urbanism now and then

I love writing about cities as a biological phenomenon, so I have already covered the evolution of cities, urban ecology, and urban evolution in dedicated features, as well as going on about continuing urbanisation of our species eg in the context of the 8 billion threshold in global population.

The recent report of vast, previously unsuspected "garden cities" in the Amazon provided a good excuse and a new angle to revisit cities again. Ancient Amazonians managed to establish a civilisation and well-structured urban space in the face of extreme environmental conditions, so maybe we should study their example when we aim to make our cities more sustainable on the verge of the global climate catastrophe?

The resulting feature is out now:

Green cities past, present and future

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 4, 26 February 2024, Pages R117-R119

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

A LiDAR image from the study by Rostain and colleagues, who describe the largest settled area in Amazonia known so far. (Image: © LiDAR, A. Dorison and S. Rostain.)

silence after the war

One hundred years of cellotude continued:

Tenth and final part of

Chapter 1

A cello called Heinrich

Previous section: When the music stops

Herrenchiemsee, near Munich, 1950s. Heinrich Tiefenbach on the right, his wife must have taken the photo.

Silence after the war

On April 16, 1945, advancing US troops took over Wuppertal without a fight. Mayor Heinz Gebauer formally handed over the city in the town hall. On April 21, the Ruhr pocket capitulated and Wuppertal became part of the British occupied zone. The city had suffered widespread destruction. Of 140,000 homes, 55,000 were completely destroyed, only 50,000 remained unharmed. Max Heinrich and Maria were lucky in that their flat in the Gronaustraße remained intact.

On May 4, Max Heinrich filled in a questionnaire from the military administration about his activities during the Nazi era. On May 23 he was suspended from service in the city administration, effective at the end of the month. On the 26th, he was arrested by military police and interned at Camp Roosevelt at Hemer, in the Sauerland mountain region. Later he was moved back to be detained in the city’s own premises. Due to being classified initially as an “offender” he would not be able to return to work as a civil servant. Then again he was approaching pension age anyway. 

In the meantime Maria got involved in black market as a travelling grandmother.  As I understand it, this involved carrying goods on the pretence of taking them for your grandchildren. Which wasn’t too far from the truth as she actually had two grandchildren who were aged six and almost four when the war ended. 

From 1946 to 1955 Max Heinrich worked as an accountant at the lawnmower manufacturer Brill in Wuppertal.  I think that Robert Brill, born in 1893, whose birthday and address was noted in the pocket diaries, must have been the owner/boss of that company. Granddaughter Margarete recalled that the offices were provisionally housed on the corner Friedrich Engels Allee / Lohstraße and that Max Heinrich used to emphasize that after passing pension age he only worked there because Herr Brill was a close friend and he wanted to help him.   

The company had a good run but was sadly swallowed by a competitor called AL-KO in 2009, which explains why I can’t find a company history online. Since its foundation in 1873, it had been independent for more than a century and the name still survives as a heritage brand. At the beginning of the 20th century the brothers Brill introduced the newfangled idea of mechanical lawnmowers to Germany – although they had been patented n Britain since 1830. A quote widely cited in German histories of lawnmowers reveals how the Brills presented the innovation to the general public at a trade far in 1904 claiming that they were already widely used in aristocratic and communal parks alike. 

Meanwhile the reckoning with his tainted past continued. in October 1947 an initial examination based on the first questionnaire gave the result: „nicht tragbar“ which literally means not to be supported / carried which probably meant not allowed to stay in the civil service. In July 1948 his lawyer Dr Fechner filed an application for denazification submitting additional documents in December 1948. 

Fechner pointed out that Max Heinrich had joined all those Nazi organisations only because of social pressure to do so and that his activities were restricted to the area of welfare. The lawyer claims that Max Heinrich had not realised the extent of the persecution of Jews and the establishment of concentration camps and vehemently objected to these crimes as and when he became aware of them. However, as the lawyer notes bluntly, with his family in mind he was lacking the courage to resign from the party and his functions. 

In May 1946 a Jewish woman gave a witness statement in his favour saying that in the years 1940-1942 he had graciously and generously helped her with tax and private matters. “Mr Gross helped me even though he knew that I was Jewish” the witness confirmed. 

Sadly the Jewish quartet player does not get mentioned in this document. We don’t know if he survived the Holocaust. 

In January 1949 the verdict came in: Category IV, followers. This came with political sanctions and restrictions of movement, with the requirement to regularly report to the local police station,, but no restrictions on work, and no further detention. Denazification may have also been required for his pension to be paid out. Delays with that may have been behind his starting to work for Brill, although he certainly stayed there longer than would have been necessary. 

The local denazification committee checked a total of 35,000 citizens of Wuppertal, with 95% being categorised as either followers or exonerated. 

