Authors: Ian Buruma
In 1886 Liebermann was called up to serve in a Prussian cavalry regiment as a private. And like Richard Schlesinger, he remained a private, even though his gentile contemporaries became officers within weeks of joining. The leader of his squadron, Captain Mackensen, didn’t bother to hide his contempt for Jews. Liebermann was
forced to eat alone, while the other recruits were invited to the captain’s table. Stung in his Prussian sense of honor, Liebermann did what came naturally to him and challenged his captain to a duel. Always a gentleman, he aimed at the captain’s legs. Mackensen aimed at Liebermann’s head. Liebermann’s bullet hit home, the captain’s didn’t. Liebermann was charged with the crime of dueling with a superior officer.
While his case was pending, Liebermann escaped for a short holiday to Belgium. He played the casinos in Ostende, lounged around the salons of Brussels, and stayed with his beloved Uncle Eduard, an old Anglophile, who had made his fortune as a stockbroker in London. One night in Ostende, Willy’s cousin gave him some advice. Not having taken it, Willy wrote in 1936, was “the greatest blunder of my life, which was not lacking in stupidities.” Willy, the cousin said, you have a long life ahead of you. You are a fine young man. You’ve had your experience with the German army. Don’t build your life on illusions. The Germans are never grateful. “There is but one country,” he continued, “where people like you can live a free and respectable life as ‘independent gentlemen.’ It’s the only country where you will be happy, because the English are gentlemen and the only people who judge individuals by their inner worth.”
Perhaps the English ladies, living on their “competences” in Frankfurt, gave similar advice to Adolf and Hermann. Or perhaps it was simply the promise of greater opportunies that first drew Adolf to London. The family music business didn’t outlive Leopold by many years. After Adolf became Ad and had acquired his Nash house in Regent’s Park, with his “Lady Ad,” he encouraged his brother to follow suit.
But Hermann always remained Hermann, living in a more modest house in Hampstead, with a wife named Anna, from Kassel. Anna Alsberg came from a similar milieu of secular, educated German Jews. Her people lived so far from the Jewish tradition that Anna’s nephew, the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, began to have serious doubts about the consequences of assimilation. After almost converting to Christianity himself, he realized that German Jews were striving so hard to conform to Wagner’s prescription of denial that Judaism might disappear altogether. He tried to stop this erosion by teaching other middle-class German Jews to observe Jewish law. Already paralyzed by progressive sclerosis, he worked for years on a new German translation
of the Bible. It was a mercy for him that he died in 1929, before the almost total destruction of German Jewry began.
My great-grandfathers made their living on the London Stock Exchange, that institution Karl Marx, among other anti-Semites, identified with Jewish money worship, and Voltaire praised as the symbol of English tolerance. In fact, for many immigrants the stock exchange was but a means to an end that had proven impossible in the country they had left behind: assimilation with dignity. If they could not feel entirely British themselves, their children could, or so it was hoped. My great-grandparents lived in that peculiar North London world of German émigrés who spoke English to one another, ate roast beef on Sundays, sent their sons to public schools, and listened to Beethoven and Wagner.
Bildung
, in the sense of self-improvement through high culture, was one thing from the old country they transferred to their children, and indeed grandchildren. That, and a particular ideal of the Englishman, fastidious in his dress, gentlemanly in his manners, and imbued by a unique sense of fair play. Some immigrants paid tribute to this ideal by dressing, or speaking, or behaving with an excessive degree of courtliness and care that might be described as theatrical, and perhaps even rather un-English.
Of the two great-grandfathers, Richard was the more successful businessman. Otherwise, his life remains obscure. He attended the same school in Frankfurt as Hermann Regensburg, came to London at roughly the same time, and moved in the same North London circles. While Hermann revered Beethoven, Richard loved Wagner. But unlike Hermann, Richard was of the Orthodox faith. My mother had only fearful memories of him, because by the time she knew him, he could speak only in a hoarse whisper and drooled down his shirt. He died in 1940 of Parkinson’s disease.
He lies buried in the Orthodox cemetery in North London, a spot that is now surrounded by mostly Caribbean and Asian neighborhoods. His grave is marked by a simple gray granite slab with his name and date of birth, next to a similar slab marking the grave of his wife, Estella, who was born in Manchester. Not far from their graves is a brick wall, separating the Orthodox from the liberal Jews. I visited on a gray, wet day and felt oddly unmoved by the occasion. It was an exclusive cemetery, an enclave of the faithful. This was not a place I could ever be buried in. The straight lines of tombs, some of them topped
with lugubrious, shrouded figures, gave the impression of rigid order, even in death. As I walked past the graves, I listened to the Indian music wafting over the wall from a Hindu festival nearby.
