Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker 1
And my name is Tim Bright. I'm a researcher at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and this is an interview with Anthony Greenwell being conducted, London West, Hampstead on the 21st of February 2025.
00:00:15 Speaker 1
So first of all, I would like to thank you, Tony for doing this with me in this series of interviews for the Leo Baeck Institute documenting researchers of German Jewry.
00:00:28 Speaker 1
And so the first section will be about . Childhood family. Uh. Could I start by asking where? Where were you born and when?
00:00:38 Speaker 2
I was born on the 6th of August 1944. I was actually born in Beaconsfield, which was just to the West of London, in Buckinghamshire. But my parents were then living in Finchley, Central in in north London.
00:00:56 Speaker 2
So North, NW London. And this was at a time when. The V ones and V twos were still landing on London, so I think my mother moved have decided to always advised to go out of London to give birth and but I have no other connection with Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire than that I was. My first place of residence was in Finchley cent. And but my parents only stayed there about a year because very soon after the end of the war, they my father bought a house in as part of London called Temple Fortune, which is north of gold, as green. It's actually between gold as green and Finchley and he. Decided to live there because he wanted to be near his sister. An elder sister, who who had recently been widowed and in fact. They stayed there for the rest of their lives.
00:02:00 Speaker 2
Where did your parents arrive for Britain?

My parents came from Vienna. My father came very soon after the Angelus. He was allowed out because he was on a business trip. And was selling goods from the family firm for British Pounds. And my mother was at first. Forbidden to leave and they wouldn't give her a passport, so she told me so. She told me when I was a boy that she got one illegally. If if my childhood memory is the correct. Anyway, she left a few months later. Obviously, after some difficulties, in July in 1938.
00:02:46 Speaker 1
Can you say maybe a little about your family background? You're already mentioned that that your family's aged from Vienna.

Yes, my family in Vienna, I think, were pretty typical. Prosperous, well educated, assimilated Jews. With. Rather little connection to form or Jewish religion. My mother's father, who has actually been born in Lemberg.
00:03:17
I live.
00:03:18 Speaker 2
Was a very successful lawyer.
00:03:21 Speaker 2
Ran a chance slide in the first district and was also a very accomplished Viola player butcher and I have a photograph, a family treasure of him playing chamber music with chamber music quartet. He played with, playing with Albert Einstein when? Einstein visited Vienna in 1931. They lived in the 9th, but Sook in a small Rd called the Modasa which is parallel to the Bab gas. There were Freud lived my. Fathers, parents, the family was originally from Budapest.
00:04:03 Speaker 2
And UM, my grandfather and my mother's family name was spelt, but my my father's family were Greenfield.
00:04:16 Speaker 2
And my grandfather, Bernhardt Quinn Ferrett, had married the daughter of the boss of a family called Adolf Lichtblau.
00:04:25 Speaker 2
And then took the the firm over very successfully. He became a commencement heart and so on it was called adult list now and made started off making meerschaum pipes. But then.
00:04:42 Speaker 2
Gravitating into all sorts of smokers, goods and.
00:04:47 Speaker 2
Fancy jewellery, small items of stationery for Vienna. It was quite a substantial.
00:04:54 Speaker 2
Undertaking, of course, aryanized in 1938, but returned to my father and his sister after the war.
00:05:04 Speaker 1
And can you tell me about your life at home and your own school education. Yes. Well.
00:05:10
It's done.
00:05:17 Speaker 2
I'm an only child, my parents.
00:05:22 Speaker 2
I think must have made a conscious decision to make a new start here. They changed their name. Admittedly, Grunfeld was a bit difficult for the.
00:05:31 Speaker 2
In for the English, my father kept the name for the firm, but it was Arthur Grunfeld. He was art or Grunfeld.
00:05:42 Speaker 2
They had a nanny for me because my mother went and tried to help out with the business as a.
00:05:49 Speaker 2
Sort of secretary.
00:05:50 Speaker 2
Uhm.
00:05:52 Speaker 2
My father started a similar business here. He'd been coming to England on business for years, ever since he was about 19 to sell goods, so he had business collections here.
00:06:05 Speaker 2
And that's how he got out.
00:06:07 Speaker 2
And how he got my my mother and other family members out he he had business contacts. Who would sponsor them guarantee for him.
00:06:16 Speaker 2
Umm.
00:06:18 Speaker 2
But they, yes, they they got a nanny who is an old fashioned.
00:06:24 Speaker 2
English nanny and I think I was very influenced by her.
00:06:32 Speaker 2
And.
00:06:33 Speaker 2
And I grew up thinking of myself really as an English born. I was Grenville.
00:06:39 Speaker 2
Well, I was telling you sometimes, of course, I was torn now and and I picked up German, though. I on the whole refused to speak German.
00:06:49 Speaker 2
Partly out of laziness and partly because you know, as a small boy you didn't want to speak. Be speaking German in the 50s. And anyway, when I was nearly eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school.
00:07:02 Speaker 2
And there I was. Well and truly integrated into the sort of British middle class of middle upper middle class system.
00:07:13 Speaker 2
And because I was good at passing examinations, I won a scholarship to a school called Harrow, which is one of them. After Eaton, probably the best known of the OR most prestigious in social terms of the British public schools.
00:07:32 Speaker 2
It was at Harrow that I actually started studying German, mainly because I wanted to avoid having to do Greek at Olafur and German was an alternative option, you know, to the great amazement of the.
00:07:49 Speaker 2
Teachers at at Harrow I said. Well, I could switch to German. What do you mean you could switch to German by how can you switch to German? I said by I speak it. What do you mean? You speak it? How can you speak German?
00:08:02 Speaker 2
But of course it was very easy for me because.
00:08:07 Speaker 2
I'd been brought up with it in my ear and we went to Austria every year on holiday, so I heard plenty of German.
00:08:16 Speaker 1
So that means your parents, they they spoke German.
00:08:21
But more than that.
00:08:22 Speaker 2
And they, as they find it difficult to remember because I understood both languages.
00:08:29 Speaker 2
They did speak.
00:08:30 Speaker 2
German to to a certain extent amongst themselves with of course they didn't, but they did with their friend.
00:08:38 Speaker 2
Refugee friends, of whom there were a great many NW W London was full of.
00:08:45 Speaker 2
German speaking, and especially Viennese refugees.
00:08:49 Speaker 2
And we had quite a number of family members here.
00:08:55 Speaker 2
But they they they spoke quite a lot of English as well to me.
00:09:00 Speaker 2
He.
00:09:01 Speaker 2
And I think I mostly replied in English. I don't think I spoke much German. The other thing they did was completely abandon any signs of Jewishness.
00:09:14 Speaker 2
I never saw my parents in a synagogue. We never had Friday evenings.
00:09:19 Speaker 2
I was unaware of what they were. We didn't celebrate even the.
00:09:24 Speaker 2
High holidays, Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah? Nothing. My parents didn't ask for an exemption for me, so I went to the Church of England. School services were to say those days were mandatory for all pupils at boarding schools, unless you.
00:09:45 Speaker 2
You had a an exempt.
00:09:48 Speaker 2
So I think they wanted to bring me up pretty bridge.
00:09:54 Speaker 1
He just touched already touched upon that question.
00:09:56 Speaker 1
But when was?
00:09:57 Speaker 1
The first visit.
00:09:59 Speaker 1
With parents in Austria after the war.
00:10:02 Speaker 2
And my father went back and in winter 1946.
00:10:10 Speaker 2
To sort of look after the firm which was being returned to him because one of the employees made that possible.
00:10:20 Speaker 2
But this was something of a disaster because he, he discovered Vienna, of course, was in a dreadful state. It was in in ruins.
00:10:29 Speaker 2
And he he met up with.
00:10:33 Speaker 2
His families, faithful domestic servant Mitsis Technik, and she told him what had happened to his parents. I hope she didn't know the whole truth because.
00:10:47 Speaker 2
I only found out much later and it was really awful. I mean, you know, even what he found out, they'd been deported to the ghetto and which this one stuck.
00:10:58 Speaker 2
And killed, of course. And he had a nervous breakdown. Apparently I was 2 at the time, so I didn't. Wasn't aware, aware of it, but.
00:11:11 Speaker 2
After that, they did go back. They went back to Austria in 1948.
00:11:20 Speaker 2
And when I see on the holiday.
00:11:24 Speaker 2
They went then they first time they took me was, I think 1951.
00:11:30 Speaker 2
And which would be around the time of my 7th birthday.
00:11:33 Speaker 2
Or 52 something like that. And we went to the Tirol Pittsburgh and Zufelt. And after that we went to Puerto Chamber to say.
00:11:45 Speaker 2
It's the sort of places that.
00:11:48 Speaker 2
They'd gone to in Austria in the days before the Angelos.
00:11:55 Speaker 2
And.
00:11:56 Speaker 2
Oh, and they went to Vienna. They the first time they took me, it was 1958.
00:12:02 Speaker 2
But they they went and and I never saw.
00:12:07 Speaker 2
Either of her, when my mother was a very strong character and resilient, but I didn't see my father have any trouble either.
00:12:15 Speaker 2
He seemed to have got over this.
00:12:19 Speaker 2
Or at least see what Austria didn't didn't trigger it again.
00:12:24 Speaker 1
And do you have the impression they?
00:12:25 Speaker 1
Missed their life in Austria.
00:12:29 Speaker 2
It's a hard question to answer. I suppose they did, and then they missed their parents. And you know the whole milieu.
00:12:38
But.
00:12:39 Speaker 2
They.
00:12:42 Speaker 2
They were a little wary of the Austrians. They didn't make any close friends with with.
00:12:50 Speaker 2
New friends with Austrian, Austrian Austrians.
00:12:57 Speaker 2
My father, much later in life, said Ohh he would have preferred to be in to live in Vienna and in in London, but I can't see him saying that in say in the 50s because I mean.
00:13:10 Speaker 2
Especially my mother, who'd stayed longer, had seen the brutality.
00:13:17 Speaker 2
And and and not only that, but the complicity.
00:13:23 Speaker 2
The of of so many of the the Viennese and the rapturous welcome afforded to Hitler when he came into to, to Vienna, my mother had seen her, her father, as I said, was an accomplished musician and his hands were ruined because he'd been forced to scrub the pavements.
00:13:43 Speaker 2
With the acid.
00:13:46 Speaker 2
Obviously there were things about Vienna that they missed which you couldn't get in London.
00:13:52 Speaker 2
But.
00:13:55 Speaker 2
I.
00:13:55 Speaker 2
I don't think they.
00:13:57 Speaker 2
Seriously, we'd ever have gone back. They could have done, of course. Certainly once I was grown up, but they they wouldn't have done so. But how did your parents talk about not only life in Austria, but especially about the period of the that right they didn't. They didn't, they didn't.
00:14:14 Speaker 2
When now my father never said a word to me.
00:14:19 Speaker 2
About his father or his parents, in 91 years, he never said a single word to me about any member of his family and life before 1945.
00:14:34 Speaker 2
He did talk a bit about life in Vienna as a boy. He was born in 1901.
00:14:40 Speaker 2
So he remembered the outbreak of the First World War, for example, and he had memories. And when I was a boy, he talked to me a bit about these, but they never went beyond the end of the First World War.
00:14:55 Speaker 2
My mother talked me a little more about.
00:14:58 Speaker 2
Especially her father, who she was very close to.
00:15:03 Speaker 2
And also my my mother's my my father's sister.
00:15:08 Speaker 2
Came here. My father, I think, got her out. She came on a domestic service permanent. And I laughed because she was. I can't imagine.
