Tag: Midlands4Cities

JEWISH BOOKSELLERS IN NAZI GERMANY: SOME NOTES ON A RESEARCH TRIP

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Steve Katon

Last November and December, Steve Katon travelled to Berlin and the towns of Oranienburg and Pirna to conduct research for his Arts and Humanities Research Council Midlands4Cities-funded PhD in creative and critical writing. Here are some of his reflections.

My PhD project looks at the underrepresentation of disability in children’s literature. The creative part involves me writing a novel set in Nazi Germany covering the state-sponsored murder of disabled people which took place under the codename Aktion T4.

Thanks to funding from the AHRC, researching the novel took me to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and the permanent memorials of the Aktion T4 killing centres at Brandenburg an der Havel and Pirna-Sonnenstein. I talk about these in a blog post that I wrote for Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day.

Below, I will focus instead on some research I undertook on bookshops that were trading in the period I am writing about, and in particular the fate of Jewish booksellers of the time. The main character in my novel is Friede, a girl with Down’s syndrome, who has been adopted by Bernard, a writer and bookseller, and his sister Dorothy, a doctor. Both siblings are Jewish.

A large part of my visit to Berlin was to help me to build a picture of Bernard’s bookshop and gain insights into the life of a Jewish bookseller in the years leading up to the war. To begin, I therefore visited the excellent Landesarchiv, which holds documents and photographs of the German capital’s institutions, businesses and residences.

I had corresponded with Carmen Schwietzer, the deputy director of the archive, before my visit. When we met in person, Carmen very kindly helped me to identify several Jewish booksellers in the districts of Charlottenburg and Schöneberg that were trading in the 1930s. While at the archive I looked at the original records of these. As you may imagine, many of the files are heavily administrative in nature and, as they were written by biased perpetrators, are not particularly revealing of their crimes. An example below relates to a Jewish bookseller called Willy Flanter, who, even after he had been banned from selling books, still fought to stay in business. The letter on the left shows his tenacity to continue trading by attempting to re-register his business as a manufacturer.

It was a privilege to study this archive. All the same, after many hours of poring through documents, I was keen to get out and explore the streets. And on a sunny Saturday morning I did just that.

A hero of Berlin bookselling is the so-called Lioness of Kurfürstendamm, Marga Schoeller. She started selling literature in 1929 and, though no longer in its original location, her shop is still trading today.

Schoeller, who is not Jewish, welcomed writers, actors, academics and students to her shop, forming, as she called it, the anti-Nazi intelligentsia of the city. She bravely reserved a good stock of banned material in a secret cellar, which was only opened for her most trusted customers. I am almost certain a fictional version of the Lioness will claw her way into my novel. If you find yourself in Berlin, I highly recommend a visit. The staff were friendly and helpful, and I could have stayed much longer than I did. But I had work to do.

When looking for inspiration for the exterior of my fictional bookshop, the name of one premises leapt out at me: Willy Cohn’s Book Corner, in Schöneberg. I found the location of the shop, which is now a rather nice cafe. Stopping here for refreshments, I imagined how my fictional characters might have inhabited it in the 1920s and 1930s.

I would have to rely on old photographs to get to grips with the layout of the premises when they were bookshops. But then I got lucky at the address of a 1930s Jewish bookseller called Ernst Hesse. There were no signs of a shop frontage: this is a block of apartments – though the architecture clearly predated the war. I imagine this was Hesse’s trading address and the door to the communal entrance had been left open. Looking inside, I was treated to the sight of an opulent hardwood handrail, some gorgeous interior doors and an original ceramic-tiled floor. Perhaps the inside of my fictional bookshop and the stairs to my character’s apartments will look something like this.

But what of the booksellers who lived in these places? How are they commemorated? There is an ongoing initiative known as the stolpersteines: 10cm square blocks set into the pavement outside the last known residences of victims of the Nazis. More than once, I found at my feet details of how their stories ended. Here are those of Willy Flanter and another famous Berlin bookseller called Arthur Cassirer, and their families.

I will end by saying your German may be better than mine, but if not, it’s perhaps enough to know that the word ermordet, etched into many of these stones, simply translates as ‘murdered’.

