Since then I’ve often encouraged Edgar to write his memoirs. But he’s a historian: to his academic mind, the life of anonymous individuals isn’t necessarily worth telling. And he had so many other books to write! So time went by and still he didn’t want to tell his story. We kept in touch, calling, writing—letters at first, then emails. Sometimes chatting on Skype.
The first time we met, Edgar was seventy and I twenty-five. He is now ninety-two and I’m forty-seven. Nicolas Reynard died in a plane crash on an expedition. Primrose passed away in 2012. “I’m starting to think about eternity,” Edgar told me. The time had come to write this book. And so at last we set off on the trail of his childhood in Munich. Before it all faded. Was lost. Just in time.
Bertil Scali
December 2016
WHAT BECAME OF THEM?
Erna and Ludwig Feuchtwanger, Edgar’s parents, were able to leave Germany a few weeks after he did, in May 1939, only months before Nazi troops invaded Poland on September 1. They managed to secure the necessary authorizations to immigrate to England. After a brief stopover in London, they joined their son in Winchester and set up home there, re-creating something of the world they had lost in this new country whose language they didn’t even speak. Sadly, only eighteen months after his release from Dachau camp, Ludwig was interned again, this time on the Isle of Man. He was not imprisoned for being a Jew, but mistrusted because he was German. After what was effectively a comfortable stay in comparison with the conditions of his German detention—which he survived only miraculously—he was freed and rejoined his family. After a whole second life during which he worked successively as a private German tutor, a consultant for the US Army and then a researcher into the Third Reich’s correspondence, he died in 1947 at the age of sixty-one. Erna lived happily in the community around Winchester until 1979. She continued preparing delicious German meals in her ancient stewpot, something of a Munich Prometheus that she wouldn’t have surrendered to the Nazis for anything in the world. This cast-iron receptacle still simmers away on Edgar’s stove from time to time. The smells that hover around it in winter make clear references to its owner’s tastes—which have remained resolutely Bavarian.
Lion Feuchtwanger was imprisoned in the Camp des Milles near Aix-en-Provence by the French police, who were soon to hand him over to the Nazis. He managed to extricate himself thanks to the intervention of the US consul in Marseille, on the insistence of Eleanor Roosevelt. He immigrated to the United States, where he pursued his writing career in Pacific Palisades, which became an intellectual hub for German émigrés. His friends, including Bertolt Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, regularly convened there. He died in 1958. His wife, Marta, who lived until 1987, kept up a substantial correspondence with Edgar’s mother, and later with Edgar himself.
Fritz Feuchtwanger was also released from Dachau on Christmas Eve 1938. He and his wife, Erna, were able to take exile in the United States at the very last minute. Franziska Diamant and her husband managed to flee there just before the war. Uncle Berthold, who did everything differently, succeeded in embarking for Peru just in time. Dorle, Edgar’s half sister, lived all her life in Switzerland. For the purposes of this account, some aspects of her private life have been modified. Dorle’s mother, Aunt Lilly, also survived the war, first in Berlin and then in a village in Bavaria.
Bella Feuchtwanger, Edgar’s aunt who was so happy she could move freely around Germany under the Third Reich thanks to her Czechoslovakian passport, and could continue working for her brother Martin Feuchtwanger’s news agency, was arrested by the Nazis when they invaded Prague. She perished in Theresienstadt.
Edgar’s childhood friend Beate Siegel, the daughter of one of the first Jews to be publicly beaten and exhibited in the streets of Munich in 1933 with a sign around his neck saying “I’m a Jew and I’ll never criticize the police again,” left Germany thanks to the British Kindertransport program. Her parents and her brother, Peter Siegel, left for Lima in Peru in 1940, and Peter became a rabbi there. Beate now lives in London, and occasionally in the South of France, near Toulouse, where she read the page proofs of the French original of this book on her computer.
Bobbie Heckelmann, “Aunt Bobbie,” and Duke Luitpold of Bavaria, who were not Jews, stayed in Germany and survived the bombing. Edgar and his mother met up with Aunt Bobbie in 1957 and went to the opera with her in Salzburg. Edgar remembers that, ever the socialite, Aunt Bobbie had invited a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha princess for the occasion. Her sister Friedl, who’d married the Hanoverian industrialist Hermann Wolff, also survived. Edgar visited the couple in 1966. Hermann, whose company had used Jews imprisoned in concentration camps as its workforce during the war, was tried after the Liberation. Speaking to Edgar, Hermann Wolff praised Adolf Hitler’s extraordinary energy, as if struggling to justify something. His embarrassing monologue petered out into a still more embarrassing stony silence. Friedl’s daughter, Arabella, had moved to New York.
Edgar never knew what became of Rosie, one of the young women who rocked him in her arms, brought him up and walked him to the park, and then later to school all through his childhood, and who had to leave the family when the employment of “Aryans” by “Jews” was banned. Her character, a composite of several young Bavarian country girls, has been filled out in this book in order to give the reader a broader understanding of the political and social context of the time. Edgar has no better information about the fate of the building’s caretaker, the perennially well-informed Funk. Similarly, Edgar knows nothing about the life of young Ralph, the school friend who invited him to his birthday parties up until the first anti-Semitic laws came into play in 1933, before more than 90 percent of Germans voted to give total power to the Führer.
Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Bernheimer and their daughter, Ingrid, immigrated to Cuba in 1941, it being the only country that would agree to take them. They could have left Germany much earlier, and for a more obvious country such as the United States. But Ingrid’s mother had a brother with Down syndrome, and no country was happy to take him. Karli was due to be “euthanized” by the Nazis, but the family’s immigration to Cuba saved him in extremis. Other members of the family, Otto Bernheimer and his family, survived by striking a deal with Hermann Göring—selling him paintings by great masters in exchange for a crust of bread, buying a ranch in Venezuela for the marshal’s aunt who was married to a Jew…but that’s a whole other story!
Eight months after Edgar left Germany, Adolf Hitler ordered his troops to invade Poland. Up in his apartment, he must have gloated presidentially about this latest pacific conquest. This time, though, France and Great Britain honored their commitments and their principles and declared war on Germany. Thanks to an interplay of international alliances, this escalated into a global conflict that cost the lives of fifty million people. All through the war, German Nazis—with the help of the sympathizers in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Ukraine, Italy, Greece, France and every other country they crossed—pursued their anti-Semitic policies that annihilated more than six million Jews, Romanies, homosexuals and other minorities. The Allies eventually triumphed over Hitler, who committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. A little while later, the American photographer Lee Miller posed naked in the Führer’s bathtub, just opposite where Edgar had lived, for an article put together with David E. Sherman for Vogue magazine.
Hitler’s Munich apartment was turned into a police station after the war. There is nothing now to show that the Führer once lived there.
Edgar still lives in the village of Dean near Winchester, in the county of Hampshire, as he has since a few months after he arrived in Great Britain on February 15, 1939. He was taken in by a volunteer family in Cornwall, the wonderful Malcolm and Beryl Dyson—in their early thirties, the parents of a five-year-old and a three-year-old—who taught him to speak English in a matter of months. In September 1939 he obtained a study grant for the prestigious Winchester College. After the war he studied history at the University of Cambr
idge, then went on to teach and write about history, specializing in subjects such as the reign of Queen Victoria, the history of Prussia and the careers of Britain’s prime ministers Disraeli and Gladstone, as well—of course—as the history of twentieth-century Germany. In 1962 he married a young Englishwoman, Primrose, whose father had been one of the generals in the 1944 Normandy campaign. Edgar is now ninety-two. He has three children and now has three grandchildren. The German state awarded him the Federal Cross of Merit for his services to Anglo-German relations. He would like to be remembered as an “honorary Englishman.”
This book was written in Munich, Paris, Winchester and London, based on Edgar’s recollections, his family memoirs published in Germany by the publishing company where his father used to work, Duncker & Humblot (Erlebnis und Geschichte: Als Kind in Hitlers Deutschland—Ein Leben in England),* numerous contemporaneous documents such as issues of L’Illustration, Paris-Match and Paris-Soir, audiovisual documents such as newsreels from Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States, and the books of Lion Feuchtwanger, particularly Jud Süß and Success, as well as the work of his then rival in bookstores Mein Kampf, whose author—a vegetarian—didn’t like Bavarian sausages with their chargrilled flavor, although they are famously delicious.
* * *
*“Experience and History: A Childhood in Hitler’s Germany—A Life in England.”
EDGAR FEUCHTWANGER was born in Munich in 1924 and immigrated to England in 1939. He studied at Cambridge University and taught history at the University of Southampton until he retired in 1989. His major works include From Weimar to Hitler, Disraeli, and Imperial Germany 1850–1918. In 2003 he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for promoting Anglo-German relations.
BERTIL SCALI is a French journalist and writer. He wrote and co-directed a TV documentary about Edgar Feuchtwanger’s childhood in Munich, and is the author of Villa Windsor.
ADRIANA HUNTER studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than fifty books including Camille Laurens’s Who You Think I Am and Hervé Le Tellier’s Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation’s 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She won the 2011 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and her work has been short-listed twice for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in Kent, England.
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Edgar, age three, in the Bogenhausen district of Munich. In the background is the Kirche St. Gabriel.
Edgar’s father, Ludwig, in his study.
Lion Feuchtwanger reading in a canvas chair outside his house in Berlin. (USC Libraries. Lion Feuchtwanger Papers Collection, 1884–1958)
Edgar (right) with his cousin Ingrid Rheinstrom, in Munich in 1928.
Edgar (right) swimming with his half-sister, Dorle, at a park in Munich in 1929.
Edgar (bottom left), in traditional Bavarian lederhosen, playing with other boys by a lake near Neuschwanstein Castle.
Dorle ice-skating in Munich, circa 1930.
Pages from Edgar’s Gebeleschule exercise book, 1934.
Michael Siegel, the father of Edgar’s friend Beate, in 1933, being forced to walk the streets of Munich holding a placard that reads, “I’m a Jew and I’ll never criticize the police again.” (Bundesarchiv)
Hitler on the balcony of his Prinzregentenplatz 16 apartment, circa 1935. (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München/Bildarchiv)
Hitler’s Prinzregentenplatz apartment building, with Nazi banners, circa 1938. (Source unknown)
Edgar in front of Prinzregentenplatz 16, in 2012.
Hitler, My Neighbor Page 16