The Hands of War, Page 3

  Noticing that several dozen brawny men with rocks and sticks— hired thugs from Hamburg’s Eppendorf and Barmbeck districts— had joined the policemen near the entrance to the bar, Siegfried tried to persuade Rosa Wolff to leave the area. But she pretended to be as indifferent to the threat posed by the newcomers as she was to the rain. A few minutes later the bar began to erupt workers who, forgetting all about international brotherhood, took violent exception to the hostile attitudes of the ruffians and their police escort. Without waiting Siegfried wrapped the flap of his coat like a great sheltering wing around the diminutive Rosa and guided her through the bruising melee to the sanctuary of an unlicensed tavern two blocks away on Gertigstrasse. Space was made for them on adjoining benches in a dark corner and a lit candle was welded by its own tallow to the table in front of them. Someone fed a couple of lengths of split oak into a nearby tile stove. Rosa removed the pins from her hair, letting it fall about her shoulders so that it could dry more easily. Siegfried and Rosa both ordered cabbage soup and roasted potatoes topped by fried eggs, accompanying both courses with slowly drawn pints of local lager.

  Although the bar was gregariously boisterous, Siegfried and Rosa quietly discussed politics and literature and each took the measure of the other’s knowledge of Talmudic and other philosophies. After homemade schnapps, courtesy of the owner, a large man with a serious mustache, they began to laugh about the paradoxical absurdities of Jewish life in Hamburg. When they could laugh no more, they argued. Siegfried agreed that the large department stores were shameful in their treatment of the women who made their clothes and hats, but he challenged Rosa’s belief that Jewish ownership of the store compounded the offense. After debating utopian versus revolutionary socialism, they agreed that every prescription for violence was inherently repugnant and that bombthrowing anarchists undermined rather than advanced social justice. They also agreed that class warfare was inevitable, but concluded on a cheerful note as she promised to sponsor his membership in the wonderful consumer cooperative only a block or two from where they were sitting.

  By the time Rosa and Siegfried had completed the long walk to her home, each was convinced the other was the smartest young person of the opposite sex either had ever met. Despite the cold they talked for another half-hour at the entrance to her apartment building. Although Siegfried normally deliberated for days or sometimes for weeks before reaching an important decision, he made up his mind within minutes of leaving Rosa that he would propose to her before the New Year began.

  Despite their reputation for ignoring class distinctions, Siegfried’s parents were terribly upset when they learned he intended to marry Rosa Wolff. It wasn’t that they personally disliked her or disapproved of her political activism. But in this prosperous, cosmopolitan seaport, where successful Jews not only were emancipated but also assimilated to a degree unimagined in Russia, they had groomed their gifted son to marry one of the several Jewish merchant princesses.

  In addition to a superb German education Siegfried had been given a year of study in London, the favorite “other” city of Hamburg’s elite. His parents also had purchased a controlling interest in a thriving boot factory, anticipating the day when practical considerations would temper their son’s passion for literature and philosophy. Their solution to the problem of the petite milliner with soft eyes and a sharp mind was to exile Siegfried to America to learn the secrets of mass marketing. If Siegfried and Rosa still wanted to wed after a two-year separation, they could do so in Hamburg with his parents’ blessing.

  My mother’s parents, Rosa and Siegfried Singer.

  New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century was not a place to dampen Siegfried’s passion. Within a month he purchased Rosa’s passage on the Deutschland, a Hamburg-built liner that held the record for the fastest Atlantic crossing: five days, seven hours and thirty-eight minutes from Plymouth, England, to New York. They were wed shortly after she arrived in New York and lived in lower Manhattan for the next two years. Siegfried made an effort to learn about business, but mostly they savored the city’s cultural smorgasbord and collected books in several languages.

  Siegfried’s love affair with the works of Shakespeare, which had begun during his year of study in London, was consummated in New York by the acquisition of a Shakespeare First Folio. At the time there were only two such First Folios in America. Siegfried and Rosa’s treasure was purchased through one of New York’s most prominent publishing firms. After they returned to Hamburg, to live in a seven-room apartment on Rosenstrasse, the First Folio was the centerpiece of their collection of rare books, which attracted scholars from yeshivas and universities across Europe both before and after the war that began in 1914.

