The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

 

Arrival
 
Now at last we’ve overcome all the obstacles in our path, and left them behind us too, on rails as smooth as the ones you’ve been on for so long. And alongside yours, too. I’m unspeakably happy . . . and this valley is already a dear friend.
 
Caroline Schlegel to Luise Gotter, 11 July 1796
 
1
 
‘A happy event’
 
Summer 1794: Goethe and Schillers
 
On 20 July 1794 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe heaved himself into the saddle and rode from his house in the centre of Weimar to Jena, where he planned to attend a botanical meeting of the recently founded Natural History Society. It was a hot summer that would soon turn into a glorious autumn – long sunbaked months during which pears, apples, sweet melons and apricots ripened four weeks early and the vineyards produced one of the century’s greatest vintages.
 
On the fifteen-mile ride from Weimar to Jena, Goethe passed farmers scything wheat in golden fields and great haystacks awaiting storage as winter fodder in the barns. After a couple of hours of riding through flat farmland, the countryside began to change. Little villages and hamlets snuggled into gentle dips, and then the forest closed in and the fields disappeared. The land became more hilly. Shellbearing limestone cliffs rose to the left, exposing the geological memory of the region when this part of Germany had been a landlocked sea some 240 million years ago. Just before he reached Jena, Goethe crossed the so called Snail, the steep hill named after the serpentine road that wound up to its top.
 
Then, finally, he saw Jena beneath him, nestled in a wide valley and held in the elbow of the Saale River with the jagged outline of the forested mountains behind. These were more hills than mountains, perhaps, but the views were spectacular – and the reason why Swiss students in Jena lovingly called the surrounding area ‘little Switzerland’.
 
Goethe was the Zeus of Germany’s literary circles. Born in Frankfurt in 1749 to a wealthy family, he had grown up amidst comfort and privilege. His maternal grandfather had been the mayor of Frankfurt and his paternal grandfather had made his wealth as a merchant and tailor. Goethe’s father didn’t have to work and had instead managed his fortunes, collected books and art, and educated his children. Though a lively and bright child, Goethe had not shown any excep-tional talents. He loved to draw, was proud of his immaculate handwriting and enjoyed the theatre. When the French had occupied Frankfurt in 1759 during the Seven Years War and their commander had been billeted at the Goethes’ house, young Goethe had made the best of it by learning French from the occupying forces.
 
He had studied law in Leipzig and worked as a lawyer, but also began to write. In the mid-1770s he had been thrust into the public eye with the publication of his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther – the story of a forlorn lover who commits suicide. Goethe’s protagonist is irrational, emotional and free. ‘I withdraw into myself and find a world there,’ Werther declares. The novel captured the sentimentality of the time and became the book of a generation. A huge international bestseller, it was so popular that countless men, including Carl August, the ruler of the small Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, had dressed like Werther – wearing a yellow waistcoat and breeches, blue tailcoat with brass buttons, brown boots and a round grey felt hat. Chinese manufacturers even produced Werther porcelain for the European market.
 
It was said that Werther had caused a wave of suicides, and forty years after its publication the British poet Lord Byron joked with Goethe that his protagonist ‘has put more individuals out of this world than Napoleon himself ’. The Sorrows of Young Werther had been Goethe’s most vivid contribution to the so-called Sturm und Drang – the Storm and Stress movement – which had elevated feelings above the rationalism of the Enlightenment. In this period, which had celebrated emotion in all its extremes, from passionate love to dark melancholy, from suicidal longings to frenzied delight, Goethe had become a literary superstar.
 
The eighteen-year-old Duke Carl August had been so enraptured by the novel that he had invited Goethe to live and work in the duchy in 1775. Goethe was twenty-six when he moved to Weimar; and he knew how to make an entry, arriving dressed in his Werther uniform. During those early years the poet and the young duke had roistered through the streets and taverns of the town. They had played pranks on unsuspecting locals and flirted with peasant girls. The duke loved to gallop across the fields and to sleep in hay barns or camp in the forest. There had been drunken brawls, theatrical declarations of love, naked swimming and nightly tree climbing – but those wild years were long gone and Goethe had turned his back on his Sturm und Drang phase.
 
In time, both poet and ruler calmed down, and Goethe had become part of the duchy’s government. The small state had just over a hundred thousand inhabitants – tiny in comparison to the five million people of nearby Prussia, or other powerful states such as Saxony, Bavaria or Württemberg. With a mostly agrarian economy – grain, fruit, wine, vegetable gardens as well as sheep and cattle – the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar had little trade and manufacturing, yet it maintained a bloated court of two thousand courtiers, officials and soldiers, all of whom had to be paid. The town of Weimar itself had a provincial feel. Most of the seven hundred and fifty houses had only one storey and such small windows that they felt gloomy and cramped inside. The streets were dirty, and there were only two businesses in the market square that sold goods which could be classed as luxury items – a perfumery and a textile shop. There wasn’t even a stagecoach station.
 
Goethe became Carl August’s confidant and his privy councillor – so trusted that it was rumoured that the duke didn’t decide anything without the poet’s advice. In time, Goethe took charge of the royal theatre and of rebuilding the burned down castle in Weimar, in addition to several other well-paid administrative positions, including the control of the duchy’s mines. He also worked closely with his colleague in the Weimar administration, minister Christian Gottlob Voigt. A diligent worker, Goethe was never idle – ‘I never smoked tobacco, never played chess, in short, I never did anything that would have wasted my time.’

 
In 1794, Goethe was forty-four and no longer the dashing Apollo of his youth. He had put on so much weight that his once beautiful eyes had disappeared into the flesh of his cheeks and one visitor compared him to ‘a woman in the last stages of pregnancy’. His nose was aquiline, and like so many contemporaries, his teeth were yellowed and crooked. He had a penchant for stripy and flowery long waist-coats, which he buttoned tightly over his round belly. Unlike the younger generation, who often wore fashionable loose fitting trousers, Goethe preferred breeches. He wore boots with turned-down tops and always his tricorne. He kept his hair coiffed and powdered, with two carefully pomaded curls over his ears and a long, stiff ponytail. Knowing that everybody was watching him, he always made sure to be properly dressed and groomed when he went out. Ennobled by the duke in 1782, he was now Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and lived in a large house in Weimar, where he often tried and failed to work amid a constant stream of strangers knocking on his door to gawp at the famous poet. He loathed these disruptions almost as much as he hated noise, in particular the rattling of his neighbour’s loom and the skittle alley in a nearby tavern.
 
Goethe might have turned his back on the Sturm und Drang era, but it seemed as if his creativity had done the same to him. For years he had failed to produce anything remarkable and his plays were no longer widely staged. He fussed over his writings for years. More than two decades earlier, he had begun to work on his drama Faust but only a few scenes had been published. He had rewritten and changed his tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris so many times – from prose to blank verse, back to prose, to its final version in classical iambic verse – that he called it his ‘problem child’. And though he was the director of the Weimar theatre, he preferred to stage popular plays by his contemporaries rather than his own.
 
Botany was now Goethe’s favourite subject, and the reason he often came to Jena. He was overseeing the construction of a new botanical garden and institute in Jena. Originally founded in 1548 as a medicinal garden, the university’s existing botanical garden had been used to train physicians, but Duke Carl August had asked Goethe to extend and move it to a new location, just north of the old town walls. Goethe enjoyed every aspect of the project because it united his deep love of nature and beauty with scientific rigour. He was looking forward to the meeting of the Natural History Society.
 
Excerpt from : Magnificent Rebels : The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

 

Penguin Random House

In the 1790s, an extraordinary group of friends led a revolution of the mind that still frames our way of being and living. This is their story.
 
