Prologue The Politics of LoveMarriage is but the union of free individuals based on erotic affection. Thoroughly liberated from the torturous earthly residue of material prerequisites, usufruct, and consequences. All freedom and love. --Otto Rühle, Die Sozialisierung der Frau , 1922 We''ll make a twosome That just can''t go wrong. Hear me -- He loves and she loves and they love, So won''t you Love me as I love you? --Ira Gershwin, lyrics, "He Loves and She Loves," 1927A Wartime Wedding in Hanover On New Year''s Eve in 1917, a young couple married at the registry office in Linden, a town on the outskirts of Hanover. The marriage of the twenty-two-year-old student from Berlin and the one-year-younger office clerk from Linden was attended by a small gathering. A metalworker, the uncle of the bride, acted as a witness, as did a local carpenter, a friend of the couple. While the newlyweds celebrated their wedding with a group of family and friends in the proletarian community of Linden, the event caused a scandal in distant Berlin: there it was viewed as an affront that Werner Scholem, the son of a bourgeois Jewish family, had married the illegitimate daughter of a household servant who had formally renounced her membership in the church just recently.
Therefore, no member of the Scholem family showed up to celebrate with Werner and his bride, Emmy, née Wiechelt. Werner''s younger brother Gerhard congratulated the couple by mail only a month later, and his new sister-in-law responded: "Thank you for your congratulations on our wedding; yours were the first, and I was very happy to receive them." Werner''s father, Arthur Scholem, was enraged by this union and refused to meet his son ever again. It goes without saying that he also shunned his daughter-in-law, whom he had met briefly by chance a few months before. He expected his family, and particularly his wife, Betty, to spurn this rebellious son as well. Nevertheless, some time after the wedding, Hans Hirsch, Betty''s brother, sent presents to the couple and was subsequently struck by what he is said to have jocularly called an "Arthur Scholem thunderbolt." So great was the paternal rancor that Arthur Scholem revised his will, reducing Werner''s inheritance to the minimum amount required by law. The wedding that took place in the fourth year of the First World War was the climax of a dispute between father and son that had begun years before.
Arthur Scholem could forgive his son for everything but this marriage to the pretty young office clerk. Whether Arthur knew it or not, he had played a role in the course of events leading to this wedding: with the decision to marry, Werner had professed not only the love and loyalty he felt for his girlfriend Emmy but also his rejection of his father and his father''s worldview. "This is also why I am marrying," Werner had written his brother Gerhard several months earlier, "I want to burn all my bridges to the bourgeoisie." It was an intentional decision to bring about a breach he knew would be irreversible. The events of the previous ten years and the experiences of his youth, cut short so abruptly by the war, made it easier for him to take the radical step of publicly celebrating the feelings that he and Emmy shared for one another. Of Versatile Disposition Werner Scholem was born in 1895, the third of four sons of Arthur Scholem, the owner of a successful Berlin printing business, and his wife, Betty. When he was two years old, his mother gave birth to his brother Gerhard, who, throughout Werner''s life, would remain the relative he felt closest to, next to their mother. Decades later, this younger brother, who had long since taken the name "Gershom" and was then at the end of a long life as a professor for Jewish mysticism in Jerusalem, included a very personal portrait of the Scholem family in his autobiography.
He described the relationship between the sons and their father as "not a particularly close one" and explained this situation with the laconic remark that their father had suffered from heart disease and had therefore gone away for rather long stays in health spas every year. His wife Betty spent her days outside the home and attended to the bookkeeping of the family business. Still, she was quite close to the children, especially the two youngest, who spent a great deal of time buried in their books and often accompanied her on her frequent vacation trips. In many respects, the Scholems were a typical German Jewish family of the early twentieth century. Arthur''s and Betty''s parents had already advanced into the educated and propertied bourgeoisie by the middle of the preceding century. The Scholems lived well on the profits of a flourishing family business that allowed them to go on spa and leisure trips regularly and also to give the best education possible to the four sons: Reinhold, Erich, Werner, and Gerhard. Theirs was a childhood with all the amenities offered by the urban, bourgeois world of Berlin around 1900. The family apartment and the printing business were located only a few meters from one another near the Leipzigerstrasse, a street lined with department stores such as Tietz, Wertheimer, and Jandorf.
