On that particular evening, I was made up in a pink, embroidered, tight-fitting dress, black high-heeled shoes, and a gray, herring bone coat. I was on my way to Calderon de la Barca’s La Dama Duende at the enchanting Cuvilliés Theater. New to Munich and unaware that I was only a few steps from the Cuvilliés, I asked a passer-by for directions. “In that case we can lose our way together,” Mr. Marx, who was on a short visit from New York, said smilingly. He himself was on the way to the Cuvilliés. Before we took our seats — his way up front in the orchestra, mine in the top balcony — he asked whether we could meet during the intermission. Reluctantly I agreed. Our destiny was sealed. La Dama Duende was the prelude to our lives together.

Initially, I would have gladly shaken off this elderly gentleman. Nothing was further from my mind than getting involved with someone 27 years my senior. Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine that, one day, Mr. Marx would become the love of my life. He was persistent, called me at work repeatedly, until I finally gave in to meet him - at a restaurant or the theater. As it turned out, he happened to be a theater and music critic for the German language paper Staats-Zeitung & Herold in New York. Whenever he returned to Munich in the following months, indeed until his death, the theater remained for us the quintessence of our first encounter.

Traveling in Marrakech in 1981, we stopped at a small shopkeeper’s place. The owner praised his embroidered handbags and cushions. But we were intrigued by a stunning Berber necklace with large, round silver beads and a rectangular, inlaid silver pendant. The pendant contained a passage from the Quran. The shopkeeper expected Henry to bargain. Not accustomed to bargaining and sweating profusely in soaring temperatures, Henry simply paid the asking price – to the delight and disappointment of the shopkeeper.

We both felt a strong connection with the culture of Native Americans and frequently traveled to the Southwest. My collection of Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni jewelry grew from year to year. Not a day goes by without my wearing one of those unique pieces. They are more than jewelry to me. They radiate the Native and, deep down, Henry’s spirit.

“You are not too young for me,” he wrote in one of his early letters to me. “Whether I am too old for you, of course, only you can decide. According to actuary tables, and assuming that I stay healthy, I should expect to reach an age of eighty, maybe even a few years more. This would mean that when you are about fifty-five, you will have to continue life without me. Does that frighten you?” Back then, such thoughts were far from my mind. I was twenty-one years old, at the beginning of my adult life. Our age difference barely seemed to matter. The actual moment when I had to continue my life without him indeed came just a few weeks after my fifty-fifth birthday.

Was it coincidence or providence that he was 27 years my senior, that I gave birth to our daughter at age 27, and that we were married for 27 years?

The house was beautiful, with lots of space and a large backyard – a place an only child liked best. There I could drive around on my tricycle, dig in the soil, and keep my playmate, a turtle. The turtle and I were inseparable. Late in the fall, however, it dug itself into the ground to hibernate until spring; with the first warm rays of sunshine, it reappeared like clockwork. But in the year after my mother’s death, the turtle did not return. The five-year-old boy was inconsolable und could not understand why the turtle had left him. I believe I cried harder over the loss of my turtle than over the death of my mother eight months earlier, which I was not yet able to cope with rationally.

Thus, my parents’ home became my father’s home. My mother had been ill for a long time: she suffered from pernicious anemia, which also afflicted her three older sisters. At the time, there was no cure; a few years later, patients were effectively treated with raw liver therapy and synthesized vitamin B. Two sisters, who were born before me, died as infants, also victims of progressive anemia and insufficient renewal of blood platelets, an illness that is often transmitted from mother to daughter. As I was told later, my mother did not want to die without a descendant; her wish could only come true if she were to give birth to a boy.

She took the risk – and so I was born: weak, anemic, with a heart defect, but viable. I suffered from colds and bronchitis countless times in the foggy winter weather of Brussels, and was not permitted to go outside before 11 a.m., even in my first school year.

My father owned several furniture stores in the South of Belgium, near the French border, where he lived during the week. Since my ill mother was hardly able to take care of me, I was looked after by a succession of nannies or governesses.

I was not yet three years old when World War I began, but the war became bitter reality for me only after it ended on November 11, 1918. I was seven then, and the war gripped me no less than the young Goethe who was the same age at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. As my father, who originated from Baden, Germany, had never applied for Belgian citizenship, it seemed advisable to leave Belgium as fast as possible. Thus, we left for Cologne by train on October 30, 1918. The train was packed with German soldiers, carrying their knapsacks and carbines as they returned from the collapsing front in France. Until then I had been far too protected to understand the meaning of war, but now, seeing the dirty, unshaven, and tired soldiers and their weapons, it dawned on me. And I realized something else on this trip: I had grown up in a French environment, and was now catapulted into German surroundings. I would have to learn a language of which I understood barely a few words.

