A slightly different creative process this time

Normally I know the end of the story before I start. I know the main hurdles it will go through and I have the structure firmly in my head, even if I haven’t written it down. Sure, the characters take off on their own a little but the skeleton of the story remains intact. This time it is a little bit different. 

Writing as a means of discovery: Clara’s spiritual journey

Ernst Lehrs, in his autobiography Gelebte Erwartung, tells us that his mother became a dedicated anthroposophist and brought comfort to other people living in the ghetto because of   her outlook on life. He also tells us that early on she found the beliefs of the anthroposophists difficult to understand. She believed that her husband only lived on in her memory and not that he was somewhere else now that he had died. Lehrs doesn’t tell us exactly how she came to change her ideas.

However, he does relate an extraordinary thing that happened to her. She was hurrying to the school because she was late for a lecture when she heard a scream from above and a child dropped into her arms. She rushed back to the house with the child. Then she “woke up” to find herself still standing on the street, her arms held open and apparently talking to herself as some other people on the street gave her some funny looks. This all happened on a day when a child had died because of heat-stroke.

Lehrs offers us no connection between this incident and Clara’s spiritual journey. I saw none either. True, it could make her think that there are some supernatural occurrences but knowing Clara she was just as likely to think that she was also suffering from the heat. However, as I wrote this scene I realised it was a turning point for Clara. As she joins her son in the dead boy’s vigil, she realises that the soul is still in the body and concludes that she had been returning the soul that had escaped too soon. It is a part of a belief system related to anthroposophy that the soul stays in or near the body for three days.

It’s interesting to look at my own process here. It wasn’t a conscious decision to make this the turning point for Clara. Yet, actually, Ernst Lehrs implies it is though doesn’t explain why. I remember a discussion before my mother-in-law’s funeral (she was Renate, whom we meet in this story) about the Christian Community’s belief concerning the time of departure of the soul. Whatever the cause, even for a rational person like Clara, this vision / hallucination must have been pretty startling. I uncovered the enormity of it for Clara as I wrote.                    

Putting in an extra thread - Rudi Lehrs

We only know a little about this character:

He was five years younger than Käthe Lehrs i.e. there was a much bigger gap between them than between Käthe and Ernst.

• He only had one lung. (Though for how much of his life we’re not sure, nor why.)
• He was a mathematician.
• He was in London with Ernst when niece Renate Edler arrived there on the Kindertranport.
• He ended up at the University of Ottawa.

Despite the problems with his lung he survived almost as long as his brother and sister.

At one point they could not find him: he had moved house in Canada and the notification had gone astray.  

That actually may seem like quite a collection but in fact we have much less of an impression of him than of the rest of the family. He seems to have been a bit of a loner but he has to come into Clara’s story. She was above all else a mother and a mother is concerned about her children.

I am only including a few scenes of Clara’s life before her “third stage” – her life after her husband’s death which spans the time of her involvement with the Steiner schools, the special class in Schellberg house and her persecution by the Nazis. Yet these scenes are crucial. They really build her.

For these scenes I am using the historical writer’s third tool – the imagination. (The other two are primary resources and repeated experience.) I’m inserting three scenes of Rudi’s earlier life. He will appear again later – mainly as he moves away from Germany.

There is a symbiotic relationship between the research we do and our writing in any case. We research the story in order to be able to tell it but as we write new questions appear. The research must stay out of the writing time and be seen as separate activity.  Sure, it counts as a writerly activity, it’s extremely interesting and it seems to me to be a good use of my time. But it can’t count as writing time.

I keep a list of what else I need to look into. Lung diseases joined that list yesterday.                 

    

What anthroposophism means to my family and what it meant to Clara and Ernst Lehrs

It feels very much as if it belongs to the New Age. It’s a little creepy when you read works by and about Rudolf Steiner and he uses word such as the “astral body” and the “etheric body” and he talks of his own reincarnation that actually should have happened somewhere in the United States in 2002. I find myself asking where is that ten or eleven-year old and what is s/he doing now? Do I really believe this happens?

And yet. If one takes out the strange language, a lot of what Steiner says in his various lectures, particularly those about education, makes an awful lot of sense. 

The first Waldorfschule, as Steiner schools are known in Germany, was built at Stuttgart. Ernst Lehrs taught there. He and Clara Lehrs built a house nearby which offered accommodation to students during the week. Later that house, the very house after which this blog is named,   would accommodate and protect a class of disabled children with severe learning difficulties. In 1973 I visited the school. The family of my mother-in-law’s best friend attended. I was taken there by the two daughters of the well-known architect, Gűnter Behnisch. Being an award-winning architect does not preclude you from sending your children to a Steiner School. Not many private schools are tolerated in Germany. The Steiner education system is.   

Nothing seemed particularly strange at the school. It was in a leafy suburb of Stuttgart.  As far as I could tell, it taught the normal range of subjects in quite small classes. I’ve been in British education system since 1974 – until 2006 at secondary level and now in higher education. What I and others consider good practice – as opposed to some crazy tick-box hurdles – always seems to line up with what happen in the Steiner schools. The latter don’t seem to have any tick-box craziness.          

My mother-in-law, Renate Edler, attended the Michael Hall Steiner School in London and during World War II was evacuated with them to Minehead. I tell her story in my novel Potatoes in Spring in my blog of the same name. My husband’s parents considered Steiner education for him and we also considered it for our children. In the end, because we all wanted out children to remain in the main stream, because we didn’t know how we would pay the fees and because of the practicalities of getting the children to school, we decided against it.

