Geneaology
Thanks to Nazi anti-Semitism, we know a lot about our German ancestors. Everyone was required to carry a document which proved you were not Jewish, back as far as possible. My mother still has hers "just in case." It shows the following for her father's side of the family:
Martin Erich Alfred Ideler, b. December 8, 1893 in Berlin, baptized in the evangelical church (Lutheran) at Dorotheen Kirche. He married Luise Martha Leonie Anne-Marie von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau December 24, 1917 in Berlin-Lichterfelde.
Martin's father was Paul Adolf Alfred Ideler, merchant, b. April 24, 1953 in Primkenau (now Przemków), baptized in the evangelical church in Primkenau, and married to Johanna Riemer September 22, 1887 in Berlin.
Martin's mother was Johanna Emilie Riemer, born January 3, 1964 in Seelow, baptized in the evangelical church in Seelow.
Martin's paternal grandparents were Karl Paul Eduard Ideler and Amalie Emilie Ida Tschöpe. Their parents were Carl Samuel Ideler and Karoline Sophie Francisca Süßmann; and Johann Christian Tschöpe and Marie Rosine Berettschneider. It is possible that Sophie was Jewish, but Mom was very careful not to research the Süßmann side of the family!
Martin's maternal grandparents were Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer and Johanne Charlotte Ruschke. Their parents were Johann Karl Gottlieb Riemer and Justine Wilhelina Kolbe; and Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Ruschke and Johanna Charlotta Haesecke.
Martin Erich Alfred Ideler, b. December 8, 1893 in Berlin, baptized in the evangelical church (Lutheran) at Dorotheen Kirche. He married Luise Martha Leonie Anne-Marie von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau December 24, 1917 in Berlin-Lichterfelde.
Martin's father was Paul Adolf Alfred Ideler, merchant, b. April 24, 1953 in Primkenau (now Przemków), baptized in the evangelical church in Primkenau, and married to Johanna Riemer September 22, 1887 in Berlin.
Martin's mother was Johanna Emilie Riemer, born January 3, 1964 in Seelow, baptized in the evangelical church in Seelow.
Martin's paternal grandparents were Karl Paul Eduard Ideler and Amalie Emilie Ida Tschöpe. Their parents were Carl Samuel Ideler and Karoline Sophie Francisca Süßmann; and Johann Christian Tschöpe and Marie Rosine Berettschneider. It is possible that Sophie was Jewish, but Mom was very careful not to research the Süßmann side of the family!
Martin's maternal grandparents were Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer and Johanne Charlotte Ruschke. Their parents were Johann Karl Gottlieb Riemer and Justine Wilhelina Kolbe; and Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Ruschke and Johanna Charlotta Haesecke.
Disclaimer
Life: Truth is a mayfly–short-lived and fragile. You can't catch it or you'll crush it. Mom may have had post-traumatic stress disorder from her teenage and young adult years in Germany. As kids, we heard story after story about her war experiences, and occasionally a few stories about her parents. As we got older, we began to recognize set pieces, which changed, it seemed, not as she remembered more detail, but as the demands of the story dictated. And of course, my own memory, not of Mom's life, but of her memories of her life, is even more brittle. I never had the idea that I could nail down the facts, so when I interviewed Mom as an elderly woman, I just wanted to get the cadence of her speech, the shape of her mind. Looking back, it's pretty clear that her dementia began, insidiously, fairly early on ... if it was dementia after all (you see how the truth is so fragile?). She said that even as a child, people said her head was in the clouds because she could never track reality. (Or, my memory fails me, maybe they said her head was up in the air. Anyway, you get the idea.) It's when I try for something like this biography that it gets frustrating. Exactly what happened? And when? There's the filter of Mom, and the scrim of a barely-understood foreign language, and the quivering rage that people get when they write about Germany in the years of my grandfather's youth and middle age. I've done my best, and this is one of the few places where you'll see an apology or disclaimer. I don't want to clutter things up with too many "I don't knows." Anyway, I am not going to make stuff up, and that's about all you can be sure of.
Martin's family (from interviews with Esther Ideler Norris, 8/75, 6/98, 7/05.
Johanna Emilie Riemer was my father’s mother. Her father was a Stadtmusickus, a city musician. There was not very much money there, she had seen poverty and art and music and all that. Her father became an alcoholic, so she didn’t have a very happy background, and she married a rich merchant.
She had a big typewriter and did all the financial transactions for her merchant husband. She had four children, and a cook, and household help, and a nanny when the children were small. She carried her weight.
Then, later on in World War I, the oldest son, my father’s oldest brother Hans, became a lawyer and later a judge in a small town in northern Germany, possibly Oldenburg.
The second studied medicine.
The daughter Grethe went to finishing school and met and married a Swede, and they are the Hokkansens.
