was impressed by his remarkable self-confidence and his ability to rise above the jibes to which he was continuously subjected. This might seem strange to you, Karl, but don’t forget that the German universities were the strongholds of reaction. Long before Hitler became Chancellor, his ideas had already triumphed in the universities.
Stein was a brilliant mathematician and Gertie always felt that if she had not distracted him, he would have easily reached the pinnacle of his profession. Perhaps, but had fate not intervened in the shape of your grandmother, he might just as easily have ended up in Auschwitz.
The two of them became inseparable. Slowly they began to explore each other’s emotions and bodies. Together they flouted Jewish orthodoxy. Gertie’s household may have been secular in every way, but the kitchen was never defiled by pig meat. David’s parents were staunch atheists. They were both active in the Social Democratic Party. Here too, the old taboo against pork was strictly observed.
David and Gertie cemented their love by walking into a non-Jewish butcher’s shop and buying some cooked ham. They walked to the old Jewish cemetery, sat on the grave of David’s grandfather and consumed the ham. Once they had finished, they appealed to the Creator to prove his existence by striking them dead. The sky remained still. The excitement proved too much for Gertie. She vomited in the street, but as David helped to clean her mouth they both began to laugh. They had cured themselves of all superstitions forever. It was only after this episode that David had dragged her off to meet his parents.
The Steins lived in a two-room basement with a tiny kitchen. A fading portrait of Eduard Bernstein was pinned to the wall. How times change, Karl. In those days Bernstein was regarded as the father of revisionist thought. A turncoat. A reactionary who had made his peace with the class enemy. Twenty years ago, this view was still widely held. Read a few of his essays now, Karl, and compare them to the speeches you write for your new Social Democratic masters. Bernstein now seems to be a die-hard, a dinosaur no less! Of course, times have changed. Why do I keep forgetting this fact?
Next to Bernstein’s portrait was a framed sepia-tinted photograph of David’s father and six other men, all of them dressed in their Sunday best, with watch-chains proudly displayed. This was the executive of the Munich railway workers’ union. Gertie was awed by David’s father. She became a regular visitor. The only subject of conversation in the kitchen was socialist politics. David’s father was one of the local leaders of the SDP, but he was entirely devoid of self-importance. He spoke softly and was always prepared to listen to his political opponents, whose numbers were growing within the railway workers’ union.
It was 1918. Germany had been dismembered by the Allies. Lenin and Trotsky were in power in Petrograd and Moscow. Ferment was sweeping through Europe. The Kaiser had been toppled and the Prussian Junkers were talking to Social Democrats, seeing them as the only way to avoid the German revolution.
Finally the day came when Gertie felt she had to take David home. If they were going to get married she had to introduce him to her parents. Aware of the polar contrast between the two households, she was dreading the occasion. Gertie’s parents did not even attempt to conceal their shock. David’s twinkling, intelligent eyes made no impact on them. They were horrified at the thought of their daughter marrying a penniless pauper, whose parents were probably recent arrivals from the steel.
They saw a totally different David. A young man in patched trousers and tattered shoes. Gertie had prevented him from wearing his only suit. They noticed that he spoke in plebeian accents and, worst of all, was not in the least embarrassed by his poverty. The kindly Dr Meyer and his even kinder wife decided that the boy was cheeky. What they really meant by this was that David was not deferential. They decided to teach him the rudiments of civilized behaviour by subjecting him to an insolent inquisition. Who were his parents? Where were they from? Was his father a socialist? Where did they live? How large was their apartment? How had David got into the university?
Gertrude was horrified. She could not see that her parents were simply expressing a fear of the other and worried about losing their daughter. She saw it as a display of decadent, bourgeois philistinism. She told me that it was a side of her parents that she had, till then, sought to ignore and repress.
David registered only mild amusement. He had replied to each and every query with impeccable dignity, while simultaneously trying to warn Gertie with his eyes to calm down and avoid a tantrum at all costs. It was no use. Your grandmother was too far gone by that stage. She was livid. Ashamed of her parents, ashamed of their house, ashamed at the presence of uniformed maids, who couldn’t keep their eyes off David, and ashamed of herself for belonging to the Meyer family.
She never asked David to visit her again. Instead, she began to spend more and more time with his family. It was in the Stein basement, where she spent most of the days of her vacation that December, that Gertie learnt of the significance of the Russian Revolution.
David’s father thought that Lenin was fine for Russia, which had no tradition of political parties and trade unions, but not for Germany. He had little time for the revolutionaries of the Spartakusbund who had split the great German Social Democratic Party, accusing even Karl Kautsky of treachery. When David pointed out that the great German party had voted war credits to the Kaiser while the Russian party had not simply refused to support the Tsar, but had instead suggested to the workers that their real enemy was at home, his father nodded sadly. He, too, had been unhappy with the SPD policy of supporting the war, but he remained adamant on the other question. Germany was not prepared for Lenin’s revolution. The old tried and tested methods of the German party were the only hope.
‘There is an old German proverb,’ Herr Stein told David and Gertie one evening. ‘A silk hat is indeed very fine, provided only that I had mine. But Karl and Rosa are a long way off yet …’ For Herr Stein, the Spartacists lived in an unreal world.
David, not wishing to upset his parents, had refrained from telling his father that he and Gertie had started attending Spartacist study classes in Munich. This was not so much because of their differences. David knew how much his parents had sacrificed in order to educate him. They would be worried that his new-found interest in politics would take him away from the university and his career.
When, a month later, in January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in cold blood by the Freikorps in Berlin, the whole Stein family went into mourning. Did you know, Karl, that one of the officers involved in the murder was a man called Canaris, later Hitler’s admiral and someone greatly admired by certain Western leaders during the war? They thought they could have done business with him. They were right.
David’s father wept loudly as he shook his head. He was sad and angry. He had heard Rosa and Liebknecht speak at many meetings before the outbreak of war. He had raised funds for them when they were imprisoned for opposing the war, but despite his admiration for the slain revolutionaries, he still could not defend their decision to launch an uprising.
‘Crazy dreamers,’ he told David and Gertie while the tears were still pouring down his face. ‘That’s what they were. The workers will miss them in the years to come. Rosa should have known better. We have to act now. We can’t sit still. If we don’t move, the Junkers will kill us all. Spartacists, Independents, Social Democrats. We’re all the same for them.’
David embraced his father, but did not speak. Old Stein was wrong. The Junkers knew the difference between the groups only too well. And Field Marshal von Hindenberg knew that in Friedrich Ebert, he had found a German patriot who would not flinch from the task that confronted him. Without the support of the Social Democrat leaders, Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann, the Junkers could not have drowned the Berlin uprising in blood.
Perhaps, Karl, you should persuade the Ebert Foundation to fund a commemoration of the uprising and the
