A Lover of Unreason Read online

  When Hitler was appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933, 525,000 Jews were living in Germany, less than one per cent of a total population of 67 million. The largest Jewish centre was Berlin, with 160,000, four per cent of the city’s population. The celebrations that followed Hitler’s appointment immediately turned into violent rallies: the first victims were the Ostjuden, Jews who had emigrated from Russia and Poland. They were beaten in the streets, their beards were set on fire and locks, which had been grown and groomed since childhood and were an integral part of Jewish orthodoxy, were brutally twisted and cut off.

  On Saturday, 1 April 1933, at 10 a.m., the Gutmanns shut themselves in when vigils of uniformed Nazis blocked the entrance to every Jewish-owned shop, lawyer’s office and physician’s clinic, preventing customers, clients and patients from entering. Windows and office plates were painted over with the word Jude and those Germans who dared to enter were photographed and were made notorious the following day in the local press. Vehicles carrying loudspeakers roamed the streets, broadcasting slogans that condemned those who did business with Jews. Windows were smashed and the shops looted in the Jewish quarters of Berlin. The organised boycott by the Nazi Party was the first countrywide initiative to ignite anti-Jewish activities and sanctions. At the end of that week, on 7 April the first law to curtail the right of Jewish citizens was enforced. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was aimed at excluding Jews not only from the Civil Service but also from other organisations in order to segregate them from Aryan society. The medical profession hastened to implement the law with extra rigidity.

  Already, in the First World War, the entire German medical profession had rallied to the call of national duty. The horrors of that military experience brutalised many doctors to a crude Darwinian view of life and a subsequent affiliation with right-wing political causes, writes John Efron in Medicine and the German Jews. Nazi ideology described the Jews in metaphors of disease: as a bacillus, a parasite, or a malignant tumour in the body of the nation. Hitler was thus perceived as the Good Doctor who would remove the Jewish malignancy and cure the German patient. It was the task of the medical profession to join the effort, restore ‘hygiene’ to the German nation and cleanse it of Jews. Removing Jewish doctors from practice was perceived as a necessary step towards saving the Germans from the Jewish plague. But it was not ideology alone that motivated these moves: the profession suffered from overcrowding and a decline in earnings. In 1933, the 8,000 Jewish doctors in Germany constituted sixteen per cent of the profession and in Berlin and other major cities they even comprised fifty per cent. It is no wonder that, with deep recession and economic competition, German medicine became ‘the most easily and eagerly Nazified of any professional group’, in the words of author John Efron. Around fifty per cent of all German doctors became members of the Nazi Party.

  Following the Aryanisation of the public health services, more than half of the Jewish doctors lost their jobs. As many as 3,500 Jewish physicians in Berlin alone were made redundant, more than half of them reduced to the brink of starvation. ‘In Berlin, graffiti outside physician’s offices such as “Jewish Swine” proliferated. Here, also, several Jewish doctors were temporarily rounded up, taken to the exhibition grounds near Lehrter Bahnhof, and shot in their legs during a roll call improvised by Nazi colleagues,’ writes Professor Michael Kater, in Doctors Under Hitler. Many were sent to concentration camps, one of them near Berlin, and never returned. Only Jewish doctors who had begun practising before 1 August 1914, or who had fought in the First World War, or had lost a father or a son in that war, or were exposed to lethal epidemics in quarantine camps, were exempted at this stage. Dr Lonya Gutmann did not qualify for any of these exemptions. Many Jewish doctors, proud of their German nationality, tried to hang on even at the price of not practising medicine, but by doing odd jobs, hoping that soon their nation would sober up and return to sanity. Dr Gutmann, who retained his Latvian citizenship, was not ready to undergo such a sacrifice for a country that he did not call home. He felt vulnerable on four counts: as a Jew, a foreigner, a doctor, and as married to an Aryan.

  In pre-Hitler times, inter-marriage offered Jews the opportunity to integrate into German society. In 1933, there were 35,000 mixed couples in Germany, most of them, like Lonya Gutmann, Jewish men married to Christian wives. A survey, published in 1940, found that Jewish men in mixed marriages came as a rule from the upper or upper middle class and generally married beneath them. With the Nazis in power, those who had married a Deutschblutige (German blooded), became ‘even more undesirable than other Jews, as they posed a direct threat to the Deutschen Blutsverband’ (German blood union) wrote Dr Beate Meyer in her article, ‘The Mixed Marriage: A Guarantee of Survival, or a Reflection of German Society during the Nazi Regime.’

