by Simon May
He had barely seen Hilde in the years since she had abandoned him and their two sons and returned to her native Switzerland, but now it was time she did something for him. He needed her first marriage certificate. He would show that to the Church and it would realize that he was not, after all, a divorced man.
Hilde was delighted to help. If he married my mother he would no longer be the forlorn ex-husband, pestering her to return. Even better, their sons’ upbringing could be subcontracted to a stepmother. And the Church duly accepted him as an unmarried man who was taking a wife for the first time.
Oddly, my mother and father wanted to marry in Germany, though at that time they still professed to despise it. They settled on a church near Freiburg, recommended by Dr Gertrud Luckner, an old childhood friend of my father who had saved hundreds of Jews during the war, been captured on a train in 1943 as she tried to smuggle money to those left in Berlin, and survived incarceration in Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Luckner was the one person who could persuade my father that there was another sort of Catholicism, one that turned its back on anti-Semitism not because the times now demanded it do so, but out of moral and theological conviction. She was the only witness at their marriage.
My parents’ quarrel over my religious identity was eventually resolved in a deal: I was to be raised without religion until the age of thirteen. Then I could choose what I wished to be.
The deal had one proviso. Both religions demanded a rite of initiation soon after birth. The Catholics had baptism, without which I would have no guarantee of salvation if I should die in infancy. And the Jews had circumcision, which got more painful the longer you waited. So I was both baptized and circumcised – in the same week. A priest officiated in the one case and a rabbi in the other.
Though I would occasionally be allowed to ‘keep Mummy company’ at Mass while my father prepared our Sunday lunch, the deal was essentially respected until his death – after which it was immediately abandoned.
I was then brought up a pious Catholic, going to Mass every Sunday, receiving weekly religious instruction, having my first Communion, and enjoying outings with the kindly friars at our local church-cum-priory.
At the age of eight or nine, I struck up a friendship with one of these friars, Brother Albert, who was invariably waiting for me after Mass with a bar of chocolate that he had secreted inside his robes. I would dash to the back of the church, where he was chatting to departing parishioners, and fish around for the piece of kindness that I knew he hadn’t forgotten.
I wondered what a friar’s body looked like beneath all that protection. It would surely be hairless and lacking a penis, with the smooth patina of ivory or marble that had somehow softened into flesh, like the statue in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that Venus transforms into a living woman. It would also be of mixed gender or none, as well as uniformly gentle in all its nooks, as if cruelty had departed him of its own accord, without having to be brought under control.
Sometimes, on a Saturday, Brother Albert took me to a nearby cafe, where he ordered a cup of tea and poured so much milk into it that it turned an iridescent shade of beige. How could he enjoy it? Was he so unspoiled by sensuality, or were his appetites so useless to him, that he could still taste the delicious tartness of tea leaves through all the beigeness? He would buy me a plain Danish and chuckled when I asked if I might indulge in a cream cake instead. My gastronomic venality seemed charming to him, though he seldom joined in. When he did, he remained impassive, and the mildness that usually leaves a face when it is in the throes of joy at a cream cake never left his.
It was bliss to be the focus of Brother Albert’s solicitude and to know that it could shine even outside his church. But these occasions were also awkward, as, alone with him, he and the mysterious piety of the priests, who were by turns severe and benign, would feel alien – a universe away from the microcosm of our German-Jewish home – and a frisson of fear would course through me.
One day Brother Albert suggested that I might like to become an altar server, a vote of confidence in my person that thrilled me.
‘Come and see me in the sacristy before Low Mass next Sunday,’ he told me.
Low Mass was a short affair, with little music, a bullet-point sermon, and a small attendance that seemed exclusive and intimate.
Father Paul was going to take it. He was businesslike, with the air of an accountant in holy vestments. I recognized him from the confessional, where, despite its darkness, I could identify the priest on the other side of the grille from his profile or his voice or both. And this unspoken intimacy we had on account of his knowing and forgiving my sins – those I had genuinely committed as well as those that I had invented – made my forthcoming debut as an altar server less intimidating.
Brother Albert kitted me out in a cassock of my own and told me what to do when. It was particularly important to remember to ring the bells before the priest consecrated the bread and the wine, and never to lose any crumbs from the plate bearing the Communion wafers, as, after their consecration, they were the body of Christ.
As I left the sacristy following my induction, I took a handful of unconsecrated wafers from a pile that I saw stacked on a golden plate, and stuffed them into my mouth.
Brother Albert erupted in anger.
I was mortified. Less at having eaten Christ’s potential body several times over than at being shouted at by a friar whose only weapon, I had imagined, was benevolence. But my attempt to apologize got stuck on a first grunted syllable: the wafers lost their crispness on contact with saliva, and their glutinous mass was sticking my tongue to my palate.
I never lost my fascination with those Communion wafers. How extraordinary that unlimited numbers of them could become Christ’s body in a trice; and that the miseries of the world might be redeemed merely by swallowing them with due piety. My favourite task as an altar server soon became to hold the golden plate under each congregant’s chin as they received Communion. Brother Albert had explained to me that it wasn’t easy: since I would stand to one side of the priest, I needed to take care neither to touch the worshipper’s chin with the plate, nor to hold it at an angle at which crumbs of Christ’s body could fall off.
