Search for Names, Places and Biographies
Already layed Stumbling Stones
Suche
Stolpertonstein
Sprecherin: Volker Hanisch
;)
© Stadtteilarchiv Eppendorf
Elsa Schickler (née Berg) * 1877
Haynstraße 1 (Hamburg-Nord, Eppendorf)
HIER WOHNTE
ELSA SCHICKLER
GEB. BERG
JG. 1877
DEPORTIERT 1941
ERMORDET IN
RIGA
further stumbling stones in Haynstraße 1:
Paula Sternberg
Elsa Schickler, née Berg, divorced Bandmann, born 13 June 1877 in Hamburg, deported 6 Dec. 1941 to Riga
Haynstraße 1
"The first thirteen years of my life, my Grandma was my favorite person in the world. We called her ‘Muni’ because little Robert couldn’t pronounce the word ‘Oma’ correctly. Now lord knows our Muni was not a grandma with lavender in her dresser drawer. She was a headstrong woman. She – Miss Elsa Berg – came from an old Jewish Hamburg family, but before the turn of the century she had married a Christian, a Hamburg merchant by the name of Bandmann whose family tree reached back to the 15th century. As a child I was very proud of that. However my grandma divorced him for reasons that nobody spoke about. So she had two children she had to raise by herself, a son called Egon who became a journalist and married several times and a daughter Margot who at the age of 21 married a 40-year-old set designer from Vienna by the name of Alfred Müller. I was their only child. "
The Muni who Robert Muller talks about in this article from the newspaper Die Zeit is Elsa Berg. She was the daughter of Sophus and Dina Berg, née Selig, and grew up in a devout Jewish household at Bundespassage 6 (today Bundesweg). Her ancestors, originally from Denmark, had lived in Hamburg for generations. The details from her grandson are correct: At the age of 21, in Apr. 1898, she married the merchant Hermann Eduard Bandmann and had two children with him: Egon was born on 13 Mar. 1899, Margot on 22 Dec. 1902. However the marriage failed, and they were divorced in July 1907. Elsa Bandmann raised her children as a single mother. In Feb. 1920 she registered a business as a "room renter” and opened a guest house in her large apartment at Hegestieg 1. When her daughter Margot married in 1923, she and her husband, and from 1925 her son Robert, lived with their mother at Hegestieg. Grandmother and grandson developed a close relationship which continued after the young family moved first to Barmbek and later to Eimsbüttel.
"Muni knew everything: the difference between a Horch and an Opel [automobiles], between a linden tree and a beech; she also told me how and where to change trains on the elevated railway. She knew nice, forbidden words like ‘meschugge’ and ‘nebbish’. She cooked a fabulous veal fricassee. She knew what happened in Parsifal and why that Heinz Rühmann film was called ‘One shouldn’t go to sleep unkissed’.”
In the late 1920s, Alfred Müller no longer received enough work as a set designer, and the family opened a toy store on Eimsbüttel’s Fruchtallee. Thus Robert Muller grew up in two worlds: "Part of my life took place in Eppendorf, my youth, because I spent so much time with my grandmother. And that was a middle-class life, not Jewish, although my grandmother was Jewish. Somehow she was very Jewish in her warmth and her manner of speech, but we didn’t celebrate Hannukah, we celebrated Christmas. So for the first five years of my life I shuttled back and forth between the genteel Eppendorf of my grandmother and the working class Eimsbüttel of my parents.”
In the meantime, Elsa Bandmann had become so successful with her guest house she wanted to expand it. She moved out of Hegestieg to Haynstraße 3 (the house at Haynstraße 3 today is Haynstraße 1, the side entrances with the addresses Hegestraße 41 and Haynstraße 3 were created when the house was remodeled in 1935-36. The house number Haynstraße 1 did not exist at that time.) and rented two floors. Her paying guests were mostly single Jewish women as Robert Muller described in an interview with Beate Meyer: "It was actually always a guest house for older Jewish women although it was never advertised that way, but more and more Jewish women came and sometimes men too. It got around by word of mouth. And they were all Jews.”
