BY
HELEN WINTER, NÉE RENSHAW
Editor’s note: Helen Margaret Winter, née Renshaw (b. 1948), is the author of this guest post about her grandfather, Eberhard Friedrich Ferdinand Bruck (1877-1960). Helen is my fourth cousin who, like many people providing ideas and inspiration for posts, found me through my blog. She lives in Wolverhampton, a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands, England. Her family emigrated to England before the Second World War. For this reason, many official papers, photographs, and vital documents related to her branch of our Bruck family survive, and over the years Helen has graciously shared many of these as she pores over them. Helen is very self-deprecating regarding her ability to meticulously translate and make sense of the handwritten German records. Helen has shared several particularly endearing sketches rendered by her grandfather. Given the sometimes-weighty topics I cover, we decided a guest post about these whimsical drawings would be an appropriate distraction. We hope readers will agree.
Related Posts:
POST 99: THE ASTONISHING DISCOVERY OF SOME OF DR. WALTER WOLFGANG BRUCK’S PERSONAL EFFECTS
POST 158: EMIL THOMAS, A FAMOUS THESPIAN & ILLEGITIMATE SON OF DR. JONAS BRUCK
I am grateful to Richard for having invited me to write this guest blog. I hope that it will amuse readers and provide a brief antidote to the gloomy news we are currently getting from all over the world. My mother, Margot Renshaw, née Bruck (1917-1985), was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. Several years ago, I discovered a chested bureau from my parents’ home in a spare room at my sister’s house, containing a trove of archival material from the Bruck family. This included official documents, such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, wills, contracts and degree certificates, theater posters, letters, greeting cards and memoirs, a few even going as far back as the 18th century. I’m studying all these materials as diligently as my inadequate, though rapidly improving, German allows.
The most exciting thing I found among the family archive was a treasure trove of sketches drawn by my grandfather, Eberhard Friedrich Bruck (1877-1960). I had, of course, known him as an elderly professor, whose books and articles dealt with Roman Law and the early Christian Church Fathers. Although I met him only four times during extended visits, he was very dear to me. He was a charming and kind person who didn’t mind me polishing his bald head and was happy to wear a cap I’d knitted for him in alternate triangles of white and scarlet dishcloth, with a tassel to match.
It was a revelation to me that, as a boy, Eberhard seems to never have stopped drawing, and that his father, Felix Friedrich Bruck (1843-1911), had lovingly saved many of the resulting sketches. Eberhard, known to the family as “Hardy,” was born on the 15th of November 1877, in Breslau, Silesia [today: Wrocław, Poland]. He had a younger sister, Margot (1879-1949), and brother, Werner (1880-1945). (Figure 1)
Felix Bruck (Figure 2) was a Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Breslau [today: University of Wrocław]. He was described by Eberhard, and his niece Bertha as a charming and witty man. Like many of the Bruck family, Felix had artistic and literary talents, even writing plays which were performed in theaters all over Germany. Felix’s wife, Anna Prausnitz, died aged only 27 of puerperal fever, on the 31st of August 1880, when Eberhard was less than three years old. Felix was devasted by the loss of his wife, whom he described as “the angelic woman who made me so happy,” and whom he loved to talk about in later life.
Nevertheless, my great-grandfather gave his three children a secure and happy childhood. Felix sat with his children for their evening prayers. He encouraged their talents. He was a fond father, collecting, and even cataloguing, the children’s school reports, writings, and drawings. In time, he became an equally fond grandfather, writing and illustrating a book of fairy stories for his grandchildren, his daughter Margot’s son and daughter, Otto and Anna Prausnitz.
Felix took his children to the premiere of his play, “The Petrified Bird,” at the Lobe Theater in Breslau on the 21st of March 1888. (Figure 3) This was a comedy about the machinations of academics at a university, and paleontology, the petrified bird being a fossil. The play was a great success, and the children were elated with their father’s curtain call. When members of the audience took offense at their excited behavior and complained that such young children should not be in a theater, they indignantly and proudly retorted, “we are the author’s children!”
My grandfather and his siblings were all artistically talented. Margot wrote poems, and Hardy plays, which they performed for a family audience.