00:15:19 Speaker 2
Most except, and she was.
00:15:20 Speaker 2
Some sort of matriarchal figure who was much.
00:15:24 Speaker 2
Better at bossing other people.
00:15:25 Speaker 2
Own my mother had an elder brother, but he was arrested in, I think may 1938 and deported to Dachau, then to Buchenwald. But his wife managed to get an an exit permit for him and he went to the states.
00:15:44 Speaker 2
And and of course, because obviously I met him when I was a child, he came over.
00:15:51 Speaker 2
As you've told me about this, but they they they life life in Vienna, these anecdotes that I told you already, almost all of what my mother told me.
00:16:03 Speaker 1
But your mother, she spoke more about the past.
00:16:06 Speaker 2
Well, she's when I when I was about 12, I would have thought.
00:16:10 Speaker 2
She told me these basic things.
00:16:13 Speaker 2
But Ohh the most important thing I haven't told you when I was about 19, I was at Oxford. My mother took me aside once when I was at home.
00:16:24 Speaker 2
And said I'm going to show you something.
00:16:27 Speaker 2
And and she.
00:16:29 Speaker 2
Brought out of a drawer where she hid, hid them what passed for the death certificates for my grandparents. Or four of them.
00:16:37 Speaker 2
You know which I didn't, but I wasn't stupid. I knew I had my parents from from Vienna. I had no grandparents living and it wasn't difficult to work out the reason why. But Even so, seeing death certificates from Auschwitz and the ghetto, this much duck.
00:16:58 Speaker 2
And again terracing there is quite a shock.
00:17:03 Speaker 2
And and my mother said to me, I keep these hidden from your father. You must never speak to him about them. He was never tell him that they exist because she was afraid that it would upset him too much.
00:17:20 Speaker 2
So because of that.
00:17:22 Speaker 2
I never asked them about anything.
00:17:24 Speaker 2
Which I regret now.
00:17:27 Speaker 2
But you know, how can you, when it's perfectly obvious that it's a sort of, it's a taboo.
00:17:38 Speaker 1
This leads to maybe to another question. Did you feel your parents were different from your friends? Parents in Britain, did you?
00:17:47 Speaker 2
Most, most most.
00:17:48 Speaker 1
Well, I mean obviously they.
00:17:50 Speaker 2
They they the end of it.
00:17:52 Speaker 2
They move very much in London. They move very much in refugee circles. There was so many. Umm.
00:18:02 Speaker 2
As to.
00:18:04 Speaker 2
My friends, of course, I was at boarding school, so for eight or nine months of the year I was away from home.
00:18:11 Speaker 2
And yes, I did.
00:18:15 Speaker 2
I did feel that they were different though. We had quite a lot of of boys with foreign parents. My closest friend from my first school and who father was an American opera singer singing at Covent Garden mother was Italian.
00:18:30 Speaker 2
Can.
00:18:32 Speaker 2
We had Iranians and Armenians and Indians a sort of post imperial, and the same was true at Harrow, though at Harrow. I don't know if I was afraid of anti-Semitism. I never experienced any, but then I was Grenfell and that you know.
00:18:38
Hmm.
00:18:52 Speaker 2
It was a bit different that I wasn't, you know, so there wasn't but.
00:18:54 Speaker 2
I got something.
00:18:57 Speaker 2
But I'm I think I was.
00:19:01 Speaker 2
Cautious about revealing my foreign background.
00:19:07 Speaker 2
I didn't like.
00:19:09 Speaker 2
Arrow at all. I hated it.
00:19:11 Speaker 2
And and I was a bit, I was but frightened of what might happen if I revealed any sort of potential weakness.
00:19:19 Speaker 1
Did you actually learn about term and truce?
00:19:21 Speaker 1
As a topic, it's.
00:19:22 Speaker 1
Cool in there. Was it ever mentioned?
00:19:24 Speaker 2
In that one, we, therefore we studied the Merchant of Venice and I can't remember that.
00:19:34 Speaker 2
There was any?
00:19:36 Speaker 2
Background to Shylock, other than he was a sort of stage villain and nothing was said about.
00:19:44 Speaker 2
What recent history and what anti-Semitism?
00:19:50 Speaker 1
Maybe a last question under this section and that leads already to the next next one. Was there something in your family passed that brought you then closer to your later research topic?
00:20:06 Speaker 2
Not really, no. No, I don't think so. I don't think I came to it because of anything in my family background.
00:20:18
Hmm.
00:20:20 Speaker 1
OK, then let's get to the second part.
00:20:22 Speaker 1
Yeah, the path.
00:20:23 Speaker 1
To studying German during the UK's German Jewish exile, of course, could you please describe your academic career? How did you integrate in the academic?
00:20:36
World.
00:20:37 Speaker 2
I had an easy time of it in a way.
00:20:40
First of all.
00:20:43 Speaker 2
I had drumman in my ear.
00:20:47 Speaker 2
I mean.
00:20:48 Speaker 2
Viennese I remember.
00:20:52 Speaker 2
Well, I decided I didn't want to study Greek they wanted. I was what they call a scholar. I had a scholarship there about 10 or 12 of us.
00:21:01 Speaker 2
And we were always supposed to be classical scholars. I thought, this is ridiculous.
00:21:06 Speaker 2
This is the second-half of the 20th century. Yeah, I said. I don't want to study Greek.
00:21:11 Speaker 2
And so Greek was technically an optional subject, not in fact, and the other options were geography in German. So as I've already said, I said I'll study German.
00:21:26 Speaker 2
And when I went to the modern languages master.
00:21:29 Speaker 1
He made me.
00:21:32 Speaker 2
And do a little translation, including this very simple sentence. I closed the door to which I wrote. He hopped it. You talked about it in my imagined some amusement, but he immediately realised that I had more German than anybody else that.
00:21:52 Speaker 2
You know in the pre O level.
00:21:55 Speaker 2
And class and of course I was.
00:21:58 Speaker 2
I remain way ahead of them.
00:22:00 Speaker 2
UM.
00:22:01 Speaker 1
So you studied modern languages.
00:22:03 Speaker 2
Isolated modern languages, German and French, yes.
00:22:06 Speaker 1
That was at Oxford.
00:22:09 Speaker 2
Well, at Harrow first of all, yeah, yes. And then from Harrow. I won a scholarship. They've still existed in those days. I won the top modern languages scholarship to Christchurch, Oxford, which Harrow. Harrow is Winston Churchill's old school.
00:22:28 Speaker 2
Christchurch is there are more prime ministers than Morris or other universities put to.
00:22:32 Speaker 2
Ever.
00:22:35 Speaker 2
Is is it was full of old Italians when I got there. They sort of prestigious. So I was sort of on a.
00:22:46 Speaker 2
I was integrated by education background into the.
00:22:52 Speaker 2
And the top echelons of the sort of upper middle class, not aristocracy, of course. But that's where I people I mixed with and.
00:23:02 Speaker 2
And I I did well at Oxford. I I thought first which was difficult. In those days. It looked like now.
00:23:10 Speaker 2
When nobody gets a degree, that isn't the first or upper 2nd in my day where we there were 1010% of the of both languages. Students my year that was considered rather high.
00:23:24 Speaker 2
Why?
00:23:25 Speaker 2
And and I then went and worked.
00:23:30 Speaker 2
Elsewhere, because I I thought I could never be like my tutors, I thought I, you know, they're in completely different league. Well, of course they were. They're 20-30 years older than me.
00:23:45 Speaker 1
But who, for instance, influenced you though?
00:23:48 Speaker 2
When I left Oxford, I had no intention of becoming an academic. I didn't know what I was going to do.
00:23:56 Speaker 2
What influenced me was an accident, a friend.
00:24:01 Speaker 2
The son of friends of my parents ran an A sort of private A levels college and for some reason I don't know why they had to get rid of their modern languages teacher and he asked me if I'd stand in and I did.
00:24:15 Speaker 2
And I worked there for a year and I very much enjoyed teaching.
00:24:21 Speaker 2
And then I did the civil service examinations for the with, of course, the administrative grade. That's the policy making grade. And I worked in the civil service for a year, but I didn't like it. And I thought what I would like to do would be to teach. I don't want to teach in the school.
00:24:38 Speaker 2
I want to teach you the university and that means getting adulterer.
00:24:43 Speaker 2
And nobody really influenced it was my it. It was a curious way to come into academic life. Ideally I should have.
00:24:53 Speaker 2
Thought what I wanted to do, and at the very least done something like going and getting your masters at the American University.
00:25:01 Speaker 2
And and seeing you know where it where that got me, but I didn't, unfortunately, anywhere I went back to Oxford and did a doctorate on the expressionist dramatist GAIL Kaiser.
00:25:14 Speaker 2
And then although jobs were very tight, when I came on the job market in 1971, I got a job first at the University of Reading.
00:25:24
Hmm.
00:25:25 Speaker 2
I was there for three years and then I went to Bristol, where I stayed for a long time. Then I was teaching principally German literature, but because I was always very interested in history.
00:25:39 Speaker 1
Hmm.
00:25:40 Speaker 2
I started as a final year special subject on the literature of the Weimar Republic.
00:25:46 Speaker 2
And.
00:25:48 Speaker 2
Where I could indulge my passion for reading history books and became a sort of well, I'm not a proper historian of course, but I well, I I could.
00:26:00 Speaker 2
Do a good job as to the second hand history, passing it on to the students. I certainly knew more than they did.
00:26:08 Speaker 2
When I left.
00:26:10 Speaker 2
I decided to leave Bristol around 1990.
00:26:15 Speaker 2
And.
00:26:17 Speaker 2
There is a convergence of factors I I I thought if I I was by then in my mid 40s, if I stay here any longer, I'll stay here for the rest of my career and I saw, you know.
00:26:29 Speaker 2
I'm not fulfilling my potential. I have a very pleasant life, a very pleasant flat.
00:26:35 Speaker 2
I'm good at my teaching. I do a certain amount of research, not great deal on famous authors. Thomas Mann, bracelet, etc.
00:26:46 Speaker 2
And.
00:26:47 Speaker 2
I'm going to move at the same time my father died.
00:26:51 Speaker 2
1992.
00:26:54 Speaker 2
And my mother was terminally ill with a form of bone marrow cancer like you. You came here.
00:27:02 Speaker 2
So I thought I'd better go and look after her.
00:27:05 Speaker 2
And I had met my present wife, Eva.
00:27:10 Speaker 2
On holiday in Sardinia and she's Belgian. She's she's from Brussels. But her parents, Polish Jews who had gone underground during the war in France, fought with the communist resistance in France.
00:27:25 Speaker 2
And and we decided to get together and she'd preferred to live in London. So I moved to London to the University of Westminster.
00:27:35 Speaker 2
Simply to get a job in London because I wanted to to be with my mother. But I didn't get on well, then it it didn't suit me and the rest of the German section with mainly 2.
00:27:48 Speaker 2
Austrians of a certain age, and I realised having the son of obscenities Jewish refugees come and you know, and be that be there to do research which they didn't do was not what they really wanted.
00:28:05 Speaker 1
How was actually your your first contact with German academia?
00:28:09 Speaker 2
For the well, of course.
00:28:12 Speaker 2
I had some when I was researching my PhD, mainly at the Academy that couldn't stay in Vienna.
00:28:21 Speaker 2
I'm sorry. In Berlin? What am I talking about? And similar places I find I found.
00:28:29 Speaker 2
German academics difficult to approach?
00:28:32 Speaker 2
Hmm.
