The Bremen »Aryanization« memorial reminds me of Doris, daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth, twelve years old, born in Guben
Marita Kloppenburg January 2024
In her novel »Heimsuchung«, Jenny Erpenbeck describes the auctions of Jewish furniture and household goods.
When I first heard that a memorial to the »Aryanization« of Jewish property under National Socialism was to be unveiled in Bremen - the first and only place in Germany to do so - I immediately remembered a passage in a novel I had read around 14 years earlier. It describes in a very impressive literary way what the Bremen memorial is intended to commemorate.
I still remember today how deeply moved and moved to tears this story of Doris, daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth, twelve years old, born in Guben.
My first reaction to the memorial was therefore very positive: how good that there is a place here in Bremen that commemorates the systematic, meticulously organized and step-by-step destruction of Jewish life, and here in particular the theft of furniture and the entire contents of the house!
In her novel »Heimsuchung« (2008, Eichborn AG, Frankfurt am Main), Jenny Erpenbeck describes a house and property on a lake in Brandenburg and tells the stories of the changing residents over the course of the past century and the impact of historical events on their lives.
One chapter of the book is entitled »The Girl« and is about Doris, the twelve-year-old daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth, born in Guben. Her mother Elisabeth is Ludwig’s sister, her parents are Arthur and Hermine and are Jewish cloth manufacturers. The family owned a plot of land on the aforementioned Brandenburg lake with a bathhouse and jetty, where they spent pleasant days in the summer and at weekends.
In 1936, Dori’s uncle Ludwig emigrated to South Africa with his wife Anna. In 1939, her grandparents also wanted to leave Germany and sold the lake property to the neighboring architect, who had to pay a 6% »de-Jewishization tax« to the tax office.
However, before they could leave the country, the grandparents were deported from Levetzowstraße in Berlin-Moabit and died in a gas van in Kulmhof near Litzmannstadt, while at the same time all their possessions - including the proceeds from the sale of the lakeside property - went to the German Reich, represented by the Reich Finance Minister, and the household goods were auctioned off.
Ernst, Doris’ father, dies of typhus while working as a forced laborer building the freeway and Doris and her mother Elisabeth are deported to Warsaw.
Ernst and Elisabeth had also tried to emigrate to Brazil and packed their furniture and household effects into a container for the move:
»In Brazil, the father had said, you’ll need a sun hat. Are there lakes in Brazil? Of course there are. Are there trees in Brazil? Twice as big as here. And our piano? It doesn’t fit in there any more, her father had said, and closed and locked the door of the container that held her desk and several suitcases of clothes and linen, her bed with the mattresses and all her books. I’m sure this container was still standing in the yard of some haulage company in Guben …« (page 86)
When Doris and her mother were living in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, one day in June, « … all their Guben household effects were taken out of the containers by Mr. Carl Pflüger and the detective inspector Pauschel assigned to him and prepared for auction in the reverse order in which her father and mother had packed them into the containers for their departure to Brazil two years earlier.« (page 88)
»… On this very day in June, about two months after her arrival in Warsaw, without her knowing it, her crib, serial number 48, was auctioned off in Guben for Mk. 20 to Mrs. Warnitschek of Neustädter Strasse 17, her cocoa pot, serial number 119, to Mr. Schulz of Alte Poststrasse 42, only a few houses away from the house in which they had lived, and her father’s accordion, serial number 133, for Mk. 36 to Mr. Moosmann of Salzmarktstrasse 6. On the evening of this day, on which she only returned to her quarters shortly before closing time, on this evening of one of the longest days of 1942, on which a light, early summer wind blew away the newspapers covering the bodies of the dead and the smell of decay rose, on this bright evening, on which she walked home in serpentine lines, as she had become accustomed to doing here, so as not to stumble over the corpses, on the evening of this day, when, as on all other evenings, the crying of the parentless children rose in the hallways, on this Monday evening, when her mother put the potatoes she had exchanged for the wristwatch in front of her, very probably the last ones she would eat in her life, on this evening all the bed sheets of Ernst, Elisabeth and Doris were already resting, each in pairs for prices between Mk. 8, Pf. 40 and Mk. 8, Pf. 70, consecutive numbers 177 to 185, rested smoothly in the linen cupboards of the Wittger, Schulz, Müller, Seiler, Langmann and Brühl, Klemker, Fröhlich and Wulf families.« (pages 88 f.)
