© Silke Hesse 2013
On
Maxim Leo Haltet Euer Herz bereit. Eine ostdeutsche Familiengeschichte. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag (Random House): München,
2011 (c.2009). ISBN: 978-3-453-40807-4
Silke Hesse
Maxim Leo, a
journalist like his mother, a grandfather and a great-grandfather before him, belongs
to the fourth generation represented in his history of what became a prominent
GDR family. Leo can draw not only on his and his family’s memories and the more
formal interviews he then conducted in his role as a family historian but also on
autobiographical accounts written by his two grandfathers, on writings by his
mother and a great-grandfather, as well as newspaper articles and the treasure
trove of the STASI files on his maternal grandfather and his parents. He also
has the distinct advantage of having grown up in the GDR and having experienced
its pressures personally; this first-hand knowledge is combined with a self-critical
and non-judgemental determination to uncover the truth. I found I had no
hesitation trusting him as a guide through this fraught and somewhat
embarrassing period of German history. The family to which he introduces us provides
a good sample of German-Jewish and
left-wing society from approximately 1928 to the present and though Leo’s focus
is on the psychology of the individuals he is presenting and their relationship
to their times and their state, an interested reader will not find it difficult
to discern wider and telling historical patterns.
The story begins with
Maxim’s great-grandfather, Wilhelm Leo, whose family migrated from Warsaw in
the 18th century, changed their name from Levi to Leo and converted
to Protestantism. Their sons had over the generations been either doctors or
lawyers. Wilhelm’s wife, Frieda, came from the prominent sea-faring family of
Barent whose ancestor had discovered the Barent Strait in the 16th
century. Wilhelm, who could have been a pianist and sometimes regretted that he
had not chosen that career path, gave up a flourishing legal practice in Berlin
“for fear he might become rich” and moved to Rheinsberg near Potsdam where his
children could grow up in ideal natural surroundings. Unusual for the period,
he was an attentive and respectful father who made time to share literature and
music with his young son Gerhard and always took his concerns seriously
In late 1927, Wilhelm
was asked to represent a retired French general who was being sued by a
little-known right-wing agitator named Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had claimed
that his club foot was the result of being tortured by French occupation forces
and that the general had stood by. With the help of photos and military
documents Wilhelm was able to prove that Goebbels was born with this
abnormality and the plaintiff was thereupon fined a token franc. But Goebbels’
solicitor utters a threat and when the Nazis come to power this is made good.
Gerhard watches at the window one night as the SS beat up his father and drag
him to their car. Due to the frantic efforts of his Aryan wife, Wilhelm is
eventually released from the Oranienburg concentration camp and after some
weeks in hospital he is allowed home. But he is made to surrender his passport
and is prohibited from leaving the house. Defying this order, Wilhelm invites
ten-year-old Gerhard to accompany him to Berlin. There he hands over briefs to
colleagues, arranges and pays for the family to be smuggled across the Belgian
border, and then invites his son to an elegant restaurant where the boy drinks
his first half-glass of wine before he is taken to his first opera. This was
the ceremony Wilhelm had long planned for his son’s coming-of-age; now
circumstances had forced a premature adulthood upon the boy. The next day
Gerhard and his parents abandoned their home with all it contained and fled to
Paris.
Wilhelm is the epitome
of the enlightened and cultured, socially aware bourgeois for whom the law as the guarantee of a fair and orderly society, and music and
literature as the highest expression of man’s humanity embody the new faith. He
is representative of a large section of assimilated German Jews who, like him,
often married ethnic Germans. European Jews were not a homogenous group; at one
end of the spectrum were the Yiddish-speaking, Hassidic communities of the East
whose lives were ruled by a religiousness that struck many modern Germans as
medieval; at the other extreme were the socially critical, modernist
intellectuals for whom little was sacred and of whom traditionalists
disapproved; and separating off from the politically moderate enlightened
humanists were the rich, internationalist capitalists, to whom Wilhelm had not
wanted to belong, the radical socialists who had replaced religion with utopian
politics, and the Zionists who had a nationalist program that envisaged a
Jewish remigration to Palestine, the ancient promised land. These were six very
different groups that often had little in common and anti-Semites of the day
might variously have had capitalists or socialists, Hassidists or Zionists or
the intellectual avant-guard in mind, more rarely well assimilated enlightened
humanists like Wilhelm. Jews, dispersed throughout the world and thus subject
to a great range of influences, represented a particularly wide spectrum of ideas.
