Peter Selz (3 page)

 

He introduced me to art. . . . And when he saw my response he took me almost every week. But the masters who interested me the most when
I was a kid were the most expressionistic, the prototypes. Especially Rembrandt, El Greco, and [Matthias] Grünewald. . . . And before long I actually saw the contemporary Germans in what was a precursor to the big decadent art show
[Entartete Kunst]
that Hitler put on in 1937. I was gone by that time, but in 1935 there was a smaller version. So interestingly enough, at the main police station in Munich you saw Kandinskys, Klees, Kirchners, and Beckmanns. Which were already vilified at that point as degenerate. I remember seeing these very badly installed paintings, and I found them extremely interesting.
¹¹

In 1934, with encouragement and advice from his grandfather, Peter set out on his first vagabond experience, a bicycle expedition with a close friend, Herbert Kahn, through the Alps into Venice (see
Fig. 7
). He describes it as the greatest adventure of his early years:

 

When we were fifteen, I liberated myself and my friend. We went to Italy, and I have pictures. This whole album is from our Venetian trip. We went to Venice, to Verona. Saw the Fascist monuments. I knew where to go. And Vicenza, see? [looking at photos] Went to see the Giorgione [
Enthroned Madonna with St. Liberalis and St. Francis
, ca. 1500] in Castelfranco. We went by bicycle, all the way, over the Alps. We had no money. The Germans didn't allow us to carry money across the border.

[Reconsidering when asked how he survived]: Well, we had a little money. We slept on the ground or in haylofts in barns. But connections I did have. My grandfather sent me a postcard with the name of a big art dealer in Venice. His place was right near Ponte dell'Accademia. He helped us out. . . . He was an art and antique dealer.
¹²

These images of the golden days with his grandfather looking at art in the Alte Pinakothek and of his youthful journey with a friend to Venice are, in a sense, part of the Selz “creation myth,” at once validating of his subsequent life and career and beautifully anticipatory, so congruent with what was to come as to be almost irresistible. Older brother Edgar, interviewed when he was in his nineties, confirms the essence of the story: “Peter was a remarkable young boy, because he got so involved in art. He spent a lot of time in the museums and art galleries. He knew every painting. And our grandfather encouraged it. He
made
him.”
¹³
Peter
burned with desire—nothing else would do—to follow in his grandfather's footsteps and be surrounded by beautiful and thrilling objects, enjoying them and making a living by finding, buying, and selling them.

Julius Drey died in 1934, and Peter was affected deeply. “He was the person I was closest to in my family, and he died when I was fifteen. That was a great loss.”
¹⁴

•    •    •

During those formative years, Peter belonged to a German Jewish youth group known as
Werkleute
(Working People). Such youth groups were a solid part of German cultural life, dedicated generally to providing healthful activities, both physical and intellectual. In the 1920s and '30s, however, as German society became increasingly nationalistic, so did the youth groups, particularly those, such as Hitler Youth, associated with the
Sturmabteilung
(SA), or Brown Shirts. The Jewish version, as in other things always a separate but related phenomenon, grew to importance in mobilizing the young for immigration and the inculcation of Zionist objectives, and it became an important—even crucial—part of the Selz immigration story as well.
¹⁵
Not only was the youth group a context in which young German Jewish lives were molded and directed, but it is in contrast to this positive experience that the Nazi reality in Peter's past becomes more vivid: “The other important memory,” he recalls, “was what was going on in the countryside with that youth group. Every Sunday when I was a little older—maybe when my grandfather died, 1934 or '35—we would go out to the countryside and hike and play ball. And other youth groups would be there too, and we would see the Nazis, the kids in their brown shirts. . . . We were running around, and they were regimented. They would be marching, and we would be playing and running.”
¹⁶

Peter has described himself—and this was seconded by brother Edgar—as an indifferent student. He was simply more interested in art and a future career as a dealer, following in his grandfather's footsteps.
¹⁷
But Peter's dislike of school was hardly unique. According to his account, it was shared by many students: “Like all kids in Germany, we hated, hated school. School was horrible. We did learn something. We had to.
But we all hated school so much that kids who cheated best at tests were the heroes because they were doing something against the establishment. Against the system. But I did a lot of reading. As far as team sports, I was never very good. But I was a good runner, hiker, and swimmer. And I looked at the art books that my grandfather gave us.”
¹⁸
Judging from Peter's attitudes toward school and academic work, and the fact that for the last year he was in Germany he could not attend school at all, it seems reasonable to assume that his intellectual and physical development took place largely within the framework of the
Werkleute
and its activities. Beyond bicycle tours and hikes, the group engaged in conversation about important writers, left-wing political discussions, and Zionist planning for a future in Palestine. The group's objectives amounted to a survival strategy conceived and directed by a liberal network of elders, the ultimate objective being to escape Germany, find sanctuary elsewhere, and pursue the main goal of realizing the Zionist dream, while still maintaining German Jewish cultural ideals. Although Zionism was a minority position among German Jews, ultimately the
Werkleute
played an important role in maintaining Jewish identity for a soon-to-be scattered population.

The apparent intellectual and cultural level of these high school–age Jews was impressive. In this respect the youth groups seemed notably serious, focused, and directed. Peter describes the political focus as an important influence on his life and his way of looking at art. His social conscience and commitment form one thread of his career, culminating in
Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond
(2006). In the book's prologue he invoked his youthful encounters with what he referred to several times in the interviews as “fascist aesthetics”: “My interest in the critical relationship between art and politics stems in large part from my personal history. In the mid-1930s in Munich, where I grew up, I witnessed the gigantic spectacles that Hitler organized: huge floats with sculptures glorifying the Nibelungs and the gods of Valhalla and depicting German medieval knights as descendents of Greek athletes rolled down the flag-bedecked streets in unprecedented pageantry.”
¹⁹
He also describes his early questioning of authority, equating parents with the establishment:

 

We
resented pretty much what our parents did, and what the establishment did. This is very important because from the very beginning I was anti-establishment. And by the time I was seventeen I called myself a socialist. I had a pretty good idea [what that meant]—I was reading Marx when I was sixteen, and I used to quote his
Manifesto
. I was reading political literature and poetry. Rilke was important, and Hermann Hesse's novels. The writers who are still important today, they were important to me. It [liberal political thinking] all goes right back to that time. Absolutely. One particular artist I knew about, really knew and liked a lot, was Käthe Kollwitz. . . . Yes, our group thought of itself as political.
²⁰

Thus Selz puts additional components of his story into place: his political engagement and challenging of authority. By implication he ascribes these qualities to his youthful compatriots in the Jewish youth group that seems to have constituted, especially in Munich, the main source of his social conscience. He also characterizes the
Werkleute
spirit as fundamentally idealistic, even utopian.

Peter mentioned Goethe and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber as figuring importantly on the young people's reading list. At the suggestion that this was quite advanced for such a young group, Peter agreed. “I know. But we were fairly mature. Yes, we were intellectual. We read books by Buber and then tried to figure the ideas out in discussion sessions. Karl Marx, who we also read and discussed. Also the poet Stefan George—we have to create a better world. That was the idea.”
²¹

Like many others looking back at that time, Peter sees the German Jews' identification with broader German culture as the element that famously made it so difficult for many Jews to recognize the danger of their changing circumstances. However, when asked if he and his family and friends recognized the danger as an aberration in German society and political power that had to be escaped, he gave an enlightening response:

 