The youngest was my father, Martin Erich Alfred Ideler. He was the youngest of a merchant family, and his father had a store on Unter den Linden, which was the main parade street between palaces. They lived really close by in a very large flat that had five or six bedrooms and a huge living room and a giant kitchen. Grandmother Johanna was a business woman, and she kept the books of the quite extensive business of exotic fruits. They had several cellars in the office with different kinds of temperatures for the different fruits that were brought to the Kaiser's table. And so Grandfather was supervising all the fruit bowls and the displays and the banquets and so at the king's table. Like, all the strawberries had to be the same size. And of course, all the rejects ended up on his family’s table. They had all these wonderful things to eat. He was at the palace often, and so he dealt with the underlings and with the servants and with the valets and was familiar with every bit of gossip about the royal family. He became a cynic. So, he was a free thinker, my father's father, a hardworking man.
And my father, the baby of the family, grew up with luxuries. The way he learned to go bicycle riding, was he was brought by taxi to the Hippodrome in the Tiergarten. Well, there was a man who had all these bicycles on ropes, and you went around, and you had white kid gloves and a bowler hat on. And he always wore silken underwear.
His father was quite strict, but Martin had his own ideas and thought, "Well I don't need money, it grows on trees, and I will just live simply, and have here and there a sale of some of my artwork." He was allowed to study art because he was just desperate to do it. He studied first with Lovis-Korinth, who was a very famous Bavarian impressionist, and then with this man (whom Mom identified as Mewes. I can't find a reference for him).
At home Vati wasn't sure what to do with us kids, he was more the gentle intellectual. The whole Ideler family was more affectionate when the kids grew up. His friends at the University also were known in the art educator field and hung out in coffeehouses. They got him a high-up position at the Paris art exhibit even though he wasn't a Nazi.
My name "Esther" was chosen from a Strindberg play, "Die Gothischen Zimmer." Esther was the anti-bourgeoise firebrand. If I had been a boy, my name would have been "Kaspar." My parents had wanted to emigrate to Sweden because Vati's sister had moved there and it was a peaceful country.
Sundays he'd take the family to the museum. Axel would throw a tantrum so he wouldn't have to go. Sometimes it worked. Later he wrote from the frontlines that he wished he'd seen more.
She had a big typewriter and did all the financial transactions for her merchant husband. She had four children, and a cook, and household help, and a nanny when the children were small. She carried her weight.
Then, later on in World War I, the oldest son, my father’s oldest brother Hans, became a lawyer and later a judge in a small town in northern Germany, possibly Oldenburg.
The second studied medicine.
The daughter Grethe went to finishing school and met and married a Swede, and they are the Hokkansens.
The youngest was my father, Martin Erich Alfred Ideler. He was the youngest of a merchant family, and his father had a store on Unter den Linden, which was the main parade street between palaces. They lived really close by in a very large flat that had five or six bedrooms and a huge living room and a giant kitchen. Grandmother Johanna was a business woman, and she kept the books of the quite extensive business of exotic fruits. They had several cellars in the office with different kinds of temperatures for the different fruits that were brought to the Kaiser's table. And so Grandfather was supervising all the fruit bowls and the displays and the banquets and so at the king's table. Like, all the strawberries had to be the same size. And of course, all the rejects ended up on his family’s table. They had all these wonderful things to eat. He was at the palace often, and so he dealt with the underlings and with the servants and with the valets and was familiar with every bit of gossip about the royal family. He became a cynic. So, he was a free thinker, my father's father, a hardworking man.
And my father, the baby of the family, grew up with luxuries. The way he learned to go bicycle riding, was he was brought by taxi to the Hippodrome in the Tiergarten. Well, there was a man who had all these bicycles on ropes, and you went around, and you had white kid gloves and a bowler hat on. And he always wore silken underwear.
His father was quite strict, but Martin had his own ideas and thought, "Well I don't need money, it grows on trees, and I will just live simply, and have here and there a sale of some of my artwork." He was allowed to study art because he was just desperate to do it. He studied first with Lovis-Korinth, who was a very famous Bavarian impressionist, and then with this man (whom Mom identified as Mewes. I can't find a reference for him).
At home Vati wasn't sure what to do with us kids, he was more the gentle intellectual. The whole Ideler family was more affectionate when the kids grew up. His friends at the University also were known in the art educator field and hung out in coffeehouses. They got him a high-up position at the Paris art exhibit even though he wasn't a Nazi.
My name "Esther" was chosen from a Strindberg play, "Die Gothischen Zimmer." Esther was the anti-bourgeoise firebrand. If I had been a boy, my name would have been "Kaspar." My parents had wanted to emigrate to Sweden because Vati's sister had moved there and it was a peaceful country.
Sundays he'd take the family to the museum. Axel would throw a tantrum so he wouldn't have to go. Sometimes it worked. Later he wrote from the frontlines that he wished he'd seen more.
Esther on Martin's WWI experience (From interviews in 6/98, 5/00.)
After his art studies came WWI and my father was drafted. Of course, having his sister marry a Swede, and he had been in Denmark, and you had just a few gold coins in your pocket and went without passport into any country you wnated. And then came WWI, where suddenly you were supposed to kill people who didn't have the same flag as you, and it didn't make any sense.
During the war, he leraned that people from different socioeconomic resources were people too. Due to his status he was a lieutenant, and his sergeant was an older man, a professional military man, who took this young lieutenant in tow, and said, "Hey, listen, this is how it's done."
"Yeah, but I don't see it."
