an excuse for being nosy

I recently heard a very interesting presentation from Anne Sebba about her book The women's orchestra of Auschwitz hosted by the Oxford Centre for Life Writing. I feel reasonably well-informed about the topic, after reading Anita Lasker-Wallfisch's memoir as well as her daughter's, and the book Cello by Kate Kennedy (who hosted the event at Wolfson College), so I didn't rush to buy the book, although I will pick it up if it crosses my path again. As I understand from the presentation it interweaves biographies of several of the women who were involved with the orchestra. (A video recording of the event is now online.)

One new insight I took away from the event arises from the author's insistence that she felt her father's involvement as a young soldier in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where the surviving members of the Auschwitz orchestra had ended up, gave her permission to write about their lives. Even though she never found positive confirmation whether her father had specifically met any of the women in the orchestra, she felt that in such a highly sensitive and much debated field as the Holocaust, writing about the lives of the victims and survivors would be an intrusion, and that her very marginal family connection gave her an excuse for being nosy.

Hearing her making this argument both in the presentation and in the discussion afterwards made me feel that I use family history in a similar way, as an excuse for being nosy about ordinary people of the distant past, most of whom weren't important enough to justify specific historical interest. When I am writing biographies of clergymen in the 9th to 16th generation of our family tree, as I have done in the first half of this year, there is the obvious risk that some of the connections may be erroneous. However, the assumed, and sometimes quite speculative family connection gives me an excuse to take interest in their lives and write about them, which is great fun and always enlightening.

Also, even if some of them may be the wrong person for a specific position in the family tree, they are quite likely to share similarities with the genetically correct ancestor, so the lessons I learn about the lives of my ancestors still broadly hold, even if the details may in some cases be misattributed. And as I get to know these people, they become family, even if I cannot prove with certainty that they are genetically related.

Some of the more general themes emerging from this research include:

• migration (mainly in the 17th century), listed here
• family networks of protestant clergymen since the Reformation, tagged Eckweiler
• musical traditions, as explored in my cello memoir
• sense of place, as highlighted in the lost cities series.
• origins of namelines, see the list at the end of this entry

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.

on the origins of radio

Some thoughts on:

Listen in: How radio changed the home
Beaty Rubens
Bodleian Library Publishing 2025

I saw this small exhibition at the Weston Library last year and came away with not much more than some memories of a few old radios and covers of early editions of the Radio Times (published since 1923). It wouldn’t have occurred to me to invest £ 30 in the accompanying book. Less than a year later, however, I spotted it in a street library and picked it up. That’s the thing with street libraries, you can always return what you don’t like, so there’s zero risk in trying something out.

In the event I surprised myself by reading the entire book cover to cover. It starts from the invention of radio and the first technologies that enabled pioneering spirits to “listen in” (as they said in the 1920s) from the comfort of their own homes, albeit with the discomfort of fiddly equipment and bulky headphones.

Rubens describes the impact broadcasting had on home life in Britain, from its start in 1922 until the second world war - after which television sets started to invade homes and diminish the importance of radio. Of special interest to me was the ambiguous role of radio in giving access to culture (including eg live music) to households, but in many cases replacing the live entertainment that people were making for themselves before (gramophones and TV sets were also complicit in this). By making some of the best performances of classical music, for instance, available to all, broadcasting discouraged mere mortals from trying for themselves, because they would not be able to compete. This led to today’s situation where playing your own music has become a niche hobby, while most people think of music as something that streams out of their devices.

It was instructive to me to follow this development in the UK setting, not only because the BBC pioneered the technology, but also because in Germany we have the “1000 years” interlude where the Volksempfänger was Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine and the medium had to be reinvented after the collapse. As Rubens briefly mentions, part of the idea of rolling out a cheap and cheerful radio for all to the entire population was that these devices didn’t have the power to pick up foreign stations, so they tied listeners to the Nazi propaganda.

As it happens, I don’t know whether the musicians starring in my musical memoir had radio in the 1920s. Both Frieda the pianist and Heinrich the cellist will have had radio after the war, and both households went to join neighbours for shared TV viewing, but about the radio listening of the 1920s I am entirely in the dark, which made Rubens’s findings from early sociological studies of radio listening interesting.

Another very interesting thing I learned from the book was the earlier existence of systems that transmitted audio from theatre or music events live through phone lines to paying subscribers. This was first demonstrated in France in 1881 as the théâtrophone, and found commercial use there and in Britain (as the electrophone in 1896). Marcel Proust is among the few contemporary users of the service who left us written testimony. Allegedly there is no written testimony from subscribers to the British service, but I am struggling to believe that. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere, in some old letters kept in a drawer. The number of electrophone users in Britain peaked at just over 2,000 in 1923, before the technology was swept away by the wireless.

The book comes with lavish illustrations (as you would expect from a volume accompanying an exhibition) with historic photos, cartoons and covers of magazines. What is sorely missing is a timeline - as I discovered when trying to find the dates I referenced above. Wikipedia has one for developments globally, from which I learned that Argentina started broadcasting entertainment programmes in 1920. The book didn’t mention that either. The centenary to which the book and the exhibition were pegged is that of the first broadcasts from the 500ft tall Borough Hill transmitter near Daventry in Northamptonshire, which for the first time reached most of the UK in the summer of 1925.

Here's a review in the Observer (when it was still part of the Guardian group)

origins of Summertown

Some thoughts on:

The Butcher, The Tailor, The Picture-Frame Maker...
Stories of Middle Way
Gareth Winrow
The Book Guild 2023

The author investigates the history of the house he lives in and the land it stands on, which is interesting to me because it happens to be in Oxford, and it offers an unusual angle on the history of our city. As a family history researcher, I am also interested in how such projects work for others and how they translate into books. (I've actually used the butcher et al line for a blog entry myself.)

There are some challenges inherent to Winrow's project: His house is only less than a century old. It was built after 1928 on the land of the former Summerhill estate which was auctioned off in 1925. Summertown as a village is only two centuries old and doesn't have a wildly interesting history.