Ernst Lehrs had fought in World War I.  He became an officer. He came home disillusioned with society. He continued his studies in the natural sciences and obtained his doctorate in 1923.  But he found some of the experiments he had to do tedious and meaningless, despite the excitement in physics at the time because of the discoveries of Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Steiner offered him a spiritual perspective and a common sense approach to science.

Clara Lehrs was born into a Jewish family. She and husband Ernst became protestant at the beginning of the 20^th century. She also became an anthroposophist later and her faith in this sustained her through many of the horrors of the Holocaust. She was resistant at first. She couldn’t quite believe what Steiner offered and it was most likely her intimate relationship with her son that persuaded her to help him and the organisation generally. By the time she was living amongst the Rexingen Jews towards the end of her life she was wholly convinced and used her own faith to help others.                                 

   

A few physicists and anthroposophists in the 1920s

Many changes about the way we look at physics came to a head in the 1920s. Albert Einstein was consolidating his theory of relativity. Ernest Rutherford helped us to understand about the fundamental make-up of matter. Max Plank and Albert Einstein were questioning some previous assumptions how radioactivity and light behaved. Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. The most important even in 20^th century science happened in the 1920s – quantum mechanics was born. Throughout the 1920s Robert Millikan confirmed that “cosmic radiation” existed. Towards the end of the 1920s Ernest Orlando Lawrence conceived the cyclotron. Possibly rocket science, both the discipline and the word, were also born at this time. Werner Heisenberg, already a scholar when quantum mechanics appeared in the early 1920s, by then was working towards his principle of uncertainty.

The Lehrs family rubbed shoulders with these physicists. Käthe was taught by Einstein and by the man she later married, Hans Edler. Rudi and Ernst would have come across some of the others as they pursued their studies in Berlin and Jena. Ernst Lehrs found himself at a conference in Stuttgart with Edwin Schrődinger. Schrődinger worked in Stuttgart for a while  and attended the same conference as Lehrs. Anthroposophism met head on with physics.

Rudolf Steiner, anyway, became well known for his clarity of vision. Physics was almost becoming mystical. Steiner seemed to concede that what the physicists were claiming was naturally true – and had been all along. We may these days find his lecture “Concerning Electricity” somewhat naïve. But for war-damaged and by-the-new-physics-confused Ernst Lehrs, and several other young men of his generation, Steiner was offering that something extra and a sense of home. By February 1923 he was forming his youth movement of which Ernst would become a part. We should remember that Steiner also had studied maths and physics and was particularly interested Goethe’s scientific papers, especially those dealing with colour.   

What most impressed Ernst Lehrs was the invitation from Steiner to think intuitively rather than discursively. The physicists anyway were turning the known and trusted science on its head and in fact suggesting something less natural and a little more esoteric. Why not, then, trust a master of spiritual matters more? At least he was one grounded in scientific discipline.   

World War II took its toll. Käthe used most of energy in getting herself and her daughter away from Germany but still kept an interest in science which she passed on to her daughter. Einstein went to America in 1933, where he found respect for relativity and never came back to Germany. Hans Edler became involved in designing the doodle-bug and the V2. British and American scientists built the first atom bomb. Ernst Lehrs, prevented from teaching in a German school because of his Jewish blood, went to Holland and then England as an anthroposophist rather than as a scientist.        

Hyperinflation 1922 – 1923 and the Rentenmark

Germany under the Weimar republic after World War 1 suffered badly financially. It had huge debts to pay and no gold reserves. It started printing money. A cycle of rising prices and wages followed. Some astute young men made killings in trading stocks and shares only to have their fortunes collapse shortly afterwards. Those living on fixed incomes suffered the most. Pensions and allowances became meaningless. Those in work encountered the inconvenience of having to turn their money into goods as soon as possible. There was a good trade in wheelbarrows – soon papers money was worth more as paper or kindling than as money and took up a lot of space, and once it was spent you needed to take home the preserved goods which were usually in tins and jars and therefore heavy.

 In the middle of all of this Käthe, Clara’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, marries. How would they pay for the wedding and importantly the dress? How did Clara survive this time? We know that Käthe married Hans Edler on 19 May 1923. At the moment we only hold a record of a registry office wedding. Possibly there was a church wedding as well, though the austerity of the times and Clara’s, Hans’ and Käthe’s great interest in science may have precluded this.

We know that Ernst senior was quite high up in the firm where he worked and therefore Clara would be receiving some sort of widow’s pension, presumably index-linked. Even in the 1920s she would be the sort of person to be allowed credit: she was clearly financially sound. The dressmaker may have been prepared to wait – especially if her own son was one of the bright young men who were trading successfully on the German stock exchange.

Even Clara, though, would have to turn cash into goods fairly quickly. Imelda the maid arrives in one scene with a wheelbarrow full of groceries.

Hans Lehrs junior describes an incident in his autobiography, Gelebte Erwartung, where he hesitates to buy a rucksack. When he returns to the shop, it has gone up in price. This is such a nice anecdote that it had to go into the story. I then needed to find a reason for why he decided to buy a rucksack at that time. I’m not going to give that away just yet, though. 

The Rentenmark was brought in on 15 November 1923. Its value was based on property and land and offered a pattern for secured loans that we still use today. This was only a temporary measure until the Reichsmark was brought in later. I know already that I have to make Clara able to understand this all very well. Later, she will use the deflation that occurs in the later 1920s to help her build the house on Schellbeg Street. I’ll probably therefore invent a conversation between her and possibly Ernst junior about the topic.   

Adam Ferguson's When Money Dies explains all about the German hyperinflation.