Under Hitler with his nationalist ambition to homogenize Germany, all these
disparate groups with their separate visions and endeavours came to be seen as
a threat. They were now equated and outlawed under the lowest common denominator,
race, an indignity in itself. Maxim Leo tells us how hard it had always been for
members of his family to perceive themselves as “Jewish”.
In the GDR, as in the
Soviet Union, anti-Semitism remained a persistent undercurrent which even the quarter-Jewish
generation of Maxim occasionally got to feel. This ideologically rigid society also
seemed to fear everything the Jews could be seen as representing: religion,
bourgeois values, capitalism, Zionism, modernism but more than anything else a
reformist, revisionist socialism in the tradition of western enlightenment. The
father of Gerhard’s later wife Nora, Dagobert Lubinski, a journalist and prominent
socialist from Düsseldorf who wrote under the name of Erich Lessing, had been
one of those non-conforming socialists who were not prepared to accept the
prescribed party line. In 1928 Moscow had declared the Social Democrats to be enemy
number one of the Communist Movement. After the revolutionary years, Moscow was
now trying to homogenize and strengthen a sprawling state with the help of
dogma and terror. Real international cooperation had become secondary. Dagobert,
who could see the stupidity of pushing a large section of the German Left into
the arms of the Nazis, had protested against this and was consequently expelled
from the Communist Party and systematically hounded by it. But he was then killed
in Auschwitz as a Jew, as were the other members of his extended family. His
daughter Nora being only half Jewish, had spent an anxious period in hiding
towards the end of the war but was eventually spared deportation. When Gerhard’s
daughter Anne later did historical research in the GDR, she found that her
grandfather’s work, which she had up till then never heard about, had been
classified with the Party’s worst heretics and was therefore inaccessible to
the public, even though his approach had long since been historically
vindicated. And as Maxim Leo explains, the split between socialists with an
eastern orientation, for whom rigid Party discipline in the perceived interests
of Moscow, however nonsensical in a wider context, was paramount, and those who
had been accustomed to the greater flexibility of western communism persisted;
in the GDR the ruling elite, who had spent their years of exile in Russia,
always remained subservient to Moscow while victims of Nazism who fled to the
west had a precarious stand and had been regarded with suspicion. The GDR was a
state run by former victims of political rather than racist Nazi persecution
who, as Leo points out, deeply mistrusted their German subjects and governed
according to principles of punishment, dogmatic faith and rigid control in
contrast to the rehabilitation which the USA had made its concern. They had moreover
learned from Moscow how to keep a population docile and conformist through
terror, preaching and propaganda, lessons they could also have learned from the
Nazis they professed to abhor.
Wilhelm, Nora and
ten-year-old Gerhard arrive in Paris as penniless refugees. Wilhelm manages to
open a small French-German bookshop which soon becomes a meeting-place for
refugees. Not long after their arrival, Gerhard contracts diphtheria. He does
not learn French properly till a kind doctor decides to teach the lonely boy in
her own time during his months in hospital. French becomes the language of his
first love. In Paris, Gerhard accompanies his father to lectures by German
intellectuals; Egon Erwin Kisch in particular has an influence on the boy. He
joins the Red Falcons, the youth group of the Socialist Party and participates
in their operations in 1936 and 1937. In 1938 the French try to expel Wilhelm
along with other impecunious refugees but the family is saved by a powerful friend,
Pierre Mendès-France. In 1940, however, the French government orders the
internment of Wilhelm and his daughters as enemy aliens and they are sent to
Gurs in the Pyrenees. Gerhard who is not yet seventeen can stay in Paris with
his mother a little longer; he is very disturbed by the separation. When the
Germans approach Paris in June 1940, Gerhard leaves his mother and makes his
way south with other refugees. In Cannes he finds work in the Grand Hotel. Eventually
a large tip enables him to leave his job and meet up with his father in
Cazaubon; Wilhelm had managed to escape from the internment camp and go into
hiding. Through his father Gerhard encounters someone working for the
Resistance and decides to join the movement, in spite of the associated dangers.