Winrow found the stories he connects to his address not in the actual house nor on the plot it stands on. He looked more widely into the lives of the people who happened to own the land over the last few centuries, along with their ancestry and business connections, making for a vast cast of characters most of whom have only a tenuous connection to the place of interest. The main characters and land-owners are (note that the first four died before the house was built):

• Elizabeth Buswell (1725-1815) who was sentenced to death for poisoning her housemaid and pardoned at the last minute by King George II.
• Henry John North (1756-1831), a lawyer, town clerk and land speculator based in Woodstock;
• John Brain (1798-1855), a butcher who mysteriously disappeared after the death of his young wife;
• James Ryman (c.1795-1880), a picture-frame maker and art dealer who befriended luminaries of the Victorian art world such as Turner and Ruskin (no indication whether he's related to Henry Ryman, founder of the stationery business);
• Florence Bocker (1909-2001), the widow of a colonial officer in Burma, actually lived at the address in question for several decades.

All of these stories are interesting in their own way, but I'm coming away with the impression that the house in question is getting overlooked. We learn virtually nothing about it from the lives of these landowners, and it just serves as an excuse to snoop into these past lives. We don't even get a description of the premises or an insight into the original shape and size, before the recent owners built their extensions.

The exciting things mostly happen in central Oxford (eg the picture frame maker's connection to Turner's famous views of Oxford), sometimes further afield, even as far as India and Burma, but rarely in Summertown. Thus, cycling through Summertown after reading the book

To me as a fellow family history researcher it is interesting that all of these characters come with a well-researched family history, but I feel for the general reader this is just a bit too nerdy and burdened with detail. Which explains the publishing format.

My house is a bit older and I have looked into its history only very fleetingly, but I wouldn't quite dare trying to make a book out of it ...

There is a clue in the cover as well, which shows the Radcliffe Camera rather than a view of Summertown.

life story of a stradivarius violin

Düsseldorf's street libraries never fail to provide me with amazing books I never knew of, so this week I discovered, among other things:

Die Meistergeige (the master violin)
Hans Werder
Otto Janke Verlag 1914

First, it turns out that the male pseudonym hides a female author I never heard of, Anna von Bonin (1856-1933). Although successful in her lifetime, her works fell into oblivion after 1945. You can see why, as the pathos overload typical of the Romantic period doesn't quite fit the reading habits of our times. If you can look past that, however, here is a rather interesting novel, representing the complete life story of a stradivarius violin, some real historic musicians as well as fictional ones.

As the book doesn't provide any years or biographical data, I'll try to conjure up a chronology by listing the owners/players of the violin and including historic events mentioned.

Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), obviously, made the violin, and sold it to:

Lorenzo de Medici allegedly the nephew of Cosimo (III) de Medici (1642-1723), Arch Duke of Tuscany, for whom Stradivari had made a violin before (so we're looking at a period when the luthier was already quite famous, maybe around 1700?). I still think this Lorenzo may be fictional though (seeing that Cosimo III appears to have had a sister but no brothers, so any nephew would have had a different surname). Corelli (1653-1713) is mentioned as his teacher and inspiration. After dramatic events involving a love triangle as well as a vision of the violin being played by a dead man, he sold it to an

unnamed musician who took it to the Franciscan friary of Assisi and died there, leaving it to

the prior of said monastery who gave it to

Guiseppe Tartini (1692-1770) when he sought refuge there in 1710-1713 and studied with Padre Boemo (aka Czech organist and composer Bohuslav Matěj Černohorský, 1684-1742). The author makes it explicit in a footnote that all biographical details of Tartini are historic. His baroque colleague Veracini (1690-1768) makes a brief appearance in 1716, as does the devil whom he credits for a sonata he wrote. Tartini left the violin to

Rinaldo Nazari, allegedly a pupil of his but probably fictional? After being saved from an untimely death by a pirate's daughter, Nazari took the violin to Germany and left it to

a woman who looked after him until he died. She later gave it to

Sdenek, a travelling gipsy musician (Zdenek being a Czech name, related to Zdeňka as in Zdeňka Černý), who reluctantly sold it to

the Earl of Konsbruch (fictional? although there was a Konsbruch branch in the descendance of the Goltz family), who left it to his nephew

Roderich who suffered injuries at the battles of Jena (1806) and Leipzig (1813). A young Paganini (1782-1840) also got to try out our violin in this chapter. After Roderich's death it was neglected for decades and eventually came down to his grandson:

Roderich the younger who wasn't a musician and died at the battle of Mars la Tour (1870), leaving it to his musically inclined cousin

Isabella who later gave it to

Harald Eginhardt, a celebrated soloist, who liked his Wagner. He took the stradivarius to the great concert halls and (spoiler alert) the violin died with him.

As for the violin itself, we have to assume it is fictional, as so many of its alleged owners are. While Tartini is known to have owned several stradivariuses, I don't think any of them could be made to fit this story. Although the author describes a specific decorative element, so maybe she had a specific instrument in mind?

So, across two centuries, this makes a dozen owners and eight players, with some having more soul in their playing than others, as the author discusses at length. It is fortunate that this was written before global fame catapulted Stradivari's instruments into the realm of investment bankers and safe vaults, from where only the more fortunate ones escape to play with globally celebrated stars.

The more down-to-earth stories appearing in this novel, with periods of neglect, danger, and a whole spectrum of musical talents are more like the life stories that some of the 19th century German violins that are still among us might also have witnessed. Only, without a famous name, nobody bothers to write them up (or imagine them).

Photo of my very lovely copy. (own photo)

Copies are available to buy here, very cheap too.

I am now making sure I systematically use the tag antiquarian for all books I review after I found them at street libraries. May have to think of a more specific tag later, but for now this will do.

UPDATE 2.3.2026 See the interesting comment below about a book published in English a few years later that seems to retell a very similar story, Philip Van Loan, The soul of the violin: A dramatic musical inspiration. Perhaps the bare bones of this Stradivarius's biography were real and documented somewhere, and different people fictionalised them each in their way?

four cellos and their humans

Some thoughts on

Cello: A journey through silence to sound
by Kate Kennedy
Head of Zeus 2024

Kate Kennedy had her fledgling career as a professional cellist thrown off track by injury, as she explained in this extract from the book, leading her to reflect on what happens when the symbiotic relation between a musician and their instrument is broken by unfortunate events. Now she explores four examples of cellists who were separated from their cellos in more dramatic circumstances, dragging her own cello around Europe to find the places and soundscapes that these earlier cellos and their humans had inhabited.