  For most of his life, Dr Gutmann had distanced himself from his ancestral faith and Judaism seemed to him a meaningless biographical detail that he did not feel responsible for and which bore no reflection on his lifestyle; nevertheless, Nazi ideology classified him as a member of the Inferior Race. From feeling a Russian in a Teutonic milieu, he was now forced to reassert his Jewish identity. In general, German wives were no shield against persecution and when the men lost their jobs and livelihood, the mixed families crumbled as they failed to maintain their standard of living. ‘The Jewish husbands found it difficult to come to terms with the loss of their position and reputation in society; the wives had to provide them with the emotional support they needed, especially when they were plagued by depression and thought of suicide,’ wrote Dr Beate Meyer. Discord rocked the mixed families and the German in-laws exercised pressure on their daughters to divorce their Jewish husbands and save themselves and their children. Many did. One doctor, Dr Arthur Bear, took his own life in order to set his Christian wife free from the pressures. He was one of several hundred doctors who could not withstand the strain and chose death. Lisa Gutmann, though, stood by her husband, and they decided that their only hope was to leave Germany.

  Spring 1933 was Assia Gutmann’s last term in kindergarten and she was looking forward to starting school in the autumn. Her parents managed to hide their anxiety and plans from their young daughters and, on 15 May 1933, Assia celebrated her sixth birthday in grand style in their Berlin home. This was a time when bonfires were burning throughout Germany, consuming Jewish ‘degenerate literature’. Soon after, the Gutmanns took the train to Italy, via Switzerland, getting off at Pisa, which became a haven for refugees. The Gutmanns rented a flat in 21 Via Mazzini. They were in the first wave of Jews who left Germany: 25,000 in just three months.

  In later years, Assia’s tales of the flight from Germany portrayed an ordeal. Lucas Myers recounts her stories, of how the whole family narrowly escaped internment. ‘Assia described hiding in a railway compartment and listening to the tramp of Nazi guards coming down the corridor.’ The poet Philip Hobsbaum, like several of Assia’s friends, remembers that she had been shunted about in various displaced persons’ camps and suffered semi-starvation and dirt, ‘But I’m inclined to think she embroidered or even fantasised it,’ he has said. Assia indeed had a taste for drama but post-war knowledge of the hideous fate of Jews in the Holocaust, which confused the memory of many of her friends, may have painted her relatively smooth exodus in darker colours than it actually merited. Relating to Assia in his poems, Ted Hughes incorporated words like ‘death-camp’, ‘ex-Nazi Youth Sabra’, ‘Hitler’s mutilations’ and ‘swastika’, all of which hardly touched on Assia’s actual experiences. In ‘Dreamers’, he addressed Plath’s fascination with Assia’s Germanic background: in Assia, Plath saw ‘hanged women choke’.

  When he left Germany, Lonya’s diplomas and certificates were confiscated, and he spent weeks corresponding with Berlin until he received the authorised copies in Pisa. He was pondering his options. It was all but impossible to get a visa to the USA. England, Italy and France demanded that every foreign doctor would have to repeat years of study and u
ndergo extensive examinations. Switzerland set even stricter immigration laws and allowed only few doctors to enter, let alone practise there. Belgium, Holland and the Scandinavian countries offered some asylum, but immigrants were not allowed to practise medicine. Canada and Australia had tight immigration quotas and forbade German-Jewish physicians from practising there, allegedly on account of the low standards of German medicine. At 37 years of age, the last thing on earth that Lonya Gutmann wanted was to start medical school all over again.

