Alex's Wake (8 page)

On March 31, another ad declared that remodeling had been finished and that the new store—
Mantelhaus Goldschmidt
, or Goldschmidt's “House of Coats”—would be opening in a few days. Then a week later, on April 7, Alex announced, “The remodeling of my House is complete. My new store will now be a special House of Coats. By concentrating on a single special line, I will be able to be even more competitive. My famous good quality, which was already inexpensive, will become even less expensive. The selection will be even greater! Grand Opening tomorrow, Tuesday, April 8, at 10:00 a.m.”

One week later, in an ad framed by images of bunnies, lambs, blooming lilies, hatching chicks, and romping children, Alex announced a “Great Easter Sale At Very Low Prices”: “We have received a brand
new shipping of the smartest spring and summer coats. The selection surpasses everything you have seen so far . . . every size, from Girls' and Teenagers' coats to extra wide and long Ladies' coats in all modern fabrics. Come and see for yourself how competitive we are!”

By June, Alex was proclaiming that his exclusive stock included “Fur coats, light-colored fleece coats, gabardine coats, leather coats, coats of English-style fabrics, Macintoshes, modern coats for travel and sport, practical, comfortable, durable, and inexpensive, in all sizes, extra large and extra long.
Mantelhaus Goldschmidt
is in a class of its own, the premiere house for coats in all of Northwest Germany!”

Alex's customers, many of whom had patronized his House of Fashion for nearly two decades, faithfully followed him to his House of Coats. He encouraged their enthusiasm with a steady stream of hearty advertisements, demonstrating almost daily that here was a man who knew how to move the merchandise. Despite the effects of the worldwide Depression, business remained good.

But buried in the minutes of the same city council meeting that had granted Alex the authority to proceed with his new plan were six lines of testimony offering a chilling preview of the fate that was slouching toward the
Mantelhaus
and, indeed, toward all of Germany and the world beyond. One of the council members complained that Herr Goldschmidt had already been planning his renovations for some time and questioned why the city council should subsidize his business venture. This councilmember was Carl Röver, representing the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

The Nazi Party had emerged from the ruins of German pride in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in 1918 and out of the desperation caused by the economic calamities of the early twenties, when runaway inflation rendered German currency practically worthless. On November 9, 1923, a thirty-four-year-old Austrian who had served as a corporal in the German army during the Great War and who, like Alex Goldschmidt, had been awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, attempted to foment a national revolution from the speaking platform of a beer hall in Munich. The putsch failed and the young revolutionary landed in jail, but Adolf Hitler's campaign for National Socialism had begun.

Within five years, bolstered by a relentless repetition of charges that the German army—and by extension, Germany itself—had been “stabbed in the back” by the “November criminals” who surrendered at the armistice, and by inveighing against the undue influence of Jews and Communists in the economic world order, the Nazi Party had won a small but committed group of followers. In the elections of 1928, the National Socialists attracted 9.8 percent of the vote in the state of Oldenburg, earning them a seat on the Oldenburg city council. The Nazis chose their regional leader, or
Gauleiter
, Herr Röver, to represent them. His vote against Alex's plans in February 1930 was not enough to derail them. But his day would come soon enough.

Seven months later, in the elections of September 1930, the Nazis polled 27.3 percent of the Oldenburg state vote. In the ensuing months, they began to campaign even more heavily in the Northwest, appealing directly to the farmers who had been among the first in Germany to feel the full effects of the Depression. Their platform included calling for cheaper artificial manures, cheaper electricity, higher tariffs on imported corn and wheat, and lower taxes. They bolstered their appeal with mass rallies, fully staged extravaganzas featuring dramatic torchlight parades, dozens of distinctive black-on-red flags, and martial music designed to boil the blood and stiffen the spine. On May 5, 1931, Adolf Hitler himself traveled to Oldenburg for a rally in the
Pferdemarkt
, and a little more than a year later, on May 29, 1932, 48.4 percent of the voters in the state of Oldenburg cast their ballots for the Nazi Party. Though not an absolute majority, that number represented more votes than any other party had achieved. The National Socialists were constitutionally mandated to form a government, making Oldenburg the first state in the country to have duly elected Nazi leaders. The new president of the state ministry was Carl Röver.

