Читать книгу The girl that could not be named Esther - Winfried Seibert - Страница 8

The Prussian Supreme Court (Kammergericht) had issued its judgment on the given name Esther on October 28, 1938. It had rejected it as typically Jewish and had forbidden the parents to name their daughter Esther. At first — it was summer, 1989 — I had before me only the decision of the Supreme Court as published in the Juristische Wochenschrift (JW) – (Legal Weekly). This gave me the impetus to look more closely into this decision. Being myself the father of a daughter named Esther, born in 1983, I liked the name very much, and the expressly malevolent dealing with the name and the Biblical story of Esther affected me greatly. I wanted to know more, more about those involved, the judges and the little girl named Esther.

The records of the Berlin proceedings were no longer to be found. According to information from the Court, they had been burned in 1945, and anything that was left had been taken by the American soldiers. I had nothing more to go on than the published decision. The initial data for such a search were quite meager.

Section 1b of the Senate of the Supreme Court had made the decision. The only thing I knew was that this Senate was not responsible for Greater Berlin. The actual content which might have helped me further was sparse. It concerned the birth on August 11, 1938 of a daughter to Pastor L., who had registered the birth at the Registry Office in G. The mayor of G. had participated in the proceedings. G. at that time must have been an independent city, not located in a county. So the first thing to do was to locate the city G.

By the middle of 1992, I had achieved my goal. At that time I summarized the search for our Esther in a written report. It went like this:

I assumed — I had no doubt about it — that G. was to be found in Brandenburg, a province in the central-eastern portion of Germany, adjoining Berlin. In the completely altered world since fall 1989, when the wall had come down, this was a particularly exciting task. Maybe that‘s why it was so easy to make a false assumption. Since September 1991, I had represented the newly founded state of Brandenburg in the soon-to-be reunited Germany for its Establishment under Article 36 of the Unification Treaty, and I was also advising the East German Radio Network for Brandenburg (ORB) in its initial phase. Everything seemed quite simple – in 1938 the independent city G. in Brandenburg could only have been the city of Gubin¹› Reference .

My query of October 16, 1991, to the registry office in Gubin at first went unanswered. I had unexpected difficulties in making a telephone call there because my office first had to find out that the listing was not under Gubin, but under the East German name of Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Gubin²› Reference. Finally I learned that the new Gubin lay left of the Goerlitz branch of the Neisse River — that is, in East Germany — while the old city, with the town hall and the courts, lay on the right bank of the Neisse and had thus become Polish. The archive in Zielona Gora, previously Gruenberg, responded with a cordial letter and the report of my being dead wrong. There were no registry documents and no church records for our Pastor L.

If you are stuck, you ask the press. Other than that, I hoped to find in old newspaper records at least a birth notice of a little girl born on August 11, 1938. Maybe even with the name Esther, since for a few days after the birth the ban on this name might not have been communicated to this family.

All this activity made a big commotion, both in Gubin and around Gubin. The newspaper Lausitzer Rundschau was extremely helpful; it even did research on its own — ultimately all in vain — at the church supervisory office regarding Pastor L. On March 19, 1992, it issued a call to its readers:

The RUNDSCHAU has received an unusual letter from an attorney‘s office in the previous West German Republic. He is seeking documents and information regarding a certain Pastor L. and his daughter born August 11, 1938, in Gubin...

The attorney’s office is interested as well in finding this daughter, who apparently was born on August 11, 1938, and whose parents wanted to name her Esther. In accordance with the demonic spirit of the Nazi era, this name was rejected with somewhat fearful reasoning.

That was worded verbatim from my letter of January 24, 1992. There was a reader response that led to a certain Pastor Friedrich Wilhelm Lucas, who had however been pastor in Gubin only up to 1929. I then learned from his housekeeper, then living in Remscheid, that from Gubin he had moved to Usedom (Baltic island). After the war, in 1946, he had buried Gerhart Hauptmann³› Reference on Hiddensee (another Baltic island).

These events were hazy in the memory of the readers of the Lausitzer Rundschau. It could hardly be otherwise after so long a time. After all, this Pastor Lucas had already been away from Gubin for 17 years at the time he presided at the burial of the great writer. This makes it all the more amazing that a few people even remembered the burial of a writer far from Gubin. A few even thought that Pastor Lucas had officiated at the burial of the Danish writer Martin Andersen Nexo, who had died in Dresden in 1954. This was all very exciting and very interesting, but it brought me no nearer to finding the Pastor L. I was looking for.

Old runs of Gubin newspapers were not to be found in Gubin. On the Polish side as well, the search was fruitless. In the Gubin of today, a barren field with a few stunted trees stands where the marketplace and town center used to be. Just beyond this there is a very lively black market, and only then does the town proper begin. I still had no answer from archives in Berlin (East or West) regarding any existing copies of Gubin newspapers. A birth announcement would have helped a lot. At least then the family name, of which only the initial letter “L” was known, would have been revealed.

On April 10, 1992, the Protestant Central Archive in Berlin wrote to me that, based on the pastoral almanac of the church province of Brandenburg of the year 1939, in 1938 no Pastor “L.” was active in Gubin. Thus in the entire Gubin area there was no Pastor L. to be found. How was that possible?

