by Ian Buruma
The anti-German atmosphere in Britain caused problems for people with German names. Hermann Regensburg’s eldest son, Walter, changed his name to Raeburn, not because Regensburg was Jewish but because it was German. There are references to the problem in Bernard’s letters. Usually he makes light of it. In his training camp at Great Missenden, he gets called “the following varying concoctions and contusions by the men. Bernard (with the emphasis on the 2d syllable) Schles, Schlesie, Schlosh, Schlosly & many others.” Itching to be sent to the front—he still had no idea what he was in for—he is disappointed when he is kept back at the training camp. In a letter to Win, who is about to be trained as a nurse, he worries for her: “I wonder how you will like the course & I also wonder if the name of Regensburg will hinder you at all in getting work at the Hospital. I think ‘Schlesinger’ did some of the harm in my case as German names have done in some others. Perhaps you will be Raeburn in Hospital.” In fact, she was not.
In their letters, Bernard and Win dealt with the Jewish question as they did in life, discreetly and lightly, as something that was inevitably there but should not be made too much of. It was not something one made a fuss about, or drew attention to. That would have been bad form. It might also have invited unnecessary trouble. In the early letters, there are Jewish jokes, sometimes in German. The parents’ influence was still there. Later, when Jewishness is mentioned at all, there are hints of snobbery. People who were “too Jewish” were perhaps a little bit vulgar, not quite salonfähig. Bernard is anxious to have an old friend posted to his Great Missenden camp. It doesn’t work out. Instead, “I stand in danger of having a fellow named Cohen—who is very Coheny—as my co-billeter & bed-fellow.” I have a feeling that the Coheny Cohen was not from Hampstead, perhaps not even from Golder’s Green.
Assimilation had taken place. It worked. My grandparents felt British. And yet they must have been aware that nothing could ever be taken for granted. Like all families, ours had its private expressions and code words. Instead of using the word “Jew” in public, we would say “forty-five.” The origin of this odd phrase is unknown. When Bernard was refused a senior position at a famous hospital in 1938, he wrote to Win: “It is the old, old story—(45).” From “Italians” to “45”: an element of unease would always remain. But this is one of the very few references to the old, old story. He was too proud, and too patriotic, to complain of prejudice. It would not have fitted his ideal of England. He once told me something, however, that was interesting, coming from a man whose father was refused an army commission. He said that the British army was the one institution where he never saw any evidence of anti-Semitism at all.
Such opinions are subjective, of course. He was a gregarious man, a joiner, a good sport who didn’t invite animosity. He wanted to believe the best about people, and of the institutions he loved. To be accepted was good enough reason to love. He loved England, he loved the hospitals that did take him in, and he loved the army. Up until one year before his death, aged eighty-seven, he attended the annual Royal Army Medical Corps dinner. The last time he went, he was by far the oldest member. He hobbled up the stairs at Millbank, leaning on two sticks, deaf, no longer entirely coherent, but loyal to the last. For there was one thing to be said about his England: it never betrayed his patriotism.
* When the memoir was published by Piper Verlag in 1988, the title was changed to the more neutral Erinnerungen eines deutschen Juden: 1863–1936. (Memoirs of a German Jew: 1863–1936).
CHAPTER
TEN
JEWISH CRICKET
England, great England, England the free,
England commanding all the seas—
She will understand us and our purpose.
—THEODOR HERZL, 1900
TO SAY THAT THE STATE OF ISRAEL WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN founded without Richard Wagner would be stretching a good story too far. But Wagner was certainly an inspiration. Picture the following scene: June 5, 1895, six months after the arrest of Dreyfus. Theodor Herzl was living in Paris as the correspondent of the Viennese Neue Freie Presse. That night he visited the Opéra to hear Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Herzl adored Wagner’s music and was dazzled by the performance, as well as by the general ambience of the opera house. Back at his hotel, he wrote in his diary: “We, too, will have such wonderful theatres; the gentlemen in evening clothes, the ladies dressed as lavishly as possible. Yes, I shall use Jewish luxury [Judenluxus], as I will everything else.”