00:28:33 Speaker 2
UM.
00:28:35 Speaker 2
Also.
00:28:38 Speaker 2
I used to go to Berlin mostly in the summer long vacation. Whenever this was W Berlin.
00:28:46 Speaker 2
In in the end of the 60s and early 70s, when everybody left in the summer apart from Gastarbeiter and then.
00:28:56 Speaker 2
I went on a Goethe Institut course it was.
00:29:03 Speaker 2
Yes, it started when I had research Fellows day after day Stipendium in Munich in the 70s. And then I started meeting academics.
00:29:17 Speaker 2
Mostly mostly my my relations with them were social and friendly, and I think I was a bit.
00:29:30 Speaker 2
Hesitant about approaching German academics, I I could. I learned when I was a PhD student that German PhD students could do things that I could not.
00:29:42 Speaker 2
But I and wasn't able to until some years later. They were much more advanced and I was very badly supervised at Oxford.
00:29:51 Speaker 2
And they knew much more about research methods than I did.
00:29:55 Speaker 2
So I tended to have a I think I had a.
00:29:58 Speaker 2
Bit of inferiority complex.
00:30:00 Speaker 2
That only changed when I mixed with German academics who were working in the field that I now work in, which is.
00:30:09 Speaker 2
Refugees German Jewish rehomed Austrian Jewish refugees, German speaking Jewish refugees I said German, because technically speaking, of course they were German after 1938.
00:30:22 Speaker 1
Did you ever think about what they did during the war? Another conversation you mentioned Hans Schweitzer. You remember? Yes. Yes.
00:30:31 Speaker 2
Not until much later.
00:30:34 Speaker 2
I you know I when I was a teenager, my parents took me from from the age of about 13 or 1414 to Puerto Humber to say, well, we lay on those sort of.
00:30:50 Speaker 2
There's a wooden bench, a wooden raft by the by, by the the the the voters say, and the majority of the other teenagers were German, and there were some pretty girls amongst them. And I was very pleased to mix with them.
00:31:07 Speaker 2
And we made friends.
00:31:11 Speaker 2
With one German family.
00:31:13 Speaker 2
And I liked them very much. And he fought on the Russian front.
00:31:21 Speaker 2
That they were very friendly to my parents and they remember my mother told me with some amusement. My parents were Viennese and were.
00:31:30 Speaker 2
More liberated than the average English travelling and I suspect them quite a lot of Germans.
00:31:38 Speaker 2
My this lady said to my mother that she'd like me to take her daughter out, to replace attractive blonde girl.
00:31:46 Speaker 2
About Mr *****.
00:31:49 Speaker 2
But then I just thought Germans were OK. Yeah.
00:31:54 Speaker 2
And the Austrians, of course, were Ultra Charming to us after all, when we went to purchase, it was only a few years before the British had been the occupying power. And you know what Austrians can be like? I I call it chocobo's charm.
00:32:11 Speaker 2
I just thought these are not people that have anything to do with the Nazis. You know, I'm I was. It's what they call Pollyanna, you know, being seeing things through. Rosie rose. Tinted spectacles. Yeah, I had.
00:32:26 Speaker 2
And I must say, when it comes to Germans.
00:32:30 Speaker 2
I have never heard any a single anti-Semitic word.
00:32:37 Speaker 2
Though.
00:32:38 Speaker 2
Perhaps that's because of the circles I move in.
00:32:43 Speaker 2
If you discount sort of leaflets in the student men's as are in favour of the Palestinian Palestinian cause, but that's a a separate matter.
00:32:59 Speaker 2
No, never.
00:33:00 Speaker 2
And.
00:33:02 Speaker 1
Maybe last question on the British academia. So in earlier conversations you mentioned uh namely 3 scholars in the field of German studies in Britain, all of them acts out. Yeah, I have in mind Siegbert Salomon, Paver, Stern and Hans Rice. Yeah. Can you maybe say a few words?
00:33:22 Speaker 1
Them and how they influence and broader way research they did.
00:33:27 Speaker 2
Well.
00:33:29 Speaker 2
Yes, zipper Prather was an influence on me because I went to his doctoral seminar in Oxford and he was a revelation. I mean.
00:33:41 Speaker 2
Of course.
00:33:42 Speaker 2
He begun his education in Germany in Cologne. He was.
00:33:49 Speaker 2
I don't. I can't remember exactly how old he was when he came here, but an older teenager.
00:33:55 Speaker 2
So he knew his German literature as I knew my Shakespeare and.
00:34:00 Speaker 2
Keats and Coleridge, you know, you were talking that you, you it was part of your.
00:34:05 Speaker 2
But my goodness, he was impressive, you know he.
00:34:12 Speaker 2
One of us would start reading a paper in the salmon arm. Say I'd read.
00:34:16 Speaker 2
GAIL Kaiser, they don't within not very long time. See that Pravo would be saying. Well, now there's this new poet called Hunt smugglers and who?
00:34:28 Speaker 1
Was quite at fault, man. Yeah. And then.
00:34:30 Speaker 1
Mini.
00:34:31 Speaker 2
He he was he was inspiration.
00:34:34 Speaker 1
Hmm.
00:34:35 Speaker 2
And I mean extraordinarily knowledgeable and as long as he was enthusiastic, which didn't last that much longer, I got him at the beginning of his time at Oxford. He was inspiring.
00:34:52 Speaker 2
You know, he he went to Berlin and he told me in 67 before I met him. And, you know, on an exchange and got landed with a seminar of Marxist students who were not interested in literature at all at the free university at the Free University.
00:35:12 Speaker 2
And.
00:35:14 Speaker 2
Were only a bitted became interested when he said. Well, you know, Karl Marx was a great reader of Greek classics. They the students didn't benefit from this, but think that Prava wrote a book on not CarMax. And world literature just like that. And.
00:35:31 Speaker 2
I think that the the.
00:35:35 Speaker 2
The three people that you mentioned were others of outstanding members of a quite a wave of German gamist and refugee germanist and JP Stone. I didn't know personally he was at Kings College London.
00:35:46
MHM.
00:35:53 Speaker 2
But I knew plenty of people who had worked with him or been taught or supervised by him, and Hans Rice was my professor at Bristol. Another.
00:36:04 Speaker 2
Extraordinarily brilliant, man. Very difficult man to work with. Not because he was unpleasant, but because he had no gift of dealing with human beings at all. I suppose other than his wife, because he had two wonderful sons.
00:36:22 Speaker 1
But.
00:36:23 Speaker 2
He.
00:36:25 Speaker 2
Well, Hans was just difficult and and and not not good as a head of department because he didn't know how to handle people at all.
00:36:35 Speaker 1
What? What was what was since read research about mobile.
00:36:38
That's.
00:36:38 Speaker 2
He he's he. He again likes it better. He covered a huge range.
00:36:45 Speaker 2
He had more fuel for philosophy and ideas and literature. I think the thing that he would be best known for was his work on Kent with one of the people I replaced at Bristol, Barry Nisbett, who went to camp.
00:37:03 Speaker 2
But Hans was an ideas man.
00:37:07 Speaker 2
But he also wrote a book on Curtis Ormann just very well received and something called the Poets Task. And it's hard to pin him down. And I, well, classical literature records.
00:37:26 Speaker 2
I also think that one of the reasons why the teaching of German at British schools.
00:37:35 Speaker 2
Underwent at such a sort of.
00:37:39 Speaker 2
Well, an ascent in the 60s and 70s and probably 50s was because a large number of refugees, mainly women, not entirely.
00:37:50 Speaker 2
Took to teaching German.
00:37:52 Speaker 2
I came across two who had been unable to finish, ladies who were unable to finish their doctorates.
00:38:00 Speaker 2
In Germany.
00:38:02 Speaker 2
Came over here, but of course couldn't get university jobs as both Germans and women.
00:38:10 Speaker 2
So when did the school teaching my colleague at the research at the Charmie and Brinson was taught by a lady called Ruth Herring. Herring's a married name.
00:38:21 Speaker 2
Who was a sort of an immoral objector to Nazism who came over here because she simply didn't wish to stay and sacrificed her career?
00:38:34 Speaker 2
Bambiland up teaching at go school in Buckinghamshire.
00:38:39 Speaker 1
Can can one maybe say that the immediate post war period in Britain was about the Golden Age of German studies?
00:38:45 Speaker 1
Because of all these.
00:38:46 Speaker 2
I agree.
00:38:46 Speaker 1
Extras said highly and Prince, I think students and scholars generationally.
00:38:52 Speaker 2
I would say exactly that.
00:38:54 Speaker 2
And people like me, I mean, they were very good English communists and as well at Oxford, my tutor.
00:39:03 Speaker 2
At Christchurch was a man called David, Luke, FD Luke, who was a very strange man, and he and I didn't see eye to eye at all. So he did what he what we call farmed me out to another Don at another college. This was Jim Reed, who became the senior.
00:39:22 Speaker 2
Professor at at Oxford and is.
00:39:25 Speaker 2
A great name and was. I mean, then he was a graduate student, nobody he nobody knew who he was particularly. But I did because he taught me. Uh, modern German literature. He he taught me expressionism. I thought this is new. I've never gone because.
00:39:45 Speaker 2
The English place like this.
00:39:49 Speaker 2
He doesn't remember it, but I said well, he he inspired my choice, the doctoral subject.
00:39:55 Speaker 2
I he later wrote a wonderful study of Thomas Mann and then books on the Vimar Centre on Berta and Schiller, me Youth, Topcase scholar. Yes, I was also taught by a refugee medievalist, Peter Gunz.
00:40:12 Speaker 2
And not much, but more by a man called David Mcclintock, who became a translator, and David Mcclintock was the first person to Doxford. That taught me, like, treated me like a grown up. And he taught me mediaeval literature and that I really I really enjoy.
00:40:33 Speaker 2
Read we read the Nibelungen lead and Tristan and some part of about the phone that focal wider and.
00:40:42 Speaker 2
Unlike the.
00:40:44 Speaker 2
Modern languages, the modern parts of the the literary papers, which were strictly literary.
00:40:51 Speaker 2
I couldn't have.
00:40:52 Speaker 2
Dated Bismarck within 20 years when I left Oxford.
00:40:57 Speaker 2
But the mediaeval stuff, of course, was historical. As mediaeval mediaeval mediaeval studies are, and I found it quite fascinating to say you know how the actual history.
00:41:12 Speaker 2
Came into the libel lungen league. You know the figure of Etzel.
00:41:19 Speaker 2
Who is who? But that was the theory I remember. Couldn't be presented too critically. And as we normally see him say in England, as a sort of barbarian and slaughterer, because the readers further down the Danube would be Hungarian, and we think quite highly of it.
00:41:39 Speaker 2
And I thought all this was fascinating.
00:41:43 Speaker 1
Like, yeah, I think that already leads us to our third section. Your main research topics. So when I prepare myself for our conversation, I realised that there were at least said please me, correct me if I'm wrong. Three main research topics in your work is dedicated to the first one is literary history.
00:42:02 Speaker 1
And in particular, combination with political history, the second one is, of course German Jewish exile and the third one I would describe as public.
00:42:13 Speaker 1
History, especially when it comes to the AJR refugee noises, crouching. But let's start with the first one. A literary history of the 20th century. I have to mention here your book and title cockpit of hyalis, the literature and political history of the Weimar Republic. Why did you choose this?
00:42:33 Speaker 1
This topic.
00:42:34 Speaker 2
Well, because I was interested in it because I.
00:42:40 Speaker 2
Didn't like.
