Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (14 page)

Meanwhile, Carl had a sense that matters were getting much worse, but he kept his worries to himself. Some of his friends were feeling the pressure. Among them was René Kuczynski—a demographer and avid pacifist—whose name appeared on the SA’s list, which led the troopers to Kuczynski’s house. In the end they withdrew because the police and the storm troopers got embroiled in a dispute over who had claims to seized properties and detainees. But Kuczynski was rightly petrified. In early March, Carl clandestinely arranged for him to hide in his clinic (located in an asylum for the insane where, presumably, no one worth worrying about would live) and set about making arrangements for his friend to escape, eventually to England, where he would teach demographics at the London School of Economics.
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It took five decades for OA to learn of his father’s private heroism. Only then did he learn from Kuczynski’s son, Jürgen, of Carl’s sanctuary. Jürgen produced the original full-sized Gertrude Simon portrait, which the family had been safeguarding, as a gesture of gratitude; for half a century, the photograph of Carl had hung on the wall as a tribute to the family’s secret savior.
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Carl was concealing another secret: he knew he was about to die of cancer. In January, he grew visibly unwell. The children were told he had ulcers. Then one day he returned home from the clinic with X-rays of his stomach and clinically pointed out the growths to his confused, and then upset, children. Some time around March 20, shortly after Kuczynski’s hiding, an operation removed the cancerous tissue; but it was too late, the disease had metastasized. Carl lived only another ten days. The children were not encouraged to see him—the decay was so swift and awful that Hedwig did not want them to remember their father in this condition. Instead, she paced the Hohenzollernstrasse apartment repeating to herself, “I must remember him, I must remember him.”
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His friends and associates, mostly doctors, ministered to him and were at his bedside
constantly. Carl was pronounced dead in a hospital in Charlottenburg on March 31, 1933. The next day, the first wave of government-sanctioned violence swept Berlin, with assaults and boycotts on Jewish shops and businesses.

The funeral brought out a crowd of doctors, friends, and family. There were memorial speeches. Ulrich Friedemann, Carl’s closest friend, gave the longest of the tributes. Thirteen-year-old Eva was inconsolable as the wreath was laid before his coffin. Carl’s body was laid to rest at the Heerstrasse Cemetery, a handsome interconfessional burial site, which the Nazis, knowing Jews were buried there, later slated to raze for the Berlin Olympics of 1936. After the funeral, the family retreated to the apartment on Hohenzollernstrasse with the closest relatives and friends. There, Hedwig’s grief burst in great fits of sobbing. Friends and family tried to comfort her. By contrast, Otto Albert was a model of unfeigned stoicism. The three children retreated down the hallway to the back of the apartment to one of their bedrooms; there they cried together and shared a few words. As evening approached, OA emerged from the bedroom to inform the guests and his mother that he would be leaving very soon for Paris. With all the grief in the room, it was hard to hear this quiet but decisive message. Most, including his sisters, figured it was a going to be a short vacation. On April 2, he was gone—five days before his eighteenth birthday. These were his final hours in Berlin; he would not return until 1979.
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Otto Albert had clearly been weighing his options. In the days before his father’s death, news of Peter Franck’s arrest had driven him into hiding; by then, people were learning that address books were inventories of suspects. There was talk that the government would throw Jewish students out of the country’s universities; that became law on April 1. There were also rumors that Jews would be banned from the legal profession; that decree came a week later. Faculties of law were thus gutted of their Jewish students. Antifascist activity had come to a halt “by fiat,” Hirschman noted, shaking his head as he recalled his final days in Berlin, and the Nazis had won. It was clear that fighting within the system (what Hirschman would later call the practice of “voice”)—at least for the time
being—was not just futile, it was suicidal. It was time to open new vistas (what he would later call “exit”).
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“Those of us who left at the time,” Hirschman told an American documentary filmmaker years later, “left with the hope that this would be a regime that would somehow break its neck very soon, and that somehow there would be some … action on the part of some section of German society that would prevent this regime from taking root.”
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It is possible that this decision to flee was a way of deflecting other sources of pain. It is hard to say for sure since Hirschman was tight-lipped about his final months in Berlin, preferring to layer his traumatic experiences with a heavy armor of silence. We get a rare glimpse into his grief, and his efforts to make something of it, from a letter to his mother written in Paris a year after his father’s funeral. “The calendar tells me that a year has passed, otherwise I wouldn’t know if it has been a month or three years. I have experienced so much joy and so many new things. On the other hand, everything that we experienced and suffered stands so near, insistent, and physical before my eyes.” The rush to embrace the new somewhere else did not succeed in obliterating the grief of the past. While the young émigré uprooted himself in part to allow the challenge of the present to crowd out old sorrows, they did not disappear. “It was the first great pain in my life. I did not have time to think out this pain because after three days the reality of the Paris trip demanded my thoughts. And so it happens that the pain always emerged in the quiet hours.”
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For the rest of his life, the quiet hours of Easter would summon memories of the loss of his father, the first of a series of losses that would sear his memory of the 1930s.