In the 1950s, life gradually normalised. Max Heinrich’s son Richard, thanks to his uncanny success in keeping a low profile throughout the Nazi times rapidly rose in the teaching hierarchy and became headteacher of a high school at Idar-Oberstein from 1950. 

In the summer holidays of 1951 and 1954, Max Heinrich and Maria hosted Richard’s son Jörg. In 1953 and 1955 they travelled to Idar-Oberstein to attend the Confirmation ceremonies of their grandchildren. 

They also went on holiday with the Tiefenbachs, a married couple who were close friends and had a VW Beetle. In July 1954, Max Heinrich and Maria had passports issued, which reveal that they travelled to Austria three times, in September 1954, 55 and 56. On the first trip, even the travel currency exchange had to be documented in the passport. In their photo album we find pictures of Kriml and Niederalpel (Steiermark) and Klein-Walsertal. 

At other times they also enjoyed trips to mountainous regions in Germany. Holiday snaps taken by one of the quartet tend to show the other three in places like Hinterzarten, Tiefenbach (Allgäu), Königssee, Berchtesgaden, and Herrenchiemsee. There is a photo from Titisee in the Black Forest which exceptionally shows all four of them, posing with somebody dressed up as a polar bear. There was a traditional inn named “The Bear” at Titisee at the time, which apparently took pride in the animal connection and boasted bears in decorations and furniture. My best guess is that the travellers stayed there and that the group photo with bear was part of the service,  

Heinrich Tiefenbach, born 1899, was among the 53 friends and acquaintances whose birthdays Max Heinrich had meticulously written down in the 1943 pocket diary. According to this source, Tiefenbach’s address was in the Gewerbeschulstr., which today boasts 25 companies, but there is none named Tiefenbach. 

In the 1950s, the Tiefenbachs were neighbours, living diagonally opposite in the Gronaustr. Both couples met on Saturday nights to play cards and/or watch television at the Tiefenbachs’ flat. Looks like Max Heinrich found another quartet. The Tiefenbachs even joined them and provided Beetle transport for the family visits to Idar-Oberstein. 

En route from Wuppertal to Idar Oberstein, Easter 1952.I'm assuming this was the car the friends had before the famous 1950s beetle, looks more like a pre-war model.

When the grandchildren came to visit them at Wuppertal, Maria was in charge of entertaining them. Both recalled cinema visits, which weren’t on offer back home. At the gigantic Thalia theatre in Elberfeld. In his brief memoir, Jörg specifically highlights the summer holidays of 1951, just before he moved to high school, and 1955, when the world championships of motor-paced bicycle racing (Steher-Rennen) took place in Wuppertal.   

Max Heinrich, on the other hand, stayed home, the grandchildren reported. I wonder if he didn’t take part in the impressive cultural life of the aspiring metropolis at all. In February 1958, for instance, Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonics played in the Stadthalle, a venue which is often praised for its excellent acoustics.  

And in June 1955, the local Instrumental-Verein played Dvorak’s famous cello concerto with Paul Tortelier as the soloist. Which is significant because among the several LPs with this concerto I inherited from Richard there is one also starring Tortelier, first released 1950, so this could have been a purchase inspired by that concert. Even though he didn’t own a turntable, Max Heinrich could conceivably bought it for his son. We will never know. 

While Maria entertained the grandchildren, Max Heinrich played patience (card solitaire) and smoked numerous cigars. The children counted up to 30 a day. He may have started smoking in the army during the first war, not sure. We do know from the second world war that Richard, who never smoked, transferred the tobacco rations he received as a soldier. After the war, relatives used to give him a special 5-mark cigar as a present on special occasions if they couldn’t think of anything else. As his health began to show the strain, his doctor tried to persuade him to give up. He declared, however: “If he insists, I’ll find a doctor who also smokes.” He only stopped smoking three days before he died. 

In February 1958, his sister Gertrud died at the age of 77 years.  On July 22 of the same year, Max Heinrich died aged 75. His golden wedding anniversary would have been on October 8 the same year. As mentioned above, the funeral featured a cellist playing Ave Maria (Schubert’s version I assume).  

In August, Jörg came to visit Maria, created the photo album from the photos kept in two shoe boxes, and undertook a day trip to the World Exposition at Brussels with Maria.  

In October 1960, after both children had started at university, Richard and Ruth moved to the house that they had inherited from Ruth’s aunt Johanna a few years earlier, which is in Hahnenbach, some 30 km from Idar-Oberstein. Richard now had to buy a car for the daily commute to his school. 

In April 1961, Maria celebrated her 80th birthday at Hahnenbach and expressed the wish to stay there, but kept the flat in Wuppertal for the time being. In the summer, she had surgery for a hernia at the local hospital of Kirn. In October, during a visit to her old flat in Wuppertal with her sister Anna, she died suddenly, presumably of a heart attack. 

