to grasp the ideas which I stumblingly try to express.”33
“Everyone tries to make me sociable,” Harry complained: “Mr. G. tried, Heinz tried, now Professor Mayer tries.” Mayer’s weapon was his son Ulrich, “a good egg,” who became a friend. Mayer’s kindness released in him a capacity for social pleasure that he rarely felt. After a Sunday afternoon at Mayer’s home, he wrote: “It is strange that a visit almost invariably stimulates me, and yet I enjoy thinking of myself as unsocial, if not antisocial.”34 Two days later, he added: “I’ve been in a state of exultant turmoil since Sunday.”
Frau Meyer was in cahoots with Paul Gottschalk. One evening, “for my delectation, partly,” she invited a number of people to supper. Harry’s report illustrates both the social dynamics of the group and his own mixture of self-satisfaction, contempt, and regret at his own discomfort. Among the guests were Heinz Gottschalk and Raymond Goldschmidt,35 the latter having recently returned from a year’s study in the United States. Harry ungratefully complained that he had never “heard so many unfounded confident generalizations in one evening before, probably because Heinz can talk faster in German, besides having support from the others in the exceptional moments between brilliant ideas.”36 It was just as well that Harry, who struggled to keep up with the intense conversation, “simply sat there and listened.” It was a typical gathering of the Meyer/Gottschalk circle, which valued above all else an engaged intellect. Her mother’s most notable quality, Grete Meyer wrote after her death, was “her vigorous, expansive mind.”37
Within this circle, generational differences chiefly concerned women’s higher education, which was taken for granted by the younger women but was unusual among their elders. Clara Freyhan was a highly cultivated woman without a profession, as was Grete Meyer. Clara’s sister Julia Gottschalk, however, belonged to the pioneering generation of university-educated women. Freiburg, where Julia took her first medical examination (in 1913), had been among the first German universities to permit women to matriculate; the University of Berlin, where she passed the last examination (in 1916), granted women that right only in 1909.38 In one respect, though, Julia was not unusual: a disproportionate number of the relatively few women doctors of her generation were Jewish.39 This trend continued in the next generation, represented by the Meyers’ daughter Lisel and Julia’s niece, Betty Elberfeld, both studying medicine in the early 1930s. By then, 29% of German Jewish university students were women, as compared with 16% of Gentile students.40 Jewish support of women’s education was in keeping with the Bildung so treasured by German Jews: “a ceaseless quest for the good, the true, and the beautiful” that was conducted “through a study of literature and philosophy, and the refinement of one’s aesthetic sensibilities through the arts and music.”41
The values of Harry’s social circle
Most of Harry’s friends were typical German Jews of the educated stratum–students, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and antiquarians who relished books, classical music, and intellectual debate. In politics, except for the ardent Communists Walter and Betty Elberfeld, they sympathized with the SPD. Political interests extended to the children. The youngest Hirschbach, Franz, recalled playing “Reichstag” as a boy in the early 1930s–performing speeches reported in the Berliner Tageblatt to the “applause and jeering” of his elders.42
Most members of the circle were moderate assimilationists. The Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, the largest German Jewish organization, argued (in 1931) that Jews “must place the highest value on humanity as a whole, while at the same time loving the German people and our specific Jewishness.”43 This assimilationist ideal soon proved to be a pipe dream. Stung by the Nazi takeover, the Central Union declared on 23 March 1933: “No body can rob us of our German fatherland…. In that we fight this battle, we carry out a German, not a selfish-Jewish, fight.”44 This was the predominant view of liberal Jews. Peter Gay’s family in Nazi Berlin, for example, thought that “the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany–we were.”45
Individuals in the Gottschalk/Meyer circle varied in their relationship to Judaism. Ernst and Laura Gottschalk kept kosher until World War I made observance difficult, and they did not resume after the war; they sent their sons to religious school and had them bar-mitzvahed, and they observed the Jewish holidays.46 The Freyhans also practiced their religion, to Harry’s disgust, for he had a visceral distaste for any religious observation. Harry described Hans Freyhan as “pretty thick and exceedingly pious, which are doubtless not unconnected,…so god-fearing that when he came home from a holiday recently on a Saturday, he had his brother go to the station for him to carry his suitcase home.”47 Harry’s ignorance left unremarked Hans’s impious willingness to have someone else violate the prohibition against carrying anything on the Sabbath. Ernst Meyer’s sons were bar-mitzvahed, but only because bar mitzvahs were the norm in his circle; he did not object when Rudy declared himself opposed to all religious observance.48 Like Rudy, after his own bar mitzvah Gustav Mayer rejected the Jewish practice in which he had been raised. The Meyers observed Hanukkah in some fashion. When Grete gave Harry a present, she wrote a note: “So that you notice it’s Hanukkah!”49 In 1933, one or two of the younger generation became Zionists. From then on, Zionists and Nazis agreed in one goal: German Jews should move to Israel.
At the far end of the assimilationist spectrum were Rose Hirschbach, her siblings, and her husband, who would have nothing to do with Judaism. Rose and Martin had their four sons baptized Lutheran, and confirmed as well. Rose and Martin wanted their sons to merge totally into “German culture and civilization,” for which Martin had fought in World War I; their Protestant identity “eliminated a major difference between us and our schoolmates.”50 To Hitler, though, “non-Aryan Christians” like the Hirschbachs were Jews.
Despite their mostly casual relation to Judaism, members of the circle had–Harry charged–an “absurd” tendency to view “things from a strictly Jewish center, a sort of Hebraico-Centric theory of the universe.”51 They had company. When, in 1932, the Jewish New Year “happened to coincide with [President Paul von] Hindenburg’s birthday,…all the Berlin Jewish congregations sen[t] hearty congratulations, doubtless not wholly unmindful of the near possibility of having to have Hitler for President.”52 The accelerating tempo of anti-Semitic acts during the year preceding Hitler’s accession to power made the Meyers “apprehensive…. As Herr Meyer one day remarked–‘These are exciting times, would that they were less exciting.’”53 As Chapters 4 and 5 will show, Harry’s friends’ hard-headed realization of the implications of Hitler’s rise to power, coupled with their educational background, saved their lives.
Paul Gottschalk, alias P.G.
Paul Gottschalk’s family and friends felt universal “admiration and love” for him.54 To the young people in his family and his office he was a solicitous but stern mentor; they called him “P.G.,” the abbreviation summing up the half-intimate, half-formal nature of many of his personal relationships. They were “fascinated by his unique and glamorous business”–visits to America were a rarity at the time–and appreciated him as “a cultured and friendly person with many stories about his friends and contacts on both continents.”55 With Paul as the generous host, the family gathered annually to celebrate his birthday; twenty guests attended his fifty-third, in 1933. Harry was grateful for P.G.’s self-assigned role as “guide and confessor.”56 Perhaps Paul recognized a kindred spirit, for as a youth he too had been so shy outside his family that he appeared to be “stupid or mute.”57 Harry could pop in to P.G.’s office at 3a Unter den Linden, just down the street from the university, and get advice or cash, pick up a book, or discuss politics.58
At the end of Paul’s very long life, he was persuaded to write his memoirs.59 He began with a reminiscence of his mother, from whom he “inherited a capacity for vivid fantasy, a quick wit, and perhaps also a great interest in people and their concerns, and if I may say so, the natural gift for gaining the confidence and winning
