when the music stops

One hundred years of cellotude continued:

Ninth part of

Chapter 1

A cello called Heinrich

Previous section: An amateur string quartet

A rare solo portrait of Max Heinrich possibly from Nazi times but I don't have a date for this one. The background looks vaguely urban so probably Wuppertal, and probably taken by Richard.

A cello is silenced

While we were distracted by the shenanigans at the pawnshop, the Nazis had taken power on January 30, 1933, starting a new era which they claimed would last a thousand years. There were some protests in Wuppertal, but then the events unfolded very much the same way as elsewhere. In local elections on March 12, the NSDAP obtained 37 seats on the city council, only narrowly missing absolute control. On March 28, some 24 civil servants of the city administration were suspended on political grounds, to be fired later. After the law to “restore the German civil service” of April 7, 1933, there was another wave of dismissals. On April 1, books were burned outside Barmen town hall as elsewhere. SA men enforced a boycott of Jewish shops. In the first meeting of the newly elected city council, the delegates of the communist party were excluded, giving the NSDAP absolute control of the council. It promptly delegated decision making to a smaller committee. Just two months after seizure of power in Berlin, Wuppertal was also under Nazi control.

Cultural life was also aligned with Nazi ideology. From 1935, Wilhelm Mühlhausen led the city’s office of cultural affairs. He made sure that composers with Jewish ancestry, such as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Jacques Offenbach, and Giacomo Meierbeer disappeared both from concert programmes and from the decorations of Elberfeld Stadthalle, its major music venue.

As mentioned, Max Heinrich and Maria now lived in their new flat in Gronaustraße 35 – technically in Barmen, but in fact only about a kilometre away from their former home in Schleswiger Straße and the centre of Elberfeld. The house is on the southern slope of the Hardtberg, with the city’s botanical garden behind its back and the front looking out across the river Wupper and towards the green hills beyond the valley. It still looks very presentable and desirable today.

Walking downhill one gets to the main road linking Barmen and Elberfeld, now named after Barmen’s most famous son, Friedrich-Engels-Allee. If Max Heinrich’s new position required him to work in Barmen town hall, which after 1929 became the main site of the united city administration, he will have taken the suspension railway to get there.

According to a rental contract from 1960, the flat consisted of three rooms plus the kitchen and was located on the first floor. Granddaughter Margarete only recalls two rooms. Initially the family also had an attic room, where Richard could stay when coming home from university. The toilet was halfway up the stairs and shared between four flats. There was no bathroom, only the communal bath house. I assume that the property has been updated since, but haven’t checked inside.

Max Heinrich and Maria stayed in the flat for the rest of their lives. A rental contract dated 1954 comes with an entire brochure detailing the terms and conditions. Making music and singing was forbidden from 22h to 8h, and also from 13h to 15h. The landlord was a Mr. Goebel living in Eisenärzt, Upper Bavaria. At least he couldn’t hear from there if Max Heinrich ever broke the rules by playing his cello after 8 pm or at lunch time.

Not that Max Heinrich was inclined to break any rules. In the new social order aligned with the Nazi ideology, Max Heinrich apparently thought he had to go with the flow in order to avoid suffering the consequences, especially because of his vulnerability after the recent criminal affair at the pawnshop. The following events are drawn from his denazification files at the state archive of Northrhine Westphalia at Düsseldorf. In the process, he was classified as category IV. Followers (Mitläufer).

In November 1933, Max Heinrich joined the Stahlhelm, an association of former soldiers. Whereas this organisation had been regarded as the armed branch of the DNVP and hostile to the Weimar Republic, under Nazi rule it soon became the only organisation that wasn’t directly affiliated with the Nazi networks. Its independence of the new regime wasn’t going to last, however.

On April 1, 1934, the Stahlhelm was merged into the SA, making Max Heinrich a reserve officer in the SA (until the end of 1937). According to his lawyer in the denazification process, he got involved as a cellist, in order not to get assigned more unpleasant tasks.

He also joined various Nazi organisations including NS-Volksfürsorge and Reichsbund Deutscher Beamter from May 1933, and then NS-Reichskriegerbund, Reichskolonialbund, and Reichsluftschutzbund in 1935. After the war he said that the leader of the local NSDAP Ortsgruppe (local group), a certain Mr Voss, lived in the same house and pressured him to join such organisations. He believed he had to give in to this pressure but always chose activities related to general welfare and not obviously linked to the Nazi ideology. He hoped that this way he would be able to avoid having to enter the party itself.

At the beginning of 1937 both Max Heinrich and Maria resigned from the protestant church. Henceforth, eg in the census of 1939, they gave “gottgläubig” as their religion, meaning, believing in God. In the denazification process he stated the reason for leaving the church was that he had no interest in belonging to a religious community. However, he still attended the baptisms and confirmation ceremonies of his grandchildren.

The time and place of this resignation from church membership are problematic, although the denazification process didn’t pick up on that. In May 1934, the Synode of Barmen (where Max Heinrich happened to live) had clarified in the “Barmen Declaration” that Christians were to trust and obey the word of God as personified in Jesus Christ rather than secular powers. This declaration was interpreted as the foundation of the Bekennende Kirche and the protestant resistance against the Nazi system. Perhaps in Wuppertal, specifically, as it was the birthplace of the Barmen Declaration, there was pressure on civil servants to turn their back on the church?

In May 1938, Max Heinrich gave in to pressure from his superiors in the city administration and applied for membership in the Nazi party. His membership was backdated to May 1937. Both of these events were considered normal procedure at the time.

Increasing pressure from the Nazi-aligned hierarchy also silenced the string quartet. One of the members was Jewish, and maybe that diligent neighbour, Mr Voss, had figured that out. Max Heinrich’s superiors in the administration told him not to spend his spare time with Jews.

