by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
At their first dinner party, with Mischka’s colleague Helmut Steinwedel and his wife as guests, they were running late when the Steinwedels arrived, and Mischka was never able to change into his good trousers. Mischka gave Olga a cheerfully ironic account of all this, but Helga thought it was no laughing matter and added her own postscript:
I don’t think it’s very nice of Mischka to have written to you about our mix-up and not being ready. It was very embarrassing to me then, and still is. But the Steinwedels did come too punctually, five minutes before the appointed time.
[pps from Mischka] She is still young and inexperienced and felt bad about this mishap.
[ppps from Helga] And Mischka just has a thick skin.
They didn’t take long to get their act together as hosts: it was something Mischka was naturally good at and probably Helga too. A few months later, when Jensen’s wife was hospitalised with typhus, leaving Jensen and his daughter to fend for themselves, the young Danoses had them round several times for lunch without any sign of anxiety even from Helga. There was some less formal social interaction as well. Dailonis Stauvers, now working as an engineer for Siemens in Nuremburg, came to stay several times. Indeed, a photograph survives of the three of them in bed together, Helga in the middle, but Stauvers assured me this was a staged event: rising early one morning, and finding Mischka and Helga still asleep in their big bed, he fetched his camera, got into bed with them and took the photograph.
Thanks to Helga’s presence in Heidelberg, the American occupation of the city became more visible to Mischka. He had noticed it at the start, writing to Olga shortly after his arrival about his ‘contradictory’ impressions of the city: its historic beauty, on the one hand, and the conspicuous American presence, on the other: ‘At the moment the traffic here is enormous, since so many American families [Amifamilien] live here and the Ami wives drive around in their huge cars. The city isn’t as peaceful as you would expect Heidelberg to be.’ While Mischka was busy at the institute, Helga had time on her hands. She had been a student at Hanover, and tried to get into a similar program at the University of Heidelberg, but with no success: returned soldiers had first priority. This was a disappointment to her and to her family, who expected her to get a degree, like her elder sister Mechthild. She had the idea of becoming a typist for the Americans, a topic she and Mischka researched thoroughly, as witness Mischka’s report to Olga that ‘the Yanks pay better than the Germans’ and had lots of jobs available and few takers who knew English, but their working week was eccentric in German terms in that they didn’t work on Saturday and Wednesday afternoon. The young Danoses had borrowed a typewriter (for which I personally am very grateful—the letters get much easier to read) so that Helga could practise.
Whether she ever got the typing job is unclear, but as of July 1951 she was working four and a half hours every morning for the ‘Ami wives’, assisting them to find domestic help. ‘They are very demanding,’ she wrote to Olga:
They require some knowledge of English, American-style cooking, looking after children and cleaning. You can imagine that there are not very many girls who will do all that for DM 135 a month, working 10 hours a day with one free day a week. Most of the girls are not used to the cheekiness of the children [and] prefer to work for less money in a German household.
Both Helga and Mischka had to spend a considerable time in their last year in Heidelberg trying to sort out Olga’s financial affairs, which seem to have been a major mess. Olga at first left power of attorney with Mischka, but then, at his request, added Helga. Judging by Helga’s letters on the topic, she worked hard and uncomplainingly on Olga’s behalf. Mischka, however, sounded increasingly uneasy, particularly about an unsettled debt of DM 300, which may have been the money lent to Olga by Martha Heimers. At one point he sent Olga a long, formal letter—his impatience and irritation barely disguised—seeking detailed clarification on a number of issues involving rent on the Fulda house. (If Olga ever provided such detailed clarification, it is not in the surviving papers.) This, incidentally, is an early indication that Mischka could, if he put his mind to it, be quite businesslike, more so than Olga. But he regarded it as time wasted. ‘This was again an unphilosophical letter,’ was his vexed conclusion to one communication with Olga, as if philosophy were what one normally expected in family correspondence.
It is true that Mischka was writing less about philosophy in his letters to Olga than he had done in the Hanover years. No doubt this was partly because there was always so much urgent financial, domestic and departure business to deal with, but I also get the feeling that Mischka was changing, making the transition from being a student to being a professional scientist. This came as something of a surprise, since when I knew him he was allergic to many aspects of science professionalism, at least in its American guise, particularly the emphasis on making a career. In his conversations with me, Heidelberg (‘the Tea Colloquium’) was shorthand for pure physics, done for the love of it. At the time, however, Heidelberg had other aspects and new experiences to offer. These included being a promising young scientist starting to make a career.
