by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
This is a bit of a puzzle. Once he moved to Heidelberg as Jensen’s assistant, Mischka’s best chance of a future as a physicist, particularly a professor of physics, lay in remaining in Germany. We have no direct evidence of his attitude to the Federal Republic, established the year he went to Heidelberg, but he thought very highly of the currency reform (Währungsreform) of 1947 that paved the way for West Germany’s rapid economic recovery, and continued in later life to cite it as a rare case of dramatically and instantaneously successful state economic intervention. As he remembered,
Before the Währungsreform, trains, trams incredibly overcrowded, like in India; people were pushy, impolite, crude, aggressive, thin-tempered, etc. … First day of DM [Deutschmark]: after getting my DM-s, I invested in a month tram-pass, which was indispensable for getting around: to school and to sports club. It was a reasonable fraction of my capital. I entered the tram. Surprise: nobody pushed, no foul language; instead: everybody polite, soft spoken, civilized. Seats available. Strange. Same on street: instead of milling, jostling crowds, polite pedestrians; instead of store windows yesterday empty and bleak, same today filled with goods with prices attached, and prices reasonable, even though nobody actually could buy much, except perhaps somebody representing a large family. Within some days, as more and more people got their salaries, the economy began moving, and that was the beginning of the Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle].
To be sure, arguing against remaining in Germany was Mischka’s new anti-Germanism, which led him to write critically of the German national character, refer to the country and its occupants as ‘Germanium’ and ‘Germanen’ (not with the German words ‘Deutschland’ and ‘Deutsche’), and to say later that he couldn’t have stayed in Germany, for all the appeal of Heidelberg’s Tea Colloquium, because of his feeling of ‘pressure’ there. This pressure evidently arose from a sense of constraint and tension; he expressed it to me later as not being able to breathe. This was a physical description, not a psychological one, but when pressed on the psychological basis, he invoked something like the theory of ‘authoritarian personality’ popular among postwar American social scientists, including psychiatrists sent to work in the American zone of Germany to uncover ‘Nazi personalities’ as part of denazification. ‘The German alternatively commands and scrapes,’ one of these psychiatrists explained; ‘this is obvious in the family, where the father, dominating his wife and children, no sooner leaves the house than he bows to his superiors.’ Fascist personality traits were to be expected ‘among children with stern, often physically abusive fathers and distant, frightened, and unaffectionate mothers’. Misha’s 1995 analysis runs along similar lines, with the addition of his favourite epithet for German behaviour, ‘rigidity’, and inclusion of the tendency to watch for and officiously correct non-conformist behaviour on the part of others.
Olga did not express anti-German sentiments in her letters, though Mischka assured Helga that she shared his strong hostility to German nationalism. Given her firsthand experience of the problems of small business, she may have been less sanguine than Mischka about the future of the German economy. On the other hand, she was not at all confident about her personal prospects elsewhere, especially in the United States, imagined in Europe as ‘a big factory populated with heartless robots’.
Perhaps the basic reason the Danoses felt, more or less unquestioningly, that they had to leave Germany was psychological. It would have been hard, even for such independent thinkers, to stand confidently against the tide that was pulling hundreds of thousands of DPs out of Central Europe, especially as the pace stepped up dramatically in 1949. By mid 1949, more than half a million had gone (out of an original million or so DPs), and a year later the number of departures had almost reached 800,000. Moreover, assisted departure was not an option that was going to last for ever. The IRO, mainly US-funded, was expected to get the job done within a few years and go out of business, and the US Congress was becoming impatient. In fact, the IRO stayed in operation after several deferments of closure (Olga and Mischka periodically exchanged anxious news of the latest developments), but the prospect of its imminent demise, along with the organisational help and free passages it offered, created its own pressures (What if the last boat goes without me?). By the time the IRO actually ceased operation at the end of 1951, only a ‘hard core’ of fewer than 250,000 DPs remained in Europe (not just Germany, though the largest group was there). While a minority were employed, like the Danoses, in the German or Austrian economy, the majority were rejects—persons with ‘paralysis, missing limbs, or a history of TB’, along with convicted criminals and the elderly—left at the mercy of the new Federal Republic and charitable organisations because no country would take them.
