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Authors: Giles Milton

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All would be forgiven when Erwin emerged clean-shaven and dressed in his smartest clothes, bringing back fond memories of Marie Charlotte's comfortable bourgeois childhood; her father, a general, was always impeccably turned out.

The town's Jewish bourgeois elite quickly warmed to Erwin's eccentricities and awkward mannerisms, excusing him because he was an artist. He, in turn, found them stimulating company.

The overt anti-Semitism that was so prevalent in other parts of Germany was less visible in Pforzheim. Although there were sometimes tensions between the two communities, Jews played an important role in local society and several leading members of the Chamber of Commerce were Jewish. The town's two principal department stores were also owned by Jews and when the community came to build a new synagogue in 1893, they were offered a site in the very heart of the town. Its architecture was conspicuously Western; with its stocky tower and gilded cupola, it could easily have been mistaken for a church.

There were the occasional unpleasant incidents. In 1922 a couple of the synagogue's windows were smashed, and in 1926 some tombs in the Jewish cemetery were daubed with paint. Yet these were isolated cases, swiftly dealt with by the authorities. In Pforzheim, the Jews had nothing to fear.

Wolfram was not yet born when the German economy suffered its first spectacular crash. In April 1923, exactly twelve months before his birth, it cost 24,000 Deutschmarks to buy one American dollar. By Christmas, that same dollar cost a staggering 4,200 trillion Deutschmarks. Reparation payments together with the loss of both the industrialised Lorraine and Silesia, had created an underlying instability. Inflation, soon to become hyperinflation, started to spiral out of control.

As instability led to catastrophe, the German mark was rendered worthless. Prices rose so rapidly that, when Marie Charlotte took her mother to Café Brenner in the centre of Pforzheim, she joked that she should pay for the drinks immediately lest she could not afford them by the time they had finished.

When the German economy crashed for the second time, in 1930, Wolfram was six years old and had just started his education in a state school that catered for the children of both rich and poor. While the wealthy still managed to make ends meet, the impoverished underclass suddenly found themselves reliant on canteens run by Quaker charities from America.

Life for the downtrodden became a succession of miseries. Wolfram paid an occasional visit to a neighbouring family where everyone was out of work and had to sit in pitch darkness every evening because they could no longer afford electricity.

In the face of adversity, some people became inventive in their quest to earn money. A long rap at the Aïchele front door signalled the arrival of the woman who called every few days with baskets of kindling wood for sale. She used to ask the forest lumberjacks for thin slices from the stumps of trees that had been felled, then split these into tiny pieces and go from house to house, trying to earn a little cash.

By the winter of that year, thousands of the town's workers were without a job. Every morning, long before it was light, bands of ragged and hungry individuals would head for the Work Bureau in the hope of getting temporary employment. They would stand close together in an orderly queue, waiting for it to open and taking extreme care not to lose their place lest someone else be given the work they desperately needed.

In apartment blocks in and around Pforzheim, men would gather in the stairwell each evening for heated discussions about which political party was best equipped to save the German economy. Some were Communists. Others threw their support behind those at the other end of the political spectrum, Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party.

Such discussions frequently took place in the Pforzheim block where the young Wolfram was living at the time. The building was owned by a committed Socialist whose tenants included a Nationalist, a Jew and a Nazi, making it a microcosm of the new Germany. The Nazi occupant, Herr Kraft, used to wag his finger at Wolfram's father and tell him that Hitler was the only leader strong enough to impose his ideas on the country. Erwin, however, vehemently disagreed; he had no time for the jumped-up Austrian corporal, and remained a German Nationalist who believed that President Hindenberg alone could lead the country out of these difficult times.

Herr Kraft, an early enthusiast for Nazism, was particularly proud of his role in establishing the Pforzheim branch of the party in the autumn of 1920, one of the first local offices in Germany. He also knew Wolfram's father well enough to realise that he would never support the Nazis and even cautioned him against signing up for membership. ‘You mustn't join,' he used to say. ‘They've got nothing to offer you. And they're too rough.' Having said that, he secretly confessed that he had joined because he relished the pub brawls in which Nazi thugs played a prominent role.

 

Herbert Kraft's enthusiasm for Hitler was not shared by many in Pforzheim. The notion of the Nazi Party coming to power seemed fanciful, for it was still very much on the margins of political life. Hitler had briefly shot to prominence in the wake of his abortive coup in 1923 when he had held hostage the ruling triumvirate of Bavaria in a Munich beer hall. This incident, later to be celebrated in Germany as the Beer Hall Putsch, was a failure. The army moved in to crush Hitler's 600 storm-troopers, killing sixteen of them in the process. Hitler himself was arrested three days later. Although he won many plaudits at his showcase trial and managed to escape the gallows, he realised that attempting to seize power by force was doomed to failure. Henceforth, he would attempt to win through the ballot box.

Yet even this strategy seemed unlikely to succeed. In the elections of May 1928, the Nazi Party had won a derisory 2.6 per cent of the vote. Although they managed to get twelve deputies into the Reichstag – among them Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering – it was cold comfort to the party leadership. The stark truth was that fewer than three out of every hundred Germans agreed with Hitler's conviction that he was the saviour of their nation.

To maximise their chances of success the Nazi political programme of 1930 had been carefully worded to tap into all the grievances of the day. Nationalistic, anti-Semitic and written in unadorned language, it was designed to appeal not just to men like Herbert Kraft, but right across the social spectrum. Point one, ‘We demand the union of all Germans in a Great Germany,' was a view held by the great majority of the electorate. Point two, ‘We demand…revocation of the peace treaties of Versailles,' was also a vote winner. Other points addressed immigration, corruption and land reform, issues that struck a chord with the overwhelming majority of the population.