Felix vowed never to remarry so as not to inflict a stepmother on his children. He employed a succession of housekeepers, but none of them lasted, because, according to my grandfather, they all wanted to marry his father. Then, in 1889, a Bertha Werner arrived to take up the post. My grandfather asked her if she was superstitious, and when she asked “Why?,” he explained, “You are our thirteenth Fraülein.” Undeterred, she stayed and became a beloved member of the family.
Like many of the Bruck family, my grandfather preferred artistic pursuits to boring everyday tasks. By his own account, he was lazy at school and found his teachers very uninspiring. Under the Prussian system of education, the school year was divided into two semesters, with the curriculum from the first semester being repeated in the second; any pupil whose performance was satisfactory could move up a class and avoid the repetition. My grandfather says that he had to stay behind no less than five times during his schooling. However, he seems to have spared no effort when it came to personal writings and drawings. Daily life, history, literature, and mythology all provided subjects.
Aged 10, Hardy copied and illustrated poems written by his sister, Margot, into a manuscript book. (Figure 4) The soldiers in historical costumes are typical of those who appear in his drawings or carousing scenes. Hardy loved equines and included them in his sketches whenever possible. They are full of cavalry battle scenes, hunting parties, medieval jousts, processions, contemporary carriages, and so on. One sketch shows his siblings as donkeys (Figure 5), who clearly had just had a disagreement, and is captioned “Margot and Werner photographed from life.”
In the panoramic sketch of a procession (Figures 6a-g), the Bedouin chief, mounted on an elephant, is followed by his personal steed, his harem, other horses, and prisoners being whipped by guards. Although the sketch is only four inches high, the tiny characters are full of life and activity.
Led by a man in Bavarian costume and his depressed looking dog (Figure 7), the riders look uncomfortable on their mules.
Monks in Hardy’s drawings (Figure 8) are always fat and gluttonous. Here they are enjoying the best vintages.
Typical of classical illustrations, often Hardy’s sketches (Figure 9) feature female nudes; here an amorous faun and nymph are overheard by an indignant old river god.
The Bruck archive includes annual posters Eberhard sketched on his father’s birthday on the 19th of May between 1891 and 1898. These are often mock heroic, making very gentle fun of his father’s habits and enthusiasms. For his father’s fiftieth birthday in 1893 (Figure 10), Eberhard has drawn him mounted on Pegasus, the steed of inspiration, while personifications of Poetry and Justice crown him with laurel wreaths, in honor of his dual careers as a playwright and lawyer, while Plenty shakes her cornucopia over him. Hardy and Margot provide a musical accompaniment on the cello and violin, while Werner turns a handstand, supervised by Bertha the housekeeper.
Other family members attend the festivities, all named by Hardy, including his first cousin, Bertha Bruck, later Jacobson, who stands third from the left in a blue dress holding flowers. Bertha was the daughter of Adalbert Bruck, brother of Felix and Julius Bruck, a somewhat austere county court judge. She wrote a long memoir of her life, up to 1913, which I’m translating, in which she speaks fondly of her Bruck uncles Felix and Julius. She remembered them as kindly men who enjoyed life, unlike her own father, who, she said, cared nothing for wine, women, and song, only for books.
Julius Bruck and his wife Bertha, née Vogelsdorf, are drawing up in a cab and their son, Walther Wolfgang Bruck, is taking photographs. Walther eventually became dentist to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s family and was also head of photography at Breslau University [today: University of Wrocław]. It is a strange coincidence that Eberhard, Bertha, and Walther were all to write memoirs.
Looking at this joyful scene, it is poignant to think that, of the family members who survived to the 1930s, four of the young people would emigrate to escape persecution (Eberhard, Werner, and Bertha to the United States and Margot to the Isle of Wight in England) while Walther is believed to have committed suicide to protect his wife and half-Jewish daughter [Bruck Family Blog, Post 99], and three older family members, Gotthold, Clara, and Olga Prausnitz, would be deported by the Nazis to extermination camps.
Hardy’s 1894 birthday poster (Figure 11) for his father illustrates Felix’s obsession with criminal law reform. A humane man, he campaigned against the death penalty and even against prison, which he thought did no good. His solution was deportation to the colonies. He wrote many books and magazine articles on the subject. The poster shows a fanciful scene of Felix arriving at a convict colony in an open carriage, welcomed by the grateful colonists with a banner bearing “Heartfelt Congratulations,” while his family (Hardy, Margot, Werner, and Fraülein Werner) watch from a balcony. His book, “Down with Prison!,” is shown behind the archway, and, above the main scene, Felix’s chief intellectual opponent, the bearded, elderly Carl Krohne (1836-1913), who was in fact a clergyman and prison reformer, perches disconsolately on the roof of an old style, castellated prison, which is collapsing.
