an international family history

Some thoughts on

Café Heimat
Louise Jacobs
Ullstein Taschenbuch 2007

This is one of several interesting books the street libraries of Düsseldorf offered me this month, and I read it immediately in my ongoing quest to learn how best to distil family history into book format.

Jacobs is a household name in Germany as a leading brand of coffee. It is the standard middle of the road coffee that your aunties would share at their Kaffeeklatsch since the 1950s and 60s. By the time I started drinking coffee, this brand was so desperately uncool I probably never bought their coffee. Also, I was shopping for fair trade, single origin coffee of course. Note that the whole Fair trade concept is largely motivated by companies like Jacobs who developed clever ways of keeping the money that consumers pay for their coffee in Bremen, rather than paying producers in the developing world a fair share of it.

Thus I didn't read the book for the coffee connection (although I'm sure the brand recognition helped the author to get it published), and I also don't care how much money the Jacobs family earned with the coffee business and how many race horses they bought with it. So let's look at it as just another family history with interesting international connections.

The story telling switches back and forth between two branches of her family tree, namely that of her maternal grandmother Ann Jessurun, whose name line descends from Sephardic Jews in Portugal who came to Hamburg at one point (glimpses of that lineage are on GedBas). During Nazi times her great-grandparents with two young daughter emigrated to Portugal, and onwards to the US. Later her grandmother ended up in Nicaragua, and her grandaunt in Bresil. I'm loving the Latin vibe here.

Her paternal family comes from a farmstead near Bremen, which has been handed down to the oldest son since the 16th century, so nothing too exotic there. The excitement comes from the younger sons who have to go out into the world to find another way of earning a living. Her great-granduncle went to Bremen to set up a shop there (born in 1869, so a little bit older than our shop keeper Julius, born 1883). Her grandfather Walther Jacobs went to America to learn all about capitalism and then came back to Bremen to work with his uncle in the shop, which he then turned into the successful coffee business.

That is obviously more than enough material to fill a book and keep readers interested with the back and forth, culture clashes, success stories and deathly dangers. The author adds an extra layer to it with the discovery story of how she found out about various relatives - not surprisingly as she was still around 20 when she investigated all this and discovered lots of things that clearly weren't discussed openly in the family.

She also dramatises the story with dialogues which may in part come from the memories her older relatives shared with her, but in other parts must have been made up. To me when I write about family history, this would be a bridge too far. While I am happy to speculate about thoughts and motivations, I wouldn't put words in people's mouths when I don't have a record or evidence that they actually said them. In summary, not an example I would follow, but an interesting read nonetheless. I suspect it may have been inspired in part by the Ullstein novel by Sten Nadolny about the Ullstein family who founded the eponymous publishing house where both books appeared.

What's missing from the book? There are obvious asymmetries in the way the Nazi times are treated in the two branches. The tribulations of the Jewish family having to emigrate are covered at great length, but for the coffee family the 1000 years seem to be passing quite quickly. Now that the membership files of the NSDAP are on open access, there may be another journey of discovery to be had here. I note also that two other grandparents are just floating by without revealing much about their lives, namely the wife of Walther Jacobs, Lore Beckmann, and the husband of Ann Jessurun, Fritz Grobien.

Oh, and the music is missing too. The one reason I am interested in the Sephardim is that I happen to love their music, and that isn't even mentioned. There is some singing on special occasions and I recall somebody in the family played cello at one point, and great-grandfather Fritz Jessurun shows off his dance moves late at night in a jazz bar in New York, but for wealthy and cultivated families in the early 20th century, there is less music than I would have expected. Oh, the Jessurun girls got to hear Albert Einstein play his violin - because they were staying with a family friend whose job involved delivering eggs to the great physicist.

a book for our time

Some thoughts on

Mein Opa, sein Widerstand gegen die Nazis und ich
(My Grandfather, His Resistance Against the Nazis and I)
Nora Hespers
Suhrkamp 2021

Nora Hespers grew up rolling her eyes at her father’s outrageous stories about how his father was an important resistance fighter against the Nazis from the very beginning and how they executed him by hanging him from a butcher’s hook. After her father left the family and disappeared from her life, she never heard the name Theo Hespers mentioned again, as nobody outside the family seemed to be aware of his story. Until the fateful day when a colleague at the broadcaster where she worked casually mentioned that he had written his PhD thesis about her grandad and would she perhaps like to take part in a radio show about him?

This jaw-dropping moment sparked a blog, evolved into a podcast, and eventually crystallised into this very impressive and deeply moving book, which intersperses Theo Hespers’ biography with the journey of discovery undertaken by his granddaughter after she began to realise that the wild stories she heard as a child were largely true, actually. The learning experience that started in autumn 2012 and snowballed through to the completion of the book in 2020 became all the more dramatic as some of the history repeated itself in ways that were unconceivable at the beginning, making it all the more important to pay attention to the lessons of the past.

West Germany honoured the resistance of a very few select people including the White Rose circle around the students Sophie and Hans Scholl, and the July 20 (1944) coup attempt led by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The famous book Das Gewissen steht auf by Annedore Leber, which we had on our shelves when I grew up contains biographies of 64 members of various resistance efforts. (An English version has been published as Conscience in Revolt) In the GDR, the emphasis was naturally on communists fighting the Nazi regime, including the group known (in Nazi documents, not in their own understanding) as the Rote Kapelle (featured in the recent movie From Hilde, with love).

As Nora Hespers notes, the resistance of the July 20 movement only awakened at the time when it was obvious that the war was lost. The officers involved had previously served Hitler’s army without resisting too much. In contrast, her grandfather, motivated by a deep Christian humanism (but also critical of church officialdom) recognised and militated against the sheer inhumanity of nazism from the very beginning. Therefore he and his family had to flee to the Netherlands as early as April 1933 and had to flee further when the Netherlands and Belgium were occupied. At one point, Theo had the opportunity to escape from Dunkirk to England but would have had to leave his family behind, which he refused to do.

This early anti-fascist engagement makes it practically inevitable to compare his story to the modern developments. At the stage where we are now, the likes of Theo Hespers are shouting from the rooftops that we have to stop fascism. Other early resisters around him who also feature in the book include Hans Ebeling (nickname Plato) from Krefeld, Max Behretz (executed 1942), Josef Thome, Josef Steinhage (cofounder of the antifascist paper Der Deutsche Weg, Peter Lütsches, Selma Mayer. Many of Hespers contacts were from various catholic movements, but he didn’t fundamentally object to working with communists united in the cause against fascism.

I read this sort of books partly as examples of how to turn family history into something that is relevant and interesting to humans beyond the family circles in question (which worked out amazingly well for the Hespers family). In this case there was an additional overlap of interest as Theo Hespers’ family lived near Mönchengladbach, in the village of Dahl, which is between Mönchengladbach and Rheydt. (Rheydt was merged into the bigger city in August 1929 and demerged at the specific request of Joseph Goebbels, who hails from there, then merged again in the 1970s.) My grandmother Ruth went to school in Rheydt, and the family lived there from 1923 until they moved to Königsberg in 1935. I didn’t spot any familiar names in the book, and she wasn’t quite the same age as Hespers (she’s from 1908, he from 1903) but I love the idea that with enough info about the social networks around both, one could probably find a connection with fewer than the famous six degrees. I was also intrigued by the very fleeting mention on page 53) that Nora Hespers’ great-grandfather might have ended up owning Kaiser’s Kaffee (a chain of grocery stores originating in Viersen).

Speaking of which, I think a book like this should definitely have an index - if only to save me the trouble of noting down all the names and page numbers. The other thing I missed was: What did that colleague write about Theo in his thesis? I may have missed something but I didn't see it mentioned or cited as a source again.

Nora Hespers launched her blog and podcast as Die Anachronistin, a word merged from the German versions of a (female) chronicler and anachronism, as she describes herself as a chronicler fallen out of the time she's writing about. Unfortunately the times have somehow looped back since then, such that this book about how brave people resisted the Nazis in the 1930s has turned into a very important book for our time, not anachronistic at all.

PS This English-language web page from her publishers seems to be an attempt to sell translation rights, which doesn't appear to have worked so far. Would be good to see more international publicity for this story though.

lost cities in literature

I have read several historic novels set in Oxford recently (see list at the bottom), enjoying the discoveries to be made even in a familiar environment (having lived here for more than 30 years now). This set me thinking about my lost cities series (about towns and cities where my direct ancestors lived before 1972) - it would be doubly interesting to read fiction set in these places both from the perspective of knowing (most of) the cities and to gain insights into the kind of places they were when (or before) my ancestors lived there. It's all about getting a sense of place, so I expect that some of the books I find will be good at conveying that and others won't. I also appreciate some real historic people among the fictional characters.