The instruments in question are, in chronological order:

• The Cristiani Stradivari, and its eponymous owner, Lise Cristiani (1827-1853), who died on an epic concert tour through the Russian Empire, covering remote locations that possibly hadn't seen a cello before. The cello currently resides in a museum in Cremona.
• A Gadigliano cello played by Hungarian composer Pál Hermann, who was murdered in the Holocaust. The cello was saved by relatives after his arrest, but the family sold it later and the author has been unable to find out what happened to it after 1952.
• A Ventapane cello played by Anita Lasker when she was growing up in Breslau. She survived the Holocaust playing a different cello in the women's orchestra at Auschwitz concentration camp. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who turns 100 this year, has also written a memoir about this. The fate of her Ventapane is unknown.
• The Mara Stradivari cello, which ended up floating in the Rio de la Plata when a ferry carrying its owner Amadeo Baldovino and his quartet sank in July 1963. (I don't understand how Baldovino could abandon the cello in search of some float to cling to - surely a cello in a wooden case floats well enough to keep the cellist above water?) It was rebuilt from fragments by W.E. Hill & Sons in London. Since then, it has served Heinrich Schiff and is now played by his alumnus Christian Poltera. It is thus the only one of the four instruments which is known to be still in active service.

The book fits my obsessions with cellos, sense of place, soundscapes really well - the main difference to what I am trying to do with my musical memoir project is that the instruments in my family - and the ones I am currently rescuing / restoring - are in a more modest price range, there are absolutely no Stradivariuses involved in my instrumental adventures (even if some of the labels pretend otherwise). As numerous examples demonstrate, the exorbitant market value and cultural significance of the famous instruments isn't doing them a good service, in that many of them are now silently sitting in museums or safe vaults, instead of playing music. On the other hand, the shipwrecked instrument certainly wouldn't have been pieced together again if it hadn't been a Stradivarius.

On a related note regarding the relation between insanely famous and common or garden instruments, the author discovered a hilarious entry in the logbooks of W.E. Hill luthiers regarding a visit by Albert Einstein and his violin in October 1933 (note 17 on page 433). The luthiers were quite disparaging about the quality of Einstein's violin and suggested that the only possible reason he might like its sound was that he had gotten used to it. In a blatantly unfair comparison, they showed him the Messiah Stradivarius (now residing in a glass case in the Ashmolean Museum) and let him bow a note on it. Still, Einstein left a happy message in their books, and didn't swap his beloved "Line" for an expensive model (although he had several through his lifetime, and the one auctioned here was probably the successor to the one the Hills saw).

Related to the Cristiani and the Messiah in their museum displays, the author shares an interesting suggestion, namely that the displays should include recorded music from the same or a similar instrument, such that they could resonate with an appropriate sound. I would sign that petition immediately. In a more understanding future, we will regard it as cruelty to keep museum instruments in permanently silent environments.

Useful things I learned from the book include the concept of whakapapa, a Maori term for genealogy including objects and locations, which reminds me of what I'm trying to do with my cello memoir and other family history endeavours. It was interesting to read about historic Breslau, as the parents of our old cellist came from there, but had left following railways job opportunities nearly half a century before Anita was born. Also handy to learn about the traditional luthiers quarter in Paris (rue de Rome, near gare St. Lazare) and the museum in Cremona (where the Cristiani cello now resides), places to visit some time, but preferably travelling without a cello.

I was pleased to see that I already have many of the cello books the author cited, but one blatant gap in my collection is the autobiography of Beatrice Harrison, who famously duetted with a nightingale (or possibly with a nightingale imitator) on live radio in the early days of the BBC. Another is Cellistinnen by Katharina Deserno (2019). Watch this space.

The cover shows the Cristiani cello (the other side of it is on the back).

Update 17.10.2025: Cellist Sol Gabetta is releasing an album of pieces linked to Lise Cristiani this month and is also going on tour with these. Can't find anything about which cello she's using for these, so I'm assuming it's not Lise Cristiani's Stradivarius.

PS here's my little library of cello-related memoirs and biographies (listed alphabetically by the last name of the relevant cellist - and for this one the author who is also a cellist):

• Mercedes Cebrián: Cocido y violonchelo
• Jetta Marie Vasak: My bohemian heritage (about the family of Zdeňka Černý, portrayed as "the greatest Bohemian violoncellist" in a famous Mucha poster).
• Elisabeth Wilson: Jacqueline Du Pré
• Hilary and Piers Du Pré: A genius in the family
• John Holt: Never too late
• Kate Kennedy: Cello: A journey through silence to sound
• Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: Inherit the truth / Die Wahrheit erben
• Gregor Piatigorsky: Cellist
• Eric Siblin: The cello suites: In search of a baroque masterpiece
• Kenneth Wilson: Highway cello

one plague to the next

Some thoughts on

Violeta
by Isabel Allende
Plaza & Janes 2022

In recent years I haven't quite managed to keep up with Isabel Allende's publishing speed (here's the last one I read), but picked this one because I thought I remembered her saying in an interview that it was based on the life of her mother, who was then in her 90s. Turns out that it isn't quite, but the 100-year timeframe may have been inspired by it. The fictional Violeta was born in 1920 during the flu pandemic and died in 2020 during the covid pandemic, so this is a very neatly defined life span from plague to plague. Even though it's not a real memoir, it is written like one, so I'll also tag it as such, to go in my memoir inspiration file.

Other than not being the biography of her mother, this is very satisfying for aficionados of the Allende universe, as we get elements of her family history and her early novels remixed and extrapolated into the 21st century. Criminal involvement of the CIA looms over people's lives as you would expect. Reviewers tend to emphasise that her novels are set in an un-named South American country, but here as in many of her previous books Chile is so clearly recognisable that no other interpretation is possible.

A bit more unexpected to me were the multiple links to European countries including Germany and Norway. With both Germany and Chile moving into and out of brutal dictatorships within the 20th century, it is kind of logical that there has been traffic of refugees in both directions, and some families have even moved back and forth. This connection between Germany and Latin America is also featured in a film from 2012, El amigo aleman (my German friend, by Argentinian-German director Jeanine Meerapfel), but other than that I haven't seen all that much coverage of it.

Naturally, with a focus on female character and the 100 year time span, progress in women's rights is a thread, but not waved around too much.

Overall a big and bold sweep of a female centred and unconventional family saga that may come to be seen as one of her major achievements.