He gets a job as an interpreter with the German army and gains access to
valuable information about e.g. deportations. But he has to flee when his cover
is blown. Eventually he is caught in a trap and taken to prison in Castres. The
German officer in charge, known as the Albino, is lenient with him to the point
of deceptiveness and when gendarmes then start to beat Gerhard up in his cell,
Russian prisoners halt this with their screams. He is moved to Toulouse to face
the war tribunal. But the Albino has arranged for a military lawyer to meet him
and advise him on how to delay his trial and his almost inevitable execution.
At his hearing, Gerhard is then severely beaten until a young army officer
intervenes to forbid such treatment. As it turns out, Gerhard was lucky to have
been arrested at a time of struggle between the secret service of the army under
Canaris and the SS. It followed the assassination attempt on Hitler of July 20th
1944; the army, about to be ousted from their portfolio, had rebelliously taken
his side. When Gerhard is moved again to face a higher court, his train is attacked
by partisans who set him free. He joins them and in gratitude, he applies for membership
of the Communist Party to which those of his unit all happen to belong. A
little later Gerhard’s saviour and friend Michael is caught and hanged by the
Germans who go on to create a massacre in Tulle with hundreds of victims. Gerhard
will never be able to forget these atrocities and when he discovers that
SS-General Lammerding, who gave the order, is not prosecuted in the West, though
the French have sentenced him to death in absentia, his loyalty to the GDR is confirmed.
Gerhard’s decisions are always very personal: because Communist partisans rescued
him from the Gestapo he becomes a Communist and because the war criminal he
encountered is not punished in the West he commits himself to the East.
However, he begins his working life as a journalist for the Communist paper Freiheit in Düsseldorf, is then by
chance involved in counter-espionage for a while, and later returns to his
profession of journalism. For years he is a foreign correspondent in Geneva.
Maxim Leo would like
to understand how his grandfather coped with his position in the rigid ruling
elite of the GDR. At home and to his family Gerhard had always presented
himself as a dogmatic and unbending Communist who would allow absolutely no
critique of the Party or the State. But on examining Gerhard’s Stasi file,
Maxim discovers that professionally, Gerhard had taken a brave stand against
Party rulings on several occasions. He also realizes how precarious and
constantly endangered Gerhard’s survival was; there seemed to have been someone
shielding him, a scribbled note on one of the documents in his file discloses
that, though Leo says he was unable to decipher the signature. He leaves the
question concerning Gerhard’s cooperation with the regime hanging but it seems
perfectly possible to guess at an answer. Gerhard had made his choice, a
choice, he might eventually have felt, between two evils: a BRD that shielded
Nazi criminals and a GDR that told lies and terrorized its citizens. His choice
was honourably motivated by loyalty to his rescuers. But he could survive in
the GDR only as long as there was absolutely no evidence that he was
influencing others with his unreliable socialism. The only way to shield the
family was by making sure that its other members could not be faulted; being a
disgraced family had almost unbearable consequences in the GDR. Gerhard
himself, of course, had then spent many years working overseas where the straightjacket
was less uncomfortable.
Maxim Leo is most
deeply concerned with the effect of Gerhard’s decisions on the life of his
mother and Gerhard’s daughter Anne. Her loyalty to her father long made it
impossible for her to leave the fold of the faithful, an extraordinary
phenomenon considering her intelligence, her honesty and her questioning mind
and also her rebellious marriage to a virtual dissident, Maxim’s artist father
Wolf. Full of admiration for her father, Anne studies to become a journalist;
she is then shocked at the blatant lies and inventions published without
protest at the behest of the Party which she too is not permitted to challenge.
After enduring years of such compromises she decides to quit work and do a PhD
in history and once she has studied the Communist heretics she can no longer
continue working for the Party. From now on, she will write as an independent
journalist and historian. For Anne the conflict is between what she knows to be
right and her personal commitments. Because she is full of compassion for the
persecution her father suffered at the hands of the Nazis and full of respect
for his choices she cannot betray him. She is like a Catholic believer whose
love of God makes it impossible for her to leave a corrupt church for fear of
betraying what is dearest to her. Yet she is careful not to impose the dogmatic
framework of her life on her children; they must find their own way and she
will support them whatever they do.