Distance and recollection did afford Otto Albert an opportunity to find in a father’s life some significance for a son who was embarking on his own. On September 8, 1933, the day before what would have been his father’s fifty-fourth birthday, the eighteen-year-old fatherless son sat down to muster some rare words of sorrow in a letter to his mother. Characteristically, he also felt compelled to cheer his mother up and thus remind her of the good times. “When I try today to imagine Daddy in spirit I always automatically see him working at his desk in a scientific discussion
with a colleague or in the white operating apron at the clinic. In this way, I respected, admired, and loved him best.” But it was not the professional achievement that motivated this admiration: “The truly great thing about his demeanor, which was so unique and worthwhile, was that he put himself
behind
his work.” In keeping with the Bildung principles with which Carl and his class had legitimated the republican system and instilled in their sons’ education, the teenage Hirschmann embraced the effort to thwart the viral despair among progressive reformists. But the uplift was jumbled with other memories. That of the failed promotion still stung, bitterly: “When he applied for the direction of the hospital, he did this because he knew that he could fill this post better than any other. The direction was everything to him in his judgment and that of others.” OA scribbled in the margins of this letter, “Given that it must have already earlier strongly oppressed him that a person is not treated according to his achievements but instead according to his relationships, how the present system would have affected him!” It was his father’s pursuit of “this human ideal,” of not working for himself but living for his work, that most inspired the young son: “The work was its own purpose, this self-creation through work seems to be the one right, fruitful, sensible, and noble mindset, from which every human activity should emanate.” It was in this “resistance of the ‘ego’ that I preserve him in myself and in this way he lives on for me.” Here was a way—through work, self-improvement, resisting despair—to keep nostalgia and narcissistic regression at bay. In an age of abandonment, of failed gods and dashed hopes, the young OA did not so much feel violently separated from a loved one than bonded to his example. OA’s was not the vengeful father; Carl’s spirit was nothing like Hamlet’s phantom. But like Hamlet’s, Carl’s example was the invention of the living, and throughout OA’s life one can occasionally glimpse a son haunted by tragedy. In this epistle, however, we see a man looking forward, not backward, searching for solace, not sadness, as he stepped into the world beyond a traumatized Berlin.
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How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