"You don't have any idea where to look." For instance, in France, in enemy territory, when they were supposed to inspect a restaurant, he had no idea that there were back rooms until the sergeant told him.
Vati still had nightmares of the war. Vati's battalion was an emergency battalion, so he saw all the major battles of WWI, arriving when it was already full of corpses. One of his sayings was, "So schlimm wie Verdun wird es nie" –"It can never be as bad as Verdun." (The Battle of Verdun lasted 10 months, with 70,000 casualties per month). He was at the Somme (a four-and-a-half month battle with a million casualties), and the Ardennes Mountains.
Verdun is in an area where there is karst, a light rock formed from sediments, porous and calcium rich, infertile, the water goes down and builds caves. Often some of those things cave in and the surface is pockmarked. There is very little vegetation, just stuff with shallow roots. Farmers have improved it with fertilizer. Vati was there in July, with extreme heat. The soldiers had built trenches just wide enough so two people could squeeze by, and their heads poked out so they had to crouch. There were no latrines in there. They couldn't build the walls up so they took the decaying corpses and built up these walls around the trenches. Every once in a while, there was cholera or typhus. There were several indications of trench fever. One was that the whole battalion would see white rats, everywhere. Another was that when they ate something it would go through in five minutes, undigested. Then they would take them out and put them in a sanatorium for a few months, and when they could function again, they would send them back to the trenches. There were 3,000 troops in his regiment, and only two survived. His brother got shot in the brain and a quarter of brain was taken out and so he was incapacitated and when his mother got too old to take care of him he had to be put in a sanitarium together with mostly naval officers whose ships had sunk in the battles around Denmark.
He said that at Christmas time, they had packets of cigarettes that they would throw out of the trench into the other one, you know, and reciprocated, and then the day after Christmas somebody shot into the air and said, okay, now it is wartime again and we kill each other."
When we went to Paris in 1937 when the train ran through Verdun from Berlin we saw the farmers with specially made plows pulled by oxen. They had five-yard long handles. Mines worked themselves up to the surface and detonated.
When my parents went for a walk in the woods and there was a bigger tree, Martin would hesitate and scan to see if anyone was hiding behind the tree. Two times cholera and one time typhus. His innards were just scar tissue for the rest of his life.
During the war, he leraned that people from different socioeconomic resources were people too. Due to his status he was a lieutenant, and his sergeant was an older man, a professional military man, who took this young lieutenant in tow, and said, "Hey, listen, this is how it's done."
"Yeah, but I don't see it."
"You don't have any idea where to look." For instance, in France, in enemy territory, when they were supposed to inspect a restaurant, he had no idea that there were back rooms until the sergeant told him.
Vati still had nightmares of the war. Vati's battalion was an emergency battalion, so he saw all the major battles of WWI, arriving when it was already full of corpses. One of his sayings was, "So schlimm wie Verdun wird es nie" –"It can never be as bad as Verdun." (The Battle of Verdun lasted 10 months, with 70,000 casualties per month). He was at the Somme (a four-and-a-half month battle with a million casualties), and the Ardennes Mountains.
Verdun is in an area where there is karst, a light rock formed from sediments, porous and calcium rich, infertile, the water goes down and builds caves. Often some of those things cave in and the surface is pockmarked. There is very little vegetation, just stuff with shallow roots. Farmers have improved it with fertilizer. Vati was there in July, with extreme heat. The soldiers had built trenches just wide enough so two people could squeeze by, and their heads poked out so they had to crouch. There were no latrines in there. They couldn't build the walls up so they took the decaying corpses and built up these walls around the trenches. Every once in a while, there was cholera or typhus. There were several indications of trench fever. One was that the whole battalion would see white rats, everywhere. Another was that when they ate something it would go through in five minutes, undigested. Then they would take them out and put them in a sanatorium for a few months, and when they could function again, they would send them back to the trenches. There were 3,000 troops in his regiment, and only two survived. His brother got shot in the brain and a quarter of brain was taken out and so he was incapacitated and when his mother got too old to take care of him he had to be put in a sanitarium together with mostly naval officers whose ships had sunk in the battles around Denmark.
He said that at Christmas time, they had packets of cigarettes that they would throw out of the trench into the other one, you know, and reciprocated, and then the day after Christmas somebody shot into the air and said, okay, now it is wartime again and we kill each other."
When we went to Paris in 1937 when the train ran through Verdun from Berlin we saw the farmers with specially made plows pulled by oxen. They had five-yard long handles. Mines worked themselves up to the surface and detonated.
When my parents went for a walk in the woods and there was a bigger tree, Martin would hesitate and scan to see if anyone was hiding behind the tree. Two times cholera and one time typhus. His innards were just scar tissue for the rest of his life.
