lisa_goldstein | Entries tagged with krefeld

The museum in Krefeld I’ve written about, the Villa Merlander, asked to see old photographs of my father and his family there, and I sent off about twenty-five of them. The clerk at the post office told me that they couldn’t go as registered mail because I’d used brown tape on the package, which strikes me as bureaucratic interference raised to a fine art, so I sent them by regular mail and hoped for the best.

A few days ago I got a letter from the photo archivist. One of the photos, dated 1916, had been turned into a postcard, something people did back then. It showed my grandfather and his motorcycle on the front, but we could never read the writing on the back, which was very faded, written in old-fashioned script, and in German. It turns out that he was writing from a hospital, that he’d gotten wounded during World War I. I’d known that he’d been a courier running messages to and from the front, but I’d never heard that he’d been wounded.

There was also a series of photos of people — my extended family, probably, though I didn’t recognize most of them — standing in front of some kind of business. The archivist identified it as a hotel in the mountains, near hiking trails in the forest. And it’s still there!!! — making it at least 95 years old. In fact it’s near Koblenz, where we’d stayed. The next time we go to Germany we might visit and show them the photos.

All this is exciting to me. My father died when I was twenty, before I got the chance to ask him questions, before I even felt more than the vaguest curiosity about his life. And he rarely talked about his past; it might have been too painful, or he might have been raised to keep things to himself, or both.

The archivist said that he was going on vacation and would write more when he came back. Very frustrating! It’s like reading a book and having to wait for the sequel.

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You may have noticed that my father’s stolpenstein says “Schicksal Unbekannt” or “Fate Unknown.” His parents had called him Edgar, but for some reason they changed their minds later and decided to call him Heinz-Jürgen. Whoever had researched the family had not realized that the name had changed, and so had not been able to find out anything about him.

My brother had taken pictures of the stolpensteine, and when I saw them I wondered if we should tell someone that my father’s “schicksal” was not “unbekannt” after all, that he had gone to the US and married and had two children. On the one hand, like a lot of people who had lived in a police state, my father hated to call attention to himself. On the other, I felt uneasy leaving his story untold. The purpose of the stones, after all, was to make sure that the names of those who had gone to the concentration camps were not forgotten.

We finally decided to write the Villa Merlander. They agreed that he should be given a new stone, but the process seemed to go on forever. First they had to find someone who could read the part of the birth certificate that documented the name change, because it was in the old German script that no one studied any more. Then, with all this new information, my brother and I had to decide what to include on the new stone. And each stone, I was told, took about a year to make.

There would be a ceremony where they replaced the stone, and we would be invited. Then the pandemic started and everything shut down. It seemed like nothing would ever happen, and finally I decided that I wouldn’t wait but just go to Germany. Unfortunately — well, fortunately, but unfortunately for me in this case — now that things have opened up the ceremony might take place next year, and I’ll be going back sooner than I planned to.

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These are stolpersteine, stumbling stones in English. A man named Gunter Demnig goes around Europe and puts them in front of the houses of people who were forced to leave because of the Nazis. They’re meant to arrest the attention of people passing by, to remind them of deportation and exile and murder, of all the men and women who disappeared.

These particular stones are for my grandparents, my father, and my grandmother's brother. My brother found them on the doorstep of their house, and when a neighbor walked by my brother tried to explain his connection to them and how surprised he was to see them. This led to the neighbor calling someone who spoke English, who called someone else, and finally my brother was put in touch with a woman who was the head of a museum chronicling Jewish life just before and during the Nazi regime in Krefeld.

The museum is called the Villa Merlander, and Doug and I go there the next day. There’s a new head, Sandra Franz, who graciously takes the time to tell us the museum’s history and show us around. Richard Merlander, who had owned the house, was Jewish and gay, and so doubly in danger from the Nazis. (Sandra says that the museum will expand in the next few years, and will include new exhibits about homosexuals during that time period.) He had gotten rich from the silk factories and threw lavish parties, but, sadly, he was never accepted by that society because of his sexuality. Before he was killed in a concentration camp he had tried to leave the house to his partner in Berlin, but the letter he wrote with the bequest was not accepted as a legal will. Instead the villa turned into a Bed and Breakfast after the war, and then became the museum.

All the exhibits are in German, so we don’t understand a great deal. Sandra says that the museum will translate everything into English as part of the expansion. One newspaper article that Sandra translates stays with me: the Nazi mayor asked for his pension after the war, and he got it. It’s infuriating.

