Lung diseases in the early 20th century

Since I last posted we’ve found out a little more about Rudi Lehrs’ lung problem. He did, in fact, have TB so badly that one lung was removed. He was middle-aged by then. The other lung took over the function of both and he led a reasonably normal life after that.

I’ve already written my first scene where they get the doctor in the night for something that looks like an asthma attack and leaves him looking blue. They cure it with steam. We think he may have been asthmatic anyway. Käthe was and so was her grandson as a child.

I’ve also made him quite weak in some other scenes, too.  

It’s actually useful in terms of story anyway. Clara’s early married life and her childhood seem idyllic.  She initially becomes engaged in what looks like a very exciting third stage of her life. Rudi’s illness questions these good times and maybe foreshadows later doom.

TB was still a killer disease when Rudi was young. There was no vaccination then and it was possibly made worse by the dirty air and smogs of the time. Berlin was not as bad as London but it was still a busy city with some pollution and people living in close proximity to each other.  The importance of cleanliness was not understood by all at that time so disease could spread quickly. It is likely that Clara was quite house-proud though not obsessively so.   

Before Rudi becomes an adult the iron lung has been invented and oxygen masks are given to soldiers affected by gas from the Great War.           

Lung removal seems a desperate measure and it is a major operation even today meaning that a patient cannot return to work for eight weeks. It’s normally only done if cancer is present. We’re not sure whether Rudi did have cancer. It can be a successful procedure and possibly was in Rudi’s case. Although both his older sister and older brother outlived him, it was only by a few years. Pope Francis also had a lung removed when he was a teenager. He seems to be doing fine.

It certainly seems really unusual to do this after TB, although it may be that Rudi’s lungs were already damaged after bouts of asthma or whatever else it was that caused the dramatic incident I’ve invented for when he was less than a year old. Sarcoidosis? GERD? And maybe he did well despite his difficulties because he shared his mother’s optimistic spirit.               

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.                 

    

Albrecht Strohschein

Albrecht Strohschein This man had a tremendous influence on Clara Lehrs, even though he was a few years younger than her eldest son, Ernst. He was very accomplished in his work with special education within the Steiner movement and so was concerned with exactly the type of children who were later taught by Karl Schubert in the special class at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. This class was later housed in the house on Schellberg Street.

It was probably because Clara was quite impressed with what could be achieved with one particular child who had very special needs that she eventually agreed to work as a housekeeper for the institution in Lauesnstein,Jena.

The German word for what went on there is “Heilpädogogik” - literally “healing pedagogoy”. Usually it is translated as “curative education” or simply “special” education.

We have now, by 2013, come a long way since the 1920s with our special education. What Rudolf Steiner, Karl Schubert and Albrecht Strohschein did was extraordinary for the time. Karl Schubert taught these children, albeit in a separate class, within a normal school. Although the Lauenstein centre was an institution where children lived away from their families, the aim was to allow the children to become as normal as possible, not just to hide them away from the world.   

It fascinates me that Germany is so tolerant, respectful even of the Steiner school system and also of its special education methods. Both Karl Schubert’s and Albrecht Strohschein’s work is carried on by schools that are named after them.

Clara Lehrs was a little wary of Steiner and anthroposophism. I am too. And yet.  The more I read the materials I’ve accumulated in the name of research, the more I see that there is something quite extraordinary within it.

Certainly both Shubert and Stohschein did a lot for children with severe learning difficulties.            

Debating titles

Martin and I went to see The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams on Friday at the Octagon in Bolton. It was a very good production, incidentally. And The Glass Menagerie is a very good title for it. A central character owns and is obsessed with a collection of glass animals. The working title for the play was The Gentleman Caller. I also like this title. The “gentlemen caller” is central to the story.

I have difficulty with titles and very often the final one doesn’t settle until I’ve completed several edits. Now I’m agonizing over the titles of my two Holocaust stories. Potatoes in Spring is so called because the girls who sent letters to each other 1938 to 1944 were more fascinated by the fact that the potato crop came early one year than by the fact that they were at war and were living under the Nazi regime.

The House on Schellberg Street is currently the title for Clara Lehrs’ biography because she and her son built the house on Schellberg Street and later hid some severely disabled children there.                

However, I’m thinking of renaming Potatoes in Spring and calling it The House on Schellberg Street. Renate thought she was going to Schellberg Street permanently when she was whisked away on the Kindertransport. One third of the story takes place at the house and is an interesting bridge between the other two strands linking ordinary Germans with the girl who had to go to England because she was Jewish.Antony Rowland, one of my beta readers, recently told me he preferred this title – he had been under the impression that The House on Schellberg Street was indeed the new name for Potatoes in Spring. As I was writing at one point I decided that I did want to rename Potatoes. However, I came back to it because another beta reader said she liked the title and because The House on Schellberg Street seemed such a good title for Clara’s biography.

I’ve now started Clara’s biography. I’m 14,000 words in and we’ve not got to Schellberg Street yet. Her biography lasts from 1918 – 1942 – though there are a few earlier scenes – and she only lives in Schellberg Street from 1928 – 1942. She actually had to sell the house in 1939. She carried on living there for a while as a lodger. If I do call the earlier story The House on Schellberg Street, I can call Clara’s story simply Clara’s Story. The first novel may ask the questions anyway “Who was this extraordinary woman?” and “What happened to Clara?”              

I really am wondering and I’d like everybody’s help with this. Let me know what you think.   

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.