Andrea Wulf’s unforgettable, Costa Prize winning The Invention of Nature transported us across the globe with one of the most extraordinary scientists who ever lived, Alexander Von Humboldt.
 
Now she is back with another story of German thinkers who changed the world – and whose ideas still matter profoundly to how we live today.
 
Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics. Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.
 
We’re still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet.
 
The first Romantics changed the world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.

Video of lecture, The Conduit, London. 
 
 
The Conduit, September 2, 2022

An interview with acclaimed biographer Andrea Wulf on her thrilling, and timely, story of a group of friends who changed the world. Andrea is in conversation with broadcaster Kirsty Lang.
 
In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends from the small German town of Jena changed the world. They were the first Romantics, and their ideas transformed society and shaped the way we lead our lives today.
 
In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf, the Costa Prize-winning author of The Invention of Nature, tells the riveting story of this revolutionary band of poets, novelists and philosophers. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. And through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heart-breaking grief and radical ideas, they launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thinkers of the time.
 
The lives of these Magnificent Rebels are as relevant today as ever as we, like they, walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community, and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet.
 
Andrea Wulf was born in India, moved to Germany as a child, and now lives in London. She is the award-winning author of five books. Her previous book, The Invention of Nature, was an international bestseller and won more than 10 awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Award 2016, Costa Biography Award 2015, the Inaugural James Wright Award for Nature Writing 2016 and the LA Times Book Prize 2016. Andrea has written for many newspapers including the Guardian, LA Times and New York Times. She was the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013 and a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. She appears regularly on TV and radio.
 
Kirsty Lang is a writer, broadcaster and former foreign correspondent. A familiar voice on BBC Radio 4 Kirsty has been a presenter on Front Row, The World Tonight and Last Word. This year she took over as the first female host of the fiendishly difficult Round Britain Quiz, the longest running game show in Europe. She is also Chair of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Newcastle and a regular contributor to the Sunday Times Culture magazine.
 
5 x 15 Stories, September 6, 2022. 

Website Andrea Wulf

A philosophy student attending a concert in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1797 could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. Seated in one row were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest writer of the age; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher of the moment, whose packed lectures attracted students from across Europe; Alexander von Humboldt, just setting out on a career that would transform our understanding of the natural world; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, then making a name for himself as a writer, critic and translator. It seemed extraordinary to see so many famous men lined up together.
 
Except that it wasn’t, not then in Jena, a quiet university town at the heart of Germany of only 800 houses and fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. For a brief period, as the 18th century gave way to the 19th, Jena had a claim to be the intellectual capital of Europe. The nation’s finest minds were gathered there.
 
It happens very occasionally that exceptionally talented people congregate in one place for a while, to encourage and stimulate one another. Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s was such a town. In this exhilarating book Andrea Wulf tells the story of what she calls “the Jena set”, a group of mainly young writers and poets who came together in “this lovely crazy little corner of the world”, as Goethe described it.
 
At the core of the Jena set were the Schlegels, August Wilhelm and his wife, Caroline, who worked together on translating Shakespeare’s plays into German verse; Friedrich, August Wilhelm’s younger and more quarrelsome brother, also a writer and critic, who for a while was in love with Caroline; the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (“Novalis”), almost the personification of Goethe’s Young Werther in his melodramatic posturing and adoration of a sickly, pubescent girl; and the serious young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, whose naturphilosophie envisaged the self as at one with everything living, and who conceived of art as the expression of this union.
 
This group saw themselves with some justification as cleverer, wittier and more poetic than anyone else. In their own eyes they were “the chosen ones”. Like other young people of their generation across Europe, they were inspired by the upheaval of the French Revolution, a challenge to established authority and ideas everywhere. Their irreverence inevitably led to feuds, first between the upstart Schlegels and the venerable poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, and later between Schelling and Fichte. Caroline’s refusal to conform to convention earned her widespread disapproval, especially from other women. Eventually she would divorce August Wilhelm and marry Schelling, 12 years her junior. Despite this, the three remained on good terms.
 
One reason why Jena became such a magnet for independent thinkers was the unusual constitution of the university, which allowed its professors comparative freedom. The most prominent of these was Fichte, who declared that “the source of all reality is the Ich” – a word with no exact equivalent in English. Fichte’s concept of the Ich placed the self at the centre of everything, always an attractive idea to self-regarding young people.
 
Goethe had been attracted to Jena from his home in nearby Weimar by the presence of Schiller. While Goethe was staying in Jena he and Schiller would meet daily, since they lived only a few minutes’ walk from each other. They made an odd couple as they strolled around town together, the cadaverous playwright towering above the older and now corpulent poet. Like the young English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller collaborated closely, editing each other’s work and suggesting improvements and changes. After Schiller’s death, Goethe would strive unsuccessfully to complete his unfinished work.
 
Goethe and Schiller were father figures to the group of younger writers and thinkers who gravitated to Jena. Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man would become a founding document for this new generation of thinkers, who called themselves romantics.
 
Goethe was a true renaissance man, as interested in science as he was in literature. For him, another attraction of Jena was the company of the young scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The two formed “our little academy”, carrying out dissections and experiments together, including electrical experiments on animals – “galvanism”. To the romantics, electricity seemed the fuel of life. It was no coincidence that Frankenstein’s monster would be brought to life by a massive electrical charge. Electricity also provided a fresh, almost irresistible metaphor. In its incessant and impassioned debate the Jena set was “electrified by our intellectual friction”; while apart, one of their number lamented the absence of “the electricity I feel with them”.
 
This is indeed an electrifying book, in its illuminated portraits, its dynamic narrative and its sparking ideas. Wulf writes clear, flowing prose, which is a pleasure to read. It’s informed by scholarship without being bogged down by jargon. Her book begins with an autobiographical prologue, explaining how, as the impulsive child of progressive parents, she chose to leave school early, rather than going to university, and became a single mother at a young age, learning in the process to balance free-spiritedness and responsibility. This introduction is appropriate, because her experience mirrors that of the woman at the heart of the story, Caroline Schlegel.
 
The Jena set broke up in 1803, dispersing across Germany and beyond in a general exodus. Magnificent Rebels ends with a dramatic set-piece chapter as French troops arrive in Jena in 1806, plundering the town and setting fire to buildings, before the battle that ends in devastating defeat for the Prussian army. The victorious emperor slept that night in Goethe’s bed. For the Jena set, Napoleon was not an enemy but a hero. They admired him as a force of nature. Ominously, Fichte began to talk about the “Ich” of a nation.
 
In her epilogue Wulf traces the influence of the Jena thinkers on subsequent generations: through the English romantic poets, especially Coleridge, and via him the American transcendentalists (Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman), on to the thoughts of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce, and into the present. We have so far “internalised the Ich”, the author argues, that we no longer recognise it. What was revolutionary is now standard: we are all romantics now. And all this began in a small town in Germany more than 200 years ago.
 
 
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf review – big ideas from a small town. By Adam Sisman. The Guardian, September 11, 2022. 

For a few years at the turn of the 19th century, Jena, a small university town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was an intellectual Shangri-La. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Though its population was barely 4,500, Jena was for a while home to many of the leading German thinkers of the time—Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schiller, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived 14 miles away in Weimar, was a frequent visitor and collaborator.
 
Andrea Wulf, born in India and raised in Germany, impulsively moved to England in her late teens and adopted the English language as her professional medium. She finds kindred spirits in the proudly independent, unconventional prodigies of Jena. They inspire in her the extravagant boast that “the last decade of the eighteenth century saw more famous poets, writers, philosophers and thinkers living in Jena in proportion to its population than in any other town before or since.” The Athens of Aristophanes, Democritus, Plato, Protagoras, Sophocles, and Thucydides, like the Princeton of Freeman J. Dyson, Albert Einstein, Clifford Geertz, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, and Erwin Panofsky, might, per capita, have outshone even Jena. However, Wulf’s central assertion is indisputable: “The Jena Set changed our world. They did so irrevocably. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and way of understanding the world without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.”
 
