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17 At Home with the Kallmanns: A Schöneberg Family in the 1930s1 HK maintained a lifelong correspondence with many of his neighbours and schoolmates from pre–Second World War Berlin, and shortly after the war ended he was able to obtain photos of people and places he had known. He formed a collection of his own scholastic records from the elementary school (Volksschule) and high school (Hohenzollern-Gymnasium) he attended, as well as documentation about his father, including his father’s LL.D. dissertation (1896, University of Göttingen) and other writings. Among the “other writings” are the 1936 article mentioned here, “Vom Geiste der Bibel” (“Of the Spirit of the Bible”), and the Kindertagebuch (Children’s Diary) begun in the 1920s.2 Though he may have long intended to write a full account of his immediate family and many relatives and their tragic wartime disappearance, the impetus to do so was an invitation from Ursula Schroeter of Kunstamt Schöneberg, the arts centre of his native district in Berlin, to contribute to an exhibition of the lives of exiled and expelled former citizens. He wrote the essay in German in 1992, and in 1993 he sent a copy of it to the Center for Jewish History in New York (the essay is available in German, along with an English précis of it, on the Center’s website at http://access.cjh .org/643464). On 30 May 1999 HK was present in Berlin for the opening of the Kunstamt exhibit Exil: Flucht undVertreibung aus dem ”BayerischenViertel” (Exile: Flight and Expulsion from Berlin’s ”Bavarian Quarter”), and he was subsequently an interviewee for the documentary film Geteilte Erinnerungen that arose out of the exhibition. In 2001, with the help of Traute Weinberg, he made this English Previously unpublished typescript, 1992/2001 Mapping Canada’s Music 224 translation and circulated it to friends.3 In 2002 HK had a plaque mounted in the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee, commemorating Arthur, Fanny, and Eva Kallmann, as well as many other close relatives who perished during the Nazi era.  Introduction Solid, educated, and law-abiding—these three qualities characterize the circle of Germans of Jewish ancestry into which I was born in August 1922. The first ten years of life are the most decisive ones for anyone, and I had the good fortune to enjoy a very happy upbringing with emotional stability as part of a close-knit family, and to be given a European education and outlook on life.4 Certainly even as a child I sensed that it was a difficult time for our family, indeed for all Germans and many other nations . Thrift guided all decisions and every adult conversation proclaimed that in earlier times, before the war, “everything had been better.” Yet one also lived in the belief that thanks to the Weimar Republic, justice, equality , and reason would prevail in the end. This report about my family during the years of the Nazis will contain little that is sensational: until October 1942 (the time of the deportations) there were no arrests, no shouting, no thrashings, no need to hide, and, as far as I could learn as a child, no slandering. (I am sure that I do not have to emphasize the fact that many horrible things were kept from the children’s ears, that I did not understand the full seriousness of a great deal that happened, and that I have forgotten much in the intervening years.) On the other hand, something else that was just as characteristic of the rule of the brown tyrants—the “dummen Jungen” (rowdies) as my father called them—was the gradualness of the steps against the Germans of Jewish descent, the almost imperceptible progression from one mean thing to another, until at the end nothing but the death sentence remained. Yet at the same time, what is surprising in retrospect is that almost until the deportation in October 1942, the old habitual forms of life were maintained: social contact with Jews and Christians, birthday parties, theatre and concert visits, excursions, even short vacations. About the years before Hitler I want to sketch only the most essential points. From about 1903, when the apartment building was new, to December 1932 my father (Dr. Arthur Kallmann, born 1873) had lived with his parents (until their deaths in 1917 and 1919) and his youngest sister (of four) Marie, at Bamberger Strasse 6, a quiet street in the attractive [3.142.198.129] Project...

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