Leseprobe

158 Loss and Memory abdications of the German Kaiser and Saxon king, both of whom had come to serve as emblems of stability and immutability for Dresden’s bourgeois elite. As a result of the unchanging routine of their pre-war existence, spent largely within the (liter- ally and atmospherically) narrow confines of the family home, the girls were marked by a certain unworldliness that had left them ill-prepared for the fundamental transformations sweeping through post-1918 German society. One chapter is dedicated to her aunt Grete Salzburg, who had a positive formative influence on the lives of both Erika and her mother, Elsa Salzburg. Chapters twelve and thirteen offer a portrayal of domestic life in the period after the First World War, when, amid the economic chaos afflicting the entire country, the family’s material woes were com- pounded by the poor health of the household’s sole breadwinner, Dr Siegmund Salzburg. Howev- er, despite the financial hardships, this was also a period of hope and opportunity, as is evident from Erika Plaut’s lively description of her first academ- ic year at the girls’ grammar school from 1919 to 1920. The writing here brims with the joy and ex- citement that the new curriculum and more demo­ cratic style of teaching inspired in Erika and her classmates. Her account also appears to be as ob- jectively accurate as it is subjectively vivid, since references in the chapter—whether to class sizes, so-called ‘study days’, or the names of individual teachers—are absolutely consistent with the cor- responding information published in the school’s official chronicle. The following two chapters deal with Erika’s memories of the ostensibly newmood of German nationalism and accompanying an- ti-Semitism that swept across the country in the years after 1918. Erika even faced anti-Jewish feel- ing and outright discrimination in the classroom, such as when she fell victim to a concerted dese- lection campaign after being appointed class spokesperson. Chapter sixteen focuses on issues relating to gender, looking at male-female relation- ships and interactions. Furthermore, the chapter reveals how it was incumbent on girls to assert themselves over their male counterparts if they were to reap the rewards of increasing equality. Erika Plaut’s memoirs also refer to a tragic spate of suicides affecting the generation of boys known as the ‘generation of 1902’. Too young to fight in the war, but old enough to have been receptive to the belligerent jingoism of the era, they entered their formative years willing to do anything for the fatherland. As adolescents, they not only lived through the defeat and humiliation of their coun- try, but were also confronted with omnipresent reminders of the valour and sacrifice of men who either returned (physically, psychologically) transformed from the front, or did not come back at all. This sense of powerlessness and guilt evi- dently built up into a kind of generational depres- sion and a wave of suicides. Seen as a whole, this could be observed as a curious sociological phe- nomenon, but the devastating personal impact on those left behind is evident from Erika Salzburg’s account of the suicide of her beloved cousin, Ralph Zucker, in 1925. However, as previously de- scribed in an earlier chapter (p. 75), the apparent motive—or, perhaps rather, catalyst—for the sui- cide did not stem from a feeling of having let down the fatherland, but rather the medical student’s crushing disappointment at having failed an ex- amination. According to family folklore, the figure of Dr Stephan Labude from Erich Kästner’s novel Fabian (published 1931) was written as a tribute to his late friend, Ralph Zucker. Chapters 17 to 23, the final portion of this autobio- graphical fragment, are devoted to Erika Plaut’s first forays into adult life between the ages of 17 and 22. Among the key defining events of this pe- riod (spanning 1923 to 1928) were Erika’s one-year internship at her uncle’s company, Gebrüder Heine in Leipzig, followed by a two-year stint as a trainee librarian in Dresden and Leipzig. She then got a job Erika Salzburg and Dr Hans Plaut in a field. Date unknown.