  Shanghai, Brazil and South Africa were the exceptional places that welcomed Jewish doctors and allowed them to practise; but Dr Gutmann, who estimated that Germany was passing through only a temporary bad spell, was reluctant to sail to the other side of the world. There was a fourth option: Palestine. He was no Zionist but, at this crucial moment in his life, he felt that he would be better off among his peers and relatively close to Europe. Since he left his childhood home, Lonya had never lived among Jews, and it did not cross his mind that living with a non-Jewish wife in Tel Aviv, the only all-Jewish city in the world, might be a problem. But running for his life, there was no time to check or inquire about the population, the standards of living, or how developed and Westernised the country was; at that stage, he consoled himself that he would not be required to repeat his medical studies and, with his savings, would be able to set up a private clinic. In the new country, which was being built by people hitherto unaccustomed to physical labour, a physiotherapist like Dr Gutmann could expect queues of patients seeking a cure for their back pains and aching muscles.

  Towards the end of 1933, word reached the Jewish refugees stranded in Italy: General Sir Arthur Wauchope, the British High Commissioner of Palestine, declared that although there was a surplus of doctors in Palestine, he was not yet thinking of cutting back the number of work permits for medical staff. Dr Gutmann was rather alarmed by the implications of this declaration and decided to hasten his departure to Palestine. Meanwhile, Assia was attending the first grade in the Padre Augustino Catholic School and, having an ear for languages, soon chattered in Italian. But after six months, she had to bid farewell to her newly acquired schoolfriends. The Italian experience left fond memories with her and, almost thirty years later, when she spent a holiday in Elba with her third husband David Wevill, she took him to Pisa, to look for the family home and old school.

  The porters of the Italia loaded crates with Dr Gutmann’s medical equipment and a choice of furniture from their Berlin home: a heavy mahogany dining table with six chairs, a glass cabinet, Persian carpets. On the occasion of her marriage, Lisa Gutmann’s dowry from her parents was packed in a beautifully carved wooden crate, bearing the year 1751, and the initials JM–AR, from the betrothal of some ancestral mother. Into this crate, which had been handed down in her family for generations, Lisa folded her cherished bedlinen and tablecloths, and added some kitchen utensils and the carefully wrapped silver cutlery and china plates.

  Two

  A New Life

  Tel Aviv, 1934–1938

  Not yet seven years of age, Assia Gutmann was tackling her fourth new language. She spoke German with her mother, loved conversing in Russian with her father and continued to chat in Italian to everyone’s delight. She glided easily between the languages but Hebrew proved a trickier obstacle: it was written from right to left, with unfamiliar letters, pronounced harshly and stressed on the gutturals. The revival of the Hebrew language in the old-new Jewish homeland meant that at school she was Esther, the name she was given at birth but had never used before. At home, she continued to be Assia. From the depths of his past, Dr Gutmann’s Jewish roots caught up with him too and he had to recognise his long-forgotten name Aryeh, the Hebrew for Leo. Celia became Tseeley and only their German mother retained her name, Elizabetha.

  When the Gutmanns arrived in the British-mandated territory of Palestine at the beginning of 1934, there were only 190,000 Jews in the entire land. They comprised fifteen per cent of the population, the majority being Arabs. Forty-five thousand Jews emigrated to Palestine that year, twelve thousand of them from Germany. Seeking refuge from Nazi persecution, the Jewish population more than doubled to 475,000 by 1940. The small community had no means to assist the flow of newcomers in such a short time and the immigrants were left to fend for themselves in finding work and housing.

  Palestine was not an appropriate breeding place for German Jews and only a few thousand of them emigrated there before Hitler came to power. Most of the first settlers were East European Jews, who established a small, homogenous community of pioneers and socialists. Inspired by Russian culture and the Communist Revolution, they were eager to create a new Jew, who was to be a manual labourer, a farmer rather than a scholar or a merchant.

  Until the 1930s, most arrivals in Palestine were young and single, ready for hard work and harsh conditions. The flow of sixty thousand German Jews brought, for the first time, entire families from middle and upper class backgrounds, with property and university degrees, liberal and assimilated, pampered by high standards of living. Most East European pioneers left their homelands out of choice and were keen to take part in building the Holy Land, but the Gutmanns, like many of their fellow expatriates, felt like refugees; they would never have left home if their lives had not been in danger. A year earlier, Dr Gutmann considered himself a Russian exiled in Germany and his world was shattered when he was classified by the Nazis as neither a Russian nor a German, but a Jew. Now, in the Jewish community of Palestine, he was considered German, on account of the country he had left.