There is only one person alive with clear memories of Richard—my grandfather’s cousin, Marjorie Schwab. She was well into her nineties when I went to see her at a private retirement home in the New Forest. There was something almost German about the area: woody smells of birch and pine, families with knobbly sticks walking briskly on the forest paths, village shops selling rustic souvenirs, horny penknives, and the like. Marjorie’s room was in a pleasant two-story house, surrounded at discreet distances by similar homes. Inside, there was a faint smell of detergent. There were ramps for wheelchairs and an electric lift going up and down the stairs with an efficient whirring sound.
I had not seen Marjorie for more than thirty years. It felt strange to be greeted by a balding, elderly lady who looked remarkably like my grandfather. We talked about cricket, in which she took a deep interest. She spoke rather brusquely in the slight northern accent of her native Manchester. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she said. “All I remember of Richard is that he wore a bottle-green suit.” What was he like? “The suit?” No, my great-grandfather. “Oh, very German, very German.” I pressed her for more. “Great stickler for rules. Always had to have rules. Everyone was terrified of him.”
And that, really, was more or less that. It was as if his life was now lost forever, like a hard drive being deleted on a computer. I asked Marjorie whether her family had come from Germany too. It was a stupid question. I should have known better. She was an Ellinger. The Ellingers had been in Manchester for at least two generations. “Oh, no!” she said, sounding a bit miffed. “Very British. Can’t bear the Germans. Went on holiday there once, a trip along the Rhine. Loathed it.” We resumed our conversation about cricket.
M
Y GRANDPARENTS
Bernard Schlesinger and Winifred (“Win”) Repensburg were as British as German Jews were German. That is to say, it was not understated. They liked to be seen to be British, to prove their loyalty, even perhaps to themselves. “Blighty,” Bernard wrote in
a letter to Win from France in 1918, was “the really one and only country.” He was eighteen when he volunteered, straight from school, as a soldier in 1915. The next year, he was a stretcher-bearer in the Royal Westminster Rifles, carrying men with stinking wounds through the slimy trenches around the Somme. It was an experience he never talked about, even though he passed on mementos of that war to me. As a boy, I cherished his brass buttons, his field dressing pack, and his badges as though they were relics. Bernard volunteered again in 1939, when he was in his forties, and again, to be held in reserve, in 1948, during the Berlin blockade, and again in 1957, and finally, once again, in 1963, when he was told, very politely, that at his age there really would be no more need for him to defend his country physically.
I read the early letters, written during World War I, when Bernard and Win were still pining partners in a love match of which his protective parents disapproved, with particular fascination. I wanted to know how past and present might have been in conflict. It cannot always have been easy, after all, to fight an enemy nation whose citizens included one’s own relatives. One of the more remarkable aspects of the Great War is how letters between British and German branches of the family continued to be exchanged until the end. Yet the anti-Hun hysteria that swept across Britain was fiercer than in World War II. I looked for signs of it in the letters. But Bernard and Win seem to have kept a dignified distance from the general mood, without ever doubting which side they were on.
In a letter from school, in the spring of 1915, Bernard reports to Winifred: “In orchestra we are doing all English music. Its quite pretty some of it. [The music master] calls it ‘healthy.’ Why this epithet I cannot imagine. I wonder if now he considers Beethoven—night-marey & Brahms—indigestible.” This he still found mildly amusing. When he heard that his cello teacher, “an awful sport who has been at Uppingham 17 years & far longer than the beastly old Head Master is going to be given the sack because he is a naturalized German,” he was disgusted.
Later that year he tells a story that suggests not so much divided loyalty as anxiety in the family. In his typically breezy tone—he had not yet been sent to the Somme—Bernard describes the visit to his parents’ house in London of a man named Wulston Holmes. Holmes was a marvel of improvisation on the piano. He played anything you wanted:
waltzes, polkas, Schubert, Beethoven, music-hall ditties, anything. Bernard asked him whether he could improvise a funeral march. No problem. It was, writes Bernard, “an uplifting funeral march which would really make you die a cheerful death.” The effect on his father, Richard, was, naturally, disturbing. “Father looked rather glum at the end of it & so I asked him if for father’s benefit he would play an antiwar tonic. A romping, cheery piece was immediately forthcoming & even father forgot the war for a few minutes.” One would have liked to know more. Who is to say what went through Richard’s mind, but he must have viewed his son’s innocent zeal to fight for king and country with a degree of ambivalence.
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
).