This was but one of many ideas for the future Jewish state that Herzl jotted down in a rush of almost manic inspiration. When the rush was in danger of flagging, he would listen to Tannhäuser once more, and the rush would come flooding back. He later remembered that “only on evenings when there was no opera, would I feel any doubt about the rightness of my ideas.” Some were political ideas, a mishmash of liberalism, socialism, and aristocracy. Some were practical: a railway network, telegraph offices, and so on. But many had to do with representation: pageantry, uniforms, flags, titles—in short, the theater of nationhood, mostly copied from feudal models, or invented in the feudal style.
Like other political figures emerging from fin-de-siècle Europe, Herzl was a frustrated artist. He wanted to be a playwright but wrote bad and unsuccessful plays. His theatrical talent went into his politics instead. Officials of the Jewish state would be dressed in uniforms, “smart, stiff, but not ludicrous.” Fine English gardens, as well as “something along the lines of the Palais Royal” would embellish the capital. Mindful of Léon Gambetta’s statue in the Tuileries, Herzl hoped the future monument to himself would be in better taste. High priests would have to be splendidly decked out. Cuirassiers would be dressed in yellow socks, and officers clamped in silver armor.
Even the more purely political ideas had a theatrical flavor, which owed as much to Herzl’s notion of the English as of the German aristocracy. Herzl would visit the German kaiser to ask for his protection, and then, to gain respect at the royal courts of Europe, he would have to receive the highest available orders, English ones first, since they had the most prestige. Duels were to be encouraged, to create a proper officer class and raise the tone of society. There would be a Jewish aristocracy based on merit. Like Venice, the aristocratic republic would be governed by a doge. Herzl would not be a doge himself, but his son, Hans, would surely make a magnificent doge. And all boys born in the Jewish state would learn to play cricket.
Herzl’s Zionism was in many respects a noble enterprise. He realized that Jews in the Russian Empire were under constant strain: pogroms; cruel, anti-Semitic officials; often frightful poverty. These were people with whom he had little, if anything, in common, apart from the inescapable fact that he, like them, was a Jew. But it wasn’t only the shtetl Jews whom Herzl wished to save. He took titles and uniforms and all the formal frippery of nationhood seriously, not only because he had a taste for theater, or was a snob (both true enough), but also because he wanted to restore honor to what he called a “people of stockbrokers.” Jewish businessmen, as well as the wretched masses from the villages in Russia and Eastern Europe, would walk with their heads high, as disciplined as Prussian officers, cultivated as Frenchmen, and smartly turned out as English gentlemen. That way Herzl would no longer need to be embarrassed by association. A young man of his background could be a noble Jew.
Herzl had always loved dressing up. He was a dandy, with the politics of a dandy. Here he is in a photograph of his Viennese student fraternity, looking more immaculate than his gentile friends: cap at a rakish tilt, coat buttoned up just so, ivory-topped cane clasped under arm like a sword. There he is, in morning coat, gloves, cane, and top hat, looking remarkably like comte Robert de Montesquiou, the famous Parisian aesthete, in the portrait by Boldini. And there we find him, waiting for an audience with the kaiser in the Palestinian desert, sweltering in black formal wear and white tie, as though dressed for an evening at the Opéra. And there, in Basel, at the first Zionist Congress in 1897, he is in a top hat and tails greeting delegates. H
e insisted that all delegates, many of them poor Jews from the east who had never worn such clothes in their lives, attend in white tie. That way, he said, they would appear, in their own as well as the eyes of the world, as gentlemen of substance.
Like Baudelaire’s, Herzl’s dandyism was a way of identifying with aristocracy, or an idea of aristocracy. His love of dueling fit the same pattern. Exactly a month after his rush of Zionism on the night of Tannhäuser, Herzl noted in his dairy: “If I wanted to be anything, it would be a Prussian noble.” The problem was, however, that the Prussians were not in the habit of ennobling Jews. Whereas in England, you had Lord Rothschild and Sir Francis Montefiore, not to mention Benjamin Disraeli, the earl of Beaconsfield. An unconverted Jew could not expect to be a major political figure or an aristocrat in Germany or Austria. In England he stood a better chance. This caused a certain amount of tension in Herzl. For the style of the English upper class was obviously attractive to him. And he envied the Anglo-Jewish grandees, who had found themselves a niche in English society, but he despised them too, for their smugness and their disdain for Zionism. He got on much better with grand British gentiles. He felt accepted by them as a gentleman, without a title, but with the right manners and, of course, the right clothes.
