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Alias Papa
A Life of Fritz Schumacher
By Barbara Wood Green Books Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Barbara Wood
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-900322-94-2
CHAPTER 1
Grown in German Soil
Fritz Schumacher was born on August 16th 1911, in the German city of Bonn. He had been preceded by twins – a boy and a girl – who were just over a year old when he was born, but as he was a healthy, strapping baby he soon caught up with his more delicate brother and sister so that the three of them came to be known by all their acquaintances as the triplets.
Fritz was named after his father's brother; the twins after their parents, Hermann and Edith. The name Hermann carried with it the burden of generations of eldest sons. Since the fourteenth century they had served their country loyally, performing civic duties in the Hanseatic town of Bremen, where the first recorded Hermann Schumacher was elected mayor. Subsequent generations of Schumachers bore the office and in 1604 Bremen publicly acknowledged their service by adding the Schumacher coat of arms to those of other notable families in the town hall.
The traditional ties with Bremen town hall were broken by Fritz's grandfather. He wanted to play a wider role in the world and went abroad with his wife, two small sons and a baby daughter, first to be German Ambassador in Bogota, Colombia, and then to be German Consul in New York, where two more daughters were born. Their life in the wilds of the Andes and amongst the skyscrapers of New York was not always conventional. The two boys were more or less left to educate themselves. After a brief and unhappy period of formal schooling in a New York establishment their father was convinced that they would learn more left to their own devices; they were given a printing press and the young 'Schumacher Brothers: Printers' set themselves up in business. They learnt mathematics by keeping their accounts and literacy through typesetting, their father insisting only that they carried on their printing business with proper professionalism and dedication. In 1882 Ambassador Schumacher was posted to Lima and the two boys were sent home to Bremen for a more formal education. They felt like orphans away from their parents and sisters. Bremen seemed to be full of critical aunts of all shapes and sizes who peered at 'the two German shoots grown on American soil' through curtained windows as they walked down the street on their way to school. Hermann, the elder, found it particularly difficult to settle down and recorded many years later in his memoirs that this episode in Bremen:
strengthened the north German tendency in my personality, but also tied me to my brother in an unusually close bond. From then on we lived – almost as orphans – in the house of my mother's older sister ... However friendly our reception was, it could never take the place of our parental home. As Fontane says, home 'exerts its influence from minute to minute in those formative years of the soul', where example is more important than teaching. That feeling of natural belonging which one takes for granted could only develop slowly and with more difficulty for the older (brother) than for the younger.
The absence of continuous family bonds, exacerbated by the early death of his father, all helped to make Hermann single-mindedly wrapped up in his own life: dogmatic, authoritarian and dedicated to the pursuit of his career, breaking only to holiday with his brother whenever their busy lives allowed. His career progressed well. He studied first law and then economics. By the age of thirty-one, in 1899, he had already gained the distinction of being appointed to a Chair of Economics, at Kiel University, without having acquired the usual obligatory academic qualification of a doctorate. Once he was a professor, the world opened out, particularly after he had founded a school of economics in Cologne in 1900, the first to have university status in Germany. As Hermann's reputation spread to the upper echelons of society he was appointed tutor to the Crown Prince and his brothers. He travelled widely to the Far East and China, collecting economic data, and twice to New York, where on his second visit in 1906 he was the first 'Kaiser Wilhelm Exchange Professor' at Columbia University, returning after a year to the Chair of Economics at Bonn University.
Professor Schumacher was a dedicated teacher and a gifted one. He took enormous trouble, not only with the material he presented to his pupils, but also in his interest in their progress. The 'Schumacher students' regarded themselves as a privileged group and formed a society, the 'Schumacher Verein' in which they honoured their teacher even after his death.
The Professor combined a personal interest in his students with a firm belief in his own authority as their teacher. Just as it would not occur to him to question the authority of a legally elected government, even if he disagreed with its policies, so he did not expect his pupils to question his position. His pupils accepted this, for it was an attitude commonly held amongst the Professor's contemporaries, and one which later was to result in tragedy for Germany. But it was less easy for his children to tolerate. Their father's interest in them often took the form of unsolicited and dogmatic advice, and his authoritarianism, lacking the compensating qualities of sensitivity but rather made worse by touchiness, oppressed them, particularly in the way it affected their mother.