Wulf titled her 2015 study of the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt (who often visited his older brother, the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Jena) The Invention of Nature. Like recent popular books that make broad historical claims—for example, that the Scots invented the modern world or that the Irish saved civilization—Magnificent Rebels credits the Jena Set for “the invention of the self.” Its members initiated the Romantic movement and redefined romanticism to mean an emphasis on subjectivity, a preference for emotion over reason, an exaltation of the imagination, a reverence for the natural world, and a yearning to poeticize science. Fichte was not the first philosopher to take the Ich as his starting point (René Descartes’s cogito ergo sum did that 150 years earlier), but a preoccupation with the self would be inherited from Jena by thinkers as disparate as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ayn Rand, and Martin Buber, and it would manifest itself in the institutionalized cravings of consumer society. The German Romantics predated and inspired poets and philosophers in Britain, France, and the United States. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was so enthralled by the Jena thinkers that much of his Biographia Literaria is plagiarized from Schelling.
 
Members of the Jena Set are not strangers to anyone conversant with German cultural history. Much has been written in German about the subject, including Peter Neumann’s Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits, published in 2018 and translated into English earlier this year. And though English-language readers surely have heard of Goethe, they might be unfamiliar with his contemporaries and confused by the profusion of Friedrichs—Schelling, Schiller, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher. Wulf begins with a list of dramatis personae and, relying on letters, journals, and published texts, proceeds to recount the stories of distinct personalities during troubled times. Her book is a collective biography of talented and productive men and women who worked brilliantly together, apart, and in opposition.
 
The story begins with Schiller, the first of the major figures to reside in Jena. Already famous for his 1781 play The Robbers, he founded the journal Die Horen, which drew many of its contributors to the town. The polymath Goethe came to Jena to supervise its botanical garden. His was an inductive mind, working from the specific to the general, but he developed a close friendship with Schiller, who worked from the general to the specific. Yet it was the house at Leutragasse 5, shared by poet August Wilhelm Schlegel, his free-spirited wife, Caroline, plus August’s younger brother, Friedrich, and Friedrich’s lover, Dorothea, daughter of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, that became the cradle of German Romanticism. There, August and Caroline translated Shakespeare’s plays into versions that turned the Bard into the quintessential Romantic. Many German speakers consider the couple’s translations superior to the original. The philosopher Fichte and the poet Novalis spent many hours in the Schlegel household in conversations that fertilized their own work. During one dazzling four-day session, writes Wulf, “they composed poems, drafted philosophical treatises, edited essays, set up scientific experiments and translated passages from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Shakespeare.”
 
But these were high-strung, competitive, and libidinous people, and their idyllic creative community was doomed to dissolve. Dependent on income from teaching, some members of the Jena Set resented it when the charismatic speakers Fichte and Schelling drew students away from their own lectures. After Friedrich Schlegel attacked Schiller in print, neither spoke to the other. Soon, other enmities developed. For a while, August Schlegel seemed complaisant about the openly adulterous relationship between Schelling and his own wife, Caroline, but numerous sexual transgressions and rivalries also fractured the group. The translator Tieck dismissed the Leutragasse coterie as being “like a big farm full of pigs.” Dysentery ended the promising life of Caroline Schlegel’s 15-year-old daughter, Auguste, in 1800, months before tuberculosis killed 28-year-old Novalis. Increasingly, disease and death took a toll on the Jena Set.
 
Germany would not become a state until 1871, and in its 1,500 jurisdictions, no central authority could enforce censorship. The Jena Set, then, was relatively unshackled by convention. Inspired by the spirit of the French Revolution, its members saw their own revolution founder in spasms of freedom. By 1806, when Napoleon Bonaparte arrived to “liberate” Jena, most of its authors had already left. The invading French army, which many had welcomed as a force for liberté, égalité, et fraternité, left the town in ruins
 
Jena-Gadda-Da-Vida : The brief flowering of an intellectual mecca in 1790s Germany. By  Steven G. Kellman. The American Scholar, September 1, 2022

Today, the German city of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, is the world centre of the optical and precision industry; but in the 1790s it spawned an even more marketable commodity. It was then a small medieval town on the banks of the river Saale with crumbling walls, 800 half-timbered houses, a market square and an unruly university. Here, in the philosophy department, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a young professor inspired by Immanuel Kant and the French Revolution, proclaimed from the pulpit his theory of the ‘Ich’. ‘A person,’ he roared, ‘should be self-determined.’ In an age of absolute power and the divine right of kings, the idea of free will was an incendiary device and Fichte freewheeled his way through each lecture. ‘Attend to yourself,’ he instructed his mesmerised followers; ‘turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self.’ Fichte’s lectures, says Andrea Wulf in her engrossing new book, re-centred the way we understand the world. It’s little wonder that intellectuals flocked to Jena.
 
Magnificent Rebels is a group biography about the decade between 1794 and 1804 when a cohort of writers, philosophers and translators, ignited by the cries of liberty, equality and fraternity coming from Paris, turned Jena into a hub of revolutionary thinking. The book is also a beginner’s guide to German idealism. It’s no mean feat to explain such hefty theories in layman’s terms, and Wulf does so without, as Byron said of Coleridge, needing to explain her explanation.
 
The grandfather of what she calls ‘the Jena set’ was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther turned suicide into an art, or group-think. Goethe, who lived with his mistress and son in nearby Weimar, was first invited to Jena by the playwright Friedrich Schiller, who began lecturing at the university in 1789. Their friendship initiated what Goethe described as a ‘new era’ in his writing. The effect of Jena turned Goethe into a ‘demi-god’ for a new generation of readers.
 
The town muse was Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, a ‘politico-erotic’ fire-ball who, together with her young daughter Auguste, had spent six months in prison in Königstein in 1793. Caroline and her second husband, the poet, critic and translator August Wilhelm Schlegel, came to Jena in 1796, where the couple translated, for the first time, Shakespeare into German verse. Their translations are still the standard edition in Germany. It was August Wilhelm who coined the term ‘Romantic’ to describe the new sensibility whose impact was also being felt in the English Lake District. ‘Speak nothing but German,’ Coleridge (unsuccessfully) counselled Wordsworth: ‘Live with Germans. Read in German. Think in German.’
 
August Wilhelm was joined by his younger brother, the writer Friedrich Schlegel, who was himself in love with Caroline. (‘One look is all it takes’, Friedrich said of her.) Friedrich brought along his best friend, the poet and mining inspector Friedrich von Hardenberg, who used the pen name Novalis. ‘My whole self,’ said Novalis, ‘is a system of fragments’, and together with Schlegel, he invented the Romantic fragment. Schiller and the Schlegels were then joined by the young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who taught at the university between 1798 and 1803. The similarity of names makes this a difficult book to follow after a glass or two of wine, but keeping up with the Jena set is challenging in other ways too.
 
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ said Wordsworth of the French Revolution, ‘but to be young was very heaven.’ Jena, now the centre of this heaven, was actually very hell. Caroline Schlegel described it as a ‘den of murderers’, and she wasn’t far wrong. Jena reduced the whole world to a town which could be crossed in ten minutes flat; no one read the newspapers and nothing was discussed beyond gossip and the new philosophy. Everyone hated everyone else and did all they could to stymie each other’s careers with bad reviews. One of Schiller’s poems, wrote Friedrich Schlegel, was so bad it was best read backwards.
 
