Overture of Hope, page 7
The sisters found themselves in exalted company. Among the 476 early tenants were Margaret Lockwood, the most popular screen actress in Britain at the time, and David Burghley, the Conservative politician and Olympic runner. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight, the chief “agent runner” for MI5, also lived at Dolphin Square. He managed to infiltrate both communist and fascist groups from a series of flats at Hood House that doubled as his home and offices. Among Knight’s most famous targets was his upstairs neighbor in Hood House, Sir Oswald Mosley. A former Conservative Member of Parliament and the leader of the British Union of Fascists, which he founded in 1932 after meeting the Italian leader Benito Mussolini, Mosley rented two large units directly above Knight’s flats. That same year, the married Mosley began an affair with Diana Guinness, née Mitford, one of six aristocratic sisters whose political escapades in the 1930s and 1940s seemed to mirror the deep fissures that would tear apart the twentieth century.2
When they weren’t immersed in opera, Ida and Louise, now both in their thirties, continued to live a quiet life with their parents at the family home on Morella Road, where Ida wrote her romance novels on her typewriter at a small desk in the attic. Dolphin Square was strictly reserved for their other life of lively opera gramophone parties but also increasingly of intrigue and drama.
In addition to Galli-Curci and her husband Homer Samuels, the sisters were still very close to Pinza and Rethberg, who became frequent visitors in the early days at Dolphin Square. “There is much excitement over here over Mrs Simpson,” wrote Rethberg in a letter from New York dated December 20, 1936, ten days after King Edward VIII announced his abdication to marry his American lover, the twice-divorced socialite Wallis Simpson. “But all my sympathies are with King Edward.” In the same letter, addressing “Miss Ida,” Pinza regretted that the couple’s schedules would not permit them to attend the Cooks’ gramophone parties over the next year, suggesting that they all meet somewhere in Europe. Perhaps Salzburg? “I am also very sorry about what has happened to your King and feel he will regret his step soon,” wrote Pinza, concluding with “[his] very best wishes.”3 Not long after, in another letter to Ida, Rethberg alluded to troubling times in her native Germany: “Everything seems like a terrible nightmare.”4
Indeed, after their encounter with Mitia Mayer-Lismann on her visit to London, the sisters had slowly come to realize that life in Germany was becoming increasingly difficult for Jews. Their new friend had told them that Jews had little protection under the law and were rapidly becoming noncitizens. “But don’t you think this will pass?” asked Louise while the sisters were shepherding Mayer-Lismann around London on that first visit. “I mean—it’s all so silly.”
But Mayer-Lismann assured them that it wasn’t silly. “If Hitler becomes even more powerful and is able to do one quarter of what he has written down in Mein Kampf it will be a bad time for the Jews. We had a friend already who—disappeared.”
“Disappeared? Disappeared where?”
Mayer-Lismann said she didn’t know. Perhaps he went to jail or to a concentration camp. All she knew was that the friend was taken by the Gestapo and never heard from again.
“Do you mean he was arrested?” asked Ida, still unable to grasp what Mayer-Lismann was saying.
Mayer-Lismann had no reply.
“But one has to know where people go when they’re arrested,” insisted Ida. “Surely there’s a trial or something? Habeas corpus and all that sort of thing. It’s against the law to take them away and keep them away without trial.”
Mayer-Lismann told the sisters that such legal niceties no longer applied to Jews in Germany. “And my husband says it’s just the beginning. He says the time is coming when there will be no law for the Jews.”
“But I never heard of such a thing!” cried Louise, the good, law-abiding bureaucrat. “This is the twentieth century!”
The sisters were so rattled by their conversation with Mayer-Lismann that Ida suggested they end their sightseeing tour and go for coffee to come up with a plan to help her. “The coffee [wasn’t] very good, but the talk [was],” recalled Ida who began to plot how she and Louise were going to bring Mayer-Lismann permanently to safety in London.5
For the first time the sisters started to learn from their guest about work permits and visas “and how one gets out of one country and into another.” They also learned that there was opposition to Jews leaving Germany, and that unless they had international banking connections, the “transfer of money [was] virtually impossible and dangerous.” Goods were equally difficult to transfer out of the country, often subject to the whim of the Nazi officials dealing with the case, Mayer-Lismann told them. She explained that she had come to England in the hope of finding work as a lecturer at a college so that she could obtain a visa to leave Germany with her family. But the process would take time, and in the meantime she had to return to her home in Frankfurt. “And wait and wait and wait,” noted Ida.