I didn’t have the slightest inkling then that this was the beginning of years of travel. Only after four places of residence, seven apartments, and four schools, did I find a true home in Berlin. For two years, from the end of 1918 until 1920, my parent’s home was one hotel room after another, first in Wimpfen, then in Heilbronn at the Neckar, followed by two furnished apartments in Munich. From there we moved to a furnished apartment in Berlin until, at last, my father remarried in 1928, and we were able to live in a home with our own furniture.

These were restless years. They caused me – against my will – to grow up faster than would have been the case otherwise. Adjusting to school in an initially foreign language was not easy, especially on account of the insufficient number of teachers immediately after the war. Our “teacher” obviously was a disciplinarian who had come back from retirement. He didn’t miss any opportunity to maltreat us seven-year-olds with Tatzen, a South German custom of striking the inside of the left hand of disobedient students. There were other kinds of sadism in the class room, like bashing the heads of two students or pulling their earlobes for speaking without permission. Whenever I, the foreigner, who seemed to share the responsibility for the defeat of Germany, didn’t immediately understand something, the rage of this fine specimen of a democratic schoolmaster showed no mercy. I rebelled, and was moved to another school with a kind teacher. As a result, for the first and only time in my school career, I became top of the class (and received twenty Deutschmarks from an old aunt who had promised me that amount if I achieved my goal).

Around that time I received my first telephone call. It was from my father who, as in Brussels, was still on the move more than at home. I ran to the phone attached to a wall, and had difficulty understanding the voice coming from 300 kilometers distant. I yelled into the receiver, hoping this happened on the other side as well. But the voice came and went, from louder to weaker, making me feel terribly frustrated. My first telephone adventure was truly disappointing.

In the summer of 1921, I went for my first car ride from Munich to Garmisch, in an open car on a mostly unpaved road. We had to wear a tight leather coat and dust goggles, but even so I arrived totally dirty, with a dry mouth, at our destination about three hours later. Still, it was much better than a train ride, notwithstanding my motion sickness, on account of which the car had to be stopped several times.

About one year later, I received my first radio, a detector apparatus that required a needle contact with a crystal. As with the telephone, the sound fluctuated enormously; one had to reconnect the needle with the crystal again and again. Yet, to listen on a headphone, not merely to words, as on the telephone, but to music, was a miracle and made the tribulation more than worthwhile.

Approximately the same time, I saw my first black-and-white, silent movie: it was about the second expedition to the South Pole by the British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.

While I cannot remember hearing music from a gramophone for the first time, I vividly remember my first television broadcast. During the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, some of the contests at the Olympic Stadium were broadcast directly to a kiosk at the Potsdamer Platz. Likewise, I clearly remember my first flight: on board a DC-3 in April 1937, from Miami to Havana and back, where I received my immigrant visa for the United States.

Next to the technical achievements, I witnessed the political developments with heightened awareness. In Munich, where I lived from 1920 to 1926, I became an eyewitness to the shoot-out that squashed the Hitler Putsch at the Odeonsplatz. On that particular day, November 9, 1923, we students were dismissed after the second or third class without being told why. I went to my usual train stop to get to Goetheplatz, but no train came. I had to walk. But because the police had cordoned off all streets in one direction, I walked in the opposite direction, and arrived at the Odeonsplatz precisely at the moment when the police began shooting at the Nazi demonstrators. I saw several men fall, others ran away, and I also ran quickly past the Odeonsplatz to the Briennerstrasse, the Maximiliansplatz and, via Lenbachplatz, Stachus, Sonnen- and Lindwurmstrasse, to my home that I usually reached by tram in no time. The next day I read in the Münchner Neusten what I had witnessed unaware.

At this time I was also not aware of pronounced anti-Semitism at my school. But there were a number of teachers who made no bones about their sentiments. At best they were honest conservatives and decent pedagogues, who at least treated all students equally, but they did not try to establish a counterweight to the ruthless Nazis among their colleagues. On the other hand, we had a Jewish teacher by the name of Schaalmann, who was extremely strict with Jewish students to avoid any reproach of partisanship. On account of him, mathematics was torture for the rest of my school days and, unfortunately, also beyond.

Luckily I could retreat from such hardships into the world of books. At the time we were subtenants of a furnished apartment near the Bavariaring. A huge bookcase, filled with books from top to bottom, was part of the furniture. Now, to my heart’s delight, a large selection of books awaited me. Before I had only read books for children and adolescents; now I could read literature reserved for adults. I failed to understand much of it at first. But strangely enough, the more I read, the more sense it made to me. For the first time I was introduced to Heinrich Mann, Arnold Zweig, and Jack London. I read Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), but also fiction. It was, if you will, a very eclectic bookcase. Since that time I have never been without books; sometimes they took up more space in my home than was agreeable to the rest of the family. Eventually I discovered something else: chess. Sometimes I played with a partner, but often by myself. I eagerly replayed chess tournaments, published in the Einkehr, a regular supplement of the Münchner Neuesten, and I learned the opening and gambits of such chess masters as Lasker, Tarrasch, Marshall, Capablanc, and Aljechin. It was several years before my chess fever subsided.