If departure was on the agenda, the next question was where to go. Olga’s original preference was for Latin America, and she registered Argentina with the IRO as her preferred destination in 1948. She already had contacts there, probably from earlier DP departures, and thought the language would be easier to master, since she knew Italian. Earlier, back in the Hanover days, Mischka had not been wholly against the Argentinian option, going so far as to ask Jensen if he had any contacts there (Jensen did, at the National University of La Plata in Buenos Aires, and said he would write to recommend Mischka). But by mid 1948, Mischka was categorical in his support for the United States option and opposition to Latin America. ‘I still see no substantive grounds for your desire to go to South America,’ he wrote brusquely to Olga, adding that he regarded the language as a minus, not a plus (admittedly, his Italian was not as good as hers) and learning Spanish an unnecessary complication. (He was, in fact, increasingly focussed on improving his English, practising it in his letters to Olga—‘I do not need any mony [sic]. And do not bother about me!’ is an early effort.)
Olga had another go at explaining her reasons, with no more success than before:
Look, Mischutka, I am simply frightened of the US. Life there demands too much shoving for my taste. And I don’t see the remotest possibility of remaining independent, just maybe working in a factory. South America is not so feverish, and I hope there to have a chance to establish myself.
At this point, Olga was so set on Argentina and hostile to the United States that she was willing to contemplate their emigrating to different destinations, writing that ‘if you go to the US and see some possibility for me there, then I could always move. But perhaps I would also be able to do something for you in Buenos Aires.’ As late as September 1948, Olga was still thinking in terms of Argentina and saving her money for an application to the Argentinian consulate in Frankfurt: she was so fed up with Germany that ‘if it had been possible, I would have jumped on an aeroplane and flown to South America’. Still, she was hedging her bets to some extent, encouraging Mischka to put his name on a new register of DPs qualified for university jobs in North America and urging him to ‘please, really please, do everything that I don’t know but you do to make your scientific work accessible and transportable’.
Regardless of destination, Olga was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with her situation in Germany. The high hopes she had had for her sculpture when she moved to Fulda seem to have been disappointed, at least until shortly before her departure. Although in a later interview with an American newspaper she described her occupation in Germany before her departure as ‘mending religious figures from bombed out German churches in Frankfurt-am-Main, Wiesbaden, Bremerhaven and other cities’, there is almost nothing on this subject in her letters of 1949. Much more space is devoted to discussion of her tailoring business and money troubles.
The tailoring business looked good on paper, but in her letters it comes across mainly as a burden. There were reports of trouble with angry customers when she was ill and couldn’t summon the energy to finish a job (it is not clear why she was doing the sewing herself, but it was possibly alterations on work done badly by her employees). There were also indications that the tailoring connected her with a grey barte
r economy: early in 1949, she reported visiting a general’s wife in Wiesbaden who gave her some material to make up but also took $10 and two cartons of cigarettes from Olga in exchange for a man’s jacket (for Mischka). Problems with tenants in the house she was living in also feature quite prominently in her correspondence; it looks as if she may have been in charge of supervising the house and letting other apartments on Mirkin’s behalf. When she fantasised about flying away to South America, it was because ‘I wanted money so much, to earn a lot of money. Perhaps a more normal time will come sometime.’
Fulda didn’t feel like a proper home, she wrote to Mischka. Apropos of the question of emigration destinations, she commented:
However it comes out, I would like to get away from Fulda. It is odd that even though now I have a house, I can’t settle down. When I would get back from my trips to Flensburg, Glücksburg, even my hotel room in Reichenberg, I felt as though I were coming ‘home’. But not here. Often I tell myself that I will probably end up having to stay here—just for that reason.
