At reference 1, I noticed a book bought, more or less by chance, arising from the book bought from Wisley, noticed at reference 2. 'No Fixed Abode', a memoir by one Peter Fraenkel, lately a controller at the World Service. An easy enough read, but for one reason and another I have only recently finished it.
A very civilised memoir from someone who had plenty of reason to be bitter; someone born in 1926 to a Jewish family in what was then a German part of Silesia and who emigrated to what was then British Central Africa, from what was then a German city called Breslau, after Kristallnacht, in May 1939.
His grandfather was a big chap, big and strong enough to have been allowed to serve in the Prussian equivalent of the Coldstream Guards, popularly known as the May bugs. While his father was not like that at all, and although allowed to join at the outbreak of the first war, on the strength of his father's record, did not stay the course and eventually wound up in the artillery (as described in Švejk, a very low cast outfit in the Imperial and Royal army of Austria, at least from the point of view of an officer from a decent infantry regiment). After the war, he suffered from a complaint called button hole panic, apt to surface when one had to attend a formal function in formal dress without having anything military to put in one's button hole, but a rapid exchange of letters with his former colonel got him an Iron Cross through the post. I dare say we had a milder version of the disease over here.
The father later became a reasonably senior legally flavoured civil servant. At some point in the 1930's he was ejected, as a Jew, from his post, but it being rule bound Prussia he continued to draw his salary while lounging about the town doing nothing - which was all well and good but nearly resulted in him in not emigrating while he still could, with the Fraenkel family being one of the last to emigrate from Breslau, in their case to British Central Africa. Where, from having been members of a persecuted race they became members of a persecuting race, as it were. Fraenkel was well aware of the irony of this and appears to have been much better behaved in that regard than some of his English colleagues in the Rhodesian Radio Service.
Another quirk of German behaviour was that while the regulations for taking money out of the country were punitive, you were allowed, if a first class passenger, to buy up expensive cameras from the ship's shop, for which purpose the necessary money was not deemed to have left Germany and so not subject to currency regulations.
Fraenkel also records how, in the run-up to emigration, persecution drove the Jewish communities closer together. More or less assimilated, secular Jews became more observant and German Jews generally became less rude about Jews from parts further east. Where they might speak Yiddish or something like that.
Various interesting anecdotes about his time in Africa, particularly his time with the Radio Service. On his account, it seems to me that it really was quite hard to do the right thing for the natives, given where most of them were starting from, with more or less no education of the western sort at all. Hard to strike the right balance between putting out material that the intended audience could relate to - perhaps about basic hygiene - and being condescending or patronising. But at least he tried, and he did make adjustments in the light of feedback.
I offer just one of his anecdotes. He was going to England on leave and a black friend asked him why he was going, as the place must be a right dump. Why so, says Fraenkel. Well, says the friend, England must be a pretty bad place for you to want to come all the way over here and steal all our land. I associate now to the anger of the Russian soldiers, angry on much the same grounds, when they found out how comfortably off the people of East Prussia were, even at the end of the second war. If they had all that, why did they need what little we had got? The story also seems vaguely familiar, as if I had heard the same anecdote transposed to some other invasion of the whites. North America?
The memoir closes with Fraenkel going back to Germany, from Strasbourg, some years after the second war, to be enthusiastically greeted by a border guard who had also come from Silesia. But what sort of a German was he?
With the book having opened with his paying a visit to childhood haunts in Breslau, by then called Wrocław and entirely Polish, at least as far as the inhabitants went. But there was a sprinkling of buildings that he remembered among the bomb sites, still, at that time, not entirely built over.
Having finished, I turned up the tree book again, which, as noticed at reference 2, was quite possibly written by British people who had lived in the land for a long time and had a genuine love for it. But apart from native names for trees, the natives were invisible. Apart from, occasionally being, along with elephants, partial to the fruit of this or that tree. No-one had thought to invite one to join the editorial board or anything else. Although, on Fraenkel's account there may not have been anyone both qualified and available, with standards of native education in the 1950's being poor. And to be fair, before our arrival, non-existent.
Perhaps I shall now turn up my history of Breslau again, a fat paperback from Davies & Moorhouse. Read some years ago, but I have no idea what prompted the purchase. Or even whether it was from new or pre-owned.
PS: it seems that quite a large fraction of German Jews did emigrate before the second war; three fifths of what started as half a million. See page 90.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/complicated-world.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/trees.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment