A clarinet, hidden under the attic floorboards of a Hamburg apartment building and discovered during renovation in 1986, triggered years of research.
Michael Batz found out about the find by chance in 2015 - and was immediately fascinated.
The author, dramaturge and director Batz is known for his light installations, since 1998 he has staged documentary pieces on the Holocaust Remembrance Day every year.
In one of his earlier plays he had dealt with a house in the formerly predominantly Jewish Grindelviertel.
Sheet music and program slips had been found under the floor of an apartment.
It turned out that a Jewish family had secretly held cultural evenings there during the Nazi era until the early 1940s.
The parallel to the clarinet made Batz prick up his ears;
he tried to fathom the secret of the musical instrument.
The engraved name of the manufacturer, a manufacture in the US state of Indiana, and the serial number provided clues.
But the company only existed until 1930, when a fire had destroyed all documents about buyers.
Batz began to determine the names of previous apartment owners and tenants from old address books and collected information on more than 50 people over a period of almost half a century.
He conducted interviews with descendants of the residents and researched archives, looking in company chronicles, annual reports and newspaper articles.
From the findings he put together a narrative sequence of scenes in a voluminous book: »The House of Paul Levy.
Rothenbaumchaussee No.
26 ".
It is the biography of an unusual building, the story of its partly prominent residents from the Weimar Republic to the "Third Reich" to the early Federal Republic.
A house full of stories
This house, built in 1922, was something special from the start: What was new, for example, was the cooperative idea of establishing a corporation as a property developer, whose shareholders acquired the right of residence.
For this purpose, wealthy citizens, mostly of Jewish faith, came together, who preferred a spacious apartment with six rooms on around 240 square meters to an individual city villa.
In addition, the house had all sorts of technical innovations such as a lift, central heating and hot water.
Enlarge image
The first house community from 1922
Photo: Analena Weber
At that time, a citizens' initiative tried to prevent the project. The 32 meter wide, dark red clinker brick facade of the mighty building did not fit into the posh residential area, which is characterized by white houses, argued the Pöseldorfer citizens' association. In vain: the Jewish architects Hans and Oskar Gerson were allowed to complete the building. They also designed important Hamburg office buildings such as the Ballinhaus, which was renamed "Messberghof" by the Nazis in 1938 because of the Jewish descent of the ship owner Albert Ballin - and is still called that today.
The initiator and driving force was the private banker Paul Levy, who was the first to move in with his family;
Co-founders were Martin Friedburg, also a private banker, and the merchant and Bolivian consul, Harry Meyer.
Four wealthy widows joined her project, among them Marie Angèle Campe, who was married to the son of the Heinrich Heine publisher Julius Campe, who died in 1909.
The tournament rider Olga von Löbbecke, daughter of the banker Alwin Münchmeyer, also became the owner of an apartment.
The Nazis had their party club in the neighborhood
In 100 chapters, the author draws a colorful panorama of life stories and relates them to current events.
“Side stories,” says Batz, “often tell something very important.
The real events are sometimes hidden in the incidents. "
advertisement
Batz, Michael
Paul Levy's house.
Rothenbaumchaussee 26
Published by Dölling u.Galitz
Number of pages: 560
Published by Dölling u.Galitz
Number of pages: 560
Buy for € 32.00
Time of price inquiry
11/30/2021 6.41 p.m.
No guarantee
Order from Amazon
Order from Thalia
Order from Weltbild
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
Batz tells of the golden twenties, of the extravagant artist festivals in the opposite Curiohaus of the "Society of Friends of the Fatherland School and Education System".
And he tells of the expressionist avant-garde of the "Hamburg Secession" to which the Jewish painter Willy Davidson belonged;
he and his partner moved into the attic, which was originally only approved as a studio.
Batz also takes a closer look at the area around the house: since 1925 the Nazis have met in their party bar »Schinkenkrug« (today »Down Under«), which they had provocatively placed in the Jewish-influenced Grindelviertel.
Batz describes the marches on the nearby moor pasture and the underground tunnel construction under the Rothenbaumchaussee in the late twenties.
