Pete Philipps —
That Sunday, for reasons he left unexplained, my father insisted on taking the streetcar to Villa Brandt instead of walking there, as we had always done in the past. That gave us well over half an hour to wait for the concert, the first one of the season, to begin. As we let ourselves into the garden, Doctor and Mrs. Brandt and their children were just gathering around the fountain for a formal photograph. Against a background of flowering apple trees, it made for a memorable tableau; a passerby could be forgiven for thinking that all was right with the world. But it would have taken a blind fool to cling to that perception.
Invitations to the concerts were highly prized, in no small measure because of the caliber of the playing, and tended to attract the elite of Berlin, including government officials, leaders of industry, academicians, and members of the arts community. The musicians were all talented amateurs (though occasionally one or another member of the Berlin Philharmonic took part) and represented a variety of professions. Dr. Brandt, the host and organizer of the concerts, was both a distinguished surgeon and a gifted pianist. He and my father, who alternated between the violin and viola, had been playing duets since they met as medical students in Heidelberg.
The other boys poked fun at me for going to the concerts instead of playing soccer with them, but I did not let their taunts get under my skin. They didn’t know—and I chose not to enlighten them for fear of further inflaming their ridicule—that it wasn’t the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven that exerted a pull on me, but Anneliese Brandt, the girl I had made up my mind one day to marry.
She and I were the same age and, though no longer children, neither were we fully grown up. How else to explain that I was basking in the fantasy of a love-struck adolescent? Never mind that I came from a family of assimilated Jews, whereas Anneliese’s parents were devout Lutherans. As though that had not been a big enough obstacle, life for the Jews of Germany was becoming more difficult by the day.
But on this sun-dappled April afternoon, when the weather was so unexpectedly warm that men in the audience took off their jackets before the concerts even began, that one could easily delude oneself into thinking that what was happening all around us was happening a world away.
Maybe it was the weather that emboldened me to sit on the grass next to Anneliese, albeit not so close that it would attract the attention of our ever-vigilant parents. Even so, Hanna and Helga, her younger twin sisters, watched us with mischievous amusement and nudged each other every time I whispered something in Anneliese’s ear. Once or twice, I caught Anneliese sticking her tongue out at them.
The concert opened with a sprightly Haydn quartet, with my father taking the first violin part. It did my heart good to see him lean into the music with his usual gusto. For the first time in weeks, he seemed less tense. By the final movement he looked as if he had been transported to another world.
During intermission, while two uniformed maids came around with trays of dainty sandwiches and crystal goblets of sparkling punch, Anneliese and I stole off to her beloved swing in a far corner of the garden. Sometimes I can still hear her squeals when I pushed the swing as high as it would go, sending her slender legs straight into the cloudless sky.
The second half of the concert was devoted to Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, one of the most effervescent pieces of chamber music ever written. But I soon realized—as others did too—that something was wrong. Painfully so. I even heard one or two people in the audience gasp. What made it even more disconcerting was that it was my father’s fault. He seemed unfocused, occasionally played the wrong notes, and made little or no eye contact with his fellow musicians. In contrast with the almost blissful expression he had worn just a short time earlier, he looked ashen and preoccupied. “Your poor father looks utterly exhausted,” Anneliese whispered midway into the second movement.
“It’s probably just the heat,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
I can only imagine how disheartened my father must have felt on hearing the tepid applause at the end. “Are you not feeling well? I asked him as he returned the violin to its case without giving it its customary dusting. He did not reply. Meanwhile the other musicians and guests were drifting into the library for drinks. I suggested calling a taxi, but my father shook his head and said he wanted to walk. As soon as we had passed through the gate he slumped against a lamppost. “We Jews are finished,” he said, not to me so much as to the empty street. I waited for him to continue, but he said nothing further. A few blocks from home he again stopped in his tracks. “We will never set foot in Villa Brandt again,” he said, barely audibly.
“Why, Papa?” I asked, shaking all over.
“Because the Brandts are Nazis!” he said. He then set off at such a fast clip that I had trouble keeping up. Not until we got home and he burst into the kitchen as if his coat were on fire did I learn the reason for his changed manner. During the intermission, he told my mother in a choking voice, he had gone into the library to look at some of Dr. Brandt’s antiquarian books when he came upon a large, framed photograph of Hitler. “When a distinguished surgeon, an intelligent and cultured man like Walter Brandt, becomes an admirer of that guttersnipe, it’s all over for us,” he said, as pale as the freshly ironed handkerchief he used to dry his eyes.
My mother tore off her apron. “Unbelievable,” she said over and over.
“I can’t get over it,” my father said. “I am in complete shock.”
“Did you say anything to Walter?”
“What was there to say? I couldn’t wait to get out of there.” He paused. Then, “Anyone who still thinks this will somehow blow over is living in a dream.” My mother started to cry, and he guided her gently to the sofa in the living room. When she had calmed down, he said, “The thought of ever again playing Mozart with that man—in that house—makes me sick to my stomach.”
It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that that was the day my parents decided to emigrate. All I could think of was at the time was that I might never see Anneliese again. I was heartbroken and simply refused to believe that she was one of them.
One night a few weeks later my father came home and announced that one of his patients, a former piano teacher named Frau Wanzel, had offered to make her home available for chamber music recitals. Though spacious, her house was nothing like Villa Brandt, he said with a pleased grin, “but it will do quite nicely.” Before sitting down to dinner, he rounded up his musician colleagues by telephone. Less than an hour later he had made all the necessary arrangements for a concert at Frau Wanzel’s the following week. “Mozart über alles,” he said and downed a glass of schnaps.
It took me a day or two to summon the nerve to ask if I could invite Anneliese to the first concert in the new venue. “Out of the question!” my father barked, for no reason I could think of. But I kept begging until he finally gave in after my mother said, “They are children. What harm can come from it?” However, Anneliese’s parents had a different mindset. By her own telling, they forbade her to ever have anything to do with me.
From that point on everything grew darker, as one calamity followed another. The initial concert had to be cancelled because the cellist fell prey to a group of Nazi thugs a couple of blocks from Frau Wanzel’s home. Left bleeding on the sidewalk, his instrument trampled to pieces, he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. “Those mindless barbarians are now in full control,” my father lamented when he heard the news. It was one of the few times I saw him cry.
Early one morning not long afterwards Mrs. Wanzel appeared at our door looking as though she hadn’t slept in days. Her brother, she informed my parents in a shaky voice, had been arrested as a suspected Communist. She was afraid, she added, that the Gestapo had her building under surveillance. “I have nothing against you or your Jewish friends,” she said, “but a large gathering in my home is certain to arouse suspicion.” With a mixture of sadness and resignation, my parents assured Mrs. Wanzel that they fully understood her decision.
“Even decent Germans are cringing with fear,” my father said after seeing her to the door. My mother clasped her hands as though in prayer, looked fixedly at the ceiling and said, “God only knows how we would behave if we were in her shoes.”
The passage of years has not dulled my memory of Anneliese—nor of the events that lead to my family’s arrival in America. I never made the effort to find out whether she and her family survived the war: it just seemed too painful to imagine Anneliese as an old woman, her dimpled face a wrinkled map, her dense flaxen hair turned white. Still there are moments when I think how everything might have turned out differently.