Anne’s husband Wolf
comes from a very different family. Wolf’s father, Werner, grew up on his
grandparents’ farm where the four-year-old had to herd the geese all day. His
father was at war and his mother could not support her family alone. But even
after the war, the father remains virtually absent, preoccupied with his drinking
mates and nostalgic memories of his cavalry days. Upon finishing school, Werner
does an apprenticeship but when the time comes for a job in early 1933, it is
the Depression and the firm has to dismiss all of its graduates. A few months
later the situation improves and the foundry takes Werner on again. He meets his
future wife Sigrid, a typist. A marvellous time of enjoyments, skiing
vacations, bike tours, boat trips, visits to the cinema, dances, gymnastics and
“Strength through Joy” holidays begins. The economic chaos is over and
according to Sigrid’s later report, Werner is full of admiration for the government
that has achieved this. He argues with her left-wing father, on one occasion
even threatening to denounce him. But Werner does not join the Nazi Party. Late
1944 he is drafted into the army which is soon in retreat. Then comes a period
of harsh captivity which he survives and two hard years as a farm labourer in
France. In the meantime Sigrid has supported their two children, Wolf and his
sister, through the post-war years of hardship. Werner is lucky that he can
start a teachers’ training course in what will become the GDR immediately on
his return. He does well and since he quickly becomes a committed socialist,
his rise in the educational hierarchy of the GDR is rapid. The Party eventually
rewards him with a luxury flat and he leaves Sigrid and the children. Werner
had always been a womanizer. He now proceeded to forgot about his first two
children; Wolf lost contact with him once he became an adult. Maxim Leo sums
up: “Perhaps Werner was the sort of person who would have done well in almost
any system and any role. He would always have made the best of things. His
life’s happiness would not have been threatened if Hitler had won the war or if
he had happened to land in the West.” For both his grandfathers, Gerhard and
Werner, Leo suggests, the dream grew out of the trauma.
Werner’s son Wolf later
did a photographic apprenticeship as a retoucher, then worked at newspapers,
occasionally absent-mindedly getting into trouble without serious consequences.
During his years of military training this was also because he had cleverly
avoided taking the oath. Like his father, he was a hard-living womanizer but
only until he met Anne. He worked as an artist, initially illustrating the
stories for a children’s TV series. But soon there are also postcards that
discreetly express his frustration with the system and critical exhibitions
with cardboard cut-outs. On one occasion he does the unheard-of thing and
spontaneously suggests an alternative list of candidates for election to the
Society of Commercial Artists. His candidates are voted in and there are,
surprisingly, no consequences. On the occasion of the important 750th
centenary celebrations in Berlin, Wolf is given free reign to design the GDR
exhibits. He does, however, then decide not to accept the prize he is awarded
for this work; that would be going a step too far. He is gifted and therefore
in demand, rebellious and critical but all the same, ultimately supportive of
the GDR in which he has found his niche and his topics. He has learned to be
creative in this society without compromising his integrity, in contrast to his
wife who remains caught in her “straitjacket of loyalty” for much longer. In
the GDR, artists became the essential safety valve for a failing system and its
disgruntled subjects.
For the third
generation, that of the author Maxim Leo himself, the GDR had lost all
ideological meaning. The students have no qualms about repeating the lies they
are told without in the least believing them, a schizophrenic form of existence.
The West becomes their dream country; as little boys they play at fleeing
across the border and when they are older they dress up and impersonate
tourists from the West. When Gerhard takes his grandson on an unheard-of tour
of France, his fascination with the West only increases. All that matters to
this young generation is to keep out of any trouble that could limit their
future prospects. Maxim does not quite succeed in doing this; after his father
has complained about the school’s military training camp and perhaps because of
this, Maxim is refused entrance to senior high school and has to do a tedious
apprenticeship while studying for his matriculation at night to get to
university. But he manages this feat of hard work and perseverance and is
eventually rewarded with the long desired fall of the Berlin wall. At the point
in time when emigration becomes a possibility, Maxim realizes that the
collapsing GDR is too fascinating a spectacle and experience to miss: that
gradual loss of fear, that growth of courage, anger, initiative and solidarity,
and finally that dawning sense of a future. In those final days, Anne too can
find a role for herself; she becomes a coordinator for the New Forum.