The city surrounding them was a modern bustling metropolis, in which electric trams and the city railway were beginning to replace horse-drawn cars. Museums were being built, parks were laid out everywhere, and the Circus Busch opened its doors at Hackescher Markt. Every Friday evening the family dined together with several close relatives, although these meals no longer had any religious content. Jewish holidays like Passover and Rosh Hashanah were only celebrated as large family gatherings, and on Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays, Arthur Scholem went to work. "We were a typical, liberal, middle-class family in which assimilation to things German, as people put it at the time, had progressed quite far," noted Gershom Scholem. Their Jewishness was merely the expression of the cultural and social network of friends and family in which they happened to live. Little is known about Werner Scholem''s childhood. Although Betty Scholem jotted down several of her recollections in 1931 during a trip to Jerusalem, these were primarily about the childhood of her youngest son, Gerhard.
When he was five years old, Werner took part in a series of scientific experiments conducted by the psychologist Arthur Wreschner, who was probably acquainted with the Scholems, showing his parents'' openness to modern science. Wreschner had selected twenty-two people of various ages and levels of education in order to study "the reproduction and association of ideas" based on these people''s reactions. The experiments required of the child were probably conducted in his parents'' apartment. To no great surprise, the results of Werner''s tests reflected the imagination of a five-year-old. Whereas the two oldest sons, Reinhold and Erich, lived up to their father''s expectations and developed the same active interest in the family business and the German empire, the third son differed from the rest at a very early age. In his father''s view, Werner was a defiant spirit and exhibited "a very versatile disposition," according to Gershom Scholem. "While I shot up to a considerable height, my brother remained rather small, but at an early age he developed sharp intellectual facial features which clearly reflected his nature. During our adolescent years we were to be faced with various shocks and conflicts.
They pointed us in entirely different directions, yet again and again they brought us closer to each other." During their childhood and youth, the two younger brothers felt as close to one another as they felt distant from the two older ones. Gershom Scholem could not recall ever having had "a real conversation" with his elder brothers, Erich and Reinhold, and it is highly probable that this was also the case for Werner, who did not care much for his two older brothers then. Werner''s "versatile disposition" prompted his parents to remove him from his school in Berlin, the Dorotheenstädtische Realgymnasium, at the age of twelve and send him to Jewish boarding school in Wolfenbüttel, where he remained for nearly four years. This school, the Samson-Freischule, grew out of a Talmud Torah school. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had been considered an important Jewish institution of the Reform movement, where prominent figures of progressive German Judaism like Leopold Zunz and Isaak Marcus Jost were taught the ideals of the Enlightenment. However, in the course of the nineteenth century, the school developed into an educational institution in which the children with little Jewish background were raised as future members of the bourgeoisie. Around 1900, when a great majority of the German Jewish population had successfully achieved social and economic advancement, the heads of the Samson-Freischule set a new educational goal.
No longer would the school teach its pupils strictly within a context of Jewish religion and ethics, but it would also strive to awaken and cultivate in them a deep love for their fatherland and emperor. Forced to leave liberal Berlin for the oppressive and confining atmosphere of this provincial school, to which, as Gershom Scholem noted laconically, mainly "Jewish businessmen, cattle dealers, and master butchers in Western Germany" sent their children, Werner was confronted with a "considerable amount of religious hypocrisy and false patriotism, which he found quite repulsive. The school was run along strict German nationalistic lines, but some major aspects of the Jewish ritual, daily prayer, and a kosher kitchen, were maintained. During school vacations I would be treated to cynical lectures and outpourings on the subject of his school by my brother, who was beg.