In Eberhard’s poster in honor of his father’s birthday in 1895, he glorifies Felix’s love of good wine and good company. (Figures 12a-e) His favorite leisure haunt (also depicted on the poster for 1891) was Green’s Wine Bar, Albrechtstraße 3 in Breslau. It seems possible that the proprietor, R. Green, could have been English. The poster shows Felix coming out of the bar, where a social scene is taking place, to meet Mr. Green. On the right, Hardy (with a bouquet), Margot, and Werner lead a crowd congratulating Felix on his birthday, including characters from some of his plays, such as Themis, the Greek goddess of divine justice, blindfolded, with scales and sword, supporting Regnault, an elderly artist and the victim of a miscarriage of justice, from the play “Themis,” which is an attack on capital punishment. Above them, Pegasus swoops down to greet the playwright, ridden by the Petrified Bird, from the play of the same title, now restored to life.
Unfortunately, Felix suffered from poor health, including diabetes and gout. Hardy suggests that wine is the cure. Spouting bottles of red and white wine, mounted on wheels like cannon, and surrounded by happy cherubs, put to flight the personifications of age and infirmity. To the left are named characters, probably also from Felix’s plays, who appear to be doctors who are retreating, including one carrying a bottle marked “death.”
In 1903, when his sister Margot married her second cousin, Carl Prausnitz, Hardy gave her a manuscript book, a long poem giving the history of their courtship, how they had fallen in love, how Carl had proposed, how he had to chaperone them on long hikes, and how he hoped his sister’s sweetness, which had made their childhood home so happy, would ensure them a happy future. On their wedding day when Eberhard did not come down for breakfast, Margot looked for him and found him asleep with his head on his desk. She remembered gently chiding him, “How can you be asleep on my wedding morning?,” whereupon he presented her with the book. (Figures 13-16)
Carl Prausnitz was bilingual as his mother was English. He became an eminent doctor in Germany who researched allergy treatment. During the Third Reich, Carl and Margot moved to the Isle of Wight, where he had family, and settled down as a country doctor. I’m very grateful to my second cousin, Alison Metcalfe, their granddaughter, for lending and allowing me to copy the manuscript book given to her grandparents by Eberhard.
The collection of my grandfather’s drawings is the work of a carefree student. Unfortunately, after he left home to pursue a legal career, and eventually an academic career, only a very few drawings by him survive. However, it’s doubtful he could altogether have abandoned his sketching.
Felix Bruck died in 1911. Two years later, Eberhard, now a professor of law in Geneva, met the love of his life, Irmgard Jentzch (1894-1955), from Halle in Saxony. This happened in Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps where he was on a walking holiday with his faithful companion, Seppel, a dachshund. My grandmother had gone there to pursue her hobby of mountain climbing. Having supper in a local inn, he sat at the table next to her and her mother. She was wearing a simple dirndl and he saw her as “the embodiment of health and strength, and beautiful like her mother.” He encouraged Seppel to approach the next table and, when she smiled and petted the dog, he decided he must get to know her. (Figure 17) He succeeded in this, overcoming the resistance of Irmgard’s mother, who, in the manner of the time, rebuffed the attempts of this unknown man in short breeches and a Tyrolean hat to make conversation. All was well, as it turned out that one of my grandfather’s colleagues came from Halle and was friendly with Irmgard’s family. Within three days, they were engaged and married in April 1914. Despite an age difference of seventeen years, they were soulmates.
My grandfather’s lack of practical skills was a byword in the family, but Irmgard more than made up for this. She was an expert at household renovation, gardening and tailoring, always appearing in elegant suits she had sewn for herself, and making lovely clothes for the family. She even found time to publish articles on nature and gardening.
As it was Seppel who had introduced the couple (Figure 18), it was only right that he featured on the invitations to the wedding reception. (Figure 19) These are, of course, engraved, but it seems likely they could be based on a design by my grandfather, showing the couple in their respective settings, Eberhard on his way to college, accompanied by his faithful dog and Irmgard climbing the mountain peaks.