00:42:43 Speaker 2
Teaching.
00:42:45 Speaker 2
Pure literature, like my colleagues at Bristol, mostly did set the medievalists.
00:42:51 Speaker 2
Am I?
00:42:53 Speaker 2
Against some resistance from my colleagues.
00:42:57 Speaker 2
I introduced this course that.
00:43:01 Speaker 2
That mixed history with with literature, you know, I said, well, look, this is a literary period with the First World War at one end and Hitler and the other. How can it not be political?
00:43:16 Speaker 2
Even someone like Thomas Mann, who was so unpolite or so he called himself, became heavily politicised and spoke in public in political matters. And then I saw well, I wrote, wrote one or two article.
00:43:32 Speaker 2
Was which were published. I published an article on Sauber, Belk on the character of NAFTA.
00:43:39 Speaker 2
In the.
00:43:41 Speaker 2
Dodge of Italy are swift and they thought well, if they accept it. Then when I write can't be that bad. So I wrote this little book. It was.
00:43:51 Speaker 2
To a considerable extent and derived from my lectures and seminars and on other occasion, it was not Geist. It was an attempt to to have a very detailed look at the historical background and to see.
00:44:08 Speaker 2
What echoes there were of it, in words and phrases, and often very much in the background of text, and which is not difficult to do. You're going to look at things like, I don't know my own, that sample, and so, and of course the impact of the First World War.
00:44:28 Speaker 2
And the things like invest, niche noise, obviously.
00:44:33 Speaker 2
And a whole lot of left wing communist inspired literature, which I found very interesting.
00:44:39 Speaker 2
And yeah.
00:44:41 Speaker 2
When I published that book, it was about the time that I came to London, and as I said, I thought I had considerably underperformed my potential. I was very keen on teaching.
00:44:54 Speaker 2
I I love teaching.
00:44:57 Speaker 2
And and my research suffered.
00:45:00 Speaker 2
And I.
00:45:03 Speaker 2
It wasn't really until 1984, when I was nearly 40.
00:45:08 Speaker 2
That hunts rice asked me to give the opening lecture at the conference of what was then called the University Teachers of Great Britain and Ireland because they were in Bristol.
00:45:20 Speaker 2
And it was customary to get one of the younger lecturers.
00:45:25 Speaker 2
To give the lecture and I said yes. All right, I'll do it on sabout, he said. Really, I said is.
00:45:32 Speaker 2
Yeah.
00:45:34 Speaker 2
No, he didn't object. But but everybody thought this was a bit bold, so I that's when I gave my my lecture on after which was later published and was republished in.
00:45:49 Speaker 2
In a volume that's huntford or Varget edited in Oxford textbook or in the Oxford textbook on the Magic Mountain.
00:46:01 Speaker 2
So I thought well that is pretty good going. I just like marrying up the two disciplines, literary analysis and history. Your book actually ends literally in also quite symbolic with by my endings. Yes. So what fascinated you about this subject by Mark endings?
00:46:22 Speaker 2
Well.
00:46:23 Speaker 2
And what it led on to, of course, that was when I began to feel more about.
00:46:28 Speaker 2
Out and my own family background, especially when I finished.
00:46:35 Speaker 2
Working on the find my Republic, I thought, where do you go from here? I thought I am not gonna work on Holocaust literature. I will not. And I have it. I can't do it.
00:46:46 Speaker 2
And.
00:46:47 Speaker 2
And I was in London by them.
00:46:50 Speaker 2
I thought I'll work try. I'll, I'll. I'll look at the exile literature and the refugees. Then I came into contact with the AJR. But that's the slightly later story. Yes, the vimar endings, of course.
00:47:04 Speaker 2
I mean, it's one of the great questions of history.
00:47:09 Speaker 2
How could a man like Hitler come to power in a country like Germany?
00:47:15 Speaker 2
How could he have been stopped? And I was particularly interested always.
00:47:21 Speaker 2
In left wing politics, I'm not particularly left wing. I'm an old-fashioned right wing Social Democrat, if anything.
00:47:28 Speaker 2
But I was fascinated by.
00:47:32 Speaker 2
This the the divisions in the pre fast ballboy spay day and the OS Spay day which my expressionists were close to.
00:47:41 Speaker 2
And then the way in which the this huge schism in the.
00:47:47 Speaker 2
Socialist Camp took place after the end of the First World War with the murder of Lukashin Luxembourg by by forces nominally under the control of the of an expedite government and the relations between the expedite and the Cape Day.
00:48:04 Speaker 2
And of course, once Moscow started dictating Carpe day policy and and the social fascism and all that, I thought this is so interesting and and of course, if you if you work on breast design as I had to for buy more, you could see all this.
00:48:24 Speaker 2
You know.
00:48:28 Speaker 2
I remember taking a girlfriend to see Arturo, which we thought was wonderful, but of course I could not notice noticing that the word Yoda doesn't appear, that it's all capitalism, you know, and and I did.
00:48:47 Speaker 2
I did write in the in a a small way. I was critical of the this sort of Marxist approach to Nazism, which, you know, racial ideology wasn't really very important and what was important was the rich and the poor of the workers and the capitalists.
00:49:06 Speaker 2
I thought well.
00:49:08 Speaker 2
Apart from my grandparents rubella, 6 million people who were.
00:49:13 Speaker 2
I didn't like it. That was another reason why I found German academics at my age hard to approach. They were very left wing and lot of so. I mean, you know, well you you can imagine what it was like in the late 60s.
00:49:33 Speaker 2
And they they thought if I went to Oxford, I must be a sort of burgers or. Well, I am so with they mostly.
00:49:43 Speaker 2
And they they could be fairly fairly dismissive when I came across German students and I said, what am I supposed to say, you know, look, the reason I studied German is because your parents or grandparents or their generation killed my grandparents. You can't say that.
00:49:46
Hmm.
00:50:03 Speaker 2
You couldn't. Then they. You couldn't say that they they couldn't.
00:50:09 Speaker 2
And that people wouldn't have been able to deal with it. And I couldn't say, well, actually, I may be, I may be due to Oxford and a British public school, but my parents were refugees and that their their, their families were more or less wiped out in the Holocaust.
00:50:27 Speaker 2
But you, you know.
00:50:29 Speaker 2
You couldn't do that with young people in the early 70s. I don't know how they'd have reacted. They probably hit me, but perhaps not. But they would have been. It would have caused a big a big fuss. They wouldn't have liked it. It was too early for that sort of thing because it was true for most of them, of course.
00:50:49 Speaker 2
Their parents had.
00:50:52 Speaker 2
But mostly not been involved, but you know they had had to.
00:50:58 Speaker 2
They joined the army or worked musicians, factories or whatever, like people had to here and and I didn't no blame attached to them in my eyes.
00:51:11 Speaker 2
Yes, it was.
00:51:14 Speaker 2
Was difficult, difficult to imagine now, but it that's how I felt it.
00:51:18 Speaker 1
So your second period as a researcher could be under the heading, I would say reinvention as a cultural historian.
00:51:25 Speaker 1
Of German Jewish exile. And let me briefly mention here another title of your books, probably your best known book, Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain from 1933 till 1970. Could you talk?
00:51:40 Speaker 1
A bit about.
00:51:41 Speaker 1
Your reinvention as a historian of Jewish.
00:51:45 Speaker 1
So how and also why did it happen?
00:51:49 Speaker 2
I left the University of Westminster.
00:51:53 Speaker 2
I was offered only retirement and very favourable terms and my head of section had retired. I was offered the headship of section on condition that there was no promotion, no salary increase and worst of all, no replacement for Eberhardt.
00:52:13 Speaker 2
Which was meant I'd had to do 2 jobs, so I thought stuff.
00:52:17 Speaker 2
You and if neighbourhood got early retirement and I'll see if that they'll do it, give it to me as well. So I went rough next there was a or a Friday evening. I got this wonderful offer the Monday morning. They didn't of course know in the in the in the the the the department responsible for.
00:52:38 Speaker 2
What we now call human relations, and they didn't know that I'd been offered the the headship of section they just saw. Ohh yes, yes, of course. We'll give you a little tab, we'll and we'll.
00:52:50 Speaker 2
Augment your pension. So I said, well, thank you very much. I was not badly off.
00:53:00 Speaker 2
Because I'd inherited my parents.
00:53:05 Speaker 2
Wealth.
00:53:07 Speaker 2
And I don't know. I Strat in Bristol and Ava was coming over.
00:53:13 Speaker 2
So I was financially secure for a bit and didn't work. Not gainfully. So I went round to the Association of Jewish Refugees, which was in quite easy walking distance. From here. We were already living here and said is there anything I could help with? No, they said, not really. They said unless you can write.
00:53:34 Speaker 2
I said where writing is. I think I could do. I'm an retired academic. I would send about 50 my early 50s.
00:53:44 Speaker 2
So I was introduced to the then editor of the Ajr's monthly.
00:53:50 Speaker 2
Ajr information.
00:53:52 Speaker 2
Later, Agial Journal that was Richard Grunberger A Kindertransport fee from Vienna, and he and I got on very well. We were very close.
00:54:02 Speaker 2
He was like, almost like a second father to me.
00:54:05 Speaker 2
And and he took me under his wing and I wrote our occasional articles. But the main thing was I saw on the shelves in the editorial office a complete run of the AJR information going back to January 1946. I said, gosh, that's interesting. I bet you get scholars.
00:54:25 Speaker 2
Coming in here, looking at them, this is a fantastic historical source. Ohh no, said Richard. They just gathered us. Nobody looks at them.
00:54:35 Speaker 2
So I said, well, I.
00:54:35 Speaker 2
Will.
00:54:36 Speaker 2
So every Monday from quite a number of years I picked up my laptop and walked over to the AJR and took notes on one issue.
00:54:47 Speaker 2
Per week wrote to the AJR journal, and I noted down every item other than things that were repetition.
00:54:57 Speaker 2
And even things like adverts, which was very good thing to do because you got a huge amount of social information and you could pick up, you know, social trends for 25 years of adverts and see the extraordinary economic change in the status of the community.
00:55:17 Speaker 2
And.
00:55:19 Speaker 2
How it?
00:55:21 Speaker 2
Largely integrated into the British middle class, lived in middle class areas and went into middle class professions and educated its children.
00:55:32 Speaker 2
And my theory was that there was in that respect those respects A considerable continuity.
00:55:42 Speaker 2
Between pre and post Nazi periods, of course, many people.
00:55:49 Speaker 2
Were completely unable to regain anything like their pre-existing status, especially older people. Who being you know, say well respected lawyers. Well, what could you do with with German law in this country?
00:56:04 Speaker 2
And a lot of people and of course, a lot of people like my aunt who started off as a domestic servant. None that were my wife, my, my, my aunt. And it's very, very, very, very well. And she married well. Second was her second husband first.
00:56:24 Speaker 2
Husband died.
00:56:27 Speaker 2
He was a very wealthy man and uh and well, my parents, my father, who worked very hard, was also.
00:56:37 Speaker 2
Well, not, not badly off.
00:56:40 Speaker 2
UM.
00:56:41 Speaker 2
Yes. So I I wrote this book which was, I thought a refugees view because.
00:56:50 Speaker 2
The other books that had been written.
00:56:53 Speaker 2
Mostly by British Jewish historians.
00:56:58 Speaker 2
Were mainly.
00:56:59 Speaker 2
Drawn from British government records.
00:57:05 Speaker 2
Before the war. So you've got all this stuff. Now we've got to keep as many of these people out as we can, which I suspect was for for public consumption, because actually it led a lot in, especially after the Kristallnacht and the Anschluss.
