three or four Jewish grandparents are Jews, while persons with either one or two Jewish grandparents are hybrids (Mischling).
Emigration for Jews means poverty. It sets in motion a process that ultimately deprives them of all their possessions. First, there is a 25 percent emigration tax on capital, while the rest of the assets are frozen and can be exchanged for foreign currency on the German market only at a high premium; once the Jews leave, the government confiscates all their property and annuls their status as subjects of the state. Like many others, Emilie has to leave all her belongings—the good Meissen china, the furniture, the Bechstein piano, the paintings (in any event, her house in Bonn will be completely destroyed by Allied bombing)—and, to her immense distress, she also has to leave behind her ailing ninety-seven-year-old mother, Fides Brach, Rudolf Brach’s widow and the matriarch of the family. Fortunately for her, Fides Brach, with the assistance of a sympathetic doctor, dies soon thereafter, in Hamburg, at home in her own bed.
Emilie emigrates to Peru by way of England. She is granted a visa thanks to her son-in-law’s Peruvian nationality. However, Helmo, the son-in-law, proves to be unreliable and, worse, he is dishonest. Officially in charge of procuring an immigration visa for his brother-in-law Rudy, Helmo, instead, does the opposite. He spreads rumors that Rudy is not to be trusted, that Rudy is a German spy. Stuck in Marseille, without a passport and without a nationality—only his French identity card—Rudy’s main preoccupation, after the fall of France and once he is discharged from the Foreign Legion, is how to get out of the country. But to do so, he needs not just a passport but an exit visa, an immigration visa for Peru as well as transit visas for the different countries en route. And, as he waits to hear from Helmo, Rudy hears only of delays. In desperation, Rudy goes to the office of the American consul to try and get a visa for the United States. He explains that he has full power of attorney on an account in the Chase National Bank in New York worth $100,000, whic
h he hopes is sufficient guarantee. For proof, Rudy cables the bank, asking them to cable back the American consul with the information. When Rudy next sees the consul, the consul greets him coldly showing Rudy the cable from the bank which states that the account in question no longer exists. Speechless, Rudy does not know what to say or what to do next. Only much later does he understand Helmo’s perfidy.
No other man, he writes in his journal, has done me so much harm or tried so hard to ruin my life than my brother-in-law . . . and never in my life had I thought that this sort of cheap melodrama could occur in our family or that I would be a part of it.
Thanks to Josephine Baker, Rudy eventually manages to get a passport—a stateless passport—and despite Helmo’s efforts to keep Rudy as far away as possible so as not to be held accountable for the money he has appropriated, a visa for Peru. From Marrakesh, Rudy goes to Casablanca, where he finds passage on a Transat banana boat on its way to Fort-de-France, Martinique, and from there, after a few more detours, Rudy at last arrives in Peru.
In Lima, Rudy makes friends with an American naval attaché who is also the head of U.S. Intelligence in Peru. “You know,” he confides to Rudy, “before you got here, you were the most suspect of men. We had you watched in Marseille, Algeria, Casablanca, everywhere. . . .”
Does Helmo give back the $100,000? Or has he already spent it? Liliane tries to imagine their meeting. Rudy shouting at Helmo in German—calling him a God damn Dieb (goddamn thief), calling him a mörder (murderer) —or nearly one, for, if Rudy had not gotten out of France in time, he would have been rounded up with the other Jews and sent to a death camp or else perhaps, like his friend Papi Glass, simply shot in the back by a German patrol, in front of passersby on a Marseille street. And what about Rudy’s sister, Edith? Whose side does she take? Despite her tears and excuses, her attempts to mediate between her husband and her brother are useless.
In the end, justice is served. Helmo’s plane, a Panagra DC-3—the same type of plane Irène, Liliane, and Jeanne flew in to Peru—on its way from Arequipa to Lima, crashes into Mount Chaparra, a thirteen-thousand-foot Andean peak, killing all on board, eleven passengers and the crew of four. The probable cause, according to the accident report, was the action of the pilot in continuing the flight on instruments in the overcast. The accident was classified as the eighth worst at the time.
Edith marries again. This time she marries a Swede. Liliane has no memory of meeting Edith—she has only seen a black-and-white photograph of a slightly masculine-looking yet handsome woman—and she imagines that Edith’s second husband is a kind but slightly taciturn man, who smokes a pipe and drinks aquavit. Half the year, he and Edith live in darkness, the rest in constant sunlight.
Once settled on Stewart Avenue, in Ithaca, New York, Emilie, who is not one to complain or regret the large town house in Bonn or, more recently, the pretty house in Lima with the courtyard filled with geraniums, keeps busy. She maintains a huge correspondence, typing letters on her German typewriter that has an o with an umlaut, to family members—to the ones who managed to survive by fleeing to England—to friends left behind in Peru, to her son Rudy, in Rome, who dutifully answers her every Sunday, and to her only grandchild, Liliane, in New York City, who seldom writes back.
Instead, on her school holidays, Liliane visits Emilie in Ithaca and, as usual, while they walk together, Emilie continues telling Liliane stories.
“Remember how I told you that your great-grandfather Rudolf Brach arrived in New Orleans on November 26, 1848, and met Joseph Hernsheim, his uncle?”
Taking Emilie’s arm, Liliane nods, “The uncle gave him fifty dollars.”
“And I told you how his uncle was in the business of ready-made cotton clothing and that he made Rudolf a partner,” Emilie continues.