Olga came down finally in favour of the United States. Her only direct statement on the decision was written years after, when—in still fractured English, so probably not too long after her arrival—she recalled that ‘after long hesitation I had given in my friends and his wifes repeated persuasians, to come to America’. The friends were probably Simon Mirkin, newly settled and employed in New York, and his new wife Ilse, also a DP. What seems to have tipped the scales for Olga was Mirkin’s offer to sponsor her. The United States, unlike most other resettlement countries, required immigrants to have a sponsor even if they came in under the DP Act of 25 June 1948, which authorised the admission in the next two years of 200,000 DPs for permanent settlement. This sponsor might be a charitable, religious or ethnic organisation (Mirkin’s own sponsor had been his employer in Frankfurt, HIAS), or it might be an individual. No actual invitation from Mirkin survives, but he identified himself as her sponsor in a statement to the press on her arrival, and explains his sponsorship as an act of gratitude to her for saving his life. There is documentation of his subsequent offer to sponsor Mischka. By the end of 1949, in any case, Mirkin’s involvement in Olga’s departure plans are taken as a given in her correspondence with Mischka. She now thought she might get to America quicker than her sister, who had applied earlier, since ‘Mirkin is sending me the work contract’.
Right up to the moment of departure, however, Olga showed little positive enthusiasm for her chosen destination, or even for departure as such. Her mood in 1948–49 was depressed, and this showed, rather uncharacteristically, in her letters to Mischka as well as her diary. ‘Mischutka, I’m getting old,’ she wrote in July 1948. ‘Since I heard of Papa’s death, I look backwards more than forwards.’ The next winter, around the time that Mischka was making up his mind to marry Helga, her mood was even lower, at least judging by a letter written to him but never sent. Having started by thanking him for a letter (‘You can make someone so happy with a few words’), she plunged immediately into a demonstration that his letter had not, in fact, had this effect:
You are one of those I love most [but] we shouldn’t stay together … No, we shouldn’t. I mean to let you go. All the people who depended on me, I brought them unhappiness. I will not at any cost give you advice. Everything I have done has been bad. I can’t get rid of the thought that the two letters I wrote to Riga [after receiving Arpad’s letter] have brought misfortune to the young ones [Arpad and Jan]. All my efforts to turn my thoughts in another direction don’t help the pain. If it could help, I would kill myself. But I don’t believe in that kind of magic … Dear, dear Mischutka, I won’t send this letter. But I’m going to pull back from you all the same, doing it so that you don’t notice. I have to spare you that at least. What a flood of nonsense is pouring out. It’s nothing but egoism …
I was quite upset when I read this letter (late in the game, when I had already written the first draft: it was a fragment in untidy handwriting that looked hard to decipher). No, you didn’t bring unhappiness to Misha, I wanted to tell her. On the contrary, you were a lifelong support and inspiration to him; if only everyone had such a mother. But this would have been a message from Misha’s wife rather than his biographer. Of course Olga was too sensible and too protective of Mischka to send her anguished letter; she kept such emotions for the diary and the drawer. And, being the resilient person she was, she coped.
It’s tempting to speculate that one of Olga’s strategies for coping with a partial loss of Mischka through marriage was to find a substitute. Daniel Kolz, a young pianist about Mischka’s age, first appears in the correspondence in a rather strained and arch letter to Mischka and Helga about the wedding, which it appears Daniel had attended, though not officially as Olga’s companion. In this letter, Olga makes much of the remarkable resemblance of Mischka in his wedding photos to Daniel, which she and Daniel had marvelled at. Thereafter, Olga’s letters regularly contain news of Daniel’s career, and Mischka’s letters include friendly enquiries about him (Mischka and Helga also kept in touch with him for years after they had all moved to America). Olga was still an attractive woman, and whether Daniel was just a protégé or also a lover is open to question. At the time, Helga recalls, it did not occur to her that they were lovers, though in retrospect she thought they probably were. If it occurred to Mischka, no trace remains. In any case, Olga and Daniel provided each other with support, emotional and practical, and evidently enjoyed each other’s company. The most buoyant letter in Olga’s whole correspondence in the Fulda period describes a celebratory dinner with other friends that Olga and Daniel had organised on the spur of the moment after some success of his. ‘You have a really young mama-in-law!’ was her final cheerful comment to Helga.
