Monday 15 July 2013

On Maxim Leo's "Haltet Euer Herz Bereit"

© 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.  

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