I do like the cover designs they are now using for her novels. At one point, when El cuaderno de Maya came out, I hated the cover so much I couldn't bring myself to buying the book.

PS have now created a tag for libros en español - also, as promised in 2020, I will create a new book review master post at the end of the year.

cycling with cellos

Some thoughts on
Highway cello
by Kenneth Wilson
City Village Books 2023

This book found me because I am known for cycling around Oxford with a cello on my back, and this author cycled from Hadrian's Wall to Rome with a cello on the back of his bike, which he used for busking in various places along the way. I haven't done that yet, but yes we do seem to have a lot in common in the cycling and cello departments:

• Once upon a time I cycled a similar distance in a similar time (3500 km in 35 days), from Germany around five of the six sides of France's hexagon, and back into Germany, carrying camping equipment but no cello. In my defence, I was learning to play the double bass back then, and Heinrich, our family cello, hadn't been restored yet.
• Since ca. 2004, I have been cycling with cellos around Oxford on a regular basis, first carrying them for the young cellist in the family, and more recently for my own musical adventures. I reckon that those short journeys taken roughly once a week over 20 years must add up to a similar distance as Hadrian's Wall to Rome.
• I have played a very similar kind of repertoire on the cello, including obviously the easier ones of the Bach suites, as well as the Swan and some folk tunes such as Sally gardens. Haven't done busking as such but played some of that outdoors eg in Florence Park during the Plague years.
• I was travelling in France at the same time as he was, but sadly missed him. I went to Nimes and then to the Drome region (see my photos here), must have crossed his route travelling by train from Avignon to Strasbourg.

However, these aren't necessary qualifications for reading the book. As far as I can tell (despite being too close to the subject matter) it is a really charming travelogue and manages to convey aspects of cello and cycling cultures to a lay audience, with other bits like old churches thrown in as well. The author used to be a vicar before he lost his faith, so there are bits about religion and philosophy too. I am surprised that it is self published (with the publisher's name obviously made up for the occasion), as I would have thought that there are quite a few travel publishers out there that would have happily taken it on.

I was pleased to learn about things like warmshowers, crazyguyonabike, and the street performance festival at Chalon sur Saone, which happens annually in July (Chalon dans la rue). Although I had been aware of carbon fibre cellos, it was interesting to read the background story of how they were invented.

Given my parallel experience, there are bound to be things I disagree with. I would never put the cello directly on the bike. I like to think that using my soft body as a shock absorber, the instrument is quite safe on my back, and it's not nearly as heavy as it looks. I also like the fact that it makes me look like a giant on the bike, so hopefully drivers will stay clear of me. And the contraption the author used looks downright dangerous to me.

Also, being a lazy kind of person, I would have avoided all those mountains he's so keen on climbing. I would find myself a nice river and follow its course - there are suitable cycle paths along the Rhine and the Danube, for instance. I find it much more civilised to go with the flow than to sweat on the serpentines. On that note, if he had stayed with the river Saone beyond Chalon and then followed the Rhone, I might have seen him busking in Avignon. (Considering his interest in church history, he really should have gone via Avignon.) Too bad.

PS here's my little library of cello-related memoirs and biographies (listed alphabetically by the last name of the relevant cellist):

• Mercedes Cebrián: Cocido y violonchelo
• Jetta Marie Vasak: My bohemian heritage (about the family of Zdeňka Černý, portrayed as "the greatest Bohemian violoncellist" in a famous Mucha poster).
• Hilary and Piers DuPre: A genius in the family
• John Holt: Never too late
• Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: Inherit the truth / Die Wahrheit erben
• Gregor Piatigorsky: Cellist
• Eric Siblin: The cello suites: In search of a baroque masterpiece
• Kenneth Wilson: Highway cello

UPDATE 9.6.2025 Here's another carbon fibre cello going places, this time to the Arctic pack ice, with cellist Sarah Smout.

a family business

Some thoughts on

Sten Nadolny
Ullsteinroman
Ullstein 2004

Some family histories are so rich in material that one struggles where to start and how to relate it - a memoir, a group biography, a novel? Sten Nadolny (famous in the last century for The discovery of slowness, a novel about polar explorer John Franklin) has chosen to gently novelise the history of the Ullstein family, the descendents of a Jewish paper factory owner in provincial Fürth, who set up a successful newspaper and later book publishing business in Berlin.

Leopold Ullstein (1826-1899), who made the crucial step from producing blank paper to selling printed paper as well as the move from Fürth to Berlin, had ten children from two wives, and all five sons took on senior roles in the company. After the patriarch's death, and when the generation of his grandchildren also developed ambitions in this direction, it led to some family drama during the Weimar years, and after 1933 the Nazis evicted the Ullsteins from their family business. The book publisher and several of the newspapers still exist today, but not in the hands of the eponymous family.

Nadolny moves smoothly between novel writing (presumably leaning on letters and diaries as well as making up plausible dialogues) and straight history writing, filling us in on family events and the broader historical context. Twelve characters get a potted biography of several pages each. Supporting cast includes basically everybody who was anybody in Germany between 1871 and 1933, from Lorenz Adlon (of hotel fame) to Graf Zeppelin.

Cover of the Ullstein paperback edition, which I found in one of the street libraries in Düsseldorf - they have an amazing ability to provide me with the books I never knew I wanted to read. The lovely cover photo shows all 7 children from Leopold Ullstein's first marriage. Their mother, Matilda Berend (1830-1871), died a few days after the birth of the youngest.

In terms of parallels with my family history (which I'm not going to novelise any time soon) the large family and spirit of enterprise reminded me of the (economically less successful) Krefeld Clan and Imig clan, where we had similar numbers of children in the mid-19th century and also some businesses. Although, crucially, we don't have an example of more than two brothers piled up in the same business. Maybe the businesses weren't big enough to accommodate more family members. Neither of them has a Jewish ancestor yet, but the Kauer clan has one here.

one hundred years of cellotude

During the plague years I have been writing up a musical family memoir built around the biography of our venerable old cello. After completing a draft version in German (some chapters accessible through the link above), I have now started translating it into English, so here comes chapter 1, introducing Heinrich the cello and its eponymous owner, as a short blog series - one entry for each of the sections of the chapter (this entry also includes a very brief introductory passage before the first subheading). There will also be a few old photos with each entry.

All ten parts are now live, click the link at the bottom of each part to move on the the next one.