"Leave the country today"
After the National Socialists came to power in January 1933, the life of the Jews who lived in Rothenbaumchaussee 26 became increasingly difficult.
Go or stay - it became an existential question.
The radiologist Henri Hirsch, owner of the apartment on the first floor on the left, received the life-saving hint from his famous colleague Ferdinand Sauerbruch.
Although the surgeon at the Charité in Berlin sympathized with the Nazi movement, he warned his colleague by telephone in April 1934 against going to a congress in the capital: »Please leave the country this evening.
Our political leaders cannot enable a Jew to have any success.
You are in the process of being put in a madhouse. ”Hirsch boarded the night train to Genoa, where his brother lived.
The lawyer Rudolf Magnus, appointed managing director of "Wohnhaus Rothenbaum GmbH", had to give up this office.
He carefully prepared to emigrate to Palestine.
In 1935 the family took the train to Trieste and from there by ship to Haifa.
The now hundred-year-old daughter Eva is the last of the first tenants to live in Tel Aviv.
Entry of the National Socialists
Little by little, the Jewish residents left the house.
They usually had to sell their belongings well below their value or have them auctioned and pay "Reich flight taxes" for the exit permit - 25 percent of the total assets.
This tax was introduced by the government of the center politician Heinrich Brüning in 1931 to prevent Germans from emigrating.
Now the tax was used to plunder the Jews.
The Nazis, however, did not recognize the Jewish symbol that is clearly visible above the entrance door of the house at Rothenbaumchaussee 26: Between the numbers 19 and 22 there is a lion of Judah carved from wood with a stylized Torah crown.
"Aryan" Germans now moved into the apartments of the Jews. The dentist and SS squad leader Walter Dessart, also a successful tennis player, rented a ground floor apartment in 1934. The gynecologist Theodor Heynemann also moved in, advocating the theory of "racial hereditary hygiene" and forcibly sterilizing hundreds of women. After the end of the Nazi regime, Heynemann was classified as "not burdened" and seamlessly continued his career as a professor at the Eppendorf University Medical Center. His students even managed to have a street in Hamburg named after Heynemann in 1960 - and it still is today.
The chamber singer Gusta Hammer, a member of the Hamburg State Opera ensemble, stayed in the house since 1935.
The contralto celebrated successes in operas with general music director Eugen Jochum and as a soloist.
Both stayed out of politics as best they could, but had to appear at Nazi celebrations and give propaganda guest performances in countries occupied by the Wehrmacht during World War II.
An unsolved mystery
In 1943 only two Jews lived in the house: Minka Wendt, who was married to a Swede and who was allowed to travel to her husband's homeland in June, and Richard Behr. When the merchant crossed the street to eat in the Curiohaus restaurant, he was arrested. After several weeks in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp, he hid with a farmer near Itzehoe. By chance the wife of his son Edgar came to this farmer's house with her children; they had been bombed out in Hamburg and were looking for a new place to stay. Richard Behr heard the children in his basement hideout for over a year without being able to show himself to them, because they might have been babbling in the village.
After the death of the widow Campe in 1930, her grandson Yves Saget, who lived in Paris, inherited the apartment and a number of other properties in Hamburg. This also included the head office of the publisher Campe at Schauenburger Strasse 59. The Hamburg NSDAP set up an equipment station there and had the building painted brown. Saget joined the Resistance in occupied France. In July 1943 he was arrested in Paris, after an odyssey through several concentration camps, he died in December 1944 of exhaustion in Neuengamme concentration camp in south-east Hamburg.
The family of the Jewish sales representative Carl Julius Neukircher, tenants on the third floor on the right, emigrated in 1939 and found shelter with a merchant in Belgium.
It was his son, a sergeant in the British Army, who on May 22, 1945 exposed the former "Reichsführer SS" Heinrich Himmler, who had been hiding with false papers, on a patrol near Bremervörde.
Batz unearthed many stories about the historic house - he could not solve the riddle of the clarinet.
As luck would have it, an actress from his earlier »Jedermann« ensemble lived in the house from 1987 to 1989, in Consul Meyer's first floor apartment.
Her great love at the time was a clarinetist.
