Claudia Reuter, née Herzfeld, as a six-year-old with her parents and siblings
Photo: Private
Interview
Claudia Reuter, born in Dresden-Pieschen in 1943 as the daughter of the Jewish doctor Wilhelm Herzfeld, studied at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig and was then assistant director to the opera director and opera director Joachim Herz. This is where she met her future husband, the long-standing conductor and general music director at the Komische Oper Berlin, Rolf Reuter (1926–2007). In 2001, she founded the International Music Academy with Sir Yehudi Menuhin to promote musically gifted people in Germany, for which she received the Federal Cross of Merit. Her two daughters are also musicians, virtuosos on the viola and violin.
Ms. Reuter, you were born as the sixth and youngest child of a doctor who narrowly escaped the murderous anti-Semitism of the Nazis.
My ancestors on my father’s side had Jewish roots. It couldn’t be called more Jewish: Herzfeld. At the end of 1944, an SS officer came to our practice and said that he had signed my father’s death warrant today. His name would have been on the deportation list. As a doctor, Dr. But Herzfeld treated his mother well. That’s why he advises him to disappear from Dresden that night to save his life. His wife – my mother – is safe as a Swiss citizen, as are our six children, but he has to go into hiding.
Where did your father find refuge?
Friends in Hohnstein hid my father until the end of the war. Dresden was bombed and we were starving. Mother’s brother – my uncle Max Huber – brought us Herzfelds to Switzerland. The Red Cross train took four days to get to Bern. Uncle Max, a watch manufacturer, put us up on an estate in Krummholzbad, about fifteen kilometers east of Bern. We moved into a Stöckli there. That’s what the move-out houses on farms were called: The farmer moved into the Stöckli when he handed the farm over to his son, a kind of retirement home. Mother helped on the farm. We originally only wanted to stay there for a few weeks. But that turned into months, then years. Germany was now divided into occupation zones, Dresden was in the Soviet zone.
But you finally got back there?
The uncle hired two smugglers in 1947. 10,000 Swiss francs in gold if you bring my sister and her children safely to Dresden. 10,000 Swiss francs in gold! That would be a quarter of a million euros today…
Was the watch manufacturer tired of his relatives and wanted to get rid of them?
No. The homesickness was as strong as the love. Heidi Herzfeld-Huber really wanted to go home to her husband, to our father.
Do you still have personal memories of this time in Switzerland?
I spent two years there and was four when I returned to Dresden. The time definitely left its mark on me, I still have a lot of images in my head, like how we drove through the woods with these two smugglers – I think they were criminals.
To what extent did Jewishness play a role in the family?
Not at all. My father was a Calvinist and my mother belonged to the Reformed Church of Switzerland. My great-grandfather converted to become an honorary citizen of Halle. A Heinrich Herzfeld, a distant relative, once wrote down the entire Jewish family history, which goes back centuries. I own it and have leafed through it, but I was only moderately interested in finding out who was a rabbi and where, when, which financial institution they owned or who ran a law firm… I’m interested in the last hundred years and the stories that have been handed down or experienced myself.
Is it just that?
No. Something is blocking me. Maybe it has something to do with my father having to go into hiding. He never talked about it.
And what experiences have you had?
During my studies, in the mid-1960s, a lecturer – I won’t reveal her name – said to me: “You’re Jewish, you can tell that straight away!” I protested against that. Not because I didn’t think I looked like a Jew, but because I was labeled and stigmatized in this way. Or that year after graduating from high school when I worked for one of my father’s colleagues in his practice in Radebeul. It didn’t end harmoniously either, and for the same reason: During dinner, a sister made a derogatory comment about Jews. I quit. When I resigned from the hospital, my mother was horrified. They are such wonderful people there.
See that pen drawing over there? Hans Körnig, a Dresden painter, portrayed me when I was 13. I don’t think you can look more Jewish. I stand by that too. But I take offense at being labeled this way. Of course I don’t offend anyone when I say: You look like a German or a Swiss. But in view of the countless denunciatory caricatures of crooked-nosed figures in Nazi propaganda, the comment: You look like a Jew is out of the question. Because ultimately it falls back on those same stereotypes. Do you remember the “Spiegel” title at the beginning of 1990 with Gregor Gysi? A cunning, almost insidious man who focuses on the viewer through his circular glasses: “The mastermind.” That’s what I call anti-Semitic filth.
I suspect that you recently received a call from Mr. B., a filmmaker. He is researching German emigrants in Russia. I told him that your husband’s ancestors settled in the Caucasus.
Yes, he already called.
I drove him to his hotel in Charlottenburg over a year ago after meeting Hans Modrow. We passed the Holocaust Memorial. Firstly he complained about the location and secondly the dimensions. Well, I said conciliatoryly, we can also talk about why there is no memorial in Berlin for the largest group of victims after the Jews. “Who is that supposed to be?” he asked, who wants to make a film about German immigrants in Russia. I said: 3.3 million Russian prisoners of war who perished, starved or were otherwise killed in Germany. Then he said: “Is that guaranteed?” Sure, of course. A few meters further he starts again: “My father was a member of the Reichstag.” Oh, I replied. For which party? “Well, for the NSDAP.»
Oh dear God.
And then he says that his father was also the district leader of the NSDAP in Glogau in Silesia. He himself experienced parades as a four-year-old, which still visibly warmed his heart today. His father died on April 3, 1945 in the fight against the “Russians”. – I remained embarrassed and consoled myself that it wasn’t far to Savignyplatz. Suddenly he said: “I would have been in the FDJ too.”
What was that supposed to mean?
He probably wanted to say that if he had lived in the GDR, he would have behaved just as opportunistically as he thought I did.
That’s disgusting and stupid. Well, my lifespan is too short for me to engage in a conversation with him.
You know, I had an incredible experience in February 2011. We, our International Music Academy for the promotion of musically gifted people, had a chamber music workshop lasting several days in Rheinsberg. It was about Dmitri Shostakovich and his 7th Symphony, which was written during the three-year siege of Leningrad by German troops. Around a million people starved to death in the city, and Shostakovich was also hit in the head by German shrapnel, from which he suffered until his death in 1975. Professor Michael Erxleben gave the 17 participants a comprehensive introduction, and the cellist – who came from Israel – then played through tears. Until then she only knew the grades, not the background. She was clueless until that day. And how it suddenly burst out of her, how she magnificently translated what she had just experienced, the knowledge of the suffering and death of people in a Russian city far away from her, into music… Unbelievable!
Claudia Reuter will be a guest at the “Rendezvous” in Hellen Panke, Kopenhagener Str. 9, 19437 Berlin on Thursday, January 25th, 3 p.m., where she will present her book “The General’s Wife” (Verlag am Park).
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