Esther on her father's teaching and war in general (from an interview January 2008)
My father ran a college course, or a high school course in art. He had a large room with tables for kids to do their art, and then he also had a separate room for himself with lots of storage of art for the art history classes. When the kids were drafted and had to go to the front, they usually came to him and they said, “Mr. Ideler, we know you think differently than our parents and our government, and we come to you to get your opinion on what to do when we are in battle." I don’t know what he told them, but he encouraged them to do their own thinking. There was the son of their best friends, his name was Hannes, and we spent many vacations together, he was 3 months younger than I was. He was drafted. You were drafted, you didn’t have a say-so. He ws in the battle of Montecasino in Italy. He fell into a crater and injured his leg so he didn’t crawl out, and when he did, he found that his whole battalion was killed. Then he went home and had a nervous breakdown. His mother’s sister had married a merchant from Constantinople in Turkey, so they sent the boy to them because they couldn’t have any children and they wanted to adopt him. He was a photographer, and he had a lady friend and they started a photographic business. A little bit later, we got the news that he had committed suicide. He said that his batallion had been killed, all his friends, and he was left. He didn’t find a way in the world.
This is the other side of warfare. You take young people in the beginning of their adult life, and shake it all up, and they don’t know what to do and they kill themselves. Of course, that is one of the things where a woman comes in. But she has to be very understanding.For instance, I was visiting a boyfriend in the hospital, and in that station there were hundreds of young people in their early 20’s with facial injuries, imagine, I saw all these things. Of course, they had had girlfriends and engagements, planning to get married. With only half a face, they said, “no, we cannot do it.” Many of these people were pacifists. THey had traveled widely in Europe. They had been in Italy and France. My father had been in the trenches, fighting against the French. He said on Christmas day, they threw packets of cigarettes across to the other people, to say, ‘we are not there with our hearts, we are ordered to shoot, but we don’t want to.'
I keep coming back to this because we are known in Europe as an aggressive nation. Our government makes fortunes with their killing machines. We are wasting our wealth and our possibilities by doing the wrong thing. This country, in comparison with Europe, well, it’s just about as big as Europe, but it has so many natural riches, agriculture, forest, the sea, big rivers. They say, ‘we don’t need any immigrants, we are overpopulated, ridiculous, In China, just about as big as the United States, there are a billion people living there. Somehow they have this rule that you can have only one child.
This is the other side of warfare. You take young people in the beginning of their adult life, and shake it all up, and they don’t know what to do and they kill themselves. Of course, that is one of the things where a woman comes in. But she has to be very understanding.For instance, I was visiting a boyfriend in the hospital, and in that station there were hundreds of young people in their early 20’s with facial injuries, imagine, I saw all these things. Of course, they had had girlfriends and engagements, planning to get married. With only half a face, they said, “no, we cannot do it.” Many of these people were pacifists. THey had traveled widely in Europe. They had been in Italy and France. My father had been in the trenches, fighting against the French. He said on Christmas day, they threw packets of cigarettes across to the other people, to say, ‘we are not there with our hearts, we are ordered to shoot, but we don’t want to.'
I keep coming back to this because we are known in Europe as an aggressive nation. Our government makes fortunes with their killing machines. We are wasting our wealth and our possibilities by doing the wrong thing. This country, in comparison with Europe, well, it’s just about as big as Europe, but it has so many natural riches, agriculture, forest, the sea, big rivers. They say, ‘we don’t need any immigrants, we are overpopulated, ridiculous, In China, just about as big as the United States, there are a billion people living there. Somehow they have this rule that you can have only one child.
Esther on her parents (from an interview 6/98)
How did the two get together? Now that’s interesting. The first Christmas, my mother right away, just like I did too, 30 years later, became a Red Cross assistant nurse. There were many books written by women who were outraged about the war and said the women have to heal while the men are murdering each other. She worked with a very famous doctor who after a short while ran out of medications so they had to use herbs, and hot and cold compresses, and all this kind of stuff. And that she brought into her marriage, and we were treated that way when we had bronchitis or a sore throat or so. There were herbs, and it was hot and cold compresses, and stuff like that.
But, how did they meet? At the first Christmas, all the young people, cousins, and people whom she knew, were sent a Christmas package, and she made baked gingerbread men for every one of them. It so happened, that my father who was just an acquaintance that didn’t seem to have much in common, got this gingerbread man, and that was the only present that he got from home. And so a correspondence began.
Both my parents felt rebellious against the way things were done. Now, my mother's father, who had been an officer in the Prussian army, was quite a loyal citizen and all that, in contrast to my father's father, who had seen too much of the royal court to be a true believer. And my mother was so horrified by the onset of the war that she had her own spiritual awakening, although she did love her father.
And it was the time, too, when the old regime of the aristocracy and the burgeoning rich middle class came to an end and was considered lacking in substance and spirituality by most of the young intellectuals and artists. Art Nouveau was a turning away from the Victorian stuff. So then when my father came into the war and the military and all these enormous new impressions, he became a different person. My mother matured too and then her father died I think in 1917, and in 1918 they were married.
Both of them studied to become teachers in high school. My mother was teaching children who had grown up with mothers working and fathers in the war, or orphaned, and she couldn’t handle them. They were just too undisciplined, too wild. She was teaching art, and they would just put the tables one on top of the other and kick them so they would fall down, and the principal came in, you know?