According to family legend, he then said (perhaps to family members rather than to the relevant supervisor): “If I can’t play with whom I want, I won’t play at all!” He wrapped the cello in its brown linen bag, stuffed it on top of the kitchen cupboard (we don’t recommend this kind of storage!) and never played again. Assuming that this happened in 1938 (as we heard that in 1937 he played cello at the SA as well). he spent up to 19 years playing the cello between the wars.

Obviously, it was the honourable thing to do not to continue playing quartets with a Nazi-compatible line-up. On the other hand, I find it shocking that he fell silent for the rest of his life and left his poor old cello idle for decades. As an alternative kind of protest he could have played the Bach suites for solo cello for the duration of the Nazi period, that would have kept his musical mind exercised. In 1927, the year of the quartet photos, Pablo Casals played the suites in the nearby cities of Düsseldorf and Essen. Both cities were easy to reach by train, but sadly we don’t know whether Max Heinrich attended any of these concerts, or whether he knew the suites at all. Back then they weren’t quite as famous as they are today. After 1945, he could have continued playing with anybody he wanted.

What I find even more shocking is that he didn’t talk about his past life as a cellist, at least not with my father. He had regularly visited his grandparents in Wuppertal and was 19 when Max Heinrich died. It was only at the funeral, when a cellist turned up to play Ave Maria, that my father found out that his grandfather had played the cello once upon a time. His sister, by contrast, recalled that her grandfather had mentioned his past life as a cellist and felt sorry that none of his three descendants was continuing the musical tradition.

After the quartet stopped playing, the cello spent the next two decades on top of a cupboard while the family muddled through and remained relatively lucky in horrific times. Wuppertal suffered heavy bombardments but the house in Gronauer Straße was spared. Their son Richard, who had hastily taken his final exams in 1933 before his (Jewish) professors were removed was able to complete his two years of practical teacher training (Referendarzeit) close to home in Barmen and in Düsseldorf.

Portrait of Richard in his 20s, from a negative found among his photography stuff.

In November 1938, Richard married Ruth Düsselmann (1908-1993), whom he had met while they were both students of the natural sciences at Bonn University and passed their final exams at the same time. Her parents and maternal grandparents had been active in the Alsace-Lorraine region before 1918, as had Richard’s parents. The birthplaces of Ruth and Richard, Merlenbach and Dieuze, are less than ten kilometres apart. Ruth’s maternal grandfather, Christoph Gottlieb Kauer, had been a railway man like Richard’s paternal grandfather, and almost exactly at the same time. He also followed the construction projects, moving along the Alsatian line south to north until his final stop at Adamsweiler where he became the station master. Ruth’s mother Helene was the youngest of five daughters of the Imperial station master – I will tell their story some other time. Two of Helene’s sisters remained unmarried, however, and will turn up in this story again.

Portrait of Ruth in her 20s, from a negative found among Richard's photography stuff.

Helene married her cousin, the adventurous merchant Julius Düsselmann from Krefeld with the intention of taming him and successfully talked him out of plans to emigrate to America. Still, his professional life was a bit of a rollercoaster.

As Ruth and Richard were planning their wedding, Julius was busy setting up his own textile factory, Kleiderfabrik Ostland, in Königsberg, East Prussia. It was originally a spinout of a company in Rheydt (today part of Mönchengladbach) where Julius had started working as a salesman in 1932.

After getting married, Richard transferred to East Prussia, meaning that his son, born at Königsberg in 1939, spent the first few years of his life as the little prince in the glamorous flat of the factory owner, attended by three women, namely his mother Ruth, her mother Helene and Helene’s sister Kätha.

In 1942, Max Heinrich and Maria travelled to Königsberg to attend the baptism of their second grandchild, Richard’s daughter Margarete. Richard also was on holiday from his uneventful military service spent as a Gefreiter (second rank from the bottom of the scale) in Lapland.

On this occasion, Richard and Julius could observe from the balcony of the flat (located centrally near Königsberg castle on the border of the lake) the very first tentative bomber attacks on the city. They understood that the city wasn’t safe and thus the family made arrangements to withdraw in good time.

Back in Wuppertal, two pocket diaries give us an idea of Max Heinrich’s social network in 1943 and 1945. The very occasional dates don’t appear to point to anything of interest, but the birthdays of more than 50 people are marked in each of the calendars, often with the year of birth and current address, suggesting that Max Heinrich meticulously copied these details over from year to year.

Most are men, many live nearby. I systematically searched for these people online in the hope of finding members of the string quartet, but couldn’t find any indications of musical activities.

What is conspicuous, however, is the large number of names associated with local businesses, some of which have survived into the 21st century, although in some cases only as brand names. There is the producer of widely known lawnmowers, Brill – we will get back to that connection in postwar times. Of musical interest is the entry for Hermann Kluge, born 1885. An eponymous man (his father?) had in 1876 left the piano factory Ibach and started an independent factory for piano keyboards in Barmen. In the 20th century, the company established itself as a world-leading manufacturer. It produced the keyboards for the piano manufacturer Steinway & Sons, which eventually bought up Kluge. Since 2007, Kluge has moved production from Wuppertal to nearby Remscheid.

Other presumed entrepreneurs in the birthday calendar include the founder of the gears factory Hugo Kautz, the ribbon maker Hackenberg, the engineering company Blasberg, and the printer Baak. The names Dürholdt, Homberg and Voß may also be linked to local businesses. There is also a teacher and a doctor of unspecified academic interests, but with the entrepreneurs alone, Max Heinrich could have filled a large table. The round would have been a bit subdued come 1945, as ten of the contacts had disappeared in the two years since the earlier diary.

Read on:

Silence after the war (final part)