00:57:22 Speaker 2
And and the other thing that that was immediately.
00:57:26 Speaker 2
This.
00:57:27 Speaker 2
Was that with the naturalisation of the refugees, which mostly took place in the years after 1945? I went to Kew and you could see there the huge numbers, 10s of thousands in the the four or five years after the war, when these people became British citizens.
00:57:48 Speaker 2
Then they.
00:57:49 Speaker 2
There were no longer documents specifically relating to them other than a few Foreign Office documents relating to restitution, and that's that dealing with the West German government. That's a separate matter. So nobody had the materials to write a history of the.
00:58:09 Speaker 2
Jewish refugees after about 1948 because it it didn't have any resources and there were.
00:58:18 Speaker 2
You know, with 25 years, 25 volumes, I only went up to 1970s types of mistake.
00:58:27 Speaker 2
Of views of see Choc 4.
00:58:30 Speaker 2
Of social history chock full of it.
00:58:35 Speaker 2
And the other thing that was perhaps.
00:58:39 Speaker 2
Helpful to me, a lot of it was high, both with high culture but.
00:58:47 Speaker 2
If they say, Oh well, there's such and such about Kafka, it didn't particularly bother me. Not that I understand Kafka, so I'm sure I've said to you before, but I you know, I could situate it in the academic discourse and, you know, at a rather deeper level than a reviewer in the AJR.
00:59:07 Speaker 2
In 1958, you know, and if they said, Oh well, we, there's a book being we we issued we're reviewing it here it's by the the well known writer you also thought I thought well yeah I know I've taught right that ski marsh.
00:59:26 Speaker 2
It's though the problem for me and there's a lot of this in the HR information and I think a conventional historian might have had a problem with that where I had a problem and omitted it.
00:59:40 Speaker 2
My was religion because I knew.
00:59:44 Speaker 2
Rosily little about Jewish practise and learned more once I got together with Eva.
00:59:53 Speaker 2
But I think you have to be brought up in it. And I wasn't. As I told you earlier.
00:59:59 Speaker 2
But I I I really like that and I have to say I think that book has not had the notice that that it deserves and it is all academics will say this.
01:00:10 Speaker 2
But it it it has been.
01:00:14 Speaker 2
To some extent sidelined because it doesn't agree at all in the mainstream of research by people like Tony.
01:00:25 Speaker 2
Of course, it's a formidable scholar, but takes a completely different view. You know, just recently on the anniversary of the Kindertransport, he wrote an article in the Jewish Chronicle saying that the British government didn't really do anything that would kill the transport or that they only did one thing.
01:00:44 Speaker 2
I thought, well, you could turn that on its head and say the only thing they did was the one thing that was absolutely essential, because if the British Government hadn't given permission.
01:00:56 Speaker 2
The the children would have been turned away at the at at the front. I mean a group of unauthorised and undocumented refugees wouldn't have gone in in the 1st place also.
01:01:06 Speaker 2
Britain is the only country that let in a substantial number in the transportees.
01:01:12 Speaker 2
And in another country did and I've researched the Hansard files, the parliamentary debates now that come, had that sort of.
01:01:22 Speaker 2
Debate. And you know, that's my view and but of course, the Kindertransport of project had its defects, to put it mildly anyway.
01:01:33 Speaker 2
Yes, this is.
01:01:34 Speaker 2
It's from that point of view that I.
01:01:39 Speaker 2
I wrote the book in a way it's he is a he is a polemic.
01:01:43 Speaker 2
Element to it. I am a although I I mean I like to think of myself as rather mild mannered. I have a sharp pen and I'm I I like an argument. I easily get into an academic argument.
01:01:56 Speaker 1
There's another title you published a year after your English book on Jewish refugees, and this book is entirely written in.
01:02:10 Speaker 1
This book obviously follows slightly different approach than the English 1. Can you please say if you are the best?
01:02:17 Speaker 2
Yes, I became established as a sort of.
01:02:24 Speaker 2
Tame historian and tame academic. Really at the age they didn't have any other academics and still don't. Not people who have been career academics.
01:02:38 Speaker 2
And.
01:02:40 Speaker 2
In 2002.
01:02:43 Speaker 2
The AJR commissioned me to create an exhibition.
01:02:48 Speaker 2
To celebrate its 60th anniversary of actually 2001, the thing didn't appear till 2002. HL was founded in 41, so I asked someone that I had met interviewing for the Shoah Foundation.
01:03:03 Speaker 2
Doctor Bayer Lefkovitz if she would help me. It's an inspired choice. She was wonderful. We created this exhibition. We borrowed the title Continental Britains from Marion Belkan.
01:03:18 Speaker 2
And it was a thumping success. It was at the Jewish Museum in Camden Town and the last two Sundays you could hardly move.
01:03:28 Speaker 2
And one of the greatest successes in the exhibition was bears film.
01:03:36 Speaker 2
Edited.
01:03:38 Speaker 2
Pieces from interviews she'd conducted with.
01:03:44 Speaker 2
Mostly fairly eminent refugees. Who was Moses was a very senior civil servant and chairman of Covent Garden. But this knows what.
01:03:49
Hey.
01:04:03 Speaker 2
No, but brining of the Amadeus Quartet.
01:04:09 Speaker 2
Yes, the actor that plays Manuel in 40 towers, you see, he's from Berlin, you know, because the refugee sucks.
01:04:21 Speaker 2
And yes, quite quite well now people all dead now. So this is a wonderful resource.
01:04:30 Speaker 2
And we then persuaded the AJR with some differently key to let us continue making more interviews, filming them and transcribing them so scholars could use them because the.
01:04:46 Speaker 2
The Shoah Foundation interviews are not transcribed, and I can't you. I can't work from Untranscribed film.
01:04:56 Speaker 2
So we bear and I in the first five years we did about 150 of these.
01:05:05 Speaker 2
Then I I had enough and said I never wanted to see another interview transcript in my life, but we were invited to go to Austria, to Vienna. I had established relations with the.
01:05:21 Speaker 2
The exile bibliotech at the Literatur House, round the corner from my.
01:05:28 Speaker 2
Fathers family firm.
01:05:31 Speaker 2
And.
01:05:34 Speaker 2
So we thought, what should we do? So we we thought well we'll we'll take some of the Continental Britains materials and we'll take them. Bear made another film and I said.
01:05:46 Speaker 2
Oh, I'll write it. I'll write it all up into a book. So I used the interviews. Oh, my God. It was difficult. And it's about how difficult it was going to be writing in German. But it I did it.
01:06:01 Speaker 1
But how was it for you to write the book in German? So it was ohh very the 1st.
01:06:06 Speaker 1
And.
01:06:06 Speaker 2
Book that you entirely run dumb it definitely. Ohh, but I'd written in German and.
01:06:13 Speaker 2
By then, I was.
01:06:17 Speaker 2
I was well into my 60s and I'd spent most of my adult life reading German literary criticism, German history, and I'm a good mimic, and I found I could write at academic German. Of course, doing the.
01:06:36 Speaker 2
These these interviews.
01:06:40 Speaker 2
Into German was very difficult because there was sort of slang and there were wartime expressions, as do this.
01:06:50 Speaker 2
But providing some fairly basic historical background and building on that and saying, well, here's so and so and this is what he does. And he was in Leeds where the Jewish community was like this. And here's so and so. And this is his experience of the British and the Blitz which they talk about a lot.
01:07:11 Speaker 2
And and lots of stuff on internment.
01:07:15 Speaker 2
Doing the historical framework to that was, well, it wasn't that difficult. It was a lot of work. It took me a long.
01:07:24 Speaker 1
Time. So you already mentioned the milestone project, a Jr. Refugee voices? Yeah. Can you say something about the challenges of such an oral history project?
01:07:35 Speaker 2
Well.
01:07:37 Speaker 2
They and I were both very experienced and I think a very accomplished interviewers.
01:07:47 Speaker 2
Uh.
01:07:48 Speaker 2
I'm not as verbose when I the interviewer as I'm when I'm the interviewee. She's very good of course.
01:07:56 Speaker 2
Challenges. Sometimes what you hear is hard to hear, hard to hear.
01:08:03 Speaker 2
The first interview I ever did, just the thing it was, may have been the second.
01:08:09 Speaker 2
That was for the British Library, the living memory of the Jewish community in I was sent to Cambridge to interview a lady called Eva Clark.
01:08:18 Speaker 2
The wife of a Lord Don who picked me up at the station summer day, we went out into garden with this nice suburban house.
01:08:26 Speaker 2
I got my this was not filmed. It was still just taped. Got my equipment ready.
01:08:34 Speaker 2
Introduce myself, she said. And I said now you're to introduce it.
01:08:39 Speaker 2
Can you tell me your maiden name? And this is about my age. And I said, can you please tell us your date and place of birth you said?
01:08:52 Speaker 2
28th, or something of April 1945, Mauthausen concentration cut.
01:08:59 Speaker 2
I mean, you could virtually hear the the interviewer, so you know, I mean you I thought gone on matter and you know, and the story.
01:09:10 Speaker 2
And and something in a way worse happened to me when I went to interview.
01:09:16 Speaker 2
For an oral history project.
01:09:19 Speaker 2
Organised by something in Morgan Institution, we haven't talked about which is the research centre for German and Austrian exile studies, which I now chair. I've chaired it since 2013.
01:09:32 Speaker 2
Took over from our founding chairman, Professor Amish Ritchie.
01:09:36 Speaker 2
When he died and when we set this up in November 1995, it was 30 years ago.
01:09:47 Speaker 2
One of the projects that was already underway amongst this little group of researchers was what was called the Oral History Project, which became a became a book called changing Places. And we did 30 odd interviews. So I said, Oh well, I've been. If you agree, I'll go and interview some of my.
01:10:07 Speaker 2
Surviving friends of my parents.
01:10:10 Speaker 2
And.
01:10:12 Speaker 2
And I don't think any of them were refugees.
01:10:17 Speaker 2
A wonderful as upon elderly lady, an older lady who was herself a refugee, the others were all British academics.
01:10:24 Speaker 1
And some of them spoke for the very first time about their experiences, refugees or survivors.
01:10:28 Speaker 2
Yes.
01:10:30 Speaker 2
Refugees. I don't think I interviewed any survivors, but I went to interview a lovely lady called Clary Friedel, who was some cosets and now Slovakia.
01:10:43 Speaker 2
Came over with her husband and again.
01:10:47 Speaker 2
She told told me about her wartime experiences now. She'd been hospitalised. She they'd been bombed in Belsize Park and we got to the end of the war. And I I asked. I said, well, how did you find out about about what had happened back home?
01:11:03 Speaker 2
And and she said.
01:11:06 Speaker 2
Some men had come over and come to see them and said Clary.
01:11:11 Speaker 2
Look, I have to tell you.
01:11:13 Speaker 2
Your mother is dead. Your father is dead.
01:11:17 Speaker 2
You, you know, I could hardly speak as.
01:11:22 Speaker 2
Your brother is dead. Your sister-in-law is dead. The children are dead. Minute.
01:11:30 Speaker 2
As you can see, it continues to affect me and I've learned not to talk about it in public. I did once and it had the same effect on me and I felt a bit of a fool because I was speaking to to six hours at school. They should expect that.
01:11:48 Speaker 2
Hmm.
01:11:49 Speaker 2
Their their history that is sort of visiting lecturers to become emotional.