But what came to intrigue me most were the congregants’ expressions. Each one was so different, and so was each tongue. Some tongues were grainy, others were smooth; some glistened, others were oddly matt; some had pointed ends and others were almost semi-circular. Most exciting of all was my mother’s. I hoped that, if I studied it in its sufferingly outstretched, receptive position, it would disclose the secret of who she was beneath her truculent, brilliant, coping self, vehemently dedicated to her twin religions of music and Catholicism. And so, perhaps, it would also disclose the secret of who I was – and might become.
34.
The promised land of Switzerland
There was a type of despair peculiar to the German Jew of my grandparents’ and parents’ generations that I am convinced had struck deep roots long before Hitler. In the case of the three sisters, fervent devotion to German music and later on to Catholicism was undoubtedly experienced as redemption from that despair: as ways of channelling its formidable energies towards what they took to be sublime ends of ultimate meaning and value.
But such devotion didn’t just redeem despair. The exhaustion it brought about also intensified the despair it was aimed at alleviating. And, for all the riches it imported into one’s inner world, the way it shut out the rest of life also left a space there that was barren and haunted.
So what was at the root of this unpacifiable spirit of gravity, which had so captured my mother, Ilse, and Ursel – and by which I, besieged by it as I was growing up, felt at once inspired and oppressed? It didn’t, I think, have obvious causes. It wasn’t merely the result of anti-Semitism, or of unrequited love for Germany. Nor was it a product of the suffering intrinsic to life, to which all three sisters were unusually sensitive. It couldn’t be alleviated by fleeing to a p
lace of safety. It was strangely unnameable and therefore intractable.
If I can say anything about it, it is this. There is a pain that can be worse than being rejected or hated: the pain of being unable to feel wholly at one with what we most love. The insoluble dilemma of many highly assimilated German Jews was to have found, in Germany, a culture that became the supreme source of meaning for them, yet which had dimensions of inwardness – such as a romanticism that was at once cold and voluptuous, sentimentally pessimistic and morbidly optimistic – that they found alien. As a result, this German world, which flowed in their veins and which some German Jews mastered to the point of becoming its unsurpassed exponents and creators, also seemed insuperably foreign and unreal. And to that extent life, which, for them, could thrive only in and through this world, came to seem insuperably foreign and unreal.
I have often encountered Jews of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations from, say, Poland or Ukraine, and, though they might be broken in other ways, they seldom displayed this particular despair – which would be instantly obvious in many a refugee from Berlin who had escaped in good time with her family and possessions. The Polish or Ukrainian Jew, however profoundly she loved and embodied and reimagined the culture of her country of origin, still had the memory of expulsion written into her DNA and, to that degree, at least, still felt an outsider. Whereas the assimilated German Jew’s joy and torment was that she felt that in Germany she had found her only possible spiritual home, even if she suffered social exclusion; yet this home that felt so indispensable also retained an unassimilable, even repellent, element.
There was one infallible antidote to this despair. The Alps, and specifically the German-Swiss Alps. Here, a deep calm took hold of the émigré German Jew’s soul, which briefly stood still and was filled with happiness – and with wonder that such calm was possible.
It began as soon as we crossed into the Promised Land of Switzerland, usually by car. In those moments of transition we felt like hostages who had walked through a magic curtain into another realm where, incredibly, we could be wholly at ease.
What was this narcotic that German Switzerland offered? It wasn’t the order, balm to the soul though that was. It wasn’t the safety, though that too was blissful. For order and safety could also be found in the French and Italian parts of Switzerland, or in Scandinavia, or in Japan. It was the Alps; but only the German-speaking Alps. The French-Swiss mountains might be as beautiful, but, to us, they didn’t speak the same language; the Austrian were complicit in the menace of an unresolved Nazi past; and the French and Italian were positively alien. Only in the German-Swiss alpine world could we inhabit beloved depths of the German spirit without being in Germany. Only here could we step on land that felt hospitable to all the greatness of Germany, while being unburdened by all the evil. Only here could we be free.
Deluded it might have been, but so great was the redemptive hope that we invested in these Alps, so great was our need for them, that we made the pilgrimage at least twice a year. Each time, without exception, the journey from the Swiss border was a progression of euphoria, as the foothills first came into view, and beyond them ever steeper slopes, and then in the distance the first, ecstatic sightings of snow-capped peaks, until we were winding our way upwards, past the gushing of brooks and the serenity of glacier-blue lakes, along routes flanked by pine trees with healthy lichen caressing their trunks. Climbing higher and higher, we finally reached our destination and stepped out of the car and took our first breath of bracing air; and Mother would quote Ernst and Emmy, who had loved this journey in the same way, and exclaim, ‘Ach Kinder, die Luft! Atmet!’: ‘Oh children, the air! Breathe!’ And my brother and I would inhale noisily and deeply and repeat in unison, half mocking our mother’s reverent, ecstatic tone but knowing that we meant it no less earnestly: ‘Ach Kinder, die Luft!’
