One hundred years of cellotude continued:
Seventh part of
Chapter 1
A cello called Heinrich
Previous section: A wanderer between both worlds
New town hall of Elberfeld, postcard from 1913.
A civil servant at Elberfeld
On June 16, 1919, Max Heinrich was hired by the city of Elberfeld for a 6-month probation period as a “Diätar”, meaning basically a civil servant with a fixed-term contract. His salary was 200 Mark per month. On the same day he also got his formal registration as a resident of Elberfeld. Note that on this date, he was technically still in the army, and the war wasn’t over yet, as the Versailles Treaty was only signed on June 28th.
Elberfeld had emerged in the industrial revolution as a rapidly growing city with numerous textile factories, but it also had engineering and chemical industry, including the budding company of a certain Friedrich Bayer (1825-1880) who developed Aspirin in Elberfeld. Bayer has kept a presence there to this day, even though it moved its headquarters to the new town of Leverkusen in 1912.
In 1838, just three years after the Adler famously travelled from Nürnberg to Fürth, the railway line between Elberfeld and nearby Düsseldorf was opened. At the end of 1919, Elberfeld had some 160,000 residents and its fair share of social problems linked to its rapid industrialisation. A certain Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) knew these problems well, as he was the son of a factory owner in the neighbouring city of Barmen and went to school in Elberfeld.
Postcards from the early 20th century show a rather wonderful world, however, with the futuristic suspension railway linking Elberfeld to Barmen and the impeccable “Gründerzeit” architecture boasting elaborate art nouveau ornamentation. On August 1, 1929, Elberfeld and Barmen along with some smaller communities were merged to form the new city that was officially baptised Wuppertal in January 1930.
Now it’s high time for a family reunion. Maria and her son Richard had stayed in Dieuze during the war, living in a small house with a garden. Richard visited his birth place in 1963 and found the house was still standing, but I wouldn’t know exactly where to look for it. Richard went to school there until the war ended – at which point he was nine years old.
After the Armistice, Maria and Richard were ordered to leave Lorraine. They were only allowed to take 30 kg of luggage. They travelled to Bruchsal to stay with Maria’s stepmother and half-siblings. Richard had half a year of schooling there, before they moved on to Elberfeld to reunite with his father.
The family rented a flat in Schleswiger Straße 45, in a quiet residential area called Ostersbaum in the Northeast of Elberfeld. It is roughly one kilometre to the North of Wuppertal main station, which back then was Elberfeld Hauptbahnhof. Walking to the Hauptbahnhof from his flat, Max Heinrich also passed the Döppersberg station of the legendary suspension railway, just before reaching the main station. The picturesque view in the opposite direction, coming out of the station and walking towards the historic city centre, can be admired on many postcards from the early 20th century (just search “Döppersberg” - see my favourte example below). It has changed dramatically in the hundred years since, and not for the better.
My favourite view of Elberfeld, looking from the main station towards the city centre, with the suspension railway crossing the frame. The postcard dates from 1916 and still has the Schwebebahn station on stilts - at some point between then and 1926 a less futuristic house was built around it.
Source.
After passing the Döppersberg station, the way to Schleswiger Straße, now leads us through the pedestrianised shopping streets of Elberfeld towards the Neumarkt square with the fountain of Neptune and the “New Town Hall”, which Emperor Wilhelm II. inaugurated in 1900 along with the suspension railway. The neogothic fairytale castle with a spire 79 metres high replaced the previous town hall right in the middle of the historic centre, which today houses the Von der Heydt Museum.
The neogothic castle must have been where Max-Heinrich worked in the first decade at Elberfeld, so we now follow his daily way home from the town hall to Schleswiger Straße, which is just a ten minute walk away. We follow a series of streets named ironically after very flat areas in Northern Germany, even though they have considerable slopes to climb and some of them are connected by stairs. One of the stairs is flanked by a mural depicting various musicians including a cellist. I read that as a sign that I was on the right track.
The house where the family lived is a four storey block which may be historic but appears to have lost quite a bit of the historic details that other houses in the street still have, including the year of construction typically displayed above the entrance. I saw 1900 and 1910 shown nearby but no date on No. 45.
In December 1919, Max Heinrich passed an exam to become an office clerk. His employment document comprises three pages specifically typed out with his details and the pay scale appropriate to his work. It outlines planned pay rises every two years for 20 years starting at 4,000 Mark, and rising up to 6,500 Mark in ten steps. Apparently they counted his military service as equivalent of ten years on this scale, so he started on 5,800 Mark.
Meanwhile, the turbulent history of the Weimar Republic started to unfold and also touched Elberfeld. The Kapp Putsch of March 1920 threatened to become a civil war. Officers and members of the numerous free corps formed from dissolved military units under General Walther von Lüttwitz wanted to replace the democratically elected coalition government of Gustav Bauer with a military government under Wolfgang Kapp.
Soldiers of the Kapp-Putsch in Berlin, March 1920.
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1970-051-65 / Haeckel, Otto / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Resistance against the coup originated in Elberfeld, where representatives of the communist, socialist and social democrat parties met and jointly called to resist the putschists by general strike and political means, and thus launched the Ruhr uprising which led to violent clashes between the Red Ruhr army and armed forces including the Freikorps. The conflict did not end when the Kapp Putsch collapsed. The striking workers who had saved the republic were then violently suppressed by the very same state they had rescued.
Max Heinrich was member of the DDP (Deutsche Demokratische Partei), which was part of the coalition government targeted by the coup. So it is safe to assume that he will not have had much sympathy for the coup. On the other hand the armed resistance of the Ruhr workers wasn’t quite his kind of thing either, I would assume.
Thus I thought that the whole episode won’t have affected him much, but then I discovered a list of monuments in Elberfeld including one for the “lightning from below” on the corner of Flensburger Str. and Paradestr., close to Max Heinrich’s home and on his way to work. There we can read that on March 17 violent fights in this neighbourhood claimed the lives of 60 civilians, most of them poorly armed workers or collateral victims. At the end of that day, soldiers hastily retired and fled to nearby Remscheid.
From the Kapp Putsch via the hyperinflation of 1923 through to the global economic crisis, the 1920s were a turbulent decade but we don’t know of any turbulences in Schleswiger Straße, where life carried on in its well-ordered paths and young Richard completed his high school education. For a time, Maria’s sister Anna joined the household. She had finished the standard school education in 1917, and now Maria wanted to help her get an additional qualification. There was a choice between a school for home economics and another one for commercial / business studies. “Anna had met another girl who signed up for the home economics school, the Bergisch-Märkische Frauenberufsschule, and she just went along with her. But she didn’t learn anything there,” as Anna’s daughter told me. Moreover, she had to leave the school prematurely, as her mother fell ill and she had to return to Bruchsal to look after her. There, Anna got married in October 1924, which leaves us with the timeframe of 1920-1923 for her stay in Elberfeld. Maybe the sisters had planned this when Maria was staying in Bruchsal after being evicted from Lorraine.
Dating this stay is important for our musical subject, because Anna later told her daughters of Max Heinrich’s cello playing, and praised its quality. She said that Max Heinrich only played good music, not such stuff as others might have played. Whatever the stuff might be that he didn’t play, the compliment suggests that he must have acquired cello skills – and possibly the cello – long before then.
Read on:
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