Although it would be months before National Socialism would achieve the rule of law over all of Germany, Oldenburg would prove to be an able laboratory in which to cultivate its culture of violence and thuggery, not to mention its long-held antipathy to what it termed “the Jewish race.” The Nazi imagination was stimulated by a prurient vision of a Master Race that sprang from the sacred soil of Germany, a race of
blond, blue-eyed bodies through which coursed uncorrupted streams of the reddest, purest blood. Years earlier, in 1920, the nascent party had clearly stated its views in its initial twenty-five-point platform. “Only members of the nation may be citizens of the State,” it declared. “Only those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. Accordingly, no Jew may be a member of the nation.” This need for “racial purity” was at the heart of the Nazis' conviction that they alone possessed the secret and the will to create a superior national culture and a powerful state that would last, in Hitler's boast, for a thousand years.

Hitler spoke of the need to “cleanse” the German body politic of the “corrupt” influence of foreign Jewish forces and “to remove from specified positions important to the state those elements that cannot be entrusted with the life or death of the Reich.” Thus was born what came to be known in German as
Arisierung
and in English as Aryanization: a comprehensive expropriation of all social, cultural, and material possessions that belonged to the Jews of Germany, and their redistribution into the hands of the more deserving Master Race.

Aryanization was a fancy five-syllable synonym for state-sponsored theft. Among its earliest examples was the forced sale, in the late autumn of 1932, of Alex Goldschmidt's beautiful house on Oldenburg's Gartenstrasse, to a Nazi functionary named Heinrich Barelmann. The sale price was 26,000 RM, a sum that represented no more than a quarter of what the house was worth. The Goldschmidts sold much of their furniture, dismissed the cook, the housekeeper, and the gardener, and moved into a small apartment at 35 Würzburgerstrasse, near the railroad tracks a bit north and west of the
Pferdemarkt
. Having invested more than twenty years of hard work and determination to reach a level of achievement commensurate with the examples set by Levi and Moses, what must Alex have felt at this humiliating and infuriating confiscation of his house, the very symbol of the safety and security that he thought he possessed?

But it was only the beginning. On Monday, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg, and the blows began falling one after another. On April 1, 1933, the now fully empowered Nazis staged a boycott of Jewish-owned
businesses across the country, with storm troopers dispatched to stand outside stores with signs reading “Germans! Defend Yourselves! Don't Buy From Jews!” Six days later, Hitler's Reichstag passed the Law for the Restoration of Tenure for the Civil Service, legislation stating that “civil servants who are not of Aryan ancestry” were to be immediately dismissed. The response was ruthless, as Jewish government workers, police officers and firefighters, postal workers, librarians, museum curators, and artists who were employed by state-supported cultural institutions were summarily fired.

A month later, on Wednesday, May 10, the National Socialist Student Association staged what it proudly declared to be “the public burning of destructive Jewish writing” in the square in front of the State Opera House in Berlin. The students lit a huge bonfire and hurled an estimated twenty thousand books into the flames, including works by Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka. In their zeal, the student firemen, egged on by a speech from Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, also burned books by non-Jews such as Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Helen Keller.

Over the next two years, more regulations were put in place, from denying Jews entry to public baths and swimming pools across Germany to forbidding Jewish youth groups to wear uniforms or carry banners. But these were mere preludes to the ordinances announced at the annual Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg in September 1935.

From September 11 to 15, the gathering featured high-decibel speeches by day and spectacular torchlight parades by night, faithfully documented by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. On the last day of the conference, Adolf Hitler himself made a speech, declaring that the international Jewish conspiracy was growing ever more dangerous and that the German people, filled with righteous outrage, were ready to arise and defend themselves. In order to prevent such confrontations from occurring, and in order for the German
Volk
to enjoy “tolerable relations with the Jewish people,” Hitler declared that it was time for a “singular momentous measure,” a “legislative solution” to the ongoing, vexing Jewish Problem.