He met Georg von der Vring (later to become a famous poet) in teaching school, and his wife, and they became best friends. They were in the same art school and art classes together. They were a group of young people who were tossing around new ideas. There were lots of Indian philosophers like Rabindranath Tagore, and they studied comparative religions and all this kind of stuff, because the old system had collapsed, the feudal system had collapsed, and what was the new order?
My father, as a young man but also oftentimes later on, had times of deep, deep depression, where his mood was just black. And the mother, having had a very comfortable living before, and the family had money invested in the zoo and in government bonds, and it all was wiped out. While my maternal grandmother had real estate, several apartment houses. She also held a big mortgage for her brother in Poland and so there was money coming from there regularly. I think she had given half of her dowry to him.
So after marriage Martin and Lonni set up a little studio, and my father painted, or designed backdrops for movies and designed all these cardboard decorations for the first “flicks,” you know, big throne-like easy chairs and so, out of cardboard, just the facade, and behind there were little stools where the actors sat on. He did quite a few fantastic backdrops of futuristic movies and such. It was just the very beginning of film, the UFA Studios in Berlin.
They had a little studio with a slanted glass top. She made batiked little chemises, and they were like hippies. My father had grown up with silken underwear and white glassé gloves and said, “I am an artist, but I am a borgoise, and I never will be a plebeian.” Whereas many of the other artists wanted then to talk Low German and wanted to belong to the people, although most of them came from very wealthy families.
Then suddenly, my mother became pregnant, and now what? Her mother said, “Look, the children have left the house, the house can be divided into two apartments, and there’s a garden. In the 1920's, she sold two parcels of land from behind the house. We watched two houses built on them. But there was still ample room. We had lots of fruit trees, and in the front we had pine trees of different kinds, and blue fir, and hazelnuts, and lots of berry bushes, and a rose bed, and a slanted bed of perennials and a verandah on which most of the summer days were spent in the shade of the roofed area. My father painted doors and wallpaperd every room nicely. We lived upstairs and only used one room below for a sitting and dining room, after it was changed from a studio for Martin when I was a child. He was given a big studio with a giant window upstairs later.
Then my father became a teacher after finishing college, and started working in a high school that was really close to the railroad station of Triederstrasse, really in the centrum of the city.
The east of the city, Alexanderplatz, was mostly populated by blue collar workers. Many of them came from Poland. I was half a head taller than the rest of the people, and when I transfered and waited for the train in the west I was half a head shorter than the rest of the people. The west winds were predominant, and so industrial pollution drifted to the east, and the west had the fresh air from the pine forests that surrounded the city.
And so, what about the life of my young parents? They moved into grandmother’s house and Vati, being a city slicker, spent much time with a group of men about ten years older than him, very famous in the movement of art education in schools. He was sent to Paris in ‘37 to arrange the art section of young people in the German pavilion in Paris, although he was not a Party member.
So both of these people, very intelligent in their own right. Vati had, just like Suzanne, very little sense for correct spelling, and my mother would always proofread his letters. And my mother was very much like you, she was a frustrated housewife. Not quite tidy. For instance, she said, “Oh, we don’t have adequate storage, my bed linens for six people, don’t fit into my cupboards.” Well, we were already teenagers, we said, “Don’t sweat it, Mom, let us putter for an hour,” and we took everything out and folded it properly, and half of the storage area was empty. So it was. Personally, she was tremendously neat. But then she started having thyroid problems and became very overweight, you know how she was. And with that ever more shy and very much loved because she was a spirited woman, a passionate woman.
Mutti lived, had companionship with my grandmother, Oma-ma. Omama was a gourmet cook, she cooked for the whole family while Mutti went to the greengrocer’s market twice a week to get fruits and vegetables and also meat, and while my father taught in school and afterwards he would often spend until ‘way late with high school students. And then in the evening he went to the Central Institute fur Kunst und Unterricht, and these were people whose work is even now being considered. They maintained that everybody can write a report if schooled with the basics, and everybody can paint a report of what he sees. It is only because we separate all of these things that we think some people are talented and some people are not. It’s just a matter of sensitizing oneself to the gift of observation. So he’d come home late, and 7:00 in the morning he’d left. School started at 8, and the commute took about an hour. Three-quarters of an hour for the train, and a quarter of an hour to walk to the station.
The European professional man had to be on top of his profession, or else he went into a very minor clerical position. That meant really his all. The competition was much fiercer than here. There were too many people, loads of people.
Then came Verien, vacation time. He was really a very solicitous father, he cut our hair once a month, he was really cuddly, and we were cuddly with him, we would always try to sit on his lap, or lean against his shoulder or whatever. He was a very tender father, but it was not really his cup of tea.
Mutti, having come with a silver spoon in her mouth, where there were servants and so on, suddenly had to see that there was adequate food on the table. She was very modern, the children had always one fruit, one sandwich with meat or cheese on it for our school lunch. It was not like when I came here, it was still like in my grandmother’s time when there was lots of butter and cream and desserts, we didn’t have that, we had vegetables, and three times a week we had meat with them, and the main meal was at noon, and we also had, when it was time for berries and all that, my grandmother would can them, in glass jars, one part of the cellar was made for just that, with shelves, and there were fresh apples, which smelled wonderful, and there were all these preserves.
