by Daša Drndic
In addition to having perfect pitch, or maybe because of it, my mother learned languages like falling off a log, easily and gaily, and, as the best pupil of the then Cercle Français in Split, whose classes she attended without charge, was awarded a prize in 1939 of a trip to Paris. In that same year, in the same month, July, in a parallel story similar to those in American films of wide consumption, as one of the best students in the third year of Electrical Engineering, my father Rudolf from Belgrade went on a study visit to France, to Paris. That Paris would later, on several occasions, cost us all dearly, but that’s for another time.
And so, in some Society of the Friends of France, a month before the outbreak of war, my mother Marisa sang, probably Dalmatian songs, in Paris, while my father Rudolf drummed with his fingers, trying to accompany her, to which she said, It’d be better if you didn’t do that, you’re tone-deaf. Paris was still joyful, the terraces were full, the bouquinistes sold books, artists painted portraits of tourists, the Latin Quarter throbbed, the days were long, the nights warm, one war, the one in Spain, had just ended, although a little to the east the ground was rumbling hollowly, in concentration camps the profile of the inmates was changing, a terrible storm was building, but Rudolf and Marisa could not now, now when love was growing, they could not think about that as they strolled along the Seine, their arms around each other, or fed each other pieces of quiche. Horace kept pace with them, whispering: Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero, and they said Yes, oh yes, and they didn’t have time even to imagine that this tomorrow, so unpredictable and terrifying, was already sitting at their table. Less than a year later Hitler visited Paris, swiftly touring the city, and its sights, with the sculptor Breker and the architects Giesler and Speer, they crossed the Champs-Élysées, went down to the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower, which now looked different from the way it did when under it, full of hope for the future, my mother Marisa smiled, in love, and in which the French would keep the lift blocked until the end of the war, so whoever wanted to climb up (or hang swastikas) had to use the stairs. Hitler was not interested in the Palais de Justice, he was not interested in the Louvre, or Sainte-Chapelle, but the beauty of the Opéra drove him totally wild. Less than a year later, in the summer of 1940, more than two million people would leave the city, and the Arc de Triomphe would groan under a covering of red and black flags with hooked crosses.
Marisa’s mother, my Grandma Ana, did not, of course, let her go on that journey in 1939, alone, she’s still a child, so in Paris her older brother Karlo snapped at her heels (only for a day or two, thankfully), because in Paris Karlo soon slipped away to follow his own dream, that Académie Diplomatique Internationale, about which in the dark dining room in 4 Ulica Matošića he had been pestering the whole household: I’ll run away if you don’t send me to the diplomatic school in Paris. Karlo Osterman threatened, gabbled, prattled on about a petition for signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sent to the League of Nations in 1933, about the Report on the Legal Status of Women in eighty-three states of the world and about the Study on the Humanization of War that had existed for three years already. That’s what I want, can’t you see where we’re heading?! yelled Karlo, which Ana pretended not to hear, until finally she burst out, Fuck off then, child!, while Max listened, his heart occasionally trembling, his eye glinting, the corners of his mouth almost imperceptibly rising, then he sighed and said, I’m going to give Meštrović a pedicure.
After the German invasion of France, the Académie Diplomatique Internationale moved its offices to Geneva, and all that was left of Karlo’s dream were two volumes (of seven published) of the Dictionnaire Diplomatique, bought on a walk beside the Seine, and the scars of two unrealized loves. Until his unexpected and sudden death Karlo worked as a journalist, in his spare time he went fishing in his small wooden boat, gazing out to sea and picking through images that could have become reality, but didn’t.
