Voyage Through the Twentieth Century by Klemens von Klemperer

Author:Klemens von Klemperer [Klemperer, Klemens von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, History, Modern, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781845455842
Google: PX-WzVxFHToC
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2009-01-15T22:15:01+00:00

Chapter Seven

“Mit dem Gesicht nach Deutschland”

In the late summer of 1973, my family and I resumed our Wanderschaft. Much academic research involves wandering from place to place, collecting information in remote repositories or, as in my case, chasing after live witnesses. But to me such traveling had a special significance. Was it another chapter of my story as a refugee? Was my having settled down in New England only an illusion? Would I ever really settle down? The Russian exile poet Joseph Brodsky, observing the unsteady and turbulent climate of our age, remarked that “displacement and misplacement are this century’s commonplace.”1 As I spent so many of these years abroad, I could not help feeling like a wanderer again. Maybe those children were right—the ones who, upon my return to Germany after the war, said to me, out of the blue, “Du bist ein Wanderer.”

There was a special note, though, to those wanderings of mine. Let me try to explain by citing the plight of a German oppositional politician under Nazi oppression. Otto Wels was the leader of the Social Democratic Party, which was outlawed soon after the Nazi seizure of power in May 1933. He had sounded his last hurrah on the occasion of the Reichstag debate on the passing of the so-called Enabling Act, which was to pave the way for Hitler’s dictatorship. His speech before the jeering brown-shirted Nazi delegates was a singular feat of courage. “You can take away our freedom and life,” he said, “but not our honor.”2 Soon afterward, he had to go with his party into exile, first to Prague and then to Paris,3 where he is said to have repeated the expression, “Mit dem Gesicht nach Deutschland” (Always keeping Germany in view).4 That “long dream of home,” which Victor Hugo had held onto in his exile from Emperor Napoleon III, was Wels’s too.

I cannot call myself an exile. I was a refugee. I left my country and my home because my livelihood—indeed, my life—was threatened. I had taken to my adopted country, the United States, with alacrity, and I was deeply grateful for the welcome I received there. Yet like Otto Wels, whatever I did, wherever I moved, I still had a distinct connection with my origins. Something inside told me that not all ties with my past had been severed and that, to the contrary, it had become my task as a historian to unearth and identify those strains in the German and Austrian tradition that could serve as a foundation for a proud new beginning.

I was asked to spend a year at Cambridge University, and I was happy to be back in England—doubly so because, silly as I am, I like monarchies, the sense of tradition and repose that they seem to radiate. When we signed in at the police station on our arrival in Cambridge, I noticed on the official’s desk blotter the vowels “AEIOU” and could not help but identify them with the motto that the ambitious fifteenth-century Habsburg king, Frederick III, had devised for his dynasty and kingdom.

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