And so mother was really busy with early childhood stuff, and improving the house. Grandmother was in charge of cooking and the garden, which she did with great delight. And correspondence. She had a vast correspondence.
Grandmother also, once or twice a month had a kaffee klatsch with many of her old cousins or cousin’s cousins that lived in the Berlin neighborhood, or suburbs. They played whist together and laughed in cascades like ha, ha, ha ha, but not guffawing, that was not done.
The thing that tied my parents together was art. They were both of the Impressionistic school. They were both in the beginning communists, like every other intellectual. They said, in Russia nothing really has worked. But there was great improvement under Communism to what the small town people and the agricultural populace had to endure during the tzar times, there it was strictly the tzar and his bosses, with the middle class and lower middle class, or, they didn’t have much.
They read a lot and discussed a lot and were really very happily married. She, the town-and-country girl, and he the urbanite who for many discussions didn’t go to the Centralinstitute, but also in one of these cafe’s, you sat indoors, you had your cup of coffee, and there was a rack with international newspapers, and you would not just read every one of the 17 party newspapers, but you would read certain papers that were available in these cafe’s. The one was the Romanesque Cafe, that was just right by the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtnis Kirche, which is until now a symbol of the destruction of Berlin.
To show you one side of his fatherly concern, when my brother had diphtheria, he was one-and-a-half years old, they had a young friend who was a doctor, but just a general practitioner, who gave them advice. They took cocoa through a sieve, and my father sat with Axel on his knees in a hot bathtub for hours until the crisis was over.
But, how did they meet? At the first Christmas, all the young people, cousins, and people whom she knew, were sent a Christmas package, and she made baked gingerbread men for every one of them. It so happened, that my father who was just an acquaintance that didn’t seem to have much in common, got this gingerbread man, and that was the only present that he got from home. And so a correspondence began.
Both my parents felt rebellious against the way things were done. Now, my mother's father, who had been an officer in the Prussian army, was quite a loyal citizen and all that, in contrast to my father's father, who had seen too much of the royal court to be a true believer. And my mother was so horrified by the onset of the war that she had her own spiritual awakening, although she did love her father.
And it was the time, too, when the old regime of the aristocracy and the burgeoning rich middle class came to an end and was considered lacking in substance and spirituality by most of the young intellectuals and artists. Art Nouveau was a turning away from the Victorian stuff. So then when my father came into the war and the military and all these enormous new impressions, he became a different person. My mother matured too and then her father died I think in 1917, and in 1918 they were married.
Both of them studied to become teachers in high school. My mother was teaching children who had grown up with mothers working and fathers in the war, or orphaned, and she couldn’t handle them. They were just too undisciplined, too wild. She was teaching art, and they would just put the tables one on top of the other and kick them so they would fall down, and the principal came in, you know?
He met Georg von der Vring (later to become a famous poet) in teaching school, and his wife, and they became best friends. They were in the same art school and art classes together. They were a group of young people who were tossing around new ideas. There were lots of Indian philosophers like Rabindranath Tagore, and they studied comparative religions and all this kind of stuff, because the old system had collapsed, the feudal system had collapsed, and what was the new order?
My father, as a young man but also oftentimes later on, had times of deep, deep depression, where his mood was just black. And the mother, having had a very comfortable living before, and the family had money invested in the zoo and in government bonds, and it all was wiped out. While my maternal grandmother had real estate, several apartment houses. She also held a big mortgage for her brother in Poland and so there was money coming from there regularly. I think she had given half of her dowry to him.
So after marriage Martin and Lonni set up a little studio, and my father painted, or designed backdrops for movies and designed all these cardboard decorations for the first “flicks,” you know, big throne-like easy chairs and so, out of cardboard, just the facade, and behind there were little stools where the actors sat on. He did quite a few fantastic backdrops of futuristic movies and such. It was just the very beginning of film, the UFA Studios in Berlin.
They had a little studio with a slanted glass top. She made batiked little chemises, and they were like hippies. My father had grown up with silken underwear and white glassé gloves and said, “I am an artist, but I am a borgoise, and I never will be a plebeian.” Whereas many of the other artists wanted then to talk Low German and wanted to belong to the people, although most of them came from very wealthy families.
Then suddenly, my mother became pregnant, and now what? Her mother said, “Look, the children have left the house, the house can be divided into two apartments, and there’s a garden. In the 1920's, she sold two parcels of land from behind the house. We watched two houses built on them. But there was still ample room. We had lots of fruit trees, and in the front we had pine trees of different kinds, and blue fir, and hazelnuts, and lots of berry bushes, and a rose bed, and a slanted bed of perennials and a verandah on which most of the summer days were spent in the shade of the roofed area. My father painted doors and wallpaperd every room nicely. We lived upstairs and only used one room below for a sitting and dining room, after it was changed from a studio for Martin when I was a child. He was given a big studio with a giant window upstairs later.
Then my father became a teacher after finishing college, and started working in a high school that was really close to the railroad station of Triederstrasse, really in the centrum of the city.
