by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
In the Hanover period, things were complicated for Mischka by difficulties with concentration and memory that were evidently after-effects of the diphtheria or perhaps of wartime trauma in general. His concentration was ‘absolutely not good enough for anything theoretical, not even for having an idea, let alone working it out’. He could only study for about two hours before losing focus, and his brain ‘seemed like a tough mass, where an impression can be let in via a pinprick, which then closes up; it is somewhat comparable to paraffin on tar. God knows when it will be normal again.’
His first exams at Hanover in May 1947 were a misery to him—in letters to Olga he reported poor memory, sleeping badly, anxiety dreams and inadequate preparation, lamenting that ‘stupidity is now my normal condition, and that moments of a little clarity come only as an exception’. Not surprisingly, he ended up with what was in effect a C grade average (‘quite good’, which was second from the bottom of the German four-tiered system of passing grades). It was no better in the exams in October, when one professor actually gave him the lowest passing grade (‘satisfactory’) in electrotechnical theory, a subject in which he ought to have done well. He was outraged about this grade and tried to challenge it or at least get the professor to justify it, but to no avail.
The exam results didn’t give the whole picture, however. Even as one professor was giving him a low grade for electro-technical theory, another was so impressed by his work in a related field that he invited him to deliver a paper at an important colloquium attended by ‘the big men of the university and in industry’. ‘I am a bit out of place in this company,’ Mischka reported to Olga with satisfaction.
As a budding scientist, Mischka had another string to his bow: his contact with Fritz Sennheiser, who had arrived from Berlin to take up the chair in high-frequency physics and electro-acoustics. Mischka encountered Sennheiser in the lab in his first months at Hanover and was taken on as his assistant, apparently on the basis of what Sennheiser had heard of his work with Barkhausen in Dresden. One would think this would have pleased Mischka, but his account in a letter to Olga on 20 July 1946 doesn’t give that impression: he got the job ‘without having wanted it’, he writes, and seems, in this letter and all subsequent references, to view Sennheiser with a certain suspicion.
Sennheiser was in the process of setting up a high-frequency electro-acoustical business that was soon to become spectacularly successful, and another person in Mischka’s place might have welcomed the chance to get in on the ground floor. But Mischka seems to have thought Sennheiser was trying to pigeonhole him as someone who could solve technical problems, whereas he was already aspiring to the theoretical side of physics. Perhaps, in addition, he simply didn’t much like the man. In the course of denouncing the professor who had given him the ‘satisfactory’ grade in a letter to Olga, he noted in passing that Sennheiser belonged to the same species— ‘a learned man, but no Personlichkeif. Personlichkeit is defined as ‘personality’ according to the dictionary, but in Mischka’s usage it conveys something between individuality and depth of character. I take it that he found Sennheiser (whose later publicity photos radiate genial bonhomie) rather shallow and uninteresting as a person.
At this point, Sennheiser certainly seemed to like Mischka, or at any rate to think highly of his abilities. Indeed, given Mischka’s prior experience at VEF and with Barkhausen, he was a lucky find. Very soon after their first discussion in Hanover, Sennheiser took Mischka out to his other lab, part of his electro-acoustical business, in the village of Wennebostel outside Hanover (it had been moved there during the war to be safe from bombing) and immediately asked if he would be interested in taking a job there after graduation. Mischka’s answer was that after graduation he wanted to go to Göttingen to study physics, which Sennheiser accepted. As Mischka remarked to his mother, at least ‘I have already got a guarantee of a job if I should want to get married.’ It’s a surprise to have marriage suddenly coming into the picture, but this may be connected to his relationship at the time with the unknown ‘F.B.’, to whom he also reported the job offer. He had been expecting the offer, he told F.B., and it ‘would have guaranteed a quite viable, professionally not uninteresting future for me’. But ‘I turned it down, of course, without the slightest hesitation. I must not bind myself, limit my development.’
Sennheiser was still in the picture at Easter 1947, when he ‘had the tactlessness to set a date for 31 April’, thus preventing Misha’s planned trip to his mother’s for the holiday. A year later they had a reasonably successful conversation about some work that Mischka had given Sennheiser to read: Sennheiser ‘made quite an impressive impression’, he wrote, the awkwardness of the phrasing suggesting his uneasiness about the man, despite the unusually positive evaluation. A few months after that, Mischka went to talk to Sennheiser about supervising him in a possible doctoral thesis on acoustics, indicating a major shift in their relations, at least from Mischka’s point of view. But the conversation went badly. Sennheiser didn’t fully understand the problem Mischka was proposing to investigate and thought of it as experimental rather than theoretical. He also seems to have been steering Mischka to a possible job as an experimental physicist with Northwestern Radio Hamburg. This, or perhaps Olga’s positive reaction to the idea, very much annoyed Mischka: ‘A job like that would be just killing time … The things that interest me to work on in the long term don’t need any Hamburg Radio. I can do them at my writing desk.’
