Wesleyan University The Honors College Two Lives in Germany by Hans Rosenthal Translated from the German by Avery Trufelman Class of 2013 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors from the College of Letters and with Departmental Honors in German Studies Middletown, Connecticut April, 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS ! Acknowledgements II Note on the Translation III Dear Reader 1 One Summer Evening in Brussels 4 An Almost Happy Childhood 15 When the Synagogues Burned 23 My Apprenticeship at the Graveyard 38 In the Orphanage 50 The Trinity Garden Colony 60 Night Raids 73 Endless Terrors… 83 …And a Terrible End 93 The Radio Messenger on the East-West Divide 98 Nathan the Saved 106 Of Care Packages and Silk Stockings 116 The Smuggled Wedding Rings 128 Afterword: An Appeal for More Tolerance 138 Translator’s Epilogue 152 Interviews 167 Sources 168 Photography Sources 169 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! I! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ! ! !! Sincerest thanks to Professor Krishna Winston for all of her time, care, and nitpicky corrections. I have so enjoyed working with her and learning her art. Danke Bianca Schröder, Anja Hempel, Saskia Sell, and the DAAD internxchange program for leading me to this project. Thank you to Gert Rosenthal, Tamar Martin, Barry Tanenbaum, and David Maschke, for being receptive, informative, and utterly charming. It was an honor to speak with them. Thanks to the residents of 59a Home Avenue, Cressy, Caleb, Taylor, Erin, and my wonderful family for their suggestions, corrections, and support. Alles Liebe, Oma. ! II! NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION Most people who have lived in Germany in the seventies or eighties will smile at the mention of Hans Rosenthal’s name. A prolific game show host, Rosenthal dominated television and radio entertainment in postwar Berlin, and was much loved for his wit and warmth. Viewers and listeners felt they could relate to Rosenthal and welcomed him into their living rooms, but few knew his full life story until the 1980 publication of his autobiography, Zwei Leben in Deutschland—the English version of which you now hold in your hands. Rosenthal’s cheery façade masked a dark childhood, in which his parents both died of illness, his brother was murdered in a concentration camp, and he himself was forced into hiding for many months, until the nightmare of World War II ended. Unlike many comparable survival stories, Rosentha lremained in Berlin after the war. Within several decades, he had a successful career in the public eye and seemed to hold no grudges against his homeland. Although Rosenthal never experienced the trauma of a concentration camp or a battlefield firsthand, he was greatly affected by World War II.R osenthal’s unusual openness about his Jewish identity and German pride is something I hvae not encountered in other survivors of his generation. By contrast, my own grandmother refuses to talk about her childhood in Berlin and does not identify as Jewish. Rosenthal relates his story honestly and candidly through his book, which is an ! III! increasingly valuable historical document as firsthand witnesses of 1940s Germany die away, and tensions between German and Jewish historical narratives remains unresolved. Modern Germany is still haunted by the ghosts of the Holocaust, with plaques and memorials on every street corner. Many young Germans I have met feel unfairly judged for their nation’s past and many Jews, my family included, still have reservations about going to Germany, even on a vacation. Armies have come and gone, a wall has risen and fallen, and Germany’s story continues to unfold, but Germans, Jews, and German Jews, still find themselves wrestling with the past. Nonetheless, Hans Rosenthal, a Jew and a patriot, shared a homeland with living Nazis and countless implicated bystanders. The proximity of the past in Hans Rosenthal’s autobiography renders his attitude all the more surprising; instead of expressing resentment towards the German people, he sees his book as a tool to build understanding between his religion and his nationality. Throughout the narrative, Rosenthal emphasizes the influences of kind Germans in his life, including his wife, and in his “Afterword” he explains Jewish customs that may seem odd to outsiders. Rosenthal acknowledges the past, but also advocates taking optimistic steps towards reconciliation and tolerance. I first heard about Hans Rosenthal when I was in Berlin on a grant from DAAD and doing research for a presentation about radio in divided Berlin. One popular program I read about, The Islanders, showcased satirical songs and skits about life in West Berlin, a little “island” of democracy. Hans Rosenthal worked on The Islanders for a time and he was remembered fondly on a number of online ! IV! message boards. One such forum posted comments about his little-known autobiography, now out of print, but, as luck would have it, available in the library of the Free University in Berlin. Some Internet scouring and phone calls finally put me in touch with Gert Rosenthal, who sounded much like his father, but with the advantage of a complete education and advanced degrees. Hans Rosenthal had been forced to drop out of school as a teenager and admitted to having been a poor student after his father’s death. After returning to New York, I decided to see what I could discover about Hans Rosenthal’s cousin, Rudi Maschke, who, as Rosenthal mentions, came to the United States as a boy. An online search led me to an article written by one of Maschke’s former employees, Barry Tanenbaum. I called the publication’s office and found Mr. Tanenbaum, who told me about “Rudy” and his son, David Maschke, who was working as an architect in Georgia. I then called David Maschke. We talked about his father and the Rosenthals, but he also gave me his sister’s phone number, saying she knew more than he did. Tamar Martin, David Maschke’s sister, is a therapist in New York City, and one short train ride brought me to her downtown office. The four subjects I interviewed knew either Rudy Maschke or Hans Rosenthal very well, and helped me build a fuller understanding of the work I was translating. I have included much of their commentary in the epilogue. The German version of Zwei Leben in Deutschland was split into three parts: “First Life,” “Second Life,” and, in the middle, “Between Lives.” I have translated the entire first part and most of the middle part, with the exception of its final ! V! sections, in which Hans Rosenthal moves to an opening at Radio In the American Sector (RIAS) in late July 1948. There he started developing on-air quiz shows, some of them pitting a RIAS team against stations