Furniture and many personal items and documents from the flat were moved to Hahnenbach without much thought, which is why some rather unexpected things have survived to this day. Max Heinrich’s cello ended up in the attic of the Hahnenbach house for the next 20 years, again being stored under conditions that weren’t exactly optimal for a venerable old cello. 

As far as I know, music didn’t happen in either household after the string quartet stopped playing. My aunt on the maternal side recalled she was shocked to find out that her brother-in-law's family didn’t even sing Christmas carols.  

At least one attempt was made, however. As I only found out in the course of this project, Richard organised private recorder lessons for his daughter. Her teacher was the husband of one of the teachers at his school. Margarete recalled that Richard also taught her some of the fundamentals and played a few notes himself to demonstrate things. 

This father-daughter activity appears to have been immensely unpopular with the other half of the family, however. Margarete had to practice in the basement, and Jörg retained a life-long aversion to recorder sounds. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, also celebrated at Hahnenbach, he very nearly suffered an allergic shock when I unpacked a new alto recorder and gave it to my daughter to try. 

With the dramatic spread of radio and record players in the mid 20th century, much of the motivation for amateur music making had of course disappeared. As mentioned, Richard had LPs with classical music and also recorded some on cassette tapes from radio programmes. 

Note, however, that Maria’s nieces in Bruchsal  raised a whole generation of professional musicians. Among the four grandchildren of Maria’s half-sister Anna we find a cellist, a gambist and a bass trombonist. Only one went against the grain and became a chef. Just how this clustering of musicians arose remains to be explained by science. 

The silence in the household of my grandparents may have to do with the genes of my grandmother Ruth, who used to speak of her musical in-laws as a curiosity, to swiftly add that one of her relatives was so amusical that he was barred from becoming a teacher. 

Specifically, the person in question was her great uncle Friedrich Kauer, born 1849 in Simmern, a younger brother of our Alsatian station master Christoph Gottlieb Kauer. He was really keen to become a teacher, but that would have required the ability to sing with the schoolchildren, which he couldn’t do. Therefore, he specialised in the newly emerging field of educating deaf children. He ended up being the head teacher of the Wilhelm-Augusta-Stift at Wriezen on the river Oder, one of the first special schools for the deaf. Although the building survives and today serves as the town hall of Wriezen, I have been unable to find any records of his activity there. This may be to do with the fact that the Nazis very swiftly disbanded this institution in 1934 and probably didn’t bother with archiving its records. 

However, Ruth’s Kauer ancestry also includes quite a few other teachers and vicars, all of whom must have been able to sing, Precisely who did and who didn’t sing carols for Christmas remains to be explored. 

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)

an amateur string quartet

One hundred years of cellotude continued:

Eighth part of

Chapter 1

A cello called Heinrich

Previous section: A civil servant at Elberfeld

Group portrait of Max Heinrich's quartet dated April 1927,
presumably taken by his son Richard, then 17.

An amateur string quartet

After another examination at the end of 1924, Max Heinrich was promoted to the rank of inspector at the city’s tax authority, which also meant a lifelong job guarantee as a Beamter (civil servant). With such a position and status one can relax and start a new hobby such as playing in a string quartet.

So I am guessing that at this point at the very latest, if not even after the end the military marches in 1920, he got involved in the string quartet. Young Richard had built his own camera and developed his own glass back negatives and prints. Three of his photos, one dated 1927 and the others undated, show the string quartet in a private home, with Max Heinrich playing the cello. At the viola, we have a white-haired man looking older than our 45-year-old cellist, with a wide-ranging white moustache. The two violinists by contrast, may be a bit younger than him, perhaps in their 30s. To this day we don’t know who the other members of the quartet were. However, we will have the opportunity to look at Max Heinrich’s circle of friends at a later stage. Conceivably, survivors of the quartet could be hiding among them.

On one of the photos (below), a bit of contrast enhancing and zooming in reveals the name of the composer they were playing. At the top end of the cover of their music it says in huge capital letters: “B R A H M S”. Further sleuthing is facilitated by the fact that Romantic composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) only ever released three string quartets, published between 1873 and 1876.

• Streichquartett Nr. 1 c-Moll op. 51/1 (1873)
• Streichquartett Nr. 2 a-Moll op. 51/2 (1873)
• Streichquartett Nr. 3 B-Dur op. 67 (1876)

The only photo we have of the quartet actually playing.

Note that at the time of the photo, this music was only half a century old, so comparable in its freshness to the music of the Beatles we still hear on the radio today. When the composer died, Max Heinrich was 14 years old.

I understand the composer spent some time messing around with the string quartet format and dismissed many attempts before he agreed to let the two quartets of opus 51 out into the world.

The 1980s guide to chamber music on my shelf thinks that the effort and delay was worthwhile as even the first of the quartets shows mature mastery of the format. The c minor quartet in particular is described as a favourite of quartet associations. The second, although also in a minor key, doesn’t lead us to dark depths of combative passion like the first, apparently. Sounds fun. The third shows the composer from a more relaxed, happy side. Phew.

On listening to all three in a row, I found the last one the most accessible. Ironically, the composer dedicated it to an amateur cellist, even though it doesn’t have any melody bits for the cello to play.

Circumstantial evidence supporting the Brahms connection can also be found in the possessions of Richard, who remained Max Heinrich’s only child. His vinyl records were a decidedly mixed bag ranging from Dvorak to low brow singers such as Mireille Mathieu. There are a few LPs with chamber works, including Brahms’ string sextet Nr. 1 recorded by the Amadeus Quartet and guests, to which I hadn’t paid attention before I discovered the name of the composer in the photo. Other chamber works among the LPs with Dvorak’s American quartet together with Smetana’s quartet No. 1 as well as trios for piano, cello and flute by Hummel, Weber and Haydn. In the decades since Richard’s death I have listened to those trios a hundred times and even tried to play bits of the Hummel. The American quartet is close to my heart because it is adjacent to the more famous cello concerto and the New World symphony. But the Brahms had somehow managed to dodge my attention.

I also recall a novel by Françoise Sagan, Aimez-vous Brahms, displayed prominently on my grandparents’s shelf (the copy has disappeared now, so I can’t check for musical annotations). So we have some Brahms memorabilia, but the sheet music shown in the photo hasn’t shown up yet.

The Brahms quartets sound quite demanding and I would struggle to play any of the cello parts. Based on this and on the witness statement from Maria’s sister Anna, I’ll postulate that Max Heinrich must have played the cello for a while, maybe even in his musical training before he joined the infantry. In this case, Heinrich the cello could have been in the family since the 1890s.

This scenario makes for a satisfying life story but throws up some challenges with the logistics. On leaving Dieuze with a child and just 30 kg of luggage, Maria can’t have taken the cello along. If it was in Max Heinrich’s possession before 1918, it must have spent the war years either with his relatives in Tangermünde and then in Magdeburg or with Maria’s relatives in Bruchsal. Always assuming that he couldn’t take it with him to the front. Even though the instrument does look like it’s been through the war, so maybe he did after all? This will remain a mystery.

In any case we can tell that it has been played a lot. The bow has a lovely deep groove where Max Heinrich’s index finger used to rest. When I use the bow, I preserve this feature for posterity by using the underhand bow-hold which I learned as a young double bass player (see chapter 3).

Another partial photo of the quartet which I rediscovered recently,

Hausmusik (home concerts) among family and friends was still a thing during the Weimar Republic. In 1932, the day of St. Cecilia (November 22) was declared the annual day of Hausmusik. Its popularity goes back to the 19th century, when members of an expanding middle class were keen to demonstrate their cultural status by pursuing activities previously reserved for the courts of aristocracy, including chamber music. The bourgeois Hausmusik set itself apart from the more popular music of the common people by its choice of instruments and classical repertoire. There were string quartets and sonatas for the flute or the piano solo. In the taverns by contrast, you would hear accordions or cithers.

In the early 20th century, there was a growing criticism of this class separation, especially because the repertoire choices of ambitious middle class families may not always have matched their musical abilities. Thus, bourgeois families may have struggled trying to play Beethoven, only to set themselves apart from the folk songs and squeezeboxes of the lower classes. The combination of snobbery and lack of competence naturally encouraged derision. To avoid this problem, some critics made the interesting suggestion that middle class Hausmusik should revisit the music of the Renaissance, which generally is easier for amateurs to learn.

In the Weimar Republic, there have been efforts to bridge the musical gap between the classes. The pianist, music educator and politician Leo Kestenberg (1882-1962) at the Prussian ministry for culture worked out a holistic concept which he published in 1923 as a memorandum for the entire cultivation of music at school and in the population („Denkschrift über die gesamte Musikpflege in Schule und Volk“). He could implement some of its reforms before he was pushed out of office in 1932.

While the quartet seems to fit in this picture, Max Heinrich did not succeed in establishing musical activity as a family tradition. Richard only learned the fundamentals of recorder playing, although he appreciated classical music recordings, as mentioned above. Richard was already 10 years old when normal family life resumed after the war, and by that time he may have had other ideas of how to spend his spare time.

Note also that having a professional musician as a parent can easily backfire if the child doesn’t immediately meet the standards expected. A cousin reports that Richard sang out of tune, and there are reports that during his military service his comrades banned him from singing. However, seeing that he was able to hear music and had the desire to sing, I am sure that a suitable intervention early in life could have helped him to learn to make music too.