The east of the city, Alexanderplatz, was mostly populated by blue collar workers. Many of them came from Poland. I was half a head taller than the rest of the people, and when I transfered and waited for the train in the west I was half a head shorter than the rest of the people. The west winds were predominant, and so industrial pollution drifted to the east, and the west had the fresh air from the pine forests that surrounded the city.
And so, what about the life of my young parents? They moved into grandmother’s house and Vati, being a city slicker, spent much time with a group of men about ten years older than him, very famous in the movement of art education in schools. He was sent to Paris in ‘37 to arrange the art section of young people in the German pavilion in Paris, although he was not a Party member.
So both of these people, very intelligent in their own right. Vati had, just like Suzanne, very little sense for correct spelling, and my mother would always proofread his letters. And my mother was very much like you, she was a frustrated housewife. Not quite tidy. For instance, she said, “Oh, we don’t have adequate storage, my bed linens for six people, don’t fit into my cupboards.” Well, we were already teenagers, we said, “Don’t sweat it, Mom, let us putter for an hour,” and we took everything out and folded it properly, and half of the storage area was empty. So it was. Personally, she was tremendously neat. But then she started having thyroid problems and became very overweight, you know how she was. And with that ever more shy and very much loved because she was a spirited woman, a passionate woman.
Mutti lived, had companionship with my grandmother, Oma-ma. Omama was a gourmet cook, she cooked for the whole family while Mutti went to the greengrocer’s market twice a week to get fruits and vegetables and also meat, and while my father taught in school and afterwards he would often spend until ‘way late with high school students. And then in the evening he went to the Central Institute fur Kunst und Unterricht, and these were people whose work is even now being considered. They maintained that everybody can write a report if schooled with the basics, and everybody can paint a report of what he sees. It is only because we separate all of these things that we think some people are talented and some people are not. It’s just a matter of sensitizing oneself to the gift of observation. So he’d come home late, and 7:00 in the morning he’d left. School started at 8, and the commute took about an hour. Three-quarters of an hour for the train, and a quarter of an hour to walk to the station.
The European professional man had to be on top of his profession, or else he went into a very minor clerical position. That meant really his all. The competition was much fiercer than here. There were too many people, loads of people.
Then came Verien, vacation time. He was really a very solicitous father, he cut our hair once a month, he was really cuddly, and we were cuddly with him, we would always try to sit on his lap, or lean against his shoulder or whatever. He was a very tender father, but it was not really his cup of tea.
Mutti, having come with a silver spoon in her mouth, where there were servants and so on, suddenly had to see that there was adequate food on the table. She was very modern, the children had always one fruit, one sandwich with meat or cheese on it for our school lunch. It was not like when I came here, it was still like in my grandmother’s time when there was lots of butter and cream and desserts, we didn’t have that, we had vegetables, and three times a week we had meat with them, and the main meal was at noon, and we also had, when it was time for berries and all that, my grandmother would can them, in glass jars, one part of the cellar was made for just that, with shelves, and there were fresh apples, which smelled wonderful, and there were all these preserves.
And so mother was really busy with early childhood stuff, and improving the house. Grandmother was in charge of cooking and the garden, which she did with great delight. And correspondence. She had a vast correspondence.
Grandmother also, once or twice a month had a kaffee klatsch with many of her old cousins or cousin’s cousins that lived in the Berlin neighborhood, or suburbs. They played whist together and laughed in cascades like ha, ha, ha ha, but not guffawing, that was not done.
The thing that tied my parents together was art. They were both of the Impressionistic school. They were both in the beginning communists, like every other intellectual. They said, in Russia nothing really has worked. But there was great improvement under Communism to what the small town people and the agricultural populace had to endure during the tzar times, there it was strictly the tzar and his bosses, with the middle class and lower middle class, or, they didn’t have much.
They read a lot and discussed a lot and were really very happily married. She, the town-and-country girl, and he the urbanite who for many discussions didn’t go to the Centralinstitute, but also in one of these cafe’s, you sat indoors, you had your cup of coffee, and there was a rack with international newspapers, and you would not just read every one of the 17 party newspapers, but you would read certain papers that were available in these cafe’s. The one was the Romanesque Cafe, that was just right by the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtnis Kirche, which is until now a symbol of the destruction of Berlin.
To show you one side of his fatherly concern, when my brother had diphtheria, he was one-and-a-half years old, they had a young friend who was a doctor, but just a general practitioner, who gave them advice. They took cocoa through a sieve, and my father sat with Axel on his knees in a hot bathtub for hours until the crisis was over.
Esther on Martin's Life as an Artist (from interviews 6/98, 5/00)
Sundays there were friends like Franz and Gretl Stock. Their daughter is Eva Scherbarth, who illustrates children's books for Ravensburg. Gretl Stock was from a very rich family but her husband's father was a Polish shoemaker, and so they lived in an apartment in the north just so they didn't set themselves apart. And my parents living with Grandma in an old suburb that had beautiful old villas and trees, it was all a little bit run down but still pretty upper middle class.
In summers we spent our vacations at the Baltic Sea. You had to make reservations in January. Artist families met at our house to plan how they would share housing and babysitting. The State railroad had special trains that went to some of the main north German cities from where little country trains would go to the resorts like Prerow and Stralsund.
