Behind the Story
Berlin
Unter den Linden circa 1900The idea of writing a story about a German-Jewish woman in an aristocratic mixed marriage came to me in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in East Central European History at Columbia University.
At the time, I had just encountered Fritz Stern’s “Gold and Iron,” a brilliant, painstakingly researched biography of Gerson Bleichroeder, personal banker to Chancellor Otto von Bismark, the political leader who unified Germany. In my mid-twenties at the time, I remember being struck by a mention in Stern’s book that as young debutante, Bleichroeder’s daughter had been consigned a wallflower at her first court ball — the gentlemen in the room refusing to dance with her not because she was unattractive, but because she was Jewish. Curiously, Elsa Bleichroeder was later given in marriage to one of the gentlemen who likely handed her that bruising ballroom insult. It was a brief marriage. Presumably, the Junker who wed her had plenty of use for her jaw-dropping dowry, but little for her.
Soon after reading that book, I ran across a provocative essay in social history by Professor Lamar Cecil. Published in the Leo Baeck Yearbook of 1975, it was entitled “Jews and Junkers in Imperial Berlin,” and summarized the uneasy social relations between wealthy Jews and the Prussian nobility. This work also suggested that notwithstanding the important contributions of Jewish Germans to their nation’s economic, scientific and cultural achievements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even the most assimilated of them — those converted and intermarried with the aristocracy — fell victim to antisemitism.
Villa on the Kadettenweg
This picture, taken of an early twentieth century villa on the Kadettenweg in the Berlin suburb of Steglitz-Zehlendorf was the inspiration for the home of Lisi von Schwabacher and her parents.I began to wonder about those mixed marriages. How many lasted? What were they like? How did intermarried Jewish women live as feudal ladies of the manor, and even accompany their husbands to court, all the while being reviled for their ethnic heritage?
My training as a pianist led me, furthermore, to an avid interest in the phenomenon of the “salon Jewesses,” those highly cultivated Jewish women who during the whole of the nineteenth century and the first thirty years of the twentieth century opened their homes to Germany’s artists, writers, musicians, academics and politicians for chamber music and talk. What quality, I asked myself, did these wealthy women possess that would draw elite men to their homes?
Neudeck
It turns out that these ladies were highly educated and intellectually curious, something that their gentile compatriots from wealthy families were conspicuously not.
Many of them were, furthermore, physically attractive in a way that German men found pleasantly exotic. As intellectually emancipated women and as Jews, these ladies were social outsiders, so that meeting one’s political opponents — or other people of vital interest who were not in one’s natural social circles — could be excused in Jewish homes. Moreover, Jewesses tended to be generous hostesses, sparing no expense when they entertained, especially where high quality food and drink were concerned. Prussian aristocrats whose peers teased them for attending “Jewish” soirees could answer (and did, frequently!) “But one eats so well in Jewish homes!”
As I immersed myself in my graduate work, it became clear to me just how critical these assimilated Jewish women were, not only to Germany’s cultural life, but to the evolution of its political life. It was in these salons, in the early nineteenth century, that many powerful ideas of political reform were born and bred. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jewish women provided the rare environment in which the social elites and the non-aristocratic intelligentsia could meet on relatively equal ground, and could talk honestly and freely about political challenges. Wealthy Jewish women, as critical observers poised at the edge of elite circles, were in many ways drivers of social change.
Imagining the Manor House
In imagining the manor house at Pulow, I used the picture above of the Neudeck manor, and the one here.Gutshaus Solzow Manor, Vipperow, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany.
My fictional heroine, Lisi von Schwabacher is, I hope, just such a scintillating woman. She is modeled on several of the historical figures I read about in my students days. In her pungently critical social observations and in her unapologetic frankness, she is a woman very like the real Rachel Levin von Varnhagen (1771-1833) who lived at the turn of the nineteenth century. In her volatility she also resembles Babette Meyer von Kalckreuth (1835-1916), who came of age in the mid-nineteenth century. Like both of these women, my heroine, Lisi von Schwabacher, can boast significant intellectual and artistic accomplishments. Like them, she converts to Christianity and marries a nobleman. But making the youthful Lisi an accomplished pianist and setting her into a novel which takes place on the cusp of the twentieth century provided me the opportunity to explore the psyche of a wealthy bourgeois Jewish woman at a time when feminist ideas were first coming into their own in Germany. It also enabled me to do something which has, to my knowledge, seldom been done in historical novels — to portray in a deeper way the centrality of music in European spiritual life, a centrality which all but replaced religion.
Hiller's Restaurant in Berlin
Readers of "All Things That Deserve To Perish" will immediately recognize that I sought to pay stylistic homage to the literature of the Victorian era.
I am a great admirer of both the Victorian and Wilhelmine novels, with their profound reflections on the struggles of the individual in society. One of my favorite authors, in fact, is the Prussian Theodore Fontane, whose “Effi Briest” is well known to English speakers in translation.
But while I don’t think that I could have fathomed writing “All Things…” without having had exposure to Fontane’s wonderful oeuvre, All Things That Deserve To Perish is not a novel of his era. Readers will immediately perceive that I have thumbed my nose at a number of established literary conventions of the late nineteenth century — and in ways that would probably have scandalized an author like Fontane. I have, for example, refused to tread lightly or side-step the so-called “indelicate” topics of the time: Sex and the social evils of ubiquitous racism are strong themes in my work. My goal, in fact, was to portray fin de siecle European life in a more realistic way than the strictures of Victorian era publishers allowed. And it was also to use the benefit of historical hindsight to foreshadow pernicious political and social developments (rising political anti-semitism being foremost here) that were, at the end of the 19th century, in their incipient stages.
The Elizabethan Fountain
Bad HomburgA lot of historical research went into the writing of “All Things That Deserve To Perish.” I wanted the historical details to be many and rich in order to fully immerse the English speaking reader in a time and place that was bound to be unfamiliar. But I would like to believe that readers of my novel will find it a very modern and relatable story. It is first and foremost a story of a potent, if contentious love between two people from very different religious and socio-economic backgrounds. Readers will recognize, in their romance, the power struggle in many a contemporary relationship.