in other German-speaking cities. In 1954, Hans Rosenthal hosted his first radio show, Ask and Win, an appropriation of Twenty Questions, later reformatted for television in 1964 as Well Asked is Half Won. During the sixties and seventies, Rosenthal continued to create an extraordinary number of shows for radio and television, including Hit Parade of the 20’s, KO-OK, Guess it All with Rosenthal. He left his salaried position at RIAS in 1980, committing to television full-time and commencing what he called “the beginning of independence.” The narration of the successful and rather glamorous “second life” unfortunately bogs down in a lot of name-dropping and insider’s peeks behind the scenes of Rosenthal’s shows. Rosenthal helped form the German media landscape at the end of World War II and during the outbreak of the Cold War, but he provides no substantive commentary on life in the cultural battleground of Berlin. I could only conclude that Hans Rosenthal’s so-called “second life” would be of little interest to English-speaking readers unfamiliar with the celebrities Rosenthal mentions. Because I translated only half of the book, I have eliminated the separation into parts and presented Two Lives in Germany as a simple series of chapters. Without the definitive divides between “lives,” the reader can watch Rosenthal develop from a resourceful young boy to a successful grown man, and Rosenthal’s second life gradually comes into view when he starts to depend on radio broadcasts for connection to the outside world while hiding in a garden cottage. ! VI! Hans Rosenthal may have been a talented entertainer and an excellent organizer, but his ability as a storyteller left something to be desired. His style is unpretentious, his tone somewhat naïve, and his infrequent metaphors and poetic descriptions often clichéd. He originally told his story chronologically, starting with his birth, until his son suggested that he add a flashback in the opening scene. Throughout the translation, I have occasionally taken the liberty of invigorating Herr Rosenthal’s voice to the best of my ability, condensing excessively long passages and sharpening Rosenthal’s word choice while still channeling his emotion. (One such example occurs in “The Smuggled Wedding Rings” when Rosenthal describes the arduous trip to Traudl’s home in Spandau.) The rambling narration relies heavily on dashes and ellipses, but what seems like poor writing is simply a very faithful transcription. Rosenthal dictated the entire memoir and presumably gave the tapes to a secretary. He had never recounted his full life story before this undertaking, and style probably mattered little to him in his cathartic unloading. “He took his time and made himself comfortable,” his son remembers. “He stretched out in a deck chair on the terrace, an umbrella over him, 1 turned on the recorder, and started to talk.” Rosenthal’s casual prose thus reflects his informal speaking voice, which I have tried to convey by using contractions and colloquialisms. With Rosenthal’s voice in mind, I have also left a number of his mistakes and inconsistencies uncorrected, such as his misspelling of “Herschel Grynszpan,” the name of the Jewish refugee who assassinated the diplomat Ernst Von Rath in Paris in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 !Gert!Rosenthal,!personal!interview.!9!Aug,!2012! ! VII! 1938. Rosenthal’s most curious inconsistency is his use of the word “Jew,” to which he draws attention in the chapter, “When the Synagogues Burned”: “The word ‘Jew’ still seems like invective to me. I prefer to speak of a ‘Jewish person,’ or a ‘Jewish thing.’” This explanation comes as a bit of a surprise, since Rosenthal has identified himself as “a Jew” until this point in the narrative. After his explanation, Rosenthal calls members of his faith “Jewish people” for a short while, but soon drops the adjectival form and, in the very last sentence of the chapter, refers to his community as “us Jews.” I cannot imagine why Rosenthal feels compelled to advocate for a nomenclature that he himself does not use consistently. Perhaps he was betrayed by his own loose and unedited dictation. As with any translation project, working within the limitations and dynamic ranges of each language provides interesting challenges. One example can be found in the final two sentences of Rosenthal’s afterword, which uses the German word “Glück” in ways that leave much room for interpretation: “Truly I have always moved fast in my life. Not to chase Glück, but to escape from danger. And in so doing, I’ve found Glück.” Rosenthal intends these last words to be powerful and conclusive, but the translator into English is faced with ambiguity. Glück can be rendered as “happiness,” “luck,” “bliss” or “fortune.” Rosenthal might have been chasing fortune and have found happiness, or chasing luck and found fortune, or he could have found the very thing he was seeking, whatever it may be. In these final lines, Rosenthal intends to return to an early reference to the fable Hans im Glück, or “Hans in Luck.” Although Rosenthal acknowledges his ! VIII! extraordinary luck in having dodged death a number of times, I imagine he would be reluctant to attribute his success to anything other than his own resolve. As an entertainer, he was very hard-working and seemed to hold fast to the classically American value of self-determination, perhaps influenced by time spent in the West. I thus stayed away from using “luck” in these final lines, choosing instead to translate the first Glück as “fortune” and the second as “happiness,” since Hans Rosenthal emphasizes his good intentions throughout his book, subtly assuring the reader that he did not go into radio to seek fame or fortune, nor did he write his book for personal benefit. st Rosenthal’s positive outlook makes sense in the 21 century, but his philosophy may not have been completely appropriate in his time. One could argue that he was absolving Germany too easily by declaring himself an ambassador for the Jewish population and distributing implied pardons with each television appearance. Perhaps his non-confrontational public personality actually betrayed the interests of the embittered German Jewish community. Whether Rosenthal was a noble representative or a naïve entertainer, his media presence embodied a number of cultural and historical rifts. In ongoing discussions about Jewish and German Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past—Hans Rosenthal’s story struck me as an interesting voice to add to the conversation. Themes of forgiveness, identity, and guilt bubble beneath the surface of Rosenthal’s optimistic autobiography, but, coated in jokes and side stories, they are left up to the reader and translator to unearth. ! IX