Finding Gertrud Kauders | Simon During
In the last years of his life my father wrote a memoir. Born in 1916 in Munich to Bohemian parents—his father Jewish, his mother not—he had spent his boyhood at a Bavarian boarding school, until the Nazis made it impossible for him to stay on in Germany. At that point he fled to Czechoslovakia, then to England and finally to New Zealand, where I was born and raised. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I didn’t immediately look at the fifty or so typescript pages he produced for family consumption only. But, in 2019, after my partner and I had bought an apartment in Berlin and I’d applied for German citizenship, I fished out his reminiscences and read them, newly curious about the life into which he had been born. The memoirs were more engaging than I’d expected. Though he had been dead for fifteen years, my father’s bleak, anachronistic worldview—a mix of old haute European class consciousness, bitterness, and civic-mindedness—became vivid again. One section left an especially strong impression on me. He devoted several …