If G. was Gubin, then Pastor L. would not necessarily have to have been from Gubin, that is, he need not have been a pastor in Gubin. The registry office was then, as it is today, responsible for every child born in its district. The child had to be registered at the birthplace. G. was then the birthplace of Esther. That much was certain. The parents‘ place of residence, however, was still an open question. The family of the pastor could have been passing through, or perhaps they were visiting the wife‘s parents for the birth. Anything was possible. But then the birth would still have had to be registered in Gubin. If that were the case, then the search had to be broken off. Pastor L. could have come from any place in the German Reich. He was not to be found.

This is, if G. was Gubin. But was it really Gubin? How had I come to that conclusion? I had assumed that G. must lie in the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and I had liberally identified that jurisdiction with the state of Brandenburg. But was that correct? It was unbelievably wrong – but more of that later.

I then took a step back in my search. Perhaps there was a chance to fill in some of the unknown quantities in the equation. If the Supreme Court decision had been published in other professional journals, perhaps there was more to read there. The content in such publications is often given in an abridged form. It might be possible to find information in another journal that had fallen by the wayside when the item was published in the Legal Weekly. In the library of my state court, I found a reference to two other publications: StAZ 38.464 and JFG 18.261.

StAZ stands for Zeitschrift fuer Standesamtswesen — The Bulletin for Registry Office Activities — which still exists today under the title The Registry Office. The publisher sent me a copy of its publication of the Esther decision in which there was a reference not to G., but to a place called W. At first I thought this was a typo in the transcription of the decision — W. instead of G., an easy mistake to make — now I know better. Here too I should have read the text more carefully, for it said the following:

Pastor L. in W. reported to the registry office that he had given the name ‘Esther’ to his daughter born August 11, 1938.

Pastor L. thus lived in W., and the responsible registry office could still have been in G. The combination of the two place-name initials didn’t help much. There remained the search suggested by the third publication: JFG. Those initials stood for the Jahrbuch fuer Rechtsprechung in der freiwilligen Gerichtsbarkeit – Yearbook of Legal Decisions in Civil Status Matters That was the breakthrough.

From this yearbook I could identify the two lower level jurisdictions of the district and state courts of Essen, a large industrial city in the Ruhr Valley, completely on the other end of the country from Gubin. Gubin, Lusatia, Brandenburg without Greater Berlin – all these had been dead ends. Hard to understand, even if I learned a lot from these detours. So – Essen it was. The two cities with a „G“ in the area of Essen, Gladbeck and Gelsenkirchen, each had their own district court.

A quick look at the text of the law, which would have been a smart thing to do earlier, gave me the answer. According to section 50 of the Civil Status Law, the district courts with authority in matters of civil status are those courts that are based in the same place as a state court. The district court in Essen was then responsible for the entire state court area of Essen.

So now it came down merely to a choice between Gladbeck or Gelsenkirchen, two medium-sized industrial towns. At first it seemed more important to look for records in the Essen courts, and if not there, perhaps in the state archive in Dusseldorf. It turned out that the records of the district court in Essen had been destroyed in 1976. They had survived the war, but they had not been considered significant for modern history and had therefore not been archived. They certainly would have been worth keeping. We had lost a small historical possibility. Now the records were irrevocably gone.

It’s true that the lawsuit register at the district court in Essen provided an important clue, but the letter came a few days too late. Barely a week earlier I had solved the puzzle.

First I have to report on another false turn. Once the search had been narrowed to Gelsenkirchen and Gladbeck, I could concentrate on looking for Pastor L. in these two places. There could not have been many pastors whose names started with “L” in 1938 in Gladbeck or Gelsenkirchen. With the help of the Protestant Church Office in Cologne, I soon knew that at that time there were no pastors “L” in Gladbeck, but there were two such in Gelsenkirchen: Johannes Karl Leckebusch, born 1882, pastor in Gelsenkirchen-Buer starting November 1930, and Theobald Lehbrink, born 1898, pastor in Gelsenkirchen starting November 1933. Both were still of an age to be fathers in 1938.

To be sure, Pastor Leckebusch, 65 years old in 1938, seemed less likely than Pastor Lehbrink, who was 16 years younger. Besides, Lehbrink had additional interesting personal data. On January 31, 1939, he had retired from the active ministry. Why? He was barely 40 years old and had another good 25 years of service ahead of him. It could be that he had to quit the ministry because of his hard-headed confrontation over the name Esther, or it could have been that his church, to protect him, had cautiously relieved him of his duties because of the stand-to with the Nazi state. Besides that, he had published something in 1935 about God and authority, a very Protestant theme, which might have gotten him into trouble. After the war he wrote something about Arminius, the Teutonic opponent of the Romans. This too led me to believe that he was no run-of-the-mill pastor. He seemed likely to have been a pastor who took on the Third Reich in other articles as well – Theobald Lehbrink could be my man!

He had died in 1962 in Dassel, near Hanover. In 1941 he had remarried. Whether his first wife — Esther‘s mother, if he was the right one — had died early or if the marriage ended in divorce could not be determined from the short biographical data. If however he had divorced between 1938 and 1941, this could also explain his withdrawal from the ministry.