Two murals had been discovered recently, hidden under wallpaper, and we go to see them. At first I think they’d been papered over to save them from the Nazis, who would have called them degenerate art, but the story is less dramatic than that. Merlander had commissioned them for a gambling room, and the owners of the Bed and Breakfast thought the dice and cards and cigars didn’t belong in a place where they hoped families would stay.

I’d never heard of the artist, Heinrich Campendonk, but he’s apparently pretty famous; the uncovered murals were news all over the world. I like them a lot. Standing in the room, looking at hearts and tigers and a menacing joker, I think there must be a story there, about hidden art, hidden identities, hidden lives.

We meet an archivist at the museum who’s interested in photos of Krefeld before and during the war. He pages through a book of them, and suddenly I see my father’s name. It’s in a list of students in second or third grade, lined up for a picture. Disappointingly, though, the kid identified as him is clearly someone else, and it turns out the list was based on someone’s imperfect memory. I vow to send them more photos, compelling enough to get my father’s real identity into the museum. Sandra looks intrigued when I say I have a picture of Alfred and his motorcycle.

Then we go to lunch with the former head of the museum. The restaurant is in a park with a lake, a place that used to be someone’s private hunting ground and was later donated to the city.

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My brother and I have documents with the address of the apartment house where my father lived, and several years ago my brother went to visit it. The house turns out to be a short distance from our Air BnB. It’s a pleasant walk, and a lot of my unhappiness disappears; the town might not be such a bad place to have lived after all.

We take a picture of the house, and then come back when I realize I want a picture of the attic as well. I’ve written about that attic before, but briefly: My grandfather Alfred owned a garage that repaired cars and motorcycles. He had a partner, and the partner wanted control of the business, so he went to the Gestapo and told them Alfred had said something critical of Hitler. (This was in 1935, before most of the concentration camps, but Jews could still be arrested on any charge.) When the Gestapo came Alfred hid in the attic, and the next day he rode his motorcycle to Holland, where the rest of the family joined him. The escape didn’t save them, unfortunately; a few years later the Germans marched into Holland.

My brother had also found a street named Goldsteinweg (Goldstein Way). Another branch of the family had lived there, though I’m not clear on the history. Doug’s GPS says that it’s forty minutes away from the house, and for some reason we decide to walk. At the time I don’t quite grasp that forty minutes is forty minutes, and would also be forty minutes back.

The houses around us grow bigger and more opulent, and my impression of the town as poky and parochial disappears as we walk. We later learn that Krefeld became prosperous from silk factories in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth they made patterned fabric for the Bauhaus movement. During the employment shortage in World War I Krefeld invited guest workers in from Turkey and Italy. I hadn’t known any of this.

The weg turns out to be more like an alley, but it’s shaded and leafy and backed by green gardens. I like it a lot, and by the end I’m feeling almost possessive about it — yes, I approve. We have some ice cream as a reward for finishing the walk. The ice cream place distributes a free magazine called Kredo, about the culture and way of life in Krefeld. I’d never heard of Krefeld in connection with culture before, but the town seems to have come a long way from when my father lived there. (I once told someone from Germany that my father had come from Krefeld, and he compared it to Stockton, California.)

When we get back even our neighborhood seems improved, with tables set up in front of restaurants and people out for the evening. Doug gets to eat currywurst, something he’d read about and had been looking forward to. (It’s exactly what it sounds like, wurst seasoned with curry.) A lot of the residents here are Turkish immigrants or descended from them, and I enjoy an image of old Adolf, roasting on a spit somewhere in hell, forced to see what’s become of his “pure Aryan” Germany. I don’t believe in hell, though, so the enjoyment is fleeting.

(Edited to add missing paragraph about Krefeld's history)

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More places are open the next day, and we go to a good restaurant for breakfast. Then we look for the train station, which is curiously hard to find, tucked out of the way near the cathedral. When we finally get there Doug heroically lifts our two suitcases up a staircase and then leans against a glass wall, which turns out to be — an elevator we could have used to reach the platform. An announcement for Krefeld comes over the PA, the first time I’ve heard the name from someone I didn’t know.

There are few hotels in Krefeld so we made reservations at an Air BnB. We take a taxi from the station and are deposited in a small, slightly rundown neighborhood. I’m disappointed, and then suddenly sad — so this was where my father grew up. He died fairly young, at 51, and all in all it didn’t seem like he had much of a life.

We go to sleep in a minimalist room where everything — the bed, the wardrobe, the cupboards — is white. There are tall apartment buildings all around us, with maybe thousands of people in them, but very little noise; quiet laws are in effect after 10 pm. On the one hand I wish I could bring those laws to the US, but on the other they seem strict, even authoritarian.

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