Mischka had gone to Heidelberg as Jensen’s assistant, but early in 1951 Jensen arranged for him to become assistant to Professor Otto Haxel, Heidelberg’s newly appointed Professor of Experimental Physics. This seems to have carried more responsibilities, including setting up a new practicum. Mischka had started to go to conferences, notably one at Bad Neuheim in the autumn of 1950. Among the great men of physics he encountered there was the 82-year-old Arnold Sommerfeld from Munich, Heisenberg’s teacher, then in the last year of his life. Despite his age, Mischka reported admiringly, he was ‘not in the least spiritually tired … took part in all the discussions and never said anything trivial or stupid’. In August of the next year, a bunch of Prominenzen (big names) from Germany and abroad converged on Heidelberg to celebrate Bothe’s sixtieth birthday. On Misha’s lips, the word Prominenzen was generally pronounced with a certain reserve, but on this occasion he may have been using it without irony.
Mischka was at the university to do a PhD, and its writing and submission were milestones of the Heidelberg period. In January 1951, Helga assured Olga that ‘the doctoral work is expected to be soon finished—at least the written part’, and said she was regularly going up to the institute with Mischka to help proofread his tables and text. But actually it went right up to the wire—a lifelong habit of Misha’s, who usually met deadlines but found it pedestrian to do so without a bit of drama. In this case, however, my impression from his later account was that he had genuinely misjudged the time needed to finish and almost panicked at the end. But he described it to Olga with a certain flourish. ‘We went to bed at 5.30 [obviously Helga was still at her proofreading duties] and had to submit it at 11.30. It was thus not just ready at 11 [the cut-off time] but already at 5.’ Olga responded with the proper appreciation that ‘it is a matter of wonder, my dear Mi, that you were ready with the [doctoral] work in such a timely manner; a whole six hours before the submission time’. Prudently, however, she withheld her congratulations ‘until I get the news that you have the diploma in hand’.
The doctoral defence was held in the Dean’s office at the University of Heidelberg at the end of February 1951. Mischka described it as ‘more a comedy than an exam’, evidently meaning that the examiners—Jensen, Bothe and another—treated it as a formality and wandered in and out, Jensen enlivening the occasion with witty sallies at Bothe’s expense. The result was a magna cum laude (‘very good’), a big step up from Mischka’s Hanover performance.
Of course such an event had to be properly celebrated. At Jensen’s urging, they gave a party at 31 Rohrbacher Street. Helga wanted to ask only seven or eight people, since the room was small, but ‘suddenly there were eleven of us. Mischka didn’t count properly as he was issuing the invitations.’ Schnapps and liqueur were served, and the party got ‘quite cheerful and boisterous’. Around 2 am, a tipsy Jensen wanted to dance. But ther
e was no room and no music, so they trooped over to Jensen’s place in the institute and the revelry continued.
Mischka was very relieved at the PhD result, writing to Olga that ‘the doctoral exam was the first (and also the only) final exam in which I ever got a “very good” … Now there can’t be any more exams. If one goes further [i.e. to the German second doctorate, the Habilitation], that doesn’t have an exam.’ Although he didn’t tell Olga this, he had, at least in retrospect, a feeling that he had blown it ‘floundering around in the orals’, and that he would have got a summa cum laude, the top grade, if he had performed up to standard. He and Jensen had evidently been having some tussles about some of Mischka’s bold theoretical forays. Telling Helga at a party a few weeks later about the high regard in which he held Mischka, both as a person and a scientist, Jensen added that ‘in his opinion Mischka could achieve more in the experimental field than the theoretical and he thinks that Michael’s very lively imagination doesn’t help him in theory and even hinders’. This Helga passed on to Olga, perhaps innocently, since she wasn’t very interested in the ins and outs of Mischka’s attitudes to physics. But to Mischka, it can’t have been welcome news. He was deeply committed to becoming a theorist, not an experimentalist, and that ‘lively imagination’ was exactly what he thought of as his great strength. (Jensen came round to the same view later, or perhaps simply accepted a fait accompli. In any case, Mischka stayed with theoretical physics, and Jensen continued to support him.)