Table of contents:

1. A railway family
2. Strasbourg in the Belle Epoque
3. What happened in the orangerie
4. Romantic writings
5. Marches and veal dumplings
6. A wanderer between both worlds
7. A civil servant at Elberfeld
8. An amateur string quartet
9. When the music stops
10. Silence after the war

UPDATE 2.3.2024. I've added some extra photos to each entry, in addition to the one that each already had at the top. And a few more links.

"One hundred years of cellotude" is one of various title ideas I have been kicking around. I'll also use this as a tag to link the instalments of the English text, such as not to swamp the more general tabs with this content. Instruments of time and truth would be perfect - but there is already an early music ensemble by that name.

 

Chapter 1

A cello called Heinrich

Heinrich came into our family roughly a century ago, and definitely before 1924, but we don’t know exactly when and how. We know that Heinrich is a cello made in the tradition of Saxony in the late 19th century. The young cellist in my family baptised the instrument Heinrich after their great-great-grandfather in the name line, who was the earliest known owner and player of the instrument. To avoid confusion, I will refer to him as Max Heinrich, even though in real life he only used his second Christian name.

Before we come to Heinrich the cello, let us first get to know Max Heinrich the cellist and his family. Their lives were decisively shaped by the key innovation of the 19th century, the railways.

Staff at Tangermünde Railway Station, 1889.

A railway family

On December 7, 1835, the steam locomotive Adler (Eagle) travelled from Nürnberg to Fürth and thereby opened the age of railways in the German Confederation (a patchwork of principalities that lasted from 1815 to 1866). German engineers followed the lead of the British pioneers of railway technology and copied the details like the gauge and the propulsion technique that had already been proven in passenger services since 1825. Within half a century, the expansion of German railways overtook the British role model, At the beginning of 1885, the German Empire had the world’s largest network with 39,000 km of track, with Britain following in second place with 31,000 km. Today both networks are significantly smaller.

Initially, railways in the German Confederation emerged from a colourful mixture of state and privately-funded initiatives. In Prussia, however, and then after 1871 in the newly founded empire, the state took the lead and only left smaller local endeavours to private companies. One key reason for state leadership on long distance rail development was that Prussia’s rulers had recognised the importance of railways for rapid troop movements. For the same reason, the entire network has been more strategically planned than the British one, much of which has grown out of wild races between competing investors.

The advent of railways facilitated travel in ways that had been unimaginable a generation earlier. In 1839. a young pianist called Clara Wieck suffered some serious discomfort travelling from Leipzig to Paris on a stagecoach. Just ten years later, and then known as Clara Schumann, she could play concerts between Paris and St. Petersburg using trains to cross the continent at ease.

The dramatic expansion and efficient running of a vast railway network that in many respects surpassed the one we have today required countless employees in roles that hadn’t existed before, and thus couldn’t be inherited in the old feudal style of bygone times. Thus they brought opportunities and social mobility to many, along with the geographical mobility and the chance to see the world beyond your native area.

People in four separate branches of my family tree used these opportunities independently of each other, including the parents of Max Heinrich the cellist. Richard Heinrich and Maria Louise married at Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland) between 1877 and 1880. Maria was eight years older than Richard and had been widowed twice. She brought a son from a previous marriage into the family. They had a daughter in April 1880, and then Max Heinrich was born September 11 1882, completing a patchwork family that stayed relatively small for the time.

Richard, born in 1852, was spared military service in 1874 because of knock-knees and height. He was assigned as a “second-class reservist” meaning that in peacetime he had no military obligations of any sort, but until his 31st birthday he could be called up if there was a war. He was lucky, as the peace lasted more than forty years. He didn’t even live to witness the war that was to end the empire.

We don’t know much about old Richard, but we do know that he worked for the railways as an office clerk. At about the same time, another great-great grandfather of mine worked with the Reichsbahn Elsass-Lothringen where he eventually became a station master, and yet another one was a railway worker at Gütersloh. The daughter of that last one, travelled along the line to find herself another railway man, whom we will meet in the next chapter.

Like the other railway employees in the family tree whom he never met, Richard came from a modest background that soon gets lost in the mist of time. His father was a carpenter, apparently, and we’re already struggling with the identity of his paternal grandfather, who may or may not have been a coachman. Maria’s father was a shepherd.

As an office clerk (Bureau-Ass.), I imagine that Richard was kind of a precursor to the 20th century’s ubiquitous secretaries. Not the most glamorous social ascent, but his workplace was clean and dry, and his work didn’t ruin his health, in contrast to the many who signed up with the flourishing mining and steel industries. And he got to see a bit of the world.

Three times Richard and his family moved to an entirely new town, in a different area. Looking at the dates when these places were connected to the railway network, they match his moves. I conclude that he was involved more with the setup of new rail links than with the operation of existing ones – until he found his personal terminus.

Following his tracks one move at a time: His daughter Gertrud was born in 1880 in Neurode, still in his native Silesia. The railwau links from Neurode to Glatz opened in 1879 and in the other direction to Waldenburg in 1880. The latter required the construction of a bridge across the Schwarzbachgrund which at the time was the highest railway viaduct in Germany. Neurode was just a small town of 6,000 inhabitants but there were significant mining activities in the area, so I assume the transport of freight must have been the economic driver motivating the investment in the line with that spectacular bridge. Neurode was still reasonably close to home, only 60 km from Breslau.

Two and a half years later, when Max Heinrich was born, the family was already further away, in Thuringia, specifically in Zella St. Blasii, now part of Zella-Mehlis. There, the lines to Erfurt and Meiningen were built in 1881-1884 enabling onwards travel westwards to Schweinfurt, Würzburg and Stuttgart. Today, this track forms part of the shortest link from Stuttgart to Berlin.

Musically, Max Heinrich’s birthplace may have been touched ever so gently by the genius of Johann Sebastian Bach, who was born in Eisenach, just 40 km away, and lived in the district capital Ohrdruf, only 20 km away, from 1695 to 1703, while he served an apprenticeship with his older brother Johann Christoph and also played the organ for the local church.