Professor Schumacher was over forty when he married, while his wife was barely older than some of his students. His approach to marriage was essentially practical. Finding there was less pressure on him in Bonn, he decided it was time to renounce his bachelor existence and find a suitable wife. A highly respected colleague and professor of law, Professor Ernst Zitelmann, had three striking daughters. Professor Schumacher first noticed them while on holiday with his brother Fritz at the North Sea. He decided that any one of the girls would suit him but was at a loss how to proceed with the selection. He wrote in his memoirs:
The meeting on the North Sea beach was a short but impressive prelude. Returning to Bonn the situation was simplified. Although the father guarded his daughters like a personal treasure, the middle and most energetic had the courage to get engaged and in fact to marry, and the eldest went to Paris and Brussels to complete her artistic studies. So only the youngest was left. The elimination, which I could hardly have managed by myself, was decided upon by a sympathetic fate.
Edith was eighteen years younger than her future husband, but her beauty seems to have struck the Professor less than her shyness and modesty. He was amazed to discover, some time after their marriage, that she was also a talented mathematician who had managed to solve a problem that had been puzzling mathematics professors for some years.
Professor Schumacher courted Edith at archaeology lectures which she attended with her mother. Not surprisingly, given his inexperience and her shyness, it was hard going. Even his proposal was unromantic in the extreme. On his way to her house he stopped to buy flowers for the occasion: the flowers he grabbed absentmindedly were artificial.
Such insensitivities were wounds that Edith Zitelmann received on many occasions after her marriage, but her husband was generally oblivious to her sufferings. One washing day soon after the birth of their twins the Crown Prince called unexpectedly. He wanted the Professor to accompany him on a visit to the Far East. After some minutes of conversation the Professor invited the Prince to step into the garden. It did not occur to him that it would humiliate his wife to walk the Prince past the flapping lines of laundry.
Shortly after this incident the Professor departed for China, Japan and Indonesia leaving his wife with the twins and expecting a third child. The trip turned out to be a disaster. The Crown Prince abandoned it before the Professor had reached their rendezvous in Singapore. Professor Schumacher nevertheless pressed on alone, only to catch malaria so severely that the doctors attending him on his return marvelled that he had survived the journey.
With her husband to nurse and twins of just one year old to look after, Edith Schumacher gave birth to their third child. He was christened Ernst Friedrich, Ernst after his grandfather, Ernst Zitelmann, and Friedrich after his uncle and godfather, Fritz. It was a happy choice, for the uncle and his nephew had more in common than just their names. They had a mutual respect and affection, and they were to share a similar sense of humour and a liking for writing apt and pithy verse. Uncle Fritz was an authority on Goethe and a distinguished and influential professor of architecture and town planning, eventually to redesign and rebuild a considerable part of Hamburg and Cologne. He was somewhat less dogmatic and authoritarian than his older brother, possibly because his two sisters lived with him and kept him in order. These two spinsters were not favourites of their nephew Fritz. His childhood memories were of two formidable ladies whose affections were concentrated entirely on a little dog with digestive disorders which filled the house with an intolerable stench that seemed to escape their notice.
Fritz's first playmates were naturally his brother and sister, Hermann and Edith. Fritz was more extrovert than Hermann and his charm and intelligence succeeded in stealing the limelight from his older brother on many occasions, particularly when family friends and relations provided an audience. Edith was more like Fritz than her twin in this respect and the two of them formed a close bond. She was Fritz's companion and confidante and though she argued with him constantly and challenged everything he said, she believed early on that he possessed an extra dimension of perception. Later, when they were both adults, she saw him after a long separation and said to herself: 'He is like another Beethoven.'
Edith was artistic and imaginative. She was also determined to prove that such insights were not flights of fancy. She genuinely believed that her brother Fritz had superior abilities and understanding. There is an old nursery rhyme called 'Hänschen Klein'. The words, roughly translated, go: 'Little Hans goes out into the world with nothing but his hat and stick for company. But mother weeps bitterly now that she has no more little Hans and the small child, realising this, returns home quickly.' Edith, although she was already six, had not consciously heard the second part of this rhyme until she heard Fritz singing it to himself. She concluded that with his compassionate wisdom he had put himself into the shoes of little Hans's mother and made up a verse on her behalf. Edith's faith in Fritz was so strong that she refused to accept his assertion that the verse had existed long before he had.
Life in the Schumacher household was disciplined and regular, dictated by the Professor's needs. These were silence when he worked in his study and modesty and thrift in his wife's housekeeping. But outside events soon imposed a certain irregularity. In 1914 Europe was plunged into catastrophe. The children were probably more affected by the birth of another sister, Elisabeth, that year than the outbreak of war but they would certainly have noticed the changes that suddenly took place around them. The colours of everyday life were transformed into a monotonous grey. The Professor wrote:
The outbreak of the war made itself visible with almost uncanny speed in the appearance of the street. Its brightness suffered a sharp decline. As with one stroke all motor vehicles were painted grey and all the many colours that the uniforms had had up to now were displaced by the standard field grey. Life had taken on a more serious and monotonous appearance.