Off the cuff I can think of only one historic novel I've read that is set in a city from my series, and that's the very impressive Riemenschneider by Tilman Röhrig (about the late Gothic / early Renaissance sculptor who lived in Würzburg and the rather gory Peasants War).

In an effort to find more novels, I'll paste in my list of cities here and try to fill it with lots of book titles too (and make them bold once I've read them). Books are all in German so far but I will consider other languages as well.

Cities listed in chronological order, sorted by the year in which the city was lost to my direct ancestors (where a second end year is given, it indicates the continued presence of other relatives):

• Idstein 1714-1804 - Die Hexe von Nassau: by Nicole Steyer
• Breslau 1830 - 1877 Schuhbrücke: Ein Breslau-Roman by Wolf Kampmann
• Strasbourg 1901 - 1908 - Die Patisserie am Münsterplatz a trilogy by Charlotte Jacobi; Wie der Weihnachtsbaum in die Welt kam by Astrid Fritz (Author), Andrea Offermann (Illustrator); Les nuits de Strasbourg, by Assia Djebar
• Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023
• Tangermünde 1888 - 1916 - Grete Minde, a famous novella by Theodor Fontane
• Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current - Der Seidenweber by Thorsten Weiler
• Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
• Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952;
• Bonn 1929 - 1934 - Beethoven by Felix Huch
• Rheydt 1923 - 1935
• Münster 1928-1929, 1934-1936 - Die Stadt der Auserwählten Michael Römling
• Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
• Aachen 1936 - 1940
• Königsberg 1935 - 1945 - Die Buchhändlerin von Königsberg by Christian Hardinghaus
• Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
• Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
• Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961 - Und morgen eine neue Welt: Der große Friedrich-Engels-Roman Tilman Röhrig
• Freiburg 1928-1930, 1957-1961 - Der Totentanz zu Freiburg: Historischer Kriminalroman by Astrid Fritz (Author) - 7th of a whole series of crime novels set in medieval Freiburg
• Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
• Würzburg 1961 - 1968 - Riemenschneider, Tilman Röhrig
• Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983 - Einstein im Bade by Daniel Mellem
• Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015

Cities organised geographically, many are in Northrhine Westphalia (NRW), some further south, a few further east:

NRW: Aachen Bonn Elberfeld / Wuppertal Gütersloh Hamborn Krefeld Minden Münster Rheydt

Southwest: Bad Münster Bad Kreuznach Bad Nauheim Bruchsal Freiburg Idar-Oberstein Idstein Lorsch Strasbourg Würzburg

East Breslau Königsberg Tangermünde

Tilman Röhrig's big novel on the other Tilman, Riemenschneider, which vividly brings Renaissance Würzburg to life. The author was born in the next village up the hill from where my great-great-aunt, my grandparents and my father lived their retirement years, but I understand that his father, a vicar, was banished there for disobedience in Nazi times, so this doesn't make him a relative.

Historic novels set in Oxford

• Folly Bridge, by D. L. Murray
• The looking-glass house, by Vanessa Tait
• The dictionary of lost words, by Pip Williams
• The bookbinder of Jericho, by Pip Williams

Not counting fantasy versions of the city as in Philip Pullman's books or in R.F.Kuang's Babel.

Last update 14.8.2026

looking for Milena

After watching the amazing new Kafka movie in November, I started reading his letters to Milena Jesenská in the old paperback edition that has been in the family since August 1966. (I can actually remember seeing it on my parents' bookshelves as child.) I stopped reading half-way in, however, when a glance at the afterword informed me that the editor had left out lots of material for fear of offending people who were still alive at the time of publication. I understand that more recent editions are more comprehensive, and have also reconsidered the chronology which is a bit of a challenge. So I'll look out for one of those to read instead.

The situation is similar for the biography of Milena and the anthology of her work that I read a couple of years ago (but forgot to review). Both have now been bettered by the efforts of Alena Wagnerová who wrote a new biography and edited a new compilation of the journalistic work as well as one with Milena's letters to other people (those to Kafka are lost). All three are in Czech originally and have been translated to German, but apparently not into English according to the references list in the Wikipedia entry.

I'll look out for all of these books, but in the meantime here's my (now somewhat antiquarian) collection of earlier Milena-related sources:

When I was looking for other Kafka-related movies, I also discovered one about Milena which I had never heard of before:

Milena by Véra Belmont, starring Valérie Kapriskie in the title role. This dates from 1990 so may not exist on DVD?