  Although he had a two-year-old daughter and a factory that was an important source of boots for the military, Siegfried volunteered for the Wehrmacht, as did thousands of Jews who might have avoided military service but who wanted to demonstrate their patriotism. Fluent in English and Russian, he was often assigned to regimental headquarters to interrogate prisoners of war. Occasionally, he surprised a captured Londoner or New Yorker with his knowledge of their city. He also surprised fellow officers by his ability to quote extended passages from the works of Nietzche.

  The regimental Junkers’ severe disdain for the Jewish intellectual who was named after a favorite hero of Aryan mythology was replaced by respect after British tanks shredded German lines in September 1918. While others prepared to surrender the overrun command post, Siegfried organized lightly armed clerks and runners to hold off the Tommies long enough for senior officers to withdraw to a new position in Belgium. He then led the surviving remnant through British lines, using darkness and his command of upperclass English to convince sentries that he was shepherding prisoners to an internment pen.

  My mother at approximately two years old.

  Siegfried was recuperating from influenza at a hospital in Belgium when the ringing of church bells signaled the armistice on November 11, 1918. While the local people were overjoyed, Siegfried’s comrades were stunned by the news that Kaiser Wilhelm had fled to exile in Holland and a republic had been declared at home. Since the German army was still firmly entrenched on foreign soil and confident of its ability to defend the Fatherland, many felt terribly betrayed. But Siegfried told everyone near him that America’s entry into the war had tilted the balance of power so drastically that continued fighting was futile. He insisted that the High Command’s greatest blunder had been to order U-boats to sink American passenger ships, and he urged anyone who would listen to be thankful it had been stopped before the homeland became the battleground.

  * * *

  During Siegfried’s recuperation, his wife, Rosa, was engaged in a tumultuous political battle that threatened to become bloody. A week before the Armistice, Hamburg was thrown into a frenzy of fractured loyalties when sailors there and in other northern ports mutinied rather than obeyed orders to take the offensive against the more powerful Allied fleet. Sensing the prospect of real power, the Socialist Party split into factions that attacked one another more zealously than they opposed the tottering monarchy. Rosa was in the streets and at countless worker-soldier council meetings, urging socialist unity, the tabling of disputes over power sharing, and concerted pressure to end the war.

  When a panicked prince dethroned the Kaiser by announcing an abdication that hadn’t occurred but couldn’t be effectively retracted, the Socialists quickly proclaimed a republic and took over the government. The new leadership included various socialist factions and even ministers from the deposed imperial regime. But it excluded Rosa Luxemburg and her more radical Spartacist faction.

  Rosa Singer agreed with the more moderate approach of the center party, which was willing to accept piecemeal socialist reforms to gain wider support for the new republic. She feared that the Spartacists’ prescription for a complete break with the politics and economics of the past would provoke civil war at home and prolong the fighting with England, France,
and America. But when Rosa Luxemburg was arrested and brutally murdered in police custody, Rosa Singer felt as if a truncheon had struck her own breastbone. Although she didn’t alter her principles, Rosa Singer’s faith in the future had been destroyed, and the loss was subtly but permanently etched in her expression.

  Although the postwar years were less deadly, Siegfried and Rosa felt they were in some ways more deranged. Reparations exacted by the war’s European victors fueled runaway inflation that pushed the price of a postage stamp to fifty billion Deutchmarks. As hunger and poverty became more widespread, unemployed shipyard and factory workers took to the streets with destitute former soldiers and sailors in a desperate effort to establish a Marxist regime in Hamburg. After bloody pitched battles, regular army units put down the uprisings and shot or imprisoned the leaders. In the regional governments to the south, right-wing paramilitary groups, also claiming to represent jobless workers, tried repeatedly to bludgeon and bluff their way into power.