Schiller and the Schlegels were thereafter mortal enemies, as were Schiller and Alexander von Humboldt, Schiller and Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling. While Schiller, who never left his house, hated everyone except Goethe, Fichte was not only hated by all his colleagues but those students who didn’t buy into his philosophy threw bricks through his windows. These attacks – which took place night after night for five months and once nearly killed his father-in-law – must have been, said Goethe, ‘a most disagreeable way’ for Fichte ‘to have the existence of a non-Ich proven to him’.
 
Everyone equally hated Friedrich Schlegel. One look, apparently, was all it took: ‘People prefer to observe me from a distance,’ he said, ‘like a rare and dangerous beast.’ They similarly hated his wife Dorothea, who in turn hated Caroline Schlegel, who hated Schiller’s wife Charlotte. ‘The minute she’s out of the house,’ Caroline said of Charlotte, ‘you should fire up two pounds of incense to purify the air.’ When Friedrich Schlegel’s friend, the poet and translator Ludwig Tieck, moved to Jena in 1799, everyone hated Frau Tieck too: ‘Oh, that wife! That wife!’, Friedrich complained to Caroline Schlegel.
 
Caroline is the heroine of the story, not least because she internalised the Ich-philosophy which, Fichte stressed, applied only to men. A woman, Fichte insisted, had to submit her own Ich to that of her husband. Caroline, accordingly, changed husbands three times, divorcing August Wilhelm in 1803 in order to marry Friedrich Schelling, who was, she said, ‘the kind of man who bursts through barriers’.
 
One reason the Jena set idealised the mind is because their bodies were so imperfect. The illnesses they suffered – gout, tapeworm, ‘nervous fevers’, infections, coughs and tumours – were treated by the local quack Dr Stark with the usual leeches, poultices, enemas and blood-lettings. When Caroline was given a mustard plaster made of horseradish to cure her sleeplessness, it inflamed her leg and led to cramps. Her daughter Auguste died after being prescribed laxatives, of all things, to stop her dysentery. Schiller, who experienced such ill health in Jena that his major organs were destroyed, was discovered after his death to have had a ‘hard, petrified sponge’ instead of a heart, which made Friedrich Schlegel laugh. One of the book’s finest chapters is an account of Novalis’s 14-year-old fiancée undergoing an operation on her liver without anaesthetic. The doctor who killed her was, of course, the wretched Stark.
 
Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession. Wulf does not draw the analogy, but Jena was a prototype of Silicon Valley, a factory in which a handful of geeks open up our skulls and rewire our brains. The Jena set invented the self, and in doing so invented us all; we now think with their thoughts and feel with their emotions. They paved the way for Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself’, Freudian psychoanalysis and Hitler’s fascism, the ‘Ich’ of a nation. Jena was the birthplace of self-consciousness, self-obsession, selfishness and selfies – the whole business of me, me, me and me too.
 
How the quarrelsome ‘Jena set’ paved the way for Hitler : A group of warring 18th-century intellectuals, devoted to the theory of the ‘Ich’, left a dangerous legacy. By Frances Wilson. The Spectator, August 27, 2022.

Rechnitz, A Novel, Hearsay, A Family History, Truth

It is a big surprise that Eva Menasse’s new novel does not appear on the longlist for the German Book Prize. In it, the writer, essayist and Berliner-by-choice talks masterfully about a Nazi crime and its consequences, without turning to moral literature. Because she does not rush to the sensational of the moment, but to the constantly everyday and thus the lies of life of an entire village community. A conversation about truth, lies and the federal election campaign as an imposition.
 
Eva Menasse, born 1970 in Vienna, initially worked as a journalist, in 2005 her debut novel, the family saga Vienna, appeared. She is the daughter of the footballer Hans Menasse, the author Robert Menasse is her brother. In 2019 she received the Ludwig Börne Prize
 
Friday: Ms. Menasse, in your new novel there is the dark secret of a war crime that everyone knows about but nobody speaks. Like in Rechnitz, where there was a massacre of Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers in the last days of the war. Is “Dunkelblum” a Rechnitz novel?
 
Eva Menasse: The historical research began, of course, at Rechnitz. But Rechnitz is only the most spectacular case of a whole series of such events that took place in Burgenland and Lower Austria in the last weeks of the Second World War. That electrified me. Today we count about 124 massacres in this area. Everyone is always talking about Rechnitz. But something broke out with brutal violence in the entire region when it was actually all over.
 
F : So not a Rechnitz novel?
 
EM : Dark flower is somehow already a Rechnitz novel, but again not. I fictionalized the entire landscape, the people, everything. It was about looking at the entire timeline since then. Because after a crime like that, it somehow goes on anyway. I wanted to know how the little people lived on after such an outbreak of violence – regardless of whether they were guilty of themselves or not. Today’s Rechnitzers would probably give a lot to ensure that someone finally finds this mass grave. History may not be coped with – an unfortunate word – but it has to be brought to some human conclusion. And in this case that would be finding the mass grave. Then this place would come to rest. The real Rechnitz stands there like a beacon in history. If you want to know what happens when you don’t speak, keep silent, hide everything and sweep it under the carpet, then it’s an impressive example.
 
F : Again and again you deal with dark historical chapters, for example in “The Holocaust in Court. The David Irving Trial ”. What do you like about it?
 
 
 EM : The riddles that I cannot fathom. I do all of this because I want to find out something. With David Irving, I wanted to understand how a really highly intelligent person comes on such a trip. And I think I understand that he doesn’t believe any of this at all. I’m relatively sure he’s just playing a diabolical game. In my eyes he is more of a player character than a real Holocaust denier. But of course my dealing with these issues is also a family legacy. I can’t get this story out of me. Maybe I’m doing a family job by dealing with it.
 
F : “Everyone involved knows the whole truth together. That’s why you never really get them together again afterwards, ”says the novel. Does literature have the function of preserving historical truths and certainties – especially when there are hardly any contemporary witnesses?
 
EM : Literature always has the same function. It can tell stories that have ambivalences and cannot be clarified with simple moral categories. Everything that resonates can be written down here. Journalism in its narrative forms can do that too, but history cannot. But she doesn’t need that either, she wants the durable, the facts. But why people act this way and not differently, or why someone is lying or shutting up at that very moment – the human aspect of all actions, so to speak – is what literature can best tell. The staff in Dark flower is invented. Still, it is hopefully a real book – not about Rechnitz, but about Dunkelblum.
 
F : You wrote the sentence that art arises in the gap between chaos and control. How does that work when you write?
 
EM : The novel was already a lot of chaos because I didn’t know how to tell the story and how to organize it. But maybe that creates the atmospheric more, because I always only notice when I’m writing where things are going on and how I have to do it. I like control too. But that doesn’t help if you sit down at your desk in the morning and don’t know what to do next. The game is in the head, and there it goes back and forth. If I know what to do next, it’s craft and control. The difficult thing is the structure, and it always begins in a chaos that has to be sorted out.
 
F : “Here our country is still as it was for centuries. We can be proud of that, ”said a resident of Dunkelblum. Are you serious?
 
EM : It’s one of those empty phrases that people utter when the day is long. Dialogue is important to me and I try to let people speak as they speak. Only Austrians are likely to notice that different social classes are also depicted. There are the very simple people who speak a very broad dialect and there are those who are a little educated. They also speak a little differently.
 
F : How important is the distance to Austria and the socio-political conditions there when writing?
 
EM : Very important. Writing Austrian novels from here in Berlin is exactly the extent of Austria that I can endure. I can no longer imagine returning to Austria. Somehow the country has become too small for me and only from a distance can I mobilize something like a sense of home in me, which then lead to such a book. But I really enjoyed the Austriaticisms, immersing myself in the Austrian language.
 
F : In your essay on compromise, you write that you have the impression that liberal societies have “become more uncompromising at all ends of the spectrum” in recent years – also due to digitization. Why is the compromise so out of fashion?
 
