The flower of my youth was spent in Germany’s darkest coming of age, a country that felt itself robbed of determination, racked with defeat and depression. It was 1931 and I was at the bottom of the pile – one of the seven million unemployed. We were all dependent on the labour exchange, the Arbeitsamt, which was like a besieged fortress. We passed our days inside its grey walls, queuing from five to seven hours just to receive a stamp. By the end of the week we had seven Reichsmark, enough to buy two loaves of bread: too much to die with but too little to live on. We were a queue of depressed, unwashed and rancid-smelling people without hope, just waiting for that one Reichsmark a day – or a change from somewhere, anywhere.
Switzerland
I felt like an animal that wanted to hibernate or to die. By the dusk of Christmas day I crashed into the ruins of a hut. It was locked, so I removed the pins holding the window glass and broke in. Inside was a small room simply furnished with the traditional ceramic stove, beside which some wood had been thoughtfully left. I immediately got a fire going. After an hour, cold and tired, I climbed onto the ‘shelf’ above the stove, curled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep, exhausted.
It snowed incessantly for days. Avalanches rumbled around me. To save energy, I rested like a hibernating animal on the top shelf of the stove. I felt as if I were entering a realm of nothingness; all movement, all activity ceased. An ecstatic spiritual strength arose in me, which increased from day to day and gave me a feeling of deep happiness. I understood that my body and spirit were undergoing a kind of remarkable cleansing. Outside avalanches roared closer, inside I felt the border between life and death and the fear of crossing it diminish. Lying on the warm shelf, I drifted in and out of consciousness.
I arrived in Copenhagen June 1932, on a balmy Sunday evening, a hopeless time for finding an inconspicuous space, for it was light, the season of white nights, and everyone was promenading.
‘Hey, hey, what have we here? A little German wandervogel! Wait, wait en lille smule – wait a little bit!’
This sympathetic, curious couple, Mr and Mrs Jochumsen, decided to offer the ‘little German wandervogel’ a better bed for the night than the bushes I was seeking. They led me through the streets and into their cane furniture workshop, where there lay an enormous heap of seagrass, used for stuffing furniture.It was late, but Mrs Jochumsen went to the back door of baker Jensen and bought an enormous bag of yesterday’s wienerbrød, locally called gammelbrød (‘old bread’), for 25 øre – virtually nothing – and Jensen, participating in their gleeful discovery of ‘the-little-German-wandervogel-who-would-sleep-in-the-seagrass’, gave an especially generous quantity.
I disembarked reluctantly in Lübeck, northern Germany, with my overcoat, hat, tie and heavy suitcase, and made my way to the Labour Exchange
‘Heil Hitler is now the greeting in Germany. Back to the door!’ Shouted the man to interview me.
‘No’, I said with emphasis. ‘No.’
‘Your blatant refusal is unusual. Not many react like you. You a must have either a bold or foolish character. Let me tell you, such audacious boldness will lead you nowhere but up the path to a concentration camp – and sooner than you imagine’ The official paused, looking intently at me before continuing. ‘Nearly all returnees from Scandinavia seem especially reluctant. They call themselves “individualists”- is this not so? You have come from there yourself…’ He seemed genuinely interested to know. ‘Yes, you are right.’ ‘Mostly my waiting room is full and I don’t usually have the time for details, but you are the only one here today. These so-called individualists – they are democrats, successful in periods of peace and prosperity. “Democracy in peace, dictatorship in war”, said the Romans. We have had war and misery for 20 years in Germany. Now is not the time for democracy. No. Today we have a leader who is giving us back our national pride and countering our humiliation. He will restore the dignity of German labour; he will create a classless national community. And we are all ready to follow him. The mothers are our eternal source of life; the fathers are the fighters for the fatherland, and the children are the bearers of our national future. Only the power of a united people, without any dissent, can liberate Germany from distress. “You are nothing; your people are all” is our slogan!’
The next morning I began my flight to Hamburg by hitching lifts. On the roads leading out of Lübeck they were building one of the new Autobahns, ‘The future military highways’ or ‘the Adolf Hitler Highways’, some called them. A gang of men toiled in the heat, bare-chested. Their shirts and uniform coats lay in a neat row on the grass bank; it was the uniform of the Arbeitsdienst. Another group marched by, singing, their spades swung over their shoulders like rifles. ‘Soldaten, Spaten’ (‘Soldiers, spades’) they sang, in their unerring uniformity like an automaton out of Brave New World their personality stripped, their work joyfully done for the common good.
On my way to Teheran, where I’d heard about some possible work, I found myself waylaid in Istanbul. On the way there I met Omar who having trained in Germany as an urban architect, would become the First City Architect of Turkey, if not the whole of Asia. He was a latter-day Young Turks, contemptuous of primitivness and exhauting technology.
Istanbul had become once again what it had been in its chequered history: a crossing point for thousands of peoples and hundreds of cultures – where caravans from distant countries, Coptic monks, Persian silk traders, Armenian architects, singers, poets, politicians, thinkers, women on donkeys, had all come and stopped and gone; a magnet for people fleeing from when Europe was ablaze with burning heretics, till today when Europe was again racked with persecution.
I arrived at the railway station in Berlin in the middle of a January snowstorm. Pedestrians struggled through the ankle-deep, slushy snow; only those with boots, typically uniformed soldiers, were protected.
In this grey run-down city, the Art and Work college appeared to me like an oasis. The director, Häring, had a lot to do with this ambience, as it was his personal selection of each student that determined the character of the college. Fifty percent of the students were Jews or had Jewish blood, and they all knew that they were sitting in an open trap. This danger appeared to inspire them to study all the more.They concentrated on the timing of the fall of the trap: it was as if they did not want to leave until the last minute. It was a game of life and death, and the tension, loaded both with fear and high political awareness, was extraordinary. A surprising optimism existed, a confidence in being able to escape from the trap in time..
Kalikellett 