Underground in Berlin (45 page)

Living on a provisional basis was over now; my parents’ lives ran on well-ordered lines. They were both studying at Berlin University, which changed its name to the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1949.

Marie Simon concluded her studies with her doctoral degree on 14 February 1951. ‘In my dissertation,’ she wrote in 1972, ‘I dealt with the border area between philosophy and classical philology that has remained my field of research.’
*

In 1956 she became acting lecturer in the department of the history of philosophy in classical antiquity. Only when she had taken the examination for the next academic rank up, in 1969, was she promoted to full lecturer, and her appointment to full professor of the literary and cultural history of classical antiquity followed in September 1973, relatively late. She was fifty-one years old by then.

My father (1921–2010), who gained his doctoral degree at the same time as she did, became a lecturer a good deal earlier, and with effect from 1 December 1960 was initially professor of classical Arabic and Arab philosophy at the same university.

While my mother retired from her professorial chair in September 1982, she remained active at the university until the middle of the 1990s.

Thousands of students must have heard her inspiring and fascinating lectures. Among other subjects, she lectured to classical philologists on the philosophy and religious history of classical antiquity and to philosophy students on the history of philosophy (classical antiquity to French materialism); she gave archaeological students an introduction to Greek philosophy; she lectured to cultural scientists on the cultural history of antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and to theological students on the history of Greek philosophy.

None of these students knew the details of her life; I have asked many of her former students about that.

Around 1970, however, when my mother did once mention, in a seminar on classical poetry with very few participants, that as a forced labourer working at a lathe she used to recite all the poetry she knew by heart to take her mind off the tedious work, the students were so surprised that they asked for no further details.

One of my mother’s former students, the classical philologist and well-known journalist Detlev Lücke (1942–2007), said that Marie Simon gave her students stability and a sense of direction in difficult political times. In the weekly newspaper
Der Freitag
, where he was an editor for a long time, he remembered: ‘What was so impressive in Marie Simon was the extraordinary clarity of her arguments. To me, her lectures were something special … They were so well attended because she provided richer and more profound ideas than was usual in the standard compulsory lectures for social scientists.’
*

Lücke describes her, his academic mentor, who ‘showed no sign of her bourgeois origins’ as ‘a very modest, honest woman. Anything extravagant was part of her nature. She arrived to give lectures with a cigarette in her hand, and noticeably well dressed, which was rather non-German and therefore, of course, wonderful. Her searching look from under her eyelids went right through you.’

During my own university studies I would very much have liked to attend my mother’s lectures, but she wouldn’t let me – or rather, she asked me not to do so because my presence would make her nervous. So unfortunately I cannot say what distinguished them at first hand. As well as communicating her solid knowledge of their subjects, they must have contained political allusions to the circumstances of her times. My mother, typically, kept at a critical distance from those circumstances. Detlev Lücke summed it up by writing, ‘She confined herself strictly to her scholarly context, which in itself was interesting enough. Others in the Institute … tried to demonstrate that, from the historical viewpoint, the Soviet Union was the third Rome, but Marie Simon never indulged in such comparisons.’
*

She was not afraid of the authorities, for one thing because over the decades she had come to enjoy something of the status of a veteran, having joined the Communist Party on 15 November 1945, and after the union of the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party in 1946, an event that she welcomed, she was a member of the SED, the Social Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic.

I never asked her whether she thought of herself as a communist. She would probably have replied that politically she was on the left. Being a member of the Jewish Community and running a fundamentally kosher household did not represent any contradiction to her.

An important aspect of her work on philosophy was her study of Utopias, particularly the question of how long they remain utopian and what puts an end to that state of affairs. In her opinion, all Utopias ending in -ism, socialism and Zionism alike, had failed.

At the university, she was one of that ‘honourable circle of scholars and university teachers who, with their wealth of expertise and courage in defending the truth, withstood doctrinaire impositions, and who taught and exemplified the ideal claim of a new society rooted in solidarity against the distorted image of the illiberal, authoritarian social state.’ These were the words of her colleague, the philosopher Gerd Irrlitz, in an obituary of her. He went on, ‘In discussions … I appreciated Marie Simon’s persistence in defending the criteria of scholarly criticism and rejecting officious politicisation – and I saw how disappointed she was by the turn that events had taken.’

