Dear Marion,

There is in one of my previous accounts an error to be corrected:
My mother's grandparents in whose second story apartment
above the corner grocery at Kastanienallee 23, she grew up,
were August und Katharine Roessner, not Doering as I mistakenly
wrote.  Doering was my great-grandmother's maiden name. August,
as Klemens reported, repaired Singer sewing machines. My mother,
if I understood her correctly, reported to me that her grandmother
worked in a cannery whose Jewish owner, Schmalbach, my greatgrandmother
successfully defended against anti-semitically inspired charges
that he preyed on his female employees. On our second and last
return visit to Braunschweig in 1990, I thought I recognized
Katharine Roessner in a group picture of Schmalbach employees
on display in a municipal museum an dem Dorfplatz. For the sake
of historical accuracy, I note the discrepancies that according to:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konservenindustrie_in_Braunschweig#Schmalbach_1898
the Schmalbach factory was located on Hamburgerstrasse, which
would have been too distant for an employee whose home was on
Kastanienallee, and the Schmalbach brothers who operated that
factory in those years are not identified as Jewish, - although
they might have been. My mother's account may well be apocryphal,
but if so, it's all the more evidence of her determination to
emphasize her family's sympathy for Judaism.

As Klemens reported, my mother born on November 23, 1898, was the
illegitimate child of Bertha Roessner, a strikingly beautiful, but
obviously not too responsible young woman, who declined to divulge the
name of the father, from whom I have always surmised my mother inherited
her extraordinary intelligence and perhaps also her unusual sensitivity.
After my mother's birth, Bertha was taken back by her devoted admirer,
Karl Schwarz, who had wooed her all along, but whom she had previously
spurned. Karl was now happy to marry her and retrieve her from her disgrace.
It was Karl's parents, whom my sister and I were once taken to visit in
their dingy Berlin apartment, when we were very young and they were very
old, - as old or older than I am now, - who insisted that the illegitimate
infant who had been grandiosely baptized as Margarethe Wilhelmine in
addition to other, even more bombastic first names that I have forgotten
and that my mother was too embarrassed to repeat, - should not be a member
of their son's household. My mother, therefore, was taken to Braunschweig
to be brought up by her grandparents. She began life as an outcast from
her own family, became in early adult life an outcast from her people
because she had married a Jew, and ended her life as an outcast from
her adopted family because she was not a Jewess. In this role as the
perennial exile, my mother now assumes in my imagination an heroic stature
that I had not previously recognized.

Probably it was the presence of young children in the family, together
with the deaths of my father's parents which explain the increasingly
essential role that my maternal grandmother and her husband, whom my
sister and I called grandpa - Opapa - played in our lives. If anything,
the Nazi persecution of the Jews only increased their affection for us.
If my memory does not deceive me, from 1934 through 1937 my sister and
I spent at minimum a week or two each year, staying with my grandparents
at Hoiruperstrasse 7, in Berlin-Nikolassee, often enough that der
Potsdamer Bahnhof, where the train from Braunschweig arrived and Margrit
and I were met by Onkel Hans, Tante Grete, Omama and/or Opapa, became
a familiar destination.

On November 9, 1938, we kept an appointment at the American Consulate
in Hamburg for issuance of Visas to permit us to enter the United States.
That night we stayed in the house of my mother's half-brother Walter
in Hamburg-Hoheneichen. The next day, when our train pulled into the
Hauptbahnhof in Braunschweig, the newspaper frontpages detailed the
revages of the Kristallnacht. My parents could not know whether our
apartment had been ransacked. The train to Berlin was about to depart
on an adjacent track. My sister and I were never taken home, but my
mother bought tickets for us, telephoned her half-brother Hans that
we were coming and sent us on our way. My parents took a taxi to
Schleinitzstrasse 1. Our apartment was intact. An hour or two after
their return, the police arrived. My father was arrested and shipped
to Buchenwald.

In the final months of her life, when she was already severely demented
my mother's glassy stare would on occasion melt into a limpid smile as
she looked at me and said: "Suesser Trost in meinem Herzen, Meine Pflicht
hab' ich getan," - das kannst Du wirklich sagen." (Sweet consolation
in my heart that I have done my duty, - you have a right to say that.)
The citation from the libretto of Beethoven's Fidelio has always struck
me as a misunderstanding, because my relationship to my parents was never
determined by a sense of duty.  Rather I interpret these final words of a
fiercely determined mind, as an index of the meaning that the Fidelio
drama of bourgeois idealism had acquired in our family tradition. For
from the onset of the Nazi terror until my father's death, my mother
invested all the resources at her disposal to her family's survival,
from making my father's medical practice a social and economic success
to saving him from murder at the hands of the Nazis, - and in both she
succeeded. I always considered it a mark of good taste that my parents
never made explicit references to her role as my father's Leonore.
She never donned men's clothes in the pursuit of her goals, but when it
was necessary she flouted her Aryan credentials - and whether they were real
only Bertha Roessner would have known - first in 1934 with the Nazi Labor
Minister Hans Seldte to secure my father's continuing license to practice
medicine, then in 1938 with the officers of the Gestapo who had become
his patients in consequence of that practice, to secure his release from
Buchenwald and make it possible for him to flee to the United States. It
wasn't easy. Once he had reached safety in New York City, it fell to her
to dissolve the household, to arrange for the family belongings to be
crated and shipped, and finally to retrieve her children from their
grandparents' care in Berlin and take them with her to Bremerhaven,
to leave behind die Sprache und die Kultur that meant so much to her.
Meanwhile in Germany, the Nazi authorities had been suggesting to her
that she should divorce her Jewish husband, while in New York City,
her sister-in-law had been suggesting to, or even urging, her husband
to divorce his gentile wife.

To be continued

Jochen