Mischka gave up the idea of specialising in acoustics and doing a doctorate with Sennheiser. In their final conversation, he had discovered ‘something that is not surprising and quite natural: Sennheiser doesn’t like me’. It may not have been surprising, given that Mischka didn’t particularly like Sennheiser either, but it obviously hurt. He used to mention him sometimes to me (though I then had no clear idea who he was), and there was always an edge in his voice. Sennheiser had shown himself to be in the category of scientists who didn’t appreciate and were perhaps even jealous of Mischka’s special insights and instinctive feel for physics, or at least recognised them only on the technical and experimental level, not the theoretical. ‘So much for Sennheiser,’ Mischka ended his report to Olga. But perhaps a feeling of disappointment or missed opportunity remained. The Wennebostel lab was the basis for the Sennheiser Electronic Corporation, founded in June 1945, which was to grow into one of the world’s foremost developers and producers of audiotechnology: voltmeters (the first product, probably what they were working on when Misha first went), microphones, headphones, telephone accessories and so on. The company is still flourishing today, according to the web, and Sennheiser is remembered as ‘a legend in audio’. Ten years older than Mischka, he outlived him by more than ten years, dying at the age of ninety-eight in 2010.
German professors are quite frequently mentioned in Mischka’s letters, German students hardly ever, or at least not the males. The DP students and the native Germans didn’t mix much, apparently: there was a tinge of condescension on the German side, according to the recollections of Mischka’s friends Bičevskis and Stauvers, perhaps related to the fact that a substantial proportion of the Germans were former active or reserve officers in the German armed forces, often overt or covert Nazi sympathisers.
A new note of anti-Germanism is evident in Mischka’s letters of the Hanover period. His adolescent pro-Germanism had completely disappeared, and his tone when he wrote of Germans, individually or collectively, was often critical. Writing to Olga, he described a potential landlord as ‘a typical German [the word being given in Latvian, thus invoking unfavourable stereotypes of Baltic Germans]—pigheaded, thick-skinned and easygoing’, though ‘withall polite and obliging’. Mischka had a tendency to describe Germans that he encountered casually almost as ethnographic specimens: exhibit A, an ‘idealistic Nazi’ whose patriotic education had been so perfect that he didn’t even realise that was what he was; exhibit B, an upper-class German manager met on a train who was ‘naturally a Communist ideali
st’ (that ‘naturally’ is typical Misha, conveying his ironic appreciation of the predictable unpredictability of the world at the level of individuals and atoms).
On the rare occasion that he met a German he liked, it was flagged as an exception. ‘Even among Germans there are some positive people,’ he wrote of his meeting with the international-minded Professor Erich Obst, who held the chair of geography at Hanover and was planning to set up an International University in Bremen. I did a bit of research on Obst and discovered that he doesn’t look all that positive in retrospect: he was one of those German colonial geographers whose geopolitical bent made them, initially at least, sympathetic to the Nazis, but could be reconfigured after the war as internationalism. The trouble with doing research, however, is that one may end up knowing more about the subject than Mischka did. From his point of view, Obst was a non-nationalist German whose ‘youthful enthusiasm’ and humanistic-philosophical bent were appealing.
The other thing that was appealing about Obst was his friendliness. Evidently viewing multilingual Mischka as a potential teacher at his International University, Obst invited him and another student out to his house for tea—a most unusual gesture from a German God-Professor to students other than his own—and, in parting, urged them warmly to come back. It wasn’t often that Mischka encountered such gratuitous friendliness in Germany, and it moved him, perhaps disproportionately. I remember that kind of overreaction from my own foreign-student days in England, and I wasn’t even a displaced person. Mischka and Bičevskis reacted similarly to the kindly interest of Miss Broadhurst, formerly of UNRRA, who, after moving to Canada at the end of her posting, unexpectedly wrote the two of them a friendly letter: they were ‘moved almost to tears’, Bičevskis remembered, as they composed their reply.
If Mischka and his Latvian friends didn’t have much to do with German men of their own age, the situation was quite different with regard to young (and even not-so-young) German women. Presentable young German men were thin on the ground because of war losses, and healthy, educated, German-speaking DPs were consequently in great demand. Bičevskis was too shy to take advantage of these opportunities, according to his own report, and after a few years met and married a Latvian girl. At the other extreme in the little group of friends, Boris Bogdanovs was the Don Juan—a good dancer who went in for dancing competitions and had multiple affairs with war widows (who gave him their husbands’ clothes and shoes). One girlfriend, the daughter of a very rich German business family, wanted to marry him, but the family disapproved and sent heavies to scare him off. Bogdanovs was always relieved when his syphilis tests came back negative, Bičevskis recalled, but his friends were more amused by his exploits than judgemental.
Mischka, however, took the whole question very seriously, and agonised in his diary about whether the Bogdanovs approach to women was permissible. But it was himself he was judging (or deciding not to judge) rather than Boris. Mischka was neither as promiscuous as Boris nor as lighthearted and open about affairs, but he too was not short of offers, both of sex and marriage, from German girls.