Just before Mayer-Lismann left for Frankfurt am Main, Ida told her that the sisters would do more research on her situation and write to her regularly. Mayer-Lismann quickly cautioned them against sending any letters, noting that they were often opened by Nazi censors.
“Opened?” said an outraged Louise. “But that’s against the law…”
But, as Mayer-Lismann had tried to explain, the laws in Germany no longer protected Jews.
“Well, then,” said Ida, “we’ll just have to come and visit you in Frankfurt in a few months’ time and talk things over.”6
And as they gradually became aware that they could no longer rely on any rational explanations for the growing discrimination against Jews in Germany, Ida and Louise would begin to envision another purpose for the gramophone party flat: “a clearing house…for the people whom we brought to England.”7
After the successful publication of Wife to Christopher, Ida began work on the other two books that she had promised to deliver to Mills & Boon—a contract that would renew itself for the next five decades. She was never under any illusions about her work. “You don’t even mind when people come up to you—as they frequently do—and say, ‘Of course, I don’t read your sort of stuff.’ ”8 She knew she wasn’t writing literary masterpieces and that her romances appealed mainly to the secretarial crowd, the kind of young women who read Mabs Fashions and cut out the dress patterns. “It used to wound me very much when I was young. But now I don’t mind a bit. I just look them in the eye and say, ‘No? And you can’t write it either, can you?’ Then they fade away.”9
It wasn’t long before Ida found herself making more money from her writing than she could ever have imagined. Ida, who had never handled more than £5 at once, suddenly found her income rising exponentially. From just over £4 a week, she suddenly started to earn advances in the hundreds of pounds.
The sisters started to travel to Germany and Italy more frequently for opera, faithfully attending performances given by their new friends Krauss and Ursuleac. They briefly fantasized about spending their new-found wealth on cars, jewelry, and fur coats, and even talked about Louise eventually retiring from her civil service job.
But as Jews began to be publicly persecuted, the sisters were also conscious of another, worthier use for Ida’s sudden windfall.
“I was intoxicated by the sight,” wrote Ida, referring to her ability to earn significant amounts of money. “And—terrible, moving and overwhelming thought—I could save life with it. Even now, I can hardly think of it without tears.”10 For suddenly, these two rather sheltered English women were gradually understanding the full horror of what life was like for Jews in Germany. “We didn’t know—imagine! In these days we didn’t know that to be Jewish and to come from Frankfurt am Main in Germany already had the seeds of tragedy in it.”11
Months after their meeting with Mayer-Lismann in London, they visited her in Frankfurt, where for the first time the sisters saw a shop with “JUDE” plastered over the window and “an SS man at the door with a gun, making people pass along and forbidding them to enter.”12
During that visit the Cooks were thrilled to be invited to supper at the Mayer-Lismann home with Krauss and Ursuleac. But a foreboding overshadowed the meal as “something like panic” struck the family after Mayer-Lismann’s brother, an investment banker, was delayed at the border returning from a business trip to Paris. He arrived twenty-four hours later, “very shaken” because he was taken off the train at the frontier “and searched to the skin,” said Ida. “Then he was kept under arrest, but finally allowed to continue his journey. There was no explanation of why he was arrested or why he was released.” When they heard the story after Mayer-Lismann’s brother arrived, the sisters again responded with incredulity. Surely, one could complain? The question provoked little more than “a pale smile” from the dinner party guests. “Least said, soonest mended,” noted Ida. “He is free now, for which everyone is uneasily thankful.”13
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from having sexual relations with Aryans, did not define Jews only on the basis of religious beliefs. Anyone who had Jewish grandparents was deemed a Jew whether or not they actually practiced Judaism.