01:11:55 Speaker 2
But I found that very difficult. That was difficult. Otherwise. You know, I'm at with things I know I can do. I'm self confident, not so much otherwise. And I know I can interview and the main challenge I had was that I had to organise the blood.
01:12:12 Speaker 2
Sick and and we transcribed these interviews and I had to recruit the transcribers, mostly postgraduate students of history of modern German history.
01:12:24 Speaker 2
And so these transcripts came back then, and I had to sort of correct them, which was an impossible task because they were 80 pages, 100 pages.
01:12:34 Speaker 2
To get a team of editors to correct.
01:12:38 Speaker 2
The the the the manuscripts you know, because these kids knew their German history.
01:12:44 Speaker 2
But they didn't know.
01:12:47 Speaker 2
The Hebrew words in religious terminology, they didn't know the.
01:12:52 Speaker 2
Street.
01:12:53 Speaker 2
Names in Vienna, which I did and they didn't know wartime expressions and the wartime events which I did because I grew up hearing about them. Oh my. It was a nightmare.
01:13:05 Speaker 2
And the the, the, the, the transcript just took full of mistakes unfortunately. But and yes, that was a challenge otherwise.
01:13:16 Speaker 2
I just had enough of interviewing.
01:13:20 Speaker 2
I just had enough.
01:13:24 Speaker 2
I found it quite stressful and not only because of what was discussed.
01:13:29 Speaker 1
So maybe we come to the fourth section, the identity that you already spoke about this and the mentality of the continental Britons. Could I start by asking you? Would you consider yourself as a Continental Britain?
01:13:44 Speaker 2
My natural reaction, certainly when I was younger, would have said no. I I've seen myself as English, yeah.
01:13:51 Speaker 2
British and.
01:13:54 Speaker 2
Over the years, especially since I started working on the refugees and have acquired a certain position, and I, you know, I think my parents would, would be proud of me, I think I it's a great shame they never saw me be editor of the AJL and was for 12 years.
01:14:12 Speaker 2
It's a pity.
01:14:13 Speaker 2
My mother would have been so proud. Of course they read the AJR religiously, as did most of their friends.
01:14:25 Speaker 2
Yes. Then then of course, I began to feel that I have got this Viennese Jewish heritage. I can't say Austrian because I have a certain hesitancy about Austria because it's.
01:14:42 Speaker 2
Relation or its behaviour or the behaviour of so many of its population at that time I have, of course, lived a lot of my life.
01:14:52 Speaker 2
Working in the field of German language high culture.
01:14:57 Speaker 2
And.
01:14:58 Speaker 2
But then serve a whole lot of my English colleagues.
01:15:06 Speaker 2
I I can't say no without reservation, but on the whole I'd say no.
01:15:12 Speaker 1
Let me add a question. What is actually a continent?
01:15:16 Speaker 2
Well, I would say it was, it was a if they have to ask. Marian Belcard is a a refugee.
01:15:26 Speaker 2
Who came over here? Probably.
01:15:30 Speaker 2
Older than a child, probably at least a teenager.
01:15:35 Speaker 2
And but not very elderly and remain simply a continental out of like a fish out of water.
01:15:42 Speaker 2
Who retained?
01:15:45 Speaker 2
Those.
01:15:47 Speaker 2
Very German Jewish values and aspirations. First of all, to integrate into the host society.
01:15:59 Speaker 2
And and to do so.
01:16:02 Speaker 2
Primarily through the means of education.
01:16:06 Speaker 2
And better than high regard, respect for building more respect for for build on in many cases than for religious faith and and.
01:16:20 Speaker 2
University education. Professional life.
01:16:24 Speaker 2
UM.
01:16:27 Speaker 2
And.
01:16:28 Speaker 2
He lived a a sort of cultured life, went to the theatre, read books and you know and.
01:16:36 Speaker 1
But but you were also interested in what German history and history from below. Yes, but what do you personally remember from the everyday life of the German Jewish community? How was it, for instance, deliver out Finchley Strausses, they said.
01:16:56 Speaker 1
Along the stretch between Swiss Cottage and Frogner so on a on a on an everyday life.
01:17:00 Speaker 2
Basis. Well, you've got to remember that I was at boarding school. Yeah, for 10 years and then went to Oxford. So.
01:17:10 Speaker 2
I was not as much involved in that as, say, my my cousin Elizabeth, who was brought up really around the corner from Finchley Rd tube station and went to first the Holy Trinity Infant School, which is slap opposite richly Rd station.
01:17:30 Speaker 2
Where half the class, she says.
01:17:32 Speaker 2
Were the children of refugees he had brought up.
01:17:39 Speaker 2
Goldust Terrace Rd. Going down right by well waitress John Barnes is is more or less the centre of the community.
01:17:48 Speaker 2
I I didn't have that. I was taken quite often to one of the famous German Jewish restaurants where Austrian Jewish actually and the dorice opposite the famous Cos.
01:18:01 Speaker 2
My, my, my, my father, my uncle Henry.
01:18:07 Speaker 2
Favoured the Doris it difficult for it and it's more difficult for me to answer that question because most of my life at that time was lived in a very English.
01:18:20 Speaker 2
Surrounding a very English setting and.
01:18:25 Speaker 2
Uh.
01:18:26 Speaker 2
Of course, I mean, we went to these restaurants, we had a restaurant that sold.
01:18:35 Speaker 2
The philtre fish and.
01:18:39 Speaker 2
Is Mark herrings gold mops and things like that which I liked. And we went often to visit. Of course we went off and to visit friends up in Hampstead mainly, and in the area in West Hampstead we had family in West Hampstead, not far from here.
01:18:57 Speaker 2
We yes.
01:18:59 Speaker 2
It was well, it was like a sort of little bubble of almost 1930s Vienna.
01:19:07 Speaker 2
A bit of a little Vienna. Yeah. Yes. Lot of Viennese food and Viennese cooking in so far as you could could get the ingredients German spoken.
01:19:19 Speaker 2
My my great aunt, one of my, one of my great aunts, got out and came here. Hunter. Olga. She was born in 1870.
01:19:28 Speaker 2
9 she came when she was 60 on a domestic service permit that she lived with the younger members of the family, including my cousin Elizabeth. I talked about with her granddaughter.
01:19:40 Speaker 2
In in Goldust Terrace.
01:19:43 Speaker 2
And yes, and so that parents and their friends of these relatives, they talk about things that refugees from Vienna would talk about and.
01:19:56 Speaker 2
And and they had more Viennese, but also plenty of German friends and.
01:20:03 Speaker 2
Of course, they talked a lot about things that were of daily intricate temporary interest too, but a lot of a lot of it was.
01:20:13 Speaker 2
Slanted towards refugee intros.
01:20:16 Speaker 2
I'll tell you a story if I may. My grandmother didn't. She never spoke much English and she.
01:20:24 Speaker 2
And certainly didn't when she came as a holistic servant.
01:20:29 Speaker 2
And she was in the kitchen cooking and the Lady of the house was ill. The Lady of the House was ill. So the man of the house came down into the kitchen. Didn't of course know where anything was.
01:20:43 Speaker 2
And and he wanted.
01:20:45 Speaker 2
To clean something up.
01:20:48 Speaker 2
And he asked.
01:20:50 Speaker 2
We he.
01:20:54 Speaker 2
My grandmother was cooking salmon for dinner.
01:20:58 Speaker 2
And he wanted his cleaning product.
01:21:02 Speaker 2
Good looks after light said.
01:21:05 Speaker 2
Where's the locks like having it for dinner? Oh, you're having it for dinner. That's sort of that classic. That was the sort of that was the sort of thing that that my parents and their friends talked about. They talked about these linguistic Copas, you know.
01:21:26 Speaker 2
I can become a sausage much cheaper around the corner and all these other things, and yes, they and and lots of things about. Yes, they talked a lot about this sort of way in which British and German or Austrian culture didn't quite fit. And what the British did, those they admired.
01:21:46 Speaker 2
My parents admired the British great.
01:21:48 Speaker 2
They they they'd seen what the Viennese were capable of, and then they came here and they saw. What? What? The London, how the Londoners behave when you know when the when. When the van market was in Calais and the Luftwaffe was was bombing the hell out of them and they were sitting in air raid shelters.
01:22:10 Speaker 2
And they they were. They were very impressed and.
01:22:14 Speaker 2
But they made a lot of jokes about the British as well.
01:22:19 Speaker 1
Can we maybe briefly talk about the academic institutions that the continent of Britain founded in the UK and London, I think.
01:22:29 Speaker 1
Mainly of three or four highly influential institutions and our research field. So Vienna library. Yeah. The Leo Baeck institute. Yeah.
01:22:39 Speaker 1
Ajr, of course, you already mentioned it and the Centre for German and Austrian.
01:22:44 Speaker 1
Exi studies may.
01:22:46 Speaker 1
Wilbert yes, let us may start with Alfred Vina and his team. Can you say a few words about the Vienna Library?
01:22:55 Speaker 2
Well, yes, but I've used it. Of course. I've spoken there often.
01:23:01 Speaker 2
But I can't say anymore than is written in the histories of the Vienna Library. Yes, I mean, well, it goes back to an anti Nazi information office that was set up by the central farine terrain, Deutsche starts building and gardens.
01:23:21 Speaker 2
Before 1933, to try and inform people about the Nazis and Alfred Wiener, who was in charge of it, then took this these this material.
01:23:33 Speaker 2
To to Holland and in 1939, fortunately brought it over to this country, where it was used very much by the British Government because it is wonderful collection of documents and information which otherwise they didn't have and they understood the lamentably little about national social.
01:23:53 Speaker 2
Prism and I mean he has his wonderful collection of who collect your sort of newspapers and and had a a teams of volunteers cutting out articles, newspapers, all manner of documents relating to National socialism and the Holocaust.
01:24:12 Speaker 2
And when I it started in Manchester Square and north of Oxford Street, I don't remember that.
01:24:19 Speaker 2
But I do remember when it was in Devonshire Street, in very primitive premises, and then moved, I suppose probably about.
01:24:30 Speaker 2
20 years ago.
01:24:32 Speaker 2
Perhaps not quite that long to its present. Very nice premises in Russell Square.
01:24:39 Speaker 2
A quite unique institution, I think without equal anywhere in the world.
01:24:47 Speaker 2
You know, for for primary materials at the time, I don't think any of the big American institutions even can compete because they weren't doing it at that time. No, no.
01:24:59 Speaker 1
And can can one maybe say that all these 4 institutions I just mentioned are about the legacy of these continental Brittany?
01:25:06 Speaker 2
Yes, yes, in a way. I mean the AJR is slightly separate because it it it's not an academic institution. I mean, I'd like to think certainly that Richard Grunberger, when he edited the journal and myself when I took over from him in 2006 that we brought a.
01:25:26 Speaker 2
Or high intellectual quality or higher.
01:25:30 Speaker 2
Certainly the.
01:25:32 Speaker 2
Publications like the Jewish chronicle.
01:25:34 Speaker 2
But.
01:25:36 Speaker 2
Well, I wasn't writing for an academic audience.
01:25:41 Speaker 2
Which didn't bother me. On the contrary, I like writing for intelligent lay readers, but the others? Yes, I mean they are, and of course are in the Warburg is in a in a class of its own, really. But it's it's such a prestigious institution. And you, I mean.
01:26:00 Speaker 2
Is is a world centre for Art history, of course. I mean again.
01:26:06 Speaker 2
And in almost without equal.
01:26:09 Speaker 2
Going back so far.
01:26:12 Speaker 1
Yeah.