We know that Max Heinrich stayed at Zella for more than a year, because he was vaccinated there just after his first birthday. The smallpox vaccine was the only vaccination that existed at the time, so the certificate doesn’t mention what disease is targeted, only that the legal requirement for vaccination has been fulfilled. In Prussia, vaccination was mandated since 1815, and in the German Empire since 1874. The certificate notes that the vaccination was successful in the first attempt, meaning that a pustule formed at the site of the cut. From the small print on the back we learn that the procedure is to be carried out up to three times if the first and second attempt don’t yield a visible result. Eleven years later, Max Heinrich received the second vaccination, also with immediate success – by then the family had moved on to Tangermünde.

Some time between 1883 and 1888 the family moved from Thuringia to Saxony-Anhalt (in today’s nomenclature of federal states), first to Stendal and then to the nearby town of Tangermünde. At around the same time, a short branch line of 10 km length linking these two towns was built,

Planners had originally considered Tangermünde as a stop on the mainline from Berlin to Lehrte, but it lost out to Stendal. Only in 1888 travellers from Tangermünde could travel down the branch line to catch long distance trains from there. The branch line was developed by a shareholder company mainly to serve freight from the sugar factory at Tangermünde, but it carries passengers to this day.

Tangermünde was the last stop in the journeys of our railway clerk, thus we have to assume that he had a permanent job there, not limited to the duration of the development project. A group photo of the entire staff of the line taken in 1889 outside Tangermünde station (a slightly cropped version appears above) shows 25 people including one woman. Richard is one of those wearing a uniform with shiny brass buttons. I guess this was the prerogative of those who didn’t have to do dirty work. He is standing nearly in the middle, below the station clock.

The station master on the other hand keeps a low profile in the background, standing in the entrance of his office, with the big sign “Stationsvorsteher” above the door. He wears a tie and a hat and manages to look modest while also making his important role unmistakably clear.

Max Heinrich's parents, Johann Friedrich Richard Groß (*1852 in Breslau), left, and Maria Louise Mentzel (*1844 Skronskau), atanding on top of the boulder. Photo dated 1900.

Tangermünde flourished as a member of the Hanse trade network in the 15th century, but was then bypassed by most historical events, including the construction of the main railway line. Its numerous historical buildings including the town hall, gothic church, the city wall and several of its gates are impeccably well preserved. The wall owes its survival to the fact that much of it also serves to prop up the city on the slope leading down to the river Elbe, and to protect it from floods.

In the summer of 1888, Max Heinrich visited the Volksschule (people’s school) in Stendal, and from the Bürgerschule (citizens’ school) in Tangermünde. In 19th century Prussia, Bürgerschule was almost as good as the Gymnasium, but without the last two years leading to the Abitur qualification, and it only offered Latin but not Greek. His reports from 1894 and 1895 show good marks in drawing, history and singing, with all subjects apart from singing sliding from the first report to the second.

Heinrich at school around 1892- second row from front 3rd from the left.

The reports also offer us samples of Richard’s signature. Acknowledging the impressive results of 1894 he signed as „Richard Gross / Eisenb. Bur. Ass.“ A year later, the less glamorous results were only signed with his last name. In both cases, the name is framed in an oval shaped garnished with a flourish at the bottom – I am still not sure whether that is purely decorative or has some hidden meaning.

Max Heinrich received his confirmation in 1896 in the very beautiful Stephanskirche in Tangermünde. Not just from any old vicar but from the superintendent and head vicar named Fenger. In the relevant almanac for the clergy of the province Saxony dated 1903 he is listed as Franz Heinrich Leopold Fenger with the note: „Rother Adler-Orden IV. Classe“. The same source also gives us an overview of the school system in Tangermünde and the distribution of faiths among the 11,500 residents of the town (1,152 Catholics, 41 Jews, 24 of the Apostolian community, four Mennonites, three Dissidents).

April 1896 marks the end of Max Heinrich’s education at the Bürgerschule. According to his police records, he remained at Tangermünde until 1897 and was then registered at Stendal from 27.12.1897 until 24.10.1899/, but we don’t know what he did there during that time. Conceivably, he may have started an apprenticeship there and left without finishing it? There is a sewing table that he allegedly built, so I imagine he may have been a carpenter’s apprentice, which would make sense in that his paternal grandfather was a carpenter as well. On the other hand, I also heard of a similar item bought after 1918 as a kit for self-assembly, so the legend that he built the piece may only refer to assembly rather than building from scratch.

Within his teenage years he must also have acquired or improved his musical skills as he later signed up with the army as a musician. Stendal today has a music school, but I can’t find any trace of a more advanced institution like a conservatoire. Then again, these institutions have a habit of disappearing. Sadly we may never know if he already played the cello then.

What we do know though is that in November 1900, just after turning 18, he identified as a musician. He signed a book he read with: „Heinrich Groß Musiker, in Bielefeld.“ And no, I haven’t the foggiest idea what he was doing in Bielefeld. We have strictly no connection whatsoever to that city apart from this one inscription. The book is a collection of novellas by W. O. von Horn (1798-1867), and we will get back to its content later. A second note reveals when and where he read it – sounds like a holiday or spa break: „Gelesen 30. Nov. 1900 in Bad Warmbrunn im Rosenheim.“ This book will be an important piece of evidence later on.

Read on:

Strasbourg in the Belle Epoque

sorting the Toynbees

After reading and reviewing Polly Toynbee's excellent family history memoir I was still a bit hazy about the Toynbees so I had to sort them into a format I can understand:

Descendants of George Toynbee (1749 - abt. 1810) and Sarah Starkey (1753 - Jun 1829)

1. George Toynbee jr. (1783–1865) ~(wikitree has his ancestors back to his great-grandfather John Toynbee or Toyneby (bef. 1672 - 1740)). George's first wife was Elizabeth, née Cullen, (1785–1820). They were married at Bracebridge, Lincolnshire, on 21 May 1811, by Licence.