Seppel features again in a sketch of the couple out walking on the 11th of November 1914 which is, unfortunately, the last of my grandfather’s sketches that I have been able to find. Entitled “The Brucks Sulking,” the couple have had a tiff. Eberhard is striding ahead, arms folded behind him, while Irmgard lags and the dog, looking slightly uncomfortable, walks between them. (Figure 20)
Shortly after their marriage, everything changed in Germany. During the First World War, my grandfather was conscripted as a military judge. He did not think much of this, simply writing that he “wore the uniform, with the rank of captain, and learned to give and receive salutes.”
My mother Margot was born during the war, on 26th of August 1917, followed by the birth of her brother Ferdinand, on the 24th of January 1921. My uncle inherited a talent for sketching and became an architect in the States under the name of F. Friedrich Bruck.
In the family, my grandfather acquired a new nickname, “Jupi,” from his children and my sister and me. It was short for “Jupiter,” the ruler and arbiter of the household.
After the First World War, my grandfather moved from Breslau to Frankfurt, and finally to Bonn, researching historical jurisprudence. As a person of Jewish descent, although his parents had converted to Protestant Christianity, he was targeted in “Der Stürmer” and was compulsorily retired by the Nazis in 1935. In 1938, my grandparents emigrated to Holland, and thence to the United States.
Wisely, my grandfather sent his children to school in Geneva, York, and Bangor (Wales) so they could perfect their French and English. Ferdinand went to Harvard at the age of 16 while my mother ended up managing a printing works in Wales during the military service of the owner, and marrying my father, Peter Renshaw, in 1942.
My grandparents were only allowed to take 10 Marks each when they left Germany, the equivalent today of approximately $95.00, and a suitcase. The disruption caused by the Second World War was brought home to me when I found letters between my mother and her maternal aunt, Ilse Freytag, who had remained in Germany with her husband, looking after my great grandmother. In 1946, they were telling each other about their lives for the last six years, as they’d been unable to communicate during the war.
My grandfather was appointed as a Research Associate in Law at Harvard, where he received a stipend for living scholars from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. He continued his research and voluntarily gave lectures on Early Christian Church Fathers which were so popular they had to be moved to a larger hall to accommodate the many students wanting to attend. He had a flair for the theatrical following in the steps of his uncle, the noted actor Emil Thomas [see Bruck Family Blog, Post 158]. He told a story well, and was, indeed, completely unselfconscious. When he visited us in suburban England, he would walk up the street practicing his vocal exercises, emitting a deep, booming “How” at regular intervals; when my mother told a neighbor that he had to go to the hospital, the neighbor enquired sympathetically, “It’s his head, isn’t it?”
My grandparents made a good life for themselves in America, where they were rich in friends, if not money. My grandfather had his books, my grandmother grew tomatoes, morning glory, and her favorite pansies in their yard, their son was nearby, and they delighted in their cats, who kept having kittens (even the one who was supposed to be male).
Somehow, probably with the help of former neighbors in Bonn, they managed to get the family papers and other heirlooms to their apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They wrote to my mother every week and from the letters my grandfather’s character emerges. When you met him, he was a kind, diplomatic gentleman who would always find something or someone to praise, though he had a keen sense of ridiculousness, as is shown in his sketches. His letters show a deeper side. He could be keenly critical, but he accepted the world as it was, and his outlook was stoic. When Irmgard, sadly, died of a stroke in 1955, he was supported by his friends and neighbors, and his son and daughter-in-law. He continued to be active in academic circles in Europe and the United States and died in Germany in 1960, appropriately I feel, on the Island of Reichenau, famous as a center of learning in the Middle Ages. Although he was 82, his death from a heart attack was unexpected and a devastating shock to his friends and family.
REFERENCES
Bruck Family Genealogical Blog.
Bruck, Eberhard Friedrich. (1958). Aus der Geschichte der Familie Bruck [Unpublished manuscript].
Bruck, Walther Wolfgang. Untitled [Unpublished manuscript].
Gedenkbuch : Opfer Der Verfolgung Der Juden Unter Dem Nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft In Deutschland, 1933-1945
https://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/source_view.php?SourceId=30920
Jacobson, Bertha Bruck. (1935/1936). Jugenderinnerungen einer Alten Frau [Unpublished manuscript].
Records of the Emergency Committee for Displaced Foreign Scholars, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