‘My dear Doctor Michael!’ Olga wrote joyfully from New York with congratulations. She was enormously pleased, and practical woman that she was, her mind had already turned to publication. This was no doubt connected to her earlier urging that Mischka do ‘everything that I don’t know but you do’ to make himself a good job candidate if and when he followed her to America. Even before the finishing of the dissertation, publication reports became a major feature of his letters to her.
His first scientific publication, co-authored with Helmut Steinwedel, appeared in the American Physical Review in September 1950. The subject was related to a letter authored by Steinwedel and Jensen and published in the same Physical Review issue, and clearly Mischka and the rest of Jensen’s team were all working in broadly the same area (oscillations within the atomic nucleus and the nuclear shell model), for which Jensen later received a Nobel Prize. But that’s as far as my lay understanding goes, and Olga’s too, most likely. Still, she was very keen to get a copy of an offprint, and Mischka— after expressing some doubts about what use it could be to her—finally sent her one. Other publications quickly followed, both co-authored and single-authored. Mischka had got so professional in his approach that he even knew the relative prestige of various journals, noting that some people considered it ‘almost improper’ to publish in one journal, aimed at American physics teachers, ‘but it’s not that dangerous’.
Olga’s growing interest in Mischka’s publications was directly related to his emigration plans and their hopes that he would find employment suitable to his qualifications. After all, ‘it’s not some ordinary mortal that’s coming, but a gentleman who is a doctor of physics, theoretical physics no less’, as she wrote proudly (in idiomatic Russian, to encourage Helga’s study of the language). Mischka’s departure for New York in November 1951 was a long time in gestation. Not long after the marriage, Mischka filled in an IRO enquiry affirming his interest in emigration and adding Helga’s details to his file, but this was not yet a commitment. In March 1950, Simon Mirkin offered to sponsor him for immigration, and around the same time a letter from Olga confirms that he had definitely decided to go. But it was clear in Mischka’s mind that he had to finish his PhD in Heidelberg before leaving, and it was not until the end of the PhD was in sight—in the autumn of 1950, shortly before Olga’s departure—that he started taking concrete steps towards emigration.
One factor in his decision to depart, though probably not a major one, was that ‘one has to anticipate the Russians’, meaning presumably Soviet incursion into Western Europe. The timing of this anxiety, which neither Mischka nor Olga had expressed before, is odd, since the key developments raising international Cold War tensions—the Marshall Plan, the creation of two separate Germanies and the consolidation of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe—had all occurred a year or more earlier. Presumably it was the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 that had increased their anxiety about Soviet aggression and the chances of a Third World War. Olga reported shortly after her arrival in New York that people there were very worried about the danger of war.
Mischka took up the theme a few months later, in connection with a conversation with Olga’s protégé Daniel Kolz, who had received an invitation to go to the States as a music student in mid 1950 but had not yet departed. Apparently Kolz was having second thoughts, as alternative career possibilities presented themselves in Paris. Rather surprisingly, as there had been no previous hint he had any interest in politics, he turned out to be resistant to the growing anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism around him. According to Mischka’s report of the conversation to Olga, Kolz
has been thinking about being able to stay in Paris, that means also Europe, [reasoning] that it can’t be so dangerous under the Russians as everyone says, and that probably it can’t be prevented that the Russians come and also stay. He is against the Yanks and the rest rearming; that will just cause conflict that is unnecessary; the Russians will be the victors anyway.
Frustratingly, Mischka does not say what he thinks of this point of view, and no reaction from Olga is recorded. It is hard to imagine that either would have agreed with Kolz. The family’s experience in Latvia had led them to see Soviet presence in a country as an unalloyed evil.
But the family, or at least one member of it, was also experiencing unpleasantness from the other side of the Cold War, namely American anti-Communism. Mary Sakss had survived the arrest by the Soviets of her two daughters and her own imprisonment by the Germans in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Outdoing even Olga, she then proceeded to drop more than ten years from her age for the purpose of DP documentation. She was in a DP camp in Geestacht near Hamburg for a while, and then at some point went to the Black Forest in the French zone, perhaps in connection with her singing career. Then she applied for resettlement by the IRO in the United States. On 1 February 1949, she left the Black Forest and came to Fulda, where Olga was living, ‘in order to emigrate to America’.