Here, too, memory was unchained and truth could be spoken. Ursel’s enactment of my father’s death would have been far more upsetting in London than it had been in the little kitchen in Gsteig. In this landscape, we felt held and protected, rather than compelled to construct the ground on which we trod. Our souls no longer squinted, to paraphrase Nietzsche. Mother seemed less reliant on Catholicism, less strenuously pious in general. Music was made more freely, emancipated from the task of providing either release from earthly suffering or a source of value so vast that it could dwarf all fear, especially of an anchorless world. There was no need for such strenuous faith, for we were in a place where nothing could be destroyed. However vast human rage, it seemed impotent beneath these eternal peaks, which stood guard over those who loved them but were otherwise blissfully indifferent to mortals – never having us in their sights.
We also noticed that those who were not of German-speaking descent didn’t seem to have the same relation to the Alps. They, too, might relish the peace and order of Switzerland, or the hiking, the skiing, and the air. But there was no metaphysics in it, or at least not in the same, urgent way. The idea that this mystical terrain was the only true home in the world would have been, to most of them, incomprehensible and absurd.
Around the time my brother and I hit puberty, my mother decided to switch from Gsteig, with its gentle pastures, to the altogether more challenging atmosphere of Sils Maria, which lies at six thousand rather than four thousand feet, and is surrounded by vegetation and valleys and lakes that somehow seem to pose questions of life and death at every turn.
Here, in our hotel, there were no Anglophones except the heavily accented German and Austrian refugees, their children and their children’s children. I still remember some of the names: Lotte Hammerschlag-Bamberger, from New York; Lilo Kantorowicz-Glick, who had been a student of Max Rostal in Berlin together with my mother and had then lived with her in the same unheated room in London, repelling the same stream of suitors, before moving on to America; Walter Herz, from Brussels, who, we discovered one evening, had been a near neighbour of my father in Cologne. And when we were all clustered after dinner in the salon of the hotel, where the three of us shared a room, I was seized by the fantasy that this is how life might have tasted had we remained in the country of our ancestors.
There were some non-Jewish Germans there as well. The excitement as well as the trepidation of sharing these holidays with them was bracing. In a small room off that salon, we children would escape our parents’ vehement opinions and reminiscences to play with the slot machines without limit by reusing a coin suspended from a piece of string, just as my mother had tried to get free heating from the stove of her freezing bedsit back in the 1930s. There, my brother and I met two German sisters of about our age, twelve and thirteen, a lot less awkward than we were and with picture-perfect blonde hair. One evening, we got them to sit on our laps, and it was thrilling to be close to such lovely forbiddenness, to communicate in our few words of German, and to anticipate the moment when we would kiss, which never happened. I still remember the delicious weight of the older sister on my lap and the tenderness of her cheek as it accidentally, or not, met my own. And I remember a thrilling but nonetheless deeply embarrassing stirring in my pants, which I very slightly shifted her away from, hoping that she hadn’t noticed but also hoping she had and was as thrilled and embarrassed as I was about it, and that it might lead to deeper intimacies.
And it was almost as exciting – and profoundly liberating – that there was no talk of Germans and Jews, and to imagine that perhaps they’d never heard of Auschwitz and could relate to us in a fresh, unburdened way. Until the evening when our mother walked in to tell us that playtime was up and threw a furious glance at the girls encircled by our desirous arms, and then at our sheepish faces, and afterwards, up in our bedroom, told us this was unacceptable. We didn’t know the ancestry of that family; we didn’t know what the grandparents had done; this mustn’t happen again. We had managed to get their phone number, but we were bereft and humiliated and never called them.
In this way, for a few treasured weeks each year,
the golden rule that the refugee must never arrive was suspended – only to snap back the night before we left, when, after the last dinner, suitcases would be packed with pained reluctance, far less carefully than on the way out. And every time we were about to drive out of Switzerland, my mother would say the same thing when we reached that place in Basel, not far from the frontier, where the ways part: Germany in one direction, France in the other – and, beyond France, England and then America. ‘You cannot imagine,’ she would tell us, ‘how unnatural it is to be heading away from Germany.’
And every time her feeling would find a precise echo within me. It was unnatural but right. We were, we told ourselves, trading home for liberty.
35.
Central Europe in London
The world of Jewish émigré London could not have been more different to my upbringing as a non-Jewish, non-German, non-British Catholic. On Sundays, after church, we would do the rounds.
It was the 1970s, but it felt like gatecrashing Jewish central Europe in the 1920s. English was hardly spoken in these homes, or appeared only as an interloper in sentences that began and ended in German and occasionally in Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, or Polish.
The immigrants hung a defiant ‘thou shalt not’ over us, their British-born children, which said: ‘You shall never leave the world that your ancestors loved.’ But, of course, we couldn’t leave their world; we didn’t know how to and were terrified of trying lest we fall into an abyss of total unbelonging. How could we possibly say goodbye to all that treasure, to all those people, and to all those memories?
The overriding challenge we faced wasn’t how to assimilate to the culture of our British hosts; it was how to build a life in a German-Jewish world that, beyond its powerful presence within our homes, had long ceased to exist.