Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 19

Amalie Perls delivered her three children at yearly intervals. Since her first daughter Elisabeth, visually handicapped from birth, was born in Berlin in 1891, we can assume that the parents arrived in the capital from Prussian occupied Poland a relatively short time before. Nathan Perls had probably been influenced by the Enlightenment while he was still in the East and had culturally assimilated himself. He belonged to the second generation of the emancipation era. By contrast, Perls’s mother Amalie was religious, celebrated the Jewish holidays, observed the laws and kept a kosher kitchen. Since her husband ate food that was forbidden to Jews, the couple ate separately, which only increased the distance between them and aggravated marital tensions (see Gaines 1979, 2). Living conditions were poor in the Scheunenviertel, with its small cramped streets. Hygienic conditions in particular were dubious. Berlin suffered from a housing shortage anyway, and had a notorious reputation for the deplorable living conditions in its tenements.

In 1896, that is, three years after the birth of his son Friedrich Salomon, Nathan Perls was able to move his family to a better neighborhood, »a more fashionable part« (Perls 1977, 61) of Berlin, in the center of town to the West. The typical neighborhoods for rising Jewish families were Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg. Nathan moved his family to the vicinity of Kurfürstendamm, where Charlottenburg borders on Wilmersdorf. Number 53 Ansbacher Strasse, ²⁰ where the Perls family lived for roughly twelve years, belonged to the so-called Bavarian Quarter. It was a middle-class neighborhood with a correspondingly large number of Jews, such as Albert Einstein, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Otto Fenichel, to name only four examples from the post-World War I years. The members of the Perls family lived in and around the Bavarian Quarter between the years of 1897 and 1942, the year when the 58^th »Elderly Transport« took Amalie Perls and her oldest daughter to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in other words, »back« to the East of the German Empire. Their addresses belonged to Charlottenburg or Wilmersdorf respectively, and the apartments of the family members were all relatively close to one another. Distant relatives also lived on Ansbacher Strasse, such as the upper class Straubs from the mother’s side of the family.

Due to the housing shortage, one of the characteristics of Berlin’s urban architecture was that every square meter of building land was utilized by speculators. So-called »canyons« had formed out of rear building courtyards where the apartments never received any light and large families often lived – better said, vegetated – in a single, dank room. The expression, »You can kill a person just as easily with an apartment as you can with an axe« stems from this period, when Berlin was called the world’s largest tenement city (Ribbe et al. ibid., 109).

The Perls family’s first apartment was situated in such a rear building and had four rooms (see F. Perls 1977, 281). Later, they apparently moved to the front building and had a »servant girl« (see ibid. 249). Four rooms for a start probably means that there were more later on, and I would like to remind the reader that Lore Perls came from an affluent, upper-class assimilated Jewish family that lived in a house of its own and employed several servants. To me, Fritz Perls’s self-categorization as »lower middle-class« appears to be an understatement. Viewed against the backdrop of society overall and the social condition of the working class in particular, his circumstances amounted to a solid, middle-class starting position.

Nathan Perls appears to have owed his rise to cooperation with the House of Rothschild. Baron Edmond de Rothschild was a member of the Frankfurt branch of the Rothschild family. He headed the Rothschild bank in Paris and had at his disposal an enormous fortune that he used to support Jewish settlements in Palestine, among other projects. Rothschild’s endeavors were by no means intended to create a Jewish national state on Palestinian soil. The idea of nationhood arose in conjunction with the Zionist movement. Given the environment between 1870 and 1890 when nationalism was flaring all across Europe, Zionists began to relinquish the idea of assimilation and elevated the Jewish question to the national level with the goal of founding a »Jewish State.«

In the year 1897, the First International Zionist Congress convened in Basel. German-born Moses Hess and Theodor Herzl, who came from Budapest, were the pioneers of this concept. Herzl’s abandonment of the assimilation idea was triggered by the anti-Semitic atmosphere surrounding the Dreyfus trial in 1896 in France, where Herzl had been posted as the correspondent of a Viennese newspaper. Looking back in 1899, he wrote the following for »Die Welt,« a Zionist weekly published in Germany:

There is more to the Dreyfus case than a mere judicial error; it involves the desire of the vast majority of Frenchmen to condemn a Jew, and in so doing to condemn all Jews. Death to the Jews! the rabble cried out, as the insignia of rank were ripped from the Captain’s uniform. (…) Where? In France. In the republican, modern, civilized nation of France, one hundred years after the declaration of human rights. (in Battenberg 1990b, 216)

Thus, differing motives and strategies came into play with respect to the settlement of Palestine. Rothschild provided financial support for hard-pressed settlement projects and assumed a protectorate, not in the sense of heading a political project, but for the purpose of reorganizing practical tasks. He had new farming methods introduced, drained swampland, and organized the construction of wine cellars and the sale of the products. The colonialists increasingly lost their autonomy and became »employees of a huge charity concern« (Battenberg ibid., 213). Nathan Perls appears to have been an independent agent for Palestinian wines from the Rothschild colonies. Records²¹ from the Colonie Richon-Le-Zion in Jaffa show a German agency named »Gsll. Palästina,« that is, »Import Gesellschaft Palästina G.m.b.H.« (Palestine Import Company, Inc.) in 1902/1903, which was located on »St. Wolfgang Str. in Berlin C.« (in the center of Berlin). This information is also printed on the wine labels.²² »St. Wolfgangstrasse,« as it is called on old maps of the city, was right in the center of town in the vicinity of Charlottenburg Palace.