EM ; This has to do with the dogma of personalization. Everyone only accepts what is good for them. And that means that the sense of community has been lost. Nobody has to adapt anymore, which has led to a social neglect of prosperity, to a pronounced egoism, which of course contradicts any compromise. If you only encounter the world in a personalized way on the screen, then I no longer have to compromise with anyone. Then I can insult any cyclist who passes too close to me or even tear them off the bike. We are currently observing these tendencies of aggression everywhere.
 
 
F : They ask to talk about what troubles us. What is it that troubles you the most at the moment?
 
EM : This irreconcilability and the roaring at one another in our society. The mental brutality on the many social channels stunned me. The election campaign is also an imposition. In the end, we talked more about Baerbock plagiarism than about climate change. Or about the CDU’s responsibility that we are not much further with the conversion to climate-neutral technology. One should actually talk about it, but that is not happening. It’s all pretty unpleasant.
 
F : Debate is also irrelevant in the cultural sector.
 
EM : That’s right. The “Close everything up” campaign was one of those moments for me when I asked myself whether I was actually still right here. You don’t have to find satire good, but the accusation that artists are to blame for people to die because people may no longer wear masks because of satire is hysterical.
 
F : There are now publicists who are fleeing from Germany to Austria because of the culture of debate. Can you understand that?
 
EM : You mean Matthias Politycki. Have fun, I can only say. I’m already looking forward to his reports from the cozy, racist everyday life in Austria. The quality of life in Austria is very high, but you have to endure politics. Austria is increasingly becoming a banana republic. What is going on there politically is shameful.
 
F :  Do you see yourself as a writer who was born in Vienna and lives in Berlin, or rather an Austrian or Berlin author?
 
EM : I think writing is influenced by your reading biography, the texts you grew up with. And from what I’ve read and where I come from linguistically, I’m certainly an Austrian author. And I will stay that way too.
 
F : Does an award like that of your compatriot Clemens J. Setz with the Büchner Prize trigger something in the Austrian author?
 
EM : Yes, I have to admit that there is a weird little national pride at this point – we can write well, we weird Ösis. I don’t have that at all in football, I always stick with Germany. But I was very pleased that Clemens Setz was awarded the Büchner Prize.
 
Interview ǀ “Actually it was all over” – Friday. By Arjun Sethi. Codelist, September 7, 2021. 

Das blaue Sofa: Eva Menasse über "Dunkelblum".
 
Hans Dieter Heimendahl spricht mit Eva Menasse über ihr Buch "Dunkelblum".
Der Quernheim, November 8, 2021. 

She was a billionaire Countess who became one of the most powerful women in horse racing, mixing with royals and holding lavish parties at her Austrian castle.
 
But behind the glamour, Nazi socialite Margit Batthyany hid a murderous dark side that would see her dubbed the 'Hostess from Hell'.
 
During the last days of the war in 1945, Gestapo leaders, Nazi soldiers and socialites descended on the Countess' grand 17th-century castle in the quiet Austrian village of Rechnitz to drink and dance into the night.
 
The war was coming to an end and Red Army troops were only 10 days away from the village, near the Austria-Hungary border, when the Countess decided to hold a party on the eve of Palm Sunday.
 
It would later be known as the Rechnitz massacre - a murderous party that would host one of the last horrific Nazi crimes against Jewish people.
 
A wealthy descendant from the German Thyssen family, the glamorous socialite was a Nazi supporter who lived a lavish lifestyle thanks to her rich industrialist family.
 
She went on to own horse farms from Kentucky to France and won three major horse racing titles, including the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1972 with the filly, San San - even rubbing shoulders with the Queen.
 
But her roaring racing success in the years after the war concealed her previous affairs with Nazi lovers and sick "kill the Jew" parties.
 
On March 24, 1945, nearly 200 Jewish prisoners were said to have been executed purely for entertainment during the party at her castle, according to author David R.L Litchfield.
 
Those who were unable to work were stripped naked and shot by drunken guests, while those who remained alive were then told to bury the dead before also being gunned down.
 
Other sick atrocities were also said to have been carried out at the castle after Jews were reportedly brought there to build a wall that would hold back Russian forces.
 
One witness describes how the twisted Countess prefered to have a front-row seat to the sadistic killings and beatings.
 
 
Nazi Lovers
 
The socialite became Countess Batthyany in 1933 after marrying Count Ivan Batthyany of Hungary - rescuing him from bankruptcy.
 
She lived in her husband's castle while socialising with her Nazi lovers before the Count retired to his nearby estate to breed horses.
 
At the close of the Second World War, Jewish prisoners from nearby work camps were moved on before the arrival of Russian troops and 600 were housed in the cellars of her castle.
 
At the time, two senior Nazis were said to be vying for the attention of the Countess - her part-time lover and Gestapo official, Franz Podezin, and Hans Joachim Oldenburg, a Nazi commander.
 
It is thought one of the men came up with the sick game of 'shoot the Jew' to try and impress her.
 
According to an article by author David Litchfield [ The Independent, October 7, 2007, editor] , At midnight Podezin took the countess and 15 guests to the barn and invited them to "kill some Jews".

 
After the massacre, the revellers continued to party, leaving 18 prisoners to bury the bodies and dig their own graves before they were shot.
 
Writing in the Lit Hub, Sacha Batthyany, a niece of the Countess who knew her as "Aunt Margit", said his father described the woman as a "monster".
 
He admitted a "crime was committed" and she had a "couple of affairs with Nazis" - but he insisted she wouldn't have been "involved" in the massacre.
 
The bodies of the victims have never been discovered, but the search for the site of one of the Second World War's most gruesome Nazi massacres is now taking place in Rechnitz.
 
Hungarian surgeon, Gabor Vadasz, 85, is the last known living relative of those who were slaughtered at the sick party.
 
"My father and the other forced labourers were either hunted and shot in the head, or beaten to death," he said.
 
"Afterwards, the perpetrators went back to the castle to continue the party.
 
"Those men were tortured and killed at this place for fun. I have been waiting for 73 years and I am getting closer and closer to the end of my life."
 
Soon after the killings, two witnesses to the horrific crime were killed, and a house containing key documents about the atrocities was burned to the ground.
 
The Countess had already fled to Switzerland where she enjoyed a long life and reputation as a champion horse breeder.
 
Nowadays, only the ruins of the castle remain after it was set alight as the Red Army arrived but in the 1960s, the graves of 18 victims were found.
 
A monument to commemorate the atrocity was erected at the rear of a local park decades later in 1987.
 
Trenches, bunkers and relics have been uncovered, but the burial site of the victims remains a mystery.
 
To this day no one was ever prosecuted for the massacre after an investigation in 1945 lead to two suspects being killed.
 
 Hostess from Hell. How evil Nazi ‘killer countess’ who met the Queen once shot 180 Jews for sick after-dinner party game. By Imogen Braddick. The U.S. Sun, September 9, 2021. 

It all began one Thursday in April, about seven years before my visit to Buenos Aires. At the time I was working for the Sunday edition of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. It was early in the morning, when there was hardly anyone in the office, and all was calm. I was writing a column about a sperm donor from the Netherlands when a rather older woman colleague, who seldom had much to say to me, put a page of newsprint down on my desk and said, “That’s quite some family you have, don’t you?”
 