One such sexual offer that Mischka evidently accepted came from an ‘experienced woman’ with a child from a former relationship. Given the prevalence of rape by soldiers as well as the general breakdown of social norms at the end of the war, a whole cohort of German women were undoubtedly sexually experienced, not necessarily by choice. Mischka did not reflect on the circumstances in which his temporary partner had acquired her experience, but he judged her for it. She would be ‘ideal company for Boris’, he wrote in his diary at the beginning of their acquaintance; moreover, she was a person without depth or independence of mind, an ‘absolute average’, as one might expect of a German. Not to mention calculating and materialistic. But it would do him no harm to ‘go through a training in superficiality’ through an affair with her, Mischka reflected, and the inevitable eventual parting wouldn’t particularly hurt her as girls ‘don’t take it so tragically, if one doesn’t take it so tragically oneself’. This, of course, implies that Mischka was going against the grain of his own habit of ‘taking things tragically’. But it’s still uncharacteristically mean, even if slightly mitigated by the fact—revealed in a letter to Olga, though not in the diary—that the experienced woman had ultimately found a better marriage prospect and dumped him. (I don’t know what Olga thought of this story, but I thought it served him right.)
In Mischka’s diary, there are several drafts of letters in which he earnestly explains to German girlfriends why he is not interested in marrying them. One explanation was that he didn’t feel ready for marriage, and saw it more as a restriction on his future development than something positive. The other explanation was that he was in love with someone else, but she had been locked up in the Soviet zone and therefore inaccessible since the end of the war. Undoubtedly both these things were true: Mischka was too honest to lie, even about such awkward matters. But of course there were contradictions here: if he was in love with Nanni, he should be actively trying to get her to come out and marry him, which he wasn’t; and he shouldn’t be having affairs with other people, which he was. For someone like Mischka, these contradictions were painful, a pain he passed in varying degrees to Nanni and his German girlfriends in the West.
Nanni, his ‘great love from Dresden’, had been being kept ‘in reserve’, as he explained in one of these letters, but now (January 1948) ‘might be flying the coop’ (getting out of the Soviet zone). She ‘might be his future’, he wrote—although in the same paragraph he expressed his general reservations about marriage.
Since the end of the war, Nanni had been working in her father’s medical practice in Chemnitz. She had suspended her university studies in 1944, perhaps involuntarily: the disruption at universities in the Soviet zone was more profound than in the Western zones, and a ruthless purge of Nazi sympathisers among the professors, together with mass flight to the West, left only a quarter of the old professoriate in place when the universities reopened in 1946. To complicate matters further for a ‘bourgeois’ student like Nanni, the universities were also required to practise affirmative action in enrolment on behalf of working-class students, who should constitute at least 30 per cent of total enrolment. Still, whether it was Nanni’s fault or not, Mischka’s letters to her have an underlying motif of dissatisfaction on his part both at the ‘lack of independence’ that kept her tied to her family and at her lack of initiative on the question of finishing her university studies.
Their correspondence continued, but with obvious tensions. In the autumn of 1946, when Mischka heard from Nanni that she was enrolling in a local trade school, he hit the roof, denouncing trade schools root and branch as a form of anti-enlightenment whose effect was to suppress the faculty of independent thought, and expressing his great personal disappointment at her decision. In reporting this to Olga, he noted that his letter in response might have been a bit ‘shattering’ to Nanni, as indeed it might, but that it was really appalling that Nanni should have taken what even she admitted to be a step backwards: ‘the disappointing thing, which is actually so typical … is the recidivism: back home again, straight back into the old pattern’. A few months later, Nanni wrote with anxious whimsy that ‘one has the impression that Hanover wants to break diplomatic relations with the state of Saxony, particularly Lichtenwalde [the suburb of Chemnitz where her family lived]. Lichtenwalde awaits clarification on the part of Hanover-Weitenhausen’.
Travel between the Soviet zone and the West had been risky in the first months after the end of the war, but then became reasonably easy, though you were supposed to get an official inter-zonal pass from the Soviet authorities. Nanni could therefore have come to the West without too much difficulty at any time in this period, if she had felt it possible to leave her family. But by mid 1947, regulation of inter-zonal travel was tightening up again, as the Cold War took hold and Germany moved towards permanent division into two successor states (the Federal Republic of Germany, based on the postwa
r American, British and French occupation zones, and the German Democratic Republic, based on the Soviet zone). It was beginning to look like a now-or-never situation for those who, like Nanni, had some inclination to leave but had not previously made up their minds. At the same time, the call of family responsibilities on Nanni was weakening. Her younger brother Roland was about to finish school and would probably leave home to go to university. Her sister Lilo crossed the border in May 1947, visiting Mischka in Hanover before settling somewhere in the West. And then, in June, it was Nanni’s turn to make the trip.
Travel from the Soviet zone was already becoming hazardous by the summer of 1947, with persons caught crossing without permission liable to be interned or sent to work in the Saxon uranium mines. Nanni escaped this, but her trip wasn’t a success. It was bad timing as far as Mischka was concerned: his affair with the ‘experienced’ woman was still either on or very recently over, and the reunion with Nanni clearly went badly. Whatever her original intentions, Nanni went back to Chemnitz after about a week.