Apart from Richard’s chamber music collection mentioned above, he also had orchestral works on LPs, including several recordings of Dvorak’s cello concerto. They range from an early one released in 1950, which theoretically could have been Max Heinrich’s property, but probably wasn’t as I believe he never owned a turntable, to a late one from 1977. From this I conclude that Max Heinrich’s cello playing must have shaped Richard’s musical mind at least as a listener.

Richard graduated from high school (Oberrealschule Nord in Humboldtstraße, Elberfeld, today Helmholtz-Realschule) in March 1928 and started studying mathematics and natural sciences at Göttingen. This traditional university was then a global leader in mathematics boasting David Hilbert (1862-1943) as one of its professors. A new building for the mathematical institute was opened in 1929. By that time, however, Richard had moved on to spend a term at Vienna and then to conclude his studies closer to home, in Bonn where he remained until he took his state examination in 1933.

From January 1930, Max Heinrich’s story continues in the newborn city of Wuppertal, which at this point had 415,000 residents. In this year, Max Heinrich became the administrator of the city’s official pawnshop. Together with Maria and their dog, a German shepherd called Schluck (Gulp), and obviously with Heinrich the cello, he moved into a flat on the first floor of the pawnshop building.

Maria and Schluck the dog.

The trouble is I couldn’t find the address of this pawnshop online. It took me a visit to the city’s archives and some snooping around in their newspaper clippings and ancient address books on microfiche to track it down.

I learned that both Barmen and Elberfeld had one of their own – they only merged in a new location in February 1940. Elberfeld’s shop is the one we’re after and it has a longer history going back to 1821. It started out in a slaughterhouse in Brausenwerth, and in 1888 it moved to the house in Obergrünewalder Straße 21, which was also the address when Heinrich and Maria moved in to live above the shop. In the 1932 edition of the address book we find under this address, eureka, the “Städtische Leihanstalt” – no wonder I couldn’t find it before, I wouldn’t have thought of giving it that name! Max Heinrich is listed as resident on the first floor, as a Stadtobersekretär (although we had already promoted him to the higher rank of Inspector above?!).

I was very pleased to find that this address is in the very heart of the Luisenviertel which at least today is an extremely attractive neighbourhood with lots of restaurants. I think it is one of the buildings on the corner with today’s Friedrich-Ebert-Straße (then Königsstraße), although I am not quite sure which one, as the numbering on the buildings facing Obergrünewalder Straße is confused and only the numbers 17, 19, 24 (sic!), and 25 are in evidence on the odd-numbered side of the road. The building on the street corner next door to number 19 is old and very beautiful, so I’ve symbolically adopted that as a mental representation of the pawnshop, even though a map that I found later shows it on the opposite side of the road, next to today’s number 24. It’s all very confusing.

Further files I consulted contained a detailed description of how the pawnshop worked – the staff members included three permanent helpers, a clerk responsible for the till, an apprentice and two magazine workers, so a total of eight people. Elsewhere, there is also a mention of experts for the valuation of specific groups of items. Max Heinrich is named in a document dated 1.12.1931. After that, however, the file goes dark and the next document dates from 1937.

What I was hoping to find in the archives as well was information on events in early 1933. There was a minor scandal in that some items went missing from the site, and Max Heinrich launched an official investigation. Unfortunately, the investigation found that it was his wife Maria who had helped herself to some of these. An expert for the court diagnosed an underlying psychiatric problem for which she got some help, while Max Heinrich ended up in another office job in the administration of corporate tax matters.

I was hoping to find newspaper reports or official documents on the scandal and its resolution but had no luck with that. However, with the address books I could confirm dates when Max Heinrich was recorded as living in that building, and the names of the people in the position before and after him.

His predecessor in the flat and presumably in the job, was listed in the 1930 edition as Otto Drees, Leihhausverwalter. His successor in the pawnshop is named in 1935 as Karl Schwabe, Stadtass.

According to my previous information, they moved to Gronaustraße 35 in June 1933. However, the address book Barmen 1934 still lists this street as Königsstraße. It was renamed after the merger because Elberfeld also had a street with that name – today known as Friedrich-Ebert-Straße, as mentioned above. In Königsstraße 35 he is listed on the first floor as a Reisender (travelling salesman) which seems to suggest that he was suspended from his position in the city administration for some time while the investigation was ongoing. I’m not sure if he actually worked as a travelling salesman or whether this was just a euphemism for unemployed.

The first united address book for Wuppertal, dated 1935, has the new street name Gronaustraße and lists Heinrich as Stadtinspektor, which we think was his rank since 1924 (even though the previous address book listed him as Obersekretär). So he appears to have come out of the scandal unharmed, but I am wondering whether it left his position in the city administration weakened and forced him to keep a low profile as the Nazis took power.