01:26:14 Speaker 2
The the research centre that you mentioned, of course a much more recent foundation, 1995, five of us who were working in the field, this got together and decided that we ought to where we work together a bit on projects like the oral history project that I mentioned decided that we should really.
01:26:36 Speaker 2
Put ourselves on a formal basis.
01:26:39 Speaker 2
And and then affiliated to the University of London to what was then a wonderful place, the Institute of Germanic Studies. It's where there been. The library is now.
01:26:50 Speaker 2
Chad's the best.
01:26:53 Speaker 2
Is generally recognised as the best library of German books outside German speaking countries.
01:27:01 Speaker 2
Then of course, that was all absorbed into the Senate House Library and lost its identity.
01:27:10 Speaker 2
Yes, and we we did that because we we we felt that if we were going to expand our activities, we needed some sort of administrative base.
01:27:21 Speaker 2
Somewhere where we could book Romans for our committee meetings, for our lectures, research, seminars, conferences. Because we'd started holding conferences.
01:27:31 Speaker 2
UM.
01:27:34 Speaker 2
And we had, we have some secretarial assistance, a little.
01:27:39 Speaker 2
And.
01:27:41 Speaker 2
And of course, have been the the research centre has gone really from strength to strength. They're now about 15 members of the committee covering a huge range of subjects.
01:27:52 Speaker 2
And.
01:27:54 Speaker 2
I'd like to think that it's a very happy institution and I don't know of any ill feelings, and I make it my business as chair to ensure that anybody that joins the committee will be for a good, good company when we go after our committee meetings to the Indian restaurant.
01:28:16 Speaker 2
And that they'll get on.
01:28:19 Speaker 2
And people it, I should say it's all volunteers. None of us have paid a penny.
01:28:25 Speaker 2
But the the colleagues are very they're very good. They're, you know, some of them. Many of them are much younger and still working.
01:28:34 Speaker 2
Some are recently graduated doctoral students you know.
01:28:41 Speaker 2
But they they they sort of, if, if, if someone proposes something and it's decided to proceed with it, then someone will will volunteer to to take it on. And you know, we have conferences every three years and publish the proceedings in our annually appearing yearbook, which has been going now since 1999.
01:29:05 Speaker 2
And it's a.
01:29:08 Speaker 2
Well, I think of course I I would. I think it's a rather remarkable little institution.
01:29:15 Speaker 2
Because it has done a great deal with almost no money, I say almost none because we got a donation.
01:29:24 Speaker 2
From the son.
01:29:26 Speaker 2
Two refugee actors, Martin and Hannah Miller and Albert Miller.
01:29:33 Speaker 2
But that we can only use for certain very specific purposes. Holding an biennial memorial rapture, we had Phillipe Sands, Bart Farnese. We've got Griselda Pollock for us. Very big names.
01:29:52 Speaker 2
UM.
01:29:55 Speaker 2
And as you know, to help finance visiting fellows coming to to London, because we consider it.
01:30:06 Speaker 2
An important part of our task to help.
01:30:11 Speaker 2
Further research.
01:30:13 Speaker 2
And you, we, we we fund doctoral students with the Miller money and we finance an archivist in the Senate House Library who is specifically devoted to exile studies and exile materials.
01:30:30 Speaker 2
And otherwise, everything that we do.
01:30:32 Speaker 2
2.
01:30:34 Speaker 2
Is done on a voluntary basis.
01:30:37 Speaker 1
Let me maybe finish this section with a broader question about the legacy of the continent of Britains that we actually taught already talked about. So do you think the image of the Exiles in the British society has changed from the time of your early studies to nowadays?
01:30:58 Speaker 1
Within these last almost 40 years.
01:31:02 Speaker 2
Well, yes, I think it has because of the general change in attitudes towards the Holocaust. Yeah. And of course, the refugees are quite likely perceived as victims of Nazi persecution. So I think they're.
01:31:20 Speaker 2
Sufferings have become.
01:31:23 Speaker 2
More visible, yes. More, more. Yeah, exactly where the publics become more aware of them.
01:31:33 Speaker 2
Another thing is with the passage of time that the experiences of the older refugees have tended to be pushed out rather by Kinder Transportees, I mean.
01:31:48 Speaker 2
The the the the amount of publicity given to the Kindertransport and to figures like Nicholas Winton. Yeah, is enormous. Not that I begrudge them.
01:31:58 Speaker 2
But compared to.
01:32:01 Speaker 2
The publicity given to groups like those that came on domestic service, yeah, permits not, admittedly, as immediately.
01:32:17 Speaker 2
Uh.
01:32:19 Speaker 2
Well, publicity favourable group is very marked. I mean nowadays, not many people would even know that large numbers of of refugees came as domestic servants. And of course the.
01:32:38 Speaker 2
Probably the biggest group of refugees who came under their own steam, as it were, and not on any particular scheme like the Kindertransport or the domestic service permits or the the men who came, who were released from concentration camp.
01:32:56 Speaker 2
And came on transit visas and were accommodated at Kitchener Camp in Kent.
01:33:02 Speaker 1
Even if you even during the war.
01:33:04 Speaker 2
You mean after the war? That was before there was before it was before? Yes.
01:33:11 Speaker 2
The.
01:33:14 Speaker 2
The Nazis announced that anybody.
01:33:19 Speaker 2
Well, it was mainly men who'd been arrested on the crystal and taken to camps like Sachsenhausen, Dachau.
01:33:29 Speaker 2
And anybody who could get documents?
01:33:35 Speaker 2
Allowing them into another country would be let out, though they have to leave Germany within two weeks or they'd be arrested and then there the outlook was pretty grim for them and the British government allowed people in.
01:33:53 Speaker 2
Even if they didn't have British visas, but if they had documents that seemed to allow them to get into another country, so if they had a boat ticket to Shanghai, so it was it, yeah. Or if you had.
01:34:07 Speaker 2
And an affidavit for the United States you could get in here. Of course, this is a fiction. They they never insisted that all these people move on and they accommodated them at this camp in in Canton anyway. But you know the the largest group of refugees just came singly.
01:34:27 Speaker 2
To individually who, like my parents, and they also tended to be.
01:34:35 Speaker 2
Rather blurred in the public memory because of course it's much easier to think of organised groups. Also, of course, for academics it's much much easier to write about Kinder Transportees because there are records and there are identifiable.
01:34:55 Speaker 2
Group. That is why, in my opinion at least, I am still the only person more or less.
01:35:03 Speaker 2
That has written a history of the refugees from Germany and Austria that goes.
01:35:12 Speaker 2
Well into the post war period after 1970, it's very difficult to write a history of people.
01:35:20 Speaker 2
Who are not easily identifiable as a group and about whom there are after about 1948, say.
01:35:28 Speaker 2
When they were naturalised and there there were no government or other documents and and.
01:35:36 Speaker 1
But do you think that there is nowadays an awareness of the contribution of these people of came to Britain as refugees to that, I say.
01:35:45 Speaker 1
To the British.
01:35:46 Speaker 1
Postal society in Chamorro.
01:35:48 Speaker 2
Certainly there is in in sort of that pretty cultivated educated circles because some of these people, of course.
01:35:59 Speaker 2
Their contribution was immense. I mean, anybody that knows anything about science will will, will, will know the famous Nobel Prize winners, and likewise in in the Arts and humanities. Yes, I think that's true though.
01:36:19 Speaker 2
Sometimes, of course, people don't know that that these well known figures are refugees. For example, you know Andrew Sacks in faulty towers with either Berlin. But.
01:36:37 Speaker 2
This is not well known at all. In fact, we interviewed him or bear interviewed him for Continental Britains he used to go around saying he's from Berlin, you know, you know.
01:36:38
Hmm.
01:36:55 Speaker 1
What about artists like Frank Auerbach?
01:36:57 Speaker 2
Yes, yes. Do you think Lucian Floyd, do you think it is known in Britain?
01:37:02 Speaker 2
Now.
01:37:03 Speaker 2
Yes, I think so. Anybody that knows anything about modern art? I think so. And the whole sort of Freud dynasty starting obviously with.
01:37:15 Speaker 2
Sigmund, but I think.
01:37:19 Speaker 2
People would have been aware of the of the contribution of Anna Freud and then the next generation, Lucien and Clement Freud, who was a they well known figure who was an MP and a sort of humorist, appeared a lot on the television.
01:37:38 Speaker 2
And he was also something of a celebrity chef. At one stage, he used to do cooking programme, telling his very well known figure.
01:37:48 Speaker 2
UM.
01:37:51 Speaker 2
And yes, there there are a certain number of them that, that, that had a high public profile. There was a man called Fritz Spiegel who who who used to make humorous programmes on the radio about the English language, you know, language versus speaker was very funny.
01:38:12 Speaker 2
Yeah, maybe that actually.
01:38:13 Speaker 1
Already brings us to the last section.
01:38:16 Speaker 1
The importance of this study.
01:38:18 Speaker 1
And I would like to start this last section with the first question. What is the social public role of form on German speaking Jews?
01:38:27 Speaker 1
In Britain today, is there actually today an outgoing?
01:38:32 Speaker 2
Well, what to say? Well, of course, most of them are no longer alive and and those that are alive are mostly.
01:38:43 Speaker 2
Too old to have much of A public role other than to appear as refugees or, and especially those that are Holocaust survivors, who I always treat as a separate category if their Holocaust survivors.
01:39:00 Speaker 2
By definition, they didn't come before the war and.
01:39:06 Speaker 2
Well, I mean their experience is so different and I would assume that the manner of their integration into society, it would be quite different because of the experiences they've had. Yeah.
01:39:20 Speaker 2
But for example, in the Association of Jewish Refugees, they now include the second generation are of course survivors. I mean second generation born here, pretty much integrated, assimilated.
01:39:39 Speaker 2
Still Jewish in many cases, of course. Yes, I think I think the image of the refugees from Germany and Austria is different from that of the rest of Anglo Jewry.
01:39:54 Speaker 2
UM.
01:39:56 Speaker 2
Certainly perceived as different by lots of lots of Anglo, Jew, Anglo Jewry.
01:40:04 Speaker 2
As being more interested in in culture and education.
01:40:10 Speaker 2
And.
01:40:13 Speaker 2
But really, the numbers involved were quite small, especially when compared with the huge migration from.
01:40:24 Speaker 2
The Caribbean from the Indian subcontinent, you know that.
01:40:29 Speaker 2
I think.
01:40:31 Speaker 2
I think when people nowadays think of.
01:40:36 Speaker 2
Immigration.
01:40:38 Speaker 2
They tend to think.
01:40:40 Speaker 2
Of the famous Windrush.
01:40:43 Speaker 1
When when we look at the, let's say, global history of migration.
01:40:47 Speaker 2
Yes, yes, yes.
01:40:49 Speaker 2
And pre war.
01:40:51 Speaker 2
Immigration, not so much.
01:40:54 Speaker 2
I mean, it was apart from anything else.
01:40:57 Speaker 2
Quite the fool. Get in here. And this was not a really a country of immigration in between the wars. If you exclude the Irish, there are special case because they be part of Britain till 1921 anyway.
01:41:14 Speaker 2
There were very few the German community had been more or less driven out by the First World War. I mean, when people people in this country think of immigrants, I am afraid to say I think they mainly think of people with different coloured sins.
01:41:29 Speaker 2
Or possibly with of of people who came in from the EU.
01:41:36 Speaker 2
After the country opened its borders to EU workers, says thicker Poles and Lithuanians now.
01:41:47 Speaker 1
Maybe we?