I glanced up and smiled at her. Only then did I look at the article she had torn out of the paper to show me. I was expecting something to do with the 19th century, elaborate period dresses maybe, or horses. Some bridge or other named after one of my forebears, an Àdám, Zsigmund or Ladislaus Batthyány; my surname is well known in Hungary. The Batthyánys had been counts, princes, bishops. One of them was prime minister of the country in 1849, another, Ladislaus Batthyány-Strattmann, was beatified in 2003 by Pope John Paul II for his services to Rome as a medical doctor. The family history can be followed back to the Turkish wars of the 14th century, although here in the West few people know the name, and why should they? They generally think it is Tamil, because the two letters ‘y’ in it suggest Sri Lanka. I get asked about it only during the Christmas holidays, when they show the trilogy of films about Sissi, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, on TV at eleven in the morning, and the Empress, played by Romy Schneider, dances with a Count Batthyány who wears a baby-blue uniform and has a large amount of brilliantine on his hair.
 
So I expected something like that when I glanced at the newspaper, something harmless. Instead, I read the headline ‘The Hostess From Hell,’ which I didn’t understand, but I recognized the woman in the photograph at once. Aunt Margit. The story said that in March, 1945, she had taken part in the massacre of 180 Jews in the Austrian border town of Rechnitz. Apparently she had thrown a party, with dancing and drinking, and at midnight, for fun, the guests held pistols to the heads of naked Jews, men and women alike, and pulled the triggers.
 
“Thanks,” I said, putting the sheet of newsprint aside and returning to the cursor blinking on my screen. I still had two hours before handing in my piece about the Dutch sperm donor.
 
Aunt Margit? My great-aunt with the pointed tongue?
 
*
 
When I was a child, we went to have lunch with Aunt Margit three times a year, always at the most expensive restaurant in Zürich. My father chain-smoked in our white Opel all the way, my mother combed my hair with a plastic comb. We called her Aunt Margit, never just Margit, as if “Aunt” were a title. She had married my father’s uncle, but the marriage was disastrous from the first. Margit was a billionaire from the German Thyssen family. She was tall, with a large torso and thin legs. In my memory she always wears a skirt suit with the jacket buttoned up to her throat, and silk scarves with horse patterns on them; her crocodile handbag is claret-colored with gold clasps, and when she talks about deer in the rutting season or cruising in the Aegean, she puts out the tip of her tongue like a lizard in the pauses between sentences. I sit as far away as possible from her. Aunt Margit hated children, and while I push chopped calves’ liver around my plate I keep looking at her. I want to see that tongue.
 
After her death we seldom mentioned her, and my memories of our lunches faded, until the day when I read the report in the paper about that little place in Austria. Rechnitz. About a party. About a massacre. About 180 Jews who had to strip naked before they were shot, so that their bodies would decompose more quickly. And Aunt Margit? She was at the center of it.
 
*
 
I phoned my father and asked him if he knew about the party. He said nothing for a while, and I heard him uncorking a bottle of wine. I saw him in my mind’s eye, sitting on the shabby old sofa that I like so much in his living-room in Budapest.
 
“Margit had a couple of affairs with Nazis, there was talk about that in the family.”
 
“It says in the paper that she threw a party, and the high point, as a kind of treat for dessert, was when 180 Jews were lured into a stable and guns were handed out to the guests, who were all dead drunk. They all joined in, Margit too. She’s described as the hostess from Hell. The English newspapers are calling her the ‘killer countess.’ And there’s a picture of her captioned: ‘Thyssen countess had 200 Jews shot at Nazi party.’”
 
“Nonsense. Yes, a crime was committed, but I think it’s unlikely that Margit was involved. She was a monster, but not capable of doing that.”
 
“How come Margit was a monster?”
 
*
 
Before I read that newspaper story about Rechnitz and Aunt Margit, I hadn’t been especially interested in my family’s history. I had little contact with it. If I had been born in Hungary it would have been different; there were places and monuments there with connections to my ancestors. However, I grew up not in Budapest but in a four-roomed apartment on the outskirts of the city of Zürich, and when I was eight we moved a hundred meters further away to a grey town house shaped like a Rubik’s cube, the puzzle that everyone played with back in the eighties. We had a ping-pong table in the garden, and a large American-style fridge that the previous occupants had left behind. It smelled so good when you opened the freezer compartment and put your head right in, past the frozen peas. I remember, even more vividly, the smell of the fuel station where we sometimes stopped on the way back from visiting friends of my parents. My two brothers and I used to sit squeezed together on the back seat, and I always hoped the tank would need filling. Then I would wind down the car window, close my eyes and breathe in through my nose. The petrol and the cool air, and all of us together in that car on the way home—I never felt safer in my life. And when we arrived I would pretend to be asleep, so that my father would carry me into my room, with his shirt still smelling of wine and cigarettes and summer. It was all part of my childhood.
 
Like whales who make for calm waters when they are about to give birth, my parents had withdrawn from the outside world to settle here. But unlike whales, who then return to the ocean depths, my parents remained stranded on the outskirts of the city.
 
Maybe they were hiding from their past. From their memories of Hungary, of the war, of flight and concealment.
 
Or possibly they simply wanted to begin again in this undefiled place. Rather than thinking back to earlier times, they wanted to make this dead-end spot their home. And it almost worked.
 
Switzerland is a good country for beginning again and shedding the burden of the past; there is nothing in it to remind you of Hitler or Stalin. The two totalitarian systems of the last century, National Socialism and Communism, the concentration camps and the gulag, are only chapters in school history books to the Swiss. There are hardly any memorials to the victims of wars, hardly any families, apart from those of immigrants, whose stories are interwoven with those atrocities. People don’t ask, “Grandpa, what did you do in the war?” No one in Switzerland was deported or gassed. There’s nothing that the Swiss have to “stomach,” there is nothing to “come out,” as the newspapers always say about revelations in other countries. There was no collective failure, there were no crises outside the world of banking. Switzerland has known only years of prosperity and security; the minds of the Swiss were at ease, particularly in my youth at the beginning of the nineties, when everything was even brighter than before, and people living in city suburbs would get on their bikes at weekends and cycle out to the lakes.
 
You might expect the color of such an idyll to rub off on its surroundings. You might expect such carefree attitudes to transfer themselves to a family’s fortunes. It isn’t always like that.
 
Neither my father nor my mother really felt at home in Switzerland, that most comfortably padded of all European countries. They did learn to speak Swiss German, they went skiing, they bought a sandwich toaster when everyone was buying them, and in winter they ate raclette like everyone else, pouring melted cheese over potatoes, maybe adding a little extra paprika. But the fact is that they participated in the life of the country only when they had to. They exchanged civil greetings with their neighbors, but they would rather get to their car unseen by any acquaintances. In secret, Switzerland and the Swiss smiled at that, or so at least it seemed to me earlier. My parents weren’t bothered by the occasional xenophobic remarks of other inhabitants of Zürich—what a funny surname we had, we spoke German pretty well for foreigners, our rusty car didn’t really suit this city—because they knew that they were never going to put down roots there. As they saw Switzerland, it was never more than a toy country, life there wasn’t the genuine article, or at least not real life with its ups and downs, with its joy and grief. Because no one who had not at least lost a few relations in the war, who had not known what it was to see a foreign power, whether German or Russian, turn everything upside down, could truly claim to understand life. Suffering was the common currency. Idyllic happiness counted for nothing. The past was always more important than the future, old was always better than modern.
 
*
 
And so they probably dreamed of another life in their own way, in that little house on the outskirts of Zürich, a city without yesterdays from which my father soon moved.
 
Two years after the Iron Curtain came down, he packed his bags and went to Budapest. My mother also left Switzerland, and did not seem to feel that she was missing anything. I never bore her a grudge for that. All of a sudden they were both gone, but they had left me with a sense that I was living in the wrong country.
 