Read on:

When the music stops

running out of groundwater

I am rapidly running out of big topics that I have never covered in my CB features, but groundwater was one of them until now. With severe drought becoming a common problem associated with the climate catastrophe (and not helped by catastrophic flooding that doesn't do much to replenish the aquifers), there have been a few worrying reports of shrinking groundwater supplies from around the world recently along with a call to recognise the groundwater as a keystone ecosystem. I've also been very excited to learn about the underground aqueducts of ancient Persia (picture below) known as qanats, many of which still provide a much more sustainable access to groundwater than modern day wells.

All of which is stitched together in my latest feature which is out now:

Losing our groundwater

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 3, 5 February 2024, Pages R75-R77

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread ishere .

In ancient Persia, underground aqueducts known as qanats channelled groundwater to low-lying outlet points by gravity alone. Although some are still used in modern-day Iran, like the one shown here in Gonabad, many have been abandoned and replaced with deep wells operating less sustainably. (Photo: Basp1/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed).)

a civil servant at Elberfeld

One hundred years of cellotude continued:

Seventh part of

Chapter 1

A cello called Heinrich

Previous section: A wanderer between both worlds

New town hall of Elberfeld, postcard from 1913.

A civil servant at Elberfeld

On June 16, 1919, Max Heinrich was hired by the city of Elberfeld for a 6-month probation period as a “Diätar”, meaning basically a civil servant with a fixed-term contract. His salary was 200 Mark per month. On the same day he also got his formal registration as a resident of Elberfeld. Note that on this date, he was technically still in the army, and the war wasn’t over yet, as the Versailles Treaty was only signed on June 28th.

Elberfeld had emerged in the industrial revolution as a rapidly growing city with numerous textile factories, but it also had engineering and chemical industry, including the budding company of a certain Friedrich Bayer (1825-1880) who developed Aspirin in Elberfeld. Bayer has kept a presence there to this day, even though it moved its headquarters to the new town of Leverkusen in 1912.

In 1838, just three years after the Adler famously travelled from Nürnberg to Fürth, the railway line between Elberfeld and nearby Düsseldorf was opened. At the end of 1919, Elberfeld had some 160,000 residents and its fair share of social problems linked to its rapid industrialisation. A certain Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) knew these problems well, as he was the son of a factory owner in the neighbouring city of Barmen and went to school in Elberfeld.

Postcards from the early 20th century show a rather wonderful world, however, with the futuristic suspension railway linking Elberfeld to Barmen and the impeccable “Gründerzeit” architecture boasting elaborate art nouveau ornamentation. On August 1, 1929, Elberfeld and Barmen along with some smaller communities were merged to form the new city that was officially baptised Wuppertal in January 1930.

Now it’s high time for a family reunion. Maria and her son Richard had stayed in Dieuze during the war, living in a small house with a garden. Richard visited his birth place in 1963 and found the house was still standing, but I wouldn’t know exactly where to look for it. Richard went to school there until the war ended – at which point he was nine years old.

After the Armistice, Maria and Richard were ordered to leave Lorraine. They were only allowed to take 30 kg of luggage. They travelled to Bruchsal to stay with Maria’s stepmother and half-siblings. Richard had half a year of schooling there, before they moved on to Elberfeld to reunite with his father.

The family rented a flat in Schleswiger Straße 45, in a quiet residential area called Ostersbaum in the Northeast of Elberfeld. It is roughly one kilometre to the North of Wuppertal main station, which back then was Elberfeld Hauptbahnhof. Walking to the Hauptbahnhof from his flat, Max Heinrich also passed the Döppersberg station of the legendary suspension railway, just before reaching the main station. The picturesque view in the opposite direction, coming out of the station and walking towards the historic city centre, can be admired on many postcards from the early 20th century (just search “Döppersberg” - see my favourte example below). It has changed dramatically in the hundred years since, and not for the better.

My favourite view of Elberfeld, looking from the main station towards the city centre, with the suspension railway crossing the frame. The postcard dates from 1916 and still has the Schwebebahn station on stilts - at some point between then and 1926 a less futuristic house was built around it.
Source.

After passing the Döppersberg station, the way to Schleswiger Straße, now leads us through the pedestrianised shopping streets of Elberfeld towards the Neumarkt square with the fountain of Neptune and the “New Town Hall”, which Emperor Wilhelm II. inaugurated in 1900 along with the suspension railway. The neogothic fairytale castle with a spire 79 metres high replaced the previous town hall right in the middle of the historic centre, which today houses the Von der Heydt Museum.

The neogothic castle must have been where Max-Heinrich worked in the first decade at Elberfeld, so we now follow his daily way home from the town hall to Schleswiger Straße, which is just a ten minute walk away. We follow a series of streets named ironically after very flat areas in Northern Germany, even though they have considerable slopes to climb and some of them are connected by stairs. One of the stairs is flanked by a mural depicting various musicians including a cellist. I read that as a sign that I was on the right track.