1.3. (third son, not sure how many girls were ignored there) Joseph Toynbee (1815-1866), otolaryngiologist, married Harriet Holmes (1822-1897), daughter of Nathaniel Holmes. The couple had nine children:
1.3.1. Gertrude (b.1848),
1.3.2. William (b.1849),
1.3.3.Lucy (b.1850),
1.3.4.Arnold (1852-1883), married Charlotte Atwood (1841-1931), college administrator at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, no children
1.3.5.Rachel (b.1853),
1.3.6.Paget Jackson (1855-1932), Dante scholar,
1.3.7.Mary H. (b.1856),
1.3.8.Grace Poleridge (1858-1946), bacteriologist, married Percy Frankland
1.3.9.Harry Valpy (1861-1941), charity administrator, married Sarah Edith Marshall (1859-1939)
1.3.1. Arnold Joseph (1889-1975) universal historian, married Rosalind Murray (1890-1967)
1.3.1.1.Antony (1914-1939)
1.3.1.2.Philip (1916-1981)
1.3.1.3.Lawrence (1922-1902), painter
1.3.2. Jocelyn (1897-1985), professor of archaeology at Cambridge
1.3.3.Margaret (1899-1987)

1.6. (sixth son, not sure how many girls were ignored there) Henry Toynbee (1819-1909) was an merchant sailor and an early meteorologist, whose career was dedicated to passing on his expertise. He introduced local weather-forecasting to the British Isles. On 22 December 1854 Henry, aged 35, married 25-year-old Ellen Philadelphia Smyth (July 1828 – 1881), a daughter of Admiral William Henry Smyth. No children.

2. Eleanor married Bettinson - see wikitree

Joseph Toynbee (1815-1866). Source

a radical family

some thoughts on

An uneasy inheritance - My family and other radicals

by Polly Toynbee

Atlantic Books 2023

I remember reading Polly Toynbee's columns in the Guardian for more than 20 years. I clearly recall her warnings not to topple Blair because if we were to let the Tories back they would destroy everything. Well she was right on that prediction.

Sometime between then and now I looked up her wikipedia entry either because I wondered about her strange name or because she had mentioned one of her ancestors in one of her columns. Actually, I think it may have been that she mentioned the Toynbee Fountain in Wimbledon, that rings a bell of sorts. I clicked my way through five generations of Toynbees back to Queen Victoria's ear doctor and came away impressed.

Remembering bits and pieces of that, I was keen to read her more coherent account of her family history which came out last year. Hers is really quite a remarkable family tree, not just in the name line. There are equally famous Victorians in the family of her paternal grandmother. Amazingly, all the famous ancestors fit the "radical" tag in the title - lefties, atheists, reformers, teetotallers, champions of lost causes, and all against the Tories. There are a couple of conservatives too, but they never amounted to much and were horrible people according to the author.

To me this is worthwhile reading for the simple pleasure of discovering lots of humans wo went against the grain and often changed their society a little bit by disagreeing with the mainstream. Obviously, gloating about your ancestors isn't allowed, especially not in leftie circles. so the framing superimposed on this is Polly's embarrassment at the apparent contradiction of being leftwing while comfortably off and socially secure due to being born into the middle class, i.e. champagne socialists. While I find that angle less interesting than the radical Victorians, there are a few insights to be drawn from these reflections on class as well. (There was also a Feature in the Guardian consisting of edited extracts from the book and making this the main issue.)

One assertion I have to protest as a family history person is when she claims (repeatedly) that there are no working class people in her ancestry. The family tree provided only goes back to her great-great-grandparents (see the family tree here, almost identical to the one in the book), and even those aren't all known (There should be 16, but only six are named in the book). I am sure that with a more probing look at those missing in the tree and their ancestors, some common people such as farmers, shepherds, servants etc. would turn up at one point. Give it another four generations and you're at 256 ancestors. They will have a much wider spread of origins from rich to poor.

The truth in her assertion is, however, that her ancestors, like most of mine, will have skillfully avoided the trap of the Industrial Revolution. I'm happy to believe that there are no industry workers in the tree, because industry only existed for a couple of hundred years, and when it started hoovering up workers the ancestors already had better things to do than becoming part of the industrial proletariat.

So I am sure there must be some stories of social ascent just beyond the horizon of this book - maybe waiting to be discovered in the next one.

PS Looking for an image of the book cover (which I don't like particularly, hoping for an improved paperback cover), I found another Toynbee-related book, which has been (re)published just after this one:

Reminiscences And Letters Of Joseph And Arnold Toynbee. Edited By Gertrude Toynbee (Blackwells)

In which Joseph (1815-1866) is Polly's great-great-grandfather, the pioneering otolaryngologist, Arnold (1852-1883) is his older son, and Gertrude is Joseph's oldest daughter - not Arnold's wife as the blurb below seems to think. Arnold's wife was Charlotte Atwood. (All nine children are listed here in a blog entry about one letter to Gertrude.)

Publisher's blurb:

This book is a collection of the reminiscences and letters of Joseph and Arnold Toynbee, two prominent British intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book provides a unique insight into the life and work of the Toynbee family, including their views on education, social reform, and politics. It is edited by Gertrude Toynbee, Arnold's wife, who herself was a writer and social reformer.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Well, now, I might be a little bit tempted by that ...

bilingual East Prussians

A few things I learned from

Paradiesstraße
by Ulla Lachauer
3rd ed. 2001

This book I discovered randomly at Oxfam recounts the memories of the farmer Lena Grigoleit (1910-1995) from Bittehnen on the river Memel, which was part of East Prussia when she was born, then of Lithuania, then Soviet Union, now Lithuania again. Lachauer discovered her as the only surviving resident of the village from East Prussian time – and also a very enthusiastic story teller, so this is how this remarkable book came into being.

I bought it mainly because I know far too little about East Prussia (birthplace of my dad and half my grandparents-in-law), so I thought every little helps. Luckily, there wasn’t too much about agriculture and quite a lot about the fascinating bilingual / bicultural situation of the area known as Preußisch-Litauen or Lithuania Minor. So here’s what I learned about that (if you look it up on German Wikipedia, you’ll find Lachauer’s book cited as a source too):

We’re talking roughly about the northern third of East Prussia as it was before 1918 – of which the bit beyond the river Memel (including Bittehnen) was cut off after the Versailles Treaty. So that area always had a mix of Lithuanian and Prussian population, with the farming villages typically being more Lithuanian and the towns more Prussian.

Map of northern parts of East Prussia showing the spread of Lithuanian culture. The area shown in the deeper shade of green on the right bank of the river Memel, represents the highest proportion of Lithuanian speakers. It is nearly identical with the area that was cut off from East Prussia in the Versailles Treaty and put under French administration, then annexed by Lithuania. The dashed line marks the limits of the southernmost church districts using Lithuanian in their services. Alternatively, the outline of the district of Gumbinnen can be used as a definition of Prussian Lithuania. The area south of the Memel roughly to the bottom edge of the map is today in the Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. Map from Wikipedia.