THEODOR HERZL WAS, on the face of it, a most unlikely man to take the Jews back to their ancestral land. Born in Budapest in 1860 and educated there, in German and Hungarian, until he went to university in Vienna, he was a typical product of the secular, liberal bourgeoisie. His father was a banker, his mother a lover of German literature. Herzl knew little about Judaism and cared even less. He had a bar mitzvah, but his parents preferred to call it a “confirmation.” German humanism, literature, music, and liberal politics were the routes of escape from the stigma of Jewishness and the smell of new money. Herzl’s intellectual education had nothing Jewish about it. As a student, he read Byron, Voltaire, Balzac, Shakespeare, Zola, and Macaulay’s History of England.
In 1878 the family moved to Vienna. Well-to-do Viennese Jews voted for the German liberals, who were chauvinistic toward the Slavs and “Anglo-Saxon” in their political views. They believed in laissez-faire economics, freedom of speech, rule of law, and the separation of church and state. Viennese liberals at the turn of the century also admired the English style. Herzl’s Anglophilia as a young man, typically, was largely a matter of his taste in clothes. The playwright Arthur Schnitzler never forgot the devastating occasion when the young Herzl examined Schnitzler’s cravat with a look of distaste and said: “And I had considered you a—Brummell!”
Herzl described the Viennese Anglophile atmosphere of hotels named Bristol, fine tweeds, and Jockey Clubs in some of his articles for the Neue Freie Presse. He specialized in so-called feuilletons, an Austro-German genre that might be described as the dandified end of journalism: sketches from daily life, literary musings, and so on. You could tell, he wrote, that the English were the ruling Kulturvolk in the world by taking a look at the racecourse in Vienna. The combination of sports and money, fair play and competition, and the maximum effort with the minimum show of enthusiasm was wonderfully, typically English. Indeed, he continued, an Englishman who “trots through the world—in travelling, too, they are the first—will see signs of his nation’s power everywhere. Hence perhaps that look of silent superiority on his face … Such a trotter will often have occasion to hum ‘Rule Britannia’ to himself, when he sees other people adopt the forms of his country. What do they call the racecourse in Vienna? Freudenau? It is in any case a scene in the English style. There are differences, of course, since it is only a copy, but the Lower Austrian landscape, the people and their animals are all tailored à l’anglaise.”
The airs of Brummell nothwithstanding, Herzl started his adult life more in the German mode. The Germans, unlike, say, the Czechs, were regarded by bourgeois Jews as the epitome of a Kulturvolk. Bismarck was an early hero of Herzl’s. Herzl still believed that Jews could shake off their shameful “Jewish characteristics,” bred from centuries of poverty and persecution, and assimilate through effort, that is, through Bildung—Goethe, Shakespeare, and Wagner. Assimilation was more than a question of doing as the Romans do; it would involve a deeper kind of transformation, which would take time. Herzl used the language of biology, innocently, as it were. Anti-Semitism, he argued, might actually be good for the Jewish character: “Education is accomplished through hard knocks. A Darwinian mimicry will set in. The Jews will adapt themselves. They are like seals, cast by an accident of nature into water. They take on the appearance and characteristics of fish, without actually being fish. Once they return to dry land and are allowed to stay there for several generations, their fins will become feet again.”
Herzl was not against conversion in principle. A large number of Austrian Jews converted. (Many Lutherans in Vienna were born as Jews; Catholic conversion, on the other hand, though not exactly rare, had an air of opportunism.) In 1893, Herzl developed an extraordinary scheme to ask the pope for protection against anti-Semites. In return, he, Herzl, would lead the Jews to be converted en masse at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. The plan came to nothing. Before this particular brainwave, however, Herzl had tried a more trusted way toward assimilation and joined a German patriotic student fraternity called Albia. He drank beer, sang beery, cheery songs, and passed his rite of manhood by dueling with a member from another fraternity, called Allemania. His cheek was properly scarred. And he received the curious fraternity nickname of Tancred, the Christian Crusader who conquered Palestine and had been fictionalized by Disraeli in his novel of that name.