That solution, a codification of the racial theories that formed the basis of so much Nazi ideology, came to be known as the Nuremberg Laws. The Reich Citizenship Law drew a major distinction between Germans and Jews. From then on, there were to be “citizens of the Reich,” who enjoyed full political and civic rights, and “subjects of the Reich,” who would be entitled to none of those rights. To qualify as a “citizen,” one had to prove that one possessed only pure German blood, which led to the next part of the Nuremberg Laws, the Law for the Defense of German Blood and Honor. It prohibited marriage and extramarital sex between Germans and Jews and also protected the flower of German female purity by making it illegal for any Jewish home to employ as a nanny, housekeeper, or maid a German woman under the age of forty-five.

Finally, the Nuremberg Laws codified the Nazi concept of Judaism as a “race” by defining Jews strictly according to their parentage. Keeping kosher, attending synagogue, or holding a particular religious belief had no bearing; the new laws defined a Jew simply as anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents. And as a Jew, one was no longer a citizen, could no longer vote or hold office, and was subjected to constant and increasing levels of fear and intimidation.

Over the next three years, the Nazis issued more and more edicts, decrees, and regulations. Public parks, libraries, and beaches were closed to Jews. Jews were excluded from the general welfare system. Driver's licenses belonging to Jews were declared invalid. Even if he held a winning ticket, a Jew could not win the national lottery. Jews were forbidden to keep carrier pigeons and other pets. Curfews were announced in German cities; Jews had to be off the streets by 8:00 p.m. in winter and 9:00 p.m. in summer. Jews were only allowed to shop for food after 4:00 p.m., by which time most of the fresh produce had been cleared from the bins. And all Jews were required to adopt a new middle name: “Sara” for women and “Israel” for men.

In these and countless other ways, the Jews of Germany were rendered the Other, stateless strangers in their own land. These decrees represented interim solutions to the Jewish Problem, as the Nazis did their best to convince Jews to emigrate.

Throughout this legal and social onslaught, Alex Goldschmidt remained unconvinced that he and his family were in genuine danger. “I fought for the Kaiser,” he declared confidently to anyone who would listen. “Hitler can't touch me.” But Alex's certainty and self-assurance were no match for the unrelenting venality of the forces aligned against him. His proud boast about his military service must have rung a little hollow even to him once the Reich Propaganda Ministry ordered the names of Jewish soldiers stricken from the lists of honored dead on World War memorials. Business at “the premiere house for coats in all of Northwest Germany” began a steady decline after the April boycott, and within two years the Goldschmidts had to abandon their apartment on Würzburgerstrasse for an even smaller dwelling at 53 Ofenerstrasse, a large blue apartment building that had become a refuge for many Jewish families.

My father became convinced of the prudence of leaving Germany and made plans to move to Sweden in the spring of 1936, when he was twenty-two years old. He leased an apartment above a milk bar in Stockholm and was days away from leaving his homeland when he met a young violist in Frankfurt and decided to stay in Germany to be with her, a story I have told elsewhere. His older sister, Bertha, immigrated to England and became a gardener. She married late in life and died in 1998, just days before her eighty-ninth birthday. But his younger sister Eva and his brother Klaus Helmut had to navigate their perilous way through the 1930s as schoolchildren in Oldenburg.

I never met my uncle, of course, and my father professed to have retained few if any memories of his younger brother, perhaps because of the passage of time, perhaps due to deep feelings of guilt. He once told me that I bore an unspecified physical resemblance to Helmut, but other than that, he said next to nothing about him. So virtually everything I know about my uncle's childhood I owe to the extraordinary cache of documents unearthed by the filmmaker and longtime Oldenburg resident Farschid Ali Zahedi.