A noteworthy detail for family history is that the area was depopulated by a plague epidemic in 1709-10 and then systematically resettled with people from western Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, with the Prussian offer of freedom of religion being a pull factor. Many came from Lithuania too, gaining their freedom from tsarist serfdom in the process. Note also that the Prussian Lithuanians were protestants, whereas those living under Russian rule and today in independent Lithuania are typically catholics. This cultural divide meant that Prussian Lithuanians, while keeping their separate cultural identity, were happy to support the German Empire and didn’t generally strive to reunite with the Lithuanians on the Russian side.

In the rural environment, Lithuanians were free to keep their language and cultural traditions, and the church services were typically held in Lithuanian too. As the towns were speaking German, and industrialisation happened far west in the Ruhr area, any move away from the farm would require speaking German. After 1871 the newly formed empire raised the pressure on adaptation a bit, and the Lithuanians wrote very polite petitions asking if they could please keep a little bit of school tuition in their language, but it all stayed very civilised and the culture only declined very gradually, in line with the shift from rural to urban life.

In 1910, the year Lena Grigoleit was born, the last census recorded around 100,000 East Prussians naming Lithuanian as their first language. After that, the peaceful and remote life of Lithuania Minor went through the shredder of 20th century history, and nothing survived – apart from the one person who, miraculously, was still around in 1990 to tell her story.

Some links to the relevant East Prussian inlaws previously mentioned in the Every picture series, they all lived near the southern border of the Prussian Lithuanian zone shown in the map:

1:14 a patchwork family in East Prussia (this family is most closely linked to the Lithuanian theme as the mother's maiden name was Domscheit, which is a Lithuanian name, but sadly we don't know anything about her language and culture background)

1:15 the missing grandmother Auguste Adschuk

1:25 Auguste at the bottom of the steps in Allenburg (a different Auguste this time)

1:26 a forester's family

1:33 a lost generation

2:19 patchwork portraits

by contrast, my ancestors only spent a decade in East Prussia, you can catch glimpses of this story in my entry about Königsberg in the Lost Cities series. Other places relevant to this story are Zinten (Kr. Heiligenbeil, now Kaliningrad Oblast) and Bischofsburg (Kr. Rößel, now Poland), neither of which is near Prussian Lithuania.

a crazy life

some thoughts on

Uschi Obermaier, Olaf Kraemer

High Times – Mein wildes Leben

Heyne 2008

This is one of the many books I discovered at Düsseldorf’s street libraries and enjoyed even though it would never have occurred to me to look for them or buy them. Our heroine was a household name in the 1970s as I was growing up. She was present with glamorous photos in Stern magazine and everywhere else especially after her participation in the famous Kommune I, the flagship commune of the 1968 movement.

The memoir written down by coauthor Olaf Kraemer based on interviews adds more material I wasn’t aware of including on-off relationships with two Rolling Stones and adventures around the world in a hippie van with a shady guy from Hamburg’s red light district. This van related part of the story was less interesting to me and maybe less relevant to world history, but all in all, one could say, never a dull moment. And her perspective on 1968 and the music scene is an interesting addition to the more official historical record.

playing cello saves lives

Some thoughts on

Inherit the truth / Die Wahrheit erben

by Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

Giles de la Mare 1996 / Weidle Verlag 1997

I had been aware of Anita Lasker’s biography – the cellist who survived both Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen – for many years, and I actually saw her son Raphael Wallfisch performing the Dvorak concerto at the Sheldonian Theatre some time in the noughties, so I felt kind of acquainted with her family already. However, a copy of her actual memoir only crossed my path now,* and I read it immediately.

She wrote the book in English for her children and grandchildren, but prepared the German version herself, which is the one I read. The book is very short considering the weight of events covered and focuses on the anecdotal events that added up to her and her sister’s survival against the odds. Like Hadley Freeman in her family memoir House of Glass, she is very good in highlighting the absurd coincidences that can decide your life and death in the context of the Nazi system setting out to kill you.

In short, her parents were born in an area that became part of Poland after 1918, which meant that in the US system of refugee quotas they were counted as Polish Jews, and had no chance at all to find asylum that way, even though her uncle, the chess master Edward Lasker, was a US citizen by then. When called up to be deported, her parents obeyed and soon disappeared without a trace.

With no parental supervision, Anita and her sister Renate got involved in forging documents to help people escape, which earned them jail terms and probably saved their lives when they arrived at Auschwitz, because convicted criminals were registered in case they were needed for further testimony in court cases.

Once in Auschwitz, Anita’s cello playing saved her life in the longer term, as she was admitted to playing in the girls orchestra. As the only cello in the small ensemble, she was clearly indispensable. Indirectly, it saved Renate too, with the reconnection made via an unlikely chain of events carried by Anita’s unusual shoes.

Compared to the privileged position at Auschwitz, the last winter of the war at Bergen Belsen turned out to be much worse, with prisoners being left to starve and rot in situ rather than being murdered and disposed of efficiently, but with further luck and resilience both sisters made it through.

After liberation of the camp, the focus returns from bare survival to the second most important thing, namely finding a cello and music to play with it (the Bach suites get a mention in this context). Oh, and getting out of Germany. All of which proves challenging but doable. So, in summary, playing cello saves lives.

I do love the photo of her they used for the cover of the English edition. My edition has a badly drawn cello on the cover, but this photo (among others) is reproduced inside the book and I was tempted to scan it for the blog. It is captioned Berlin 1938. (She went to study cello in Berlin but soon had to return to her family home at Breslau.) I will look out for the English edition too. Blackwells

UPDATE 7.8.2023 In a book exchange, I just discovered a German paperback edition (rororo) using the photo as well (and without the red hue).

Some related links:

• BBC Desert Island Disk appearance (ft. recordings of both her husband and her son)
• Observer interview from 2020 (on the occasion of her objection to the location of a planned Holocaust memorial in London).
• The Wikipedia entry of Anita's uncle, chess (and Go) player Edward Lasker contains an interesting paragraph about the Lasker family history and the origins of the name Lasker. According to this, the older and more famous chess champion Emanuel Lasker was a distant cousin of Edward.

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* Note: I found a signed copy of the book in my late father's extensive collection of Holocaust-related books. One of the things he forgot to mention to me, otherwise I would have read it a lot earlier. It's also too late to find out whether he (or if not who else) met the author to get the autograph.