This Graveyard on the Brink of Beeston Hill

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NTU MIDLANDS4CITIES DOCTORAL STUDENT TUESDAY SHANNON GOACHER ON A POETRY PILGRIMAGE: HEADING NORTH FOR TONY HARRISON’S v.

It’s a grey day in June 2019, 34 years since Tony Harrison’s v. was first published. Few poems manage to capture a landscape in the way that Harrison does in v., be it geographical or political; Channel 4’s 1987 broadcast, featuring Harrison reading the poem interspersed with clips of political and emotive film (including footage of Hitler, the Second World War, the Miner’s Strikes of 1984-5 and Margaret Thatcher) met with much controversy, and was even debated in The House of Commons. Today it’s considered a seminal piece, defining an era. (You can watch the 1987 broadcast here, but be warned: the poem contains a lot of racist and otherwise offensive language.)

On this dour, though thankfully dry, day, I’m headed north to Leeds to visit the graveyard that inspired that poem, chauffeured by my supervisor, Rory Waterman. We make good time and get there relatively easily, despite a satnav instruction to ‘perform a U-turn’ which, upon following, is repeated.

The first thing I notice about the graveyard is its view back over Leeds, the Bauhaus-style buildings of Leeds University cutting into the skyline, the places where Harrison ‘learned Latin, and learned Greek’, contrasted against the lush greenery beyond.

Harrison blog 1
‘V POEM’ is attributed to 1987 – the year of the television broadcast, not the poem’s print publication.

We clearly aren’t the first to make this journey for these purposes, and a wrought iron sculpture shows pivotal historic moments from the graveyard’s history , with ‘V POEM’ on the timeline. Despite directions to the grave we’re looking for, the Harrison family plot isn’t easy to find. The poem had warned us this might be the case: ‘you’ll have to search quite hard’ for it, he writes. We split up, and I find a Byron about thirty yards away (though not ‘three graves on’, as Harrison put it in the poem) and Rory spots ‘Wordsworth, organ builder’ – accurately described in the poem as ‘opposite’ – before turning around to find the Harrison family vault.

Harrison blog 2
The poet’s father and mother – ‘Not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie’ (‘Marked with D.’) – are among others in his family who have been buried in Holbeck Cemetery, Leeds.

And now we aren’t sure what to do. We stand for a moment, reading the inscriptions and both thinking that we can’t just look at it and leave. So, we find a patch of grass that doesn’t seem to be atop anyone’s final resting spot, sit down and watch Tony Harrison’s Channel 4 reading. It’s an odd but comforting experience, and it feels like the right thing to do. At the end, we recall that Harrison does, in fact, invite us to visit, to check on his family plot, to take away the discarded beer cans, and to see whether the ‘UNITED’ spray-painted on the headstone has been left in place. It hasn’t. All the graves have been scrubbed clean of graffiti, though they do all still lean due to subsidence from the worked-out seams below – some, in fact, are completely toppled, while the graves beneath others are beginning to cave in.

Before we head back, we jump the graveyard wall to have a wander down the streets of back-to-back terraces Harrison knew as a boy, and look out at the view of Elland Road, where Leeds United ‘disappoint their fans week after week’ – now obscured from the hill-top graveyard, at least at this time of year, by a line of trees. A corner shop, the proprietor of which is a Patel, is open for business (though this is ‘K. Patel’, not ‘M. Patel’, as in the poem); children home from school ride bikes in the street rather than booting a ball at a tree; a bedraggled stray cat lounges on the roof of a car, making the most of the sun that has finally appeared, close to where scaffolding climbs one of the terrace ends. It feels as though not much has changed since Harrison’s 1984 return visit. In some ways, it hasn’t.

At the end of the day we stop at a service station just outside Leeds, in need of a caffeine top-up. It’s humid and the sun has come out properly, so we sit outside and chat about the poem, the graveyard, my research, while a few yards away a man in a grey t-shirt smokes. When we head to leave, he stops us, and asks if either of our surnames is Harrison. His is, but he ‘ain’t related to no poet’. He looks a lot like a younger Tony, though, and we go, wondering whether it is wrong to feel we might have just met the alter-ego from the poem.

Tuesday Shannon Goacher, NTU MA Creative Writing student 2016-17, and current M4C doctoral candidate