Yes and no. We knew it had to be escaped, but people did not think it was an aberration. There had been so much turmoil during the Weimar years, so many chancellors coming in and out. Hitler having so few votes the one year and a lot the next. He seemed so far out and so crazy
that they [the Jews] thought it would pass. They sent the kids away because we couldn't do anything. But, yes, they thought it would pass, and then it got worse and worse. Like, about the time I left there was another law passed that affected my father. He could only have Jewish patients; he couldn't have Aryans anymore. Most people thought that although things were terrible, they would change. But there was a feeling that the German people were turning their backs on the Jews.
²²

Many Jewish parents eventually came to the difficult realization that their Germany was about to turn on them. On 25 April 1933, a law against “overcrowding” of German schools, directed at limiting the number of Jewish students in high schools and universities, made it evident that there was no future for Peter and his young counterparts throughout Germany.
²³

Yet when asked about the Nazi displays of grandeur and strength, Peter described with excitement the spectacular “power” parades down Munich's Ludwigstrasse. Despite what they represented and the deep misgivings they must have inspired among more attentive Jews, Peter was drawn to them as spectacle—more of his “fascist aesthetics”: “I saw the Nazis marching down the streets in Munich, the center of the Nazi movement. I mean, Hitler's Brown House was not so far from where we lived. So we saw all of this, yes. The enormous great parades, which looked very gorgeous, actually, with all the flags and bunting. These great floats going down the main street.”
²⁴
Later he elaborated, “This whole aesthetic of fascism was extraordinarily impressive to me. Look at this, what's going on [he shows some photographs in an album]. I know I should have hated it because these were the Nazis and they were going to kill us—we didn't know that yet—but it was extremely impressive.”
²⁵

But did these theatrical displays of power make him, or other Jews, proud of being German? Selz responded in the negative—adamantly: “No, no, no. Not at all. Not at all! We were never nationalists. When my father was in the World War I medical corps, for some reason they gave him the Iron Cross. And when the war was over he put the medal on his dog's collar. That's what he—we—thought. We were left wing to some extent, never nationalists. So I never felt proud of anything like this.
[pause] But it really
was
impressive. Of course, at that time we had no real idea of what was to come.”
²⁶

According to Peter, neither his family and relatives nor the other adults he knew and observed—and certainly not his younger peers, despite their purported goal of leaving Germany—were aware of what lay ahead, the enormity of the Holocaust.
Kristallnacht
was still several years away. Nonetheless, the Selz family was presciently alarmed enough to get the boys—first Edgar and half-brother Paul, and later on Peter—out of Germany. There was no alternative.

“In '35 I was kicked out of school
[Realgymnasium]
because I was Jewish.”
²⁷
Without access to education, there was simply no viable future for young Jews or for the community itself. For Peter's parents, the critical objective became locating sponsors—relatives or friends—in England, the United States, Scandinavia, South America, China, Cuba, even Africa: any destination where they would be accepted. Palestine was for many the ideal refuge, the anticipated site of a long-desired Jewish state that through the symbolism of geography could reunite the Hebrew people with their historic past. But Edgar went to London; their half-brother, Paul Weil, already had a job in Paris. As for Peter, his journey would take him far from home—though not, as it turned out, in the direction he favored. “[My parents] didn't want me to go to Palestine. So they found these very distant relatives, the Liebmanns, in New York. In order to get an immigration visa you had to have relatives. I don't know exactly how my father found these people. I probably was told, but I don't remember.”
²⁸
As Peter recounts, “I did not want to come to America, because I belonged to this left-wing, socialist, labor, Zionist youth group.”
²⁹
But according to Edgar, Peter was tricked into going to America by their parents, who were of course aware of their son's political leanings: “Peter was an arch Zionist. Did he tell you this? He wanted to go to Israel [Palestine]. But my father discovered our relatives, the Liebmanns. And he wrote them a letter asking if they would accept, would take Peter to America. And he didn't tell that to Peter. And when the letter of invitation arrived, he told Peter, ‘Look what's coming out of the blue? You can't ignore that. . . . It's a letter from nowhere, inviting you to America. It's a sign from God. You have to accept it.'”
³⁰