In the 1880s something began to go seriously wrong between the Germans and the Jews. The story of Herzl and his fraternity illustrates this. Richard Wagner was the patron saint of student societies like Herzl’s. Whatever else they felt, listening to his music, young German patriots felt the rush of blood and soil, the call of tribal gods, the headiness of a new age—albeit in a quasi-ancient package. As part of this package, Wagner promised to liberate German Kultur from the yoke of Jewish corruption. Herzl and many other Jews either ignored this element of Wagnerianism or rather approved of it. They, too, after all, wanted to transform the Jewish character through German Bildung. Then two things happened. The stock market crash of 1873 was blamed on Jewish speculators, and the preeminence of the German Volk in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was threatened by the increasingly demanding Slavs. Pan-Germanism, which had contained a liberal element, turned sour, and racist. Jews became targets of hatred. Liberal German politicians were replaced in Vienna by racist rabble-rousers such as Georg von Schönerer, knight of Rosenau, a vicious dreamer much admired by the young Adolf Hitler.
Wagner’s death in 1883 was commemorated by Herzl’s fraternity brothers at a mass meeting in Vienna’s Sophiensaal. But what had been planned as a solemn occasion, full of torchlit ceremony and soulful chanting, turned into a sinister political demonstration. Herzl’s friend and fraternity brother Hermann Bahr bellowed to a restive audience that Austria would be saved by Germany, that Aryan pan-Germanism would rule, and that Wagnerian anti-Semitism would rejuvenate the German Geist. Much moved by these sentiments, the students stamped their feet and roared patriotic songs. They got so carried away that the police had to intervene to stop things from getting seriously out of hand. Herzl felt he had to resign, as a “lover of liberty.” His resignation was not accepted; he was dismissed instead. Cap, ribbons, and beer mug were to be returned to the fraternity forthwith.
This event, as well as subsequent signs of anti-Semitism, such as the Dreyfus trial, nudged Herzl toward the conclusion that Jews could only become a proud and noble Kulturvolk in their own land. But his enthusiasm for the German Kultur, including Wagner’s music, remained. He was a frustrated playwright who wrote bad plays, but they were unmistakably German plays. He continued to make a living by writing for a German Viennese paper, edited by assimilationist Jews who refused to take Zionism seriously. And if Hitler’s Third Reich was set to Wagnerian mu
sic, so was Herzl’s vision of Zion. Herzl described his mission as a Gesamtkunstwerk in the Wagnerian mold. The second Zionist Congress in 1898 was opened to the sounds of Tannhäuser. The souvenir program was decorated with a Siegfried figure clad in medieval armor.
For a long time Herzl also retained a touching faith in the goodwill of the Prussian aristocracy. He was always telling wealthy Jews, who treated him as a crank, that he would go straight to the kaiser. The kaiser, he said to Baron Maurice de Hirsch in Paris, “will understand me. He has been trained to be a judge of great things …” Some of the most telling, comical, and pathetic passages in Herzl’s diaries are descriptions of his overtures to German noblemen, including the kaiser, who treated him with a mixture of cunning politesse and amused contempt. He regarded them with a combination of awe and sardonic wit.
In September 1898, Herzl visited Friedrich, grand duke of Baden. The introduction to this well-meaning duffer was furnished by the useful (to Herzl) but rather absurd Anglican clergyman William Hechler. Hechler was one of those English zealots who promoted Zionism as a divine mission to bring back the Messiah. He later became chaplain to the British consulate in St. Petersburg. Herzl was worried that Hechler’s presence would make him look ridiculous in the duke’s eyes. To be ridiculous was about the worst thing imaginable for a nervous man of honor. But the duke was impressed by Hechler’s mysticism. The idea of assisting in the Second Coming of Christ brought pious tears to his eyes. After having been asked to wait in a separate room, so the grand duchess could pass by with her guest, the duchess of Genoa, without being subjected to the gaze of commoners, Herzl was able to put his case to the grand duke. Helping the Jews to found their own nation had many advantages, he said. Not only would Zionism take Jewish minds off revolutionary activities, but the Jews would “add an element of German culture to the Orient.”