Germany and Me

A Brief Account of my Encounters with Germany from Birth and Through the Years

-- I --

   I was born in Heidelberg on in February, 1927 to a business man, Jacob Weingärtner, originally from Flehingen, and his wife, my mother, Grete (Kahn), originally from Offenburg.  My parents were moderately observant Jews, somewhere between orthodox and “liberal,” as was the synagogue we faithfully attended every Sabbath and holiday.

  As a kid, I went to a Kindergarten and then, at the very beginning of the Hitlerzeit, to a public school in Neunheim, not far from our house on the Moltkestraße. That lasted into my third grade, having been taught by Fräulein Sonnenschein, known for the braids circling her head and then Herr Müller, known for his Tatzen with a long stick on the palm of a culprit.

   That lasted into sometime during my third grade when Jews were evicted from regular schools and a Jewish school was established, taught by Jewish teachers who had been dismissed from their posts. I recall only one actual elementary school teacher, Herr Durlacher; the others had been thrown out of their Gymnasium or Realschule posts and were not used to teaching little kids.

   The first locus of that Jewish school were some classrooms of a regular school in Rohrbach (where I was once tripped to fall downstairs) but somewhere in my third grade we were kicked out from there and moved into a building that had housed a Jewish organization on the Bunsenstraße. That lasted until Kristallnacht, November  9,1938, now sensibly renamed Progromnacht,. On my way home I saw the smoke from the burning synagogue as I got to the Neckar to bike across the Neue Brücke.

   It was suggested to my father that he take a long walk that day, but he  was too good a German to try to evade his fate. So he was at home when they came early in the evening to arrest him, very politely,. He was even told to put on warm clothes, since Dachau, where he was to be taken, was by then quite cold.

   He returned some time in January, much thinner, with a shorn scalp and some frostbites.

-- II –

      My father had been tipped off fairly early that the American consulate in Stuttgart was giving out numbers, in the manner of a busy bakery, to determine the order in which they were to appear to get visas. He had received the required affidavit from a relative who had gone to the US much earlier. To my knowledge, everything went smoothly there, later that January or early in February. (Most noteworthy for me was the fact that for the first time I saw someone writing with his left hand.)

   Not much later all of the furniture and household items that we wanted to take with us were loaded into two huge boxes called lifts. Every item had been listed and approved for export and was checked off  by a functionary as it was carried out to be loaded. It is often forgotten that before the actual holocaust there was a period when the German policy for Jews (the Judenfrage) was emigration, provided plenty was paid for the “privilege.”

   So we got out, actually traveling in style on the Queen Mary, since my father could buy tickets with money that he could not have gotten out of Germany. We arrived in New York on March 9, 1939, a month or so after my 12^th birthday. That day was a Thursday; on the Monday after it, I was taken to a nearby elementary school to be in a sixth grade class that already housed a few other German Jewish refugees. I quickly became American. (At a speech test for some reason later on, it was noted that I had a slight New York accent.)

   Quite some time passed before I had anything further to do with Germany, except for the very important fact that I spoke German with my parents as long as they lived, into the eighties. That helped me maintain—if not improve—my German language skill to the point that when I came to write my doctoral dissertation (and first published book) on Georg Simmel, I had little difficulty basing it just about entirely on material written in German.

-- III --

   On graduating from Columbia College in 1950, my very close friend, Carl Hovde and I were each awarded a modest traveling fellowship that had hitherto mostly been used to "travel" across the street to graduate school. Carl and I surprised the associate dean when we told him we were actually going to travel. Which we did for a year on bicycle and by other means, with stops, the longest in Paris. That took me back to Germany. I was not comfortable there. In particular I very much resented the quite frequent expressions of envy that I had “gotten out” before the war. I had been “lucky” to avoid the war and its calorie-rationed aftermath. Lucky? Really! 

   That was in 1951. I did not set foot again into Germania for  another thirty years or so.  Then my German speaking wife (born in Danzig of Russian parents) and I made a trip there, speaking English whenever needed to make clear who we took ourselves to be. The trip was sightseeing plus.

--  IV --  

   There were other short trips to Germany. In   the late eighties, we went to hear the Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth. I was (am) a selective Wagner aficionado; my first  Ring was in 1942, distinguished by the fact that it was Lotte Lehmann’s last Sieglinde.

   I had a couple of visits to Berlin on different occasions and enjoyed my brief stays there. I was amused by the fact that what used to be the likes of Adolf Hitlerplatz or Göringstraße had turned into an enormous number of streets named after Jews.

  Like some other German cities, Heidelberg has instituted “reunions” of its ehemaligen jüdischen Einwohner. I went to the first three (about five years apart)—the first with my son Mark, the second with my daughter Eleanor, and the third with my grandchildren Max and Eva. With the latter, energetic youngsters, we were there for a couple of extra days and did a splendid job walking and riding all over the city and surroundings. We also did not miss out on a favorite meal of mine, consisting of super-fat white asparagus then in season.

   For each meeting, very varied programs had been planned, with many interesting sessions and some not so. The Heidelberger published a book, Erinnertes Leben, with all contributions translated into German if that was not the language in which the pieces were written. I have some pages in that volume, on one of reunion programs, among other things.

   I will conclude this account of Germany and me with a trivial effect I was able to have on Heidelberger officialdom that pleased me no end. A plaque mounted at the Altstadt end of the Alte Brücke stated that the bridge had been destroyed in World War II and rebuilt afterwards. 

   When I read that, I wrote a note to Heidelberg’s Bürgermeisterin with whom I had become friendly during our meetings, that the clear implication of that plaque was that the Americans had destroyed the bridge. But it had actually been the Germans who foolishly had blown up a medieval bridge that could not have held a tank of American pursuers, I am pleased to report that the plaque was replaced to make clear who did what to whom. I hope it is still there.