The house where the family lived is a four storey block which may be historic but appears to have lost quite a bit of the historic details that other houses in the street still have, including the year of construction typically displayed above the entrance. I saw 1900 and 1910 shown nearby but no date on No. 45.

In December 1919, Max Heinrich passed an exam to become an office clerk. His employment document comprises three pages specifically typed out with his details and the pay scale appropriate to his work. It outlines planned pay rises every two years for 20 years starting at 4,000 Mark, and rising up to 6,500 Mark in ten steps. Apparently they counted his military service as equivalent of ten years on this scale, so he started on 5,800 Mark.

Meanwhile, the turbulent history of the Weimar Republic started to unfold and also touched Elberfeld. The Kapp Putsch of March 1920 threatened to become a civil war. Officers and members of the numerous free corps formed from dissolved military units under General Walther von Lüttwitz wanted to replace the democratically elected coalition government of Gustav Bauer with a military government under Wolfgang Kapp.

Soldiers of the Kapp-Putsch in Berlin, March 1920.
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1970-051-65 / Haeckel, Otto / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Resistance against the coup originated in Elberfeld, where representatives of the communist, socialist and social democrat parties met and jointly called to resist the putschists by general strike and political means, and thus launched the Ruhr uprising which led to violent clashes between the Red Ruhr army and armed forces including the Freikorps. The conflict did not end when the Kapp Putsch collapsed. The striking workers who had saved the republic were then violently suppressed by the very same state they had rescued.

Max Heinrich was member of the DDP (Deutsche Demokratische Partei), which was part of the coalition government targeted by the coup. So it is safe to assume that he will not have had much sympathy for the coup. On the other hand the armed resistance of the Ruhr workers wasn’t quite his kind of thing either, I would assume.

Thus I thought that the whole episode won’t have affected him much, but then I discovered a list of monuments in Elberfeld including one for the “lightning from below” on the corner of Flensburger Str. and Paradestr., close to Max Heinrich’s home and on his way to work. There we can read that on March 17 violent fights in this neighbourhood claimed the lives of 60 civilians, most of them poorly armed workers or collateral victims. At the end of that day, soldiers hastily retired and fled to nearby Remscheid.

From the Kapp Putsch via the hyperinflation of 1923 through to the global economic crisis, the 1920s were a turbulent decade but we don’t know of any turbulences in Schleswiger Straße, where life carried on in its well-ordered paths and young Richard completed his high school education. For a time, Maria’s sister Anna joined the household. She had finished the standard school education in 1917, and now Maria wanted to help her get an additional qualification. There was a choice between a school for home economics and another one for commercial / business studies. “Anna had met another girl who signed up for the home economics school, the Bergisch-Märkische Frauenberufsschule, and she just went along with her. But she didn’t learn anything there,” as Anna’s daughter told me. Moreover, she had to leave the school prematurely, as her mother fell ill and she had to return to Bruchsal to look after her. There, Anna got married in October 1924, which leaves us with the timeframe of 1920-1923 for her stay in Elberfeld. Maybe the sisters had planned this when Maria was staying in Bruchsal after being evicted from Lorraine.

Dating this stay is important for our musical subject, because Anna later told her daughters of Max Heinrich’s cello playing, and praised its quality. She said that Max Heinrich only played good music, not such stuff as others might have played. Whatever the stuff might be that he didn’t play, the compliment suggests that he must have acquired cello skills – and possibly the cello – long before then.

Read on:

An amateur string quartet

a wanderer between both worlds

One hundred years of cellotude continued:

Sixth part of

Chapter 1

A cello called Heinrich

Previous section: Marches and veal dumplings

This photo shouting "1914 War" marks the beginning of the war in Max Heinrich's photo album. Next to his official portrait in uniform (shown below).

A wanderer between both worlds

Max Heinrich left no record of his experience of the war, so we will just have to piece together the jigsaw. At Dieuze, his regiment was already stationed quite close to the French border, and it was swiftly moved into France and into battles at Lagarde and Nancy-Epinal.

When the Western front became stuck in trench warfare, the regiment was moved to the Eastern front where it suffered severe losses in the Winter Battle of the Masurian Lakes in February 1915. The third battalion, ie one third of the regiment, had to be disbanded on February 20th and could only be reformed several weeks later, initially only as a half-battalion. In the last year of the war, the regiment was moved back to North of France, where it once more suffered devastating losses. Again, entire companies had to be disbanded and rebuilt.

Lists of the casualties of IR138 are available online and paint a haunting picture. Max Heinrich’s first company had 206 fatalities (just among the soldiers, not including officers who have a separate list). This is roughly the nominal strength of the company, so on average the entire population was killed and replaced once. I’m trying to get my head round that but it is a struggle.

As a musician in the band, also helping out with the medical service and the communications, Max Heinrich must have had better survival chances than the colleagues in the trenches. At least I couldn’t find any hoboist in the casualties lists. He also had the good luck of falling ill soon after the war began and staying that way for much of its duration.

On September 13, 1914, after six weeks at war, he had stomach and gut problems (Magen- und Darm-Katarrh) which was treated in the field hospital in Fling for a year and a half, until April 3rd, 1916, according to his record card. Unfortunately I can’t find a place called Fling anywhere.

On April 4th he returned to his regiment still at the Eastern front, which had just successfully stopped a Russian offensive at the Lake Naroch (today’s Belarus).

Max Heinrich ca. 1916.

Max Heinrich spent one month at the Eastern front. During that time, his mother died at Magdeburg on April 20th, the day before her 72nd birthday. On May 3rd, he became ill with bronchitis and was treated at an army hospital in Bruchsal – conveniently close to Maria’s family, so he will have been able to catch up with his wife and son during that time.

Max Heinrich visiting family in 1916. The location has been seen in previous family portraits including one with his mother so it is likely to be either his parents' house in Tangermünde or his sister's in Magdeburg. As his mother is conspicuously absent from this one, the reason for the visit could have been her funeral.

On July 7th he joined a reconvalescent company of his regiment, which I guess is where all the numerous soldiers injured in previous battles were brought back to fighting strength. On August 30th, 1916 he came to the 4th company of his regiment, later moving to the 1st company where he was originally. From this point to the end of the war, his itinerary must have been identical to that of the regiment.

During his illness, the regiment witnessed a development that became a significant part of literary history. The young philologist and writer Walter Flex, born 1887 at Eisenach (also the birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach and 40 km from Max Heinrich’s birthplace), had forged a friendship with the theology student Ernst Wurche during officer training. At the end of May 1915, both joined IR138, each commanding a platoon of the ninth company. Their company was part of the third batallion which was severely decimated in the Winter Battle of the Masurian Lakes.

On the Eastern front, Flex and Wurche experienced an intensive relationship which found a brutal end when Wurche died on August 23. Flex eternalised his memories of the time with him in the romanticising novella Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten (The wanderer between both worlds). The two worlds of the title can be read as life and death. Wurche is presented as a carefree adventurous type who valiantly faces the mortal risks of life at the frontline.

Dustjacket and hardcover of Walter Flex's famous book. Sadly not the family edition (which has gone missing by the time its significance dawned on me) but a 1937 reprint (20th anniversary of the author's death) which I found in a street library.

The novella was published in 1916 and made Flex famous overnight. Poems included in the story, expecially „Wildgänse rauschen durch die Nacht“ were set to music and further spread his fame. Today his work counts as a precedent for the successes of Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque. Flex was called to Berlin in 1917 in order to participate in a literary account of the war. After completing his contribution, he could have stayed in the safety of the PR world, but insisted on returning to his regiment and the Eastern front.

On October 10, 1917, the regiment embarked on various ships to take part in conquering the islands Ösel and Moon in the Baltic Sea. Walter Flex suffered a shot wound on the island of Ösel on October 15 and died of his injuries the day after.

Max Heinrich was with the regiment at this time, so he must have played his tuba when the band played the last march for Walter Flex. A copy of Flex’s famous book lived on my grandparents’ bookshelves well into the 21st century. By the time its significance dawned on me, it has sadly and mysteriously disappeared.

The Russian Revolution began on October 25. The Bolsheviks had promised the Russian population peace, and thus a ceasefire between Germany and Russia came into force on December 15, leading to the peace of Brest-Litovsk the following year.

For Max Heinrich’s regiment, this meant a return to France and another rendez-vous with death. In January 1918 his regiment took position at Pérenchies West of Armentières, near Lille. During the battle of Armentières, it crossed the river Leie and got involved in fighting near Doulieu and Merris. By August the regiment was so severely decimated that it was no longer fit for service and had to be reconstituted. Later, defensive engagements in the Champagne region brought further severe losses. Overall we get the impression that Max Heinrich had to play lots of funeral marches that year, but he managed to hang on with no further illnesses nor injuries.

After the Armistice of November 11, the remainders of the regiment marched homewards through the Eifel mountans to Schupbach (Hesse). As their home barracks in Dieuze was out of bounds (reclaimed by the French), they marched onwards to Coswig on the river Elbe, where the regiment was officially disbanded. In May 1919, Max Heinrich was moved to an “Auflösungs-Kompanie” – a company with the purpose of managing its own dissolution, I love the absurdity of that – and at the end of October he was dismissed from the army.

As the Versailles Treaty only allowed a German army of 100,000 men and the Lower Alsatian Regiment was disbanded, there was no question that Max Heinrich’s military career was finished. Instead, there was the prospect of the quieter life of a civil servant – and chamber musician.

Read on:

A civil servant at Elberfeld