Life in Munich ended faster than I expected, because my father, a partner in a real estate business, was transferred to Berlin. The leap from Munich to Berlin plunged me into a crisis more difficult to overcome than the compulsory relocation to New York a decade later. I arrived at the capital of Prussia as a Bavarian: I spoke German with a Bavarian accent, and my way of thinking was slower than that of the fast-thinking Prussians, whose dialect I often didn’t understand right away. My classmates made fun of the immigrant, and the teachers joined the cruel game. Again I had to defend myself against a hostile school environment, as I had had to do twice before. The fact that, two years later, in the Oberprima (equivalent to senior high school), I was elected class representative shows how well I dealt with the situation this time.

What seemed unattainable during two years in Heilbronn and six years in Munich, I accomplished in Berlin within six months: I had found a new, the only Heimat of my youth. I felt like a Berliner. I plunged into the intellectual and artistic life near the final phase of the Weimar culture, ventured into my first literary attempts (to the chagrin of the principal who also taught the German class), and I studied for four years at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University until the Nazis made any further development impossible. After these painful, prematurely terminated studies, I began an apprenticeship at a bank. That also came to a quick end, when, in June 1934, the Gestapo gravely threatened my external and inner existence, and forced me to view life from the perspective of two concentration camps: Oranienburg and Lichtenburg.

Fifty years later, I would be lying to claim that I had been prepared for such events. In hindsight I can only say that these events cut a deep wound, ending the period of naïve youth. Only much later did I understand the truth behind Nietzsche’s words, “what does not kill me makes me strong.” I stayed in Berlin for two more years, before I bid farewell to the remains of my parents’ home in January 1937, in order to immerse myself in a new world – the new world of America. My stay there turned out to be the longest in my life.

But my intellectual roots took hold in my Berlin years. I bid farewell in the awareness that – like Heinrich Heine a century before – no one could take away from me the other: the portable Fatherland.

Henry Marx: Excerpts from ‘Mein Elternhaus’ – My Parents‘ Home
Ein deutsches Familienalbum (A German Family Album)
©1984 Econ Verlag GmbH, Düsseldorf and Vienna
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, München, 1986 (Translation Carin Drechsler-Marx)

In December 1992, our lives changed abruptly when he fell ill with spinal AVM, a malformation of arteries and veins that can lead to complete paralysis. After losing his ability to walk, he had to undergo spinal surgery. All my worries about the future ceased to exist. We lived from day to day. Nothing was more important than helping Henry regain his health and former lifestyle. With perseverance he practiced walking on crutches in our hallway, back and forth, back and forth, and again. Nine months after his first operation, he had a relapse and had to undergo surgery again. He never gave up hope of recovery; in due time he resumed his work at Aufbau, reserving his energy solely to this task.

In the spring of 1994 we were invited by the Berlin Senate to spend a week in the capital as part of the 25th anniversary of the Visitor Program for Persecuted and Emigrated Berliners. We thought long and hard about attempting this trip, but Henry had made visible progress, and after Berlin, we would relax in the Swiss Alps.

Our stay in Berlin was enjoyable but also strenuous. Since his emigration to the United States, Henry had returned to Germany, in particular to Berlin, countless times. It will forever remain a mystery to me why he decided on this very trip to visit the site of the former concentration camp Oranienburg for the first time since his imprisonment there in 1934. A young German scholar had asked him - the only known survivor of the camp - whether he would like a car ride to Oranienburg and the nearby Sachsenhausen Memorial. Despite my concerns about Henry’s frail condition, he agreed. The next morning, as we approached the camp along a narrow, tree-lined street, the young scholar said, “This must be the road on which you were taken to Oranienburg.” Henry did not recognize the road; he had been transported in the middle of the night in a Grüne Minna (paddy wagon), and had not been able to see where they were going.

A week later, after our arrival in the Swiss Alps, he contracted a bad case of pneumonia. The village doctor urged him to go to the regional hospital immediately. The attending physicians suggested Henry extend his vacation by a week or two to give him enough time to recuperate before returning to New York. “That is out of the question,” he replied, “I have to resume my work as planned.”

When I arrived at the hospital the following morning - unsuspecting - the chief physician informed me that Henry had passed away at 9:30 a.m. from asphyxiation while his lungs were being drained. It was June 22, the very day he had been arrested by the Gestapo 60 years earlier.

Everything had happened with breathtaking speed. Less than two hours before, he had called me at our hotel. No one had attended to him yet; he felt extremely weak; could I withdraw some money from the local bank? It was our last conversation.

The alpine landscape was drenched in sunlight. At sunset the snow-covered mountain range radiated from Alpenglow. Alone in my hotel room, I strongly felt Henry’s presence. Alas, his life had come full circle.