01:41:49 Speaker 1
Come to a few last questions and.
01:41:54 Speaker 1
And we'll look into the future of what research questions can maybe inform future studies in exercise studies. What open?
01:42:03 Speaker 1
Research questions do you see?
01:42:07 Speaker 2
Who?
01:42:08 Speaker 1
I mean, you already made just this link between exile studies and.
01:42:11 Speaker 1
Migration studies and.
01:42:12 Speaker 2
Yes, yes, yes. Well, of course, yes. There any number of very interesting questions that arise if you may. If you were to make comparative studies.
01:42:27 Speaker 2
Between the experience of.
01:42:32 Speaker 2
Middle class mostly. Well, not mostly, but predominantly middle class white refugees or 8 Jewish, but still white and.
01:42:47 Speaker 2
Believe in middle class Indian immigrants say you know, many of whom we came over here with were professionals, especially those that came from East Africa.
01:42:59 Speaker 2
And.
01:43:01 Speaker 2
It would be interesting.
01:43:04 Speaker 2
I mean putting it in its most basic.
01:43:09 Speaker 2
Nobody asks me where I originally came from and I was born only six years after my parents came to this country, whereas back people or people with brown skins can be asked where they came from and their grandparents came here and.
01:43:29 Speaker 2
I think one of the big differences.
01:43:32 Speaker 2
That affects really the whole of British society is that after the war and the first decades, this country was still very much defined by class.
01:43:45 Speaker 2
And I think it still is. I think class is underestimated now.
01:43:52 Speaker 2
And people look at race, perhaps too exclusively. I mean, take the last Prime Minister before Starmer. I I regularly see people say how astonishing.
01:44:05 Speaker 2
That an Indian could become Prime Minister of Great Britain.
01:44:09 Speaker 2
But from a bad point of view, as somebody that went to a public school and see.
01:44:13 Speaker 2
Well.
01:44:14 Speaker 2
Public school.
01:44:16 Speaker 2
The class issue helps people. The the former head boy of Winchester becomes Prime Minister to me. Not that much of a surprise at all. So the question of classes are slightly neglected.
01:44:30 Speaker 2
And I would say it was, I would say that one of the most important things and the most important factors influencing.
01:44:42 Speaker 2
The experience of the refugees from Germany and Austria and their descendants is the fact that they came in large measure from middle class backgrounds and they attempted to integrate at insofar as possible at much the same level. They did not settle in the East End of London.
01:45:04 Speaker 2
Like the poor Jews that came from Eastern Europe who were, in British terms, plainly working clothes, they settled in places like us. That's park and West Hampstead and gold is green.
01:45:17 Speaker 2
And and I I think that is very important and that seems to be not to have been researched at all really be very interesting to to go through addresses and things that you I'm sure you'd find in NW London.
01:45:37 Speaker 2
That you got a heavy concentration in areas which are easily recognisable as middle class and that.
01:45:45 Speaker 2
As soon I saw this when I was dealing with a Jr address, as soon as you get to areas like, well, if you go and West from from where I live from West Hampstead, West Hampstead was full of refugees. But if you go to killcam, the address is dry up almost entirely.
01:46:07 Speaker 2
I mean the whole.
01:46:09 Speaker 2
Social background of the refugees.
01:46:13 Speaker 2
Seems to me not to have been.
01:46:16 Speaker 2
Investigated.
01:46:21 Speaker 2
Partly, I suppose, because people like me don't have statistical training and have done it on a much more.
01:46:28 Speaker 2
Well, I might almost say impressionistic way. If that isn't being a little harsh on my own research.
01:46:36 Speaker 2
Yes. As I said there the that sort of thing will be brought out by by comparative studies, yeah.
01:46:43 Speaker 2
And the.
01:46:45 Speaker 2
The main comparative study that I know of is by a colleague of mine at the research sent to Rachel pistol, who compared the internment here with the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbour, which is.
01:47:04 Speaker 2
Very interesting.
01:47:09 Speaker 2
I would have thought that.
01:47:12 Speaker 2
A lot of.
01:47:15 Speaker 2
Attention has been paid to culturally prominent refugees.
01:47:21 Speaker 2
But where did that culture come from? I mean, there, this, this, this. It seems to me is.
01:47:30 Speaker 2
A case where you've got that a very tall trees growing out of the General forest, I mean, yet it is a.
01:47:40 Speaker 2
A. A community that had a very high regard for culture. Yeah, even in its home countries, and actually was very attached to German culture. Yeah, despite what happened after 1933.
01:47:55 Speaker 1
Even though maybe one has to admit most of them as he described.
01:48:00 Speaker 1
And timander flucht.
01:48:02 Speaker 1
Actually came from a rather modest background, let's say one in 10 generations. Yes, yes.
01:48:09 Speaker 2
But Even so.
01:48:13 Speaker 2
I'm thinking of someone that was.
01:48:17 Speaker 2
A professor with Oxford who I knew personally went from the days I was undergraduate, Peter Paulson, who was born in the and brought up in the 20th district in Vienna, which is.
01:48:29 Speaker 2
Pretty humble. I mean, it's not the second district which is the Leopold Stone.
01:48:35 Speaker 2
Which was really where poor Jews from Nice settled at the.
01:48:39 Speaker 2
That, that, that the 20th district was adjoining very, very, very humble. But but parents very concerned for his education. And and he ended up as Gladstone Professor of Public and Ministry of Government and Public Administration at Oxford.
01:48:59 Speaker 1
And it would probably involve another.
01:49:03 Speaker 1
Along side would be social question, which is the mentality.
01:49:07 Speaker 1
Yes, yes, yes.
01:49:12 Speaker 2
I mean, I tried to research that through the AJR information, the old journal, that was my, almost my main interest.
01:49:25 Speaker 2
Coming from a literary background myself.
01:49:31 Speaker 2
The colleague I mentioned.
01:49:33 Speaker 2
Just a couple of minutes ago, Rachel Pistol is now carrying out statistical research. She's researched.
01:49:43 Speaker 2
The number of journeys from the various cities in Germany and Austria journeys coming here and has shown.
01:49:52 Speaker 2
As I expected that the largest single number came from Vienna, although of course the Jewish population of Berlin was greater.
01:50:02 Speaker 2
But not so many came here. They went elsewhere. Most the Viennese came large numbers here, that sort of thing. And.
01:50:13 Speaker 2
She is also directing a really big project on gathering together all sorts of Holocaust testimonies in this country.
01:50:28 Speaker 2
Which I think is another thing that needs to be done because you've got all these series of interviews and and centres here and there like there's the Holocaust Centre in the north.
01:50:40 Speaker 2
And.
01:50:41 Speaker 1
There's either venal library there, or with even in the early.
01:50:43 Speaker 1
Years of project on.
01:50:45 Speaker 1
Holocaust testimony.
01:50:47 Speaker 2
Yes, yes.
01:50:48 Speaker 2
And.
01:50:50 Speaker 2
And lots and lots were quite a lot of people working away in their own little area without being that much aware of or in contact with other centres. Yeah, that brings me maybe to the very last mission, which is a bit more personal. One, what are your?
01:51:10 Speaker 1
On future research projects, or what unwritten books manuscripts.
01:51:15 Speaker 1
Do you have in your when in nature?
01:51:19 Speaker 2
Well, I should start by boasting. I've just finished an article where you know it on the continuity which from the Centre for Hire in Germany before 33 and.
01:51:38 Speaker 2
Institutions in Britain, and particularly the AJL.
01:51:43 Speaker 2
The thing I'm actually writing at the moment is nothing to do really. With refuge. It's it's it's on concepts of revolution in.
01:51:53 Speaker 2
20th century German political drama, which has been an interest of mine for years.
01:51:59 Speaker 2
And and I offered the paper to the Doctor Gamma Aniston Tak in band strike in September. That is something I'm doing at the moment and then back to the roots of John studies. Yes, yes, yes.
01:52:20 Speaker 2
I don't know if I shall write another.
01:52:23 Speaker 2
Big book, partly because of the difficulties I have in getting out to do a lot of research.
01:52:30 Speaker 2
And.
01:52:32 Speaker 2
But I shall.
01:52:35 Speaker 2
I shall certainly continue speaking.
01:52:39 Speaker 2
And probably writing up what I speak, for example, in November, I'm speaking.
01:52:47 Speaker 2
Well, you know, I'm.
01:52:48 Speaker 2
Speaking at British at the British Academy.
01:52:52 Speaker 2
On the SAG offering to Britain fellowship, which the refugees funded in the 1960s as a gesture of thanks to to Britain, I'll probably write that up.
01:53:04 Speaker 2
And and I would like.
01:53:08 Speaker 2
To put.
01:53:10 Speaker 2
What I consider to be a refugee perspective on the whole subject.
01:53:16 Speaker 2
Because.
01:53:19 Speaker 2
There aren't many refugee.
01:53:23 Speaker 2
Well, descendants of refugees working in this field most, most of the people, a lot of them are British Jews.
01:53:31 Speaker 2
And and a lot are just British historians.
01:53:37 Speaker 2
And.
01:53:39 Speaker 2
They.
01:53:41 Speaker 2
Almost entirely. Take a very critical view of the British Government.
01:53:48 Speaker 2
Not unreasonably.
01:53:51 Speaker 2
Because they look at the documents and the the government must always say, oh, we can't let in too many.
01:53:56 Speaker 2
Of these people that.
01:53:58 Speaker 2
That that is.
01:54:00 Speaker 2
Political publicity. If you look at the actual actions they did, let it pleasure people and and also then the the description of the experience.
01:54:15 Speaker 2
Of the refugees as.
01:54:19 Speaker 2
Pretty negative, which is not, of course not my or my families experience, but wasn't the experience of most of the people that I knew and grew up with.
01:54:33 Speaker 2
You know, I regularly see things like ohh the Kindertransport wasn't as great as it was made out to be in. In particular, they let the children in, but the British Government excluded the parents.
01:54:47 Speaker 2
But that's not true. Strictly speaking, they didn't exclude the parents. There was that the the the parents were no more excluded than any other group of of of Jewish adults. I don't say they were allowed in or masses. Perhaps they should have been well, if the if the Nazi government.
01:55:07 Speaker 2
Would never have allowed all these thousands of parents to come out. Ohh yes, you know, we've got to be two manage these Jews and not separate them from their children. I don't quite see that.
01:55:21 Speaker 2
Or the British cancelled all the visas and wouldn't let Kinder transports in after the outbreak of war.
01:55:31 Speaker 1
So, but maybe just to finish this so there.
01:55:35 Speaker 1
Is no desire to write a last or another book. Any of these issues that you already I'm. I don't think it would be a book, but I would like to sort of put the.
01:55:49 Speaker 2
The positive case for the refugee experience because.
01:55:56 Speaker 2
But it it it seems to me it's more or less the regard for academics to be to take a critical stance and there's nothing wrong with that. You know, you don't want academics fawning on on, on, on, on.
01:56:12 Speaker 2
Government.
01:56:15 Speaker 2
That I think I think some.
01:56:19 Speaker 2
Uh.
01:56:20 Speaker 2
Your figures were biassed. I think the pendulum swung a bit too far. Yeah, yeah, I would like to do that. Probably something will turn up or some idea will turn up that I will then decide to write up in an article. But a book I I'm not sure so.
01:56:40 Speaker 1
Thank you for the conversation. Well, thank
01:56:42 Speaker 2
You for interviewing me was that.
01:56:44 Speaker 2
Hey.
01:56:45 Speaker 2
It was a pleasure.