  In time Siegfried and Rosa agreed that the perverted mythology of the Nazis, rather than the polemics of Lenin or Trotsky, was the pottage for which Germans would trade their undervalued republic. Streetcorner Storm Troopers handed out leaflets claiming that Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield but had been sold out and served up by Jews. These “November traitors” also had reaped enormous profits by overcharging for war materials, the troopers declared. Like spores from noxious mushrooms, Nazi propaganda seeded itself in the common misery and the conviction that Aryans had a superior culture and were better educated, harder working and more disciplined than everyone else. Even after their bungled “beer-hall putsch” landed many of their leaders in jail and made them the butt of countless jokes, the Nazis continued to attract support.

  Despite all the angst and near anarchy, however, five years after signing the Treaty of Versailles the ugly-duckling republic began to develop a long white neck. Soon beer halls that had reverberated to the ranting of brown shirts were bustling with tourists from countries that until recently had been despised enemies. Rhine steamers, Black Forest trails, taverns and ratskellers hosted countless brief encounters in foreign tongues. While Paris continued to mesmerize American expatriates, Berlin became the city of choice for sojourners who wanted to experience the sensation of living “beyond good and evil.”

  Regardless of his preference for books over boots, Siegfried shared in the burgeoning prosperity. He and Rosa frequented the Hamburg Opera, concert halls, galleries, and other cultural institutions and added rare books and precious works of Hebrew theology and philosophy to their library. They were on the boards or were members of various charitable associations and cultural societies, both Jewish and secular, and made their home a haven for serious discourse.

  For her seventeenth birthday daughter Margarete was given a season in Paris, which her mother viewed as a practical finishing school for a somewhat sheltered young woman who would soon be making life-shaping choices. Remembering her own utter bewilderment upon entering the cultural carnival of fin de siècle New York, Rosa wanted to ensure that her daughter’s choices were as informed and assured as possible. Where better than Paris, the city of light, with its matchless commitment to esthetic, intellectual, and material refinements, for her daughter to develop the confidence to deal gracefully with a world that could be extraordinarily kind one moment and unbelievably cruel the next?

  Hans, who was born nine years after my mother, and his nanny.

  Mother holding her brother, Hans, in 1922.

  My Uncle Hans, circa 1924, who was later deported and murdered in 1941.

  Rosa believed that it would also be good for her son, Hans, to have his father’s undivided attention for a time, and good for Siegfried to have Hans’s companionship. Handsome, bright and able to please without effort, Hans seemed to be everyone’s favorite younger brother. Despite the disparity in ages, Margarete’s friends adored him almost as much as she did. But Rosa felt there was a too-polite distance between father and son. She knew that Siegfried bitterly regretted letting his autocratic father saddle him with the boot factory. Running a business not only didn’t suit Siegfried, it frequently depressed him for days on end. When a friend went out of business after losing key contracts and credit, Siegfried was more upset than the injured party. He believed that competitors had ruined his friend by exploiting anti-Jewish attitudes.

  Rosa and Margarete arrived in Paris in mid-October, when chestnuts were falling and cracking their horny shells on the roofs of taxis. They sent their trunks ahead by cab and went by open carriage from the train station to The Ritz. Still a believer in democratic socialism, Rosa nevertheless wished Margarete to experience service fit for nobility. Her own household, Rosa knew, was too informal to serve as a model for a young woman who might marry into a family in which ritual formality was observed every day and not merely when guests were invited.

  Margarete’s season in Paris was undermined, however, by the crashing of financial markets, first in the New World and then the Old. Perhaps because the crimson plush at the Ritz effectively absorbed external shocks, Rosa at first underestimated the severity of the downturn. As the autumn progressed and the wind stripped the trees, there were noticeably fewer tables set in the Ritz dining room. But this seemed no more surprising than the inevitable whisperings that Jews were to blame for the crisis. Siegfried’s letters made no mention of a drastic drop in sales but spoke only of golden moments with Hans, which greatly pleased Rosa. Since Margarete had met some attractive young internationals, neither mother nor daughter was in a hurry to return to Hamburg.

  My mother (right) with her younger brother, Hans, seated directly in front of their parents.