The book chapter describes how Doris holds out in a tiny, pitch-black room, which serves as her hiding place and which her mother has ordered her not to leave. She is now all alone, the ghetto has been evacuated and her mother will not return. Everything around her is completely silent and dark and no one knows she is there. »The only thing that is still colorful is what she remembers in the middle of this darkness.« And these memories are primarily those of the property on Lake Märkisch, where the family spent many happy and carefree hours.
»While the girl sits in her black chamber and tries to sit up from time to time, but bumps her head against the ceiling of the hiding place, while she opens her eyes wide and yet cannot even see the walls of her chamber, while the darkness is so great that the girl cannot even see where it ends, memories of days when the whole field of vision was filled with colors to the edges appear in her mind. Clouds, sky and leaves, oak leaves, willow leaves hanging down like hair, black earth between her toes, dry pine needles and grass, pine cones, scaly bark, clouds, sky and leaves, sand, earth, Water and planks of the jetty, clouds, sky and glistening water in which the sun was reflected, shady water under the jetty, she could see it through the cracks when she lay on her stomach on the warm planks to dry off after bathing. After her uncle had gone, her grandfather took her sailing for two more summers. Grandfather’s dinghy is probably still in the village shipyard. In winter quarters for four years. Now, not knowing whether it is day or night outside, the girl reaches for her grandfather’s outstretched hand, climbs over from the jetty to the edge of the boat, sees her grandfather undo the knot that ties the boat to the jetty and throws the rope into the boat.« (page 81)
Doris had also learned to swim in the lake there and the neighbor had shown her how to catch crayfish; she had planted a willow there with her grandfather and uncle.
In the end, the girl was discovered in the chamber of the abandoned apartment in Nowolipiestrasse in Warsaw by the »valuables collection squad led by a German soldier«.
She now walks through the streets of the Warsaw ghetto for the last time and is deported to an extermination camp.
»Of the one hundred and twenty people in the wagon, about thirty suffocate during the two-hour journey. Because she is a parentless child, she, along with some old people who can no longer walk and a few who have lost their minds during the journey, is considered an obstacle to the smooth running of the train and is therefore herded aside as soon as it arrives, past a pile of clothes as high as a mountain … For two minutes, a slightly cloudy, whitish sky arches over her, as it always does at the lake just before the rain, for two minutes she breathes in the smell of pine trees, which she knows well, only she can’t see the pine trees themselves because of the high fence. Has she really come home? For two minutes she feels the sand under her shoes, including a few small flints and pebbles of quartz or granite, before she takes off her shoes for good and stands on the board to be shot.
There is nothing more beautiful than diving with your eyes open. Diving up to the shimmering legs of her mother and father, who have just been swimming and are now wading through the shallow water back to the shore. There is nothing better than tickling them and, muffled by the water, hearing them shriek to please their child.
For three years the girl has learned to play the piano, but now, as her dead body slides down into the pit, the word piano is taken back by the people, now the backward somersault on the high bar, which the girl knew better than her schoolmates, is taken back, and also all the movements that a swimmer makes, the grasping for crabs is taken back, as is the little knot in sailing, all this is taken back into the unfound, and finally, at the very end, even the name of the girl herself, by which no one will ever call her again: Doris.« (page 91 f.)
Thanks to the Bremen memorial to the »Aryanization« of Jewish property under National Socialism, I now think about this story of Doris, daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth, twelve years old, born in Guben, more often when crossing the Wilhelm Kaisen Bridge, walking along the Weser promenade or on the way to the Weser stadium.
Marita Kloppenburg