I think it would be
difficult to read Maxim Leo’s book, whose title could perhaps be translated as
“Ready Your Hearts”, and remain judgemental of the Germans whom the fortunes of
war condemned to the GDR. But is there more to be learned? To outsiders like
myself it seems surprising that in this family history the socialist ideology, its
ideas and goals, is of almost no significance. Perhaps this was partly because
after the devastations of the war, there was not much of a class system left to
fight in Germany.
There is, of course,
another reason for this indifference to ideology which Leo does not really talk
about. The GDR was socialist only because it had been conquered by the Soviet
Union; as one of the Allies, she had to be given her share of the spoils of
war. For Moscow, there were war costs to be recouped and future anti-Soviet
aggression to be made impossible. Towards this end East Germany was
incorporated into its shield of satellite states that all replicated the
political system of the motherland. Attempts at modification, as in Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, were responded to with military force. In order to assure conformity
and loyalty, Russian-trained comrades were put in charge of the GDR. Change
without the blessing of Moscow was therefore quite unlikely to succeed; there
was very little that individual protest could achieve. The Soviet system imposed
on the GDR had been devised when the idealistic, ideological phase was over in
that country and it had entered the phase of consolidation. What was now
important was internal homogeneity, centralist reorganization, and military
strength. The emphasis was on dogmatic unity and absolute obedience to a controlling
central authority and these demands were automatically imposed on satellite
states. How individuals in the socially more advanced and liberal-minded Central
European countries forged a life for themselves within such prescriptions was
various. Though he does not spell this out quite so plainly, that is what Maxim
Leo’s book is partly about: adaptations to the almost unbearable. Without
Gorbachev, this state of affairs could have continued for much longer.
Most East Germans were
citizens of the GDR simply because their home was in this region of Germany.
But Gerhard and to some extent even Werner had actually chosen to make the GDR
their home. Both men had been traumatized by their war-time experiences. For
Werner, the GDR offered a windfall, opportunities that a working-class boy may
not have had in the West. After defeat, degradation and bare survival, the GDR
represented the dream of an ordered society in which people like him could make
useful contributions. That was enough. For Gerhard, the decision was motivated
by loyalty and gratitude to (some of) the people who had freed him and the
world from fascism and racism. It was a very personal decision. In the words of
Maxim Leo: “from trauma comes the dream”. People like Gerhard initially needed
the dream of social justice to cope with their traumas and the fact that that
was not really what the state they had chosen was about eventually left them
helpless. All the same, they passed the beautiful dream on to their children.
That may sound
harmless but ideologies invariably contain at least an implied division of the
world into the good and the bad. As the self-appointed representative of good,
the Socialist Unity Party in the GDR gained a pope-like status of
infallibility; individual people lost the ability to follow their consciences
and to see the world as it was. Moreover, such dualisms suggest the constant
need for a warlike struggle, of good against evil, in spite of all the talk of
peace. These dishonesties distort the lives of those on whom ideologies are
imposed, causing further trauma as the dream of the injured few is forced upon
the many. A trauma-dream often becomes a legacy through the generations. Goebbels’
club foot, in a way a fitting symbol of Germany’s inferiority and defeat,
brought him ridicule; he sought to overcome its stigma with a dream of heroic
injury. When this did not work, he and his like took revenge on the likes of Wilhelm.
Wilhelm’s trauma became that of Gerhard; Gerhard’s trauma became that of Anne;
Anne tried hard not to pass it on to Maxim. And in the end, trauma has
proliferated and the world has become quite unreal.
It is interesting to
observe that the working classes seemed completely absent from the GDR dream of
the Leo family; punishment of Nazis was the only pretence at ideology that
remained. But race and world dominion had also been absent from Werner’s and
Sigrid’s experience of Nazism. They were at the time far too young and naive to
be susceptible to such ideas; moreover, the trauma of WWI defeat from which
this ideology had grown belonged to an earlier generation. The obsessive
question as to whether someone was a Nazi sympathizer, which Maxim Leo too,
brought up in a state that prided itself on being anti-fascist, initially deems
important, makes sense only in that imaginary world of absolute good and evil. What
ordinary people quite properly want from their governments is practical
outcomes efficiently and fairly delivered and it was renewed order and
prosperity that attracted Werner and Sigrid and many like them in the early
years of Hitler’s rule.
No comments:
Post a Comment