The fifth point of the programme was more contentious. ‘Only those of German blood…may be members of the nation. Accordingly, no Jew may be a member of the nation.' In a town where the Jewish population was well integrated into society, this seemed neither feasible nor fair.

Although Wolfram's father had no truck with such dogma, he, like so many of his contemporaries, had learned to despise the fledgling democracy of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, he increasingly blamed democracy for the chaotic state of affairs in Germany.

Hitler used every possible occasion to stress his intention of coming to power through the ballot box. In March 1930, he finally got his chance. The right-wing German chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, dissolved the Reichstag and called national elections, confident that the electorate would blame the centre parties for the economic crisis and vote, in their millions, for the German Nationalist Party.

It was a catastrophic error of judgment and one that was fully exploited by Hitler. The Nazis threw everything into the campaign, aware that if they could not succeed in a time of economic crisis, they would never manage to win an election.

In Pforzheim there was a feeling that change was on its way. In Wolfram's tenement, Herbert Kraft felt certain that the Nazis would at long last achieve a breakthrough. Even those tenants who did not support Hitler agreed that a radical solution was necessary. People were saying that things could not carry on as they were and that life could not get any worse, even under Hitler or the Communists. What everyone agreed upon was that Germany needed a strong leader.

The prospect of Communist rule terrified Pforzheim's middle classes. Whilst also unhappy about the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, most of them thought that this did not have to be taken too seriously. Being prepared to try anything, they felt that Hitler should at least be given the opportunity to show what he could do.

It was an opinion shared by 6.4 million Germans. When the election results were announced, the Nazi Party was revealed to have achieved a stunning success. With 18.3 per cent of the electorate and 107 seats in the Reichstag, it had become the second-largest party.

 

Wolfram, who was far too young to care about such matters, spent his spare time seated at the family table, producing intricate drawings of medieval village life. Every now and then, his mother would glance into the dining room and smile as she watched her young son hunched over a sheet of paper, lost in his own miniature world.

The farmsteads and churches in his drawings were inspired by trips to his relatives in the countryside around Freiburg, but the crowds of villagers who inhabited the pictures were conjured to life in young Wolfram's imagination – rough farmhands, hawkers and pedlars, burghers and merchants in floppy galliskins.

The quality of the draughtmanship astonished his parents' friends; indeed, they did not quite believe that Wolfram could have produced them without help. One of these visitors, Herr Tiehl, visited the family villa regularly to select one of Erwin's paintings to print in the magazine he owned. When he paused one day to look at what the young Wolfram was drawing, he was taken aback by his confident technique. The illustration in question depicted a Christmas market with festive stalls and decorations, and cauldrons of steaming food. In the background were half-timbered mansions blanketed with snow.

Herr Tiehl immediately asked whether he could print it in the Christmas issue of the magazine, paying Wolfram the princely sum of 25 Deutchsmarks.

These childhood pictures also provide a glimpse of the village of Eutingen as it appeared to a young boy. The surrounding hillsides were covered in orchards and tidy vineyards that stretched up the slopes in orderly parallel lines.

The centre of the village, a sleepy single street called Hauptstrasse, lay at the bottom of the hill, with a parish church and a handful of stores selling household goods, haberdashery and sweets. Here, too, was the local primary school attended by Wolfram, his brother and sister. There was also a
rathaus
or town hall – a grandiose description for the village offices.

From the centre of the village, a steep path called the Hohe Steig or High Path led up to the
künstler colonie
or artists' colony at the top of the hill. There were only six houses here, each encircled by large gardens. They were so off the beaten track that no one went there unless they were invited, which meant that the Eutingen hilltop could become the Aïcheles' private domain – isolated in its own bubble from the rest of Germany.

Over the years to come, a stream of eclectic friends, acquaintances and clients of Erwin would visit, safe in the knowledge that, once they were inside this magnificent home, conversation was free and open. Among them was Dr Schnurmann, a Jewish physician whose penchant for Hitler jokes would soon land him in hot water, and August Zorn, whose headstrong daughter would get into serious trouble after falling in love with an enforced Polish labourer. Yet another was Karl Weber, a senior public attorney, who would soon join the Nazi Party only to find himself prosecuting individuals who were good friends of the Aïcheles.

On their visits, Dr Schaaff and his Japanese wife captivated the children with tales of miniature artwork from from Schaaff's native land. Another visitor was a great-aunt with a huge collection of African spears and lances. Another was Dr Hillenbrandt, who had hacked through the jungles of equatorial Africa like some latter-day Livingstone.

Wolfram loved to chat with the adults and listen to their tales, and they, bemused to find a young lad so interested in their stories, would talk to him as if he were already a grown-up. Wolfram's parents were pleased to see their children conversing with these adult visitors. They wanted them to form their own opinions about the world.

 

Among the occasional guests at the Eutingen villa was an attractive young mother and her four young children. Martha Luise Rodi was very different to most guests of the Aïcheles. The daughter of one of the influential jewellery dynasties of Pforzheim, she had been brought up in bourgeois comfort in the centre of Pforzheim.

She might never have met Wolfram's parents had it not been for the fact that she and her husband, Max, attended the same parish church. The Christengemeinschaft, or Christian Community of Pforzheim, was centred on the teachings of the esoteric Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who held that the spirit in human beings could be guided towards the spirit in the universe.

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