Don’t mention the ... horizontal bricks?

Credit: RAF Valentines Day 1943

The plane home from Hamburg thrummed steadily through the night, down the western side of Germany to Amsterdam, then across the narrow sea to Essex. I think a returning WW2 bomber would have crossed higher, spent more time over the sea than the land. Thousands of people fly to and from Germany every day. Our countries are allied against larger aggressors to the east and west. It’s not necessary to wake these hurtful memories of things that happened before most of us were born. 

Except … when I had asked my brother earlier that day whether he’d like to live in Hamburg, he thought not. ‘Too many horizontal bricks,’ he said. We laughed at him of course. ‘That’s the way bricks are laid!’ but when he pointed across the street to one of so many postwar, Lego-like, redbrick rectangular blocks we understood what he meant.

We had met in Hamburg for a funeral. My brother normally lives in former East Berlin, a city hung over by its own c20th history. Every week he flies to London for work – and it’s unnecessary to spell out the extent of reconstruction that has been needed there. Margery Allingham’s The China Governess (1963) is just one novel that uses the brutalist rebuilding of London’s East End as an ambiguous, troubling background. She had been living in Essex throughout WW2 and was among the many who had become accustomed to the dull roar of bombers – ours and theirs. She had wondered whether it was okay to continue writing fiction at such a time. ‘Still, young men read thrillers when they’re flying out to bomb Kiel, and so maybe it was all right for middle-aged ladies to continue to write them’ at such a time' (Oaken Heart 1941) 

Kiel is also a rebuilt city that it’s somewhat uncomfortable to visit, but among all the memories of havoc and destruction, on either side of the North Sea, the bombing of Hamburg – Operation Gomorrah – retains a special horror. Indelible images of people burning as they ran for their lives in a firestorm, the 46,000 civilian deaths in just over a week, almost 2/3 of the total number of people killed by all the Allied bombing raids on Germany.

Rahlstedt cemetery

We had met in Hamburg for a funeral. My sister-in-law’s father, Hans-Jürgen, had died. He was just two years older than me, born into the immediate postwar generation, marked by the experience of our parents. Hans-Jürgen had been born in Hamburg, in the Rahlstedt area of the city where he was now to be interred. He was one of three children, brought up by their mother on her own. (I don’t know what happened to his father. Somehow it hadn’t ever felt like a question to ask.) How had Rahlstedt fared in the firestorm, I wondered? Its cemetery was calm and dignified, a huge area of many smaller plots each enclosed by trimmed privet hedges, overlooked by cypresses and other dark evergreens.

Hans-Jürgen had longed to travel. In 1968, at the time of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war, he was living in Ohio, aged 16. He found a father figure, he was involved. Back in Germany he studied Russian history, law and business administration and became a communist. He wanted to become a teacher but under the radical decrees of 1972 this occupation was forbidden – berufsverbot – because of his affiliation. He married a fellow party member and settled back in Hamburg, eventually with five children. He became a successful insolvency administrator, specialising in salvaging and restructuring East German businesses, many of which were foundering in the stresses of reunification. He was passionate, imaginative. He took short cuts and disregarded protocols, believing that this was justified by the circumstances. There was no personal gain but suddenly he was arraigned, accused of fraud, a wanted man, a criminal.

In 2002 Hans-Jürgen vanished. From Hamburg, from Germany, from his family’s life. For six years they had no idea where he was or whether he was still alive. Their trauma was profound. As if a firestorm had swept through their existences.

When my sister-in-law, the oldest of the children, stood up to speak at the celebration of her father’s life, she took this abandonment and inflicted pain head on. Did not hide it; did not omit to speak of the time her father had also spent in Fuhlsbüttel prison on his return. For this celebration of his life, we had crossed the city from Rahlstedt to the Barmbec area of Hamburg-Nord. This was where Hans Jurgen had lived and worked for the rest of his life after his release. He had not changed his politics or his passion. He was a founder member of Die Linke party, fully involved in local and city politics and worked tirelessly for people oppressed by the system. His party paid tribute.

He empowered countless people to stand up against bureaucratic arbitrariness and social welfare injustice. He carried out this work with great dedication, passion, and commitment. He would sometimes work through the night on a single case or prepare a presentation on a socio-political topic. Music, art, and political literature were important companions on his journey. Numerous texts and essays bear witness to his fight for social justice and security,equal opportunities, and the fight against poverty.

My sister-in-law didn’t gloss over the impact on his family of such dedication to his work, nor the irritation she’d felt as a young teen asking a simple question about agriculture in the Middle Ages and getting a detailed, lengthy exposition of Marxist – Leninist theory of the feudal system. But she also talked about music and love: listening and healing. It was the most honest, loyal and grief-stricken eulogy I have ever heard. At the beginning she had said, ‘my father was an extraordinary man’ and at the end, ‘I think I have understood my father’.

Community Centre Barmbec 
Hamburg Nord

Francis and I won’t forget the warmth of Hans-Jürgen’s welcome when we first visited Hamburg in 2018. A memorable evening on a terrace beside the Elbe, with the mighty Blohm+Voss shipyard also in view.He made sure that we understood he had done wrong, that we knew he had been in prison. He found us a map of the area of former East Germany where we would be driving, helped open our eyes to the beauty of its countryside, talked and listened, embraced us with his interest and energy.  Looking back at my emails now I see that he had previously offered to take the whole day off and spend it showing us round his city. How I regret not saying yes.

75 years earlier my uncle, the composer and organist Anthony Scott had been the navigator of a Lancaster bomber in those massed raids over Germany. I read an appreciation of him by Basil Ramsey, founding editor of Choir & Organ magazine:

This was a talented composer whose war years were spent in RAF Bomber Command as a navigator, and who took part in several of the massed raids on Germany which suffered severe losses. I did not know Scott before the war but saw clear signs of how such experiences had affected him when he was struggling for recognition as a composer.

I knew my uncle as a gentle, diffident person who took me riding on the Berkshire Downs and once with my mother to the Albert Hall to hear his friend Lennox Berkeley. I never knew what to talk to him about. He seemed so far away.

I feel certain that composers who were in the front line in whatever service had problems shedding the effects of battle when they returned to civilian life. Such a mental struggle was the same for any man, but those who were actively creative desperately needed the muse to return. War does sometimes generate a raging fire of emotions within creative artists that throws out poetry, prose, and music of a dramatic intensity commensurate with the event. In Anthony Scott I saw only a continuity of writing music. If the nights over flame-torn cities had seared his soul, he did not speak of this to me.

I cannot think that it would have been possible for my uncle to speak of this to anyone. 

Hamburg – city of Brahms and Telemann, of CPE Bach, of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, of Mahler… we must return, learn to know it better, accept the ‘horizonal bricks’.

Before Operation Gomorrah (1943) the first thousand-bomber raid had taken place on Cologne / Köhn in May 1942. It should have been Hamburg, but weather conditions prompted a last minute change. In Köhn, this year, a new small publishing house has begun publishing some of the Golden Duck list of books. I hope they’ll soon invite me to visit. I shall certainly accept.