Leseprobe

157 The Youth Memoirs of Erika Plaut, née Salzburg that had emerged in the intervening period. For in Great Britain and France (respectively), the poppy and cornflower had come to symbolize the battle- fields and war dead of Flanders. ‘Primroses and liverworts’ serve as another happy-seeming motif that Erika Plaut later invests with negative conno- tations: beauty transfigured by tragedy, a once cheerful vision now surveyed with sadness. Erika evokes happy memories from the years around 1917, when the children’s aunt, Grete Salzburg, would take them on Sunday hikes in the country- side near Dresden. In the springtime, they would invariably go to see the blooming primroses and liverworts along the Lockwitz Valley. However, this bucolic setting was also where Dr Siegmund Salzburg spent a period in a sanatorium in 1919 after he first fell sick (untreatably, as it would tran- spire). Once again, his daughters resumed their Sunday outings to the Lockwitz Valley, only this time, to visit their ailing father. Erika Plaut once again refers to the primroses and liverworts that set the landscape ablaze with colour. However, the reference is here somewhat wistful, since the flow- ers now call to mind the memory of a carefree though irretrievably lost period of her life. The contrasts between security and insecurity, permanence and ephemerality, stability and insta- bility, inertia and change, continued to have con- siderable significance for Erika Plaut even in later life. Her adult life was characterized by an unsuc- cessful search for continuity and a quest to find a concomitant sense of personal connection with the past. She compares her own destabilized biog- raphy to the work of a modern composer who makes no reference to an exposition and feels no obligation to return to a main theme, and thus de- viates from the conventions of the classical sonata by moving solely in one direction—forwards. The autobiographical account is divided into chapters, each of which explores a particular theme that was of significance for Erika Plaut at different ages and stages of personal develop- ment. The two opening chapters introduce Erika’s mother and father to the reader. These chapters also contain the first references to the family home, the villa at Mozartstrasse 3, and include a description of the outdoor area, bound by a wall and fence, that was to play such a prominent role in the girls’ later lives. In the third and fourth A spot of music at the Plauts, probably 1947 in Mansfield, Ohio. Erika Plaut, née Salzburg, on violin, Dr Hans Plaut on cello, with the couple’s three children on piano. ‘Teddy (17), Eri (16) in their first evening dresses. 1922.’ chapters, Erika Plaut describes the typical, monot- onous routine of her pre-school years, which were largely spent with her sisters and the girls’ govern- ess. This period was also dictated by the rhythm of family rituals, such as the different seasonal tasks punctuating the annual gardening cycle, and their yearly visits to Dresden’s Christmas mar- ket. Chapters five and six explore the family’s re- lationship to their Jewish cultural and religious identity, while also giving an account of Erika’s first years of formal education at a private girls’ school. The next four chapters deal with the after- math of the First WorldWar, including the sudden collapse of the German monarchy. Even at just twelve years of age, Erika Salzburg was acutely aware of the prevailing sense of disillusionment that followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War. She was also conscious of the sense of fore- boding and defencelessness precipitated by the