And even if they had converted to Christianity, they were still considered Jews under the race laws.
Such was the case of Mitia Mayer-Lismann.
Mitia Lismann was born on June 3, 1883, in Saint Petersburg as violence against Jews erupted in a series of pogroms. The brutality emerged after the assassination of Czar Alexander II by Russian revolutionaries in 1881. When Alexander III succeeded his father, he set about reversing all his father’s liberal reforms and stoking anti-Semitic rhetoric that blamed Jews for his father’s assassination; he sought to unite Russia under a single language and the Christian Orthodox religion. Jews had long been discriminated against in the empire, and the new czar saw an opportunity to either kill them all off or force them out of Russia.
In 1882 the passage of the so-called May Laws forbade Jews from living outside the Pale of Settlement, an area in western Russia where most Jews were forced to stay. The new laws prevented them from entering into any lease or mortgage agreements, and they were later barred from holding government jobs or working as doctors and lawyers, while strict quotas were placed on entrance to high schools and universities. At the same time, Russian soldiers went on a series of bloody rampages, destroying Jewish businesses, raping Jewish women, and killing thousands. As a result of the continuing violence, more than two million Jews left the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1914. Among them was Lismann’s family, who escaped to Germany, settling in Frankfurt am Main.
Lismann was of Jewish origin, but her family was completely assimilated into an intellectual, cosmopolitan circle who cared more about classical music and art than about religion. She displayed musical talent from an early age and began piano lessons in 1889 at the age of six. She trained as a teacher and finished her exams in June 1910. A year later, she married Paul Mayer, a businessman, and on April 17, 1914, their daughter Else Mayer-Lismann was born. The couple also had a son—Fritz Mayer-Lismann—who died in January 1933, two days after Hitler came to power.
In 1931, when her husband’s company fell on hard times, Mayer-Lismann began teaching piano at the Hoch Conservatory. A year before the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935, Mayer-Lismann also started to give lectures in English and German, mostly to tourists who frequented the Salzburg Festival and the Frankfurt Opera. By the time she had distinguished herself as an opera lecturer, Mayer-Lismann and her family socialized with a circle of friends that included Richard Strauss, German soprano Adele Kern, and Clemens Krauss.
While in Salzburg during that difficult summer of 1934, Mayer-Lismann worried about her family. She confessed her growing anxiety to Ursuleac, to whom she had become extremely close, and Krauss over dinner at a “quiet outdoor restaurant along the riverbank.” She also told them that she was going to England to give an opera lecture and while there would try to explore possibilities for leaving Germany. Krauss suggested that Ursuleac should introduce her to the Cook sisters. “What about your two English adorers, the Cook Mädels?” said Krauss, using the German phrase for “lass” that he frequently used to describe the sisters. “Can’t you make use of them?”14
Life in Germany for the Mayer-Lismann family became progressively worse. By 1936 Mayer-Lismann, then fifty-two, was prohibited from continuing most of her professional activities. Officials at the Conservatory told her she would only be allowed to teach Jewish children. With her husband out of work, the family began to rent out rooms in their home on Im Trutz Frankfurt Street, 27, in order to survive. Mayer-Lismann was one of thousands of talented and well-respected Jews forced out of their professions after Hitler targeted culture in Germany. Music and art were placed under the control of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, whose mandate was to rid German culture of Jewish influence, control the media, and place the arts in the service of furthering the Aryan “glories” of the Third Reich. Overnight, so-called “degenerate” artists, the modernists who had flourished in the Weimar Republic and whose works were often blistering critiques of fascism and authoritarianism, were deemed enemies of the state, and many were rounded up and sent to concentration camps as political prisoners.
Goebbels purged cultural institutions of Jews and Nazi Party opponents, creating the Reichsmusikkammer, or Reich Music Chamber, in 1933. The goal of the Berlin-based institute was to promote German music and musicians, such as Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, and Bach. Music by classical composers who were born Jewish, such as Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler, was banned, as were compositions by Claude Debussy, who had married a Jew. Jazz, swing music, and modern works by composers such as Alban Berg, Igor Stravinsky, and Paul Hindemith were labeled “degenerate” and forbidden.