“And how Rudolf goes to Mexico,” Liliane says.
“Yes,” Emilie says before launching once more into her story, “and after five stormy days on a schooner called the Shannon, Rudolf reaches Brazos Santiago on the Gulf of Mexico; from there he takes a smaller boat to Port Isabel, then a mule cart to Brownsville, Texas. Along the way, he describes how the countryside is filled with small, gnarly, crippled mesquite trees and prickly cactus shrubs and how all the vegetation is full of thorns, even the grass has edges like a saw.
“Brownsville is built like a camp; the huts and tents have almost no furniture and Rudolf has to sleep on the ground. To make matters worse, the town is experiencing a cholera epidemic. Hundreds of people die. In the streets, the corpses are placed into wheelbarrows then thrown in the river—the river water that the townspeople drink—or in the woods for the vultures, who gather in flocks of thousands.”
“Is that true?” Liliane asks, frowning.
Emilie nods but does not answer, “Most of the townspeople are thieves. Their chief possessions are pistols and knives and they make their living by stealing horses and cheating at card games. The best thing that can be said about them is that they often shoot one another—”
Liliane laughs.
“Rudolf, too, has to carry a pistol and learn how to use it. He also has to learn how to ride a horse, his principal means of transportation. But let me go on—from Brownsville, Rudolf follows the Rio Grande upriver, along the Mexican border.”
“How old was Rudolf?” Liliane interrupts. “I forget.”
“I told you, he was nineteen—just a few years older than you,” Emilie answers. “Traveling with him are three Mexicans. At villages along the way, Rudolf sells his wares: cloth, sewing cotton, knives, axes, shovels, coffee, sugar. The land he rides through is made up of vast prairies with thousands of wild horses and marauding Comanche and Apache tribes. The Indians are particularly feared as they plunder and burn villages, kill the men and take the women and children.”
“Did Rudolf meet any Indians?” Liliane starts to ask.
“Yes, on another trip, a woman and the two men in Rudolf’s party go ahead, and when Rudolf and the rest of his party catch up to them, they find that the two men and the woman have been shot by Indians. The two men are dead and the woman has a terrible gash in her chest but has survived. Just as they are trying to help her the Indians return, and Rudolf and his party have to leave her to seek cover behind the wagons. The attack is repelled but when they go back to where the woman was lying, she is dead.”
“Who was she?” Liliane asks.
“Stagecoach robbers were also a problem,” Emilie continues. “Another time, while Rudolf is waiting to take a stagecoach from Guanajuato to Aguascalientes, the stagecoach is late. Due to arrive in Guanajuato at four, it is five, then it is six o’clock, and still no sign of the stagecoach. The people waiting for their relatives or waiting for newspapers and mail become more and more concerned and just as they are getting ready to send an express rider to investigate, they hear the crack of the whip and the stagecoach appears at a canter. Everyone rushes to the stagecoach to learn the cause of the delay but they are immediately told to stand back. Apparently, the stagecoach was robbed. Robbed twice. The second time—since there was so little left to rob—the bandits took all the passengers’ clothes.” Emilie pauses a moment.
“And there were two ladies among the passengers. Shall we sit down for a minute,” Emilie also says.
At a bus stop, on a bench, Emilie and Liliane rest for a while and Liliane asks, “How do you know so much about Rudolf? Did he tell you those stories?”
“In the evening after dinner, if he was in a good humor, he told us children about his adventures. He also kept a journal. My father was not an easy man but he was an honest one and his intentions were good,” Emilie answers.
In my early days, the reason my aspirations centered mainly on the acquisition of so-called worldly goods is to be found in the fact that I had seen the battle with the wolf at the door from too close quarters in my childhood and that I was thus led in this direction from the start. Perhaps in so doing
, I ought to have been less neglectful of more idealistic endeavors, perhaps I should have placed myself between two chairs.
Emilie goes on. “Rudolf spent nearly thirteen years in North America and the reason he left was the impending Civil War. The ports were closed and it would be difficult to transport goods. But by then he had built up a big export business from Hamburg, Paris, and Manchester to Monterrey, Mexico, and by then, too, he had made quite a fortune.” Emilie smiles. “Rudolf’s capital grew from eight-thousand dollars in 1853 to three-hundred-thousand in 1858. He also owned a three-thousand-square-mile estate in Mexico, which included a farm for breeding bulls, a cotton and sugar plantation, and a hat factory. A pity he didn’t keep it,” Emile adds. “We could have all gone to Mexico during the war instead of to Peru.”
In 1866 Rudolf married Fides (short for Friederike, née Feist Belmont) and in 1868 he went back to Mexico. He did not return to Paris, where his wife and children were then living—in a house Victor Hugo later bought but never paid them for—until 1870, right before the start of the Franco-Prussian War and right after the birth of his daughter Emilie. As a child, Emilie remembered being intimidated by Rudolf. He appeared distant and disinterested in his daughters (there were to be three) and Emilie could not help but feel that she, as the second born and another girl, was a great disappointment to him. On learning of her birth, he wrote from America to Fides:
We have a second daughter and have to be satisfied with our fate. . . . The result of it is that with two female descendants I must exert myself more than ever in order to earn something and to provide for them. I must renounce all sentimentality and inclination for easy living and I must in this stern world try to capture for my daughters the livelihood that is due to them.