Confronting History: A Memoir

5 - Experiencing Exile

5 Experiencing Exile FIFTEEN years would elapse before I saw Germany again. I was almost fifteen years old when I left and thirty years old when I visited Germany once more, but for me a whole world lay between those dates, and I was to feel no nostalgia, no real emotion, when eventually I revisited the scenes of my youth, including Schenkendorf, where I had had so many happy times. This was no doubt because Iwas so young when I left and because, as I see it, my real growing up took place outside Germany. Being forced to leave at the very start of the Third Reich, I never experienced the oppressive environment under whichJewish boys like myself had to live in the new Germany. This fact undoubtedly was responsible for my unsentimental attitude toward postwar Germany in general; it enabled me, later on, to gather historical material even from those who had been committed National Socialists. The end of our existence in Germany did have its effect for a long time, and I will have cause to refer to it often throughout this book. The way in which we lost our publishing empire was difficult for me to grasp at first, and at the time I could not have cared less. But later, after the end of the Third Reich, all sorts of nasty rumors about my father's role in this process were circulated and books, some of which collected every rumor that had been current in Berlin's newspaper circles, were published. As a result, I reconsidered these events and tried to correct false reports. Such accounts seemed to begin where the attacks of the Nazi press had left off. My father's lack of judgment about people was perhaps his greatest failing, and it pursued us even in exile. I was not directly involved, but merely a spectator in 1930 when he installed a former publicity man and one-time editor, Karl Vetter, as general manager of the firm. In the family 71 Experiencing Exile Vetter was regarded as an evil genius; he was no doubt ambitious and somewhat of an opportunist. The appointment a little later of a general counsel for the firm did affect me, however, for he went into exile with us, became a family friend, and took over the litigation for the restitution of our German properties at the end of the war. Ludwig Levy was a distant relative and good friend of my stepmother, who had recommended him to my father. I admit that I rather liked him, and after the war gave him my trust, out of laziness rather than judgment of character. Levy had told me, long before any restitution proceedings were thought of, how much he hated my father for some apparent slight, a fact which should have been reason enough to sound an alarm. I knew, of course, how important our large restitution claims were, but I have always been focused on my own work, and have tended to brush aside all else as basically uninteresting . Moreover, I seem to have in common with my father the tendency to avoid painful realities and to sidestep that which might turn out to be disagreeable. As it turned out, my brother was the only one who gave any warning; but we discovered in the end that Ludwig Levy, through dubious realestate transactions, had misappropriated considerable sums of money. While he was negotiating on our behalf, he was also receiving money from our opponents. The restitution claims were at first clouded by the difficulties the publishing house had faced because of the Great Depression and the growth of a political and racist Right whose newspapers were surging forward. But as judgments by German courts after the war stated repeatedly during the restitution proceedings, it would have been impossible in 1933 to resist successfully the pressure to abandon the publishing house-after all, the Nazis used all possible forms of coercion to force the Lachmann-Mosse family to give up, since Mosse functioned as the symbol for the hated "Jewish Press." The actual expropriation took place on March 21, 1933, when Wilhelm Ohst became the Nazi administrator of the firm. His tenure was destined to be short. Brandishing a revolver, he forced my father, as I have recounted earlier, to sign over the publishing house to a foundation that supposedly aided war veterans. This foundation, however, was actually a front for a takeover which would integrate the newspapers into an emerging...