One of the villages had wetlands they called bodden. There were thatched roof cottages, with dill and potatoes and vegetables and a cow or some sheep. The men were fishermen, with nets. They went out at night with lights and came back at six in the morning with their catch. The artist women came with their net bags for the fish. Certain fish were saleable, but other fish had a jinx on them because they had green bones (garfish). The fishermen said, "You want them, you can have them!" With that and the dill, there was always a group of artist women cooking, they made a feast, with a big pot of potatoes that we bought from the farmwives. For dessert we picked berries, maybe in the nearby national wildlife refuges. We just had to be careful of the elk. They would charge into a house when they were in an amorous frenzy.
Several times we went to a place where Gretl's mother had a pension. I remember how there was a kitchen where they had a slanted concrete floor with a drain in the middle. I must have been around four. The artist women had baskets and baskets of eels, and they cut off their heads. Some still tried to wiggle, and we children stood there in the door staring.
In summers we spent our vacations at the Baltic Sea. You had to make reservations in January. Artist families met at our house to plan how they would share housing and babysitting. The State railroad had special trains that went to some of the main north German cities from where little country trains would go to the resorts like Prerow and Stralsund.
One of the villages had wetlands they called bodden. There were thatched roof cottages, with dill and potatoes and vegetables and a cow or some sheep. The men were fishermen, with nets. They went out at night with lights and came back at six in the morning with their catch. The artist women came with their net bags for the fish. Certain fish were saleable, but other fish had a jinx on them because they had green bones (garfish). The fishermen said, "You want them, you can have them!" With that and the dill, there was always a group of artist women cooking, they made a feast, with a big pot of potatoes that we bought from the farmwives. For dessert we picked berries, maybe in the nearby national wildlife refuges. We just had to be careful of the elk. They would charge into a house when they were in an amorous frenzy.
Several times we went to a place where Gretl's mother had a pension. I remember how there was a kitchen where they had a slanted concrete floor with a drain in the middle. I must have been around four. The artist women had baskets and baskets of eels, and they cut off their heads. Some still tried to wiggle, and we children stood there in the door staring.
Rolf Grosse (Lonni's cousin) with Erika Grosse on the post-war years (from an interview in Hamburg, 7/91)
Rolf spoke in German, which I am not fluent in. As far as I could make it out, this is what he said:
When the Russians came to Berlin, Onkel Martin lived in the American zone. Some of his students who lived in the Russian zone wanted to escape to the American zone, and Onkel Martin helped them. Therefore he was in danger, but he didn't know it. The American High Commissar of the CIA (I can't find a reference for the CIA in early post-war years. There was the OSS, then the SSU, then the CIG, and finally the CIA) said to Onkel Martin, "Mr. Ideler, you are in danger from the Russians, you should move further West." They took him in the middle of the night to Hamburg, and Lonni followed later with what was left of the household goods after the bombing. The Russians had heard about him and wanted him to set up an art education program in Moscow like the one in Berlin. The CIA gave him a job at the Kunsthochschule in Hamburg.
Martin was good with pen and ink, as Lonni was a portrait master.
He was against the Nazis. The whole family, all of us, were in the party, but not Onkel Martin. He was against the system. "Uberhaupt ein ziemlich querkopf"–"a pretty major contrarian." He had a Berliner schnauzer (snout), a fast, sharp, witty manner. (Erika interrupted to say, "He had a clear and a critical word for everything but he loved me.")
When the Russians came to Berlin, Onkel Martin lived in the American zone. Some of his students who lived in the Russian zone wanted to escape to the American zone, and Onkel Martin helped them. Therefore he was in danger, but he didn't know it. The American High Commissar of the CIA (I can't find a reference for the CIA in early post-war years. There was the OSS, then the SSU, then the CIG, and finally the CIA) said to Onkel Martin, "Mr. Ideler, you are in danger from the Russians, you should move further West." They took him in the middle of the night to Hamburg, and Lonni followed later with what was left of the household goods after the bombing. The Russians had heard about him and wanted him to set up an art education program in Moscow like the one in Berlin. The CIA gave him a job at the Kunsthochschule in Hamburg.
Martin was good with pen and ink, as Lonni was a portrait master.
He was against the Nazis. The whole family, all of us, were in the party, but not Onkel Martin. He was against the system. "Uberhaupt ein ziemlich querkopf"–"a pretty major contrarian." He had a Berliner schnauzer (snout), a fast, sharp, witty manner. (Erika interrupted to say, "He had a clear and a critical word for everything but he loved me.")
Baerbel Welger on the Hamburg years (from an interview in Bochum, 7/91)
Your grandmother cooked such nice dinners, they had a tiny flat in Blankenese, one big room. She had a cooker where she made the meals because after the war it wasn't so easy to find a flat. I didn't see Martin so often. He liked to be with his students. He spent most of his time at the Kunsthochschule where he was a professor. I think she had to wait often for him–he liked better to stay with the young people. My grandmother was often disturbed because when he met the old ladies he made remarks to annoy them. He was always the "bad boy." But he was also very humorous. He made jokes and your grandparents were such good painters.