Starting in 1935 Robert attended the Eppendorf High School, right around the corner from his grandmother’s guest house. Now his two worlds collided, and he constantly tried to hide one from the other: "My classmates, ‘enthusiastic weekend whippersnappers’, couldn’t know that I was actually a non-Aryan in disguise. Like them I bellowed ‘Heil Hitler’ twelve times a day at my teachers. Had they discovered my forbidden favorite person, my double life would have been over. So I had to deny the existence of my Muni. She knew that. It was extremely unpleasant, that secret, and tore me up more than the so-called Kristallnacht in Nov. 1938, more than jeering SS men peeing on the Torah and more than my relatives being arrested.”
The atmosphere in Elsa Bandmann’s guest house changed too: "After 1933 they [the guests] were waiting for Argentine visas, for permission to enter Palestine or for affidavits from the USA and played bridge in the meantime.”
Robert’s parents also endeavored to find a way for their son and themselves to leave the country. In autumn 1938, having just turned 13, Robert Muller left his hometown of Hamburg and his beloved grandmother on a children’s transport to England. Alfred and Margot Müller followed him shortly thereafter.
Left behind in Hamburg, Elsa Bandmann married the 60-year-old Adolph Schickler. Robert Muller recalled: "He was the partner of a lady who had hung herself. And she inherited him, so to speak. He was a nice, compatible, older, witty, somewhat indecent gentleman. The old ladies all liked him. And my grandmother had grown fond of him. Besides he was a moocher, he didn’t have any money and he lived off of my grandmother. But I believe she loved him.”
Until the war started in Sept. 1939, grandmother and grandson could write each other letters. Elsa told him about her daily life and the people in her guest house, she inquired lovingly about friends and his beloved soccer, took a lively interest in Robert’s life in England. The war cut off their contact, but in 1941 they found a new way to write each other via Portuguese friends.
By then Elsa and Adolph Schickler had moved to Loogestieg 13 and from there to the "Jewish house" at Haynstraße 5 III. Adolph Schickler died on 25 Feb. 1941. Elsa never gave up hope of seeing her daughter and grandson again: "I wait daily for the withdrawal and have given a lot of consideration to taking a trip to Uncle Mole instead [killing herself], but we humans continue to hope as long as we’re alive. I keep thinking that maybe, just maybe I’ll be able to see my beloved children again – and when the misery becomes too much and all hope disappears, then I can always go to him, I know the way. Goodbye, my dearly beloved child. Give the boy a kiss for me …”
Elsa Schickler was deported to Riga Ghetto or to the nearby manor Jungfernhof on 6 Dec. 1941. There is no information about her further fate.
Her son Egon lived in Berlin during the war. At the end of the war he was registered as missing and was declared dead as of 31 Dec. 1945. His sister suspects he was "detained and killed by the Russians”. Her daughter Margot and son-in-law Alfred survived the Holocaust in England and only returned to Hamburg on visits.
Robert Muller became a successful writer and screenwriter. His love for his grandmother pervades his work, just like his love-hate relationship with Hamburg. In his autobiographical novel "Die Welt in jenem Sommer", also filmed under the same title, he describes his youth in Hamburg. He died in May 1998.
Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.
Stand: January 2019
© Maria Koser
Quellen: 1; 4; 5; StaH 351-11 AfW, 3420; StaH 332-5 Standesämter, 8922 Nr. 1711/1877; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 8589 Nr. 155/1898; StaH 36-2 Gewerbepolizei, K 3827; AB 1907-1939; FZH/WdE 127 Interview vom 15.3.1991; Interview Stadtteilarchiv Eppendorf vom 21.6.1991; Müller-Wesemann, Auf der Suche, in: Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte, Bd. 88, 2002, S. 235ff.; Muller, Robert, Niemand rettete Muni, Erinnerung an eine verordnete "Abwanderung" in "Die Zeit" vom 31.1.1992; Muller, Robert, Die Welt in jenem Sommer, Bern, München, Wien, 1993.
Zur Nummerierung häufig genutzter Quellen siehe Link "Recherche und Quellen".
