Each time I return to Hamburg (about once a year, on average) I pay a sentimental visit to my grandmother’s magnificent old house, where she spent her cosseted, idyllic youth, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.
It’s a robust Teutonic villa, a bombastic relic of the Gründerzeit – that flamboyant building boom which followed Bismarck’s triumphant unification of Germany. It’s on one of Hamburg’s smarter streets, a leafy avenue called Heimhuderstrasse – but it’s not the ornate architecture that draws me there, or even the snob value of the neighbourhood. What brings me back year after year are the stories that cling to this house like ivy – stories from the life my German grandmother lived before I knew her, before and during the second world war.
The Führer would have been proud of her, the mother of two Aryan children before she turned 21
Born in 1916, my grandma, Ursula Emma Frieda Lilly Lampert, spent a happy, pampered childhood here. Her father was a rich industrialist, who escaped the economic ruin of the Weimar years (Germans with concrete assets generally did OK – it was the lower middle classes, with only paper investments to fall back on, who were wiped out by the hyperinflation of the 1920s).
Two photos encapsulate her early years. In one of them she’s sat on the back seat of an enormous automobile. Up front is the uniformed chauffeur who drove her to school every day. In another she’s standing beside a gigantic Steiff teddy bear, then as now the most exclusive and expensive of cuddly toys. Most Steiff bears are titchy, and even the smaller ones are pricey, but this one towers over her. It’s taller than she is.
Her fortunes took a downward turn when she met my feckless grandfather, Werner von Biel, at a ball at the Vier Jahreszeiten, Hamburg’s grandest hotel. With her new money and his old family, it seemed like an ideal match. Werner’s people were Prussian Junkers, with a Schloss and a thousand acres and a coat of arms and an ancient title, but like a lot of aristocrats their wealth was tied up in land, and Werner was a youngest son, with no money and no prospects.
They married in 1935 at St Johannis Kirche, the local parish church. In their wedding photos he looks confident and elegant, resplendent in top hat and tails. In her voluminous white wedding dress, she looks anxious and excited. She was 18. A year later she bore her husband a daughter, called Marion. The year after she bore him a son, called Michael. The Führer would have been proud of her, the mother of two Aryan children before she turned 21.
Insulated from the creative chaos of the Weimar years, she was also protected – at first – from the regressive rigours of the Third Reich. Like most women of her class, she regarded Hitler as frightfully common, an odd little fellow with a funny Austrian accent and a Charlie Chaplin moustache. It was snobbery not morality which turned her against him, but she did nothing to oppose him. Women like her didn’t take any interest in politics. However, as the old saying goes, you might not be interested in politics – but politics is interested in you.
With two toddlers to raise she barely went beyond her front door, but her small world changed when her nice next-door neighbour, a Jewish doctor, was taken away in an ambulance. After a few months he returned, looking thin and tired, and packed up the house and left, without a word, never to return. She didn’t know where he’d gone. My grandma felt bad about it – he’d treated her children when they were ill – but she said nothing. She knew it was important to keep her head down. Everyone had heard of people who’d been sent to concentration camps for speaking out.
After that Jewish doctor moved out, the local police chief moved in next door. He put up a flagpole in the garden, with a Nazi flag flying from it. His sons saluted it every day. One sunny day these smart little boys knocked on my grandma’s door. Politely, they asked her, could Michael and Marion come out to play?
My grandma knew one’s own children could be especially dangerous. They might overhear you saying something and repeat it to a playmate who’d tell their parents. Now that peril was very real. Even worse, her maid had started courting a local brownshirt. From now on, she could no longer speak freely in her own home, so she said nothing at all.
In 1941, my grandfather was conscripted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht. After he went away to war, my grandmother discovered that she was pregnant. Now Hamburg was no longer safe, bombed by the RAF night after night. When a bomb landed in my grandma’s back garden and blew out all the windows, her sister, who lived in Dresden, invited her to come and stay. Dresden was beyond the range of Allied bombers, she reassured her. It was the safest city in the Reich.
My father was born in Dresden in 1942 and spent his first few years there. In 1945 my grandmother watched the destruction of Dresden from his bedroom window. Luckily, her sister lived outside the city centre. My grandma caught the last train out of Dresden, ahead of the rapacious Red Army. Her carriage was strafed by Allied fighter planes, but she made it back to Hamburg.
When my grandmother returned to Heimhuderstrasse, the police chief who lived next door had gone. Germany surrendered and the house was requisitioned by British soldiers. One of them was a dapper officer called Gerry Cook, a Fleet Street journalist back in Civvy Street. Gerry and my grandma fell in love and he brought her back to London, with her three children, to raise them as his own. My grandfather, Werner, was in a British Prisoner of War camp at the time.
I always thought of Gerry as my real grandpa. I loved to sit and listen to his tales of journalistic derring-do. He’d covered the Spanish civil war. He’d reported from all over Europe. He made it sound so thrilling. When I grew up, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to do?
I never met my real grandfather – he died when I was a child falling out of a train in Switzerland. The police said it was an accident but my grandma always suspected he’d been murdered. However she never liked to talk about him, or her life in Hamburg before the war.
By the time I made it to Hamburg in 1993, Germany was reunited and the city was wealthy and modern, its wartime ruins replaced by shiny office blocks. However Heimhuderstrasse still looked much the same as it did in my grandma’s photos, and her old house was still there.
At the end of this sedate street, I found the neo-gothic church where my grandparents were married. The door was locked and on the wall outside was a plaque. With my schoolboy German, I could just about make out what it said. ‘In 1933, nearly 20,000 Jews lived in Hamburg. In 1945, there were 945. When they were hunted down, deprived of their rights, and then forgotten, when their synagogues were destroyed, we did nothing. We beg their forgiveness, and shalom.’
Comments