I stayed where I was, all the same, perhaps out of inertia; studied at university, because that was what everyone did, and became a journalist. Soon I was writing about armed gangs of kids in Liverpool, I slept in the caravan belonging to a high-ranking Ku Klux Klan member in Texas, I spent several days walking around the streets of a Zürich suburb to report on the case of a girl of thirteen who had been gang-raped, and I sat on the Dutch sperm donor’s sofa with a lesbian couple who wanted a child. I saw him give them a small container and a syringe, so that one of them could inject herself with his sperm. “I’m just going out to do a bit of shopping,” he called, already in the doorway. “Do you want anything? Cola? Crisps?” The women shook their heads, taken aback. Cola? It was a baby that they wanted.
 
Hungary might be my parents’ country, but what business of mine was that? I was in my early thirties, newly in love. The Second World War and a war crime involving the murder of 180 Jews couldn’t have been farther away. We had our own problems, I thought, immigration, disorientation, globalization, I wrote about such subjects: too much consumption, too much pornography, too many opportunities.
 
But after coming up against my family history on the morning when I recognized Aunt Margit in the newspaper article, I began to do some research. I wrote to members of our family in Vienna, Budapest and Munich. “Hello,” I began my letters. “We haven’t met, but we’re distant relations. Have you read what’s said to have happened? Do you know anything about it?” I got hold of files on Aunt Margit and her husband Ivan, my grandfather’s brother; I read books about the Thyssens, the history of Hungary; I spent whole days in archives in Berlin and Berne, Budapest and Graz; and I had many conversations with my father. Aunt Margit had set me traveling back into past history: because of her, I faced the story of my origins for the first time in my life.
 
It was the massacre of 180 Jews that brought me closer to my family.
 
 
From A Crime in the Family: A World War II Secret Buried in Silence—and My Search for the Truth by Sacha Batthyány. 2017.
 
Discovering My Family’s Murderous Nazi Past. By Sacha Batthyány. LitHub, November 1, 2017. 

One morning in April 2007 journalist Sacha Batthyany was approached by an elderly colleague at the Swiss daily where they both worked at the time.

  colleague waved a newspaper clipping in front of him. It was an investigative report entitled, “The Hostess from Hell,” published by a German daily.

Glancing at the headline, Batthyany didn’t understand why he was being shown this article, but then he looked at the picture of the hostess and recognized it immediately. It was Margit, his father’s aunt —someone to whom the family demonstrated the utmost respect and also around whom they tended to tread carefully.

 So he started to read the piece. In March 1945, it said, just before the end of World War II, Margit held a large party in the town of Rechnitz on the Austrian-Hungarian border to fete her Nazi friends. She, the daughter and heiress of European baron and tycoon Heinrich Thyssen, and her friends drank and danced the night away.

 At the height of the evening, just for fun, 12 of the guests boarded trucks or walked to a nearby field, where 180 Jewish slave laborers who had been building fortifications were assembled. They had already been forced to dig a large pit, strip, and get down on their knees. The guests took turns shooting them to death before returning to the party. The organizer of this operation was Margit’s lover Hans Joachim Oldenberg. Margit’s husband, Count Ivan Batthyany, Sacha’s grandfather’s brother, was also at the party.

 It was the first time that Batthyany, then 34, had heard about this incident. He was shocked. “Let’s set aside that it was my aunt,” said Batthyany, who visited Israel last week as a guest of the Jerusalem Book Fair. “It’s just an incredible, brutal story of this night. I mean, I know there are hundreds and thousands of other [violent stories] from the war — I don’t want to compare, but if you read what happened that night it is just unbelievable.”

 In the article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the writer, David Litchfield, describes the party as a celebration of death. Killing for dessert. “I was in shock. I was shocked and surprised that I had never heard of this. And I had studied history, I knew more than the average person, but I’d never heard about this massacre or about Rechnitz, or about my family’s connection to any kind of story connected to the Holocaust.

  “I remember that I had to finish a stupid assignment I was working on but all I was thinking was that I couldn’t wait to talk to my father.

 “This area between Budapest and Vienna is where my family comes from, where my family owned land and castles and stuff. I remember asking him, ‘Did you ever hear of Rechnitz?’ And he said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Then I asked him, ‘Did you know about the massacre?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I knew about it. I heard about it, of course, I’m not stupid.’ So I asked, ‘Did you know that Margit was at the party that night when it happened?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, everyone knew it.’

 “So I wasn’t talking as logically as I am now, but I said more or less, ‘So you knew A and you knew B, but you never made the connection?’ And he said no. I asked him why not and he said, ‘I don’t know why not.’

 And it was this moment that was the starting point of all the emotional stuff about not drawing the connection. Why not? Who has the power to decide not to ask? He said he never thought about it. He never thought there was a connection between the people in the castle and what happened there. Everyone knew that [Margit] had affairs with Nazis, she was a German who was very much into the Nazi regime and she had affairs, but no one ever wanted to ask the questions.”

 

Personal upheaval

 These questions led to the appearance a decade later of “A Crime in the Family,” the fascinating book that Batthyany wrote about the incident, originally in German, and translated into English by Anthea Bell. Batthyany set out that morning in April 2007 on an in-depth search.

 With the caution of a sapper dismantling a bomb, he peeled away the historical details he needed to expose. The fact that he was asking questions of his aristocratic family, the fact that he was uncovering the layers of this embarrassing history demanded a great deal of courage. It was also a personal upheaval: How was he connected to this history? How had it shaped his life, his personality, and his image?

 Everything is integrated in the book from several points of view. It’s not just the story of that sickening night. Batthyany also explores the connection between his grandmother, Marita, and an Argentinean woman named Agnes Mandel, a Jewish refugee from the village in which the two grew up, one as the daughter of the local nobleman and the other as the daughter of village Jews who were murdered.

 He also tells the story of his grandfather, who was imprisoned for a decade in Siberia and came out a shadow of a man; of how his paternal grandparents fled with his father, then a teenager, from Soviet-occupied Hungary to the home of the wealthy Countess Margit. And he examines the family pathology, the pathology of men who were eternally grateful to Margit and who preferred never to ask any questions.

 The Batthyanys were European aristocrats who lost most of their property under the Soviet occupation but who had obviously been important. Batthyany says that when he visited Hungary, his name jolted the hotel staff, who treated him with great respect and sent champagne and fruit to his room.

 Growing up in Switzerland he was regarded as the slightly strange son of immigrants (“I have a difficult name and people thought I was from India”) and had no clue that somewhere there were streets, castles, parks and even a chocolate cake bearing the family’s name. He also had no knowledge of the dozens of Batthyany descendants who held periodic family gatherings in Austria or Hungary.

 But what Batthyany saw in that German newspaper report changed everything. He responded like a journalist, getting his editor to agree to give him time off to investigate. He began reading and searching in archives and also began to question distant relatives whom he had never met. When some of the cousins told him about a family gathering that was to take place, he announced that he was coming and that he planned to discuss the story.

 In his book he describes the meeting: A few dozen Batthyanys, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee from elegant cups, none of them too thrilled to discuss the matter. “After a while it became really nasty,” he says. “One of the old uncles said, ‘What if it’s all not true’ and ‘Who owns the media’ and about vested interests and all this anti-Semitic stuff. Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian playwright, wrote a play about the story, and they were talking about her and it became nasty.”

 Like a Mafia movie

 He recalls that the deeper he dug, the more intense the reactions became, to the point that relatives warned him to stop. “They called me like in a Mafia movie – no joke, anonymous calls saying ‘your name doesn’t matter, I’m just telling you to stop.’” At that family gathering an uncle of his with whom he’d actually been quite close said, ‘Don’t play with the name of our family. You have no idea what could happen.’”

 But Batthyany continued his search, travelling to Rechnitz three times, the first time as a tourist. “Then I talked to the mayor; the mayor was nice. I even spoke to a woman who was at the party that night, who has since died. She told me that not only was my aunt there, but also her husband, Ivan, who is directly my family. My father and Ivan were friendly.