If he was Esther‘s father, and if Esther, under whatever name, was still alive, then there must be evidence in the estate papers. A call to the district court in Einbeck revealed that there were records of the estate, but they were in storage. By telling the person in charge that there were some copyright issues to clear up in connection with the pastor’s literary efforts, I was able to obtain — somewhat irregularly — a copy of the certificate of inheritance. Luckily, two days later I could discard it since other inquiries had shown that Pastor Lehbrink could not have been the mysterious Pastor L.

A telephone call to the church office in Dassel took me to a helpful woman who, as luck would have it, not only had known Pastor Lehbrink but had even been confirmed at the same time as his daughter. Even though this confirmand had been named Gisela, this did not mean anything since our Esther was originally not allowed to be called so. But the birthdate! After looking in the church records, the friendly woman said that Gisela had been born on May 18, 1939. Again nothing. With that birthdate, she could not have had an older sister born August 11, 1938.

Now what? There were two Pastors L. in Gelsenkirchen, and according to the list of Protestant pastors in Westphalia from the age of the Reformation down to 1945 only these two were of the right age, and neither one was the right one. The one to whom a lot of the evidence pointed was Lehbrink, but he wasn‘t the one. As it turned out, I almost had the fox guarding the henhouse. On May 8, 1992, the State Church Archive of the Protestant Church in Westphalia wrote me:

Unfortunately, on the basis of the available documents, we were unable to confirm your assumption of the possible paternity of the Pastor and Superintendent Theobald Lehbrink of a daughter named Esther, born August 11, 1938. Since Pastor Lehbrink numbered among the German Christians [Nazi-oriented breakaway church group], it is quite unlikely that he would have chosen such a name.

That was stated quite modestly. Lehbrink, as it later was shown, was an almost fanatical National Socialist with a rigid belief in the Fuehrer, or at least that was the way he expressed it in his Christmas 1935 tract on God and authority, as we shall later see. It is impossible that such a pastor, who stood so close to the Nazi-faithful German Christians, would have caused such a row over the name Esther in 1938. Why Lehbrink left his ministry in 1939 could not be explained. That wasn’t important now. What mattered was that Pastor L. was still unknown.

I didn’t know what to do next. Perhaps I had gotten carried away. Court decisions are not published with the purpose of identifying the parties to the dispute. But I only wanted to find the little girl Esther, born on August 11, 1938, in G., apparently Gelsenkirchen. I will never forget the decisive long-distance telephone call that ended my search.

On May 7, 1992, I reached a very friendly woman at the registry office in Gelsenkirchen, who was really surprised at what I had to ask her about. In 1938, I said, some 5,500 births were registered in Gelsenkirchen. That would come out to an average of about 15 children a day. Statistically, there must have been some seven little girls registered on August 11, 1938. Could there have been one or more whose family name began with “L“?

Luckily, the woman had become curious. It didn’t take more than two minutes for her to confirm that on August 11, 1938, the birth of a girl with the surname L. had been registered. That MUST have been Esther. But she couldn’t say – on account of the data protection law. I then explained why I was looking for this girl. Yes, she said, I was at the right place, and then she read next to the given name Elizabeth a subsequent registration of the name Esther in 1946. Unfortunately, she could not tell me the family name. She was really very sorry, but I had to understand.

We quickly established that the family name was neither Leckebusch nor Lehbrink. That used up the only two pastors L. in Gelsenkirchen. I was so to speak standing in front of the open birth registry book with the entry I was seeking, and I had forgotten my glasses. Esther was so close, but I couldn’t get any farther. I could only conclude that this Pastor L. had not been a pastor in Gelsenkirchen, and that the child had been born more or less by accident in Gelsenkirchen. We had had that problem in Gubin.

The woman understood my despair. When she heard my deep sigh and my utterance that a name starting with L must continue with a vowel and that there were only five of these, she suggested that I start at the end of the alphabet. In addition, she raved about the women’s hospital in Gelsenkirchen, which was always popular with mothers from Wattenscheid, a small town that is now part of the city of Bochum. – That was the answer!

Pastor L. came from Wattenscheid, and Esther had come into the world at the hospital in Gelsenkirchen. The presumed typo of “W” in place of “G” was not an error; both letters were correct. Suddenly, everything fell into place. After a lightning visit to the church office and a look at the centuries-long list of Westphalian pastors, it was clear that the name of Pastor L. was Friedrich Luncke.

He had been born on July 10, 1908, the son of a miner in Heeren. After a short interlude as an assistant pastor in Spenge, he was inducted as minister in Wattenscheid-Leithe on April 4, 1937, where he remained until July 31, 1973. He died on September 16, 1976. His first wife, the mother of the Esther I was seeking, had died in 1966.

A call back to the registry office in Gelsenkirchen erased all doubts. The name was correct. Now I had only to find out what had happened to the little girl who had received the name Esther after the war and where the 53-year-old woman was now to be found.

At this point I am going to break off my reciting of the report for my daughter. The end of the story belongs at the end.