  Many suffered from culture shock and a sense of regression. Tel Aviv was not a bustling metropolis of millions, but a city without a history named after a novel: Altneuland, by the founder of the Zionist movement Theodore Herzl. It was a new town that in 1909 had sprung from the sands of the Mediterranean under the blazing sun. It now had only a hundred thousand inhabitants and could obviously not supply a fraction of the delights of the German capital. Moreover, the social ethos of the pioneers was one of asceticism and austerity, khaki shorts and sandals, and of denouncing the bourgeoisie with their tailored suits and bow ties.

  Dr Gutmann wanted no change; just to maintain the standard of living he enjoyed in Berlin. In their humble habitation, crammed with furniture and household utensils from Berlin, the Gutmanns built a haven, with their damask tablecloths and three meals a day eaten with silver cutlery. Forbidden to raise their voices at home, Assia and Celia had to ring a Tyrolean shepherd’s bell to attract their mother’s attention and call her to their room whenever one of them was ill and wanted a drink. Lisa continued to attend church in the nearby Arab town of Jaffa. On Christmas Eve, she sneaked with her daughters to join the congregation for mass. Oblivious of their Jewish neighbours, they decorated their flat and behind closed curtains celebrated with the traditional Christmas meal, German biscuits and cakes and singing carols. ‘As we grew up, Assia and I made fun of the carols, to annoy Mutti,’ Celia recalls. ‘If we wanted to taste any Jewish tradition, our neighbours and friends always invited us to light candles at Hanukah.’

  Immigrants were expected to integrate quickly in their host country and praise its culture and achievements but most German newcomers felt superior. They stuck to their own customs, reluctant to learn Hebrew, feeling that in speaking the ancient tongue they were becoming more Jewish than they cared to be. The sound of the language irritated Dr Gutmann and, frustrated that he, a man of culture, felt lost for words, he preferred to speak German and Russian with his patients. His wife spoke hardly any Hebrew at all and was furious when people insisted that she address them in the language of the land. Assia and Celia spoke Hebrew between themselves, turning the language into a secret code to exclude their parents. They wished the earth would swallow them up when, walking in the street and entering a shop or sitting in a café, their parents conversed with them in German. The language barrier kept the Gutmanns from being involved in their daughters’ education and they could not assist Assia and Tseeley wi
th their homework. In their miniature Berlin in the heart of Tel Aviv, ready to pack and leave at any moment, the parents remained nomads. Assia inherited her parents’ sense of alienation and found it difficult to put down roots in the historical Fatherland.

  After years of just mothering her daughters, Lisa Gutmann had to share the burden of supporting her family. She used her talent for embroidery to make dresses for other doctors’ wives. At lunchtime, she would place four tables in the living room and, being a talented cook, served lunches to regular clients. At a later period she counted herself lucky to find a job at the Hadassah Hospital to don the white nurse’s uniform again. The family was hard up, and Professor Richard Lipsey, Assia’s second husband, recalls Assia’s many stories of deprivation, ‘one of which was how her parents made her go to the butcher’s, to get the meat at a reduced price, and in return, she allowed him to hold her hand and fondle her rather innocently, but repulsively to her.’

  With the money they brought from Germany, the Gutmanns rented a three-room flat on the first floor of 9 Balfour Street, with a balcony closed by shutters to add some extra living space. It was one of the first streets to be built in Tel Aviv and named in honour of Lord Balfour. This British foreign minister was renowned for his declaration of 1917, stating that His Majesty’s Government viewed with favour the establishment of a National Home for the Jewish People in Palestine. Balfour was a central street, just a short walk from the bustling Carmel Market. Number 12 Balfour Street housed an elementary school and, even more appealing, number 30 was the Ohel Shem Concert Hall, home of the Palestine Philharmonic, recently established thanks to the arrival in Palestine of German-born musicians. The municipal public clinics were in 14 Balfour Street and the Hadassah Hospital was just around the corner but Dr Gutmann did not find work in either institution. In the mornings, Lisa Gutmann would fold their double bed into a sofa, turning their bedroom into a makeshift clinic. The living room served as a waiting room. Having no telephone, just a small plaque on the building outside, the few patients just dropped in.