 “It took months. I was working at a magazine then and my boss at the time allowed me to focus on this, but after some weeks I realized that this was going to be different than any other investigative piece I’d done.”

 Batthyany’s initial research resulted in a magazine feature, but the topic gave him no rest. Though it was only one night in the history of a family that ostensibly felt distant enough from the event to be able to suppress it, Batthyany was tormented. He continued to work, married and had a family. Today he and his wife and three children live in Washington, where he is a correspondent for the Germany daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and other publications. But what he thought would end with a magazine article continued to haunt him.

 When the Soviets occupied Hungary, tens of thousands of people, including his father and grandfather, fled. But unlike others, who ended up in a Red Cross refugee camp, their journey ended when the rich aunt sent a private chauffeur to pick them up and bring them to a castle near the Italian-Swiss border. Their first meal was an elegant dinner with glasses of sherry.

 Aunt Margit employed Batthyany’s grandfather in one of her factories, completely financed his father’s education and, as he later understood, was the dominant matriarchal figure in the family.

 “I couldn’t let it go,” he says. “I knew what I had to know, but I wasn’t done. I understood that this was my family and the questions didn’t stop. The title of the book in German is exactly the question that intrigued me then: ‘What Does it Have to do With Me?’ I realized this was the question I was interested in, but I had no idea how to approach it and answer.”

 The answer he found was complex. Batthyany started to see a psychoanalyst, and the insights he derived from the conversations with him appear in the book. There are also sections of a diary his grandmother wrote and diligently edited in the last years of her life. The grandmother talks about the Mandels, the parents of Agnes who ended up in Argentina. Batthyany found Agnes and her daughters and formed a close relationship with them based on a shared fate and shared insights.

 He also traveled with his family to Siberia to trace his grandfather’s life in the gulag and to understand what happened to him during that decade no one ever spoke about.

 The picture that emerges from the book is well-rounded, moving from the personal to the historic, as it emerges that the victim and the criminal are part of the same family. Batthyany’s obsession with the past, with what happened and who was involved, seems at times like a mirror image of what so preoccupies Israelis, a desire to dig deeply and to decipher the present through people who are long lost.

 Batthyany writes on the last page of the book about the similarity between him and the children and grandchildren of Agnes, again like a mirror image. He says that Agnes and the daughters and even the children of the daughters “always went to Hungary to this little tiny village in the middle of nowhere.”

 He recalls: “There’s really nothing there. And they always went there to – I don’t know, to look for something or just to be there, and it was always surprising to me that even the generation afterwards, is still kind of haunted and interested in their roots.”

 He says that while he studied history and psychology in university, even as a journalist he never, or hardly ever did stories on Hungary or World War II. “Before [2007] I wasn’t that interested in my family’s history. I knew just that the name is a very important name in Hungary.

 “It was out of the blue,” he says that he became interested, “and I really think it probably has to do with my character,” he reflects.

 “But I think [the lack of interest in history] also has to do with Switzerland. I really do think that Switzerland, although it’s in the midst of everything, is some kind of historic vacuum. There’s nothing that makes it think about what happened. There are no monuments, for example. When you’re in Hungary, even the tiniest village has three, four, five monuments in the center of the village. For example, one is for the victims of the Holocaust, the other is for the victims of Stalin’s gulags, and they are still fighting about which one is higher. That’s Hungary.

 “So the only thing connected to all of these things and all these dark chapters of our history is in school, when you have your teacher – but it’s all in theory, not something you share on an emotional level.”

 He says most Swiss children do not ask their parents and grandparents what they did during the war. “You don’t ask because there wasn’t much,” he says. Basically, he observes, life in Switzerland doesn’t demand any confrontation with your past, or any past at all.

 He recalls that his first readers were friends or journalists from Switzerland. While they liked his writing, they would also write things like ‘I don’t really understand this thing with the past,’ he says. In Switzerland, this connection with the past is considered odd, he says.

 "I think I’m a bit jealous."

 Batthyany laughs and says: “I was scared because I thought I shouldn’t have done it.

 “But then the book was received entirely differently in Hungary, Germany and Austria [than in Switzerland]. You always carry the past with you, it’s what you are. There are those who don’t want to be aware, but if you feel the burden of the past you will see the connection to the present, to who you are.”

 This article was originally published in July 2017.

 My Aunt Had a Dinner Party, and Then She Took Her Guests to Kill 180 Jews. By  Gili Izikovich. Haaretz April 21, 2020.

Historians dispute the claim by a British journalist that Nazi fanatics attending a party near the Austro-Hungarian border in March 1945 killed 200 Hungarian Jews as an "additional entertainment" laid on by the hosts. The massacre did happen, though, and the circumstances surrounding it remain unclear.

 

A row has broken out among historians about one of the most spectacular Nazi crimes committed in Austria. On the night of March 24 to March 25, 1945, some 200 Hungarian Jews were murdered in the Austrian town of Rechnitz near the Austro-Hungarian border. The bodies of the victims still haven't been found.

 
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper last week published an essay by British journalist David Litchfield in which he claims that several guests at a party held by Countess Margit von Batthyany, born Thyssen-Bornemisza, in Schloss Rechnitz castle were offered the chance to murder the Jews as an "additional entertainment" laid on by local Nazi party chief Franz Podezin. The guests accepted the offer, Litchfield wrote.
 
But several historians are now disputing Litchfield's version of events. Berlin-based anti-Semitism researcher Wolfgang Benz says Litchfield is spreading "murmurings and hearsay."
 
Winfried Garscha of the respected Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance: "It was indisputably a mass murder but it didn't arise from a party whim. People incapable of marching were murdered everywhere at the time."
 
Garscha said that according to documents from an official investigation into the case after the war, the victims were among thousands of Hungarian Jews who were forced to work on the "Southeast Wall" fortifications along the Austro-Hungarian border from autumn 1944 onwards.
 
On March 24 a train brought 600 of these forced laborers from the town of Köszeg in neighboring Hungary to the town of Burg in the Burgenland region of Austria. Some 30 percent of them were sick and weak and were transported to Rechnitz where they arrived in the early evening.
 
Meanwhile the countess was making the final arrangements for her "followers' festival" which started at 9 p.m. The advancing Soviet Red Army was close to Rechnitz. It wasn't unusual for Nazi officials to hold raucous parties before the impending defeat.
 
The killing of the Hungarian Jews in Rechnitz had already been decided before the party began, according to the investigation by public prosecutors after 1945 which cited testimony from one of the accused men.
 
In addition, the driver who was to take the victims to their execution had been ordered for 9 p.m. At 10 p.m. other forced laborers were taken to dig mass graves. Across the German Reich, Jewish prisoners were being driven westwards by their captors who were fleeing Soviet forces. Those incapable of carrying on were killed. The killings at Rechnitz fit in with that pattern.
 
When the preparations for the executions had been made, at around 11 p.m., local Nazi party chief Podezin gathered a group of loyal Nazis who were at the party and ordered them to drive with him to a barn and kill the Jewish prisoners, according to the investigators. His orders were carried out.
 
Litchfield's version can only be explained by speculation that those accused of the massacre were lying when they said Podezin had ordered them to commit the atrocity -- by way of covering up the alleged connection to the party. Podezin disappeared in 1945 -- presumably with the help of the countess. The bodies of the victims were apparently buried by 18 other Jewish prisoners who were themselves murdered the following evening.
 
The case has been a political issue in Austria for decades because many Rechnitz residents boycotted the investigation. One withness was even murdered in 1946, and other witnesses died in mysterious accidents. In the meantime a commemorative society called Refugius has been established in Rechnitz. Its head, Paul Gulda, suspects that Litchfield wanted to attract attention with his sensational version of events.
 
Mass Murder as Party Entertainment? Der Spiegel International, October 22, 2007.