  
FRANZ KAFKA

D
ays after Hitler became German chancellor, Hirschmann’s former French tutor wrote to him from Paris: “In case you desire to come to France, please do not hesitate to stay with us.” As his train pulled into Paris, it was to his demoiselle’s address that he headed, hoping to get his bearings. To his surprise, his hosts were not French-speakers at home.They, too, were émigrés—from Salonika, Ladino-speaking Jews and veterans of Balkan intolerance—one more family in a city that was becoming the world’s refuge from European tyrants. Hirschmann’s shelter among Ladinos was the first step into the world of stateless people.
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As with many émigrés, Hirschmann was not without contacts that might open doors. Henri Jourdan, the director of Berlin’s Maison Académique Française, with intellectual aspirations of his own in France, had met Otto Albert through the Collège Français. Jourdan recommended him to old friends, Pascal and Monique Dupuy. The Dupuys were of high Third Republic stock. Protestants, Monique’s father had been a senator and former governor of Morocco and occupied other high offices in the republic, while Pascal’s father, a magnate in the coal industry, was a director of the intellectually aristocratic École normale superieur. When Hirschmann arrived in Paris, he dropped the Dupuys a line; they invited the young German to their apartment on the opulent rue de Medici, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. Otto Albert must have made a good impression because the Dupuys offered him a job as a German tutor to their two sons, Michel (eleven) and Jacques (thirteen). For the rest of that spring, he worked on the boys’ German and bided his time, considering his options and hoping the Nazi storm would pass. He must have grown on the parents because they invited him to join the family for the summer at their house in Normandy at St. Aubin-sur-Mer. With nowhere better to go, Hirschmann happily accepted. The summer at the beach must have reminded him of his younger days. He became friends with neighbors, especially the Cabouat family from Nîmes, also Protestants, whose house bordered on the Dupuys. Their teenage son, Jean-Pierre, joined the circle. Between German tutorials, playing tennis, swimming in the ocean, and walking the Normandy beaches, the dangers of Berlin were far away.
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Otto Albert and Ursula in Normandy, early summer, 1933.

But not out of mind. In mid-July, a telegram caught up with Otto Albert—from Berlin. His sister had also fled and followed his tracks to Paris. Otto Albert explained the situation to the Dupuys, who extended their invitation to Ursula as well. While she had fled with her boyfriend, Ernst Jablonksi, she agreed to leave him in Paris for a few days while she
went to visit her brother. Otto Albert was anxious for some news from Berlin. Was the storm finally passing? Should he return? Ursula’s news was bad. Since Peter Franck’s arrest, there had been more detentions. More friends had either gone underground, fled, or were in detention. Indeed, the police appeared at Hohenzollernstrasse demanding that Hedwig reveal the whereabouts of Otto Albert and Ursula. Mutti urged them both to stay away from Berlin until further notice.
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For the next three days, Otto Albert and Ursula talked and talked, replaying the recent past and considering future options. A photograph of the brother and sister reunited in Normandy is a reminder of just how young the fugitives were.

Hirschmann’s future was decided not just by the repression meted out to Hitler’s leftist opposition. Hirschmann found himself a Jew by decree. He could not go back to the University of Berlin even if he wanted to. Six decades later, he quipped to Sabine Offe in the midst of an academic brouhaha over identity politics, “Well, when I was young, we did not have problems with our identity, we had problems with identity-papers!” At summer’s end, he decided to return to Paris and moved into a flat with Ursula and Ernst in the fifteenth arrondissement, where many from the first wave of German refugees were starting to congregate. There were always new guests arriving in this “collective apartment,” mainly Germans bearing the latest news from the political front. There were also unwelcome guests: swarms of cockroaches and bed bugs. The plague was so bad that Otto Albert contrived a system to place the legs of the beds into cups of kerosene; this flammable solution appears to have kept the armies of insects at bay. Like so many of the expatriates, Ernst, a Communist militant, spent his days anxiously waiting for the news of an uprising, ready to return to join the valiant struggle. But even Ursula could see the limits of her companion’s Communist dogma and vain hopes; after a while the brew of love and historical materialism soon lost its appeal and the couple broke up. Otto Albert, who found Ernst’s party line a deterrent to conversation, was pleased to see him go. This left Otto Albert and Ursula together in the squalid flat, where they became especially close. Having bonded as activists and shared the discouragement of their parents, they still had their differences: Ursula had joined the Communist Party,
whereas Otto Albert never regarded it more than a necessary, if distasteful, ally in the common front against fascism. But party affiliation did not get in the way of what blossomed into “a beautiful friendship.” “We lived,” Hirschman was to recall, “without having secrets from each other, in any case very few. We talked about everything that concerned us, my relationships with other women and her preferences for other men.”
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