During these increasingly desperate times, Mayer-Lismann placed her trust in the Cook sisters and her well connected music-world friends. And surely she could continue to count on Krauss, who was a rising star in Nazi Germany.
At the beginning of their friendship with Krauss, the Cooks could scarcely have imagined how much their favorite conductor was a figure of intrigue in both Austria and Germany—beloved by Hitler but openly hated by some of the titans of classical music who saw him as a dangerous threat. Ferociously ambitious, Krauss was determined to become a star. Besides, he needed the money. Following a bitter split from his first wife, Margarethe Abraham, Krauss was ordered by an Austrian divorce court to pay more than half his salary of 4,000 schillings per month to support his two children, Oliver and Oktavian. After his marriage to Ursuleac, he was also helping to raise her daughter, Nadja.
Like Strauss, he eschewed politics and was devoted to his art. He had little patience with bureaucracy and made enemies of those he considered of lesser talent. He was not above firing even the most popular singers and musicians if they did not meet his criteria for excellence and reassigning long-established operatic roles. He did little to discourage open hostility against him, which had been building for years in Vienna where opera-world worthies accused him of being a Nazi and a traitor, especially after he took over from Strauss at the Salzburg Festival in the tense summer of 1934. He came in for even more criticism when he attempted to organize a tour of South America for the Vienna State Opera a year later—a move that critics saw as further sabotage because the trip would probably conflict with the Salzburg Festival. “Repercussions of Salzburg intrigues and jealousies quiver through the first autumnal stirrings of the Vienna music season,” noted Herbert Peyser, the classical music critic for the New York Times in the autumn of 1934. “The storm center of hypotheses and discussions is Clemens Krauss, whose personal prestige was not advanced by the late course of events at Salzburg. Today one even gathers that his foothold in Vienna is scarcely as secure as was hitherto imagined.”15
In fact, on the opening night of Beethoven’s Fidelio, starring German soprano Lotte Lehmann, at the Vienna State Opera in September of that year, Krauss was pointedly snubbed by Austria’s new chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, who presented the singer with a large and ornate wreath on stage. “In this ostentatious gesture many people discerned an implicit slap at Herr Krauss, officially administered,” said Peyser.16 Lehmann, adored in Austria where she had long been associated with the Vienna Opera, made no secret that she couldn’t stand Krauss. In fact, whenever she was passed over by Krauss, Lehmann leaned on Schuschnigg to intervene. “Such was the intrigue that if Ursuleac got a role Lotte Lehmann did one of her famous hysterical scenes with Schuschnigg,” wrote one observer. “[She] complained to Schuschnigg that he [Krauss] was a Nazi.”17 In Austria, belief in Krauss’s perceived Nazi leanings was so widespread that he and his wife were under constant police surveillance. After the Dollfuss assassination, while the couple were in Salzburg, their apartment was searched by Austrian police.18
Annoyed by the petty jealousies and constant challenges to his artistic vision in his native country, Krauss looked to Germany to bolster his career. He had already demonstrated that he had few qualms about taking over the posts vacated by colleagues who were either routed by the Nazis or resigned in protest at their rule. Such had been the case over Arabella, the first opera the Cooks saw Krauss conduct at Covent Garden in May 1934. Behind the scenes, Krauss was called in to substitute for German conductor Fritz Busch at the Dresden State Opera when Busch was fired over his very vocal opposition to the Nazis a year earlier. Strauss, who had dedicated Arabella to Busch, was incensed by the Nazis’ backstage meddling in the opera. Members of the Dresden opera company were pressured into signing a letter critical of Busch’s talents, but a more complicated scenario suggested that Busch was actually being groomed by the Nazis to take over the Berlin State Opera. The move was ultimately blocked by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Germany’s greatest conductor, who did not want to compete with Busch for prestige in Berlin. In addition to his leadership of the Berlin Philharmonic, Furtwängler was also musical director of the Berlin State Opera.19