As young people went into the army, the number of the Professor's students dwindled, reducing his income. He began to write for local newspapers and give outside lectures. Soon the Prussian Minister for Trade, Von Sydow, summoned him to Berlin to discuss wartime economics and particularly the problem of war profits. Then the problem of food supplies became pressing. There was an element of black humour in Professor Schumacher's involvement in these discussions. The Germans, with their reputation for enjoying a good sausage, were faced with the dilemma that a vast population of pigs was competing with the population of humans for limited supplies of cereals. It was a question of bread today or sausages tomorrow. Professor Schumacher advised bread today and the resulting slaughter of pigs went down in history as the Schweinemord — the pig murder. It caused a controversy which rumbled on beyond the end of the war.
In 1917, just as Fritz was reaching school age, Professor Schumacher was appointed Professor of Economics at Berlin University and the family moved to the capital city. The Professor was delighted with the move. It meant more to him than just academic promotion. In Bonn the family had lived in the Zitelmann's old house. In Berlin, for the first time, he bought a house of his own. He wrote in his memoirs: 'Here a feeling of home could develop. The ownership of the house, even more than the new professorship, made me believe that I had reached the goal of my life.'
The new house was to be the family home until the early 1940s. It was a large and typical nineteenth-century German house with a high gabled roof and carved veranda. A conservatory led into the garden, well stocked with fruit bushes and shrubs – lavender, lilacs, roses and rhododendrons. Around it were other similar houses and gardens. Steglitz was a respectable, middle-class suburb of Berlin where many professional families had settled. Arno-Holtz Strasse, where the Schumachers bought their house, was half way up the Fichteberg, the highest point of the area from which one could look down over the whole of Berlin, and also led directly into a botanical garden where the Professor took a daily walk.
The Schumachers' move to Berlin coincided with the beginning of hard times in Germany. By 1917 food was getting scarce. It was no longer enough to live frugally; extra measures had to be taken to live respectably. The Schumachers tried unsuccessfully to grow vegetables and then turned the garden over to livestock. Chickens, rabbits and goats became part of family life and gave the children some of their happier memories during those difficult years. The goats, which at one time numbered ten, gave them the most pleasure. They were housed in the cellar but the kids were allowed into the drawing-room where the poor creatures tried to take their first shaky steps on the slippery parquet floor. Even the Professor was amused by the entertainment.
As food shortages bit harder it became more difficult to feed the goats. The children would go out daily, foraging for scraps in their neighbours' dustbins.They became a familiar sight running about on the Fichteberg in bare feet (for shoes had become a luxury) with their buckets in their hands. But the goats got thinner, their milk supply dried up and they were relegated to the stew pot. The children seem to have been very unsentimental about this, remembering only their interest in seeing the inside of the goats as they were cut up before going into the cooking pot.
It was not a time to be sentimental. In the last months of the war and in the years after the fighting had ended the children felt real hunger. It made a deep impression on Fritz. He never forgot the feeling of emptiness, the feeling of exhaustion which lack of food produced, and later recalled vividly how he would have to rest on his way up the Fichteberg when he carried his violin back from a music lesson. For a while the family felt real deprivation, so much so that when the Red Cross selected undernourished children to recover in their camps from the rigours of the war, the Schumacher children were amongst those chosen.
If hunger was a formative experience for Fritz, so was the bitterness felt by many patriotic Germans at their humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles, leaving them without any hope in their future. Professor Schumacher expressed the opinions of many when he wrote in his memoirs:
That Germany was robbed of her ability to negotiate politically by having to hand over her warships, by being forbidden an airforce, by having to pull down her defences and by the utmost reduction of her strength at sea was understandable. But that Germany was weakened as no other country before by having important lands in the east and west of the country taken away, as well as all colonies, that the remaining territory was torn apart by the Polish Corridor, that the most important part of her merchant navy was taken, that her foreign investments were liquidated and initial refusal given to most economic plans, as well as being burdened with war indemnity under the name of 'reparations' that would have exceeded even her unweakened economy, was hard to understand. All reconstruction that a modern four-year war demands was made impossible. Constant new unrest was unavoidable.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Alias Papa by Barbara Wood. Copyright © 2011 Barbara Wood. Excerpted by permission of Green Books Ltd.
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