In 1939 Frida Landsberg was studying violin with Professor Adolph Metz, the only Jew at the Riga Conservatoire, and just beneath her chin, on the left side of her neck, she had a small red patch, something like a scar or a hematoma. The Riga Conservatoire was later renamed the Latvian Academy of Music, but Frida would never know that. Nor would her teacher Adolph Metz. Frida Landsberg went to Paris in that July of 1939 in the hope of arranging a meeting with the violinist and conductor Charles Munch, director of the Paris Philharmonic Society and professor at the Paris Conservatoire. Walking through the town, making their way toward Gare St.-Lazare, Marisa, Rudolf, and Karlo stopped in rue de Madrid in front of the building at number 14, having no idea that this was where the famous Paris Conservatoire was housed, although from the open first-floor windows a cacophony of notes wafted, piano, trumpet and violin. They stood there, enchanted, watching a blue-eyed girl with long, light-brown curly hair playing, playing what?, they had no idea what she was playing, but she played wonderfully and smiling young people gathered around her and threw small coins into the violin case on the pavement. They would discover later, That’s Guy Ropartz, Frida Landsberg would say, Sonata number 2, for violin, in E major, she would say, as the four of them stirred their lemonade in synchrony in a café on Place de l’Europe, because rue de Madrid was somehow gloomy and deserted, locked between two long rows of dreary buildings of the same color and height. Sometime later Karlo would learn who Charles Munch was, but that is not crucial to this story. Several times, perhaps in the moments when he was trying to stifle the sudden attacks of his inner storms, Karlo would say, While Matačić was strolling untroubled through the ashes of civilization, while he was conducting in Hitler’s Reich, Munch did not leave France, It’s wartime and I shall not set foot on German soil, that’s what Munch used to say, he who had previously played and conducted in Leipzig, Cologne, everywhere, Karlo said. And I learned, Karlo said many years later, that at that time Munch refused to include the works of contemporary German composers in his repertoire. And he protected the non-Aryan members of his orchestra. And helped members of the Resistance Movement. Unlike Henri Rabaud, director of the conservatoire, who as early as 1941 compiled a list for Vichy France of the detailed racial characteristics of all the students. At that time, of course, I knew nothing more detailed about Frida Landsberg.
She was beautiful, Marisa would say, we were all in love with her. In the evening we would sit in the Latin Quarter, sometimes on the pavement, more rarely in a café, she would play, I would sing, then Karlo would steal her from us and she would leave an emptiness. And an uncomfortable silence. It was only many years later, after that episode with Hitler’s medal in Leila’s parents’ house, that I began to do some research. And to call to mind Marisa’s accounts, little sparks of information, snippets, fragments in her memory of a faded time or perhaps of a time so festive and relaxed that it had to be hidden from reality, preserved in special little jewelry boxes, in little boxes opened just once — before death. Marisa was no more, and Karlo was no more, and Rudolf’s memory in that regard, amorous, Parisian, seemed to lie even more deeply buried in him, hidden under deep layers of political abominations, intrigue and insinuation, which he spent his entire life trying to clear up. There was no one I could ask. As long as the actors in these two love stories were alive, and I still very young, I spent my summers with my Uncle Karlo, I played water polo, and in the evenings at the pool either briscola or chess. Sometimes, largely in fun, Marisa and Rudolf would mention Karlo’s former infatuation, his absolute intoxication with Frida Landsberg, then, in Paris in 1939, never mentioning that the “divine Frida” had found Charles Munch, that she had arranged an audition possibly to continue her studies at that famous conservatoire, nor why her liaison with Karlo was broken off, because perhaps they did not know, or perhaps there was no truth, truth had been transformed into possibility, into hope, or because it was so terrible and incomprehensible that it had become unsayable. Essentially, back then in July 1939, in Paris two love stories from my family pulsated, not to go into deta
ils now, love is love, touches, whispers, embraces, smiles and glances often obtuse to the onlooker, and all that in a city whose magnificent beauty (because lovers see only that), squares and parks, water, whose breath enslaves reason and common sense.
As the day of their return to Split approached, Karlo said to his sister, Let Rudolf go back with you, I’m going to Riga.
From Paris, in 1939, Marisa brought back a copy of Vogue for her mother, my grandmother Ana, and, before going to Zagreb in 1941, Ana would use it to sew glamorous outfits for the Split beauties, for daytime and evening outings, and later, on the Riva, some of these outfits worn by merry “Italian girls,” often in the company of Fascist officers and soldiers, would be sprayed with hydrochloric acid by “red” passersby, while some of Ana’s other outfits would end up in chests in the attics of family houses as mementos of a past age, because the women of Split would exchange them for military uniforms of heavy cloth, with a partisan cap on their heads.
On May 31, 1939, Germany signed a nonaggression pact with Latvia and Estonia. On November 5 of the same year, in Warsaw, Hitler organized a Victory Parade, and that same day the Soviet Union signed a secret Treaty of Mutual Assistance with Latvia (it signed an identical agreement with Estonia a week later, and with Lithuania a week after that). According to this bilateral agreement, the Soviet Union had the right to locate its military bases throughout those then independent Baltic countries, particularly along their coasts. Anxious, the altruistically benign Soviet Union was preparing to “defend” three weak and unprotected little states from a potential attack by Nazi Germany. In fact, in June 1940, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, with military marches and brass bands, with the smiles of high functionaries, but also their secret agents, and with the general waving of little paper flags by the people, ceremonially and officially handed their freedom to the Soviet Union, as one might say, be my guest, only for all three to fall later without a murmur. The Soviet Union swallowed the Baltic states. Twenty-two years of Latvian independence were swept away on the wind, its language sank, slunk off into the crannies of consciousness and the subconscious, the frontiers fractured and the country stretched away out of sight; people scattered, fields were appropriated, houses seized, livestock became everyone’s and no one’s, the NKVD, later the KGB, determined who would go where, when and how. Cattle trucks waited on the secondary tracks of country railway stations. The gulags acquired new residents. The Soviet authorities did not waste time. Before the German invasion, which would happen a year later, in 1941, the Soviet government arrested some 28,000 people in that little country of barely two million inhabitants, more precisely — today we know — 27,586 people, without explanation, without trial, and the majority of them were deported to the distant frozen north because of alleged cooperation with the German Army, while 945 individuals were shot on the spot. Those who were then shot, were shot, they disappeared, full stop. If it is of any comfort, of those who were deported at that time, some survived and returned, whereas had they remained in Latvia they would not have returned. If they held out in those gulags until Stalin’s death in 1953, there were those who still had time for life, regardless of the fact that that life was lousy — it was life. There was time for new loves, Soviet ones, granted, but love is love, there was time for studying, for sailing, for swimming, there was time for dancing in the rain, there was time for chess, oh, yes, for singing, for violins and croquettes, for traveling, short journeys within the Union, but still, there was time for giving, for dreaming, and even for escape. All that, that future time, Nazi Germany crushed for many in Latvia, in the blink of an eye, in two or three days.
On July 10, 1941, the German armed forces occupied Latvia and it became part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Those who opposed the German occupation, and those who collaborated with the Soviets, received a bullet in the brow (or the back of the head), or in the best case were shoved into concentration camps. According to Hitler’s decree a civil occupying regime was formed, with Latvian paramilitary formations and with Latvian auxiliary police divided into special — Latvian — police battalions and those Latvians, whether by command or voluntarily, zealously embarked on hunting down and killing their former fellow citizens — Jews, Roma and communists — according to the principle of every man for himself. In fact those Latvians were then a bit, as it were, confused — they had had enough of the Soviets and their communism — and calculated that this SS and the Wehrmacht could not be worse than communism, could they? So the German soldiers were greeted by various people, and by beautiful women walking through town, as on another occasion, on April 10, 1941, in Zagreb, except that in Zagreb that took place with a lot more euphoria, with rapture and joy, and in large numbers, although at that time Zagreb was a smaller town than Riga.
A year earlier, in 1940, my uncle Karlo Osterman, returning from Riga, watched the same thing, the entry of the Nazis into Paris — and wept.
The German civil administration was nominally under the competence of the Ministry of the Reich for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete) under the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, some say the son of a wealthy trader, others maintain he was the son of a cobbler from Latvia, that Estonian-German born in 1893 in Reval, today’s Tallinn, studied architecture in Riga and Moscow, where he gained his doctorate; a philosopher and ideologue of Nazism, the author of theories about race and the persecution of the Jews, fierce opponent of “degenerate” modern art, which he purloined throughout the whole Baltic region and beyond, and sent to Germany, first for himself, then for the Reich, for Hitler’s future museum and the musical academy in Linz, for unlike Adolf, Alfred Rosenberg was a man of undoubted artistic talent, but Alfred Rosenberg was also well read, he read Goethe and Balzac, liked art, all art, and so also music, and so in the course of his plunder, his theft, he did not neglect musical instruments, especially violins (for they were easier to transport, as his private booty). That was the very Rosenberg whose mouth smelled, the Rosenberg of baneful breath, once a friend of the debauched pedophile Röhm (whose life Hitler at first spared, as long as he didn’t touch young men and boys, and then had callously murdered in the Night of the Long Knives, along with another thousand homosexuals, with the explanation that Aryans could not be gay, but in fact because he didn’t care for his politics), that Rosenberg, the Führer’s delegate, obsessed with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, who founded the Institute for Researching the Jewish Question, which he affectionately called “Höhe Schule,” and into whose library poured books, documents and manuscripts stolen from literally all the countries of occupied Europe. In document 1015-B-PS there is a detailed list of more than twenty-one thousand stolen works of art, and document 188 describes the plunder of more than seventy-one thousand apartments throughout France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway (here Rosenberg was helped by his friend Quisling), and then the occupied eastern territories, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and in Hungary and Greece. This is the writer and engineer Rosenberg who adored wearing lilac shirts with a red tie, who in July 1941 had his photograph taken with a young Ukrainian married couple in national dress, whom the young married couple presented with flowers and a cake, and soon afterward they were murdered.
In Spandau and later in the Nuremberg prison, Alfred Rosenberg wrote, on official Third Reich notepaper, his prison diary, memoirs which served as evidence at his trial, while in his defense Alfred Rosenberg affirmed that he had absolutely no idea what the Holocaust was, He’d never heard of it, he said, and then, after Alfred Rosenberg had been executed by hanging in 1946, that diary magically disappeared, but since nothing ever disappears forever, but returns in an altered form or just as it was, sometimes more horrific, sometimes watered down, so too this diary of Alfred Rosenberg’s reappeared, after seventy years, it raised its head, woke up, crawled toward the present, climbed onto the stage of history, and in the name of its creator who, in 1946, with a black hood over his head, fell into the “r
epository” of the gallows, crowed Here I am again! Out of that opus of enviable literacy with lyrical passages of restrained sentiment, out of that diary found in 2013, fell the copy of a small yellowed note, a copy of the confirmation of the confiscation of a violin made by Maestro Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in the possession of a certain F. Landsberg, born in Riga on April 13, 1920, once resident at 99 Stabu iela, but in October 1941 removed to the suburbs, to Maskavas iela. Of course, immediately after the establishment of the SS government in Latvia, Alfred Rosenberg founded Sonderstab Musik (A Special Combat Office for Music”), charged with the task of “collecting” musical instruments and sheet music and sending them posthaste to Berlin, but some minor actions, such as this confiscation of the violin belonging to a certain F. Landsberg, he undertook himself. In the hours he spent philosophizing about the modalities of creating a pure Aryan race, in the peace of his elegantly furnished Berlin apartment, whose walls were adorned with degenerate oil paintings, and the rooms with two pianos, one Estonia and one fairly indifferent J. Becker — which his twelve-year-old blonde angel, his Irene, could practice on — there were also several cellos, the makes of which are not listed, and a dozen violins (there are lists of those, but I don’t feel like reeling them off now), listening to Borodin and Rimski-Korsakov, sipping chamomile tea, gazing with longing at his insufficiently studied favorite writers, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, Alfred Rosenberg was overcome for a moment, only for a moment, by a faint, vague nostalgia, like a little snake, it slid down under his collar and started crawling over his bare chest. A flash — Paris, a little table in Café de la Rotonde, on the corner of Boulevard Raspail and Montparnasse, when over an unsweetened coffee and two brioches he was waiting for his ballerina Hilda; a flash — Riga and its narrow cobbled lanes, a cramped student’s room; a flash — Reval, out of which, as from deep black water, faces emerge, dead faces, immobile, gray, and living faces, the smiling faces of his everyday life. And while in 1942 this well-groomed and tranquil fifty-year-old stroked the violin on his lap that had belonged to F. Landsberg, and in the core of which was hidden a label with the name of its creator, Alfred Rosenberg heard himself asking, who was he asking? Did I have to leave my native land in order to acquire a homeland? My memories are weightless, my memories are empty. Then he looked again at the beautiful instrument in his lap, smiled, and a quiet joy came over him. It’s good, he said. The job is done.