She had not been thrown off course by the fact that the country for which she had consciously decided no longer existed; the old Federal Republic of West Germany was never a viable alternative for her. Yet the huge political changes after the fall of the Berlin Wall made her uneasy. In addition, there was a family tragedy: my sister, three years my junior, who had just taken her doctoral degree and was following in the scholarly footsteps of my parents, died of an incurable disease on 27 November 1989.

My mother bore this blow of fate with her characteristic strength, and shared her mourning only with my father. She did not talk about it to other people.

However, her grief over my sister’s death may have been one of the reasons why she went along with my wish for her to dictate her memoirs. It is absolutely certain that if she had not wanted to, no one in the world could have made her change her mind.

In the course of the long time I have spent working on the story of my mother’s survival, I have often wondered how far the experiences of wartime persecution determined her life after it. Can anyone really function properly after all that? What fears did it leave behind?

In looking at that question I must, of course, be careful not to see all my mother’s characteristics as the result of what she had experienced. All the same, I will mention a few later consequences.

My mother was on friendly terms with everyone she knew, but kept her distance; she had hardly any close friends. Yet there were exceptions, such as the historian of classical antiquity Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf (1901–1979).

The two women retained a formal mode of address in public, calling each other
Sie
, but they were intimate friends. My mother’s friendship was not just with the university professor, but with her alter ego, the successful writer who published her novels about Native Americans under the name of Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich. The basis of their friendship was that both, in their very different ways, had fought against the Nazis, and if necessary they continued to fight at the university.

My mother couldn’t stand either protracted goodbyes or late arrivals on the part of her family and friends. It was taken for granted that until her death I phoned her several times a day.

Finally, her experiences caught up with her after a major operation, when she had not fully come round from the anaesthetic and was firmly convinced that the Nazis were torturing her with sharp-edged cannulas.

Only today do I fully understand some aspects of her behaviour. As a child, I was never allowed to wear a ski cap, although I would have loved to look like the other schoolchildren. But on the grounds that ski caps were ‘Nazi headgear’, I was given a fur cap instead. No explanation was forthcoming, and I had a feeling that I had better not ask for one.

Nor did anyone tell me why Trude Neuke, who lived in our neighbourhood, always called my mother ‘Hannchen’ when the two of them happened to meet in the street. I did know, however, that Marie Jalowicz had once gone under the false name of Johanna Koch.

Her relationship with the ‘real’ Johanna Koch, whom Marie Jalowicz Simon describes at length in all her ambivalence in her memoirs, was to play a part in my mother’s life once more after Frau Koch’s death.

On the whole, my mother succeeded in looking back at her past life soberly and with composure. Frau Koch is an exception in that my mother never really got over their relationship, and sometimes was overcome by panic, thinking that Johanna Koch might unexpectedly come to our door.

When Frau Koch died on 20 January 1994, a will of 18 February 1940 suddenly came to light. In this will, Emil and Johanna Koch left their entire estate to ‘Fräulein Marie Jalowicz as their heir’. Towards the end of her life, then, my mother got her parents’ house in Kaulsdorf-Süd back. She never set foot in it again; she gave it to me soon after the legacy came through, although not without asking the family’s lawyer to go to see her in hospital, where she had to spend a good deal of time at that point.

In front of the lawyer, she told my wife and me that she would make the gift only if my family immediately sold the property that weighed on her mind so much, and we did as she wanted.

When we were clearing the house in the early summer of 1994, my father turned up unexpectedly. He went into what had been the Kochs’ bedroom, and with the air of someone who knew what he was looking for opened a drawer in the bedside table and took out a number of documents. They included a passport made out in Bulgaria and my mother’s identity card, both in the name of Johanna Koch.

Shortly before my mother left Kaulsdorf for Pankow at the end of August 1945, Johanna Koch had simply taken these documents out of her handbag on the grounds that they were her papers.

I assume that my father was acting on my mother’s behalf. When he was about to take them away with him, I protested and asked him to let me have them. At the time, I was already forming a decision to preserve the life story of Marie Jalowicz Simon.

My mother was always convinced that chance had allowed her to survive. In a lecture of 1993 on the ‘U-boats’ who had survived the Nazi period, she generalised on the subject in these words: