Gert Krell
On the long Pentecost weekend we watched the film “Auf der Suche nach dem Gedächtnis” (In Search of Memory). You may know it, and of course you know Eric Kandel, the famous Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist on whose book, which combines personal biography with the story of his scientific discoveries, it is based.
Eric Kandel’s family left Vienna in 1939, a year after the “Anschluss” and the November pogroms, when their situation had become unbearable. In an interview for German TV he said he had been afraid to cross the street, but that he crossed the Atlantic. Eric (I assume he was called Erich at the time) was nine years old when his parents sent him
and his brother to grandparents in the United States. They followed their sons six months later.
Of course, I connected Eric Kandel’s story with my recent reading of Brigitte Hamann’s book on “Hitler’s Vienna”. Eric Kandel himself established such a connection when he complained in another interview that the part of the ring road, where the University of Vienna resides, was still named after Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic popular tribune and one of Hitler’s political teachers. (A few weeks ago, I read in the papers that a group of Viennese students was trying to have this ring road section renamed, but it seemed an uphill fight.)
German industrialist Fredrich Flick
Yesterday we watched a German TV documentary about Friedrich Flick, one of Germany’s biggest tycoons of the 20th century. Flick built his first industrial empire in the 1920s and persuaded the government, with a mixture of political blackmail and financial lubrication, to save him in the crisis of 1932. They bought parts of his coal and steel works with taxpayers’ money for more than three times their worth on the stock exchange.
Friedrich Flick was heavily involved in the Nazi economy and in arms production during WW II. He was close to Hermann Göring and also a member of Heinrich Himmler’s “circle of friends,” which he supported financially. He greatly profited from “aryanization” and from forced labour, altogether increasing the value of his group fourfold between 1933 and 1943.
Flick was no. 3 on the Allies’ list of the 42 industrialists most responsible for the Nazi crimes. During the Nuremberg trials, he denied any active involvement in the Nazi era and depicted himself as a kind of involuntary fellow-traveler, even a victim in his own right. He got away with a sentence of seven years in prison, of which he only served three, and later used the mild ruling as proof of his essential innocence. The new German government and its new Western allies needed him for rearmament. Our first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, wrote to him and congratulated him on his “great and amazing life’s work.” So Flick began, even when he still was in his prison cell, to reconstruct a new financial and business empire, of which Daimler/Mercedes later became a central part for many years.
Flick had to make restitution of Jewish property, but he arranged clever deals which did not harm him too much. He never paid any compensation for forced labor. On his 70th birthday, one of his friends presented him an album of photographs from the Nuremberg trials in which he ridiculed the whole process and particularly the witnesses who had testified on the conditions in Flick’s factories during the war. By the end of the 1960s, Flick had become the richest man in Germany. He and later his son also continued the habit of (illegally) subsidizing the major political parties – the young Helmut Kohl is said to have been one of his major clients –, also trying to buy tax favours. This led to a political scandal in the 1980s and a trial in which one central manager and two cabinet ministers were (mildly) convicted.
According to the documentary, only one of Flick’s six grandchildren and heirs to his tremendous fortunes voluntarily contributed to the forced labor claims fund jointly set up by the German government and the business community in 2000 (when most of the potential claimants had already died), and another one only after public complaints had been raised about an exhibition of his collection of paintings worth several million Euro.
Eric Kandel was luckier than your mother, because his parents also survived and the family rejoined in the US. Yet even for him, the expulsion from his old Heimat and the Holocaust were traumatic experiences. In the book he writes: “In retrospect, my family was fortunate. Our suffering was trivial compared with that of millions of other Jews who had no choice but to remain in Europe under the Nazis. (…) Although my family and I lived under the Nazi regime for only a year, the bewilderment, poverty, humiliation, and fear I experienced that last year in Vienna made it a defining period of my life.” He had tears in his eyes when he said, in an interview about the film, that it was not easy to be a Jew.
In 1963, Friedrich Flick, one of the leading figures in the Nazi regime, was awarded the “Große Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband”, one of the highest decorations which the Federal Republic grants.