Kolz was also no doubt partly responsible for the growing prominence of music in Olga’s and Mischka’s letters. They had always exchanged occasional reports of music they had heard in concerts and on the radio, but in 1949-50 the frequency and seriousness of these reviews became such that they might have been professional music critics. Probably it wasn’t only Kolz’s arrival on the scene but also Helga’s that produced this result: music was the main thing the four of them had in common. But they weren’t the only ones in Germany to whom classical music mattered. It mattered so much to the German population as a whole that even the Allied occupiers noticed. ‘If ever the beasts of war are tamed, it will be music which will grant us the strength of heart and soul to do it,’ as one official of the American military government put it.
Hoping to bring out the Germans’ better side, all the occupying powers, including the Soviets, competitively encouraged live performances and supplied more on their zonal radio stations. Naturally there were some political complications, particularly with regard to performers: the Nazi leaders had also liked music, as long as it wasn’t modernist and degenerate. The pianist Ellen Ney, a Beethoven specialist and sometime favourite of Hitler, was on the blacklist in the American zone until 1948, her concertising limited to ‘atonement’ concerts for American troops, POWs and DPs. The great pianist Walter Gieseking had problems too. He had not been a Nazi party member but, because of his visibility as a performer in Nazi times, was widely regarded as a collaborator. The Americans had him on their blacklist until early 1947, although the French allowed him to teach and perform freely in their zone. When he went to play Carnegie Hall in New York in 1949, immigration officials swooped in, following noisy public protests, and he had to leave the country swiftly under threat of deportation.
The Danoses both went to Gieseking’s concerts in Germany that same year, Olga in Frankfurt and Mischka in Heidelberg. They went to those of Ellen Ney, too, as well as a whole string of other pianists and string quartets, all thoughtfully reviewed. Neither Olga nor Mischka showed any sign of being interested in the political controversies; they went to Gieseking’s and Ney’s concerts for the music. So, incidentally, did my father and my eleven-year-old self when Gieseking came to Melbourne i
n 1952 (there was controversy about the visit in Australia too, but my civil libertarian father was against boycotting musicians for political reasons). Olga was a bit critical of Gieseking’s Debussy (the composer was something of a Danos specialty, his art songs being prominent in Arpad Sr’s repertoire) and so, I must admit, was I, when he played all twenty-four Préludes at one sitting in Melbourne, putting me off Debussy for decades.
Mischka had splurged a back-pay windfall to buy a Philips ‘Philetta’ radio ‘with very good sound quality’ to listen to music. He had it on while writing a letter to Olga, and his attention was suddenly diverted to a broadcast of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue: it reminded him how extraordinarily modern Bach was (he offered a brief technical analysis); there was nothing like it again until Hindemith. Mischka, but not Olga, quite often mentioned Paul Hindemith in his commentaries on music. His exposure to Hindemith—a German modernist composer who had emigrated in the 1930s—was no doubt thanks to OMGUS, the propaganda arm of the US occupation forces, which was pushing modern music and abstract art on the Germans on the slightly bizarre premise that as the Nazis had labelled modernism ‘degenerate’, it must have some intrinsic connection with democracy.
When Olga first started taking serious steps towards departure in the summer of 1948, she was still thinking in terms of Argentina. She went through her IRO screening for emigration eligibility at the end of July, and was planning to go off to Frankfurt to register with the Argentinians as soon as she had enough money. Her emigration number came through early in 1950, with the United States replacing Argentina as her destination. But there was a problem with the birthdate registered in her papers, of which the police had informed her a few weeks earlier. In April she wrote to Mischka that her papers were going through IRO, but she was so fed up with all the problems that the night before, on the eve of the final submission date, she had ‘toyed with the thought of having to give up the whole emigration’. The main problem seems to have been that her documents showed an earlier birthdate than 1905, and she was insisting on a correction with as much outraged determination as if she had actually been born then, and not in 1897. In the end, by going over the head of a junior official to a senior one, she had her way. These arrangements were evidently all being coordinated with Mirkin in New York, but that correspondence is lacking. Once Olga had been approved on all sides as an immigrant to the United States, control left her hands for the time being: she just had to sit and wait until the IRO told her to proceed immediately to the transit camp prior to embarkation on such and such a vessel.