But this emigration never took place, the reason apparently being that the Americans blacklisted her for contacts with Communists. According to Misha, Mary
had gone to the Soviet repatriation office, in the British zone, to enquire about her two deported daughters; of course without any success. This was reported by a fellow DP to the Americans (actually Mary had a well-founded suspicion, a clear opinion about the author of that denunciation: an ex-aizsargs—a paramilitary Latvian organisation—who made it known that he doubted that Mary would be given a visum to the States).
In the 1990s, Misha told this as a story of rank injustice, and it certainly seems likely to have upset the whole family. But apart from some passing mentions of Mary not being in a good state, there is no mention of it in Olga’s and Mischka’s correspondence, which suggests that they thought it a topic best avoided in postal communication for political reasons. Mary died on a concert tour in Denmark in December 1953, never having succeeded in obtaining a US visa or contacting her daughters.
For Mischka, the big political issue of these years was a practical one arising out of Helga’s youthful membership of the League of German Girls (BDM, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth). US immigration rules banned entry into the United States of persons who had belonged to a ‘totalitarian’ party, a concept encompassing both the Nazi Party in Germany and the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, and for several years this ban was also understood to cover members of the BDM. Membership of the organisation had actually been compulsory for Helga’s age cohort, but she might
well have joined it anyway. The Heimer family were evidently patriotic Germans (Helga’s older brother had been killed in action at Normandy in 1944) who were not actively, if at all, anti-Nazi. Helga’s older sister Mechthild had joined the BDM voluntarily and enjoyed its hikes and camps. By the time Helga came of age for it, membership was mandatory, but she also enjoyed the artistic and sporting side, while being bored by the political lectures.
Mischka became aware of the problem late in 1950. Visiting the American consulate in Frankfurt, he had learnt that a ‘new security law’ in the States—in fact, the notorious Internal Security Act of 23 September 1950 introduced by Senator Pat McCarran—banned the entry of BDM members, among others. His reaction was both indignant and legalistic:
The paradox is that none of those who belong to the 19201935 cohort can go to the States, since membership in the Hitler Youth was mandatory under the terms of the Youth Education Act of 1936 or 1935. Acting contrary to the regulations was punishable by a prison sentence. It is quite probable that this law will not last for very long, but it exists for the moment and creates an obstacle for us. In about ten days they expect to get more exact specifications on the regulations, and then we will see whether there the clause that affects us has been removed. If these expectations are not fulfilled, one must do all one can to show ‘public opinion’ that at least some points of this law are simply stupid and overall many points are out of touch with reality. Social categorisation of people according to party membership is in general relatively problematic; in the final analysis, an individual’s behaviour cannot be predicted …
The ‘hateful law’, as Helga called it, and the possibility of its amendment or revocation, became a staple of the Danoses’ transatlantic correspondence from the winter of 1950–51. Late in the old year, Olga wrote to say that the immigration specialist on the American Committee for Émigré Scholars, Writers and Artists, with which she had contact in New York, had said that ‘the amendment to the law on Hitler Youth is currently being worked on and one hopes for positive results in two or three months’. Early in the new year, Mischka and Helga went to the pastor in her home parish in Hanover to make a formal declaration that membership in the BDM was compulsory and that Helga did not take a leadership role within the organisation. Mischka and Olga both anxiously followed the American debate and the practice of the US authorities in Frankfurt. Mischka assured Olga early in 1951 that ‘so far as we can find out unofficially, it seems that the Yanks are going in the direction of normalisation, that they now make trouble for those who were particularly active and slide the others through’. In March, Olga’s informants were still saying that a change in the law was expected in the next three months, and Mischka, in response, reported that the story was in the German newspapers every day and there must be a positive resolution soon, since ‘public opinion is quite intensively engaged in the States too’. On 4 April 1951, Olga was finally able to report that ‘the law on relaxation of entry has gone through. People aged 16 and under who belonged to an unfortunate organisation are not affected [that is, are no longer subject to the ban]. So Helgalein is in the clear …’