  Their idyll ended abruptly, however, when Hans wrote Margarete that Siegfried was discouraged by the new wave of anti-Semitism fueled by the financial slump. Hans said that Siegfried was still despondent over the bankruptcy of his friend and that he believed the problem was getting insurmountable. Instead of doing things together, Hans said, Siegfried spent hours alone in his study writing articles that were never published, in response to anti-Jewish screeds.

  On the train to Hamburg, Rosa smiled at Margarete’s excitement at the prospect of being reunited with her brother and her father, but couldn’t escape the feeling that she had stayed too long in Paris. When there was no one to greet them at the station, Rosa arranged for one taxi to take her home immediately and another to follow with Margarete and the luggage.

  Rosa arrived at their apartment on Rosenstrasse to a scene of utter desolation. An hour earlier Siegfried had put on his dress uniform, locked himself in his study, taken his service revolver from a locked drawer and shot himself through the heart. The servants, hearing the shot and being unable to enter the study, had phoned the police and summoned a doctor and an ambulance. Before they arrived, however, Hans and a servant had succeeded in breaking open the heavy wooden door. When Rosa entered the room Hans was still lying on the floor embracing his father’s bloodstained chest. A handwritten note apologizing to Rosa and the family was on the desk. Siegfried gave no explanation for his action, but his family and those who knew him well attributed it to despair over the attacks on Jews, rather than to a fear of business failure.

  * * *

  It was three years later that Emma Singer Muller, Siegfried’s tall and more robust younger sister, attempted to reawaken Margarete’s interest in young men. Emma believed that women should be entitled to equal rights with men and, moreover, that it made no difference whether the woman was single or married. Witty and worldly, Emma had waited until she was almost thirty to marry, because, as she said, “it was so much fun being single.” After marrying, she saw no good reason why she should stop having fun. Rather than children she first chose to have a second apartment in Paris. Even after her husband sold the apartment to keep the French from confiscating it during The Great War, and after she gave birth to a son, Kurt, she continued to visit friends there almost every year.

  Having known a
nd loved Siegfried longer than Rosa, Emma had little patience for Rosa’s feelings of guilt about his death. Emma respected and loved her sister-in-law, but vociferously opposed the notion that Rosa could have saved Siegfried from himself. She insisted that her brother had always done exactly as he chose, that he didn’t tell others what to do and wouldn’t ask anyone for help. Even though she had been in Hamburg while Rosa was away and had seen him often, he had given no indication that he was unusually depressed but, on the contrary, had told her how pleased he was to have the opportunity to spend more time with Hans.

  Despite the hardships of The Great Depression or, perhaps, because of them, Hamburgers were socializing as never before. Unless the weather was really foul, friends and strangers would gather to share a pot of coffee or keg of beer beside the Alster, or simply to talk or listen to an accordion. Everyone who could crawl attended street fairs, and couples of all ages privately polished dance routines to compete in immensely popular contests. Emma knew that Margarete loved to dance and she knew a very attractive young man who was an accomplished ball-room dancer. Although her friend, Eddie, also was adept at opening bedroom doors, and he was not a Jew, Emma believed that she could trust him with Margarete.

  Even though she was a monarchist and he a communist, Emma appreciated Eddie for not being a conventional Hamburger who said and pretended to do whatever social norms prescribed. He was from Friesland, the North Sea area claimed by Germany and the Netherlands, but which really belongs only to itself. Although his father had died at sea, Eddie had gone to sea after finishing high school and had made the world his university. He read everything he could get his hands on and would sometimes leave a ship and stay in a foreign country until he was ready to sign on with another. After seven years, he was able to speak seven languages and knew quite a bit about the cultures that competed for prominence, commerce or merely space in the world. Along the way he acquired an abiding interest in politics and philosophy and a passion for the arts, but never lost the impish streak that amused and occasionally confounded those around him. Emma noted that other people also turned to him for unorthodox direction or, in her case, collaboration, perhaps because they sensed that whatever he undertook would have an interesting, if not a completely successful, outcome.